The Seeker - Isobelle Carmody [178]
“We must block the mouth or the coldwhite will come in,” the horse sent.
Under his direction, I labored for more than an hour, piling stones at the mouth of the cave, shivering in my light dress and coat. When I had finished, there was nothing but a narrow slit I could barely squeeze through.
“Now the fire,” Galta instructed.
Fortunately, I still had my hand flint, and there was a pile of wood and twigs. I managed to burn myself twice before setting them alight. I crouched over the flames, trying to warm my fingers as smoke curled up to the roof of the cave. Outside, the wind had reached a shrieking intensity, and snow fell in a dense curtain. I looked at Galta searchingly, but he only stared into the flames as if mesmerized. “How long do you think the storm will last?” I asked humbly.
He answered simply that he did not know.
I bit my lip. “How did you get here?” Never mind about me, I thought.
The horse looked up. “The funaga must know everything,” he sent, but without his old contempt. He looked into the fire as if it were a window, and miniature flames leaped in his eyes.
“I spent many days in the place where the mountain ate you. I thought you must be dead, and I was tortured by my cowardice. I believed then that I did not care what happened to me, but when the funaga tried to trap me with their nets, I fought them and ran away. I did not go to Obernewtyn, but higher, to the fields where I once ran with Avra. But I could not stay. I went on and on to the high places where the old equines go to die. I meant to abase myself before their spirits. I hoped I would die, that they would demand it of me.
“I did not eat or drink, as is the custom among equines seeking a vision. I waited and day after day, there was no answer. I thought the old ones were deaf to me and had cast me out. I called myself Galta—nothing.
“Then one night I slept, and in my dream I saw a vision of a high mountain valley, where a lake lay yet unfrozen in the midst of ice and snow. A voice told me to find that place. It promised that I would find absolution there. When I woke, I began to search.
“It was hard, and many times I despaired and thought of giving up. But every night in my sleep, the voice came, reassuring me, urging me higher, promising an answer to the pain in my heart and a purpose for my life. It told me many things for my ears alone, and a blackness, one that had been inside me all my life, began to melt as easily as coldwhite before the sun. I could have gone back to Obernewtyn then, for I understood that pride and arrogance, rather than true grief, had kept me away. But the voice urged me always to go on.
“At last, I found this valley. Then the voice came again, telling me I had been drawn to the mountains to take part in a quest whose end would concern not only equine and funaga, but all living creatures. This was to be my life’s most important work, above any other glory I had imagined.” I could feel the faint sense of awe that marked his thoughts.
“The voice told me a funaga would be brought here, one whom I must keep safe. One day, this funaga would fight a great and perilous battle whose outcome was unknown even to the wisest of the wise but which might mean the destruction of all life on the earth forever. I must carry this funaga wherever it wishes to go and protect it with my own life if it were needed.
“It was strange and ironic that I, who had so despised the funaga, should find myself bound to such a task. There was a time when I would have refused, believing your kind to be a blight on the world. But the voice had helped me see that no life-form is greater than another and that all are bound up in an intricate and delicately balanced pattern of coexistence.
“In the daylight, I found this cave. And then I waited. Many weeks passed, yet always the voice told me to wait. So I waited. Two moons passed, and still I waited, wondering if it was my punishment to wait forever in these cold lands for one who would never come,” he sent bleakly.
“Two moons?” I whispered