Brack looked at the boy. “You feeling all right? You've been quiet.”
“So have you.”
“Why don't you tell me something.”
The boy went to the water and knelt and drank with it cupped in his hands. Dripping through his fingers and from his chin. Beading brightly. “What is it you want to know?”
“It's you I want to know.”
“What's that supposed to mean?”
“It means where'd you come from and how'd you get to be where we found you.”
“I told you that.” Sitting back on his haunches as if unsure if he wanted another drink or not. “We met a man selling his horse. Told him he could come with us.”
“Go back farther. How'd you get there?”
“You figure now you don't trust me? We've been riding for days and just now you decide it.”
“I never said I didn't trust you.” Brack went also and bent and drank. Perhaps that similarity would put the boy at ease. If not the water was cool and fresh and in its own right a relief. “I just want to find out how you ended up there and where you're going.”
The boy looked at him a minute. Squinting into the sun. “All right,” he said at last.
The story the boy told was this:
He and his sister had set out from a town deep in the mountains, a place with little farming and nothing else and which had been beset with plague. Their parents dead and many others. Rotting bodies in the streets. Those still alive determined to leave and as they left the others burned to the ground every house and store and chapel and barn. The bodies of the dead dragged inside to burn also and the smoke horrible and they rode with their cloaks over their faces until they couldn't smell it anymore and still he could smell it in his cloak for days and at last threw it away and carried on without.
The next town they came to knew where they were from and drove them out in the night. Holed up as they were in a field left fallow. The men came with torches and pulled them from their tent and their bedrolls and put them outside and told them as blades glinted in that torchlight that they'd never be seen again or they would die. His sister pleading and crying. And in the end they left and they walked two weeks with nothing and were almost dead when they came to the third village and there no one knew them.
In this place they found work and it was hard but it was work. The boy a farmer's hand and rising with the sun to work the fields and turn soil and tend crops. The girl also but her duties to the animals. Milking cows and scattering feed for the chickens and when those chickens had fowled their pen moving them as a flock to a new place where they could live while the old sat in rain and sun and turned all back to dirt.
This a small farm and the flock not large and the wages as meager as all that would bring. But they had a place to sleep and food and they needed little else and lived there for some time.
Brack asked him the name of the town and he could not recall. Could say only the name of the farmers they'd lived with but it could have been anyone's name and Brack had met more men with it than he could count.
But this too had come to an end for the blight had followed them and soon the village was sick. The town began to die and the farmer's wife and then the farmer himself fell ill. Laid all day in his bed and the field rotted and the chickens died in their pen and the cattle called to be milked. The boy and his sister at first doing what they could but they could not do it all and then the farmer was dead and they left.
That town did not burn when they were there for the people did not know what was on them or what it would do. But it burned a few days later, he said. They were living then in a cave in the mountains and could look down to that valley and the scattered farms and for seven days people flooded by on that road, some sick and dying and others healthy and terrified and all going where they went. He called out but they would not stop and some looked at him with fear and others told him to run.
He woke that night and the whole valley was fire. He could smell the bodies and somewhere off a man screaming. The next morning they left the cave and the smoke was still heavy and everywhere and the fire was in the timber. Burning and rising and thick. They rode out on the stolen horse with the fire at their backs and hours later when he looked again the whole mountain was in flame and he did not know if it had ever stopped but they continued on.
The fourth town they came to their last. This one the same the boy had named before: Canntal. Here they had looked for work and not found it and already rumors had followed them. The hooded glances of strangers. Men who would not look at them nor speak to them when they asked for work. Talk of plague and fire and a faceless god of wrath or judgment. Others walking these same roads.
And so they had left, he said. Heading for the road and the other man selling his horse for food and people would not speak to him either and they three had set out and hoped perhaps in the plains and not these close mountain towns they would again be unknown and they could carve out for themselves something that was a life.
They stood in that depression with the fall roaring and the horses drank their fill and the boy took off his clothes and walked out into the water to wash the rest of the blood from his body. Juoth checking the ropes holding the girl in her blanket and Brack standing beside the horse and looking up the side of the far mountain where starkly silhouetted against the sky moved a line of travelers. All on foot and leading pack animals. Too far away to see anything but the black shapes of their forms where they came out of the trees and walked along the spine of the mountain and then went back into the trees again.
These vagabonds with an unknown origin, a destination the same. Perhaps wandering without end or perhaps even now approaching some place where their journey would cease. He could not hear them over the waterfall and they moved as ghosts. After a time he lost count and then he looked away and when he looked back they were gone as if they had never been.
The boy finished and dried himself with his own shirt and pulled on all but that shirt and held it out to dry in the sun and the thin air and they remounted and moved on. Forward through the stands of trees and here the ground level and easy for the first time in days. Littered always with green and brown needles, those dead and those dying. Shot through with grass. The horses walking slowly and eating as they did. The sun so close to hot now but still a deep cold when they moved through shadows of trees or clouds. The boy shivering and then putting on his shirt when it dried and all three riding in silence.
For perhaps to some others they were the vagabonds and the whole world the opposite of what Brack saw now and those other men and women with their lives and desires and dreams watching them move across the valley floor and disappear into their own trees.
All men so alike and so blinded to it.
It was a half an hour riding through that forest before they came to the edge of the gorge and the old stone bridge standing across it. The span four hundred yards and the bridge as wide as six men lying down and sweeping gently upward as it rose. The rock faces below it red and dark and jagged. Far below the sound of water rushing, but visible from the edge only that sheer face dropping away as if it descended to the center of the earth and the hell that waited there. The stones of the bridge dark with age and ivy running long and heavy along the sides.
They stood the horses in the road and looked at it and Brack looked at Juoth and the other man shrugged. In this all that needed to be said. The horses were shying from the edge and did not want to carry on but they would do it if they were forced and once they were on the bridge itself and those stones too wide to see below they loosened and walked as they should.