Bound Home
Chapter 2
The solitary goose does not drink or eat,
It flies about and calls, missing the flock.
No-one now remembers this one shadow,
They've lost each other in the myriad layers of cloud.
It looks into the distance: seems to see,
It's so distressed, it thinks that it can hear.
Unconsciously, the wild ducks start to call,
Cries of birds are everywhere confused.
-Du Fu, The Solitary Goose
Wander.
The sand dances, the sun burns, the autumn sky is empty, and he wanders within Palestine's embrace searching for a grave. The golden desert is spread out before him like the ocean floor, and the sky is the water, somehow lifted to allow him passage in this secret, silent place.
The English warriors did not doubt him. He asked about a woman, and they asked nothing in return. Their faces were sunburned and knowing as they pointed east. "We heard about her," they said over their bowls of cold stew. "That she died trying to save the king. What was her name?"
His mouth seemed shaped for one purpose - to recount to every passing listener the tale of his betrayal, to drive the sword into his own flesh, to live it again and again and again.
"Marian," he said.
Their gazes turned toward the rising sun. Marian. He saw it in their eyes, their putting a name to the story buried beneath the sand, a name to the woman they remembered only when a weary traveler happened to ask about her.
The king she died for is no longer even here.
He left the Crusaders to their meal without another word. He thinks about their empty, tired faces as he journeys in the direction they gave him.
Time flows around her like river water around a rock. She is unmoved by the passage of the hours, yet they still wear away at her edges in an erosion too slow and constant to be noticed. The days fade into nights and nights fade into days, but she is still in a dark, hot room, holding her hand to a burning face and staring into eyes that no longer know her. Still watching a chest struggle to rise, watching it fall, waiting for the next breath as if her own depends on it, until that breath fails to come. Still watching that motionless, empty chest. Reliving it again, and again, all other memories ground to dust by the crushing weight of that one hour, that dark room, that fever and that life and that death. She remembers every second of his last night.
She must leave this place before she goes mad.