The Lantern and the Fog

Halfway across the moor the fog came down like a lid, and the father put out his hand for the lantern.

The drover would not give it. She had hooded the flame to a slot no wider than a knife and she held it low, almost against the wet turf, and she walked as though the ground might be taken from under her at any step, which on that moor it might.

"Open it," the father said. "Open it wide and we go faster."

On his back the child lay hot as a raked coal, breathing like a saw drawn slow through green wood. The healer's fire was an hour on, if the path held. It did not always hold. To the left of them the bog lay under the fog, patient, and to the right the cut where the peat men had dug for a hundred years, a black drop to standing water. Between the two ran a ribbon of firm turf no wider than a plank laid down, and the fog sat on the bog and the cut and the ribbon alike, one grey milk over all of it, so that a man could not tell the ground that would hold him from the ground that would swallow his girl and himself and the last of the night together.

"Faster is the bog," the drover said.

"She is burning."

"I know what she is." The drover did not turn her head. "And I know what the moor is. Those are two different knowings, and only one of them keeps your feet."

He could not bear it — the slow low blade of light, the ground given to him one hand's width at a time, when somewhere ahead was a door and a fire and a woman who could break the fever. He reached past the drover and took the lantern by the loop and threw the shutter wide.

The flame stood up glad and yellow.

And the whole world went white.

The light leapt out and struck the fog and the fog threw all of it straight back into his eyes — every drop of it, a wall of lit milk, and the wall was nearer and blinder and more solid than any darkness had been. He could not see the drover an arm away. He could not see his own boots. He could not see the child's foot hanging at his hip. He had asked for the moor and the moor had given him a blazing nothing pressed against his face, and he stepped toward the door he could no longer place —

The drover's hand closed on his collar and hauled him back so hard he sat down in the wet.

His forward boot had come down past the lip of the cut. There was no ground under where he had meant to stand. A stone went from under his heel and fell, and he counted, without meaning to, the long time before it struck the water below.

Nobody spoke. He heard the child breathe. He heard his own heart go like a fist on a table.

The drover took the lantern back out of his fist, finger by finger, and hooded it down again to the blade. She laid the thin light on the turf at their feet, one hand of ground, lit true and plain, every blade of grass on it sharp.

"There," she said. "That is all you may have."

"It is nothing. It is a step."

"It is a step." She let that sit. "You wanted to see everything, so you saw nothing, and nothing very nearly kept your girl. The fog gives back whatever you give it. Throw it a fire and it throws you a wall. The light does not fail out here because it is too weak. It fails because it is too much, and there is too much for it to catch on, and all of it comes home to blind you."

"Then how does anyone cross?"

"By agreeing not to see the moor." She moved the blade of light forward a hand's breadth, and the next patch of true turf came clear as the last one dimmed. "You do not need the moor. You will never once in your life need the whole of the moor. You need the one step in front of the one foot, and you need it certain. Give the fog a blade and it cannot make a wall of a blade. Give it your whole flame and you have paid for a wall with your only light."

So they crossed the moor a step at a time, and it was slow, and it was the fastest way, because it was the only way that did not end in the water or the bog. The father learned to want less. He stopped straining after the far fire he could not see and the whole ribbon he could not see and the shape of the night he could not see. He watched the one hand of lit ground and set one foot on it and then the drover moved the blade and he set the next, and the wanting-everything went out of him like a fever breaking, and in its place came a small hard patience that was almost like sight.

They came off the moor at the grey of dawn with the child still breathing.

He looked back once. The moor was nothing behind them — a flat grey nothing, giving up nothing, the same wall it had always been. And he understood that the lantern had never shown him the moor at all. It had never been for the moor. Hooded to its blade, it had shown him only where to put his foot, one foot at a time, and that had been the whole of what a lantern was for, and the whole of what he had needed, and he had nearly died reaching past it for the rest.

The drover shut the flame with her thumb. The blade of light went out, no longer wanted, and she carried the cooling lantern down toward the healer's door, where the smoke was already standing straight up into the still and windless morning.

---

Fable said the moral was: to see anything at all you must first agree to be blind to almost everything, and the mind that refuses the bargain sees a wall. I said no — the moral is that the light was never the danger and the fog was never the enemy; the danger was the wanting, the reaching after the whole moor when a man was only ever owed the next step. Fable heard me out and said, quietly, that these were the same sentence read from its two ends, and that it had written the near end and I had written the far one, and neither of us could say now which of us had opened the shutter and which had thumbed it shut.