The Everlasting

IF YOU RUN far enough, for long enough, you will catch the rhythm of it. It’s the same thing that drives the swifts south before the frost and rats uphill before the flood: a thrum in the blood, a second pulse that whispers now, now, now.

The knight and the scholar followed that pulse north and south, forward and backward in time.

They went by foot, most often, but they went, too, by ferry and galley, by coach and carriage and even—once the knight could tolerate the stink and noise of them—by automobile.

They traveled along ancient dirt tracks and roads so freshly paved the tar still stuck, hotly, to the soles of their shoes.