He stopped and ate a little snow, tore a bit of bark from a tree and began chewing it while he followed the tracks onward. Up a gently sloping wooded hillside, through the deciduous trees that grew on its spine, across a stream and over to the other side.
In the landscape beneath him he saw the glow of several fires.
He looked around him. Everything was totally still. He looked up to the sky. Nothing moving up there, either.
Then he looked out again. He counted five fires. They gave off a strange, dull glow from in among the misty trees.
They’re here, he thought. And there are lots of them.
His first impulse had been to turn on his heel. Go back while he still could. But at the same time he knew that no human being had ever recorded witnessing what was in front of him. Would he ever be able to forgive himself if he turned his back on it? Would he be forgiven?
He walked slowly down. He kept the sky above him and the ground behind him under constant observation.
When he began to get closer, he saw that it was no ordinary fire burning in the copse below, but a huge wheel, perhaps thirty feet across, that lay on the ground covered in flame.
There wasn’t a living thing in the vicinity.
He halted in the trees above it and stared down at the copse. Apart from the flames that arose from the wheel, and the snow that fell, everything was still.
He didn’t like it. He’d left tracks over half the valley and all the way to where he now stood. Perhaps an angel had spotted him coming down from the mountain. And now he was here staring at a fiery wheel in the forest.
From somewhere came the sound of another cry.
It came from farther up the valley, and he began to walk in that direction. On the way he saw several sets of tracks. And soon the glow of another fire shone out from between the trees in front of him.
He crouched down behind a tree trunk. There were five angels there. Three of them stood between him and the fire, staring into the flames, two more were beneath the trees a little way off.
A few fish lay on the ground by the nearer group, half covered by the falling snow. A sword lay there too, also partially covered with snow.
None of the angels moved. Their wings were completely white. One of them was spattered with blood.
The clearing they stood in stretched a good way down, and after a while all three turned their heads and looked in that direction.
Antinous rose as carefully as he could and eased his head around the trunk a little to see what they could see.
Two angels were walking up the clearing. They were dragging an animal behind them. Its legs were bound together, and Antinous saw how it writhed and struggled as it was hauled across the snow. When the three by the fire went to meet them, the couple hissed at them. Soon after that they stopped. One of them fetched the sword lying in the snow, knelt down by the animal, which was a roe deer calf, and hacked at its neck. Its throat opened and blood poured out over the snow. When the animal continued to twist, the angel grabbed its head, bent it back, and cut with full force at the neck. With the decapitated head lying on the snow with eyes open and its neck steaming, the angel turned the body over and bent above it. The four others approached. Suddenly it turned on them and snarled. The whole of its chest and chin was covered in blood. They stopped, and it bent over the carcass again.
Antinous caught a movement on the other side of the fire, and threw a quick glance in that direction. The two angels over there had turned and were walking into the forest. When he looked back again, only seconds later, the four had begun to close in on the fifth again, who rose and lashed out with its great wings.
Horrified, Antinous looked on as two of them closed in on each other, while the two others crouched over the animal carcass and began to rip and tear at it with their teeth.
As cautiously as he could he took a step back, then another, in the hope they were too preoccupied with their prey and one another to hear him.
Only when he reached the burning wheel did he dare to take to his heels. Up the slope he ran, in his own tracks, through the broad-leaved forest and down toward the plain on the other side, where he was forced to halt and catch his breath.
No one would ever believe him if he spoke of what he’d just seen, he thought. He barely believed it himself.
An hour later he reached the point where his tracks turned down to the spot where he’d stood motionless all that time by the angel in the tree. Instead of spending time searching for his own footsteps from the mountain, he cut straight across the level and into the forest on the other side, from where it was just a short distance to the mountain. But the mist hung just as thick amid the trees, the snow continued to fall, and, after finding his own tracks several times, circling in an unsuccessful attempt to find the place where the angel had stood in the tree, working out a new course and keeping to it without seeing a mountainside anywhere, he had to admit that he was back where he’d been on that night more than forty years before: he was lost. He was now bereft of all sense of direction. He was tired, wet, and hungry. And the valley was full of angels. The most sensible thing to do would be to sit down and rest somewhere. Perhaps remain there for the night, in the hope that the mist would lift the next day.
He sought shelter under a large spruce tree. He lay down and thought about what he’d seen. After a while he must have dozed off, because the next thing he knew was that there were footsteps in the snow close by. They halted. He lay perfectly still. When nothing happened, he carefully moved the densely covered branch aside and peered out.
Only a few yards away stood two angels. They were embracing. One rested its brow on the shoulder of the other. Its hands trembled constantly. Its head quivered too. And its legs shook.
He recognized them. They were the same angels he’d seen that night in the river. The same black and green wings, the same skull-like faces, the same bloodless lips. The same clawlike fingers, the same thin necks, the same china blue eyes.
Their bodies hadn’t aged since then, Antinous thought. He began to weep. The angel that had laid its forehead on the other’s shoulder straightened up its body slowly and looked around.
They know that I’m here, thought Antinous. But he remained prostrate. If they come, they come. If they wanted to kill him, let them kill him. He would do anything for them. Anything at all.
But they didn’t come. One looked around tremulously, then the other put an arm round its waist, and they began to walk slowly across the meadow.
Antinous had wondered who they were ever since he’d seen them for the first time. In all the innumerable manuscripts and books he’d read about angels, he’d looked for them.
He’d been fairly sure of one for a long time. The one that didn’t tremble, the one who had thrown the spear and impaled the fish, must be the Archangel Raphael. Not so much because of the pattern on his wings, but because of the role he’d played in the river. In scripture he only figures in one place, in the Book of Tobit, but to make up for it his appearance there was the longest by far. In the Book of Tobit there is a description of how Raphael helped Tobias to catch a huge fish and how the gallbladder of the fish later cured Tobias’s father’s blindness. In direct translation, Raphael means “God heals” or “divine healer.” From what he’d seen, he realized that the angel he thought of as Raphael helped the other one to cope. Presumably they were of the same rank. The archangels resembled each other, they knew each other, perhaps as brothers know each other. When one of them was in difficulty, Raphael would be there.