Sailing to Sarantium (24 page)

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 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.