You may wonder why Axl did not turn to his fellow villagers for assistance in recalling the past, but this was not as easy as you might suppose. For in this community the past was rarely discussed. I do not mean that it was taboo. I mean that it had somehow faded into a mist as dense as that which hung over the marshes. It simply did not occur to these villagers to think about the past — even the recent one.
To take an instance, one that had bothered Axl for some time: He was sure that not so long ago, there had been in their midst a woman with long red hair — a woman regarded as crucial to their village. Whenever anyone injured themselves or fell sick, it had been this red-haired woman, so skilled at healing, who was immediately sent for. Yet now this same woman was no longer to be found anywhere, and no one seemed to wonder what had occurred, or even to express regret at her absence. When one morning Axl had mentioned the matter to three neighbours while working with them to break up the frosted field, their response told him that they genuinely had no idea what he was talking about. One of them had even paused in his work in an effort to remember, but had ended by shaking his head. “Must have been a long time ago,” he had said.
“Neither have I any memory of such a woman,” Beatrice had said to him when he had brought up the matter with her one night. “Perhaps you dreamt her up for your own needs, Axl, even though you’ve a wife here beside you and with a back straighter than yours.”
This had been some time the previous autumn, and they had been lying side by side on their bed in the pitch black, listening to the rain beating against their shelter.
“It’s true you’ve hardly aged at all down the years, princess,” Axl had said. “But the woman was no dream, and you’d remember her yourself if you spared a moment to think about it. There she was at our door only a month ago, a kindly soul asking if there was anything she might bring us. Surely you remember.”
“But why was she wishing to bring us anything at all? Was she a kin to us?”
“I don’t believe she was, princess. She was just being kind. Surely you remember. She was often at the door asking if we weren’t cold or hungry.”
“What I’m asking, Axl, is what business was it of hers to single us out for her kindness?”
“I wondered myself at the time, princess. I remember thinking here’s a woman given to tending the sick, and yet here’s the two of us both as healthy as any in the village. Is there perhaps talk of a plague on the way and she’s here to look us over? But it turns out there’s no plague and she’s just being kind. Now we’re talking about her there’s even more comes back to me. She was standing there telling us not to mind the children calling us names. That was it. Then we never saw her again.”
“Not only is this red-haired woman a dream from your mind, Axl, she’s a fool to be worrying herself about a few children and their games.”
“Just what I thought at the time, princess. What harm can children do us and they just passing the time of day when the weather’s too dreary outside. I told her how we hadn’t given it a second thought, but she meant kindly all the same. And then I remember her saying it was a pity we had to spend our nights without a candle.”
“If this creature pitied us our lack of a candle,” Beatrice had said, “she had one thing right at least. It’s an insult, forbidding us a candle through nights like these and our hands as steady as any of them. While there’s others with candles in their chamber, senseless each night from cider, or else with children running wild. Yet it’s our candle they’ve taken, and now I can hardly see your outline, Axl, though you’re right beside me.”
“There’s no insult intended, princess. It’s just the way things have always been done and that’s all there is to it.”
“Well it’s not just your dream woman thinks it strange we should have our candle taken from us. Yesterday or was it the day before, I was at the river and walking past the women and I’m sure I heard them saying, when they supposed I’d gone out of hearing, how it was a disgrace an upright couple like us having to sit in the dark each night. So your dream woman’s not alone in thinking what she does.”
“She’s no dream woman I keep telling you, princess. Everyone here knew her a month ago and had a good word for her. What can it be makes everyone, yourself included, forget she ever lived?”
Recalling the conversation now on this spring’s morning, Axl felt almost ready to admit he had been mistaken about the red-haired woman. He was after all an ageing man and prone to occasional confusion. And yet, this instance of the red-haired woman had been merely one of a steady run of such puzzling episodes. Frustratingly, he could not at this moment think of so many examples, but they had been numerous, of that there was no doubt. There had been, for instance, the incident concerning Marta.
This was a little girl of nine or ten who had always had a reputation for fearlessness. All the hair-raising tales of what could happen to wandering children seemed not to dampen her sense of adventure. So the evening when, with less than an hour of daylight remaining, the mist coming in and the wolves audible on the hillside, the word went around that Marta was missing, everyone had stopped what they were doing in alarm. For the next little while, voices called her name all around the warren and footsteps rushed up and down its corridors as villagers searched every sleeping chamber, the storage burrows, the cavities beneath the rafters, any hiding place a child might go to amuse herself.
Then in the midst of this panic, two shepherds returning from their shift on the hills came into the Great Chamber and began warming themselves by the fire. As they did so, one of them announced how the day before they had watched a wren-eagle circle above their heads, once, twice, then a third time. There was no mistake, he said, it had been a wren-eagle. Word quickly went around the warren and soon a crowd had gathered around the fire to listen to the shepherds. Even Axl had hurried to join them, for the appearance of a wren-eagle in their country was news indeed. Among the many powers attributed to the wren-eagle was the ability to frighten away wolves, and elsewhere in the land, it was said, wolves had vanished altogether on account of these birds.
At first the shepherds were questioned eagerly and made to repeat their story over and over. Then steadily a scepticism began to spread among the listeners. There had been many similar claims, someone pointed out, and each time they had proved unfounded. Someone else stated that these same two shepherds had only the previous spring brought back an identical story, and yet no further sightings had followed. The shepherds angrily denied bringing any such previous report, and soon the crowd was dividing between those taking the shepherds’ side and those claiming some memory of the alleged episode the previous year.
As the quarrel grew heated, Axl found coming over him that familiar nagging sense that something was not right, and removing himself from the shouting and jostling, went outside to stare at the darkening sky and the mist rolling over the ground. And after a while, fragments began to piece themselves together in his mind, of the missing Marta, of the danger, of how not long ago everyone had been searching for her. But already these recollections were growing confused, in much the way a dream does in the seconds after waking, and it was only with a supreme act of concentration that Axl held on to the thought of little Marta at all while voices behind him continued to argue about the wren-eagle. Then, as he was standing there like that, he heard the sound of a girl singing to herself and saw Marta emerge before him out of the mist.