“Below the living, with the dead
Sleep we gray and pale.
Find us you won’t
Where a whisper can pass,
Nor where it’s high and bright.”
Thomas walked on in silence. It was a riddle he had spoken in a fit that overcame him in Italia. Waldroup had taken it to mean that the dormant Yvag would not be found in the ruins any longer. That much they agreed on: The ruin would let whispers, breezes pass everywhere.
After a time, Waldroup commented, “Took Onchu in the day, though, not in the dead of night. Even if they’ve come again, you most likely missed ’em.”
Angrily, Thomas turned and argued, “What should I do, then? Live in the ruins, Alpin?”
There was no one beside him to answer, of course. Just moonlit shadows.
Something had been going on with Waldroup, but for the longest time Thomas didn’t know what. By the time their participation in Queen Matilda’s campaign had ended, the change was obvious—a twitchiness had begun to undermine Waldroup’s calm and calculating way of preparing for and looking at battle. He lost his train of thought, got confused, contradicted his own plans. If they joined another military campaign, it was going to get him killed, and maybe Thomas along with him.
On the road, traveling through Paesi Bassi and then south, he woke on repeated nights to find his mentor sitting awake, features traced in a blue glow, obviously and surreptitiously contemplating the ördstone. If Thomas asked what he was doing, he confessed that he was fearful the stone might lead the Yvag to them, and that to be safe they should keep moving. Thomas wanted to ask, if he considered the stones so dangerous, why he didn’t propose they bury them somewhere and go on without them?
They rode on south, through France and down across the German Empire.
One night as they lay exhausted side by side, Waldroup suddenly asked him, “What if ours is not the only world, Tom?” It sounded like a question he’d been turning over for some time.
Given what they’d already experienced at the ruined abbey, he replied, “We know it isn’t. The Yvag—”
“Yes, the Yvag, but what if it’s more than them? What if there’s more than we know of?”
Thomas rolled over and, as he’d half expected, found Waldroup cast in the blue light of the ördstone, which he was holding up overhead as if placing it like a star in the sky. He probably should have asked then, but Waldroup tucked the stone away again, rolled onto his side, and said nothing more.
The night of the fit that brought forth the riddle about the “high and bright,” they had been working for a month as masons on the abbazia di Santa Maria di Lucedio, a Cistercian abbey in northwest Italia. Another of the stonecutters, a thick-bodied and shaggy fellow named Gallorini, happened to be sitting there beside Waldroup when the seizure struck. He heard the riddle, and while he could hardly have understood many of the words, he crossed himself and instinctively backed away, obviously persuaded that something unholy possessed Thomas. He was hardly the first who’d attributed the fits to demons.
Despite their assurances to him that it was a sickness, not possession, in the days and weeks after that, Thomas often caught Gallorini watching closely, as if anticipating some further revelation or evidence of possession—another seizure at the very least. And all the while, Waldroup continued to grow more disturbed. The stone seemed to have wormed its way into his mind, embedding tumefying notions and doubts.
Finally, after one evening’s meal, they were sitting alone when Waldroup abruptly asked, “What if you found out that Christ wasn’t from here? That the real isn’t real at all.” His voice grew tighter and more frantic. “What if you pushed at the world with your hand, and it flexed and opened, and you beheld another, one that was a desert of blue sand with scattered moons across its sky? This other, suppose it proved so real you could smell it, and it smells nothing like here, and there are castles and fortresses like nothing we’ve ever seen or know even how to build, some so high they look to reach the moon—what if that turned out to be the real world? Or what if it opens onto another and that onto another, like doors inside doors inside doors? What if . . .” He sat trembling, unable to find the words to describe this vision and further.
Thomas hesitated before asking, “These are dreams you’re having?”
Waldroup shifted, as if he’d just discovered Thomas beside him, then nodded tentatively. “Dreams, yeah.” He met Thomas’s gaze. “It feels like they’re going to catch up to us, Tom. Like they know exactly where we are.”
“You want to move on again when we have employment here, and no one is looking for us.” He shook his head. He wasn’t used to being the wise counsellor between the two of them. But now his friend had become so unstable, it worried him. “We fled the Yvag over a year ago,” he said. “The stones have never been out of our possession in all that time, despite which, we haven’t encountered a single one of their kind anywhere. None of your high-born skinwalkers strolled any of our fields of battle in search of wounded, did they? No one pursued us here, either. It’s exactly as you predicted, Alpin—they don’t know what happened at Old Melrose. We left them no idea where to look or who to look for. They’re likely still hunting for us all around Ercildoun.”
“Clacher knows we left. He’ll describe us and not even realize he’s told them.”
“But he doesn’t know where we’ve gone. He’d have told them we were returning after the winter, which means we’ve disappointed them sorely by not turning up.” This was ridiculous—he was saying to Waldroup things that Waldroup had told him. It must be the Yvag’s stone warping Waldroup, but he couldn’t understand why. The stone he had taken from the alderman had had no destabilizing effect upon him. He didn’t even believe he was dreaming peculiarly, certainly not dreams of other worlds or Yvag pursuers; if anything, between the two of them, after all that had happened, he should have been the one obsessed and paranoid.
Tempted as he was to ask Waldroup to let him carry both stones awhile, he was certain the suggestion would drive a wedge between them.
“We don’t know if we’ve encountered them, Tom,” Waldroup rejoined. “The walkers look like . . . like everyone. There might be some hidden among the Cistercians. The abbot . . .”
“There might,” he conceded, “but then they don’t seem to have identified us, either, do they? We’re just two itinerant stone cutters, same as all the others here. Nobody’s come out of the forest and taken us at swordpoint. Nobody in that black armor. Think, Alpin, what it would look like if they had found us.”
And Waldroup agreed finally that, yes, they were better off hidden among other stoneworkers and should stay put. That ought to have put the matter to rest, but of course it did nothing to address the control the stone was exercising over him. Reflecting upon it, Thomas conceded that they perhaps should have moved on, but he suspected that no matter where they went, the same thing would happen, the same visions and fears would plague his friend.
One night perhaps a week later, after they’d worked the whole day upon scaffolding at the level of the abbey roof, Waldroup sopped the last of his dinner gravy with a hunk of bread and abruptly said, “I’ve been thinking, suppose abbeys are built in places that were already seen as hallowed, long before monks came.”
“What, like Old Melrose, you mean?”
“Mmm.” He nodded vigorously. “What if it’s the same here? If we asked the abbot, do you think he’d know if this place was deemed sacred and that’s why we’re building his abbey here?”
“I—it might be.”
“Food for thought, innit?”
Without having to ask then, he knew Waldroup was planning something, and these various “innocent” questions were just a discursive path to that plan. He wanted to probe further, but squat Gallorini was watching from his one-legged stool near the fire, so Thomas concentrated on his meat and said nothing more. He glanced past Gallorini, at the other fourteen stonemasons, at the twenty distant monks leaving their beehive huts on the ridge to gather for compline before they retired. There were too many people hereabouts for Waldroup to enact what he seemed to be considering. But the two of them had practically lived in each other’s skin long enough now that Thomas could guess what was coming. It came sooner than he expected.
Later that same night, he awoke to find Waldroup gone. Each of the groups—the French, Hungarians, Germans, Spanish, and Italians—slept in clusters with the cooking fire at the center. The two of them slept off to the south of it, a place where the hillside leveled onto a shelf just large enough for two people to lie comfortably.
The cooking fire was nothing more than embers now, and no one else stirred. Thomas quietly gathered his bow and quiver. He noted that Waldroup had left his own bow behind, but taken his knives. He guessed at which direction his friend had gone. He headed down the hill.
Many of the trees had been cleared on the hillside—most for the scaffolding they stood on daily. The true woods, called Locez, began at the bottom of the hill. Thomas paused there and drew a small leather pouch hung on a thong around his neck. He loosened the cord and reached in, taking out a small lump wrapped in wool. This he unfolded, then lay the stone upon his palm.
The blue glow of it was dull, but as he moved his arm to the left, the stone pulsed brighter, and for an instant the air ahead ignited with the ghost of the same glow, like a line of glittering spiderweb leading deeper into the woods. He moved his hand back to that point, and when the darkness glittered again, he followed the path it wove.
He crossed a shallow stream, one of many tributaries of the Po River, and kept going, deeper into the woodland, measuring the distance, speculating as to what Waldroup might consider sufficiently remote from the camp. The masons would see nothing this far away, and he anticipated that Waldroup wouldn’t be able to wait very much longer.
Something crashed away from him, a stag or something as large, off to his left. In the thick of the forest now it was so dark, he could make out almost nothing. Branches brushed his face. He navigated by the thin blue glow of the ördstone.
