He even welcomed the mist that settled in around them as they climbed a slope luxuriant with wildflowers, their petals splashed with extravagant shades of scarlet and teal and lemon yellow. As the moist haze thickened, the blossoms took on an air of unreality, their variegated faces staring brazenly at the shrouded sun, kaleidoscopic denizens of a languid dream.
Soon the mist had congealed to the point where even the black litah was hard pressed to espy a route upward, and they were reduced to following the stream that had cut the canyon. Though the humid air was still temperate and the climbing not difficult, Ehomba found himself glancing around apprehensively. Noting his friend’s unease, Simna edged close.
“Hoy, long bruther, something’s troubling you.” The swordsman strove, without much success, to penetrate the haze. “You see something?”
“No, it is not that, Simna.” As the herdsman licked his lips he tried not to suck in any of the prevailing moisture. “I was—I am—trying to remember something.” Raising a hand, he gestured imprecisely. “It is this fog.”
Simna took a look around, then shrugged indifferently. “It’s fog. Accursedly thick fog, but just fog. So what?”
“I remember it.”
The swordsman couldn’t help himself: He laughed without thinking. “Hoy, Etjole, a man remembers the deaths he escapes and the lovers he’s had. He remembers long, restful mornings and nights awash in celebration. He doesn’t remember fog.”
Ehomba ignored his friend’s good-natured chiding. There was something not in the air, but about it. A quality that stirred a particular memory. He struggled to recall it. Perhaps Simna was right. What was fog, after all, but droplets of moisture that hung in the air, too tired to rise as cloud, too lazy to fall as rain? How could anyone “remember” something so transient and ordinary?