unable to spot anything resembling a doorway or even a cave mouth.
“Can’t imagine who carved out all these fiendishly concealed stairs,” he grumbled, “unless it was one of us poor benighted Children of the Sun. We’re so clever with little engineering feats like this.”
“Oh, shut up,” said Lord Ermenwyr, gasping for breath. He leaned on the wall at a slightly wide place and motioned them past him. “Go on, damn you. But you’ll wait at the top until I get there! I get to knock on the door.”
“I have had an epiphany, Smith,” said Willowspear, as they ascended.
“Really?” Smith panted.
“There is a parable the Lady tells. I will translate it for you. The trevani Luvendashyll is traveling through the forest, he comes to a village, he sees a woman lamenting. ‘How can I help you?’ he asks her, ‘What is wrong?’ and she says, he thinks she says, ‘Oh, kind sir, I need wisdom!’
“He says, ‘My child, you must travel a long road to find wisdom, for it is not easy to get. You must struggle, and suffer, and speak to all you meet and study their ways, learn what is in their hearts; and even then you will only have begun to find wisdom,’ and the woman says back, ‘No, no, that can’t be right! Can’t you give me wisdom?’
“And Luvendashyll says, ‘I have a little wisdom, my child, but it cannot be given so easily. You would have to become my disciple, and give all you owned to those who are less fortunate than you are, and travel with me to the ends of the earth, and hear me disputing with other trevanion; and perhaps in twenty years I could give you a little wisdom. Or it may be that the wisdom of other trevanion would seem better, and you might leave me and apprentice yourself to them for a score of years, in order that they might give you wisdom.’
“And the woman is angry, she says, ‘That’s ridiculous! Why should I have to do all that to get a little wisdom?’ So Luvendashyll is offended, and he says, ‘Impatient woman! You do not know what I had to go through for the wisdom I possess. I studied with my master from my earliest childhood, for his wisdom. I spent many days lying in a dark place listening to the Seven Stories of Jish, repeating them for my master until I knew them by heart, to obtain his wisdom. I fasted and prayed and stood on one leg in the bitter cold of winter, that I might be worthy of his wisdom. I walked on cinders and scored my back with a knotted thong, and yet in the end I was granted a little wisdom only, for my master did not like to part with his great wisdom.’
“And the woman says, ‘Look, all I want is wisdom, because the one I have has a hole in it and my acorns keep falling out!’ “
“Huh?” said Smith.
“The trevani Luvendashyll has misunderstood the woman,” Willowspear explained. “It’s a funny story in Yendri, because he thinks she has asked him for wisdom, trev’nanori, when all along she asked only for a new basket, ‘tren atnori’e.”
“Oh,” said Smith.
“And your confusion adds a further dimension to the parable, because you don’t speak Yendri in the first place,” said Willowspear, taking great strides upward in his enthusiasm. “And for the first time, I see the hidden meaning in it!”
“I never thought it was all that funny,” said Lord Ermenwyr sullenly, struggling along behind them. “I mean, so the trevani is deaf, so what? Or maybe the woman is missing a few teeth.”
“The point is that the woman needed a simple thing,” said Willowspear, “but the trevani did not comprehend simplicity, and so he wasted her time—” He scrambled up on a wide flat landing, and turned back to pull Smith after him, “wasted her time with advice, when what he ought to have done was simply taken reeds and made her a basket! And I, Smith, will make baskets for your people. Figuratively speaking.”
He pulled Lord Ermenwyr up as well, and turned to gesture triumphantly at the shoulder of the mountain they had just reached. “When we go up there, Smith, we will look out upon the Garden of Rethkast, and I will show you your future.”
“All right,” said Smith. He plodded after Willowspear flat-footed, envying the younger man his energy.
“The door is this way,” Lord Ermenwyr shouted after them, pointing to a cave.