Chapter 1: Dark Signs

Aégid

The mist was wrong.

Every evening of Aégid’s life it had come up off the Breach as the light went: the open marsh north of the village, where the pools ran out into standing water and the standing water ran out to the edge of the world. It came up white and lay on the water all night, breathing with it, high over the warm pools and low over the cold. By noon the sun had burned the mist to rags, and you could see clear across to the dark shapes on the horizon. Today it had not burned off. The mist lay on the grey grass thicker than he had ever seen it. It was green, and it did not move.

Aégid stood just out past the last of the dead trees, with the grass to his ankles and the damp beading on the green-grey scales of his arms, on his horns, on the bone and shell of his necklaces. He had come out looking for dry wood. Lizardfolk lived by their fires in the cold months; a jar could warm a sleeper, but it could not cook a fish. The Elders’ teaching said it plainly: on damp wood the lizard takes no pride. The wood was the young ones’ work every autumn, his and his friend Krýl’s with the rest of them, and the rain had made a joke of it. The sheds behind the huts stood in water.

He had found some, too. All afternoon he had been up in the north stand, the old dead trees on the rise at the forest’s north edge, where the ground lifted out of the wet and the wind could get at the trunks; he had gone along them knocking with his knuckles and prising the bark up with his claw. Under the bark the wood was white and dry, the only dry wood he had found in a week. He had come down off the rise to tell somebody, and stopped where he stood now, at the foot of it, because the mist was still there.

His tail was up out of the wet behind him, the tip curled, easy, as a tail sits on a lizard with nothing the matter. Nobody came down to the edge of the Breach for nothing. The men came out to hunt along the margins and went back as soon as the hunting was done; the boys came out to dare each other, and went back faster. The old came out once in a long while, to stand where he was standing, look at the edge of the world and say nothing. He had never asked any of them what they were looking for. He watched the mist for the time it takes a pot to boil, and it did not move.

He knew the pools. He had hunted the Glinká over them as a boy with his mother’s jars: the swarms of little insects with a light in their backs, that came down over the water at dusk in their thousands, gold on black. She had told him a hundred times what was in that water. Long before she was born a fever had come up out of the Breach one summer and taken eleven in the village, and the mothers still told it to any child who went near the pools; but the water had never made him sick.

It had rained for weeks. The pools had joined up. Under the mist the Breach was one water now, with the grass standing up out of it, and the smell that came off it was the smell of the pools and one thing more.

He flared his nostrils and drew the air in. Cold and wet, weed and black mud: the pools. Under that, faint, a thin cold smell like wet iron, that he had never smelled on the marsh and had no name for. The fever had come up off this water. He thought of the eleven, and did not want to.

His tongue went out at the mist. That was not what a tongue was for. His nose was for smells. His tongue you put out at somebody before you spoke, at anybody but an Elder, and it came back with whatever they had about them, temper or fear or a lie kept behind the teeth. He had done it to the mist three times since he came down without deciding to, and every time it had come back with nothing at all, as it should from weather. Somebody who gave you nothing was hiding something; his mother had taught him that. He did not know what it meant in a mist.

The light was going. The sun was going down away to his left, behind the trees, and the edge of the world was going from grey to black.

Then, something moved in the mist.

A speck. Grey, darker than the mist, upright, out where the mist met the dark; it came loose from the dark and was there, and then the green closed over it. A heron, he thought. The grey herons came down to the far pools in late summer to fish, the only birds that ever came near the village. But it was too late in the year for herons, and this was too far out; and if it was as far out as it looked, it was too tall.

He stood very still. His tail went down into the mud behind him and lay there. His eyelids twitched, and deep in the hearing holes on both sides of his head an itch started up that no claw could get at.

There was a sweet taste at the back of his throat. That was the fumes, the breath that came off the standing water: the first thing they did to you if you stood at the edge long enough, and he had. Everybody knew the rest: the edges of things doubled, the Breach showed you what was not there, the Elders said; then the sleep came, and if you slept out here the Breach stole you. The Elders said it, mothers said it, boys said it to each other and went out anyway. He looked down at the grass by his foot. One grass, one edge. He looked at the dark shapes along the edge of the world, standing up out of the mist as they always stood, taller than any weather. Each stood single, and nothing moved on them.

So it was not the fumes. He knew it, and made himself not know it, because if it was not the fumes, a grey thing taller than a heron had been standing far out on the open water. He had been out too long, that was all. He said it aloud, to the mist, a foolish thing to do. ‘Too long,’ he said. ‘Go home.’ He turned round, and the unease came with him, the way a sack comes with you when you have lifted it and cannot put it down.

The dead trees took Aégid in.

The dead forest stood between the Breach and the village, and it had been dead as long as anyone had counted: black trunks with their branches hanging down, and a grey moss on the bark that came away on your hand in a cold smear. A couple of steps over from where the path went in stood the tree he kept his count on, a mark cut into the bark for every cycle of the moon since he was born; and it was the only tree in the forest still alive. Not much. It had a few leaves on it still, a handful, brown, up where the light got to them. It was alive, and that was why he had chosen it: dead bark came away. He had learned that on his second tree, when the bark came off in sheets one wet winter and took a hundred and twelve marks with it. He had spent the next warm day on his knees in the mud cutting the marks over again, onto a tree that was not going to do that to him. Living bark held.

He passed his tree without stopping. He did not need to stop. Two hundred and twenty-eight marks, in rows, on the side where the moss did not grow, cut with the long claw of his forefinger, the last of them a month old. He would need to carve in yet another line — but not tonight. The Elders laughed at it, a boy who kept his count when they had long stopped keeping their own. He kept it anyway. Things went into the marsh and did not come back, nets, jars, men; a number stayed where you cut it.

His feet knew the way. They went into the mud to the ankle and came out again with the noise they always made, and the webbing between his toes held him up where the moss floated on the wet. He went south with the light going and the cold coming.

The cold was the thing. It was late in the year, the evenings had teeth now, and once the sun went the cold got into you. It slowed you: first the tail, then the legs, until you stood where you were and waited for morning, and if the morning was a cold one you did not always see it. Nobody stayed out past dusk; the village shut itself up like a fist. He walked faster.

Then the yellow came through the trees.

It came low down, in pieces between the trunks, warm: the lanterns. Every lantern in the village was a glass jar with a swarm of the Glinká living in it, their light and their warmth together, kept and fed. By day each jar wore a leather rag against the sun, which dried the swarms out; at dusk the rags came off. Nothing else in the marsh was that colour. He saw the two at his own gate first, in the gap in the fence where his mother had put them; then the others down the main path, one after another; then the huts back under the trees. The hum came next, under everything, the sound of every jar in the village at once; you did not hear it unless you had been away from it. His own hut hummed louder than any. His mother bred the swarms, and her jars stood on every shelf in it, forty-four of them, warm; he had counted them once and been told not to. It was the warmest hut in the village, and you slept in it like a stone. Then the smell, fish going onto the stoves, and the soot-smoke over it. He was home. But he did not go into his.

Mothers were on the paths pulling the children in, with the light not gone yet: not calling them, pulling, a hand on the back of a neck. The men were coming up from the herb fields with their tools already shouldered, walking fast, on legs the cold had not got into yet. Nobody was saying why. Nobody in the village ever did, about a fear nobody could put a claw on: a thing said out loud was a thing you had to answer, and nobody wanted to be the one. The fields were the village’s medicine, the tea herbs and the poultice leaves in their small wet beds, and a man did not leave them before the cold made him, not in autumn, not for anything. But here the men walked up the path, leaving them.

Old Kháddis was going down the path from lantern to lantern, the whole heavy bulk of him, lifting the leather rags off the jars, and the swarms woke gold under his hands one after another. He was doing it fast. He was not looking at the jars.

As Aégid came up, his tongue went out at the old man before he had decided on a word. It came back with Kháddis on it: rag-leather and tiredness, the same at any dusk of the year, and under those, sour and faint, what his mother gave off when he came in late from the Breach. Kháddis was afraid. Aégid had never once had that off him.

‘You,’ Kháddis said, when Aégid came level. He had the rags he had taken so far over one arm, and one more in his hand. ‘Where’ve you been?’

‘The Breach.’

‘I can smell the Breach on you from here.’ Kháddis pulled the rag off the next jar. The swarm inside stirred and brightened, and for a moment his face was all yellow, all lines. ‘Your mother’s been to the gate twice. Go in.’

‘Is something—’

‘Go in, I said.’ Kháddis moved on to the next jar. Then, without turning round: ‘Everyone’s gone in.’

Pulling the rags was Kháddis’s work. The council gave it, as it gave out the herb beds and the woodcutting: to the oldest man in the village who was not an Elder, or else to the slowest, and in all his count Aégid had never heard anyone say which of the two Kháddis was. He had pulled the rags longer than Aégid had been alive, at the same slow pace every dusk of the year until tonight, saying the same few things; and never once, in all that time, ‘Everyone’s gone in.’

Between one jar and the next, Kháddis’s eyes went off into the trees, north, towards the Breach.

Aégid’s eyelids twitched, and the itch came back deep in his hearing holes. He put a claw in and scratched, and it did no good. It had been like this at the Breach, and it was like this here, a hundred paces of dead trees away, with the fence between.

He looked towards his own hut, and could see the shadow of his mother wandering about inside against the warm glow. She had been sharp with him all week, for no reason he could find, and he could not go in to her now with the speck in him and nothing to say about it that she would want to hear. He should have gone in... but went the other way. Down the main path, past the last of the lanterns, to the hut under the trees where Aetius lived: the Eldest, who sat at the head of the council of Elders and spoke last in it, and who had been looking at that mist since before anybody else in the village was born.

Three knocks. The wood of the door was soft with rot and gave under his knuckles.

‘Aetius. It’s Aégid.’

Nothing. He knocked again, and then again. Aetius never answered the first time, or the second. Aégid stood on the step in the cold and looked back through the trees at the yellow of the lanterns, alight now all down the path, and counted them, because he counted things: nineteen from here. There should have been twenty. Kháddis had missed one, or a swarm had died.

The door opened a crack. The tongue came first. It came out through the crack at the height of Aégid’s chest, quick, took him in, went back. Then the eye, pale yellow, with the long pupil standing up in it, and it looked past him at the trees before it looked at him.

‘Boy,’ the old lizard said. ‘Come in. Come in before you let the cold in.’

The hut was one room: the stove at the back with the herb shelf over it, a table and two chairs under the window, and the window looking west through the trees to where the last of the light was. It smelled of dried herbs, of old scale, of the smoke of a hundred winters, which had gone into the mud of the walls and would not come out. Aetius shut the door and put the bar across and stood a moment with his hand on it. He was smaller than he had been. That was not a thing you noticed until you had been away from him a few days and came back: the neck gone down into the shoulders, the loose skin along the jaw, the back bent under a load he had carried too long. A tortoise, Aégid thought, and nearly smiled; then the old man turned round with those eyes on him, and Aégid did not. Eyes that looked the boy over and rested on him a while too long, before the old man moved again and shuffled away towards the stove.

On the wall by the door hung a hook. It was iron, and iron came from the post. Humans kept the post, out where the marsh ended in the east, and came no further; the hunters took them swarm-lanterns and pool-leather, the hides of the black pools, and brought back glass and iron. This was a hunter’s hook with the barb gone dull. Aégid’s mother had told him once, and once only, whose it had been. Aégid never looked at it, and he could have put his hand on it blind.

‘Sit,’ Aetius said. ‘I’ll make tea. Has Krýl got you into trouble again? I told him. I told him to leave the others alone, and I told him what would happen if—’

‘It’s not Krýl.’

‘No?’ Aetius had a hand on the stove already. He struck a stick of dry wood hard down the face of the soot-stone, which threw sparks off anything dragged hard enough along it, and again, until a spark took in the dried marsh grass under the logs. The flame went up, and its light ran into the folds of his face. ‘Well. That’s something. He’ll be the death of one of you, that boy, and it won’t be him. I told his mother. She said he was high-spirited. High-spirited. Pah.’ He fed a split log to the flames with the care of a man who knew exactly how many he had left. ‘Half the village is high-spirited, and the wood’s still wet.’

‘How many logs?’

‘What?’

‘In the shed. Dry.’

Aetius looked round at him with the next log still in his hand. ‘You’d count them.’

‘I did. On the way past, yesterday. Forty. Forty-one, with the one behind the door, and eleven of those are wet at one end.’

‘And eleven wet.’ The old lizard put the log in and turned back to the stove, shaking his head. ‘Then you know what I know. Three weeks of rain, the shed half in water, and the cold coming. I need men on the firewood tomorrow, every boy who can carry, and I need it dry, because as you know very well, on damp wood—’

‘—the lizard takes no pride.’

‘So it’s in there somewhere.’ The old man did not turn round. ‘Good.’

‘The north stand’s dry.’

That turned him round. ‘On the rise? With the Breach at the bottom of it?’

‘Up on the rise. It’s white under the bark. I went along every trunk on it this afternoon.’ Aégid held his hands out to the stove. The warmth went into his palms and up his wrists, and his tail, for the first time since the edge, came up a little off the floor.

‘That’s for the council,’ Aetius said, after a while. He set the pot on the stove and took the two clay cups down.

The herb jars stood on the shelf above the stove, thirty-two of them, and there was not a mark on any of them; Aégid had counted them in his sixtieth cycle and could not have told one from the next. Aetius did not look at them. He put his face along the shelf and took down the two he wanted by the smell of them, and set them by the cups.

‘Still at your tree?’

‘Two hundred and twenty-eight.’

‘I know how old you are, boy. I asked if you were still at it.’ Aetius lifted the lid off one of the jars, put his nose to it and set the lid back on: the wrong one. Aégid had never known him pick wrong.

‘Every moon.’

‘Which one is it now?’

‘The one with leaves.’

The old man’s hand stopped on the shelf. ‘There’s one with leaves?’

‘One. At the edge, where the path goes in.’ He heard how it sounded and said the rest anyway. ‘It’s the only one still alive. The bark holds.’

Aetius put a pinch of the bitter herb in each cup, for the cold, and a pinch of the sweet one, which he only used for company. ‘And the Elders had a good laugh about that too, I expect.’

‘They laugh at all of it.’

‘They do. I’ve heard them.’ He put the lid back on the sweet jar. ‘Sit down, boy.’

Aégid sat on the chair by the window. He scratched at his hearing hole, and then did not know what to do with his hands, so he put them on the table, and then took them off it, because the table was Aetius’s and his hands were wet.

‘Your father sat there,’ Aetius said over his shoulder. ‘In that chair. Same as you. Hands on the table, hands off it, hands on it.’

‘I don’t remember him.’

‘No. You were small.’ The water ticked in the pot. ‘He’d come in at dusk stinking of the Breach, and I’d say, where have you been, and he’d say, hunting, and I’d say, hunting what, and he’d say, whatever’s there. That was your father. Whatever’s there.’ He did not look at the wall by the door, and neither did Aégid. ‘He was a good hunter. He didn’t listen, either.’

‘To what?’

‘To me.’

Aégid looked at the window. This was the thing about the old man: you came with one question and he gave you six, and by the time you had got your own out again the tea was cold. He tried anyway.

‘I was at the Breach,’ he said.

‘I know where you were. You smell of it.’ Aetius lifted the pot off the stove and poured, and the water went hissing over the herbs in the two cups. ‘Everyone who’s been near the Breach today has come to me stinking of it, looking the way you look. There’ve been four of you. It’s not yet full dark.’

‘Four?’

‘You’re the fourth.’

‘Who were the others?’

The Eldest brought the cups to the table, sat down across from him and put one in front of him with an old hand that shook a little. ‘That’s their business,’ he said. Then he did not drink. ‘Tell me yours.’

‘The mist’s thicker.’

‘It’s autumn.’ Aetius blew across his cup. ‘It’s thick every autumn. It was thick at your count, and at your father’s, and at mine.’

‘Not like this. It didn’t burn off at noon. It’s lain there since last night and it hasn’t moved a hand’s breadth all day. There was wind up on the rise. The grass went over in it. The mist didn’t.’

‘What else?’ said Aetius.

‘It’s green.’

‘That’ll be your eyes. You’ve been at the edge all day.’

Aégid put both hands round his cup. It was too hot to hold, and he held it.

‘My eyes are fine. I looked. Nothing was doubled.’ Aégid heard his voice go up and brought it down. ‘It’s green, Eldest. Green as the scum on a pool that’s stood all summer. And it smells of something I haven’t got a word for, like wet iron, near enough, and I’ve known every smell out there since I was small enough to fall in. I put my tongue out at it, too. Three times.’

‘Mist gives you nothing.’

‘I know. I did it anyway.’

‘Did you see anything?’

Aégid looked at his cup. The herbs had sunk. He could tell him now: a grey thing at the edge of the world, there and gone in a blink, taller than a heron. He could hear how it would sound in this room, from a boy who had breathed the edge all day, and he could see the old face hearing it. He had never lied to the old man in his life.

‘I saw the mist,’ he said, and the words sat in his mouth after he had said them.

The old man looked at him until Aégid had to look up again. ‘And?’

The grey thing was right there behind his teeth, and the old man was waiting for it. Once was a slip. Twice was a lie you had chosen, and he chose it.

‘And I don’t like it,’ he said. ‘That’s all. I came to ask what you make of it, Eldest. I thought you’d know.’

Aetius’s gaze went out of the window and lost itself somewhere beyond the trees. The clouds over them had gone red, then a colour past red. The old lizard looked at them as he looked at the Breach when he stood at its edge with the young ones: a man looking for a thing he had lost long ago and did not expect to find.

Aégid put his tongue to the tea and burned the tip of it, and drew it back.

‘Too hot,’ the old man said, not looking. ‘Always too hot. Your father did that too.’

‘You said he didn’t listen.’

‘He didn’t. He also burned his tongue.’ Aetius set his cup down and left his hand round it. ‘No. That’s enough of that. Whatever’s on that water, I feel it too.’

He said it to the window. Then he turned his head.

‘You’re old enough. What you’ve got comes at about your count, in most of us, and in some it never comes, and you’re not one of those. We feel things, boy. Lizards do. Things that are still far off, before anyone else feels them. It’s in the scales. It grows as you grow. When you are as old as I am you’ll wake in the night with a knot in your chest, as I did this morning and the morning before, and you’ll look out over the water and see the ghosts of long-gone days walking, as I do. That’s the Sense. Nobody taught you the word because nobody thought you needed it yet.’

‘I don’t have a knot in my chest.’

‘You have an itch in your hearing holes.’

Aégid took his claw out of his hearing hole.

‘What ghosts?’

‘What?’

‘You said you see ghosts. Long-gone days. What do they look like?’

Aetius was quiet for a while. Outside, the light went down another colour, and the window showed more of the old man’s face than of the trees.

‘Like us,’ he said. ‘Standing out there on the water where nobody can stand.’

Aégid’s tail went flat on the floor. Out on the water, where nothing could stand. He had seen a thing stand there not an hour ago.

‘They don’t look at you,’ Aetius said. ‘They’re not looking at anything. When I was twice your count I thought it was the fumes. When I was four times your count I thought it was age. Now I’m what I am, and I think it’s neither. I think they’ve always been there, and it takes a long life to see them.’ He drank at last, and made a face, because the tea was still too hot for anyone. ‘I’ll tell you a thing I’ve told nobody. The first time the Sense came on me I was younger than you. It was a summer. Nothing wrong with it, a good summer, the pools low and the swarms thick, and I woke one morning with a stone in my chest and couldn’t shift it for a week. Everyone said, you’re sickening. I wasn’t. At the end of the week the fever came up out of the Breach. You know how many it took.’

‘Eleven.’ The sweetness was back at the back of his throat, here in the warm, as if he had brought the edge in with him.

‘They’ve told it ever since. Nobody’s ever told it with me in it. I’d felt it coming a whole week, and I hadn’t known what I was feeling. I was nine hundred cycles learning what I was feeling. You’re going to learn it faster. That’s not a kindness.’

‘Why not?’

Behind the old man’s chair his tail dragged a little way across the floor and stopped. ‘Because of what you’ll feel.’

Aégid looked into his cup. He thought about the speck again, and about telling it now, after the lie; it would be worse now than before. He put his tongue out, a little, no more than the tip. You did not do that to an Elder, his mother had taught him; it was frowned upon. What came back off the old man across the table was what he had got off Kháddis in the path. The Eldest was afraid. All his life, whatever came up out of the Breach, the old man had sat here and known what to do about it; and now he sat with both hands round a cup and was afraid, and the boy who had seen a grey thing out there had just lied to his face about it. There was no telling it now. It would only be one more thing for him to be afraid of.

He did not tell it.

‘It’s out there,’ the old man said, as if he had heard him not say it. ‘In the deep of the marsh, past anywhere any of us goes. The fever was a stone in my chest. This is bigger than a stone, and further off, and it’s been on me two mornings now. I’ve been sitting here since noon trying to put a name to it, and there isn’t one. Something’s woken up out there that shouldn’t have.’ He put both hands round the cup. ‘There’s a storm coming, Aégid. I don’t say that lightly. I don’t know if we’ll come through it.’

He did not often use Aégid’s name.

‘What kind of storm?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Then how do you know it’s a storm?’

The old man did not answer at once. Aégid’s eyes had gone over the old face while he waited, the folds under the jaw, the lines at the eye, and he was counting them before he knew he was.

‘Because I’m old,’ Aetius said, ‘and that’s what a storm feels like from a long way off. Don’t count me, boy. I’m not one of your trees.’

It was nearly a joke, and Aégid’s tail nearly came up off the floor for it. Then the old man’s face went back to the window, and whatever had been almost a smile went with it, and the tail stayed where it was.

‘What do I do?’ Aégid said.

‘Tonight? Nothing. Go home.’ Aetius took his hands off the cup. ‘Look after your mother. It’s the two of you in that hut and nobody else. The night’s going to be cold and long. She’s been sharp with you all week because she feels it too and doesn’t know she does.’ Aégid had not told him that. ‘Be gentle with her. Tomorrow you go for the wood with the others, wherever the council sends you, and you carry twice what Krýl carries, because you will anyway. That’s what there is to do, for any of us.’

‘And after?’

‘After is after.’ Aetius looked at the stove, where the fire had gone down to red, and did not get up to feed it.

‘That’s not an answer.’

‘No,’ the old man agreed. ‘Now drink your tea, and be quick about it.’

Aégid got up. The tea stood in his cup hardly touched, and he left it. He had never done that in this hut in his life. At the door he stopped with his hand on the bar, under the hook, and said the thing you said, because it was the thing you said.

‘Thank you for the tea, Eldest.’

‘Anytime, my boy.’ The old lizard was looking at the window again. ‘Anytime.’

The cold had come down while he was inside. He felt it in the doorstep under his feet and in his tail. The tail did not want to lift. He went up the main path fast, past the nineteen lanterns, towards his own gate.

Halfway there he stopped, because everybody still out had.

Kháddis stood in the path with a leather rag in his hand and his tail flat in the mud behind him. A woman stood at her fence with a child half in and half out of the door. Nobody was looking north now. They were looking west, over the tops of the dead trees, where the sun had gone down and the last of the red still lay along the bottom of the sky, and where, out of the same red, the moon was coming up.

It came up white and slow out of the place where the sun had set. In two hundred and twenty-eight cycles it had come up in the east, every one; he had cut every one of them into his tree, and he knew. A number stayed where you cut it. Aégid flared his nostrils and drew the damp air in, the whole cold weight of it, and let it go. Then he went in to his mother, and nobody in the village said a word about it that night, and the moon went on climbing over the west of the world as if it had every right to be there.