"Winter Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (M M M, L L L, Lee Tanith, Murphy C. E.)

3 Journey

They both moved at a steady lope along the continuing track that ran through the trees. Everything was as it had been, a hot day burning up behind the leaves and pine needles, freckled sun-shafts, cool shadows, little wayside streams, rocks, and the rare sound or sight of a bird, and once a yellowish fox trotting over their path.

Near noon they came into another glade, without water, but the turf covered with drifts of the pale flowers. Vines hung from the trees like nets, jeweled by fast-ripening grapes.

They paused here, picking and eating the fruit.

From behind the walls of the pines, there came suddenly a jeering, eerie whoop.

He heard it too, she thought.

Transfixed, Clirando saw a dark huddle of shapes ruffling along behind the curtains of the vines. There were more of them now. A whole pig herd of these demons of hers.

Last night she had yearned that the lion cat would catch and devour them. But obviously, even if it had, other members of the tribe existed.

“What is it?” Zemetrios said to her.

They had, until then, spoken very little, and of nothing beyond their own advance, the grapes, and the mooted village.

Shaken again, Clirando said, “Animals.”

He stared over where she did.

“Or,” he said, “supernatural things.”

“Can you see them?” The question burst from her before she could decide to withhold it.

“Something…but the island is full of such stuff. They trouble you?” he asked, turning his blue eyes full on her.

Angrily Clirando said, “What business is it of yours?”

“Only this—I too am tormented by creatures or images that roam through the trees. Not animal in that sense. They call to me in drunken voices…insubstantial. An army of drunken ghosts.”

As he said this, clear as if drawn in paint, Clirando saw Araitha standing between two pines. She wore her traveler’s cloak, and her golden hair with its ornaments caught the sunlight. Her face had no expression.

Clirando began to tremble. She told herself dizzily that it was only her sleepless eyes that played the trick. She shut them, which was a mistake, and felt Zemetrios catch hold of her, lifting her clear of some abyss into which she had been about to fall.

She pushed him away. His strength and quickness alarmed her. She was humiliated by her own weakness.

But he would not let her push him off. He held her up and put the flask against her mouth.

“Take some.”

“No.”

“It’s only water. I drank the last of the spirits last night.”

Clirando drank. The water was still cold, and despite his words, kept the tang of alcohol. It steadied her.

“My thanks. Let go of me now. I’m well.”

“You’re not. But yes, I’ll let go. There.”

She could smell him, the health of his young body, the clean aroma of his hair and breath.

Clirando glanced at the pines.

The ghost was gone.

“Did you kill her?” Zemetrios asked.

“What?”

“You spoke a name, two in fact. A man’s name and a woman’s. You spoke his name with utter scorn. And hers with—forgive me, warrior girl, with fear.”

Clirando dropped herself down to her knees, and sat back. She no longer felt faint, but drained and—what Araitha had promised—empty.

This man was real. She had disgraced herself by nearly fainting in front of him like some pampered lady. What did the truth matter now?

“I killed her. Not directly. But she died because of what I did.”

“Because she lay down with your lover? Oh, Clirando, it isn’t hard to guess. You spoke two names, remember?”

“She lay down with my lover. She’d been my friend. Him I beat in fair fight and he was sent away. She also. She went to Crentis but the ship sank. She’s dead, as you say. Through me.”

“By the Father,” said Zemetrios softly.

“She cursed me, too,” Clirando gave a small rasp of laughter. “I can’t sleep. A slight curse, you might think.”

“No, I don’t think that.”

“Well,” said Clirando, “let’s get on.”

She stood up again.

The forest was silent and black beyond the sunlight of the vine glade. Like all her life surely now, beyond that night when lightning struck Parna’s Temple.

Why did I trust him? Stupid, to blab it all out to him. Are you a child, or what? Well. He knows now.

Clirando ran lightly beside Zemetrios, through the glints and shades, angry with herself, lamenting, full of pain.

Nothing had importance, only to go on, to find her band. Or if not, respectfully to complete this awful and weird penance set her by the priestesses of the Maiden. And then be done with all of it.

I too will go away. Into the East perhaps, where people lose themselves. Because already I’m lost. Who is Clirando? Clirando would never have blurted out her secret to some stranger.

But as they loped shoulder to shoulder, glancing up at the “stranger,” from time to time she saw the twitch behind his eyes, and once his head turning, then snapping around again. He too heard and saw devils in the forest as he had said, that fact alone was certain.

And she—she came to hear sometimes an unearthly low sound that filtered through the trees like wind, though the leaves never moved. It had for her no noise of drunken voices—the multiplied voice of Yazon in all the moods of his insanity. If she detected anything it was the jeering cry of the pig things—but now never too close.

Possibly he had been right. To travel together might provide a little distance for both of them from their haunts. Even the ghost of Araitha had not drawn near.

Had it been she? For sure?

Clirando frowned as she ran. They are my devils. They come for me. Out of my heart and mind. It’s only that the forest makes them real. But how real? Could I have gone to her and seized her, run her through with a knife?

Clouds massed across Clirando’s eyes. She half stumbled, and he turned and looked at her. His face was concerned, curious.

“A root,” she said.

And pushed memory and idle surmise to the edges of her brain.

The trees began to thin out near sunfall.

The downward slopes were more gradual, and oak trees and wild olive predominated. Here the track ended abruptly. Another altar place stood there, this one with a whitish stone roughly carved and pocked, a sort of uneven globe.

He and she halted beside it. In the bronzy light now slanting sidelong through the trees, the globe seemed to pulse with uncanny inner light.

Clirando took the last honey wafer from her pack, and laid it by the stone. “I do not know you, but I reverence you.”

Zemetrios, rather sheepishly, she thought, put the final sliver of cheese on the altar. It was mostly rind. Any god would disdain it—or perhaps not, since they would otherwise have eaten it.

“Look,” he said quietly.

A hare bounded among the olives, its long ears brushed with light and glowing red.

They could have brought the hare down for supper, either of them, she was certain. But in this place neither had wished to, or though it wise.

Did they in some ways then, think alike?

No.

Remember Thestus, the arch deceiver. Though Thestus, she believed, would have wanted to throw his knife or a rock at the hare, and she would have had to stop him.

As they turned from the altar, Clirando saw an old man sitting about fifty paces away under a broad-leaved tree. His hands were busy with something that sparkled—and she was positive he had not been there in the preceding moments.

“Do you see him?”

“Yes,” Zemetrios said.

Slowly they walked forward, making no attempt at caution. The old man did not look up. But when they were almost within arm’s length of him, he raised his aged face. His eyes were black and keen in the pleated paper of his skin.

“You’re going to the village,” he told them, “the Moon Town.”

“It exists then,” said Clirando.

“Perhaps,” said the old man.

What spangled through his hands was a threaded skein of brilliant stones—like Eastern rubies and diamonds they looked. He seemed only to be playing with them and suddenly he cast them down.

Zemetrios but not Clirando sucked in breath.

Meeting the ground, the sparkly web changed instantly to a long and coiling snake, marked along its back with points of red and silver.

“Oh,” said the old man, sarcastically polite, “did I make you jump, bold soldier?”

“Yes, Father,” said Zemetrios. Good-naturedly he laughed. “You’re a magician, then.”

“Sometimes a magician. Sometimes other things. Sometimes I am a tree.”

They regarded him wordlessly. The burnished snake poured itself away and up the narrow trunk of a nearby olive.

“Things come, and also they go,” said the old man.

“How great a distance to the village now, Father?”

“Not far. Be there before sunset ends. They close the gates at first dark.”

“A wise precaution,” said Clirando.

She guessed Zemetrios, as she did, tried to draw the old man out, provoke him into some revealing word or action.

But he did not reply now, only took from the inner folds of his garments another skein of beads. Moving it to and fro between gnarled hands, he crooned what must have been the spell to make a serpent out of it.

“Well, good evening to you,” said Zemetrios.

He and Clirando walked on.

About twenty steps farther along, both of them turned as one. Only shadows sat under the broad-leaved tree.

“The snake-maker, I shall call him that,” said Zemetrios.

“It was a trick, an illusion.”

“Maybe. Did you see how he did it?”

“No. But then often you never can—that is the idea of it.”

“I met an old woman, too,” Zemetrios said, “the first day, when I’d climbed up from the beach. There was an unlit beacon there. She wove only cloth, not snakes. She said she lived in a hut.”

“I met her also. The hut hadn’t been used for years.”

“What are they?” he said softly, as they paced on again. “Are they demons, too? If so, I don’t recognize them.”

“Not all demons are recognizable.”

“You’re sensible, Clirando.”

She shrugged.

The ground sloped up now. The trees were much fewer in number, long stretches of grass and weeds between them, and no path anywhere, as if, though many walked through the forest, none ever came as far as this.

The sun, which they could see now, hung low in the sky, a red ball in a curdling of gold and scarlet cloud.

They had reached the top of the hill. They looked down into the small basin of a valley.

Impending sunset described it exactly. Fields and groves, vineyards and orchards clustered there. And from them protruded high walls of dressed stone, above which showed tiled roofs, and one tall slim tower. The village. Behind everything, mountains rose, three peaks, one behind another, and touched sidelong with flame by the dying sun.

The way down to the valley was easy. The slope was broken now by another pathway, itself of laid stone, and broad enough for three men to walk together.

“At first dark the gates shut,” he repeated.

They broke into a racer’s run, leaping down the roadway into the valley.