The Pilgrims

The castle itself, if castle was even the right word, was so huge he saw only part of it, nesting among mountains of a similar stone, as though it had been chiselled down from them into its present shape, layer by layer. A mass of windows — round ones, square ones, some glass-covered, others not — dotted the colossal stone slabs of its flank.

Though the castle partly obscured the view of the land spread beyond, he could see that it was like a tabletop model of rolling hills: large plains of white or green, clusters of woodland. Other distant structures curved skywards, maybe lookout towers, maybe geographic features, bone-white like the land’s protruding sun-bleached ribs. A patch of the far horizon shimmered and gleamed like a sea. A vast paved road ran dead straight into the distance, dividing the landscape left and right almost perfectly into halves. Small as insects, things moved along it.

Just visible at the very end of sight were the high walls of a city, within it a cluster of red rooftops. But the castle kept commanding his attention back whenever he looked away. He squinted at the windows, fancying he could see people on the other side, but it was hard to be sure … perhaps a trick of the light. He felt very visible himself; surely from those windows someone could see him, if they looked his way.

Drunk as he was, grief and sadness burbling below his false cheer, Case had to stop and take in the dizzying sights, and admit to himself this would be a fitting last thing to see before clocking off to the next life, if this wasn’t the next life already. The castle itself, well, he could still only see part of it, even from his vantage point above and behind it. How it must look from ground level! You’d damn near fall to your knees and pray to it.

So he stood and gazed, and inside sighed deeply with relief; though he wasn’t sure how this sight, this other world spread out as real as the shoes on his feet, had eased some burden on his heart and mind which he hadn’t been aware of until now, despite having heaved it around all his long life. Was it the secret fear that the world he knew was all there was, in all its good and bad, banalities and miracles?

He didn’t know. He just gazed, and savoured the taste of every gulping breath, and said, ‘How about that, then. How about that.’

He didn’t know how long he stood and gazed, but the act was broken by the sound of beating wings, and air buffeting him. For a crazy second Case thought he was being swooped by a butcher bird, and he ducked to the ground, hands shielding his head, an instinct recalled from decades before: a boy doing a paper route, crying as birds swooped down at him from the power lines, to go home with streaks of tears on his cheeks and a beating from a father who needed his son tougher than that, and probably never got his wish.

Now, when he thought of how he’d marched right up close to that deathly beast to get his bottle, and that here he was ducking in terror from a potential bird, he burst out laughing, helpless with it, rolling around in tears on the soft grass.

Then he opened his eyes and saw her, one of the creatures that had appeared in his dreams. His heart leaped. She was here! She was real! And oh yes, she was beautiful, far more than the glimpses he’d caught of her in his sleep had shown. Her body was a naked woman’s, young and sleek, with an hourglass figure. Silky black hair blew and tossed about on her shoulders with the wind. Her eyes gleamed and flashed with colour. ‘You’re real,’ said Case with wonder, though he knew nothing of her, whether she were as dangerous as the thing with horns or not. In his dreams they had flown like flocks of birds, high up, now and then dropping down to peer at him with curiosity, speaking words he could not understand, then darting back to the sky so fast they left streaks of blurred motion behind them.

Two white feathery wings spread out behind her, soft-looking, and he wanted to run his hands over them like he’d wanted nothing else. He said, ‘You’re real, and you’re beautiful.’ Ah you old fool, he thought, don’t say things like that.

She did not smile, nor did she blink. She stared at him with hands on her hips, bright red lips slightly parted, her expression completely foreign to him. Was she displeased? Angry?

‘I am real,’ she said back, voice stilted as though she did not often use it. ‘You are real. Your friend is real. He lives.’

If Case had been spellbound, that broke him free. ‘Eric? Eric’s alive?’

‘Yes. He and you are the ones who lived. I heard you call him, but there’s no use. He is far away.’

‘Where? Now where is he? I need to find him!’

‘I have a task for you first, then I will take you to him. You understand my speech?’

‘Of course. I’m talking to you, aren’t I? But I don’t see why you can’t just tell me where Eric is. You better tell me.’

‘Quiet, listen. I am speaking the tongue of the Invia. Not your tongue. Yet you understand me, as I understand you. Pilgrims to and fro always have such magic about them, as It wills. You may understand their speech too.’ She pointed at the castle looming behind and below. ‘Enchantments protect their words in the upper halls, for they fear to be overheard by the great ones I speak to. It may be you are immune to this disguise. We are not.’

‘Now, damn you, if you know where my friend is and you don’t tell me, I swear I’ll choke the breath out of you!’ He took some shambling steps towards her, the bottle raised like a club.

She stepped lightly up and out of his reach without even beating her wings, though she extended them now, gracefully flexing and angling them flat. The look on her face hadn’t changed; it expressed nothing. She just watched him from above, nothing more.

Case sat down hard on the ground, body shaking with sobs. ‘Too much for me to understand,’ he said. ‘I don’t get it any more. Don’t know where I am or what it all means. Thought I was about to die, back there, and I would’ve let it kill me, because I dragged my friend into this in the first place. All those people, deader than shit. And you’re just looking at me like that. Damn it, tell me where he is.’ He cried harder, wiped his eyes, and when he looked up she wasn’t there.

Lying in the grass beside him was a long necklace of dull silver beads. He hesitated then grabbed it. The beads stuck against each other a little, like they were faintly magnetic. He cast his eye around, trying to find the woman with wings, but she was nowhere to be seen.

Wait — over there, by the castle. She floated in the air above the nearest tower, distance making her seem hardly bigger than a bird. She waved. Come. Case stood, wiped the tears from his cheeks, and grabbed the bottle, muttering curses.

The strip of valley ended just a little further ahead, where it curved steeply down to the castle’s back edge, nestled in the sheer cliff base. It was a long drop, but there was some semblance of a path zigzagging down through a few trees, shrubs and boulders of white stone. I’m too old for this, he thought, already puffing from the first steps of his descent.

And he was too drunk for it. His foot slipped and down he went. As much as he’d been casual about the prospect of dying a few minutes before, now the moment had come, perfectly involuntary panic bloomed through him like an explosion, and he clutched desperately at the ground as he slipped over the edge into air.

But hands caught him under his armpits. He felt a steady lurch as the Invia’s wings beat. He grabbed hold of her arms as hard as he could, too alarmed by the sight of the world far below his feet to worry whether he was hurting her. Her grip was strong and painful; her breasts pressed into his back firm as fists. He looked down at the forearms he held onto and was startled to see thin little scales covering her skin, clear as glass.

Between his feet was the round marble-white roof of a lower part of the great structure, which seemed a grouping of fat dome-shaped temples, while other parts led off and trailed in giant branches curving away from the main mass. The whole thing had some huge deliberate shape to it, like an enormous sculpture, nothing like any actual castle that Case had ever seen. There were courtyards way down there where dot-sized people scurried about. Case’s head spun, guts spun, and he tried not to reflect on the odds of her letting go if he puked on her forearms. ‘Don’t drop me,’ he said. ‘I’ll do what you want. Don’t drop me.’

‘Hush! You are annoying.’

Each beat of her wings brought them closer to a tall tower, its upper half coloured gold. Case thought it was about to smack them head on until she parked on the wide ledge outside a window two-thirds of the way up. She set him down and stepped backwards onto the air as though standing on an invisible platform, angling her wings so they held her still. She said, ‘Now it becomes difficult. You must go inside when the prisoner opens her window. She will not see you, as long as you wear the charm. No one will see you. Do not take it off! And do not speak. You are a fool, I think. I hope you listen.’

‘No argument from me. What’m I supposed to do here?’