He extended his free arm, indicating the endless steppe, bowed birch trees like the ribs of fallen giants and lichen covering the earth like mist. The wind was a wall crashing down; the sunset the world behind the wall, nightmarish yet inescapable. There were no stars, no moon. A few yards in front of us stood a single large birch tree, its bark tinged pink from the sunset, its leaves blade-shaped and yellow as buttercups. Behind it the sky glowed like a furnace, black edged with purple, the horizon riven with crimson and a single brilliant ribbon of gold that spewed from the earth like a flame. It was so beautiful it made me shiver; but it was a beauty composed mostly of terror. I could imagine no people living there, nor even animals; nothing save those bloodthirsty midges.
“Oh, but people do live here, Lit,” Ralph said, in the same soft, vague tone he had used before, as though talking in his sleep. He let his arm drop from me, bent, and began to dig in the ground. I crouched beside him, watching. The earth was hard but when he broke through the surface it became friable, falling in small chunks from his hand. He continued to dig, pausing now and then to examine what he found; finally held up a small piece of reddish rock.
“Ochre.” He rubbed the stone between his fingers and it crumbled, staining his hands. “‘Farben auch, den Leib zu malen, steckt ihm in die Hand, dass er rötlich möge strahlen in der Seelen Land.’”
He turned. With the chunk of rock he drew upon my forehead and upon each of my cheeks; then carefully smoothed the ochre across my skin. “That’s from Schiller. ‘Put ye colors into his hand, that he may paint his body so he will shine redly in the Land of Souls.’”
“What—what do you mean?”
He stood, rolling the piece of rock between his fingers and staring at the horizon. Very carefully I touched my cheek, drew my hand away and smelled damp earth and another odor, cold and faintly metallic, like old pennies. I looked at Ralph; he raised his arm and with a flick of his wrist threw the stone toward the sunset. It arced high above the lone birch tree, and by some trick of the light seemed for an instant to hang there and glow, not like a spark or star but like some glittering aperture, a watchful eye in the void. Then it was gone. I did not hear where it fell.
“There they are,” he murmured.
I looked where he pointed. On the horizon, a dark smudge appeared. I squinted, thinking at first it was another stand of birches suddenly made visible by the angle of the sun. But the smudge grew larger, broke into smaller jots of darkness and then regrouped. Soon it was near enough that the wind brought its sound. A jingling as of many small bells, unmelodic but constant; voices calling back and forth; an occasional explosive huffing. I glanced at Ralph uncertainly, but he only continued to peer into the deepening shadows.
Minutes passed. The breeze became a cold blast, and now along with the walking music of the caravan the wind carried its scent. Woodsmoke, birch leaves, the pungent and recognizable stench of unwashed bodies. But most of all a dense, warm, animal smell, far stronger than any familiar grassy barn odor—the only thing I could liken it to was the sharp, almost angry musk one encounters at a zoo. I moved closer to Ralph. He did not acknowledge me beyond nodding, his eyes fixed on what was approaching.
A moment and they were only twenty feet from us, near the birch where I had last glimpsed the bit of ochre that Ralph had tossed away. It seemed to me that full night should have fallen by now, but the eerie twilight had not corroded into darkness. If anything, the sky had grown more brilliant, the colors a tumult of lavender and violet and crimson.
Certainly it was bright enough that I could see clearly the little group that had stopped in front of us. I counted eleven of them, slight slim-bodied figures, most no taller than myself. Their clothes were archaic but gorgeously designed—long skirts of hide or fur, dyed red or sky-blue and hemmed with ropes of beadwork and bone; strange open jackets of the same material that were almost like frock coats, trimmed with white fur and small triangular brass pendants. I could see their features very clearly, high cheekbones and skin the color of bronze, onyx eyes and hair. The men wore small conical caps of short dark fur. Their facial hair was sparse but unshaven, their chins ending in wispy black beards. The women had their hair in long braids, strung with still more beads and white feathers; all save one, whose braid was laced with leather tassels dyed red. On their feet were flat-soled shoes of carven wood and hide. They spoke in soft fluting voices that were more birdlike than human, broken now and then by laughter or the cries of two small children toddling behind the grownups. As they moved across the taiga clouds of insects sprang up about them, gilded by the sunset. Watching them I felt a profound, almost childish joy—
Because, marvelous as the people were, what was most wonderful of all was that every one either rode or walked beside a reindeer. Not huge and terrifying stags like the one I had seen slain; nor were they the graceful, golden deer that leaped across the roads in Kamensic. These animals were like nothing I had ever seen before, save in the fairy-tale posters by Edmund Dulac that hung in Ali’s room—small, graceful, almost dainty creatures, their fur the soft gray of a kitten’s belly. Even their antlers seemed toylike, the tips sawn off and strung with gold filigree and brass bells, a child’s memory of Christmas Eve and restless movement upon a rooftop. Small as they were, they seemed to bear their slender riders with ease; all save the two animals which brought up the rear of the cavalcade. The first of these carried no rider, but only a large bundle wrapped in deerskin and bound with leather thongs.
But it was the last reindeer that was truly a creature from a dream. Snow-white, its fur dazzling in the eternal twilight. It alone bore antlers that had not had their prongs sawn and blunted, and it alone carried neither saddle nor any other ornament. A solitary figure walked alongside it, head bowed and hidden beneath a fur hood. A figure slight as the others but wearing garb that seemed at once more archaic than their own, and more hieratic— a long tunic of supple hide, and over this a long open-fronted jacket, white and unadorned save for bands of white fur at cuff and hem. At the neck hung a necklace formed of myriad loops of crimson beads, heavy and pliant as a woven scarf.
The figure walked in silence, its feet moving in step with the animal’s. The white reindeer drew closer to its fellows, cropping at the coarse moss beneath their hooves, but before it could join them its keeper raised a hand bearing a long thin wand and slapped it upon the flank. The white reindeer halted. The figure struck it again, and this time I could see that the wand was in fact an antler, all its points shorn save two which formed a V at the tip. At the wand’s touch the reindeer shook its head and snorted in protest. The figure cried out a word of command; the animal immediately fell silent and began to nose the moss at its feet.
“See how it listens to you,” a voice breathed beside me. I started—I had forgotten Ralph was there—but before I could question him the figure took a step away from the animal and stood directly beneath the birch tree. The wind tore at the milky folds of the tunic and made ripples in the hood’s thick fur. The figure stood for a moment, wand in one hand. Then it tugged the hood back, and turning to the white reindeer cried out again. Louder, so that the other people stopped milling about and stood docile as their little herd. The command meant nothing to me, of course; but this time I recognized the voice. I began to shake my head, mouthing the word No over and over again until Ralph had to cover my lips with his hand.
“Yes, Lit.” With his other hand he forced my head up so I could see. “Oh, yes, yes, yes…”