"Sailing to Sarantium" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kay Guy Gavriel)

CHAPTER IV

Vargos of the Ihicii was not a slave.

Many of the Posting Inns" servants-for-hire along the main Imperial roads were, of course, but Vargos had chosen this job of his own will, as he was quick to point out to those who erred in addressing him. He'd signed his second five-year indenture with the Imperial Post three years ago, carried his copy of the paper on his person, though he couldn't read it, and collected a payment twice a year, in addition to his guaranteed room and board. It wasn't much, but over the years he'd bought new boots twice, a woollen cloak, several tunics, an Esperanan knife, and he could offer a copper follis or two to a whore. The Imperial Post preferred slaves, naturally, but there weren't enough of them, since the Emperor Apius had elected to pacify the northern barbarians rather than subdue them, and stout men were badly needed for parties on the roads. Some of those stout men, including Vargos, were northern barbarians.

At home, Vargos's father had often expressed-generally with spilled ale and a table-thumping fist-his views on working or soldiering for Sarantium's fat-rumped catamites, but Vargos had been of the habit of disagreeing with his parent on occasion. Indeed, it had been after the last such discussion that he had left their village one night and begun his journey south.

He couldn't remember the details of the argument any more-something to do with a superstition about ploughing beneath a blue full moon-but it had ended with the old man, blood dripping from his scalp, deliberately branding his youngest son on the cheek with a hunting knife while Vargos's brothers and uncles enthusiastically held him down. Vargos, for all his violent, injurious struggling at the time, had had to concede to himself afterwards that the scarring had probably been deserved. It was not really acceptable among the Inicii for a son to hammer his father half to death with a stick of firewood in the course of an agrarian dispute.

He'd chosen not to linger for further debate or familial chastisement, however. There was a world beyond their village, and precious little within it for a youngest son. He had walked out of the house that same spring night, the two nearly full moons high above the newly planted fields and the dense, well-known forests, and had set his marred face to the far south, never looking back.

He'd expected, of course, to join the Imperial army, but someone in a roadside caupona had mentioned positions on offer at the Posting Inns, and Vargos had thought he might try that for a season or two.

That had been eight summers ago. Amazing, when you thought about it: how quickly-made decisions became the life you lived. He'd his share of newer scars since then, for the roads were dangerous and hungry men turned outlaw easily enough in Sauradia, but the work suited Vargos. He liked open spaces, had no single master to knuckle his forehead to, and didn't share his father's bone-deep hatred of the Empires-either Sarantine or the old one in Batiara.

Even though he was known as a keep-to-himself man, he had acquaintances at every Posting Inn and roadside tavern from the Batiaran border to Trakesia by now. That meant decently clean sleeping straw or pallets, a fireside sometimes in winter, food and beer, and some of the girls could be soft enough on the occasions when they weren't commanded elsewhere. It helped that he was one of the freemen, and had a coin or two to spend. He had never been out of Sauradia. Most of the Imperial Post servants stayed in their province, and Vargos had never had the least desire to wander farther than he already had eight years ago, cheek dripping blood, from the north.

Until this morning, on the Day of the Dead, when the red-haired pvhodian who'd hired him at Lauzen's inn by the border set out in fog from Morax's with a slave girl marked for the oak god.

Vargos had converted to the Jaddite faith years ago, but that didn't mean a man from the northern reaches of the Aldwood couldn't recognize one who'd been named to the tree. She was of the Inicii herself, sold off to a slave trader, perhaps even from a village or farm near his own. In her eyes, and in the looks given her by some of the men and women at Morax's, Vargos had read the signs the night before. No one had said a word, but no one had to. He knew what day was coming.

Vargos's conversion to the sun god's faith-along with a contentious belief in the holiness of Heladikos, the god's mortal son-had been a real one, as it happened. He prayed each dawn and at sunset, lit candles at chapels for the Blessed Victims, fasted on the days that called for fasts. And he disapproved now, deeply, of the old ways he'd left behind: the oak god, the corn maiden, the seemingly endless thirst for blood and human hearts eaten raw. But he'd never have dreamt of interfering, and certainly hadn't done so, the two other times he'd been here at Morax's, close to the southern godtree on this day.

None of his business, he'd have said, if the thought had even occurred to him or been raised by anyone else. A servant didn't summon the Imperial army or clergy to halt a pagan sacrifice. Not if he wanted to go on living and working on this road. And what was one girl a year, among all of them? There had been plagues two summers in a row. Death was everywhere in the midst of them.

The red-headed Batiaran hadn't raised anything at all with Vargos. He'd simply bought the girl-or had her bought for him-and was taking her away to save her life. His choice of her could have been an accident, chance, but it wasn't, and Vargos knew it.

They'd been planning to stay here two nights, in order not to be travel on this day.

That intention had been in line with what every halfway prudent man on the roads of Sauradia was doing on the Day of the Dead. But late last night, before going up the stairs to his room after the extremely strange capture of the thief, Martinian of Varena had summoned Vargos out to the hallway from his pallet in the servants" room and told him they'd be leaving tomorrow after all, before sunrise, with the girl.

Vargos, taciturn as he was, had been unable not to repeat, "Tomorrow?"

The Rhodian, unexpectedly sober despite all the wine they'd been noisily drinking in the other room, had looked at Vargos for a long moment in the dimly lit corridor. It was difficult to make out his expression behind the full beard, in the shadows. "I don't think it is safe to stay here," was all he'd said, speaking Rhodian. "After what has happened."

It wasn't in the least safe outside, Vargos thought but did not say. He'd considered that the other man might be testing him, or trying to say something without putting it into words. But he hadn't been prepared for what came next.

"It is the Day of the Dead tomorrow," said Martinian, speaking carefully. "I will not make you go with us. You do not owe me that. If you prefer to stay, I will release you freely and hire another man when I can."

That wouldn't be tomorrow, Vargos knew. There would be expressions of regret but no one would be free to travel with the artisan tomorrow. Not for a fistful of silver solidi.

No one would have to.

Vargos had made a swift decision or two in his day. He shook his head. "You asked for a man to come to the Trakesian border, I recollect. I'll be ready with the mule before the sun-up prayers. Jad's light will see us through the day."

The Batiaran was not a fellow with an easy smile, but he'd smiled briefly then and placed a hand on Vargos's shoulder before heading up the stairs. He said, "Thank you, friend," before he went.

In eight years, no one had ever offered to release him from duty in that way before, or offered a thank-you to a short-term hired servant for simply performing-or continuing-his contracted service.

This meant two things, Vargos had finally decided, back on his narrow pallet, elbowing away a too-close, snoring Trakesian. One was that Martinian had known exactly what he was doing-somehow-when he'd had the merchant buy him that girl. And the other was that Vargos was his man now.

Courage spoke to him. The courage of Jad in his chariot battling cold and darkness each long night under the world, of Heladikos driving his horses far too high to bring back fire from his father, and of a single traveller risking his own death for a girl who had been named to a savage ending on the morrow.

Vargos had seen some celebrated men in his time on this road. Merchant princes, aristocrats from the far-off City itself, clad in gold and white, soldiers in bronze armour and regimental colours, austere, immensely powerful figures in the clergy of the god. Some years ago, memorably, Leontes himself, Supreme Strategos of all the Empire's armies, had passed with a company of his own picked guard on their way back east from Megarium. They'd been riding to the military camp near Trakesia, then heading north and east against the restive Moskav tribes. Vargos, in a dense press of men and women, had caught only a flashing glimpse of golden hair, helmetless, as people screamed in ecstasy beside the road. That had been in the year after the great victory against the Bassanids beyond Eubulus, and after the Triumph the Emperor had granted Leontes in the Hippodrome. Even in Sauradia they had heard about that. Not since Rhodias had an Emperor granted a strategos such a processional.

It was this artisan from Varena, though, a descendant of the legions, the Rhodians, the blood Vargos had been raised to hate, who had done the bravest thing he knew, last night and now. And Vargos was going to follow him.

They were unlikely to get far, he thought grimly. Jad's light will see us through, he'd said in the hallway the night before. There was no light to speak of as they led the mule out of the courtyard in a black, blanketing thickness of pre-dawn fog. The pale autumn sun would be rising ahead of them soon-and they would have no way of even knowing.

The three of them walked from the yard in an unnatural, muffled stillness. Men-or the blurred outlines of men-stood and watched them pass. No one offered to help, though Vargos knew every man there. They had tasted no food or drink, on Martinian's instructions. Vargos knew why. He still wasn't sure how Martinian knew.

The girl was barefoot, wrapped in the artisan's second cloak, the hood hiding her face. No other travellers were moving, though the Megarian merchants had left earlier, in full darkness, carrying the wounded man in a litter. Vargos, awake and loading the mule by torchlight, had seen them go. They wouldn't travel far today, but they had little choice but to move on. Where Vargos came from, the apprehended thief would have been an obvious candidate to be hanged from Ludan's Tree.

Here, he wasn't sure. The girl had been named. They might choose another, or they might not relinquish her, fearing a year's bad luck if they did. Things were different in the south. Different tribes had settled here, different histories had set their stamp. Would they kill him and the Batiaran to take her back? Almost certainly, if they wanted her and the two men resisted. This sacrifice was the holiest rite of the year in the old religion; men interfered at absolute peril of their lives.

Vargos was quite certain Martinian would resist.

He was somewhat surprised to feel an equal certainty in himself, a cold anger overriding fear. As they passed out from the courtyard he walked past the stablemaster, Pharus, a burly figure in the mist. Pharus was staring at them in a certain way, no proper respect in his bearing at all, and though Vargos had known him for years he did not hesitate. He stopped in front of the man just long enough to swing the bottom of his staff upwards, hard, hammering Pharus right between the legs without a word spoken. The stablemaster let out a high-pitched screech and crumpled in the mud, hands clutching for his groin as he thrashed on the cold, wet ground.

Vargos bent low in the fog and spoke softly in the ear of the gasping, writhing man. "A warning. Leave her be. Find another, Pharus."

He straightened, carried on, not looking back. He never looked back. Not since he'd left home. He saw Martinian and the girl gazing at him, cloaked shadows on the almost invisible surface of the road. He shrugged, and spat. "Private quarrel," he said. He knew they would know it was a lie, but some things were best not spoken aloud, Vargos had always felt. He did not, for example, tell them he expected to die before midday.

Her mother used to call her erimitsu, "clever one" in their own dialect. Her sister was calamitsu, which was "beautiful one." and her brother was, of course, sangari, which was "beloved." Her brother and father had died last summer, black sores bursting all over their bodies, blood running from their mouths when they tried to scream at the end. They buried them in the pit with all the others. In the autumn, faced with winter coming, imminent starvation, and two daughters, her mother had sold one to the slavers: the one who had the intelligence to perhaps survive in the harsh world far away.

Kasia had had a reputation already that made her almost unmarriage-able at home. Too clever by half, and too thin by more than that in a tribe where women were valued for full hips and soft figures-promise of comfort in the long cold and children easily birthed. Her mother had made a bitter, brutal choice but not a unique one that year as the first snows fell on the mountains above them. The Karchite slave traders knew what they were doing that season, travelling the northern villages of Trakesia and then Sauradia in a slow circuit of acquisition.

The world was a place of grief, Kasia had understood, beyond tears, after the first two nights journeying south with shackles on her wrists. Man was born to sorrow, and women knew more of it. She'd lain on the cold ground, head averted, watching the last sparks of the dying fire as she lost her maidenhead to two of the slavers in the dark.

A year in Morax's inn had done nothing to change her thinking, though she had not starved and had learned what to do to avoid being beaten too often. She was alive. Her mother and sister might be dead by now. She didn't know. Had no way of knowing. The men hurt her sometimes, upstairs, but not always and not most of them. You learned, if you were clever, to shield that cleverness and gather a blank, stolid endurance about you like a cloak. And you passed days and nights and days and nights that way. The first winter in this alien south, spring, summer, then the coming of autumn again with turning leaves and memories you wanted to avoid.

You tried never to think of home. Of being free to walk out of doors when work was done, following the stream uphill to places where you could sit entirely alone beneath circling hawks and among the small quick woodland creatures they hunted, listening to the heartbeat of the world, dreaming in daylight with open eyes. You didn't dream, here. You endured, behind the cloak. Who had ever said existence offered more?

Until the day you understood they were going to kill you, and you realized-with genuine astonishment-that you wanted to survive. That somehow life still burned inside like the obdurate embers of a fire more fierce than desire or grief.

On the almost-invisible road, walking east with two men in grey, sound-swallowing fog on the Day of the Dead, Kasia watched them dealing with fear and the rawness of their danger and was unable to deny her joy. She struggled to hide it, as she had hidden every emotion for a year. She was afraid if she smiled they would think her simple, or mad, so she kept close to the mule, a hand on its rope, and tried not to meet the eyes of either man when the mist swirled and showed their faces.

They might be followed. They might die here on the road. This was a day of sacrifice and the risen dead. There might be daemons abroad, in search of mortal souls. Her mother had believed that. But Kasia had claimed her knife in the mist before dawn, darting through fog to the smithy and taking it from its hiding place. She could kill someone, or herself, before they took her for Ludan.

She had seen the shape of Pharus the stablemaster in the courtyard as they walked past. He had been leaning forward intently, still watching her as he had for the past two days. And though his eyes had been almost hidden in the enveloping greyness she could feel the fury in him. She had wondered suddenly if he was the oak priest here, the one who offered the heart of the sacrifice.

Then Vargos-who had simply been one of many servants on the road, a man who'd slept here so many nights without exchanging a single word with her-had stopped in front of Pharus and clubbed him upwards between the legs with his staff.

It was when Pharus collapsed with an appalling inhalation of breath that Kasia had begun struggling not to show the fierceness of her joy. With every step they took down the road after that blow-wrapped in fog as in a blanket, a womb, unable to see ten paces ahead or behind- she felt herself being reborn, remade.

It was wrong, she knew it was. There was death out here today, and no sane person ought to be abroad. But death had been summoned and waiting for her at the inn already, a certainty, and it might or might not find her out in the mist. Any way you looked at it, a chance was better than none at all. And she had her little knife.

Vargos was leading them, the Rhodian behind. They walked in silence, save for the muffled snorting of the mule and the creaking of the weight on its back. They listened. Ahead and behind. The world had shrunk nearly to nothingness. They moved, unseeing, in an endless grey on a straight road the Rhodians had built five hundred years ago in their Empire's bright glory.

Kasia thought about the artisan behind her. She should be ready to die for him, given what he'd done. She might be, in fact. But she was the erimitsu, and thought too much for her own good. So her mother used to say, and her father, brother, aunts-just about everyone.

She wasn't sure why he hadn't touched her last night. He might prefer boys, or find her thin, or simply have been tired. Or he might have been being kind. Kindness was not a thing she knew much about.

He had cried a name in the middle of the night. She'd been dozing herself, on the pallet, fully clothed, and had startled awake to the sound of his voice. She couldn't remember the name and he'd never quite awakened, though she'd waited, listening.

The other thing she didn't understand was how he'd known to run to the courtyard instead of up the stairs with everyone else when she screamed. The thief might have escaped, otherwise. It had been black in the room; she couldn't have identified anyone. Pacing along by the mule, Kasia worried that puzzle like a dog with a scrap of meat on a bone and eventually gave it up. She wrapped herself more tightly in Martinian's cloak. The cold was damp, penetrating. She had no shoes, but she was used to that. She looked over to left and right, couldn't see a thing beyond the road, could barely see the road itself beneath her feet. It would be easy enough, actually, to fall into the ditches. She knew where the forest was, to their left, knew it would draw nearer as they continued east.

Around mid-morning-at a guess-they came to one of the small roadside chapels. Kasia hadn't even seen it until Vargos spoke softly and they stopped. She peered through the greyness and made out the dark outline of the tiny chapel. They'd have gone right past had Vargos not been looking for it. Martinian called a halt. Standing where they were, listening all the time for sounds in all directions, they quickly ate chunks of dark bread with some beer, and shared out a wheel of cheese Vargos had taken from the servants" table. When they finished, Vargos looked an inquiry at Martinian. The red-bearded man hesitated, then Kasia saw him nod. He led them into the empty chapel for the invocation to Jad. Somewhere the sun had risen by now, was shining. Kasia listened to the two men hurry through the litany, and joined them for the responses she had been taught: Let there be Light for our lives, lord, and Light eternal when we come to you.

They went back out into the fog, untied the mule, began walking again. There was nothing to be seen at all. In front of her the world ended beyond Vargos. It was like walking in a dream, no passage of time, no sense of movement, the slabs of the road cold underfoot, walking away and away.

Kasia's hearing was extremely good. She heard the voices before either of the men did.

She reached back, touched Martinian on the arm, pointed back down the road. In the same moment Vargos said, very softly, They are coming. Left, just up here. Cross over."

There was a short, flat cart bridge spanning the ditch, leading into the fields. She wouldn't have seen that, either. They took the mule across, went a short way through the muddy stubble in the dense, impenetrable greyness, and stopped. Listening. Kasia's heart was racing now. They had come for her, after all. It was not over. They ought not to have stopped to pray, she thought.

Let there be Light. There was no light. At all.

Martinian stood on the other side of the mule, his red beard and hair dulled by the greyness. Kasia saw him hesitate, then slip an old, heavy sword silently free of the ropes that strapped it to the mule's side. Vargos watched him. They heard the noises clearly now, voices approaching from the west, men talking too loudly, to encourage themselves. Footsteps now on the road-eight men? ten? — muffled but very near, just across the ditch. Kasia strained to see, prayed she would not be able to. If the fog lifted for even a moment now they were lost.

Then she heard growling, and a sharp, urgent bark. They had brought the dogs. Of course. And they all knew her scent. They were lost.

Kasia laid one hand across the mule's shoulders, felt its nervousness, willed it to silence. She fumbled for her knife. She had the power to die before they took her, if no other power at all. Her brief, mad joy had gone, was lost, swift as a bird into greyness all around.

She thought of her mother a year ago, alone on a leaf-strewn path with a small bag of coins in her hands, watching the slave train take her daughter away. It had been a brilliantly clear day, snow gleaming on the mountain peaks, birdsong, the leaves red and gold, and falling.

Crispin considered himself an articulate man and knew he was a reasonably educated one. He'd had a tutor for many years after his father died, at his mother's insistence and his uncle's. Had struggled through the classical authors on rhetoric and ethics, and the tragic dramas of Arethae, greatest of the city-states in Trakesia: those thousand-year-old confrontations between men and gods written in an almost-lost form of the language men now called Sarantine. Writings from a different world, before stern Rhodias had shaped its empire and Trakesia's cities had dwindled into islets of pagan philosophy and then, latterly, not even that, as the Schools were closed. It was merely another province of Sarantium now, barbarians in the north of it and beyond its northern borders, and Arethae was a village huddled under the grandeur of its ruins.

Even more than his education, Crispin thought, fifteen years of working for and then alongside Martinian of Varena would have honed the thinking of any man. Gentle as his older partner might be in manner, Martinian was unrelenting and even joyful in chasing a dialectic down to its conclusions. Crispin had learned, of necessity, to give as good as he got and to derive a certain pleasure in marshalling words to guide premises to resolutions. Colour and light and form had always been his chief delight in the world, the realm of his own gift, but he took no little pride in being able to order and formulate his thoughts.

It was therefore with real distress that he had come to understand earlier this morning that he wasn't even dose to having words to express how uncomfortable he was out here in the fog. He couldn't begin to say how passionately he wanted to be anywhere else but here in Sauradia on an almost-invisible road. It went beyond fear and awareness of danger: his was the distress of a soul that felt itself to be in entirely the wrong sort of world.

And that was before they'd heard the men and dogs.

They stood now in the wet earth of a bare field, in silence. He was aware of the girl beside him, her steadying hand on the mule, keeping it quiet. Vargos was a shrouded shape a little ahead of them, with his staff. Crispin, on a thought, turned and carefully worked his sword free of the ropes on the mule's back. He felt awkward holding it, a fool, and at the same time genuinely afraid. If anything at all turned on the swordplay of Caius Crispus of Varena. He expected Linon, on her thong about his neck, to say something caustic, but the bird had been silent from the moment they awoke this morning.

He had brought the sword at the last moment, an impulse, an afterthought, and only because it had been his father's and he was leaving home and going far away. His mother had said nothing, but her arched eyebrows had been-as ever-infinitely expressive. She'd sent a servant for the heavy footsoldier's blade Horius had carried when summoned to militia duty.

In the house where he'd grown up, Crispin had drawn it from its scabbard and noted with surprise that blade and sheath were oiled and cared for, even after a quarter of a century. He'd made no comment on that, merely raised his own eyebrows and then offered a few dramatic, self-mocking passes with the sword in his mother's receiving room. He'd struck a martial pose, weapon levelled at a bowl of apples on the table.

Avita Crispina had winced to see it. She'd murmured drily, "Try not to hurt yourself, dear." Crispin had laughed, and sheathed the blade, claiming his wine with relief.

"You are supposed to tell me to come home with it or upon it," he'd murmured indignantly.

"That's a shield, dear," his mother had said gently.

He had no shield, no real idea how to use the sword, and there were dogs here with the hunters. Would the fog impede them, or the water in the ditch by the road? Or would the hunting hounds simply follow the girl's known scent right across the small bridge and lead the men right to them? The barking grew strident in that moment. Someone shouted, almost directly in front of them:

"They've crossed to the field! Come on!"

One question answered, at any rate. Crispin took a breath and lifted his father's blade. He did not pray. He thought of Ilandra, as he always did, but he did not pray. Vargos spread his feet wide and held his staff before him in both hands.

"He's here! "said Linon suddenly, in a tone Crispin had never heard from the bird. "Oh, lord of worlds, I knew it! Crispin, do not move! Don't let the others move."

"Hold still!" Crispin said sharply, instinctively, to Vargos and the girl.

In that moment several things seemed to happen at once. The accursed mule brayed stridently, legs gone rigid as tree trunks. The dogs" triumphant barking went suddenly high with shrill, yelping panic. And the shouting man screamed in terror, the sound ripping through the fog.

The mist swirled about the road, parted for a moment.

And in that instant Crispin saw something impossible. A shape from tormented dream, from nightmare. His mind slammed down, desperately denying what his eyes had just told him. He heard Vargos croak something that must have been a prayer. Then the fog closed in again like a curtain. Sight was gone. There was still screaming, high-pitched, appalling, from the vanished road. The mule trembled in every stiffened limb. He heard the streaming sound of it urinating beside him. The dogs were whining like whipped puppies. They heard them fleeing, back to the west.

There came a rumbling sound, as of the earth itself, shaking beneath them. Crispin stopped breathing. Ahead of them, among the hunters, the first man's scream went sharply, wildly higher, and then was cut off. The rumbling stopped. Crispin heard running footsteps, men screaming and the dogs" yelping sounds receding swiftly back the way they had come. Vargos had now dropped to his knees in the cold, sodden field, the staff fallen from his fingers. The girl was clutching at the trembling mule, struggling to steady it. Crispin saw that his hand holding the sword was shaking helplessly.

"What is it? Linon. What is this?"

But before the bird on his neck could make any reply, the mist parted again ahead of them, more than a swirling this time, a withdrawal, revealing the road across the narrow ditch for the first time that morning, and Crispin saw clearly what had, indeed, come on this day. His understanding of the world and the half-world changed forever in that moment as he, too, sank to his knees in the mud, his father's sword dropping from his fingers. The girl remained standing by the mule, transfixed. He would remember that.

Very far to the west in that moment the autumn sun had long since risen above the woods near Varena. The sky was blue and the sunlight caught the red of the oak leaves and of the last apples on the trees in an orchard beside a road that joined the great highway to Rhodias a little farther south.

In the courtyard of the farmhouse adjoining that orchard an old man sat on a stone bench by his door, wrapped in a woollen cloak against the crispness of the breeze, enjoying the morning light and the colours. He held an earthenware bowl of herbal tea in both hands, warming them. A servant, grumbling out of ancient habit, fed the chickens. Two dogs slept by the open gate in the sunlight. In a distant field sheep could be seen but no shepherd. It was clear enough to make out the towers of Varena to the north and west. A bird trilled from the rooftop of the farmhouse.

Zoticus stood up, very abruptly. He set down his tea on the bench, spilling some of it. A watcher might have seen his hands tremble. The servant was not watching. The alchemist took a step or two towards his front gate and then turned to face the east, a grave, intent expression on his weathered face.

"What is it? Linon!" he said sharply and aloud. "What is this?"

He was, of necessity, unaware that he was echoing another man's question. He received no reply, either. Of course. One of the dogs stood up, though, head tilted a little to one side, questioningly.

Zoticus remained that way for a long time, motionless, as if listening for something. He had closed his eyes. The servant ignored him, used to this. The chickens were fed, and then the goat, and he milked the one cow. The eggs were collected. Six of them this morning. The servant carried them inside. All this time the alchemist did not move. The dog hesitated, and then padded over to lie down beside him. The other dog remained by the gate, in the light.

Zoticus waited. But the world, or the half-world, gave nothing more back to him. Not after that one sharp vibration in the soul, in the blood, a gift-or a punishment-offered someone who had walked and watched in shadows most men never knew.

"Linon," he said again, at length, but softly this time, a breath. He opened his eyes, looking out at the distant trees of the forest through the gate before his home. Both dogs sat up this time, watching him. He reached down without looking and patted the one at his knee. After a while he went back into the house, leaving his forgotten tea to grow cold on the stone bench outside. The sun rose higher through the morning, in the clear and cloudless blue of the autumn sky.

Twice in his life Vargos thought (he was never entirely certain) he had seen one of the zubir. A glimpse in half-light, no more than that, of the Sauradian bison, lord of the Aldwood and all the great forests, emblem of a god.

Once, at summer sunset, working alone in his father's field, he had looked up squinting to see a bulky, shaggy shape at the edge of the wood. The light had been fading, the distance great, but something too large had moved against the dark curtain of the trees and then disappeared. It might have been a stag but it had been enormous, and he hadn't seen the high, branched horns.

His father had beaten him with an axe handle for suggesting that evening that he might actually have seen one of the sacred beasts of the wood. To see a zubir was an awesome thing, reserved for priests and sacred warriors consecrated to Ludan. Fourteen-year-old boys with a disrespectful turn of mind were not granted such felicities in the scheme of the world as the Inicii-and Vargos's father saw it.

The second time had been eight years ago on his solitary springtime journey south with a branded cheek and a hard, sustaining anger. He had fallen asleep to the howling of wolves and awakened in moonlight to the sound of something roaring in the woods. He had heard an answering roar from nearer yet. Peering into a night made strange by the noises and the blue moon, Vargos had again seen something massive move at the forest's edge and withdraw. He had lain awake, listening, but the roaring had not come again, and nothing else appeared at the limits of his sight as the blue moon swung west after the white one and then set, leaving a sky strewn with stars, and the distant wolves, and the murmuring of a dark stream beside him.

Twice, then, and uncertainty both times.

This time there was no doubt. The fear that went into Vargos lodged like a knife between two ribs. In fog and a damp cold on the Day of the Dead he stood in a stubbled field between the ancient Rhodian high road to Trakesia and the southernmost edgings of the infinitely more ancient forest and fell to his knees at what he saw on the road when the mist parted.

There was a dead man there. The others had already fled, and the dogs. Vargos saw that it was Pharus, the stablemaster from Morax's. He lay flat on his back, limbs wide outflung like a child's discarded doll. It could be seen-even from there-that his entrails were spilling out. Blood was spreading all around him. His belly and chest had been ripped apart.

But that wasn't what drove Vargos to his knees as if felled by a blow. He had seen men die badly before. It was the other thing in the road.

The creature that had done this to the man. The zubir that was-Vargos knew this in that moment as he knew his own name-more than only an emblem, after all, however awesome that might be in itself. His ideas of faith and power crumbled in that cold muddy field.

He had adopted the teachings of the sun god, had worshipped and invoked Jad and Heladikos his son almost from the time he had first come south, forsaking the gods of his tribe and the blood-soaked rituals as he had forsaken his home.

And here now was the presence of Ludan, the Ancient One, the oak god, before him in a swirling away of greyness on the Imperial high road, in one of his known guises. Zubir. The bison. Lord of the forest.

And this was a god who demanded blood. And this was the day of sacrifice. Vargos's heart was pounding. He saw that his hands were shaking and was not ashamed. Only afraid. A mortal man in a place where he should not have been.

The mist swirled again, fog wrapped the road like a cloak. The obliterating bulk of the bison was lost. And then it was not. It was, somehow, in the field right beside them, enormous and black, an overpowering presence, a rank smell of animal and blood, wet fur and rotting earth, leaving the dead man alone on the empty road, torn apart, his heart exposed to the day this was.

Her hand on the neck of the shuddering mule, Kasia saw the mist part, saw what had come to be in the road, and she went straight through her own fear and beyond in an instant.

In a kind of trance of unfeeling, she watched the fog descend again, and was utterly unsurprised when the zubir materialized in the field beside them. Vargos had fallen to his knees.

How, she thought, how should one be surprised at what a god could do? She realized suddenly that the donkey had stopped trembling and was standing very still, unnaturally so, given the smell and presence of the monstrous creature not ten paces away now. But what could be strange, what could be strange when one had strayed from a known road this far into the world of the powers? A bison stood before them, so big it would have blotted half the road from her sight if the road had not been lost. Three men could sit between the sharp, short curving of its horns. She saw blood on those horns, and streaky, viscous matter dripping slowly from them. She had seen the stablemaster in the road, ripped into meat.

She had thought this morning, foolishly, that she might escape.

She knew now-oh, she knew! — that Ludan was not to be escaped. Not like this. Not by some clever Rhodian with a scheme. Not by a girl named, however unfairly, however cruelly, to the god. Cruelty had no… place here in the field. It was a word that had no meaning, no context. The god was, and did what he did.

In this suspended state of calm, Kasia looked into the eyes of the zubir, eyes so deep a brown they were black, and she saw them clearly even in mist, and seeing, she surrendered her mortal will and the meaning of her soul to the ancient god of her people. What man-what woman, even more than man-had ever been immune to destiny? Where could you run when your name was known to a god? The secret pagan priest here, the whispering villagers, Morax's gross, small-eyed wife… none of them mattered. Their own destinies awaited them, or had found them already. Ludan signified, and he was here.

Kasia was serene, unresisting, as one drugged with the juice of poppies, when the bison began moving towards the forest. It looked back at the three of them, slowly turning its massive shaggy head. Kasia thought she understood. She had been named. He knew her. There was no path in the world that would not lead her here. Her tread, barefoot in the mud and crushed grass, was steady as she began to follow. Fear was behind her, in another world. She wondered if she would have time to wish a prayer that mattered, for her mother and her sister far away, if such things were allowed, if they were still alive, if the sacrifice had any power in what she was. She knew without turning back that the two men were coming behind her. Choice was not granted here, to any of them.

They went into the Aldwood on the Day of the Dead following the zubir, and the black trees swallowed them even more completely than the fog had done before.

"The numinous," the philosopher Archilochus of Arethae had written nine hundred years ago, "is not to be directly apprehended. Indeed, if the eods wish to destroy a man they need only show themselves to him."

Crispin struggled to barricade his soul behind ancient learning, a desperately conjured image of a marble portico in sunlight, a white-clad, white-bearded teacher serenely illuminating the world for attentive disciples in the most celebrated of the city-states of Trakesia.

He failed. Terror consumed him, asserting mastery, dominance, as he followed the girl and the stupefying creature that was. more than he could grasp. A god? The showing forth of one? The numinous? Upwind of them now, it stank. Things crawled and oozed through the thick, matted fur that hung from its chin, neck, shoulders, even the knees and breast. The bison was enormous, impossibly so, taller than Crispin was, wide as a house, the great, horned head vast and appalling. And yet, as they entered the woods, the first black trees like sentinels, wet leaves falling about them and upon them, the creature moved lightly, gracefully, never turning after that first look back-certain they were following.

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. 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?"

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.

Later that day, towards twilight far to the west, a grey-haired, grey-bearded man rode a jostling farmer's cart towards the city walls of Varena.

The farmer, having had more than one animal cured of an ailment by his passenger, was happy to oblige with irregular rides into the city. The passenger, at the moment, could not have been said to appear happy, or pleased, or anything but preoccupied. As they approached the walls and merged with the streaming traffic heading into and out of Varena before sunset closed the gates, the solitary passenger was recognized by a number of people. Some greeted him with deference and awe, others moved quickly to the far side of the road or fell back making a sign of the sun disk as the farmer's cart passed carrying an alchemist. Zoticus was, in fact, long accustomed to both responses and knew how to deal with each. Today he scarcely noticed them.

He'd had a shock this morning that had greatly undermined the wry detachment with which he preferred to view the world and what transpired within it. He was still dealing-not entirely successfully- with that.

‘I think you should go into the city," had said the falcon earlier that day. He'd named her Tiresa when he'd claimed her soul. ‘I think it would be good for you tonight."

"Go to Martinian and Carissa," little Mirelle had added, softly." You can talk with them." There'd been a murmur of agreement from the others, a rustling of leaves in his mind.

"I can talk with all of you," he'd said aloud, irritated. It offended him when the birds became solicitous and protective, as if he were growing fragile with age, needed guarding. Soon they'd be reminding him to wear his boots.

"Not the same," Tiresa had said briskly. "You know it isn't."

Which was true, but he still didn't like it.

He'd tried to read-Archilochus, as it happened-but his concentration was precarious and he gave it up, venturing out for a walk in the orchard instead. He felt extremely strange, a kind of hollowness. Linon was gone. Somehow. She'd been gone, of course, since he'd given her away, but this was… different. He'd never quite stopped regretting the impulse that had led him to offer a bird to the mosaicist travelling east. Or not just east: to Sarantium. City he'd never seen, never would see now. He'd found a power in his life, claimed a gift, his birds. There were other things he would not be allowed, it seemed.

And the birds weren't really his, were they? But if they weren't, then what could they be said to be? And where was Linon, and how had he heard her voice this morning from so far?

And what was he doing shivering in his orchard without a cloak or his stick on a windy, cold autumn day? At least he had his boots on.

He'd gone back inside, sent Clovis off, complaining, with a request to Silavin the farmer down the road, and had taken the birds" collective counsel after all.

He couldn't talk to his friends about what was troubling him, but sometimes talking about other things, any other things, the very timbre of human voices, Carissa's smile, Martinian's gentle wit, the shared warmth of a fire, the bed they'd offer him for the night, a morning visit to the busde of the market…

Philosophy could be a consolation, an attempt to explain and understand the place of man in the gods" creation. It couldn't always succeed, though. There were times when comfort could only be found in a woman's laughter, a friend's known face and voice, shared rumours about the Antae court, even something so simple as a steaming bowl of pea soup at a table with others.

Sometimes, when the shadows of the half-world pressed too near, one needed the world.

He left Silavin at the city gates, with thanks, and made his way to Martinian's home late in the day. He was welcomed there, as he'd known he would be. His visits were rare; he lived a life outside the walls. He was invited to spend a night, and his friends made it seem as if he was doing them a great honour by accepting. They could see he was disturbed by something but-being friends-they never pressed him to speak, only offered what they could, which was a good deal just then.

In the night he woke in a strange bed, in darkness, and went to the window. There were rights burning in the palace, on the upper floors where the beleaguered young queen would be. Someone else awake, it seemed. Not his grief. His gaze went beyond, to the east. There were stars above Varena in the clear night. They blurred in his sight as he stood there, holding memory to himself like a child.