“Accept this one, then,” Stilpo said, seeming pleased with himself. “His name is Teuser. May he be of assistance to you.”
Otson looked at Teuser carefully.
“He’s mine?” he asked.
Stilpo laughed.
December was nearing its end when they set out. They would ride as far as a certain hamlet in the foothills, then exchange horses for a donkey.
When Otson admitted he’d never seen a gladiatorial bout in his life, Tullus latched on to him and regaled him en route with repetitive accounts of battles he had either participated in or witnessed up close. He was a good storyteller, with zest for his subject and a surprisingly good ear for mimicking voices, but for the most part he was too technical to follow, so that it seemed like a blur of arms and legs, weapons, shields, elbows and butting heads swarming from his mouth in a baffling succession of decisive maneuvers and spectacular coups.
Meanwhile, Nicostratus glared at the mountains as they slowly approached, already searching them from where he was. The peaks were filmed with a meager snowfall and the weather was clear, if windy. The mountains continued docilely to look like mountains. He found it impossible to attach any special idea of menace to them.
The hamlet in the foothills he found surprisingly large. They would stay the night there. There was an entire house standing empty that was theirs to use, if they wanted it. Otson inquired how it was that they happened to have an empty house, and was told, a little sheepishly, that a family had been living there until early last autumn, when some ailment or other carried off every last one of them.
“We don’t want that house,” Otson said flatly.
Crammed in a corner by a heap of feebly glowing embers that night, Nicostratus remembered Otson’s refusal and regretted it.
The following day, they set out at dawn. A light morning mist burned off nearly right away and the sky deepened to pure indigo. They ate bread and honey, received more bread and some cheese to take with them on top of their provisions, and Nicostratus left thinking that they would have had that much less to eat, perhaps, if they had slept in that empty house.
By noon, they had reached the spot where Libo’s party must have tied their horses. There was the narrower path leading up, curving out of sight. They found nothing but the tracks of Grumio’s men, and those were nearly fully effaced. Teuser hovered near and scrutinized a patch of ground behind some brush that might have been what Otson called “the bloody place.”
They searched carefully, for an hour. Nicostratus discovered score markings on some of the tree trunks that he believed were made by ropes. There were notches, blackened now, but not very old, where the horses had yanked the ropes tight enough to cut into the bark so deeply he could fit the tip of his thumb into the groove, halfway to the first joint.
“A horse would have to throw itself forward with all its weight to pull that hard on a line,” he said. “You see how, eh — there’s no scraping? It only goes directly in, just here. It was a single tug, and it would have parted the rope.”
They kept the donkey with them when they climbed the path. It was too steep for horses, but, according to Otson, it would level off to an easier grade a bit past the bend.
A wind came up and rustled dead leaves in the copse when they saw it for the first time. The path cut neatly through it, in an unobstructed line right up the slope. The way was stony, but straight, and the slope above it was plainly visible not a hundred yards from where they stood. No one, even at night, could have gone astray on that path.
They kept climbing, assiduously scanning the ground, which was bare and innocent. They entered the copse with a sense of foreboding that could be attributed to nothing in their surroundings. There were dead trees, dead leaves, stones, a blank and traceless path, the slopes to either side, and the open space beyond that had engulfed so many.
They tied the donkey below the copse and began going over the place, inch by inch, turning over stones, brushing fingertips over the tree trunks, checking for broken branches. They spent hours in that copse and, once, Teuser gave a wild yelp and flashed away, running at full tilt down the path and out of the copse. Otson ran after him a little way, then gave up. Nicostratus hurried over to where Teuser had been when he cried, but found nothing. Otson came back, Tullus came over, and they all three pored over that ground, eyeing every piece of grit, even sniffing at the ground themselves, but found nothing. They resumed their search. Nothing.
As they were preparing to give up, Otson saw Teuser standing a few feet away from him, looking sheepish. He did not meet Otson’s eyes when he approached.
“This time you were afraid,” he said to the dog. “Be brave next time.”
They decided to have a little something to eat. Nicostratus climbed a short distance up out of the copse and seated himself on a stone. Otson understood and agreed; he didn’t want to eat in that copse either. They were refreshing themselves in frustrated silence when he stood up, peering intently across the gorge where the road bent below them.
“Do you see those rocks?” he asked, pointing across the gorge.
If the day hadn’t been so clear, he would never have been able to make them out from this far away; a small heap of rocks, high up there on the far side. There was a seam, or projection there; not a path, but a way, at any rate, and, almost hidden beside a boulder, that artificial heap of rocks.
“The top one,” Otson says. “Do you see how it curves out, toward us?”
Nicostratus couldn’t say he did, but the top stone was long enough and thin enough to look a little unnatural standing upright on top of a little heap of rocks.
“That’s how the witches mark their paths.”
“How do you know that?” Tullus asked.
“Because I know them,” Otson said, pointing. “The mountains up north. That’s where I come from. The witches light bonfires and meet their gods in caves, and they mark their paths with rock piles. I’ve seen them.”
“You’ve seen the witches?”
“No, the piles. And the fires. The witches I’ve only heard, never seen them. On the nights when they gathered, we could hear them down in the valley.”
Otson kept gazing at the heap.
“Their voices were very strange.”
They backtracked to a point below the place where Libo’s men had tied their horses, and turned off a little more toward the south. The sun was sinking now, but it was still only just beginning to wester, so that their shadows preceded them as they went. With no path, their progress was slow through the trees, but the ground soon opened out. They were climbing through dead brown brush and rocks along an irregular slope. Teuser darted this way and that, sniffing the ground curiously, but none of the men saw any tracks.
Then they reached a natural terrace and their going became much easier and swifter. The outer edge of the terrace was above the level of the inner, which made it harder to notice from below. Off to the left, they could look down on the copse. When they reached the rockpile, Teuser started scanning the ground. Otson knelt by the pile and pointed to the thin rock on top.
“Where I come from, they turn the curved piece toward the mountain, not away.”
The pile stood at the outer edge of a broad place in the terrace, where it folded back along the mountain almost due south.
“Over here,” Tullus called. “Look at this.”
Nicostratus inspected the medallion closely, holding it up in the light directly before the better of his two eyes. He rubbed away the dirt that clung to it.
“What is it?” Otson asked.
“This is from Emesa,” Nicostratus said thoughtfully. “In the East. It is a talisman of Sol.”
Otson peered at the medallion as Nicostratus held it out for him. “Isn’t that a mountain?” he asked.