The Long Way Home

The fog had thinned.

She noticed it at the mouth of the Tunnel, where the slate road ran out of the broken hills and into the gray, and she stopped so suddenly that Casimir walked into her back. The air that came out to meet them was not the thick pewter pressure she remembered. It was pale, and loose, and moving. It wandered across the road in long slow veils, with the light showing through, and in places she could see right through it to the far wall of the cutting, wet and black and shining. It smelled of rain on stone.

"Is it supposed to do that?" said Casimir.

"No."

"Is it dangerous?"

"I don't think so." She held out her hand, and a skein of mist drifted over her fingers, cool and soft. Nothing happened. The numbness did not come. No gauze laid itself across her thoughts, no wet cloth passed over the slate. "I think it's just fog now."

"Just fog," said Casimir, trying out the words.

"You say that as if it were a great mercy."

"I believe that it is."

They stood a moment longer at the threshold, the four of them, with the ruin of the valley behind and the white hills at their backs. Elodie, in a coat of the cartographer's that came to her ankles. Elowen, with her bandaged hands and her pack. And between them, leaning on the lute player's crutch with a face the color of old wax, a tall thin man who had never in his life walked farther than the length of a corridor.

He had been quiet all morning. He had eaten his bread. He had let himself be wrapped in three blankets and a woman's shawl. He had said goodbye to the guests one by one in the cellar passage: to the cartographer, who was already half a mile down the east road, walking fast, with his map under his arm and a name on his lips that was not Casimir's; to the laughing woman, who had kissed him on both cheeks and told him he was a perfect disgrace; to Rosalind Quill, who had said nothing at all, and shaken his hand, once, hard, as one shakes the hand of someone one has decided to go on being angry with.

Now he stood in front of the dark, and did not move.

"I have a confession," he said.

"Go on."

"I am a coward."

"We know," said Elodie.

"I do not think I can take the first step."

Elowen set down her pack. She did not argue. She did not tell him he was brave. She knelt, and unbuckled the strap, and drew out the thing she had carried a thousand miles, and a hundred and four steps, and across the whole of a dead house. It was warm from her pocket. The silver had worn smooth along its edges.

"Hold this," she said, and put the music box in his hands.

He stared at it.

"It stops one note short," said Elowen. "It always did. Wind it up."

…

He wound it with great care, with his tongue between his teeth.

The little mechanism woke. It plucked its way up the first line, thin and bright and fragile as frost on a pane, and she felt rather than heard the way the fog stirred around them in answer. The road ahead began to glow. It was not the pearl-pink of the Heart; it was a clean, colorless, ordinary light, the light of a morning at the end of a very long night. It came from a long way off, at the other end of the Tunnel, and it lay along the slate like a ribbon.

The tune reached the end of its last line, and stopped.

It stopped one note short. It always did.

Casimir drew a breath. He opened his mouth. In a high thin steady baritone, and very slightly flat, he sang the note.

It was the half-tone higher. It was the one that turned a lullaby into a question. It hung in the thinning air, bright as a bead, and then it was gone, and the answer came to it out of the dark, from the road ahead, from the light at the end of the world. Not a note. A sound. A long, slow, deep exhalation, as of a great animal turning over in its sleep, and settling, and sighing out its last cold breath.

"That," said Elodie, very softly, "was her."

"Yes," said Casimir.

"She's gone."

"I believe she is." His hand was shaking on the music box. "I believe she has gone to find him. It's a long way. She will be tired. But I find I am not afraid for her." He shut the lid. "She was always the sort to ask directions."

Elowen put her arm through his.

"Count with me," she said.

…

One.

They went into the fog in step, and she counted aloud, and he counted with her.

Two. Three.

It was the strangest thing she had ever done. She had been here before, a lifetime ago, in the autumn, with her teeth chattering and a number running out of her head like water through a sieve. Now the slate rang under her boots, and the numbers came when she called them, round and ordinary and complete, like beads on a string. Four. Five. She could feel his arm in hers, and his weight on it, and the uneven drag of the bad leg. Six. Ahead of them, Elodie was humming. It was not the lullaby. It was something else, something quick and tuneless and cheerful.

Seven. Eight. Nine.

"Elowen."

"Yes?"

"The number after nine."

"Is ten."

"I thought that it might be." He sounded faintly awed. "I wished to be sure. I find that I do not entirely trust things that come in order."

Ten.

She laughed. It rang off the walls, and the fog took it up and passed it along, and for a moment the Tunnel was full of her voice, going on ahead of them into the light.

They walked on.

It was a long road. There were four hundred and eleven steps in it, and by the two hundredth the bad leg had begun to give out, and he was leaning on her with his whole weight, grim and breathless and silent. By the three hundredth she was carrying half his blanket. By the three hundred and fiftieth the walls had begun to pale. The black slate turned gray, and then fawn, and then a dim warm brown, and the fog came apart into scraps and streamers, and the air that moved in it was not cold. It smelled of grass. It smelled of dung, and wet earth, and smoke from somebody's chimney.

Four hundred. She was crying. She did not know why. Four hundred and ten.

"Elowen," said Casimir, in a small voice. "There is a great deal of light."

"I know."

"It is very bright."

"You'll want to shut your eyes."

"I have only just got them open."

Four hundred and eleven.

They walked out of the Tunnel into the sun.

…

He did not make a sound.

She felt him go still beside her. She felt his arm tighten in hers, and the whole thin frame of him stiffen, as a man stiffens who has stepped off a stair that was not there. She turned her head, and saw his face.

It was a face she would see for the rest of her life. She knew it. She would know it in the dark, on her deathbed, at the end of the world. He was standing in the road with the crutch in one hand and the music box in the other, with his mouth open and his eyes wide and the sunlight pouring down on him like water. It lit every line of him. It lit the dust in his hair, and the scar on his temple, and the long gray smudges of exhaustion beneath his eyes. It picked out the green wool thread at his wrist and made it blaze like a blade of spring grass.

Before them lay the world.

It was green. That was the first thing, and the most absurd. It was green all the way to the edge of the sky. There were hills, long soft folded hills, dotted with sheep and stitched with hedges, and a river winding through them like a bit of dropped silver. There were fields in stripes of gold and brown. There were trees: great round heavy trees, in full red-and-yellow leaf, with the wind going through them like a hand through hair. There was a road, and on the road a cart, and on the cart a man in a hat who had stopped to stare. Smoke rose from a dozen chimneys. Somewhere a dog was barking.

It was the colored world. It was the bright one, the plain one, the one she had left in the grip of a terrible fear. It lay in the afternoon sun as if nothing had happened. As if no one had ever left.

"Oh," said Casimir.

He lifted his face to the sky and shut his eyes. And he sneezed.

It was an enormous sneeze. It came from the soles of his feet. It doubled him over, and sent the music box flying, and set the man in the hat to laughing so hard that he nearly fell off his cart. Casimir straightened up. He wiped his nose on his sleeve. He looked at her with an expression of the purest bewilderment.

"What," he said, "was that?"

"That's a sneeze."

"It is disgusting."

"You'll get used to it," said Elodie, behind them, and she laughed and laughed, and Elowen laughed with her, till they had to sit down in the road.

…

Her father was in the shed.

She had known he would be. She came up the garden path at dusk, with her sister's hand in her left and a tall unsteady stranger on her right, and the plum trees were bare and dark against a sky the color of pale apricot, and the door of the shed stood propped open with a bucket. A lantern burned in the window. There was a smell of crushed fruit and warm yeast and sharp sweet spirits, and she stopped at the gate with her hand on the latch.

Eleven trees. She counted them. Eleven.

"Is it—" said Casimir.

"Shh."

She went up the path alone.

She stood in the doorway. He was bent over the great copper kettle, with his back to her, stirring. He was thinner than she remembered, and his hair had gone the color of ash, and he was wearing a scarf she did not know. But his broad stooped shoulders, and his big slow hands on the paddle, and the way he hummed under his breath as he worked: all of it was exactly as it had been. She had thought she'd forgotten it. She hadn't. It had only been put away.

"Papa," she said.

The paddle stopped.

He did not turn at once. He stood perfectly still, with his head tilted, listening. His face was blank and patient. The eyes were open, and clouded, and milky, and fixed on nothing. He had gone blind weeping, the stories said. She had read it in a corridor, in the dark, in a house of glass.

"Lowie?" said Thomas.

"It's me."

"That's a lie." He said it quite gently. "You're a dream. I've had a hundred of you. You always come at the end of the day, when I'm tired. You say my name, and I turn round, and you're not there."

"I'm here."

"I'd know your step. You always walked like a heifer."

"Papa." She was in the room. She was in front of him. She took his hands in hers, the big ones, rough and hot and smelling of fruit. "It's me. I'm back. I've brought Dee."

"Dee?"

"I'm here, Papa," said Elodie, from the door.

He made a noise she'd never heard a man make.

It was not a word. It was the sound a tree makes when it comes down in a storm. He let go of the paddle, and it fell and clattered on the flagstones, and his arms came out and caught the two of them against his chest, one on each side, and held them there so tight that she couldn't breathe. He was shaking. He smelled of plums. His beard scraped against her forehead, wet and warm, and she knew without looking that it was wet with tears.

And something gold came in at the open door.

It was very small. It was no larger than a mote of dust. It drifted in on the evening wind, over the threshold and the bucket and the stacked casks, glittering faintly in the lantern light, and it moved with the air of a thing that knows exactly where it is going. She watched it cross the shed. She watched it hover above her father's bowed gray head.

It settled on his eyelids, and sank in.

He went rigid.

"Papa?"

"I..." His voice cracked. "Lowie. There's a light."

"Where?"

"There. In the window. There's a lantern." He drew back from them, and she saw his face change: the milky film clearing from his eyes like breath from a pane. They were hazel. They were the hazel of old oak leaves, brown and green and gold at once, and they were swimming with tears, and they were looking at her. "I see it. Lord help me. I see the window. And there's a crack in the ceiling beam, I've been meaning to mend that, and..." He caught his breath. "And you've a scar on your chin."

"It was a door."

"Of course it was a door."

"You said that," said Elodie, laughing, "in exactly the same voice."

"You've both got thin." He was weeping openly, with his big hands cupped round their faces. "You're thin as rakes. Thin as lath. Martha! Martha! Come out here! Come out and look at what the wind's brought!"

…

They sat up all that night.

Her mother had come out of the kitchen with her sleeves rolled and her hair in a net, and had stood quite still in the doorway with a wooden spoon in her hand, and then dropped it, and said nothing at all. She had crossed the shed in four steps. She was a small woman. She had a sharp chin and a tired, humorous mouth with a gap in the teeth, and she gathered both her daughters against her chest and hummed into their hair, flat and off-key, a wordless sound that went on and on.

Elowen stood in it and let it wash over her.

It was her mother's voice. It was the voice that had sung, once, over a cradle. She did not know the song. She would never remember the tune, the nights, the quilt, the long lamplit evenings that had gone out into the dark like candles. They were gone, and it hurt, and it would go on hurting. But the voice was here. The warmth was here. The thing the song had been for was standing in front of her in an apron, smelling of flour, and she had not lost that.

She had not lost that at all.

They ate stew at the kitchen table. They ate three loaves. They told it in pieces, interrupting one another: the fog, the glass, the house with a thousand eyes. Her father went pink at the ears. Her mother kept getting up to touch them, a hand on a shoulder, a palm on a head, as if checking that they were solid. When the story reached the stair, and the music box, and a certain tall man in a blanket who had said nothing for an hour and was sitting very straight in a hard chair, with his hands in his lap, looking at the table as though it might bite, Martha looked from one to the other of them, over the rim of her cup.

"Mm," she said.

"Mam."

"I didn't say anything."

"You said 'mm.'"

"I'm entitled." She put the cup down. She regarded Casimir for a long, level, assessing moment, with her head on one side, and he looked back at her with the expression of a man who is waiting to be told that he has failed an examination. "Can he eat?"

"I can eat," said Casimir. "I can eat a great deal. I find that I am quite remarkably hungry."

"Can he work?"

"Madam, I can do sums. I can keep accounts. I can read the weather. I have done a considerable amount of entertaining." He swallowed. "I do not know how to light a fire."

"Can he sing?"

A beat.

"He's flat," said Elowen.

"So am I," said her mother. "It runs in the family. He'll do." She got up and fetched a bowl. She set it down in front of Casimir with a bang. "Eat. And if you burn the bread, you can clean the oven."

He looked at the bowl. He looked at her. And something happened to his face that Elowen had seen only once before, in a high white room, with a girl in a periwinkle shawl asleep in a pillar of light.

"Yes, ma'am," said Casimir, in a voice that shook. "Thank you."

…

She found him at the gate, much later.

It was the middle of the night. The house was asleep. A thin frost had come down over the garden, and the plum trees stood in it like rows of black lace, and the sky was a deep wide pouring dark, thick with stars. She had a quilt round her shoulders. She had come out for a breath of air, and found him leaning on the post in his borrowed coat, with the crutch under one arm, looking up.

"They are so many," said Casimir.

"They've always been this many."

"I had thought there were forty." He did not turn. "In the Land. In the window of the tower, on a clear night, one could see forty, or so. I counted them. I gave them names." His voice was low. "I did not know."

She leaned beside him.

For a time they said nothing. The cold crept in under the quilt. Somewhere in the hills a fox screamed, a long thin scrap of sound, and was answered. A light came on in the window of the house across the field. In the kitchen behind them, someone had banked the stove, and a thread of warm smoke rose from the chimney and slid across the stars.

"Elodie is going to Edmund's grave in the morning," she said.

"I thought she might."

"She wants to sing it to him. The new verse. She says she's sure he can hear." She hesitated. "I said I'd go with her. And after that I thought I might ask Papa for the loan of the cart. There are people at the foot of the hill, Casimir. Rosalind. The old man with the lute. A lot of them don't have anywhere to go. I thought..."

"That we should go and fetch them."

"That I should."

"We," said Casimir, firmly. "I am a person who has promised, on the stairs, to do things together. I intend to keep it. I intend to keep every promise I ever make from now on, down to the last and smallest." He tilted his head. "Beginning with this."

"With what?"

He turned.

The frost had silvered his hair. He looked tired. He looked very young, and rather ridiculous in a coat three sizes too short in the sleeve, and the eyes that were fixed on her face, in the starlight, were gray and clear and astonished. He lifted his hand. It was cold. It was warm. It touched her cheek, as it had done in the Heart, as lightly as a snowflake settling.

"I love you," said Casimir.

"I know."

"I intend to say it every day. I wish you to understand that it will become tedious."

"Try me."

"I love you," he said, and kissed her; and the world, which had been so strange for so long, which had been a thing of glass and silver and reflection and cold, was warm and rough and real under her hands. It smelled of woodsmoke and pressed plums. It tasted of frost. She could hear her own heart, and his, going against each other, like two clocks learning to keep time.

When they drew apart at last, she was laughing.

"What?" said Casimir.

"Nothing." She pressed her forehead to his. "It's only that I never thought I'd have to teach a man to breathe during a kiss."

"Was I not doing it correctly?"

"You were doing it like a fish."

"I shall practice," he said gravely. "At length."

And behind them, in the kitchen, the stove ticked and settled. The stars went on, silent and enormous. A single flake of snow, the first of the year, came drifting down out of the black, an ordinary one, soft and white and small. It landed on his sleeve. It did not shine, or ring, or hold a face. It was only snow. It sat there a moment, and shivered, and melted into the wool.

He watched it go.

"Elowen," said Casimir, softly. "Ember, ember."

She smiled, with her eyes shut.

"Go on," she said. "I'm listening."

And he sang her home.