She turned; the eyes of the man had glazed over. Sighing, she closed the lids gently.
"He was your son," the wizard murmured. "I had twelve sons," she replied. "Six remain. I had sixteen daughters. Only two still walk."
Her face was thin and shrunken to the skull. But the eyes still were large, the hair a cascade of foam down her back. Manning-lore's throat tightened; he put his hand out to her. She did not feel his touch.
Manninglore ordered the corn mown, the stalks plowed under. Then he kindled fire and brewed magic powder. He broadcast it over the fields and planted the maize.
And the old woman moved through the village, tending her children, for the young now were dying.
The corn grew green and tall—but the kernels were small, and crumbled to powder as the husks were stripped off.
It was plowed under, and the wizard brewed waters of power from the saps of trees, then planted the maize.
And the old woman knelt by her last dying daughter. Breath stilled; the old woman stayed by her in silence awhile. Then, stretching out her quivering hand, she closed the eyes of her child. She sighed, and fell limp in the dust.
Manninglore cradled her head in the crook of his arm, holding a steaming cup to her lips. The old eyes opened slowly. "I loved you, wizard," she whispered. "I saw you at dawn on the moun-taintop, and I loved you. I could not be content with any man, because my love was you. I bore a child to every man of my generation, twenty-eight children, one for each year I could bear, because of my love for you. No other man would I have; I lived therefore in shame and in scorn. Yet still I love you."
Then her head fell back as her eyes rolled up, and the slow rise and fall of the flattened breasts ceased.
He closed her eyes, pressed her hair to his cheek. "She loved me—I, hunchback and cripple, who swore no woman could look upon me without revulsion. I ruined her life, and she loved me. I gave her nothing, yet for all of her days, she loved me."
He looked up to the old folk crowding about him, bodies of wire and paper under the fiery sun. "Are all the youth dead?" he asked, and they nodded.
He tallied the walking mummies about him and muttered, "These at least shall not die."
Then Manninglore brewed fierce magic, a potion of earth and water long simmered with berries of virtue and bones of creatures dead a hundred thousand years and more. Into the fire beneath he cast powders that flamed in strange colors so that the broth would breathe the powers of their vapors as it drew into itself the flames below and the air above. Long he watched it churn and roil while stars drifted across the sky and the sun rose like a grim coal where once his ridge had stood. Then he set it aside an hour and, when it had cooled, held the beaker in his hands, frowning down upon it, considering at length what he had wrought and what he meant to do, for he knew the potion's power, knew how long it would keep him alive, knew why it would need to—and thereby knew its cost. At last he stood, squaring his shoulders, set the beaker to his lips, and drank the entire brew.
Then did Manninglore strip off all his garb and walk out over the fields, each step a mighty labor, for as the sun rose higher and heat beat down, red drops began to spring from every pore—and the wizard measured the fields with his tread all that day, stooping forward to water the earth with his blood.
But when he leaned, drained, on the trunk of an oak, the blood still stood, thick and heavy, over the furrows. It failed to sink into the earth through all that long night, and the sun, in the morning, baked it to glaze.
"Now, spirit, how is this?" sighed the wizard. "I have given the blood of my life, but the earth will not take it."
"You have waited too long," mourned the spirit. "Sage, your blood has grown thick with the ages. It will not yield to the earth."
Then Manninglore slumped to his knees and leaned to strike, rolling full length in the dust. The old folk of the clan saw the fall of their sage and, moaning, slipped one by one to measure their lengths on the clay under the glare of the sun.
The afternoon light burned red through his eyelids; the last labored breathing ceased near him. Only the rustle of Demouach's wings by his shoulder, and the calling Wind over the lip of the beaker, were left him.
Then, slowly, the red of the light slipped from his sight. A cool breeze touched his cheek. Forcing his eyelids open, Manninglore saw the tip of a spruce standing between his face and the sun.
And there in the shadow, by Manninglore's elbow, a shoot of green corn speared through the glaze.
"Too late," the sage muttered. "Too late." Then he rose up on his elbow screaming, his free, shaking arm pointing up at the spruce. "Go, Demouach! And hang this sounding bell to the top of that tree, that men may know there was once a clan here!"
And Demouach leaped into air with the beaker, bound it to the top spike of the spruce with a ribbon of corn husk. Crying, then, he swooped to the side of his master and friend.
But the wizard's eyelids were closed, sunken in, the skin of his face become ashen, the last fate-spiting breath expired.
Then Demouach swirled into the air with one last screaming wail, and ceased.
The forest has reclaimed the valley, filling it from hill to hill, but high above the restless green of hickory and oak towers the skeleton of a spruce, bleak against the annealed sky. From its scaling, brittle tip there hangs a bell, a bell of bronze without a clapper, alien in the wind's demesne. And the cataracting gale exacts a tribute from it, a tribute paid in moans, a groaning lament caught from the mouth of the bell and flung out over the forest, to break against the mountains and be funneled down into the mountain pass.
There, in the notch between the peaks, the dirge collects again, feeding in upon itself, slapping into the baffled granite and rebounding, rolling in its torment till it echoes up into a banshee wail, an eternal keening coronach, despair.
And far below, a patch of forest floor is bare, fused into obsidian. At its center stands a mummified cornstalk, paper wrapped around a hollow core, sole testament to the clan of Mannin.