The Reign of Magic. Wolf Awert

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      Nill noticed nothing. The moment’s meaning passed him completely. He was impatient and could not understand why Dakh and Esara took so much time standing together in silence. If all had been said, they could go. He did not know that not everything had been said, not by a long way.

      After what seemed like an age the druid turned around and began to walk with his long, calm steps. Esara kept looking long after the two had disappeared.

      *

      The air was still cold and stabbed at the lungs, but the grayish-yellow on the horizon promised another hot day.

      “Ringwall lies in the direction of Woodhold. We will be going towards the morning sun, however, until we reach the outskirts of Metal World,” the druid said. “That way we can avoid the villages.”

      Nill did not understand why they were supposed to avoid the villages. He had expected to enter every village as Dakh-Ozz-Han had: powerfully, spectacularly and in the manner of a king. Nill had a hard time concealing his disappointment, but Dakh-Ozz-Han acted as though he had not noticed.

      The druid and the boy kept an even pace, as experienced wanderers do when they have a long way to travel. It was important to move quickly and achieve a good stretch before resting in the early afternoon, at which point they waited for the heat to pass. Nill had taken the lead for now, as he knew every path in the vicinity of his village. At first he stuck to the old path he had taken every morning with his herd. He answered the druid’s questioning look: “I have an old friend to say goodbye to.”

      But it was not goodbye. The old ram stood atop the hill where he had always waited, tilted his head to one side and gave the druid a wary glance. He let neither Nill nor Dakh come within twenty paces of him.

      “It looks like it doesn’t trust us,” the druid grumbled. “But he seems to be a grand fellow.”

      Dakh made a few attempts at baiting him, but the old ram resisted. The druid’s face became more serious after each failed attempt.

      “Leave him be,” Nill said. “He’s stubborn, old, but generally quite harmless.”

      The druid growled deep within his throat. “No being capable of withstanding a druid’s allure is harmless. Where did you find him and what have you spent the summer doing?”

      Nill shook his head uncertainly. “He just appeared. There was a bit of a question of whose responsibility the herd was, but I managed to convince him. From that moment we took care of the herd together. I sat by the slope and he stood atop the hill. And when I brought the herd to the stables for the night he brought up the rear.”

      Dakh-Ozz-Han began to move again, taking his eyes off the ram. Nill waved at the ram in a sheepish kind of way and then ran after the druid. Even a simple farewell was too much for him at the moment. Nill felt as though his entire tidy life was crumbling into little pieces, none of which seemed to fit together any more.

      It’ll all work out, he thought.

      The old ram stood there like a sentinel. Only after the boy and the druid had vanished behind the next hill did he raise a hoof.

      Nill walked where he had walked a hundred times before, and even when they had long since left the familiar terrain the landscape was unchanged. A web of tough, dry grass covered the bleached, naked stone of the hilltops. Lonesome black bushes that nobody and nothing could get rid of dug deep into the rock with their roots. This was the home Nill knew, a place for tough and frugal people, for rams, small rodents and scratch-birds. Where the old caverns had crumbled in the white rock now lay deep gorges between the hills that had become fearsome swamps over time. These holes were both a blessing and a terror to the shepherds. In the hottest of summers the herds could always find enough water here so as not to die of thirst, but more than one animal had slipped on the steep slopes and been caught in the bog below.

      The hard, triangular grass that grew in the mud at the bottom of these basins was difficult even for the rams to digest, so thirst was the sole motivator for their trips down into the gorges. But for humans, the grass as well as the morass in which it grew in had a different advantage, because it was an excellent building material. Still, the bricks had to lie in the sun for a long time, until the stench had left them. Both animals and humans valued a small strip of good, solid earth between the wet trenches and the bare hilltops. The grass there grew more readily and certain herbs gave the air an agreeable aroma.

      The path stretched on, and one day passed like the last. Slowly the dried grass became more yellow, the bushes grew more verdant, isolated birdsong contained speech, and the air was thick with the smell of earth and grass, as though it wanted to fill their lungs completely.

      “Have you noticed?” Nill asked the druid.

      “What’s that, my boy?”

      “All nature is suddenly richer and fuller.”

      The druid smiled. “No, I hadn’t noticed. Nature is always rich and full.”

      Nill grimaced at this answer and stayed silent for a while. He tramped grumpily after the old man, who was ascending and descending the hilltops with ease. Whenever Nill stopped for a moment to marvel at something he had to run to catch back up to the druid.

      “May I ask you something?”

      Dakh-Ozz-Han turned his head slightly, not enough to lose any of the smoothness in his step, and said shortly: “What is it?”

      Nill ran a few more steps to get beside Dakh and started talking immediately. “Is there a difference between a druid who comes and a druid who goes?”

      “Yes,” Dakh acknowledged with a smile. Nill waited for more, but the druid seemed to consider the question answered.

      “But why is that, and how do you do it?”

      “For druids it is like for all other people. They come with their wishes, hopes, expectations or intentions, and they go with their disappointment or happiness, in great sadness or lost in thought. But why do you ask?”

      “That wasn’t what I meant. When you came to our village, all nature bowed before you. The animals and even the wind foretold of your arrival. You brought the people out of their houses, sent the hounds to their dark hiding places, and the earth trembled at your every step. Now I feel that nature is celebrating, and you walk so lightly that you don’t even leave footprints.”

      The druid smiled again. “When a king arrives, his people carry the banners before him, fanfares are sounded and drums are beaten. Messengers foretell of his coming, and children and young women lay out flowers and petals to honor him. Everyone sees the herald, because they highly anticipate him. Yet the thief arrives in the neighbor’s dress, the spy stays unrevealed. I came like a warlord and went like a thief. Out here, in the wilds, I move unseen, and I will enter Ringwall as an unloved envoy.”

      Nill listened in silence. He had always gone as he had come. Or had he?

      Apart from a short rest at noon they had wandered for a full day again. The grass covering the hills was still yellow, sporadic groupings of bushes lent sparse protection from the sun and fresh water was so rare that they had to live off their own rations most of the time. They slept in the small forests that had now begun to cover the hills more frequently. Nill, who had never seen trees this large before, had noticed that the druid always set up his night СКАЧАТЬ