“Of course you can. You will go on without them, because you cannot take them with you. You may or may not separate yourself from your possessions now, but you will surely be separated from them later. Do it now and you’ll be free to serve the King.”

“If you have less,” Malaiki said, “you’ll have less to worry about.”

“Who are you to talk?” asked a dour-looking man. “You carry heavy sacks, without even a wagon to aid you!”

“We carry these stones because the King tells us to,” Malaiki said. “I can’t explain it, but the more I carry, the stronger I get, and somehow it feels lighter. What you carry grows heavier each day, and you become weaker.”

The frazzled woman looked at her things and fingered them. “But my art, my music, my books, my collections,” she said. “These are good things, aren’t they?”

“Many of them are good,” Malaiki said, “and we should thank the King for them. But even the best things can’t endure the journey. They’re expendable. The GuideBook says we shouldn’t hold anything too close in the short today that will not be ours in the long tomorrow. It commands us to travel light.”

The longer we walked, the more people and possessions we encountered, the more tired I got, and the less enthusiasm I felt for the road. That night we let the fire die early and withdrew to our tents with little conversation.

Words in the dark pulled me out of sleep. These were not the murmurs of some unknown being, but a man inside the tent. A dark image just three feet from me fervently whispered in a hoarse creaky voice. Then I heard the distant sound of clanging metal. The more the shadow whispered and the more intensely, the louder the clangs.

Vicious but unintelligible words filled the air. As the whispers in the tent continued, there was a shriek, followed by one last clang, and then a shout of triumph in some glorious unfamiliar tongue. As I watched, the shadowy figure crawled back under his blanket. Within a few minutes he began to twitch, then snore.

The next day we walked for hours alongside a magnificent, well-tended estate that sprawled across the south side of the road as far as we could see.

“Who owns all this?” David asked. “I’m impressed!”

We heard approaching hoofbeats and a jet-black thoroughbred with hints of blue appeared, ridden by a distinguished and finely dressed gray-haired gentleman, accompanied by several attendants also on horseback. I stared at the black horse, obviously bred for speed and intelligence.

“I’m Mr. Timothy Bartholomew,” he said, extending his hand down to me. When he saw me admiring his mount, he added, “And this is Thunder.”