The Rebirth of Pan by Jo Walton

Author:Jo Walton [Walton, Jo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Fiction
Published: 2011-04-06T23:00:00+00:00

no two ways about it. But she'd never fallen in love before, in all those years of going round the world, pulling the tides behind her.

So she thought and she thought. At the last she decided to take up a form and go down to the world to speak to the man and see if he'd be prepared to leave the world and come and live on the moon with her. She harnessed up her four stags to her chariot. She dressed herself in silver with her arms all white and bare. She set her sickle knife at her side, and put on a fillet of silver to hold her dark hair back.

She looked at herself in the ocean, and she saw that she was beautiful. Then she waited until she saw him, and drove down the moon's path on the water until she was standing before him, with the stags'

hooves breaking the water and making his little boat rock, rock, on the waves.

Well, he looks up, surprised, that fisherman, for one minute he's dropping his nets in the moonlight on quiet water and the next the boat's rocking on breaking waves. When he looks up what does he see but the chariot and the moon standing up in it, splendid and shining right in front of him. And he's clean scared, as who wouldn't be, seeing a sight like that? No doubt in his mind who it was, though he didn't know what it was she wanted of him. So he flings himself down in the boat, shielding his eyes from her glory. And this isn't what she wants, not at all, not even slightly, she knows all about worship and values it in its place, but not from this lad. So she tells him to get up, and asks him straight out without pause for thought, she says:

"Get up. I want you to come back with me up the moon's track to live with me in the moon and teach me what love is."

He does get up, and he stands there trembling in his boat before her, and he doesn't know what to say. And after a while he gets his courage together and he says:

"I've got a girl at home. I'm next best thing to a married man." And she frowns, all terrible, and the lead stag paws the water, snorting, sending up the spray, and she says:

"But don't you want me? All these ages I've never once loved anyone, and now I do and you spurn me?" And he trembles again, fit to set the little boat rocking once more. But the gods don't set their sights on fools, mostly, and for sure he's no fool, though younger than he might be if he'd had time to get older.

"I've always honoured you and I always will, but I'm just a common fisherman, and as I said, I'm promised to a girl on the island, begging your pardon."

"If you come with me you could live forever." she says, tempting him now.

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