Leshii, of course, had asked to see the silver dihrams, and the Raven had shown them to him one evening as they camped. To Leshii silver had a beauty that was deeper than gold’s. He let the money run through his fingers, listened to the satisfying rain of coins that had come to end his drought, felt the delicious tickle as they fell back into the bag like bright little fishes into water.
What, thought Leshii, was to stop him cutting the Raven’s throat in his sleep and taking everything he had? He looked at the man, the torn ruin of his face, the slim sword that lay at his side, the cruel bow he carried on his back. He thought of the desperation with which the wolfman — Chakhlyk, the man who had slaughtered five men before they got him to the ground — had fought him on the riverbank.
‘You’re laughing, merchant, why?’
‘Occasionally,’ said Leshii, ‘I amuse myself with my own stupidity.’
They sat for a while in silence while Leshii munched on a duck the Raven had caught in a dead fall trap. The fire they’d used to roast it was a risk as it could attract attention, but Leshii thought it was worth it to feel warm and dry for once.
‘You haven’t asked for a story,’ said Leshii. Merchants, with their travels, were noted as story-tellers, and people commonly pressed them for tales of faraway lands.
The Raven said nothing.
‘Then tell me one,’ said Leshii. ‘Come on. I am always telling my tales. I bore myself with them.’
The Raven picked at the wing of the duck he had in his fingers. ‘I have no talent for them,’ he said.
‘You need no talent. Just tell me about yourself. How did you come to be such a mighty man?’
The Raven threw the remains of the wing into the fire. It was almost as if the merchant had read his mind. He was thinking of the mountains, of how he had stolen away from the monastery and his home in the valley to go with his sister and the strange woman with the burned face to the heights where no one ever went.
The paths were steep, the boulder fields draining. They climbed small cliffs, trudged over swampy ground, crossed perilous slopes where they were just a slip from falling into nothing, moved on across snow fields, up and up into the mists. It was dawn when they came to the cave, the light frogspawn grey. They approached it along a perilous path by a great waterfall. She had fed them there, bread, salt beef and strange pale mushrooms, almost translucent, that reminded him of the pale skin of the abbot as he’d lain on his bed, the dead god’s necklace at his throat.
He had looked out at the land beneath him. No one ever climbed the mountains — the danger of falling and the presence of the hill spirits would have put them off even if there had been any good pasture up there. Looking out he had a sense of the vastness of creation and his tiny place within it. His valley home had been all he knew, but here he could see the great lake that stretched like a sea to the north; he could look down on the massive chain of mountains that stretched west, see hints of other places, other valleys. And there was the forest, the vast forest.
‘Here,’ said the woman, ‘the gods will talk to you.’
‘I cannot understand. You say our words wrongly.’
The woman spoke slowly: ‘The gods are here.’
‘I am scared,’ said his sister. She’d used his name. What was it? Louis. Every second boy in the valley was called that. She usually called him Wolf, for his hunting skill and for his black hair.
‘You will have your brother to cling to,’ said the woman. ‘Now go inside the cave. You will come to no harm. This is the first step on your path to service.’
‘To serve what?’ he’d said. He’d been the bold one in those days.
‘You will see,’ said the woman. ‘He will speak to you. The darkness is a soil. You are seeds within it.’
They were just children and they’d trusted her so they’d entered the cave. And then she had piled up the stones, to seal them in. The woman had said they would cling to each other and they did, terrified by the darkness and the cold, by noises from the earth, which seemed to groan and wail about them, to creak like a house in a storm, and by the flashes and glimmers that danced at the corners of their eyes but which gave them no light to see by. They sobbed, desperate for food, desperate for water, licking the rocks for moisture, weeping but without tears.
It had been quiet for a long time when his sister broke the silence.
‘Wolf.’
‘Yes.’ His voice was hoarse.
‘Who is in here with us?’
‘We are alone.’
‘No. There is someone else in here. Feel.’
She took his hand and put it out, but he felt only a rock, smooth and cold.
‘It is nothing.’
‘It is a corpse. Can’t you feel the rope at his neck? Touch his cold eyes. Here. Can’t you feel? There is a dead thing in here with us.’
‘There is only stone and darkness, Ysabella.’
He heard his sister swallow, felt her hand trembling in his.
‘He is here.’
‘Who is here?’
‘The dead god. The lord of the hanged.’
‘There is nothing.’
‘He’s singing. Listen.’ She chanted a strange off-key melody.
‘Three times deceived, I was,
Those treacherous knots,
One thing inside another,
Inside another held tight.
Unseen,
Unheard,
The dead god’s necklace
Closes to open the way to magic.’
He heard her scrabbling in the dark, her hands pulling at something. Only when he heard her begin to choke did he know what it was. The rope. He reached for her in desperation, hands tearing at the three knots at her neck, trying to loosen or untie them, but his fingers were raw and numbed by the cold. He tore and he ripped and he screamed and still she kept on choking. He felt around him with desperate hands, trying to find a stone sharp enough to cut the rope, but it was useless. Tug and tear as he might, there was no way to get it off her.
Desperation, starvation and tiredness overwhelmed his mind. He coughed and retched with the thirst in his throat. And then she stood before him bathed in the light of strange symbols that shone and spoke. He heard their voices, sounds like the wind over water, thunder and rain, the rattle of hail against the roof of a house — he heard the growing of the plants and the decay of the autumn, felt summer sun and winter ice.
Ysabella stretched up her arms to the symbols. She took one, picking it like a fruit from a branch. It disappeared within her, its light undimmed. Other runes — he had seen the wise woman carve them for the spell that had cured the fever, the spell that he had completed by providing the final ingredient of the abbot’s death — were glowing and writhing on her skin. Her face was inconstant, one moment bathed in a golden light, ecstatic, the next blue and bloated, the ligature tight around her neck, her tongue protruding, her eyes bulging, like a gargoyle leering at him as if through a mist.
She reached her hand to him and he took it. She guided his hand to the rope, to the knots. As he touched them, he saw the truth. There was only her for him. They had been together before and they would be together again. They were two threads entwined in eternity, their fates linked in lifetimes past and in lives to come. Music sounded in the cave. He and she danced to it, had always danced, would always dance to it — their flesh and bone expressions of the eternal melody.
‘I am here for you,’ he told her, ‘always.’
‘Something comes to part us.’
‘The rope is so tight on your neck. Let me loosen it.’
‘It is my strength and I must return to it. We have a fierce enemy.’
She opened her hand and on it writhed another strange symbol but not quite like the others. It was a jagged
