“Come on, didn’t you say we used to play at being the W.S.?”
“The what?”
“The Wandering Saint.”
“How are we going to get the blessing if you ridicule this place, and him, and all he did for travelers?”
Now Rigg began to see why Father had warned him never to come up against a man’s religion. “Nothing makes people angrier than finding out somebody thinks they’re wrong about how the universe works.” It had been a mistake to try to tell Umbo anything. “Sorry,” said Rigg.
“No you’re not,” said Umbo. “You weren’t even joking. Do you really think that you’re a demon?”
“I’m thirteen years old, and I’m just ordinary.” Then Rigg walked out of the shrine, to show that he thought the discussion was over. If Umbo refused to drop the matter, then this idea of traveling together wasn’t going to work.
Umbo stayed inside the shrine for a while, then came out, acting a little huffish as he gathered up his few things. Clearly he was ready to go, and was marking time until he could say what he needed to say.
Rigg was about to tell him that it was all right, Umbo could go back home and Rigg would continue his journey alone. But Umbo spoke first. “You’re not ordinary.”
“Is that good or bad?” asked Rigg.
“I’m sorry I got so angry. I’ve just never—nobody ever says a bad thing about the Wandering Saint. And nobody calls him the ‘W.S.’”
Rigg wasn’t going to play this game—the apology that was really just a continuation of the argument.
“Believe what you want,” said Rigg.
“I was thinking I should leave you. Go back home before you bring down a curse on us.”
Oh, so the W.S. has the evil eye now, thought Rigg. But he didn’t say anything.
“I don’t know if it’s safe to travel with you if you’re going to mock him like that,” said Umbo, and he sounded afraid as well as angry. “But then I remembered how your father talked about saints and demons, back when he was teaching me . . . things. So you were only talking like your dad.”
Rigg remembered now that Father had taken Umbo out on walks in the woods or through the fields. Not recently, but when they were both about eight or nine. And Father was teaching him?
“For what it’s worth, I wasn’t mocking,” said Rigg, “I was realizing something.”
“That you’re a demon?” said Umbo scornfully. “I know you’re not.”
“No, I realized that the demon in the Wandering Saint story wasn’t a demon at all,” said Rigg. “So I’m not a demon, but I’m the person who did the things that the demon in the story supposedly did—and before you start getting mad at me again, you watched me do it.”
“The Wandering Saint was hundreds of years ago,” said Umbo. He was barely containing his impatience.
“I’m not lying, and I’m not joking,” said Rigg. “When I was trying to save your brother, the reason I couldn’t do it was because this man appeared. I was jumping to try to get to your brother, and suddenly there he was.” There was no reason to complicate things by trying to explain about the paths and how for the first time ever they turned into people. “I fell into him and it knocked him into the water.”
“I didn’t see anything like that.”
“I know you didn’t,” said Rigg. “I’m not saying you saw him—he was in the past. I’m saying you saw me do the things the demon does in that story.”
“So he’s there hundreds of years ago, and you’re there a couple of days ago, and you bump into him and knock him into the water?”
“Exactly,” said Rigg, ignoring the tone of mockery in Umbo’s voice. “The water swept him over the edge, but he caught himself on the very same rock where Kyokay was hanging on. Kyokay in the present, and him in the past, and they overlapped. His hand was completely covering Kyokay’s hand.”
Umbo rolled his eyes and jammed his hat on his head, sausage and all.
“Why not wait to make up your mind until you hear me out?” said Rigg. “Even if you don’t believe me, I know it happened, and if you believe in saints and demons and curses, which I think are impossible, why not consider the possibility that I saw and touched a man from the past at the same time I was trying to get past the man so I could grab your brother’s arm?”
“‘Consider the possibility,’” Umbo echoed. “You really do sound like your father.”
“And was my father stupid or a liar, so that you have to reject anybody who sounds like him?”