Flying to Nowhere: A Tale by John Fuller

direction of the harbour, for dead bodies did not worry him and there was one, not human, for which he cared and for which he hoped that something, perhaps in the way of exequies, might even now be done.
    When the party reached the shoulder of the mountain, and hurried into the well-house, they found the well empty.
    ‘Trickery!’ shouted Vane. He did not bother to wipe away the sweat which trickled down his face and gathered at his nose like rheum, as he leaned on the rim of the well and stared into the waters.
    ‘The body was clinging to the side, you say?’ mused the Abbot. ‘And you dislodged it?’
    Vane grunted assent.
    ‘The well is much deeper at one end than you suspect,’ continued the Abbot. ‘In fact, no one quite knows how deep it is.’
    Vane ignored him.
    ‘The body must have been removed,’ he said.
    ‘Perhaps it has been resurrected,’ countered the Abbot, himself now exasperated at the temper and obtuseness of the Bishop’s officious minion. ‘You may report a wondrous and unexpected efficacy of the healing liquids of the well.’
    Vane merely looked at him in blank wonder. The proposal, being of a totally different character from the suspected legerdemain on the Abbot’s part, could not be entertained. But the Abbot’s words for a moment entered his mind and did not seem ridiculous. They had a force beyond human argument, as would a voice from the rocky peak above them or, perhaps, tiny neighings in the grass.
    The novice as usual stood apart by the doorway, converting the scene into a meditation for his book. As Vane and the Abbot peered into the water he thought to himself: ‘The unknown trader, marooned once again after exhausting adventures and chained to the island by a malign invisible power, removes himself at will through native cunning and the borrowed influence of a magic fountain.’

12
    Although the island was ringed with the blue of eyes, shaded here and there with elusive streaks of a darker colour, but altogether, as seen from the mountain, of a brightness to impel the gaze; nonetheless, at the sea’s edge its appearance was oily, umber, repellant. The rocks that the tide periodically covered were smooth and humped, clad in skins of a slippery gelatinous weed. Between them the clefts swirled with the movement of longer tendrils in black water that never seemed still. A little further up the shore the boulders that were free of the attentions of the tide were baked paler by the sun and covered with lichens in random scribbles: ochre-splashes and larger bisecting rings of bronze. This colouration, on grey slabs of varying sizes, had the strange consistency and persistence of a pattern. As he climbed over the rocks, Geoffrey picked at the crusty rings of dried fronds and crumbled them in his fingers.
    He had seen Saviour’s head and shoulders from the headland in just the same position as on the previous evening. From that distance the posture looked natural, even relaxed, as though the horse were sitting at ease and looking down the shore. Geoffrey was seized with a sudden hope that he might, after all, not yet be dead, and had made his way down to the rocks where the beast had leapt and fallen.
    As he approached, he could hear above the lapping of the sea another, stranger, sound, like the wind in the tops of trees— only there was no wind. It came from the body of the horse which Geoffrey could now see was quite dead, for its haunches were already decomposed, leaving the spine arched like a flying buttress. Beneath it, heaped and massed within the collapsing bulk of the animal, was an army of maggots the volume of a broken sack of meal. He came closer and watched them with a sickened respect for this ferocious process of corruption: each maggot writhed and flopped in its effort to struggle free of the mass and to secure for itself a scrap of the decaying flesh to feed on, half of each white coiled body twisting blindly and reaching above the others for a hold that the air