He had been patient. It was abundantly clear that Timou would always back away from a man who coaxed and importuned and followed her about the countryside begging for her glance. No. Still very young, Timou was not yet certain she cared for the interest of men. What she wanted was to learn the arts of the mages . . . of which Jonas had only the vaguest idea, except magecraft in this country bore little resemblance to the violent sorcery of the land he had left behind.
Certainly Kapoen was nothing like the sorcerers of that land. When Jonas had first come to this village, Kapoen had given him one thoughtful, summing look that seemed to pierce him through. Then the mage had said, in his deep voice, “Time is the best cure for deep wounds. Go speak to the apothecary. I believe he could find work for a careful man.”
This easy knowledge had shaken Jonas, who had thought he had learned to keep his private thoughts private. He had avoided the mage after that, as best he could in a small village. But Kapoen, a private man himself, had not seemed inclined to intrude; Jonas had eventually learned to trust that he would not.
Jonas could not guess whether the mage had known when he had begun to see Timou’s face reflected in the rain. He had avoided Kapoen even more assiduously, and the mage had not seemed inclined to seek him out. So Jonas had waited, saying as little as he could manage. And Timou went quietly on through her days, apparently oblivious, learning magecraft from her father and that men were fools from the one or two who thought they ought to catch her eye. Jonas had hoped he might persuade her otherwise. He’d been willing to face Kapoen for that chance: Timou’s father might have a cool way about him, but Jonas knew Kapoen loved his daughter, and thought the mage might eventually learn to approve of a man who did the same.
And then the spring failed, a spring Jonas had looked to with hope. Kapoen left the village, and then Timou after him. It had hurt her when Kapoen left her, Jonas suspected. She was not as cool of heart as she thought herself. He’d seen the way she was with other girls’ mothers, with Taene’s mother. He suspected that the absence of her own mother, accepted so matter-of-factly by the villagers who’d known her all her life, had been harder on Timou than anyone understood—than Timou understood herself. And then Kapoen had left her behind as well. . . . No wonder Timou had followed her father. And no wonder she had refused all his offers of companionship, no matter how carefully offered: of course she was afraid to let herself grow close to anyone who might leave her. Jonas regretted now that he’d let her go away on her own, that he hadn’t insisted on accompanying her, or followed her.
On the sixth night after Timou’s departure, Jonas dreamed of a savage wind that came down from the heights and whipped massive dark clouds into froth that streamed past the moon. Great trees as old as the world broke and crashed around him. High above, something that was not the wind wailed, urgent and predatory.
Timou ran past him, down a path that twisted through the forest. She was all in white and her white hair flew behind her: in the wind-torn dark she seemed to shine with a light of her own. There were spots of blood in the tracks her bare feet left. Jonas, stunned, reached his hands out to her, but she was past before he could catch hold of her. She did not see him. He tried to go after her, but in his dream he could not move. She ran past and was gone.
After Timou came the wild hounds of the storm. Lean white hounds, each the size of a pony, they coursed Timou like a hare: their eyes were the wild yellow eyes of birds of prey, and as they ran they gave tongue with the high cries of hunting eagles. Behind the hounds rode the Hunter on his white horse. He seemed to fill the whole world. A tangle of black antlers crossed the sky far above him, or perhaps he wore the branches of a great spreading oak as a crown. His horse shone like the moon. It was shod with lightning; thunder crashed when its hooves touched the ground.
Jonas tried to cry out, but he was voiceless and made no sound. The Hunter turned his great antlered head and met Jonas’s eyes with his own: frosted golden eyes, expressionless and terrible, eyes that saw him clearly, though everyone knew the Hunter was blind when he rode through the land outside his own dark Kingdom. Then he was past, rain lashing down in his wake, piercingly cold, like arrows out of the night, and Jonas knew that he drove Timou to a dark destination, but he could not imagine what that might be.
He woke shaking.
That day was hard. Jonas went on with small tasks about Raen’s house, loading the loft in her barn with hay and repairing a hole in her poultry shed before a fox worried it big enough to get in. But through these tasks he several times found himself standing for minutes at a time looking at nothing, the hammer forgotten in his hands, listening for the high wild cry of hounds running before the storm.
He went, out of habit, to the inn for his noon meal, but when he got there, he found he did not want to go inside. He stood for a moment listening to the voices within—cheerful, ordinary, everyday voices, with an undertone of worry that no one wanted to acknowledge openly—and felt suddenly that he could not bear to pretend to be one of them when he was not. To pretend to be well when he was not well, when nothing was well—when he felt nothing might ever be well again. He went back to Raen’s house and took bread and cold meat out to the fields to eat under a tree. The tree was butter-yellow with autumn. It made him feel the pressure of time at his back, as though this was the first year he had ever watched move toward its end. When a long line of geese went by overhead, Jonas flinched at their voices.
That night he dreamed the same dream, and woke with tears cold as rain on his face. It was raining when he got up and went to the window. There was thunder in the distance. Jonas listened to the thunder with foreboding, as though it were an omen. He had never thought of omens before in his life.
He went through the whole of that day as though he were still half asleep, which might have been true, since he had spent half the night staring out the window and listening to the distant thunder. After he drove the hammer down on his thumb twice, Jonas put his tools away and went instead for a long walk through the fields. He took his small rabbit-bow so he could pretend to be hunting. He did not even string the bow. It was too easy to imagine the feelings of the rabbit. He thought he might never go hunting again. He came back at dusk, walking with long strides to beat the night to Raen’s door. He had never feared the night before. He feared it now.
He lay awake for a long time. Then he got up and paced. Weariness drove him to lie down again near dawn. The first pale hints of coming light were in the window before he felt safe enough to close his eyes. He should not have felt safe: it seemed he had no more shut his eyes than the dream had him. For the third time, the storm hounds ran before the Hunter, pursuing Timou through his dreams. This time, when he woke, he was muffling a scream behind his hands, as though he was afraid even to make a sound.
“What is it?” the widow asked gently when Jonas sat at her table that morning stirring the breakfast porridge without tasting it. He had been late to the table, but Raen had said nothing. He had thought she had not noticed his trouble. He had not meant her to notice. When he only looked at her wordlessly, she said, “I don’t mean to intrude. But I bore five children, and raised them through all the troubles and joys and heartbreaks of their youths. If some difficulty has found you, my dear, you might do worse than tell me.”
Jonas told her his dream.
The widow leaned her chin in her hand and listened quietly while he told her, her eyes, wise with her years, on his face. Then she said, “Well, Jonas, you are going to have to go after her, aren’t you?”
“Do you think I should?” Jonas stood up restlessly and went to the window. The day was dawning fair and cloudless. There was not a hint of stormy weather anywhere about, and yet he thought he might feel thunder in the earth, right through the floor of the widow’s small neat house. “She didn’t want me to go with her.”
“Do you think you will be able to stay here, waiting and blind?”
Once the question was asked, the answer was obvious. “No,” Jonas a
dmitted.
“Then you’ll have to go. Once you find her, I think she will manage to cope somehow with your presence.”
“If I find her,” said Jonas.
“Oh,” said the widow calmly, “I think you’ll find her. I’ve known young men in love before, once or twice. I think you’ll find her.”
Jonas had given Timou his leather knapsack. He was not sorry he had given it to her, but he was sorry he did not have another. He borrowed a satchel from Raen.
“Nerril and his family will be sorry to see you go,” Raen observed. Nerril was the apothecary.
“I know,” said Jonas.
“He will fear for you.”
Jonas shrugged. “Many people travel between the City and the outlying lands. Most of them arrive safely where they want to go.”
“Not all.”
“I’ve been on the road before.”
“Not that road,” said Raen. “I came that way, once. I walked that road once, from the City, where I was born. I came here and lived here and was happy. I never went back to the City, but I remember the road that lies between.”
Jonas’s hands had stilled on the table, where he had been sorting out the best candlelighter and candles from the assortment the old woman had dropped in front of him. He said, surprised, “You’re from the City?”
“When you’ve lived somewhere sixty-two years, people forget you ever lived anywhere else. But I did once. Does it seem amazing to you that I should stay here, so far from the great City, where I lived as a child?”
Jonas made a little gesture of negation. Nothing seemed more likely or more reasonable. He thought about living in one tiny village for sixty-two years, never going more than a day’s travel from its quiet and peace. He thought it sounded a really fine idea, if he could do it with Timou. He said, “What is it like? The great forest?”
“Haunted,” the widow said tersely. “Hunted.”
“Hunted. By what?”
“Who knows? The blind Hunter, I suppose, and his storm hounds. Or maybe by something else, something quieter.” Raen was quiet for a moment. “You have to go, of course, my dear. You should go. But be careful. Never leave the road.”
“I know that,” Jonas protested mildly. He did. He had heard stories. He had always listened carefully, if a little skeptically; he had once been trained to be skeptical. But then he had met the Hunter and looked into his blind eyes. . . .
“Of course you do.” Raen looked at him, frowning. “Never leave the road, or you’ll wander in the forest far longer than you intended: there is no other way through that leads straight from the start of your journey to its end. Drink no water that does not flow across the road, eat nothing you did not bring with you, and be careful of anyone you meet under the great trees. You won’t meet any other travelers once you pass into the forest. No one ever does. So anyone you do meet belongs to the forest. Be brave, and kind and courteous to everyone, but be sparing of trust. Tell no lies and make no promises. Don’t tell anyone your name, especially if he asks.”
“I will remember,” Jonas promised soberly.
“Huh. So you had better. Don’t cut living wood—you know that, I suppose. Don’t pick the flowers, if you see any at this time of year—well, you know that, too. Be careful with any fires you make. Let me think.” The widow gazed dreamily at her kitchen fire. Jonas waited patiently.
“Ah,” she said after a while. “I remember one more thing. The man we traveled with, he went back to the City every year. I remember he told us, before he took us into the forest, that if you do get lost under the trees, you should not go into any house or tower or castle you find; but if you do, you should expect to pay a price to get out.”
“What price?” Jonas asked.
“I don’t know,” said Raen. “I never got lost under the trees. But whatever price is demanded, you had better be prepared to pay it honestly and willingly. Men—ah, and women, too—will go into the forest to find their hearts’ desires, but some that come out have lost more than they would have dreamed of paying. It’s a chancy place, that forest. Stay on the road, that’s my advice, and stay out of enchanted towers.”
“Believe me,” said Jonas fervently, “that is all my intention.”
Jonas went quickly, his long legs taking him through the woods and out of the woods, under the sky. He did not think he was at all likely to overtake Timou. But he nevertheless felt that he might, if he could go quickly enough. He would have welcomed the sight of her in the distance. He looked ahead eagerly, but he saw no one on the road in front of him. The road was deserted. This seemed strange to Jonas, who had traveled a great deal through other lands in his youth. He knew that one never goes for long on any road without encountering strangers, without passing houses and whole villages built along the road, without seeing granaries and pastures and somebody taking a wagonload of something from one place to another. This road seemed like it had been made for him alone. It made him walk all the more quickly, trying to put it behind him, to come to some more comfortable place where men lived.
He never did. He walked alone and slept under the sky alone—fair skies, always, with no hint of rain, but he feared each night and hated to watch the sun set. He found places off the road under trees at first, out of sight of the sky. When he came to the open country, it so horrified him that he could not rest, for all he told himself there was no reason for his dread. The road was clear enough, running like a broad silver stream under the passionless moon: Jonas walked by the moon’s pale light and lay down only when the sun was back in the sky. He did not dream, or if he did, he did not remember his dreams.
Jonas came to the great forest nine days after he had left the widow’s house. The forest, too, horrified him. He could feel its power and its age, like a pressure against his skin. When he visualized Timou walking, tiny and alone, between those great trees and into the green shadows, he could hardly bear it. It was impossible to know how he would have felt if he had come to this place with Timou, were he not haunted by dreams. He suspected he would have been awed. He hoped he would not have been appalled. Jonas made a fire there, at the entrance to the great forest, and rested beside it, but he could not sleep. He could hear the wind in the branches, though no breeze blew through the smoke of his fire. In the morning his eyes were gritty and his head felt stuffed with wool.
It was the memory of Timou’s voice saying, If you are with me, I will also think about you that drew him finally past the ancient sentinels and into the waiting green dimness. He could hear her quiet voice as though she were in front of him, looking at him with her eyes the color of the sky at the exact moment the gray dawn became the clear pale blue of a winter morning.
Jonas walked fast for a while . . . he did not know how long, because the green light hid the passage of time. He walked with his head bowed and his attention on the road. Great roots twisted across the path, dangerous for an unwary foot, but he was careful and never stumbled. Sometimes streams dashed across the road. When there were stepping-stones available, Jonas crossed the water on the rocks. When there were no steppingstones, he got his feet wet. He did not complain out loud, because he felt that his voice would echo too loudly in the great quiet under the trees. Though there was no one, it occurred to him eventually, to hear him. No one and nothing. No bird or squirrel, no whining insect. . . . Jonas walked even more quickly for a while, thinking about this, and about the way the forest itself seemed to watch him and press in on him. He always wanted to move more quickly when he was frightened. He was frightened now, and knew it, and set his teeth against it.
Well, he told himself, Timou was somewhere ahead, and he surely walked in her steps. The road did not branch, but ran straight on. A man must simply follow it, and it would lead him out of the forest as it had led him into it. . . .
After a while—Jonas did not know how long—he found he had grown weary. It was many days’ walk through the great forest, but even so Jonas was reluctant to stop. Hard as the forest pressed around him during
the day, he knew it would press much harder at night. So he tried not to notice the fading of the light. But it faded anyway. He would not be able to walk at night under the trees, where true darkness would come with the passing of the day. So when the green light had turned dusky gray, he finally stopped and sat wearily down where he was, in the middle of the road. He heard a breeze in the leaves above, although there was no breeze near the ground. It was not a pleasant sort of sound, though there was no reason it should have disturbed him. He sighed. He wanted to say, I am going as fast as I can. I will trouble you as little as I can. But he did not want to offer his voice to the listening trees. He did not want to draw attention to himself at all. He had a blanket in his satchel, and bread and cheese for his supper, and a handful of dried apples. He thought about the sweetness of dried apples. It was a comforting, normal kind of thought.
He was just opening his satchel when he heard a long high wailing cry far above and far away. The wind carried it, but the sound he heard was not the wind.
Although Jonas knew he should be safe on the road, his fingers nevertheless froze on the satchel’s buckle. He sat very still, listening, wondering if Timou, somewhere in front of him, was hearing this same cry on the wind. It did not come again. But Jonas could not eat. He moved to the side of the road and put his back against a tree, because even a haunted tree for shelter from the sky was more appealing than no shelter at all, and stared into the growing dark, listening. He fell asleep like that, sitting up against the broad bole of a tree.
Sleeping, he dreamed he was asleep. He dreamed he woke to a wailing cry that pierced the air all around him. He dreamed he leapt to his feet and fled along the road, with that cry reverberating through the forest at his back. It was the kind of dream where you run and run and cannot bring yourself to look over your shoulder for fear of what you will see behind you.
He had lost the road, and ran through towering trees. At first branches slashed at him and he had to put his arms up to protect his face. Later the trees were tall and straight, with no branches near the ground. But it was darker in his dream, darker than night, darker than even a moonless night under the trees, and he ran into one great smooth bole after another, blundering and bruised, until he finally fell. Having once fallen, he could not get up and cowered, waiting for his pursuers to catch up with him and tear him apart. He waited in terror, and then the terror wore itself out and he found he was alone and it was perfectly quiet. And then he found he was awake.
The City in the Lake Page 10