angel.”
He kept on holding onto me for a long time, talking much more nonsense of the same kind. But I gun to get an idea now of what some of it might mean.
“Senlas,” I says, “what about the others that went before? Them you chose as your altar boys, I mean. Will they sit with us too?”
“No,” he whispered. “No, no, no. They lost their way, you see. They won’t sit with us because they never got there. If they had got there, the way would of opened. But when your soul flies, Koli, oh, it’s going to fly straight and true. Isn’t it?”
“Yes, Senlas,” I says.
“You’re going to be my beacon.”
“Yes, Senlas.”
“And my guide.”
“I will, Senlas.”
So now I knowed about the altar, and the bonfire, and the wagon. And I knowed that Ursala was right when she said Senlas was mad. He was the kind of mad where there isn’t nothing that’s real to you except just you, your own self. Even the people that loved him and believed in him was only important because they done and said all the things that kept him in that same love and belief. When he looked at them, he didn’t see nothing but his own shadow.
And when I was with him, I felt more and more like I wasn’t nothing but a shadow neither. That was what made him so frightening. The times I knelt next to that bed, or half-knelt rather, was the darkest times in my life up to then. Senlas’s voice creeped inside my head and filled it up, so there almost wasn’t no room for me to stay in there my own self. Afterwards I would go back to the seclusion, and be locked up again behind the grating, and I would have to work real hard to remember what I said to him. It come back slowly, like a dream, though his words to me was heavy and solid like stones, sitting inside me and weighing me down.
49
The worst of it was that we didn’t know how long we had got. That lulled us somewhat into thinking it was more than it was. Ursala was cleverer than anyone I ever met, but there was a part of that cleverness that rested in seeing everything there was to see, knowing everything there was to know and only moving when she was sure. But here there was a great many things we couldn’t never be sure of. She said my leg wasn’t strong enough to take my weight yet, and there was truth in that. But she was also gathering all she could, questioning me on everything I seen when I was outside the seclusion, putting it all together in different ways to see what it looked like and how it might go.
I think, also, we was both of us scared of what would happen if we tried to run away and was catched. That cave was full of people who lived in Senlas’s dream, and Senlas’s dream was full of blood and miracles. They would most likely tear us into pieces in bringing us down.
And for me there was the other thing I already told you. I was trapped in them talks I had with him. I come away every time thinking I had got to run away right then, that night, that day even, and take my chances. And yet I was still there the next morning when the hand people come for me.
I might of sunk all the way into Senlas’s mad dreams if it was not for Monono. She talked to me every night, since her charge was built up enough that she didn’t need to worry no more about running out. After that first time, she didn’t have no more secrets to spill out, so it was my turn to tell. I laid it out in scraps and whispers, from when I fell down off the lookout tower in Ludden right on through to where we was. I explained about Ursala too, and how I knowed her from Mythen Rood before I met her here.
What Monono done, for her part, was to tell me jokes from the old times and then explain why they was supposed to be funny. I learned a lot from that, though the jokes made no sense to me even when they was explained, and I forgot them right after. All except for one, which was this.
I just read a list of the hundred things you should do before