A spark sprang out of the darkness at my feet and from it a tall yellow flame arose.
‘Excellent!’ said my companion, laid his hand upon my shoulder and gave it a clumsy pat which felt like the shaking a terrier gives a rat. My new-born light showed me that his hand was a mighty paw and that the rest of him matched the hairy appendage for strength and hideousness. The mouth from which his scholarly voice issued was a red maw, lipped with thick folds of leather, toothed like a tiger.
I cried his name fearfully, ‘Om Ren!’ and, losing all my new-found power, began to mutter a woman’s charm to placate and appease him.
‘Peace, master,’ the wild man said. ‘If you were a mere soldier, albeit a Green Wolf and one of the best – if, as I say, you were a common man, I would have let you continue your hopeless wandering. You would have died.
‘But I have stepped into your path because I wish to speak to you. Look upon my intervention as happy – but also as the beginning.’
Here, he paused to scratch his genitals, outdoing the butcher in lewdity and grossness. He gave me a terrible grin.
‘I am a beast in body,’ he said. ‘Filthy as any hermit, disgusting of habit as a pariah dog; and cursed with a mind as pure as snow-water. Listen to me:
‘You, Koschei Corbillion, have demonstrated your undiscovered powers to me. Will you continue on your way to join battle with the Myran forces and perhaps meet death as certainly as if I let you wander into the wilderness? You have twenty-five years only but you are an adept, of both praying and fighting; in your short life you have already been two men, a priest and a soldier, yet you are the same Koschei. Few are given the ability to pass through successive transformations and remain themselves.
‘Do I speak riddles?’ Here, the Om Ren smiled his ghastly smile again.
‘I follow you,’ I said.
‘Then, to continue: this chameleon quality of yours is one the Archmage himself would give a sight of his soul for. It is searched for and sought after; a man must be born with it, of course: it cannot be bestowed. You possess it. Will you waste it?’
‘Do you mean that I might practise magic?’
‘“Practise magic” indeed! Magic is not Medicine. You are Magic. It surrounds, inhabits and becomes you – you must learn its particular language, that is all.’
It was my turn to mock:
‘All?’ I said. ‘To learn that “language”, as you call it, takes a lifetime.’
‘Best begin!’
‘How do I know you are not a false spirit of the forest, a dissembling will o’the wisp or jack o’lantern sent to lead me astray?’
The great beast laughed, or howled rather.
‘Do I look like the ignis fatuus?’
‘Why should I believe your words?’ I countered.
‘It was you who made the fire.’
We both looked down at the flames, which burned in contained fashion between us.
‘And you also,’ said the Om Ren, ‘who has begun to build the Memory Palace by the cloister at Espmoss.’
‘That is just a small house, a hut, filled with certain objects which hold associations for me.’
‘Is it? When you walk in there, it fills with the ghosts of your past, does it not? – with the presences of your mother and father, the little dog you had when you were a boy. You have made love to Nemione Baldwin there, have you not?’
‘Alas, only to her doppelganger.’
‘But you remember doing so, do you not? Can you distinguish between memory, imagination and clairvoyance?’
‘Yes!’
‘We will make trial of that assertion. Look into your fire! What do you see there?’
I crouched over the fire involuntarily and looked into its red heart. I suppose the Om Ren made me, with his crystal, matchless mind.
For a moment or two, I saw nothing beside the glowing coals; but soon I saw them divide and fall away as if they were the stones of a breached city wall and I looked through the doorway thus made. I saw a tower, absolute in its loneliness. It stood, tall, grey, and topped by a small turret with a conical roof, on a promontory above the ocean. Its sole door was twenty feet up the wall, and there was no ladder or stair. High above that was a slit window. I looked into it. What I saw filled me with disquiet.
I saw Manderel Valdine, Prince of Pargur and Archmage of Malthassa, in all his solitary glory. Cloaked (against the cold) in furs and robed (against any suspicion that he might be an ordinary mortal) in cloth-of-gold studded with brilliants, he was conjuring before a great map stitched together from many parchments. The curve of the wall repeated itself in the curve of the map fixed to it. It seemed leagues across that wall of map.
Valdine made arcane gestures with his staff.
‘Show me!’ he cried. ‘Show me the place of safety!’ Sweat stood in dewdrops on his broad forehead. The bald dome of his scalp glistened. He groaned with the effort of his spell, like a man in torment, like a man in ecstasy.
‘Valdine casts a spell,’ I told the Om Ren. ‘A terrible spell, surely of plague or destruction, his face is so white and red.’
‘Then listen carefully!’
The Archmage in my fire bent down, slowly lowering himself to the floor. He abased himself before his magic map, making desperate plea to Urthamma: he, the blessed, cursed demon, is the god of magicians. A column of light arose from the body of the Archmage, a twisting column composed perhaps of his golden robe or of the very essence of his manhood. I saw Urthamma standing twined within it, great and glorious, glowing like a lighted brand above the crouched figure of Valdine.
‘You try me!’ said the god.
The man on the floor mumbled wordlessly.
‘I tell you, Valdine,’ the god said from a mouth like a broken crossbow. ‘Your desire for immortality is an embarrassment on Mount Cedros. I am a laughing stock.
‘However –’ Here, he yawned and clawed his fiery tresses into some sort of order. ‘Look at your map when I am gone. The fair province of SanZu is as good a place as many.’
The god yawned again and, turning widdershins gracefully, disentangled himself from the oriflamme of silken matter and disappeared. Valdine leapt to his feet and I peered hard through the insubstantial window, disappointed because I was too far away to see any detail of the map other than a wedge of lines which seemed to represent a rocky promontory as cruel and precipitous as that on which the Archmage’s spytower stood. I heard Valdine cry ‘Aah, salvation!!’
The vision faded and the magical fire dimmed as if I had exhausted it. I stood in a murky twilight with the hideous man of the forest, who tapped my chest with a horny forefinger.
‘Well?’ he demanded.
‘Valdine deserves his position as Archmage. A formidable show!’
‘But what did you see?’
‘He was using his powers to find a place of absolute safety. He summoned Urthamma!’
‘No such thing – as a place of absolute safety. But what was it that you saw?’
‘I told you. I told you everything I saw, as it happened.’
‘But did it happen? Was it an episode from your imagination, projected into the fire? Was it precognition? Was it memory? Was it mere prestidigitation?’
‘It was a vision.’
‘Ah! Most deceitful of mental processes; most desired. You saw them when you were a religious, did you not – and not always spiritual in content?’
‘They were invariably sacred. I saw the blessed Martyrs at Actinidion and the Saints in Glory; Nemione Baldwin undressed twice only – more holy and more lovely than any Martyr or Saint.’
‘You remember all these visitations, or visions?’
‘I think so.’
‘Then what is the difference between the original and its copy?’
I began to protest. My memories were surely most precious, most detailed, each nuance lovingly built up – embroidered – dwelt upon. I wasn’t sure. If the vision had been less than the memory, would I have remembered it at all? At last,<
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‘I don’t know,’ I confessed. ‘I’m not sure if I know the difference between memory and imagination. As for clairvoyance –’
‘Huzzah!’ the beast thundered. ‘Bravo! Now, as you have satisfactorily proved my point, I will take you to my house and there you will get a meal and a good night’s rest before I set you on the way you should have taken.’
The Wild Man led me by the hand through the dark forest. I was glad he held my hand in his huge paw, content as a child to be led by his nurse for all that my hand was the broad and sinewy gripping instrument of a swordsman. A puvush danced. Nivashi sang to me, leaning up from the streams and marshy places with sad and seductive expressions on their pale faces.
‘Look,’ said the Om Ren. ‘Look and learn from looking; but never touch one. She would burn you instantly to death with her icy touch or, if she felt playful, drag you down to her streambed, lie and let you mount her as you drowned. The puvushi are little better. Their toys are ivy stems and rotting wood. You would have one chance of escape rather than none – if you were lucky.’
He squeezed my hand until it ached.
The Om Ren’s house was a shambling affair as squalid and dishevelled as himself. It did not look like a house but like a great faggot of branches someone had thrown against a tree.
‘The puvush of this tree’s earth is saintly,’ he told me. ‘Peace now, Iron Glance, it is only myself.’
I heard something scratching in the earth. Inside the ramshackle house lay a heap of straw and a long coil of straw rope.
‘My bed and my weapon,’ said the Om Ren proudly. He showed me his larder, a hollow in the tree, and took seeds and nuts from it.
‘Eat!’
I managed to swallow a few dry walnuts and a handful of green wheat. Noticing a big red nut amongst the remaining grains, I stretched out my hand.
‘No!’ the Om Ren suddenly cried. ‘Not that one. It should not be amongst these wholesome fruits. Let me put it away.’ He picked the red nut up himself and tucked it away under the long hairs which covered his belly. ‘That nut could kill you.’
‘I have never seen its like before,’ I said. ‘What is it?’
‘It is called the Ripe Nut of Wisdom. It is nothing of the kind of course, but the peasants tell stories about it. It looks so appetizing.’
‘It does indeed. Is it a deadly poison?’
‘A good one would bring on an attack of the megrims. The one you saw is addled: it is full of the eggs of the black worm and they are fatal if consumed.’
‘It is fortunate that you saw it in time.’
‘Oh, I am a careless fellow. Cankers, toadstools and belladonna arc my daily companions. Have the rotten nut if you will. It may help you. It will bring catastrophic changes if you use it well.’ He retrieved the nut from his body hair. ‘There! Here’s to a fresh intelligence and new wisdom in the world – if you discover how to use the nut!’
I tried, of course, to question him further, but he would not respond and diverted all my queries with uproarious laughter or with his vile bodily habits of scratching his private parts (not at all private in him but hanging there for all to see), his belly and his armpits. His body was obviously a pasture to herds of fleas and lice; for my safety I had to remain with him while the darkness lasted and sleep in his musty bed, where he snored and scratched all night. Yet I thought him a kindly creature, more bark than bite. What use as a weapon was a rope of straw? – and his house was like an unlit bonfire. The wolf in the children’s tale could easily have blown it away and any wildfire which coursed through the forest after a storm would burn it down.
We woke at dawn and breakfasted on the last of the seeds. The Om Ren shambled out to relieve himself against his house and, after a decent interval, I followed him. He glanced in my direction as I urinated and, leavening his words with one of his fearful smiles, said,
‘If I may say so without offence, you Wise Men are poorly endowed. How do your women pleasure themselves on such a tiny thing?’
‘They are very inventive,’ I said.
He laughed and offered me a drink of rainwater from his cupped hands. It was good water, he told me, collected from another hollow in his tree. Treading carefully, that we did not disturb Iron Glance’s slumbers, we left his home. We walked for a while, not long, and soon came to a broad track, which we followed. Though it was lined with tall bents and foxgloves, I did not recognize it.
‘Are you sure this is the way?’ I said.
The Om Ren replied with a wave of his arm. He pointed to a tree in the middle distance and this, I recognized: the chestnut which spread its branches low to the ground, like a woman’s skirt.
‘The Silver Dwarf waits there,’ he said. ‘In hiding. His kind are happier when they cannot see the sky. Listen! A woodbird sings. It is a good omen. Go safe on your way.’
What should I say? Not feebly ‘thank you’ nor yet suggest some temporal reward.
‘I hope you never find yourself the master of the Red Horse,’ I said, intending, by this obscure and convoluted compliment, to wish him a long life.
He laughed, or roared, through his hand – I think he hoped to mute his voice.
‘You mean to say “I hope your skin is never made into a bridle for the mightiest stallion,” I think. It is an honour, Master Corbillion, and I will be already dead, you know. The Ima have access to the power of my kind, even when the wielder of that power is dead.’
‘Well, I hope they have all they need, for a long while yet.’
He gently thumped me. It felt like one of the well-aimed blows of my sparring partner. ‘You won’t get to the battle,’ he said confidently. I protested:
‘I will. You have put me on my road!’
‘You will go to Pargur. I think you have a desire to see the city and a greater desire to interview its prince, the Archmage Valdine.’
‘Have I? I must follow my duty first, wherever it leads me.’
The Wild Man took my hand in his and squeezed it, much harder than he had before.
‘Does that hurt?’
‘Aagh!’
He let me go.
‘You are a self-deceiver, Koschei,’ he said. ‘You are already more than half way to abandoning your life as a Green Wolf, just as you abandoned your life in the cloister.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Certainly. But the dwarf waits under the chestnut tree. He is anxious. You forget how sharp his hearing is.’
I set off along the path, intending to turn and wave. When I looked back, the Om Ren had gone, camouflaged by the forest greenery like a puvush or a deer. I pushed my way under the branches of the chestnut. Erchon was sitting there on the ground, his back against the trunk of the tree and his goods spread out around him, rapier on top.
‘Who were you talking to, Master?’ he asked. ‘A gypsy was it, or an apparition? The Om Ren himself!’
‘Hush, you fool! It was he.’
‘You don’t say?’
‘It was the Wild Man indeed. I was lost in the forest – I have a tale to tell.’
‘It will sound better over breakfast.’ The dwarf got up and rummaged in a woven basket. He fetched out a length of smoked sausage, bread, mustard and beer.
We sat down to eat, safe enough beneath the chestnut tree. I told him as much of my tale as I judged fit, gratified to impress him at last.
‘Perhaps we should go to Pargur before we turn toward the battle and possible death?’ I suggested finally.
‘Perhaps we ought, Sir Green Onetime-Wolf. I should like to see my Lady. She journeys to Pargur.’
‘I should also like to see Nemione!’
‘Then we are agreed?’ said Erchon, and I felt that he had taken hold of my uncertain scheme and made it into a reality.
‘To Pargur!’ I said. ‘But where were you, Erchon, till now? What delayed you on the road?’
‘Oh that is another tale – not so grand perhaps as yours. I was detained in Tanter by a – hold, master. Be still.’ He leaned forwa
rd quickly and pressed his ear against the ground.
‘Hooves, wheels,’ he whispered. ‘The Romanies – no, it is a timber waggon. Rest easy. I’ll continue my tale.’
Guy heard the lorry changing gear before he saw it, one of those continental juggernauts sensibly barred from his own country, which now with lights blazing and engine growling threatened to engulf and crush him under its wheels as comprehensively as might any Hindu god-waggon. He jumped back into the hedge, only there was none, and found himself floundering in a dry ditch, strands of barbed wire clutching at his clothes.
When the lorry had gone and he had extricated himself from his predicament – lucky it was a dry night! – he turned back towards the village, comforted by the few lights still showing there, small yellow, homely stars.
‘I bet the bugger never even saw me,’ he muttered, ‘– another careful French driver.’
One of the yellow stars shone out of the downstairs room at the Old Presbytery, the comfortable living-room in which he had left his son and Alice Tyler. The curtains had been drawn back, and the lamplight illuminated a stretch of gravel and his car. A second car, a big saloon, was parked beside it – Georges Dinard’s, he supposed. He heard Alice calling softly, ‘Guy! Guy?’ She was standing outside the open front door, her white shirt gleaming almost as much as her hair.
‘There you are! You missed dinner.’
He went swiftly up to her and put his arms round her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m always abandoning you. Where’s Dominic? Inside?’
‘He went to bed, ages ago. We are to sleep in that room.’ She pointed to a pair of open casements above the dining room into which he had peered in the afternoon; long ago in terms of new experiences: before he had met his son, before he had re-encountered Helen.
‘And Helen?’ he asked Alice. ‘Have you met her?’
‘Oh yes. She cooked for us and there was Bordeaux and a Pouilly Fumée. Georges came back from Lyon.’
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