“You plan to return, then?”
“If the world be round, I can scarcely help it.” He chuckled. “Someday, I should like to mingle with my clan again, even if I must disguise myself to do so.”
The shaman shook his head. “I have it on good authority that Lord Aelfric's men are going to attack your old citadel as soon as the roads are dry in spring. They will kill all who resist and baptize the remainder. Long before you return — if you return — the independent city you once ruled will be but another Roman outpost on the frontiers of the Holy Empire.”
Alobar smacked his palm with his fist. “Then I must warn the clan! I'll organize a defense! Maybe we'll attack first! By the golden whiskers of the morning star, we'll show those turnip eaters what battle's about! They'll need more than one god to save their asses ere I and my boys are through, blah blah blah. .”
“Too late, Alobar, too late.” As if to somehow illustrate his point, the shaman tore a badger mask from the wall and tossed it into the fire. “The foe is not merely Lord Aelfric but the whole of the empire. It is too large, too entrenched, has too much momentum. The world is changing, Alobar.” He gestured at the burning mask. “Don't waste your life trying to hold back the tides of history. History begot Rome, and history someday will bury it. In the meantime, you've other fish to fry. Have you forgotten? Are you to be an individual, a trespasser in territory none else has had the wit or nerve to explore, or just another troublesome mosquito to be swatted by the authorities? You're no longer king or warrior, remember, but something new. It will do your clansmen no good for you to be slain alongside them, but who can guess what benefits may result from a new life wholly led?”
“You are correct,” said Alobar. He sighed. “The clan, its lusty women and its noble hounds, lies behind me. It is forward I must go.”
After embracing the old man, he marched out into the snow. He aimed his boots at the east and forced his heels to follow his toes. Quickly, the little hut of the shaman was out of view. Out of sight, too, was the village and the manor.
Frol must suspect that I am taking swift advantage of my beanship, straddling another's thighs at this late hour, he thought. He sensed that he was causing her some pain, and that, in turn, hurt him. He would miss Frol and the babies, perhaps more intensely than he missed Wren and Mik. But there was a strange wind blowing through him, was there not? Was it not blowing him away?
The sky was a velvety black paw pressing on the white landscape with a feline delicacy, stars flying like sparks from its fur. The cry of an owl, brooding over its ruby appetites, cut through the frigid air like a vibrating pin. Then, all was silent except for the soft crunch, like ants chewing wax, of his boots upon the snow. His steps quickened. They took up a gay rhythm. He was very nearly dancing across the frozen fields.
“The world is round,” he sang, in tune with his footfalls.
“Existence can be rearranged. A man can be many things.
“I am special and free.
“And the world is round round round.”
A few weeks later, Alobar was awakened by a hot sun in his face and a hot stench in his nostrils. He sat up in the grass and rubbed his eyes. Don't ask where the rest of that dream went, Alobar. All dreams continue in the beyond.
The warm sunlight gave him a lazy, comfortable, lie-around-all-morning-and-scratch-your-armpits feeling, but inside his nose the cilia were waving, the turbinates were knocking, and the spheno-ethmoidal recess was on red alert: by Woden's honey pots, what a scent!
Nearby, a flock was grazing, and Alobar guessed the aroma must be its fault, but fie on wool and a pox on mutton if sheep were so rude to the proboscis. Perhaps in warm climates, sheep take on the odor of their cousins, thought Alobar, for surely it was the essence of goat that permeated his nasal passages, and rutting goat at that.
With a flock so close, there must be a shepherd in the vicinity. Maybe I can talk him out of a few crumbs of breakfast ere I get me to a prettier-smelling place. Alobar went to rise but something snagged his cloak and pulled him back down. Again he tried to stand, again he was yanked to the sod. He reached behind him to free himself from the branch or vine that held him, but he touched nothing. Scooting forward a few feet on his rump, he made another attempt at rising, and another and another, each with the same result. Angry and a little frightened, he drew his knife and, still sitting, whirled around. There was no one behind him. With all of the elastic in his leg muscles, he snapped himself upward. Thud! Down he went like a sack of meteorites addressed special delivery to gravity.
This time he just sat there, fingering his blade, giving every sheep on the hillside a good look at his expression of frustration, bewilderment, and humiliation. Nearly a quarter of an hour passed before, very slowly, centimeter by centimeter, sinew by sinew, he commenced cautiously to draw himself upright. And he made it! He was standing! He stretched, expelled a sigh of relief that fluttered the lashes of a ewe twenty yards away, and strode off, only in midstride to fall flat on his new growth of beard.
An outburst of wild, magnificent laughter resounded over the hillside and echoed from the crags in the distance; wild laughter because its notes were outside the range of the normal human voice and so uninhibited as to make the shaman's cackle seem fettered; magnificent laughter because it seemed huge in scope and rare in distribution; laughter that was simultaneously strange and familiar and that instilled in Alobar the fear of the unknown and the joy of self-recognition. It was laughter that might have been squeezed from the tubes of his own darkest heart, then amplified fifty times through the bellows of a loon's ass.
The laughter evidently affected the sheep, for all at once they began to bleat and kick, the oldest rams in the flock cavorting as if they were lambs. A breeze suddenly raked the landscape, drawing from the grasses a dark murmuring, and setting the thistle bushes to chattering like thin teeth. Bees abandoned the gorse to fly in crazy circles a few feet above ground, while the birdsong that previously had gladdened the hillside lowered appreciably in volume, its capricious trills and whistles replaced by a consistent melodic line, almost reverent in tone. The unease that Alobar experienced was as piercing as a thorn, yet there was a pleasant tightening in his groin, and his limbs felt ticklish and kinetic, inspired beyond his control to join the flock in its awkward dance. The way he found himself moving horizontally through the grass made him wonder if he had not been seized by the Serpent Power, if there were not an edge, after all, and if he were not dangerously close to it.
“Hey!” a voice called out. “Why doth thy crawl about on thy belly? Art thou a man or a worm?”
Compelled by the voice, which was both dreadful and jolly, threatening and seductive, Alobar forgot his recent failures and scrambled to his feet. “Where are you?” he asked in a shaky falsetto. “Why are you laughing?”
“I am everywhere,” the voice boomed. “And why shouldn't a god laugh at the puny endeavors of man?”
It was then that Alobar's battle-trained vision focused on the leer in the leaves. At first, the leer was all that he could see, but then he caught sight of a shaggy tail and realized that it was connected to the leer. (The tail bone frequently is connected to the leer bone, although today that connection is illegal in seventeen states and the District of Columbia.) In a moment, the bushes parted and into the pasture pranced an unbelievable creature, all woolly and goatlike from its waist down to its hooves; human and masculine above. Or, to be precise, human above save for a pair of stubby horns thrusting like bronze-tipped beet-diggers in the bright mountain air.