The Pilgrimage - Part 2

It had been just over a month since he stumbled.

It concerned him, to say the least. Stumbling was always a sign of the Sacrificial. Traditions and hunches were as close as anyone got to the scientific method on the Pilgrimage. Journey was faith. Knowledge was only experience, filtered through hope and expectation. And everyone who experienced a stumble expected a fall.

He hoped he was wrong.

Someone he met on the road once, driving a wagon, and said that she traveled with a Sacrifice before its fall (all sacrifices became an “it” after they were lost). That’s where she got the second horse. She told him that it was sort of like coming down with a cold. It starts with an unexpected symptom, a cough, immediately followed by personal denial. Like it wasn’t a sickness, just a tickle in the throat. Just an accident.

“It kept saying, in the beginning, that ‘I just tripped.’ But I know it didn’t. It was leading this horse, when I saw it lean on the reigns.”

Then, apparently, the symptoms get worse and the afflicted begin to accept that they’re sick. They begin to think that they could beat it. If they just walked a little slower, if they just took their time and their vitamins it would get cured before it got too bad.

Of course, it always got worse, she said. Once you’ve got a cold, you’ve got a cold. She’d never seen anyone get sick and not die. But, she said, it fought. And the symptoms got worse. Then, like everyone who gets sick, they eventually resign. Just give in and accept that that’s all life was. Pain and suffering. And then there was the wait for it to all be over.

“That’s when it gave me its horse. Said it didn’t need anything anymore. That’s when I knew it knew. I took the horse and gave it the Last Thanks.”

He hadn’t really asked her. He secretly wished she hadn’t. She just rode up and started talking. He figured she just needed to talk about it. A coping mechanism. It was always tough when someone went to the other side. Very little was more haunting than someone being food for the Dogs.

But it did give him a certain calm about the whole thing. Like someone else was looking him in the eye, even though she never – not once – actually looked him in the eye. No one did. He couldn’t remember the last time he saw the insides of real eyes. It was too dangerous.

He didn’t tell her that he had stumbled, but somewhere, he was pretty sure she knew. After she finished her story, she just moved right along. She was careful to move the wagon to one side, so that there was no dust kicked up into his face. They didn’t say goodbye. No one fare-welled here. To do so, when you knew better, was downright malicious. The Dogs were bad enough; no Children need do the Enemy’s work too.

He continued diligently, telling himself that one stumble needn’t define him. If he was careful, he’d never stumble or stagger again. He could just keep going, as he was supposed to. As he had always thought he would. No – as he always will.

He let his mind protect itself with all the usual tricks. He thought again to the Promises. The honeysuckle of a man-made heaven. Of finally inheriting the gifts for which he had already been damned for. There was a fuel that righteousness gave him that nothing else ever had. The rituals and old traditions gave him strength. The Promises. The Ladies. The Horizon.

They were the reason to answer the Call that Must Be Answered. No, they were the Call that Must Be Answered.

The Last Thanks. It was neither a goodbye, nor a vindication. The Sacrifice was stripped of its identity, its gender, and age. It was the ritual preformed when one of the Children had lost their way. Knowing it had become an object, a tool of the Dogs, it was removed of all that it possessed, materially or socially, within the eyes of the Children. It was not so much sacrilege as inherently detestable to leave those monsters beside the path anything. They had taken enough.

But, paradoxically, no Sacrifice had ever fought to keep who they were. They always gave it freely. And so, in a moment of uneasy clarity, The Last Thanks became a defining hesitation in the Journey of all the world’s inhabitants.

Somehow, he never found that paradox – that momentary agreement between black and white – confusing. The more he pondered it, the more it just made sense to him. How easy and comfortable it would be to just give up.

That was how he stumbled the first time. His mind tricks were not working as well as they used to. In the oppressive beauty of Eden, the Promises had lost some of their lustre. Oh how easy it was for the Children to be wretched. Ungrateful.

But they shouldn’t lose their lustre. It wasn’t supposed to work that way. How was he to make them regain it? How, now so very tired, feeling the warm wind blow against him, was he to continue? How many hills and mountains had he climbed, yet to see the Horizon?

Where was Inspiration? Where was Reubin?

The wagon was far down the hill now, passing down and over a stream.