‘What is it? Linon. What is this?’
But before the bird on his neck could make any reply, the mist parted again ahead of them, more than a swirling this time, a withdrawal, revealing the road across the narrow ditch for the first time that morning, and Crispin saw clearly what had, indeed, come on this day. His understanding of the world and the half-world changed forever in that moment as he, too, sank to his knees in the mud, his father’s sword dropping from his fingers. The girl remained standing by the mule, transfixed. He would remember that.
Very far to the west in that moment the autumn sun had long since risen above the woods near Varena. The sky was blue and the sunlight caught the red of the oak leaves and of the last apples on the trees in an orchard beside a road that joined the great highway to Rhodias a little farther south.
In the courtyard of the farmhouse adjoining that orchard an old man sat on a stone bench by his door, wrapped in a woollen cloak against the crispness of the breeze, enjoying the morning light and the colours. He held an earthenware bowl of herbal tea in both hands, warming them. A servant, grumbling out of ancient habit, fed the chickens. Two dogs slept by the open gate in the sunlight. In a distant field sheep could be seen but no shepherd. It was clear enough to make out the towers of Varena to the north and west. A bird trilled from the rooftop of the farmhouse.
Zoticus stood up, very abruptly. He set down his tea on the bench, spilling some of it. A watcher might have seen his hands tremble. The servant was not watching. The alchemist took a step or two towards his front gate and then turned to face the east, a grave, intent expression on his weathered face.
‘What is it? Linon!’ he said sharply and aloud. ‘What is this?’
He was, of necessity, unaware that he was echoing another man’s question. He received no reply, either. Of course. One of the dogs stood up, though, head tilted a little to one side, questioningly.
Zoticus remained that way for a long time, motionless, as if listening for something. He had closed his eyes. The servant ignored him, used to this. The chickens were fed, and then the goat, and he milked the one cow. The eggs were collected. Six of them this morning. The servant carried them inside. All this time the alchemist did not move. The dog hesitated, and then padded over to lie down beside him. The other dog remained by the gate, in the light.
Zoticus waited. But the world, or the half-world, gave nothing more back to him. Not after that one sharp vibration in the soul, in the blood, a gift-or a punishment-offered someone who had walked and watched in shadows most men never knew.
‘Linon,’ he said again, at length, but softly this time, a breath. He opened his eyes, looking out at the distant trees of the forest through the gate before his home. Both dogs sat up this time, watching him. He reached down without looking and patted the one at his knee. After a while he went back into the house, leaving his forgotten tea to grow cold on the stone bench outside. The sun rose higher through the morning, in the clear and cloudless blue of the autumn sky.
Twice in his life Vargos thought (he was never entirely certain) he had seen one of the zubir. A glimpse in half-light, no more than that, of the Sauradian bison, lord of the Aldwood and all the great forests, emblem of a god.
Once, at summer sunset, working alone in his father’s field, he had looked up squinting to see a bulky, shaggy shape at the edge of the wood. The light had been fading, the distance great, but something too large had moved against the dark curtain of the trees and then disappeared. It might have been a stag but it had been enormous, and he hadn’t seen the high, branched horns.
His father had beaten him with an axe handle for suggesting that evening that he might actually have seen one of the sacred beasts of the wood. To see a zubir was an awesome thing, reserved for priests and sacred warriors consecrated to Ludan. Fourteen-year-old boys with a disrespectful turn of mind were not granted such felicities in the scheme of the world as the Inicii-and Vargos’s father saw it.