The days went on. He sat on a hill once, and saw a slave running through the fields beneath, through the strange slow patterns that the currents in the wind pushed through the golden-red pelt of the land. The slave’s path left a trail like the wake behind a ship. She got as far as the river, where the landlord’s mounted overseer ran her down. He watched the overseer beat the woman – saw the long stick rise and fall, tiny in the distance – but he couldn’t hear anything because the wind was in the wrong direction. When the woman finally lay still on the river bank, the overseer got down off his mount and knelt near her head; he saw something flash, but could not tell exactly what was going on. The overseer rode off; hobbled slaves came and took the woman away, later.
He made a note.
That evening, after dinner in the house of the old couple, once the wife had gone to bed, he told the old man what he had seen. The man nodded slowly, chewing on a mildly narcotic root, and spat juice into the fire. The overseer was known to be strict, the old man said; he took the tongue of any slave who tried to escape. He kept the tongues drying on a string stretched over the entrance to the slaves’ compound at the lordship’s farm.
He and the old man drank some fierce grain spirit from little cups, and then the old man told him a folk tale.
In the tale, a man walking through the wild wood was tempted from the path by some beautiful flowers, and then saw a handsome young woman lying asleep in a clearing. He went to the maiden, and she woke. He sat down beside her and as they talked he realised that she smelled of flowers, a perfume more wonderful than anything he had ever experienced before, and so intense that he was made dizzy by the heady strength of it. After a while, surrounded by her flowery scent, enchanted by her softly lilting voice and shy demeanour, he asked to kiss her, and finally was allowed, and their kisses grew passionate, and they coupled.
But as they did so, even from the first moment that joined them, whenever the man looked out of one eye he saw the woman change. From one eye she looked as she had from the first, but looking through the other eye she was older, no longer just past her childhood. With each beat of their love she grew older (though only seen through one eye), through her maturity and late glow and the matron look, to spry then frail old age.
All the time the man could see her in all her youth by just closing one eye – and certainly could not stop himself from the act they had embarked upon – but always he was tempted to sneak a look through the other eye, and be shocked and amazed at the terrible transformation taking place beneath him.
In the last few movements of his knowledge, he closed his eyes, only opening both at the moment of fulfilment, when he saw – with both eyes, now – that he had taken to him a rotting corpse, already known by worms and grubs; the smell of flowers changed in that instant to an overpowering stench of corruption, but in such a way that he knew that it had always smelled like that, and as his loins gave themselves to the corpse, his belly threw out his last meal at the same time.
The wood spirit had his life by two strands, therefore, and with both hands took a firm grip of him, unravelled him from the weave of life, and dragged him away to the shadow world.
His soul was shattered into a million pieces there, and thrown over the world, to make up the souls of all pollen-flies, which bring new life and old death to flowers, at the same time.
He thanked the old man for telling him the story, and told him some tales he remembered from his own upbringing.
A few days later he was running after one of the small animals on the moor; it skidded on some dew-wet grass and tumbled end-over-end, finally falling, limbs spread, on some stones, winding itself. He gave a victorious, whooping cry and threw himself forward down the slope towards the animal as it wobbled to its feet; he jumped the last couple of metres, landing with both feet, just beside where the animal had fallen; it collected itself and sped off again, unharmed, and vanished down a hole. He laughed, breathing hard, sweating. He stood there, put his hands on his knees and bent at the waist, trying to get his breath back.
Something moved under his feet. He saw it, felt it.
There was a nest under him. He had landed right on it. The eggs, their speckled shells shattered, spread their fluids over his boot heels and into the twigs and moss.
He moved his foot, already sick in his heart. Something black wriggled underneath. It moved into the sunlight; a black head and neck; a black eye staring up at him, bright and hard as a jet pebble at the bottom of a brook. The bird struggled, making him jump back a little, as though he had landed with naked feet on something that stung; the bird flapped hopelessly out onto the moor grass, hopping on one foot, dragging one limp wing after it. It stopped, a little way off, sideways to him, and tipped its head, seeming to regard him.
He wiped his boots on the moss. All the eggs were smashed. The bird made a small keening noise. He turned away and began to walk off, then stopped, cursed, retraced his steps and stamped after the bird, catching it easily in a storm of squawks and feathers.
He twisted its neck and dropped the limp remains into the grass.
That evening he stopped writing his journal and never returned to it. The weather grew humid and oppressive and no rains fell. The man with the kite waved and called out to him one day, from the top of a hill; he hurried away, sweating.
It was ten or so days after the incident with the bird that he admitted to himself he would never be a poet.
He left a couple of days later and was never heard of again, even though the lord’s marshal sent word to every town in the land, because the stranger was suspected of being involved in what happened the night he left, when the overseer at the lord’s farm was found trussed in his bed, his face fixed in an expression of darkest horror, and his mouth and throat stuffed with dried human tongues and pieces of blank paper, on which he had choked to death.
* * *
Nine
He slept until after dawn, then went for a walk to think. He left via the service tunnel from the main hotel to the annexe, and left the dark glasses in his pocket. The hotel had cleaned the old raincoat; he put it on and some thick gloves and wound a scarf round his neck.
He walked carefully along warmed streets and dripping pavements, and held his head up to gaze at the sky. His breath went before him. Little snow-falls slumped off buildings and wires as the weak sunlight and a mild breeze raised the temperature. The gutters ran with clear water and soggy bergs of bumping slush; pipes from buildings ran or dripped with the melt and, when a vehicle passed, it did so with a wet hiss. He crossed the road to the other side, where the sun was.
He climbed steps and crossed bridges; he walked gingerly over icy parts where there was no heating, or it had failed. He wished he’d put on better boots; these looked fine but they didn’t have enough grip. To avoid falling you had to walk like an old man, hands splayed as though trying to grasp a stick, bending at the waist when you wanted to walk straight-backed. This annoyed him, but walking on without acknowledging the changed conditions, and slipping on his backside, appealed to him even less.
When he did slip, it was in front of some young people. He was walking carefully down some icy steps leading onto a broad suspension bridge over a railway junction. The youngsters were walking towards him, laughing and joking with each other. He divided his attention between the treacherous steps and the group. They looked very young, and their actions, gestures and pealing voices all seemed to bubble with energy, suddenly making him feel his age. There were four of them; the two young men trying to impress the girls, talking loudly. One of the girls in particular was tall and dark, and elegant in that unselfconscious manner of the recently matured. He kept