The Fog Returns
Year of Our Lord 557, the first cold nights of autumn
Recorded by Brother Gildas
It came in from the river at dusk, the way it always comes, though I do not usually remark on weather in these pages. I remark on it now because Norwyn stopped walking when he saw it, and Norwyn does not often stop for weather.
By full dark it had taken the whole of the lower town. A man could not see his own hand held at arm’s length, nor hear much beyond it either — the fog seemed to close over sound the way it closed over sight, so that a dog barking two streets off sounded as though it barked from inside the same room as you.
We had meant to lodge the night and move on in the morning. We did not move on.
Within the hour, Wilfrid had been stopped twice by people wanting to know whether we had seen anything, and had answered honestly that we had not, not yet, though I confess by the second asking I no longer entirely believed him. There was a quality to the fog itself, a kind of pressure behind the eyes, that I have felt before and like less each time I feel it.
We saw a soldier first, standing at the old crossing where the Roman road still shows beneath the mud, dressed for a campaign that has not been fought in longer than anyone now living could say. He did not see us. Wilfrid greeted him regardless. He did not answer, and after a moment the fog took him back the way it had given him.
We saw a woman further on, walking quickly with her arms wrapped around something that was not there, calling a name none of us recognised, in a manner that made all three of us stop rather than follow.
Norwyn drew neither of them. He drew something else instead — something none of us had seen at all, standing, by his account, just at the edge of where his sight gave out into fog. He would not describe it to me afterward beyond saying that it had been there “the way the others were there,” which I did not find as reassuring as I think he meant it.
An old woman selling what little she could still see to sell in that murk told us, unprompted, that she had not known a fog like it since the fog year, and would not be drawn further than that phrase no matter how plainly Gildas — that is, no matter how plainly I — put the question to her.
I asked Wilfrid, once we had lost her in the murk, what fog year she meant.
He did not answer at once. When he did, he said only that some things settle a debt with a person once, and are not owed a second telling, and that he thought I understood him well enough not to ask twice.
I did not ask twice. I record here only that I did not, and that I noted it, and that Norwyn did not look up from his book while Wilfrid said it, though I do not think Norwyn missed a word.
The fog lifted before dawn, as such fogs generally do, and the town was much as it had been, and most of what walked in it during the night was gone with it by morning.
Most.
We found, near the crossing, the soldier’s shape still faintly there in the grey hour before full light — thinner than he had been in the fog proper, but present, in a way that the others we saw that night were not. He remains there still, so far as I know, waiting on a war that ended before any of us were born.
I do not know why the fog left him and took the rest. I have my suspicions, none of which I am prepared to commit to this page while they remain suspicions and nothing more.