The Vorrh

the place spoke of an entwining outside of his memory. He looked around for visual signs, but found none: the place spoke to him through another vein.
    They sat for a while and talked about their separate journeys, before and beyond, in a way that helped them arrive and depart. The Bowman was going inland; the boatman was returning to the mouth of the river. He would collect his self on the way back. Paulus explained that their landing place was the origin of both the river and the forest, and that it was a difficult place to walk; its ruggedness was not made for people, its steep ascents being full of declivities and unpredictable impasses. According to the unknown sources of history, the very name of the Vorrh came from its description.
    They continued to talk for a few hours, letting their experiences waft and disperse until the moment came. It crept in during a pause, announcing itself bodily with the stretching of cramped legs. The bow, quiver and other possessions were unloaded and placed safely away from the water. They rocked the boat gently out of the shallows and into deeper water; Paulus clambered on and punted it further out with the boat-hook, while the Bowman waded back to shore and watched The Leo join the stream, diminishing with its waving captain, beyond the range of sight. As it vanished, a light ripple dazed the air, a rhythmic shudder of ambience. He smiled to himself, realising that it was a farewell from his friend; a short, percussive rift, played on the rim of the boat’s wooden hull as it returned its captain to another world.
    * * *

    Cyrena sat in her favourite room, the one with the wrought-iron balcony outside. She used to spend hours there, over-sensing the city, its aromas and sounds shaping a landscape of poignant, knitted contentment and longing. One of her favourite times was the evening, when the city’s sounds folded down to allow the distant forest its full voice. She loved to feel the exchange, the tides of human and animal sounds passing each other in the growing dominance of night.
    Her sighted friends (and all were) had always said that she had marvellous perception of the world they shared. Over the years, they had learned not to lead their conversations with descriptions of sight. Cyrena had never minded, but she could always sense their embarrassment when they inadvertently referred to appearance, or invited her to look at something; little words that created errors in their shared reality, small slips in perceptual reciprocation.
    High above, the swallows turned into bats, foraging the sky for its shoals of insects. The birds’ tiny, sharp cries were like single stars, calling for a fraction of a second out of a constellation of glittering darkness; they became the stars she had never seen. Her first sightings of the swifts in the bright air had delighted her. Their spinning and darting was faster than anything she could have ever imagined, their spatial acrobatics instantly displacing her previous image of pinprick chirps echoing from a vast distance. At first, it had been a more-than-adequate barter, but over the weeks their sky-weaving had become predictable; dismally, unimaginatively attached to the food chain. Other things in her eyes were also beginning to flatten and become commonplace. The colours of her furnishings had started to pall. They had invigorated her in the beginning, their richness accentuated by their textures, which had once been their greatest appeal. Now they seemed to jump unpredictably, or daze the depth of the room; with sight, things seemed smaller and somehow pinching.
    Perhaps it was the recent meeting that had so depressed her. The Tulp girl had given a little friendship, but it had been a very slight compensation for the greater loss. Her expectations had been single-minded: their reunion that day had been the only option she had considered, she had pictured every detail of the moment. If ‘pictured’ was the right word; in truth, her anticipation had not been shaped by her visual imagination at all. It had been carefully sculpted from touch and sound, his presence bolder in the contours of those memories than anything she had seen since the miracle. Ghertrude’s descriptions had made it worse. How could she accommodate this ugly portrait with the sweeping clarity of the beauty of that night? Her new eyes were bringing more disappointment to her than she could have ever anticipated. They shunted in a continuous torrent of irrelevant