“We’re not mistaken, sir! We prayed to the God Jesus last night and now you’ve come! Please, elders, go inside our house, where a fire’s still burning.”
“But where are your parents, child?” Beatrice asked. “Weary as we are, we’d not intrude, and so wait for the lady or master of the house to call us through the door.”
“It’s just us three now, mistress, so you can call me lady of the house! Please go inside and warm yourselves. You’ll find food in the sack hanging from the beam, and there’s wood beside the fire to add. Go inside, elders, and we’ll not disturb your rest for a while yet, for we must see to the goat.”
“We accept your kindness gratefully, child,” Axl said. “But tell us if the nearest village is far from here.”
A shadow crossed the girl’s face, and she exchanged looks with her brothers, now lined up beside her. Then she smiled again and said: “We’re very high in the mountains here, sir. It’s far to any village, so we’d ask you to stay here with us, and the warm fire and food we offer. You must be very weary, and I see how this wind makes you both shiver. So please, no more talk of going away. Go inside and rest, elders, for we’ve waited for you so long!”
“What is it so interests you in that ditch there?” Beatrice asked suddenly.
“Oh, it’s nothing, mistress! Nothing at all! But here you’re standing in this wind and your clothes wet! Won’t you accept our hospitality, and rest yourselves beside our fire? See how even now its smoke rises from the roof!”
“There!” Axl took his weight from the rock and pointed. “A bird flown to the sky. Didn’t I tell you, princess, those are birds standing in a line? Do you see it climbing in the sky?”
Beatrice, who had risen to her feet a few moments before, now took a step beyond the sanctuary of their rocks, and Axl saw the wind immediately pull at her clothes.
“A bird, right enough,” she said. “But it didn’t rise from those figures yonder. It could be you still don’t see what I point to, Axl. I mean there, on the further ridge, those dark shapes almost against the sky.”
“I see them well enough, princess. But come back out of the wind.”
“Soldiers or not, they move slowly on. The bird was never one of them.”
“Come out of the wind, princess, and sit down. We must gather strength the best we can. Who knows how much further we must pull this goat?”
Beatrice came back to their shelter, holding close to herself the cloak borrowed from the children. “Axl,” she said, as she seated herself again beside him, “do you really believe it? That before the great knights and warriors, it’s a weary old couple like us, forbidden a candle in our own village, who may slay the she-dragon? And with this ill-tempered goat to aid us?”
“Who knows it’ll be so, princess. Maybe it’s all just a young girl’s wishing and nothing more. But we were grateful for her hospitality, and so we shouldn’t mind doing as she asks. And who knows she isn’t right, and Querig will be slain this way.”
“Axl, tell me. If the she-dragon’s really slain, and the mist starts to clear, Axl, do you ever fear what will then be revealed to us?”
“Didn’t you say it yourself, princess? Our life together’s like a tale with a happy end, no matter what turns it took on the way.”
“I said so before, Axl. Yet now it may even be we’ll slay Querig with our own hands, there’s a part of me fears the mist’s fading. Can it be so with you, Axl?”
“Perhaps it is, princess. Perhaps it’s always been so. But I fear most what you spoke of earlier. I mean as we rested beside the fire.”
“What was it I said then, Axl?”
“You don’t remember, princess?”
“Did we have some foolish quarrel? I’ve no memory of it now, except that I was near my wit’s end from cold and want of rest.”
“If you’ve no memory of it, princess, then let it stay forgotten.”
“But I’ve felt something, Axl, ever since we left those children. It’s as if you’re holding yourself away from me as we walk, and not just on account of that tugging goat. Can it be we quarrelled earlier, though I’ve no memory of it?”
“I’d no intention to hold myself away from you, princess. Forgive me. If it’s not the goat pulling this way and that, then it must be I’m still thinking of some foolishness that was said between us. Trust me, it’s best forgotten.”
He had got the fire blazing again in the centre of the floor, and all else inside the small cottage had fallen into shadow. Axl had been drying his clothes, holding each garment up to the flames, while Beatrice slept peacefully nearby in a nest of rugs. But then quite suddenly, she had sat up and looked around her.
“Is the fire too hot for you, princess?”
For a moment she continued to look bewildered, then wearily lowered herself back down onto the rugs. Her eyes though remained open and Axl was about to repeat his question when she had said quietly:
“I was thinking of a night long ago, husband. When you were gone, leaving me in a lonely bed, wondering to myself if you’d ever come back to me.”
“Princess, though we escaped those pixies on the river, I fear some spell still lingers on you to give you such dreams.”
“No dream, husband. Just a memory or two returning. The night as dark as any, and there I was, alone in our bed, knowing all the while you were gone to another younger and fairer.”
“Won’t you believe me, princess? This is the work of those pixies still working mischief between us.”
“You may be right, Axl. And if they were true memories, they’re of long ago. Even so …” She became silent, so that Axl thought she had dozed off again. But then she said: “Even so, husband, they’re remembrances to make me shrink from you. When we’ve finished resting here, and we’re on our path again, let me walk a little way in front and you behind. Let’s go on our way like that, husband, for I’ll not welcome your step beside me now.”
He said nothing to this at first. Then he lowered the garment away from the fire and turned to look at her. Her eyes were closed again, yet he was sure she had not fallen asleep. When Axl finally found his voice, it had come out as no more than a whisper.
“It would be the saddest thing to me, princess. To walk separately from you, when the ground will let us go as we always did.”
Beatrice gave no indication of having heard, and within moments her breathing had grown long and even. He had then put on his newly warmed clothes and lain down on a blanket not far from his wife, but without touching her. An overwhelming tiredness swept over him, and yet he saw again the pixies swarming in the water before him, and the hoe he had swung through the air landing in their midst, and he remembered the noise as of children playing in the distance, and how he had fought, almost like a warrior with fury in his voice. And now she had said what she had. A picture came into his mind, clear and vivid, of himself and Beatrice on a mountain road, large grey skies above them, she walking several steps before him, and a great melancholy welled up within him. There they went, an elderly couple, heads bowed, five, six paces apart.
He awoke to find the fire smouldering, and Beatrice on her feet, peering out through one of the small gaps in the stone that constituted the windows of an abode such as this. Thoughts of their last exchange returned to him, but Beatrice turned, her features caught in a triangle of sunlight, and said in a cheerful voice:
“I thought to wake you before, Axl, seeing the morning grow outside. But then I kept thinking of the soaking you got in the river and that you needed more than a brief nod or two.”