Fair Semblances: An Allegorical Fantasy (Chapter 3)

The wildesteed carried its rider closer to Mishael, until it stood at the very foot of the cliff above which he was stranded. Looking up intently for a few seconds, the rider finally broke the silence, crying out, “Are you he for whom the trumpet has summoned aid?”

Mishael, still not sure what or whom to believe, and suddenly feeling ashamed that he had ignored the rider’s first “Hallo,” finally collected his thoughts sufficiently to stammer out in a timid tone, “Yes, um, that is, I think so”.

“Stay there,” the rider called out (although it was quite obvious that there was nowhere for Mishael to go); “I’ll be up presently to assist you”. Then, the wildesteed promptly disappeared from Mishael’s view. The rider was gone for what seemed quite a long time, but was really only a few minutes; and just when Mishael was beginning to wonder if he had only promised aid in order to mock him, he heard him again, this time above him; and soon he appeared on the now scorched ridge from which he had fallen at first, and promptly proceeded to lower a rope, with instructions to tie it around his waist, and then to attempt the steep climb back up to the ridge. A few bumps and scrapes later, Mishael was again on top of the ridge, face-to-face with his unexpected succorer.

“Of what sort of assistance are you in need, besides the obvious?”, the rider asked Mishael abruptly.

“Well, I guess I would just like to get safely back to Fair Semblances,” Mishael murmured, looking at the ground.

The rider seemed utterly taken aback. He looked at Mishael intensely, as if trying to determine whether he were not just the butt of some monstrous joke. Finally, he spoke again, this time without the confident air he had exuded up to this time, but with a hint of disbelief and a very solemn gravity: “Do you mean to say that you have come from Fair Semblances?”

Now, it was Mishael’s turn to be taken aback, although he was not altogether certain why. He looked inquisitively at the rider, paused for a moment to consider whether there might be some obvious incongruity in his desire to go back to Fair Semblances, and then, finding none, very timorously said, “Yes, I have lived in Fair Semblances all my life. I found the map in the portrait above the Divertisement, and followed it through the Impenetrable Thicket, and now I am here, and I don’t know how I shall get back.

The rider quickly responded, “Well, of course you can never go back. But if your story is true, and if you are what you seem, the consequences could be unimaginable. Quickly!”, he added suddenly, “It’s not safe to remain here. The nearest lodgings are at Waverly Lake, more than fifteen miles away. You must ride with me. If we leave immediately, we will be there shortly after nightfall.”

And swinging up onto the wildesteed, the rider gave Mishael his hand, pulled him up behind him, and set off at a most rapid pace down the footpath which the bewildered young man had been following since he left Fair Semblances.

* * * * * * * *

For most of the ride, Mishael and the rider were both silent. A sort of somber heaviness seemed to lie all around them, and the air was thick and sultry, so that Mishael spent a good deal of the long journey amusing himself by imagining that they were really plodding along on the bottom of a great sea, with the boundless weight of the ancient and turbid waters pressing down upon them, frustrating their desperate desire for haste, engulfing them in a sluggish and enervating confusion. “And in fact,” he thought to himself, “after the unlikely events of the past two days, would it really be too strange to think that we could be at the bottom of the sea?” The thought amused him so much, for some reason, that he had to stifle a sudden chuckle. The rider turned and looked inquisitively at him, and he suddenly flushed, and grew somber again.

After a moment’s pause, the rider broke the silence:

“We must take care not to excite any undue attention, for we are in a most vulnerable place right now. To the right,” he motioned, swinging his arm out towards the mountains looming up beside them, “are the Crags of Bewilderment. The narrow paths are so treacherous, and the crags so sharp and deceiving, that only the impish satyrs, who delight to lure sojourners from the safety of the Tedious Trail, can safely negotiate them. Many an unsuspecting traveler, seeing them scuttle across the broken ridges with apparent ease, have been deceived into thinking that there is a shorter and easier way across this mountain-spur that intervenes between us and Waverly Lake, and have followed them to their doom.

“And then to the left,” he said, here motioning with his other arm, “just out of sight, in the midst of the Primeval Pines, lies the Vale of Sorrows. There, the voices of the ancient deceived and overcome cry out in such frightful wails of anguish and despair that all who hear them go utterly mad. No one who has strayed too far from Tedious Trail, either to the right hand or to the left, has ever been found again. And so,” he concluded, with something of a commanding whisper, “it would be most inopportune to encounter any unfriendly company; we would have nowhere to go but back again, which is impossible, or straight through the midst of them, which could likewise be disastrous. And unfriendly company abounds in these parts.”

“What sort of unfriendly company?”, Mishael asked hesitantly.

“There are bands of roving marauders, for one thing,” the rider responded. They used to be seekers, but growing tired of the unforeseen burden of a wait which seems almost interminable at times, they slowly became mere liers-in-wait, ambushers. And then,” he said, in a tone suddenly much more apprehensive, “we can only pray that we encounter no sanguinors. But they are very rarely seen around here anyway. It is the back part of the world, and they usually have more consequential places to be.”

Mishael wanted to ask who these sanguinors were, but he felt that he had already asked too many questions, and he didn’t quite have the courage to ask another; so he held his tongue. The rest of the ride was silent, and thankfully, uneventful. Just when dusk was giving way to pitch darkness, the two wayfarers came to the western edge of Waverly Lake, on the shores of which was a small town (or perhaps it was only a large village), surrounded by a wall of sharpened posts driven into the ground, with a great wooden gate, held together by massive iron straps, that was just then closing.

“Who are ye and whence do ye come?”, a watchman cried out from a small tower adjoining the large gate, and rising slightly above the level of the wall; “and what is your business in Waverly Lake?”.

“We’re simply travel-weary sojourners, seeking a night’s lodging,” the rider responded in a calm, confident voice.

“Come into the light and show yourselves,” the watchman called out again. The rider urged his wildesteed a little closer to the wall, and into the semi-circle of light cast by a small, flickering torch high above them.

The watchman scrutinized them carefully for a few seconds, and seemed to be a bit incredulous that anyone who had come from the inhospitable regions to the west of Waverly Lake could be up to any good. But finally convincing himself that they were harmless enough, he motioned to the guards below to open the gate, who did so a little grumblingly, for they had only just shut it, and it was a rather unwieldy and laborious operation to open it again.

Mishael and the rider passed through the gate, and into the frontier town of Waverly.

* * * * * * * *

After passing through a few narrow, sinuous streets, which the rider seemed to know quite well, the travelers came upon a solid, imposing structure, rather narrow but very lengthy, which was built, like the wall, of great trees cut into segments, driven upright into the ground, and adjoining each other tightly. The roof was thatched, and on the left side of the doorway was an old, weatherworn sign, reading “Wayfarer’s Inn”. When they entered the building, Mishael saw that the floor was simply bare dirt covered with a great quantity of rather filthy sawdust. Scattered across the large room into which the doorway led was a handful of very large and impressive tables, which seemed to be just great logs cut longitudinally in half, to create a more or less smooth plane, and resting on solid tree trunks.

Immediately upon their entering, a rather portly old man, with a bit of a twinkle in his eye, jumped up from the rough stool upon which he had been sitting, and which was really nothing more than a tree stump (Mishael was beginning to think that the whole town was constructed of nothing but solid trees), and greeted the rider with an obvious familiarity and unaffected joy at his arrival:

“Ah, my dear friend and long-absent companion! how dreary it has been for so long without you here to help me pass away the time! I hope you are planning to stay for a good, long while! You have no idea –” and suddenly seeing Mishael, he broke off abruptly, and inquired, with a great deal of enthusiasm (it appeared that everything he did was with a great deal of enthusiasm), “and who is this here?”.

The rider, heartily embracing the innkeeper, and then stepping quickly back, replied in a voice marked by genuine affection, but losing none of its characteristic solemnity:

“I wish more than you know that I could stay and enjoy your company until you grew utterly sick of me, and thrust me away at last,” and seeing the innkeeper about to protest most vigorously against this outrageous insinuation, he hurriedly continued, “but I am in a most difficult situation, and desperately need your help and” (he conspicuously emphasized that word, “and”), “your complete discretion. We need a room for the night, in your quietest corner. If anyone comes searching for us, you are to say nothing. If we leave suddenly and with no farewell, I apologize in advance, and hope you will not take it amiss; but great things, perhaps momentous things, are afoot. This is Porthos,” he said, abruptly turning to Mishael; “you can trust him implicitly”.

“And I’m Mishael,” the young man stammered, and almost added, “from Fair Semblances,” but thinking better of it, cut off the phrase just after “from,” and left the sentence hanging awkwardly unfinished. The inkeeper seemed not to notice, but the rider scowled ferociously for the merest instant.

Porthos, the inkeeper, had become much more subdued at this point, although he had not lost the twinkle in his eye. With a solemn whisper that they should follow him, which still retained, however, some overtones of his lighthearted and carefree nature, and which therefore seemed grotesquely incongruous and unnatural, he attempted to slip away from the great entry room surreptitiously. The attempt to be inconspicuous was altogether unsuccessful and would likely have been humorous if the situation were not so serious.

The three of them did, at least, make it out of the room and into a narrow hallway without too much of a scene. At the end of the hallway was a steep staircase (and Mishael noticed that the steps were made each one of a tree trunk from which a quarter had been removed in a pie-shaped wedge, lengthwise along the axis); the innkeeper took them up this staircase, entered a room which opened into the hallway, and then brought them through a small closet at the corner of that room, into a smaller room, to which the entrance was invisible except to someone standing in the closet.

There was only one small bed in the room, with an oval-shaped rug on the floor next to it, and a small nightstand at the head of the bed, next to the wall. There was a yellowish tallow candle on the lampstand; and directly above it was a small window, opening up on the back side of the inn. Mishael, feeling suddenly very tired, sat down on the side of the bed.

The two other men carried on a brief, whispered conversation, which Mishael could not quite make out; then Porthos left, and the rider came over to the side of the bed, and began to speak in a low voice, which was not quite a whisper:

“I am leaving you enough bread and water to satisfy you for tonight and possibly the next day. Do not under any circumstances leave this room before I return, or at least until after nightfall tomorrow. Make no noise, and keep the candle unlighted. My name is Tobiah,” he added, suddenly and unexpectedly changing the topic; which was a manner that seemed a habit with him, and gave the impression that his mind was so involved with other, weightier matters that he could not keep a train of thought unbroken for any amount of time.

Mishael began to reply, “And I’m Mishael,” but remembered that he had just told the innkeeper that much in the rider’s presence, and so, commencing with a bit of a stutter, he responded instead with an artificial, “Pleased to meet you”. Then, seeming embarrassed by his lack of tact, he quickly added, mostly because he simply wanted to say something further, in order to salvage his disgraceful first response, “I have something I want to show you”.

Mishael had indeed thought before of showing the rider his scratched out map with its inscription in the old characters, but had not quite made up his mind yet whether it would be the right thing to do, and was almost convinced, moreover, that it would in any event be unhelpful, as he suspected that no one in the world still understood the old characters; but now that he had blurted it out, he had no recourse but to produce the map from his knapsack, and give it to Tobiah.

Tobiah looked at the map intently, only asking, “And this is the map by which you escaped from Fair Semblances?”. Mishael was a little taken aback by his choice of the word “escaped,” but decided to say nothing in reply besides a simple “Yes”.

The rider then folded the map, and placing it in his own pocket, told Mishael, with such an air of assumed authority that he did not dare to question him, “This could be of much importance. I know one not too far from here who understands the old characters; and I think this would interest him greatly.” Then, with another abrupt change in tone, he repeated, “Stay here until I return”.

Tobiah, the laconic and mysterious rider who had so suddenly and unexpectedly arrived to help Mishael earlier that day, just as suddenly left him alone, walking out of the tiny room with brisk, determined strides. Mishael, more exhausted than he had ever been before, sank down into the bed without so much as turning down the covers, or taking off his boots. Soon, he was snoring softly, dead to the world.

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