It was day two-hundred and twenty-four that he started talking to the ghost.
He had started talking to himself just four hours into the walk, reliving arguments with his neighbors. Well… former neighbors. The words escaped his lips, first in a whisper, growing louder with each hour passed. No, Zinzabana, I don’t think there are fish that can jump the Road, that would be a ten-men high jump. Have you ever seen that? Yes, Girundachi, I am spending ever coin I have. I doubt they use our currency in a land unvisited for ten generations. I won’t stave Ararnau, why do you think I have so many sacks of rice, not to mention those fishing poles?
Well over two hundred days in, he had proved most of his arguments true. The food had not run out, the fish were biting. He did have a pause one day, when he saw the biggest fish of his life — teeth protruding like curved spears — jump about halfway up to the top of the Road while he was reeling in what he expected to be a fresh dinner, and bite clean through the jewel line he had purchased at great expense, devouring the smaller fish on its descent to the depths of the ocean. Losing the fish was fine, as he lost his appetite for the rest of that night.
After a couple of full moons, he talked to the birds that had been following behind him, gnawing at the scraps of fish he left behind. At first, it was less talking about more shouting at them to leave, but the Road was their home long before he started this walk, a long, stable, out-of-danger place to roost and sleep, and to watch the ocean for signs of fish. Once he found himself out of range of Miniz-Tau-Ho, the city of his birth and the largest city on the eastern shore, he found whole colonies of gulls, safely out of range of predators. Even if a caynid had the gall to walk the Road looking for the gulls who flew away over the horizon, there would be no way to hide or sneak, as its approach would be spotted quite a way off. The Road was flat and straight, a black thin line that passed over the ocean from one horizon to the next.
He asked the birds questions about their home. They would know the most, after all, having lived here for uncounted generations. That they never answered was not a concern of his. He didn’t ask the questions everyone asked, questions that have also been unanswered despite years of inquiry. Questions like: who built this road over the sea? For how many years have the long pillars, curiously devoid of barnacles and the other clingers of the sea, stood in the warm waters of the Great Ocean. How long does it take to traverse, whether on fast wings or the slow plodding of a pack mule?
How would the birds know any of this? Instead, he asked bird different questions. Where are the best places to fish? How best to keep out of the rain that pummeled the sea every few days during this wet season? Where to roost at night, and when should he set out for the day to make the most of the cool of the morning, to make time to stop for fishing, and to make time for an afternoon rest.
He first saw the ghost the day the rains stopped. The day he nearly fell into the sea.
Every three or four days of travel, the path would widen on either side, a bulge on the long road, stringing together like a necklace of black pearls laying across the waves. For what purpose these protrusions and their crumbling ruins ever served, the seagulls never said. Rusted grit lined the floors, and the patchy roof barely kept out of the rain or sun. At first, these were curiosities, simply something to watch for a few hours as they slowly arrived into view and then disappeared out of site. But as he relied more on fishing, once his stores began to run short, these sanctuaries became a place to hold a day while smoking his catches, the shelters keeping away the flocks of birds from the fragrant plume rising into the sky.
It was on such a day, fish drying in a rusty makeshift cooker with a fire lit with whatever debris littered the road and dried seaweed he could pull out of the ocean. The days had been hot, and this particular stop along the Long Road had a bit of wall that had fallen against another just so to provide a perfect bit of shade for an afternoon of fishing. The heat was beating waves of slumber into his brain, and so he tied the line he had been using in a loose loop around his wrist and began to slumber.
He should not have tied it so tight.
The line jerked his arm hard enough to lift him out of his makeshift chair and slam his face into one of the few standing pieces of railing left on this stretch of road. He struggled to pull against the line, managing to right himself before being pulled off the high road and into the depths below. The pain in his hand burned like a fire, and indeed, it would be days before he could use it normally. After a few futile moments of grasping at his line with sweaty hands, he reached for his knife, and hesitated. He had brought three lines with him, each long enough to reach to the oceans below, and had already lost one on a similar situation weeks earlier, though at that time he had not fallen asleep. He might have several moons more to travel on one lifeline if he cut this one.
A flash of light dove into the waters. A moment later, the line went slack.
It was a bird, he told himself. One of the gulls looking to snipe a quick meal and somehow bit the line instead.
He saw it again a few days later. A flash of white behind him, near dusk. He would have missed it had not the cartwheel jammed itself on some broken rocks, and he turned around to fix it.
Within the week, he was seeing it every night. It became impossible to pretend it was a bird any longer.
The people of Miniz-Tau-Ho knew all about the spirits of the dreamland. Talking to the people in dreams was considered appropriate: for one, you could hardly stop yourself in a dream if the spirits willed the conversation. And he had recited the prayer to Manawondo every night since his childhood, more out of habit than belief, to protect his soul during slumber. Yes, the stories told of nothing but misfortunes for those with the hubris to commune with the spirits while awake, with full ability to make deals that the gods would enforce. Klonedah the Clever had to serve the Lord of Livers for a hundred and thirteen years because he asked a ghost for words to heal his daughter. And Mushun the One Armed became so named because he challenged a spirit to a battle. He won that battle, and the prize of a generational chiefdom for himself and his children, a prize he personally enjoyed but for a few days before the stump festered, and he left to join the land of ghosts himself.
He talked to the birds. He wouldn’t even look at the ghost. They spent the waxing and waning of the moon in this silence, the ghost following behind him without trouble or concern.
Until the day it zipped ahead of him as fast as lightning.
“Shit!” he exclaimed to a gull that he had been catching scraps of fish he has been throwing. The bird squawked in return and flew away to the sea.
The road was widening to one of the periodic bulges. He had not intended to stop— his last bit of fishing yielded such an abundance that smoking it all had attracted nearly every damn gull within a day’s flight. He was actually struggling to keep them out of his stores at night, having to block everything under the cart, surrounded by the hard packed spices he brought for trade, and in the morning still found them pecking holes in the bags.
As he drew closer, he saw the ghost hovering on the other side of the road, above a collapsed building. He climbed over the small partition that occasionally ran down the middle of the road, leaving his cart behind, wary, but curious at what he might find.
He watched the ghost light carefully as he drew near the ruined building. It remained motionless, hovering without even a hint of sound or motion. Only the crunch of his boots against gravel and the ever present breaking of waves on the towers that held the Long Road above the sea broke the silence.
Though the broken walls, he saw the remains of a cart, the wood beginning to rot, the wheels broken, the owner, or former owner, laying on the ground, bones peaking through a tattered robe. He looked for danger, but what danger would remain after what was clearly months, if not years, of decay? His heart pounded as he realized this traveler must have come from the other end of the Long Road, for no one had braved the Road from his end in over a hundred years. Carefully, he walked into the ruin, and examined the old, ruptured sacks. They were mostly filled with rod and dust, but he did find two looms of a strange black material that somehow had resisted the rot, and a sack of coins, slightly corroded from the salty air. He did not recognize the symbols or words stamped upon the disks, further confirming his suspicions that this unfortunate fellow tradesman hailed from the other side of the great ocean.
He looked down at the bones. He wasn’t a mago by any means, but he knew his prayers well enough. He took one of the looms of strange cloth and wrapped up what remained.
“My brother of the sand.
My sister of the wind.
Manawondo will fly him.
Manamodo will hold him.”
He carried the wrapped bones to the edge of the Road.
“Manalitta will see him home.”
He pushed the bones into over the railing and into the ocean.
It did not take him long to load the salvageable bags into the little extra space on his cart. Once the body had been pushed over the edge, the ghost began moving again, small circles around the ruin. He looked up at it as he finished the packing. There were a few hours of daylight left, and he had no desire to sleep near the site of this impromptu funeral. The ghost was still circling.
“Thank you,” he said. It was the first time he had acknowledged the ghost. Today was day two hundred and twenty-four of his journey.
Twenty days later, he saw a boat. By this time, he and the ghost held regular conversation. Very one-sided, of course, at least while he was awake, though it was not long before the ghost started appearing in his dreams.
He wondered why the ghost took so long to appear in the dream world, and when he was awake, he would ask and receive no answer, and when he was asleep, he wouldn’t remember to ask. Instead, he would listen in wonder as the ghost told stories of the ancient past. Gleaming insects, hard shelled beetles, giant in their form, raced along the Long Road. Beetles yes, but not bugs, their wings would open and people would walk out seemingly unharmed. The ghost showed him a boat which had drifted too far from shore, swallowed whole by a toothy maw, the rest of the creature hidden in the ocean depths. Not a single plank floated to the surface. He saw the sky ringed by fire, he saw men and women both jumping off the bridge that spanned the ocean, faces locked in despair, the ghosts unable to rescue them before tentacles dragged them to their depths.
He watched birds colonize the abandoned road. The ghost did not try to help the birds. It did not know how.
The boat he saw in the waking world was not eaten. Its red-striped sail was full of wind and purpose, traveling south under the road, a pattern he knew well from residing much of his life in a seaside town. Legitimate sailors rarely sailed out of site of the shore. Smugglers and pirates were far more likely to risk the depths and the dangers within. And sure enough, the next morning he awoke to the signs of a far away green horizon, his reward for walking late into the evening. As he continued towards the shore, on what would be his last day on the road, he could not stop thinking of his dream from the night before, a conversation with the ghost as most of his dreams were during this past moon.
\<\<What is your purpose?\>\> The voice was indescribable, he was unable to place a gender, or accent, or even a tone. It was through the words just appeared in his head. In the dream, this was perfectly logical and normal.
He answered with why he left his home— the fact that no one had done it in living memory, that he was the right person because he had nothing to lose but his life, his family had died three years ago during the famine, and with the imminent war with Ban-So-Bana and the increased pirate attaches on the food ships from Queenport, life was so cheap already. His life was basically without value. That best case, he would become rich beyond measure, running caravans across the road, exploiting what was sure to be a massive trading imbalance, and worst case, he would die of exposure on the road, but most likely, he would make enough to live comfortably in a foreign land.
It seemed as though this was the wrong answer.
\<\<That is your function. What is your purpose?\>\>
He told the ghost of the gods. Surely, being a dream spirit, it would already know of the twelve tasks that Manawondo set before all people, of the twelve comforts Manamodo had prepared.
He hadn’t thought of it in these terms before, religion not being on the forefront of his mind. He was faithful in his way, but he felt that the best way to honor the gods was to live best the life they had provided. This trip was a good example of the Fifth Edict— Walk the Right Road. May a bit more literal that the gods intended, but he felt there was a lesson there in taking the metaphor at face value.
Yet, this still was the wrong answer. \<\<That is the purpose of the gods. What is your purpose?\>\>
He had to confess, he didn’t know what the ghost meant.
The ghost confessed it wasn’t sure either.
\<\<I also do not know my purpose. They only gave me a function.\>\>
What is your function, he wondered out loud, not questioning in the dream who would be assigning a function to a ghost.
\<\<This,\>\> said the ghost.
‘What is my purpose?’ he thought as the shore got closer, minute by minute, the green resolving to individual tree line, except for where the road ended, the black line in front of him terminating in a confusion of color, bright reds and oranges, blues and purples, the colors of a city full of people, and…yes… purpose. No one at first noticed his approach because no one was looking. Why would they? He could hear the murmur of a city at work, the rumblings of carts, the grumbling of a long-necked beast of burden he had never seen before, shaggy in fur with long perked ears. He could even hear the shrill cries of children, all before he was first noticed. A youth, probably ten or so, pointed and shouted, and was roundly ignored by his elders for some time for his nonsense before one finally humored the child to turn and look at the road long abandoned.
From there, the shouting only intensified, and a crowd began to grow. He wondered if they were more excited about him or the ghost, and the became concerned if they could even see the ghost, or if it was only visible to him. Not for the first time, he considered it might be a figment of his sun madness, and then a more uncomfortable thought that the appeared end of the road that lay before him could also be a mirage.
And if it was, then what? He would continue along this road that led ever onward into the sea, another day, another step. The oceans were full of fish and water, his hand pump continued to remove the salt, his cart continued to roll. Perhaps he would leave his bones and goods to be found for the next traveler. It might not be the purpose of the gods, but it would be a purpose, to walk the way as far as he could, success or no.
In a different person, these would be words of prophecy. But he was a merchant, not a theologian.
But the people were real, and as he drew close enough for everyone to see his cart full of wares and not weapons, several rushed forward to meet him before he hit the shore. They were different from him, for one, he could not tell any differences between male and female. They had a slightly redder tone to their faces. Though their hair and eyes were as brown as his own. He was surprised that even though he was unable to understand their language completely, which he expected, there were words close enough “Rhoda,” they said, pointing behind him. “Rhoda Oceania.”
He had a few silver coins in his pockets, and passed them into a few hands. “Bed and food,” he said, pantomiming eating and sleeping. They took his silver with a smile and grasped his hands, leading him to a person a bit more richly dressed than the others, just as colorful but with more golden shine.
As he left the road, he glanced behind him, slightly to the left, where the ghost had kept its vigil. It was no longer there. He looked further back, to see a faintly glowing sparkle in the air— the ghost had stopped where the road met the sand and budged no further, its unknown purpose either fulfilled or calling it back to the black strand.
“Goodbye,” he said. He wasn’t sure if the ghost could hear him.
And then he added, knowing better what his future held. “But not for long.”