Wintermoon

“Can you see them?” The question burst from her before she could decide to withhold it.

“Something…but the island is full of such stuff. They trouble you?” he asked, turning his blue eyes full on her.

Angrily Clirando said, “What business is it of yours?”

“Only this—I too am tormented by creatures or images that roam through the trees. Not animal in that sense. They call to me in drunken voices…insubstantial. An army of drunken ghosts.”

As he said this, clear as if drawn in paint, Clirando saw Araitha standing between two pines. She wore her traveler’s cloak, and her golden hair with its ornaments caught the sunlight. Her face had no expression.

Clirando began to tremble. She told herself dizzily that it was only her sleepless eyes that played the trick. She shut them, which was a mistake, and felt Zemetrios catch hold of her, lifting her clear of some abyss into which she had been about to fall.

She pushed him away. His strength and quickness alarmed her. She was humiliated by her own weakness.

But he would not let her push him off. He held her up and put the flask against her mouth.

“Take some.”

“No.”

“It’s only water. I drank the last of the spirits last night.”

Clirando drank. The water was still cold, and despite his words, kept the tang of alcohol. It steadied her.

“My thanks. Let go of me now. I’m well.”

“You’re not. But yes, I’ll let go. There.”

She could smell him, the health of his young body, the clean aroma of his hair and breath.

Clirando glanced at the pines.

The ghost was gone.

“Did you kill her?” Zemetrios asked.

“What?”

“You spoke a name, two in fact. A man’s name and a woman’s. You spoke his name with utter scorn. And hers with—forgive me, warrior girl, with fear.”

Clirando dropped herself down to her knees, and sat back. She no longer felt faint, but drained and—what Araitha had promised—empty.

This man was real. She had disgraced herself by nearly fainting in front of him like some pampered lady. What did the truth matter now?

“I killed her. Not directly. But she died because of what I did.”

“Because she lay down with your lover? Oh, Clirando, it isn’t hard to guess. You spoke two names, remember?”

“She lay down with my lover. She’d been my friend. Him I beat in fair fight and he was sent away. She also. She went to Crentis but the ship sank. She’s dead, as you say. Through me.”

“By the Father,” said Zemetrios softly.

“She cursed me, too,” Clirando gave a small rasp of laughter. “I can’t sleep. A slight curse, you might think.”

“No, I don’t think that.”

“Well,” said Clirando, “let’s get on.”

She stood up again.

The forest was silent and black beyond the sunlight of the vine glade. Like all her life surely now, beyond that night when lightning struck Parna’s Temple.

Why did I trust him? Stupid, to blab it all out to him. Are you a child, or what? Well. He knows now.

Clirando ran lightly beside Zemetrios, through the glints and shades, angry with herself, lamenting, full of pain.

Nothing had importance, only to go on, to find her band. Or if not, respectfully to complete this awful and weird penance set her by the priestesses of the Maiden. And then be done with all of it.

I too will go away. Into the East perhaps, where people lose themselves. Because already I’m lost. Who is Clirando? Clirando would never have blurted out her secret to some stranger.

But as they loped shoulder to shoulder, glancing up at the “stranger,” from time to time she saw the twitch behind his eyes, and once his head turning, then snapping around again. He too heard and saw devils in the forest as he had said, that fact alone was certain.

And she—she came to hear sometimes an unearthly low sound that filtered through the trees like wind, though the leaves never moved. It had for her no noise of drunken voices—the multiplied voice of Yazon in all the moods of his insanity. If she detected anything it was the jeering cry of the pig things—but now never too close.

Possibly he had been right. To travel together might provide a little distance for both of them from their haunts. Even the ghost of Araitha had not drawn near.

Had it been she? For sure?

Clirando frowned as she ran. They are my devils. They come for me. Out of my heart and mind. It’s only that the forest makes them real. But how real? Could I have gone to her and seized her, run her through with a knife?

Clouds massed across Clirando’s eyes. She half stumbled, and he turned and looked at her. His face was concerned, curious.

“A root,” she said.

And pushed memory and idle surmise to the edges of her brain.

The trees began to thin out near sunfall.

The downward slopes were more gradual, and oak trees and wild olive predominated. Here the track ended abruptly. Another altar place stood there, this one with a whitish stone roughly carved and pocked, a sort of uneven globe.

He and she halted beside it. In the bronzy light now slanting sidelong through the trees, the globe seemed to pulse with uncanny inner light.

Clirando took the last honey wafer from her pack, and laid it by the stone. “I do not know you, but I reverence you.”

Zemetrios, rather sheepishly, she thought, put the final sliver of cheese on the altar. It was mostly rind. Any god would disdain it—or perhaps not, since they would otherwise have eaten it.

“Look,” he said quietly.

A hare bounded among the olives, its long ears brushed with light and glowing red.

They could have brought the hare down for supper, either of them, she was certain. But in this place neither had wished to, or though it wise.

Did they in some ways then, think alike?

No.

Remember Thestus, the arch deceiver. Though Thestus, she believed, would have wanted to throw his knife or a rock at the hare, and she would have had to stop him.

As they turned from the altar, Clirando saw an old man sitting about fifty paces away under a broad-leaved tree. His hands were busy with something that sparkled—and she was positive he had not been there in the preceding moments.

“Do you see him?”