The Pilgrims

That touched a nerve, perhaps what he hadn’t said as much as what he had. Case stormed away from him, not before turning and whispering fiercely, ‘I tell you what, I’m gonna wait for my chance. And don’t you tell them. You owe me that much.’

‘I guess if you don’t measure what’s owed or not in a material way, you’re right,’ said Eric, thinking of the money he’d spent on this geezer’s alcohol alone.

Case frowned. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Nothing, forget it. OK, Case. You got it. My lips are zipped.’

It was several hours before Eric discovered Kiown had been joking about Siel’s age. She was really nineteen. When Sharfy told him this, he suddenly shared every violent wish Anfen may or may not have had for the lanky redhead, although the relief he felt was like a gift from the heavens.

Meanwhile the ground bore no path for them across its sloping turf; the bush was thick in parts, then thinning away to bare fields of stiff grass; and the trees were mainly kinds not dissimilar to pine and eucalyptus, some hugely tall with thick, strong branches, others skeletally thin. There was small game to hunt: creatures that seemed cousins of deer and rabbit. They were easily caught, full of good meat, and seemed to live for little purpose other than to feed travellers. Eric tried to think of what bothered him on sight of the creatures, why they seemed less real than they should. He thought, sketched by a different nature. Each looks pretty much the same as every other of its kind. But it’s not like that with people, or with the animals you see of our world, like crows and horses …

As days and nights of marching took them deeper into the woods, mist which never lifted covered the ground in a white shroud. It was so thick in parts that they lost sight of each other, and the march became a blind stagger with arms extended to stop head-on collisions with trees. There was no sign yet of the ghosts Sharfy had feared, unless the peculiar echoing calls of birds they never saw, seeming to report their progress, came from the throats of ghosts.

Occasional clearings held the corpses of old villages: longneglected huts of log and stone. They stopped to explore these, finding in them no recent signs of life, human or animal — just abandoned stone water wells and the trees keeping silent vigil. Their feet began kicking up old bones in the undergrowth. Eric overheard Sharfy and Anfen quietly talking of massacres, mass executions of soldiers marched here in lines from trapped or surrendering armies, their bodies left in shallow ditches and the woods left full of angry spirits.

They bathed in cold clear streams when they found them, without time for modesty or embarrassment if the mist was thin. Eric soon found that Sharfy had just as many scars on his hairy backside as on his face and arms, and deep crisscrossing grooves on his back which could only be from distant lashings. Siel meanwhile did not much speak to him or anyone else, only to say necessary things. She had distanced herself on purpose and he didn’t know why. Again and again he thought back to the hilltop, and always he saw her head turning away from him, denying her mouth to him, then passively giving it with her eyes looking sideways into the distance as though at nothing, as though waiting for him to hurry and finish what she had willingly started. Like he had caught her and thrown her down instead. Did you? he wondered. If she thought you were a prince, was it not a lie that got her to offer herself? How is that different? As the days of travel went on, and they got further and further from the world he knew, a desire grew in him to do that very thing, right and wrong aside: throw her down and have her.

In the nights they spent in those lonely silent parts, white orbs glinted on the edges of their sight, seeming to press in, bringing with them a biting chill. A wind they couldn’t feel whispered and rustled through the grass and bushes with faintly heard sighs of pain and weeping. But when they turned to look closer, the lights fled their vision, staying always at the edges of it.

‘Silly old ghosts!’ Loup cried one night, when the lights sat at the edge of their small hilltop clearing and no longer fled, bathing the whole campsite in eerie flickering white. ‘Go on, leave us a while. You and your whines and moans, trying to give us nightmares. Here! Come with me, come tell me all about it, get it done with. Yes, yes, you’ve got your troubles, so do the living, curse it, so do we …’ He marched grumbling off into the trees, the glimmering lights following him. He was out of sight for a long while, but when he returned, the lights didn’t come with him. ‘Ignore em,’ he said with a yawn, as though they were no more than loud neighbours. ‘They make the air cold — so what? They’re no harm, just seeing who we are and why our feet make such a noise through their scrub, whether we mean harm to kick their bones with our steps or no. They’d need lessons from foul dead-meddling spells before they could make real trouble, oh aye. These poor sad ones don’t know how.’

Siel for some reason was not so easily assured; she moaned and whimpered in her sleep. Eric suddenly had to fight no lust, only a desire to stroke her hair and tell her she’d be all right.

Loup saw him watching her and whispered: ‘She can see what happened here, back in the day, that’s all.’ Seeing his surprise: ‘Oh, aye. Got a little Talent, she does. Can’t control it or help it, of course. But bad things happened here at this very spot, very bad things. She can hear em, loud as if they’re going on this very moment, just over yonder. Kept it hidden, she has, brave thing, but it’s harder tonight. This is a bad place. Men of honour died here in a way they never deserved, lots of em at that. She hears it.’

In the night’s quiet, with just the faintest of breezes whispering through the branches, Eric lay back and imagined he could hear the sounds too: horrible screams of pain from the strangers whose bones littered the undergrowth, whose torment would never really end, but was in some little pocket of time forever locked away, their screams still trailing on and ricocheting faintly off the tree trunks, which stood as indifferent to all this then as they did now.

26

There followed one of those days when the mist eased, perhaps as the ground rose. It didn’t help much, as any stretch of woodland seemed identical to the last, down to the moss-covered stones. Anfen turned and gave Eric an expectant look and a half smile. ‘Well?’ he said, nodding towards Sharfy. ‘You are walking next to a great source of knowledge. A vast pool of it. Why not scoop in your hands and drink? Do not drown, I warn you. It could become a flood, a storm of words, and we could all be swept away. Just a drink, for now, of his wisdom. It may distract you from … other troubles.’ Anfen’s smile was ambiguous.

It’s as obvious as that, is it? Eric thought; he had spent the last day and a half determinedly not looking Siel’s way, and succeeding some of the time. Now that he learned she had magic about her, the intensity of his fascination was almost overpowering. Sharfy meanwhile seemed to take Anfen’s words quite earnestly, and held his head up proudly.

‘What’s to be your first lesson?’ said Anfen, and Eric saw he wasn’t entirely joking. ‘Our worlds are very different and you’d better learn fast. We are in the wilder parts of it now.’ The tall trees seemed to agree with their silence. The group’s footsteps cracking on fallen branches and undergrowth sounded unnaturally loud, as though any kind of netherworld demon might be called by it and come screaming their way.

Eric shrugged. ‘How about magic, then? What makes a folk magician different from a war mage?’

Sharfy gladly replied without delay. ‘Folk’s just a word for a whole lot of little bits, mixed from the major schools. Passed down by mouth, not books. Be lucky to meet two folk mages who know all the same things. Other kinds of mage all got killed off or ran into hiding for good. ’Swhat war mages were made for, see? Mage hunters. Got to be careful with spells, cos they can see it from a long way off. That’s why you see Loup pick up a sword or knife in a scrap, not start waving his arms, making funny lights.’

Eric glanced back at the senile-looking old man, no teeth, no shirt no matter how cold it got, now sharing a joke with an unsmiling Case at the back of the group. Loup wheezed laughter while Case looked like he only wished the magician would shut up and leave him alone. ‘Could Loup really make funny lights and all the rest?’

‘Doubt it, I never seen it,’ said Sharfy. ‘Mages get offended if you ask em what they can or can’t do. But you can bet he probably blessed the sword he picked up. So you’d best be careful, if you mean to scrap with him.’

‘Hey, he’s OK by me.’

‘He’s handy enough for us,’ Sharfy continued. ‘He’s why we’ll get through these woods alive, despite this cursed mist. He can sense which way’s best to go. But in the old days, when the five schools of magic were strong,