She had thought this morning, foolishly, that she might escape.
She knew now-oh, she knew!-that Ludan was not to be escaped. Not like this. Not by some clever Rhodian with a scheme. Not by a girl named, however unfairly, however cruelly, to the god. Cruelty had no … place here in the field. It was a word that had no meaning, no context. The god was, and did what he did.
In this suspended state of calm, Kasia looked into the eyes of the zubir, eyes so deep a brown they were black, and she saw them clearly even in mist, and seeing, she surrendered her mortal will and the meaning of her soul to the ancient god of her people. What man-what woman, even more than man-had ever been immune to destiny? Where could you run when your name was known to a god? The secret pagan priest here, the whispering villagers, Morax’s gross, small-eyed wife … none of them mattered. Their own destinies awaited them, or had found them already. Ludan signified, and he was here.
Kasia was serene, unresisting, as one drugged with the juice of poppies, when the bison began moving towards the forest. It looked back at the three of them, slowly turning its massive shaggy head. Kasia thought she understood. She had been named. He knew her. There was no path in the world that would not lead her here. Her tread, barefoot in the mud and crushed grass, was steady as she began to follow. Fear was behind her, in another world. She wondered if she would have time to wish a prayer that mattered, for her mother and her sister far away, if such things were allowed, if they were still alive, if the sacrifice had any power in what she was. She knew without turning back that the two men were coming behind her. Choice was not granted here, to any of them.
They went into the Aldwood on the Day of the Dead following the zubir, and the black trees swallowed them even more completely than the fog had done before.
‘The numinous,’ the philosopher Archilochus of Arethae had written nine hundred years ago, ‘is not to be directly apprehended. Indeed, if the eods wish to destroy a man they need only show themselves to him.’
Crispin struggled to barricade his soul behind ancient learning, a desperately conjured image of a marble portico in sunlight, a white-clad, white-bearded teacher serenely illuminating the world for attentive disciples in the most celebrated of the city-states of Trakesia.
He failed. Terror consumed him, asserting mastery, dominance, as he followed the girl and the stupefying creature that was . . . more than he could grasp. A god? The showing forth of one? The numinous? Upwind of them now, it stank. Things crawled and oozed through the thick, matted fur that hung from its chin, neck, shoulders, even the knees and breast. The bison was enormous, impossibly so, taller than Crispin was, wide as a house, the great, horned head vast and appalling. And yet, as they entered the woods, the first black trees like sentinels, wet leaves falling about them and upon them, the creature moved lightly, gracefully, never turning after that first look back-certain they were following.
And they were. Had there been choice, any kind of volition here, Caius Crispus of Varena, son of Horius Crispus the mason, would have died in that wet cold field and joined his wife and daughters in the afterworld- whatever it turned out to be-rather than enter the Aldwood as a living man. The forest had frightened him even at a distance, in sunlight, seen from the safety of the road in Batiara. This morning, this otherworldly morning in Sauradia, there was no place on the god’s earth he would not rather be than here in this dank, inhuman wilderness where even the smells could horrify.
The god’s earth. What god? What power ruled in the world as he knew it? As he had known it: for this unnatural creature appearing in fog on the road had changed all that forever. Crispin spoke in his mind to the bird again, but Linon was silent as the dead, hanging about his throat as if she were, truly, no more than an amulet, a pedestrian little creation of leather and metal, worn for sentimental reasons.