Guy Kay - Sailing to Sarantium

Why, indeed? He made no reply, went on, staff in hand, through the gates. He waited by the ditch for a company of horsed merchants to pass, and their laden mules, and then began walking again. So many autumn mornings here, remembered in a blur, striding alone in search of fame, of knowledge, the hidden secrets of the world. Of the half-world.

By midday he was on the main road, running due east, and the great wood marched with him, north and very near.

It remained there through the days of walking that followed, in rain, in pale, brief sunlight, the leaves wet and heavy, almost all fallen, many-coloured, smoke rising from charcoal pits, a distant sound of axes, a stream heard but not seen, sheep and goats to the south, a solitary shepherd. A wild boar ran from the woods once, and then-astonished in the sudden light as a cloud unsheathed the sun-darted back into dark and disappeared.

The forest remained there in the nights, too, beyond shuttered windows in inns where he was remembered by no one in the common rooms and recognized no one after so long, where he ate and drank alone and took no girls upstairs as once he had, and was walking again with the day's first eastward breaking.

And it was there, a boy's stone throw from the road, towards evening of a last day, when an afternoon drizzle had passed and the westering sun lay red and low behind him, throwing his own long shadow forward as he went through a hamlet he remembered-shuttered at day's end now in the cold, no one at all in the single street-and came, not far beyond, his shadow leading him, to the inn where he had always stayed before going out in the dark before sunrise to do what he did on the Day of the Dead.

He stopped on the road outside the inn, irresolute. He could hear sounds from the enclosed yard. Horses, the creak of a cart being shifted, a hammering in the smithy, stablehands. A dog barked. Someone laughed. The foothills of the mountains that barred access to the coast and the sea rose up behind the inn, goats dotting the twilit meadow. The wind had died. He looked back behind him at the red sun and the reddened clouds along the horizon. A better day tomorrow, they promised. There would be fires lit inside the inn, mulled wine for warmth.

"We are afraid," he heard.

Not Tiresa. Mirelle, who never spoke. He had made her a robin, copper-chested, small as Linon. The same voice all of them had, the wry, patrician tones of the jurist by whose new-laid grave he had done his dark, defining ceremony. An unexpected irony there. that nine souls of Sauradian girls sacrificed in an Aldwood grove should all sound, when claimed, like an arrogant judge from Rhodias, killed by too much drink. Same voice, but he knew the timbre of each spirit as he knew his own.

"Oh, my dears," he said gently, "do not be fearful."

"Not for us." Tiresa now. Hint of impatience. "We know where we are. We are afraid for you."

He hadn't expected that. Found he could think of nothing to say. He looked back along the road again, and then east, ahead. No one riding, no one walking. All sane mortals drawing themselves now within walls at day's end, barred windows, roofs, fires against the cold and nearly fallen dark. His shadow lay on the Imperial road, the shadow of his staff. A hare startled in the field and broke, zigzagging, caught by the long light, down into the wet ditch by the road. The sun and the western clouds above it red as fire, as the last of a fire.

There was no reason, really, to wait for morning, fair as it might prove to be.

He walked on, alone on the road, leaving the lights of the inn behind, and after no very great distance more came to a small, flat bridge across the northern roadside ditch and knew the place and crossed there as he had years ago and years ago, and went through the wet dark autumn grass of that field, and when he came to the black edgings of the wood he did not pause but entered into the weighted, waiting darkness of those ancient trees, with seven souls and his own.

Behind him, in the world, the sun went down.

Darkness lasted in the Aldwood, night a deepening of it not a bringing forth. Morning was a distant, intuited thing, not an altering of space or light. The moons were usually known by pull, not by shining, though sometimes they might be glimpsed, and sometimes a star would appear between black branches, moving leaves, above a lifting of mist.

In the glade where blood was shed each autumn by masked priests of a rite so old no one knew how it had begun, these truths were altered- a very little. The trees here gave way enough for light to fall when the tendrils of fog were not hovering. The noontide sun might make the leaves show green in spring or summer, red-gold as they were claimed by autumn frosts. The white moon could make a cold, spare beauty of the black branches in midwinter, the blue one draw them back into strangeness, the half-world. Things could be seen.

Such as the crushed grass and fallen leaves and the sod where a hoofed tread that ought to have been too massive for the earth had fallen, just now, and had gone back among the trees. Such as seven birds lying on the hard ground, Grafted birds, artifices. Such as the man near them. What was left, more truly, of what had been a man. His face was untouched. The expression, by the moonlight which was blue just then, serene, accepting, a quiet laid upon it.

He had returned of his own will: some weight had been given to that, allowance made, dispensation. The body below was ripped apart, bloodily, from groin to breastbone. Blood and matter lay exposed, trailed along the grass away, where the hoofprints went.

An old, worn traveller's pack lay on the ground a little distance away. It had a wide leather strap, Esperanan, worn soft.

It was silent in the glade. Time ran. The blue moon slipped through empty spaces overhead and passed away from what it saw below. No wind, no sound in the bare branches, no stirring of fallen leaves. No owl called in the Aldwood, or nightingale, no rumbling tread of beast, or god returning. Not now. That had been and had passed. Would be again, and again, but not tonight.

Then, into such stillness in the cold night, came speech. The birds on the grass, and yet not them. Voices of women were heard in the air, in the darkness, soft as leaves, women who had died here, long ago.

Do you hate him?

Now? Look what has been done to him.

Not only now. Ever. Before. I never did.

A quiet again, for a time. Time meant little here, was hard to compass, unless by the stars slipping from sight as they moved, when they could be seen.

Nor I.

Nor I. Should we have?

How so?

Truly. How so?

And only look, said Linon then, her first words, who had been first of them to be claimed and to return, look how he has paid.

He wasn't afraid, though, was he? Tiresa.

Yes, he was, said Linon. A breath in the stillness. He isn't, any more.

Where is he? Mirelle.

No one answered that.

Where are we to go? asked Mirelle.

Ah. That I do know. We are there already. We are gone. Only say goodbye and we are gone, said Linon.

Goodbye, then, said Tiresa. Falcon.

Goodbye, whispered Mirelle.

One by one they bade farewell to each other, rustling words in the dark air as the souls took leave. At the end, Linon was alone, who had been first of all, and in the quiet of the grove she said the last words to the man lying beside her in the grass, though he could not hear her now, and then she spoke something more in the dark, more tender than a farewell, and then at last her bound soul accepted its release, so long denied.

And so that hidden knowledge and those transmuted souls passed from the created world where men and women lived and died, and the birds of Zoticus the alchemist were not seen or known again under sun or moons. Except for one.