The House of Caves by Francis Hagan

Author:Francis Hagan [Hagan, Francis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-02-04T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

‘ . . . This snow is like the falling sand save that it is white – that awful white of bone and dust. It falls, father, and the cold which wraps us up is like nothing I have ever felt before. At least under the desert night – with its stars and high sliver of a bloodless moon – we feel a cold which is dry and brittle. Here, in these mountains which stand so high Old Jubyal feels they are touching the moon itself, this cold is wet and deep like a dark fever. It has claws and a bite to it as if it were alive.

I hear you mutter into your breath that I am mad, father. I do. I hear you even as I write this, my hands numb and the ink dull and listless on my stylus. And your laughter, its slight disbelief, warms me a little.

I remember in my green days when the ways of the desert and Ailat were still a mystery to me how you took me out into the night and made me gaze up into the stars. Do you remember how many there were? I do. A glorious tapestry of diamonds filled that night sky, all glittering with warmth and life. You pointed out patterns and signs to me, naming some and telling me stories about others. And I remember looking up in awe, shivering a little. And you asked if I was cold and when I nodded in reply you smiled a little and bundled me deep into your cloak. It was not the cold which made me shiver, father, as well you knew. It was the magnificence above our heads. Its starkness and beauty – and the vastness of it. I looked up into a high vault of velvet studded with a thousand stories and names and felt the awful loneliness of a lost soul beneath it. I shivered at my own nakedness and knew for the first time what insignificance meant. Names do not make a thing familiar, father, they render it immense for in that name rests a past and a history and also a future, too, which mocks and takes away from our own. And above my head emerged a thousand thousand unknown names.

I have seen that chill on the face of another tonight. Here, in this high cold place, where the very rocks and stones seem to brush those stars, I saw a face drift past and on it lay an emptiness and coldness which reminded me of that night with you.

Flavius Anicius walked past as nothing more than an empty thing – a hollowed out statue adrift from us all. No legionary called out to him. No watch-word challenged him. No adjutant or immunes asked for his advice. This Italian with his aged-face walked on past us all as if we were nothing but shadows or wraiths in the night and the snow.

He had pulled a thick cloak of wool about him. It was pinned at the shoulder with a brooch of silver in the fashion of a horse.

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