by Tad Williams
Rachel heard the scuffling of heavy boots across the white stone floor of the bell-chamber and risked a peek through the narrow opening. The king’s green-cloaked form was just disappearing through the doorway. She listened as his steps descended and grew fainter, then waited a long while after they had passed from her hearing altogether before she clambered back down the ladder. She stepped out from behind the curtain into the airiness of the stairwell, then patted at her forehead and cheeks, which were damp with perspiration despite the cold stone. Stepping carefully and quietly, she began to descend.
The king’s conversation had told her much that she needed to know. Now, she must only wait and think. Surely planning such a thing could not be half as complicated as commanding a spring cleaning? And, in a way, that was what she planned, was it not?
Her old bones aching, but her face stretched in an odd smile that would have set her chambermaids to shuddering, Rachel walked slowly down Green Angel Tower’s endless stairway.
Binabik’s eyes would not meet Sludig’s across the cookfire. Instead, the troll swept his sad pile of knuckle-bones back into their bag. He had cast them several times that morning. The results seemed to give him little pleasure.
Sighing, the troll pocketed the sack, then turned and poked in the ashes of the fire with a stick, digging out their breakfast, a cache of nuts that he had located and dug from the frozen ground. It was a bitterly cold day, and their saddlebags were empty of food. Binabik was not above stealing from squirrels.
“Do not speak,” the troll said abruptly. After an hour of silence, Sludig had just opened his mouth. “Please, Sludig, for a moment be saying nothing. Just the flask of kangkang from your pocket I am asking for.”
The Rimmersman sadly handed over the flask. Binabik took a long swallow, then wiped the sleeve of his jacket across his mouth. The sleeve made another pass across the troll’s eyes.
“A promise I made,” he said quietly. “I was asking for two night’s fires and you gave them. Now I must be fulfilling the oath that of all I would be most happily breaking. We must take the sword to the Stone of Farewell.”
Sludig began to speak, but instead accepted the flask back from Binabik and took a deep draught.
Qantaqa returned from a hunting foray to discover the troll and the Rimmersman wordlessly bundling their few belongings onto the pack-horses. The wolf watched them for a moment, then uttered a low moan of distress and danced away. She curled up at the edge of the clearing and peered solemnly at Binabik and Sludig over the fence of her brushy tail.
Binabik lifted the White Arrow out of the saddle bag and held it up, then pressed its wooden shaft against his cheek, the arrow shone more brightly than the powdery snow lying all around. He tucked the arrow back into the bag. “I will be back for you,” the little man said to no one present. “I will find you.”
He called for Qantaqa. Sludig swung up into his own saddle and they vanished into the forest, the string of pack horses following. The downsifting snow began to fill in their footprints. By the time the muffled sounds of their passage faded, all trace of their presence in the clearing was gone.
Sitting in one place lamenting his fate wasn’t going to do him much good, Simon decided. In any case, the sky was becoming unpleasantly dark for mid-morning and snow was beginning to fall more heavily. He stared ruefully at the looking glass. Whatever Jiriki’s mirror might be, the Sithi prince had spoken truth when he said that it would not bring him magically to Simon’s side. He put it back in his cloak and stood up, rubbing his hands.
It was possible that Binabik and Sludig were still somewhere close by. Perhaps, like Simon, they had also been tumbled from their mounts and were in need of help. He had no idea how long he had lain helplessly in the grip of sleep, listening to the Sitha-woman speaking through his dreams—it might have been hours or days. His companions could still be close by, or they might have given up on him. They could be leagues away.
Pondering the bleak possibilities, he began walking in what he hoped was an expanding spiral, something he dimly remembered Binabik suggesting as a good thing to do when people were lost. It was difficult to know if this spiral-walking was exactly the right thing to do, however, since he was not sure precisely who was lost. Also, he had not paid particularly close attention when the little man had explained how one calculated this spiral—the troll’s woodcraft lecture had concerned the movement of sun, the coloration of bark and leaves, the direction certain tree roots sprouted as they lay in running water, but at the time Binabik had been explaining these things, Simon had been watching a three-legged lizard slowly limping along the Aldheorte Forest floor. It was a shame Binabik had not tried to make his explanation a little more interesting, Simon thought, but it was too late to do anything about it now.
He tramped on through the thickening snowfall as the sun rose invisibly behind the smother of clouds. The brief afternoon arrived, then almost immediately began preparing to leave. The wind blew and the storm seized Aldheorte in its frosty fingers and squeezed. The cold jabbed at Simon through his cloak, which began to feel as thin as a lady’s summer-veil, it had seemed adequate while he was still in the company of friends, but when he thought about it, he could not remember the last time he had felt truly warm.
As the day of unrewarded snow-trudging dragged on, his stomach began to ache as well. He had last eaten in Skodi’s house—the memory of the meal and its aftermath dislodged one of the few remaining shivers that the cold wind had not yet discovered. Who could say how much time had passed since then?
Holy Aedon, he prayed, give me food. The thought became a sort of verse that echoed over and over in his head in time with the crunching of snow beneath his boots.
Unfortunately, this was a problem that would not go away by thinking of something else. Neither had it gotten as bad as it could get. Simon knew he could not get any more lost than he was at that moment, but he could become a great deal more hungry.
In his time with Binabik and the soldiers he had gotten used to others doing the hunting and gathering, when he had helped, it was usually at someone else’s direction. Suddenly he was as alone as he had been during those first awful days in Aldheorte after he had fled the Hayholt. He had been dreadfully hungry then, and had survived until the troll found him, but that had not been winter weather. He had also been able to pilfer from isolated freeholdings. Now he wandered in a frozen and unpeopled wilderness that made his earlier sojourn in the forest seem an afternoon outing.
The storm winds rose in pitch. The very air seemed to grow suddenly colder, sending Simon into a fresh spasm of trembling. As the forest began to darken ever so slightly, sending the first warning that even this weak daylight could not last forever, Simon found himself fighting back arising surge of horror. All day long he had tried to ignore the faint scrabbling of its claws; at times he had felt as though he walked along the edge of an abyss, a pit which had no bottom, no limit.
In a situation like this, Simon realized, it would be very easy to go mad—not to spring suddenly into arm-waving lunacy, like a beggerman ranting on Tavern Row, but rather to slip over into quiet madness. He would make some unrecognized misstep and topple slowly, helplessly into the abyss whose nearness seemed at that moment so unarguably clear. He would fall and fall until he did not even remember that he was falling anymore. His real life, his memories, the friends and the home he had once had, all would dwindle until they were nothing but ancient, dusty objects inside a head like a boarded-up cottage.
Was that what dying was like, he suddenly wondered? Did a part of you stay in your body, as in Skodi’s ghastly song? Did you lie in the earth and feel your thoughts dwindling away bit by bit, like a sandbar broken down and carried off by a flowing stream? And now that he thought of it, would that be so terrible after all—to lie in the damp and dark and just slowly cease to be? Might it not be better than the frantic concerns of the living, the useless struggle against impossible odds, the panicky and pointless flight from death’s ultimate vict
ory?
To give in. To just stop fighting…
It had a pacific sound to it, like a sad but pretty song. It seemed a gentle promise, a kiss before sleeping…
Simon was falling forward. Shocked into alertness, he threw out a hand and steadied himself against the trunk of a skeletal birch. His heart was beating very swiftly.
He saw with astonishment that snow had gathered thickly on his shoulders and boots, as though he had stood in this place for a long time—but it had seemed like the merest instant! He shook his head and slapped at his cheeks with gloved fingers until the stinging brought life surging back through his body. He growled at himself. To almost fall asleep standing up! To freeze on your feet! What kind of a mooncalf was he?
No. He growled again and shook his head. Binabik and Sludig had said he was almost a man: he would not prove them wrong so easily. It was cold and he was hungry, that was all. He would not cry and give up like a lowly apprentice scullion locked out of the kitchen. Simon had seen and done many things. He had survived worse than this.
But what should he do?
He couldn’t solve the lack of food immediately, he knew, but that wasn’t so bad. One thing Binabik had said that Simon remembered very well was that a person could go a long time without food, but could not survive a single night in the cold without shelter. For this reason, the troll always said, fire was very, very important.
But Simon had no fire, nor could he make one.
As he considered this grim fact, he kept walking. Despite the fast-increasing darkness he hoped to find a better camping place before he stopped. The snow was falling faster now, and at the moment he was slogging along the bottom of a long, shallow canyon. He wanted to find higher ground, someplace where he would not have to dig his way out if he survived the night. Thinking about this, Simon felt a painful smile form on his cracked lips. With the dreadful luck he had been having, the high place he chose would probably be struck by lightning.
He laughed hoarsely and was momentarily heartened by the sound of his own mirth, but the wind snatched it away before he could savor it.
The spot he chose was a stand of hemlocks clustered atop a low hill like white-caped sentries. He would have preferred the shelter of several large stones—or better still, a cave—but his luck was not so generous. He ignored the gurglings of his empty stomach as he briefly surveyed the little copse, then set to work pressing snow into hard lumps. These he piled between the trees on the windward side, pressing and smoothing them together until he had a serviceable wall that reached to a little above his knees.
As the last light started to bleed from the sky, Simon began pulling branches from the surrounding hemlocks. He pilled them near the base of his snow-bulwark until he had made a bed of springy needles nearly as high as the wall Not yet content, he continued his way around the clearing, using his Qanuc knife to cut branches by the handful until a pile of equal size lay beside the first. He stopped for a moment, breathing heavily, and felt the chill air suck the warmth away from his exposed face as abruptly as if he had been fitted with a mask of sleet.
Suddenly aware of the enormity of trying to stay warm during the wintery night to come—and of the fact that if he decided wrong, he might not wake up the following morning—he was spurred to a feverish renewal of his efforts. He shored up the snow wall, making it a little taller and much thicker, then built a lower wall supported by tree trunks on the other side of the first pile of branches. He raced around the copse cutting more branches—his gloves were now so resinous that he could not separate the fingers, and could only remove his hand from his knife by stepping on the blade first—until the height of both piles equaled that of his windward wall. By now it was almost too dark to see even the great trees were rapidly blurring into murky smudges against the near-luminous snow.
He lay down on his bed of branches, bending his knees and pulling his long legs up against his body so that they would benefit as much as possible from being wrapped in his cloak, then began to pull the remaining branches over himself. He tried his best, with clumsy, sticky fingers, to weave them together so that there were no large exposed areas, and ended by reaching awkwardly up through the hemlock blanket to drag the last few branches over his head. He then turned his face sideways so that it was mostly hidden in his hood. The position was miserably uncomfortable and unnatural in the extreme, but he could feel his own warm breath whispering in the pocket of the hood, for this little while at least, he stopped shivering.
He had been so exhausted when he lay down that Simon expected to be asleep in a matter of moments, despite the tickling branches and his cramped legs. Instead, he found himself growing gradually more wakeful as the first hour of night wore on. The cold, while not as sharply biting as when he had earlier walked through the forest into the teeth of the wind, nevertheless sneaked through his meager shelter and seeped down into his bones and flesh. It was a dull and relentless sort of cold, patient as stone.
The chill was bad enough, but though the thunder of his breathing and the drumbeat of his heart were loud in his ears, he could hear other, stranger noises as well. He had forgotten how differently the night forest sounded when no friend slept nearby. The wind moaned achingly through the trees; other sounds seemed ominously stealthy, yet were loud enough to be heard even above the lamenting wind. After all the horrors he had seen, he harbored no idle hopes that the night was innocent of dangers—surely he was hearing damned souls crying in the storm, and lumbering Hunën prowling the forest in search of warm blood!
As the night marched on, Simon felt black dread rising once more. He was all alone! He was a lost, doomed fool of a mooncalf who should never have dabbled in the affairs of his betters! Even if he survived the night, even if he was spared the clutches of some gibbering, faceless nightwalker, it would only be to starve in the daylight! Certainly he could last a few days, perhaps weeks if he was lucky, but from what Binabik had told him it was many leagues to the Stone of Farewell—and that was assuming that he knew how to get there at all, and could find his way through Aldheorte’s unsympathetic depths to do so. Simon knew he did not possess the woodcraft to survive a long exile in the wild: he was no Jack Mundwode, not even close. Similarly, there was almost no chance that anyone who could help would pass through this remote part of the northeastern forest, especially in such hellish weather.
Worst of all, his friends were long gone. In the middle of the afternoon he had suddenly found himself in a fit of panicky shouting, repeating their names over and over again until his throat felt rough as a butcher’s block. At the last, just before his voice gave out, he thought he had been screaming the names of the dead. That was the most frightening thought of all, a path that ran very close to the abyss: shout for the dead today, speak to them tomorrow, join them soon after—in a living death of irredeemable madness if nothing else, and that might be worse than actually dying.
He lay beneath the branches and shivered, but no longer from only the chill. Darkness rose within him and Simon struggled against it. He didn’t want to die yet, that he knew—but did it matter? There seemed to be nothing he could do about it one way or the other.
But I will not die here, he decided at last, pretending for a moment he had been offered some choice. He felt for his own desperation and began to smooth it down and push it back, quieting it like a frightened horse. I’ve touched dragon blood. I won a Sithi White Arrow. It all means something, doesn’t it?
He didn’t know if it did all mean something, but he suddenly wanted very much to live.
I won’t die yet. I want to see Binabik again, and Josua…and Miriamele. And I want to see Pryrates and Elias suffer for what they did. I want a home again, a warm bed—oh, merciful Usires, if you really are real, let me have a home again! Don’t let me die in the cold! Let me find a home…a home…let me find a home…!
Sleep was conquering him at last. He seemed to hear his own voice echoing down an old stone well. At last he slid away from cold and painful thoughts into a w
armer place.
He survived that night and six more nights after it, each followed by a morning of terrible, frigid stiffness, of solitude and increasing hunger.
The unseasonal cold had killed many of Spring’s children in the womb, but some plants had managed to bud and flower in the brief, false season of warmth before the deadly winter returned to stay. Binabik and the Sithi had both given him flowers to eat, but Simon had no idea if there were right or wrong kinds of flowers. He ate what few he could find. They did not fill him up, but neither did they kill him. Patches of bitter yellow grass—very bitter—had survived beneath some of the snow hummocks as well, and he made full use of all he could find. Once, in a moment of starved unreason, he even tried to eat a handful of fir needles. They tasted astoundingly dreadful, and the sap and his own froth made a sticky, half-frozen mess of his downy beard.
One day, when his longing for something solid to eat had become a maddening obsession, a chill-baffled beetle wandered across his path. Rachel the Dragon had held a very firm line on the almost incalculable filthiness of such vermin, but Simon’s stomach had become a far more powerful force than even Rachel’s training. He could not let this opportunity pass.
Despite his hollow gut, the first one proved very difficult. When he felt the tiny legs moving within his mouth, he gagged and spit the beetle into the snow. Its aimless kicking made him want to be sick, but a moment later he snatched it up again, then chewed and swallowed it as quickly as he could. The beetle’s texture was that of a delicate, slightly flexible nutshell, the taste little more than a musty tang. When an hour had passed with none of Rachel’s dire predictions coming to pass, Simon began to watch the ground carefully in hope of a few more such slow-moving morsels.