“Have to go, Ann.”
“I know you do.” Small and gray, she rolled her forehead against his chest and dug her fingertips into his heavy rib-cage. “So—so go find him, Will!”
Then Wilbur Hurley went out in the late morning with his bow, and a long hunting-knife and steel-tipped arrows of his own making, searching for Bruno whom (he now understood) he had loved more than a little. He and Ann were childless, yet it was more than that, as love is always more than the sum of its needless explanations.
Having no clue at all, he entered the forest by the same wood-road Bruno had traveled. He knew that knoll with the flat rock summit as well as Bruno—better, and knew an easier path to it than the deer-run: push through a thicket by this oak, a thicket no Maplestock forester would ever disturb, and you come out on a single-file but obvious path leading to the knoll and the flat rock, where even nowadays sacrifices are sometimes offered— libations of wine, fresh-killed chickens unplucked, a hunter’s gift of rabbit or pheasant, maybe an egg with a phallic shape drawn on it in charcoal which means some woman desires to become pregnant of a male child. And it’s true (even nowadays) the covens may be more active up there on May Night and Midsummer’s Eve and Halloween than the Church cares to admit. Hurley knew the place from the years of his youth, which are the subject of another story.
He knew the knoll and would have gone there, but as he was moving down that obscure path, silent in his moccasins, eyes and ears intensely alert, he heard the music of a brown bird well known to him and loved, coming from his right and not very far away (he thought) but from a place where the hemlock grew so dense and dark that something of night was always present and something of the dreams of night. Hurley had more than once known the wood-thrush to sing in this manner in the full daylight hours, though his time of glory is evening, when the robin’s sundown music may join him, and perhaps the white-throated sparrow will be a third among them if human listeners are most fortunate and willing to stop their own noise long enough to accept it. But to hear the vesper song of the brown bird in morning hours is not altogether a common thing, and Hurley felt in it the pull of strange. He parted hemlock branches, and moved off slowly following the sound, although he understood that it was remaining the same distance from him, and no haste of his would ever bring him up to it unless that should be the wish of whoever made the music. But a simple bird (Hurley knew) can do this quite well, merely keeping out of sight and perhaps wanting to lead the clumsy human thing away from a nest, no supernatural reason demanded. He followed—traveling, though he could not know it, in the direction opposite to that taken several hours earlier by Bruno and his friends: although in this forest directions cannot always be what they seem, and as some wise man commented maybe a thousand years ago, the longest way ‘round is the shortest way home.
Hurley did not know this part of the woods, but felt (unaccountably) no terror of the lost, and it scarcely occurred to him to wonder how much time had passed while he followed the music—through green darkness or hemlock, and small glades where the sunlight was a green gold flowing down the treetrunks to slake th thirst of the wood-spirits who often look like evanescent butterflies to you and me. He followed, recalling old things, as though the discovery that Bruno was a person, one who might well have been loved, had made it necessary for him to hunt back along some of the plains and hills of childhood, that era when you believed in wood-spirits without any itch to offer a propitiatory smile. He recalled the grandeur of his patient father at the forge, and a dog called Bock always a snuffle of demanding love for him; and he recalled the country of somewhat later years, certain journeys in pursuit of the unattainable, the courting of Ann in her shining girlhood, her marriage dream that their son (never to be born) might win an education beyond their position in life, and so on to learning, glory, maybe even the priesthood— although Will Hurley himself would have been well content if a son of his simply grew into a good and patient ironsmith, for he felt in his soul that there’s a virtue in continuity. (Is it possible that some ages of man have forgotten this to their sorrow?)
He followed the music. Sometimes his mind would have it that the bird was singing: “Will you follow? Love follows. . . . Will you follow? Love follows.” He followed, delighting in the high clarity and tenderness of the song, yet doing so through the mist of his distress for Bruno, and against a growing distraction of pain, which centered in that massive rib-cage and sent spurts and ripples of anguish down his left arm. Why would no one come with me?
“Will you follow? Love follows “
He followed the wood-thrush, if such it was, until the forest ended where the trees had grown to the very edge of a drop, the end of it not seen. Grasping the last barrier branches, Will could look out and up with sunlight pouring over him, to watch at last the flight of the singing bird, a golden vanishing even now become a nothing in the wonderful wilderness of white vapor, and he called aloud: “I will go with you.”
His wiser mind passed through its moment of trouble: I must find Bruno. He may need me. Then his heart burst; he was not breathing; even pain vanished; a wish to live commanded him to keep his grasp of the branches, but he could not. He fell, and the rocks far below took him with mercy.
Thus died, childless, Wilbur Hurley, our Ironsmith, a good man and a generous one of the quiet spirits, on an errand of love; and who has ever supposed these errands can be run without peril?
* * * *
In the first opening pallor of morning Baron Ashoka rode up through the ground-fog to join the men grouped leaderless on the steps of the Store. The Baron was followed by Horrow and his northern hounds, who slunk out of the mist so like a part of it that Tom Denario shivered and made across his chest the sign of the Wheel. “Good morning, Father,” said the Baron; Father Clark bowed wanly. In the damp chill—fine drops glittered on the Baron’s brown and orange hunting cap, and his square face was shining as if with sweat in the lamplight from the Store—the Baron studied the others, greeted them, and asked: “Where’s Hurley Ironsmith? I was certain he’d be here.”
“Wilbur Hurley,” said Father Clark, “went to search the woods for Bruno yesterday morning and has not returned. His wife has still a lamp in the window. I prayed with her until an hour ago. I ought to have gone with him, Baron, but I did not know his intention, and besides, I am not brave.”
“I am sorry to learn of his absence,” said the Baron. He tapped his hat against his knee to knock off the wet, causing his mare to jump and fret a little; his white hair tumbled moist and lank about his ears. “Father Clark, I implore you, if there’s any ill feeling between us let it be put aside while this work is to be done.”
“There’s no anger, Baron. Until we find Bruno and, please God, Will Hurley, I am only one of your hunters to do as you order. Bodwin has lent me a bow—I had some skill when I was younger.” Elias Clark was trying to pierce the formidable shadows and heaving mist, to see beyond the gaunt malignity of Horrow and his hounds, to forget them, to smile. “I have no anger for anyone this morning, Baron, not even Father Death.”
“Then let us go.”
At Hurley’s house, Ann Hurley had made up packages of food, and did not understand how they could not burden their hands with anything but weapons. She was a little silly with grief—fluttered and cried, too deferential to the Baron, rambling in her speech. Father Clark took her aside. “You will find him, won’t you?”
He was not quite certain which one she meant; perhaps she was not certain herself. “Of course, daughter. Wait and pray. If we are late beyond dark, put the lamp in the window again. Now rest in Abraham, and the peace of God be with you.”
At the cabin by the forge, the hounds were given Bruno’s spare blouse and loin-rag to smell, and though the trail was two days old they made no great confusion of it but smelled on a course that took them to the wood-road and then into the tunnel of the deer-run— moving indifferently it seemed, bored beasts performing a trick on demand, bored no doubt because the smell was only th
e familiar human scent that did not trigger their lust to kill. Nevertheless Horrow gripped the leashes firmly in one hand, the whip poised in the other, as the rawboned heads drove through the mist.
The Baron had left his mare in charge of Bodwin; a tiger hunt is no place for horses if you love them. But on foot, carrying like Denario and Short a long knife at the belt and a seven-foot spear, he was as much as ever Baron Ashoka of Maplestock, tribune of the Imperial Assembly, here in the gray dangerous morning by his own choice. He walked in the commander’s natural place, well back of shambling Horrow and his hounds to leave them room. Behind him were the archers, Barton Linz and Father Clark and that lank man from the Baron’s household whom Ashoka addressed as Kemp though no one else cared to use his name: we do sometimes try in this manner to shut them out from humanity, the bitter distorted ones, as though we had the authority. Then the other spear-carriers Tom Denario and Dan Short. These seven, and the dogs; there were no others.
Climbing the ancient knoll, the dogs lost boredom, galvanized into frenzy. “Aahh!” said Horrow, and responded with a huge bulging of his left arm as the beasts plunged forward against the leashes, and a crack of his whip in the air, a kind of speaking. He addressed them in other ways too, as they circled the rock at the summit snuffing and yattering: “Eh, Jad? Eh, Jedda? What nah? Find? Find?”
The bitch of the pair lifted her long head and howled, her nose pointed toward those crowded hills in the west, remotely visible from the knoll across a sea of treetops, a darker part of the sky. Dawn had begun behind the hunters; the mist was retiring in rags, spent ghosts worn away with the perishing of the night “Tiger,” said Horrow. “It’s tiger. Us knows, eh, Jedda? Eh, Jad? Find!” And he set the pace down the slope, westward and into the deep passages of the forest, a pace that went on through the morning and through a time when some of the day’s moist heat filtered down below the canopy, a pace that would not slacken until the end was known. Mosquitos became a torment, butterflies passed on secret evergreen journeys; then the light above the trees no longer glittered, but turned gray, and a noise not unlike the strange short roar of brown tiger was perhaps instead the first warning of the gray storm that was rolling toward them out of the west across the hills.
* * * *
“That was a hound’s cry, Poet, but I think it was very far behind. We were hunted by them once, in the north-Tiger killed three; he carries a scar on his flank where one closed with him. See!—he heard and he knows. I think there’s a brook not far from here and we can walk down it a way, but Tiger won’t understand—he’ll jump the brook and follow us on the other bank. Are you afraid, Poet?”
Bruno shook his head.
They came to the brook and waded downstream where thickets grew on either bank; as Tiger Boy had known, their friend would not step through the water with them but jumped the brook. They knew his presence beyond the thicket, and when they came out in a clear space he rejoined them with cat displays of pleasure, fawning and arching his golden neck. “He may be the death of us,” said Tiger Boy, “because he fears nothing and is not truly wise. And I see you are not afraid. But we should hurry on. We can tire them. They won’t travel by night, but we can, Poet, as surely as dreams do.”
They moved on quickly, ate quickly from a sack of dried meat and roots and mushrooms that Tiger Boy carried on his shoulder, and the morning spent itself with no further warning of pursuit. Tiger Boy was not reassured, for he could remember how the hounds kept silent on a trail unless obliged to check and separate in search. But later, when morning had passed, and noon, and they heard the thunder and saw the graying of the sky, Tiger Boy smiled and told Bruno: “That’s good, that may help us. A rain would kill the scent. But we must keep on. Are you tired, Friend?” Bruno nodded. “Maybe we can rest soon. Ah, look there!”
Ahead of them the trees thinned, revealing a long ragged slope of rock, too steep and firm for any vegetation but a little scrub, but not too steep to climb. And beyond the crest of it the sky was churning deep gray to black; already large single drops were falling and a snake of fire struck at distant earth. “We’ll climb it, Poet, and let the rain wash our scent from the rock.” He gripped Bruno’s hand. The tiger flowed up the long slope in one airy run and waited for them, a golden silhouette gazing back along the country they had traveled. At the end of the climb Bruno was gasping, hardy though he was from youth and his good work at the forge. Tiger Boy supported him for the last steps, when the rain became a sudden torrent and the vast slanted rock face foamed and shouted like a waterfall. “You’re tired. Let’s get over into the brush by that big rock, and rest. Oh!—have you hurt your foot?”
Bruno nodded. The pain was not too severe, only a wrench maybe, but Tiger Boy picked him up and carried him into the thicket, under the natural roof of a rock overhang that held off the flood and let it tumble as a curtain before their eyes. Within minutes the storm dwindled to a tranquil rain; the smell of wet earth and leaves came sweet, and through the curtain now thin and lazy they watched the air and the green life and a faint return of sunlight. The Tiger lay beside them to lick his fur back into neatness; the thicket filled with his musky scent. Grown drowsy, Bruno whispered: “Is that lake far from here?”
“Maybe no more than eight days’ journey now.”
“And the big river?”
“Oh, much farther. But well come to it before the leaves turn, and where it flows in the south there’s no winter ever.”
On that river mighty as a sea
we shall build us a boat of firm timbers.
One sail it shall carry of white linen
from flax grown in a field of happiness.
And we shall sail over the rim of the world
to a country I made in childhood
where no one weeps.
“Sleep a little, Poet. I will watch.”
But as he spoke his words were smashed down by the roar of the Tiger, who plunged out of the thicket and charged to the edge of the rock slope, and there received the arrow of Father Clark in his neck and the Baron’s spear in the core of his heart, quickly dying. And Tiger Boy running forward would have cried out something to them all, perhaps a warning that he was human, but a cold thing in an orange and brown loin-rag delivered him an arrow below the heart, and shouted: “My shot, Baron! I got him! I got the bastard!”
Meanwhile Horrow, anxious to save a valuable hide that would be his perquisite, whipped the hounds away from the Tigers carcass. Still witless and berserk with the smell of him that was everywhere, in the thicket, the wet air, Bruno’s clothes, they flung themselves on Bruno, who was stumbling to his friend, and brought him down. Moments passed before Father Clark, slashing with his knife and impeded by Horrow’s prancing and gibbering, could destroy the hounds and take up his son’s body in his arms, and learn there was no life in it.
Life lingered briefly in Tiger Boy, and the Baron knelt by him bewildered. “Why did you come upon us? Why? Why have you made us destroy you?”
“I was searching for a friend.”
Later the Baron felt Father Clark’s hand heavy on his shoulder. “They are both dead, Baron. We must take them back to the village where they shall have burial.” The Baron nodded, stunned and vague. “We must look for Will Hurley. I suppose we have other labors, Baron, and certain years to be lived.” They would return together, Father Clark knew, not in friendship but because this is the way the world goes, more or less, in daily necessities, compromises of good and evil, error and some vision and good intentions and growing old. They would consult with politeness as usual on parish affairs, would now and then dine together with the Abbot of St. Benjamin’s, and would remember—imperfectly, more and more imperfectly. And the prior of St. Henry’s at Nupal must of course be compensated for the loss of two valuable hounds.
Thus perished in the summer of the Year of Abraham 488 an unknown whom men called Tiger Boy. And in this manner died Bruno, like many of our other poets, his work unfinished.
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Universe 2 - [Anthology] Page 23