“Yes,” Zemetrios said.
Slowly they walked forward, making no attempt at caution. The old man did not look up. But when they were almost within arm’s length of him, he raised his aged face. His eyes were black and keen in the pleated paper of his skin.
“You’re going to the village,” he told them, “the Moon Town.”
“It exists then,” said Clirando.
“Perhaps,” said the old man.
What spangled through his hands was a threaded skein of brilliant stones—like Eastern rubies and diamonds they looked. He seemed only to be playing with them and suddenly he cast them down.
Zemetrios but not Clirando sucked in breath.
Meeting the ground, the sparkly web changed instantly to a long and coiling snake, marked along its back with points of red and silver.
“Oh,” said the old man, sarcastically polite, “did I make you jump, bold soldier?”
“Yes, Father,” said Zemetrios. Good-naturedly he laughed. “You’re a magician, then.”
“Sometimes a magician. Sometimes other things. Sometimes I am a tree.”
They regarded him wordlessly. The burnished snake poured itself away and up the narrow trunk of a nearby olive.
“Things come, and also they go,” said the old man.
“How great a distance to the village now, Father?”
“Not far. Be there before sunset ends. They close the gates at first dark.”
“A wise precaution,” said Clirando.
She guessed Zemetrios, as she did, tried to draw the old man out, provoke him into some revealing word or action.
But he did not reply now, only took from the inner folds of his garments another skein of beads. Moving it to and fro between gnarled hands, he crooned what must have been the spell to make a serpent out of it.
“Well, good evening to you,” said Zemetrios.
He and Clirando walked on.
About twenty steps farther along, both of them turned as one. Only shadows sat under the broad-leaved tree.
“The snake-maker, I shall call him that,” said Zemetrios.
“It was a trick, an illusion.”
“Maybe. Did you see how he did it?”
“No. But then often you never can—that is the idea of it.”
“I met an old woman, too,” Zemetrios said, “the first day, when I’d climbed up from the beach. There was an unlit beacon there. She wove only cloth, not snakes. She said she lived in a hut.”
“I met her also. The hut hadn’t been used for years.”
“What are they?” he said softly, as they paced on again. “Are they demons, too? If so, I don’t recognize them.”
“Not all demons are recognizable.”
“You’re sensible, Clirando.”
She shrugged.
The ground sloped up now. The trees were much fewer in number, long stretches of grass and weeds between them, and no path anywhere, as if, though many walked through the forest, none ever came as far as this.
The sun, which they could see now, hung low in the sky, a red ball in a curdling of gold and scarlet cloud.
They had reached the top of the hill. They looked down into the small basin of a valley.
Impending sunset described it exactly. Fields and groves, vineyards and orchards clustered there. And from them protruded high walls of dressed stone, above which showed tiled roofs, and one tall slim tower. The village. Behind everything, mountains rose, three peaks, one behind another, and touched sidelong with flame by the dying sun.
The way down to the valley was easy. The slope was broken now by another pathway, itself of laid stone, and broad enough for three men to walk together.
“At first dark the gates shut,” he repeated.
They broke into a racer’s run, leaping down the roadway into the valley.
Shadows are called
By the ending of the day
Night unfolds her wings
With the white moon in her hair…
Clirando shuddered. The fragment of song had sounded inside her skull, words clear as the plinking of the lyra which accompanied them—
Zemetrios this time did not seem to notice Clirando’s lapse.
He said, “There are no lights in this village.”
Clirando said, “Nor any lights anywhere among the fields and orchards. Not one torch burning. Not a single dog to bark.”
The sun was just now down over the horizon, leaving a solitary rift of gold. Darkness was claiming the landscape. But not a lamp shone out anywhere, and over the stubble of the fields, where already the grain must have been scythed, not one figure walked. The orchards too had been stripped of fruit, which surely would not have been ripe.
“What’s happened here?” Zemetrios asked.
The walls of the village-town lay ahead of them, and in them two tall wooden gates stood wide. A street of tamped earth ran in from there, and buildings lined the way. But there also—no movement, and no illumination.
“We must go and see,” she said.
The thought of her girls as in her mind. They had vanished—and now this deserted village.
They hurried to the gates, and reached them as the final golden wash faded on the sky’s edge and darkness bloomed like a long sigh over the earth.
“
Together, not thinking, caught by some primal instinct, they bolted between the slowly joining gates. Clirando cursed herself even as she did so—to pelt into this unknown enclosure that might contain anything—and heard Zemetrios curse louder.
But by then they were in.
The gates padded together at their backs.
And, in a fiery chorus, at once every lamp, torch and candle in the village was, or began to be, lit.
The village street, the houses and other buildings, blushed to sudden life. Faces appeared at windows and figures emerged on terraces. Others came strolling along the thoroughfare. Two men, that neither she nor Zemetrios, she thought, had previously seen, were securing the gates with bars.
“Just in time, travelers,” one of the men remarked to them.
Then down the street came striding a giant creature, tall as the roofs, her black hair swinging as she swung her impossibly long legs, a lighted brand in her grasp with which she brought alive the last torches leaning from house walls.
Zemetrios laughed. Clirando glared at him. Had he gone crazy?
“A stilt-walker, Clirando,” he said.
