Ten

The next day, I woke to the sound of clinking armor. A familiar-looking knight stared down at me—the same knight with whom I had collided yesterday.

“Loitering is illegal. I’d arrest you myself if I hadn’t just been given a new church contract. Get out of here.”

“I don’t suppose your contract involves leading pilgrims across the northern desert. If so, I’m one of them.” When the knight said nothing, I added, “I paid for it.”

The knight sighed. “They don’t pay me enough. Dust yourself off and follow me to the stables.”

I complied and waited around as the knight helped the pilgrims with their horses. One of the pilgrims was a beautiful woman several years older than I, one who needed very little help and had clearly ridden before. Just as I was about to start daydreaming about her, the Knight (whose name was Sir Mau) said, “Your turn, Nial. Left foot. No. Left foot. Yes. Stick it in the stirrup. Now hoist. Hoist.”

I hoisted myself up and managed to stay perched.

Sir Mau explained: “Kicking makes her go. ‘Whoa’ makes her stop. Reins for side-to-side. Got it?”

I nodded. And just when I was convinced that he had forgotten my transgression from the day before, the man said, “And try not to run into things.” To cover up my flush as people glanced in my direction, I mumbled something like, “Are stables always so hot?”

The only person who needed more help with horses than me was a girl whose name I must admit to having forgotten—because, when introductions were made, I had been too busy trying not to stare at her shoulders. Her clothing was more expensive than anything I’d ever seen; and it seemed to draw my eyes to her shoulders—bare and quite fetching. But I didn’t want to seem like a creep, so I tried to look sidelong, as I had with the morl the day before.

“You might want to cover those,” I said later when she was astride her horse alongside mine. “They’ll be scorched by noon.”

She gave me a look that could wilt a cactus. Her horse carried bags twice the size of everyone else’s: she had insisted on bringing far more than what the church had provided. She did not, as it turned out, elect to cover her shoulders.

Mau addressed the group of riders: “There are broad-brimmed hats in your packs. I suggest you wear them.”

My skin (as you might expect) was already tanned from two years of seafaring, but I put on my hat anyway, mostly to blend in. Part of me was still expecting to hear the sounds of a search party any minute now.

Mau went on: “We’ll stop every hour to give the horses water. But you should drink more often than that. Sip every few minutes. If you get dehydrated, I’ll leave you behind.”

A few pilgrims laughed nervously. Mau did not. He continued: “When we leave the city, we’ll follow the road for a few days to the edge of the basin. Then we’ll switch to camels for the open desert.” His last piece of advice was, “Try to get to know each other. It’s going to be a long journey.” Indeed, the mountains were barely visible above the basin’s rim—ghostly blue peaks in the far north.

With that, we were off. I could barely think. My heart tried to escape my chest. We were finally moving. Each clip-clop of hooves on the street carried us away from the docks, away from the Ariel Angel and toward… who knows what! I dared to let myself think it might be something as romantic as “my destiny.” Soon the street ended, the adobe buildings fell away, and the city was behind us. A road stretched out northward, toward a distant escarpment that formed the wall of the basin. Beyond that would be an ocean of red sand.

Except for Sir Mau and Father Ori, I couldn’t remember anyone’s name because I’d still been pretty nervous when introductions were happening. But I’d already formed a stereotype for each of them based on their appearances—a name I’ve decided to start using while writing about them, to protect their identities. I remembered some of them from the church office: the Wizard (the man in the blue robes, in his mid-fifties or sixties or seventies) and the Mourner (the woman with the veil, whose age was impossible to tell). I dubbed the rich girl who was my age the Noble (though I seriously considered calling her Shoulders). The Old Lady was the one who had been snoring in the clerk’s office. That left three more: One woman—perhaps the prettiest ever born, and dressed in silks almost as fine as the Noble’s dresses—hummed constantly beneath her breath; a tantalizing, enchanting noise that gave me the impression that she might burst into song at any moment. I called her the Singer. Another woman, with rugged features, a perpetual scowl, and hunter’s clothing—I called the Hunter. Both the Singer and the Hunter seemed to be in their mid-thirties; but I was not sure. I’ve never been good at judging ages.

Dear Human, as you may have guessed, I am Father Ori, the one morl amidst these nine humans. And yes, I can confirm that Nial was, in this early stage of our long adventure, exactly the kind of person who would place everyone into grossly inaccurate stereotypes. He did not bother me, though, for I knew I could get rid of him if he grew too annoying.

The last pilgrim, for whom I had neither a name nor a nickname yet, was a massive blond man in his twenties who had not yet stopped smiling. His white teeth shined from beneath his battered hat. His clothes were those of any commoner on the street. I guided my horse next to him and said, “Hello.”

Blue eyes and a blinding smile turned toward me. The man waved, even though I was only a few feet away.

I took a sip of water from my canteen, trying to decide what to say. “I’m Nial.”

The man laughed and nodded vigorously

“What’s your name?” I asked.

More laughing. More nodding. A few indecipherable hand-motions in the air.

“He’s deaf,” said the Noble. “I already tried.”

“Oh,” I said.

The blond man bounced happily atop his horse.

“And,” said the Noble, patting her shoulders with a silk handkerchief, “there’s something wrong with his head.” She tapped her skull. “You know?” She whispered, “He’s slow, or something.”

I nodded and decided not to ask why she was whispering if the man was deaf. Unable to help myself, I dubbed the blond man “the Fool,” which I know is impolite. But I figured he wouldn’t find out, and it was, after all, a common term in the South Sea Nations for people like him.

“What’s your name?” I asked the Noble. For some reason, she rolled her eyes and selected that moment to start pretending that I didn’t exist.

Anyway, there were ten:

The Morl

The Knight

The Wizard

The Old Lady

The Hunter

The Singer

The Fool

The Mourner

The Nobel

And me…

Who am I? I wondered. I wondered what category people placed me into on sight. The Smart One? The Sailor? The Young Man? I didn’t know, so I fancifully placed myself into one of my own choosing: the Hero. After all, what is life for if we cannot make ourselves heroes in our own story?

Tentative conversations began. The initial alliances. I couldn’t help but watch with fascination. The Singer tried to talk to the Fool and—upon failing—switched her attentions to the next-most attractive man, the Knight. She laughed a lot and touched his arm whenever she did.

The Wizard, the Old Lady, and the Hunter struck up a conversation about the weather and how the heat didn’t seem so bad because the air was dry. The Wizard offered a complicated meteorological analysis that produced blank looks. After that, he left the conversation and produced a book from the folds of his blue robe. He read it on his horse while the Old Lady and the Hunter tried to find common ground across a fifty-year age gap, and ultimately failed.

The Mourner rode alone. Everyone respected her isolation and silence. The Noble rode alone because (I assume) she was too good for the rest of the group. Her shoulders had begun to turn red. The Fool rode alone yet seemed perfectly happy, still smiling.

The Morl’s horse glided alongside mine. Against my will, my muscles tensed, an unbidden fight-or-flight response.

“Did you find a place to stay last night?” he asked.

“It wasn’t the best tavern in town,” I said, bullshitting. “But it wasn’t the worst tavern either.”

“I find that interesting, Nial. Would you like to know why? There are no ‘taverns’ on the north side of the South Sea. Across all of Drymar, they call them ‘hotels’ or ‘inns.’ An odd linguistic quirk.”

“Ah, yes. Thank you. I think I read that once.”

“You must be from Lopesa or Seadom,” he said. The Morl had a disturbing quality of not being visible out of the corner of my eye, as if he always ended up in my blind spot. So I looked at him in spite of the headache that ensued. In the light of the rising sun, his shimmers were visible enough. He must have noticed me trying not to squint because he said, “Don’t worry. As the sun rises, you’ll have less trouble. Human eyes tend to slide off of us.”

“I noticed.”

“My hypothesis is that these silly optical nuances are what engender much of the mistrust your people have for my kind.”

I was surprised to hear a morl speak so properly. The sailors on the Ariel Angel had possessed a vast repertoire of jokes about the infinite stupidity of morls.

“I’ve always had the same thought,” I said. “I don’t see the big deal.”

“Many humans have a deep-seated fear of darkness and the unknown. And we morls represent both. We’re virtually invisible in the dark, which conjures up images of night prowling and secrecy. It is a presupposition that ignores the fact that morls are not nocturnal at all.”

“Then what’s the point of being invisible at night?” I asked.

“Why do you have an appendix?”

I didn’t disclose that the word “appendix” was lost on me, except insofar as it sometimes referred to the latter portions of books. I vaguely recalled something about it from an anatomy textbook I had once read. It probably wasn’t important, or I would have remembered more about it.

The Morl went on, running a hand over his bald scalp, or maybe through his hair (it was impossible to tell): “And because you cannot really look at our faces, our features, your mind must construct what it thinks we look like. Many see us as ugly. This is interesting because human features tend to be exquisitely attractive to morls.”

“Really?” I said. My hand drifted unconsciously to the paper in my pocket. I felt like I should be writing this down. For my book.

“Oh, yes,” said the Morl. “Do you see the girl with the green dress?”

“The Noble?” I said.

“Certainly. She’s second only to the one who seems to be infatuated with our guide.”

“The Singer?” I said. And when the Morl looked at me quizzically: “I sort of named everyone. She hums under her breath.”

“Ah! And I suppose I am ‘The Morl.’” I glanced down with some shame. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m proud of my race. It ought to define me.”

“They are both quite beautiful,” I said, changing the subject back to women. The sailors on the Ariel Angel had only been able to talk about the wives they hadn’t seen for months, or the whores they had seen at the last dock. I had never been able to relate.

“A great temptation,” said the Morl. “Especially for a priest.”

Dear Human, if there is one good thing I can say about Nial, it is his knack for recalling the details of conversations. I suspect this is because he took frequent notes and chronicled his experiences on an almost nightly basis. I have no doubt that I did, indeed, say “A great temptation, especially for a priest.” However, I can hardly remember this portion of the journey myself. I look back at it across the last century as if it were a dream. I remember only that my goal during this stage of my mission was to befriend each of the nine human pilgrims.

Not a hard task. With Nial, I quickly learned that he (as is the case with many seventeen-year-old human males who have had no experience finding mates) inwardly obsesses about that which he yearns to have, eyes landing on certain fellow pilgrims more frequently than others. Converting him to an ally, I knew, would be a simple matter of noticing what he noticed, validating his inner turmoil.

“You’re a priest?” I said, my eyes a bit too wide.

“Why so surprised?” said the Morl. “Your people seem to think we worship demons.”

“Even some humans worship demons,” I pointed out. “It’s not that farfetched.”

“Do you want to know what I’m going to ask at the shrine? I’m going to ask how I can lead my people out of oppression.”

“Funny. Last I checked, the Morl Nation was exporting more products across the South Sea than any three other nations put together,” I said, trying to sound smart.

“Yes, but what do we not export? Our people. And what do we not import? Your people. When we walk through the streets of any country that isn’t our own, human children scream and point, priests mumble prayers under their breath, and soldiers grip their weapons tighter. Most human beings would rather die than cross the border into the ‘Nation of Night’—as many call it. In some ways, every morl child who has been born since the war has found itself trapped within the ever shrinking borders of their fatherland.”

“The Morl Nation is most definitely not shrinking.”

“Its geometric area remains the same,” said the Morl. “But its population is growing. The places where a youngling morl can stick a shovel in the ground and say ‘I will build my home here’ become fewer with every generation.”

I realized that I no longer had trouble looking into the Morl’s shimmering mass. Perhaps it was because the sunlight had grown brighter.

“I wish I knew what to ask at the shrine,” I confessed. “I’ve been thinking about it for two years.” It was mostly true. Ever since I’d seen the church’s brochures, I’d been toying with the notion of going on an adventure to the shrine after leaving the Ariel Angel. The self-defense thing had just made the option even more appealing.

“You have a while yet,” said the Morl. “This journey changes people. Half of these people don’t know what they’re going to ask at the shrine. And most of those who do know will change their minds before they get there. Our guide, Sir Mau, has been to the shrine three times, he told me—and he has never once asked a question. That’s indecision.”

I watched the Knight, who silently accepted the unbridled affections of the prettiest woman on the pilgrimage, and wondered what kind of man would pass up three chances to ask any question in the universe.

“No one is what he appears,” said the Morl. “Don’t make that mistake.”

“Too late,” I said. “I thought the deaf man would turn out to be a pirate or something. I don’t know why.”

“By the time we get to the mountain shrine you’ll know these people’s souls as well as your own.” Something about the way he said it made me shiver in the desert heat.

“Now go,” said the Morl, “try to talk to one of the young ladies. Before I do it.” Within the shimmers, I thought I saw him grinning—a strangely human expression—except that, if I wasn’t mistaken, his teeth were all sharply pointed, the needle-like tools of a carnivore.

Dear Human, I cannot resist interjecting that my morl teeth are not the least bit needle-like and never have been. For what it’s worth, though, I don’t think Nial was trying to deceive his readers. The human mind does funny things when it sees morls. Ask ten humans what they see when they look into the shimmering mass of a morl, and you’ll get ten vastly different answers. Some will see a tall morl, others a short one. Some an old morl, others a young one. Some a morl with seven eyes and a long snake-like tongue, others a humanoid face of great beauty. My theory has always been that those descriptions tell you more about the mind of the human beholder than the morl beheld. The reality is that we are anatomically almost the same as humans: two eyes, two hands, two feet, etc. Fun fact: I even have an appendix!

The Morl rode off to talk with the Wizard. I didn’t dare approach any young ladies, so I rode alone until sundown, making up stories about adventures and imagining what I might say if I were to talk to one of the young ladies. Sheets of dust blew across the trail like brown wraiths in the evening light, advanced scouts for an invasion of chilly wind from the south.

“We’ll stop here,” said Sir Mau. “There are jackets in your pack. But if Nial can figure out how to set up a fire, then maybe we won’t need them.” With that, the Knight hopped off his horse, reclined on a rock, and closed his eyes.

Everyone stared at me as I scavenged the general area for bits of tender, mostly dried bits of thistle and some brown-matter from long-shriveled cacti. The night grew colder much more quickly than my arms filled with wood. I suffered a barrage of flashbacks to my life aboard the Ariel Angel, where I had performed the double duty of fetching things for people and being the constant butt of everyone’s jokes. No one had appreciated me there, and I was determined not to let the same thing happen here.

Finally, the Wizard said, “Sir Mau, with your permission, I will put an end to this gross display of ineptitude.” Then, after cracking his knuckles, he began waving his hands over a pile of dried grass. At first it seemed like nothing was going to happen. When the flame exploded into being, I dropped the tender I had gathered and resigned myself to being as much of a screw up on land as I had been at sea.

“Enjoy the fire this week,” said the Knight. “In the open desert there won’t be anything to burn, even with magic.”

Turning our backs to the cold, we sat in a circle around the flames. I found myself nestled between the Noble and the Morl. The Noble’s shoulders had turned scarlet—yet I still had to fight to keep my eyes off them. I admit that I wanted very badly to see what it felt like to put my cheek on one of them, and I found myself daydreaming about hearing my father tell the story of how he’d met my mother in a marketplace in Grennport.

The Knight tossed something into the fire, making it change colors. The Fool whooped and laughed and clapped his hands. The green flames produced smoke that smelled like pine trees.

“Something you may not know,” said the Knight, “is that the greatest loss of life during the early pilgrimages to the shrine was the shrine itself. It can be… quite intense. The solution to the problem was invented centuries ago, from what I understand. You’re smelling it right now. In a moment, you may feel your eyes begin to droop. You will feel your mouth begin to go dry. Don’t worry, though. This drug is not dangerous when taken in small doses. In fact, taking it in small doses now will prepare your body for the amounts we will take when we reach our destination.”

I felt warm, felt my head growing light, saw colors in the fire, wondered why the stars were vibrating, tried to put my head on the Noble’s shoulder, earned myself a shove in the opposite direction, felt a strong desire to tell the Noble everything about me, from the moment I was spanked to life by a Grennport midwife to the moment I just got shoved for putting my head on a pretty girl’s shoulder. The only thing that stopped me from babbling was realizing that someone was still talking.

The Knight was somewhere on the other side of the fire. Flickering green light danced on the man’s face as if he were underwater.

“I will warn you,” said the Knight, “that the sensation of hearing your life’s most personal stories flowing out of your mouth can be disconcerting. The tradition is to roll this six-sided die to decide. Unfortunately, we don’t have six pilgrims, as we usually do, so I’m afraid the probabilities will be difficult to calculate. I am also being paid to inform you, at this juncture, that because you A) signed several carefully worded contracts and because you B) have accepted the liabilities associated with this pilgrimage, you cannot C) hold the church or its affiliates (such as myself) legally responsible for anything you may say—including but not limited to information that may be embarrassing, incriminating, and/or deeply personal. The storytelling process is for your own good. It helps to cleanse your soul before the shrine cleanses it for you. As for the matter of probability, we’ll have to gather some grass and draw straws.”

I was suddenly terrified that I would get picked and my story about the self-defense thing would come tumbling out, so I was quite relieved when I heard a voice say, “There’s an easier way.” Who had spoken? Someone near me—someone extremely near me. The Morl?

I looked at the Morl. The Morl looked at me. Not the Morl. The Noble? I looked at the Noble. The Noble looked at me. Finally, I realized that I myself had spoken, so I continued, realizing that this was my chance to avoid certain topics while also demonstrating how well-read I was on the subject of statistics, something that would no doubt impress the Noble. “We can do it fairly. And with just the die. No straws. Roll once, if the number is higher than three, one of the five men will tell the story. If it’s three or below, one of the five women will tell a story. After doing this, we assign everyone in the selected group a number from one to five. Roll the die again. Whoever’s number comes up will tell the story. If the number is a six, it doesn’t count. We reroll.”

Everyone blinked at me. At first, I thought they were impressed, so I gave a humble smile. Then, the Noble said, “Isn’t it easier to just draw straws like Sir Mau said?” To which the Wizard replied, “Obviously. There’s plenty of dried grass.” When everyone concurred, I looked at the vibrating stars overhead. Why did no one ever listen to my good ideas? Not on sea; not on land. My thoughts trailed off into a drugged haze in which it occurred to me that maybe the drugs were just making me think my ideas were good, which was disconcerting in itself.

I will admit, Dear Human, to feeling a small amount of sympathy for Nial myself at this stage. He is a product of his past, isn’t he? And aren’t we all? Can he help coming up with overly complicated ideas in a drug-induced mind-haze? Can he help the smoldering feeling within, the one that drives him to prove his worth to these nine pilgrims as soon as he can? Can he help that he is annoying, off-putting and doesn’t seem to realize it?

Many of the youngling morl students with whom I have had the pleasure of discussing this text, have written essays on such subjects. I wish I could share some of these with you now, but sadly, it would spoil the upcoming events. Suffice it to say that the subject of “could Nial have escaped being Nial?” has been a question of philosophical interest for almost a century now. Yes, Nial’s name is well-known throughout the Morl Nations, and millions of my kind have read his account of things. They have smirked and rolled their eyes in many of the same places, no doubt, as you. Our people are not so different.