The Hanged Man: Part 8: Lithia
Post #80: In which we are guided ...
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The long summer day was gone. Radulf made his way through woods, trying to keep his guide in sight. He’d discovered over the last couple of days if he did lose sight of it, he had only to pause and the animal circled back, Radulf fancied with an air of irritation at his human limitations. It was getting too dark to go any farther now, especially in the dimness of the wood. The two previous nights the wolf had stopped well before dark, in plenty of time for Radulf to make a camp and a fire. His steps slowed now and he strained his eyes to see the grey figure among shadowed trees.
Light showed ahead, a soft white glow. It wasn’t the warm flicker of fire but a pearly glimmer, as of starlight. It looked familiar, but Radulf couldn’t quite remember what it reminded him of. He moved toward it as silently as he could.
The glow didn’t appear to be moving. As he approached nearer, he saw movement, the graceful arc of a head balancing a heavy rack of antlers turning toward him. The dim light hastened his last few steps.
It was the White Stag, stately and calm, with the big dark eyes Radulf remembered from initiation. The wolf stood in front of the stag, looking up at it, long tongue lolling and teeth showing in what looked like a grin. It glanced at Radulf and melted away between the trees before Radulf could say a word. He had a distinct feeling of having been handed off.
He laid a hand on the stag’s shoulder, remembering the oily feel of the coat, smooth but made up of coarse hairs.
“I’m glad to see you,” he said to the White Stag. The creature bent his head and laid his muzzle in the palm of Radulf’s hand. Radulf felt the flick of the tongue and shuddered, thinking of hot breath, sharp teeth and the smell of spilled blood.
The stag turned and Radulf fell into step beside it. They left the trees. Radulf heard water flowing and saw a cluster of buildings next to a river. He smelled wood smoke and firelight glowed in the open entrance of two of the structures. The stag led him to an empty one. It proved to be a stone shed with an arched open doorway. Radulf ducked inside. An unlit fire lay ready. The floor was clean packed earth and the ceiling no more than tree branches, leaves still attached, laid over the top of four walls. He set down his bundles and returned to the stag.
“What do you want of me?” he asked the stag. The stag turned away and began to browse near the edge of the wood.
“In the morning, then,” said Radulf, and ducked inside the arched door.
***
He woke early, feeling rested, and went out into an early summer morning. Dew beaded the grass. He crouched by the river and sluiced water over his head, face, and arms. He found a wide shallow pool behind the stone huts, covered with a layer of water lilies. They weren’t blooming yet and he wondered what color they’d be. A spring evidently fed the pool, for he could see water bubbling up from the bottom.
“The lilies are white when they bloom.”
He turned and found a young woman with a thick tail of hair, like a horse. She smiled at him.
“I wondered,” said Radulf.
“White, with a tinge of pink,” she said.
“What is this place?” asked Radulf.
“You don’t know?” She seemed surprised.
“No. I only arrived last night after dark.”
“It’s the shrine of Coventina,” said the woman. “Do you know her?”
“No. Will you tell me about her?”
“She’s a water spirit. Some say she’s a mermaid.”
“A mermaid,” Radulf repeated to himself. “Of course.”
“She heals and grants…fertility,” said the young woman, looking away from Radulf. He saw sadness in her face.
“Her shrine has been here a long time,” said the young woman. “People come to be quiet and alone. It’s a good place when you feel troubled. Peaceful. You know?”
“Yes,” he said. “It feels like a good place. Thank you for telling me about Coventina.”
“You’re welcome,” she said. She turned away.
Radulf circled the pool and the huts, making his way back to his own door. The trees nearest the pool were dressed with bits of cloth and ribbon, left there, he assumed, by petitioners. He wondered how often Coventina answered prayers and petitions.
The White Stag was visible inside the wood near Radulf’s hut. Radulf approached him. “Do you want me now?” he asked. “Shall I bring my things or leave them here?” The stag turned away and began to walk. Radulf fell into step at his shoulder.
The stag led him out of the trees onto a path, more than an animal trail but not heavily traveled. They walked along, Radulf dropping behind the stag on the narrow track. The path roughly followed the course of the river. The stag stopped and Radulf came up beside him, laying a hand on his shoulder.
In front of the stag the ground had been disturbed. Grass lay flattened and a bank of bushes showed bent branches. It was quiet. Radulf was aware of the flowing river a few yards away. He realized the tension he felt was not just his own. The muscles in the stag’s shoulder were rigid under his hand.
Radulf dropped his hand. He reached into his pocket and laid the wolf’s eye in his palm. It was open.
Radulf dropped down into a squat next to the stag. He closed his eyes, holding the eye loosely in his hand.
He could smell the river, green and growing things, trees. After a moment, he found the stag’s scent. He could also smell a sweetish mixture of death and blood.
He opened his eyes and began to scan the area in front of him. Little by little his gaze covered the ground, surrounding trees and bushes. He looked for nothing. He looked at everything.
Whatever had happened, it was over. Birds sang without alarm. The river flowed, chuckling to itself. The woods weren’t watchful.
A nearby tree had a damaged trunk. A low branch stuck out, nearly horizontal, at eye level. A strong man, lifting himself up to the branch, might kick the trunk of the tree in just that place, scuffling for a toe hold. The grass under the tree lay flattened.
When Radulf had absorbed as much as he could from his squatting position, he stood erect, laying his hand on the stag’s shoulder to support his popping knees. He dropped the open eye into his pocket. He left the stag and began to circle around the area.
A few paces past the damaged tree he found a track. Someone had come quickly to this spot, breaking branches and disturbing growth. They’d come out of the woods, not along the path. He found a discarded bed roll, frayed and well used, and then a larger bundle like a pack. It was well tied and the cloth looked worn. He left the things where they lay and continued.
Opposite where the White Stag still stood, Radulf found the path approaching the shrine. It looked the same as the one he’d just trodden — more than an animal trail, but not much more. He followed it with his eye. It continued to wander between river and trees, and he supposed at some point it met up with a bigger road. He stepped over it into heavy brush and the stench thickened so he was warned before he found the body, a man, lying on his side. A wound gaped in his throat and flies buzzed around him, crawling in and out of the wound.
Radulf had been a soldier and seen death before, but it was never pleasant. He controlled his gorge and knelt by the body. The man had been thick and strong, broad in the shoulders, with a bullish neck. His roughly chopped hair showed no grey. Radulf found no weapon. Gingerly, he pulled the shoulder and rolled the body onto its back. The breeches were open. The man smelled unwashed and his clothes were stiff with grime. Even before death he’d stank, Radulf thought. The only wound he found was the one to the throat. It had been enough. The body wasn’t soaked in blood, however, nor the ground under it. His throat hadn’t been cut where he lay.
He stood up, glancing at the White Stag, which stood exactly where he’d left it, watching him. With a feeling of dread, Radulf took a few more steps through the brush.
They huddled together like lovers. Radulf thought distantly that death had a strange way of making the most familiar face remote and unrecognizable, but even so he knew Artyom at once. The woman lay on her back, chest, face and hair soaked in blood. Flies circled and crawled in a glistening mass over her. Her legs splayed, boneless, and her head lay at an odd angle that made Radulf’s stomach clench. Artyom lay on his side facing her, one arm protectively over her. In the cold clarity of shock Radulf saw the coarse, grimy skin on the lifeless hand, very different from the smooth hand of the young nobleman he’d known before the initiation, but the nails were still bitten to the quick. The gold ring Artyom had always worn on his little finger was gone. Artyom’s boots and clothes had done long service and the bones in his cheek and jaw jutted sharply.
A fist-sized rock lay on the ground near Artyom, crusted with blood and a hair, and Radulf noted the pulpy wound to the side of his head, clotted with blood and tissue.
The ground looked as though something heavy had been dragged across it. The trail led back to the body of the stranger and Radulf concluded the stranger had crawled, or been dragged, away. There was blood on the grass, but that might be from either the throat wound or Artyom’s head.
He stooped and picked up another pack, probably the woman’s, and a hunting knife with a notched wooden handle. The sharp blade was sticky and dark with blood. He stumbled away from the flies and the smell of death, sitting down in the clean grass at the base of a tree and leaning against the trunk. He closed his eyes and breathed. He became aware of the river again, and birds in the trees. He put his hand in his pocket and touched the eye.
He wiped the knife on the grass and put it into the pack without looking to see what else it contained. Vaguely, he wondered how it had happened, how these three came to this place and why. Who was the stranger and why had Artyom killed him? It seemed evident he had. Had the two men killed each other? Radulf couldn’t imagine a woman having either the strength or the will to cut a throat or smash a head in with a rock. The mute evidence of the bodies suggested Artyom had tried to save her from the other man, and Radulf thought grimly of the open breeches and the damaged tree. Had the man waited in the tree for a victim to come by? What had Artyom’s life been since initiation? It didn’t look as though it had been easy.
After a long time, he rose stiffly to his feet. He walked straight across to the White Stag, no longer careful about confusing the scene. He dropped the pack, put his arm around the stag’s neck and rested his cheek against it. The stag dropped his head, sighing, and tension drained out of them both.
Radulf left the pack in his hut and went to the river to bathe. He lay full length in the current, allowing the cold water to cleanse his body and wishing it could cleanse his memory as well. When the smell of blood no longer filed his nose and he could think about something besides the sinister moving black carpet of flies on the woman’s face and neck, he emerged, dressed, and sat in the sun near the stag while he emptied out the woman’s pack.
He picked a notebook out of the heap of rolled up clothing and a length of gold fiber. He found some food and water and a bedroll tied to the outside of the pack. He set the knife aside.
Radulf opened the notebook to the first page and read, “Jenny’s Notebook.”
He shut the cover. The White Stag loomed over him. He lowered his head with its massive knot work of antlers and sniffed at the notebook.
“It can’t be,” said Radulf, but he knew it must be. He felt ashamed that he’d failed to recognize her, though the soldier in him knew the dead thing he’d seen was not his friend Jenny, but a decomposing body under a mask of blood and flies.
Radulf swallowed. The smell of death was in his nose again and he gagged, sour water filling his mouth. He wanted to do something violent, rage and shout, hit something, kill something, purge himself of feeling. He held himself still, willing himself not to be sick.
Air fanned against his cheek, stirring his hair. He smelled clean earth, green growing things, damp ground and leaves. A shimmer of colorful light with a long trailing tail flashed right by his face and he jerked back, surprised. The White Stag threw up his head with a snort. Radulf scrambled to his feet and looked into the shining black eyes of the Firebird, perched in the White Stag’s antlers like a magnificent crown.
“Jenny’s dead, and Artyom too,” Radulf said to it, and the words released his tears.
CHAPTER 30
Radulf stayed at the shrine for several days. He spent a night reading Jenny’s notebook, fascinated and weeping for her awakening strength and confidence, the loss of all she might have made and been. He read some of it to the White Stag and the Firebird, wondering how best to get word to Minerva about what had happened. One evening an owl flew down with the Firebird onto the stag’s antlers. A small pouch was tied to its leg. Radulf tore a sheet from Jenny’s notebook and wrote a note to Minerva, telling her he’d return the notebook and Jenny’s other belongings and begging her to let Rumpelstiltskin know of Jenny’s death.
Radulf buried Jenny and Artyom near the shrine. It comforted him to know they lay in such a peaceful place. When they lay clean and neat in their graves, the Firebird pulled out two of his long golden feathers and dropped one onto each body. Radulf covered his friends with cool, dark earth.
The length of gold he found in Jenny’s pack was, he surmised, intended to dress a tree in petition to Coventina for guidance and healing. He cut the length into pieces and tied each piece to a tree whose branches shaded the graves, praying that Coventina would keep them safe and heal their hurts.
He buried the other body near where he’d found it, laying a couple of large flat rocks from the river over the top to prevent animals digging it up. He didn’t mark the grave in any other way.
Then it was done. “The only thing now is letting Artyom’s people know what’s happened,” Radulf said to the White Stag and the Firebird. “I’ve no idea how to do that, and no way of knowing who the other man was, either.” He’d found what he assumed were the stranger’s belongings in the deep grass beneath the tree with the damaged bark, but they gave no clue to his origins or identity.
“I wonder where I should go now,” said Radulf softly to himself. All his years of restless wandering he’d felt free. Now he only felt lonely and adrift.
Something dropped into his lap and he looked down at a gold key. Red gems encrusted the shoulders and bow, warm and fire-shot in the dappled light under the trees. He picked it up. Above him, the Firebird circled gracefully, weaving in and out of branches, long feathers and tail shimmering and waving. Up it rose, spiraling, rising free of the tree canopy, glowing and joyous, and then it swirled out of its circling airy dance and flew out of sight, a smaller and smaller shining fleck of gold until it disappeared.
He watched it until it went out of sight. “Well,” said Radulf with a sigh. “What do you suppose I’m to do with this?” He tucked the key carefully away, somewhat comforted. It was good to know something lay ahead, some plan, some intention, some kind of lock he could now open, even if he was ignorant of where it was. He laid his hand on the White Stag’s shoulder. “What about you? Where will you go? Are you finished with me?”
The stag stretched its neck forward, bit off a green twig and chewed, looking at Radulf out of liquid dark eyes.
Radulf sighed again. “I think I’ll set out in the morning, my friend. Someone else might want to use this hut and there’s nothing more I can do here. If you leave before me, I wish you well. Maybe we’ll see one another again. Thank you for letting me help,” he waved his hand in the direction of the fresh graves, “with this.”
When Radulf stepped out into the dawn the next morning, the sky was filled with pale light and birdsong. The stag waited for him.
Following the wolf had been solitary. Radulf had glimpses of it, but it never rested with him and he didn’t try to approach it. Walking with the White Stag was like walking with a friend. Radulf put aside his vague irritation at being managed, guided here and there like a child.
He remembered with a wry twist of his lips the proud, unapproachable man he’d been until he met Artyom before the initiation. His defenses had been built of shame. Now both shame and defense had gone. The wolf hadn’t misled him and he didn’t regret allowing himself to be guided. Now he trusted the stag was taking him where he needed to go. It wasn’t as though he had a definite plan himself, only a rising longing to find a place to call his own.
As they walked, Radulf fingered the eye and the key and thought about the puzzle he’d found back at Coventina’s shrine. What a strange thing life was, he reflected, with everyone on a path intersecting unexpectedly with other paths. Where had Artyom been and what had he been doing these last weeks? Had he regretted leaving the initiation? Radulf remembered Kunik’s anguish and rage. It had hurt Kunik that Artyom chose to be outcast. Too close to the bone. Where was Kunik now? Would he ever learn about Artyom’s death?
Jenny had explained everything to him in her notebook. There was no mystery there, except the last moments of her life. It seemed probable she’d been attacked. Had the last face she’d seen been Artyom’s, and had it comforted her?
And who had the stranger been who perched in a tree, waiting and watching? Was he waiting specifically for Jenny, or just a woman alone?
They traveled leisurely through the summer days. Radulf was aware the stag led him along increasingly traveled ways, though they stayed off roads for the most part.
At the end of a long, sultry day Radulf was looking for a camping place. The sun had gone down but the air under the trees remained hot and heavy. Radulf felt sweaty and tired. He hoped to find water, imagined taking off his clothes and washing away the day’s dust and effort. He smelled wood smoke and veered away from it. They’d avoided other travelers since they left Coventina’s shrine. The White Stag stopped and sniffed at the air. To Radulf’s surprise, he headed straight toward the smell of smoke.
The site lay off the main road. A familiar-looking cart sat near a campfire. In the dimming light under the trees a horse grazed. Radulf knew that cart and knew the horse. He strode ahead of the White Stag with an exclamation of pleasure, holding out his hand to the lean man who rose from where he squatted next to the fire.
“Dar!”
“Radulf!”
The two men embraced.
“I’m so glad to see you,” said Radulf. “I’ve been having a strange time. Everywhere I go I run into someone from initiation.”
“Interesting!” said Dar. He laid an affectionate hand on the White Stag’s shoulder.
“He brought me to you,” said Radulf. “I knew he was taking me somewhere I needed to go, but I couldn’t guess where.”
“I want to hear about it. Take off your pack. I’ve some food. Make yourself comfortable by the fire.”
Radulf said hello to Gideon, who whuffed interestedly down his neck in greeting and returned to his grazing. The White Stag began to browse, paying no more attention to Radulf or Dar. The two men collected more wood and provided themselves with a meal.
The peddler was a self-contained companion. Radulf remembered the feeling he could speak or be silent, sleep or sit awake, and Dar would offer no comment or reproach. He pleased himself and left others free to do the same, according to their needs.
When they finished eating Radulf laid more wood on the fire and handed the wolf’s eye to Dar.
“Look at this.”
“Oh, very nice!” exclaimed the peddler. “Remind me to show you my collection. I haven’t any eyes, though. A wolf! How appropriate!” He grinned at Radulf. “Where’d you get it?”
“Vasilisa’s fiery skull spit it at me.”
Dar looked astonished for a moment and then roared with laughter. Radulf joined in.
“Now, tell it properly, from the beginning,” said Dar, settling himself comfortably. “You’ve got my attention.”
Radulf began. His flood of words surprised him. It seemed a long time since he’d left Vasilisa, Irvin, Marceau and the children.
Dar listened intently and Radulf watched expressions flash across his mobile face. Sober attention to his return home and what he’d found, interest in Irvin and the children and delight at his meeting with Vasilisa and Marceau. As he told of following the wolf and Coventina’s shrine, though, Dar’s face darkened.
“So, we buried them side by side there at the shrine,” said Radulf. “The Firebird put a feather into each of the graves. I sent word to Minerva and Rumpelstiltskin. The Firebird left after giving me this key.” He groped in his pocket and laid the key in Dar’s palm. Dar returned the eye and examined the key in the firelight, turning it and watching the gems glow.
“I’ve seen this before. Morfran carried it once.” He handed it back to Radulf, and said, “Beautiful Jenny. I’m so sorry.”
They sat looking into the fire in silence for a time.
“Artyom and I traveled together. We just parted recently. I wonder if I was the last person he ever saw before Jenny and the stranger,” said Dar at last.
“No!” said Radulf.
“Yes,” said Dar. “I don’t suppose you found a weapon on him? Ah, yes. I thought so.”
Radulf laid a sheathed knife and a black piece of iron with a sharp pronged trident head in Dar’s lap.
“Do you know what this is?” asked Dar, holding up the trident.
Radulf didn’t reach forward to take it. “I think it’s a frog gig,” he said carefully.
“And his grandfather’s knife,” said Dar. “Artyom wore them both every day.” He pushed them back toward Radulf. “Put them away again. I don’t want to look at them.”
Radulf wrapped them carefully and put them in his bundle. “Will you tell me about it?”
While Dar told of Artyom, the Firebird and the rabbit Surrender, Radulf listened without interrupting. Now and then he threw a stick into the fire, but it was getting late and he let it gradually burn down.
“…so off he went, the Firebird leading him.”
“Do you think the Firebird took him there on purpose, to help Jenny?”
“If so, his timing was off,” said Dar bitterly, and broke a stick between his fingers with a sharp snap. He threw both pieces into the sinking fire. “I don’t know, Radulf. The waste of it makes me angry. Everyone says the Firebird leads one to treasure. Did Artyom find treasure in his dying moments, or did Jenny, or the strange man?”
“I don’t think we’ll every know,” said Radulf. He felt surprised by Dar’s distress. For the first time, he recognized the vulnerability beneath Dar’s mordant humor.
“Where are you headed?” asked Radulf, changing the subject.
“Oh, I’m going nowhere in particular,” said Dar. “Just moving from place to place, listening and watching, collecting stories and giving them away again. I’m thinking about dropping by to see an old friend but I’ve no firm plans.”
“I wish I could travel with you for a time.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know where he — “Radulf gestured to the dim white shape of the stag, “is taking me. Somewhere. He has some purpose in mind. I need to follow him until he’s finished with me.”
“Ah, yes, another enigmatic guide! I hope he leads you to a better place than Artyom found. Well, we’ll see what the morning brings, shall we?”