Kay, Guy Gavriel – Sarantine Mosaic 01 – Sailing to Sarantium

If he understood any of this rightly, Linon had been a woman, named as Kasia had been named to the forest god, but she had died in that grove a long time ago. Heart cut out, body hanging from a sacred tree. And soul…? Soul claimed by a mortal man who had been watch­ing, insanely daring, and drawing upon some arcane power Crispin’s mind could not compass.

He remembered, unexpectedly, the look on Zoticus’s face when it had emerged that of all his birds it was Linon whose inward voice Crispin had heard. She was his fast, Crispin thought, and knew it was true.

Tell him goodbye, the bird had said silently at the end, in what would once have been her own voice. Crispin shook his head. He had thought once, in his arrogance, that he knew something of the world of men and women.

‘There is a chapel we will come to soon,’ Vargos said. Crispin pulled his thoughts back, and realized they had both been watching him. ‘Before sunset. A real one, not just a roadside shrine.’ ‘Then we will enter it and pray,’ said Crispin.

There would be comfort in the well-worn rituals, he realized. A return­ing to the customary, where people lived out their lives. Where they had to live their lives. The day, he thought, had done all it could do, the world had revealed all it would just now. They would calm themselves, he would order his thoughts, begin adjusting to the absence about his throat and in his mind, begin thinking of what to say in a difficult letter to Zoticus, perhaps even begin looking forward to wine and a meal at tonight’s inn. A return­ing to the customary, indeed, as if coming home from a very long journey. Men, when they think in this way-that the crisis, the moment of revealed power, has passed-are as vulnerable as they will ever be. Good leaders of armies at war know this. Any skilled actor or writer for the stage knows it. So do clerics, priests, perhaps cheiromancers. When peo­ple have been very deeply shaken in certain ways they are, in fact, wide open to the next bright falling from the air. It is not the moment of birth-the bursting through a shell into the world-that imprints the newborn gosling, but the next thing, the sighting that comes after and marks the soul.

They went on, two men and a woman, through an opening world. No one else was on the road. It was the Day of the Dead. The autumn light became mild as the sun swung west, palely veiled. A cool breeze moved the clouds. More rifts of blue could be seen overhead. Crows in the fields, jays, and another small bird Crispin didn’t know, swift-flying on their right, with a bright tail red as blood. Snow far off, on the distant moun­tain peaks emerging one by one. The sea beyond. He could have sailed, if the courier . ..

They came to the place of which Vargos had spoken. It was set behind iron gates, some distance back from the road on the south side. It faced the forest. The chapel was much larger than the usual roadside places of prayer. A real one, as Vargos had put it: a grey stone octagon with a dome above, neatly cropped grass around it, a dormitory beside, outbuildings behind, a graveyard. It was very peaceful here. Crispin saw cows and a goat in the meadow beyond the graves.

Had he been more aware of time and place, had his mind not been wrestling with unseen things, he might have realized where they were and been prepared. He did not, and he was not.

They tied the mule by the low wall, went through the unlocked iron gate and up the stone path. There were late-season flowers growing beside it, lovingly tended. Crispin saw an herb garden to the left, back towards the meadow. They opened the heavy wooden door of the chapel and the three of them went in and Crispin looked at the walls, as his eyes slowly adjusted to the muted light, and then, stepping forward, he looked up at the dome.