Soldier of the Mist

CHAPTER XLI-We Are in Sestos

The goddess sent me here, and it was no dream. How easy it would be to write that I dreamed, as so many have written in so many other places. Yet I know I did not, for I dreamed before the goddess came.

It was a dream of love. The woman was raven-haired, or so it seemed in the moonlight, with eyes that flashed with desire. How she clutched me and drove my loins into her own! A lake, dark and still, mirrored silver stars; all along the shore men in horned and leering masks capered with women crowned with the vine, to the thudding of timbrels and the rattle of crotali.

Then I woke.

The woman had vanished, the instruments fallen silent. My torn ear burned and throbbed. The stones stood about me, hard and dark. The air was cold, heavy with snow. I heard the wind muttering among the oaks, and I knew it-though I do not know how-for the thought of Jove, the god who rules the gods and cares little for men. It seemed to me that he was mad, black thoughts repeating one or two words again and again as they brooded upon revenge.

I sat up, and the night was like any other. A wind walked among the trees, and an increscent moon hung low in the west. Far off a wolf howled. My limbs were stiff with cold, but I felt no desire to roll myself in my cloak again; I felt instead that I should rise and fly from some danger, and though I no longer recalled what it was from which I had fled earlier, I sensed a menace that was no less now. Stretching, I looked down to find this scroll, which I recalled having pushed into a hiding place among the rocks.

At once I gasped and nearly cried out, staggering backward from the lip of an abyss beside which I had slept only a few moments before. It seemed a pit without a bottom, or at least without any bottom the silver radiance of moon or stars could ever reach. Trembling, I cast a stone into it and listened. I heard nothing, though I strained to hear for many thuddings of my fearful heart.

Though perhaps my stone is still falling, falling always and without end, something moved in the abyss. If it lacked any termination, still it had sides; and blurs of white and palest green, tiny and remote, swarmed over them as ants may creep across the walls in a sealed tomb. Sometimes it appeared that they flew from one side to another, flitting like bats and flickering like rushlights.

"You would find me," someone behind me said. "I have come already."

I turned and saw a girl of perhaps fifteen sitting on a stone behind me. Her gown was woven of somber autumn foliage, yellow, gridelin, and russet, and a stephane with an ebon gem was on her brow. Though she sat with her back to the moon, I could see her face clearly; it seemed hungry and ill, like the faces of the children who sell their bodies in the poor quarters of cities.

"Soon you will wonder what became of your book," she said. "I will keep it for you; now take it, and leave my door."

When she spoke, I was more afraid of her than of the abyss; perhaps if I had not feared her so, I could not have done as she instructed me.

"I have rolled it tightly for you, tied it, and pushed your stylus through the cords. Put it through your belt. You have much to do before you write again."

I asked, "Who are you?"

"Call me Maiden, as you did when we first met."

"And you're a goddess? I didn't think-"

She smiled sourly. "We still meddled in the wars of Men? Not often now; but the Unseen God wanes, and we are no longer lost in his light. We will never be wholly gone."

I bowed my head. "How may I serve you, Maiden?"

"First by taking your hand from your sword hilt, to which it has strayed. Believe me, your blade is powerless against me."

I dropped my hands to my sides.

"Second, by doing as I instruct you, and so relieving me of the necessity I laid upon myself for Mother's sake. You recall nothing of this, but I have promised to reunite you with your comrades."

"Then you've been kinder than I deserve," I said, and nearly stammered from the joy that flamed in my heart.

"I act for my mother, and not for you. You owe me no thanks. Nor do I owe you any. If you had accepted your beating like any other slave, my task would have been easy."

"I am not a slave," I said.

She smiled again. "What, Latro? Not even mine?"

"Your worshiper, Maiden."

"Smooth-tongued as ever. No man outreaches his gods, Latro, not even in falsehood."

"You said that you've promised to bring me to my own people, Maiden. If that was a falsehood, slay me now."

"I will keep my promise," she said. She licked her lips. "But I hunger. What payment will you give me, Latro, when I do as you wish? A hundred bulls to smoke upon my altars?"

I shook my head. "I'd slaughter every one, and singing, if I had them. I have nothing beyond what you see."

"Your book, your sword, your belt, your sandals, and those ragged clothes. And your body, but I will not ask you for that; it will be mine soon enough, no matter what. Would you heap my altar with the rest?"

"With everything, Maiden."

"And Io?"

I asked, "Who is Io?"

"A slave. She says yours. Will you give her to me freely?"

I nodded, though I sickened to nod. "You have only to show her to me, Maiden."

"Then I will not ask you for her. Nor for your book and sword and the other things. I ask an easier sacrifice instead: a wolf."

"Only a wolf, Maiden?" Now my spirit leaped for gladness. "You are too generous, too merciful!"

"So many have said. Yes, a wolf. The wolf is sacred to my mother, as you would know had you not forgotten it. Furthermore, I will see that this wolf comes to you, and I will place my sigil on it so that you will know it."

"And I won't forget?"

She pointed, and though the hill stood between us and the rising sun, when she pointed I knew that it was there. "In summer, when the days were long, you lost the dawn before evening. Days are shortened now; when the wolves howl again, you will yet remember me and this: The wolf will attack you, yet you will not fear it. He is the one."

"As you command, Maiden, and gladly."

"Not so gladly when the time comes, perhaps. But first you must return to the walls you fled, return with the dawn. Will you do that?"

"It's dawn now," I told her. "Can I run so fast? I will if I can."

"Your foes seek your life. Be wary. As the sun rises, you will see a woman and a child walking hand in hand. Draw your sword and give it to the child. Do you understand?"

I nodded. "I will do just as you've said, Maiden."

"Then when you find the wolf, grasp its ear, cut its throat, and speak my name. Go now, do that, and my promise will be fulfilled."

The city was far out of sight to the west; yet I saw it, its gray walls, grim with a hundred towers, rising high above the tents of the besiegers. I sprinted toward it, and it vanished; but I continued to run, leaping stones and loping across fields of stubble until I reached in truth the tents I had seen falsely through the eyes of the goddess.

Here soldiers woke and spat like other men, goaded by the braying of the trumpets-buckled on their armor, took up spears and hoplons marked with the inverted ox of Thought, and formed ragged files that were soon straightened by the curses of their enomotarches. Some looked at me curiously, and I waved this scroll above my head so they would think me a messenger; no one stopped me.

The tents ended. I reached a place where houses and shops had stood outside the walls. They had been burned, though whether by the besiegers or the besieged I cannot say. There were towers and sheds on wheels, and ramps of clay and wood. Worse, the tumbled stones and tiles of the ruined houses threatened to trip me with every stride. Once I noted a dented pan among the ruins, and once a scattered string of coral beads. I thought then of the misery of poor women I would perhaps never see.

Soon I was within bowshot of the walls. An archer there kindly told me so, sending his shaft whizzing past my eyes to bury itself in the blackened ground to my right, so that I returned this scroll to my belt and ran wider.

Already the sun was well above the horizon behind me. The Maiden had said I was to give my sword to the child "as the sun rises," but it seemed to me it was impossible that day. Yet I continued to run, or rather to trot, circling the walls in search of the woman and the child.

The temptation always was to go too near, for by curving my path more sharply I could have decreased its length. Twice more archers loosed at me, their long-flying arrows falling at last almost at my feet.

I had made a half circle when I saw them-a woman in a purple gown and a child in a torn gray peplos, hand in hand, so deep in the shadow of the wall that the soldiers on it might have slain them with stones had they wished.

At the same instant a wounded man shouted, drew his sword, and dashed toward me. I marveled at his courage, for he had lost his left forearm not long before; the stump was still bandaged below the elbow, and the bandage was still gay with his blood. I had drawn my own sword before I remembered the words of the Maiden, who had perhaps desired that fight this one-armed man without it. That seemed no more than just, for surely he was still weak from his wound. I ran to the woman and the child then with all the speed I could command, extending my sword to the child hilt foremost.

She accepted it readily; but when I turned, others were sprinting after the one-armed man. One fell with an arrow through his throat, but two more caught the one-armed man, wrestling his sword from his hand and pulling him to safety. As I watched them, I was bathed in gold. The sun had risen above the city wall, bringing a second dawn.

Still other men, shieldmen in armor, dashed from the wall to take us. They dragged me, with the woman and the child, into a doorway so deeply set that it was like a tunnel ending in a narrow door. When this door swung back, we were in the besieged city. Houses of two and even three stories were set thickly along the narrow street, many with their backs formed by the wall. The men who held us seemed not otherwise than the men outside who warred on them; but with them were soldiers not like them at all, soldiers whose curling beards were black instead of brown, and who wore loose trousers of yellow, blue, and green.

They bore us to the citadel and took the woman from us, and with her my sword as well. Now we are shut up in this guard room, where at Io's urging (for this child is the slave girl I told the Maiden I would sacrifice if she wished it) I write my account.