A great exhaustion had overcome Owen Calca from his hammering against the implacable mountain and his calling for Abna. Instinct told him that his brother was inside, but hope suggested that Abna might have taken another path, even though there was none. He also knew his brother was not alone. Distorted glimpses of somebody, or something, came to Owen every time he bellowed his name. Did his sibling want this? Had Abna found a genie or a demon? Was he in rapture or in imprisonment? If Abna needed him, he would find a way out or leave a sign, a message, for Owen. But there was nothing, excepting the disturbing flashes of his brother’s phantom liaison inside the mountain.
Defeated, with a sick feeling in the pit of his soul, he reluctantly limped back to retrieve his horse and turned down the track to find Follett and the rest of the party. Dread and hollowness filled the time of his descent.
“Calca! What be it? What ails thee?” Follett asked as the weary and sick-looking rider joined the men, who’d stopped to await him.
Owen could barely speak, but he coughed out words made of saliva and fear. “It’s Abna. He’s been taken.”
“Taken?”
“Taken by whom?”
An echo of enormous capacity and loneliness lived in the space below where the men stood. The words caught there, no matter in what volume they were said, and were called back, making fun of them, turning the word taken into a flock of derisive, distant crows. Owen opened his eyes wider and blinked hard until his eyes became his brother’s. He felt as if he were staring into a dark tunnel, into the very core of a shadow where he saw a creature in the dim light. An impossible beauty, a female not of this world: A thousand careful words could never describe this enchanted being. The awe of the vision forced him back into the company of men, with one wrong word stapling his tongue to his limited powers of description.
“A demon,” he said, with unexpected force. “A demon has taken Abna inside the mountain.”
The echo snatched up the words in a mocking song.
“Demon, demon, demon, taken, taken, taken, Abna, Abna, Abna…”
Follett unsheathed his spear and spoke sharply to his horse while turning it tightly around, a sign to the other riders that they were going back. The men rearranged themselves in their saddles; some standing in their stirrups to look around. Only Pearlbinder remained stationary, blocking Follett’s path back up the mountain.
“We’ll lose valuable time here,” he said.
“Can’t be helped. We will make it up later.”
“Thou knowest we couldst miss the tryst if we tarry here.”
“What tryst?” snarled Follett.
“Lent.”
The men glared at each other vacantly. Follett’s horse skidded, hooves clattering on scree as it tried to remain stationary on the steep incline.
Pearlbinder remained rock-solid, barring the way. Then he turned on the shivering brother. “Hast thee seen this demon, Calca?”
Owen blinked at the harshness of the question. “It came to me as I was riding. It’s in the form of a woman.”
“Have you seen it with thine waken eyes?”
“It has beguiled Abna with its—”
“Have you seen it in the flesh?” bellowed Pearlbinder.
“N-no,” spluttered Owen.
The echo was in exaltation at all this shouting.
Pearlbinder turned his back on the defeated man and cleared the path for Follett, whom he now addressed with determination and respect.
“I believe thou means to give up the creature to the abbey below at the beginning of Lent. When all fleshy matters are quenched, and prayer becomes the only language of strength.”
“Damn thee, Pearlbinder.”
“I estimate we have two days before Shrovetide. Send Calca to chase phantoms and to find his brother alone, and we might just make it. If we all go back, we shall lose the day. The church needeth this treasure on time, and I wager the top sum of our reward depends on it.”
All the other men were now paying great attention to this conversation.
“Am I not right, Captain?”
Follett swore, spat, and said, “Thou are always right, Samuel, but this is not the place to discuss that matter.”
“I think it might be,” added Tarrant, who had turned his horse to face Follett.
“I will not tolerate insubordination.”
“ ’Tain’t that,” said Pearlbinder. “Just best that we all knoweth the price and the time of our delivery of this Blessing.”
“I hath told thee, individually, the price you will be paid when we make our delivery. Your percentage of our bounty has increased since the loss of some of our party.”
“And the timing?” asked Alvarez.
“The Pearl was right. Lent, at the beginning of Lent,” Follett answered, turning his spear and horse around, speaking loudly as he descended.
“Owen, do you want to go search for Abna or stay with us and pray that he joins us below?”
There was so much stone, gradient, time, and fear between Owen Calca and his lost brother that failure seemed the only outcome. So he announced, “I will stay with thee.”
It sounded almost gracious, but everyone heard the husk in his throat, and Follett immediately elected him for the next Steeping. The raw edge of his anxiety would add much to his confession. Slowly the men continued down the path toward the tangle of towns below and the tryst that they now knew awaited there.
No one looked at Calca, but they all watched Follett more closely than ever.
Three hours later, the vertiginous track wallowed out onto a slope. Gradually, it became a narrow, flat bumpy road with the mountain on one side, and a screen of tall trees guarding the next drop on the other. They were on the southwest face, and the day was in full force beyond the fringe of trees. Tarrant steered his horse close to the branches and looked through onto an uninterrupted view of the landscape. Pearlbinder joined him at the edge, sliding open a long brass telescope he had retrieved from his pocket. He put it to his eye and reached out through the branches toward the blur of houses that nestled in the valley below.
“Civilization,” he groaned, handing the instrument to Tarrant, who eagerly took it.
The world bobbed and floated disconnectedly as he pointed the lens down and saw the villages and fields below free from snow. The world down there was normal in the flattened space. Silhouettes of different kinds of trees broke the continuity of the sprawling horizontal lines of smoke rising from the chimneys, like spiderwebs in the clear, breezeless air; then there was another movement on the green blur at the center of the community—a pond or some kind of lake. It took him a while to make it out while his hands shook in the cold. The sight connected to a long-exorcised memory of a different time, and a despised emotion crept into the self-tempered hollow where his soul once lived. For a second or two, he saw his wife and their children alive, and he hated it.
The horses were becoming restless, their hooves stamping impatiently on the frosted ground. They smelled pastures and warmth and wanted to move out of the high, tight cold.
“What hast thou seen?” demanded Follett. Tarrant was lost between the lens and what it captured, unable to answer. Suddenly, and more important, a huge black blur filled his view: a moving mass that seemed to float above the distant village like a solid cloud. He stopped looking and wiped his eye. Nobody paid him any attention and he returned to the view. The blur was another group of men, far below them, making their way down through the steep snow, dogs following behind, their misty breath panting into the air. The men carried spears. Warriors, or stray caballistas, Tarrant thought for a moment, until he saw the single thin rabbit carried on one of their backs. Hunters returning after a dismal day’s event, the one animal all they carried home. The chill of poverty inside the warmth of home and the faint sounds, perhaps imagined, of a smithy and church bells, sent a wave of longing that gilded the air above the village and plucked at their purpose.
Pearlbinder looked at Tarrant and saw something he did not like. He reached out to take his telescope back. The removal of the metal tube unlatched Tarrant’s mouth.
“People, just people,” he said, in response to Follett’s question.