The Revenants

the dunes, legs rasped by blades of bitter grass, watching the small ships of the Shambles tack to and fro across the swollen seas, beating against the endless winds only to fly before them once more, indomitable and detached. She began to think of herself as like them, endlessly fighting against the wind or fleeing before the wind to an unkown place. The people of the Shambles came to know her form, if not her name. From guard towers she was seen, striking westward to the sea or eastward to the mountains, sometimes carrying fish she had caught, or mussels stripped from the weed-grown rocks weighing down her bundled shirt. Several times men from the villages of the Shambles or Tharsh skulked away after her, thinking to enliven a dull time with a bit of stranger-rape and murder. Only one such group ever came close to her hiding place, and no member of it ever returned. After a time they gave it up. The woman in white was said to be surrounded by glamour and witchery. All decided it was healthier not to see her, and thenceforward they did not. Leona had read all the books and had tired of the Shambles. She had decided to explore the Jaggers and east to the Abyss of Souls and then to go on to Seathe and the eastern lands.

Thus it was that she came to the banks of the Lazentium in the spring, to the croft of a shepherd there, to find the man busy at the drowning of pups. There were three, and the man had left one for the bitch and was about to drown the others when Leona came out of the mist to his side, silent, white, and chill. She reached out her hands and the shepherd put the sack into them without a word. Something in her eyes spoke, and he answered as best he could, touching his forelock and bending his knees in a curiously ancient gesture of combined distress and honour. She laid her fingers on his forehead in a complex motion which burned him joyously and then turned away. An hour later he was standing there still, eyes unseeing yet watching the way she had gone.

She named the male dog Silence, and the female, Sorrow. In Leona there was something which passed for amusement in calling into the icy winds of the Northlands, ‘Come, Silence; come, Sorrow’ – ‘Nai, Mimo; nai, Werem’ in the tongue of the Fales. Since both had attended her for endless days, not having been summoned, and now departed to make way for some new intention, she felt it was well to be reminded of them.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

LITHOS

Year 1165

Some way south of the Fenlees, among the scarps above Owbel Bay, the hamlets of the Thanys lay like beads scattered from a broken wristlet. The Thanys were a tight-knit people, suspicious of strangers, made so by the proximity of the Bay and those who held their rites there. The Thanys considered all of themselves, and only themselves, close kin; not outsiders. All children, they said, were savages at birth, but all could be won by love and firmness to an understanding of the duties owed by kin to kin. All, they whispered, except perhaps for the son of the widow at Bald Knob.

Him they regarded with disquiet. He had a face brown and closed as a nut. He had odd, light eyes of so steely a grey as to be almost no colour at all. It says much for the people that they never gave him harsh words. The children avoided him, true, believing him to be responsible for certain injuries to themselves. There was Jerym, once loud and mocking, who spoke only in stuttering whispers. And Willum, whose strong right arm had withered. And Verila, who sat staring endlessly at nothing. These young ones thought the widow’s son had been fathered by a ghost. Indeed, he had been born in a night of howling storm, ten long months after the widow’s husband had died, and none had known her to be generous with her favours. The young ones said the widow’s man had risen from the grave to couple with her; summoned by a spell she wove, some said. Sent by the devil, said others.

When they tried to explain their suspicions to the adults, they met with no belief. The oldsters were unable to believe ill of any Tanyan. All their fears were reserved for those who dwelt below, those who anointed the stones near Owbel Bay.

The boy at Bald Knob was nearly grown. His name was Lithos, and he well knew he was suspected of much ill. He could feel in his own body every cramp and twist in others, could reach into their heads to twist thoughts into an endless, nauseating tangle from which the thinker might emerge hours later, sweating and sick. He had not done this often. Only enough to know that he could.

The widow loved him, helplessly and too well. She never thought of his begetting or his birth, only of his being, her only child, her only company. She forgave him everything, and herself everything in the getting of him. She ignored every insolence, every pang – until the day he told her he intended to leave the scarp.

‘There are things I want to know,’ Lithos said, gesturing indolently at the huddled village beside the fair meadows. ‘You people here are boring.’

‘Where will you go?’ The words came like nuggets of iron, heavy, choking and her heart seemed to stop.

‘Down there. I want to see what they do there, at the Bay.’

‘Oh, my son, my love, no. No, you don’t want to see what it is they do there.

Lithos shrugged her words away indifferently. ‘So you all say. But none of you say why.’ His voice filled the room with a horrid chill which she did not feel, which she had spent his young life learning not to feel.

Instead she struggled