Writing Right Out In Public: Scene #6

[ecosophia]

I ended up way behind schedule on this, though there was good reason for it -- in fact, two good reasons. On the one hand, I had the editing and foreword to do for Vintage Worlds I, the anthology of Old Solar System stories edited by me and Zendexor, the general factotum of the Solar System Heritage website -- that's now at the publisher, and a call for stories for Vintage Worlds II will be forthcoming shortly. On the other, the sixth volume of my epic fantasy with tentacles, The Weird of Hali: Hyperborea, was in the last stages of completion; I've rarely had to work harder on a novel, and it swallowed much of my spare time for more than a month before finally coming out right. 

Still, both those are out of the way, and I was able to work out the next scene on this project last night and tonight...

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A vast silence gathered around Embery then. It embraced the thorn trees, the gray crannied stone of Mollory Edge, the pale blue sky above, the whole of Raithwold and everything beyond it, but what lay at its heart was the half-human figure before her, crouched at the foot of the trees. She tried to open her mouth, tried to make the least sound, and could do neither. The golden eyes regarded her without curiosity, without haste, as though she had been standing there on the grass since the spirits had shaped that part of Raithwold and would be standing there still after ages of ages when Mollory Edge had crumbled away to dust.

“Thank you,” Tay said. “Thank you, Uldin.”

The faun glanced at him, and the half-human face creased in a smile. “You’re early,” he said in a high sharp voice. “You’re lucky I’m here at all. And who is this with you?”

“My mother.” Then, in a rush: “We’re in trouble. They’ll stone us if they catch us.”

“Ah.” The horned head gestured back over one shoulder, toward the darkness beneath the thorn trees. “Best come in, then. No one finds this cave unless I wish it.”

Tay got his satchel and his blanket roll from the grass, took Embery’s hand, pulled her forward. Dazed, she followed, bent low to pass under the branches of the thorns, clambered into the darkness beyond. Dry rushes covered the floor of the cave. The rank animal scent of the faun filled the air, but through it she caught odors of smoke, dried meat, old pungent roots.

“Sit,” said the faun, gesturing. She settled, and the rushes crackled beneath her. Tay sat next to her, nestled up close, and she put an arm around his shoulders.

The yellow eyes regarded her again. “They wish to catch you,” said the faun. “To stone you. Why is that?”

Embery found her voice. “Some of the people in the village saw you and my son walking up past Creel’s Head. The monks think that means I’ve had dealings with unhallowed things.”

“Have you?” the faun asked.

Taken aback, Embery stared at the creature. “No,” she forced out. Then, because she was sitting a few steps away from a faun of Amalin, she let herself say something she’d scarcely allowed herself to think before: “But I wish I did.”

A smile spread over the half-human face.  “Maybe you will.”

All at once he turned, scuttled low to the ground into the back of the cave, came forward again with shapes in his hands she couldn’t see clearly at first. “Here,” he said. “Before anything else. Your son has shared bread and drink with me but you have not. Will you?”

She took the flat brown loaf he gave her, bit back her apprehension. There were stories about the bread that strange beings in the woodlands baked and the wine that they brewed, and what those did to the people who ate and drank them. Those were not stories of Amalin, she reminded herself. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course.  When Eremon asked wisdom from the faun, they ate and drank together before the faun gave him counsel.”

“Good,” said the faun. “Your son knew that too.” Then, with a odd sidelong look, as though the words shamed him: “I am not that faun.”

Remembering the story, she broke the loaf in half, bowed a little as she sat while handing him half of it. The yellow eyes regarded her, inscrutable, as the faun poured something from a wineskin into two cups fashioned from wooden burls hollowed out.  He gave her one, dipped a corner of the bread in his cup, waited until she’d done the same.

The bread was of seeds and roots ground coarsely together, she guessed, and half-glimpsed in thought the faun’s strong hands pushing one rock over another. The wine was of autumn berries, and tasted faintly of the skin in which it had been aged. Neither worked any change in her that she could sense. She and the faun ate and drank in silence until the loaf was gone and the cups were empty. Tay watched them both, kept the same silence.

“Now,” said the faun. “Tell me. Tell me everything.”

Embery drew in a long breath, and told the whole story: how Merimer the doctor had come to the village, how the villagers would rather give her gifts than pay him in silver pennies, how Anner’s sons had seen Tay and the faun off beyond Creel’s Head, and from there to her flight with Tay to Mollory Edge. All the while the faun watched her with those unreadable eyes, and kept watching her for a long moment after she’d finished.

“What do you desire?” he asked then.

The question took her by surprise. “I don’t know.” Then, catching herself: “I don’t want them to catch me or Tay. I know we’ll need to go somewhere else and try to find a new home, but I don’t know where, and I don’t know how we’ll manage.”

Her voice trickled off into silence. Now that the immediate threat of the magister and the monks was at arm’s length, and the shock of the faun’s appearance had begun to fade, the bleakness of her situation and Tay’s had begun to sink in. It was early yet in the year, true, and enough days remained to travel far before winter closed in—but in all Raithwold, was there a place that would welcome the two of them? She knew well enough what the folk of the village she’d left would think if a stranger woman who dealt in herbs and healing showed up suddenly in their midst. Worse, word of her disappearance and Tay’s would spread, and though it might take time to come to whatever place she went, come it someday would. There hovered before her eyes in the cave’s dim light a vision of a life spent fleeing further and further into strange countries, pursued always by magisters, monks, and fearful villagers with stones in their hands—

All at once she realized she was trembling. Tay gave her a troubled look and took one of her hands in both of his, but the faun simply watched her, his yellow eyes giving back nothing.

“How far are you willing to go?” he asked her then.

“I don’t know,” she said again. “As far as I have to.”

“That is wise.” He considered her for a time.

Tay, watching him, ventured, “We talked about going.”

The yellow eyes turned. “Yes, we did.” Then, to Embery: “I owe you a debt.”

“How so?”

“When your son went with me beyond the place you call Creel’s Head, to learn certain things from the wind in the oak-trees there, I did not think we would be seen. I was wrong, and so the two of you have lost your home and may yet lose your lives.” He shrugged. “A little thing, perhaps, for you will both be gone soon enough.”

That called up an unwilling laugh from her. “I suppose so.  You don’t die, do you?”

The yellow eyes narrowed suddenly. “Of course we die. We can be killed. Have been killed, by the thousands, by the tens of thousands—but should one of my kind escape such a thing, why, then season follows season without bringing him the least step closer to death. We do not age toward death, even when that would be merciful.”

Abruptly he turned away, moved back a little, for all the world like a skittish goat shying away from some too rapid approach. “Enough,” he said then. “I waste your time with empty words. Will you come?”

The abruptness of the question startled her. “Come where?”

“Amalin,” said the faun.

She stared, open-mouthed. The faun regarded her with inscrutable eyes.

It was Tay who broke the silence that followed. “That’s what we talked about, Mother,” he said, his eyes shining. “That’s why we went past Creel’s Head to the oak groves, to ask the wind in the oak leaves for an omen—and it was a bright omen, a good strong omen, the kind that came from Oromas himself in the old days. We can go. We can leave Raithwold behind and go to Amalin. We really can.”

“Will you come?” the faun asked her again.

She was trembling again, but this time it wasn’t fear. All the stories she’d learned from old Neely came crashing into her mind at once, every tale of Amalin the golden, where white temples rose up against a sapphire sky, where Eremon fought and Dreela reigned and Tatennen answered every riddle but one. More: the wild desire that had stirred in her earlier that morning, to raise an altar to the gods and goddesses that were gone with never a monk or a magister to learn of it, burst over her again, irresistible.

“Please,” she said, and tears pooled in her eyes.

Comments

[ecosophia]

You're welcome and thank you. None of the novels that moved me most had the kind of plot that depends on the author cooking up ways to make things difficult for the characters, and some of them -- I'm thinking here especially of Hermann Hesse's Demian, and more recently Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge -- don't have problem-oriented plots at all. The kind of story in which a character works out a complex destiny without benefit of contrived crises is one I find very satisfying.

As for "I am not that faun," I have a guess -- but at this point it's no more than a guess. The faun told Tay earlier that he's wise but not good, and now he's distancing himself from the faun who counseled Eremon (who's the stand-in for Heracles in this world). I think there is a bitter failure in our faun's past, something that reaches back to the death of the old gods. But we'll see...