A Journey of the Heart (40 page)

I nodded.

"You too."

I opened my mouth to speak, but words wouldn't come.

"Hush," she said. "I know what you meant. We'll talk tonight."

At midmorning it began to snow. By midafternoon the world around us wore a veil of white. As we had done the day before, we traveled all day without stopping. By evening I was tired and cold and hungry. For several hours the north wind had been blowing, and my fingers were stiff from clutching my cloak tight around me.

Even after dark Maara didn't seem to be looking for a place to camp. There was no moon. I stumbled as the ground grew rough underfoot. When I was so tired I didn't think I could take another step, Maara stopped.

"We'll rest here a while," she said.

"A while?"

"The forest isn't far."

"Shouldn't we keep going then?"

"We'll go on when the moon rises."

Although she said nothing about the weather, I understood that if it grew much worse, we would be in danger as long as we were in open country. Once we reached the forest, we could find some kind of shelter and fuel for a fire. Until then we were at the mercy of the storm.

Maara lifted my pack from my shoulders and shrugged out of hers before I thought to help her with it. She cut some bracken and shook it free of snow to give us something dry to sit on. When I sat down, I found that we were in a little hollow in the landscape that gave us shelter from the wind, though I could hear it whistling by inches above my head.

"Are you sleepy?" she asked me.

My legs were tired, and I was glad to be off my feet, but I didn't feel like sleeping.

"No," I said. "Are you?"

She shook her head. "Better not to sleep."

Even in that dreadful weather, she got a fire started. While she collected enough twiggy shrubs to feed it for a few hours, I threaded strips of venison onto sticks and propped them over the flames. Maara sat down and leaned back against our packs, which she had arranged to serve as a backrest. Then she opened her cloak and beckoned to me to come sit between her legs, as I had sat the night before when I told her the story of the fairy queen. I took my own cloak off and pulled it around us like a blanket. After a little while, I was almost warm enough, and by then, our supper was ready.

It would be several hours until moonrise. A full stomach and the warmth of Maara's body made me sleepy. Although I hadn't intended to fall asleep, I must have slept soundly for at least an hour. When I awoke, I found that I had half turned to her in my sleep and now lay with my head on her breast, my legs tucked under me. I was so comfortable, I didn't want to move, but it was Maara's turn to sleep, and one of us had to stay awake. When I started to sit up, Maara's arms held me where I was.

"Don't move," she said. "I'm finally warm."

"You should sleep a while."

"I'm all right," she said.

She must have been as tired as I was, but I didn't argue with her. The burden of keeping us alive in that hostile place lay entirely upon her shoulders. As long as she kept watch, nothing would surprise us. I depended on her so completely that I forgot to worry about the dangers that surrounded us. I thought of other things, of what had passed between us the night before.

"I didn't tell you everything," she said.

I caught my breath and waited, knowing that what she was about to say would be hard to hear.

"I didn't tell you about Elen."

She hadn't told me in so many words, but she had told me more than she realized. "I know you loved her," I said, and before she could accuse me of jealousy, I added, "I'm glad you had someone then, even if it wasn't me."

"I was only her companion."

The ghost of a memory sat just out of reach in the back of my head.

"I was her property." A pause. "Her slave."

The ghost whispered,
I was there for her pleasure, not my own.
They were Sparrow's words about Arnet, the old woman who had taken a child to bed.

"I counted myself lucky," Maara said. "She had changed my life. She probably saved my life. I was grateful, glad to repay her in any way I could. I had nothing to offer her but myself. I never expected her to love me back."

"Did she?"

"No."

I reached for Maara's hand and held it against my heart. She had told me that no one in that household cared for her, but I never imagined that anyone could have used her as Elen did.

"She did a shameful thing," I said.

"Shameful? Why?"

"She hurt you," I said. "She used you."

"And I used her."

"It's not the same thing."

"Listen," she said. "I needed to love her. I needed to love someone."

As do we all, I thought, but at what cost.

"I would have died for her," she said.

"And she would have let you." I began to dislike Elen very much.

"Are you angry with me?"

I brought her fingers to my lips. "Of course not."

She brushed her fingertips over my mouth. When she cradled my cheek in the palm of her hand, she felt my tears.

"Why?" she said.

"You deserved so much more than that."

She wrapped her arms around me and held me tight. "And now I have you," she said.

We spoke no more about it. Nothing more needed to be said. While we waited for the moon, I tried to imagine how it would feel to love someone as Maara had loved Elen, without hope of a return. The more I thought about it, the more I believed that it was impossible not to hope, and few things could be more painful than to hope for love only to be constantly disappointed.

A half moon rose at midnight. The air was still, and the sky began to clear. Maara whispered to me that it was time to go. When I stood up, I shivered in the bitter cold.

We walked for hours, through wind-blown drifts that barred our way. Where we could we went around them. Maara kept our direction true by following the stars.

At dawn we saw the distant hills. By midday we had reached them. We passed a scattering of trees, their trunks wind-twisted into fantastic shapes. On the hill's crest, their silhouette against the pale sky looked like a line of dancers waving long ribbons that curled above their heads. It seemed as if they danced us on our way, as they swayed back and forth. The silence thundered in my ears. I fell.

When I woke, I was lying on a bed of leaves, wrapped in my cloak, with Maara's cloak beneath me. Close by a fire was burning. Our packs lay beside it. I was alone.

The smell of food awakened my hunger. Steam rose from our cooking pot. In it was a rich soup, made from the deer's marrow bones. I wanted to wait for Maara, but I couldn't resist eating my share of it. I set the pot down a little more than half full.

"Finish it." Maara's voice came from behind me. Even in snow that crunched and squeaked underfoot, I hadn't heard her approach.

"That's for you," I said.

"I've had mine."

I doubted that. "Then have some more."

She frowned and held the pot out to me. I refused to take it until she had swallowed a few mouthfuls.

"I'm not the one who made a faceprint in the snow," she said.

"I'm all right."

"You should have said something."

She was trying to scold me, but I heard the worry behind her words.

"Next time I will," I said, although I doubted I could keep my promise. I hadn't known I was so tired.

"Can you go on?"

"I'm fine," I insisted.

"From the top of this hill, you can see the forest."

A shiver of anticipation went through me. "Then let's go," I said.

What we called forests were really only groves or woodlands. I had never seen one of the ancient forests, although I had heard tales about them. The old forests had many names -- abode of wolves and of the old ones, outlaws' haven, hunters' home. It was said that once all the world had been covered by the forests and that humankind had lived in them like creatures of the night, always in darkness under the trees.

When we reached the hilltop, I thought I would never be able to look long enough. The forest was immense, covering the hills as far as I could see. As my own breath hung in the cold air, mist hung in the treetops as if it were the forest's breath, as if the forest were not only made up of living things, but as if it were a living thing itself, a being of mystery and power.

Maara was patient with me. She let me stand there looking. When I began to shiver, she took me under her cloak.

"What will it be like to live there?" I asked her.

"The forest once felt like home to me," she said.

It took us the rest of the day to reach the forest's edge. As we grew near, I felt it waiting for us. When we were safe among the trees, I gathered firewood, while Maara hurried to make a shelter before we lost the light. She wove together twigs and branches to make three walls and a roof. One end she left open to the fire. It looked a little like the pens we made for our sheep at lambing time. It was all I could do to stay awake long enough to eat my supper. That night we were both too tired to do anything but sleep.

We slept through the long night and well into the next day. It was midmorning before we continued our journey into the heart of the forest. I had expected that we would have to make our way through a tangle of undergrowth, but only bracken and a few creepers grew on the forest floor. The evergreen yew and pine blocked out the sky, and even the bare branches of the oaks had grown so thickly intertwined that they let in little light.

The still air was warmer here than in the treeless wilderness. A breeze stirred the treetops, but made only the softest sound. The rustling of our footsteps in dry leaves was muted by the forest's stillness. In the silence and the gloom, I found I couldn't speak above a whisper.

The trunks of the ancient trees were as big around as a shepherd's hut, and their limbs were thicker than my body. They sometimes sprawled their lower branches across the forest floor, and we had either to go around them or to clamber over. I preferred to go around. As I would have been reluctant to disturb the sleep of giants, I feared to wake the spirits of these great trees.

We rested for half an hour in the afternoon. Perched on the rotting trunk of a fallen oak, we made a cold meal of smoked venison. Maara's face wore such a thoughtful, private look that I hesitated to speak to her. Even watching her, as I often did, felt like an invasion of her privacy. Instead I looked around me at this enchanted world while tales from my childhood played themselves out inside my head. I felt small and insignificant among these trees grown old and wise.

"Does it please you?"

Maara's voice startled me out of a daydream. I didn't know what she meant.

"The forest," she said.

It would never have occurred to me to ask myself such a question. The forest cared not a bit whether I was pleased with it or not, but I saw that Maara did care. She waited to hear my answer as a woman waits to hear her guest praise the beauty and the comfort of her home.

"I am humbled by it," I said.

Maara smiled.

We were traveling north and west, or so Maara said. I didn't understand then how she could tell direction when she couldn't see the sky or the horizon. From time to time she would stop and study the gentle rise and fall of the land or the way the leaves turned to take advantage of what light there was. More than once she seemed puzzled, as if she had expected one thing and found another. I didn't let that worry me. I had no doubts that she would find what she was looking for. If she had any doubts herself, she never let me see them.

In the forest it was impossible to know when the sun had set. The gloom deepened slowly, until the light was gone. When Maara disappeared, I thought it was the last of the light playing tricks on my eyes. We had been following a brook upstream, and I had knelt for just a moment to drink. When I stood up, Maara was a dozen yards away, standing still, gazing up into the branches of an oak tree. Then she took a step and vanished.

I cried out and began to run toward the place where I had last seen her. Before I had taken a dozen steps she reappeared, as if her body had distilled itself out of the air. I stopped. At that moment I believed all the tales of enchantment I'd ever heard.

Maara beckoned to me. Cautiously I approached her.

"Look," she said, gesturing at a deep fissure in the trunk of the oak tree.

I was beginning to recover from my fright, but I didn't understand what she was showing me. Then she stepped into the fissure and was gone. By now it was so dark that I thought she might be lost in shadow. I took a step closer.

"Come on," she said.

Her voice echoed in the air around me like the voice of a disembodied spirit. I had heard tales of portals that opened into another world. Perhaps this fissure in the tree was such a portal. I closed my eyes and stepped into it.

I found myself in deep darkness. After a few moments, I began to see a little. Dim light filtered down from above me, revealing the shape of someone kneeling at my feet. It was Maara. If I had taken another step, I would have fallen over her. She struck a spark that caught tinder and blew it into a tiny flame. Then I saw where we were.

"We're inside the tree," I said.

Maara looked up at me. "Of course. Where did you think we were?"

Although I felt a little foolish, at the same time I felt delight at being in the heart of this ancient oak. It was almost as good as being in another world.

Maara piled up some of the litter that lay on the ground and set it alight.

"Bring some firewood," she said.

When I had a good pile of deadfall stacked outside, I brought an armload in to her. She was mixing batter for oat cakes.

"You knew about this tree," I said.

Maara nodded. "This was my hiding place."

We were sitting side by side, leaning against the smooth, warm wood, our bellies full of the best meal we had enjoyed since we left home. Along with venison, roasted on the coals, we'd had fresh oat cakes with bits of dried fruit in them. Now we were sharing a pot of fragrant tea.

My hunger satisfied, my body warmed, my heart at ease with Maara beside me, I was only half awake, so comfortable that I nearly missed the meaning of what she told me.