The wind howled in long mournful dirges through the gorge below, and the jester’s coxcomb was whipped around his shoulders in the semblance of a vicious snake. He looked back at the woman approaching cautiously from the camp, and turned from the darkness to greet her. He bowed low and his bells spoke to the night.

‘Greetings my lady,’ he said, looking from beneath his hood into her eyes. She was not looking at him, rather she was watching with worry the night skipping past in whirling dervish beyond the edge of the cliff. The jester rose from his position of supplication, intent on getting a response from her. He approached and stood next to her on the cliff edge. They stood together for a time in silence, looking with watering eyes out into the screaming darkness. The woman shifted and settled on the floor, , letting the grit on the floor run through her fingers. The jester did likewise and in time, as the night edged by above them, she spoke to him.

‘Hello.’

‘Verily good lady, and I greet thee in kind.’ The jester picked upon a stone, and instead of throwing it over the cliff, as men are wont to do he examined it closely and found that it had many cracks and furrows. They put him in mind of a landscape not of his world, and he travelled to that place and explored it long in his mind, seeing the blue sun and volcanic furrows snaking over the landscape.

‘What do you find so interesting, good sir, in such a small thing?’ asked the woman looking at him carefully.

‘I see places were men have not walked and fire is king. In these places the stars shine differently and the sky is red where it is accustomed to be blue. There walks a lizard, long and with many legs with large gripping feet across the blasted landscape, looking with closed mouth for a morsel of foodstuff which exists in small pools of hot sulphur on this world. That, lady, is what I see in this small thing.’

The woman sat quietly once more, picking up stones and looking at then in the same way as the jester had done by instinct. She started to speak many times but always she stopped after a few words and picked up another stone, looking once more at the new thing in her hand. The night passed by above them and in the darkness behind the camp silenced to the sleeping lull with nought but the far noise the patrols breaking the thoughtful silence.

‘Here,’ she said finally, proffering a stone of such unusual white hue that the jester looked more closely than he was going to as she spoke upon it’s nature. ‘Here is a place made of ice, and on that ice there is built a castle of many towers and great import, out of the very ice surrounding it. I see people entering and leaving, carrying wood long distances, where do they go? I see, to a clear place in the snow, where the silver-grey stone shows through. Here they pile the wood they have carried fort the castle into a great pillar and once every month they light it and send sparks and heat to the sky. But no heat do they enjoy, in that cold castle mad eof ice. Inside there is but blanket warmth, no fire to be made in the chill hearths. They huddle together until they go hence to collect wood from the underground forests on this ice world, for the sun is weak and there is one place where a great sheet of ice has made warmth possible and here trees grow underground. People come, labour for a time, and leave to burn the fruits of their labour to provide nothing for themselves. It is cold place of hardship and ritual. I don’t like it here.’ She looked up from her stone and saw the jester looking closely at her as he had scrutinised the stone in his hands. Her eyes were as stones to him, and in them he saw many worlds and places long unknown. Standing, the jester offered his hand to the lady.

‘I shall show you real worlds that ill make your heart leap and mind spark. Will you come with me?’

She sat on the rock looking first at him, then at the stone held tight in her hands, then back to the camp.

‘I cannot go with you, dark man. I have no knowledge of you and while I am impressed by your empathy with the very body of the earth I shall not desert my town now. I have duties.’

‘I saw your duties, as you so politely call them. I will ask you only once, for I have little time to spend on wasted things, do you think with Michael?’

She sat for a minute dumbfounded. The jester watched the conflict in her eyes and he saw her to be lost, at least he reasoned, for the time. Without a word he turned and walked away. He was almost at his horse when he heard her running after him. Again without a word she pressed the white stone into his hand and walked away with her head hung. Taking a moment to admire the stone he mounted his horse and rode away swiftly past the sentry and out into the world, while far above worlds circled and know nothing of his own.