Trigger Warning

I looked up. It might be possible, I thought, climbing slowly, with fortune on my side, to make it up that mountain. If it did not rain. If the wind was not too hungry. And what choice did I have? The only alternative was death.

A voice: ‘So. Will you leave me here to die, dwarf?’

I said nothing. I had nothing to say.

His eyes were open. He said, ‘I cannot move my right arm, since you stabbed it. I think I broke a leg in the fall. I cannot climb with you.’

I said, ‘I may succeed, or I may fail.’

‘You’ll make it. I’ve seen you climb. After you rescued me, crossing that waterfall. You went up those rocks like a squirrel going up a tree.’

I did not have his confidence in my climbing abilities.

He said, ‘Swear to me by all you hold holy. Swear by your king, who waits over the sea as he has since we drove his subjects from this land. Swear by the things you creatures hold dear – swear by shadows and eagle-feathers and by silence. Swear that you will come back for me.’

‘You know what I am?’ I said.

‘I know nothing,’ he said. ‘Only that I want to live.’

I thought. ‘I swear by these things,’ I told him. ‘By shadows and by eagle-feathers and by silence. I swear by green hills and standing stones. I will come back.’

‘I would have killed you,’ said the man in the hawthorn bush, and he said it with humour, as if it was the biggest joke that ever one man had told another. ‘I had planned to kill you, and take the gold back as my own.’

‘I know.’

His hair framed his face like a wolf-grey halo. There was red blood on his cheek where he had scraped it in the fall. ‘You could come back with ropes,’ he said. ‘My rope is still up there, by the cave mouth. But you’d need more than that.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I will come back with ropes.’ I looked up at the rock above us, examined it as best I could. Sometimes good eyes mean the difference between life and death, if you are a climber. I saw where I would need to be as I went, the shape of my journey up the face of the mountain. I thought I could see the ledge outside the cave, from which we had fallen as we fought. I would head for there. Yes.

I blew on my hands, to dry the sweat before I began to climb. ‘I will come back for you,’ I said. ‘With ropes. I have sworn.’

‘When?’ he asked, and he closed his eyes.

‘In a year,’ I told him. ‘I will come here in a year.’

I began to climb. The man’s cries followed me as I stepped and crawled and squeezed and hauled myself up the side of that mountain, mingling with the cries of the great raptors; and they followed me back from the Misty Isle, with nothing to show for my pains and my time, and I will hear him screaming, at the edge of my mind, as I fall asleep or in the moments before I wake, until I die.

It did not rain, and the wind gusted and plucked at me, but did not throw me down. I climbed, and I climbed in safety.

When I reached the ledge the cave entrance seemed like a darker shadow in the noonday sun. I turned from it, turned my back on the mountain, and from the shadows that were already gathering in the cracks and the crevices and deep inside my skull, and I began my slow journey away from the Misty Isle. There were a hundred roads and a thousand paths that would take me back to my home in the lowlands, where my wife would be waiting.

My Last Landlady