The young man labored up the zig zag path, resting every third turn. Clouds that he'd climbed through an hour ago shrouded his valley home and undulated like a great, bright, white ocean in the afternoon sun. The chilly mist that had soaked his thin beard and matted his hair against his head had long since dissipated, so he loosened his tunic to the breeze that smelled of alpine grass and trickling water. At dawn, the path had seemed a pleasant task--he could even see from the farmhouse, where his parents and brothers and sisters slept, the goal high on the mountain, but the uphill hike closed the distance slowly, and now the aching emptiness of his legs matched the fullness of his heart. A night on the pass, and then tomorrow he would meet his bride in the valley beyond.
He paused to drink from a leather pouch and to measure the distance between the sun and the mountains' tops before pushing forward. No place on the trail would be safe for the evening. He had to reach Old-Stones Camp by sunset. If the last traveler had not left firewood, he would be scrambling in the dusk for fuel.
The next turn brought the first ruin, a broken pile of bricks the size of bread loaves scattered around the hint of what might have been a foundation that overlooked the winding trail he'd already climbed. His father had told him this might have been a guard post for the remains of the fortress at the pass, but a guard from what?
Hundreds of feet higher, he passed another remnant, this one with two walls still standing that reached mid-chest, and the gap of a window to look at the ascending trail.
His father had told him the way. The next ruin meant he was nearly there. "A bit of a climb after that," his father said. "A bit of a climb and a night on the pass." He'd clasped his son's shoulder and looked as if he might say something else, but he bit the words back. "Keep the fire lit, son, and be strong," he'd said. "Your bride waits on the morrow."
He turned a corner on the narrow trail to a rise steep enough that steps had been carved into the rock, some so shallow and smoothed by time that they were as treacherous as the bare slope. A scattering of gravel made the footing worse. To his right, the mountain dropped away for a thousand yards. If he fell, nothing would stop his plunge. He placed his feet carefully, focused on the ground immediately in front of him and kept his left hand braced against the mountain.
Twenty summers ago his father had come over the mountains from the village on the other side to marry. The young man liked the thought that he was walking the same trail his father had taken. He imagined the two of them passing. Perhaps they would wave, share some bread, clap each other on the back, congratulating each other, before continuing toward their unmet wives.
The sun slid below the mountains. Only the peaks on the valley's other side caught the light as the young man walked into the flat area at the top of the pass that they called Old-Stones Camp. He passed between two broken pillars five times taller than he stood, carved from rock he didn't recognize, not the blue grey granite he'd been passing all day. On either side of them, the tumbled remains of what must have once been imposing walls slumped across the notch that formed the pass. A matching set of ruins showed where another wall had blocked the other side. Between the walls were two-hundred yards of courtyard, although now huge square stones, some taller than him, had tumbled from the walls, creating shadowed spaces and dark crevices where animals could hide.
At one end of the notch, pine trees covered the mountain. If he had to, he could break dead branches from them to make a fire, but a pile of wood waited by the blackened circle in the middle of the clearing. He assembled his campfire with the smallest twigs on the bottom, and then a few medium thickness branches on that. Lichen grew in the cracks of the clearing's floor. The floor was laid stone also, huge slabs that stretched more than three strides.
The sun left the opposite peaks. A breeze swept around him that warned of a cold night. He was glad for the thick blankets he'd carried in a roll on his back. As sparks caught in the tinder, he crouched down, shielding the flame from the wind until the larger pieces of wood kindled. Darkness fell unnaturally fast, and already stars glimmered. The wood pile was large enough to last the night, but he was tired. Muscles in his back ached from leaning uphill. He would have to wake often enough to keep the fire alive. If the fire went out, all would be lost.
The blankets felt good across his shoulders as he stared into the fire's flickering shapes, dancing orange and yellow figures, like wedding dancers, and he thought about the woman he he'd meet tomorrow. The women in the other valley, he had heard, were strange and wild and tasted like cinnamon when kissed. He shivered to think of it. Around him, shadows dipped and swayed to the flicker in the wood-smoke scented air.
He might have fallen asleep sitting up. It seemed he'd only closed his eyes for a second, but the stars wheeled above him in utter blackness now, and he realized he was not alone. An old man sat across from him, a staff across his knees. The young man could see the wall behind the man, through the man, one of Old-Stones Camp’s ghosts. The old man’s eyes were aged and dark, defeated eyes that dragged the young man to the edge of long ago battles where friends and heroes died alike, and no one left the battlefield unscarred. More than that, the young man felt loss in the old man. His shoulders slumped in a way that suggested great weight: the weight of children who’d died before the parent, the weight of a sickly wife who suffered long and departed in pain. The weight of loneliness and a loss of purpose.
The old man lay down his staff and put his hands out. “Come with me,” he seemed to say. “We can choose a high place to look from and see the world again as men, as eagles even, and fly above it all. Ascend while we still can.”
The young man pictured them walking from the fire to one of the many ledges beyond the fortress. Starlit clouds would be below their feet. Together, they’d take the final step. Why suffer the penalties of life when we can avoid them ourselves? The old man’s face seemed wise and compassionate.
But the young man sat, unmoving. Gradually, the old man’s face changed, melted in the firelight, and at first the young man thought the ghost had become his father, but his father was not dead. He’d talked to his father just the day before! The young man almost stood. He would rush home to be sure his father was healthy. The ghost continued to change, though, until the young man saw himself sitting across the fire, a vision of himself aging. The clothes grew ragged on the apparition’s shoulders. His hands wrinkled and twisted arthritically. Then, the tunic fell away to the stones and vanished. The naked ghost of himself sat in the light, skin sagging from a skeletal frame, hair wispy and thin clinging to the almost bald skull; the ghost stood, stepped across the fire. Flames crawled up the spirit’s legs, lit his interior so the bones glowed. The young man gasped, his heart convulsing in his chest as the vision of his own old age reached to touch him, perhaps to strangle him with his huge-knuckled fingers, or, even worse, to caress his face. Closing his eyes, the young man smelled the ghost’s stench, but he felt nothing.
He sat, eyes squeezed shut, afraid that if he opened them, the ghost’s face would be almost against his own. The young man would look into terrible old eyes and never see anything again. Only the mountain’s breeze touched him, though, and when he finally forced himself to look, he was alone at the fire. A long stick in the flame, thick as a leg bone, burned through and collapsed into the coals, splashing a dozen tiny embers onto the stone at his feet. They throbbed like hearts before fading away.
Above, the stars glittered in the cloudless night. The fire at his feet, the uneven reflections of the flame from the old fortress, and the piercing starlight were all he could see. He added more wood until he had to scoot back from the heat. Pulling the blankets tight around him, he lay on his side, facing the flame, and tried not to think what might creep up from behind.
Later, the moon woke him—it had risen while he slept--or maybe it was the cold from the stone floor, but he found himself looking into the fire that had almost died, aware that he was not alone again. A moonlit shape walked through the old fortress gate, barefooted, pale legs aglow beneath the short fur cloak she held closed in front of her, a woman his own age, dark haired, a face as smooth as porcelain and as pure.
She circled the low embers and sat on the stone floor beside him as if to warm herself, although the fire provided little heat. Her legs stretched so that her feet were at the fire’s edge. She wiggled her toes. The young man rolled a little so he could look at her face. He felt no fear. She stared beyond the embering coals for a long time. At some point, he couldn’t say when, her hand moved from her side and rested on the stone beside his cheek, only inches from him. She did not seem insubstantial like the ghost of the old man. Her fingers were finely formed, the nails filed neatly. A callous on the inside edge of her thumb matched one on his own hand that came from hours in the fields with a hoe, or the afternoons he spent splitting firewood.
The ghost turned her gaze from the fire to look at the young man. She brushed the hair away from his forehead. Her fingers grazed his skin, but they weren’t ghostly in the least. His chest tightened and he felt himself breathing harder. She leaned toward him so she could cup his cheek. He held himself perfectly still, not even blinking. Her cloak had fallen partly open, but shadows hid her from him.
For many minutes she ran her fingers across his cheek. A breeze kicked the coals into brightness, turning her eyes into orange reflections. Her hand slid down to the side of his neck, pushed under his blanket so she could feel his shoulder and chest, each circle of her hand sliding lower, exploring more of his skin. He ached against her warmth. His mouth went dry, and he couldn’t swallow. If he waited, perfectly still, he would be hers. In a moment, she would move beside him, lay her firm legs beside his own, and his hands would be upon her.
The image was so clear it was if he was already doing it. The ghost made flesh would be against him, his blankets pushed aside. They would know each other under the stars, among the blue and grey stones, beside the fire’s mellow coals. He grew hot beneath her fingernails that traced fiery paths on his stomach, travelling farther with each orbit. She rested her elbow on his chest so he could feel her weight, smell the windy distance in her hair, hear her soft exhalations mixed with the mountain air’s whisper across the stones.
He would be lost, he knew, unutterably lost if he let this fur-cloaked spirit take him, if he took her. The two would rise, would mix, would become the moan that haunted lonely places when a storm scoured the land. He would become the painful stillness in the room of a sleepless lover whose spouse had departed. He would vanish from the face of the loving land and never see his bride on the morrow. (But she felt so good!) He arched up just a little into her hand. His father told him once, “You never forget the one you never had.” If he didn’t let her push his blanket aside, if he didn’t follow the moment, he would always return to her in his dreams. And what did any moment except this moment matter? The world had narrowed until everything, all of it, every cloud and forest and river and lake, every unplanted field, every unharvested crop, every season, everything that was a part of who he had been and who he would be, narrowed to the tips of her fingers.
The young man put his hand on the ghost’s wrist, stopping the movement. The muscle in her arm twitched. Her heart, her ghost heart, beat time under his fingers. She turned her gaze to meet his own. Hair hung across her face, almost hiding her expression in the shadows, but her face was sad. Slowly, her fingers on his belly clenched into a loose fist. She mouthed the word, “Please.” Was it possible that a spirit felt emotions? Was this connection with the living beside a dying fire on a clear night a relief from the suffering of death?
The young man shook his head, the hardest motion he had made in his life. Even now, he could release her wrist, let her continue. He shook his head again, and the ghost gathered herself, touched his cheek again, but this time in farewell, before walking into the night, the white silhouette of her legs disappearing last.
He realized he was gasping as if he’d just finished a race, and the fire was almost out. The young man pushed himself up. His blanket slid to the stone, and the breeze cooled the sweat on his chest and back. The new sticks he thrust into the coals soon caught, pushing the circle of light to the broken walls. Sparks floated up to mix with stars. Heat baked his face, but he loaded more wood until when he reached blindly for the next stick, he found nothing. He blinked tears to clear his vision. The wood was gone. The flame crackled and hissed. Had he made a mistake? If the fire died before the sun rose, then he’d have nothing to hold onto. The ghosts would have him, or so he had heard. They’d take him in despair or take him in lust, and when the next young man climbed the slope, he’d find the spot where the fire had been, but there would be no wood waiting.
The three-quarter moon stood nearly overhead. Flames leapt two and three feet into the air; the wood burned fast. In the couple of hours left before sunrise, it would die to nothing. He needed more wood.
The young man stood, his legs shaky beneath him. There might be deadfall in the trees at the edge of the fortress, if he could find them.
Beneath the creaking branches, the moon gave more illumination than the fire. Milky palm prints of light moved like schools of fish across the rock and pine needles. Rocks poked up between the trees, and some trees grew from cracks in the stone as if the mountain had squeezed them out, but he couldn’t tell wood from shadows. He kicked at the ground, rubbed his arms against the chill, then climbed the slope, bracing himself against tree trunks, being careful of his footing. Soon the fire peeked through the trees below him. Branches swayed. He stumbled over a branch as thick as his arm, broken at both ends. A single twig with a few dried pine needles stuck at a right angle from it. He snapped it off. The branch served as a staff.
Now, farther from the fire he could no longer see, there was more wood to gather. A tree had fallen long ago, and the branches broke off easily. Soon he had as much as he could carry. He walked down the hill, careful not to slip on the steep slope, but whatever path he’d chosen on the way up, he lost. He paused, looking for a familiar mark, momentarily baffled. He hadn’t climbed that long, had he? The fire should be visible. The only way to go was downhill, but it felt as if he’d already come down farther than he’d gone up.
Dried bark dug into his forearms. The old wood smelled dusty. For a moment, he considered climbing again to find the dead tree. Then he could return the way he’d come. While he tried to make up his mind, a sound that was not wind in the trees caught his attention. He cocked his head to the side, listened intently. Now, only the pines creaked. Branches tapped against branches. There, it came again. A mewing, high sound, choked off at the end, like a baby crying. What direction?
He turned round. A longer branch in his arms caught against a trunk, so he tilted the armful. Again, it was a baby’s cry to the side, not far. Without thinking, he took a few steps toward the sound, but it shifted. More uphill. It sounded like a baby, exactly like one, a baby abandoned in the cold.
A baby couldn’t possibly be on the mountain. Maybe it was an animal. Did bears come this high? Not that he imagined a bear could make such a noise. Mountain cats were said to haunt the mountain’s reaches. A cat might make such a noise, but it didn’t sound like a cat sounding like a baby. It sounded like a baby. The young man scrambled up the slope to go around a boulder that blocked his way. Trees obscured most of the moonlight, as dim as it was, so he couldn’t see more than a few feet before the darkness swallowed shadows and trees alike.
He stopped. The crying stopped. His arms ached with the load of wood. For a moment, the wind stilled, leaving his heartbeat pounding in his ears and the rasp of gravel beneath him as his foot slid a little. Had the sound been real? Carefully, he stepped toward where he’d heard it last. In the dark, movements had to be slow, to be considered. He laughed a little to himself. This was foolishness, to be walking on the high mountain pass at night. Below, the fire needed wood. There could be no baby abandoned in the forest. What he’d heard must not be real. It was a deception like the old man or the woman. But where was he to go now? He couldn’t see the stars to orient himself. Uphill, downhill were his choices, but it seemed he’d turned around somehow. Was the fire downhill to his left or downhill to his right? Which way had he come from?
Then the baby cried again, almost underfoot. He bit back a scream, dropped some of the wood. It couldn’t be a baby. It had to be an animal or spirit. A congregation of claws and teeth, or deadly supernatural vapor, dedicated to his destruction.
He went around a tree, focused on his balance, afraid of losing control, so concentrated on not falling that it took a minute to realize he wasn’t in the trees anymore although the hill was just as steep. Stars breached the sky’s veil like knife points, and the moon glared. There was no fire below him. The mountain fell away to cliffs and clouds. Where was he? Slowly, so that he didn’t begin a slide that would take him over a precipice, he turned. To his left was the broken wall of the Old-Stone’s Camp fortress. He’d gone around the top of the wall or through a breach, arrived on the other side. If he’d fled the baby’s cry just a bit faster, he would be dead now, bleeding in a broken pile at the bottom of a long fall.
Behind and above, the cry rang out again, and then there were dozens of them, caterwauling from the trees. Babies, babies and babies, sobbing with their little throats. He could imagine them naked on the rocks, tucked between roots, freezing while he listened, doing nothing, but he knew it was a trick of the mountain that loved no living thing, and whatever spirit or creature that owned such a voice wailed now in frustration.
He half climbed down, half slid, until he reached the trail. By the time he walked between the white pillars for the second time, the crying had faded until only the wind sweeping through the trees and over cold stone covered his footsteps. When he grew close to the remains of his fire, a dark shape rose and trotted on four legs in the other direction. By the moon’s dim light he recognized it as a wolf. After the night’s visitations, a mere wolf hardly worried him. Its eyes glowed as it stared back at him until he mimed throwing one of the sticks at it.
Soon, the fire crackled back to life. He rocked on his heels, feeding stick after stick into the flame. The sky lightened to the east, blotting out the stars. Even the three-quarters moon faded away, and along with it his fears lost their grip, became memories. By the time the sun appeared above the horizon, he was thinking about the long hike down the mountain to his grandfather’s village where a wedding ceremony waited for him. They would fete him, introduce him to his bride, and show him his land and the house that would be his.
He pictured walking the fields with this woman he hadn’t met. They would talk about plantings and crops and the ebb and flow of the seasons. Perhaps they would hold hands. After the walks, after meeting the people who would become his people, after the ceremonies and feast, they would retire to the home that was now theirs: the house his father had grown up in. The house where he would age until one day, he would talk to his own son about going up from the valley, and then down to a valley, and the pass between.
The young man gathered wood from the trees, swinging long dead branches against a lightning blasted stump to break them into fire-sized pieces. The work built a sweat against the morning’s chill. He smiled at the weight of the wood in his hand, the solid thump and crack of the labor. When he’d gathered enough to last through the night for the next young man who came this way, he rolled his blankets, tied them snug, and slung them over his shoulder.
He wondered as he walked toward the rising sun if it was true that the women of his new village tasted of cinnamon. He wondered if his wife’s hair would be dark. Would her face be like porcelain in the night, and would her fingertips trace fire on his skin?
Would she wear a wrap of fur?