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 gods 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 an
d 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.