The winter has come and gone. We are already deep into spring. The days are watery blue and the wind blows mild, but there is no blossom to be seen. The scrub is grayish green rather than black, the sea throbs and burns. But there are no orchards to break into bud, no violets, no shade trees to show their pale green fronds, no streams to bubble and braid in the sunlight. Winter has been terrible beyond belief. For seven months the wind from the pole comes howling in across a thousand miles of open grassland, flattening the brush, whipping the sea into black foam, till at last the whole ocean freezes, and you can walk out from the shore upon it and see the fish motionless below. The brackish pools from which the women draw our drinking water grow solid, and it is the men who go out now to chip lumps of it that they haul back to be melted, as we need it, over a flame. Impossible to venture out in the that freezing gale without a flapped cap and wrappings of fur, a cloak boots, leggings - and even then the breath freezes, the beard forms icicles that snap and tinkle. A man’s speech might be chipped off in the same manner as our drinking water and melted later in the warmth of the house, if anyone dared open his mouth out there to pass even the time of day. We move about it in a dream, as if our wits had turned to sharp little crystals in our head. As if, like bears and other such creatures, we had crawled deep into some cave in ourselves and fallen asleep, moving about only as dream figures, stiff, unseeing, as we pass in and out of each other’s lives.
My mind moves out continually to the deer forest and the Child. How does he survive out there? Naked. Unhoused. I see him often in my sleep, a ghost moving over the snow among the birches, chewing at lichen, digging under the ice for mold. Can he survive this season? Will the men find his tracks next year? I am impatient for the weather to soften so that I can urge the old man, Ryzak, to make up a party and search for him. It is my secret. I will speak out nearer the time. It is what keeps me alive in all this. Meanwhile, night after night, I hunt the Child in my sleep. I warm him with my breath. Or is it the breath of some animal that warms him, wolf or deer, even there in my dreams? Or does he perhaps sleep out the winter like one of the creatures, curled up in some hollow and tied to the continuance of things only by his own slow breathing? And if so, how is he fed? And what does he dream of? Does he dream? He is the wild boy of my childhood. I know it now. Who has come back to me. He is The Child. Two events give shape to these white months. One was the first news in our village, cried from street to street and beaten out with the wooden gongs, that the Dacians had taken and burned one of the towns to the north and were streaming toward us over the river. The other, which followed almost immediately, was their attack on us.
The river, long before the year’s end, had begun to freeze. Five- thousand paces wide, it was now a bridge of solid ice, and the Dacian horsemen, hundreds of them, poured from the northern plain and were thundering across it. We had to man the walls of our village against them, and I too was called upon to turn out with one of the companies, given a lance and helmet - I who have lived through fifty years in an empire at peace with itself and never done a day’s drill - and sent to stand behind the palisade in the cold night air, unrecognizable under my mountain of fur.
I am taken with the irony of it. As a Roman citizen of the knightly order, the descendant of a whole line of warriors, with the law and the flower of Roman civilization to protect against the barbarians, I scoffed at such old-fashioned notions as duty, patriotism, the military virtues. And here I was, aged fifty, standing on guard at the very edge of the known world. To protect what? A hundred or so mud and wattle huts, three hundred savage strangers who do not even speak my tongue. And of course, my own skin.
As it happened, on the night the raiders came I was in bed, and had to be shaken awake by one of the women. I heard it too then. The thunder of their hooves on the ice, the wooden gongs beating, the voices in the dark. Ghostly figures out of the north, out of my dream, galloping in across the wide arc of moonlight that was water only a few weeks ago. I stumbled out. Arrows rained out of the sky and fell in the thatch, struck a poor fellow watching at the corner of the stockade, and he fell, writhing. The arrows are tipped with poison. The wound festers and stinks, and for three days the man whose body has been struck is in delirium, finding hiw way slowly out into the grasslands beyond the river to the place where the earth will receive him. All night they swirled round and round the stockade, yowling, yelping like wolves, and the arrows fell. In the morning they were gone, and all the brush to the southeast was aflame. Great clouds of smoke rolled back over us, black, bitter with the smell of thorns. They have passed on to one of the settlements on the Thracian side. And now it is spring.
I have spoken to the old man about a search party (I have enough of their language now to make the most pressing of my wants known to people) but he seems unwilling to commit himself. Is he afraid? Does some superstition exist about the Child? Was the shaman’s trance song, which I took to be some sort of blessing on the deer hunt, in reality a ceremony for the Child? Where do these people believe the Child comes from? The gods? Do they think he is one of their own people? Is he? Or a child perhaps from the grasslands to the north, who has been lost here in one of the raids?
I have not told the old man that I know the Child, and used to speak to him when I was a boy at Sulmo. Nor have I admitted to him that I want to capture the boy and bring him here among us. Only that I need to assure myself that he has survived into another season; which the old man believes readily enough, since they think me mad anyway, endlessly in a ferment about things they care nothing for, fussing about notions in my own head. But day after day the old man makes excuses. The palisade has to be repaired, and they have to make a long trip north to the pine forests for timber. Then an old man in the village dies, and the whole male population has to make a two day funeral journey to see him interred. Then the fish are running. A whole week is taken up while the men row out with nets day after day and take them. Then another period when they go out with lanterns after the squid. Is the old man simply humoring me? Must we wait, as before, for autumn? It is autumn. Tomorrow we go again to the birch woods after deer. I dare not mention the Child. We ride out in the same way as before, make the same detour up to the plateau and through the screen of pines to where the dead ride high on their fleshless horses. Only this year the cold has come early. The plateau is in cloud, gray mists swirl across before us and the poles click and sway. The shouts of the men as they ride round scattering their handfuls of seed are dampened by fog, cut off and blown back into their throats.
On the way to the woods it drizzles. There are no tracks. The earth underfoot is soggy and the horses splash through puddles of brilliant blue light amongst the leaves, or through dirty-gray clouds. We hunt deer. Flay them, butcher the meat and load it in panniers. There is no sign of the Child. The other men look anxiously about them and are glad when we can get away. I am crazy with disappointment and grief. Another winter. How can he survive? How can I survive, without knowing he is still there?