The Age of Terror by David Plante

Author:David Plante
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

NINE

When he’d been a boy, he had always run away from the wanderer, who was sometimes invited into the kitchen by the cook and given food. Now a young man, he was one afternoon walking along a hedge on the prince’s estate and was startled to see the wanderer lying in a ditch on the other side of the hedge, and about to turn away he was stopped by the wanderer’s rising and staring at him over the top of the hedge, and he returned the wanderer’s stare.

“You have traveled a lot around the world,” he said.

“I have,” the wanderer answered, “and what I have seen makes me sure that the world will cease to be the world we know and become a different world.”

“What world?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does anyone?”

The wanderer stared more deeply into the young man’s eyes and said, “Come with me,” and moving slowly because of the chains he wore under his ragged clothing, he walked toward the edge of the forest along a boundary of the estate.

The young man followed the wanderer into the forest, past high, interconnecting mounds of moss with mushrooms growing out of the mounds that looked like a range of hills that the young man, a giant, looked down on; trickles ran down the hills like rivers, and ants herded together on them like black sheep. When the young man looked up into the dimness streaked with light, he imagined he became very, very small and he was looking up from the roots of grass and cow parsley and burdock into blades and stems and leaves. There was no path, and often the wanderer had to hold branches aside with his staff to let the young man go through. They went through a crag and came into an open space surrounded by high rocks, and in the middle of the space was a big oak tree.

The wanderer made a gesture for the young man to wait, then went, with a slowness not caused now by his chains, to the tree. He seemed to speak to it. He raised his hand for the young man to come.

The trunk of the tree was hollow, and a naked man was standing in the hollow. His long hair was matted about his body, his shoulders and chest and thighs, so he looked as if he were a hairy creature. The bark of the tree had grown over the opening of the hollow, and he was visible only through a slit. He would not be able to get out if he wanted to. When he raised his hands, his fingernails, some curved like horn and broken and jagged, caught at his hair, and his white, wrinkled flesh was exposed. His face was smooth, though, and his eyes clear, and when he looked at the young man through the slit in the tree, he smiled.

The wanderer said, “He is the saint of the monastery even deeper into the forest and has been here longer than you have been alive.”

The man in the tree made a gurgling sound in his throat.

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