WATCHERS AT THE LIVING GATE
A TALE OF THE FORGOTTEN REALMS
He lived with his own kind in the forest, away from the towns of the human world, because of what he was. But once a year since he was small he’d come away to the ruined city on the mountainside where his own people never ventured, nor full-blooded humans either, a place of old magic and old defeats. That first time he’d been hunting on the cliff top, and a wounded ram had led him far from home. In a bowl of mist and leaning stones he brought it down, a lucky shot with the small bow, but soon he heard the hounds yelping behind him. Before he could claim the kill he had been whipped away by men on horseback, shouting and cursing the mother who had borne him. Some dismounted and threw stones. Helpless, he had watched them pull the ram away, his arrow still lodged in its throat.
When he ran away it had not been in shame or fear so much as rage. Toward sunset he came out on the mountainside above the clouds and watched the red light cut across the rocks amid the tussocks of coarse grass. There was the fallen gate, its stone posts inscribed with runes he couldn’t read, not yet. He approached, and came into the first of the ruined streets, the ruined houses built into the cliff side.
Carved statues lined an avenue. Some had lost their arms, legs, heads, but even so, he could see a vision of ideal beauty in the broken stones. He paused to study the statue of a boy about his age, yet more beautiful even than a human child, tall and slender, with long eyes and delicately pointed ears.
He stood at the lip of a stone pool, gesturing down into its depths, and in the last rays of the setting sun, the living boy squatted over it and saw reflected in its surface, as carefully as in any mirror, his own distorted features, his heavy jaw, protruding teeth, mashed nose, bulbous eyes under heavy ridges of bone. In such circumstances even the small attempts at decoration, the shards of broken glass that his mother had tied lovingly into his shaggy hair, appeared to mock him as they caught the light.
Then it was dark. He looked around for the door of a stone hall that still retained some of its roof. The black doorways seemed suddenly menacing. Who knew what ghosts and spirits prowled these ruins, who had died here when the city fell? Instead, shivering with cold, he stayed beside the pool, until the moon rose behind the shattered peaks, and moonlight struck the surface of the water.
That was the first time he had seen her. Every year since then he had returned, when the first full moon of summer fell into the water. He had changed since that first time, grown in stature and in skill, but she never changed. Always she stroked to the surface as if swimming up from underneath, from some submerged tunnel, he had thought at first.
Then, because he was a boy, he had worshiped her as a boy does a woman, worshiped her goodness, as he imagined it, striven to be worthy, and to fulfill every command. Later, full-grown, his shoulders tattooed with his clan’s symbols of manhood, his ears pierced with iron rings, he had moved into another kind of worship, as she had stood with the water to her knees, her body clothed in wet silk, and a phosphorescent sheen that had followed her from the depths. Later still, reckless, he had staggered down into the pool, only to find himself enmeshed in weeds, while she pulled laughing away. “How ugly you are! How is it possible for a living creature to be so ugly? You disgust me-truly, you disgust me.” But when he was exhausted and discouraged she came close to him again, and with flashing eyes she told him once more what he must accomplish to prepare himself. He’d done everything she’d asked.
These commandments, as if from a goddess, had led him far from his own people. Not for him the brawls between the clans, the comforts of marriage and children. Instead he lived with his widowed mother in the forest, away from the clan’s hearth, despised, he imagined, by the purebreds in his village. With a dedication born of rage, he studied human lore. He learned the languages of men and other creatures. He studied old books by candlelight, and parchment scrolls from the libraries of the abandoned city. He spoke the words the goddess brought to him until the trees came alive. And in the spring he cut his totem stick from a piece of bone, and carved the length of it in a pattern of braided hair, and fashioned its knob in the shape of a wolf’s head, with lumps of agate for its eyes.
On the night of the full moon he slept most of the day. His mother woke him for supper, as he had requested. Yawning, he sat down on a mossy rock in the middle of the stream, washed his body, shaved his face, combed his hair and knotted it with iron beads. Then he dressed himself in the clothes he had laid out the night before, his father’s shirt, made from doeskin as fine as linen, salvaged by his mother after he’d left them, mended and patched over the years. The tribe wore furs and harder, heavier leather when they wore anything, but she had kept this human garment for the wedding of her half-human son.
Now she brought him porridge and blood sausage from the fire. She stood watching him, holding the food in the wooden bowl. Long before, she had learned not to question his choices, because it was common for the men in the village to abandon their old mothers and fathers to the wolves, the totem of their clan, when there were too many mouths to feed. But her son was a powerful hunter. Others claimed to see the deer and elk search for him in the meadows and the woods, and lay their horned heads in his lap.
“Haggar,” she said.
He looked up, smiling into her coarse and wrinkled face, until he noticed that her eyes were bright with tears. “Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried. But you are going far away.”
He expected some sort of complaining then, and when it didn’t come he started to say all the things that he’d rehearsed in order to forestall her: “I won’t be long. I’ve left seven necklaces of iron cash. In the digging pit there’s a wooden box with agates and opals you can sell in town. Humans love them for their games. The smokehouse is full of meat and fish.”
But when she said nothing about any of that, he stood up to comfort her. “I won’t go far,” he said, which was a lie, the first he’d ever told her.
“There’s my cousin,” she said, referring to a girl in the village. “She waits for you.”
When he put his arms around her, she relaxed into his chest. “Me, too,” she said, fingering the bone buttons of his father’s shirt.
Later, as it got dark, he left the encampment. Barefoot, he ran uphill through the woods. When the trees gave way among the rock piles, he clambered onto the ridge, then stood looking back for a moment at the firelight among the trees. It was the first night of the summer festival, and the men were lighting the bonfire in the charmed circle. They were already drinking their honey beer, and soon the women would dance to the rhythm of the drums, while the old shaman marked their foreheads from a bowl of blood-he’d never seen this ceremony. He missed it every year.
He stood on the ridge as the darkness gathered. “I know you’re here,” he said without turning round. The she-wolves picked their way over the stones, their heads low. He ran among them up the slope into the high meadow, among the red-star columbines. The wolves coursed after him but could not reach him, because as he ran he gripped his totem stick and muttered his evocations, until he could feel the coarse hair on his back and down his arms, and he dropped down to all fours.
Everything she’d asked he had accomplished, no matter what the sacrifice. Tonight she would understand that there was no remaining trace of the boy whose shape had so disgusted her. She would recognize how love had changed him.
Before moonrise he paused at the stone gatepost on the mountainside, whose runes, he now saw, spelled out a name, or else part of a name: CENDR. The remaining letters on the other side had crumbled away, and the post itself had broken into pieces in the coarse grass. The wind had died. Black clouds hung above him, obscuring chunks of stars.
And when he saw the sky glow silver behind the eastern peaks, he picked his way down the avenue of statues, his feet delicate on the uneven stones. At the limit of his senses he could hear the noise of rats or rabbits in the empty houses; they would not show themselves. They would crawl into their crevices and holes, not knowing they were safe from him; he wasn’t hungry. All day he had fasted, in preparation. Now finally he reached the rim of the stone basin and lowered his head to drink. But at the last moment he did not break the surface with his long
