The countryside looked new and green and fresh; it was summer, and the fields and woods, the path sides and river banks were full of unnameable flowers of every colour. The tall trees flexed in the warm summer winds, leaves bright and fluttering like flags, and water ran off the moors and hills and across the bunched stones of sparkling streams like some clarified concentrate of the air itself. He sweated to the crests of the gnarled hills, climbed the outcrop rocks at their summits, and ran whooping and laughing across the broader tops, under the brief shadows of the small high clouds.
On the moors, in the hills, he saw animals. Tiny ones that darted invisibly into thickets from almost under-foot, larger ones that leapt and stopped, looked back, then leapt away again, disappearing into burrows or between rocks; larger ones still that ran flowing off across the ground in herds, watching him, and then became almost invisible when they stopped to graze. Birds mobbed him when he walked too near their nests; others called out from nearby, one-wing fluttering, trying to distract him, when he approached theirs. He was careful not to step on their nests.
He always took a small notebook with him on his walks, and made a point of writing down anything interesting. He tried to describe the feel of the grasses in his fingers, the way the trees sounded, the visual diversity of the flowers, the way the animals and birds moved and reacted, the colour of the rocks and the sky. He kept a proper journal in a larger book, back in his room at the old couple's cottage. He wrote his notes up in that each evening, as though filling out a report for some higher authority.
In another large journal book, he wrote his notes out again, along with further notes on the notes, and then started to cross words out of the completed, annotated notes, carefully removing word after word until he had something that looked like a poem. This was how he imagined poetry to be made.
He had brought some books of poetry with him, and when the weather was wet, which was only rarely, he stayed in and tried to read them. Usually, though, they sent him to sleep. The books he had brought about poetry and poets confused him even more, and he had to continually re-read passage after passage to retain each word, and even then still felt none the wiser.
He went into the village tavern every few days, and played skittle and pebble games with the locals. The mornings after these evenings he regarded as recovery periods, and left his notebook behind when he walked.
The rest of the time he tired himself out and kept fit; climbing trees to see how high he could get before the branches became too thin, climbing rock faces and old quarries, balancing his way across fallen trees in steep gullies, leaping from rock to rock across rivers, and sometimes stalking and then chasing the animals on the moor, knowing he could never catch up with them, but laughing as he sprinted after them.
The only other people he saw in the hills were farmers and shepherds. Sometimes he saw slaves working in the fields, and very rarely he met other people out walking. He didn't like to stop and talk to them.
The one other person he ever saw regularly was a man who flew a kite on the high hills. They only saw each other from a distance. At first it just happened that their paths never crossed, but later he made sure that they didn't meet; he would change direction if he saw the gaunt figure of the man walking towards him, climb up a different hill if he saw the little red kite flying above the summit he'd intended to head for. It had become a sort of tradition, a little private custom.
The days went on. He sat on a hill once, and saw a slave running through the fields beneath, through the strange slow patterns that the currents in the wind pushed through the golden-red pelt of the land. The slave's path left a trail like the wake behind a ship. She got as far as the river, where the landlord's mounted overseer ran her down. He watched the overseer beat the woman — saw the long stick rise and fall, tiny in the distance — but he couldn't hear anything because the wind was in the wrong direction. When the woman finally lay still on the river bank, the overseer got down off his mount and knelt near her head; he saw something flash, but could not tell exactly what was going on. The overseer rode off; hobbled slaves came and took the woman away, later.
He made a note.
That evening, after dinner in the house of the old couple, once the wife had gone to bed, he told the old man what he had seen. The man nodded slowly, chewing on a mildly narcotic root, and spat juice into the fire. The overseer was known to be strict, the old man said; he took the tongue of any slave who tried to escape. He kept the tongues drying on a string stretched over the entrance to the slaves" compound at the lordship's farm.
He and the old man drank some fierce grain spirit from little cups, and then the old man told him a folk tale.
In the tale, a man walking through the wild wood was tempted from the path by some beautiful flowers, and then saw a handsome young woman lying asleep in a clearing. He went to the maiden, and she woke. He sat down beside her and as they talked he realised that she smelled of flowers, a perfume more wonderful than anything he had ever experienced before, and so intense that he was made dizzy by the heady strength of it. After a while, surrounded by her flowery scent, enchanted by her softly lilting voice and shy demeanour, he asked to kiss her, and finally was allowed, and their kisses grew passionate, and they coupled.
But as they did so, even from the first moment that joined them, whenever the man looked out of one eye he saw the woman change. From one eye she looked as she had from the first, but looking through the other eye she was older, no longer just past her childhood. With each beat of their love she grew older (though only seen through one eye), through her maturity and late glow and the matron look, to spry then frail old age.
All the time the man could see her in all her youth by just closing one eye — and certainly could not stop himself from the act they had embarked upon — but always he was tempted to sneak a look through the other eye, and be shocked and amazed at the terrible transformation taking place beneath him.
In the last few movements of his knowledge, he closed his eyes, only opening both at the moment of fulfilment, when he saw — with both eyes, now — that he had taken to him a rotting corpse, already known by worms and grubs; the smell of flowers changed in that instant to an overpowering stench of corruption, but in such a way that he knew that it had always smelled like that, and as his loins gave themselves to the corpse, his belly threw out his last meal at the same time.
The wood spirit had his life by two strands, therefore, and with both hands took a firm grip of him, unravelled him from the weave of life, and dragged him away to the shadow world.
His soul was shattered into a million pieces there, and thrown over the world, to make up the souls of all pollen-flies, which bring new life and old death to flowers, at the same time.
He thanked the old man for telling him the story, and told him some tales he remembered from his own upbringing.
A few days later he was running after one of the small animals on the moor; it skidded on some dew-wet grass and tumbled end-over-end, finally falling, limbs spread, on some stones, winding itself. He gave a victorious, whooping cry and threw himself forward down the slope towards the animal as it wobbled to its feet; he jumped the last couple of metres, landing with both feet, just beside where the animal had fallen; it collected itself and sped off again, unharmed, and vanished down a hole. He laughed, breathing hard, sweating. He stood there, put his hands on his knees and bent at the waist, trying to get his breath back.
Something moved under his feet. He saw it, felt it.