We said our goodbyes to Giln and Zurn, promising we would meet up with them on our return.  Sheleck was in Doctor Murger's room so an eye could be kept on him.  The doctor told Giln -- and Giln told us -- that Sheleck was now conscious and grumbling that he needed to be with his Brother and Zurn.  But the doctor stood his ground.  He said Sheleck didn't know how lucky he was that it was just a flesh wound, but his biggest danger now was infection:  "Lose a limb," the doctor said, "or lose a life.  Infection doesn't care which."

"So you will talk to the Council?" Giln asked in a low voice, glancing over to make sure Zurn wasn't listening.

"Yes," said Klasco.

They watched us, in silence, load the wagon and hitch the Gray and Chestnut to their respective places and then climb up to our seats.

"You think they will listen to you?"

"Yes, I think they will."

Zurn lifted a hand to the Chestnut's mane.  "It's soft," he said over his shoulder to whomever was listening.

Giln glanced over.  "Don't let him bite you."  Then to Klasco: "And, you'll be able to petition them to let your brother enlist in your place?  Seems that would be hard enough by itself."

"Not in my place.  I'm exempt.  I would be leaving a wife and two female children, one who's ill.  I need to petition them to let him enlist because he isn't from our province."  He smiled at me and I nodded, as to give his words credence.  "If he weren't my brother it would be out of the question."

Giln looked confused.

"I shouldn't say more. Glnot Rhuether's men or his sympathizers are everywhere."

"Ah … I see."

An awkward silence spread among us, suggesting the conversation had gone as far as it could, but with the unexpressed affinity that had formed in our encounter, there existed a void that somehow needed filling.

"Well," Klasco said, "If we want to get to Kabeez before the Council adjourns we must be going." 

We shook hands all around, Giln and Zurn stepped away from the wagon, and Klasco shook the reins.  The muscles on the crossans' hips bunched as they pulled against the weight of the wagon.  The large wheels made a quarter turn, crunching gravel, then another and another as the crossans lumbered forward.

Klasco's parting words to Giln were, "Be faithful.  We'll return with what you need."  And, before we were out of hearing, repeated, "Be faithful."
   
We rode for what, to me, was about a mile with each of us in his own thoughts before Klasco interrupted mine with a question that took me right back to the conversation we had been in earlier.

"Brother, are you going to tell me about your beloved's Kojutake and your encounter with it?"

I smiled.  "My mind will wander less if we call her Axtilla."

"Yes, if memory serves, you had just had your pants scared off you."

I chuckled at his attempt to get me flustered.  I figured it was his way of defusing what to him might otherwise be a volatile and forbidden subject.  "Klasco, Axtilla's Kojutake was very real—I mean very real—while at the same time being an illusion.  I wonder, Brother, whether this is anything within your frame of reference that you can even grasp.  Let's not even call it by the name that is so emotionally charged to you.  Let's call it, oh … Disneyland."

"Disneyland?"  He looked blankly at me.

"An amusement park where I came from," I said, knowing that would also not likely register.

He shrugged.

"What's strange to me is that I even know about Disneyland.  I have no memory of ever being there.  I—"

"So, this Disneyland was so real you could reach right out and touch it, but when you tried it was not real at all."

"Exactly!"  He was talking about Kojutake!  I was astounded that he grasped it so readily.  But, I needed to take him a little deeper.  "The Disneyland from my—my province was very large.  Imagine entering it through a gate and everything you left was as real as your crossans and the road and the fields we see, but once inside you find the rodents that might spook your crossans are now human-sized and walk on two legs and speak your language.  The boy rodent's name is Mickey Mouse, The girl rodent's Minnie Mouse.  There are bears that are twice the size of bears, a tiger named Tigger that walks on his hind legs.  Oh, Brother, there is so much more I could tell you about this Disneyland, so much more than the creatures.  But this is enough to explain about Axtilla's … Disneyland."  Then, I thought further about it.  "No, that's not true.  I have to say something more about it.  Children love these creatures.  Children the age of Sarisa go right up and hug them.  They do it because in some part of their minds they know the Creature is an illusion.  A real tiger would hurt them, but Tigger wouldn't."

"Right, Doctrex," he said to the road.  "Tell me about the Disneyland that you and Axtilla went into."

"Okay," I said.  "But it was more like standing outside the gates and looking through at all the wonders of Disneyland, inside.  Yes," I said, pleased with the way I put it, "that's kind of what it was.  We were leaning against the log; Axtilla was remarkably healed from her snake bite, but horrified about what she kept insisting would be our encounter with … with Disneyland.  It was starting to get dark and the thunder and lightning intensifying—you do know what thunder and lightning is, don't you?"

"I've never seen it, but people who have been to the Far Northern Province talk about flashes of light that turn the darkness into just what it is now.  And they say there was a horrible rumbling sound that came with the flash that was not like anything they'd ever heard before."

"You have an idea, then, about what we were experiencing.  Then, just as it was getting dark, something I would describe as a gigantic sheet spread out across the sky above our heads.  It was more than a sheet, though; it was more of a membrane, so incredibly thin you could see through it; and with regenerative powers—so that it could heal its own tears, punctures and wounds as they occurred.  Axtilla called it skin and that probably more accurately described the organic intelligence that seemed to infuse it."

I went on to tell him about the pomnots drifting in and out of a sulfurous fog as they devoured a fallen animal's heart, how it was entirely in pantomime and how the blood dripped through the membrane but before it could hit the ground the membrane had closed the puncture.  The only thing separating our plane from the plane of Disneyland was that thin membrane.

"According to Axtilla," I told him, "the Pomnots could see us as easily as we could see them.  And, while seeing them savagely attacking the heart and then each other froze my blood, she assured me they could not penetrate the membrane.  I found that hard to wrap my mind around, and so I prepared a test for the theory."

I described the antics I used to try to entice one of the Pomnots to attack me through the membrane, and how I was completely blindsided by the membrane being stretched to nearly the point of rupturing by the angry Pomnot, bent on retribution for my taunting.  Klasco’s eyes were huge and unblinking when I described the Pomnot-attached membrane bumping me just before it flung the creature back into the yellow fog.  His wide eyes peered over the palm that didn’t quite cover his spreading grin, and when I shared Axtilla's reaction to the stunned look on my face, I feared Klasco was going to tumble off his seat, so taken over was he by laughter.

"I'll swear, Doctrex you have—you have the gift of storytelling," he said once he was recovered.

"But, you think I'm just trying to entertain you as I did your family."

He appeared to consider it a moment before he asked: "If I told you that story what would you think?"

I started to take the direct approach and tell him I had been just entertaining his family then, but this time it was the truth.  But, the truth was even more farfetched than the fiction.  "I—I'd probably compliment you on your storytelling abilities," I admitted, "but, if you persisted in your need to convince me of the truth of it, and you had been truthful with me about every other thing, I think I would try very hard to suspend judgment."  I took a deep breath.  "Especially, Brother, if you told me that the whole structure of everything worthwhile I believed about you would collapse if I couldn't accept an even more difficult truth, then, yes, I think I would try very, very hard to believe."