Guns Of Avalon

A howling pack of red-eyed things, twisting along our trail… Shadow… Green-eyed… Shadow… Yellow… Shadow… Gone…

But dark peaks with skirts of snow, jostling one another about me… Frozen snow, as dry as dust, lifted in waves by the icy blasts of the heights… Powdery snow, flour-like… Memory here, of the Italian Alps, of skiing… Waves of snow drifting across stone faces… A white fire within the night air… My feet rapidly numbing within my wet boots… Star bewildered and snorting, testing each step and shaking his head as if in disbelief…

So shadows beyond the rock, a gentler slope, a drying wind, less snow…

A twisting trail, a corkscrew trail, an adit into warmth… Down, down, down the night, beneath the changing stars…

Far the snows of an hour ago, now scrubby plants and level plain… Far, and the night birds stagger into the air, wheeling above the carrion feast, shedding hoarse notes of protest as we pass…

Slow again, to the place where the grasses wave, stirred by the less cold breeze… The cough of a hunting cat… The shadowy flight of a bounding, deerlike beast… Stars sliding into place and feelings in my feet once more…

Star rearing, neighing, racing ahead from some unseen thing… A long time in the soothing then, and longer still till the shivers go…

Now icicles of a partial moon falling on distant treetops… Moist earth exhaling a luminescent mist… Moths dancing in the night light…

The ground momentarily buckling and swaying, as if mountains were shifting their feet… To every star its double… A halo round the dumbbell moon… The plain, the air above it, filled with fleeting shapes…

The earth, a wound-down clock, ticks and grows still… Stability… Inertia… The stars and the moon reunited with their spirits…

Skirting the growing fringe of trees, west… Impressions of a sleeping jungle: delirium of serpents under oil cloth…

West, west… Somewhere a river with broad, clean banks to ease my passage to the sea…

Thud of hoofs, shuttling of shadows… The night air upon my face… A glimpse of bright beings on high, dark walls, shining towers… The air is sweetened… Vision swims… Shadows…

We are merged, centaur-like, Star and I, under a single skin of sweat… We take the air and give it back in mutual explosions of exertion… Neck clothed in thunder, terrible the glory of the nostrils… Swallowing the ground…

Laughing, the smell of the waters upon us, the trees very near to our left…

Then among them… Sleek bark, hanging vines, broad leaves, droplets of moisture… Spider web in the moonlight, struggling shapes within… Spongy turf… Phosphorent fungus on fallen trees…

A clear space… Long grasses rustling…

More trees…

Again, the riversmell…

Sounds, later… Sounds… The grassy chuckling of water…

Closer, louder, beside it at last… The heavens buckling and bending in its belly, and the trees… Clean, with a cold, damp tang… Leftward beside it, pacing it now… Easy and flowing, we follow…

To drink… Splashing in its shallows, then hockhigh with head depressed, Star, in it, drinking like a pump, blasting spray from his nostrils… Upriver, it laps at my boots… Dripping from my hair, running down my arms… Star's head turning, at the laughter…

Then downriver again, clean, slow, winding… Then straight, widening, slowing…

Trees thickening, then thinning…

Long, steady, slow…

A faint light in the east…

Sloping downward now, and fewer trees… Rockier, and the darkness made whole once again…

The first, dim hint of the sea, lost an odor later… Clicking on, on, in the nightsend chill… Again, an instant's salt…

Rock, and an absence of trees… Hard, steep, bleak, down… Ever-increasing precipitonsness…

Flashing between walls of stone… Dislodged pebbles vanishing in the now racing current, their splashes drowned in the roar's echoes… Deeper the defile, widening… Down, down… Farther still…

Now pale once more the east, gentler the slope… Again, the touch of salt, stronger…

Shale and grit… Around a corner, down, and brighter still… Steady, soft and loose the footing…

The breeze and the light, the breeze and the light… Beyond a crop of rock… Draw rein.

Below me lay the stark seaboard, where rank upon rank of rolling dunes, harassed by the winds out of the southwest, tossed spumes of sand that partly obliterated the distant outlines of the bleak morning sea.

I watched the pink film spread across the water from the east. Here and there, the shifting sands revealed dark patches of gravel. Rugged masses of rock reared above the swell of the waves. Between the massive dunes - hundreds of feet in height - and myself, there high above that evil coast, lay a smashed and pitted plain of angular rocks and gravel, just now emerging from hell or night into dawn's first glow, and alive with shadows.

Yes, it was right.