by IGMS
She had to go somewhere. And three days' walk from the Lodge of God was a soft city full of rich men -- a whole new world, full of bolts of red silk waiting to be taken.
Shadow of Turning
by Joan L. Savage
Artwork by Nick Greenwood
I have searched for my son ever since the sorcerer stole him, a cooing toddler, from beneath my apple tree. So long ago now, my son could not possibly remember me. I have searched anyway.
I set my peddler's pack beside my door, ready to go out again.
"You've only been home a day." My wife clasped my hand. Her hands were so cold, as if the life slowly ebbing from her was withdrawing its warmth. "Stay with me, Thomas. Stop looking for him. After twenty-five years he's surely dead."
I cleared my voice. It was rough, unused to speech. But she understood the curse that had been placed on me, so with her I tried to talk. "I'll find a nowhere I've always seen."
My wife wiped at her eyes. "You've been everywhere. You've probably walked every road a hundred times. He's lost to us. Accept it. Grieve, like I've grieved . . ."
I could not. I pulled my hand from her grasp, shouldered my pack, and stepped through the doorway. Behind me, I heard her crying. I wanted to weep too, but instead I laughed, as those who are cursed must laugh, as those who are mad.
My son could be anywhere; one path seemed just as likely to lead to him as any other. I wandered towards the mountains and, on the last morning of spring, chose a track that went up the mountain. It was so rough it would bounce the wheels from any cart that tried to traverse it. Because I had walked so many years barefooted, my calloused feet barely felt the stones. Grass fawned at my knees. From its depths, the occasional shadow-form of a snake darted across the road, eager to reach whatever now fed its insatiable hunger.
Me, the snakes ignored. I have heard that grief gives off no scent. Maybe that made me invisible to them. Maybe they ignored me because I had no place left in their schemes. Either way, it didn't matter.
I approached a village I had visited often before. A young mother pulled her baby closer and watched me with wary eyes. An old man stopped hoeing when he saw me; the mad are always feared by the sane. The old man clutched his hoe so tightly I could see his knucklebones through his tanned and weathered skin.
"Peddler!"
The old woman who lived at the edge of the village pushed through her gate and shuffled towards me. Her one wooden leg scuffed back and forth as she walked; it made a pattern in the dirt like a snake's-track. The other villagers made the sign of warding against her because of it, but they still bought the wares from her that she dared to buy from me.
"Peddler!" She clutched my arm with a hand deceptively strong for its boniness and pulled me towards her cottage. I went eagerly. She never needed me to speak. Despite my silence, she told me every scrap of gossip about her neighbourhood. It was why I always came to her.
"You know how I figured out, last you was here, that you was looking for a boy you lost in the Snake Wars?"
My heart lurched in my chest.
"Well, just the other day, Mandy came down off the mountain. I ain't seen her in, oh, thirty years. Not for such a long time, not since we was girls together."
I tried to smile, and tried not to hope. This would just be another story from her childhood -- precious to her, but useless to me.
"Mandy said a man and a babe came to the mountain, near on twenty-five years ago. No one knows where they came from . . ."
Twenty-five years. The time was right. But hope was too hard a thing. Each time it rushed over me it broke me a little more, when the whispers turned out to only be whispers. When the man turned out to be someone else's child. I had to fight hope. Not let it take root. I shook my head.
She ignored me. "The man, he was a sorcerer. Here! So close to the snakes' lairs, where sorcerers never dared to come, even during the wars."
I would never have dared to come here, either, even now, if I had still had my power. Even though the snakes were now banished into shadow forms and made powerless.
"And the babe -- well, he's a man now -- but guess what about him!"
I held my breath.
"Mandy says," she paused and lowered her voice, "the boy's eyes . . ."
I tried to nod encouragingly, though my heart pounded against my ribs.
"They're green like a snake's. Like yours. That's a sure way to know a sorcerer, or someone as used to be one. They don't always go together, green eyes and power. But often as not --"
I caught her arm then, forced out of my habitual silence. My voice, unused to speech, cracked. "There?"
She frowned. "What? Oh, you mean, where? Mandy says he lives in a hovel beside a fork in the path, where the path turns to Last Hamlet, and --"
I didn't wait to hear more. I knew the hut. I had passed it. The hovel was a poor-looking place, crouched on rocky land that bore thin crops. The thatch was often torn. A few scrawny chickens pecked bugs from the dust of the yard.
I had stopped there my first time past, when the boy had been maybe twelve. The man had met me at the gate. He said he was the boy's father, and that the boy had been born there. There had been nothing about the boy, nothing, to make me guess that the man lied. I had not noticed that the boy's eyes were green. I had been looking for it -- how could I not have seen? Heaven forgive me.
Though I noted that the boy grew from child to man, that he left his childhood perch on the step, where he watched the path, to heave stones out of the rockyfields, I had never wondered what had become of the mother I never saw, or why the boy seemed so often alone.
I rushed from the old woman's yard so quickly that I left her gate swinging wildly.
At the edge of the village lay a monument to the Snake Wars: the last remains of the devastation. At the end of the wars, in every hamlet, the villagers had gathered every board from each trampled house, every broken piece of furniture, each garment that had belonged to one of the snake-touched, and mounded them to moulder into dust as a remembrance, and a warning. Every time I passed such a mound, in every village and at every crossing of paths, I stopped to remember, and grieve.
This time I would have hurried past, but a beggar sat beside the monument. He was a withered-looking man, one of the snake-consumed, with a hunched back and his legs twisted under him. By his look, he'd probably been barely out of childhood when the snakes sucked away his magic and left his body weak and twisted.
He held up a copper mug as I passed. The clink of the few pennies inside sounded hollow. "Alms for a beggar?"
I stopped and fished in my pouch for one of the two coins I had left. I dropped one in his cup, partly for him, but mostly for myself; for how my part in the wars had been untimely cut off, for how the war had left me, in my own way, as helpless and as futile as he.
"My thanks." The beggar clutched the cup to his chest. "Such a kind man. Bless you. You were in the war, too. I see it on you." He pointed to my twisted legs.
I nodded but did not dare to speak. Besides, what was there to say?
The beggar shook his head. "There ain't no running from what's been done, is there? There ain't no changing it."
I turned and fled, as fast as my old legs would propel me. I must have been a comical sight: an old peddler half-running down the road on his twisted legs, with bare feet and his pans banging against his thighs.
I did not care. My son. If only I could find him, at last, I would find peace.
The sun was near to setting on my second day out from the village when Iapproached the hovel. A broken gate leaned against the fence. A man sat on the cracked stone that served as his step, with a sharpening stone and a scythe in his heavily callused hands.
I wondered how I had been so blind. I had never noticed the long curve of his forehead, so like his mother's, the arch of his nose. If only I had seen his eyes, all those years ago.
Yet even now, when he raised his gaze at my approach, I could not see their colour. My heart was too full; I d
id not give it any thought except to put it down to the slant of the evening light.
Here, I must speak. When a father first meets his son -- that must be a place of speech for that is how people greet each other, how they tell of hardships and joys, how they touch, if they touch at all, in a brief spark of communication. I cleared my throat and braced myself.
"Morning," I called, though evening light lay across him in long golden embers that burnished his face to bronze.
He straightened. "Hello."
At the sound of his voice, my heart lurched. When a lost thing is found, a lost penny beneath a cot, a lost chick beneath a woodpile, a lost son in a stranger's hut, the joy of it is a fire, a flood. I wanted to weep.
Instead I laughed, as all men who are cursed must do. As do the mad.
He frowned, instantly wary. "I can't afford to buy from you, peddler, and Lost Hamlet is a long ways up the road. You'd better hurry if you want to reach it before dark. There are wolves here-abouts."
I did not try to say that wolves never bother me; grief gives off no scent. Instead I said in a rush, and hoped that this once the words would come out right instead of backwards, cursed, futile: "When I was an old woman a friend took my father."
A look of pity crossed his face. All gentle souls get that same look when they realize they are speaking to the mad. Yet even though they pity, they also fear. He stood as if to go into his hut.
"Yes!" I cried and rushed towards him, hampered by my twisted joints, by my bulky pack as it caught on the gateposts. Silently, I cursed sorcerers and their curses. My son must understand my futile speech. His mother needed to see him before her racking coughs stifled her last breath.
Brave soul, he did not run from me. I loved him for that, even as I cursed him for being as deaf as all people were deaf. I had hoped, prayed, that with him it would be different. That he would hear my backwards words, and by some miracle understand.
"What do you want here, old man?"
I pointed at my bare feet and tried, as I had tried for so long, to speak backwards so my words came out forwards. But curses read intentions, not deceptions, as I had learned to my misery. My voice said, "I have worn these shoes ever since I found you."
He stood his ground. "Good shoes they must be, then."
"Yes! Yes! I speak forwards because a good man blessed me so."
"May we all be blessed." He seized the latch on his door, opened it, and started to back inside.
"Be deaf to me!" I cried, and ran to seize him. His four chickens squawked and scattered as I staggered across the tiny yard. On the cracked stone step I tripped, lost my balance, and fell against him. With the weight of my peddler's pack and my momentum combined, I knocked him off balance. He staggered backwards into the hut. I fell to my knees, frantically clutching at him, and he pulled a knife from its place at his belt.
For one flickering second I thought, I should go. I can only do harm here. He does not know me. Maybe he does not want to know. Maybe it would be better if he never knew.
But I did not leave. I could not plod home to his mother and sit by her bed, laughing, laughing, and tell her I had succeeded again, succeeded again. I could not watch the tears roll again down the creases they had worn in her aged skin, could not watch her turn her face to the wall because she could not bear my hysterical laughter any more than I could bear it myself.
I crawled towards my son, on my knees, with my arms outstretched. The hut stank of the chickens that must share it with him at night.
"I don't want to hurt you, old man," he said.
"You don't misunderstand me."
"What?"
I tried to get to my feet, and looked for something to help me drag myself up from my knees. The only furnishings were one chair beside the open fire-pit, one table, and two beds against opposite walls. One bed was rumpled. The other was dust-covered and had obviously not been slept in for some time. I could not look away from it.
"The good man woke there."
"My father died five years ago. Did you know him?"
I could not move. Five years. All the years I had trudged past this hut without knowing the truth, and now it was too late. No sorcerer left to undo his curse on me and make my words straight again. No sorcerer to explain to my son who he really was. I bowed my head to my knees and tried to stifle the laughter, but it burst through me and made my shoulders shake.
My son must have thought I was crying. I heard his feet approach. "Did you know him well?"
"Yes," I muttered into the dust of the floor.
"You were friends?"
"I loved him."
"Figures," he muttered, with bitterness in his voice. "The only person who cared for the bastard was a crazy peddler."
I lifted my head. "Didn't he hate you?"
"What kind of a question is that? Did he hate you?"
"He blessed me."
My son's eyes narrowed. "What did you just say?"
"He blessed me, blessed me, blessed me." I rocked back and forth. "And now I came in time to make it begin, I came in time."
"In time for what?"
I barely heard him over the pounding of my heart. "And you will always know how much I hate you."
"What? Why? What did I ever do to you?"
"The good man left you behind."
His eyes were round in the gloaming. Fading sunlight began to hide him from me as surely as ignorance and miscommunication had hidden him all these years.
As I struggled to push myself to my feet, he caught my arm in a hard grip. "What are you saying? What do you know about me and my father?"
I closed my eyes and repeated the words I had repeated over and over again, to countless strangers, for countless years, to no response. "When I was an old woman a good man took my father."
"No. You said I came with the good man. Where did we come from?"
Hope, that brutal companion, had driven me here. But it was more agony to see him and not be known than it had been to not know where he was. I whispered, "When you died I hated you so little."
He ignored me and grabbed my arm. "Where did we come from? He would never tell me, but I remember a house, before this hovel."
I nodded, impotent.
"He said we lived there together before my mother died. He would never talk about her. Did you know her?"
"No," I breathed, as I would have breathed in the lavender of her hair, like silk across my face.
His face fell in disappointment.
"I hate her, hate her with all my head," I said.
"You just said you didn't know her, you old fool." He turned away from me in disgust.
It was then, in the failing light of evening when all worlds touch for the briefest of moments, that I saw it. As he turned, a shimmer fell from him, like dust shaken from his tunic, like water stains left behind by his shoes.
I stared. He had inherited my power. More than my power, for I could tell from the quantity of dust that fell from him that he was stronger than I had ever been. This must be why the sorcerer had taken him. The knowledge that a stranger had seen the power in my son before I had recognized it burned in a knot under my heart. Had my eyes been too close, blinded by love, that I had not seen?
I knew from the careless, wasteful arc as it fell from him, that my boy did not know the power he held. Some spell must bind his power from awakening.
That was good. If his power awakened, the snakes, shadows though they were, could feast and draw enough strength from it to break whatever enchantment had held them as shadows for the past twenty-five years.
His power reached towards me, as if sensing my own power that had been twisted inside me and made useless. I could not stay if my presence was going to wake in my son that which must never be woken.
I backed towards the door, but could not leave. Twenty-five years of searching, only to see him for a brief moment? Never to be able to take him to his mother, to know him but not be known -- that was torment.
Though I had lost my power,
I had not lost my ability to see. As I hesitated, a shadow-snake slithered in through the open doorway behind me. Its tongue flicked eagerly towards the dust of power left behind on the floor; it snatched up that dust like a starving dog would snap at crumbs.
I turned and fled.
It was the wrong thing to do. My father repeatedly warned me -- before the curse bound my power fruitless inside me, before my father could not bear to look at what I had become, turned away, and died -- he had warned me, never run from anything magical.
There was nothing left in the land more magical than my boy. He caught me just before I reached his gate. The power in him roused like the hackles on a cat. To my trained eyes he appeared twice his normal size. Then the sun slipped beneath the horizon and the illusion faded.
His grip on my arm tightened. "Why are you afraid of me? Who are you? What do you know about my father?"
Only the frantic need for him to know me had driven me to speak in the first place; now I retreated into silence and merely shook my head and bobbed it in the acquiescent way that makes strong men have pity and weak men turn away in disgust. I bowed my body in submission, subjection, a poor creature not even worthy of his contempt, and tried to pull away from him.
His hand only tightened, and his eyes searched my face. "No. Don't leave. I'm sorry. I was inhospitable."
I tried to shake my head, but he ignored the motion.
"Come in and stay for dinner. You'll never make it to Lost Hamlet before dark. There are wolves. Stay with me tonight. Tell me where my father and I came from."
I would sooner have walked to the hamlet with the wolves and the snakes than spend a night with his unborn power. Its fire rubbed against my twisted power like sparks from a bonfire. So I shook my head again and tried to back away.
"I'm sorry I frightened you. Please, come back inside."
While he spoke, he looked into my face as if he were trying to peer past the madman to whatever human soul might lurk within my twisted shell.