To move is to abut against the world. Sit quietly and it vanishes.
[location; 7 miles from Excolo]
[Wednesday, June 9th, Day 374]
I sit sketching in the dying light, adding the ground covered in the day’s ride to maps of my own devising. I note the topography, water sources, points of interest. Wildlife. Plants and trees. There are no hesitations or wasted strokes.
Later I can feel the ground cooling beneath my back while I watch the sky fade from blue to black. To someone watching from between the stars, did the planet Earth’s end of days register as anything more than a sparkle in the great celestial eye? I decide that a new world needs a new name, and smile.
If the tanner told the truth, I’ll reach the next settlement by mid-morning. Excolo.
After all these years of wandering, I’ve learned not to light fires when I bed down for the night unless it’s truly a matter of life and death. Fire warms, but fire blinds. In exchange for bodily comfort, you announce your presence to anyone and anything with eyes to see and a nose for scent, and blind yourself to their approach. I check the pistol underneath the jacket I use for a pillow, the knife in its sheath nestled against my breastbone, and settle deeper under the blanket. The restive animals will wake me if anyone nears. I will sleep the sounder for being invisible.
And I do sleep soundly. But sleeping, I dream of fire, and of fever-bright eyes that are more uncomprehending than afraid.
[June 10th, Day 375]
[Location: Southwestern Entrance to Excolo]
First light finds me changing into the faded habit of my old order and removing the hobbles from my pack animals. I take special care to check the straps that secure my bundles of leatherbound notebooks to the mule, and to make sure the oilcloth is keeping them properly dry. My only truly valuable possessions, more valuable than diamonds, though they would not seem so to thieves. All the better.
Breaking my fast on dried fruit and salted meat, I rein Memory to a halt when the town first comes into view midst forest and field. She tosses her head angrily, and I quiet her with a hand on her dappled neck. Spirited. Fights me every step of the way, sometimes. It’s why I chose her, why I named her. There are days she’d kill me if she could. The nameless mule merely waits, glumly, mute as meat.
It is important to me that my mount never be capable of true domestication, so that I can never be deceived as to the nature of our relationship. A symbiosis of force, my will and her resisting spirit. In the naked use of force there is at least respect for the separateness of that which you dominate. The truly domesticated creature has been emptied of all it has to give, and is not even worthy of the lash.
I'll sell the mule as soon as I can find a place to stow my things.
A squeeze of my knees and Memory is moving again, taking me toward the town. I stop well short, though, and dismount. I always dismount before entering a new place. Better to enter such a place on foot, pulling the animals behind me on leads.
Smiling gently, as I do now. A humble man of the cloth.
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