A Shadow All of Light (23 page)

“Should not you deliver these tidings?”

“He must not spy me.”

“As you say, then. Shall I fetch bread and water for you here?”

“Thank you,” I said. “Do so discreetly. In the morning, join with me about half a league farther on. I will ride Mutano's horse. Sneakdirk may ride my hireling mount and bring along Woman. He showed a capable hand in taking our captive.”

“He has a fisherman's wrist for casting rope,” Torronio said, departing.

*   *   *

They made a late start from camp; the sun was over the treetops when they joined me on the trail. We went on, the six of us with three horses and three mules, making slow progress, with Crossgrain quarreling over his turn to ride and Goldenrod complaining that he, being lifelong a jolly sailor, was not suited to stony trails in thickety hills. When we came to an open space at ridgetop, I halted our train and gestured toward the forward vista. “Behind yonder mountain lie our fortunes.”

Though it was a league from us, it looked to stand as close as the wall of a castle and seemed as sheer in its slope. Green and pleasant shone its foot, but the incline darkened to a misty blue and then to purple and along its topmost ridge a fringe of frost silvered the peaks against a bright blue heaven. Our trail meandered from our vantage through a grassy, unpeopled plain, then disappeared into the mountain's lower forest.

“This day's march shall bring us to the foot,” I said, “and there we shall make camp for tonight and all next day. We shall be climbing that eminence for two nights, lying doggo during daylight. We must accustom ourselves to moving in darkness and we shall not enter the Dark Vale until the dark o' the moon.”

“Why so?” asked Crossgrain. “The Vale does not retreat. Let us make haste and reap its lettuces and sell them off and spread our blankets on massy heaps of coin.”

“Daylight is too perilous in that place,” I replied, and did not explain, though I saw by his expression that impatience sat restless on his mind like an unhooded falcon on a hunter's wrist. “Alive you may sleep on coin; dead you can sleep as comfortably on stones and thorns.”

*   *   *

So on we went at leisure. The sky was pleasant, the verdure appealing, and by the foot of the mountain ran a river where we filled our two casks and watered the beasts and refreshed ourselves, bathing in the cold water.

We found an easy glade a little above the plain and set up camp and lazed and ate. When night fell, I went to my supply chest and brought out four lanthorns fashioned to my particular design.

“You see how this lanthorn is made,” I said, “with top and all sides but one so tightly enclosed that no ray of light can escape its innards.”

They looked on gravely.

With a scrap of tinder and a quick steel spark I lit the oiled wick inside. “You see?” I closed the black tin door so that no light showed, opened it again to let light shine out, then clapped it shut quickly. “You see?”

They stood silent. Squint shrugged, and I called him forth.

“Stand here,” I said, placing him between the lanthorn and the thick, whitish trunk of a plane tree. I opened the lanthorn blind, then snapped it closed. To the others: “You see?”

“What is there to see?” Crossgrain said. “Anyone can open and shut the blind of a lanthorn.”

“His shadow on the tree trunk—what did you observe?”

“That without the lamplight it does not appear and when you loose the light upon him his shadow darkens the wood. “'Tis but a child's game.”

“How long does his shadow stay on the wood?”

“Briefly, of course.”

“What else did you see of the surroundings?”

“Little. The light went away too quickly.”

“This then is our exercise,” I explained. “In that brief space of time while the lamplight is loosed we must each learn to see and locate the objects about us accurately and remember where they are. And we must not allow our shadows to lie on any surface for more than the swiftest of moments.”

“Why so?” asked Torronio.

“If our shadows be not visible, they cannot be taken from us. Yet in the dark we cannot find the objects of our desire. So we must learn to place them in our minds as if by the flash of a lightning bolt and then go to them in the ensuing blackness. If we are deft at this sleight o' hand, we shall take our prizes.”

They gazed at one another for some moments and then laughed softly.

“We are fishers,” said Sneakdirk. “We work our boats and nets at sea when no light from landward shows. We float silent in the darkest night.”

“That is one reason I have enlisted you,” I replied. “But fishermen labor in moonlight and starlight. We enter the Vale in the dark of the moon. Have you seen your shadow cast by starlight?”

“Faintish to discern.”

“Too faint, too flimsy, we shall hope, to be snatched away from us. We shall toil when the moon is absent in a place where little starlight enters. If we work quickly, our shadows shall be secure.”

“Shadows are often stolen from men and women,” Torronio said. “I have heard that in Tardocco town there dwelleth a master thief named Astolfo whose trade in shadow-filching is profitable as well as venerable. Yet I never heard that they who lose their shadows to him perish afterward.”

“Those shadows still exist in our world,” I said. “They only go to serve the purposes of others. But shadows forfeited in the Dark Vale are destroyed utterly—so all the sages agree. It has been said that they are devoured. Such a destruction must bring the end of life.”

“This is but a tale for the idle chimney nook,” he said.

“We shall take precautions,” I stated firmly, and with that we set at it again, opening the lanthorn blinds quickly and clapping them shut. We advanced so well in this practice that in the time required for the least gray glimmer of a shadow to appear on the tree trunk, we had thrust into memory much detail of the surroundings.

When this employment began to wear the aspect of sport, I called a halt and we made ready for sleep.

“By tomorrow midday we shall reach the limits of the Vale,” I told them. “There we will stop and observe. In the dark we shall enter.”

“Well,” said Torronio. The others said nothing. Solemnity had crept upon them.

*   *   *

“Stalwart, where are you?”

It was Crossgrain inquiring, but his voice lacked its customary querulous tone. There was no reason to whisper as Sneakdirk did, since we were going not among men or animals but only plants. The Dark Vale, it was said, was void of animal life. Only plants throve there, as in that happy age of the world before humanity arrived to sully creation.

“Here I am,” I said.

“I cannot see you. I can see nothing.”

I grasped his shoulder from behind and, startled, he made a tremulous half leap.

“Gods!”

I had wrapped myself in a thin black cloak, muffling the green-forest colors of hose and doublet and eclipsing the glitter of buttons and silver buckles. My colleagues were outfitted less prudently and I could just make out their forms, dark against the dark.

We had made our way in the gloaming down the disused trail through the hill cleft and had paused till full dark before descending into the Vale itself. I had spent the daylight on the hilltop, scanning the area with my glass, trying to distinguish the more valuable plants and locating them in memory. This was a vague undertaking. The terrain would be much different at the lower levels than it appeared from a height and the darkness made of this landscape a different world.

Commercing with shadows, as I had done now for a half dozen seasons, I had experienced darknesses of every shade, texture, and smell, but this night in the Dark Vale brought forth a voluminous atmosphere aggressive in blackness. Here might be one of the world's origins of darkness, I thought, and there was writing to the effect that great earth-mouths in the Vale opened to a world below and that visible darkness poured forth from these orifices like streams gathering themselves to rivers from woodland springs. It had been conjectured by Albertus and Lullius that the precious flora of the Vale had first developed in these local subterranean caverns and over their long generations had progressed gradually to the surface, braving the light and changing their pallid mushroom hues to dark greens nigh black in their flat dullness. It was proposed by some half dozen wise herbalists that these plants—ferns, flowers, creeping shrubs, and low bushes—fed upon shadows to replenish the obscure powers they had derived from their underworld beginnings.

But books are never so accurate or so wise as their authors claim and here we had to trust mainly to our own wits.

We had fared middling well so far. Squint had proved the aptest among us for facility in opening and closing the lanthorn blinds and Goldenrod was most capable at locating specimens in the black intervals. But the farther we penetrated into the depths of the Vale, the deeper the obscurity thickened, and this had caused Crossgrain to lose all sense of where I was and where the others might be.

“All goes well,” I told him. “I am here at your side.”

“I can see nothing. I feel this dreadful darkness pressing upon my eyes like dusty cloth.”

“'Tis thick,” I admitted.

“No! My eyes—”

“Light us,” I told Squint. “Be quick.”

He unblinded the lanthorn and shut it again and in that instant we saw that Crossgrain's eyes had been taken from him. That was our swift impression. Then when the dark returned and the glimmer-echo of the light had faded from my eyeballs, I understood. A great black moth had lit upon Crossgrain's forehead—the size of a saucer, this insect—and its velvet wings spread over his eyes.

“It is but a bug,” I said. “Cast it from you. The gleam of your eye-water drew it to you.”

“'Tis monstrous,” he said.

“There will be more. We must take all care.”

“There was to be no animal in here. So you said. What else might there be?”

“Our business is with plants. Did you not glimpse a night-bloomer just now in reach of your right-hand side?”

We heard him step away and heard the rustle of his hand amid foliage. “Yes,” he said. “I feel a huge blossom here. Moist and pulpy, like the tongue of a young heifer, though not wet.”

“Feel below where its stem joins to the main stalk. Snip there and place the blossom in your pouch. Then follow the stalk to the ground and find whether you can lift it out or we must dig.”

We heard him fumbling with the plant and breathing hoarsely as he stooped, though not from exertion. The black moth had quickened the breath of each of us.

Then he swore. “The ground is covered with—”

We waited. “What is it?”

“Light!”

Squint complied, and we saw that the ground about Crossgrain's feet writhed as if with throbbing vines. A network of ebon vines undulated, shiny and repulsive. When he closed the lanthorn, we waited a space to try to comprehend what we had seen.

Goldenrod spoke first. “Black serpents. They are all around us. I can feel them over my boots and crawling upward.”

“We are undone,” said Crossgrain.

“Courage,” I said. “If they were noxious, we should already be shrieking with pain. But there is nothing here for a poison serpent to strike. The plants consume the shadows of anything that moves.”

“These serpents move most unpleasantly,” said Goldenrod.

“But they cast no shadow, being so close to the ground.”

“What if they be attracted to eye-gleams like the moth?”

“Did you not note that they have no eyes? They are harmless to us. Let us set about our tasks.”

“What is that smell?” asked Torronio. “It much clingeth.”

We made sounds of disgust nigh unto sickness. A passerby in this deep night, if any such person could be in this place, would surmise that we had all fallen foul of spoilt oysters.

“It smells as of an ancient offal pit, filled with excrement and diseased corpses.”

“It is odorous as a hundred turnip-fed bum-blasts.”

“A devil has shat here and been proud of his work.”

Squint ascertained the source. “It is those cursed blind serpents. They exude an oil that smears upon the skins of things. They need not fangs to repulse their enemies. Their perfumery is more daunting than the sharpest bite.”

“Take heart, lads. Let us cleave to our purpose. Keep in your mind's eye the picture of gold coins stacked into a tower. Let it glow before you in this foul darkness like a beacon on a promontory.”

They answered not, but Squint was busily opening and closing the shutter of the lanthorn and the Wreckers were gathering leaves, buds, roots, and blossoms as quickly as they could. They were not discriminate in their collecting, but I had no heart to admonish. I longed to depart this noisome hole as avidly as did they.

*   *   *

We were at this tedious work for the rest of the watch. The Wreckers tried to lighten their burden with common shipmate raillery, as when Goldenrod said to Crossgrain, “Had'st not thou once a wife who smelled as of this place?” and Crossgrain retorted, “If you say so, then thou know'st more than is well for thee.” But there was more determination than true humor in their chat and when the east began to lighten they were glad to hear me give order to depart.

“Take care to tie up the bags and keep the vial lids tight,” I said. “We must not cast our shadows on our prizes.”

They mumbled assent and we turned to go back up the slope, but I had miscalculated the hours and more light was spread through the sky than was healthy for our welfare. A saving grace was that clouds thinly veiled the east; we did not cast dark shadows with sharp edges but only ghostly emanations, the tinges of shadow that the pulpy leaves rubbed against and the questing tendrils of vines touched searchingly.

Wrapped in my black cloak, I was less affected than the others, but when a great black leaf that looked something like a burdock swept against my tinge-shadow my forearms went gooseflesh and my neck hair prickled. I urged them along more quickly, and they did not hang back. They struggled upward as fast as they could.