The Hanged Man: Part 8: Lithia (Entire)

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Sep 17, 2023

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PART 8 LITHIA

Summer solstice; balance point between the culmination of fertility and growth and the beginning of diminishment. Maturity, fulfillment and consummation.

The Empress

Growth, fertility, personal power

ARTYOM

Artyom followed a fugitive shimmer of gold that appeared and disappeared through the concealing canopy of trees. He glimpsed it often enough to steer by. Once or twice, he’d woken in the night, feeling the brush of a soft wing across his cheek. It couldn’t be the Firebird, yet it must be.

The first time he glimpsed the flicker of glowing color he didn’t believe his eyes. It was like the Firebird, but he’d watched that die weeks ago during the initiation.

Weeks ago. Miles ago. It seemed like lifetimes ago.

That dark night he left the fence of bones and initiation rites, he cast away, one by one, the linen shirts Vasilisa made for him. He took bitter pleasure in releasing them from his hand and watching them fall. In the following days, as his anger cooled, he began to regret his haste. Maybe it wasn’t too late. Perhaps Vasilisa, too had regrets. After all, he was prepared to offer her a life of wealth and power she could never aspire to, given her circumstances. If she truly loved him, she couldn’t possibly hold his childish brutality against him.

He was a ruler, a father to his people. Wouldn’t a true ruler give one of his subjects the benefit of a doubt, a second chance?

He resolved to find her — but how? Where would she go after initiation? The Firebird was gone and could no longer guide him.

It seemed an unsolvable problem, and he turned it over in his mind while he traveled, going nowhere in particular, avoiding any possible contact with others, unable to bear more than a short pause for food and rest.

Somewhere in the edges of his consciousness he knew he must rejoin his traveling entourage and go home to his responsibilities. He’d been gone too long already. He’d hoped initiation and Vasilisa would give him the desire and confidence to take his father’s place as the leader of his people, but Baba Yaga had ruined all that.

He knew he must go, but he didn’t see how he could bear to. When he pictured himself rejoining his countrymen and servants, returning home and taking up his responsibilities, it seemed unreal, as though he visualized a stranger’s life.

He must find Vasilisa before he did anything else. He thought of how long the search might be with something like relief. He needed time, time to think about things. He might never again be alone and free.

He longed to become anonymous, unknown. After a month on the road, his gold ring was gone and his clothes looked as common and rough as any other traveler’s. His only weapons were a well-used sharp knife with a wooden handle that had belonged to his grandfather and a thin rod of iron with a sharp trident at one end -- an old frog gig. He wore both at his belt, his knife at his right hand in case of sudden need, the gig at his left. He could no more have shed them than his skin.

He resolved to walk away from the young ruler who’d been trained and educated from childhood to assume responsibility of rule. He’d walk away too from the child Baba Yaga had pulled out of a shallow grave and revealed in all his ugly pain and loneliness.

Then he began to see the flashes of gold among the trees ahead, and in spite of knowing the Firebird was dead he felt hope and a measure of comfort, as though he was not utterly alone and outcast. He might as well follow, he thought, as he had no other plan or guide.

The golden glimmer wasn’t Artyom’s only companion. At first, he’d thought wild rabbits lived in the area, but he began to realize he was seeing not many but one rabbit over and over. It didn’t come too close but browsed along his path, regarding him from time to time out of shining black eyes. He suspected it was the rabbit Surrender, but he couldn’t imagine why the creature followed him.

He didn’t want it. It was somehow unbearably irritating to have a rabbit, of all things, attach itself to him. Especially a rabbit associated with the initiation. He felt an almost frantic desire to be free of his past and left alone.

He tried to drive it away. He chased it, yelling. He threw rocks or chunks of wood at it, clapped his hands, growled. When it vanished into the undergrowth with a flirt of its white tail, he felt meanly triumphant.

But it always came back.

“You should stay away from me, you stupid thing!” he shouted at it one day. He pulled the gig out of his belt and brandished it. “You don’t know what I can do with this!”

The rabbit crouched within easy reach in deep summer grass, nibbling, paying him no mind.

Sickened with himself, he thrust the gig back under his belt and turned away. He walked far into the night that day. He glimpsed the golden bird intermittently, shining like a candle in the distance, and only stopped when the flame blew out.

Midsummer passed. Dust from the road sifted into his hair and the sun coaxed sweat onto the surface of his body. He still followed the shining bird. He did his best to ignore the rabbit.

Enjoying the cool night air one evening, he saw ahead not one but two patches of flaming color. The smell of wood smoke hung in the air and he strode ahead, watching a golden glimmer rise and fall in a graceful dance above a campfire. It couldn’t be the Firebird! It couldn’t be!

But it was. He saw the same jeweled wings, long graceful tail and melting flame of color. The sight of it brought back bright dreams of a life with Vasilisa, his friend Radulf, himself walking away from initiation, Jenny’s dance. The Firebird had died, but now it lived. He stood quite still, watching it in absorbed wonder. The Firebird leads you to your treasure, he thought. Had the Firebird led him to initiation, or had that been the malign influence of Baba Yaga? Treasure or trick? Was it possible this was Vasilisa’s fire? Is that why it had led him here?

A thin piping began. The Firebird lifted and swirled over the sparks of the fire in response. Artyom felt rooted to the spot. He knew that piping. It belonged to the night of initiation too, Kunik’s mad dance with Death, Radulf’s kindness and gravity. He remembered the goat-footed piper, engorged with life, and the peddler, Dar, with his drums.

Kunik hadn’t wanted Artyom to leave. He’d cried out his name, again and again. Artyom wondered what had happened there by the men’s fire after he left. What had they said about him?

The piping stopped. The Firebird flew to a branch and began to preen its shining feathers. Still, Artyom stood without moving. Firelight fingered his face and the night forest stood cool at his back.

“I’m glad to see you, my friend.” The voice sounded calm and unsurprised. Artyom suddenly smelled horse. In shadows, he made out the shapeless dark blot of the cart, and he knew it was gaily painted with the words “Come and be welcome. Go and be free. Harm shall not enter.”

“Do you suppose the Firebird has led me to the treasure of you or you to the treasure of me?” asked Dar.

Nonplussed, feeling manipulated, Artyom snorted. A dart of white movement sped right over his feet and sprang into Dar’s lap. Dar, sitting comfortably away from the heat of the fire with his back against an old fallen tree, twitched and grunted in surprise. His bone flute fell out of his lap, silver banding and gems shining. Lightly, the shape sprang back to the ground and ran to the horse, who grazed peacefully near the cart. The rabbit paused under the horse’s belly, shook itself, scratched an ear with a hind leg, and began to nibble the grass.

“Friend of yours?” inquired Dar dryly.

“No,” replied Artyom shortly.

“Surrender, I presume?”

“Yes. What a stupid name for a rabbit! I’ve tried to drive him away but he’s a persistent devil.”

“Ah,” said Dar noncommittally. “I wondered what had become of him.”

Artyom tensed at the reference but Dar left it there.

Artyom refused food. He felt reluctant to join Dar, but the Firebird had its head under its wing and clearly had no intention to travel further that night. Having followed him for so many weeks, Artyom felt incapable of leaving him. In grudging silence, he unrolled his bedding and settled down to sleep.

Sleep was long in coming. He lay on his back looking up at stars in the dark, moonless sky. Gradually he relaxed. He’d been afraid of Dar’s talk. He didn’t want to talk. He wanted to be left alone, not poked at. But Dar wasn’t going to talk. Artyom felt grateful for his quiet self-containment.

Dar began to play the flute again. The music sounded infinitely tender and gentle. It made Artyom think of a child, a blond, stocky child with blue eyes wrapped around a vast emptiness. The flute wept for the child, compassionate and loving. The stars blurred. Artyom turned on his side at last and slept.

***

Dar caught fish in a nearby creek for breakfast. Preparing these for the pan and building a bed of coals distracted Artyom. Falling into easy male companionship, Artyom gutted the fish with his knife while Dar tended the cooking fire. Artyom shook out his bedding and hung it in the sun to air. He spoke to the horse and spent some time brushing its hide with a handful of grass, more for his own pleasure than because of any necessity. The horses in his father’s stables were a good memory from his boyhood. Surrender hopped in a desultory fashion from patches of flowers to grass and back again.

The smell of frying fish and mushrooms brought Artyom back to the fire. He squatted next to Dar and gave in to his curiosity.

“I watched the Firebird die in a net. At least I thought I did. How can he be guiding me? And where is he this morning? I haven’t seen him.”

Dar shrugged, smiled and handed him a tin fork. They bent together over the pan, eating the hot white flesh carefully, blowing to cool each bite.

“Life-Death-Life-Death,” Dar said when he’d dealt with a mouthful.

Artyom raised an eyebrow at him.

Dar speared a mushroom with his fork. “Baba Yaga, I mean. She’s a Life-Death-Life-Death figure. The Firebird was reborn from her cauldron.” He blew, popped the next bite into his mouth. “An old piece of wisdom, that, the ability to let die what must.”

“I was thinking of something like that,” said Artyom, interested. He used his fingers now, the pan and its contents having cooled. “Surrender should have stayed close to his burrow instead of wandering. He’s a rabbit. Everything wants to eat him.”

“Well, death is inevitable, isn’t it? The only thing we can do is decide to live our lives fully or not risk it. Whatever we do, we’ll die in the end. The question is how we want to live.” He gestured toward Surrender in a patch of sunny grass. “He wants to live. Me, too. I like life — when it’s real. I insist on things being real. You might say it’s my mission in life. Makes me unpopular at times.” He grinned unrepentantly.

Artyom picked up the fork again and began to scrape out the bottom of the pan where a thin blackened skin of trout had adhered. “Maybe some people aren’t good enough to be real.”

“Don’t you believe it,” said Dar easily. He laid back on his elbows, chewing on a grass stem. “Take me, for example. He bared his teeth around the stalk. “I’m not a bit good. Women think I’m dark and mysterious and I take shameless advantage, secure in the knowledge that I’m a traveling man and thus free of consequences. I’m impulsive and impatient. I’ve a temper of the cold variety, not the fiery kind. I never met a rule I didn’t want to break in the most insulting way possible. I hate stupid people and don’t care if they know it! Oh, me, I’m a devil!”

Artyom was taken aback, but silent. He’d looked upon Dar as a leader, full of power and wisdom, belonging with Artemis, Death, the goat-foot piper and even Baba Yaga.

“But…I thought you were good,” he said tentatively.

Dar chuckled. “Good, bad or real, eh? They’re not mutually exclusive, my friend. I can be good, too. Usually it’s the most boring option, but occasionally I do it, just to stretch my act a little! No, I don’t concern myself much with good or bad, right or wrong. I only try to be real. Occasionally that means a real bastard and occasionally it means a real nice guy. Depends.”

Artyom thought about this. “But there are right and wrong ways to act. I mean, we make mistakes — do things that are…wrong.”

“Some choices lead to effective results and some don’t,” observed the peddler. “I don’t use the word wrong. It’s all just learning. Everyone,” he fixed Artyom with a steady grey gaze, “has done things they’re ashamed of.”

Artyom looked away. “You, too?”

“You should talk to my brother sometime,” said Dar, with feeling.

Artyom let that pass.

“Why did the Firebird bring me to you?” he asked abruptly.

“No idea,” said Dar laconically. “I suspect we have something to give one another. Perhaps if you join me for a time we’ll find out. I thought he was bringing me to you, by the way. I’ve been following him, too.”

“Where were you going before that?”

“Nowhere in particular,” said Dar. “Following my nose. Where are you going?”

“Nowhere,” said Artyom shortly. He stood up, picked up the pan and crouched by the creek to scrub it out with a handful of sand.

When they broke camp Artyom threw his bundle in the back of the cart and walked alongside a wheel, within easy conversational distance but not up on the seat. Gideon ambled. The sun rose. It began to get hot. Artyom was glad to be unburdened. The peddler whistled snatches of music now and then, spoke a few words to the horse, and appeared perfectly content to travel silently. His face in repose looked good humored and alive with intelligence and curiosity. Artyom, perversely, found Dar’s silence irritating after a mile or so. He stole sideways glances at the faintly smiling face and wondered what was in Dar’s mind. He began to worry one of his fingernails.

Surrender streaked along the side of the road in the grass, showing a flash of white tail before disappearing in a thick patch. Artyom scowled.

Dar had seen him too. “Why do you think he follows you?”

“I don’t know,” said Artyom irritably. “I don’t want him. Why didn’t he follow one of the girls, or Radulf? What an idiotic thing, to have a rabbit attach itself to me! I’m glad my people can’t see me now!”

Dar’s lips twitched. “Not very dignified,” he said gravely, “for a ruler.”

Artyom laughed in spite of himself.

“Oh, what a ludicrous situation! Dar, I’m not a ruler. I don’t want to be a ruler. I’m not sure I could be a ruler, even if I did want to. But I must be a ruler! It’s what I was born to do! I can’t wander the roads forever! I must go back and face my life, but I don’t know how to do it!”

Artyom ran his hands through his dark blond hair distractedly. “That rabbit is right under my skin because he reminds me about surrender — and not surrendering — and I don’t know what surrender even means anymore! Am I to surrender to a life I don’t want? Am I a ruler? Am I a bully and a brute? Oh, I know who I am! I was forgetting! I’m Artyom, the one who didn’t go through with that asinine initiation!” He ended on a savage snort.

“Oh, you are,” said Dar instantly.

“What the hell do you mean?” asked Artyom heatedly. Gideon twitched his ears and laid them back.

“You said you didn’t go through with initiation. You are. Your initiation is taking place now, on the road, with the Firebird and Surrender and me for company. What you needed wasn’t only waiting for you by the men’s fire. It’s been walking beside you every day.”

This take on the situation so surprised Artyom he was distracted from his irritation.

“You make it sound as though I don’t have a choice.”

“Do you think you can avoid learning what you need to, and growing through it?” inquired Dar with interest.

“I left,” insisted Artyom.

“Well, initiation didn’t leave you,” retorted Dar.

Artyom started to say several things at once, got tangled up and stopped. The cart rolled down the road, Gideon patient in the dusty sun.

“I’m ashamed of myself,” Artyom muttered at last.

“Your pride got hurt,” Dar said baldly. “Your cover got blown, you got mad and you left. Things arranged themselves around your choices and here you are, back again at initiation, which, I might add,” he said relentlessly, correctly reading the beginning of Artyom’s heated protest, “is about independence, interdependence, and sexual energy!” He rattled these off loudly, as though reading from a textbook. “But that’s inside information for initiation leaders and I’m not supposed to reveal it to initiates. Ha! Another rule broken.” He grinned down at Artyom.

He looked so like a wicked boy Artyom couldn’t sustain his bad temper. He threw up his hands, half smiling, half resentful. “All right. I admit my pride is hurt. But why don’t I recognize my own life? Why don’t I know who I am?”

Dar considered for a minute. “Did you recognize the boy in Baba Yaga’s story?”

“Oh, yes,” said Artyom at once. “That was me. I was a horrid young wart but I was also dreadfully unhappy and alone. I’ve writhed over that memory all my life. Now to find out it was Vasilisa! My God! But I can’t undo what I did. I’ve always tried not to think of it, to forget it, told myself no one ever need know.”

“And then Baba Yaga put the frog on the table, as it were,” said Dar. “And everyone saw it and smelled it and got slime on their hands, except frogs aren’t slimy, really.”

Frog image by cocoparisienne from Pixabay

Artyom winced, remembering.

“So, you recognize the boy but you don’t recognize the ruler?”

“My father was King, not me. I know he’s dead now — I was there when he died and I closed his eyes myself. It doesn’t matter. My father was King. I’m not.”

“You don’t look like a king. You look like a tough soldier who’s gotten into trouble and been kicked out.”

“I do?” Artyom looked down at himself. “I suppose I do. I wanted to leave my identity behind. Most of my gear is with my traveling party. I wore my plainest hunting clothes to initiation. I sold my ring and nearly everything else of value I had with me.”

“What did you keep?” asked Dar curiously.

Artyom took the frog gig from his belt with his left hand, slid the knife out of its sheath with the right, and handed them up to Dar.

The peddler tucked the reins under his thigh. He laid the knife in his lap and turned the frog gig over in his hands. His eyebrows rose in surprise.

“You’ve carried this with you — all these years?”

“I tried not to. I tried to put it away. Once I even tried to bury it. But I couldn’t stand not having it, though it hurt me, so eventually I gave in and began to carry it again.”

Dar cautiously tested the sharpness of one of the trident prongs with his thumb, then laid the thing in his lap and picked up the knife. The handle was stained and notched, shaped with long handling. The blade was sharp and well-tended.

“That was my grandfather’s knife,” said Artyom. “He died when I was a boy, but I remember him. He used to spend time with me in the forest, teaching me to hunt and track. He loved horses, too, and let me help in the stable sometimes. I’ve carried that knife since the day he died. I remember him skinning a deer with it. I learned to use a sword and other weapons as well, of course. I was a soldier at one time, as every ruler must train in fighting and war. But no weapon ever felt as much a part of me as that knife.”

“So, your whole life has been framed by the child you were and your grandfather. You’ve walked between them.” He handed the gig and knife back to Artyom, who replaced them in his belt.

“I suppose you could say so.”

“It seems to me that’s who you are, then, someone between the child and the grandfather. Somewhere within that frame is your real self.”

“I’m not as cruel as that child,” said Artyom quickly. “I know right from wrong now.”

“So why do you carry him on your hip?”

“He’s like that damned rabbit! I can’t get away from him!”

“And your grandfather?”

“I’m not the man he was. He was good and wise. He always knew the right thing to do in life. He’s my only memory of warmth and safety, of being loved for who I truly am.”

“Will you hear two stories about things that follow us?” asked Dar.

Artyom glanced up at him. He sat loosely, back slightly curved, reins in his hands.

“All right,” he said cautiously.

“An unhappy man surrendered himself to a wise teacher, asking to learn the ways of enlightenment. He was full of fear. He had tried and tried to rid himself of his demons without success. No matter where he went or what he did, his fears and anxieties followed him.

Everything became much worse under his teacher’s guidance. The teacher instructed him to live simply and he filled his days with tasks like chopping wood and carrying water. He owned nothing and had nothing with which to distract himself. There was only himself in each day and the work necessary to living. His demons followed him everywhere, whispering in his ears.

He learned to meditate. He learned ancient arts of self-defense and disciplined movement. He fasted. He prayed. Nothing worked.

One day, in despair, he asked to be sent into the wilderness alone. He no longer wanted to live and hoped in solitude he could find a way into death and peace.

He was taken to a cave in the high remote mountains with only a couple of tools and the clothes on his back. He decided he would sit in the cave and allow himself to be engulfed by his demons, hoping they would drag him down into death.

The man sat cross-legged on the floor of the cave and looked out at the world from his high perch. He felt hungry and exhausted. For the first time in his life, he allowed himself to let go of his defenses. With every breath, he opened himself more widely to his demons.

For a long time, nothing happened, except that a wonderful feeling of peace flowed into him. He felt like a fist that has at last been unclenched. The hoarse muttering of the demons had been replaced by the honey of silence.

Then, slowly, the man began to feel irritated. Where were his demons? They’d pursued him relentlessly all his life. At last he’d stopped running and they’d vanished. He was ready for death. More than that, he could hardly wait to welcome it.

He decided he sat in the wrong place. Perhaps the demons would feel more comfortable approaching him if he sat in the cold shadows at the back of the cave. He rose and moved, resettled himself, breathed.

After a while he began to feel the need to pee.”

Artyom snorted with laughter. Dar looked down at him. “Even holy men need to pee,” he said reprovingly. “Even men who want to die need to pee. It’s only natural. Don’t interrupt.”

“Where was I? Oh, yes, after a while he began to feel the need to pee. He was so disciplined that neither hunger nor cold compelled him to move, but his body became more and more insistent and at last he stood, rather stiffly, moved to the mouth of the cave and relieved himself on the doorstep.

He stood there, filled with an exquisite sense of relief and ease, looking out across the landscape of steep mountains and valleys. He was suddenly conscious of a vivid feeling of life within him and around him. He thought he might be feeling joy, actual joy, here where he’d come to find death. The air on his flesh felt thin and cold. The sun slid behind the shoulder of a mountain. He wanted a fire.

He built a fire and luxuriated in its color and warmth. He fed it stick after stick for the pleasure of watching them consumed by dancing flames. He lay down peacefully on his stony bed and slept.

After a few days, he made his way back down to his master and his life among other people. He became in his turn a wise teacher and many students came to study with him. He became famous for teaching the power of yes.”

Artyom walked beside the turning cart wheel. Gideon’s hooves made a patient sound on the road. Dar lounged in the seat above him. He watched his square toed, worn boots move a step at a time, one after the other. He was conscious of his own resistance.

“No is safer than yes,” he muttered.

“Is it?” asked Dar, without much interest. “Are you ready for the second story?”

Artyom grunted.

“Come on, man, show some enthusiasm! It’s a tale of eastern splendor. You’ll love it. It’s one of my favorites. Behold,” he declaimed, with a bold gesture of his arm, “the tragic tale of Abu Kasem’s slippers!”

“There was once a wealthy merchant named Abu Kasem. He was well known for his miserliness and ability to drive a hard bargain. He didn’t believe in wasting money on things like bathing and his clothes and turban were rags. You could smell him coming a mile away.

Equally famous were his odiferous slippers, which were old, worn, patched and stained. The soles were studded with nails from every cobbler in the city. Once the slippers had been green, made in the latest fashion with the toes turned up, but that was ten years ago. The lowliest of servants would have been ashamed to wear them now, but Abu wore them everywhere. They were inseparable from his public character.

One day, Abu Kasem made two especially good deals. First, he acquired a collection of fragile crystal bottles. Then he bought a batch of fine, sweet rose oil from a perfumer who had fallen on hard times. He told everyone about his purchases and speculated with pleasure on his future profits. He decided to treat himself and stopped at the public baths for his yearly soak and a steam.

When he arrived at the baths, Abu met a fellow merchant in the dressing room. The man lectured him on the state of his slippers, the state of his clothing, and the state of his reputation. He advised him to buy a new pair of slippers, as he was a laughingstock. Abu contemplated his awful slippers. ‘I’ve been thinking about this myself,’ he said, ‘but I do think there are a few more miles in these.’ He departed to enjoy his bath, leaving the merchant gagging in the presence of his temporarily discarded green slippers.

While the miser relished his rare treat, the Cadi of Baghdad, the judge, also came in to take a bath. Abu finished first, and when he returned to the dressing room, he couldn’t find his slippers. They’d disappeared, and in their place sat a lovely new pair. Well, Abu thought to himself, my friend decided to honor me with a gift. Maybe he thinks it’s good business to win the favor of a rich man like me! Abu put on the new slippers and returned home.

When the judge emerged later there was a quite a scene. His servants looked high and low and couldn’t find his slippers. Behind a curtain they found sat a tattered disgusting pair that everyone knew belonged to Abu Kasem. The judge was furious and immediately sent for the culprit and had him locked up. Of course, they found the missing slippers on Abu’s feet. He spent a night in jail and paid a heavy fine — and received back his beloved slippers!

Abu went home, sad and sorry. In a fit of temper, he threw his treasured slippers out the window and they fell into the river. A few days later, a group of fishermen thought they’d caught a particularly heavy fish but found, to their dismay, Abu Kasem’s instantly recognizable slippers in the net. The nails in the soles had torn several holes in the nets, and the fishermen were angry. They hurled the sodden, stinking slippers through an open window into Abu Kasem’s house.

The slippers landed smack in the middle of Abu’s dining room table, where he’d set up his lovely crystal bottles and was busy filling them with sweet rose oil. Now the bottles, the oil, and his dream of big profits lay in a dripping, glittering mess of broken shards on the floor, stinking of ten years of unwashed, sweating feet; dead fish and rose oil.

‘Those wretched slippers!’ cried Abu. He grabbed them, took a shovel, dug a deep hole in his back yard and buried the offending slippers. But his neighbor was watching (who isn’t interested in the doings of the rich?) and imagined something quite different. The neighbor thought the rich miser buried treasure there, treasure he didn’t want to report or pay taxes on. So, the neighbor reported Abu to the judge.

No one could believe a person would dig a big hole in their back yard just to bury a ratty old pair of slippers, especially since everyone knew how Abu loved them. He was thunderstruck when he heard the amount of his fine, and the court flung the slippers after him as he left.

Now Abu was desperate to get rid of his old slippers. He decided his best plan was to take them far out of town where they could do him no more harm. So, he drove out into the country and dropped the slippers into a deep pond. He watched as they sank down below the surface and returned home with a sense of sweet relief. But wouldn’t you know it, the pond fed the city’s water supply and the slippers found their way into the pipes and stopped them up. When the workers came to fix the mess, they immediately recognized the slippers, both by smell and by sight. Abu went to jail again for befouling the city’s water supply, and paid another large fine. And he got his slippers back!

The slippers pursued him like evil djinn! This time Abu resolved to burn them. Because they were wet, he laid them out on his balcony to dry. A dog on the neighboring balcony got a whiff of the most luscious, captivating scent he’d ever drawn into his nose. It was better than a dead cat, better than rotting garbage, better than raw sewage. It made him drool with delight. He jumped onto Abu’s balcony to find the source of that ecstatic smell. He slobbered on the slippers, rolled on them, lifted his leg on them, tossed them up in the air and—oops!--one sailed into the street below, where it hit a pregnant woman on the head and knocked her down. She went into shock and had a miscarriage. The husband ran to the judge and demanded damages from the rich old miser, who was no longer so rich. Abu was forced to pay, and the malignant slipper was returned to him.

Abu was broke and broken. He stood before the judge and raised the slippers aloft in a gesture so solemn and earnest the judge nearly laughed through the handkerchief over his nose at the absurdity of it. ‘Please, your honor,’ begged Abu, ‘don’t hold me further responsible for the evils caused by these slippers!’

The judge felt he couldn’t refuse and granted the plea.

Abu Kasem walked barefoot until he could buy a new pair of slippers.”

Dar laughed delightedly, but Artyom was grudging.

“What are you trying to say?” he asked suspiciously.

“I’m not trying to say anything,” said Dar crossly. “You said you’d hear two stories about things that follow us. Now you’ve heard them.”

“But what’s the point?”

“The point? The point is on the green slipper!” Dar chortled and snorted with laughter for some minutes.

Artyom glared.

Dar got hold of himself. “You are a blunt instrument, aren’t you? The point is whatever the stories mean to you. There isn’t one point, like a nail the story hangs on. That’s not how it works.”

Artyom sighed. “All right. I’ll play.” He chewed at a fingernail, thinking. “The student tried to run away from his demons, but he couldn’t. When he sat still and invited them, they wouldn’t appear.”

“Right.”

“He was happy, then. He could feel his own life.”

“Well put.”

“The demons only pursued him when he ran away — because he ran away?”

Dar raised an eyebrow at him without answering.

“Humph. Abu Kasem was proud of his slippers, but then wanted to get rid of them.”

“Why was he proud of them?”

“He was proud of his reputation as a rich miser. He liked being a rich miser, and the slippers reminded everyone, all the time, wherever he went.”

“So, what went wrong?”

“They started to cost him money. He liked being rich. He didn’t want to be poor. But then he couldn’t get rid of them. All he got rid of was his money.”

“Quite a shift in priorities. At first, he clung to his reputation, his idea of himself. The slippers identified him to the world. Then all he wanted was to get rid of the slippers, but they’d become such a part of his persona it wasn’t that easy. People continued to see him as a rich old miser and the slippers kept coming back to him.”

“They chased him like the demons chased the student.”

“He couldn’t escape from himself,” said Dar. “He was like a dog with a tin can tied to its tail.”

“He had to find a new identity,” said Artyom in a low voice.

“Maybe he only had to uncover his true identity. Maybe it was with him all the time, but he’d covered it with the slippers.”

“He needed help, though,” said Artyom. “He had to ask the judge for help.”

“Oh, well, naturally,” said Dar casually. “We need other people, even a solitary devil like me — sometimes.”

RADULF

Evening sunlight rimmed a few summer clouds in the western sky with golden orange. The seaport streets were busy with people going home after a day’s work. Gulls circled over the harbor, where fishermen gutted the day’s catch. Radulf made his way through the familiar streets of his childhood, noting changes. He found new businesses and new buildings. He saw no faces he recognized. The streets widened and quieted as he approached the castle by the sea that had belonged to his family for generations. He felt worn out and not at all sure of his welcome. He marked several inns along the way, just in case. He wondered what he would find. Did his parents still live? What had become of his young wife after he left her? Not so young, now. They’d been of an age when they married.

A strange servant answered the door. Radulf gave his first name and asked to see his father.

“I’m sorry, sir, but he’s been dead for ten years.” The servant eyed Radulf’s travel-worn appearance warily. Radulf had a fleeting memory of the anxious wrinkle between his father’s eyes.

“I see. Does his wife live? Is she here?”

The servant bade him wait and disappeared.

It was quiet. Nothing had changed. Radulf felt as though he’d never left. A clock against one wall ticked ponderously, underlining silence. He was ferociously hungry.

“Radulf?”

His first thought was she’d sunk and compressed, like a feather bed in need of a good shaking. She looked shorter and fatter, but her bosom and body appeared hard rather than soft. Her scalp showed pink through carefully arranged silver hair and he felt a rush of pity.

She was an old woman.

“I can hardly believe it,” she said.

They stood looking at one another. He remembered she’d never been physically affectionate.

“I had to come back,” he said.

“I don’t know why. We never expected to see you again.”

“I want to try to explain and I wanted to know how you…all are.”

“It would have pleased your father to have seen you again,” she said, and summoned the servant.

He didn’t see her again that night. He was shown to a room in the guest wing. He wondered what had become of his old room. Food was brought on a tray. He ate, bathed and fell asleep as soon as he lay down on the comfortable bed.

A balcony off his room faced the sea. The next morning, he stood looking down at the marble steps descending to the water. The smell and sound of the sea entered him, waking memories. For years, the sea had haunted his dreams and thoughts. He wondered suddenly if the unformed, confused youth he’d been haunted the sea in return. Perhaps Marella’s hopeful, doomed love and his own careless immaturity were a story the place whispered to itself as waves rose and fell, and perhaps at night the echo of her singing as she held him in her arms above the water and floated him to land could still be heard.

He breakfasted with his mother. She was coldly polite. He thought she might dismiss the servants so they could talk, but she didn’t. When they finished eating, he asked for a private audience.

She took him to her own sitting room. He remembered it had always been her favorite place in the castle.

He felt defensive and about ten years old. He didn’t want to fence with her. She’d always been implacable when her will was thwarted, and he didn’t bother asking for forgiveness.

“Mother, I’ve come home to try to explain to you why I left. I don’t want anything or expect anything. You deserve to know what happened and I need to know I’ve done what I could to make amends.”

“Amends!” she snorted. “Amends for breaking your wife’s heart, and your father’s, and killing them both?”

His heart sank. “She…my wife is dead, too?”

“She is. Three years after you left, she took ill and died of a lung complaint.”

He looked away from the hard satisfaction in her eyes. “I’m truly sorry.”

She sniffed. “Are you?”

“Yes. She was a sweet girl and deserved a better husband.”

“Indeed.”

He felt his temper fraying and took tight hold of it.

“Mother, I need three minutes of your time to listen to what I’ve come to say.”

It took two minutes and forty seconds by the ornate clock on the round table at her elbow. She didn’t interrupt. He spoke of his youthful confusion and his feeling of living someone else’s life. He spoke of loneliness and emptiness and his desperate choice to abandon everything and search for his true self.

“I’ve come back to tell you I’m well. I’ve traveled, been a soldier and learned a great deal. I’ve never forgotten you and Father and my wife. All these years I’ve hated myself for leaving the way I did. I wish I’d been able to do it more gently and respectfully. It was never my intention to hurt or betray any of you. I know now I didn’t want the life you envisioned for me, but I didn’t know how to tell you. It was the right choice to leave, but I regret any hurt I caused.”

“It’s too late for an apology now.”

“Perhaps it is, but it’s the best I can do,” he said steadily. “Is there anything I can say or do to make things better?”

She looked away. “No. It’s too late.”

“It seems silly to waste any more time talking, then,” he said gently. “Where is my wife buried?”

That surprised her. “In her own family plot. It’s what her parents wanted.”

He rose to his feet. “Thank you for your time and the night’s hospitality,” he said. “I won’t trouble you again. Be well, Mother.”

He returned back to the room and retrieved his belongings. It didn’t take long. He took the back stairs and made his way down to a wide patio with an ornate rail that looked over the water. The marble steps led down from it. He stepped out, carefully and quietly closing the glass paneled door behind him. The morning sun glinted off the water and the patio felt warm and sheltered. He dropped his bundles and descended the wide, shallow steps.

He sat for a long time in the sun, waves at his feet, feeling unexpectedly peaceful. If the young pair in his memory haunted the place, they didn’t trouble him. No ghost of night sea song disturbed his ear. The marble underneath him felt smooth and hard and the breathing presence of the sea enfolded him. Sunlight shone gently on his skin but glittered in his eyes, making him squint.

After a time, he stood and made his way back up the steps.

***

He found a room at an inn. It was tiny but the bed was comfortable and it was private. He spent several days in the town, walking the streets, revisiting favorite places and shops, and remembering. He almost expected to catch sight of himself as a boy, running here and there, playing with friends, buying a handful of candy or food from a street vendor, watching the busy life in the harbor. Now and then he came across an aged version of a familiar face, but he didn’t attempt to talk to anyone. He spent a day at his father’s grave. It was a sunny summer day and he bought a meat pie on the street and sat cross legged in the warm grass, pulling up weeds and cleaning out a flower bed someone had planted.

He also visited his wife’s grave. A wreath of summer flowers lay on it, nearly fresh, and he felt comforted to think someone watched over her and loved her memory.

He liked to go out early in the morning and after dark and walk in the town. Everywhere he found vivid memories of his boyhood. Strangely, that version of himself was much better defined than his young adult self. He had a rueful affection for his childish self. Little did the boy who had snatched an apple while the fruit vender watched an altercation spilling out of a pub at lunchtime know what lay ahead of him and how far he’d travel from this harbor town. It was all dear and familiar and he said a slow good-bye as he wandered through the town, knowing there was no place in it for him now — and perhaps there never had been.

He found a stable and rented a horse for a day. The first morning he swung himself up into the saddle with pleasure. He loved to ride and the mare was alert and fresh, a perfect companion. She danced to see what he’d do, read calm authority in his handling of reins, his voice and his seat, and settled down.

He rode out of town, intending to follow the shoreline. The sea called to him and he wanted to be alone with it.

They cantered on a bluff above the sea for two or three miles. It was smooth going in the summer fields and Radulf let the mare run when she wanted. Below them, waves spread cream lace on rocks and shingle. The bluff gradually descended and a curve of land cupped a small harbor. He found white-walled buildings, low and weathered, and a church made of blocks of unadorned grey stone. A bell hung at the apex of the steeple, and Radulf wondered what it sounded like. There was something pleasing about the sound of a good sweet bell mingling with the sound of the sea. A creek ran down into the mouth of the harbor, cutting a corner out of the neat rectangular churchyard behind the church.

He turned the mare’s head inland, meaning to circumvent the town. He made a wide detour around it and came back to the shore behind a steep cliff that hid the town and harbor from view unless he waded out among a scatter of large rocks around which the waves foamed. He made the horse comfortable in the shade of the cliff on a patch of wiry beach grass and sand, shed his footwear and stood in the sea.

It was cold, of course. Rocks were hard and slippery underfoot. The tide sighed and lapped around his feet. He judged it was coming in and, to test this, stood in one place for a few minutes, watching the waves spray and spume around the rocks. He wondered if low tide uncovered them. A wave higher than the others wetted him to his knees. He laughed and moved up the shore a few steps.

He caught movement between the rocks. Seals! He stood still, watching. A sleek head broke the surface. He had a glimpse of seaweed floating around it and then it dove, in the graceful manner of seals, and he watched the smooth curve of a back follow the head down, and the flash of a tail, green and blue.

Not a seal. No seal ever had a tail like that. What was it? He racked his brain, trying to fit what he’d seen with a sea creature that dove and strayed so close to shore — and so close to people.

He moved up the shore again, escaping the deepening surf. He scanned the rocks, looking eagerly for movement or shape within the sunlit waves and spray.

There! A larger, more muscular wave rolled smoothly in and something surfed along its top, swimming effortlessly with a powerful tail. It was smaller than a seal, about half the size of a man…

The wave came in, weakening as it reached shallower water. The wave top collapsed and the figure skimmed towards the shingle, long dirty blonde hair tangled, and Radulf said to himself even as he disbelieved his eyes — it’s a child!

It was a child. A girl with wet hair draped over her shoulders, strange eyes like an abalone shell and a green and blue tail. The sea cast her, giggling, nearly at his feet. She looked up at him with a supple movement of her neck and her eyes became wary, though the giggle lingered on her lips.

“You’re not supposed to! I’ll tell on you!”

Radulf looked up from the little girl’s strange cold eyes and saw, clinging to the rock, a little boy, bobbing up and down comically in the wash of waves and looking absolutely furious.

“Children!”

Radulf found the source of the call just as the caller dove. The tail slapped the water in an aggravated manner as it followed the body beneath the waves. The figure resurfaced, swimming with powerful thrusts of its tail. Broad shoulders knotted with muscle moved effortlessly through the breakers.

The mermaid child at Radulf’s feet flopped onto her side and watched the swimmer coming. All trace of laughter was gone but Radulf didn’t see fear in her face, just a rather adult resignation. The small boy out near the rocks cast himself onto the crest of a passing wave and rode it in casually, but he stayed in the safety of shallow water beyond where the waves purled and hissed against the land.

“Clarissa, what do you think you’re doing?” The man had a booming voice. Radulf saw several scars on his broad upper body. He wore a gold ring in one ear and his hair and beard were plaited. He looked younger in years than Radulf, judging by the color of his hair. He sounded thoroughly exasperated and paid no attention to Radulf, though he stayed safely out of reach in shallow water.

“Daddy, he has a horse! I saw it!” Her cheeks bloomed with excitement.

“Oh, Clarissa,” said the man on a sigh. Radulf laughed.

Father and daughter looked at him warily.

“I’m called Radulf. I do have a horse, you’re quite right.” He looked down into the shining abalone eyes.

“You know you’re not supposed to be seen, child,” said the merman.

“But he has a horse!”

“It’s all right,” Radulf put in. “I used to know one of your people. I won’t do you any harm and I won’t tell anyone.”

The merman sighed again. His face relaxed and Radulf saw lines of sorrow in it. He was young to look so worn with care.

The little boy had edged his way to his father. Now he put his arms around the man’s neck and pressed himself against the strong scarred back. “I told her not to do it,” he said. “I told her and told her but she wouldn’t listen.”

“I want to see the horse!” said Clarissa.

Radulf squatted, careless of the fact that his rear end dipped into the surf. “Shall I bring the horse to you or carry you up to her?” he asked.

Clarissa glanced at her father.

“Do you want to see the horse, too?” Radulf asked the boy.

He nodded solemnly, his thin arms wound around the merman’s neck.

“I’ll bring her to you, then. Horses can be easily frightened by something they’ve never seen, and I don’t know if she’s ever seen…”

“Merfolk,” put in the merman quietly.

“…merfolk before. She might not like the water, either. I don’t know this horse. You must be quiet and make no sudden movements. Let her see she’s safe and get used to your smell.”

“We don’t smell bad!” said the boy indignantly.

His father laughed. “We smell like the sea, I expect,” he said. “Every creature has a scent, Chris. He didn’t mean we smell bad.”

The mare wasn’t frightened of either the sea or the merfolk. She stood in the surf up to her fetlocks, lowered her head and examined the little girl with a soft curious nose. Clarissa, holding still, whispered, “Can I touch her?”

“She’ll like that,” said Radulf. He ran his hand over the bay mare’s cheek in a brief caress. Clarissa reached out a hesitant hand and patted her nose.

Chris and his father let the waves carry them onto the shore and the mare inspected them as well, and allowed herself to be petted. Radulf dug into his bundle and found an apple. He cut it in half and gave each child a piece, showing them how to hold their palms flat and offer the fruit to the horse. She lipped the apple up out of their hands and crunched it in strong teeth.

“Why do people say waves are like white horses?” asked Clarissa. “They’re nothing like a real horse.”

“My people say that, too,” said Radulf. “I used to be a sailor. Being on a ship at sea is a bit like riding a horse. Riding a horse can be smooth and flowing, the way you looked riding in on the crest of that wave.” He grinned at Chris, who smiled back shyly. “Sometimes, though, a horse doesn’t like being ridden and then it bucks and kicks and jumps around, trying to get you off. Then it’s like being in heavy swell when there’s a storm. It’s hard to hang on. Everything’s moving in a different direction at once. I suppose people who’ve ridden horses and been on ships think the feeling is alike.”

“I want to…” began Clarissa.

Her father fixed her with a stern eye.

“No!” he said.

She was silenced, crestfallen.

Radulf said, “I wouldn’t put any child on a horse I didn’t know well. Perhaps one day when I bring a horse I trust and your father and I know one another better I can take you for a ride here along the shore, where no one will see. What do you think people would say if they saw a little mermaid riding a horse?” He pulled a face and she giggled.

“When there are white horses on the sea, we just dive under them,” said Chris, paying no attention to his sister’s disappointment. “We look up at them from underneath.”

“’A ceiling of amber, a pavement of pearl,’” murmured the merman to himself.

Chris ignored this as well. “When the horse doesn’t want to be ridden why don’t people get off?”

“That’s a good question,” said Radulf. “Some people want what they want no matter what.”

“Like Clarissa,” said Chris.

Radulf stifled a smile and looked at the merman, whose eyes gleamed with momentary amusement.

“I’m Irvin,” he said, extending a callused hand.

Radulf took the horse back to nap in the shade. The tide flowed in until it reached its apex and Clarissa and Chris swam and splashed, their thin voices sounding above the boom of surf like birds calling. Radulf slouched on the shingle and talked with Irvin.

“Her name was Margaret. My folk warned me taking a human woman for a mate would be difficult. I loved her so much I didn’t care. I felt certain we could overcome any difficulty with our love and joy in one another. I spent the happiest years of my life with her. The children came, first Clarissa and then Chris. We stayed close to this coast and the harbor and I encouraged her to visit her family and friends whenever she wanted. I knew it was hard for her to leave everything she knew for my sake, though she loved the sea and appeared content at first.

One day, when Clarissa was six and Chris four, we heard the sound of church bells down in our cavern. It was a calm, sunny day and she was sitting with Clarissa on her knee, combing out her hair. The bell made a silver sound and the sea was green. I remember the way the sunlight quivered and gleamed on the cavern floor. She sighed, and talked about her soul, and I bade her go up into the town and church, and come home when she felt ready, so she went. The day grew old and a storm approached, but she didn’t return. The children kept asking when she’d come home again. We made our way up the creek that runs by the churchyard and empties into the sea.”

“I saw it,” said Radulf.

“The sea stocks were blooming,” said Irvin. “I remember the purple color of the flowers against their fuzzy leaves. We pulled ourselves up on the tombstones. A cold wind was rising. The hard stone made a good perch and I could see in through the window panes. Margaret sat by a pillar. An open book lay in her lap and her gaze was fixed on a man in the front, who was talking. Many people were there. Nearly every bench was full. The cold wind seemed to touch my heart, wrap it and sweep it away. She looked so serene and distant, there with her own people. The church door and windows were shut and Clarissa’s hair flew in the wind, getting more tangled by the minute. Chris held out his arms and cried for his mother, but the walls are thick and nobody heard. We returned to the creek and I took them down in the driving rain to the sea and home.” He remained silent a moment.

She never came home again.”

“But you’ve seen her?” asked Radulf.

“Yes. In the evening, she walks on the shore. She comes alone after the lamps are lit in the houses. She has a dinghy in the harbor and I’ve seen her take it into the bay and drop anchor. I think she sits there, alone in the dark, to feel the movement of the sea under her. She sings the lullabies she sang when the children were babies and sometimes she weeps. I think she misses the children, but she wasn’t happy with us or she couldn’t have left like that. I don’t want the children to lose her all over again, so I never speak to her or show myself.”

Irvin looked at Radulf with troubled eyes.

“What is this thing you call a soul? Why does it demand Margaret choose one thing or another? Why can’t she live in her world and ours and be happy in both?”

“I don’t know, Irvin,” said Radulf. “When you say it like that, it sounds ridiculous to me, too. Other people expect us to behave in certain ways. You said some of your folk advised against taking a human mate?”

“Yes. It’s been done now and then but it rarely turns out well.”

“Were you punished?”

“Punished?” Irvin looked surprised. “No, not punished, exactly, but I don’t see some of my old friends anymore and I’m not a part of the community the way I was. I didn’t mind. She was worth it, and I thought my people would come around when they realized we were making it work.”

“If you’d known when you met her what you know now, would you make the same choices?”

Irvin watched the children competing to see who could leap higher out of the waves. “I can’t regret loving her,” he said thoughtfully, “or the children. I might have tried to understand what she needed, though. If I’d known she had to follow rules about how to live it might have been different. But it might not.” He looked back at Radulf. “How can I say for sure?”

“You can’t. It’s a question I ask myself about my own past. If I’d known the right questions to ask, if I’d had all the information, would I make different choices? I might, but how can I say for sure?” He shook his head.

“I told you I’d known one of your people before. Her name was Marella…”

Radulf told the story of his little mermaid and recounted his return home. When he stopped speaking the two remained silent for a time. The tide had turned and ebbed in a low, soothing rhythm. The children scrambled among the rocks offshore now.

“I never thought about how important it is to know yourself before,” said Irvin at length.

“Which one of us are you talking about?”

“All of us. Take Marella, for example. I’ve no doubt her people warned her against doing such a thing, sacrificing so much for the love of a strange human man. Obviously, she thought it was worth it, but in the end she gave too much of her life away. She had nothing to rebuild with. She didn’t know who she was or what she needed, and so she didn’t think about what you needed, either.”

“And your Margaret? She needed to live in the faith of her church but she didn’t know until it was too late?”

“Yes. That’s the pity of it. We don’t know until we find ourselves in a situation where we don’t possess what we need. Only then do we realize something essential to our happiness is missing.”

“I couldn’t see I was trying to live a life that wasn’t mine,” said Radulf. “I was young and I just went along with the expectations. I didn’t know how unhappy I was until I ran away, and even then I wasn’t clear about why I had to do that. The truth is it’s just been in the last couple of months I’ve clearly understood how frantic I felt.”

“You’d never have married if you’d known yourself better.”

“No. I wonder if she’d have married me if she’d known herself better?” He thought about this. “Probably not.”

“I was willing for Margaret to be free to shape her life around the children and me and her own people. It didn’t occur to me it might not be possible. I also didn’t know I couldn’t respect the rules that were so important to her. I tried to respect that she respected them, but I thought them ridiculous and limiting and I had no intention of living with them myself or teaching the children to live by them. I want them to be free.”

“Yes, I see what you mean,” said Radulf. “Knowing oneself, knowing where one belongs, is important. Do you think that’s something we’re always learning?”

“I suppose so.”

Radulf said, “I didn’t know life would take so much courage and endurance. Did you?”

“No. Do you think I should take the children and go somewhere else? The sea is wide.”

“I’ve been traveling, one way or another, for twenty years,” said Radulf. “The world is indeed wide, and deep and tall! I’ve seen and done extraordinary things. This will always be home to me but I’m too big for it now. Are you too big for this bay and the grey church on the windy hill and Margaret’s rules and needs?”

“I can do more than this,” said Irvin.

“Then do.”

CHAPTER 28

ARTYOM

“Do you play marbles?” Dar asked.

They’d stopped to eat. It was a soft summer day, filled with the sounds of insects and birds. Dar had pulled the cart onto an old track leading to a long-abandoned hut that was gradually sinking into the earth. Sunlight filtered through holes in the roof, showing part of an old floor. One corner of the place had been cleared of debris.

“Marbles?” For some reason, Artyom felt vaguely insulted. He remembered some reference to marbles as Baba Yaga and Dar bantered before the initiation.

“Yes, marbles,” said Dar.

“No, I don’t play marbles.”

“High time, then. I’m a good player and an even better cheater. I’ll teach you how to cheat, shall I?”

Artyom hunched his shoulders suspiciously. “I don’t cheat at games.”

“You should,” said Dar impudently. “Everyone should. Cheating is an inextricable part of playing games.” He’d been rummaging in the cart and jumped out of it with a brocaded bag in one hand.

“I like to stop here when I’m in the area,” he said. “It’s hard to find a good flat place to play on the road, but this old floor works fine, at least until the rest of the roof goes and the grass takes over.”

Dar crouched, hands moving over the ground. “Kneel there. I’ll set out the game, like so. Here’s your shooter, here’s mine, and the rest are ducks. Now, this game is called Corner the Cow, and the object is…”

Artyom, unwillingly fascinated, was taken through a game or two and then spent a half an hour learning the fine points of bombsies and fudging without getting caught.

It was the most fun he’d had in years.

MARY

Mary retched resignedly. For a few days after the nausea had started, she’d taken care to seek privacy behind a bush or tree, leaving Lugh to wait on the road. Now she made for the nearest clump of grass or growth, careless of his eyes or a chance passerby.

With some ruefulness, she’d realized it didn’t matter to Lugh. He roused her to pleasure and took his own, not the slightest bit put off by occasional bouts of nausea. She felt thick and bloated, but he reveled in her abundant flesh. The changes in her body unexpectedly triggered her own desire and made her want to rediscover their passion again and again.

Nausea receded. She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand and stood straight, Lugh’s hand under her elbow.

“Better?” he asked sympathetically. “Will you try a piece of bread?”

She nodded and he produced a piece of stale bread, which she began to nibble on.

They sat in a clump of daisy-starred grass.

“I’m starving,” said Lugh. He was always starving. His enormous vitality required constant fuel. She felt hungry too, now nausea had passed.

He took a vigorous bite off a strip of dried meat and fat, a mixture he’d perfected since learning to make it at Valhalla. She sniffed at a chunk of bread spread thickly with bacon fat to see what her stomach said. It growled. Happily, she bit into the bread.

“I wish I could do something for you,” he said, chewing, an anxious line between his brows.

“I know. It’s all right, Lugh. Women have been having babies for a long time. I’ll be fine.” Her reassurance was automatic. They’d had this conversation many times before.

Summer Solstice had come and gone. Seed was sown and harvest lay ahead. It was the pause between exhalation of full-lipped summer and inhalation of harvest.

“What if I can’t take care of you properly?”

Irritation rose in her and she took another bite to distract herself. All her emotions were easily triggered these days.

“We take care of each other. We work together, just as we always have. You know we must each tend to our own harvest, Lugh.”

He looked down, thick gilt lashes hiding green eyes.

They tightened their bundles. Lugh stood, brushing grass and insects off his clothes and running a tidying hand through his thick hair. “Do I look all right?”

Gravely, she nodded. He extended a hand and hauled her to her feet. She kissed him on the mouth in silent assurance and promise.

“Tell me about Valhalla,” she said as they resumed walking.

“Again? I’m bored with that old story.” He gave her a teasing sideways glance.

“You are not!” she said, loving every single thing about him, his childlike vanity, his uncomplicated good nature and his vigorous maleness. “Make it a story. I like to picture your life before we met.”

“They called me Billy,” he began.

She snorted with amusement.

“Whenever I heard, ’Hey, Billy! I suspected a trick and put my hands up. The first time it happened I was just in time to catch a half-frozen side of pork. It rocked me on my feet and I tightened my arms around it in an awkward catch that made everyone laugh.

The slaughtering shed at Valhalla is a busy place. Men work bare-chested in the chilly air, warmed by wielding shears, blade and mallet. The shed smells of stiff flesh, greasy offal and congealed blood.

I’d been excited to leave Yule House and my foster mothers. I longed for the company of men. When Baubo told me I was to live at Valhalla as an apprentice to Odin, I imagined myself on a splendid horse, crimson cloak swirling as I joined the Wild Hunt. Or exploring wild places, tracking boar or bear, chasing hounds, taking my place among the men as a hunter with blood on my hands from a fresh kill, providing meat for the table.

Fresh blood seemed the height of romance, but all I had at Valhalla was greasy old blood that left its stink on my skin and caked stubbornly under my fingernails.

Odin barely looked at me. When we arrived, he indicated the slaughtering shed with a jerk of his chin and walked away without a word. Baubo gave me a last hug and I was on my own, feeling mightily left down. I went to the shed and opened the door, trying to look confident.

That was the last time I wore my cloak or my gold earring anywhere at Valhalla. I folded the cloak and hid it away, wearing it only when I was alone, waking cold earth under fields and forests with my flute. I hid my earring in the flute, plugging the end with a bit of cloth.

At Valhalla, I was never alone. I had what I’d wanted, the company of men, but rough, coarse company, unkind and brutish. They took one look at my split hooves and brown flanks and nicknamed me ‘Billy.’”

“I remember,” said Mary, her belly blooming with warmth. “I remember you the night we met …”

“That was before you came along and tamed and civilized me,” said Lugh. “Before Valhalla and you I was wild. I spoke only with my flute, and with that I roused winter into spring and spring into consummation. As the wheel turned, I regained my human shape and lost my adolescent goat-foot aspect.”

“Do you miss it?”

“Sometimes. I miss the power and lust of it. I miss being a creature apart, with no responsibilities.”

“But you did have responsibilities. You had to call me out of maidenhood, as well as the earth out of winter.”

“Yes, but I wanted to do that. I couldn’t help myself. You seduced me.”

She laughed and slapped his arm playfully.

“I suppose you liked me better in those goat-footed days, you wench!” His tone was light, but she sensed a tinge of insecurity.

“You’re my mate,” she said. “I loved you then and I love you now. Together, we turn the wheel.”

He took her hand and squeezed it.

“Tell more,” she said. “More about Valhalla.”

“Where was I?”

“They called you ‘Billy.’”

“I was never allowed to forget my cloak and gold hoop, though I only wore them once,” resumed Lugh. “They made fun of my body when I appeared without the cloak and adopted my flanks as the most convenient place to wipe their knives, administering sly cuts and digs as they did so. Every evening I had to clean matted gore off myself.

I was the butt, the drudge, the scapegoat. I was the youngest and most unskilled, so I did the heaviest, dirtiest work. I was everybody’s whipping boy. I was in three fights the first week, all of which I lost ignominiously.

By the second week, I’d become more stoic. I wrapped a heavy sacking apron around myself, ignored (or at least didn’t react to) every jibe, and learned. I started asking questions. Sometimes my only answer was a kick or a blow, but occasionally I got a gruff reply. As I sharpened and cleaned tools at the end of the day, I remembered how they’d been used, sculpting dead flesh, cleaning bone, severing tough cartilage. I scoured pots and blackened kettles; poured off rendered fat; hoisted carcasses to hang;, skinned, cleaved, salted and ferried fresh meat to Valhalla’s kitchens. My hands cracked from mixing salt and water for slurry.

I ate. Everyone ate well at Valhalla. I ate all the meat I could hold, glistening with fat, fueling long cold hours in the slaughtering shed and my changing body.

I began to appreciate the thoroughly male dance of heavy boots, soiled sawdust, carrion odors, tools and skilled hands. There was beauty in uncovered bone, beauty in the shine of greasy sweat on heavy belly and muscled arms. I enjoyed slipping skin and pelt off flesh. There was something sensual in the naked structure of the meat. The splattering hot fat was like pale honey and left burns on my arms. I learned the skill and mastery of working with dead flesh, reading the grain, anticipating hidden ribbons of cartilage and membrane, seeing how best to shape death into sustaining life.

Sometimes I slipped away with my cloak and flute. Outside the slaughtering shed spring approached. During those times I wandered, my cock heavy and my body humming with vitality. The flute spoke as I caressed it with my tongue, fingers and mouth. Winter came to me, seduced, and I pressed myself against its snowy lips until they melted into cold drops pooling on my tongue.”

Mary stopped in midstride, turned and pulled him to her, giving him a hot open-mouthed kiss. They stood together, their hands greedy on one another’s body, the kiss deepening, and Mary remembered the Day of Seeds with every cell and nerve in her body.

“I called you, my Seed Bearer,” he said, freeing his lips but not drawing away. “I knew you were in the world, my cup, my mate, my female half. I wanted you. My seed cried out for you.”

MIRMIR

The Hanged Man smiled without speaking. A searching wind rattled dried leaves around them as though Yggdrasil sighed.

“The White Lady used to come with me when I roamed at night,” he said dreamily. “I remember that. We were strange companions, but I liked to be with her. We understood one another, somehow. I wonder why?”

“She iss as you were then,” said Mirmir, “primordial and unknowable.”

“Her wings left feathery marks on the snow around drops of blood when she hunted,” said the Hanged Man.

“She wass a crown of platinum, ssmoke and crysstal on the ssoftening brow of winter, and you were ssticky and odorouss with death, yet turgid with life. Together, you readied for spring,” Mirmir said, sibilant as the wind in the leaves.

VASILISA

Vasilisa caught up with the old man on a cliff overlooking the sea at sunset on a June evening.

She’d left the place of initiation feeling changed. The too-sweet maiden Baba Yaga had so despised was shed and cast away, left in the old hag’s cauldron in company with other remnants that lined the Firebird’s womb.

The dream of a life with Artyom was over.

She’d been naked. She’d seen and been seen. The shape of her maimed foot was her private shame no more. Yet even her nakedness contained a world of hidden things. The stranger Morfran, with a few words, took the self she recognized and gave her a new outline she’d no idea how to fill in.

“My name is Morfran, lady. And you’re my aunt. I bring greetings from my grandfather and your father, Marceau, one of the sea kings.”

She was determined to look into her true father’s face and find out where she came from. Then she might know who she was. But she began to wonder if self-knowledge was ever complete.

She traveled with the fiery skull on its stick and the doll her mother made her in her apron pocket. To the doll, she said, “We go to find my father.” To the fiery skull, she said, “Take me to Odin. He’s wind and storm, and the sea answers his call.”

The sun sank among islands of pink and orange clouds, rimmed in golden light. Outlined against the sky at the top of the cliff she saw the figure of a man. A breeze off the waves stirred his long, grizzled hair, revealing the profile of a jutting nose. The fiery skull leapt into flame and the doll in her pocket stirred against her thigh.

Vasilisa climbed the last few yards to the end of her search. The sea moved with a shushing sound against land, stroking and retreating, stroking and retreating. She’d never heard it before, yet its rhythm sounded familiar. The sound companioned her like a friend holding her hand.

The old man stood looking at the sky over the water. She stood beside him, catching her breath, and watched the sun go down and the colors fade. She felt in no hurry.

When the last sliver of sun sank beneath the horizon, he turned to look at her and she saw an empty eye socket.

“Vasilisa the Wise,” he said.

“I’ve never been called that,” she responded, surprised.

“It’s never been your name before,” he said. “Why do you think I can help you find Marceau, a King of the Sea?”

“Because you fill the green sky with stormy wings and call the wild white horses from the violet waves,” she responded.

Odin laid a gnarled hand on her shoulder and turned her. “See there, that beach with the handful of rocks?”

In fading light, she examined the place he indicated. The land rose in a low sloping hill, the cliff having crumbled and sunk into nothing. A large rock with a flat top stood with its feet in the surf and farther up on the shingle a group of rocks made a kind of rough circle.

“I see it.”

“That’s a place of beginning and end. It’s a special place for Marceau and he often visits it during the summer. Beginnings and endings demand recognition, you know.” He looked into her face, his one eye dark and gleaming in its deep socket. “There’s no escape from them. They pursue you beyond death unless you make a place for them to rest.”

Vasilisa’s chest tightened. She swallowed past a constriction in her throat and said steadily. “I’ll remember.”

“Let me see the doll.”

She reached in her pocket and put the doll into his hand. Her mother’s voice whispered in her ears, “Show her to no one,” but she knew the doll was safe with Odin.

He turned it carefully over in his hands. It was nearly full dark but he made no move to examine it by the light of the fiery skull. He explored the doll by touch, handed it back to Vasilisa. She carefully returned it to her pocket.

“Marceau will come to the light of the fiery skull,” said Odin. “Wait for him. Watch for the Sea Wolf.” He turned away from Vasilisa and pulled the fiery skull’s stick out of the ground with a jerk. He passed his other hand in front of the grinning skull in an odd movement like a caress that never touched the bone. He put the stick into Vasilisa’s hand.

“The Sea Wolf?”

“You’ll know him. Don’t fear.”

Vasilisa inclined her head.

“Thank you, Grandfather,” she said, giving him a title of respect rather than fact.

“You’re welcome, Granddaughter.”

RADULF

Radulf dreamt of a wolf with golden eyes. It was dark but he could see the lean gray shape of the animal, its eyes glowing around dark round pupils. It padded closer and closer to him until they were face to face. The wolf opened its muzzle and panted and Radulf could smell meat and blood, crushed green things on the forest floor and a hint of the sea. The smell of the sea grew stronger and the eyes blazed, glowing like flame, like the sun. He looked deeper and saw sunflowers, huge dark heads heavy with seeds, petals gold, orange and dark red. The eyes rippled with amber light and looking into them was like lying with his face in the sun.

Suddenly one of the wolf’s eyes popped out, as though poked from within the skull. It jumped out all of a piece, like a marble, and hit the ground and rolled, soundless. Radulf cried out in dismay and the wolf drew back its lips in a kind of canine grin, tongue lolling, as though laughing at a joke. Radulf groped on the ground for the eye, thinking maybe he could push it back in, but it eluded him.

As he moved his hands over the ground, he felt wetness. The ground was saturated. His hands splashed. Water rose and sloshed around the wolf’s legs. The smell of sea grew stronger and he brought his wet finger to his lips and tasted salt. The wolf stood up to its belly in water, and began to swim. Radulf stretched his legs out behind him and swam too.

“Sea wolf,” he thought. “It’s a sea wolf…”

He looked down. He could see one of his own front legs and a canine paw with webbed toes paddling under the water. The other leg ended in a jagged white splinter of bone and torn flesh.

***

Summer was a series of peaceful days steeped in sea sound and warm horseflesh. The mare was called Bonnie. Nearly every day Radulf took her out to wander for miles up and down the coast. In the days before his younger self fled, the sound of the sea became a haunt, an endless menace that whispered relentlessly, telling him things he couldn’t quite hear. Yet he’d loved the sea all his life and the transformation from comfort and beauty to horror was a terrible and painful loss at a time when he badly needed some refuge, some center place to shelter in. In these days, the sea’s breathing once again soothed and comforted. The menace of things unseen and imperfectly understood receded.

He dreamt of an amber-eyed wolf and sometimes of the wolf he’d seen in Baba Yaga’s cauldron during initiation many weeks ago, easily recognized by the maimed leg. At times, they seemed to be the same animal. He woke from these with a vague sense of searching, of seeking for something of terrible beauty and power, and also of something coming toward him, inevitable but taking its own mysterious time.

He met Irvin and the children often. Several times he took Clarissa in his arms and gave her a ride. After a week or two Chris allowed himself to be lifted onto Bonnie’s back as well. He was quieter than Clarissa but his look of joyous wonder as he observed the world from the horse’s broad back was a gift Radulf never forgot.

Bonnie made friends with both children and ambled gently, paying no attention to excited wriggles and shrieks of delight.

In exchange, Irvin and the children took Radulf swimming. He was a strong swimmer and loved the water, but with them he ventured farther into the arms of the sea than ever before, played with seals, floated on his back and watched stars until it seemed he floated in the sky and looked down into candle-lit black water.

Irvin was thinking about leaving the harbor and his Margaret. Radulf made no plans. He felt something approach and waited to meet it. He was comfortable at the inn. The guilty restlessness that had dogged him for so many years dwindled. He’d come back, explained, made what amends he could. He’d faced his dread, shouldered responsibility and discovered it weightless. Guilt and shame had been the heavier burdens. When it was time to leave, he’d know. He wasn’t in a hurry. For now, it seemed enough to eat and rest, ride, allow himself to be cupped in sun and sea.

One afternoon he lingered long, wandering farther than usual. He’d spent the morning with Irvin and the children, sharing a picnic and swimming. When he left them, he didn’t return to town and stable but went on. He rode through the long afternoon, sun-soaked and peaceful, a thin film of salt on his skin and hair. They climbed the low hill of a cliff that fell away into the sea. From the height, he looked down onto a curve of beach and shingle. A flat rock sat in the surf, big enough to lie on, the outgoing tide lapping peacefully around it. He saw a ring of rocks. Someone had made a camp. A neat pile of blankets lay on a ground cloth within the ring of rocks and there was a fire ring. Beyond the shingle, green stems, tall and thick, stood in the wiry beach grass, supporting heavy, tightly-closed flower heads.

Radulf nudged Bonnie forward and they came down the slope toward the crescent of shingle and sand. The cliff crumbled away on their right as they descended. A figure appeared, walking along the shoreline with skirts tucked up and an armful of wood. Radulf dismounted. The woman walked barefoot with a black skirt, a white apron and a vest embroidered with colored…

“Vasilisa!” He gave a shout of surprised delight.

She paused, looking uncertain. The sea exhaled and she stood ankle deep in water. He remembered with a pang her misshapen foot.

“Radulf?”

He took three gigantic strides and threw his arms around her. She dropped the wood with a muted clatter and warmly returned his embrace.

He felt inordinately glad to see her. He took her face between his hands and looked at her. She was just the same, the fleck of a mole under her left eye. He gave her a brotherly kiss and another hug.

“I can’t believe it!” she said, smiling. “I want to ask a million questions!”

“Me, too. Let’s sit awhile. Let me help with this.”

They collected the wood, some of which was now wet, and splashed through the receding tide to sit together on the flat rock. They faced the lowering sun and sea. The rock felt warm beneath them.

“You go first,” said Radulf. “Tell me everything.”

She pulled her knees up, wrapped her arms around them, looked at the low curling waves in the bay and began to talk.

“…So, I’ve been here ever since. I’m sort of waiting but I’m also thinking of what Odin said about making a place for beginnings and endings. Now that I’m not searching for Odin and Marceau and there’s nothing to do and nowhere to go, the inside of my head is quiet. I feel strange. As though I’ve lost myself. Except the self I’ve lost wasn’t really me at all — just the person I thought I was. Does that make any sense?”

“There’s a good word for a memorial for beginnings and endings. I just learned it myself. Descanso.”

“Descanso,” she repeated.

“It means resting place in Spanish.”

“I like that.”

“Me, too. And yes, it makes sense to me. You had a family, a name, a sense of your place in the world through the people you came from. You thought you’d be married and start a life with your husband. You thought you were a nice girl!”

She made a rueful face. “Be careful! I am a nice girl. I’m just not a too-nice girl anymore!”

“That’s a good thing.”

“Yes,” said Vasilisa. “It’s a good thing. None of it’s bad, just so unexpected. Now I feel half erased and I don’t know how to fill myself back in. Who am I really?”

“Vasilisa the Wise?”

She shook her head without answering and looked out over the waves.

“Think of what we learned from Nephthys,” he said gently. “Start with what you know is truly yours. The doll in your pocket. The fiery skull. Your mother and her love for you. Your friends. It’s enough to build on. Even your foot. It’s real and true. It’s a love note from life.”

“Radulf,” she protested, “it’s…ugly.”

He took the hurt foot in both his hands. “It’s not ugly. It’s part of you and your life. Perhaps it’s the beginning of wisdom.”

“It seems to me wisdom is inordinately expensive. No one ever told me that.”

“I was just saying something like that to a new friend of mine. Here’s what I’ve been up to…”

Vasilisa listened sympathetically, looking into his face, nodding, smiling and making small sounds of distress over his reunion with his mother. “Oh, Radulf! She sounds… well, she sounds rather horrible, to tell the truth.”

“I know. I think she’s just not happy. My father’s gone. I defied her and abandoned her. Mother has always been serenely convinced it’s her duty and right to manipulate everyone around her into doing what she thinks best. She’s never tolerated noncompliance from anyone. I’m sad about it but not really surprised. What matters is I came back, told her the truth, gave her a chance to create a relationship with her adult son.”

“I see that. I’m glad for you. I know it took courage to come back and face it all. And you never had a chance to speak to your wife!”

“No. I’m more grieved about that than I am about Mother. I wanted to apologize and explain. It wasn’t to be.”

“Do you think my father will be glad to see me?”

“He’s a fool if he’s not. Let me tell you the rest, though.”

He told of Irvin and the children and the long summer days rambling on Bonnie’s back. He went back and told her what he’d seen in Baba Yaga’s cauldron during initiation and described his recent dreams.

“Oh, Radulf! Odin told me to wait for the Sea Wolf! He said I’d know him when I saw him and not to fear.”

They looked at one another for a moment.

“This is strange,” said Radulf, “and at the same time it’s not strange. I’ve had a feeling of waiting for something. Vasilisa, do you remember that Marceau — your father — is also Marella’s father? And you are her half-sister! Do you think — should I meet him, too? Try to explain how it was with her in my world? And apologize? Would that be a good thing to do or is it a bad idea?”

The sun was sinking. It lit Vasilisa’s face as she mused.

“I’m not sure,” she said at last. “Poor man. I mean, poor merman! I don’t know how he found out about me. Morfran didn’t say. And now we come and give him news of another lost daughter. Ugh!” She shivered. “What will we say to each other?”

“Perhaps you’d rather speak to him alone, with no one else there?”

“No.” She met his eyes. “No, I’m glad you’re with me. Maybe we can help each other — and him. I think you should at least offer to tell him what you know. It might comfort him.”

“It might not,” said Radulf grimly.

“It should be his choice.” Vasilisa, having made up her mind, was firm. “Radulf, Marella made her own choices. It’s not your fault she died.”

“I know,” he said.

They built a fire together. Radulf wanted to get Bonnie back to her stable for the night but they agreed he’d return the next day with provisions and his gear and camp with her until Marceau came.

So Radulf left the harbor town the next morning, after settling his bill at the stable and inn. He hardly noticed what might have been a bittersweet and painful leavetaking. His mind was full of Marceau and the coming meeting.

He stopped and spoke to Irvin near the white-walled town. Irvin promised he and the children would meet Radulf and Vasilisa near the crescent of shingle and its flat-topped rock.

Evening found Radulf on top of the cliff, looking down onto Vasilisa’s camp. The fiery skull faced the sea, glowing in the dark air. His pack hung heavy and he anticipated the pleasure of taking it off and letting the breeze dry his shirt where it clung between his shoulder blades. He adjusted the straps and strode down the hill to meet Vasilisa, who stood waving and smiling by the fire.

They waited, but not with impatience. Vasilisa was a good companion, as self-contained in her way as Radulf was in his. Initiation had made them intimate, in spite of the fact they knew little about one another.

“Maybe everyone should meet and exchange their deepest secrets before anything else,” said Vasilisa, as they talked by the evening fire.

“It does create a close connection,” Radulf agreed.

“I suppose when someone knows the worst about us and doesn’t turn away, we trust them quickly. I usually hate for anyone to see my foot, but I don’t mind you a bit.”

Radulf put a piece of driftwood on the fire.

“All of you at initiation know me better than any of my old friends or family. I’m at once glad and appalled. It’s so good to be seen and known, and so uncomfortably exposed at the same time.”

“I know,” she said, chin in hand, looking into the flames.

“I met a woman after initiation called Maria. It was the same with her. She was weeping along a river at dusk and we wound up telling each other our truest stories. It made me feel close to her, even though we parted the next day.”

“Maybe it’s the easiest way to be in the world,” said Vasilisa. “No pretense. No secrets. Just real.”

“Maybe. I don’t know if everyone can do it, though,” said Radulf, thinking of Artyom.

“You mean Artyom.”

“Yes,” said Radulf, apologetic, “but not only him. How many people can bear to have their deepest shame exposed?”

“It might be done more gently than Baba Yaga did it,” said Vasilisa dryly, “and we survived.”

“True.” Radulf stiffened and lifted his head.

“What is it?” asked Vasilisa.

“Shh. Listen.” He held up a hand to quiet her.

A low sound of singing came from the surf, a familiar melody, soothing, like a lullaby. It was a sound out of Radulf’s memories.

Vasilisa stood and slid a hand into her apron pocket for a moment. Radulf knew she touched her doll. She pressed his shoulder briefly with her other hand and walked forward to stand next to the fiery skull, which glared out over the dark sea.

“Marceau?” she called into the night. “Is it you?”

A gruff voice came back. “I’m Marceau.”

“Will you come out to us? Can you?” she asked tentatively. “We … we’re waiting for you.”

A figure walked out of the surf.

***

Radulf, resolving to give the other two a chance to make friends, busied himself in building up the fire. Somewhat to his surprise, Marceau accepted the offer of soup, and Radulf heated this, along with water for hot drinks. As he moved around the camp, he listened as Vasilisa nervously introduced herself without mentioning their possible kinship. Every few minutes she reached in her pocket to touch the doll.

The being who’d come out of the sea was enough to make anyone nervous, though Radulf had the advantage of being used to Irvin. This merman’s face was marked by many years of experience and grief, although Radulf sensed a deep serenity. Grief hadn’t embittered, merely seasoned. His grizzled hair hung in long ropes, caught neatly in a thong behind his head. He wasn’t large but his body was roped in muscle. Scars tattooed his skin. A gold ring like Irvin’s glinted in one ear as he turned his head in the firelight. He had the weathered, enduring look of an old twisted tree, Radulf thought.

They looked intently at each other, the young woman and the old merman. Vasilisa smiled into the strange grey eyes, like sky and water on a cloudy day, and he returned the smile. Radulf caught his breath at the fleeting resemblance in line of jaw and eye socket. It flashed like a lighthouse in the dark and then was gone again. It was enough for him to be certain they were kin.

He searched for a resemblance to Marella, but her features had blurred in his memory. It made him ashamed, knowing now how she’d loved him. Her young, unshaped beauty hadn’t outlived her, just a lingering feeling of sweet presence and devotion, reproaching him with its generosity.

He handed a bowl of soup to Marceau, and a mug of tea to Vasilisa, sweet, the way she liked it. She smiled in thanks. She looked more relaxed now. The food and hot drink eased the tension still further, but Radulf wondered if Vasilisa wanted help starting. He glanced at her and Marceau intercepted the look.

“Odin brought me word you wanted to talk with me,” he said, setting down the bowl. “He knows I visit this part of the coast and he said you’d wait for me here.”

“He said this was a place of beginnings and endings for you,” said Vasilisa.

“Yes. It’s a story. Would you like to hear? It would honor my memory.”

Radulf laid more wood on the fire, remembering the circle of telling and listening at the initiation. Awkwardness and fear fell away from him. Stories would show the way. He sat cross-legged in the sand.

“I had the pieces of this story from the two in it,” said Marceau. “It’s not a story about me, except my absence contributed, I think. When I had all the pieces, I took them back to my people and gave them the story, so we’d all remember we do not imprison one another. Other lives are possible. It’s not wrong to seek a different life, if that’s where heart and desire lead. We sea kings allow freedom. The love of family and tribe doesn’t diminish with absence and distance. So, I’ll give you the story the way we give it to our young people. We call it ‘Clytie and the Sun.’”

“Clytie drifted in the throbbing sea. The people of the sea moved about her, quicksilver flash, languorous dance and steady crawl. She knew the dolphins’ muscular joy and the whales’ vast intent. She listened to the fish singing in praise at dawn and moonrise. She watched beauty and terror, life and death, a thousand stories within the sea’s embrace. Wonder, questions, all she saw and heard and felt, struggled within her.

She tried to talk about light with those in eternal dark, but they weren’t interested.

She tried to talk about depths where light never came, but those in the top layers of sea shuddered and turned away.

She tried to swim with laughing dolphins as they played, but they never stayed.

She wanted to know about the deep call of faraway places, distant stars, wheeling seasons, but the whales had no time for her.

The sea and its creatures moved about her, restless, never silent, but it was too vast. The sea didn’t hear her own song, didn’t stop for her, didn’t notice her. It cared nothing for its own mystery and beauty. It was self-sufficient, remote. She was alone.

Clytie, drifting, exploring, searching, discovered the shore. Here was something new. As she ventured out onto rocks and sand, she discovered stillness. Breezes whispered over her. Spray and sometimes rain splashed her. The sea vibrated with sound and power in her ears, but she lay in stillness out of water.

And then there was the sun.

She discovered warmth.

Stillness and warmth.

And then, one day, the sun spoke to her.

‘My name is Yr. I wish I could know about your world. Would you tell me something about it? It’s hidden from me and often I’ve wondered…’

Clytie stretched out on a rock, feeling waves lap at her tail where it trailed over the edge. Painfully, hesitantly, she began to tell him, and as she spoke, he smiled down at her, touching her with warm, gentle fingers. Salt dried on the scales of her tail, leaving a white crust. Her hair dried, golden, glinting in sunlight. She shut her eyes, gave her throat and breasts to Yr, felt herself open, soft and sweet.

And so it began. Day after day, Yr came. She emptied out her heart to him until she felt light enough to rise into the sky and float among clouds. She surrendered herself to the sea at dusk, drifting with currents and tides, looking down into the world below her, colors, shapes, scenes like jewels. These she took and spread before Yr. Together they considered every question she’d ever asked in her heart.

Then Yr began to speak of land. He told of vast mountains, of deserts, of plains and forests. He spoke of beauty and terror, life and death, the unfolding of a thousand stories. Each night when he slipped out of Clytie’s sight, he looked down at the world spread out below him, colors, shapes, scenes like jewels. These he took and laid before Clytie. Together they considered every question he’d ever asked in his heart.

One day, Clytie left the sea for the last time. She flung herself out of a wave onto a sandy beach and made her way up the beach beyond reach of the sea. She found a hollow of grass protected by a scatter of rocks. She lay in the hollow.

Yr touched her with his warm fingers, kissing her in farewell as he slid down behind the sky’s rim.

Clytie lay in the night, drinking dew and listening dreamily to the sea’s breathing.

Yr rose and kissed her. She turned her face toward him, relaxed in his warm embrace, her hair golden about her.

Nine days later, Clytie turned her face toward Yr as he rose. The hair he’d so loved lay thick and yellow about her face. Green and gold she was, rooted lovingly in solid earth beneath Yr. Now she told him about the life of roots, the worlds lying beneath the land he saw. Clytie had become the first sunflower.

Clytie and Yr covered the land with the golden fruit of their sharing. Their family made its way across every land and look out at every sea. Their constancy built a bridge that connects root and wave.

Clytie and the sun.

Clytie and the sun.”

Vasilisa was crying. Radulf could see streaks of moisture on her cheeks gleaming in the firelight. She smiled at Marceau, tears sliding down her face. Marceau touched her cheek with a gentle finger, tracing a wet path.

“Why are you crying, ‘Lisa?” he asked.

She leaned forward into his embrace and wept against his chest while he held her and stroked her hair.

The old man closed his eyes and Radulf saw tears on his face too, and felt a lump in his own throat.

***

Vasilisa’s mother had vacationed with her family by the sea when she was a young woman. She’d been a woman of strength, brave and with a streak of mysticism. She hadn’t seen the sea before, but fell in love with its wild beauty and spent hours in solitary exploration of the threshold between land and water while her parents read together, walked in the town, listened to music and sat snugly indoors listening to wind and waves.

Marceau had always been interested in humans and liked to watch the town. The young woman caught his eye. One day he spoke to her.

“Her family rented a house for a month,” said Marceau. “We spent as much time together as we could. We knew it wasn’t forever. After she left, I thought of her often with great affection, and hoped she’d find a good man, make a family, perhaps one day come again to the sea, or even live near it, as she loved it so. It never occurred to me there might be consequences to our brief time together.

“She did marry,” said Vasilisa. “She married a woodcutter. He worked hard for us and was often away. We were poor but they loved one another, and me. I was the only child.”

She reached out and took Marceau’s hand. “She died when I was ten years old.”

New grief settled into lines already drawn on his face. He wrapped his fingers around her hand. “Tell me.”

“She started to feel tired all the time. She grew weaker and weaker and one day she couldn’t get out of bed. I was old enough to take over the housework. There wasn’t anything we could do for her. She wasn’t in pain, exactly, just weak and tired. We were with her when she died. She gave me this.”

Vasilisa reached into her pocket and put the doll in his hand. Radulf was surprised. He’d never see the doll himself, though he knew she carried it and understood it guided her in some way. It was dressed as Vasilisa herself was, in a black skirt, white apron and vest embroidered with colored threads.

“She told me to keep it with me always, that it was her gift to me. She said it would guide me but I should keep it secret.”

“And has it — she — guided you?”

“Yes, through many events and over many miles. She helped me find Odin — and you.”

Marceau turned the doll over in his hands, pressing his fingers against the body. “What’s inside her?”

“Inside her?”

He looked up at her and smiled. “You didn’t know? Here, press here.” He placed her finger on the doll’s trunk. “Feel that hard lump?”

“Yes! I never felt that before. I always touch her gently, or hold her in the palm of my hand.”

“I think I know what this is,” said Marceau. “Your mother was fascinated by sea lore. Our legends say coral is mermaid blood and pearls and sea glass mermaid tears. I used to bring her gifts so she could take something of our time together with her when she went. Did you find such things after she died?”

“No,” said Vasilisa. “There was nothing like that among her possessions.”

“Because she put them here for you,” said Marceau, handing the doll back to her. “It was all she had of me, besides you, of course. Perhaps she wanted you to know who your father was. Or perhaps she wanted you to carry the power of blood and tears with you always.”

Vasilisa turned the doll gently in her hands, smoothing her thumbs over the gaily embroidered vest and the white apron.

“You were with me all the time,” she said, looking into Marceau’s grey eyes.

“We’ve both been with you all the time,” he replied. “Love is never lost. It just transforms.”

Radulf had been listening to Vasilisa and Marceau talk, tending the fire and watching their faces in the flickering light. He felt glad for Vasilisa. Marceau was a kind man, tender and wise. Radulf wasn’t so afraid to tell him about Marella as he had been.

“Marceau?” he said.

The merman turned to him at once. “You’ve been patient with us,” he said. “Thank you for your friendship toward my daughter. I hope it will extend to me, also.”

“Of course,” said Radulf, liking him more and more. “But — I have something to tell you, too.”

Vasilisa tucked the doll back into her apron pocket and reached out a reassuring hand to Radulf. “It will be all right,” she said.

Marceau’s eyebrow rose in inquiry as he looked from one to the other.

Radulf swallowed. “You’ve told us about Clytie and now you know Vasilisa is also your daughter. We know Morfran’s mother was another daughter.”

Marceau smiled. “A grandson I didn’t know I had and now a daughter! I’m blessed to find you both.”

“Were there other daughters?” asked Radulf.

“There were,” said Marceau, and the joy left his face. “The youngest of my girls was called Marella. She never knew her mother at all, and to my lasting regret, she knew little of me, either. In those days, I was caught up in my grief and turned to other concerns, leaving my daughters in the care of my mother. It didn’t occur to me how much they needed their father until it was too late. Marella was lost. Like Clytie and Morfran’s mother, Melusine, Marella left the sea for love. I don’t know what happened to her, here in your world. Her sisters told me she died at sea some time later. They watched her dive off a ship into the waves at dawn and she became sea foam, but I didn’t want to believe it. I suppose I’ll never know what happened.”

“I know what happened,” said Radulf simply. “I’ve come to tell you.”

Radulf told the story clearly and without drama, sparing neither himself nor Marella, pausing now and then to run his fingers through his hair and grope for words.

Wolf-raven image by Willgard Krause from Pixabay

“…and then I left,” finished Radulf. “I left my wife without a word, and my family, and went out into the world. I’ve been traveling ever since, trying to forget and remember at the same time, trying to understand and hating myself. When I finally heard the story of who Marella was and where she came from, I realized she died because of me. Soon after, I knew I had to come home and try to make amends. I’ve done that now, as best I can. I never thought I might have a chance to speak to her people, though. I met Vasilisa again and she told me about you and I thought I should tell you. I thought you might want to know what had happened. So, I asked her if I could wait with her and speak to you.”

“How did it go for you, making amends?” asked Marceau. Radulf looked at his clasped hands between his knees.

“My father and my wife are dead. Marella is, of course, gone. My mother…well, my mother declines to forgive me.” Radulf looked up and met Marceau’s gaze. “But she did listen to my explanation and she knows I came home to do what I could to make it right. That was the important thing.”

“What will you do now?” asked Marceau.

“I don’t know. For some reason, I didn’t want to leave here, though I wasn’t sure why I stayed. Then I met Vasilisa and I thought I needed to speak with you. Now that I’ve done that, I’m ready to leave. I suppose I’ll go out into the world again and see what turns up.”

“I see.” Marceau turned his gaze to the fire for a few minutes, considering. “You say,” he said thoughtfully, “you heard the story about what really happened from someone. Who told you?”

“Baba Yaga,” said Vasilisa. “She told us at an initiation ritual this spring. Morfran was there, too. She was the Sea Witch.”

“Ah!” said Marceau. “Of course.” He shook his head. “I should have seen that myself. Baba Yaga is a hard teacher. And you two went through an initiation with her?”

They nodded, remembering.

“I salute your courage, children. And your wisdom. Baba Yaga doesn’t waste time with weaklings and fools. My poor Marella!”

Marceau looked into Radulf’s face, tears gleaming on his cheeks. “Radulf, Marella’s death is as much my fault as yours. I was absent in her life. I might have taught her, guided her, been a friend to her in many ways, but I was busy with my own concerns. Can you forgive me?”

Radulf stared at him. “Me forgive you? I ask for your forgiveness, Marceau. I was careless and blind.”

“You were as lost and lonely as she was,” said Marceau. “Neither you nor I can go back and make the story different, Radulf. It’s done. Even had we made different choices, Marella might not. It’s not useful to dwell on what might have been. We have regrets, naturally, but we both learned. If we’d known how to do things differently then, we would have.”

“I never thought of blaming anyone but myself,” said Radulf.

“Forgiveness is an interesting idea,” said Marceau. “Everyone talks of forgiving those who wrong you, but that’s the least important part of it.”

Radulf thought of Maria. “Can we forgive ourselves?” he said in a low voice, asking no one in particular.

“Yes. Do we choose to forgive ourselves? That’s the tricky part. If we withhold forgiveness, we destroy any learning or understanding that might be born out of difficult situations. I’ve made many mistakes in my years. I’ve tried to learn from them. You’re not to blame for Marella’s death. On the contrary, you gave her joy in the last months of her life and because of you she learned what love truly is and behaved accordingly. I’m proud of her — and you.”

Radulf felt tears slide down his cheeks and into his beard. He let them fall, recognizing the sudden relief of a heavy burden carried so long its weight had been invisible to him. He reached out a hand and Marceau met it with his own hard, scarred one and clasped it tightly.

CHAPTER 29

ARTYOM

Artyom had fallen into the habit of caring for Gideon when they camped in the evening. He unhitched the animal, brushed the day’s dust and sweat from his coat, watered him, fed him some grain and made sure he had good grazing.

One evening, when this was done, he found a patch of clover, pulled it up and piled it near the wagon before gathering wood for the fire.

Later, after they’d eaten and sat at their ease while light faded from the sky, Artyom spied Surrender nibbling near the horse. Feeling a fool but determined, he held out a handful of clover to the rabbit, making a clicking, coaxing sound with teeth, tongue and lips.

Dar, observing this, put his flute to his mouth and played a silvery run of melody, inviting and playful. The rabbit sat up, regarding them, jaws moving. He hopped in aimless fashion, indirectly approaching the two men, pausing now and then to feed.

He meandered his way to Artyom, stretching out his neck to take clover from his hand, watching him out of shining black eyes. Dar continued to play the flute, the coaxing melody having shifted into an old ballad, like a man talking to himself or writing in a journal and taking no notice of anyone else.

Artyom never forgot those moments. Green bone and silver music cupped the evening. The sound of Gideon grazing came clearly, and the quiet sounds of the fire. Cooling air felt soft on his face and forearms. There was no discomfort, no feeling of want. What was present was enough. The rabbit pulled the last of the clover from his hand and Artyom thought of trying to coax it under the wagon to spend the night safely.

The piping stopped abruptly. He sensed sudden movement from above, soundless and swift. Surrender crouched and froze, ears laid back, eyes wide with fear. The owl struck. The rabbit screamed, a terrible, thin shocking sound. Artyom heard a scuffle, a flurry of wings within an arm’s reach, and both owl and rabbit were gone. A shadowy form flew low among the trees.

Artyom was wordless with shock.

Dar let out the breath he’d been holding. “Surrender,” he said sadly to himself.

Artyom lay awake a long time, listening to Dar tend the fire and then lie down in his own blankets. The fire burned and diminished and still he lay, thinking of ghosts and demons, yes and no, and wretched dogs with cans tied to their tails.

***

“How do we recognize the right thing to do?” Artyom asked Dar the next day. “I know what’s expected of me. I know what the rules and traditions say about what to choose and how to act. But those don’t shape a life I recognize as my own. How do I decide between yes and no?”

“I advise you to never follow rules,” said Dar carelessly. “I’ve told you before, always exercise your power to cheat. Who makes the rules? And who told them they could? Why do we think we can tell each other what to do? Pah!” He spat and wiped his mouth.

“But that’s not right, either,” said Artyom. “Saying no to rules just because they’re rules is as bad as saying yes for the same reason. There’s nothing wise or effective about rebellion for the sake of rebellion! Come on, man, I want to discuss this. How do we decide if no or yes is appropriate?”

Dar looked at him with amused irritation. “Well, if you’re going to ask me to be an adult about it…”

“Oh, stop posing,” said Artyom, feeling cross. “I want to understand this.”

Dar cocked an eyebrow, sat up straighter and gathered the reins together, which had been dropping out of his relaxed hands, Gideon having no real need of guidance.

“Very well. How do we judge if yes or no is appropriate? It’s easy. How does it feel after you’ve chosen? How did the choice work out for you?”

“But by then it’s too late if you made the wrong choice! You’ve already done it!”

“My dear man, perfection isn’t a goal! What do you want, a recipe? You simply choose yes or no, experience the consequences, and take that experience to the next choice. There isn’t any right or wrong, only whatever happens next. Are the consequences positive and effective or not?”

“Effective. Who decides that?”

“You. We’re talking about your life. If rule, expectation or consequence doesn’t work for you in your life, then it’s not effective for you.”

“It might be for someone else.”

“It might be, but that’s not your business. It doesn’t work for you. That’s enough to know. It’s the only place where you have power. And it changes, mind you. You might begin with choices that work well for you and then they stop working and you have to try something new.”

“Like Abu Kasem.”

“Exactly like him.”

Artyom scowled down at his boots. “It’s so messy,” he said resentfully.

Dar laughed. “It is that,” he agreed. “All the best things in life are messy, haven’t you noticed?” and he launched into a series of erotic stories he’d collected. For a time Artyom thought of nothing but the mysteries of female flesh.

It was a night of full moon when they talked about Surrender for the first time since he’d been killed, although Artyom often thought of him. Dar had been playing his flute and it seemed to Artyom the music drew the silver globe of Noola up from the horizon with threads of green fire. For a time after Dar laid the flute aside, they remained quiet, watching Noola dwindle as she climbed higher. The night filled with silver-edged shadows.

“Do you think Surrender regretted anything at the end?” Artyom asked.

“No,” said Dar at once. “He knew the inevitabilities of life. He accepted them. All he could choose was how to live.”

“He chose the yes,” said Artyom.

“I think many people are afraid to die,” mused Dar, “but more are afraid to live. That’s why they say no automatically. He wasn’t like that.”

He threw another stick on the fire and stretched out his legs, sighing. “Tomorrow you drive for a while and I’ll walk. I’ve been sitting too much. My legs are restless.”

“Whatever you like,” said Artyom absently, his eyes on Noola.

“Do you see the hare?”

“Where?” asked Artyom sharply, sitting up and looking around the moonlight splashed camp.

“In Noola. In some places, they say there’s a hare in the moon. I know a story about it. We’ll share a story in honor of Surrender, shall we?”

“Long ago, naked Noola looked down into a forest clearing. A brown hare whose young had long since grown nibbled a sliver of bark in the shadow of a rock.

Suddenly, the hare raised her ears, listening. Her whiskers twitched as she scented the air.

The hare left the clearing and moved through the trees, following the sound of whimpering.

She came onto the moon-tarnished plain. A mother jackal lay bleeding from a wound in her haunch under a Bodhi tree. Two small pups nosed around her, crying hungrily. The jackal panted and groaned.

‘You’re hurt, my friend,’ said the hare.

‘Why do you call me friend? I would kill and eat you if I could.’

‘Does that mean we aren’t friends?” inquired the hare. ‘I too am a mother.’

‘I am hurt. A man tried to kill me. Now I can’t hunt and my children will die.’

Noola shone blankly above them, dappling the ground with heart-shaped shadows from the tree’s leaves.

The hare looked kindly at the jackal.

‘Your children need not die. Do me the honor of eating me so you can feed them. I’m not young but you won’t mind if I’m tough.’

With that, the hare leapt straight into the jackal’s jaws.

The jackal caught the hare, white teeth gleaming. She leapt to her feet and flung the limp body of the hare into the night sky.

The hare whirled, wind in her velvet ears, paws open in surrender.

Far below, she heard the jackal call, ‘A creature as kind as you shall not die! Let all the world look up at night and see the Hare-in-the-Moon, and remember her compassion.’

A chorus of barks and howls rose from the moon-washed plain.

And so Noola, to this day, glows around the figure of the kindly hare. Those in despair find hope and encouragement when they see her there.”

“I can’t see a hare there,” said Artyom. He lay on his back with his hands under his head, looking up.

“It’s like making pictures with clouds. Sometimes I can’t see anything in Noola, not a man, not green cheese, not a hare. But sometimes I can see everything up there, every dream, every fey fancy.”

“She was rewarded for her compassion.”

“So the story goes. We wanderers under her light are also rewarded for her compassion. I like to think of that when I’m out driving late under the full moon. I think of compassion as a circle now, a big silver circle, complete and unbroken. I don’t think of myself as a compassionate man. I’m too impatient. But I know people with a wonderful deep well of it.”

“Me, too. I think Kunik is like that.” Artyom rarely referred to the initiation but he said Kunik’s name without hesitation in the silvery trickle of light.

“I think you’re right. Part of what was important for him to learn was being compassionate with himself. If compassion doesn’t include oneself, the circle is broken.”

“Humph,” said Artyom. Dar put his flute to his lips and Artyom imagined he played the ethereal light, Noola’s silver globe and the spangled dark night. He stopped playing after a time and Artyom pictured the last notes of music flying up to join the stars, perhaps seeds of new stars. Such thoughts made him feel vaguely womanish and ashamed.

“Compassion is larger than kindness to oneself and others, though,” he said, returning doggedly to more solid ground.

“Yes?” Dar said.

“The hare…she had compassion for everything in the story. The night, Noola, the jackals and herself, too. She held it so…tenderly. She didn’t mind sacrificing herself because it was somehow what had to be, what everything else in the story needed.”

“You express it well. It’s hard to put words to it, isn’t it? It takes us back again to recognizing the right thing, that which must be done, the choice that serves all in the moment.”

“Acceptance,” said Artyom.

“Oh, yes, that too. Another important piece. Acceptance and compassion for what is and what must be, ourselves included.”

“Surrender,” said Artyom with certainty.

“Does that help you feel better, seeing it clearly?”

“It does. It gives his death meaning. And his life, too.”

Dar began to play his flute again.

***

Noola had waned to three quarters when the Firebird returned.

Artyom woke one morning from a confused dream of blood and fighting. He rolled over, stretched, and opened his eyes. The sky showed a tender dawn color and the Firebird perched in the tree under which he lay, his head under his wing.

Artyom lay looking up at him. The long golden tail feathers trembled slightly as the Firebird breathed in sleep. The wings were darker flames of smoky red and orange, tipped with feathers of copper and gold. He looked, as always, too beautiful to be real.

An hour later he sat in the tree and preened, carefully tweaking every feather into place, paying no attention to either of the men as they went about their morning routine.

Artyom took time to gather his belongings, which had slowly spread into the cart or been mixed up with Dar’s gear, and packed more carefully than he had in weeks, rolling his bedroll tightly and tying everything together for easy carrying.

He and Dar didn’t speak about the change they both felt, but Artyom was conscious of a sad feeling of farewell as he fed Gideon and smoothed his coat, ate breakfast, and cleaned the pots and pans.

When the fire was buried in earth, the cart packed, Gideon harnessed and Artyom’s pack on his back, the two men looked at one another and then up at the Firebird.

“Where to?” Artyom asked at Dar.

“My road is that way.” Dar pointed.

“Let’s go, then,” said Artyom, settling his pack more comfortably. Dar sprang into the seat and picked up the reins and Artyom fell into step alongside the front left wheel in his usual place.

With a rustle of feathers, the Firebird landed on Artyom’s shoulder. It felt surprisingly heavy, landing with a thump. It gripped tightly and Artyom winced.

“He’s heavier than he looks,” he said to Dar.

“I’ll take your word for it,” said Dar with a grin.

“I hate to leave you.”

“Maybe you won’t need to. Let’s try, anyway.” He chirruped to Gideon and slapped the reins gently. The horse stepped forward.

The Firebird tightened his grip. Artyom didn’t move.

“No,” he said to Dar. “I’m not to go with you.”

The Firebird took off heavily, brushing the side of Artyom’s face with a wing. It perched in a tree, staring at Artyom out of shining black eyes.

“I’m sorry to part,” said Dar. “Go well, my friend.”

Artyom felt a lump in his throat. “Goodbye, Dar. Thank you. Perhaps we’ll meet again.”

As he followed the Firebird through the trees, the sound of the horse and cart and Dar’s merry whistle died away behind him.

The Firebird took him across country. They crossed a road or a track from time to time, but Artyom thought they traveled as the crow flies and it was slower going than if he’d had an open road or even a path or trail to walk on. He didn’t mind. He missed Dar’s companionship but his mind was pleasantly occupied with new ideas. He found himself whistling, quietly content, and felt a kind of amazed gratitude. His irritation and anger had fallen away. He could almost imagine his grandfather, striding along beside him, naming trees and forest plants, pointing out birds and animal tracks. His child self ran ahead or behind, weaving among trees, splashing in creeks and streams, exploring and discovering. He had no feeling of wanting to get away from either of them.

He accepted each day as it came, not thinking much about where the Firebird took him, or why. For the first time, he discovered the simple peace of surrendering to what he needed to do in the moment without thought of the future.

They came over a low forested ridge and spent several hours descending gently into a wide river valley. It was the biggest waterway they’d come to. Artyom had no more than glimpses of it, but he could smell water and the geography told him water had been running here a long time. As they drew closer, he could hear it. He lengthened his stride, eager to come to it. The Firebird was taking him through a thin forest of birch when he heard a woman scream.

It was completely unexpected and before his ears had registered the sound his heart began to hammer and his breath came short. The Firebird darted through the trees toward the sound and Artyom began to run heavily in the same direction.

Another scream tore through the quiet afternoon, a mingling of terror and despair. Artyom, without pausing, flung off his pack. He burst out of the trees, branches whipping his face, onto a track running along the river. A large man in a shapeless assortment of dark ragged clothing struggled with a woman. His broad back hid most of her from Artyom’s view, but he had an impression of a long plait of wheat brown hair bound with a gleam of gold. The Firebird shot between the faces of the two like a golden beam of light, faster than thought, but the clenched bodies were not divided. The woman breathed in ragged gasps as she fought. The man muttered, cursing and fumbling with one hand at his crotch. With the other he took the woman brutally by the neck and flung her onto the ground. She fell hard, making a sound like the dry snap of a branch, and lay still in a boneless sprawl. The man fell onto his knees over her, tearing at her clothing.

Artyom, as soon as he came into sight of the struggling pair, left the shock and chaos of panic and entered the silent, icy killing room many soldiers carry within themselves. Fear, disbelief, doubt, were suspended. There was only the stark choice between kill or be killed. His grandfather’s knife was in his hand and he had a moment to be glad of the hours spent honing and cleaning the blade.

He ran across the track, his heavy body light and silent. His left hand grasped a handful of greasy, clotted hair. He jerked the head back and away from the face beneath it, the empty face, open eyed, of Jenny. His eyes saw, his brain registered, but his hands went on with their work, with what must be, with what the story demanded.

His right hand, holding the knife, passed under the exposed throat. He felt the thick flesh and muscle of that living column under the blade and used all his strength and skill to cut into it. Jenny’s face and eyes disappeared under a gush of red blood. The man let out a horrible, gurgling, gasping cry of surprise and rage and heaved under Artyom, catching him by surprise with his strength. Artyom lost his grip on the knife and they fell sideways. The iron smell of blood was in his mouth and nose and he felt warm spray on his face. The man reached, groping, with one hand, still making the choked sounds Artyom recognized as final breaths, and then the hand, clenched around a stone, came at him like a piston and a terrible crunching blow caught the side of his head. The bone of his skull broke like an eggshell under it. The hand fell away.

For a moment Artyom drifted in a warm fog, feeling sleepy and peaceful. When he came back to the track and haze of blood, he noticed the silence. There was something important about silence. He groped in his mind for what it was… Something heavy pinned him uncomfortably to the ground and he flung it away. A thick arm, sticky with blood.

Ah. That was it. It was silent because the man was dead. Not silent, though. He could hear the river flowing nearby, clean and fresh. It would be clear and tea-colored over rocks. Jenny was dead, too. He’d heard the snap of her neck and seen her empty face before a wave of blood flowed over it, filling her open eyes…

With a great effort, he sat up. The glare of sunlight stabbed at his eyes, flickering and painful. He couldn’t see well. He wiped roughly at his face with his sleeve. Jenny shouldn’t lie with her killer. He must drag the man’s body away.

With some difficulty, he struggled to his feet. He felt unsteady and his vision was definitely queer. He bent carefully over, swaying, and picked up the man’s feet. He was a big man, larger than Artyom himself, but Artyom was hardened by weeks of walking, on top of his innate ox-like strength. He kept his eyes averted from the gaping neck wound, got a good grip on the thick ankles, and heaved with all his strength. The body slid across the grass and Artyom dragged it slowly around a knot of bushes, out of sight from where Jenny lay.

He thought he would rest, lie down for a minute and gather himself. He staggered back to where she lay and tried to smooth down her clothing. His hands felt numb and he couldn’t do much of a job, but he fumbled at her leggings and tunic, straightening them and covering bared skin.

He didn’t want to look at her again. After a rest, he’d wash the blood from her face and hair. He lay down carefully next to her, closing his eyes against the jabbing green and gold of the summer day. The sound of water was cool and soothing. He’d listen to that and rest, maybe sleep for a few minutes. He put an arm protectively over Jenny so she’d know he was there and feel safe.

He thought, I’m not a ruler. I’m a soldier, and felt a burst of joy. He smiled as he drifted away to the sound of flowing water.

RADULF

Radulf fingered the wolf’s eye in his pocket. He wondered if the amber eye was open as he passed his finger over the smooth round sphere. It made him cringe, thinking of touching an open eye, disembodied or not. He avoided doing so when he could see it, even knowing he must be touching the open eye often when his fingers sought its hidden shape during the day.

It had been days since he’d left Vasilisa with Marceau on Clytie’s beach, where the heavy sunflower heads swelled and the big flat rock sat rooted in the surf. He’d intended to stay longer, enjoying Vasilisa’s companionship and Marceau’s wisdom and warmth, until the day of the storm.

One morning, as he, Vasilisa and Marceau waited for Irvin and the children to appear for a swim, Radulf had passed by the fiery skull, whose eye sockets were cool and blank. He heard a sound like a muted hiccup and something shot out of the grinning mouth. Automatically, Radulf reached out and caught it. He thought he knew what it was — what it must be — even before he opened his hand to look. He rolled it in his palm and the glowing amber wolf’s eye he’d seen in his dream looked up at the three faces bent over it.

Vasilisa exclaimed in surprise and took an involuntary step back. “What is it?”

“I dreamt this,” said Radulf, rolling the heavy round marble in his hand. “Remember, ‘Lisa?” He’d fallen easily into the affectionate nickname Marceau had given her the first night.

“The one-eyed wolf,” she said. “And Odin told me to watch for the Sea Wolf.”

“The Sea Wolf?” said Marceau. “Ah, I see.” He looked searchingly at Radulf. “I didn’t know of this.”

“It didn’t seem important,” said Radulf. “I’ve had dreams of wolves. One was caught in a trap and gnawed off its leg to escape. Another’s eye popped out, an amber eye like this one.” He closed his fingers lightly over the eye for a moment, then opened them again, not liking to block the thing’s vision. “In one dream, I swam in the sea. I was the wolf, and one of my legs was chewed off. Then I met Vasilisa, and she said Odin told her to watch for the Sea Wolf. She asked him what it meant but he only said not to fear it.”

“When we met here on the beach, he told me about the dreams,” said Vasilisa. “I remembered what Odin said about a Sea Wolf. What does it mean, Father?”

“’Dulf! ‘Lisa!”

They turned and watched Clarissa pulling herself up the shore. Christopher bobbed in the surf near the flat rock.

Marceau picked the child up. She wound her arms around his neck and gave him a loud wet kiss.

“We’re here! We’re here! Let’s swim!”

“Where’s your father?”

“There!” She wriggled in his arms and pointed. Beyond the breakers, Irvin raised a hand in greeting.

Radulf carefully wrapped the eye in the sleeve of his discarded shirt and they spent the morning swimming. At midday, sun dazzled, chilled and waterlogged, Radulf and Vasilisa persuaded the others to come ashore and eat a lunch of fresh-caught fish.

Marceau had told the children the story of Clytie, not mentioning his relationship to her but making it a children’s story of adventure and wonder. Consequently, they developed a fascination with the budding patch of sunflowers and checked on them regularly, longing to see them bloom. Vasilisa told them about peasant children making sunflower houses and Christopher and Clarissa were enchanted, endlessly debating the best place to do this when the flowers bloomed.

Radulf took charge of the cooking, with Marceau’s help, who was surprisingly knowledgeable and skilled in the use of different kinds of seaweed and other flavoring harvested from the sea. Irvin tended the fire. He never tired of watching the bright flames consume the wood.

“We were talking of Sea Wolves when you came,” said Marceau, squatting over the sizzling frying pan. He stabbed at a fish with a fork and turned it over.

“I always loved those tales,” said Irvin.

“Tell us,” encouraged Vasilisa. “I’ve never heard of a Sea Wolf. What are they?”

“I’ve never seen one,” said Irvin. “The stories say Odin originally bred them for the Wild Hunt. He has wolves, you know. They lope across the sky at the heels of his horse when the year dies and winds groan in the gale. But Odin also rides the wind that rouses white horses and turns waves from fields of violet to rolling mountains of grey, and the wind screams in a voice only the sea knows. The Sea Wolves, it’s said, were bred to run before that wind, to snap at the heels of the white horses and break the tops of the towering grey mountains into steel drops of spume and spray. Their eyes are amber, their teeth pearl and their tongues coral. Now Poseidon breeds them.”

“They sound fearsome — and beautiful,” said Vasilisa. “I do love the way you talk about things, Irvin. It always sounds like poetry!”

He smiled, rather shyly. “I love the old stories,” he said. “The words stay in my mind and make pictures and I take them out and look at them over and over.”

“Talented fellow,” remarked Marceau. “You’ve made my green and gold Clytie’s story beautiful.”

Radulf thought he wouldn’t be surprised if Irvin and the children returned with Marceau. They’d become good friends and the children already looked upon the older man as a grandfather.

“All wolves are consummate survivors,” said Marceau. “They’re predators with a complex social structure within their packs. They choose to work with Odin and a few others. She of the crossroads, Hecate, has a wolf. Poseidon loves them. But wolves are powerfully wild. They can’t be tamed or compelled. They live by their own instincts.”

Radulf unwrapped the eye and handed it to Irvin, who drew in his breath at the open eye and examined it respectfully while Radulf told him how it had appeared.

“How does it happen that fellow had a Sea Wolf’s eye in his mouth?” asked Irvin, nodding at the fiery skull perched on its stick in the sun, looking entirely deceased.

“I think I know,” said Vasilisa. “I’ve been remembering the night I met Odin. He made a funny kind of gesture in front of the fiery skull. It was lit. He didn’t touch it, but passed his hand in front of it as though he caressed it. I think he put the eye in then.”

“A one-eyed Sea Wolf. A one-eyed god of wind and storm,” said Irvin thoughtfully.

“But what am I supposed to do with it?” asked Radulf. “What’s it for?”

“Eyes are for seeing,” mused Vasilisa. “Like the fiery skull.”

“I’m reminded of my nephew Morfran,” said Marceau. “When I first met him, he was seeking clarity. He wanted to see himself and the world with truth. That desire led him on a long journey.”

“He was at the initiation, but we didn’t get to know one another. Did he find what he was looking for?” asked Radulf.

“Yes. In a manner of speaking. Seeing things clearly is a daily practice, not a destination. Morfran found a partner and a community committed to authenticity and clear seeing, inward and outward.” He turned his deep-set grey eyes to Radulf. “What are you seeking, my friend?”

Radulf thought. “I’m not sure,” he said at length. “When I came back home, I sought forgiveness. I thought I needed it from others, but now I think maybe I needed it most from myself. Then I met you, Marceau, and your forgiveness made up for all I couldn’t get from others. In my time here I’ve found self-forgiveness, and now I’m at peace. I feel like an exile from my family and birth place, but I’ve found unexpected friendship lately, and that’s made me realize how lonely I’ve been. I never really had friends before. Maybe what I want now is to find a place to be at home with friends. I want to belong somewhere.”

“They say Odin collects unspoken prayers of the heart,” said Irvin dreamily, looking into the fire’s depths. He held the eye gently in his closed hand. “The prayers possess no words to anchor them to another ear, so they float in the wind until a gale flings them into the arms of the Wild Hunt, along with lost souls — and marbles, of course! Perhaps your heart whispered its desire to the wind and Odin heard and gave you the eye to help you find your way.”

They remained silent, considering that.

“But, how do I use it?” asked Radulf. He looked helplessly at Vasilisa.

She frowned. “Eyes,” she said, groping. “How do eyes work?”

“They open and shut,” said Marceau. “They see and they don’t see.”

“Yes,” said Vasilisa. “Eyes can be confused, can’t they? Not only confused, they can be disabled. We can say — no, I won’t see that. I don’t want to know. I won’t look.”

“But what’s seen can’t be unseen,” said Marceau. “Morfran learned that. Once we’ve clearly seen something, it’s too late. We might try to forget, but we can’t. Sooner or later, we must come to terms with it.”

“Eyes can be blind,” offered Irvin. “They can fail to function. Or they might function properly but we don’t understand what we’re seeing. We think it’s something else.” He handed the eye back to Radulf.

“Back to confusion,” said Vasilisa. “But confusion works in both directions. I mean, our eyes can be confused as we look out of them, but people who look at us from the outside might also be confused about what they see.”

“For that matter, we may see clearly outward and have poor vision when it comes to seeing ourselves,” put in Irvin. “Radulf and I talked about that before.”

“I’m more and more confused,” said Radulf. “I never realized how complex the idea of seeing is.” He looked down at the eye in the palm of his hand. It looked sideways, out to sea.

“Oh, Radulf!” said Vasilisa. “Sea Wolf! Don’t you see?” She shook her head. “There it is again. It’s a joke, a play on words. Sea Wolf — a creature of the sea and see, wolf. See with your eye.”

Radulf opened his fingers and let the marble lie on his palm. He looked down at it. “sea wolf,” he murmured to himself. “See, Wolf.”

“Don’t over think it,” advised Marceau. “Clearly Odin meant for you to keep it. You’ll understand why in time.”

***

A storm came out of the eastern sky over the sea. The morning had been hot and sultry, the air heavy with moisture and stagnant without the usual breeze off the water. After noon clouds gathered, towering white mountains changing from the color of whipped cream to blooming bruises on the skin of sky. The breeze stiffened to wind, abrupt, dank and cold. The water turned sullen pewter and heaved greasily.

Vasilisa and Radulf wedged their belongings between rocks well above tide line. Marceau, Irvin and the children were anxious to be off, safe away in deep water, but they didn’t like to leave the other two exposed to that sky.

“Go!” shouted Radulf, above the rising wind. “We’ll be all right! It’s only a summer storm! Get the children to safety!”

“Lie flat between the rocks!” bellowed Marceau. “Let it pass over you!”

“Go!” shouted Radulf again. “Look!” He pointed out to sea. The sky showed nearly black and water rose in eerie dark green mountains.

Marceau pulled Clarissa onto his back. She wrapped her arms around him. Christopher clung to Irvin and the two mermen dove into the side of an oncoming wave, veined with dirty foam.

Radulf took Vasilisa by the arm and they ran together, fighting wind and feeling a spray of sand and the first hard raindrops in their faces. They ran beyond the fire ring and the sunflowers to where a few large rocks scattered at the base of the bluff.

“Look!” Vasilisa paused, pointing up to the top of the bluff.

Radulf pushed his hair out of his eyes and followed her pointing finger.

A man stood on the top of the bluff, a cloak rippling around him like wings. His arms were outstretched, as though welcoming the storm. His raised his face to the sky.

“It’s Odin!” shouted Vasilisa.

Another shape, looking like a tattered grey cloud, flowed and streamed around Odin’s legs and feet. Radulf saw the lean body, upright ears and tail, every line of the wolf expressing excitement and primitive delight in the storm.

The rain began to come in sheets. Radulf dragged Vasilisa down between the rocks against the side of the bluff. They huddled together.

Vasilisa drew up her knees. Radulf put an arm around her, pulling her close for warmth, and wiped wet hair, both his and hers, off his face.

The wind howled and groaned. Rain fell in a solid wall. Through the rocks they could see waves throwing themselves onto the beach.

Vasilisa tensed in the circle of his arm. He searched for what had caught her attention. A wave hurled itself onto the shingle, hissing and foaming. He looked across the top of the waves, ridge after ridge of heaving greasy green and iron, and watched a wolf pack, flying before the wind, bounding through the tumult of water and sky. He strained to see clearly, but grey fur blended with grey wave and charcoal sky and water blurred everything. He couldn’t be sure he saw them at all, except Vasilisa clearly did, too. For a moment, he couldn’t tell what direction they moved, but another wave crashed onto the stones and he saw the startling red of lolling tongues and caught a gleam of white teeth. He remembered Irvin’s voice, saying, “Their eyes are amber, their teeth pearl and their tongues coral.”

They flowed onto the shingle and were met by a single grey shape, swift and lithe. They circled, leaping aside from waves, dancing in foam, white teeth bared, tails stiff and ears laid back. Long wet muzzles snarled and eyes glared with cold amber fire.

Radulf hardly breathed. He searched among the creatures for one with a missing foreleg or a missing eye, but every animal he saw looked fit and strong, unblemished. He was so caught up in the primitive beauty of the wolves’ meeting on the edge of land and sea he was slow to realize the rain dwindled. He could hear Vasilisa’s quick breathing next to him. The roar of the storm had quieted.

As though realizing this, the sea wolves broke out of their circling clump and swirled like a bedraggled grey feather, fanning out, bounding down the shingle and up the sides of the waves, melting out to sea, disappearing, even as Radulf strained to look, into spray and ragged clouds and the slowing wings of wind.

One wolf remained. It stood looking out at the waves, then trotted toward the fire ring and out of sight.

Radulf let out his breath. Vasilisa reached down and took his cold hand in hers.

It seemed to be hours later when they stumbled out of their cramped shelter, but Radulf realized the storm had lasted less than an hour. He felt as dazed as though he’d crouched under it all night. He could already see the sun behind the clouds. Wild waves had washed the shore line clean, reaching nearly to the fire ring and sweeping away their stack of firewood. The waves remained high and the water choppy, but already the ominous mountains of water had diminished to mere hills. A fresh breeze blew stiffly. Vasilisa shook out their bedding and draped it over rocks, weighting it down with smaller stones to keep it from flying away.

They were searching for dry driftwood when Marceau shouted and waved from the surf. The sun came back out.

Irvin re-laid the fire while the children excitedly told Vasilisa and Radulf about the storm. Having told the story, they wandered off to check on their sunflower tent. “Maybe the storm made them bloom!”

Marceau had just asked how Vasilisa and Radulf had fared when Christopher and Clarissa returned, pulling themselves close to Irvin.

“What is it?” he asked.

“It’s an animal,” said Christopher.

Radulf rose and strode to the patch of flowers. A wolf lay among the stems, licking at its drying grey coat. It paused in its ablutions and looked at him out of golden eyes. Two eyes, Radulf noted automatically. Radulf backed away and the wolf, looking completely relaxed, stretched out a back leg and returned to its grooming.

Vasilisa looked up at him when he reappeared beside the fire and cocked an eyebrow. He nodded at her, wordless.

Irvin coaxed the fire into life with a few pieces of dry wood Vasilisa had found sheltered under a rock. Radulf helped him while Vasilisa told what they’d seen during the storm. The children listened with wide eyes.

“That’s not fair!” said Clarissa. She flushed with annoyance. “I’ve never seen a sea wolf and I live in the sea!”

“Well, now you’ve seen a land wolf,” said Irvin pacifically. “And you don’t even live on the land!”

Clarissa pouted.

“Do you think Odin is still near, too?” asked Marceau.

“I don’t know,” said Radulf. “Maybe he was only here for the storm.”

“Why didn’t the wolf stay with him, then?”

Radulf shook his head. He looked into the fire, feeling Vasilisa’s gaze.

“Tell it again,” demanded Clarissa, “about the sea wolves.”

Obligingly, Vasilisa told it again, the others joining in with questions and comments, and Radulf retreated into his own thoughts.

Later, after the others were gone and they were alone, he and Vasilisa stood outside the sunflower patch. The wolf lay curled up, asleep.

“Do you think it’s for you?” she asked.

“Yes. I think it’s a guide.”

She reached down and took his hand. “I’ll miss you.”

Two days later, Radulf stood in the same place, packed and ready for the road. The wolf watched him approach, rose, stretched like a cat, and began to move inland. Radulf turned a last time and waved at Vasilisa, put his back to the sea and followed the wolf.

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.

Image by Susanne Jutzeler, Schweiz 🇨🇭 💕Thanks for Likesa from Pixabay

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?”

Radulf didn’t like the uneasy feeling of the village. It was the kind of summer day when people should be cheerfully at work in field, garden and shop. It was time for the noonday meal but no laughing groups took their ease and exchanged talk. Here and there two or three people spoke with their heads together, every face serious and strained. He could feel eyes on his back as he and Dar rattled along the main street in the cart, but no one hailed them or approached. In other towns they’d passed through they’d been followed by a crowd of children and welcoming smiles on every side. The arrival of a peddler in town was a treat. Not only did he bring essentials like pots, lamps, tools and such, but also small luxuries, news and gossip.

“This place has changed,” said Dar in a low voice, looking around. The reins hung loose in his hands.

“What’s wrong, do you think?”

“No idea. But we’ll probably hear about it in time. I don’t want to stay here in town, though. Let’s find a place to camp nearby.”

“The White Stag headed in that direction before we came into town,” said Radulf, gesturing.

As they traveled, the stag, for the most part, had stayed off the roads and out of sight. Now and then they glimpsed him on either side or ahead, and he always appeared in the evenings where they camped.

Dar bumped through the village and took a track into the trees. It wound through the forest, passing by a couple of dilapidated huts. The White Stag materialized out of the woods as though he’d been waiting for them and walked regally ahead of the horse, leading the way.

Radulf began to hear a loud chorus of frogs. They rolled out of the trees into a small homestead. Radulf heard a river. They discovered a cluster of trees beyond the house like a little orchard, a wooden henhouse with a patched fence and a weedy garden. The front door wasn’t quite closed. The place had an unmistakable air of abandonment, but recently, Radulf thought, looking around. The garden was laid out in careful rows, plants staked and trellised lovingly. By the end of summer, it would be seriously overgrown, but at this point it only needed a good day of weeding.

“Do you know this place?” Radulf asked Dar.

The peddler had a faraway look, his gaze traveling around the clearing nestled in the curve of river.

“I’m not sure,” said Dar absently. He dropped the reins and leapt to the ground.

Radulf stood by Gideon’s shoulder and watched Dar prowl around the yard. The White Stag had disappeared. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the eye. It lay in his palm, wide open and fierce. It was the first time it had been open in many days. There was something to see here, then.

Radulf explored the orchard. The grass had been mown at least once and was starred with white chamomile and clover. The trees looked healthy and well pruned. Mushrooms grew in hollows, clusters of creamy pink and brown.

He peered in a window next to the back door.

He looked into a small, neat kitchen. A few dishes lay drying next to the sink. The counters and table were clean.

He tried the door. It opened easily.

Radulf walked through the house, cat footed. Just inside the front door there’d been a disturbance. A small table lay on its side with a broken leg. Something had spilled on the floor and stained it. Hanks of scattered fiber lay on a rag rug next to an overturned basket.

Dar pushed the front door open.

“Look at this,” said Radulf, gesturing.

The two of them stood surveying the entry. Radulf found a large loom in the room beyond. A chair stood in front of the fireplace and a pile of cushions lay on a rug in front of the hearth. There was no room for more.

Radulf still had the eye in his hand. He opened his fingers and showed the open eye to Dar.

“What do you think happened here?” he asked, low voiced.

“Something bad,” said Dar briefly. “Can’t you feel it?”

Radulf could feel it. He left the doorway and stood in the sun. The river embraced the clearing. Just beyond the orchard it spread out and made a boggy place where reeds grew. It was a lovely clear summer day, birds singing, but Radulf felt cold.

“Are we going to stop here?”

Dar looked around. “Where’s the stag?”

“I don’t know. Disappeared when we pulled in.”

“I think we’d better stay here, yes, but not in the house.”

“No,” agreed Radulf soberly. He began to unhitch Gideon.

Neither of them entered the house again that afternoon. Dar shut the door firmly and they busied themselves making camp. The water in the well proved clear and sweet. They gathered firewood. Somewhat hesitantly, they picked greens and peas from the garden. Dar discovered the remains of four chickens in the chicken coop. It had been recently repaired. The water pan was quite dry. No way in, even for a weasel or a fox, and no way out for the hapless fowl.

The White Stag didn’t make an appearance that night. They ate and sat silently by the fire for some time before rolling themselves in blankets and going to sleep. The sound of the frogs followed Radulf down into dreams.

The next morning, they returned to the village square. Radulf knew the routine by now. They found a comfortable place under a tree and opened up the cart, propping up counters and displaying wares.

The children came first in search of sticks of candy and toys. Word had gone around the day before when they drove through town, and soon people made their way to the cart from every direction.

By late afternoon there were no more customers and they packed up and returned to their camp.

In the long summer evening, they lay in the orchard grass and Dar told Radulf about Juliana and Morfran.

“And you think this is her place?”

“I’m sure of it. Morfran described it exactly and it feels like Juliana, somehow. I didn’t know she wove, but when I met her she hadn’t found herself yet. She was still waiting.”

“In the village, they talked about cloth but I only heard a word here and there.”

“I had the story from a housewife. These people believe they’ve been chosen for special blessings. It seems mysterious gifts of cloth appear in time for births, deaths and weddings. A few weeks ago, a young couple married and didn’t receive a set of linen bridal sheets. That was the first. An old grandmother died and no shroud was forthcoming. Now the villagers are afraid they’ve displeased God in some way, and every man looks at his neighbor with suspicion and fear.”

“That accounts for the bad atmosphere,” said Radulf.

“It does,” agreed Dar.

“You think maybe Juliana was the weaver?”

“I wonder. Think of the shawl.”

They’d found a length of cloth draped over the chair by the hearth. It was so obviously an adornment they assumed it was a shawl. On a background of luminescent creamy white were woven two contrasting colors of purple, one light violet and the other the bruised purple of a summer storm. The darker color looked sinister to Radulf, like a threat. The lighter violet, though, reminded him of a thread of music, mocking and haunting but not ominous. It was a strange pairing, disturbing and jarring. The border pattern was pink and shades of brown and green.

“So, how’d they get the idea the linen came from God? Why didn’t she give it to them openly — or better yet, sell it?”

“Why was she living here, and not in town?” Dar asked.

Radulf thought. “Would she go regularly to church, dress soberly and keep her hair covered?”

Dar smiled. “I don’t think so. She was pretty beaten down when I met her, but she loved color and texture. In the sun, her hair was a mixture of gold and silver. It was short then. Morfran noticed her hair, too. When he met her, she wore it long and he said he’d never seen anything like it. Silvery gold, he said.”

“Every woman I saw today had her hair covered.”

“Yes, I noticed that too. Maybe she didn’t want to live in the village but wanted to be near for the market.” Dar frowned. “As you say, though, why not sell the cloth openly?”

“Perhaps she did but she liked giving anonymous gifts?”

Dar shook his head. “Are they such fools, then, that they didn’t notice it was the same work? What kind of people assume they’re God’s favorites? It’s either very childish or very arrogant, I’m not sure which.”

“It’s dangerous,” said Radulf shortly. He stood and wandered along the river bank, turning it all over in his mind. Behind him, Dar began to play his flute. Radulf walked along the river, past the orchard, until thick growth barred his way. He turned around and retraced his steps. The ground began to feel spongy at the edge of the bog. Judging from the evening concert, hundreds of frogs dwelt among the reeds, but he couldn’t see even one.

The sun slid behind thin clouds. The muted light made a patch of reeds look silver. Radulf, listening to Dar’s flute, idly watched them turn and sway.

Suddenly he realized there was no breeze. The evening was quite still, but the reeds stirred. He stiffened, staring.

Dar stopped playing. “What is it?”

“Come here.”

Dar came to stand at his shoulder. “See that patch of reeds that look different from the rest?”

“I see them.”

“Play again, and watch.”

Dar put the flute to his lips. The reeds stirred. Dar stopped playing.

“Are we dreaming?” Radulf asked uncertainly.

“No. Look,” sad Dar, gesturing.

The White Stag waded across the bog, head raised alertly, balancing the weight of antlers. He stood in the patch of reeds, and when he turned his gaze on them, Radulf saw that he wept.

Radulf sloshed across the bog and laid a comforting hand on the stag’s neck. “What is it?”

The stag lowered his head, tears falling down his muzzle into the bog.

“The ground’s been disturbed,” said Dar, who’d followed Radulf.

Under the stag the ground had been churned up into ankle-deep mud. Broken and uprooted reeds lay on the oozing ground among a fringe of newly-sprouted silvery green shoots.

They stood there together, the sorrowing White Stag and the two men. The river flowed by and the sun sank. Frogs vibrated like miniature thunder. It was full dark before the stag moved away into the trees and the men sought their beds.

HEKS

She thought the sun would fall on the heel of his left shoe first. For a long time, she’d considered the question, sitting on the stump with her knees together and her hands wrapped in her apron. It was important to keep them bandaged and protected. The high midsummer sun blazed down onto kiln and grader. Heaps of fines and debris from careless shoveling lay about on the scorched ground in dark clots. The kiln was cold. He’d been loading the bottom spiral of wood to start a new burn.

Heks pulled herself back to the main point. The sun, given its height and trajectory, would surely touch the heel of his left shoe first. That was the important thing. When that happened there would be a way to go forward. Right now, everything was stopped. There was nothing for her to do and nowhere to go. There was only the sun, moving imperceptibly across burnt ground.

Having made this plan and settled the question, her mind twisted and flailed frantically for something else to hold onto. She bent and picked up a piece of charcoal.

It was a perfectly adequate piece. Not too small. Not too large. Just the right texture and friability. Put this with thousands like it and it would sell with no trouble at all. She held the piece in her right hand and spread out the fingers of her left, palm up. Using a broad plane of the charcoal, she began to rub it over her palm and fingers. She frowned, concentrating on rubbing with just the right amount of force to erase the feeling of vibration still echoing in the bones and flesh of her hand. It was important to relieve that feeling, to eradicate it fully and never feel it again. Her mouth pursed in disapproving distaste as she rubbed the gritty charcoal, and wrinkles sprang out around her lips.

Sunlight crept across the ground, but she’d forgotten it now, wholly intent on the new project of erasing all traces of the last connection between herself and the dead man. She used each side and plane of the charcoal, meticulously covering every bit of skin on her fingers, knuckles, and palms. She rubbed the charcoal well into her nails and cuticles. She rubbed it over the network of wormy blue veins on the back of her hands, in web spaces and over wrist creases.

When she finished, she let the charcoal fall and turned her hands this way and that, admiring her work. The feeling that had seeped up the handle of the axe from the blade socketed in soft flesh was quite gone. That was good. She moved her gaze from her hands to his left shoe. The sun hadn’t only touched it but moved halfway across the sole, illuminating the cracked, blackened leather.

Someone was going to have to do something.

Someone.

It was peaceful, sitting there in the sun. She rarely sat during the day. Now she could sit whenever she wanted. She was free.

Maybe she felt happy. She wasn’t sure. Peaceful, certainly, but perhaps something more. She wanted to smile. She decided to risk it. It felt good, smiling. Sunlight moved across the bottom of his shoe.

Do something. Someone.

She heard a heavy clang of iron behind her. Heks flinched, twisting off the stump and raising an arm protectively in front of her face.

A large iron cauldron sat on the heavy lid of the kiln where it lay on the ground. In the cauldron was a figure dressed in rags. Her fingers ended in claws, her hair was a stew of snarls, and a wiry tangle of whiskers lurked in the background where her chin and nose nearly met.

“Ha!” said the newcomer. She bent her knees and jumped. The cauldron, as though glued to her feet, jumped with her and came down with another deafening clang.

Heks covered her ears while the cauldron and its occupant bounced, the old woman screeching with glee.

When she stopped, the air continued to echo with the harsh sound for a moment. She wheezed but said in high delight, “What an announcement! What fanfare! Baba Yaga has arrived!” She slapped her thigh and cackled.

She sprang out of the cauldron, revealing bare feet with iron claws at the end of her toes, and stood looking down at Joe’s body.

“Huh. So much for him. So much the better for you.” She fixed Heks with eyes like steel balls. “Shall we eat him?”

“Eat him!” Heks gasped.

Baba Yaga moved one of the dead man’s limp arms with her toe, looking thoughtful. “I bet he tastes of smoke and ashes. Pickled and dried and steeped in charcoal. I prefer something tender and juicy.” She grinned suddenly, showing teeth like tusks. “Still, we might make a barbecue sauce and marinate him, see can we put some flavor back!”

Heks giggled. The giggle floated on top of nausea and churning bile at the thought of eating Joe, actually eating him!

“I was going to burn him,” she said.

“Pathetic,” shot back Baba Yaga. “You’re not trying at all, poppet. Or maybe it’s too late? Did you give him everything?” She nudged the arm again, making the hand flop uselessly, “I hoped for better from you.”

RADULF

By midday an uneasy crowd had gathered around the cart. There was low-voiced muttering and hushed talk. The crowd wasn’t hostile — yet. Radulf thought it would take little to push suspicion and fear into hysteria.

He’d tried to dissuade Dar from talk of murder, but Dar remained stubbornly determined. He seemed bent on infecting the town with his own sullen anger. Dar was absolutely certain Juliana was buried in the bog. In his view, the villagers were self-righteous fools, and he longed to puncture their rigid complacency.

Privately, Radulf was also certain the woman Juliana lay in the mud under the reeds. However, he would have preferred to confirm her presence and approach the already uneasy villagers more reasonably.

Dar lounged against the cart with his arms crossed, managing to convey contempt and anger without moving a muscle, his expression perfectly blank. Radulf, with some exasperation, realized it was up to him. He wanted the villagers to follow them back to Juliana’s grave, but he didn’t want to find himself in the center of a witch hunt. He and Dar were strangers. How could they know of the grave — unless they were involved?

“What kind of devil’s work is this?” called a man from the crowd, as though hearing his thoughts.

Radulf groaned inwardly. He swung himself up into the cart seat so everyone could see him.

“This place has seen some trouble lately,” he began conversationally, deliberately keeping his voice low so they had to strain — and be quiet — to hear him. “We’re sorry for it. You good people appear to carry a heavy burden of grief.”

“We’re forsaken,” said a young woman. She stood next to a pale young man with a strained face in the front of the crowd.

“I’m sorry,” said Radulf. “How did this happen?”

“We don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “I think maybe it was my fault…”

“No, Liza,” said an older woman behind her. “You’re a good girl. It’s nothing to do with you.”

“Then who?” called out a voice.

“It wasn’t just Liza and Brian,” called out another. “There was no shroud for Millie, remember. What harm could she do, bedridden and soft in the head?”

Radulf saw tears on Liza’s cheeks. “Brian and I were married three weeks ago,” she told him. “There were no linen sheets given for the wedding bed. For months, every newlywed couple received a set of linen sheets, but we didn’t. Then Millie died, and there was no shroud.”

“And before that every passing soul received a linen shroud?” guessed Radulf.

Liza ducked her head. “Until Millie. And every new mother and babe, too, were provided everything needful for birth and newborn. When it began, we felt special, singled out…”

“We were chosen by God,” started someone in the back.

“Oh, stop that,” said an exasperated old man. “What nonsense! For a time, someone gave gifts. Gave, mind you,” he glared up at Radulf. “Not sold. Gave. Some person, not God! Don’t know why they started. Don’t know why they’ve stopped. What I want to know is who is this missing woman? And why do you speak of murder?”

“A woman does appear to be missing,” said Radulf carefully. “She lived in the woods near the river. We may have found her grave. We thought we should come tell you about it.”

“So you should,” said the old man, “that’s right and proper. If there’s a murderer about, I want to know. But we know one another here. Nobody missing. Still, I’ll come and help you investigate.”

“Could the missing woman have anything to do with the linen, do you think?” Liza asked Brian.

He looked tenderly into her worried face. “I don’t know, my dear.” He looked up at Radulf. “We’ll come and see, too,” he said to Radulf.

“Don’t go,” called out someone. “How do we know they’re not the murderers?”

“A poor kind of murderer, who’d tell the story to a whole village!” said the old man testily. “Don’t be a fool!”

A loud slam made Radulf jump. Gideon snorted and tossed his head and the crowd flinched. Dar had swept a counter clean with a motion of his arm, kicked out the prop and flung it up.

They wound slowly along the track through the trees. Dar and Radulf sat silently side by side, Dar keeping Gideon to a slow pace. Behind them, in groups of twos and threes, came some of the crowd from the market square, among them Liza and Brian and the old man, who limped along with a cane.

HEKS

Heks surveyed the house and garden from the tree’s hard embrace.

She wasn’t the same woman who’d watched the sun move across the ground ten days before.

Baba Yaga had swallowed her. She knew now the act of murder, deliberate and sensual, had summoned the Baba, both summoned and begged for…something. Some kind of action. Some kind of understanding. Some kind of opening. By the time she realized the opening was the black iron mouth of Baba Yaga’s cauldron, greasy lipped and infinitely capacious, she was halfway through and no way back.

Baba Yaga had disassembled her with tusk and claw. Nothing escaped the old crone’s steely eye or flaying tongue. She turned Heks inside out like a dirty sock and shook her, and then together they hacked apart the man whose name had been Joe, disjointing and butchering Heks’ life with tools and teeth. She’d eaten the flesh of her powerlessness, sucked poison out of bones. She’d danced in bare feet on blood-soaked scorched earth with Baba Yaga, brandishing one of Joe’s gnawed bones at the moon.

It was a transformation beyond guilt, beyond shame, beyond tears. Those were too weak and too easy and Baba Yaga scorned them.

The woman in the tree had picked tough tissue from between her teeth, scrubbed blood from beneath her nails, cleansed her hair of greasy death, eaten and belched and eaten again. The taste of her old life lingered in her mouth and nose. She had yet to realize all the nuances of its flavor.

Now, in the tree, she remembered the last time she’d seen her son Bruno. He’d come home late one day in a state of excitement she’d never seen in him before, vibrating and tense with glittering eyes. He’d cornered her in the kitchen, but his fists had been dispassionate, mechanical, like a man buttoning his shirt. He didn’t see her. She was nothing to him.

She’d stayed still and silent where she fell while he bumped and thumped in the hut, jumbling things together into a rough bundle. Then he’d left, without a word or look.

That was a long time ago, before. Before the axe, the slow-moving sunlight, the black cauldron and Baba Yaga’s iron-rasp voice, “Oh yes, my lady, you’ll eat! This meal has long been preparing and you’ll rend and hack, tear and grind! You’ll lick and suck and chew and swallow! And then you’ll fart and belch and your tongue will lie still under the greasy taste of what you cooked. There’ll be no burning and burying, not any more. You’ll see! You’ll taste! You’ll dance in blood! You won’t look away. You’ll do this — or you’ll die. This time you’ll choose, my little Heksie! Choose to live or die, one or the other, but no more in between!”

She’d chosen. She’d eaten, and danced and surrendered.

When it was over, Baba Yaga pointed wordlessly to a faint trail leading out of the clearing where kiln and grader stood. Heks stepped onto the path and melted into the trees. Her senses felt tingling and sensitive, as though scoured the way she’d scoured the black cauldron clean for the Baba. She’d bathed and washed her scanty hair, plaiting it into a thin braid. Her rags were clean. She was well fed. The last of her bruises had faded to yellow and green. She was alive.

The path looked like an animal trail, but every instinct she had told her Bruno’s body had made it. Bruno’s thick arm had brushed these twigs. Bruno’s careless feet had disrupted moss and crushed plants. Bruno’s hand had pushed branches out of the way. When the path stopped, she put her hands on the tree at the end and thought, Bruno was here. This tree knows Bruno. Climbing with hands and feet, she reached the branch on which he’d sat, bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh.

And so Heks was watching when they came.

A wooden cart rolled out of the forest, gaily painted with the words “Come and be welcome. Go and be free. Harm shall not enter.” A broad-backed horse pulled the cart and two men sat on the seat. Both were dark haired and lean, though one head was liberally flecked with grey. Behind the cart walked a dozen people in groups of twos and threes. Heks recognized some of the faces from the village. An old man called Gabriel stumped along with a cane, bright-eyed and scowling. A young pair, Brian and Liza, walked hand in hand. There were no children. Most of the faces looked apprehensive.

The cart drove into the yard and stopped. Heks had an excellent view. The driver jumped down and began to unhitch the horse. The man with the grey hair met the others coming into the clearing, holding out his hand to each as though introducing himself. The villagers walked slowly around the place, examining a chicken house, a garden and what looked to Heks like a small orchard. One of the men threw a stone into the well, listening intently. Heks saw for herself the place had been well taken care of. She couldn’t see the front door from her perch, but no one went in or out of the back door.

The cart driver busied himself with the horse, speaking to no one. After brushing down the animal, he let him wander and graze as he would. Then he came back and opened up the cart, organizing and straightening from the day’s business. The other man, the one with streaks of grey hair, moved easily among the villagers, talking, listening, smiling. Heks couldn’t see everything from where she hid, but she liked his air of calm courtesy and confidence. Gradually the villagers grouped themselves near the cart and the two men. They seemed to be waiting for the strangers to speak.

“Never knew this was here,” said Gabriel loudly. “What d’ya say her name is, the woman who lives here?”

Unexpectedly, the cart driver spoke up. “Her name was Juliana.”

Something about the way he delivered this simple statement made Heks glad she wasn’t standing in front of him.

“Never heard of her.” Gabriel turned in a slow circle. “Nice place, though. She’s alone out here?”

“She’s an outsider,” said a middle-aged woman with a pronounced chin and a wen on her right cheek. Heks knew her. She was called Maggie, and was a backbone of the church. “No mystery about it. She’s one of those who doesn’t come to church. We don’t want her kind in town. There are others like her living in the forest. She’s probably gone off for the day.”

“There are four dead chickens in the coop,” said a young man.

“Did anyone know this Juliana?” demanded Gabriel.

Everyone shook their head.

Maggie sniffed. “No family, no community. Lawless. I’m not surprised she fell in with bad companions — if it’s not all fantasy in the first place.”

“There’s a loom in the house,” said Brian.

“If she did the weaving and gave the linen,” put in Liza, “then she has a community. Our community hasn’t accepted her, but she accepts us.”

“Nonsense,” said the woman with the wen. “Blasphemy! This nobody has nothing to do with God’s gifts to us. We’re good folk in our village, better than most. We pleased God and so He rewarded us.”

“Her name,” said the cart driver between his teeth, “was Juliana.”

“Horse apples!” said Gabriel to Maggie. He thumped his cane on the ground. “Our church isn’t special and neither are the asses in the pews!”

The cart driver grinned.

“I tell you,” continued Gabriel, glaring fiercely, “an ordinary person gave that linen and if it was this Juliana then she’s more special than either you or I, Maggie McWhortle, because she gave and received nothing in return — not even the dignity of her own name.” He directed his glare at Radulf. “I want to know what happened here. Show me the grave!”

Heks, listening from her perch, decided it was time to show herself. She longed to puncture Maggie’s self-righteousness, for one thing. For another, she had a bad feeling about the missing woman, a woman whose face she thought she knew, though she’d never known the name Juliana. Thirdly, she was devoured with curiosity. What was this about linen? And a grave?

She climbed down from her perch in the tree, making no effort to hide her presence. The group, on the point of following Radulf towards the river, paused and stared.

Heks approached them warily. She spoke to the man with the grey flecks in his hair, having decided he was the most neutral, as well as the kindest.

“My name is Heks. I live in the forest.” She glanced briefly at Maggie. “I don’t like church.” She turned away from Maggie’s umbrage, feeling amused, and saw an answering quirk in the grey-haired man’s lips. His eyes were deep set and she couldn’t quite see their color.

He answered her with the same courtesy he’d shown everyone. “I’m Radulf. This is Dar,” he extended a hand to the cart driver, who nodded at her, looking interested.

“I think…I think I might know who the murderer is. If there is a murderer. But what is this about linen and weaving?”

Liza and Brian told her.

Heks’s feeling of unease increased as she heard the story. Before she could decide if she should tell them about Bruno, Gabriel interrupted.

“Here’s another woman who lives hereabouts and I don’t remember her face or her name. Give an account of yourself, woman! How long have you lived here?”

“Twenty years,” said Heks.

“Twenty years!” gasped Liza. “But who are you? Do you live alone in these woods, too?”

“I’m the charcoal burner’s wife,” said Heks steadily. The group exchanged a silent flurry of looks. They all knew the charcoal burner.

“That’s right!” exclaimed Gabriel. “I knew he had a wife, and a child, too, a son. Bruno’s his name!”

“The charcoal burner is dead,” said Heks.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Liza, wide eyed.

She was a kind-hearted girl, Heks realized. She wondered what they would say if they knew she was still picking the charcoal burner out from between her teeth.

“Thank you,” she said to Liza with dignity.

“But you still have your son,” Liza continued eagerly.

Heks looked from one face to another. Gabriel listened intently, head slightly cocked. Maggie had subsided into resentful silence, her face flushed. Radulf had the alert, attentive air of a good watchdog. Brian and Liza stood close together, her shoulder nestled under his arm.

A melody wound through the air, threading in and out of the small crowd. The wild sound made Heks’ belly clench. It rose and mingled with the heavy summer tree canopy overhead. It was invitation and challenge. It beckoned to Heks, speaking of passion and sensation. Heks wanted to follow it. It hinted at a kind of life she’d never had.

The notes trickled away, leaving the group of people softened and wondering. Dar took the bone flute from his lips.

Heks took a steadying breath. “The charcoal burner beat me and the child. I’m glad he’s dead. He was a brute. He taught Bruno to be a brute, too. I’ve no friends. I live alone in the forest because I don’t wish to go to church and such are not welcome in town.” She looked Maggie in the eye. “I was trained as a midwife and a healer. If I’d been given a chance, I might have saved your daughter’s life.”

Maggie paled. “My daughter,” she said. “My daughter.”

Heks looked at Liza. “I don’t have my son. I only had him in babyhood. He was his father’s creature after that. A few weeks ago, he left. He didn’t say where he went or why and he didn’t say when he’d be back. Then my husband — died. Today I followed a path my son made through the woods. It ended right there,” she turned and pointed, “at the base of that tree. There’s a good perch in it — see there? You can see a stretch of river, the well, the garden, the back of the house and part of the yard. I was there when you came.”

Radulf put a hand out and gripped the edge of the wagon, a look of mingled recognition and anguish on his face.

“Show me,” he said tightly, and came to her side. She led them back to the tree, pointed out the faint forest trails spreading out from the trunk, the scuffed bark and the perch. Radulf studied everything carefully.

“This means something to you, sir?” Liza asked shyly.

“Yes. But before I say more, I think we should check for a grave.”

A few minutes later they stood on the edge of the bog, taking in the silvery reed bed and Dar’s and Radulf’s muddy footprints. They’d found a pitchfork, a shovel and gardening tools in the shed. Dar passed them out and several people slogged onto the muddy ground. They began to dig.

Maggie, driven by curiosity, stood ankle deep in the marsh, watching the digging. Liza and Heks stayed back with the others. Heks found herself in a group of somewhat shame-faced village women and the conversation quickly turned to childbearing and herbals.

When the body had been found, the group gathered on the riverbank in the sun, rinsing muddy clothes and feet. Radulf sat cross-legged in the grass and told them about Coventina’s shrine and what he’d found there.

Gabriel sucked thoughtfully at his teeth when Radulf had fallen silent. “So,” he said, “Juliana comes here and catches Bruno’s eye. He pursues her but she’s not interested — or perhaps she is interested and they had a fight or some such.”

“If she’s interested, why is the man perched in a tree spying on her?” demanded Maggie.

“Good point,” conceded the old man.

“Humph!” said Maggie.

He continued. “She’s not interested, then. Meanwhile, we in the village begin to receive sheets and nappies and shrouds.” He grinned, enjoying the march of words in his mouth. “Sheets and nappies and shrouds. Bruno’s got an obsession. He watches and waits and kills Juliana. He buries her and thinks she’ll never be found because no one will know she’s gone in the first place. We stop getting linen doodads. Then Bruno leaves and for some reason winds up near the shrine of Coven-what’s-er’name.”

“Coventina,” put in Radulf.

“Coventina,” Gabriel repeated. “Since it’s worked before for him, he climbs a tree and watches the path. This Jenny comes along and he goes after her. She struggles and makes noise and this other fella— “

“Artyom,” supplied Radulf.

“Artyom is nearby and comes to the rescue. In the struggle, all three are killed, but you’re not sure who killed whom.”

“That’s right,” said Radulf. “Are we sure about who killed Juliana?” He looked around at the villagers.

“I’m sure,” said Heks. They all looked at her. “Bruno killed Juliana and likely killed your Jenny, too.” She looked into Radulf’s face. “These deaths are partly my responsibility.”

Liza made a sound of protest.

Heks looked at her. “I chose to stay in a bad life with a bad man. I didn’t protect my son. Worst of all, I didn’t protect myself. I had nowhere to go and no one who cared. I gave up.”

“This is wrong!” Liza spun on her heel and thrust her face into Maggie’s. “This is our fault, too! Why should people who don’t follow our rules be outcast? This might not have happened if Heks and Bruno had friends and somewhere to be safe. Heks is a midwife! We need her and she needs us. I’m ashamed of our church, Maggie, if this is what it requires of us. Maybe I’ll stop going. Then will you cast me out?”

Maggie took a step back from this verbal torrent, looking uncertain. “It’s nothing to do with us— “she began.

“It’s everything to do with us,” roared Gabriel.

“Four lives are lost,” said Dar in a voice of cold iron. The others fell silent. “No amount of shame or blame will bring them back. The question is what will you do now? What will you do to give these deaths meaning?

“These forest people must be brought into the fold!” said Gabriel.

“They won’t all want to be,” said Heks.

“Do you want to be?” he shot back, glaring at her.

She was taken aback. “I’m not sure,” she said at last.

“Ungrateful!” muttered Maggie under her breath.

Heks looked at her. “You don’t think I’m good enough for you,” she said levelly. “Why am I not free to decide you’re not good enough for me?”

Gabriel cackled with laughter. Dar cocked an eyebrow at Radulf, who smothered a smile.

Heks turned from Maggie’s red face to Dar. “You ask what we’ll do now to give meaning to these deaths. I can only try to live a different way. It’s not much but it’s what I can do.”

Dar gave her a nod, and she thought she saw resignation in his face.

Radulf turned to Maggie. “Will you see that Juliana is decently buried?” Radulf asked. He gestured around the homestead. “I think you can see how she loved beauty and order. It grieves me to think of her lying in a shallow, muddy grave.” He dipped his head. “I know it’s a big thing to ask, as I recently had the same sad task, but perhaps you could find some others to help…?”

“I…of course,” she replied. “We’ll be glad to take care of that.” She looked defiantly around at the others.

“A headstone, of course,” suggested Radulf.

“Of course,” she repeated. “And I’ll dig a clump of her own flowers and plant them on the grave!”

“Thank you,” said Radulf, and gave her a smile. “I knew I could count on you.” He looked around at the group. “What about this place? Could someone come and use it? It’s a shame to let it fall down and go wild. There’s the loom, too.”

By the end of the day a plan was in place and the villagers began to make their way back to town.

RADULF

Maggie had been as good as her word. Under the force of her inexorable will and gimlet eye, Juliana’s body was dug out of the mud, wrapped decently in a shroud, and laid in a proper grave. A headstone was being carved in the village out of a piece of marble. They had no date of birth or death or even a last name, but she wouldn’t lie nameless and forgotten. After some discussion, everyone agreed it was fitting she lie in her own orchard. Maggie herself had dug up clumps of violets and planted them over the grave.

Radulf and Dar bunched flowers and herbs and bound them to a woven ring of thick stems and thin wood, winding it with tough honeysuckle vine, and laid the wreath on the grave.

The place in the embrace of the river was to be given to a young couple, just starting out, who had no place of their own and no means with which to buy one. They’d come nearly every day, caring for the house, the shed, and the land, and privately were quite glad to move out of the village proper. Radulf could see they already loved the place and were not put off by the grave under the trees. They’d talked with Dar, interested in the woman who’d created such a home, and concluded her memory would only enrich both land and house.

Radulf and Dar stayed on, overseeing the work and lending a hand in the evenings after the day’s business. Trade was brisk; the villagers came to buy and to talk, and Dar gradually grew less surly.

One night, under the orchard boughs, clustered with new fruit, Dar and Radulf relaxed together and Radulf spoke of his plans to move on.

They’d found a lantern in the house and Dar had lit it and hung it carefully in a tree, away from tender growth that might be scorched. The frogs sang and moths and other night fliers danced around the glass-shielded flame. A few feet away lay the smooth, rounded hump of Juliana’s new grave.

“Where to?” asked Dar.

Radulf said, half irritated and half amused, “Well, unless someone appears to lead me by the hand--“

“Or paw, or antler, or tail feather,” put in Dar.

“--I think I’ll just start walking. My feet itch and I think I’ve done what I came here to do. What about you?”

“I’m not sure,” said Dar. “I have a feeling I’m not quite finished here. I’ve been talking to Gabriel. It appears there’s a group of people who might be interested in moving on and finding a new community. He thinks Heks would go, too. Perhaps they’ll need a guide.”

“Interesting,” said Radulf. “It’s a big undertaking, beginning a new community from nothing. I’d like to watch that unfold.”

“I think they’re prepared to do things differently now,” said Dar. “If I can be part of it, Juliana’s death doesn’t seem so needless, or Jenny’s or Artyom’s, either.”

Radulf lay on his back, arms crossed under his head, watching moths fly around the lantern’s flame. “The world is filled with strange stories,” he said. “For a long time, I didn’t know that. Life is like an unending book, each of us a character, each page a day of our lives, all of us coming together and parting and creating stories connecting with other stories.”

“That’s one of the differences between youth and maturity, I think,” said Dar. “Youth thinks the story is theirs. Maturity knows the story is everyone’s.”

“Some people think when they die the story is over, like that,” Radulf made a chopping motion with his hand. “But I don’t think so. We go out of the story, at least in the form we once had, but the stories we enter go on without us and I’m not convinced we don’t continue to circle in and out in some form. Look at Juliana. If they do begin something new it’s because of her—she’ll go with them and be there in that community, be a part of the stories to come.”

Dar sighed. “She will. But I’m angry at the waste. I want her alive and warm and with us the way she was, not her memory or her ghost or her reincarnation or whatever else you like to call it.”

Radulf grunted and for a time they remained silent together, listening to the soft fluttering sounds of night insects attracted by the light and the song of frogs and river.

“Do you like mysteries?” asked Dar.

“Mysteries? I suppose. It depends on whether they’re any good,” said Radulf, smiling. “Why, do you know of one?”

“I do. It’s a wonderful mystery about an unhappy king, his twelve beautiful, nubile daughters and the shoes each daughter wears out every single night while locked and presumably sleeping in their bedchamber.”

Radulf sat up. “You’re joking! Twelve?”

“I’m not. I call it ‘The Twelve Dancing Princesses.’ Catchy, don’t you think?”

“They wear their shoes out dancing? In their bedchamber?”

“Nobody knows, you dolt! That’s the mystery, see?”

They laughed together.

“Tell me,” said Radulf. He sat up and put his back against a tree, watching Dar’s expressive face in the lantern light as he talked.

Lantern in tree image by Larisa Koshkina from Pixabay

“A young king and queen had twelve daughters. In the beginning, the king was bluff, good natured and hearty, well-liked by his subjects. His wife was fey, some said, but lovely. People whispered she was a witch and practiced magical rituals in secret, but she drew no attention to herself and gossip starved for want of material.

As the years passed, the birth of twelve daughters took their toll on the royal couple. The king’s disappointment at not gaining a single male heir eroded some of his love for his wife, whose youth and beauty trickled away under the strain of childbearing and motherhood.

The twelve princesses shared a single large room, and at some point, rumors began that every night the queen and those princesses old enough to be on their feet wore out a pair of slippers.

Although the older princesses were of marriageable age, the king and queen did not entertain suitors or attend social occasions in which they might meet eligible young men. Some said the king was possessive, but some blamed the queen for tainting the princesses with her own reputation for secrecy and magic.

Soon after the twelfth princess was born, the queen disappeared one night. Her body was never found and the princesses, clearly grief stricken, could provide no explanation for her absence.

The loss of the queen hit the king hard, and he became jealous and suspicious. The eldest of the princesses passed marriageable age and entered spinsterhood. The rumors about the worn-out slippers every morning became common talk, in spite of the king locking the princesses in their chamber each evening as though they were recalcitrant subjects instead of full-grown women.

The king became obsessed by the mystery, which the princesses could not or would not explain. He grew certain the queen’s unsolved disappearance was somehow connected with the worn-out slippers. The passing of years increased his obsession rather than softened it.

At last, the king made a proclamation. Any man who could solve the mystery of the worn-out slippers would be given his pick of the princesses as wife, as well as part of the kingdom. Failure to unravel the explanation of the worn-out slippers, however, would be punished with death.

This tempting offer offset the advanced age of some of the princesses, and at first many men took up the challenge, determined to win their fortune and a wife. But each of them failed to discover the reason for the twelve pairs of worn-out slippers the servants collected each day, and each forfeited his life. After a time, the story developed a sinister overtone. The matter of twelve princesses and their shoes no longer appeared so harmless and humorous. Fewer and fewer men came to try their luck.

To this day, the proclamation stands. The king refuses to consider any suitor who declines to attempt to solve the mystery. The queen’s disappearance has never been explained, and the king clings more stubbornly to his grief and resentment every year. The princesses, presumably, are growing old together in their chamber in the castle, unwed and ignorant of anything outside the castle walls, the only ones who know the truth of the worn-out slippers.

People say there must be powerful dark magic at work that stops the princess’s tongues and keeps them all imprisoned, the princesses in their chamber, the king in his obsession and loss, and perhaps even the queen in some inaccessible, invisible place.”

“Well,” said Radulf when the tale was told. “I’m intrigued. You didn’t present yourself to the king to solve the mystery and claim a wife?”

Not me! I’m rather too fond of my life to risk it. A princess and part of a kingdom to rule are nothing I want. I don’t see why I should add myself to the grim tally of failures. Many a promising young man has lost his life in that place. It’s a tale smelling strongly of futility, but, as you say, intriguing. Something is certainly going on, but it’s not a game.”

“No, indeed. It doesn’t sound like a game. One wonders if the young men are the only victims, though.”

HEKS

Heks opened the door and walked into the broken-down hut she’d called home for so long. It was empty. She, Joe, and Bruno had made no lasting impression on the place. If there had been ghosts, they’d been banished, either in the orgy of butchery, cooking and gorging, or in Heks’s subsequent furious scrubbing of cauldron, clothing, house, and body, all overseen by Baba Yaga.

Now it was evening. Baba Yaga was gone. Joe was dead. She felt quite certain the unnamed man who’d died with Jenny and Artyom was Bruno. She stood inside the door and had the disconcerting feeling she stood in a stranger’s house. She was in the wrong place. It didn’t want her and she didn’t want it. She remembered, with a wry twist of her mouth, what she’d said to Maggie.

If she was to find a way to live differently, it wouldn’t be here. There was nothing here she wanted. She was homeless. She was free.

She went out, leaving the door open. Kiln and grader stood where they’d always stood in the clearing behind the house. Any bloodstain was entirely obliterated by Baba Yaga’s unholy cooking fire. Faintly, she smelled cinder and bitter ash. Her eyes fell on the stump she’d been sitting on the day she’d killed Joe and Baba Yaga had appeared. It seemed a lifetime ago.

She reached with two fingers into a pocket concealed inside her clothes and brought out two small, hard spheres, black as charcoal but glossy. She laid them on her palm and each glittered with pinpricks of light, just visible. She hadn’t known the bits of light would actually glow. In the daylight, if one put the marble close to the eye, it was like looking at the night sky through a small lens.

“You bought and paid for that carcass. Don’t see why I should sweat over it,” Baba Yaga had said the afternoon she’d arrived, rummaging through the contents of the upended cauldron. Tossing aside odiferous clothes, bones, rags, what looked (and smelled) like a small, badly tanned hide, a bent fork, shards of sharp glass, a packet of musty smelling dried leaves, and an enormous bedraggled golden feather, she seized a couple of saws, a pair of heavy shears and a trio of sharp-looking knives. She tossed them on the ground at Heks’ feet. “Get busy,” she said curtly. “I’ll amuse myself — work up an appetite.”

In her hand, she held a bag made of some kind of thick, wrinkled skin. Coarse, curly dark hair adorned the bag. A drawstring cinched the top. Baba Yaga paced around the clearing, muttering to herself and looking at the ground. She smoothed a patch out with the side of her horny bare foot, drew a circle in the sooty dirt with a stick and upended the bag. A cascade of marbles spilled out. They were made of stones and glass, horn and ivory, gems and metal, all mixed together in every color and texture. Heks longed to stir through them, look at each one, roll them in her hands and against her skin, even taste them. They were enchanting.

Baba Yaga cackled, rubbing her hands together. “My pretties,” she said gloatingly. “My little poppets! Aren’t they precious? Aren’t they beautiful? And I’ve collected them all, or won them, fair and square! Fair and round! Catseyes and prits! Steelies and aggies! Corkscrews and ades! Peewees and dobbers! Ha!”

Heks stood looking down at the marbles, mesmerized. “Would you like one too, Heksie? Would you like a little toy, a sweetie? Would you roll it on your tongue — or some other moist pink place?” Baba Yaga leered and thrust out her pelvis.

Heks looked at her, speechless. She was horrible, this old hag. She filled Heks with loathing and fear. She saw too much, and said too much. She was like foul smoke choking the lungs and coating nose and mouth, impenetrable, unspeakably vile…but she was also like a breath of air taken at dawn on the top of a winter mountain.

Heks did want a marble. She nodded her head, wordless.

“Well, you may have one dearie,” said Baba Yaga caressingly. “You may have two, in fact.” She bent and stirred through the pile of tools, picking out a small metal scoop like a spoon edged with sharp iron teeth. She slapped the handle into Heks’ hand. “Dig out his eyes!” she commanded, and playfulness vanished.

Heks turned numbly to the body lying on the ground next to her, knowing she was incapable of doing this thing and staying sane — or even conscious. She watched the fingers of one hand spread the lids of Joe’s left eye apart and the vile tool in her right hand insert itself along the bony orbital rim. Then she closed her own eyes, pushed sharply down, making a scooping motion at the same time, and felt the eyeball pop out with surprising ease.

Another moment and both eyes rested in her hand, grotesquely large. She hadn’t realized how little of a human eye is normally visible. She looked at Baba Yaga, not wanting to move, breathe or think. Especially not think. The eyes felt unpleasantly heavy and sticky in her hand, but she resolutely turned away from the feeling.

“Hmmm,” said Baba Yaga, her own eyes narrowing. She tapped her lower lip with an iron-tipped finger, thinking. She stroked her whiskers. “Charcoal and burning, ash and ember, stench and rage and broken teeth! Yesss! Blood and iron! And other things, too, mmmm?” She leaned closer, her eyes penetrating as nails, and Heks smelled old fish and foul breath. “Hidden things, dark things, things that happen where no one sees. Oh, I know all the dirty secrets!”

She stepped back suddenly, standing straight, triumphant. “Galaxies, I think,” she crowed, and snapped her fingers. “Galaxies…because miracles happen in the dark!” She dropped to her knees on the ground next to the circle in the dirt and the shining heap of marbles within it and began to set them out in some kind of pattern, absorbed.

Heks felt released and took a breath. The feeling of imminent nausea retreated. She swallowed carefully. She had involuntarily closed her fingers over the eyes. Without looking, she would roll them onto the ground. She couldn’t bear to touch them any longer. She lowered her hand and tilted it, opening her fingers, her flesh shrinking.

The eyes rolled out of her palm. They clinked together.

They clinked together.

There on the scorched ground lay two glassy black marbles, about twice the size of the tip of her thumb. They felt quite dry, absolutely round, and hard. She picked one up between her thumb and forefinger. The marble contained dozens of pinpricks of light. It looked like the night sky.

“Galaxies,” she whispered. “Galaxies.”

Now the first stars came out in the real night sky. She raised her hands up in the air, the fingers of one clenched around the marbles, holding her arms out as though in welcome, or petition. Did she have a right to pray for anything? What did she want? Was there anyone out there — anywhere — to hear her?

I need help, she thought, and then — it’s wrong to need help.

But when she sat paralyzed and Joe lay dead on the ground, Baba Yaga had come.

Was that help? She shuddered.

She closed her eyes. Her arms were getting tired. She breathed, imagining the smell of stars, how they’d feel on her tongue and bubbling through her blood. Sharp and stinging? Cleansing and stimulating, like peppermint? Or hot, like a spatter of sizzling grease, tasting of iron and warm spice?

Show me what to do now, she thought. Show me, and I’ll do the rest.

Something brushed against her leg. She flinched back, an arm shielding her face, and saw a dog. She lowered her arm, feeling a spurt of shame at her reflexive fear. The dog turned and looked over its shoulder, eyes glowing in the torchlight. She thought, wolf, and realized there was torchlight in fact, somewhere behind her. In five minutes, it would be full dark.

A lean, ageless and sexless figure with short hair stood holding a burning torch. Heks had a strong impression of power. An unfamiliar feeling rose in her, part recognition, part longing. Uncertainly, she took a step forward.

The wolf sat like a dog at the motionless feet of the torch bearer.

“You stand at a crossroad,” said the figure.

Heks considered this. “I don’t know which direction to choose,” she said.

“One choice is to stay here.”

“No,” said Heks, “I don’t belong here.”

“Are you sure?”

Impulsively, Heks stepped forward, keeping an eye on the wolf, who made no move. She reached for the torch. Now she realized the torchbearer was a woman, swathed anonymously in a dark cloak in spite of the summer night. The woman handed the torch to her and Heks took it into the hut. She touched it to the stained mattress, the rickety wooden table, a rag rug on the floor, stiff with dirt. Everything she touched blossomed into flame, as though soaked in flammable liquid. In minutes, fire engulfed the hut, roaring hungrily, sending out waves of choking heat.

They moved back, the torch back in the torchbearer’s hand. The wolf watched the fire through slitted eyes, ears pricked.

“Very well. Out into the world, then. Follow the white light.”

***

A small fire burned, as though in echo of the blaze behind her. The friendly cart, the horse and the two men sitting near it made a welcoming picture, framed by the frogs’ insistent song and the flowing river. She felt an intruder as she stepped out of the night.

“There was a fire. My house has burned down. I need a bed and I thought of…” she gestured with a hand toward the house. She’d learned the safety of silence and invisibility and kept her words colorless and brief.

They were surprised. They grey-haired man who made her think of a wolf, Radulf, uttered a sound of concern and stepped forward, as though to comfort her, but stopped when she stepped back.

“Can anything be saved?” asked the peddler.

“No,” she said.

“Of course, you must use the bed,” said Radulf. “I believe the ladies put clean sheets on it for the new family, but they won’t move in for a few days, yet.”

The entered the quiet, tidy house. There wasn’t room for more than a few pieces of furniture. A pile of cushions sat near the fireplace.

“Shall I light it?” asked Radulf.

Heks shook her head. She’d seen enough fire for the night.

Radulf left her and she lit a lamp and looked around. Here, there’d been life. Someone had moved in these rooms, squatted to light the fire, stretched out with the cushions. Someone had sat in the comfortable chair with a lamp at her elbow. Someone had stood at the kitchen counter, preparing food. Heks opened the back door and the summer night flowed in.

She heard a soft sound of inquiry at her feet. A cat, tattered tail raised in the shape of a question mark, stepped past her into the house. Heks liked cats. She filled a bowl with water and put it on the kitchen floor. The cat drank, wetting its white bib. It was yellow eyed. Its long orange coat needed attention. It had a mat under one ear and bits of leaves and twigs in the feathers on its back legs and probably underneath, as well, Heks thought. It appeared quite at home. Clearly it belonged in the house. Heks wondered why it hadn’t shown itself before. She bent and stroked its head. It arched its back, inviting her caress, and began to purr loudly. When she took the lamp and went into the front room, the cat went with her.

She ran her fingers along the warp and weft of the loom, almost expecting to hear music. A shawl draped the chair in front of the cold hearth, and she sat down and wrapped it around her shoulders. It was a beautiful thing, woven with a slubby texture in glowing creamy white with ripples of color running through it. She ran her fingers over it and caught a fugitive gleam of gold and silver in the pattern.

The cat jumped into her lap, kneaded with brief rapture, and curled up, a solid weight.

For some reason, the house made Heks want to weep. She leaned her head back against the chair, closed her eyes and rested her hands on the cat, her fingers stirring gently through its coat.

Cautiously, she explored her feelings and recognized peace. Her senses were both soothed and fed by the house’s beauty and order. Fed. Funny how that kept popping up. Baba Yaga had told her to eat or die, and she’d eaten. Oh, how she’d eaten, in a kind of ecstatic lust that made her writhe in memory but had been raw triumph and power at the time.

Her aging, unlovely body ached and longed for…what? Rest? Gentleness? Yes, those. But more than those. Pleasure? Oh, yes. Yet pleasure had never been hers to live with and keep. Once or twice she’d known it, brief as a hummingbird’s wing, before life became blunt-edged and hard as a knucklebone, before she withered and dried and her hair and skin thinned and even the thought and dream of pleasure were no longer for her.

She wouldn’t sit and think any more. It had been a long day. She lifted the sleepy weight of the cat carefully and set it on the floor.

The bedroom was no more than a closet, almost entirely filled by the bed. She set the lamp on a shelf next to it. The cat jumped onto the thin summer quilt, a mingling of pink and orange, beautifully stitched together. Methodically, she undressed and unpinned her hair. She smoothed the quilted bedcover. The back of her hand was blotched with brown spots and laced with prominent veins. It looked like an old lady’s hand. The sight of it against the vivid colors of the quilt filled her with grief. She put out the lamp and, in the dark, turned back cover and sheet and slid into the soft bed.

Heks turned on her side and curved around the purring cat. Cool linen sheets began to warm against her skin, smelling of lavender and sun. She couldn’t remember ever sleeping naked before. Certainly, she’d never slept in such luxurious comfort. She laid a hand against the cat’s unkempt coat. She slept.

GINGER

Ginger had been out all morning, unwilling to face the inevitable ritual of choosing yarrow stalks with her sisters. She’d been wandering the castle grounds, needing to be free of the confining walls and roof. It was breezy, and one of her combs had come loose. A lock of dark red hair blew across her face.

She found no solution to her problem on the castle grounds. She had long since stopped searching for one. The relief she sought was the simple freedom of being outside.

Her thoughts circled around and around on the same trampled path that had occupied her most of her life.

I can’t do this anymore.

You must.

Why?

Because you owe it to your mother. You’re the eldest. You must take care of your sisters, and you must guard your spiritual life. You cannot betray them all, and yourself as well. Without the roots of spirit, life is nothing. If you aren’t vigilant, it will all be taken away. You’ll fail everyone in your family.

But if my father knew the truth, perhaps he’d come back to us, unlock the door, love us again. Perhaps he’d allow …

He’ll never allow. You know it. All will be lost because you failed in your trust.

What is a spiritual life soaked in blood and death? Is that what Mother wanted?

You must guard.

I can’t do it anymore.

You must protect.

I hate myself.

You must do your duty to your mother and sisters.

It was time to go inside.

Ginger released her dangling comb and headed back to the castle, where chaos met her. She stood on the threshold of the room she shared with her sisters, took a steadying deep breath, and stepped into a tumult of voices, possessions, clothing, unmade beds and a yapping puppy.

She made her way slowly toward her own bed. Elizabeth and Grace were having a loud altercation about havoc wreaked by the puppy in a carelessly gaping wardrobe, Elizabeth bent on punishing the animal and Grace defending it. “It’s your own fault! You’re so careless!”

Susan had eaten all the raisins meant for a cake and the cook had scolded her bitterly. “I didn’t know they were for a cake, Ginger, honestly! I just wanted a snack!”

Amy had her easel up and was painting, paying no attention to the activity around her. She had a quiet attic room with good light to paint in, but for some reason preferred squashing next to her bed with chair and easel in the middle of the noise. Ginger saw a tube of burnt sienna oozing fatly onto the bedspread.

As she went, she did her best to create order out of chaos, picking several items of clothing off the floor and laying them across beds and chairs. She also collected a stack of books to be returned to the study.

“Gemma, will you collect the shoes?” she called over the noise.

“Yes!” said a round-faced young woman who bounced up from the floor between two beds. She began at once to collect a pair of worn-out shoes from each bedside, excavating among dresses, stockings, books, drawing pads, gloves, scarves and underwear.

Once she’d reached her own bed, tidier than most of those around her, Ginger surveyed her troops and the room for progress. A pile of shoes lay near the door for disposal, a daily reproach.

The row of beds was made, ranging from neat, tight sheets and covers to duvets pulled hastily over wrinkled blankets and squashed pillows. Most of the floor was visible. Clothing was out of sight, if not neatly hung and folded.

It was the best any reasonable person could expect from a room shared by twelve sisters, ages 25 to 40.

She took a jar off her chest of drawers. A handful of dried yarrow stems bristled out of it. As she counted aloud in the now silent room, eleven other voices joined in. “Five, six, seven, eight…” She chose twelve stems at random and evened up the bottoms, throwing a scarf over her hand to conceal all but the tips. Each of her sisters drew out a stem.

This time Ginger held the short one. She sighed.

When she’d been younger and her mother was alive, she’d assumed she’d be married as soon as she came of age, leave her parents and home, make a new family and a new life.

That was more than twenty years ago. The sleeping chamber that once held twelve young women and girls now held twelve full-grown women, trapped in a kind of arrested childhood by their father’s obsession and their mother’s legacy of secrecy.

Ginger looked at the short stalk between her fingers and thought this is all I’ll ever be. There’s no way out of this madness. Every life we take will diminish ours a little more until we’re old women and our own deaths come. Is this what you wanted for your daughters, Mother?

They didn’t kill with their own hands, of course. They killed with smiles and hints, flattery and attention. They killed with a sleeping draught in a goblet of wine, passed so fingers must brush casually together. The young men drank, dreaming of power and seduction, slept, and thus forfeited their lives.

After his interview with the king, each suitor was shown to a room off the princesses’ bed chamber. It was a pleasant sitting room with comfortable chairs. Windows lined one wall and a lemon tree grew in a large pot in the sun flood. The sister who’d drawn the short straw administered the sleeping draught, hidden in a careful dose of charm and a glass of wine.

Ginger readied a tray with wine and elegant bits of food. Why couldn’t everyone have what they needed, instead of working at such hopeless cross purposes? Life had to offer more than this — didn’t it? Her mother had married, had children, had some experience of the world. Then, without warning or explanation, she’d simply gone, leaving Ginger to honor and keep the jail of secrecy they were all chained in.

When the tray was arranged, she carefully added three drops of sleeping draught to the visitor’s goblet, knocked on the door and entered the sitting room at his bidding.

Her first impression was surprise at his age. This was no youth. Iron flecked his thick hair and his face was lined. She couldn’t tell the color of his rather deep-set eyes at first glance. He took the tray from her, thanking her courteously. She distracted him prettily with a taste of this and a taste of that, pouring out wine for both of them. When his goblet was safely in his hand she relaxed slightly. They moved to the window and looked out across the summer landscape.

She took a sip of her wine and prepared to flatter and show an interest in the stranger, feeling rebellious and depressed. What would happen if she took the goblet out of his hands and said “Leave! Leave now or you’ll surely die!”

He touched the outside of his pocket, as though checking to make sure something was there, and said, “You said your name was Ginger. I’m Radulf.”

She looked into his face and realized his eyes were hazel. His short dark beard was greyer than the hair on his head. She groped for something to say.

“Tell me about your life here,” he invited.

She had a strong urge to tell him everything — every single thing she’d learned, felt and thought, right up to her present turmoil.

She didn’t, of course. But she did mention her mother, keeping the loss casual, and her sisters. She made no mention of shoes danced to pieces each morning, and neither did he. They discovered a mutual love of books and explored a shelf of them in the sitting room, finding favorite authors in common.

This was always the part she dreaded most, making conversation while watching the goblet empty, sip by sip. On this evening, light faded from the sky and the goblet emptied without her being aware, she enjoyed the conversation so much. He was interested but not intrusive, expressive, and willing to share — to a point. He had private depths to match hers.

She left him with a book in his hand in a ring of lamp light. He was still awake, but she knew soon he’d sleep. She shut the door to the sitting room softly behind her, set the tray down, and made ready for the evening.

The headboard of one of the canopied beds concealed a locked door. Three of the women moved the bed aside, put out the lights and ducked through it, Gemma, the youngest sister, leading the way. Ginger brought up the rear. She glanced around the room once more, pocketed the key and shut the door quietly behind her.

Stairs, wide and shallow, wound down. Dim light filtered through the air like mist. Holding up their skirts, they descended, one after another, feet quick and agile on the polished stone. Ginger thought they were like birds, light-footed and rustling, escaped from a cage, but wasn’t the freedom an illusion? They merely moved between the cage of their bedchamber and a larger cage. For an uncomfortable moment, she imagined her mother and father behind her, driving her and her sisters before them like geese.

The stairs led them into the lovely avenue of trees, with their leaves of silver, gold and diamond. The trees hummed, those with gold leaves on a deep, rich note, and those with silver leaves with a sound of green fire.

As they emerged from the avenue of trees, the lake lay before them, calm and glassy. Ginger and her sisters found their boats and set sail, a flock of silent swans.

As she skimmed across the living water, Ginger wondered if she’d already found the limits of her life, if nothing remained to learn or discover, and her restlessness and disloyalty were leading her into discontent that would erode the rest of her days and nights into bitter old age.

They reached the other side of the lake and stepped onto the dancing floor. As she went through the familiar preparation and ritual, Ginger, with relief, put away spoken language and quieted her mind. The music began and she gave herself to it gratefully and let it lift her away from her unhappy, dangerous thoughts. Her intellect slept, dreaming, and her body expanded into wild female life, at one with leaf and water drop, crystal and star.

RADULF

Radulf didn’t open the book in his hand but sat listening for a time after Ginger left him. Prudently, he’d emptied the content of his goblet into the pot holding the lemon tree while the woman Ginger was distracted. He could hear faint sounds from the town outside the window. Vague female voices spoke on the other side of the door, no words distinguishable. He heard no raised voices or sounds of distress. Perhaps they were getting ready for bed. Perhaps getting ready to go out?

After a few minutes, he rose and extinguished the lights. He put his ear to the crack of the door. Yes. They were there — or at least some were. He thought he heard several different voices. They were talking, but not sleepily, as though moving toward bed. He heard drawers being pulled open and shoved shut, and the closing of small, light doors, like wardrobes or cupboards. He had an impression of movement and anticipation.

Then the voices fell silent and he heard a heavy muffled scraping, as though something large was dragged across the floor. Carefully, he turned the door handle until he felt the latch release and opened it the merest crack, just enough to put his eye to.

A group of women stood with their backs to him. One of the canopied beds had been pulled away from the wall, not awry but straight out, leaving a narrow gap just wide enough to squeeze through. Radulf thought it possible it might not be noticed from the chamber door, should anyone glance in and check, at least if the light was dim.

A door in the wall opened. He thought one of the women had used a key, but couldn’t see clearly. One by one, they disappeared through the door, skirts rustling, gauzy scarves floating, and glimmer and shine of gold and jewels at necks and wrists. Oddly, they wore their hair down rather than pinned, braided, twisted and tied with adornments. Ginger’s shone like polished wood, perhaps mahogany. The other heads were variations on brown, some lighter and some darker. She was the last one through the door. It shut behind her and he heard a key turn in the lock.

By then he was halfway across the floor of the bedchamber. The key with the red-jeweled haft and shoulders the Firebird had given him was in his hand. He knew, without a single doubt, it would fit in the door. It did. He opened it as carefully as he could and found it swung silently, heavy but perfectly balanced. A flight of shallow marble steps twisted out of sight, reminding him for a second of the marble steps leading into the sea outside his family’s castle. But the sea lay many miles away from here. The sound of the women faded. They were well ahead. He shut the door, relocked it, and descended the steps.

He came out in an avenue of trees. A deep, rich sound of humming filled the air, a vibration he heard with his whole body. The trees gleamed and shone, reflecting light as though they bloomed with stars. When he reached them, he realized with wonder that some had leaves of gold, some leaves of silver and some leaves of diamond.

Only one way lay through the trees. He couldn’t see the women, but, faintly, he heard their voices ahead.

He came out of the trees and in front of him a lake stretched like a sheet of glass, reflecting a thousand points of light. Overhead, stars pricked the dark, or lights of some other kind. The stairs had appeared to take him down, but he didn’t feel he was underground and accepted this was some other dimension, someplace far from the sleeping chamber at the top of the stairs. The cool breath of the lake filled his lungs. Small boats moved across the dark water, silent and graceful as birds. Ginger was in the act of launching hers.

He set out around the lake on foot.

Torchlight sprang out on the far shore, guiding Radulf. He could see figures moving about. Approaching cautiously, keeping to the shadows, he discovered a wide flat floor of polished wood, set around with torches. He stopped well back in the shadows. One of the women moved from torch to torch, hand rising and falling in a graceful but commanding motion, and the torches dimmed until the floor was just lit enough to see. He came a step nearer, watching.

The women spread out on the floor, each somehow remote from the others. They weren’t talking now. They might each be alone. Slowly, coming from nowhere and everywhere, music began to swell. The hair stood up on Radulf’s arms and the back of his neck. Dar’s music had been strange, mocking and insistent or moving and tender, but the silver green voice of the bone flute couldn’t be compared to this slow upwelling. It was like comparing the fluttering pulse of a hummingbird to the slow, inexorable heartbeat of a whale. It contained the hum of the trees he’d walked under; the cool, gleaming voice of the lake; and the whispering of sails from the boats in an unseen and unfelt wind. It sounded primitive and ancient and deeply, deeply female. It held blood and bone and tangled hair.

A squat, heavy figure stepped onto the floor from the shadows. The figure was naked and female. Radulf could see a heavy growth of pubic hair spreading across her groin and onto thick thighs. Her breasts hung, soft and pendulous. She was short, with vast hips. She danced with eerie grace, moving with youthful suppleness. She was hideous. She was beautiful. Radulf couldn’t decide which. He couldn’t look away. He found himself smiling and didn’t know why. She herself smiled, grinning widely, joyously. Curls of thin hair bobbed on her head. She danced barefoot.

She reached into the shadows and lifted two drums onto the floor, held in place by some kind of stand. She laid her hands caressingly on the drums, fondling them, running her fingers across them as though across a lover’s body.

Gradually, she began to play and he heard the drums’ voices weaving with the music filling the night. She beat a steady rhythm, but he could hear variations in the beat as her hands moved across the drums. Her hands danced their own dance within the larger dance, lifting the beat out of the hollow drums, calling it, opening the way, her palms and fingers strong and skilled. She looked as elemental and natural as a mountain, as an old tree, as the desert.

Gold nude dancer Image by efes from Pixabay

Radulf had been so intent on the old woman he’d lost track of what the others were doing. He tore his gaze away from the squat, bobbing figure stamping and turning and dancing with the drums and found the twelve princesses dancing. They didn’t dance together, at least not obviously. Each appeared to be creating her own dance, but together they expressed something deeper than themselves. It was a dance of doors and steps, trees, shining leaves, water, sails, invisible wind, vaulted night sky. Hair flowed over shoulders and necks. Breasts were bared, jewels shed. Scarves floated, gloves discarded, skirts subsided into formless rustling heaps at the edge of the floor.

Radulf suddenly felt himself a violation. He didn’t belong here. He had no right to look upon this. He thought of the king, sitting in his throne looking at Radulf out of hard eyes, saying, “Women are sly creatures, untrustworthy and silly. I rue the day I took a wife, though at the time I was determined to possess her.” He’d laughed, then, bitterly, his mouth tight. “And she gave me twelve more to deal with! They’re a heavy burden, young man, a heavy burden. Secretive. But I’ll break them. One day I’ll know where they go, who they’re with and what they do. I don’t care what the price is. One day I’ll know the truth!”

Now he understood. No wonder the princesses felt they couldn’t tell their father the truth. The dance belonged to them; was theirs and theirs alone. No doubt the mystery of the queen’s disappearance was also tied to this place. The humming trees, the living lake and the dancing floor hid within the depths he’d sensed in Ginger, but what a price these women paid for their spiritual life! What a tragic price in death for such wild strength and beauty.

He returned to the lake, knowing, soon or late, they must return to the boats. He sat with his back to the dimly lit dancing floor, looking out across the gleaming water and thinking while the night played its music around the drumbeat at the center.

GINGER

On the way back across the lake, Ginger thought of her mother’s face, dark-eyed and framed in hair tangled from her dance.

“We’ve no choice,” her mother said in memory. “We must hide this part of our lives or it’ll be stolen away and we’ll be nothing but powerless puppets going through the motions of life. Promise, me Ginger, to guard our secret.”

She’d promised and she’d held to that promise for twenty years, and become a powerless puppet going through the motions of life in spite of it. In the morning, another man would die.

I can’t do this anymore.

You must.

***

The following morning a servant came to the bedchamber, glanced at the pile of worn-out dancing shoes by the door and led the man Radulf away. He gave Ginger a smile as he left. She could hardly look at him. She wondered if he’d given her the last smile of his life, or would that be for a servant or even her father, the king? He’d been a courteous man, Radulf.

***

The king called for his daughters to appear before him. They went in their fine clothes with hair dressed and jewels on, twelve proper princesses. When they entered the room, Ginger saw Radulf standing quietly in a corner. He held three branches — one of gold leaves, one of silver leaves and one of diamond leaves.

Ginger controlled her expression but she heard one of her sisters gasp and felt tension ripple through the neat line of twelve standing before her father. She dropped her eyes, looking fixedly at a crack between one plank and the next on the polished floor.

“Tell it again,” commanded the king, nodding to Radulf.

“Your daughters contrived a key to fit the lock on their door,” said Radulf. He held up a gold key and sunlight from the window next to him picked out red jewels encrusting it. Ginger had never seen it before.

“I followed them. Conveyance waited for them and they were taken to a dance.”

“Lord Dunstan, I expect,” said the King. “He hosts dances and parties all summer long.”

Radulf inclined his head politely.

“We passed down a wide avenue in a park with lovely trees.” Radulf held the branches in his hands out in illustration. “Naturally, the princesses didn’t lack for partners and they danced the night away.”

The king paced up and down in front of his daughters, who stood stiffly in their line, not meeting one another’s eyes. He clasped his hands behind his back and inflated his chest. His round belly pushed out in front of him. “Silly girls,” he said, shaking his head. “Silly women.” He stopped in front of Ginger. She looked him square in the eye.

“I suppose all these years you’ve protected your mother. She met someone at one of these dances, didn’t she? Met someone and ran off with him, leaving her husband, her duty and her daughters behind. Your mother always kept secrets. I knew it. I tried to bring her to heel but she was stubborn. And beautiful. I was a young fool in those days.”

Ginger, who well remembered her mother’s wild sweetness and fierce independence, kept her face calm and her eyes steady.

The king waved a hand in dismissal. “It doesn’t matter. Ancient history. Better off without her, we are.”

He began to pace back and forth again in front of them. “If you want to go to dances, why not ask permission and do it properly? Why all this sneaking and secret key business? Why make a mystery of it? I’d have been delighted to find suitable husbands for you when you were still young, if you’d only been less stubborn and told me what I wanted to know.” His gaze roamed over them. “Now some of you are too old, but Gemma and the younger ones might still be fresh enough.”

The king paused and looked at Radulf. “My thanks, sir. I can’t think why such a silly puzzle wasn’t solved long ago. I felt greatly upset by the loss of my wife and for some time I didn’t think clearly. When it appeared my daughters were following in her footsteps, I became quite beside myself.”

“Naturally,” said Radulf.

“As a reward for the peace of mind you’ve brought me, please accept one of my daughters in marriage. We must consider what part of the kingdom you’d like to be responsible for.”

The relief of tension made Ginger feel faint. This man had seen—and not told. The jeweled key hadn’t unlocked the chamber door, but the hidden door. He’d followed them down the stairs, along the avenue of trees and over the lake. He must have watched their ritual and dance, and then followed them back.

Clearly, he didn’t intend to betray them.

Oh, Mother, she thought, you were wrong!

Radulf stood before her. He spoke, but the words flew away from her ears like birds. He held out his hands and it was as though a door opened. She put her hands in his and stepped through.

(To read Parts 9 & 10 in their entirety, go here.)

A Stone, a Web, a Story

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