***
The frustrating chase continued. They met a shepherd, about an hour after noon, who was sitting in the shade of an oak, watching his flock with a couple of rough dogs; he said a stranger had passed, on his way to the grove at Lakiri, half a day up the valley, on the heights to the north. But when they got there in the late evening, the tall trees of the grove casting long shadows across the hillside, the place was empty, but for a patch of grass that had been pressed down, as if a man had been lying there.
They followed the ridge trail to a rough hut, where Marce found a few crumbs of spelt spilled on the ground, and the scuff of footmarks in the dust. They slept there; Master kept the first watch, and made Marce take the second, just in case Larth was tempted to try to make his way back to take care of the captive.
In the night, Master dreamt of blood; he dreamt of slicing through flesh, watching droplets of blood well up, each one a perfect globe, spreading and flattening as it grew, glittering like metal, till eventually the drops ran together in a red flood. Then he cut deeper, till the flesh on each side parted, evenly, the wound falling open, showing the white bone – white, red, white, life laid open before him. It was all silent, but for the small hiss of the knife. When he woke, he realised he had bitten his tongue as he slept, and his right hand was on the hilt of his knife.
The next day, early, they came across a place by a stream where someone had camped; there were a few crumbs of spelt, again, and a patch of grass had turned yellow, as if starved, where a mat had pressed it down. There were not even the remains of a fire. This man travelled light indeed, Master thought; as light as a ghost.
"He moved on before dawn; there's dew where he slept. If we'd been here an hour later we've have missed it," Marce said.
"Yes, but where did he go?"
There were no tracks in the dew. There was a path that led onwards, along the slope above the new valley that ran down towards Arretna; but from here they could see the next village, on the other side of the stream.
"We'll cross the valley," Master said.
"No," Larth said. "He's gone on, I'm sure of it. If he's heading for Arretna, he won't stop so early in the day. He'll go straight on. And the high track misses the marshes; he'll make better time."
Master shook his head. That kind of directness was the way Larth thought, so Larth assumed Cacus would be like him; but that wasn't the idea Master had of the man they pursued, not any more. "He's gone down, I'm sure of it."
"How sure? Are we even sure the man we're following is Cacus?" Marce asked.
Master wondered; but he wasn't going to admit his doubts to his men.
"We'll lose time if we cross the valley," Larth said. "If he's gone straight on, we're only a couple of hours behind him now, but we'll lose as much again going down to the village, and coming back."
"And if we get ahead of him?"
There was no answer to that. They scrambled down the slope into the headwaters of the valley, going as fast as they could despite the boggy patches where they sunk up to the knee, or which they skirted, but at the cost of doubling the distance taken. Once, they came across a sheet of water surrounded by reeds, where the water brooded darkly as if it contained a shadowed world from which the sunlight had been sucked out.
Master saw a man above them on the hill near the village, so far and so minuscule to the sight that he wondered if he had imagined it, till Marce pointed out the tiny moving shape. Once, they came across footprints in mud, and some flattened reeds, and thought they'd found his tracks; but they'd somehow got turned around, though they shouldn't have, for the sun was clear overhead and if they'd followed their shadows to the north they couldn't have gone wrong, and they realised the tracks were their own and they'd lost a long hour in their wandering.
"We'll have lost him now, you know," Larth said. "Whatever he's doing."
Master knew better than to answer. Sometimes it was best to pretend not to have heard, rather than make a mutiny out of a single complaint. But it was true, none the less, and neither of the choices he could make now was a good one; to retrace their tracks to the ridge, and make straight for Arretna, or to carry on and hope they found the village. And now, the village itself was invisible; the world seemed to have contracted to the tall reeds and the silvery mud and a tiny patch of blue sky, and whichever way they looked, the reeds seemed to fill the way.
Flickers of thought lit through his mind. He must be on the other side. I saw a lake from above; where is it? We don't know it was him. You can't see how long the lake is. There were sheep above the village. A river down the middle. Wet feet. There may be a ford. We would see better from the ridge. Can't lose time. Heavy going. Too much time lost already.
They pushed on. The reeds clustered closer; at one point he had to cut the path open with his sword. (That will dull the blade, he thought.) It wasn't clear, now, whether they were on land or in water; the path streamed with water, every footstep splashed sparkling.
And then suddenly, the reeds ended, and there was the village on the hillside above them.
They didn't need to go into the village, in the end; they found a hamlet, no more than a couple of round huts, by an inlet. The place stank of fish guts and smoke.
They found two women at work; one slitting fish, tipping the guts into a great clay vessel where they'd rot down to a thin sauce; the other spearing the splayed bodies on twigs to lay them on racks in the sun. The younger of the two did much of the talking; the elder, a tall woman with a tight mouth and a hint of moustache, hung back a little, silent but disapproving.
Yes, there was a lake – down the creek, but you couldn't see it through the marshes; yes, a traveller had come through, but he'd gone already; yes, they did have something other than fish to eat here, but not much, but a bit of bread and some cheese, they could manage that.
"I don't suppose you get many people through here?"
"We don't often see this many. You're trying to catch up with Cacus?"
"No, not really." Master thought quickly; at least they knew who they were following now (unless, he reminded himself, this was another bluff, determined to put him even further off route than he already was), but he couldn't alarm the village. "We were headed to Arretna – we were going to meet some of his followers there."
"A strange coincidence," said the older of the women.
Master shrugged. If only Larth had the sense to keep his mouth shut, they might yet be all right. But having gone on hints and supposition thus far, he wondered if it wasn't all coming too easily now; if he was being fed what he wanted to hear.
"Strange coincidences have a habit of happening wherever Cacus shows up," he said, allowing a little portentousness into his voice.
"Don't they just?" said the younger woman. "But he says" – the stress on that single syllable showing her veneration, perhaps also a little too much docility- "that there is no such thing as coincidence."
Master nodded. He hoped he looked suitably reverent, rather than anxious as confused, which is what he was.
"It's the birth of a new age! The age of the man who burns and is not consumed! An age that will be birthed in the blood of a king!"
Master could imagine what Vipienas would make of that statement. So, he supposed, could the old woman, who coughed, and looked meaningfully at the younger, who looked away, embarrassed.
"You'll be going on to Arretna," she said. "Who were you trying to find?"
"Ranazu didn't say."
"Sounds rather unorganised." Her voice was dry as kindling, and as dangerous.
"Make for Arretna, and you'll be met. That's what he said, and we trusted him. But..."
"Yes?"
"I'm wondering if he meant for something like this to happen."
Her eyes were cold, and he could see her brain worked as coolly as his; incessantly weighing thoughts, discarding, rebalancing.
"He must have hoped..." the young woman had started, but the older cut in.
"You're on th
e wrong side of the river. How could he have known you'd cross it? And why did you cross it anyway? The straight track lies the other side."
"Crooked trails are sometimes the straightest." Again he tried to force that note of fanatical reverence into his voice.
"And we think we were followed," Marce added. "So we've taken a few detours, just in case..."
"So it is a coincidence." The old woman's face seemed to soften, though she did not smile.
"There is no such thing as a coincidence," the younger said. "Cacus won't go to Arretna now; they're waiting for him. He's headed to a cave on Amiata. He said he's withdrawing from the world of men; he needs to prepare for the new age."
"He's moving on," said the older, "always moving on. Some of us settle, we put down roots. We compromise. But he's always looking for something that isn't here. I've known Cacus for years, but when he was here, when he looked at me, it was as if he were looking through us. As if he was somewhere else."
Yes, Master thought; it's like that time with the general, when I seemed to be watching from a very long way away, and the world seemed to have slowed down, and time was sticky, like pine resin, and everything looked blurred. You look out on reality, and what you're really thinking about is something else, or rather, it would be truer to say, a vague feeling of... of what? Futurity? Some time or place where or when you could be fully present, revealed to yourself, when you would look out without that presence, always, of the commentator in the back of your mind, the hinthial that lurks within. Perhaps that's what Cacus calls the new age. But it's no use; it never will be any use. This world of strangers is all we have to work with.
Was that, then, what Cacus stood for? Or only to him? And he thought; that's how he does it. We do it to ourselves. We find a way to understand him, and when we do, we think he spoke our thoughts. We see in him what we want to see, like the wind-shimmered mirror of a lake reflecting the sky.
"Do we follow, then?"
"Sorry?" Master blinked; he'd nearly fallen asleep in the sun.
"Do we follow Cacus to Amiata?"
"Yes, Marce, we follow him."