Dance the Shadows (2nd ed.)

Dance the shadows

Revised 2nd edition

by Geoff Hart

...one was aware of a curious lightness and freedom... one was happy all the same; one had crossed the boundary into country really strange; surely one had gone deep this time.—Graham Greene, Journey Without Maps

Copyright

© Copyright 2011, 2020 by Geoffrey Hart

Cover photo of wild wolf ©2008 by Cynoclub

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Hart, Geoff, 1962-

Dance the Shadows / Geoff Hart.

ISBN 978-1-927972-25-0 (print)

ISBN 978-1-927972-27-4 (PDF)

ISBN 978-1-927972-26-7 (EPUB)

ISBN 978-1-927972-28-1 (MOBI)

I. Title.

PS8615.A754D36 2011 C813’.6 C2011-900424-0

Diaskeuasis Publishing

112 Chestnut Ave.

Pointe-Claire, Quebec

H9R 3B1 Canada

www.geoff-hart.com

Dedications

To my parents, as always, but particularly for sending me out into the world at a time when I’d just as soon have stayed comfortably and stagnantly at home. To Matthew and Alison, for constant (mostly welcome) reminders of responsibilities and of how things change, and to Shoshanna for ensuring that I have reason to change and to write with joy in my heart. Last but not least, to Mark Baker, Andy Fraser, Charles Kellen, Rob Perry, and Guy Shimwell, for sharing so much of the art and practice of storytelling and helping set me on this path many years ago.

Prologue

We learned of Shadow’s spread far later than some. That knowledge arrived in the form of Graemor, a crippled warrior who lacked both a left arm and a left eye. A shiny, lighter thread of scar emerged from beneath the patch that covered his eye socket and ran through the ebony of his face, ending in what remained of his shoulder. His appearance sent a chill through all who saw him—which was soon everyone, given the rarity of travelers and excitement at seeing someone new—but the news he bore created less interest. Shadow, he claimed, had begun spreading through the land, and those who faced it often suffered terribly for their temerity—as he had done. We had scant evidence his claims were true, since Shadow was mostly a thing for the priests to worry about and we had little desire to seek evidence it was real. Most of the village believed that an extraordinary wolf or even an ordinary man with a sword had caused the damage that so horribly disfigured him. Secure and placid in what proved eventually to be an island of Light in a sea of darkness, most of us felt little need to question the matter further. Most wrote him off as a crazed veteran of some distant war, inventing wild tales to make his injuries seem more heroic and to spare him the necessity of earning his keep.

His skills with his remaining arm and his woodcraft lent credence to the most popular rumors of his origin, which related to a military career that ended badly. But his burning desire to teach those skills, in exchange for nothing more than food and a place to sleep, earned him a seat at our table. Few accepted his offer of training, and few for long; there was more important work to do, such as tilling the fields and tending the crops, or retrieving strayed livestock. Only those of us young enough and restless enough to chafe at the peaceful nature of our lives stayed. For us, his origins and his dire warnings were catnip for cats, and led us to endless speculation whenever we could escape our chores and the constraints of adult supervision. When it became clear that only we few were interested in learning more, Graemor focused his persuasions on us and abandoned the adults to their own devices.

I sought that escape eagerly, along with a few like-minded friends. Each of us was old enough to have earned some independence, but not yet so old that adult responsibilities had entered and consumed our lives. Before coming to Haven, I’d sought my freedom in the many books and a few ancient scrolls in the Temple library, relishing that form of escape from childhood’s bondage, the more so when those yellowed pages held tales of heroes and adventure. But that ended when the Council sent me away, along with most boys and girls of my age, to be fostered in a distant village, as was our people’s custom. After the stench and crowding of a large city, Haven had many compensations, not the least being the clean air, the endless fields, and the dense woodland surrounding them. But Haven’s Temple was too small to have much of a library, and I felt that as a grievous lack. I missed my parents and some friends I’d left behind, but our people had many lifetimes of experience in the practice of fostering, and knew how to ease the pain of separation. In any event, it was a pain that soon eased. Not so the loss of those books, which I mourned ever more keenly when I’d finished reading all the books available to me in Haven.

To fill the time I’d rather have spent reading, I eagerly sought out Graemor’s martial training. In the absence of anyone who might possibly wish to war upon such a small community, and with no bandits or other scofflaws in recent memory, the profession of arms seemed an attractive sport, for there was little risk of having to use my newly acquired skills and risk our teacher’s fate. Better still was the woodcraft he taught. As one of Graemor’s Rangers, I could easily bring in enough game to feed him, myself, and possibly even a future family. With the way that Mareth had begun to look upon me as my muscles expanded under the burden of all this exercise and as my wit grew somewhat nearer to its natural bounds from my time spent mastering woodcraft, this seemed a very good thing indeed. Both arms and ranging were legitimate professions that, once mastered, would spare me the only other profession I could reasonably hope to perform with the skills the Light had gifted me. These included neither the fine dexterity and hunched back of a future craftsman nor the quiet subservience and aching bones of a laborer. For a village the size of Haven, that left only farming or herding. By no means do I scorn those who labor to keep us fed, but neither was it in my personality to accept such fatiguing work and so many constraints. Ranging the woods about the village satisfied my need for freedom admirably.

When he perceived that we believed his wilder tales no more than the rest of the village, Graemor prudently left off his warnings and concentrated on tales more relevant to our immediate needs. But he also vanished occasionally for several days without warning, and one day a few of us took it upon ourselves to learn why. It was both terrifying and exhilarating to travel so far from our village on our own—for Graemor had endurance that put many a younger man to shame, and we knew from previous fruitless explorations that he walked more than a day’s travel from our homes. Given the length of his typical absence, we suspected we might have a long hike ahead, so we packed food accordingly. As a man who had no reason to fear being tracked, he was easy to follow, and after a time it became clear where he was heading. An abandoned road led west of our village, and remained distinct despite the absence of any traffic since I’d come to Haven, years ago now. The road passed over a low range of hills and... and vanished into a wall of night, though it was still full day when we first saw it. That darkness looked uncomfortably like the Shadow he’d warned us about and that was mentioned, in intimidating terms, in many of the older books that I’d read.

Nonetheless, Graemor’s trail led unfalteringly in that direction, and seemed certain to vanish into the darkness. The whole situation was sufficiently unfamiliar that we halted and debated for some time before proceeding. I, for one, felt increasingly uncomfortable, beginning to believe that even Graemor’s most unsettling tales had some truth to them. I argued that point with a growing discomfort that I’d never experienced before. Perhaps there was a reason the rare travelers between villages always carried an ark of the Light with them?

On the other hand, several of us argued there might be nothing whatsoever amiss with this darkness; who, after all, could claim to know enough of the world beyond our farms to say what was and wasn’t natural? Perhaps all the world was this way! I reminded them that none of us had traveled far from our origins, and certainly not far enough to speak with authority about the wider world. The possibility that we really didn’t understand our world at all, and that the warnings in the scriptures might be more than religious sophistry, was every bit as terrifying as Graemor’s tales. That fear made me reluctant to accept what the evidence before us suggested. I wished I remembered more of what I’d read, but even so, it might not have helped; the older books were far too metaphorical and obscure to provide any certainty.

Those who argued we were well-armed and—though we later found out how foolish this notion had been—well prepared for anything the world might throw at us won the day. So we proceeded. By sunset, we had approached close to that wall of darkness, though we agreed without the least dissent to camp a stone’s throw from it, just in case. Suddenly, this simple lark, the tracking of our absent master, had become something altogether more exciting. But had we not been surrounded by friends and the implied threat of mockery for any who fled, we doubtless would have returned home, even at the risk of marching by night. Instead, we took turns on guard as Graemor had taught us, as if this were warfare and we had no desire to be surprised by some hypothetical enemy. And though we’d learned to sleep at our ease in woods that were home to boars, bears, and wolves, and despite the presence of a series of guards who’d been scared into vigilance, none of us slept well that night. In the morning, when we made our first tentative efforts to enter the strange new land, we discovered we’d been right to proceed cautiously.

As the oldest Ranger, they chose me to enter the dark lands first, despite my protests; the others would follow if nothing untoward happened, or would rescue me if something did—and should rescue prove impossible, would race home bearing news of my fate. Had it not been for the false bravado inspired by their good-natured mockery, I might still have refused, but in the face of those gibes I had no choice.

Entering Shadow for the first time reminded me of the river that ran past my village and that became the site of many a test of one’s budding manhood. There was the time that, on a dare, I’d jumped into the river the first day after the ice had broken up and begun its annual migration downstream. I remember the tension in my groin as my balls retracted painfully tight, and I remember the panic of how sluggish my muscles felt and how near I’d come to joining with the Light before someone pulled me from the river, my limbs shaking and the cold of the grave upon me. Another, warmer, time, I’d essayed to touch the bottom to impress Mareth, even though it lay deep below a swift current. I succeeded, narrowly, but to this day, clearly remember being crushed by the weight of all that water. I’ve also never forgotten the inexorable feeling of expansion as I hurtled to the surface, a slimy stone clutched in one hand as proof that I’d succeeded, lungs bursting with the need to breathe, straining to hold in the last of my air, and how that weight came off me in a rush, my ears popping as I broke the surface.

But despite this previous experience, Shadow came as a shock. There was the expected chill, for it was a warm day and I was stepping into what appeared to be deep shade, but more than that, there was a profound difference in my mind. As had happened when I’d fled the river bottom, seeking a different light, I felt an irresistible sense of expansion. It was as if I were being pulled outward in all directions at once, while simultaneously blurring, mentally and physically, in some terrible way I couldn’t then find words to describe. Entering Shadow felt very similar. Had I not staggered backwards from the sheer terror of that experience, and fallen full length on the ground, I hesitate to think what might have happened to me. As it was, two of my friends were fleeing as fast as they could run back towards Haven by the time my eyes refocused, and the others, the whites of their eyes showing, were not far from joining them; they refused to say what they’d seen, and wouldn’t meet my eyes. Things might have gone ill for me had not Graemor chosen that moment to rejoin us.

The scarred veteran appeared as if from nowhere, stepping forth from the benighted land as casually as if he’d been there and watching us all along. Many years later, I still wonder whether that was the case and he’d been waiting all this time for us to muster the courage to follow him. That day, he made no comment on our impudence, but instead examined me carefully before nodding his head, satisfied I was all right. That, more than anything, reassured me, for with my mind still in shock, I’d begun to doubt who and what I was.

Graemor sat us down, then explained as best he could what had happened to me. In short, Shadow transforms us, and without training on how to resist its effects, that transformation can prove permanent or even fatal. Then to bring home his lesson, he stepped again across the line that separated us from that horror, and showed us the effects of Shadow. For all his grim demeanor, he was no fool; he began his changes subtly and gradually, lest he terrify us into joining our departed comrades. And yet... seeing a man transform into a creature of Shadow, a rack of antlers that would have shamed the largest deer in the forest growing from his head, shook each of us to our core. When he was done, and returned to his natural form, he reassured us that any strong man—or woman, in Bethan’s case—could walk in Shadow and still remain human. Then he began to teach us how we could do the same.

Learning to stand in Shadow was equal parts terror and exhilaration. The terror came from that irresistible outwards pressure that built as soon as you stepped across the line separating our world from that of Shadow; the exhilaration lay in learning how to resist the pressure by instead shaping it to our own ends. To become, for example, a deer or a wolf. In time, the terror vanished, replaced by a growing self-confidence and the breathless excitement of feeling like something larger than yourself. Once I understood and mastered Shadow, I could no more have renounced its freedom than I could have renounced breathing.

Those were the early days, when Shadow still lay a comfortable distance beyond our circle of Light. We soon learned that it wouldn’t always be so. When the day came that Shadow approached close enough to our village to be seen on the horizon from our most distant field, life in our village changed. Graemor called together our Council and repeated the tales they’d scorned. Though they treated him once more with polite skepticism, each Ranger took our turn confirming what we could of his story; eventually, we mounted an expedition with the Council and anyone who could afford the time away from their fields and who was willing to either laugh in our faces or be convinced. We convinced them in short order, and they returned to town, pale and shaking, to bear witness of what they’d seen. Talmin, the priestess who tended our Temple of the Light, anxiously studied and restudied the few books that spoke of Light and Shadow in anything beyond metaphorical terms, but found no knowledge of how to stop Shadow from encroaching, other than to keep the Light burning steadily in the Temple, as the scriptures commanded.

Fear of what the encroaching Shadow might portend let Graemor wrest an informal sort of command from Haven’s Council, at least in the matter of self-defense against what Shadow might bring, and he began training anyone who could be spared from the fields. Those stolid enough to be trusted with weapons, he taught the art of arms so they could patrol the boundary between Light and Shadow in case something chose to cross that boundary. But we few who’d been with him since the beginning, and who had the courage to remain with him, became his elite Rangers. It was a heady feeling to see the people of Haven watch us with fear, and sometimes even respect, when we returned from our patrols.

Our excursions soon revealed that Haven was surrounded by a slowly closing sea of Shadow and that we had nowhere to run. Not that we could have fled our homes anyway, with the crops still far from harvest and no certain knowledge of anywhere that would shelter us closer than the capitol from whence I’d come, a journey of several weeks. Graemor sent us endlessly into Shadow, seeking we knew not what, knowing only that we might conceivably find something that would help us avert the spreading darkness. I could have refused to go, as some did, and had I refused, it’s doubtful anyone would have forced me; Graemor led us strongly, but knew not to push us beyond our limits, particularly those of us who hadn’t yet seen our sixteenth birthday. On the other hand, it would have been difficult to refuse his command yet still embrace the freedom that was Shadow, which called to us from beyond the last tilled field.

Mareth had become my girlfriend during this time, and eventually my lover. Like the wisest of all lovers, she knew not to compete with this other love, though she could rarely hide her displeasure at having to share me. For her, the knowledge that I’d promised to always return seemed enough; her trust in me was inspiring, and gave me increasing confidence with each safe return. The knowledge that I was respected in the village for my dangerous profession—even feared by some—made me a man, at least in my own mind. Sadly, the definition of what makes a man expands with time, from being able to touch the river bottom, to earning the right to sleep with a beautiful woman, to something so much more complex these many years later.

But even had I not cherished those times when I fled the Light, however briefly, I would have had little choice but to serve my village in this manner. Such service was the only way to earn a home in the village and a share