The Wondermark Gazette

The mountain was steeper than it looked. Its paths were winding and narrow; its tall, looming silhouette never seemed to draw closer, even as the goat and I made our treacherous way towards that far-off peak.

The pygmy-goat’s tread was slow and plodding, despite my most vigorous flank-spurring. Its gallop had given out after thirty seconds of flat-land sprinting, and the hour since that initial burst had taken two tedious hours to pass. Riding the low, pot-bellied animal was surely slower than subjecting my own tender feet to the mountain, but I remained astride nonetheless; perhaps it was loyalty that bound me to the beast, or else a deep-seated sense of man-to-steed honour. It also could have been simple curiosity at how long the creature’s legs could bear my mass.

The answer, it turned out, was slightly less than three hours. By then, the goat had slowed to a quivering creep, and we were barely making two inches per minute forward progress. All of a sudden its knees popped, one and then the others in quick succession, and the animal deflated beneath me like a rank, furry balloon, exhaling a final feeble, goatish breath, expiring limply without so much as a bleat of apology. I felt my knees slowly descend onto the hard earth as my own body once again assumed the peasant’s task of supporting my weight. It sucked; there were little rocks, and they were pointy.

The stall-man had been right. My goat had given out on me, and now I was stuck on the mountain with a sad, pot-bellied hulk of furry, uncooked chevon, with night fast approaching.

I creakingly stood and stretched my body, weary from the arduous trek. The trail was barely discernible against the rocky ground — I’d been largely trusting the goat to stick to the path, but upon examination, I wasn’t entirely sure that there was a path to follow. The thin line of broken brush ahead could just as easily have been the aftermath of a bear as a trail to the peak, and I wasn’t eager to rush headlong into a bear’s den, or warren, or whatever, especially this time of year, just after the Day of Bear Atonement. The bears would be especially ravenous as their ritual fast came to an end. (Although I wasn’t entirely sure if the bears on this island were even Jewish, or if that was just a cruel stereotype I’d heard in passing.)

I paced in circles for a while around my goat-corpse, trying to pick up the trail, ready to dash behind a tree at the first glimpse of any growling, hairy form, trying to remember my bear-calls from school. I thought I might whittle a quick lady-bear decoy from leaves and twigs, to distract any man-bears that might appear, but a quick pat-down confirmed that I had neither any sort of pocket-knife nor the necessary honey-pitch to construct such a contraption. Besides, I was not entirely sure that I would be able to construct a convincing bear-replica without any sort of visual reference; though loath to admit it, I was not totally confident that I knew what an appealing lady-bear might look like. I imagined it would have an abundance of hibernation-fat, and probably a decent day-job in a solicitor’s office, but I had no idea how to fashion an appropriate business-formal pant-suit from the leaves in this area.

What I did have, however, was Abu Fromage’s femur-crafted cheese-wand — truly the most perfectly-balanced twirling-wand ever fashioned by a human. (I didn’t want to speak for bears, in case there were any nearby who might be offended by the insinuation.) The wand positively danced across my finger-tips without the knuckle-friction common to cheaper, shop-bought wands, typically carved in bundles by orphan-children in tangled-sounding countries for pence on the pound. This was a marvel of cheese-twirling engineering, and as it sparkled brightly in the reddening day-light I wished, in that moment, for nothing more than a properly-steamed fondue-pot. Then, I knew, I could let muscle-memory and reflex take over; I could clear my mind, and focus solely on maintaining total command over a narrow, cheese-focused micro-universe. In that moment, if only for a handful of fleeting seconds, I could be in control.

But alas, there was no cheese to be found, and I discarded a hasty plan for making mud with spit and dust and fluids to try and approximate the consistency of a week-old Fromunda. What would be the point? Even if it scraped, it wouldn’t twirl, and if by some miracle I could get some slobbery mess to lift on the wand, why would I be-soil this sacred gift with such a vulgar offering?

My fingers twitched, and I knew I would have to fight the urge. I had the wand. I wanted to twirl something. And before I could stop it, my mind began to run through the many viscous and appropriately-goopy substances to be found in the body of a not-yet-putrescent pygmy-goat.

I advanced on the animal, screaming within my own mind the whole way, but it was hopeless: it was as if I watched myself from outside my own body. I was repulsed by my own appearance. I could not look myself in the eye. But I knew I must — and, after a long, psychic, purely metaphorical struggle, I did.

I saw my own eyes, and I leapt backwards — for reflected in them was a person. A big woman, the size of a man the size of a big woman. She was dressed in denim trousers and a sailor’s tunic, with long hair pulled into orange braids. She moved heavily, like an oak tree given life. She stood by the goat. And she was real — for, given the chance, I’d like to think that my imagination would surely have conjured up someone a bit comelier.

“Hullo,” she said. I couldn’t say from whence she appeared, but her deep voice rumbled the ground beneath my feet — or was I just quaking in fear?

“Hello,” I said, surprising myself. “I’m trying to reach the cave at the top of the mountain, but my goat has given out on me, as you can see.”

“No wonder,” she said, picking up the goat-carcass in one big hand and slinging the whole creature over one thick shoulder. “Goats aren’t good for much on this mountain. That’s why we never see ‘em much — so this’ll be a nice treat. Obliged to you.”

She turned and walked away, taking my goat with her, while I worked my jaw up and down, trying to force words from my mouth.

After a few steps, she turned back to me. The movement struck a chord in my distant memory, but I couldn’t place it… “Well?” she called. “Aren’t you hungry?”

“Starved,” I croaked.

“Then come on,” she said. “Let’s get you washed, shaved, and fill that stomach.”

“Wait!” I shouted, stumbling to follow the woman through the under-brush, fearful that I might lose sight of her in the twilight and not find her again, fearful even to blink, even when I crashed through a mini-cyclone of gnats. “Who are you? What about the deposit on the goat?”

“I can’t help you with that,” she laughed, a booming sound that scared the gnats away, except for one glued by tears to the surface of my eye-ball, its wings fluttering feebly and futilely. “But I’ll gladly answer the other. Step up here and take a look, will you?”

She took a mighty step up onto a boulder, and with her non-goat-encumbered hand she helped me climb up next to her. Her hand was rough, and wrinkled, and red, and strong. She did not hold my hand longer than necessary, but gestured outwards, at what we could see. Before us, lay the island — and beyond that, the ocean.

She fished for a moment in her trouser-pocket, and produced an egg-shaped lens of light blue crystal. She peered through it as if it were a spy-glass, and then held it delicately before me, clutched between two meaty fingers. “Look through,” she said.

I did, and the oceans vanished: the island itself became a mountain among valleys and canyons of dark, dry rock. The sea-bed was bare as a canyon through the crystal: what might have been whales and sea-serpents slithered through bare air. I caught my breath and moved my eye closer, making out the barest traces of flashing lights, glowing red and orange trails of smoke and flame, streaking in long lines between the island and the far-off main-land of Ireland, streaking off in every direction imaginable. The impression was of lightning-fast rail-road lines, embedded in the ocean floor.

But that was crazy! I knew crazy, and that was just plain crazy.

She dropped the lens back into her pocket, and the water was back, as if it had never left. I thought I saw a flicker of orange beneath the waves ten miles away, but it might have been the reflection of a twinkling star. She was smiling when I finally tore my eyes away from the water.

“We are the Yam-Runners,” she said.

NEXT: In the Chair

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