Free The Anatomist's Dream by Clio Gray Page B

melted away from the stranger’s fire, some to fetch him the victuals he’d asked for, most to go and take a drink and discuss what they ’ d heard tonight.
    Philbert didn’t move. He was as frightened as he was unwilling to leave. He’d no idea what had happened, or if anything had really happened at all, but what he did know was that the path he’d been seeking back into his past had somehow been opened up to him. Lita was the one to lead him away but he heard Maulwerf speaking as they went.
    â€˜Well, Kwert,’ he said. ‘Take some wine. I think you have need of it.’
    He glanced back, saw Maulwerf smiling right back at him, and felt Lita’s hand wrapped about his own. He didn’t understand the shenanigans back by the fire, found them faintly ridiculous now, but was glad to be Philbert, and perhaps even a little proud.

    Many years later, Philbert would think on that evening, what might or might not have happened if Kwert – with his yellow teeth, thin lips and thinner donkey – had told Philbert he was just a boy with a lump on his head, giving his taupe a quick poke and moving on after giving some vague predictions of long life and children. Maybe then those sudden outbursts of memory triggered by Kwert’s touch wouldn’t have become the seeds of delusion he would grow up believing: that he had a destiny ­different from the rest. Maybe the dead would not have been dead. And then again, maybe nothing would have changed at all. Maybe all roads do lead to Rome. Maybe it was only hubris for Philbert the Man to believe otherwise, and that the world would have been different if only he’d stayed by the lake ­stabbing his foot with his stick, and never allowed Kwert to lay a hand upon his misshapen head.

9
    Mr Wharton’s Most Wonderful Jelly
    Philbert woke early the next morning, no one else abroad, still obscurely excited by the night before. Kroonk slept on oblivious beneath their cart so he extricated his arm from her shoulder and chose to wander through the quietness of the camp alone. It suited Philbert that morning, liking the thin curls of smoke and smells wisping from abandoned fires, mingling with the snores that crept through the crevasses and cracks of carts and canvas. He poked around several ash piles until he found a warm parsnip, peeling off the blackened skin, popping the melt of pale yellow pulp into his mouth. His stick-stabbed foot had begun to throb a little as he walked, so he went down to the shallows of the ox-bow lake to dip it into the cool water.
    He was shocked to find someone there already, and more so that it was Kwert. He was kneeling, head bowed so low he must have been staring almost straight into his stomach if his eyes were open, breathing steadily and loud, mumbling the same refrain over and over, though Philbert could not make out the words. Only later did Philbert learn that Kwert was a Hesychast, and this strange way of kneeling was their way of prayer and meditation. For now, though, the Hesychast Kwert took no ostensible notice of Philbert, nor Philbert of him. Philbert went instead a little way off, sat himself on a promontory, dangling his bruised foot into the water, watching the shards of sunlight shimmering down to the white sand below.
    In the quiet, Philbert could hear the man a little better: a strange language, rhythmic, breathing in on one sentence and out with the next, calm and even as the ripples Philbert found himself making with his foot. The whole world seemed to have relaxed with Kwert’s chanting, even the ducks and moorhens dabbling gently in the weeds were quiet, and Philbert saw the oiled brown fur of an otter ciphering in and out of the sunlit water, plashing the surface gently with its paws, watching him warily with one eye, contemplating the sky with the other. After a while, Philbert heard the clatter-batter of Kroonk coming down the bank and she came up beside him, laid her head upon