Salutation, fellow fiction-lovers.
Today, I’m very excited to bring you one of my favourite writers here on Substack — Kevin LaTorre. Kevin writes A Stylist Submits — a collection of essays and poems that circle literary Christianity. Such is Kevin’s knowledge of literature and his mastery of language, that I make sure to never miss an issue.
Here, Kevin brings us another fascinating short story, this time depicting the demands of untouched wilds and total faith on a small, fearful village. Enjoy!
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Around the holy mountain, there lay the forest none entered. It began always in the black soil beneath the beech and pine trees that sheltered the grouse, falcons, and chaffinch who were invisible beneath the canopy but clear, stark, against the rare openings of white sky. Without trails trod by men, the forest organized its lands along its own slow-moving streams where trout and lamprey evaded deadly pike in eternal waters no longer fished. Where the battlement of the pines ended, there grew meadows of high, sweet hair-grasses, who concealed mushrooms and blueberry briars grown full. Both day and night the forest lived in its own music, the croaking of frogs and teeming birdsong as well as the gurgling waters, the crackling branches, the nightly howls of the mountain’s wolves. The forest was a world of peace and predation.
Only one human village still remained at its westernmost border, and its people had foresworn the mountain and forest for generations without number. No one knew if the untamed forest truly ended, much less whether it fell upon a great plain or bare bunter sandstone or a sudden river that led to the sea. Old men prayed against the thunder over the mountain’s peak. Sheep in pastures thousands of leagues from the forest bleated in terror before the nightly howls they could not hear. Even the children of the nearby countries dared not even think of that land. The untouched forest was man’s greatest fear, making it their greatest mystery. It heaved with life.
When the traveler arrived in the village by the forest’s edge and told the innkeeper’s daughter he’d come to ascend the holy mountain, she withheld his key. No longer a young man lean with health, the traveler wore expensive everyday clothing. His spectacles hung lower on their righthand side.
“May I have my key?” he asked.
“Why have you come?” the innkeeper’s daughter asked, trembling. “To climb the mountain in the forest,” repeated the traveler. “Why?” she asked.
He thought. “I don’t know,” he said, in such a way that the innkeeper’s daughter believed him to be sincere, if mad.
“Why have you come?” she asked again.
“To climb the mountain the forest,” repeated the traveler. “Please, may I have my key?”
“You are very polite for a madman,” said the innkeeper’s daughter in a lowered voice. Her father could’ve returned inside from his back garden, and he disliked boarding madmen. Before the innkeeper’s daughter gave the traveler his key, she required a promise. “In return for your key,” she said, “you are not to speak of the mountain again. Please.”
The traveler accepted the covenant and the key. When the innkeeper’s daughter smiled in relief, her teeth were crooked within her full lips, and the traveler felt warmed. He took his bag into the sparse room alone on the inn’s second story and thought of the innkeeper’s daughter as he watched seven crows gather through the window. They lined the roof opposite and croaked to each other, to the forest. Despite the room’s cold draft, he felt calmed and at home. She had smiled at him, though he was a stranger. Her white teeth had been crooked, and her dark curls slipping from her binding braid had looked silken to the touch.
The traveler kept his promise to the innkeeper’s daughter for his first three visits. In that time he said little, only greetings and courtesies as she served him breakfasts of rye bread and hot broth. Each visit he invited her to sit with him. With her warming smile, the innkeeper’s daughter instead asked if his room was to his liking. He answered always that it was just what his journey required. After each breakfast, the traveler complimented the innkeeper’s daughter for her food and kindness and left the inn. He walked east through the muddy lane until he passed the lumped buildings to disappear within the far beech trees. To the crows and vultures overhead, his was a harmless figure.
He first met the innkeeper on his third visit. When the traveler noticed the older man walking through the inn to his garden, he said good morning. The innkeeper said, “Good morning. Your room is comfortable and without vermin of any kind. Yes?”
“It is,” said the traveler, “thank you, sir,” but the innkeeper had already knelt at his petunias. In truth, he preferred the name of innkeeper to keeping an inn.
During the traveler’s visits to the mountain, the innkeeper’s daughter looked to the trees she saw from the inn. The village’s fear of the wilderness had taught her to lower her eyes from the beeches, to flinch at their smell on the wind. They were no friends to her. And yet, now knowing the traveler, she steeled herself and looked to the trees.
For two days the traveler would not appear. Only after that time would he return, unkempt and flecked with mud as he collected his bag and settled his board. In these passing minutes he looked hollowed, satisfied. “Thank you again for your kindness,” he would tell the innkeeper’s daughter. “I’ll return to your inn in a short time.”
She withheld her questions. But for his journey she gave him rye slices wrapped in cloth napkins, the parcels concealed in her skirt so the innkeeper wouldn’t see them.
On the traveler’s fourth visit, the innkeeper’s daughter upset their exchange when he arrived. “My name is Hilde,” she told the traveler.
“My name is Seán,” he replied.
Autumn
Hilde joined Seán for breakfast the following morning, and he offered to pour her tea from the pot she’d brewed, which was kind but ridiculous.
Hilde asked, “What is it like to walk within the forbidden trees?”
Bound to their promise, Seán hesitated. He renounced nothing lightly. But he teemed with the touches of the forest, filled with the wild breaths he’d had no chance to express. The mornings, the birdsong, the days, the brook, the nights of harshest wonders had filled Seán to overflowing. “It is terrifying, loveliest freedom,” he began. When he spoke all things to Hilde, he did not hear the far crackling groan of the forest.
As the grasses thinned and the foliage of the forest reddened in the mounting cold, as the grouse, chaffinch, and other birds prepared to fly for warmer climes, as wide broad leaves coated the dying forest floor beneath the pines’ resolute green, and as the ferns still allowed in the dreary village curled themselves against the coming dark, Seán described where he had walked.
Hilde listened and asked questions until she gaped. She drank in Seán’s stories like they were hot mulled wine. They were the touch of the world beyond but felt close, fresh, for she could smell the spruce trees on the wind and hear the mountain’s wolves from her bed.
When Seán went again like a pilgrim through the unending forest, Hilde lived in her drudgery and couldn’t recall all he’d told her, not the names of the trees nor the faces of unafraid deer.
But it did not matter. Her impression of the mountain’s lands was fresh. Her moments with Seán were fresh, sweet. From the doorway of the inn, her eyes upturned, Hilde could look to the forest in wonder.
As a girl she had cried in the night for her mother, or for God who might hold her like her mother had. Only her father had come to Hilde to sit on her narrow bed. He’d held her, and whispered that the Lord comes to man when man is controlled, measured. Especially to composed little girls, he’d added sweetly.
“Seán,” Hilde whispered, “can you take me into the forest?”
Orange pine needles were like threads in Seán’s hair. He looked into her, and he did not reply.
“Promise me you will take me into the forest when you come again,” Hilde said.
He took her hand, the first touch of countless he would give her. Their hands were each cold. “I can’t, Hilde,” Seán whispered.
Winter
The forest died in its time. The beech trees were gaunt like the landscape, having shed their leaves without worry. Their bare arms blurred like watercolor. Ice hung teeth upon the black branches and hardened the corpse of autumn’s leaf litter at the trees’ feet. Peregrine falcons high in the foliage of the stronghold pines spotted squirrels and mice moving in the shriveled meadows and killed them, always in swift silent dives. As snow fell, these prey whitened or burrowed into the earth. The holy mountain swelled in size without its plumped forests. Touched only by cold sun, the mountain and its lands shone with white, alien beauty. Their ice shimmered with visions.
The wider land had died, but only inside the village did winter feel like loss and decay. Death passed through it in icy winds, claiming grass, two calves, an infant son, apple trees, and the innkeeper’s garden. He sat indoors wrapped in a carpet and wished to withstand winter, to overcome it. It was foolishness, the innkeeper knew, but this dream of his triumph warmed him.
Until he could garden again in spring, the innkeeper obsessed over his coming petunias, daffodils, rosebushes, and hydrangeas. At length he described them to his daughter. “I’ll begin before the final ice if I can,” he said, “to seed those bulbs that need the frost. And that early, there will be no insects or birds to torment me.” Hilde brought his tea and curtseyed as he required, agreeing that the slugs and aphids were God’s most accursed creation.
Without his fiefdom to tend, the innkeeper remembered the village chapel and prayed in its front pew often. In his youth, prayer had been gentle conversation that opened him. But with his years it had become a weighting and straightening of himself, so that he felt stronger in his neck, shoulders, and legs. Kneeling within the clean chapel walls, the innkeeper requested a short winter and the cunning to cleanse his inn of rats. He also requested that his daughter take to her work with greater diligence. Hilde had been mooning about the inn’s front entrance, looking to the sky while her broom lay idle in her hands. “I want still greater industry for myself, of course,” he prayed.
At the chapel door, the innkeeper often kicked at a shaggy stray who nosed the dirt of the walkway. All his village cursed feral animals as hands of the mountain. The stray always loped away. His life was lower to the land and ranged from the village to the spruce trees, where even slight sunlight would warm him.
Throughout the dead season, Seán slept on the holy mountain. He wore every layer of clothing he hadn’t given away to walk through the snowy remains of the forest. Seán rarely removed his gloved hands from his pockets full of fire-heated stones, and his beard gathered snowflakes. At Hilde’s plea, he filled his pack with the inn’s firewood and bread and strapped it tight against himself. He lived in the dead land when he wasn’t at the inn.
The pines held baskets of snow that dripped, and Seán avoided their snow by walking under the sky. There were no leaves whispering in the air nor underfoot. No animal stirred.
The songbirds had gone, and the flies had died. The utter silence of the white forest made it larger. Seán received every loss as gain. If he found squirrel tracks beneath trees or beaver slides on riverbanks, he laid snares made from twined branches and returned for their yield the next morning. Only the wind moved in the land. During the day it whistled for Seán, only to batter him at night when he curled around his fire to guard the flames.
Every night, as he lay too cold to sleep, his vision unfurled beyond the uneven firelight.
A figure wearing pelts offered his upturned palms. He had orbs of golden light in place of pupils. Sweet hair-grass was woven through his beard. When the figure spoke, his voice was a multitude of male voices speaking every tongue of the earth: “Lead my sheep to the grass of my fields.”
Blueberries broke the snow at the figure’s bare feet and he ate. So did Seán.
“Do not rest in the world of men,” said the figure, “for it is a short dark season. Seek the grouse. Seek the lamprey, the berries and fruits of my lands.”
The figure held a parcel wrapped in a wolf’s pelt, and he untied it to reveal a sealed scroll the length of a man.
Each day the vision consumed Seán’s every step and white breath, as he set and emptied his traps. Wherever he walked, Seán looked to the mountain’s peak. He imagined being impaled upon its highest stone in a spray of sun.
Spring
Hilde had counted the days until the green returned. It didn’t fully return to the village, which remained in its constant gray. But the fresh green did restore the fields and beeches. Grass grew emerald, and young spruce leaves sang anew in the wind. From the inn’s doorway Hilde drank them.
She grew sick by caring for her father’s springtime sickness. Each year the innkeeper returned too early to his garden and grew feverish in its lingering cold. Hilde put him to bed and soon became ill by bringing him her stew and company. “Why are we sitting about?” the innkeeper demanded, “there is so much before us to do!”
“You are sick, Papa,” Hilde said.
“What of it?” the innkeeper said. “And what is your excuse, Hilde?”
Seán, sweet as the spruce songs to Hilde, visited more than before. With the innkeeper bedridden, Hilde sat with the traveler long into the evenings and through the mornings despite her sniffling. He’d grown whittled in the winter. He no longer slept well, Seán said. Hilde wished to lay his head in her lap and caress her fingers through his hair, unto sleep. “What is the mountain like in winter?” she asked him.
“It is harsh,” Seán said, “but beautiful, every moment. The sky is heavy with stars. I slept beneath them every night.”
“Then of course you sleep poorly!” Hilde said. Their talks had grown the light-handed fun of a children’s game. Happily, Seán told Hilde of learning to trap squirrels and use every portion of their bodies, of gathering mushrooms and readying to gather springtime berries. She feared his taking from the land, but his child’s joy in the activity touched her. Always, Hilde desired a vow from Seán.
“Seán,” she asked, late one night, “when will you take me into the forest?” “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t promise that to you, Hilde.”
Hurt, she avoided Seán the following morning and on his next visit.
He had long suffered over what he wished. The holy mountain and its forest were the loveliest lands he’d seen, and Hilde was the loveliest woman he knew. But the figure’s voice of the multitude prevented his vow.
So Seán ate alone at the inn, as he lived alone in the forest. All was renewed. He heard again the trilling of chaffinch, hoopoe, and wheateater, the knocking of woodpeckers high in the spruces. The birds’ songs taught Seán their names. So did the gathering he began beneath the canopy again filling with green shade, as the fallen brush taught the names fir, spruce, beech, deer fern to Seán’s fingers. Compelled as though by invitation, he cleared and bundled the dead to free the new seedlings sprouting in the forest floor. Seán gathered and burned only the brush he needed to cook his gifted prey and warm his sleep.
But in his labor, Seán wished for Hilde. She would drink the sweet fresh springtime.
Beside a brook, he watched two minnows flicker and ran his hand through the grass, as though it were silken hair. A doe stood at the edge of the trees across the brook, disappeared. He wished Hilde had seen how the deer moved, calmly, in her own chosen time, through a path which seemed a higher gift.
Because the innkeeper remained bedridden, Hilde tended his garden. His illness had never lasted so long into spring. She gardened well and understood she wouldn’t meet his directives. Especially because the caterpillars and crickets she shooed from his infant plants were more numerous this year.
The stray with the knotted gray pelt was also new to the garden. For weeks he nosed open the back gate, ran when Hilde cursed him, and always returned. One afternoon Hilde, kneeling, simply watched him enter. Before that day she had never seen an omen. The shepherd dog sniffed her from the air and found her scent pleasing, correct. He sat, panting, and waited for Hilde. The black soil lining her very fingernails, she lay down her trowel and followed the shepherd.
He led her from the village. They passed the unused pastures warmed by the day, where the sky parted to let through its sunlight, and Hilde could’ve called out a loud cry from her sheer, renewed joy. But she knew to remain silent. She’d entered a pact with the animal and dared not test it.
The shepherd led Hilde to Seán just as he emerged from the forest. The woman and the man stopped short. Glad now to have done his part, the shepherd loped past them, beyond the beech trees. Hilde and Seán walked through the field beside the forest, where the grass grew tall and smelled sweet. They did not speak. In his covenant labor Seán had begun seeding this field, to advance the forest with new spruce saplings but also to plant the first crops in generations. He’d agreed with the mountain to farm beneath it and add a vein of its beauty.
Her fingers trailing the blades of grass, Hilde was alight in this open country where she could hear the wind through the pines. Seán walked before her but cherished her slow, satisfied steps as he heard them hiss against the field.
On the largest bluff that faced the mountain, they turned to one another and made love, lying hidden in the hair-grass. They were known to one another, they had always been. Their joining was a tremor felt through the bedrock into the deep molten earth.
Neither Seán nor Hilde returned to the inn, where that night the innkeeper fell into feverish dreams of horror. His inn quaked upon the gaping earth, and the innkeeper was shaken inside it like a moth caught in a jar. All the while he heard the mountain’s wolves outside his window—wolves howling, ravaging his garden. Though he fought and crawled he could never reach his flowers, he could only hear the wolves digging and crying like devils to the blood moon.
In the morning, his fever broke in a shroud of sweat. The innkeeper again heard barking in his garden and rose slowly, terrified. He put on his boots, quivering, and outside found the gnarled gray stray chasing a crow through his flowerbeds.
The garden had been trampled. The stray had its dirt scattered over his grizzled pelt and snout. When the innkeeper emerged from the inn, the crow flew high and far. But the stray retreated into the garden’s far corner, and the innkeeper guarded the gate with his shovel. He beat the stray to death in the remains of his daffodils. The shovel was meant for digging the beds of apple saplings.
The innkeeper hung the stray’s corpse on his fence and nailed it in place. He breathed ragged, steaming breaths but could not recover himself.
Summer
Before the forest warmed, rain first drenched it. The clouds darkened and opened in unending downpours which only the village disliked. Unlike years past, the summer rain did not relent. The chaffinch ruffled and bathed in the rain upon exposed tree branches, their nests sitting dry in the denser foliage. Trout lay in wait for insects left stunned by raindrops pocking the streams. The mountains’ wolves played and yipped together in the downpour.
They relished its water in their throats when they threw back their heads to cry. Like the other mountain life, Seán thrilled in its touch. He now lived without end on the mountain and in its forest. When he fished a daily trout from its stream, the rain disguised his line and cleansed his face. It rewarded him, as it did the land. The field he’d cleared now grew its young spruce, potatoes, grain, and corn, and he’d filled his bark baskets with the blueberries, worthleberries, and mushrooms of the forest.
Seán was warm to the touch, Hilde noticed. Thin after the winter, he’d grown fuller in their spring ecstasy and now became ruddy and plump in the summer heat stirred by rain.
Hilde trusted these were the mountain’s touch, its cast blessings.
She now met Seán beneath the beech trees that guarded the holy forest. Their litter created dry mats of leaves and moss where they lay together, opening one other in whispers and lovemaking while the rain sang. Afterward, Seán went to his work of the forest and the mountain. For now, Hilde did not follow.
The inn had become a fraught place for Hilde. The innkeeper found himself at war with vermin there. Weevils and slugs appeared in his bedding, and fleas filled the innkeeper’s clothing despite his washing. In the darkness crows pecked at his windows and cawed into his rooms. New strays dug up the grass that lined his front walkway, barking and fleeing and returning with glee. Somehow he had lost control of the inn.
Unable to sleep, he sat bloodshot in his parlor at all hours. “The Lord curse you,” he whispered to the dogs, the crows, the fleas, the weevils, the slugs. All of fallen creation was conspiring against the innkeeper. “The Lord curse you with extermination, far worse than he has cursed me.”
Now indoors at all times, the innkeeper watched his daughter and the traveler, for he was no fool. They were the final and foulest proof of his accursedness. Smitten young girls were easy to spot, as were their smug lovers. Wracked with his discomfort, the innkeeper could not confront them.
“The Lord curse you,” he whispered to the traveler. “The wild take you,” he whispered to his daughter.
One afternoon, he spied the traveler passing his open front door with a coarse basket of berries against his chest. “Traveler!” called the innkeeper.
“Hello, sir,” Seán said, coming from the rain into the doorway. He was soaked and pink with health. The seated figure before him wavered and faded like a spirit in the gloom.
The innkeeper coughed but wrapped himself. “Do you like slumming in the filth of that forest like a pagan?” he demanded.
“There is no filth there,” the traveler said, slowly.
“I vowed to keep myself and my child clean,” said the innkeeper. “I swore it in that chapel, and I kept my word. But then you arrived and brought your beetles, dogs, fleas, and filth with you.”
“Creation is always with us,” said the traveler. “You never controlled it. It never left you.”
Rising, the innkeeper was the dark red of blood-cherries. “I live to keep all I have from formlessness,” he spat, “and so I hate your—”
“This land already has perfect and untouched form,” Seán said.
“And I suppose my daughter is untouched too?”
“She is untouched,” Seán said, “as I am. We were made clean, to love each other.” The innkeeper roared in flung spittle that the traveler had perverted man’s pact with God against the wild, it was he who had brought ruin into the innkeeper’s garden, his inn, his child! The innkeeper thundered his curses and forbid the traveler to return. Not once did Seán flinch. He returned to the rain before the innkeeper was through, to offer the wild blueberries of his basket to houses on the lane.
All remained beneath the lash of the rain. Only the high peak of the holy mountain above the churning clouds was dry, and Seán retired there each night. On the summer’s longest day, he received his final vision.
Humming the song of the chaffinch, the figure again unwrapped his pelt-covered scroll before Seán. But he now unfurled the scroll and read aloud:
Mend, till, love.
Loosen, protect, tend.
Lo, the binds that free mankind!
As do the grouse and the lamprey, live free and weak before the Creator.
The figure rolled his scroll shut and plunged it into the ground. When Seán awoke the next morning, a beech sapling with seven bright leaves grew from the wound.
Autumn
The land again drew near to frost and darkness, but Seán planned to bed the sapling beside the village. He waited through the final warm weeks until the beech could withstand the journey and then gathered it like a lamb into his arms. The crops had readied for harvest on Hilde’s bluff, but this promised beech would live beside the village. Its people had culled their trees too long, leaving their lanes smelling foremost of petrol lamps.
Hilde met Seán on the low hill which watched over the inn. She had brought her father’s shovel for their work and accepted the sapling from Seán so he could dig. As he did, he cleared sandstones from the soil and laid them in a ring.
From his parlor the innkeeper watched them. “She was still my girl,” he muttered. But wasn’t she? For he saw his own good shovel in his daughter’s hands. He saw it given over to the traveler for the earth of the hill. The innkeeper would not wait, unseen, in his own parlor.
“Isn’t it too cold to plant this, Seán?” Hilde asked.
“It could be,” Seán said, “but we’re still to plant this one. It is a binding request.”
Hilde accepted this silently, as she had long accepted Seán’s covenant. He was bound to tasks she rarely understood, for the holy mountain which frightened her still had marked him.
Seán stopped digging. “Hilde,” he said, “I’ve wanted your help since the first day.”
“Then why did you never bring me to the mountain?”
“It was not asked of me,” Seán said, digging again. “Even now, I can’t explain all that is asked of me, nor why. But I do know I must tend to this land, that I must till it.” He had prepared the bed for the sapling and lay the shovel aside.
Hilde loved must. Never in her life had it meant growth or flowered with encouragements. “I want to be bound as you are bound,” Hilde said. She passed the beech sapling to Seán and he received it, planting it in the bed with care. As he did, Seán said, “We are bound, Hilde.”
They did not see the innkeeper approach. His knife did not glint before he stabbed Seán in the back and wrenched the blade upward. Hilde screamed as Seán knelt. The innkeeper stood over him looking gnawed to the marrow. It was the fated act of his ebbing control. His mouth was opening, closing.
Seán split his head with a stone. His hand had braced against it when he knelt and the stone rose and struck and fell again with the innkeeper. The dead man lay across the hair-grass, and his blood crept downhill with mottled gray tissue upon it, and his lips were still squirming with his final reasons.
When Hilde clung to Seán in fear, he told her to finish bedding the young beech. He wrapped his sodden shirt around the wound.
“Let me get help,” Hilde said as she hid the sapling’s roots in soil. She said it thrice. “Seán!”
“There is no help here,” Seán said. He had to whisper. “Only on the mountain.” “Take me there,” Hilde said, “please, Seán, now!”
Now he did not hesitate. His first and final covenant was being honored, drop by drop. Seán and Hilde left the shovel, the innkeeper’s body, and the stone on the sapling’s hill. All her days Hilde would tend to the tree like a mother. Hand in hand the lovers entered the forest.
Within its trees, the living symphony startled Hilde. The dead broadleaves shuffled against their feet, and the brooks gurgled, and the invisible birds called, and the high far wind whistled, and the sky grumbled. The forest lived as full sound. She couldn’t have known it.
In Seán’s eyes the forest was alight like a fire, and he muttered. Hilde had to support him as they staggered to the mountain. Despite her panic, she thrilled in the clean harsh air, for it filled and cleansed her.
Within their tree hollows, squirrels and owls watched the exiles and did not flee. The last flies of the autumn did not molest them. So too did the mountain’s stones support them and not slide underfoot as they approached the peak. Winds caressed them and preserved their last words to each other. For the man was speaking choked promises to the woman, promises the grouse and chaffinch would recognize: mend, and till, love and loosen, protect, tend and mend, binds for free mankind. His blood was upon the air. Only his companion could not smell its meaning.
The forest had also scented the innkeeper’s corpse, and the mountain’s wolves would repay. In the azure hour after sunset, they loped from the trees and circled the innkeeper’s body. It was dragged over leaf litter, stones, and streams. They left nothing of it for the flies and worms.
The inn fell to the wild. It passed to the crows who plundered its pantry, to the weevils and moths who burrowed through its soft linens. As the wolves howled their song of the avenged, stray dogs made a warm den of the inn’s body. Pups were born within its walls, and they lived there beside their forebears. Bitter-smelling ivy grew over the front door and flowered. The villagers knew better than to approach.
When the man died on the summit of the holy mountain, its winds dried the woman’s tears, after she had clung to his body for the proper time. The two had never spoken of love though they had shared it. Their bond outlived the man, for it was more truly like springtime, scented with the fertile beginnings so nearly forgotten when they return. As she held his body, his last words echoed for her: “Mend, mend…loosen, loosen…love, love…tend, tend…”
Hilde sat in the cloud that shrouded the mountain, praying for a bed of soil to bury her lover in this last place. But the summit was desolate and gray, its stone unyielding. Nothing could be seen nor revealed. Hunched, cold, Hilde whispered to the echoes, “The binds that free mankind.”
Before her, there stood a figure clothed in pelts. It blurred in the cloud. When the figure called her name, Hilde heard a multitude of male and female voices calling in every tongue of the earth.
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