In the morning, they enter a vast forest. Great dripping pendulums of catkins hang from the trees and they move through them as if passing through thousands of curtains. The girl coughs; rooks screech; something clatters high in the branches above: then silence and the hugeness of the world.
* * *
Whenever he stands, the trees bleed away in long streaks and take several heartbeats to right themselves. He aches to see the shape of the mountain on the horizon but it does not appear. Once in a while the girl mutters words, prayers or curses, he cannot say. If only, he thinks, they had Moonlight with them. Moonlight would know the way. He had heard it said that God made men above beasts, but how many times had they lost a dog high on the mountain only to find it covered with burrs back home? Was it by smell or the angle of the sun in the sky or some deeper, hidden faculty, possessed by animals but lost to men?
In the long June dusk, he sits on the forest floor, too weak to go on, and peels bark from the branches of a wayfarer shrub. He chews the bark until it is a paste, and with his last remaining energy, smears as many branches as he can with the sticky lime, as Grandfather used to do.
The girl helps him gather firewood, and the sun drops, and three times he gets up to check his traps, and each time they are empty. All night he drifts in and out. When he wakes he sees the girl tending the little fire, her face pale and dirty, the hem of her dress torn, her eyes as big as fists. He sees a shadow separate from his body and fly off into the forest, over the river, over the house of his family, herds of deer running through trees high on the mountain, and wolves slipping through the shadows behind, until he reaches the place in the far north where sea dragons slither between mountains of ice and a race of blue giants holds up the stars. When he comes back into his body, shafts of moonlight are falling through the leaves and touching the forest floor in bright shifting patches. Beside him the girl has the sack in her lap and she is running fingers along the lines of the book and murmuring words in her strange language. He listens, and when she stops—as though she has summoned it with her magical book—a flock of stone-curlews comes flowing through the underbrush, clicking and nattering, and Omeir hears the panicked flutter of one caught in a snare, then more, and still more, and the night fills with their shrieks, and she looks at him, and he looks at the book.
* * *
The hummocks become foothills and the foothills mountains. They are close to home now, he can sense it. The varieties of trees, the texture of the air, a smell of wild mint halfway up a climb, the bright round pebbles in a streambed: all these are memories, or run parallel to memories. Like oxen, pulling through the rainy dark, maybe there is something in him too, some magnet pulling him homeward.
By the time they come over a ridge and descend a trail to the river road, news of the fall of the city has reached the villages. He keeps the girl bound at the wrists with the rope attached and to each person they pass he tells the same story: victory was glorious; all honor to the sultan, may God keep him; he has sent me home with my rewards. Despite his face, no one seems to begrudge him, and though many eye the dirty bundle and sack he carries, no one asks to see what’s inside. A few carters even congratulate him and wish him well, and one gives him cheese, and another a basket of cucumbers.
Soon they near the tall black gorge where the road pinches and the log-bridge extends over the narrows. A few carts come and go; two women drive a gaggle of geese across, on their way to market. Omeir listens to the river cut deeper through the gorge and then they’re across.
* * *
In the dusk they pass the village where he was born. A half mile from home, he leads her off the road and to a bluff above the river and they stop beneath the spread boughs of the half-hollow yew.
“The children,” he says, “say that this tree is as old as the first men, and that on the darkest nights their ghosts dance in its shade.” The tree waves its thousand branches in the moonlight. She watches him, eyes alert. He points into its crown, then at the sack she keeps clutched to her chest.
He takes off his oxhide cape and lays it down. “What you carry will be safe here. It will be out of the weather and no one will come near.”
She looks at him and the moon-shadow plays across her face and just when he decides she understands none of what he is saying, she passes him the sack. He wraps it in his cape, swings himself into the branches, squeezes inside the hollow tree, and presses the bundle deep inside.
“It will be safe.”
She stares up.
He draws a circle in the air. “We will come back.”