Before long he discovered a faint trail that led him into a deep forest. Morning birds had begun to wake in anticipation of the day. Now and then a crow would startle him with its barbaric cries, so like the taunts of the enemy that had accompanied him to sleep the night before. But he came upon no encampment. No village. No sign of human habitation.
Shortly after dawn, still gripping the standard to the baldric that laced his torso, he emerged from the low-lying miasma onto a hillside clearing. To the east—the direction from which he’d come—a few similar hills gently nursed at the underbelly of the fog, but other than this there was nothing to see. Ahead, to the west, was a mountain range that oughtn’t to have been there, its spires jagged, covered with snow. From amongst the rugged folds of these, a tiny thread of smoke undulated sinuously upward, untroubled in the stillness. It signified a campfire. It signified life. It signified food, and he realized he was ravenously, achingly hungry.
It was toward this fire the trail led. The smoke called to him. As he walked, he was reminded of a legend he’d heard among the Jews of Cappadocia, how their god had once become a pillar of smoke and so led them through the wilderness to their promised land. Would this do the same?
By day’s end he had stumbled through intermittent forests and grassy clearings into the jagged shadows of the mountains. The smoke, nudged to odd contortions by contrary breezes, marked a cave in the lower reaches of the nearest mountainside. Between him and it was a long, downward-sloping field at the foot of which was a fast-flowing river. For one who had come so far and suffered so much, these impediments were nothing. He slung the standard over his shoulder and ran the rest of the way. In the river he slipped often, falling repeatedly into the clear, frigid water. If this were Hades, it was unlike any of his imaginings. If this was the Styx, it was too shallow for a boat to cross. No coin for the boatman.
He trudged ashore on the opposite side. The cold water had, if anything, invigorated him. It had washed the blood and gore from his flesh and cleansed his wounds. The silver eagle caught an errant shaft of sunlight and, for a moment, burned as brightly as if it were on fire. The trail continued. He was not surprised that it led to the mouth of the cave, a small, dark cleft in the sheer granite walls. He had to climb for half an hour to reach it. Often the shale gave way beneath him and he would slip backwards. But even reflexively he would not use the standard as a crook with which to steady himself. He would fall under it rather than let it touch the ground.
Darkness had purged the last traces of light from the day when he arrived at the cave that now, in contrast to the night, was filled with a soft, glowing light. Hunger overcame caution. “Hello!” he called in Gaelic. It was one of few words he knew in that infernal and guttural tongue.
There was no response. He ventured into the mouth of the cave surrendering, at last, one hand to the hilt of his sword. “Who is there?”
Still no reply. He ventured farther in, his heart shaking the bars of his ribs with both hands.
The cave, clearly not carved by the hand of man, wound upward at crazy angles through virgin rock, narrowing as it went. The light never became brighter, but continued soft, reddish-gold and welcoming. To his dismay, the smoke, which leisurely wandered the craggy ceiling toward its release, bore no smells of cooking.
The tunnel became so low, at last, that he had to crawl on his hands and knees. This necessitated his strapping the standard to his back. He bent low and slithered along on his belly to keep from scraping it on the roof. At last, when it seemed the tunnel had grown too small to allow him to squeeze on any farther, it gave way to a cavern. No amount of imagining could have prepared him for the strange sight that met his eyes.
The floor of the cavern was a lake, its waters black and thick as the bitumen he’d seen seeping from the ground on the Scythian campaign, and still as ice, perfectly reflecting the individual who sat, cross-legged, on a small island of flat rock in its midst. A woman, naked but for a bit of cloth draped loosely about her hips. Her skin was dark, nearly as black as the water, and glistened with the sweat of her labors. Between her knees a fire glowed, nearly white at its core. Lucius, in hasty thoughts assembled by his first reaction, wondered that she wasn’t consumed by the heat, which he could feel even at so great a distance.
The woman seemed unaware of him. She was bent over her task, utterly absorbed by the mechanics of her fingers as they dipped into the flames and, extracting fistfuls of molten gold, stretched them between her spread hands in shimmering threads. Mesmerized, he watched as she wound the threads about a tall spool, the spindle of which was wedged in a cleft of the rock beside her.
Forgotten, for the time, was hunger, forgotten his aches and pains. Forgotten, even, the sacred standard over which he had suffered so much. It fell to the ground with a chorus of clangs that filled the cavern with complaint. The woman didn’t start. She didn’t look up from her work.
Lucius was too captivated by the sight to retrieve the staff, too riddled with wonder even to move.
After a time, the woman began to unwind the thread from the spool and, with an implement of unfamiliar design, began to weave it into miraculous designs that were no sooner formed than they dissolved in the air. And so she labored, spinning patterns of fantastic intricacy, as if racing to complete each pattern before the thread’s dissolution.
Lucius watched. Whether the woman was beautiful or not, he could not have said. Nor could he have sworn to any other particular of her physicality beyond those he’d first observed, but that her fingers were mills of wonder there was no denying. His senses were so utterly overcome by their rhythm that it was a long time before he realized each individual strand sounded a note of music; that each note inspired an emotion; that these, when wound together, made a song far too sublime for the cup of his perception to contain.
An eternity may have elapsed before his wits were able to command his body to action; it may have been only moments, but eventually he stood up, seizing the standard, and made his way down the path. The way was jagged and ill-traveled; the securing of each foothold demanded his attention, but it hurt to take his eyes from the woman. If not for the music, he couldn’t have borne even so brief an absence from the sight of her and the dazzling cadence of her actions.
At last he found himself on a stony promontory directly opposite her, staring. His eyes ached for want of enough sight to absorb what he was seeing, his ears for enough depth to contain each musical phrase. But no sooner were these gone, than another took its place: another sight, another sound, another fragile marvel that made his ability to perceive them seem brutish and awkward. He was witness to that which his language was unfit to testify.
The woman worked on. Now so near he could see that each elaborate detail of her weaving was overlain with layers of intricacies that were finer still and within these, yet others. The sweat of her brow and breasts formed tiny beads of light that rained now and then upon the molten strands, forming brief jewels that hung for a moment, shimmering, as the thread dissipated beneath them, and they with it. He knew, somehow, that each was a prayer, a wish, a hope in the heart of someone somewhere.
He knew she was aware of his presence. “Who are you?” he called across the water.
She did not reply, but for a moment her fingers slowed.
“What is your name?” he called a little louder.
“A name would tell you nothing of who I am,” said the woman, without looking up from her work. Her voice seized him with its lyrical beauty. For a long time he said nothing, but watched.
“You are a goddess,” he decided.
“As much as you are a god,” she replied.
“What are you making?”
“Come and see.”
He studied the lake and the island. “I can’t get to you. There is no bridge.”
“Was there a bridge across the river you forded to get to my mountain?”
“No, but it was shallow.”
“And this is not?”
“
No.”
“How do you know?”
“I can tell by looking, it is deep.”
“That may be. Come to me anyway.”
“I am no swimmer.”
“Then you don’t wish to see.” She held up a magnificent strand of threads, each of which seemed alive, with details too fine to comprehend.
“I do!”
“Then come.”
Again he looked at the water. “I cannot.”
The woman continued working. The music swelled and in it he heard voices, singing in a language no human tongue could form.
He fell to his knees, resting his arm upon the standard.
Finally the woman stopped working. The music faded slowly, its final phrases echoing into oblivion. She looked at him and the luminosity and depth of her eyes took his breath away.
“Give me what is in your hand.”
He looked at the standard. “I cannot.”
“Why?”
“It is the symbol of all I hold sacred.”
“Give it to me,” said the woman again.
“I cannot.”
“There is much you cannot do, isn’t there? Yet, you wish so mightily to come to me, to see my design. It is far lovelier than anything you have known, is it not?”
“Yes.”
“And your staff? It is nothing but a poorly-wrought bird upon a pole.”
“It is not what it is, but what it represents.”
“Which is?”
“Honor, nobility, courage, duty,” he said automatically.
“And love?”
“And love, yes. Love of my country.”
“Countries come and go.”
“Rome is eternal.”
“I’ve never heard of it,” said the woman. She returned to her work. Once again the threads danced to life in her hands, once again the music, more beautiful than silence, filled the cavern.
“The path brought me here,” Lucius said at last.
“Your feet and your will brought you here.”
“I don’t understand.”
“If you did, you wouldn’t be here,” said the woman with a pleasant smile. “Not only do you not understand these mysteries, you don’t understand the things you most deeply believe.”
Lucius was a soldier, a man of action. Philosophies and rhetoric made him impatient. “Of course I do.”
“Of course you don’t,” said the woman. There was nothing of ridicule in her voice. Though her words seemed condescending, they were not. “You have inherited the beliefs of your fathers. Your culture. Its gods. Its mores. Its construction of absolutes. Of right and wrong. They are none of your own discovery. You call them beliefs, but they are no more than practice. Habits of the familiar.”
The words were too disquieting. “What are you weaving?”
“I can weave you anything you wish. The question is: is what you wish what you need?”
“You speak in circles.”
“One cannot speak in straight lines in a circular world, else one’s words will run out of room.”
“Better than running into themselves.”
The woman laughed, a brief rhapsody of delight.
“And what do I need?” Lucius said at last.
“That which will make you whole.”
“And that is?”
“Give me your staff,” said the woman in reply.
“I cannot.”
“Then neither can you be made whole.”
“It is my life,” he protested.
“And that is dear to you?”
“Of course it is.”
“But not dearer than your beliefs, for you were willing to sacrifice it for them on the field of battle.”
“Then my beliefs are dearest to me, and this,” he tamped the staff upon the ground, “is their emblem.”
“Then that is what I require.” Again she stopped working, and held out her hand. “Bring it to me.”
For the first time, Lucius wavered. “First, you must tell me who you are.”
“It is not who I am, but what am I making, you should ask.”
“Then tell me what you are making.”
“These are the thoughts that occur to men.”
“You are inspiration?”
“Not always so lofty as that,” said the woman, smiling. “But each thought requires a decision, whether to act upon it or not, whether for good or evil. It is the response to these choices that makes a man what he is. He may destroy himself or make himself whole, as he wishes.” She held out both hands. “Do you wish to be made whole?”
“If I am not, then yes. I wish to be.”
“Then give me your staff.”
Lucius struggled mightily with an overwhelming desire to surrender the standard, but his hand wouldn’t let it go. “I cannot.”
“Please yourself,” said the woman. She lowered her hands and resumed her work. “So long as you hold to it, there is nothing I can do.”
“You ask too much.”
“You are content with too little.”
“The water is too deep.”
“And your faith too shallow. Try your belief upon it. See if it sustains you.”
“It cannot.”
“Why? Are your beliefs ruled by your reason, or your reason by your beliefs?”
Lucius could bear the terror of such beauty no longer; he must either seize it—and see all he believed and valued burn away—or flee from it. He breathed deeply, gripped the standard tightly in his hand, and made his choice.
“I didn’t see you come in,” said Rat, who had been staring at the reflection of his soul in the helmet of Lucius, the Roman foot soldier from whose subconscious he had only recently emerged.
Cummings spread a cloth of hand-woven linen upon the rocky promontory where Rat reclined and proceeded, thereupon, to distribute the breakfast he had brought: poached gull’s eggs, a decanter of pomegranate juice, a perfectly carved wedge of melon, and a carafe of Earl Gray breakfast tea from his own dwindling reserve. “Thank you, sir.”
Rat hadn’t intended the comment as a compliment but, upon consideration, could see how Cummings might have interpreted it as such. It was, after all, his job to be unobtrusive. “There was a woman on that little island there,” he said, with a nod toward the outcropping in the middle of the lake below.
“Indeed, sir? I trust you found her companionable.”
Not the word Rat would have chosen. The female in question seemed a variation on one of those hill-top know-it-alls who litter the landscape of myth and legend. A species that tends to confine itself to remote and lonely places, who knows all questions before they’re asked and keeps the answers pretty much to themselves.
“We were speaking of pith not long ago?” said Rat.
“I recall the conversation, sir.” Cummings poured the tea with the reverence of a sacrificial libation, which to him, it was.
“Well, this sister had it by the gonads. No doubt you and your cronies at Prigmither’s School for Young Men of Promise were subjected, from time to time, to speechifying; the headmaster droning on, a visiting politician or the local vicar extolling at length upon vice or virtue as if they were being paid by the jot and tittle.”
“Prolix is the word we agreed upon earlier, sir, if you mean to suggest they were not the soul of brevity.”
“Brevity! Exactly. In an earlier episode we concurred that a decent vocabulary is a good thing to have, providing we don’t blow the whole wad every time we open our mouths.”
Cummings tilted his head at an acquiescent angle.
“Well, the female under discussion didn’t waste ’em.”
“You remark that this is uncharacteristic of the sex, sir?”
The question brought to mind thoughts that were not germane to the issue. “That’s beside the point, Cummings. The point is that she packed her comments with pith like a French innkeeper packs his sausages with this and that.”
“In few words, she gave you much to consider, sir?”
/> “You’ve latched onto the nub, my sparsely-coiffed attendant. She gave me much to consider. The central premise was faith. Or rather, the point at which one is required to act upon one’s beliefs.”
“Well-defined, sir.”
Rat turned his attention to his reflection and ruminated upon it for some moments internally. The creature in the mirror had evolved considerably over time. Where once it could have easily been mistaken for one of the more grotesque gremlins of a stone carver’s fancy, akin to those inhabiting the upper reaches of Notre Dame, it was now less bestial, more proto-human. The head was more rounded, the ears less pointed, the teeth less jagged, the eyes less craven and with a depth at least suggestive of an intelligence, however rudimentary, within. Rat entertained the notion that it was becoming more like him, but this was not, at the moment, a sure thing. Surely its sartorial preferences—the vest it had acquired earlier was now augmented by a watch fob and it seemed to be developing a coat or jacket of sorts—were not representative of anything Rat would have selected with which to present himself to the world.
“She seemed to suggest,” he said at last, “that the exercise of faith may require giving up the very thing you cherish most . . . even the beliefs upon which the faith itself is founded.”
This was, indeed, a pithy observation, and Cummings afforded it suitable reflection before replying. “The implication being that, if one is seeking truth, sir, one must be willing to sacrifice all else to it, even those things once held to be true, should they not stand before it.”
Rat nodded. “One doubts one’s beliefs, Cummings, but may prefer to cling to them rather than venture into the unknown.”
“Letting go of the familiar and comfortable is a frightening prospect, sir. Even if they are a mirage.”
Rat enlarged upon the theme. “It’s a frightening thing. It takes . . . it takes . . .”
“Courage, sir?”
“Courage. Yes. Like Columbus. I mean, it’s one thing to sit around the neighborhood Starbucks and give lip service to the possibility that the world may be round. Conjecture costs nothing. It’s something else to climb aboard some leaky caravel with a boatload of malcontents and unfurl your sails toward the setting sun.”
Storyteller Page 21
