Another spring.
I understand all that is said to me now in this crude tongue, by these plain but kindly people. I have begun to teach the old man’s grandson Latin, to write it, and to recite poems. Some of them my own. He is a bright child, but of a sullen disposition, and he sees no use in what he learns. Listening to the old man now, telling his stories in our little yard, I know what the different voices signify: they are the north wind, they are wolves, they are giants, they are the ghosts of warriors, they are a shinbone, a severed head, they are the bottom of the sea. The old man’s stories are fabulous beyond anything I have retold from the Greeks; but savage, a form of extravagant play that explains nothing, but speaks straight out of the nightmare landscape of this place and my dream journeys across it. Our civilized fables that account so elegantly for what we see and know seem feeble beside these elaborate and absurd jokes the old man mutters over. They are like winter here. They fill the world. They make the head buzz, they numb the blood. They seem absolutely true and yet they explain nothing. I begin to see briefly, in snatches, how this old man, my friend, might see the world. It is astonishing. Bare, cruel, terrible, comic. And yet daily he seems nobler and more gentle than any Roman I have known. Beside him I am an hysterical old woman. Utterly without dignity.
It begins to be autumn again. There is a smokiness in things.
Once again we go to the birch woods.
Almost immediately, in the golden light of a fine autumn day, with the sky broken in rain pools among the drifts of yellow leaves, he is there, standing quite still and taller after these two years, among the slashed birches. I am filled with joy. He is there. He is real. The others see him too. He is streaked with mud, with bony knees and elbows and a shrunken belly. An ugly boy of eleven or twelve with a bird’s nest of dirty hair. We are sitting, five of us, in a circle, drinking a little of the thin soup we have brought with us, while the horses wander among the birches, grazing off what blades of grass still push up through the leaf mold. It is late afternoon. Still. We hold our cups in both hands, drinking, not speaking, and suddenly the boy is there, watching us. The men’s eyes dark over the rim of the cup and their fingers grimy. We all look. First at the boy then at one another, and are frozen. Even the horses cease grazing and raise their heads against the watery blue of the afternoon, sniffing, scenting another presence. I can hear our breathing. It is as if were all, for a moment, charmed. As if time had stopped. And I feel that if we could sit like this long enough, cross-legged on the leaves, so that it seemed like another part of the wood; if we let our spirits out, shaking them loose, and became wood, leaf, mold, lichen - he would come to us. The others, I know, are afraid. Their stillness is a sort of terror. These men who are not afraid of whirling horsemen in the night with poisoned arrows and firebrands, or of a wild boar with its tusks foaming, are afraid of the Child. I am not. My stillness is for fear that we may, even with the lifting of a finger or the catching of a breath, startle him into flight.
So we sit - for how long? - and stare at one another. He does not startle. But one of the horses, lowering its head to nibble, moves across between us, and when it passes, the space between the birches is empty of all but light.
I am calmer now. He is still there, that is what matters. There is time for the rest. We shall stay two nights in the birch woods.
The first night, just at the edge of the fire’s circle, where the dark begins, I set a bowl of grueclass="underline" mixed grain seed boiled in brackish water and flavored with honey. For hours after the others sleep I sit wrapped in my cloak, straining to hear a footfall among the leaves. I know he must come to watch. He has begun to look for us, I know that, as we look for him. He feels some yearning toward us, some need to satisfy himself about who we are, and why we have a shape, a smell, so unlike that of the other creatures of the forest. Has he begun to ask of what kind he is? Does he guess that some part of us, at least, is of his kind? As we know that in shape at least he is one of ours. I listen but hear nothing. I fall asleep, still sitting upright against a birch trunk, and am woken by the first silvery light of dawn. I scramble across to the bowl. It is empty. Something has come and lapped up the gruel. A deer? One of the forest demons these people worship? The Child? I hide the bowl under my cloak and pretend I have been to relieve myself but the old man watches me and knows. He thinks this is all folly. And dangerous folly. He is too much ashamed of me, and my old man’s silliness, to le me see that he knows. He orders the young men about in a voice louder and gruffer than usual as if he were trying to frighten the Child away.
It is a clear still day and the deer are everywhere. The men hunt and kill five or six of them, and our camp in the clearing is like a butcher’s shop, the smell of blood is all over us, the skins hang dripping from branches, joints of meat - haunches, legs, rib-halves - are stacked ready for packing. The women will salt and store them against the winter. The work takes us all day. We will spend a second night here and be off at dawn. Again I set out the bowl of gruel, and this time sleep on the far side of the fire, propped up hard against a tree trunk and determined not to doze.
I fall asleep almost immediately, and dream. What I half thought in the woods yesterday, while we were watching the Child, is true. We have all been transformed, the whole group of us, and become part of the woods. We are mushrooms, we are stones - I recognize my companions. I am a pool of water. I feel myself warm in the sunlight, liquid, filled with the blue of the sky; but I am the merest broken fragment of it, and I feel, softly, the clouds passing through me, their reflections, and once the suddenness of wings. Slowly it grows dark. A breeze shivers my surface. And as darkness passes over me I begin to be afraid. My spirit hovers somewhere close and will, I know, come back to me when I wake. But I am afraid suddenly to be just a pool of rain in the forest, feeling the night creep over me, feeling myself grow cold and fill with starlight, feeling the temperature drop. I consider what it might be like to freeze. I imagine that. But only at the edges of myself, as the first ice crystals click into shape. It is fearful. What would happen to my spirit then? I lie in the dark of the forest waiting for the moon. And softly, nearby, there are footsteps. A deer. The animal’s face leans toward me. I am filled with tenderness for it. Its tongue touches the surface of me, lapping a little. It takes part of me into itself, but I do not feel at all diminished. The sensation on the surface of me is extraordinary. I break in circles. Part of me enters the deer, which lifts its head slowly, and moves away over the leaves. I feel part of me moving away, and the rest falls still again, settles, goes clear. What if a wolf came, I suddenly ask myself? What if the next tongue that touched me were the wolfґs tongue, rough, greedy, drinking me down to the last drop, and leaving me dry? That too is possible. I imagine it, being drawn up into the wolf’s belly. I prepare for it.
Another footfall, softer than the first. I know already, it is the Child. I see him standing taller than the deer against the stars. He kneels. He stoops towards me. He does not lap like the deer, but leaning close so that his breath shivers my surface, he scoops up a handful, starlight dripping from his fingers in bright flakes that tumble towards me, and drinks. I am broken again. The disturbance is fearful, a noisy crashing of waves against the edges of me. And when I settle he is gone. I am still, reflecting starlight. I sleep. I wake.