Woolgathering

by Christina Hambleton

Prostrate. It had always been such a feeble sounding word, limp and benign. It was the kind of word one assigned an enemy as he drew his last, the kind of word reserved for the pitiful by the proud.

  And yet… what peace.

  Icarus stared, simply stared. It was all that he could do. He had been released from the choice of rising, or of speaking, or of searching his environs. All that was left to him was his lot, a swaddle of helplessness and the timeless sensation of all the world washing over him, effacing him, wearing away all the rough and craggy edges as it coaxed him gently from existence. He half wondered if he was lying on a beach—but no. He was not above the waves. He was a part of them, just like the smooth ash-wood gondola under him, whose bottom was all he could see. Well, all he could see beyond the scintillating robe that fell in front of his eyes, undulating with the motion of its oarsman.

  He meant scintillating in a… strange sense. It was not an array of colors that glittered and shifted over the robe's surface, but an array of forms, of incarnations, of… avatars. One had an ashen, fraying hem that covered the spectre's ankles, another donned a white robe and sandals, and a third wore a sable raiment that bared a skeletal foot. There was even one silk curtain whose folds swathed the dark, bare toes of a Bodhisattva.

  These weren't shifting states, though—no, they existed side by side in something like duality for all that there were hundreds more than two of them. It was just that it was impossible to focus on more than one at a time, tangled as they were in the richly embroidered cloth of the sentience above. Icarus might have been awed, but he had a feeling this was a place through which all men passed and all were rendered equal and base.

  There was no rhyme or reason to why he was there now. He didn't desire one. Just then, just blissfully, he knew only that he existed, and he didn't want to know anything else.

  Tired. The word came to him. He was too tired.

  "If you aren't careful," spoke a silky voice, its power drawing Icarus's gaze, tilting his chin upward as the mottled play of realities dancing over the ferryman conglomerated into a familiar set of pupil-less grey eyes, ashen skin, and silver hair. "Then I may ferry you farther than I had intended."

  Icarus felt too weak even to groan in protest, but he did manage to furrow his brow, instead.

  Charon shrugged as his charge slumped back into the gondola's bottom—that omnipresent, wry grimace of his fixed. It was a queer un-smile bent by sadness into something unshakeable, all knowing and darkly amused.

  The fact that Charon wouldn't—or perhaps couldn't—offer Icarus a hand jarred the man. He realized he'd been thinking of the spectre as a friend, and what a mistake that was. The cold thrill of remorse jolted him from his indolence, into a seated position.

  He blanched at his surroundings, grey-green swimming with wispy figures he could only imagine were spirits all around them, slowly twisting into anthropomorphic creatures under his gaze and projection.

  Charon chuckled.

  Trying not to think about it, Icarus turned back to the ferryman, rubbing at his head. After a moment of thought, a greater perplexity overcame him.

  "…I didn't get Adamae to come," he said. "So you must have interceded on my behalf, to free me from that world...” It was obvious, what he was getting at, but he said it anyway:

  “Why?"

  The ferryman raised a brow, lips stretching wider to bare teeth. "Me? Sully my mitts on such a troublesome little poppet as yourself?" he wondered, splaying one hand over his breast when the motion of the oar brought it there. A breeze blew past them, rancid at first whiff with decay, then leaving a cool, sweet wake, and Charon leaned into it, closing his eyes. "Mmm. No. It wasn't me."

  "God?" Icarus hazarded incredulously.

  Charon blinked at him, then threw back his head and laughed, the noise reverberating, causing alarming waves in the river that surrounded them as Icarus clung desperately to the rocking boat. It seemed forever that he was in that lurching, tenuous state, but at last the ferryman's mirth subsided.

  "How would I know?" he asked, remorseless. "I don't understand the notion of God any more than you can grasp my true nature."

  "Then how am I alive?" Icarus blurted, sounding more than a little ill.

  "You aren't. Yet. In the sense you mean. Or haven’t you been paying attention?"

  A pause, in which the world finally stopped rocking and resumed its gentle undulations, the frenzied dead of what Icarus was coming to regard as both the Styx and the Path easing back into placidity.

  He forced himself to think, to weigh his next words carefully.

  "Where are you taking me?" he asked in a hushed tone.

  "Wherever you tell me to stop. But the further I go, the greater the price." Charon winked, yet somehow the frivolity of the gesture did not quite reach his eyes.

  The man shuttered. "Can you leave me in my body? The physical one I had before I ate the plum you offered, that is."

  "How very specific," Charon mused. "I'm so charmed I might juuuust tell you when to jump off the ride."

  Icarus sighed, feeling very depressed very suddenly, wondering if it was from the air between the spectre and him. "Will Adamae ever escape?" he asked.

  Charon shrugged. "You'd do better asking her, personally. Who knows? Perhaps she's content. I can't be bothered to keep track of every mortal's fate."

  Yet you do. "I thought I was content there at first, and I was wrong."

  "Well, you understood things a bit better." Charon moved to shrug again, but the tendons in those shoulders strained as he rolled them, as though a great weight was draped over them like a mantle.

  "…I want to remember you," Icarus confessed at last, sensing that his time was drawing near. The sea of spirits about them seemed too quiet, had fallen to susurrations too low for mortal ears.

  Yet the ferryman shook his head and gave one of those rarer chuckles, the ones that pealed deep and smooth inside his chest.

  "Few do,” he told Icarus. “It's likely you'll think me a dream."

  "I won't."

  Charon loaned the man an indulgent half-smile. "Everyone says that while they're in the dream."

  Icarus couldn't hold that fathomless, pupil-less gaze, and he bit his lip to stare, blushing, at the grains of wood in the ruggedly hewn gondola. The vessel was battered, weathered by time. Warped yet true and serving its purpose still, ever faithfully, ever without complaint.

  Icarus took a deep breath, and he stood, gripping the ferryman's shoulder. The ferryman recoiled at the steadiness of those normally shifting eyes as his charge’s back straightened and he vowed solemnly:

  "I will remember you as a story, Charon."

  There was a sudden hush like a thunderclap, and a wave crashed over the gondola, nearly taking Icarus with it into the now foaming river. Regaining his footing on the damp bottom of the gondola he realized that Charon had stopped rowing. The spectre was bent double over his oar as it morphed into a scythe and he into a form with a low black cowl.

  Another wave, and Icarus was nearly thrown, staid only by clutching Charon's arm, but the next thing he knew the spectre had tossed him away and he slammed into the side of the boat, catching it in his gut so that he was nearly thrown over head first.

  His eyes widened at the chasm forming beneath the ephemeral river, barely visible under the frenetic, twisting visages of the dead. Horrified, he turned to face Charon, to plead for his soul.

  But "Jump!" Charon hissed, and the command was too strong for Icarus to resist. He lurched back over the hull of the gondola.

  Just before he shattered its icy surface, just before the current dragged him under, he could have sworn he caught a glimpse of a true, beatific grin under the shadow of that cowl. One that would have given any heart a pulse.

  And he realized the story was longer than he’d imagined.