Chapter Text
A plant with yellow flowers and soft leaves grows between the furrows of two tracks left by passing carts. He walks along the furrows. His boots leave prints where the earth gives, but the road behind him doesn't mind. The trees here are an unfamiliar shape and they are already losing their needles.
The horizon is doing its steady work of staying ahead. A bird turns far up, not circling, going south, just as he is.
He comes to a low stone bridge over a narrow channel. He stands on the bridge a while because it is good to stop on bridges, which sit over moving things and stay still.
There are two of them waiting on the far side of the bridge, wearing long coats that fall to their boot-tops, red and tasseled. Their hats are tall and winged and pointed. Each carries a staff with a pennant trailing from it.
"That hat," says the nearer one.
"Yes," Snufkin agrees.
"Where did you come by it."
"I made it," he says. "Years ago. I've had several. They aren't complicated to make."
The man looks at him. Then he looks at the hat.
"The brim," says the second one, a woman.
"It keeps the rain off my shoulders as well as my head," Snufkin says. "It's a practical shape."
"Take it off."
He does not take it off. He looks at them both in a courteous and unhurried way, and then he looks at the road ahead, which continues pleasantly across the plain, and then he looks back at them.
"The hat," the man says, "marks you as a criminal."
"The hat marks me," Snufkin replies, "as someone who likes the sun out of my eyes."
"You'll come with us."
"I wasn't planning to."
"No," the woman says. "I don't expect you were."
The woman has moved during this, until the space he might have stepped into is no longer there.
"I'm only telling you what the hat is," he says.
He goes sideways then, not quite running, almost into the river. It buys him about two steps. The woman is faster. The pennant has him by the arm. He moves like a cat that does not want to be held. It costs them a little time and some fraction of their patience.
"Are you finished," the woman says.
"I haven't started," he says. "I could go much longer."
The device comes out of the man's coat. It is not large and rests in his palm. It is inscribed, pale marks on a dark ground, catching the light with a faint coldness. It reaches for him.
"This is easier," the man says, "if you stop moving."
"Most things are easier if I stop moving," Snufkin says. "Which has never struck me as a good reason."
It puts out its thin arms, and they feel their way toward his face, careful, almost gentle, a mechanism going about the thing it was made to do.
The arms feel through him, through the years of walking, the autumn smell of a great many roads, the harmonica in his pocket, a valley with a river in it somewhere faraway north of here. They find pipesmoke and the particular way that ice breaks up on a river in early spring. They find a Moomin, but the Moomin is not the kind of magic they are looking for. They feel through all of it. It is the sensation of a hand searching an empty pocket twice to make sure, finding the fabric and the bottom of the pocket and nothing else. There is nothing in him of the kind it has come to find, no more than there is in the road, or in the grass at its edge, or in the sunlight itself.
"Are you quite done," he says.
"Again," says the woman.
They try it a second time. The arms feel their way through him and find what they found before.
"Where did you say you were from?"
"A valley. With a river."
"There has to be something."
"Must there be?" Snufkin says.
The man takes the hat and sets it alight. The felt takes the flame quickly because it is old and dry and has gone a long way in all kinds of weather. The man sets it down and lets it burn. The brim holds its shape a moment and then loses it, and a thin grey smoke goes up and moves off on the wind without looking back.
Snufkin watches it. He has had the hat a long time, which is not quite the same as saying it cannot be replaced.
He does not, when he weighs it, feel that he has come out even. A hat he has had for years is not the same as a hat he has had for an afternoon. But the road is still good and still goes the way he is going.
"The matter is closed," the man says. "The hat is gone. Move on."
So he moves on.
The cloth-seller's place stands at the edge of another village, smelling of dye and long-kept wool. The light inside falls from a high window.
"I'm after scraps," Snufkin says. "Whatever's going spare. Green, if there's any."
A child comes to the end of the counter and stands there. She is small, bright-eyed. She brings three short rolls and unrolls a length of each: a grey-brown, a faded blue, and a green that is not the green Snufkin would have chosen but is green, and a good weight, dense in the hand. "It's not a full piece," she says.
"I don't need a full piece." Snufkin turns it in the light. The weave is even and the cut end is clean. "Thanks," he says.
He finds a little wall a past the village and sits on it with his pack open beside him. He lays the cloth on one knee.
The scissors open with a small click, and he cuts along the grain, across. He ties the thread before he starts and seats the seam in small even stitches.
The last stitch goes in and he turns the hat right way out and works the brim between his palms until the curve is even all the way round. He sets it on his head and sits a moment, taking the weight of it across his brow, the set of the brim.
The road runs on ahead, the same sky pressing solid from edge to edge.
The hat is green and it is his and the road is still there.
He walks.
