Toward Ecosophy

High and shrill, a chorus of birds greeting the new day woke Embery. She lay there blinking for a moment before memory returned, reminded her where she was and why she and Tay were curled up fully clothed under quilts damp with cold dew. She extracted herself from under the quilts, tucked them around Tay, clambered out from under the spindle-bush that had sheltered them through the hours of darkness.

Dawn spread cold and gray over the little hollow as she stretched out the aches a night’s sleep on hard ground. The birds sang on—a comfort, that, for they’d surely fall silent if anyone from the monastery or the village blundered through the wild land nearby. Reassured, she reached back under the spindle-bush and shook Tay gently awake.

A short while sufficed to shake out the quilts—they’d need to hang in sunlight later to dry, but that would have to wait for some safer place—and to share a loaf of bread and water from the spring for a cold meal. Then they shouldered satchels and blanket rolls, and went back to the place where the highroad could be seen. With the sun just gilding the tips of the distant hills, it was early yet for travelers, and nothing moved on the road except a fox trotting past on some errand of its own. That seemed like a hopeful omen, and so they scrambled down the slope to the road, crossed it as quickly as possible, slipped into the shadows of the wood on the far side.

“Below Mollory Edge,” she said to Tay once they were well away from the road, following a deer-path under twisted oaks. “Where?”

“Up past the creek that flows into the marsh by Gellen’s farm. You go by the three rocks the other boys say were put there by a bad spirit, and then along the foot of the Edge until you get to a place where three thorn-trees grow out of the rock.” He glanced up at her. “I saw the trees and thought of how Tatennen met the lamia by a thorn-tree and answered her three riddles, and that’s why I sang Eremon’s song there.”

She was staring at him by the time he finished, and he quailed a little and said, “Did I do something wrong, Mother?”

“No.” She blinked, forced a smile onto her face, kept walking. “No, not at all. But there’s a story I haven’t told you yet, and it’s about three thorn-trees that grew from a cleft in the rock.”

“I’d like to hear that story,” said Tay.

“Sometime soon,” she promised. “Once we’ve found a safe place again.” That satisfied him, and the two of them wove their way among the oaks in silence thereafter. The birds finished their morning songs and settled into the desultory calls of the day. Off in the distance, the low harsh note of the monastery’s iron bell sounded the call to morning prayers, and a sudden wild desire flared in her to find a place where she would never have to hear that call, where she could raise a stone altar to the old lovely gods and goddesses with her own hands, and pray to them if she wanted to pray to anybody. It was a foolish enough thought, she knew; the old gods and goddesses were dead and gone, and no prayers could reach them ever again; for that matter, if there was a place left in the world where magisters and monks hadn’t proclaimed the Holy Law with staves and cords in hand for those who weren’t minded to listen, she’d never heard of it.

By the time the sun cleared the hills to the east they’d followed the wood as far as it would go, and veered west into a steep-walled valley not much visited even by sheep. A lively little stream wound through it, and they walked in the water for a while to throw hounds off the scent if the monks should go that far. Desperate though their situation was, her mood lifted as they walked. She thought of the three black sloes that Dreela placed in the hollow of the rock in a bitter hour, the only offering she had to give, and the three thorn-trees she’d found there that told her the long years of exile were over and the curse upon the house of Kendath had been lifted at last. That sent Embery’s thoughts straying back through one story after another, all the way to Tatennen’s birth and the terrible impiety that brought the vengeance of the gods down on Kendath’s kings. And the faun, she thought then. Is it waiting in exile as Dreela did all those years ago, waiting for some offering to be accepted?

The thought shattered as she shaped it. There was no one to receive such an offering any more—and was there even a faun waiting below Mollory Edge? The day before, as she’d stared into Tay’s anxious eyes, she’d been sure that he was telling the truth as he knew it, but that certainty was difficult to hold onto as the harsh light of a Raithwold morning dipped further and further into the valley. At most, she told herself, some old hermit who knows the old stories called out an answer when he heard Tay singing, and it may have been less than that, a stray noise, the movement of a wild beast.

Anner’s sons saw Tay walking with something past Creel’s Head, her memory reminded her. Something that wasn’t human. She pushed her perplexities aside, turned her attention outward, tried to make herself think instead about whether someone might have seen them or guessed at their destination.

The valley ended in a ragged slope thick with gorse. They picked their way up it, looked back along the way they’d come, saw no sign of pursuit. The sun was high in the east by then, bare and bright in a sky empty of clouds for once, and by that unforgiving light they hurried across the bare ground atop the ridge and down the far slope.

Ahead, Mollory Edge loomed up gray and crannied, a ragged cliff left behind by the spirits knew what convulsion of the land in ages past. A glance to the right as they came down the slope showed three boulders, doubtless the three rocks of the boys’ stories, and off beyond it in the middle distance the silver line of the stream that flowed past Gellen’s farm to the marsh. She looked the other way, searching for the three thorn-trees, but just then Tay pointed and said, “There are the trees I told you about.”

There they were: three gnarled thorn-trees well leafed out, and all three of them rising from a crack in bare rock at the foot of the cliff. Embery’s breath caught. With Tay at her side, she finished the descent, crossed the meadow at its foot, approached the trees.

Two paces from them, no more, Tay stopped. “This is where I sang,” he said. “I should sing again, to let him know.” She nodded, gestured at him to begin, and he set aside his blanket roll and satchel, put his hands behind him as though reciting a lesson, and sang:

     “In the plains of Eshdar I made the great bull yield to my will,

     High on Druan Mountain I took an egg from the griffin’s nest,

     Three hundred warriors quailed before me at the Bridge of Ai,

     But need now lies upon me and the path I must take is hidden.

     Come to me, wise one of the hill, and offer me your counsel,

     Though I have nothing to offer you in return but my praise.”

After the first few words, Embery closed her eyes. To hear the song of Eremon so, not whispered in darkness with the door barred against the night but in open daylight in her son’s high clear voice, sent mingled dread and delight surging through her, pushing at the limits of her self-control. It was something Neely had warned her of more than once, the longing that might lead her to fling aside every caution and chant the praises of the old dead gods even though it meant throwing her life away. The thing had happened, or so she’d heard: in one of the western islands, in the broad plains of the north where oxcarts followed the great herds, and once, a lifetime ago, in the king’s city of High Leedaw itself. Whispered hints alone spoke of what they’d done that latter time.

The song ended. In the stillness that followed, wind muttering in the leaves of the thorn-trees seemed loud. Then, unmistakable, dead leaves rustled beneath a footfall, and she opened her eyes.

The first things she saw were a pair of eyes facing hers: great and golden, gazing out from a darkness beyond the branches of the thorn-trees, focused on her with the wariness of a wild thing. Dim shadows alone hinted at the thing’s body. Then it stepped forward, into daylight, and she knew that Tay hadn’t been wrong. From great curving horns that framed the shaggy head, down past bare skin and coarse black hair and manhood sheathed like a goat’s, to broad cloven hooves that trod the leaf-strewn stone: impossible or not, a faun of Amalin crouched beneath the thorn-trees in the clear light of day.