taking up a handful of dried moss, placed it gently over the young man’s wounds before covering him with the sheepskins. Later that day, she would begin the purification procedure all over again, and the next day, too, and perhaps the next. But for now, it was enough.
She rose and returned the cauldron to the edge of the fire ring, and settling herself once more on the three-legged stool, she pulled her cloak around her shoulders and closed her eyes on the day.
Bran did not know how long he had been lying in the dark, listening to the rain: a day, perhaps many days. Try as he might, he could not remember ever hearing such a sound before. He could vaguely remember what rain was and what it looked like, but so far as he could recall, this was the first time he had ever heard it patter down on earth and rocks and drip from the canopy of leaves to the sodden forest pathways below.
Unable to move, he was content to lie with his eyes closed, listening to the oddly musical sound. He did not want to open his eyes for fear of what he might see. Flitting through his shattered memory were weird and worrisome images: a snarling dog that snapped at his throat; a body floating in a pool; a black-shadowed hole in the ground that was both stronghold and tomb; and a hideous, decrepit old woman bearing a steaming cauldron. It was a nightmare, he told himself: the dreams of a pain-haunted man and nothing more.
He knew he was badly injured. He did not know how this had come to be nor even how he knew it to be true.
Nevertheless, he accepted this fact without question. Then again, perhaps it was part of the same nightmare as the old crone—who could say?
However it was, the woman seemed to be intimately connected with another curious image that kept spinning through his mind: that of himself, wrapped in soft white fleece and lying full-length on a bed of pine boughs and moss covered by deerskins. Now and then, the image changed, taking on the quality of a dream—a peculiar reverie made familiar through repetition. In this dream he hovered in the air like a hawk, gazing down upon his own body from some place high above. At first he did not know who this hapless fellow in the rude bed might be. The young man’s face was round and oddly misshapen, one side purple black and bloated beyond all recognition. His skin was dull and lustreless and of an awful waxy colour; no breath stirred the unfortunate’s lungs. The poor wretch was dead, Bran concluded.
And that is when the old woman had first appeared. A hag with a bent back and a face like a dried apple, she limped to the dead man’s bed, carrying the gurgling pot fresh from the fire. She leaned low and peered into the fellow’s face, shaking her head slowly as she carefully positioned the cauldron and settled herself cross-legged on the ground beside him. Then, rocking back and forth, she began to sing. Bran thought he had heard the song before but could not say where. And then, abruptly, the dream ended—always at the same place.
The injured man and the old woman simply vanished in a blinding white haze, and most upsetting, Bran found himself waking in the dark and occupying the injured man’s place.
This distressing transformation did not upset him as much as it might have because of the overwhelming sympathy Bran felt for the unfortunate fellow. Not only did he feel sorry for the young man, but he felt as if they might have been friends in the past. At the same time, he resented the repulsive old woman’s intrusions. If not for her, Bran imagined he and the wounded man would have been free to leave that dark place and roam at will in the fields of light.
He knew about these far-off fields because he had seen them, caught fleeting glimpses of them in his other dreams. In these dreams he was often flying, soaring above an endless landscape of softly rounded hills over which the most wonderful, delicate, crystalline rays of sunlight played in ever-shifting colours—as if the soft summer breeze had become somehow visible as it drifted over the tall grass in richly variegated hues to delight the eye. Nor was this all, for accompanying the blithe colours was a soft flutelike music, buoyant as goose down