A. Hartley - Will Power

But the idea of the bath cooled rapidly as we strode along the blackened track for an hour or more with no sign of intelligent life. The road, if that was what it was, felt like it was going somewhere, but it dragged through the mountains, curling aimlessly here, doubling back around an outcrop of rock there, so that its progress was random to say the least. After a while I felt like I was riding some huge, lazy, and very confused-or possibly blind-earthworm. After a second hour, I gave up on the beer and venison, too.

The one thing we did have on the path was protection from the icy wind and, though the air was still crisp and clear, the sun brushed our upturned faces and warmed them gently. Around us the mountains loomed: great angular crags of pale russet and violet-gray, towering as hard and impassive as a gold merchant’s wife and fading into distant peaks white with snow. Of Vetch there was little hope and no sign.

After another hour, the company grew restless again. The sun had clearly begun its descent (in the west?) and we couldn’t go on walking till dark with no plan for what happened if we didn’t stroll into a cleverly concealed city around the next corner. Mithos grew even more surly than usual, and as he muttered earnestly to Orgos, they began walking a little faster. Renthrette, still mounted, trotted up to them and exchanged a few insights on our condition. Apprentice Will, man of dubious talents, tired legs and all-round miserable bastard, trudged behind and counted off all the places I would rather have been.

Suddenly there was a bird call, high and caustically harsh, from in front of us. It was a starling, feathers ruffled, wings aggressively half-spread, and it sat in the bare branches of a small and withered yew tree just left of the path. We hadn’t seen many trees in the mountains, and even one as blasted as this was something of an event. Moreover, the bird’s position in it, coupled perhaps with the way it fixed us with its hard bird eyes, gave it the aura of a guard or sentinel. I couldn’t help but smile as the bird, small though it was, continued to screech its anger at us, flicking its wings and bobbing its head up and down as it called.

Mithos and Orgos stopped in their tracks before reaching the little tree, giving me time to catch up.

“Odd that it doesn’t seem afraid of us,” Mithos remarked.

“Probably used to people ’round here,” I answered, snide. The bird cried again and flashed its wing feathers, dark and glossy as polished steel. Then it took to the air, circled us once, and flew away over a great purple boulder, calling all the time.

That was the highlight of the afternoon. We walked on for another mile or two before Mithos came to an abrupt halt.

“We have only two or three hours of good light left, and there is no sign of a town or an inn,” he said, as if we might have missed that fact. “We are going to have to spend the night outdoors.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but the others seemed quite unmoved by the patent idiocy of this suggestion so, for the moment, I held my peace.

Turning to Renthrette, Mithos asked what we had with us.

The saddlebags on the horse were the only luggage that had completed the “journey” from the Black Horse. Most of the rest had been inside the carriage, and we had been traveling light even then. Now, as Renthrette’s quick inventory of the leather satchels across her mount made clear, we were virtually weightless.

“Two blankets, flint and tinder, an oil lamp, one small hatchet, some bread and cheese, and a length of rope. About thirty feet,” she said, not exactly exuberantly.

“No tent?” I ventured.

“Did I mention one?” she snarled, her eyes still on Mithos and Orgos.

“Then you’ll have to build a bivouac,” I said. Actually, I was far from clear what bivouacs were, though they were reputed to save the lives of outdoor types from time to time.

“Do you see large numbers of trees around here?” Renthrette spat, lips curled with that special talking-to-Hawthorne contempt.

“What?”

“Branches,” she said. “Leafy boughs? Clods of soft earth and turf? Yards of twine or vines to hold the thing together?”

Her scorn suggested that these things were somehow connected, even integral, to bivouacs, and that construction of one in our present conditions seemed unlikely.

“You, no doubt,” I began, “would rather construct a three-story villa with a pool and one of those tiled porches with a little fountain and. .”

“Shut up, Will,” said Orgos, thoughtfully.

“I was only trying to be helpful,” I said.

“We need to find a cave,” said Mithos with a shrug. “And we’ll need to build a fire, so gather what wood you see as we go. There won’t be much, and we’ll need all we can get. Renthrette, you can walk from here. Use the rope to bundle up the firewood and tie it to the saddle.”

She nodded once and slipped easily from the horse’s back, managing to hide her inevitable disappointment at no longer being the mounted escort poised to charge any dangerous but misguided beast that should come lumbering down the mountain into range.

Above us came a screeching call, so sharp and loud that we all turned our eyes upward.

“A kite,” said Orgos.

“No,” I corrected him, “it’s a bird.”

“A kite is a bird, idiot,” he said without malice. “A kind of hawk.”

The bird was circling perhaps a hundred feet overhead, its tail black and forked like a swallow’s and its head down, watching. Its head and body were a brilliant white, even against the pale sky, and set off the black of the tail and wings strikingly. I was about to turn away from this before Orgos started one of his lectures on the wonders of nature, when a curious thing happened. A smaller bird flew up to the kite, chirping shrilly, then veered off and swooped low at us with only a yard or two of clearance.

“A starling,” said Orgos. There was a note of confusion in his voice as his eyes followed the smaller bird to where it rejoined the kite, calling as before. The raptor, continuing to glide in tight circles, wings out straight, pinions splayed, returned a series of sharp whistles.

“It’s not a starling,” said Mithos, eyes upturned. “I mean, it’s not a starling, it’s the starling. The one we saw before.”

“Based on what?” I asked. “You’ve seen one starling, you’ve seen ’em all.”

“Based on nothing,” said Mithos, dropping his eyes to mine. “A hunch. A sense of being watched.”

This was, of course, quite absurd, but “absurd” is not a word which leaps to the lips when confronted with Mithos giving you one of those looks. Orgos? Maybe. Renthrette? Certainly, though you should expect to pay for it. But Mithos? Absurd? No. Mithos kept himself to himself, showing little emotion and letting the world go on around him till he told it to stop. When he gave orders, people followed them without question because he seemed so sure of his own mind and so dangerous to challenge. Not that he was violent or overtly threatening, you understand. He was just grim and powerful. Yes, that’s the word: powerful , in every sense.

Now, though my brain said that the idea that these birds were keeping an eye on our progress and discussing it over a sandwich and a couple of pints was preposterous, the fact that it was Mithos who had said so gave it a kind of weird credibility. Renthrette watched him for a moment as if expecting further explanation, but he did not give any, and when she turned away, her face was blank, expressionless. Orgos nodded thoughtfully to himself and advanced along the cinder track, eyes skinned for an opening in the rock that would get us out of the freezing night winds.

I watched as they set off again and wondered, as I have often wondered in their company, what the hell I was doing with these people.