Sailing to Sarantium (25 page)

And they were. Had there been choice, any kind of volition here,
Caius Crispus of Varena, son of Horius Crispus the mason, would have
died in that wet cold field and joined his wife and daughters in the
afterworld-whatever it turned out to be-rather than enter the Aldwood
as a living man. The forest had frightened him even at a distance, in
sunlight, seen from the safety of the road in Batiara. This morning,
this otherworldly morning in Sauradia, there was no place on the
god's earth he would not rather be than here in this dank, inhuman
wilderness where even the smells could horrify.

The god's earth. What god? What power ruled in the world as he knew
it? As he had known it: for this unnatural creature appearing in fog
on the road had changed all that forever. Crispin spoke in his mind
to the bird again, but Linon was silent as the dead, hanging about
his throat as if she were, truly, no more than an amulet, a
pedestrian little creation of leather and metal, worn for sentimental
reasons.

He reached up with one hand on impulse and clasped the alchemist's
creation. He flinched. The bird was burning hot to the touch. And
this, as much as any other thing-this change where no such change
should have been possible-was what made Crispin finally accept that
he had left the world he knew and was unlikely ever to walk back into
it again. He had made a choice last night, had intervened. Linon had
warned him. He regretted Vargos, suddenly: the man did not deserve a
fate such as this, randomly hired at a border inn to attend an
artisan walking the road to Trakesia.

No man deserved this fate, Crispin thought. His throat was dry; it
was difficult to swallow. The fog drifted and swirled, trees
disappeared then loomed around them, very close. Wet leaves and wet
earth defined a hopelessly twisting path. The bison led them on; the
forest swallowed them like the jaws of a living creature. Time
blurred, much as the seen world had blurred; Crispin had no idea how
far they had come. Unable not to, awed and afraid, he reached up and
touched the bird again. He couldn't hold her. The heat had penetrated
now through his cloak and tunic. He felt her on his chest like a coal
from a fire.

'Linon?'
he said again, and heard only the silence of his
own mind.

He surprised himself then, and began to pray, wordlessly, to Jad of
the Sun-for his own soul, and his mother's and his friends', and the
taken souls of Ilandra and the girls, asking Light for them, and for
himself.

He had told Martinian little more than a fortnight ago that he wanted
nothing in life any more, had no desires, no journeys sought, no
destinations in a hollowed, riven world. He ought not to be trembling
so, to be so profoundly apprehensive of the shifting textures of the
forest around them and the mist clinging like fingers to his face,
and of the creature that was leading them farther and farther on. He
ought to be ready to die here if what he'd been saying was true. It
was with a force of real discovery that Crispin realized he wasn't,
after all. And that truth, a hammer on the beating heart, smashed
through the illusions he'd gathered and nourished for a year and
more. He had things unfinished in his mortal house, it seemed. He did
have something left.

And he knew what it was, too. Walking in a world where sight was
nearly lost-tree trunks and twisted branches in the greyness, heavy
wet leaves falling, the black bulk of the bison ahead of him-he could
see what he wanted now, as if it were illuminated by fire. He was too
clever a man, even amid fear, not to perceive the irony. All the
ironies here. But he did know now what he wanted, in his heart, to
make, and beyond cleverness, was wise enough not to deny it in this
wood.

Upon a dome, with glass and stone and semi-precious gems and
streaming and flickering light through windows and from a glory of
candles below, Crispin knew he wanted to achieve something of
surpassing beauty that would last.

A creation that would mean that he-the mosaic-worker Caius Crispus of
Varena-had been born, and lived a life, and had come to understand a
portion of the nature of the world, of what ran through and beneath
the deeds of women and men in their souls and in the beauty and the
pain of their short living beneath the sun.

He wanted to make a mosaic that would endure, that those living in
after days would know had been made by him, and would honour. And
this, he thought, beneath black and dripping trees, walking over
sodden, rotting leaves in the forest, would mean that he had set his
mark upon the world, and had been.

It was so strange to realize how it was only at this brink of the
chasm, threshold of the dark or the god's holy light, that one could
grasp and accept one's own heart's yearning for more of the world.
For life.

Crispin realized that his terror had gone now, with this. More
strangeness. He looked around at the thick shadows of the forest and
they did not frighten him. Whatever lay beyond sight could not be
half so overwhelming as the creature that walked before him. Instead
of fear, he felt a sadness beyond words now. As if all those born
into the world to die were taking this shrouded walk with them, each
one longing for something they would never know. He touched the bird
again. That heat, as of life, in the damp, grey cold. No glow. Linon
was as dark and drab as she had ever been. There was no shining in
the Aldwood.

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. I 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?'

There was no reply. The inner silence was absolute. That long,
unearthly note seemed to hang in the air between forest and field,
earth and sky, and then it faded away like the mist.