Jasmine cast around her, confused, i need to cut it up, and to squeeze the juice out. I need fire to boil it down. That’s all. I will mix it with the cordial in my flask. The nuns in Lak Island gave it to me, and I have never touched it.’
They minced the root and squeezed its milky juices in a twist of cloth while the endless screaming went on and on. Jasmine tried not to hear it as she boiled the juices. At last she took the pan from the fire and poured the contents into her flask. This she took to the screaming bundle, almost dropping it when she turned the blanket back and confronted the bulging eyes and gaping mouth.
Terascouros came to her side. ‘Let me. Go, sit down. I’ll do it.’ She began to drip the liquid between Jaer’s torn lips, drop by slow drop, pausing to stroke the corded throat until she felt a swallowing motion beneath her hand, then dripping the mixture once more. ‘How much? How much is safe to use?’
‘A spoonful, perhaps. That much, and then wait. If that is not enough, then another few drops and wait again. Each root is different, and they vary with the seasons.’
Terascouros went on with the slow administration, drop by drop. There was some change in the meadow, some shift of light or movement of cloud – then they realized it was the fall of silence. The screaming had stopped. Beneath Terascouros’s gnarled old hands Jaer’s eyes had closed and the bloodied lips grown still.
‘Have I killed her?’ asked Jasmine.
‘No. She is asleep again. As she was when she was brought out of Murgin by Leona – and where is Leona now?’
They looked about them, without real interest or concern, then sprawled down by Jaer’s body. Only Terascouros stayed alert enough to see Leona emerge from the distant copse and walked naked across the meadow to join them, her arms and sides cut with long, deep gashes closed by clotted blood. Terascouros found her clothing among the packs and helped her dress after washing the wounds with the mixture Jasmine had made. Leona said nothing, only lay beside them and let her eyes fall closed. All slept. Above them the mist began to gather, and from the fringes of the wood behind them long tendrils of searching white curled across the meadow. When they woke at last, it was evening, and the battalions of vapour hung about them like amorphous creatures of the sea, writhing and curling toward them and away. The fire was long since dead.
Jaer still slept, and Terascouros thought that the torn lips looked less swollen, though it was hard to tell in the grey light. She stood to confront Thewson. ‘Do we eat first and have hot food, or do we go and eat cold food as we walk?’
‘Grandmother,’ he said, ‘be very still and look about us. Use your vision. What is it you see?’
Terascouros peered into the fog, stilling herself with an internal command, a practiced quieting of mental scurrying. She instructed herself to see, and she saw. About them stood an army of white, silent figures, robed in fog, motionless as though blind and deaf, all turned toward them and massed one behind the other to the far edge of the meadow at the circling trees.
‘Ghosts,’ she whispered. ‘Ghosts of Keepers, of those in Murgin, blind and seeking. What do they seek?’
No one answered.
At Thewson’s instructions they built up the fire so that it [ burned brightly, drawing the white forms even closer, then followed him away. As they went through the ghosts they felt a tingling, horrid and premonitory, a clammy intimacy as though they were embraced by something not living. They, the living, passed through the gathered forms to go away north, leaving that great host centred upon the abandoned fire.
‘How did you know?’ Terascouros asked, in a whisper.
‘I saw them, early this day, in starlight. They were white on the dark sky, watching for fire. I think perhaps they find warmth? Perhaps they are sent to find warmth? Wa’osu. We have in my land a great sin. We have few sins, but this is one. It is called xoxa-nah luxufuzh, gathering of shadows. Those dead in Murgin, they do not sleep in their bones. Here are their shadows come after us. For what? What can shadows do? Voal yoa: away from evil. Ulum, hara-ah-ya! Lord, deliver us.’
Terascouros was shaken. She looked back down the slope they climbed to see the meadow full of white forms, still, still, still, focused upon the fading glimmer of the fire. ‘We must hide from them. Somehow.’ She walked beside Leona who paced beside them almost as blindly as the ghosts, though her wounds no longer bled.
They walked throughout the night. It was mountainous land which rose before them and plunged before them so that they were always climbing up or staggering down. They lost sight of Gerenhodh for long hours only to see it loom before them at the end of some long black line of mountains and then lose it again as they dropped down into a wooded valley. At last the horizon above the mountains turned pale green at the east and light crept into the world. Jaer had half wakened twice throughout the long hours. Each time, Jasmine’s medicine had sent her again into deep sleep. It seemed that Jaer breathed easier, too, but Terascouros derided herself for imagining it.
Just as the dawn broke full in the eastern sky, they saw the tendrils of searching mist break through the trees at the top of the hill down which they had just come. Leona seemed to see them for the first time. ‘What is it?’ she asked through dry lips. ‘That is not fog. Fog
