“Didst thou understand why we had to come this way?” asked Pearlbinder as they walked the flinty road.
“No, but it must be where the payment lies, farther in that direction,” Follett answered. He waved a vague hand before him.
“We must have been walking for hours now in this desolate way, and we have not seen a single living soul.”
“Aye, but it’s a well-trodden path. We hath done our duty like those who went before us…a prodigious line of men, all delivering similar creatures to that monastery.”
“But what will they do with it?” asked Pearlbinder, stopping as his exasperation at the question seemed to flatten his lungs and render him breathless.
Follett also stopped and slowly turned his lance so he could lean on its verticality. “I don’t know, but it must have led to this place in some way. We might be given a sense of it with our payment hither.” His eyes narrowed as he stared at the road ahead.
The weather was different here. A mild heat haze made the hardness of the landscape shimmer into an unrealistic stream or a sluggish river. Beyond the tree-lined banks, the distant clamor had focused slightly; the men’s stillness on the road allowed them to hear the edge of the noise. Both men listened, turning their ears toward its meaning, and then, as it continued, they recognized it as familiar: it sounded like a battle, far off and enormous.
They had to drag their heads away from the sound to sever their growing attachment and wordless understanding. Follett looked about himself, at the trees of linden and oak that fringed the road on both sides. He turned to look back whence they had come, and it was identical to the perspective of the path before them. No sign of gates, mountains, or walls—all had been swallowed in the curvature of the Earth. Follett allowed the weight of his lance to swing it into a horizontal position, and the momentum of the act jarred him forward. Pearlbinder followed the motion, and they started to walk again.
The sun was dropping, but the road and the trees remained the same; only the sky thickened, and the smell of fire became more tangible. They had been walking two hours or so when Follett had the sudden impression that they were not walking on a flat road at all but on the rim of a gigantic wheel—one that turned with their pace, giving the illusion of travel, while the trees held them in the channel of its circumference. He stopped again.
Was this the rotation of Earth, a constant bland orbit? He was just about to speak when Pearlbinder said, “Thou sees it?” and raised a weary arm to point ahead.
Follett had seen nothing and now found it difficult to focus his eyes on the distant horizon, the vanishing point, where a blur now stood.
“What is it?” he asked as Pearlbinder pulled out his brass telescope to answer the question.
Pearlbinder put the tube to his eye and allowed the compressed distance to swallow all sound.
“Well?” Follett asked, becoming anxious in his static seclusion from knowledge.
“It looks like…a sack…or a flag, planted in the middle of the way.”
“It might be the point of no return.”
Pearlbinder made a guttural sound and slowly closed his telescope.
“Whatever it is, I think it’s moving”—Follett glared at his companion—“this way.”
Its approach was broken and ragged. The movement of a thing uncertain, as though propelled by wayward breezes or purposeless uneven slopes in advance of its footfall. Or, more alarmingly, perhaps, it was traveling on a reverse rotation of the wheel. Follett was caught in the unease of that idea as the thing slowly wandered into focus. The rippling haze from the road eventually gave way to a recognizable profile.
“My God!” Follett exclaimed. “It’s a horse.”
“Was a horse,” stated Pearlbinder as the staggering ghost of empty skin and rancid, scaffolded bones drifted into their presence.
Follett unsheathed the blade of his lance and seated the end of the shaft in a notch in the road, a standard defensive counter to a cavalry charge. Pearlbinder spat a gob of sound into the bristling air. The utterance was intended as laughter—a jest at the impropriety of what stood before them—but what emerged instead was instinctive: something between a scream and a sob. Because what was approaching on a trajectory of hopeless loss was the withered carcass of a once-huge horse, one that looked as though it had been dead and buried for months. All the flesh, all the muscle was gone from inside the teetering sack of bones. Great gashes in its dry hide let the wind pass through it and across the lips of its desiccated wounds, making a shrill whistle that emphasized the unnatural quiet of its hooves on the hard road. It stopped four spear lengths before them and lifted its long, hollow head, as if to acknowledge them; their dread doubled.
Pearlbinder blanched, his arms and his voice sinking to nothing, his eyes staring from his bloodless face.
“My God, it’s Sophia,” whispered Follett.
The physical apparition turned slightly, as if in recognition of its distant name. The stink from its blackened teeth and rotten joints was overwhelming, and both men wanted to run back to the towns, villages, and landscapes they knew, back into their previous existence. Back into life.
What had been Sophia moved forward, and both men shrank back. Follett dropped his lance, which fell against the ridges of spine that pierced her scrawny haunches. Although not heavy, the lance dug solidly into the horse’s hide and bone and shed pieces of skin onto the road. She slowly spun, the lance dangling alongside her plodding gait. Sophia shivered in the way that living horses do, but not with the adjusting tics of nervous tension. Her movements were sullen and disgusting, having no place in a body so bereft of vitality. She continued to walk away, turning her head to glance back at the spear that she dragged behind her and at the two men who did nothing to retrieve it.
The sound of the tip dragging against the flinty road traveled up the shaft and through the blade and snapped the lance into the empty ribbed interior. There it amplified, sounding like the clawing of fingernails on a blackboard in a deep, dry well.
Pearlbinder tried to vomit, but only dry membranes came forth. Follett covered his ears with trembling hands. This was the point of no return, and the great wheel started turning again in their direction. The lurch made them fall against each other before they were able to walk again, framed by the lindens and oaks that no longer efficiently filtered out the screams and the fire. Soon they would be passing into the vale of The Triumph of Death, and both automatically unsheathed their swords and daggers.
The soft organs of their bodies shrank inward, away from the contours of who they had once been. A sliver of space was left between the shell and the core, just enough for the memory of exactly where and when they had died to bloom and quickly fade.