Sailing to Sarantium (63 page)

But there were powers greater than royalty in the world, and he was
travelling to meet one now in a place he knew. His affairs were in
order. Martinian and a notary had the necessary papers. His heart had
quailed at times once the decision had come to him-only a fool,
vainglorious, would have denied that-but there was no least shadow of
doubt in him as to what he had to do.

He had heard an inward cry earlier this autumn, a known voice from
the distant east, unimaginably far. And then, some time after, a
letter had arrived from Martinian's friend, the artisan to whom he
had given a bird. Linon. And reading the careful words, discerning
the meaning beneath their ambiguous, veiled phrasing, he had
understood the cry. Linon. First one, little one. It had been a
farewell, and more than that.

No sleep had come to him the night that letter came. He had moved
from bed to high-backed chair to farmhouse doorway, where he stood
wrapped in a blanket looking out upon the mingled autumn moonlight
and the stars in a clear night. All things in the shaped world-his
rooms, his garden, the orchard beyond, the stone wall, the fields and
forests across the ribbon of road, the two moons rising higher and
then setting as he stood in his open doorway, the pale sunrise when
it came at last-all things had seemed to him to be almost unbearably
precious then, numinous and transcendent, awash in the glory of the
gods and goddesses that were, that still were.

By dawn he had made his decision, or, more properly, realized it had
been made for him. He would have to go, would fill his old travelling
pack again-the worn, stained canvas, Esperanan leather strap, bought
thirty years since-with gear for the road and with the other things
he would have to carry, and begin the long walk to Sauradia for the
first time in almost twenty years.

But that very same morning-in the way the unseen powers of the
half-world sometimes had of showing a man when he had arrived at the
correct place, the proper understanding-a messenger had come from
Varena, from the palace, from the young queen, and he had gone to
her.

He had listened to what she told him, unsurprised, then briefly
surprised. Had taken thought as carefully as he could for
Gisel-younger than his never-seen daughters and sons, but also older
than any of them might ever have to be, he mused-and pitying her,
mastering his own grave meditations and fear, his growing awareness
of what it was he had done long ago and was now to do, he gave her,
as a kind of gift, the plan for her escape.

Then he asked if he might sail with her, as far as Megarium.

And here, now, he was, the watched ship heeling already away to the
south across the line of the wind and the white waves, the driven
rain cold in his face. He kept the pack between his feet on the stone
jetty, wise to the ways of harbours. He wasn't a young man;
waterfronts were hard places everywhere. He didn't feel afraid,
though; not of the world.

The world was all around him even in autumn rain: seamen, seabirds,
food vendors, uniformed customs officers, beggars, morning whores
sheltering on the porticos, men dropping lines by the jetty for
octopus, wharf children tying ship ropes for a tossed coin. In summer
they would dive. It was too cold now. He had been here before, many
times. Had been a different man then. Young, proud, chasing
immortality in mysteries and secrets that might be opened like an
oyster for its pearl.

It occurred to him that he almost certainly had children living here.
It did not occur to him to look for them. No point, not now. That
would be a failure of integrity, he thought. Rank sentimentality.
Aged father on last long journey, come to embrace his dear children.

Not him. Never that sort of man. It was the half-world he had
embraced, instead.

'Is it gone?' Tiresa said, from inside the pack. All seven of them
were in there, unseeing but not silenced. He never silenced them.

'The ship? Yes, it is gone. Away south.'

'And we?' Tiresa usually spoke for the others when they were being
orderly: falcon's privilege.

'We are away as well, my dears. We are, even now.'

'In the rain?'

'We have walked in rain before.'

He bent and shouldered the pack, the smooth, supple leather strap
sitting easily across his shoulder. It didn't feel heavy, even with
his years. It shouldn't, he thought. He had one change of clothing in
it, some food and drink, a knife, one book, and the birds. All the
birds, all the claimed and crafted birdsouls of his life's bright
courage and dark achievement.

There was a boy, perhaps eight years old, sitting on a post, watching
him watch the ship. Zoticus smiled and, reaching into the purse at
his belt, tossed him a silver piece. The boy caught it deftly, then
noted the silver, eyes wide.

'Why?' he asked.

'For luck. Light a candle for me, child.'

He strode off, swinging his staff as he walked through the rain, head
high, back straight, north-east through the city to pick up the spur
of the Imperial road at the landward gate as he had so many times
long and long ago, but here now to do something very different: to
end the thirty years' tale, a life's untellable story, to carry the
birds home that their called and gathered souls might be released.

That cry in the distance had been a message sent. He had thought,
when he was young, reading in the Ancients, shaping a prodigious,
terrifying exercise of alchemy, that the sacrifice in the Sauradian
wood was what mattered there, the act of homage to the power they
worshipped in the forest. That the souls of those given to the wood
god might be dross, unimportant, free to be claimed, if dark craft
and art were equal to that.

Not so. It was otherwise. He had indeed discovered he possessed that
knowledge, the appalling and then exhilarating capacity to achieve a
transference of souls, but earlier this autumn, standing in his own
farmyard of a morning, he had heard a voice in his mind cry out from
the Aldwood. Linon, in her own woman's voice-that he had heard only
once, from hiding, when they killed her in the wood-and he had
understood, an old man now, wherein he had been wrong, long ago.

Whatever it was that was in the forest had laid claim to the souls,
after all. They were not for the having.

A sleepless night had followed then, too, and a burgeoning awareness
like a slow sunrise. He was no longer young. Who knew how many
seasons or years the blessed gods would have him see? And with the
letter, after, had come certainty. He knew what was asked of him, and
he would not go down into whatever travelling followed the dropped
cloak of mortal life with these wrongly taken souls charged against
his name.

One was still gone from him; one-his first-had been given back. The
others were in his pack now as he walked in rain, carrying them home.

What lay waiting for him among the trees he did not know, though he
had taken something not meant for him, and balancings and redress
were embedded at the core of his own art and the teachings he had
studied. Only a fool denied his fear. What was, would be. Time was
running, it was always running. The gift of foretelling was not a
part of his craft. There were powers greater than royalty in the
world.

He thought of the young queen, sailing. He thought of Linon: that
very first time, bowel-gripping terror, and power and awe. So long
ago. The cold rain on his face now was a leash that tethered him to
the world. He passed through Megarium and reached the walls and saw
the road ahead of him through the open gates, and had his first
glimpse of the Aldwood in the grey distance beyond.

He paused then, just for a moment, looking, felt the hard, mortal
banging of his heart. Someone bumped him from behind, swore in
Sarantine, moved on.

'What is it? ' Tiresa asked. Quick one. A falcon.

'Nothing, love. A memory.'

'Why is a memory nothing? '

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, Crafted 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.