Bound Home
Chapter 3
Here, beside a clear deep lake,
You live accompanied by clouds;
Or soft through the pine the moon arrives
To be your own pure-hearted friend.
You rest under thatch in the shadow of your flowers,
Your dewy herbs flourish in their bed of moss.
Let me leave the world. Let me alight, like you,
On your western mountain with phoenixes and cranes.
-Chang Jian, At Wang Changlin's Retreat
He thinks of the life he left in his country without regret. He has conquered old ghosts, resurrected the boy he had once been, the boy of faith and fairness. He has found brothers, friends. He has experienced for the first time what it is to have an ally he can trust.
No, there are no regrets. Nottingham is now his victory. But there is one ghost that lingers, and it is here, in the Holy Land, whispering his name and calling him back into the darkness.
She entangles him even now.
He brought wine, just in case he decided to face her with senses too dull to feel the affliction, but the wineskin sits now abandoned at his side, slumped over in the sand, unopened. The pain is not fresh.
He slouches beside her grave. The two years in between her death and his return – vanished. He understands, now, that so much of the goodness he found with his brothers-in-arms originated here, with her body and the echo of her brightness. Her cruelty did, for a time, overshadow him. For forgotten months, he buried himself in the carcass of his mistakes, searching out never-endingly the paths he should have taken. But the madness subsided. It was not long before he saw how much of that cruelty was deserved. It was not long before he saw in himself the better man she tried to awaken.
He still wants to be someone new. He still wants to be the man who sometimes, in certain flashes of candlelight, had lived within the turn of her careful, quiet smiles.
Night is falling. The first breath of autumn chills his skin. He sits with her and his memories, recalling exactly the way she would push her hair behind her ear and watch him from the corner of her eye.
She walks for days, unhurried, patient, following the snowfall into the mountains. The climb is arduous, but the exertion is a kindness to her aching bones. One midday, she reaches the first patch of snow. Autumn winds wash the clouds away, and she can see clearly in the distance a lone speck of white on gray – a goat, picking its way down the slope. The quiet is peaceful.
The al-Yahud in the market, who have only a passing acquaintance with her faith, asked her why she did not want wailing women for the funeral. This, she thinks as her eye traces the flight of cranes in the southern sky. This is why. Settled on the ridges of Lebanon, it is easy to feel that the mountains grieve with her, and it is no screaming, sobbing thing that can be bought for a few pieces of silver. It is vast, and it is eternal. Here, she can mourn.
The farther up she climbs, the colder it becomes. The trees thin out, the grass disappears. She reaches a snow-covered outcropping and stops to turn and gaze upon the wilderness below. The wind searches through her clothes. She feels a chill on her face - her tears, turned to frost.