As I stretched there for sleep, I felt cleaned and cleared, and only what I was, a boy, with no one to answer to, and no squabbles to hinder me. I had a notion of striking off alone at sunup, leaving hearth and tent and krarl and tribe behind, leaving custom and pride, my scratchy wife, and the sneering words and the battle-lust and all the rubbish of my past. Yes, even leaving behind my mother with her black-robed face. It is good to dream, though you feel the anchor hold you back, root-deep in the seabed of your life.

I woke at midnight.

I sat up and looked around, but the dogs lay quiet as gray bolsters with their noses on the meat bones. The sky was many starred and the trees slimly mantled in shadow. Nothing seemed abroad to wake me, yet it was like a charm. I got to my feet and took a step or two, and the dogs slept on, and the forest, and I was left alone with whatever drew me.

I walked light but with no sense of danger. I had gone about eighty paces and had a plan of returning, when I came suddenly on an older part of the wood where the trees were massive as pillars and the air heavy with their craggy scent. Maybe it was the scent that woke me, that stagnant muttering of soil and bark and centuries, on the crisp air.

Among the trunks was an open place, and at its center, something white.

For a minute I had a wild thought or two, recalling stories. Then I made it out. A stream bubbled from the earth here, and some thousand or so years ago they had built a basin to receive it, and put a marble girl on the plinth above. I think she was the goddess of the stream, or of the grove.

The basin was green and growing weeds and the water only a trickle now, hardly that. A briar bound the plinth like dark rope. But she, the goddess-girl, was pure as morning under the moon, which still rained on her between the leaves.

She was just human size, not tall but slender, with sweet secret breasts and a waist that narrowed like the waist of a dancer, and her carved gown gliding like serpents on her thighs. Her face had weathered but was still beautiful, like no woman’s face I had ever seen. And her stone hair rayed like a stiff flame outward as if some stony wind lifted it yet.

I had never come on a girl I wanted for more than an hour or so. It was strange to find her like that, locked in marble. It must have been the time and the oldness of the wood, but I half got an idea I should have her, that she would come off the plinth and put on flesh for me.

Then I heard the dogs begin barking as if a bear had roused them. I turned and ran back, cursing, with the spell broken in bits. I guessed they had only been looking for me; nothing else was about, and they rushed forward, wagging their tails like fools, smiling and panting.