Day's first light diffused through the mist like water through the stonework of an old tomb.  Gray swirls and undefined shadows drifted about.  Each breath took in a pitiful catch of air, and each lungful felt incapable of sustaining life.  Dell choked.  He was drowning!

"Curse it, Dell!" said the blacksmith.  "I do not like the sounds you make."

"I cannot breathe!"

"Yes, you can."

"It is like a cat.  It takes my breath!"

"No, it does not."

"But...!" Dell started to protest, but was cut off.

"Quiet or I shall show you the difference."

Dell peered at the smith and felt uneasy.  It was sometimes Edward's nature to make cruel jokes, but this time, his tone had naught of humor in it.  Dell took another breath and held it until his lungs burned.  The air carried thick, earthy odors drawn from the humus beneath the ground.  It was bad air.  He exhaled sharply.

Edward looked at him with eyes the color of cold ashes but said nothing.  Their expression alone conveyed his mind.

Dell took another breath, more quietly and tried to think of other things.  He looked ahead but saw only gray and white.  He looked to the earth at his feet.  At least there, he saw something with form.  He glanced up again, strangely compelled by the emptiness.  It seemed odd that whiteness could mask as effectively as darkness.

Nothing solid existed outside his small sphere of vision, and there, details thrust obscenely forward.  Mud heaved covetously at his feet.  It made grotesque sucking sounds.  Bits of it dropped from his shoes like satiated leaches.  It was the mud of graves.  Behind him, the cart creaked like a death wagon, its heavy wheels fighting the mud with tearing sounds which made him cringe.  The wheels, like rustic instruments, played their own scale and rhythm.

No echoes returned from the roadside.  The fog swallowed everything.

If only Edward had chosen a few weeks previous to make his journey.  Then, the road would have been rutted but firm and crowded with convivial travelers.  Now it stretched long and deserted, boggy, sick smelling, like a huge decaying salamander.  Only in rare places did the ground support a wheel without depression.

The smith had intentionally waited until weather cleared the road of wayfarers.  He did not like company.  He chose this season to journey out of sheer hatefulness.  Ha!  But it proved more difficult than he had bargained for, what with the ill timed death of the ox.  Now they were the ox.  The only solace he could find lay in Edward having to pull like a draft animal alongside him.  The solace was small, however, as Edward simply took the ill luck in lugubrious stride.  He seemed to care little whether he or the ox pulled, so bestial was he himself.

Dell looked at the mud caking his clothes.  Mud covered his braies halfway up his thighs.  Damp chill penetrated through the wooden soles of his shoes and through the leather uppers.  Even his linen shirt felt heavy and wet, it had soaked up so much of the filthy mist.  The wool of his overshirt would never be the same again, and he could scarcely imagine Edward reaching into his purse for a couple of silver pennies to pay for another.  He tucked his chin to look at it closer.  He saw numerous patches, some nicely stitched, others bearing a man's touch, but all unevenly spread with mud.  He remembered when it had looked new.

The mist pressed in again.  Suddenly, his ears felt vulnerable, and with first one hand, then the other, he pulled the flaps of his snood cap down over them.  The fabric felt a trifle uneven, but if he dared remove both hands from the shaft at the same time to adjust it, he knew Edward would deliver a quick blow of rebuke.  The journey was bad enough without that.

And Edward lumbered on, looking more of unfinished clay than man, self absorbed, his jaw clenching and unclenching, occasionally grumbling angrily to himself as if he had two ill-tempered terrier dogs stuffed into his shirt.  Beads of dew shimmered within the tangle of his beard.  His shaggy brows dripped like the excavated and severed roots of some dark dwelling herb.  He stood out in any crowd, as a lightning blasted tree dominates a hill.  He bristled at the world, and for all that, was ever master, never companion.

Somewhere above, the predawn sky brightened an infinitesimal degree and a faint wind penetrated through the branches.  The fog moved and writhed, as if something within its nebulous confines struggled to find form and manifest itself.  It looked awful.  Dell clenched his eyes and walked a few paces with them closed, but not seeing was worse than seeing.  He opened them again.

He wondered, did mist make visible the ghosts of Legionnaires who once marched these old roads?  Did it define form and movement as dew makes a spider web visible?  The image unnerved him and he immediately wished he had not thought of it.

He shivered and looked over his shoulder for the hundredth time.  If it were not for the burly old blacksmith beside him, he knew he would have bolted in panic long before.  He glanced sideways.  Edward grumbled still.  The smith had no comfort within and none without, but his presence, by sheer weight of hull and crust, offered some shelter from the oppressive whiteness and the terrors it harbored.

Mist stole over his hand, taking with it a bit of warmth.  It touched his cheek, then his neck.  From its emptiness, it called to him.  But, did it really speak, or were the quiet whispers merely droplets of mist settling over dying leaves and filling the crevices of tree bark, as Edward said?  He listened.  No, there was more to the sound than droplets of water.

Beside him, Master Edward plodded, unaware.  Perhaps the pounding of his hammer and the glare of his forge had, over the years, blunted his senses, twitched away his capacity to see the half-seen or hear the half-heard.  The gray hours before dawn were not to be laughed at.  Everyone knew that.  Those uncertain hours loosened the body's hold on its soul.  Did not many old people die at this hour?

He felt watched.  Something there?  Fearfully, he moved his head to the right and looked.  No.  Never when you looked directly.  Never straight on.  Whatever dismal things the mist allowed refuge appeared only at the edge of vision.  He looked sideways again at Edward.  Did the smith not sense these things?  Did he not have the capacity for fear?  Even a beetle knows when a shrike stands close.  Did the smith lack the perception of a common beetle?  It was conceivable.

Edward pulled like an ox, head down, shoulders thrown forward.  Even an ox could sense danger!  Edward did not.

"Stop gawking.  Pull at it!" growled the smith.  "Pull 'til your spine cracks!  Pull!"

"Yes, Master Edward!"  He hurried to obey, and for the first time found the distraction of labor comforting.

Together, they pulled.  The fog enveloped and disgorged their labors like the breathing of a giant fish.  The smooth wood of the shaft and the slimy leather gave him an anchor to hold onto.  He gripped the cart as firmly as his purse on market day, but the mist sapped him.  In a short time, the distraction of Edward's anger faded, and again he felt his back exposed.  Hollow odors drifted past, clinging to the whiteness like sin on a soul.  Would the sun not come and burn it away?

He shuddered.  He could almost see individual figures, shades of Roman soldiers walking in groups, staggering under the weight of wounds and armor.  It suddenly occurred to him, perhaps the spirits just had not noticed them.  God.  What if they should hear a wheel creak?  Or what if Edward suddenly let loose one of his tirades of curses?  He looked at the older man with fear.

Noticing the sudden attention, Edward groaned through his beard and cast a baleful eye at him.  He turned full face and their eyes met briefly.  Dell quickly looked down.

"God's teeth!" said the smith with a tone of infinite exasperation. "It is only fog!"

Dell stared into the mist, fearful of immediate retribution for the smith's blasphemy.  But, the fog was silent, drifting.  Edward, he pleaded in his thoughts, why do you tempt God's mercy?  Why do you bait Him?  No good can come of it.  No good whatsoever.

He feared to look at Edward again.  He knew better than to say anything.  His trembling became more pronounced.  God, he begged, please watch over us and pay no heed to Master Edward.  He hoped his prayer worked.  He glanced at the smith out of the corner of his eye.  Edward strained any prayer, especially as improper an entreaty as he could muster.

He said another prayer for his own protection, and added a word for Edward, since he needed the smith to keep him safe.  "Amen," he muttered aloud.  He felt much better.

Edward grumbled something unintelligible and subsided.  The mud continued its monotonous litany.  A raven called from an invisible branch overhanging the road.  The whiteness grew brighter.  Somewhere, the sun was rising.  They made a turn in the road and Dell caught his breath.  Vague shapes, real shapes, appeared and disappeared just beyond his vision.  He paused, but Edward jerked the cart shaft against him.  They edged past the shapes, and he nearly collapsed with relief as they proved to be no more than a small herd of lost cattle, stirring to avoid the cart.

"I am tempted to hook one of these beasts up," declared Edward.

"No!" cried Dell, forgetting himself.  He was unnerved.

"No?" asked Edward, playfully.  "Since when does an apprentice order his master?"

"I am sorry, Master Edward."

Edward answered with a measuring stare.

Dell looked away.  Edward was a cruel man, but cattle theft would get you hung.  Should they survive the fog and be found out as cattle thieves, the lord of this shire could do no less than hang them!  Suddenly, he knew where the real danger lay.  He found himself shaking his head worriedly.  He regarded the smith with concern verging on fear.

Edward contemplated the cattle, measuring them.  Then, the smith relented with a grin.  "Do not worry, Dell.  I will not let them dangle you for cattle theft.  We will keep pulling."

Yes, they would!  Dell leaned into the shaft with determination.  The cart picked up speed.

After a time, the wheels turned easier.  They had reached a firmer stretch of road.  And better yet, though the fog still obscured, daylight so suffused it that the terrors were banished.  It was only mist!

"How much farther?" he asked.  He was exhausted and the day had scarcely begun.

"A long time," answered Edward without looking up or breaking his stride.  "We will be there mid day."

The smith's tone implied the question had been repeated too many times, yet this was the first time he had asked.  He tried to say something cheerful, something to cheer the smith's mood.

"Well, I will be happy to see it done.  I am tired of being an ox," he said.

"Yes," came the one word response.

"What time do you think it is?" asked Dell.

"Matins," said the smith beleagueredly.  "Nearly Prime."

"If we are near Malmesbury, should not we hear the bells?"

Edward did not answer.  The iron in the cart had clinked over a rough spot and Dell knew the smith's mind momentarily tended the ingots in the cart, but more particularly the round billets of wootz he had contrived to be brought him from faraway Aleppo, in Byzantium.

Edward cared deeply about his iron, probably more deeply than for anything excepting his wife, and if she were wise, she would never test the balance.

On the road at night, after evening meal, the smith always tended the iron, much as a mother would tuck in a child.  The smith sometimes mumbled a question to the round billets, something like, "Iron, is the alchemy right this time?" and sometimes he would cryptically ask, "Iron, where are you hiding your lines?"  Sometimes during a meal, he pronounced without provocation, "Let fools chase bloody glory!  Forged steel outlasts them all!"  And, sometimes, at his forge, the smith would stand over his work, red steel smoldering beneath his hammer, and say matter-of-factly, "There!  That is purpose a man can manage!"  He was a strange, irreverent heathen.  His roughness was frightening to many.  Edward did not like his fellow men.

Dell was shaken from his thoughts by the shaft he strained against suddenly springing from his grasp.  It struck the smith hard and raked his ribs with great force.  At the same instant, the cart lurched sideways and stopped dead, canted to the left.  The left wheel had collapsed a hollow under the ground and now rested a third submerged in muck, against the root boule of a willow.

"Mother of God!" muttered Edward with heaving breath.  He held his ribs gingerly.

Dell stood with his mouth open in supplication.  "I am sorry!" he said.  "It slipped from my hands!  I did not mean to!"

"Damn it all!  Will you look at that?"

The smith's line of sight took in the sunken wheel.  Dell sighed inwardly.  The smith's anger would settle there, not on him.

The smith took a breath and flinched, "Jesus Christ, Pope, and beardless saints!"

Dell glanced reflexively over his shoulder.

Edward looked up with malicious amusement.  "Afraid something might mistake you for me in this fog?"

"It is nothing to jest about."

"Few things are not matter for jest!" answered the smith.  "If I do not burn in Hell for my Holy work in Richard's Crusade, a few loose words here or there will not make the difference between a devil's fart and an angel's kiss."

"Edward," said Dell, making the sign of the cross, "Your soul!"

"Let me worry about my soul.  You help me unload these damned ingots!"  Edward hoisted a sixty pound iron pig with one hand and gestured Dell to begin.

Dell bent to the task, two-handedly.

They pulled ingots from the cart, concentrating on the side with the downed wheel.  Dell started to heft one of the billets of wootz.

"Leave that for me," ordered Edward.  "I do not want you setting that down in this muck and having it sink out of sight.  It is worth a damn sight more than you are."

Edward pulled the billet towards his side of the cart.  It rang dully as it scraped against another ingot.  The metallic sound startled a brace of rooks somewhere above.  A pair of harsh cries, accompanied by the rustling of feathers moving into flight, filtered through the fog.

"Rooks will not pray me into Heaven either, lad," said Edward.

Dell shook his head.  "Can we not speak of other things, Master Edward?  You make me very...."

"Very what?" the smith interrupted.

"Uncomfortable," finished Dell obligatorily.

Edward ignored the word and dumped another ingot without ceremony, then said, "That should do it."

"You think you can shift it now?" asked Dell dubiously, hoping to divert the smith's anger.  The cart was still half full of ingots, at least twenty stone, four-hundred pounds.  And the ox yoke was still aboard.  The cart itself weighed at least fifteen stone.  Dell watched as Edward jammed an ingot behind the good wheel.  Yes, he thought, he probably could.  His strength seemed to double when he got mad at something, and this was just the sort of thing to stoke his ire.  Judging from his temper, you would think he hailed from Anjou.

"Stay back," warned Edward.  He grabbed hold of one shaft at its farthest extremity and planted his feet firmly.  Mud oozed impatiently around his boots.  He began a rocking motion with the cart.  The stuck wheel rolled a twelfth turn back, a twelfth turn forward, struck the root boule and flung itself backwards again.  Keeping momentum, he pushed in the same direction.  The cart groaned, but this time the wheel turned an eighth turn back, an eighth turn forward, and struck the boule with nearly enough force to propel it over.

"Next time!" Edward shouted.

The wheel rolled a full quarter turn back.  Dell leaned into the cart as it began to move forward.  It picked up speed.  With a sudden burst, it slammed into and over the boule and landed with a rumble on the flat of the road.  By luck, the ground was firm there.  The cart rolled forward a half-dozen feet and stopped.  Both of them were breathing hard.

"That is enough to rouse a person!" Edward roared.  The effort had improved his spirits immensely.  He actually smiled.

Dell examined the hole where the wheel had been stuck.  "Wet-weather spring," he said.

Edward nodded.  "As much as this cart weighs, we will find every one of them."

Dell responded unenthusiastically and picked up one of the ingots.  He carried it forward to the cart and released it an inch above the bed to avoid crushing his fingers.  The wood resounded louder than he expected.

"Quiet!" commanded Edward.  His voice had lost the soft edge of humor.  Dell paid close attention.

Edward peered into the bright mist behind them, listening for something.  Then Dell heard something, too.  A spare sound, getting louder.  From the firm ground somewhere behind them, through the mist and trees and brambles, came the slow, heavy, hollow sounds of hooves against earth.  Big hooves.  The hollow thump of each footfall resounded like fire logs dropping from a wagon.  No cow or ox, this, no palfrey or hunting horse with their mincing clip, clip, clip.

Edward stood from his harness and waited for the fog to reveal the maker of the sound.  Dell knew it could only be ... a war horse!  And it was.  The big animal pushed the mist aside like Sampson rending the pillars of the temple, its huge, benevolent head alert to the sounds and smells of those it knew to be waiting ahead.  The horse snorted, as horses do when excitement awakens their domesticated instincts.  Its ears pivoted forward and its head gave a nodding jerk.

The great horse stopped a dozen paces away.  They took stock of the rider, a smallish fellow in a snood cap whose face they could not make out, but whose movements indicated was contemplating them just as curiously.  Friend, foe, robber, or fellow traveler?  Approach or retreat?  They could read it all in the fellow's intent position.

There was a moment of silent contemplation.  The horse shifted its weight from one foot to another.

"Ho, horseman!" cried Edward abruptly.

Dell watched and waited.  He had never been on such a journey, and the ways of the road were still new and mysterious.  So, too, this encounter.

"Ho, yourself!" cried the horseman in a voice less sure.

The voice sounded vaguely familiar, but Dell could see that Edward recognized it.  "And so, Gil," said the smith with restrained amusement, "what are you doing on the back of so fine a great black horse on so dreary a morning so far from home?"

There was a pause from the rider as he listened to these words and the familiar voice saying them and matched them with a memory from another place.

"Edward?" came the tentative reply from the rider.  "Edward the smith of Norbury?"  The rider still was not fully convinced.

"The same.  And you are Gil the saddler's apprentice, from that self-same village."

"By God's Mercy!" cried Gil.  "I thought you might be a robber!"  He urged the horse forward until four white-stockinged legs the size of small trees stood abreast the cart.  Mud oozed up to the hairy feathering around the hooves.

"Dell," nodded Gil from horseback as he reached down to clasp hands with Edward.  Gil sized up the situation at a glance.  "You have lost your ox," he said with friendly revelation.

Edward looked at Gil soberly.  "I will maintain your sight is second to none."

Dell stifled a smile, then abruptly they all laughed.

"What happened to it?"

"It saw our load and decided death lay closer than Norbury."

"Really?"

"We are not hiding it."

Gil's eyes flicked back and forth for an instant, as if he suspected he might find the animal, as Edward suggested.  After reassuring himself of the conspicuous absence, he said, "That is a shame.  Get anything for it?"

"A bit for the hide."

"That is a real shame."

"None to be had along the way?"

"I cannot afford another one until I turn this iron into something useful," Edward said, indicating the black lumps in the cart.

Dell wondered at Edward's civility toward the saddler's apprentice and felt a touch of envy.

"Seems like you just cannot stay ahead of it sometimes," said Gil, shifting needlessly in the saddle, trying to call attention to his position atop the war horse.  Dell read the movement easily.  It was time for Edward to ask about Gil!  But Edward was a contrary old he-goat.

Dell approached the horse.  It was a very big animal, a stallion, massive, sleek, well built, with muscles the size of a man's chest, twitching and shifting under Gil's featherweight.  It was anxious to be moving again.  Gil rode upon a knight's saddle, with high cantle and forepiece, double cinches and a chest strap.  The leather of the saddle creaked each time the horse moved.  It looked new.  Dell had rarely seen so splendid an animal so close.  He touched the flank.

"He is a real prize!" said Dell.

"He is a right fine horse all right," agreed Gil, obviously proud to be astride such an animal.

"Quite a view from up there," commented the smith, at last.

"It is!"

"Where are you taking him?"  Edward cocked his head humorously.  "Or have you won your spurs behind our backs?"

Gil took this line of conversation very seriously.  His face sobered with the excitement of a man with news.

"There is going to be war, Master Edward," he whispered.  He paused dramatically.

"Here or somewhere else?"

"The way I hear it, King John and King Louis are at it again and our own Lord William is being sent to Brittany.  The lord is sending for his knights and is bound to make a few more, I am thinking, because he sent me to bring back this fine beast!"  Gil straightened his back.

"Reasonable, Gil, reasonable," Edward said speculatively.  "But I wonder about Brittany.  I would imagine John has better use of men on this side of the Channel."  Gil had nothing to say to this remark.  Such speculation was quite beyond his depth.

The smith said, "By the time we get home, the facts will be all over town.  We will hear it then, eh?"

Gil wiped his nose with the back of his hand and peered anxiously down the road.  Blue sky was beginning to show through the fog and leaves.  The bells of Malmesbury clanged in the distance.  It was Prime.

"I had best be off.  The lord will flay me if I am late."

Edward smiled, "Best not be late, then.  We will see you later today."  He stepped back from the horse, and said, "Dell, I do not need a lame apprentice.  Step back and let Gil be on his way."

Dell jumped back.  "'Bye, Gil!" he said cheerfully.

"'Bye, Dell!"

Gil gave Edward a sober nod, a gesture he evidently thought befit his position while upon the horse.  He raised the reins and touched his spurless heels to the horse's sides.  Of course, the well trained animal needed little encouragement.  The muscles of its flanks bunched and sprang with deceptive speed, forcing Gil to lose a little of his noble bearing in just remaining aboard.  He did not turn around to see if they saw his balance fail, but raised his hand in a cursory wave, then swiftly returned it to the forepiece of the saddle.  The big horse moved quickly and in a short time, both it and Gil were out of sight.  A while later, out of earshot, too.