Mercedes Lackey - Wintermoon

Nothing had importance, only to go on, to find her band. Or if not, respectfully to complete this awful and weird penance set her by the priestesses of the Maiden. And then be done with all of it.

I too will go away. Into the East perhaps, where people lose themselves. Because already I’m lost. Who is Clirando? Clirando would never have blurted out her secret to some stranger .

But as they loped shoulder to shoulder, glancing up at the “stranger,” from time to time she saw the twitch behind his eyes, and once his head turning, then snapping around again. He too heard and saw devils in the forest as he had said, that fact alone was certain.

And she—she came to hear sometimes an unearthly low sound that filtered through the trees like wind, though the leaves never moved. It had for her no noise of drunken voices—the multiplied voice of Yazon in all the moods of his insanity. If she detected anything it was the jeering cry of the pig things—but now never too close.

Possibly he had been right. To travel together might provide a little distance for both of them from their haunts. Even the ghost of Araitha had not drawn near.

Had it been she? For sure?

Clirando frowned as she ran. They are my devils. They come for me. Out of my heart and mind. It’s only that the forest makes them real. But how real? Could I have gone to her and seized her, run her through with a knife?

Clouds massed across Clirando’s eyes. She half stumbled, and he turned and looked at her. His face was concerned, curious.

“A root,” she said.

And pushed memory and idle surmise to the edges of her brain.

The trees began to thin out near sunfall.

The downward slopes were more gradual, and oak trees and wild olive predominated. Here the track ended abruptly. Another altar place stood there, this one with a whitish stone roughly carved and pocked, a sort of uneven globe.

He and she halted beside it. In the bronzy light now slanting sidelong through the trees, the globe seemed to pulse with uncanny inner light.

Clirando took the last honey wafer from her pack, and laid it by the stone. “I do not know you, but I reverence you.”

Zemetrios, rather sheepishly, she thought, put the final sliver of cheese on the altar. It was mostly rind. Any god would disdain it—or perhaps not, since they would otherwise have eaten it.

“Look,” he said quietly.

A hare bounded among the olives, its long ears brushed with light and glowing red.

They could have brought the hare down for supper, either of them, she was certain. But in this place neither had wished to, or though it wise.

Did they in some ways then, think alike?

No.

Remember Thestus, the arch deceiver. Though Thestus, she believed, would have wanted to throw his knife or a rock at the hare, and she would have had to stop him.

As they turned from the altar, Clirando saw an old man sitting about fifty paces away under a broad-leaved tree. His hands were busy with something that sparkled—and she was positive he had not been there in the preceding moments.

“Do you see him?”

“Yes,” Zemetrios said.

Slowly they walked forward, making no attempt at caution. The old man did not look up. But when they were almost within arm’s length of him, he raised his aged face. His eyes were black and keen in the pleated paper of his skin.

“You’re going to the village,” he told them, “the Moon Town.”

“It exists then,” said Clirando.

“Perhaps,” said the old man.

What spangled through his hands was a threaded skein of brilliant stones—like Eastern rubies and diamonds they looked. He seemed only to be playing with them and suddenly he cast them down.

Zemetrios but not Clirando sucked in breath.

Meeting the ground, the sparkly web changed instantly to a long and coiling snake, marked along its back with points of red and silver.

“Oh,” said the old man, sarcastically polite, “did I make you jump, bold soldier?”

“Yes, Father,” said Zemetrios. Good-naturedly he laughed. “You’re a magician, then.”

“Sometimes a magician. Sometimes other things. Sometimes I am a tree.”

They regarded him wordlessly. The burnished snake poured itself away and up the narrow trunk of a nearby olive.

“Things come, and also they go,” said the old man.

“How great a distance to the village now, Father?”

“Not far. Be there before sunset ends. They close the gates at first dark.”

“A wise precaution,” said Clirando.

She guessed Zemetrios, as she did, tried to draw the old man out, provoke him into some revealing word or action.

But he did not reply now, only took from the inner folds of his garments another skein of beads. Moving it to and fro between gnarled hands, he crooned what must have been the spell to make a serpent out of it.

“Well, good evening to you,” said Zemetrios.

He and Clirando walked on.

About twenty steps farther along, both of them turned as one. Only shadows sat under the broad-leaved tree.

“The snake-maker, I shall call him that,” said Zemetrios.

“It was a trick, an illusion.”

“Maybe. Did you see how he did it?”

“No. But then often you never can—that is the idea of it.”

“I met an old woman, too,” Zemetrios said, “the first day, when I’d climbed up from the beach. There was an unlit beacon there. She wove only cloth, not snakes. She said she lived in a hut.”

“I met her also. The hut hadn’t been used for years.”

“What are they?” he said softly, as they paced on again. “Are they demons, too? If so, I don’t recognize them.”

“Not all demons are recognizable.”

“You’re sensible, Clirando.”

She shrugged.

The ground sloped up now. The trees were much fewer in number, long stretches of grass and weeds between them, and no path anywhere, as if, though many walked through the forest, none ever came as far as this.

The sun, which they could see now, hung low in the sky, a red ball in a curdling of gold and scarlet cloud.

They had reached the top of the hill. They looked down into the small basin of a valley.

Impending sunset described it exactly. Fields and groves, vineyards and orchards clustered there. And from them protruded high walls of dressed stone, above which showed tiled roofs, and one tall slim tower. The village. Behind everything, mountains rose, three peaks, one behind another, and touched sidelong with flame by the dying sun.

The way down to the valley was easy. The slope was broken now by another pathway, itself of laid stone, and broad enough for three men to walk together.

“At first dark the gates shut,” he repeated.

They broke into a racer’s run, leaping down the roadway into the valley.

Village

Shadows are called

By the ending of the day

Night unfolds her wings

With the white moon in her hair…

Clirando shuddered. The fragment of song had sounded inside her skull, words clear as the plinking of the lyra which accompanied them— so clear, for a moment she thought a voice had actually sung aloud, a hand actually plucked the chords. Araitha’s voice and Araitha’s hand. It had been a favourite song of hers to play after supper.

Zemetrios this time did not seem to notice Clirando’s lapse.

He said, “There are no lights in this village.”

Clirando said, “Nor any lights anywhere among the fields and orchards. Not one torch burning. Not a single dog to bark.”

The sun was just now down over the horizon, leaving a solitary rift of gold. Darkness was claiming the landscape. But not a lamp shone out anywhere, and over the stubble of the fields, where already the grain must have been scythed, not one figure walked. The orchards too had been stripped of fruit, which surely would not have been ripe.