The White Road of the Moon

by Rachel Neumeier

  The stories he told were set in the world before the Southern Wall had been raised up. The world was a smaller place now, filled with smaller people, like Aunt Tarana, who had never in her whole life been farther from Tikiy than the trading post on the Yellow River Road and who thought the most important thing in the world was seeing her daughters well married to craftsmen instead of muddy-handed farmers. And disposing of her black-eyed niece in the most expedient manner possible.

  Meridy was still too angry to think about that.

  She moved to sit on the blanket spread before Ambica’s bench—bright in memory, half visible to Meridy’s black eyes, barely there to any touch—and smiled back. It was easy to smile at Ambica, even when she was angry. He was so good-humored himself and always pleased to see her, and that made it hard for Meridy to hold on to her bad temper. Even today. That was why she’d come down the mountain. Well, and she had always found the presence of the dead far more welcome than that of the living. Especially Aunt Tarana. Especially today. She tried to scowl at Ambica, but she could feel it was no use.

  “Ah, Mery, bramble-child!” he said to her. He called her by little-names sometimes, as though he were no older than she, especially when she was in a temper. No one else ever did. Meridy would not have answered anybody else who tried. He patted her hand. “I had a story for you, one I’ve never told you before, a good one, all bright courage and noble sacrifice and tragic death, but there’s no time, no time. You’ve someone seeking you.”

  “Seeking me?” Meridy thought she must have misunderstood. The lingering dead of Tikiy did not think enough about the living to seek out anyone.

  “Ah, well, seeking any witch, I think,” Ambica amended. “A ghost, he is, seeking you or one like you: someone with eyes that see behind the world. Fretful, he was. I told him you’d do. I told him there’s not much your black eyes look past. I said I’d send you along, bramble-girl.” He patted her knee with one bony hand, smiling at her as though he’d done her a favor.

  Meridy stared at him. “You’re telling me a ghost came here from somewhere else, deliberately looking for a witch, someone who can bind ghosts?” This seemed so unlikely that she could hardly frame the questions that pressed suddenly behind her teeth.

  The quick dead, the ghosts who turned away from the White Road of the Moon and lingered instead in the real, were usually bound to the place of their death. If they left it, then unless a living person anchored them, ghosts would forget themselves, and eventually shred away on the wind, lost to the world and the God alike. A wife, a brother, a child—any of the living might anchor someone after he died, even though they couldn’t see him and could hardly hear the thin, breathless whisper of his voice. But if anchored by a wife or brother or child, a ghost could turn away from the world and take the God’s Road. That choice was always there for such a ghost. No ordinary person could hold one of the quick dead back from that choice once a ghost had decided to depart the real and go to the God.

  It was different for a witch, because a witch could anchor one of the quick dead, bind him, and use him as a conduit between the real and the ethereal. That was the source of all of a witch’s magic, so witches sought out the lingering dead and bound them whether they wished to be anchored or not. Meridy could not quite imagine why a ghost would deliberately risk such servitude by seeking out an unknown witch.

  Getting to her feet, Meridy stared away, into the ruined town and the half-glimpsed memory of it the ghosts of Tikiy recalled, layered one above the other, looking for someone she did not know. Someone she did not recognize.

  “Go on, bramble-child,” Ambica urged her. “But be careful! He’s got depth to him, that one. He’s carrying a story on his shoulders, and not a light burden, or I miss my guess.”

  “Yes,” Meridy said again, not really listening. She was curious, about this ghost and about the anchor who must have brought him here. So she headed straight into the ghost town. Or as straight as she could while picking her way through crumbled streets and around ruined homes.

  —

  She found Ambica’s stranger in one of her favorite spots in the whole town: the crumbling base of the central fountain. He appeared quite at his ease for all Ambica had said he was fretful. He seemed a boy about her own age. That surprised her. The ghosts of children rarely lingered. But he was obviously a ghost and obviously someone she had never before seen, so who else could he be but Ambica’s impatient stranger?

  Meridy paused between part of a broken wall and a tree that had grown up through the remnants of a foundation, just to study him. The ghost boy was leaning back on his elbow, staring down into the depths of the dry fountain, one hand resting on the head of a big brindled wolfhound. The dog was also a ghost, but no more familiar to Meridy than the boy himself. As dogs were sacred to the God, after death they went as they pleased between the world of men and the God’s realm. But this one clearly belonged with the boy.

  Where shadows fell across boy and dog, the two ghosts were hard to see, even for her, but the noon sunlight caught out the boy’s head and shoulder in more detail. The light glistened off dust motes in the air, delicately limning the place where he almost was. Even at this distance and only half visible, his expression was abstracted.

  Then the boy looked up and saw her. He straightened, gazing right at her, meeting her eyes. The dog, too, sat up alertly, pricking his ears.

  Meridy started forward. She couldn’t see anyone living. She didn’t understand how the boy could have come here by himself, but if a living person had brought him, then where was that person? Tension clenched her stomach. Meeting someone like herself, maybe a witch…someone older, someone who knew things and wanted things and had perhaps even come here looking for her, or for someone like her. It was bound to be complicated.

  Still, she could see no one except the ghost boy and his dog.

  Meridy cast a quick glance around the town square, but she saw only a few townsfolk, familiar ghosts all, going about their simple days. They paid no attention to her, absorbed in their own memories; she was too familiar to them to draw more than an occasional indifferent nod. She saw no one else, no one living who might anchor a ghost, no one who might pose a challenge or a threat.

  The ghost boy had risen to his feet. He was clearly waiting for her to join him at the fountain. At last Meridy allowed curiosity to lead her forward.

  It became more possible to distinguish details of the ghost’s appearance as she approached the fountain. The boy was tall, by his height and the cast of his features of pure northern blood. His clothing was not village clothing: the dyes must have been clear and strong to produce those echoes of blues and violets, and the style was not familiar, his shirt close fitted at the wrist and neck and loose everywhere else.

  His expression was both tense and contained. He had a measuring look about him, as though he had set himself to judge her, and Tikiy, and all its other ghosts; as though he had a right to judge them all. He looked somehow less solid and at the same time more vivid than the ghosts Meridy knew, and she thought Ambica was right: there was a depth to him. Although he had died young, this one was an old ghost. The dog was clearly his dog. She wondered if they had died at the same time, and how it had happened.

  The dog dropped his head and laid back his ears in a friendly way. His tail stirred, though of course the dust and dead leaves did not shift in answer.

  Close by the boy’s hand, on the cracked tiles of the fountain’s rim, lay a rose. The pink and white tiles were an echo of the wealth Tikiy had once possessed, though the colors were faded now, with ferns growing in the cracks. In contrast to the tiles, the rose looked perfect. Too beautiful, too perfect to be real, the rose was blood dark against the tiles.

  If enough of the ghosts of Tikiy had been near the fountain, their gathered memories could have restored it to the beauty it had enjoyed in their day and Meridy might have seen it as they saw it. But there were few ghosts nearby, save for this one she did not know. A ghost boy, a crumbled
fountain, and a single perfect rose lying on the broken tiles.

  The ghost boy gave Meridy a careful, gauging look. Then he picked up the rose and offered it to her with a courtly gesture. Resisting the urge to touch it, Meridy put her hands behind her back. It was an ethereal rose, of course, and would melt away if she touched it. But it was beautiful. It looked, in fact, exactly like the sort of rose that might restore the soul to someone who was dying. If she had been able to make one like it out of dreams and memory…

  The shadow of grief brushed her, but she was old enough now to know that the stories about roses were just stories, and fever was fever. After a minute, she sat down on the rim of the fountain and let the ghost thread the rose into her hair. His touch was cold and light, almost imperceptible, like being brushed by a dream of cobwebs. If Meridy kept her hands away from the rose and pretended that it wasn’t there, it would probably last a little while before fading.

  The ghost boy, glimmering in the sunlight, told her, in the feathery, breathless voice of the quick, “There’s an injured man in the woods. Down by the ruined mill.”

  Meridy looked at him carefully. “Your anchor?”

  The ghost shrugged. His tone was cool, assured, unimpassioned, by no means the tone of any boy his apparent age. “Does it matter? He’s hurt. Perhaps he’s dying. Will you leave him there to die?”

  This boy had come here looking for her. He had gone to a good deal of trouble, in fact, to find help for this man who must be his anchor. He’d made her an ethereal rose, even. That spoke well for the man. Whatever he was to this boy, whether he was a witch or a priest or a sorcerer, Meridy couldn’t believe he was wicked. She was fairly certain she didn’t want to meet a priest, who might well, considering her black eyes, try to pen her up in some sanctuary and make her take vows to the God. On the other hand…curiosity tugged at her. And the boy was right. She had no reason to care about this stranger, but if the man was hurt, she couldn’t refuse to help him, either. She winced away from imagining what it would be like to lie helpless in the cold woods and know that you were dying.

  She stood up.

  The ghost boy immediately faded out, becoming nearly imperceptible even to her. Impatient, that was clear. Intolerant of questions. “Hurry,” his airless voice murmured.

  Meridy shrugged, to show that she didn’t care one way or the other, and headed for the mill. Fine. She would bring this man to the town inn and make a fire; old and ruined as it was, the inn in Tikiy-by-the-Water still possessed a sound roof and walls. He might die anyway, if he’d been lying alone too long and was too sick or too fevered, but at least he could die where it was warm. So she walked down through the woods toward the old mill, pretending not to hurry but walking fast for all that, following the flickery corner-of-the-eye motion of the ghost boy.

  The man certainly was hurt. Meridy, in her first summing glance, thought he might already be dead. A closer look showed that he was merely unconscious. As the boy had said, he was wounded: bleeding sluggishly from a long slash on his thigh and more freely from another cut on his side. The wounds did not look like they had been made by any animal or accident. They looked like they had been dealt by a knife, or perhaps even a sword. There was a knife, in fact, close by one outflung hand. It gleamed dully in the mud: no cook’s knife but a fighting dagger. No one in Tikiy carried such a weapon. Meridy knew of no one who even owned a fighting knife. Skinning blades and everyday belt tools had quite a different look about them, which was not something she had been aware of before, but it was obvious enough now.

  Meridy cast an uneasy look around, but there were no signs that this man’s enemies, whoever they might be, were anywhere near. Nor, even more curious, were there any signs to show how the man had come to be here. No broken shrubs or crushed undergrowth spoke of any recent battle. There was blood on the man’s clothing, but very little on the ground. He might have come out of the air, stepped off the White Road itself, to fall and die alone in a ghost town at the edge of the world.

  Meridy knew less of sorcerers than she knew of witches, and she knew little enough of witches, but she could recognize the working of magic when it was this obvious. She regarded the man uneasily. He didn’t look powerful. He looked only exhausted and ill and likely to die, if he was not cared for properly.

  Crouching down beside him, she touched his throat. The skin was cool and damp, not a good sign, but not the worst possible, either. The man did not respond to the touch. She thought of the ethereal rose, probably still tucked in her hair. But the man’s heartbeat seemed steady and strong enough, though a little fast.

  Muttering an exasperated curse under her breath, Meridy shook the man lightly. He moved a little, and his mouth twitched. Meridy looked at the ghost boy, standing nearby, nearly invisible in the woven shadows of the trees. “Can’t you heal him?”

  “No,” the boy said, clipped and impatient. “Healing takes the aware assistance of a witch—and he’s not a witch, anyway. You need to get him somewhere warm. Then I’ll help you heal him, if it comes to that.”

  “Huh,” Meridy muttered. He meant he’d let her bind him, a secondary binding if this man was already his anchor. It was still an unexpected offer. She didn’t say that she didn’t know how to heal anyone, that it would never have occurred to anyone in Tikiy-up-the-Mountain to ask for her help. That in Tikiy-up-the-Mountain, some people not only believed that a witch could bind the quick dead—which was true—but thought a witch could steal your soul and make you into a ghost while your body still walked and spoke and went about its days like a normal person, which as far as she knew was completely false. Though Aunt Tarana probably thought a girl with black eyes, even her own niece, was just waiting for a chance to do exactly that.

  She looked back at the man, considering. He couldn’t stay here in the damp, or he would surely die. Witches used ghosts to reach into the ethereal somehow, and their power to heal came from that; but even if the boy had been bound to her, which he wasn’t, Meridy didn’t know how any of that actually worked. And she certainly couldn’t carry a grown man.

  Meridy gingerly picked up the knife and tossed it some distance away. Then she leaned forward and pressed her hand firmly against the cut in the man’s side.

  He curled forward with a cry and caught her wrist with one hand, his grip much stronger than Meridy had expected. But after her first involuntary jerk away, she stopped herself and moved instead to offer support. The man’s hand, so strong at first, rapidly weakened; she set her knee behind his shoulder to keep him up. “I can’t carry you,” she told him. “If you want to live, you must walk. I’ll help, and it’s not far.”

  The man stared at her wordlessly. His eyes were not black but a surprising, vivid blue. But his gaze was quite blank, as though he were still unconscious or the next thing to it.

  “Or you can lie here in the mud and finish dying,” Meridy said, refusing to be intimidated by either the man or the circumstances. “At the rate you’re going, it won’t take long.”

  Awareness slowly filtered back into the man’s face. He made a small sound and struggled to get his feet under him. Meridy threw her strength into the struggle, and then he was up, swaying. The ghost boy watched critically but offered no advice.

  The walk back up the hill was a nightmare of mud and loose rocks and desperate sharp breaths as the injured man slipped, and caught himself, and slipped again. Blood dripped on the path. Meridy kept her head down and her eyes on the path, and she pretended to herself that it was just one more step, and then just one more, until the ghost boy flickered quickly in front of her, lifting his hands, and they were there, with the door to the inn a few paces away and a crowd of curious ghosts fluttering dimly within.

  Between them, Meridy and the man managed to get up the few steps and inside and at last to the hearth of the nearest fireplace, where the man sank down as gratefully as though the stone hearth were a feather mattress. Meridy left him for a moment while she kindled a fire, thankful that on her last visit she h
ad for once bothered to put wood by for future use. She fetched water and put a kettle over the fire to make tea, found the threadbare blankets in the corner where she stored them, and came back to the bench.

  The man was fumbling with the clasp of his wet cloak, trying to get it off. His hands were shaking so badly that he could not manage the task but only made the cut on his side bleed faster. Meridy impatiently unfastened the clasp herself, getting his shirt off also while she was about it. The man was soon wrapped in the blankets, his violent shaking slowly winding down to a kind of gentle quivering. Meridy made tea and brought it to him in her best cracked mug, and he took it with hands that were only a little unsteady. She watched long enough to be sure he wouldn’t drop the mug, then drew her boot knife and began to cut her cleanest blanket into bandages.

  An hour later, the man, bandaged and no longer shivering, was working on a second mug of tea and the last of the slightly stale rolls Meridy had brought for her lunch. Meridy sat on the floor, her arms wrapped around her drawn-up legs, and watched him. The innkeeper’s wife bustled around them both, building up the fire till it roared with ethereal flame and laying out transparent dishes loaded with ethereal food. It gave Meridy an odd sort of double vision, the innkeeper’s wife’s memories of this inn as it had been imposed over the faded reality. The ghost boy sat on a nearby table, watching, his expression closed and hard to read. His dog lay beside him, stretched out almost the whole length of the table, his enormous straight-jawed head resting on equally enormous paws, watching everything with evident approval. The dog’s tail thumped soundlessly whenever Meridy looked at him. He certainly seemed friendlier than the boy.

  The flagstone Meridy sat on was cold despite the fire. She was trying to ignore this discomfort by concentrating firmly on the man. Like the boy, he seemed to be of pure northern blood. His hair, drying, was quite curly and fair as sunlight, rare this far south.