The Neverending Story (22 page)

For a time both were silent. Then she went on: “Humans are our hope. One of them must come and give me a new name. And he will come.”

Atreyu made no answer.

“Do you understand now, Atreyu,” she asked, “why I had to ask so much of you? Only a long story full of adventures, marvels, and dangers could bring our savior to me. And that was your story.” Atreyu sat deep in thought. At length he nodded. “Yes, Golden-eyed Commander of Wishes, now I understand. I thank you for choosing me. Forgive my anger.”

“You had no way of knowing these things,” she answered. “And that too was necessary.”

Again Atreyu nodded. After a short silence he said: “But I’m very tired.”

“You have done enough, Atreyu. Would you like to rest?”

“Not yet. First I would like to see the happy outcome of my story. If, as you say, I’ve carried out my mission, why isn’t the savior here yet? What’s he waiting for?”

“Yes,” said the Childlike Empress softly. “What is he waiting for?”

Bastian felt his hands growing moist with excitement.

“I can’t do it,” he said. “I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do. Maybe the name I’ve thought of isn’t the right one.”

“May I ask you another question?” said Atreyu.

“Of course,” she answered with a smile.

“Why do you need a new name to get well?”

“Only the right name gives beings and things their reality,” she said. “A wrong name makes everything unreal. That’s what lies do.”

“Maybe the savior doesn’t yet know the right name to give you.”

“Oh yes he does,” she assured him.

Again they sat silent.

“I know it all right,” said Bastian. “I knew it the moment I laid eyes on her. But I don’t know what I have to do.”

Atreyu looked up.

“Maybe he wants to come and just doesn’t know how to go about it.”

“All he has to do,” said the Childlike Empress, “is to call me by my new name, which he alone knows. Nothing more.”

Bastian’s heart pounded. Should he try? What if he didn’t succeed? What if he was wrong? What if they weren’t talking about him but about some entirely different savior? How could he be sure they really meant him?

“Could it be,” said Atreyu after a while, “that he doesn’t know it’s him and not somebody else we’re talking about?”

“No,” said the Childlike Empress. “Not after all the signs he has had. He can’t be that stupid.”

“I’ll give it a try,” said Bastian. But he couldn’t get a word out of his mouth.

What if it actually worked? Then he would somehow be transported to Fantastica. But how? Maybe he would have to go through some sort of change. And what would that be like? Would it hurt? Would he lose consciousness? And did he really want to go to Fantastica? He wanted to go to Atreyu and the Childlike Empress, but he wasn’t at all keen on all those monsters the place was swarming with.

“Maybe he hasn’t got the courage,” Atreyu suggested.

“Courage?” said the Childlike Empress. “Does it take courage to say my name?”

“Then,” said Atreyu, “I can think of only one thing that may be holding him back.”

“And what would that be?”

After some hesitation Atreyu blurted out: “He just doesn’t want to come here. He just doesn’t care about you or Fantastica. We don’t mean a thing to him.”

The Childlike Empress stared wide-eyed at Atreyu.

“No! No!” Bastion cried out. “You mustn’t think that! It’s not that at all. Oh, please, please, don’t think that! Can you hear me? It’s not like that, Atreyu.”

“He promised me he would come,” said the Childlike Empress. “I saw it in his eyes.”

“Yes, that’s true. And I will come soon. I just need time to think. It’s not so simple.”

Atreyu hung his head and the two of them waited a long while in silence. But the savior did not appear, and there wasn’t the slightest sign to suggest that he was trying to attract their attention.

Bastian was thinking of how it would be if he suddenly stood before them in all his fatness, with his bowlegs and his pasty face. He could literally see the disappointment in the Childlike Empress’s face when she said to him: “What brings you here?”

And Atreyu might even laugh.

The thought brought a blush to Bastion’s cheeks.

Obviously they were expecting a prince, or at any rate some sort of hero. He just couldn’t appear before them. It was out of the question. He would do anything for them. Anything but that!

When at last the Childlike Empress looked up, the expression of her face had changed. Atreyu was almost frightened at its grandeur and severity. He knew where he had once seen that expression: in the sphinxes.

“There is one more thing I can do,” she said. “But I don’t like it, and I wish he wouldn’t make me.”

“What is that?” Atreyu asked in a whisper.

“Whether he knows it or not, he is already part of the Neverending Story. He can no longer back out of it. He made me a promise and he has to keep it. But by myself I can’t make him.”

“Who in all Fantastica,” Atreyu asked, “can do what you cannot?”

“Only one person,” she replied. “If he wants to. The Old Man of Wandering Mountain.”

Atreyu looked at the Childlike Empress in amazement.

“The Old Man of Wandering Mountain?” he repeated, stressing every word. “You mean he exists?”

“Did you doubt it?”

“The old folk in our tent camps tell the children about him when they’re naughty. They say he writes everything down in a book, whatever you do or fail to do, and there it stays in the form of a beautiful or an ugly story. When I was little, I believed it, but then I decided it was only an old wives’ tale to frighten children.”

“You never can tell about old wives’ tales,” she said with a smile.

“Then you know him?” Atreyu asked. “You’ve seen him?”

She shook her head.

“If I find him,” she said, “it will be our first meeting.”

“Our old folk also say,” Atreyu went on, “that you never can know where the Old Man’s mountain will be at any particular time. They say that when he appears it’s always unexpectedly, now here, now there, and that you can only run across him by accident, or because the meeting was fated.”

“That’s true,” said the Childlike Empress. “You can’t look for the Old Man of Wandering Mountain. You can only find him.”

“Does that go for you too?”

“Yes,” she said, “for me too.”

“But what if you don’t find him?”

“If he exists I’ll find him,” she said with a mysterious smile.

Her answer puzzled Atreyu. Hesitantly he asked: “Is he—is he like you?”

“He is like me,” she replied, “because he is my opposite in every way.”

Atreyu saw that with such questions he would get nothing out of her. And another thought weighed on him.

“You are deathly sick, Golden-eyed Commander of Wishes,” he said almost sternly. “You won’t go far by yourself. All your servants and courtiers seem to have abandoned you. Falkor and I would be glad to take you wherever you wish, but, frankly, I don’t know if Falkor has the strength. And my foot—well, you’ve seen that it won’t carry me.”

“Thank you, Atreyu,” she said. “Thank you for your brave and loyal offer. But I’m not planning to take you with me. To find the Old Man of Wandering Mountain, one must be alone. And even now Falkor is not where you left him. He has been moved to a place where his wounds will be healed and his strength renewed. And you too, Atreyu, will soon be in that same place.”

Her fingers played with AURYN.

“What place is that?”

“There’s no need for you to know that now. You will be moved in your sleep. And one day you will know where you were.”

“But how can I sleep?” cried Atreyu, so shaken that he lost his sense of tact. “How can I sleep when I know you may die any minute?”

The Childlike Empress laughed softly.

“I’m not quite as forsaken as you think. I’ve already told you that there are some things you can’t hope to understand. I have my seven Powers, which belong to me as your memory or courage or thoughts belong to you. They cannot be seen or heard, and yet they are with me at this moment. I shall leave three of them with you and Falkor to look after you, and I shall take the other four with me as my escort. You needn’t worry, Atreyu. You can sleep easy.”

At these words, all the accumulated weariness of the Great Quest descended on Atreyu like a dark veil. Yet it was not the leaden weariness of exhaustion, but a gentle longing for sleep. He still had many questions to ask the Golden-eyed Commander of Wishes, but he felt that her last words had vanquished all his wishes but one, the wish for sleep. His eyes closed and, still in a sitting position, he glided into the darkness.

The clock in the steeple struck eleven.

As though far in the distance, Atreyu heard the Childlike Empress give an order in a soft voice. Then he felt powerful arms lifting him gently and carrying him away.

For a long time, all was dark and warm around him. Much later he half awoke when a soothing liquid touched his parched lips and ran down his throat. He had a vague impression that he was in a great cave with walls of gold. He saw the white luckdragon lying beside him. And then he saw, or thought he saw, a gushing fountain in the middle of the cave, encircled by two snakes, a light one and a dark one, which were biting each other’s tail.

But then an invisible hand brushed over his eyes. The feel of it was infinitely soothing, and again he fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

At that moment, the Childlike Empress left the Ivory Tower. She lay bedded on soft silken cushions in a glass litter, which seemed to be moving under its own power, but was actually being carried by four of the Empress’s invisible servants.

They crossed the Labyrinth garden, or rather, what was left of it, making frequent detours, since many of the paths ended in the Nothing.

When at length they left the Labyrinth, the invisible carriers stopped. They seemed to be waiting for a command.

The Childlike Empress sat up on her cushions and cast a glance back at the Ivory Tower.

Then, sinking back, she said: “Keep going! Just keep going—no matter where.”

Blown by the wind, her snow-white hair trailed behind the glass litter like a flag.

  ong-thundering avalanches descended from the heights, snowstorms raged between towering ice-coated summits, dipped into hollows and ravines, and swept howling onward over the great white expanse of the glaciers. Such weather was not at all unusual for this part of the country, for the Mountain of Destiny—that was its name was the highest in all Fantastica, and its peaks literally jutted into the heights of heaven.

Not even the most intrepid mountain climbers ventured into these fields of everlasting ice. It had been so very, very long since anyone had succeeded in climbing this mountain that the feat had been forgotten. For one of Fantastica’s many strange laws decreed that no one could climb the Mountain of Destiny until the last successful climber had been utterly forgotten. Thus anyone who managed to climb it would always be the first.

No living creature could survive in that icy waste—except for a handful of gigantic ice-glumps—who could barely be called living creatures, for they moved so slowly that they needed years for a single step and whole centuries for a short walk. Which meant, of course, that they could only associate with their own kind and knew nothing at all about the rest of Fantastica. They thought of themselves as the only living creatures in the universe.