Changing Planes

As they go up into the mountainous Middle Lands, they do not bunch together, but spread out onto hundreds of different tracks, some taken by many, others by only a few, some clearly marked, others so cryptic that only people who have been on them before could ever trace the turnings. “That’s when it’s good to have a three-year-old along,” Kergemmeg said. “Somebody who’s been up the way twice.” They travel very light and very fast. They live off the land except in the arid heights of the mountains, where, as he said, “They lighten their packs.” And up in those passes and high canyons, the hard-driven rubac of the traders’ caravans begin to stumble and tremble, perishing of exhaustion and cold. If a trader still tries to drive them on, people on the road unload them and loose them and let their own pack beast go with them. The little animals limp and scramble southward, back down to the desert. The goods they carried end up strewn along the wayside for anyone to take; but nobody takes anything, except a little food at need. They don’t want stuff to carry, to slow them down. Spring is coming, cool spring, sweet spring, to the valleys of grass and the forests, the lakes, the bright rivers of the north, and they want to be there when it comes.

Listening to Kergemmeg, I imagined that if one could see the migration from above, see those people all threading along a thousand paths and trails, it would be like watching our northwest coast in spring a century or two ago when every stream, from the mile-wide Columbia to the tiniest creek, turned red with the salmon run.

The salmon spawn and die when they reach their goal, and some of the Ansarac are going home to die, too: those on their third migration north, the three-year-olds, whom we would see as people of seventy and over. Some of them don’t make it all the way. Worn out by privation and hard going, they drop behind. If people pass an old man or woman sitting by the road, they may speak a word or two, help to put up a little shelter, leave a gift of food, but they do not urge the elder to come with them. If the elder is very weak or ill they may wait a night or two, until perhaps another migrant takes their place. If they find an old person dead by the roadside, they bury the body. On its back, with the feet to the north: going home.

There are many, many graves along the roads north, Kergemmeg said. Nobody has ever made a fourth migration.

The younger people, those on their first and second migrations, hurry on, crowded together in the high passes of the mountains, then spreading out ever wider on a myriad paths through the prairies as the Middle Lands widen out north of the mountains. By the time they reach the northland proper, the great rivers of people have tasseled out into thousands of rivulets, veering west and east, across the north.

Coming to a pleasant hill country where the grass is already green and the trees are leafing, one of the little groups comes to a halt. “Well, here we are,” says Mother. “Here it is.” There are tears in her eyes and she laughs the soft, clacking laugh of the Ansarac. “Shuku, do you remember this place?”

And the daughter who was less than a half year old when she left this place—eleven or so, in our years—stares around with amazement and incredulity, and laughs, and cries, “But it was bigger than this!”

Then perhaps Shuku looks across those half-familiar meadows of her birthplace to the just visible roof of the nearest neighbor and wonders if Kirmmmid and his father, who caught up to them and camped with them for a few nights and then went on ahead, were there already, living there, and if so, would Kimimmid come over to say hello?

For the people who lived so close-packed, in such sociable and ceaseless promiscuity in the Cities under the Sun, sharing rooms, sharing beds, sharing work and play, doing everything together in groups and crowds, now have all gone apart, family I from family, friend from friend, each to a small and separate house here in the meadowlands, or farther north in the rolling hills, or still farther north in the lakelands. But if they have all scattered like sand from a broken hourglass, the bonds that unite them have not broken, only changed. Now they come together not in groups and crowds, not in tens and hundreds and thousands, but by two and two.

“Well, here you are!” says Shuku’s mother, as Shuku’s father opens the door of the little house at the meadow’s edge. “You must have been just a few days ahead of us.”

“Welcome home,” he says gravely. His eyes shine. The two adults take each other by the hand and slightly raise their narrow, beaked heads in a particular salute, an intimate yet formal greeting. Shuku suddenly remembers seeing them do that when she was a little girl, when they lived here, long ago. Here at the birthplace.

“Kimimmid was asking about you just yesterday,” Father says to Shuku, and he softly clacks a laugh.