Кэролайн Черри - Fortress in the Eye of Time

He walked and walked, unhappy with himself, following the ancient stonework until the trees grew so close he could no longer find the next white stone to guide him.

So he had made another mistake. He had lost the Road. He was afraid, standing alone in the dark and trying to know what to do in this place where the path ran out. But it seemed to him that, if there were no white stones, still a long track stretched ahead clear of trees, and that seemed indisputably the right direction to go.

And, true enough, when he had gone quite far on that treeless track he saw something in the starlight that he deluded himself was another of the white stones.

His heart rose. He went toward it as proof that he had solved the dilemma.

But it was only a broken tree, white inside, jagged ends of wood showing pale in the night.

Then he was truly frightened, and when he looked about him he saw nothing even to tell him which way he had come. He might have made, he thought, the worst mistake of all the mistakes he had ever made and lost the Road once for all, Maurylʼs last, Maurylʼs most final instruction — beyond which he had no idea in the world what to do.

At that moment a shadow brushed his cheek, substantial enough to scare him. It settled on a branch of that dead tree, hunched up its shoulders and waited.

“Owl?” Tristen said. “Owl, is it you?”

Owl, a sullen bird, only spread his wings and ruffled his feathers with a sound very loud in the hush of the woods.

“Do you know the way?” Tristen asked him, but Owl did nothing.

“Have you come on the same Road?” Tristen asked then, since they came from the same place perhaps at the same moment, and Mauryl had set great importance on his being here. “Did Mauryl tell you to come?”

Owl gave no sign of understanding.

He had never trusted Owl. He had never been certain but what the smallest birds disappeared down Owlʼs gullet, and he was all but certain about the mice.

But he felt gladder than he had ever thought he should be of Owlʼs presence, simply because Owl was a living creature as well as a Shadow, and because Owl was a force whose behavior he knew — and because he was despondent and lost.

“Do you know where the Road is?” he asked Owl.

Owl spread his wide blunt wings and, Shadow that he was, flew through the darkness to another tree and perched there. Waiting, Tristen thought, and he followed Owl in desperate hope that Owl knew where he was going. Owl flew on again, which he also followed. A third time Owl took wing, and by now he had no hope else but Owl, because he had no notion as he looked back where he had come from, or where his last memory of the Road might lie.

Owl kept flying in short hops from tree to tree, never leaving his sight — and by now he feared that he might have done something Mauryl would never have approved, and trusted a bird that Mauryl had never told him was acceptable to trust. One of the pigeons he might have relied upon, never questioning its character or its intentions; but Owl was the chanciest of creatures he knew, and he knew no reason Owl should go to such great difficulty to guide him to the Road. Certainly he would have helped Owl. That was a point: creatures should help one another, and perhaps Owl was constrained once there was such calamity.

He had never apprehended Owl to have great patience with him. He knew no reason Owl should not lead him far astray and then fly away from him. But Mauryl was often peevish himself, and yet Mauryl had never failed him or done him harm.

So he kept tracking Owlʼs flights through the woods, fending branches aside, scratching himself and snagging his clothing on thorns and twigs all the while. His ankle hurt. His hands hurt. Owl traveled farther at each flight now, and sometimes left his sight. He struggled to keep up and called out, “Owl! Wait! Iʼm not so fast as you!” but Owl only took that for encouragement to make his next flight through a low spot filled with water and to lure him up a muddy bank.

He was altogether out of breath now. “Owl, wait,” he called out. “Please wait!”

Owl flitted on.

He tried to run, and caught his foot on a stone in the tangle of brush and fell to his knees, bruising them and his hands and sticking his left palm with thorns.

But the stone on which he had fallen was pale, a tilted, half-buried paving of the Road, and he sat there catching his breath, seeing other stones before him.

“Who?” he heard a strange voice calling. “To-who?” He had never heard Owlʼs voice, but something said to him that that was indeed Owl speaking his question into the night.

And it struck him that it was like Maurylʼs questions, and that he had no answer, since the world was far wider and the Road was far longer than he had ever imagined.

“Come back,” he said to Owl, rising to his feet. He tried to follow Owl further, but Owl left the pale trace that was the Road, and he gave up the chase, out of breath and sweating in the clammy night air.

But he could have no complaint of Owl. He kept walking, comforted that he was not alone in the woods, and hearing from time to time Owlʼs lonely question.

In the black, branch-woven sameness of the woods, the Road seemed finally to acquire a faint glow in the night, a glow against which Tristen could see the detail of branches in contrast. And slowly thereafter the whole world of black branches and pale stone Road widened around him until, looking up, he could tell the shadow of the trees from the gray sky. It was the dawn creeping through, not with a bright breaking of the sun, but a stealthy, furtive dawn that took a long, long time to insinuate itself into the black and gray of the woods. He might not have made any progress at all. Nothing looked different from where he had lost the light.

He had walked the night through without resting, and he supposed that since he had somehow reached the dawn unharmed he had done something difficult that Mauryl would approve, but he felt no comfort in his situation. He was very thirsty, there was no breakfast, he was bruised from his falls, and he missed Maurylʼs advice and asked himself whether Mauryl had ever given any hint, any remote hint if, after Mauryl had gone away, he might ever find him again — because without Mauryl, he had no idea what to do next, or what he should be thinking of doing.

Use your wits, Mauryl was wont to say, but one had to know on what question to use oneʼs wits in the first place — like wondering how long his ankle and his knees would hurt when there was no Mauryl to make the pain stop, and wondering how long and how far the Road went, and wondering where Owl was and why Owl had followed him, out of all the birds he liked far better.

His thinking had become merely a spate of like questions with nothing to suggest the answers, and long as he walked, the sights around him never changed, one tree being very much like another to his opinion.

Sitting down, which he did when his legs were utterly exhausted, offered him only time to think up more questions, so he proceeded slowly and steadily, in pain that was more persistent than acute, pain that might, for what he knew, go on forever, as the Road might — in his worst imaginings.

But after a measureless time he found a little trickle of water running down from rocks beneath the roots of trees, at the side of the Road, a trickle that ran away and lost itself beneath a layer of leaves, but where it emerged from the rocks it was bright and clear.

And the mere fact it existed made this a Place, not just a part of the endless Road. It was not more trees and more Road; it existed as a difference in his condition, it offered relief from thirst, and he bent down by it and drank — then washed his face and his hands to the elbows and then his head and hair in the good, clear water, not caring that it chilled him through. He scrubbed and scrubbed until he began to shiver in the light breeze that blew, because Mauryl had taught him to love being clean.