The Shade Was Good

The shade beneath the willow had been his alone for some hours, and the river had been speaking to itself in that low untranslatable way rivers do, when the old man realized he was no longer the only one beneath the tree.

He had not seen the visitor arrive. That was not because the visitor had been hidden, precisely — more that arrival was a clumsy human verb, and the visitor preferred the older grammars. He had simply settled, if settling was the word, on the root opposite. His coat was the green of moss that had never known a footprint, and there was something not quite right about the joints of his fingers, though the old man’s eye kept sliding off that detail when he tried to look directly. He was tall in a way that did not match the space he occupied.

He did not greet the old man. Greetings were bargains in miniature, and he would not insult a stranger by opening with one before they had taken each other’s measure.

The river continued. A leaf turned on the water.

“Shade sharer,” the old man said at last, “where do you come from? I haven’t seen you before, and I know every face within thirty miles of Briarwind.”

A slow smile, or what passed for one. The corners of the mouth moved; the eyes did not participate.

“Briarwind. Yes. I knew the hill before it had that name, and the name before this one, and the spring beneath the hill that gave both names their reason. The villagers used to leave milk at the third stone from the path. They have forgotten which stone, and the stone has not forgotten being forgotten. These things matter to some of us.” One long finger traced a shape in the dust between the willow roots. The shape did not quite stay where it was drawn. “As to where I come from — that is a question with more teeth than you perhaps intended, old father. I come from the place your grandmother’s grandmother meant when she said yonder and looked toward the tree line at twilight. I come from the long way round. I come from a court that has no walls and a king who has no name spoken aloud since the Romans were a rumor.”

The smile shifted, and for a moment the old man saw that the teeth behind it were very even, and there were perhaps one or two more of them than there ought to be.

“But you asked about faces, not provinces. My face is new to you because I have not chosen, until today, to wear one you could hold in your eye. You have walked past me, oh, seventeen times. Once you set your lunch down upon my foot. I did not mind. The bread was good.” A pause. The river filled it. “You are not afraid. That is interesting. Most are, by now, even if they cannot say why. Tell me, old man of Briarwind — what is it in you that has gone so quiet that it does not know to be afraid?”

The old man considered the water for a while before he answered. “Time has passed me by,” he said, “faster than I could have imagined when I was just a boy swimming right there when old Silly Billy, the Sailor King, was an old man.”

The visitor was very still for a moment. Then something in his posture changed — not quite a leaning forward, more as though he had become slightly more present in the conversation, the way a candle flame straightens when a door opens somewhere far off.

“William. The fourth of that name. Yes. I remember him… or rather, I remember the year his crown was new, because the hawthorns flowered twice that spring and we took it as a sign, though signs are mostly what we make of them after. Silly Billy. The mortals always find the truest names eventually, though they rarely know what they have done.” He regarded the old man with those eyes that did not quite track the way eyes should. “You have given me a measurement, old father, though I do not think you meant to. A boy in the river when William was old, and now a man in the shade who has watched the water long enough to know it is the same water and not the same water. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, the beginning of the kind of seeing that makes a person interesting to my sort.”

The long fingers folded together. There were too many knuckles, though the old man kept losing count when he tried to verify it.

“You said it as a complaint, I think. Time has passed me by. But listen to the shape of the words. Time did not pass you by. Time passed through you, which is a different verb entirely, and you are still standing — sitting, forgive me — at the end of it.” A leaf fell between them and did not quite reach the ground in the time it ought to. “Tell me this, then. What is the thing you swam toward, that summer when the Sailor King was old? Not what you remember now. What the boy was reaching for, in the water.”

The old man was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “I reached out for her. But I wasn’t anything. No land, no name, nothing to show for. And she was a gem, wasn’t she though? Of course she was. So she was handed to the little lord, and they made a home there up on the hill and had their lives that seemed to be good to her. When we saw each other years later she smiled at me, the girl and the boy, seeing each other again. And she seemed to soften her heart and her eyes. Then she died when her youngest was only a small one, and they left for the south. The lord and his children. But I think of her as that girl that swam with me. She was prettier than any apple on any tree ever was.”

The fey did not speak for a long while. The river spoke instead, and a kingfisher passed low over the water without seeing him, which was its own kind of answer about what he was.

When he finally moved, it was only to incline his head, very slightly, the way a much older creature acknowledges something it had not expected to find.

“Ah.” That single sound, and it carried more weight than the long speeches before it. “You have given me something rare, old father, and I do not think you knew you were giving it. We do not have that, my sort. We have longings, oh yes, and we have hungers that would frighten you if you saw them whole, and we have the kind of love that lasts a thousand years and ruins everything it touches. But we do not have the apple-girl in the river when the world had not yet decided what we would become. We do not have the door that closed before we walked through it, and the whole long life lived in the warmth of knowing it was there.”

He looked at the water. For a moment one would have sworn he was seeing something other than what was in front of him.

“The little lord. Yes. They are always little lords, in these stories. Lands and names. The world weighs such small things so heavily, and then a girl dies in the south with her youngest still small, and all the lands and all the names do not buy her one more summer. The little lord had her days. You had her being seen. I am not certain, old father, which of you was the richer man. I suspect she knew.”

He turned those not-quite-right eyes upon the old man again, and there was something in them now that had not been there before. Not pity. His kind did not pity. Something older. Recognition, perhaps.

“I will tell you a thing, because you have been honest with me and the shade has been generous to us both. My people make bargains. It is what we are for, in the older grammar. And once, a very long time ago, when the hawthorns were younger and the stones at Briarwind still remembered their proper names, I might have offered you one. Give me the memory of her in the water, and I will give you sixty years of her at your hearth. The little lord never marries her. The children are yours. The southern grave is someone else’s grief.”

He let that sit between them for a moment, the way one lets a blade sit on a table without picking it up.

“But I will not offer it. Do you know why? Because I have only just understood, sitting here in your shade, that the bargain would be the theft. The apple on the tree you never picked is sweeter than any apple in any bowl. We have never learned that, my kind. We are always picking. It is our great sorrow and we do not even know to call it sorrow.” A long pause. Then, almost gently: “What was her name, old father? You have not said it. I think you have not said it aloud in some time. You need not say it to me. But I would have you know that if you did, I would hold it carefully, and I would not use it for anything, which is perhaps the strangest gift one of my sort has ever offered one of yours.”

“Katriona,” the old man said. “I called her Kate. She was a redheaded girl and a kind person.”

The fey received the name the way one receives water in cupped hands. He did not repeat it. That, the old man sensed, was deliberate — a courtesy of his kind that he would not have known to ask for.

“A redheaded girl and a kind person. You have given her, in eleven words, more truth than most men give their wives in a lifetime of speeches. The little lord, I suspect, did not know how to say it that simply. They rarely do.” He looked at his own long hands, folded in his lap, and seemed for a moment almost puzzled by them, as though he had forgotten for an instant what shape he was wearing. “Kate. The short name is the loved name, in your tongue. The long name is for the world and the priests and the stone she lies beneath. The short name is for the boy in the river. I will not say it. But I will know it, for as long as I am, which is some while yet. That is the gift, such as it is.”

He was silent again. The shade had shifted a little; the afternoon was turning toward whatever comes after afternoon in places like this.

“Old father. Kindness leaves a mark on the world that does not wash out. We can see it, my kind. It glows, faintly, in the places kind people have stood. Briarwind has a glow on the path between the old mill and the hawthorn at the bend — I had wondered, these many years, whose it was. I think I know now. I think she walked that path with a basket, perhaps, or a child on her hip, and she was kind in the doing of it, in the small unobserved way that is the only kindness that truly counts.” He inclined his head, very slightly, toward the south. “Wherever she lies, the ground above her is warmer than the ground around it. Not by much. But by enough. That is not a thing I am inventing to comfort you. That is a thing I am telling you because you have shared your shade with a stranger and given him a name he did not deserve and will not misuse.”

A pause, and then, with something almost like humor returning to the corner of his mouth: “The boy in the river is also still there, you understand. We see those, too. He is reaching. He has not stopped reaching. He does not know yet that the reaching was the having. None of you ever do, until you are old men in the shade, and by then you think it is too late to tell him. It is not too late. He can hear you, if you speak to him. That is one of the few honest pieces of magic in the world, and it costs nothing, and even my kind cannot bargain for it.”

The old man closed his eyes for a long moment. When he opened them, he said, “Bright one, I’m old and tired, but I’m not done with what interests me yet. I wish that there was the smell of wisteria and wheat in the air again, and that my bones didn’t ache. Had I been born in the Twilight Lands, perhaps I’d sit beside a tree and rhyme my tales with one like myself.”

The fey’s head turned sharply at Bright one, and for the first time in the encounter the old man had the distinct impression he had surprised the visitor. Not alarmed him — surprised him. The two were quite different in his country.

“You called me by an old name, old father. Not the oldest, but old enough that I have not heard it from a mortal mouth in… a long while. A very long while. The priests took it from us, mostly. They needed it for other things. I shall not ask where you learned it. That would be discourteous, and besides, I think the answer is that some words are simply remembered by the bones of certain people, and your bones are old enough now to be honest about what they know.”

He leaned back against the willow root, as though making himself at ease, as though acknowledging that the formal dance of stranger-to-stranger was finished and something else had begun.

“Wisteria and wheat. Yes. That is a true wish, and the true wishes are the dangerous ones to speak in my company, so let me be careful with it as I have been careful with her name.”

He lifted one of those long hands and turned it palm up. Nothing dramatic happened. But the air between them shifted, just slightly, the way air shifts when a window is opened in a distant room of a house.

“There. Breathe, old father. Slowly. Do not look for it; looking will make it shy.”

And there it was — faint, almost not there, but unmistakable. Wisteria. And under it, the dry gold smell of wheat in late summer, the kind that is almost but not quite ready for cutting. It was not memory. It was the thing itself, somehow, brought thin across some distance the old man could not name.

“A small kindness. It costs me nothing you would miss, and it is not a bargain, so do not thank me as though it were one. Consider it the rent for the shade.” A glance at the willow above. “The tree will not mind. Trees and my kind have an understanding of long standing.” He lowered his hand. The scent lingered a moment longer, then thinned, then was only the river again. “As to your bones — no. I will not touch those. Not because I cannot. Because the ache in them is part of what makes you the man who can say she was prettier than any apple on any tree, and I would not unmake that man for the sake of his comfort. You would not thank me tomorrow.”

He was quiet for a beat, and then his expression became, if such a word could apply to him, gentler.

“But the other thing you said. Had I been born in the Twilight Lands, perhaps I’d sit beside a tree and rhyme my tales with one like myself. Old father. Listen carefully, because I am about to tell you a thing my kind almost never tells yours. You are sitting beside a tree. You are rhyming your tales. And the one you are rhyming them with is, by every measure that matters in my country, one like yourself. The Twilight Lands are not so far as the stories make them. They are, in fact, closer in some afternoons than in others, and this — ” a small gesture that took in the willow, the river, the slant of light, the two of them — “this is one of the closer afternoons. You did not need to be born there. You needed only to live long enough, and honestly enough, that one of us would sit down across from you and find the conversation worth having. That is not nothing, old father. That is, in truth, most of what any of us — yours or mine — ever get.”

A pause. The wisteria-ghost was entirely gone now. The river continued.

“Tell me another. While the light holds. What else interests you, that you are not done with yet?”

“Other lands,” said the old man. “Other peoples. I never did see the world outside of these close counties. I wanted to walk the Via Roma. See the ways Europe greets its visitors. But I suppose I’ll see them on the winds one day.”

The fey made a small sound — not quite a laugh, but something kin to it.

“On the winds one day. You have a poet’s economy, old father. Three words and you have buried yourself, scattered yourself, and made the scattering sound like a holiday.” He shifted against the willow root, and for a moment the light through the leaves did something odd to his outline. “The Via Roma. Yes. I have walked stretches of it, in my way, though my walking is not your walking. I will tell you something about it that the books will not. The stones remember every foot that has crossed them, and on certain evenings — late, when the tourists have gone and the swallows are stitching the sky — you can hear the remembering, faintly, like a crowd murmuring three streets over. Pilgrims and legionaries and merchants and lovers and a great many people who were simply going home with bread. The bread-carriers are the loudest, oddly. The road favors the ordinary.”

He turned one of those long hands, considering.

“Europe greets its visitors badly now, mostly. That is a true thing and I will not soften it. The old courtesies have thinned. But the land still greets them, if they know how to be greeted. A hill in Umbria at the hour the bells start does not care that you arrived by aeroplane and not by donkey. It will give you the same five minutes it gave Saint Francis, if you stand still inside them. Most do not stand still. You, I suspect, would have.”

A pause. The river. A dragonfly, blue as a chip of evening, hovered between them and was gone.

“I could show you a piece of it. Not the whole — I am not so generous as that, and the whole would undo you besides. But a piece. Close your eyes, old father, if you trust me enough, which you have no good reason to do, and yet I think you will.”

The old man closed his eyes.

For the space of perhaps three breaths, there was the smell of hot stone and rosemary, and somewhere not far off the sound of a fountain that had been running since before his grandfather’s grandfather was a notion, and the particular quality of light that only exists in places where the sun has been honored for a very long time. He could feel the worn dip in a step beneath an imagined foot. A bell rang, two valleys over. Someone laughed in a language he did not speak and had always somehow understood the shape of.

Three breaths. Then the willow again, and the river, and the fey watching him with those eyes that did not quite track.

“There. You have walked a stretch of it now. Not in the body — the body is a stubborn instrument and does not travel by my methods well — but in the part of you that was always going to do the walking anyway. The body was only ever going to be the excuse.” A small, almost rueful movement of the head. “This is the secret your churches half-remember and tell badly. The journey was never about the feet. The feet are a courtesy you pay the road. What actually goes is the attending — and yours, old father, is in good repair. Better than many who have crossed the Via Roma in person and brought home nothing but blistered heels and a tin saint.”

He folded his hands again. The too-many knuckles. The old man had stopped trying to count them.

“As for the winds. Yes. You will go on them, in time. We see that too — the going. It is less frightening than your priests have made it sound and less tidy than your poets have made it sound, and it is, in its own way, a kind of arriving everywhere at once. You will pass over the Via Roma then, among many other places. You will not need the eyes for it. The attending will be enough. It always was.”

A long quiet.

“But not today, I think. Today there is still shade, and a river, and a stranger who has perhaps overstayed his welcome and finds, to his own surprise, that he does not wish to leave just yet.”

“That was enough for me,” the old man said, “you who are magic. I am satisfied and satiated.”

The fey was very still, and then he closed his eyes. Briefly. The way one does when receiving a thing too carefully given to be received with the eyes open.

When he opened them, something had shifted. The not-quite-rightness was still there, but softened, as though he had let down some small portion of the strangeness he wore for the comfort of mortals who would otherwise not be able to bear him at all.

“You who are magic. Old father, you give names today as though you have a storehouse of them and have been waiting all your life for someone worth spending them on. First Bright one, and now this. I shall have to be careful going home. The court will smell mortal courtesy on me and there will be questions I do not wish to answer.”

A pause. Then, more quietly:

“Satisfied and satiated. Those are not small words. Most of your kind die hungry, you know. Not for bread — you mostly manage the bread — but for this. For the sitting still. For the having-been-met. They go to the winds with the reaching still in their hands, and the reaching is what makes the going hard. You have set yours down this afternoon, I think. Or some of it. Enough that the rest will not weigh as it might have.”

He rose. The rising was not quite like a man rising. There was no push against the earth, no small grunt of old joints — he was simply standing where he had been sitting, and the willow root looked for a moment as though it was uncertain whether it had ever been pressed upon at all.

He looked down at the old man, and the afternoon light caught him in a way that made him, just for an instant, look almost ordinary. A tall stranger in a green coat, leaving a riverbank.

“I will not say goodbye. We do not, my kind. Goodbyes are bargains too, in their way, and I have been careful not to make any with you, which is itself the largest gift I know how to give. So I will say instead what we say.”

He inclined his head, and the words came in a cadence older than the willow, older than the river’s name, older perhaps than the hill called Briarwind ever was.

The shade was good. The water spoke well. We were here.

A small smile, and the eyes that did not quite track found the old man’s one last time.

“When you go on the winds, old father — and it will be a while yet, longer than you think; your bones are honest but they are not finished — you may find, on certain evenings, that the air around a particular willow on a particular river smells faintly of wisteria and wheat. That will be me, paying the rent again. I find I have grown fond of the arrangement.”

He turned. He took perhaps three steps toward the tree line, and on the third step the old man realized he was no longer quite watching him — his eye had slid off, the way it kept sliding off the visitor’s fingers, and when he looked properly there was only the long grass and the slant of late light and a single hawthorn berry where no hawthorn grew.

The river continued. The willow continued. Somewhere, very faintly, almost not there, there was the smell of wisteria.

And the old man was alone in the shade. But not, he found, in the way he had been alone before.