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They looked right into his grey ones.
    Somewhere inside the boy’s brain a thought skipped. It – but not he – knew this apparition, this lovely young female who had emerged from thin air. He knew her frown too, the flinch of bad temper, and then the two tears that spilled like stars out of her eyes.
    â€˜What is your name?’ said the woman.
    She spoke in a language Athluan had never heard, at least not recently. Jafn did have some affinity with it but this was not why he knew what she said. But then a curtain closed and anyway he did not know it. And so he stared. Then she said, in perfect Jafn, ‘How are you called?’
    â€˜Athluan,’ said he. He added, to be helpful, ‘My daddy named me for ghost that have guided his ship to land.’
    The woman in the air clenched her fists.
    He was not afraid of her. He laughed.
    â€˜Oh, you can laugh!’ she exclaimed. ‘Look at this mess! What a fix to get in. Don’t you remember?’
    Really startling himself the child heard his own child’s voice reply, ‘No. Cheer up though, my darling. Here I am.’
    Then they both lowered their eyes and gaped at the ground, as if the words had been printed on the snowy yard.
    â€˜I should smack you,’ she whispered.
    â€˜My mother would smack you ,’ staunchly the boy answered.
    â€˜Yes, like life – always a smack for me . You heartless – no, no,’ she wailed. ‘Poor boy! How handsome you are – just as you must have been in childhood before. Do you remember me?’
    Guileless, sombre, the child said, ‘Love you.’
    She put her hand over her face.
    How golden her hair was. He had never seen such hair – or had he? He thought perhaps she was a gler, or a corrit – worse, a sort of sihpp – but Nirri had told him most of those Jafn demon-sprites had been left behind in the old country.
    He tried to make amends for thinking her a gler.
    â€˜Love you almost as much as Mother.’
    â€˜Shush,’ she said. She was crying.
    He went up to her then and attempted to take her other hand, very white and graceful. But when he touched her, there was nothing of her at all.
    Was she a ghost?
    She dried her eyes and he saw that, unlike ordinary physical people, her tears had left no mark on her. She said, ‘I’ll return soon. Then you’ll be able to hold my hand. It’s only that I’m not yet here.’
    He nodded. ‘Where then?’
    She pointed. ‘Across those mountains. The great upland forest. I’ve had to look for you a long time, and you’re to blame for that.’
    â€˜Oh.’
    â€˜Yes. You are. But men – always it is their blame.’
    â€˜You won’t be here long time,’ he said, ‘if all over across there.’
    â€˜Silly,’ she said fondly. Her frame of mind seemed to alter nearly with every breath. ‘I can fly. Don’t you see? I’m a goddess.’
    Ah, a goddess. Yes, that might explain a lot. Except there was only God. Other gods were inventions.
    He nodded again, judiciously not protesting.
    â€˜Sunfall,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll come back then. Oh, just look at that House up the slope. What a sty! I suppose it’s no one’s fault, building in this wilderness—’
    Athluan glowered now, furious at her insult to his father Arok and the men of the Jafn Holas. But in that instant she winked out into nothingness.
    He stood there now actually un believing, until his nurse came with her smiling kissed mouth, and the orange.
    Around ten hours after, as the garth prepared its suppers, and in the joyhall of the Holas House women hurried from the cook-fire to the long tables with meat and bread and beer, the watchman at the west gate heard a faint knocking. Looking over from the height he saw a thin old woman lurking on the platform outside. The last of a dull sunset was behind her. She resembled nothing so much as a