I did not have his confidence in my climbing abilities.
He said, “Swear to me by all you hold holy. Swear by your king, who waits over the sea as he has since we drove his subjects from this land. Swear by the things you creatures hold dear—swear by shadows and eagle feathers and by silence. Swear that you will come back for me.”
“You know what I am?” I said.
“I know nothing,” he said. “Only that I want to live.”
I thought. “I swear by these things,” I told him. “By shadows and by eagle feathers and by silence. I swear by green hills and standing stones. I will come back.”
“I would have killed you,” said the man in the hawthorn bush, and he said it with humour, as if it was the biggest joke that ever one man had told another. “I had planned to kill you, and take the gold back as my own.”
“I know.”
His hair framed his face like a wolf-grey halo. There was red blood on his cheek where he had scraped it in the fall. “You could come back with ropes,” he said. “My rope is still up there, by the cave mouth. But you’d need more than that.”
“Yes,” I said. “I will come back with ropes.” I looked up at the rock above us, examined it as best I could. Sometimes good eyes mean the difference between life and death, if you are a climber. I saw where I would need to be as I went, the shape of my journey up the face of the mountain. I thought I could see the ledge outside the cave, from which we had fallen as we fought. I would head for there. Yes.
I blew on my hands, to dry the sweat before I began to climb. “I will come back for you,” I said. “With ropes. I have sworn.”
“When?” he asked, and he closed his eyes.
“In a year,” I told him. “I will come here in a year.”
I began to climb. The man’s cries followed me as I stepped and crawled and squeezed and hauled myself up the side of that mountain, mingling with the cries of the great raptors; and they followed me back from the Misty Isle, with nothing to show for my pains and my time, and I will hear him screaming, at the edge of my mind, as I fall asleep or in the moments before I wake, until I die.
It did not rain, and the wind gusted and plucked at me but did not throw me down. I climbed, and I climbed in safety.
When I reached the ledge, the cave entrance seemed like a darker shadow in the noonday sun. I turned from it, turned my back on the mountain, and from the shadows that were already gathering in the cracks and the crevices and deep inside my skull, and I began my slow journey away from the Misty Isle. There were a hundred roads and a thousand paths that would take me back to my home in the lowlands, where my wife would be waiting.
UNBELIEF
Michael Marshall Smith
IT HAPPENED IN BRYANT PARK, a little after six o’clock in the evening. He was sitting by himself in lamp shadow amongst the trees, at one of the rickety green metal tables along the north side, close to where the Barnes & Noble library area is during the day. He was warmly dressed in nondescript, casual clothing and sipping from a Starbucks in a seasonally red cup, acquired from the outlet on the corner of Sixth, right opposite one of the entrances to the park. He queued, just like any normal person: watching through the window you’d have no idea of who he was, or the power he wielded over this and other neighbourhoods.
He had done exactly the same on the preceding two evenings. I’d followed him down from Times Square both times, watched him buy the same drink from the same place and then spend half an hour sitting in the same chair, or near enough, watching the world go by. Evidently, as I had been assured, it was what this man always did at this time of day and this time of year. Habit and ritual are some of our greatest comforts, but they’re a gift to people like me.
He might as well have tied himself up with a bow.
ON THE PREVIOUS OCCASIONS I had merely observed, logged his actions, and walked on by. The thing had been booked for a specific date, for reasons I neither knew nor cared about.
That day had come, and so I entered the park by the next entrance along, by the restrooms, strolling in casually and without evident intent.
I paused for a moment on the steps. He didn’t appear to be there with protection. There were other people sparsely spread over the park, perched at tables or walking in the very last of the twilight, but there was no indication they were anything more than standard-issue New Yorkers, taking a little time before battling the subway or bridges and tunnels or airports, heading home to their families or friends or real partners for the holidays. Grabbing a last few seconds’ blessed solitude, an unwitnessed cigarette, or an illicit kiss and a promise not to forget, before entering a day or two of enforced incarceration with the people who populated their real lives.
Their presence in the park did not concern me. They were either absorbed in their companions or in something within themselves, and none would notice me until it was too late. I have done harder jobs under more difficult conditions. I could have just taken the shot from twenty feet away, kept on walking, but I found I didn’t want it to happen like that. Not with this guy. He deserved less.
I watched him covertly as I approached his position. He appeared relaxed, at ease, as if savoring his own few private moments of peace before tackling some great enterprise. I knew what he thought that was going to be. I also knew it wasn’t going to happen.
There was an empty chair on the other side of his table. I sat down on it.
He ignored me for a couple minutes, peering in a vaguely benign way at the skeletal branches of the tall trees that stand all around the park’s central grassy area: at them, or perhaps at all the buildings around the square revealed by the season’s dearth of leaves. Being able to see these monoliths makes the park seem both bigger and yet more intimate, stripped.
Defenseless.
“Hello, Kane,” he said, finally.
I’d never actually seen him before—not in the flesh at least, only in pictures—so I have no idea how he’d managed to make me straightaway. I guess it’s his job to know things about people.
“You don’t seem surprised,” I said.
He glanced at me finally, then away again, seemingly to watch a young couple perched at a table twenty yards up the path. They were bundled up in thick coats and scarves and necking with cautious optimism. After a few minutes they separated, tentatively smiling, still with their arms around each other’s shoulders, and turned to look at the lights strung in the trees, to listen to the sound of cars honking, to savour being where they were. A recent liaison, the legacy of an office party, perhaps, destined to be a source of embarrassed silences in the office by Valentine’s Day. Either that, or pregnancy and marriage and all the silences after that.