Wintermoon

Clirando lifted her eyes from her own emotions, and looked at him levelly.

He took this as his cue. Clirando did not know if she had meant it to be one.

“I killed a man,” Zemetrios said woodenly. He began to gaze again into the pool. “Fair and square, you might say, in a duel outside my father’s house. Or my house, since my father died last year.”

Clirando watched him.

The moon lighted his face, but his eyes were shadowed, looking down at the water.

Zemetrios of Rhoia told her how the man he had slain had been his best friend. “We’d fought as comrades in the legions since both of us were seventeen. He was a fine soldier, loyal and trustworthy and clever. We were like brothers from the first. We’ve fought side by side in enough battles…been promoted to the rank of leader at the same time. I was at his wedding. A pretty girl, a sweet girl. I don’t know where she’s gone now. She ran away from him, you see. That was after he changed into another man.”

A silence.

“What do you mean?” Clirando heard her voice. It had a sound of awe. Zemetrios had caught her with his storytelling. She must be on guard.

Zemetrios said, “He turned into a drunkard. Oh, there had been times in the past—you fight hard, you take leave and drink hard. But those sessions are occasional. Then, with Yazon, they became habitual.”

Zemetrios spoke briefly, in terse sentences, of drunk brawls, meaningless and savage fights with citizens of the town that Yazon, deranged with wine, would pick. “He was a trained fighter. You see what that would mean. They hadn’t a chance. He broke their legs and arms and knocked them senseless like cold stones. I and others dragged him off, doused him in the horse trough. Sometimes we would have to chain him up like a mad dog till he sobered.”

Yazon began to beat his young wife also. She fled to her parents’ house on the hills, and later, after Yazon pursued her there, firstly with gifts, then with threats, to some other land.

“They cast him out of the legions in dishonor. He had only his soldier’s pension then, much reduced since he was young and had ruined his own career.”

Yazon, Zemetrios said, went to live in an old fisherman’s hut near the quay. He begged for his living, or committed acts of robbery—twice ending in the jail-pit for a public whipping. All he could get in money went on wine—bad wine, now, the dross of the waterfront taverns.

“I tried my best to help him, Clirando. I’d paid off his debts three times, I’d begged the legion to give him a second chance—twice I did that, but the second time a second chance was refused. He didn’t know me mostly anyway, said he thought me some enemy. By then he was never sober. My father was sick by then, too. I had other difficulties, and soon enough the duties of burial and mourning.”

Zemetrios paused again.

Clirando said nothing. The tale disturbed her. She empathized with this unknown man and, not daring to trust him—Thestus had won her trust, and Araitha had always had her trust—would not speak.

In the end Zemetrios told her that he came from the house one morning to find Yazon lying across the threshold. “He was filthy, covered in sores and fleas, half-dead. I took him in. He had been my friend. What else could I do?”

Cleaned up, fed, and doctored by a physician, Yazon was surly and irritable. Refused more than three cups of wine, he stole it from the cellars, and broke the pitchers in the courtyard when he was done. On a morning when Zemetrios needed to report to the town fort, Yazon attacked two of the kitchen girls. He raped one, and beat them both with a stick, and when someone came running to the fort, Zemetrios raced to his house and pulled the yowling drunkard out into the square. Before a crowd of citizens and soldiers, Zemetrios punched his former friend to the ground, threw him a sword and told him to get up and fight.

“It lasted less than the tenth of an hour. I never meant to kill him, or believed not. But he was no longer Yazon and I perhaps was no longer much myself, either. I’d seen the girls crying. My father had kept a kind and worthy house. The sword pierced him through cleanly enough. He fell over and was dead. Yazon. Dead. I remember,” said Zemetrios, “one time in the deserts, marching east, he and I sat looking at the stars and talked about what we wished for ourselves. Both of us wanted only good things. Nothing to anger the gods. But he died on the street and I left my legion, and sold my father’s house. And now the priests have sent me here.”

Clirando had been holding her breath. She let it go carefully, so he should not hear her sigh.

The full moon reached the perimeter of the trees. It slipped behind the canopy, looking for a moment broken in silver pieces, before darkness closed the view.

In the morning Clirando forced herself to alertness. This now was her fifth night without sleep—aside from the deadly drugged hour on the beach. She had not taken much of the herbal medicine on the galley, not wanting her band to guess her predicament, or herself to be unready for any demand the voyage might make. On Moon Isle, she had always realized, she could not risk it at all. Parna’s temple had supplied instead a cordial to help her keep her energy and a clear mind. Clirando drank from the vial.

Zemetrios, after he had made his “confession” to her, had lain back and slept again, but not, she then saw, so well. His slumbers were disturbed. She felt a mean amusement at it. But what if this too were some act?

I can never trust him. He may be a liar and felon. Or—he may not be real at all.

Was such a thing possible? Yes. There were demons here, she had encountered them, for what else were the pig things but some type of animal demon? A man demon might also be feasible. And he had appeared by her fire —as if from nowhere.

She thought grimly, And enough demoniac men already exist in the human world.

They shared bread and oatcakes for breakfast. They drank water from the pool.

He told her then that the priests in Rhoia had assured him a large village lay at the heart of the Isle, deep in the forest and below the mountains. This was where the Seven Nights were celebrated.

“We should make for there.”

Was this a lie, too? Or a trap?

But she could think of nothing else to do. Against all common sense she had a wild hope the girls of her band might be at this village, part of the celebration they themselves had discussed.

3

Journey

They both moved at a steady lope along the continuing track that ran through the trees. Everything was as it had been, a hot day burning up behind the leaves and pine needles, freckled sun-shafts, cool shadows, little wayside streams, rocks, and the rare sound or sight of a bird, and once a yellowish fox trotting over their path.

Near noon they came into another glade, without water, but the turf covered with drifts of the pale flowers. Vines hung from the trees like nets, jeweled by fast-ripening grapes.

They paused here, picking and eating the fruit.

From behind the walls of the pines, there came suddenly a jeering, eerie whoop.

He heard it too, she thought.

Transfixed, Clirando saw a dark huddle of shapes ruffling along behind the curtains of the vines. There were more of them now. A whole pig herd of these demons of hers.

Last night she had yearned that the lion cat would catch and devour them. But obviously, even if it had, other members of the tribe existed.

“What is it?” Zemetrios said to her.

They had, until then, spoken very little, and of nothing beyond their own advance, the grapes, and the mooted village.

Shaken again, Clirando said, “Animals.”

He stared over where she did.

“Or,” he said, “supernatural things.”