He turned to face me with a look of distaste he no doubt believed would make me repent on the spot.
“First and foremost, it is the cowardice that is most unseemly, most unbecoming for one in the service of a Knight such as Sir Bayard. But it is also the lesser things—the whines and the whimpers and the concerns with long odds and stormy weather. Th’art often a pain not worth the having, for if there’s a burr in thy saddle, thou’lt find it, and a pebble in thy pallet, so that thou hast me marveling at what thou wouldst say in the teeth of real danger, real discomfort. I have said too much.”
“At least in that you are right, centaur. You have said too much. Maybe I do whine and whimper about the weather, but look around you, Agion. It’s getting colder the higher we travel, and a big thick-witted centaur is going to be the last one to feel any real emergency in the temperature.
“But emergencies happen. We could run out of food in the highest reaches of this pass. You’ve heard the stories—how the travelers go through provisions, then through the horses, then through each other? Well, after the traveling food is gone, it’ll be the pack mare first, then Valorous—I’m sure we’ll go in order of familiarity. Guess who’ll be third, Agion? Folks wait until the last moment to eat something in their species—it’s just human nature, everything’s nature except maybe goblins.
“Remember who’s the odd one out here,” I whispered, closing my argument as menacingly as possible.
“Species loyalty is a powerful thing.”
So we sulked and refused to speak to one another. We traded off watches for the rest of the night, each sleeping fitfully when it wasn’t his turn.
Agion surely did, snoring so heavily that at times I woke suddenly at my post on watch, filled with the fear that I was about to be covered by an avalanche or a rockslide tumbling down upon us from some peak we hadn’t noticed.
All of this was silliness, was dream. But sleep was fitful because of the dreaming, as old fears rose from memory and imaginings to share my fireside and blanket. I dreamed of the Scorpion finding me, of Bayard finding out about the Scorpion, of Alfric rising from the mud of the swamp, knife in hand, and of Father on the road to meet us, clutching the order for my hanging tightly in his gloved hand. Some time very early in the morning—the night was at its absolute darkest—I started awake from my watch again.
Good luck was with me. I had nodded off, and still no dire thing had happened. I sighed and looked overhead, where the Book of Gilean wheeled faintly in the sky above me, covered fitfully by the clouds that passed rapidly by from east to west. It was hard to see beyond the light of the fire, hard to hear beyond the crackle of the blaze, the breathing of the horses, Agion’s snoring, and the dim cry of the wind. But somewhere off in the darkness to the south—in the direction of the pass—the wind lifted a sound toward me, making me sit up and listen again, this time to a distant silence, as the sound did not repeat itself. For an hour or so I sat there alert and silent, still listening. But from that point onward I heard only the snap of the pine branches in the fire and the rumble of the centaur, who slept untroubled by thought, I was sure, because he was so untroubled by any thought while he was awake.
What I had heard was the sound of voices passing. And for the life of me, they sounded like my brothers’ voices calling my brothers’ names.
When Agion replaced me on watch, for a moment I thought about following those voices. But where had they gone?
Who was to say that I had heard brothers on the wind and not some monstrosity?
Bayard awakened the next morning, babbling to someone about securing the keep, that “Vingaard is once more ours, Launfal.” He was a hundred miles away and a dozen years back, evidently, and it took us a while to explain to him where he was.
It took him awhile yet to recover. Sullenly he resolved to wait until the next day for us to travel, knowing that his wounds would not bear the journey on horseback.
When evening came, Bayard had recovered some. He relaxed and became almost pleasant. There was still no sign of the ogre, so he and I climbed an enormous, sloping array of rocks that peaked above the trail, leaving Valorous and the pack mare behind in the care of Agion. Bayard gestured toward the horizon.
“Perhaps they watched for dragons here back in the Age of Dreams, when there were dragons,” Bayard murmured.
“Who watched, Sir Bayard?”
“Dwarves. Maybe men. Maybe a race older than both, or one born from both and since forgotten. We know so little of the time in which these rocks were placed here.”
He looked at me reflectively.
“Indeed,” he concluded, “we know just enough of our past to get us in trouble.”
He was silent for some time. Below us and to the east, the faces of the mountains declined rapidly into foothills, then rolling hills, then plains I could see even from where we were standing—from great distance and in the growing dark.
This must have been the way this country looked at the time of which Bayard was speaking—back in the Age of Dreams, when men fought elves, when dwarves trusted nobody, when everyone looked out for dragons. Back then, perhaps, the trees grew more thickly in the altitudes, unhewn and unfired. Back then, even in autumn, there might have been more bird song.
As I reflected, a pinpoint of light flickered at the farthest east my eyesight could reach. It was followed by another, then another, and soon a whole patch of dark downward and eastward lay speckled and spangled with dim light. It looked as though you were looking down a well where someone—some mischievous boy, perhaps—had hidden vials of phosfire.
“Solamnia,” Bayard said softly behind me.
I turned to see him looking beyond me, smiling.
“What you see lighting the eastern horizon is a village in Solamnia. A pleasant little place, halfway between the end of this pass and the south fork of the Vingaard River. We should be there by tomorrow night, the gods willing. And from there the Castle di Caela is but two days away—a day and a night of hard riding if we travel with spirit and the horses are able.
“As for now,” he said and looked at me more directly, his gray eyes drooping with fatigue, “as for now, a rest well deserved. No matter my hopes of arriving on time to the tournament, I shall not risk the lives of my companions on rocky terrain in the blackness of night.”
“Master Bayard? Master Galen?” Agion called from below, for the first time a note of fear in his voice. He was afraid of the slippery rocks and sliding gravel beneath his large and clumsy hooves. Bayard walked to an overlook behind us, to where he was in sight of the centaur.
“Agion, make a fire. We shall be down shortly, and then all of us will sit and talk, and sleep when the need for sleep comes.”
The great pile of rocks stretched over the plateau for almost a hundred yards. Bayard knew the pass well, knew the plateau, too. If he had decided not to travel by night, we were crossing deceptive ground indeed. On the leeward side of the rock pile the air was calm and dried branches lay bundled and stacked in an orderly fashion, as though the travelers before us had looked out for our comfort, never knowing who we might be or how much time would pass before we followed their footsteps.
Agion scraped together the fire, using one bundle of the kindling. The horses saw the spark from the flint, smelled the pine smoke, and moved closer to us as the light began to rise from the dried branches. We sat, our backs to the warmth of the horses, our faces and our outstretched hands to the warmth of the fire. It was there that I heard the rest of Bayard’s story.
And understood that history was something like this notch in the road filled with abandoned bundles of kindling—that things are left within it to be picked up and used later, in ways that those who had left those things might never have dreamed.