Guy Kay - Sailing to Sarantium

Only the awesome thing that led them, delicate for all its bulk, through the tall, silent trees for a measureless time until they came to a clearing and into it, one by one, and without a word spoken or a sound Crispin knew that this was the place of sacrifice. Archilochus of Arethae, he thought, had not been born when men and women were dying for Ludan in this grove.

The bison turned.

They stood facing him in a row, Kasia between the two men. Crispin drew a breath. He looked across the girl at Vargos. Their eyes met. The mist had lifted. It was grey and cold, but one could see clearly here. He saw the fear in the other man's eyes and also saw that Vargos was fighting it. He admired him then, very much.

"I am sorry," he said, words in the wood. It seemed important to say this. Something-an acknowledgement-from the world beyond this glade, these encircling trees where the wet leaves fell silently on the wet cold grass. Vargos nodded.

The girl sank to her knees. She seemed very small, a child almost, lost inside his second cloak. Pity twisted in Crispin. He looked at the creature before them, into the dark, huge, ancient eyes, and he said, quietly, "You have claimed blood and a life already on the road. Need you take hers as well? Ours?"

He had not known he was going to say that. He heard Vargos suck in his breath. Crispin prepared himself for death. The earth rumbling as before. The ripping of those horns through his flesh. He continued to look into the bison's eyes, an act as courageous as anything he'd ever done in his life. And what he saw there, unmistakably, was not anger or menace but loss. And it was in that moment that Linon finally spoke. "He doesn't want the girl," the bird said very gently, almost tenderly, in his mind. "He came for me. Lay me on the ground, Crispin." "What?" He said it aloud, in bewildered astonishment. The bison remained motionless, gazing at him. Or not, in fact, at him. At the small bird about his throat on the worn leather thong.

"Do it, my dear. This was written long ago, it seems. You are not the first man from the west to try to take a sacrifice from Ludan." "What? Zoticus? What did-"

His mind spinning, Crispin remembered something and clutched it like a spar. That long conversation in the alchemist's home, holding a cup of herbal tea, hearing the old man's voice: "I have the only access to certain kinds of power. Found in my travels, in a guarded place. and at some risk."

Something began-only just began-to come clear for him. A different kind of mist beginning to rise. He felt the beating of his own heart, his life.

"Of course, Zoticus, "Linon said, still gently. "Think, my dear. How else would I have known the rites? There is no time, Crispin. This is in doubt, still. He is waiting, but it is a place of blood. Take me from your neck. Lay me down. Go. Take the others. You have brought me back. 1 believe you will be permitted to leave."

Crispin's mouth was dry again. A taste like ashes. No one had moved since the girl sank to her knees. There was no wind in the clearing, he realized. Mist hung suspended about the branches of the trees. When the leaves fell, it was as if they descended from clouds. He saw puffs of white where the bison breathed in the cold.

"And you?" he asked silently. "Do I save her and leave you behind?" He heard, within, a ripple of laughter. Amazingly. "Oh, my dear, thank you for that. Crispin, my body ended here when you were still a child in the world. He thought the released soul might be freely taken when the sacrifice was made. In the moment of that power. He was right and wrong, it seems. Do not pity me. But tell Zoticus. And tell him, also, for me.»

An inward silence, to match the one in the grey, still glade. And then: "There is no need. He will know what I would have said. Tell him goodbye. Put me down now, dear. You must leave, or never leave."

Crispin looked at the bison. It still had not moved. Even now, his mind could not compass the vastness of it, the presence of so huge and raw a power. The brown eyes had not changed, ancient sorrow in grey light, but there was blood on the horns. He took a shaky breath and slowly reached up with both hands, removing the little bird from his neck. He knelt-it seemed proper to kneel-and laid her gently on the cold ground there. He realized she was no longer burning, but warm, warm as a living thing. A sacrifice. There was a pain in him; he had thought he was past such grief, after Ilandra, after the girls.

And as he laid her down, the bird said then, aloud, in a voice Crispin had never heard from her, the voice of a woman, grave, serene, "I am yours, lord, as I ever was from the time I was brought here."

A stillness, rigid as suspended time. Then the bison's head moved, down, and up again, in acquiescence, and time began once more. The girl, Kasia, made a small, whimpering sound. Vargos, beyond her, put a hand to his mouth, an oddly childlike gesture.

"Go quickly now. Take them and go. Remember me." And in his mind now Linon's voice was that same mild woman's voice. The voice of the girl who had been sacrificed here so long ago, cut open, flayed, her beating heart torn out, while an alchemist watched from hiding nearby and then performed an act or an art Crispin could not begin to comprehend. Evil? Good? What did the words mean here? One thing to another. The dead to life. The movement of souls. He thought of Zoticus. Of a courage he could scarcely imagine, and a presumption beyond belief.

He stood up, unsteadily. He hesitated, utterly uncertain of rules and rituals in this half-world he had entered, but then he bowed to the vast, appalling, stinking creature before him that was a forest god or the living symbol of a god. He put a hand on Kasia's arm, tugging her to her feet. She glanced at him, startled. He looked at Vargos, and nodded. The other man stared, confused.

"Lead us," Crispin said to Vargos, clearing his throat. His voice sounded reedy, strange. To the road. He would be lost, himself, ten paces into the forest.

The bison remained motionless. The small bird lay on the grass. Tendrils of mist drifted in the utterly still air. A leaf fell, and another. "Goodbye," Crispin said, silently. "I will remember." He was weeping. The first time in more than a year.

They left the glade, Vargos leading them. The bison slowly turned its massive head and watched them go, the dark eyes unfathomable now, the horns wet and bloody beneath the circling trees. It made no other movement at all. They stumbled away and it was lost.

Vargos found their path, and nothing in the Aldwood stayed them upon it. No predator of the forest, no daemon or spirit of the air or dark. The fog came again, and with it that sense of movement without passage of time. They came out where they had gone in, though, left the forest and crossed into the field. They reclaimed the mule, which had not moved. Crispin bent and picked up his sword from where it had fallen; Vargos took his staff. When they came to the road, over the same small bridge across the ditch, they stood above the body of the dead man there, and Crispin saw amid all the blood that his chest had been torn entirely open, both upwards from the groin and to each side, and his heart was gone. Kasia turned away and vomited into the ditch. Vargos gave her water from a flask, his own hands shaking. She drank, wiped her face. Nodded her head.

They began walking, alone on the road, in the grey world.

The fog began to lift some time afterwards. Then a pale, weak, wintry sun appeared through a thinning of the clouds for the first time that day. They stopped without a word spoken, looking up at it. And from the forest north of them in that moment there came a sound, high, clear, wordless, one sung note of music. A woman's voice.

"Linon?" Crispin cried urgently, in his mind, unable not to. "Linon?"