At noontide, when the sun shone hot on their heads, Swin and Erum heard the sound of a lovely singing, as if the remote blue mountains were descanting of cool self-sufficiency and peace, or as if the ripples of the ever-flowing River were uplifting a tranquil music of their own. The sunbeams bouncing off the water now seemed to assail the two men’s eyes from all directions; turn which way they would, they could not avoid the molten, glittering lights. Swin began to see strange things. In an awed voice he asked: ‘Who are those bright people?’ Erum wiped the sweat out of his own eyes, stared fiercely and for a moment beheld the phantasms, elvishly fair, that advanced towards them over the surface of the flood: their eyes glittered bright, their hands were outstretched in welcome and sweet psalmody poured from their mouths.
‘Wraiths,’ he said incisively. ‘Glamour. Ignore them. You are not to go to them.’
Swin continued to see the apparitions, and to talk to them, but thanks to Erum’s clarity and strength of will he escaped from their seduction – which, if he had yielded to it, as Erum said, would probably have resulted in him drowning.
The afternoon wore on; the mountains fell silent; the joggling and juddering got worse and worse until suddenly, snap, the raft ceased to exist. Erum clung to a log and let Swin push him to the shore. The woods on the right bank had drawn away from the River’s brink, leaving a long bare stretch of mud and shingle, upon which many birds were pecking and hopping about. Not far ahead, however, a short spit was thrust out into the stream, a ridge on which pink and blue flowers waved among coarse grasses. Set midway on this ridge, isolated and conspicuous, was a large rock or erratic boulder. It made a goal for Swin to aim towards as he steadily paddled and pushed Erum along. The sun was going down in a haze of gold, the distant mountains turning to a row of dark jagged teeth, but the boulder turned out to be quite real. Its solidness, moreover, had a strange look and feeling of inevitability, as if this were the true goal at which, had they but known it, the travellers had been aiming since the outset of their voyage. They came to it out of the gently lapping water; they shook some of the wetness off themselves and then began to walk round and round this stone, examining it closely.
What could be seen of it was roughly egg-shaped. Its base was buried in the earth and surrounded by a thick blanket of leaves of bindweed. The plant was of an unfamiliar variety: its large pink flower-bells, of which there were many, resembled the flowers of the mallow, with thin red crimson spines down each petal and a crimson frill round the bell’s rim. They had a faint scent, sweet but rank, slightly disturbing. Erum thought they were pretty. Above them the surface of the boulder was dark grey, craggy and pitted but weathered to smoothness in many places. Its upper surface was covered with thick moss, green and amber-coloured, with a forest of tiny sepals that stood trembling in the warm breeze.
For a long time neither Swin nor Erum spoke. Both of them felt reluctant to spoil the silence with clumsy speech. At last they sat down and rested their backs against the hard but comfortable surface, the ‘little end’ of the egg that rose from among the flowers. They turned their faces towards the dark water.
‘This is the west bank,’ said Erum. ‘We’ve crossed it at last.’
Swin nodded. Still they sat looking at the distant mountains, the hills and the woods. Taking in the fresh muddy smell of the River and the desolate crying of the birds, Swin felt a familiar pang, that sense of the unimaginable vastness of Midyard.
A second time Erum broke the silence. ‘It’s midsummer’s eve, you know.’
‘Very good,’ said Swin. ‘And you are thinking, are you not: this is a trysting-place? But whom are we to meet?’
Erum made no answer. Slowly the sunset thickened and became mottled, the sun smeared and inflamed like a boil. Deep red glints rippled up the water, and dusk spread over the face of the land. The last birds rose, wheeled and resettled. The gloomy woods behind the stone were silent...
Quietly, far off, a nightingale began to sing.
Swin got up. ‘I’m hungry,’ he said. He went into the wood to gather fuel, but he did not seem to get very far. Erum heard the sound of awkward disturbances, rustlings and snappings of undergrowth.
‘Do you need a hand?’
‘I guess so! Never seen such thick cover!’
The spaces between the trees were barricaded with thick brambles and almost impenetrable. After a ten-minute struggle in the gathering darkness Swin decided that he had enough kindling. Some of the pieces of the raft had floated to the shore, and these would serve as fuel. He lit a fire (Erum was not yet handy with flint and tinder); he took up his bow and arrows and strolled off in search of a fat goose for supper.
Since the two of them had struck out on their own the living had been very easy, as has been remarked upon. So Swin was mildly surprised to find that the waterfowl had all disappeared. Believing that they were under the eaves of the woods, he at first tramped along loudly; he expected a few winged shapes to flutter out of the trees and offer themselves, against the rich blue night-sky, as a mark for his bow. But none did. After walking more than a mile along the shore he found a place where the trees were thinner, the boughs less tangled. He plunged into the forest.
And then, straightaway, he was lost, beglamoured, trapped in the woods.
Sometimes he thought he saw a night-bird, an owl swooping or rearing up with shining yellow eyes; or a pale deer slipping away, or a black boar snuffling among the tree-roots; he shot and shot, but he hit nothing, and then he knew that he must save his last few arrows. He turned about, seeking the way back to the Belechel, trying to orient himself by the song of the nightingale; but then the trilling seemed to be coming from many directions at once, and the River was nowhere to be found. He plunged on more and more desperately, getting tripped up by roots and thick stems, lacerated by brambles, bruised by his frequent falls. Sometimes he again heard the sweet elvish music, but never a glimpse of his ensnarers did he catch, unless it might be a swift shimmer under the trees, or a light and shadow flowing away through the whispering grasses of some unreachable glade. His head became confused; his thoughts were dominated by the refrain, endlessly repeated, of one of the songs of his own people:
And all night long he hunted
And nothing could he find
Except the moon a-sailing...
But there was no moonlight, nor starlight, only the luminous twilight of midsummer and a faint uneven glistening, as of water, that showed up the edges of leaf, branch and bole but wove of them a deceitful fabric, with ever more bewildering suggestions of shapes to puzzle his unhappy eyes. Sometimes he seemed to see a flat level gleam, as it might be the rippling surface of water under starlight – but it faded and scattered as he pushed towards it. Or then he might see the outline of a forest cottage, or of the boulder, with Erum sitting beside it, tending the fire – but these pictures also dissolved. At last he sat down on a tree-trunk and buried his face in his hands, resolving to stir no more, to remain where he was and there await the dawn – but then, looking up, what should he behold but the most terrible phantom of all? A tall witch stood before him, dressed in black robes, with long black floating hair. The glistening light outlined the edges of a long knife that she held in her left hand. Swin gave a cry of terror, leaped up, turned to flee, stumbled, fell heavily and banged his head a third time. Then followed, like a nightmare, an interval in which he seemed to be awake but could see nothing, do nothing, feel nothing. He heard the nightingale. Then the sound was the sound of distant crying, screaming, the long screaming of an agony so intense that it overmasters the throat-pain of the scream itself. The voice was Erum’s. He was lost and far away. More time passed. Then the birds were singing once more. Swin opened his eyes. The light had changed to a dull gloomy grey. The short night was over and a thin rain was falling on his face.
Painfully he got to his feet; he shivered and shuddered and tried to shake off the fears of the night. He noticed the dark fir-tree that his fantasy had garbed as a witch. He raised his face to the rain, slapped his cheeks, washed off blood and dirt. His head was very sore, but when he felt it with his fingers he found no bad injury. Still, the night-terrors were hard to shake off. The morning weather, though plain and convincingly real, was oppressive; the leaves dripped slowly in a humid mist; and the bird-calls now seemed fierce, too close, full of menace or mockery.
He faced about, went this way and that, explored a little, until he was able to recover a sense of the path he had trodden last night – not so very long a trail, though at the time it had seemed to be going on for ever. He walked through the wet and shadowy trees, into a wider, greyish light. There was the River, sullenly rolling, with many white birds now floating on its back. There were the hills, their heads cut off by the cloud. There was the line of the shore. Left or right? Right, right of course, though strangely he had to master an impulse to flee away, as fast as his legs would carry him, in the opposite direction.
He walked along the riverside.
Presently he set eyes on the boulder. Not surprisingly, it was just where it had been before.
And all night long he hunted...
But it looked different. The green leaves had grown up its sides, and something white had been laid on top of it.
A thicker curtain of rain swept along the River, and tears started to flow from Swin’s eyes. He quickened his pace, hastened to the boulder and began to see what had been done to his friend. Erum was lying on his back, stark naked, spreadeagled on top of the stone, with his limbs drawn down and secured, each one separately, by the seeking, twining and binding stems of the pink-flowered plant. The points of his lower ribs jabbed upwards; his head was flung back in agony, the chin jutting, the cords of the neck standing high. All of his skin was white, dead-white, white as marble; and his fists were clenched within their green bonds.
He gasped with a convulsive movement, his ribs jerking up still higher. His eyes fluttered. He was aware of Swin’s presence. Anxiously and rapidly deliberating on the best way to help his friend, Swin moved round to the other end of the stone. And there he saw the terrible mutilation, the red ragged hole in Erum’s groin, from which blood was still oozing into the moss.