Night, and somehow another day were gone, before he reached the clearing in the wood. The wagon was gone, too. In the dark he could not find the wheel ruts traced over the turf and summer-hard soil. He could not even find the remains of the fire.
He began to search, idiotically, about the wood, wandering in circles mostly. Day and night blended. He came on a deserted farm at the wood’s edge. A few roots and other vegetable stuff were coming up wild in the garden patch, and there was a well. It was enough to keep him alive, and gradually to bring him back to logic and fatalism.
He lost track of time again in the farm ruin. Not for many years had he been so indecisive, so plainly lost over the horizons of his own self. The days seemed very hot, the nights interminable. The old house looked out southward from the wood, into the slender valleys that lay between the claws of the southern mountains. Seen mainly by night, they did not seem real either. Indeed, nothing did.
In the end, the idea of the Ghyste came back to him, supplanting other ideas or regrets. To travel across the northern mountain again became imperative—to go after the legend.
The memory of the woman who was like Silky became frankly an embarrassment. Whatever had been done to the crippled leg, it had healed into its usual awful acceptable state. The same could occur with memory.
As he came over the mountain pass, down the steel-blue road in the dusk, toward that leaning macabre house with its stone tower—the house of Ciddey Soban, the house of the ghost—he had a wonderful sharpened sense of returning to reality, and to purpose. The golden woman slipped away from him like a dream.
He could have done nothing for her. Trouble had caged her. He could not have set her free. He had not loved her, certainly. He had never loved, woman or man, place or beast or object. Not even Silky. Silky had only been a part of himself.
CHAPTER TEN
Sable was plaiting her thin iron hair again, as she came into focus for him across the hovel, but the sun no longer shone on the rag bed where Myal Lemyal lay immobile on his back, head still averted toward the right shoulder, the grimy sheet pulled to his Adam’s apple, unruffled by any movement.
“You’ve been away a long while,” said Sable. “Thinking, or else you sleep with your eyes wide open. I could count the times you blinked on the fingers of one hand. Practicing?”
Dro watched her pointlessly busy, agile and magical paws.
“You mean I’d prefer to use my own will, rather than Cinnabar’s drug, to get there? That was always the plan.”
“Then don’t you wonder why she sent this boy in ahead of you?”
“She thought she saw something in the cards she cast. She told me. She insisted Myal must go with me. She persuaded him after me. He had some supernatural baggage with him I could have done without.”