Winter Moon (18 page)

Scornfully she said to him, her heart beating too fast, “So you're afraid of the Isle? My regrets. But I'm no companion for you. I have my band to think of—” and broke off, aware that she had lost her band and very likely would never find them again. A wide grief swept through her and a sense of shame. She had failed her girls.

He said, “Do me the kindness then, Clirando, of letting me tell you of my crime. In the temples of the Father, anyone may go and tell his worst sins to a priest, if the burden becomes too great. And I know, in Amnos, there is also a priestess tradition among the female warriors.”

Clirando lifted her eyes from her own emotions, and looked at him levelly.

He took this as his cue. Clirando did not know if she had meant it to be one.

“I killed a man,” Zemetrios said woodenly. He
began to gaze again into the pool. “Fair and square, you might say, in a duel outside my father's house. Or my house, since my father died last year.”

Clirando watched him.

The moon lighted his face, but his eyes were shadowed, looking down at the water.

Zemetrios of Rhoia told her how the man he had slain had been his best friend. “We'd fought as comrades in the legions since both of us were seventeen. He was a fine soldier, loyal and trustworthy and clever. We were like brothers from the first. We'd fought side by side in enough battles…been promoted to the rank of leader at the same time. I was at his wedding. A pretty girl, a sweet girl. I don't know where she's gone now. She ran away from him, you see. That was after he changed into another man.”

A silence.

“What do you mean?” Clirando heard her voice. It had a sound of awe. Zemetrios had caught her with his storytelling. She must be on guard.

Zemetrios said, “He turned into a drunkard. Oh, there had been times in the past—you fight hard, you take leave and drink hard. But those sessions are occasional. Then, with Yazon, they became habitual.”

Zemetrios spoke briefly, in terse sentences, of drunk brawls, meaningless and savage fights with citizens of the town that Yazon, deranged with wine, would pick. “He was a trained fighter. You see what that would mean. They hadn't a chance. He broke their legs and arms and knocked them senseless like cold stones. I and others dragged him off, doused
him in the horse trough. Sometimes we would have to chain him up like a mad dog till he sobered.”

Yazon began to beat his young wife also. She fled to her parents' house on the hills, and later, after Yazon pursued her there, firstly with gifts, then with threats, to some other land.

“They cast him out of the legions in dishonor. He had only his soldier's pension then, much reduced since he was young and had ruined his own career.”

Yazon, Zemetrios said, went to live in an old fisherman's hut near the quay. He begged for his living, or committed acts of robbery—twice ending in the jail-pit for a public whipping. All he could get in money went on wine—bad wine, now, the dross of the waterfront taverns.

“I tried my best to help him, Clirando. I'd paid off his debts three times, I'd begged the legion to give him a second chance—twice I did that, but the second time a second chance was refused. He didn't know me mostly anyway, said he thought me some enemy. By then he was never sober. My father was sick by then, too. I had other difficulties, and soon enough the duties of burial and mourning.”

Zemetrios paused again.

Clirando said nothing. The tale disturbed her. She empathized with this unknown man and, not daring to trust him—Thestus had won her trust, and Araitha had always
had
her trust—would not speak.

In the end Zemetrios told her that he came from the house one morning to find Yazon lying across the threshold. “He was filthy, covered in sores and fleas,
half-dead. I took him in. He had been my friend. What else could I do?”

Cleaned up, fed, and doctored by a physician, Yazon was surly and irritable. Refused more than three cups of wine, he stole it from the cellars, and broke the pitchers in the courtyard when he was done. On a morning when Zemetrios needed to report to the town fort, Yazon attacked two of the kitchen girls. He raped one, and beat them both with a stick, and when someone came running to the fort, Zemetrios raced to his house and pulled the yowling drunkard out into the square. Before a crowd of citizens and soldiers, Zemetrios punched his former friend to the ground, threw him a sword and told him to get up and fight.

“It lasted less than the tenth of an hour. I never meant to kill him, or believed not. But he was no longer Yazon and I perhaps was no longer much myself, either. I'd seen the girls crying. My father had kept a kind and worthy house. The sword pierced him through cleanly enough. He fell over and was dead. Yazon. Dead. I remember,” said Zemetrios, “one time in the deserts, marching east, he and I sat looking at the stars and talked about what we wished for ourselves. Both of us wanted only good things. Nothing to anger the gods. But he died on the street and I left my legion, and sold my father's house. And now the priests have sent me here.”

Clirando had been holding her breath. She let it go carefully, so he should not hear her sigh.

The full moon reached the perimeter of the trees. It
slipped behind the canopy, looking for a moment broken in silver pieces, before darkness closed the view.

 

In the morning Clirando forced herself to alertness. This now was her fifth night without sleep—aside from the deadly drugged hour on the beach. She had not taken much of the herbal medicine on the galley, not wanting her band to guess her predicament, or herself to be unready for any demand the voyage might make. On Moon Isle, she had always realized, she could not risk it at all. Parna's temple had supplied instead a cordial to help her keep her energy and a clear mind. Clirando drank from the vial.

Zemetrios, after he had made his “confession” to her, had lain back and slept again, but not, she then saw, so well. His slumbers were disturbed. She felt a mean amusement at it. But what if this too were some act?

I can never trust him. He may be a liar and felon. Or—he may not be real at all.

Was such a thing possible? Yes. There were demons here, she had encountered them, for what else were the pig things but some type of animal demon? A man demon might also be feasible. And he had appeared by her fire—as if from nowhere.

She thought grimly,
And enough demoniac men already exist in the human world.

They shared bread and oatcakes for breakfast. They drank water from the pool.

He told her then that the priests in Rhoia had assured him a large village lay at the heart of the Isle,
deep in the forest and below the mountains. This was where the Seven Nights were celebrated.

“We should make for there.”

Was this a lie, too? Or a trap?

But she could think of nothing else to do. Against all common sense she had a wild hope the girls of her band might be at this village, part of the celebration they themselves had discussed.

Journey

T
hey both moved at a steady lope along the continuing track that ran through the trees. Everything was as it had been, a hot day burning up behind the leaves and pine needles, freckled sun-shafts, cool shadows, little wayside streams, rocks, and the rare sound or sight of a bird, and once a yellowish fox trotting over their path.

Near noon they came into another glade, without water, but the turf covered with drifts of the pale flowers. Vines hung from the trees like nets, jeweled by fast-ripening grapes.

They paused here, picking and eating the fruit.

From behind the walls of the pines, there came suddenly a jeering, eerie whoop.

He heard it too she thought.

Transfixed, Clirando saw a dark huddle of shapes
ruffling along behind the curtains of the vines. There were more of them now. A whole pig herd of these demons of hers.

Last night she had yearned that the lion cat would catch and devour them. But obviously, even if it had, other members of the tribe existed.

“What is it?” Zemetrios said to her.

They had, until then, spoken very little, and of nothing beyond their own advance, the grapes, and the mooted village.

Shaken again, Clirando said, “Animals.”

He stared over where she did.

“Or,” he said, “supernatural things.”

“Can you see them?” The question burst from her before she could decide to withhold it.

“Something…but the island is full of such stuff. They trouble you?” he asked, turning his blue eyes full on her.

Angrily Clirando said, “What business is it of yours?”

“Only this—I too am tormented by creatures or images that roam through the trees. Not animal in that sense. They call to me in drunken voices…insubstantial. An army of drunken ghosts.”

As he said this, clear as if drawn in paint, Clirando saw Araitha standing between two pines. She wore her traveler's cloak, and her golden hair with its ornaments caught the sunlight. Her face had no expression.

Clirando began to tremble. She told herself dizzily that it was only her sleepless eyes that played the
trick. She shut them, which was a mistake, and felt Zemetrios catch hold of her, lifting her clear of some abyss into which she had been about to fall.

She pushed him away. His strength and quickness alarmed her. She was humiliated by her own weakness.

But he would not let her push him off. He held her up and put the flask against her mouth.

“Take some.”

“No.”

“It's only water. I drank the last of the spirits last night.”

Clirando drank. The water was still cold, and despite his words, kept the tang of alcohol. It steadied her.

“My thanks. Let go of me now. I'm well.”

“You're not. But yes, I'll let go. There.”

She could smell him, the health of his young body, the clean aroma of his hair and breath.

Clirando glanced at the pines.

The ghost was gone.

“Did you kill her?” Zemetrios asked.

“What?”

“You spoke a name, two in fact. A man's name and a woman's. You spoke
his
name with utter scorn. And hers with—forgive me, warrior girl, with
fear.
”

Clirando dropped herself down to her knees, and sat back. She no longer felt faint, but drained and—what Araitha had promised—
empty
.

This man
was
real. She had disgraced herself by nearly fainting in front of him like some pampered lady. What did the truth matter now?

“I killed her. Not directly. But she died because of what I did.”

“Because she lay down with your lover? Oh, Clirando, it isn't hard to guess. You spoke two names, remember?”

“She lay down with my lover. She'd been my friend. Him I beat in fair fight and he was sent away. She also. She went to Crentis but the ship sank. She's dead, as you say. Through me.”

“By the Father,” said Zemetrios softly.

“She cursed me, too.” Clirando gave a small rasp of laughter. “I can't sleep. A slight curse, you might think.”

“No, I don't think that.”

“Well,” said Clirando, “let's get on.”

She stood up again.

The forest was silent and black beyond the sunlight of the vine glade. Like all her life surely now, beyond that night when lightning struck Parna's Temple.

 

Why did I trust him? Stupid, to blab it all out to him. Are you a child, or what? Well. He knows now.

Clirando ran lightly beside Zemetrios, through the glints and shades, angry with herself, lamenting, full of pain.

Nothing had importance, only to go on, to find her band. Or if not, respectfully to complete this awful and weird penance set her by the priestesses of the Maiden. And then be done with all of it.

I too will go away. Into the East perhaps, where peo
ple lose themselves. Because already I'm lost. Who is Clirando? Clirando would never have blurted out her secret to some stranger.

But as they loped shoulder to shoulder, glancing up at the “stranger,” from time to time she saw the twitch behind his eyes, and once his head turning, then snapping around again. He too heard and saw devils in the forest as he had said, that fact alone was certain.

And she—she came to hear sometimes an unearthly low sound that filtered through the trees like wind, though the leaves never moved. It had for her no noise of drunken voices—the multiplied voice of Yazon in all the moods of his insanity. If she detected anything it was the jeering cry of the pig things—but now never too close.

Possibly he had been right. To travel together might provide a little distance for both of them from their haunts. Even the ghost of Araitha had not drawn near.

Had it
been
she? For sure?

Clirando frowned as she ran.
They are my devils. They come for me. Out of my heart and mind. It's only that the forest makes them real. But how real? Could I have gone to her and seized her, run her through with a knife?

Clouds massed across Clirando's eyes. She half stumbled, and he turned and looked at her. His face was concerned, curious.

“A root,” she said.

And pushed memory and idle surmise to the edges of her brain.

 

The trees began to thin out near sunfall.

The downward slopes were more gradual, and oak trees and wild olive predominated. Here the track ended abruptly. Another altar place stood there, this one with a whitish stone roughly carved and pocked, a sort of uneven globe.

He and she halted beside it. In the bronzy light now slanting sidelong through the trees, the globe seemed to pulse with uncanny inner light.

Clirando took the last honey wafer from her pack, and laid it by the stone. “I do not know you, but I reverence you.”

Zemetrios, rather sheepishly, she thought, put the final sliver of cheese on the altar. It was mostly rind. Any god would disdain it—or perhaps not, since they would otherwise have eaten it.

“Look,” he said quietly.

A hare bounded among the olives, its long ears brushed with light and glowing red.

They could have brought the hare down for supper, either of them, she was certain. But in this place neither had wished to, or though it wise.

Did they in some ways then, think alike?

No.

Remember Thestus, the arch deceiver. Though Thestus, she believed, would have wanted to throw his knife or a rock at the hare, and she would have had to stop him.

As they turned from the altar, Clirando saw an old man sitting about fifty paces away under a broad
leaved tree. His hands were busy with something that sparkled—and she was positive he had not been there in the preceding moments.

“Do you see him?”

“Yes,” Zemetrios said.

Slowly they walked forward, making no attempt at caution. The old man did not look up. But when they were almost within arm's length of him, he raised his aged face. His eyes were black and keen in the pleated paper of his skin.

“You're going to the village,” he told them, “the Moon Town.”

“It exists then,” said Clirando.

“Perhaps,” said the old man.

What spangled through his hands was a threaded skein of brilliant stones—like Eastern rubies and diamonds they looked. He seemed only to be playing with them and suddenly he cast them down.

Zemetrios but not Clirando sucked in breath.

Meeting the ground, the sparkly web changed instantly to a long and coiling snake, marked along its back with points of red and silver.

“Oh,” said the old man, sarcastically polite, “did I make you jump, bold soldier?”

“Yes, Father,” said Zemetrios. Good-naturedly he laughed. “You're a magician, then.”

“Sometimes a magician. Sometimes other things. Sometimes I am a tree.”

They regarded him wordlessly. The burnished snake poured itself away and up the narrow trunk of a nearby olive.

“Things come, and also they go,” said the old man.

“How great a distance to the village now, Father?”

“Not far. Be there before sunset ends. They close the gates at first dark.”

“A wise precaution,” said Clirando.

She guessed Zemetrios, as she did, tried to draw the old man out, provoke him into some revealing word or action.

But he did not reply now, only took from the inner folds of his garments another skein of beads. Moving it to and fro between gnarled hands, he crooned what must have been the spell to make a serpent out of it.

“Well, good evening to you,” said Zemetrios.

He and Clirando walked on.

About twenty steps farther along, both of them turned as one. Only shadows sat under the broadleaved tree.

“The snake-maker, I shall call him that,” said Zemetrios.

“It was a trick, an illusion.”

“Maybe. Did you see how he did it?”

“No. But then often you never can—that is the idea of it.”

“I met an old woman, too,” Zemetrios said, “the first day, when I'd climbed up from the beach. There was an unlit beacon there. She wove only cloth, not snakes. She said she lived in a hut.”

“I met her also. The hut hadn't been used for years.”

“What are they?” he said softly, as they paced on
again. “Are they demons, too? If so, I don't recognize them.”

“Not all demons are recognizable.”

“You're sensible, Clirando.”

She shrugged.

The ground sloped up now. The trees were much fewer in number, long stretches of grass and weeds between them, and no path anywhere, as if, though many walked through the forest, none ever came as far as this.

The sun, which they could see now, hung low in the sky, a red ball in a curdling of gold and scarlet cloud.

They had reached the top of the hill. They looked down into the small basin of a valley.

Impending sunset described it exactly. Fields and groves, vineyards and orchards clustered there. And from them protruded high walls of dressed stone, above which showed tiled roofs, and one tall slim tower. The village. Behind everything, mountains rose, three peaks, one behind another, and touched sidelong with flame by the dying sun.

The way down to the valley was easy. The slope was broken now by another pathway, itself of laid stone, and broad enough for three men to walk together.

“At first dark the gates shut,” he repeated.

They broke into a racer's run, leaping down the roadway into the valley.