The Light That Did Not Answer Part 1
Year of Our Lord 557
Recorded by Brother Gildas
Part One
We saw the tower before we reached the village beneath it, a broken finger of stone against the sky where the moor gives way to cliff and the cliff gives way, without warning, to the sea.
Norwyn stopped walking before any of us. He does this rarely, and never without cause, so I stopped as well, and asked what troubled him.
He did not answer. He looked at the tower a long while, the way a man looks at a face he cannot quite place, and then walked on without a word, faster than before.
The village below keeps a wary distance from the ruin. It stands within a broken wall on the headland, roofless, half its stone already given back to the cliff edge or the sea beneath it. A well sits inside that wall, stone-lined, deep, and dry only in the sense that no one living will lower a bucket into it. They draw their water elsewhere, and have done, an old woman told us, for longer than any living memory reaches, though none of them could tell us plainly why, only that it is understood, the way certain things in small places come to be understood without needing to be said aloud each time.
It was built, she thought, in the old days, before her grandmother’s grandmother, to watch the sea. There had been others like it along that coast once, each within sight of the next, so that a fire lit on one could be seen and answered from the next, and so the warning might travel faster than any rider along a warning of ships out of the eastern waters that no one wished to meet unarmed. This one, she said, had not answered. Or had not been answered. She was not certain which, and I am not certain the distinction would have comforted her either way.
We made camp within the broken wall, for the shelter it offered against the wind if nothing else, and I confess I did not care for the closeness of the well, though I would not have said so before the others.
Norwyn did not sleep.
I woke twice in the night and found him sitting upright, facing the sea, his sketchbook open on his knees and his hand moving, though there was no fire and precious little moonlight by which to draw anything at all. In the morning I looked at what he had done.
Page after page of the same shape, repeated with small variations, as a man might repeat a word he has half-forgotten the meaning of until the shape of it stops feeling like a word. Small figures, close together, arranged in rows one atop another, as though laid rather than standing. He had drawn perhaps thirty pages of it before first light, and torn out most of them, and kept only a few, which he would not show me directly, though he did not stop me looking either.
I asked him what he had drawn.
He said only that he did not choose it. That his hand had gone on without him for some part of the night, and that he had let it, because stopping it had not seemed, at the time, to be within his power.
Wilfrid asked whether he was afraid.
Norwyn considered this longer than the question seemed to warrant, and said that he did not think fear was quite the right word for what he felt near that well, though he had none better to offer in its place.
He said almost nothing else that day. He ate little. He watched the tower from a distance most of the daylight hours, as a man watches something he expects to move.
Toward evening, with the light going gold and then grey over the water, he rose without announcement and walked toward the ruin alone.
Wilfrid made to follow him. I stopped him.
I do not know, even now, whether that was wisdom or cowardice on my part. I know only that something in the way Norwyn walked toward that tower told me he was not walking toward it as a man walks toward a place he chooses to go, and that I did not trust myself to say the right thing to call him back, and feared saying the wrong thing more than I feared his going.
We watched him climb what remains of the tower stair until the dark took the shape of him entirely.
Neither of us followed. I do not know that I can fully account for that either.
We kept the fire low that night, and did not sleep, and did not speak a great deal, and in the morning went to find him.