The Pale Maraud
by Andrew McEwan
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Copyright 2012 Andrew McEwan
Smashwords Edition
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Cover design by Andrew McEwan
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Smashwords Edition License Notes
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Chapter One - The Mute Jeriant
His mother took shelter from the storm in a cave whose entrance was screened from both wind and eyes by a thick wall of leaves shaped like spear points. Her sodden cloak outlined her swollen belly as she rocked tearfully, wretched, cast out by family and village, her own mother beaten when the pregnancy was discovered. They would have beaten her too, but it was considered ill luck to harm one with child, no matter how that child was conceived. The talk was of magic. Certainly, this witch had no husband. Her father had been given no choice other than to load his daughter onto a cart and abandon her far from home. No one in the village would tend her or witness such a birth. Her mother’s crime was punishable. His mother, soon to guess the colour of his hair and wash his tiny face with spit, to lift him to her breast - her plight was inadmissible, the sad result of a soldier’s courting, his helm rich with feathers and his sword’s blade dazzling.
The war-tide had taken him. She wished that tide on her village as she lay dying.
Rain lashed from the sky. The pain inside her matched the violence without, livid stalks of lightning stretched taut from earth to cloud, the space between streaked like burnt iron. A livid blue echo that cut to the bone. On such a night and in such a place was her son born, pushing from his bloody mound into his bloody world; from death to life, a pathetic creature wrapped in slick tissue, delivered onto cold stone. She was too exhausted to move. Her limbs were as weak as his, feeble knots of flesh and bone exposed to the vagaries of the combative elements. This the winter season, the breath in their lungs cold and raw.
Her head propped against the cave wall, her fingers gripping roots, she saw her child, his withered right arm and clawing left, the slant of his cheek, the distortion of his face, one eye still closed. His strangled cries frightened her more than the wind. If he had been born in the village the women attending would have taken him to be drowned. But he was not, and would live. She was sure of that; his survival perhaps his fate. In his good hand was a strength, a will, a purpose. That which had silenced his father would suffer defeat in challenging him. She named him then, Jerian, from jeria, meaning outcast, for already he was friendless, alone, couched between her stiffened legs, his name pressed in the shape of her thumb on his forehead. He would remember it, she reassured herself. He did not need her past morning...
Struggling free of the afterbirth his mother shielded him, turning her back to the outside elements. She would teach him to suckle and that was all, laying him across her arm so that when she died he would have use of her nipple. Her body, curled to surround him, would serve as a cradle, and her skin, warmed by his own, would be his blanket, her ragged cloak stretched like a tent above. If in time he grew empty and did not wish to leave the safety of the cave, he could burrow into her chest and fashion both a meal and a refuge, eating more of her as the days passed. Ultimately the decision to explore beyond the cave mouth would be made for him. Hunger, gnawing at his own chest, would drive the young wolf from his lair, and once he had seen the sun and moon, and grown accustomed to the stars, not even his mother would be able to stop him venturing deep into that sphere where corpses laughed and danced, cavorting with one another before falling down and rotting.
She wondered how Jerian would fare. His mother wished him well
It was a world of blood and gore he entered.
*
The boy crawled amongst the thorn bushes on his knees, his one hand sweeping the tall sharp grass from his eyes, alert to the bloated feast of worms, the filling berries, succulent fruits which these stunted trees had in plenty. He stopped to read his name in a puddle as he had done countless times before, the breeze sifting fingers through his hair and whispering in his ear. There was a sunny rock on which he liked to stretch when his belly was full. There were grooves criss-crossing it, and Jerian traced these with his thumb.
An owl watched him through the summer months.
When snow fell he sheltered in the cave, digging under his feet with a bone. Jerian used this talent to uncover a stream, and was happy to drink, the water gurgling stories of bears and lichens, goats and dragonflies.
He budded with the leaves come leaf-time.
When he was strong enough to climb as far as the topmost branches of the tallest trees, he learned the bird’s names. He dreamed at night of flying like them; but no bird could fly with just one wing.
Chasing a rabbit he tripped and fell. Yet he caught that rabbit another day...
He could not talk. He had nothing to say. He laughed emptily and swung from tree to ground, racing over the damp earth in the wake of a shower having spied a horseman on the road. The air in his lungs lifted him, drove him, Jerian with a crude wooden spear. Something had fallen from the rider’s saddle, something that glittered as if spangled in dew, the boy’s curiosity matching his stomach for guile. Pausing, breathless at the road, two jumps wide, he watched the horse vanish into the mist before grabbing the object and running back to his rock to inspect the find. He turned it in his five fingers and pushed it against his tongue, but could not determine its use. It was not a knife as he had hoped. It was hollow, tapered at one end, etched with complex designs that shattered the light into blue and gold, ice and fire sitting together on his palm. Sometimes oxen dragged hay wagons along the road. It wound in both directions for as far as he had explored, narrow and twisting. Jerian collected the straw that drifted between the lats. There was a hollow oak where people left the entrails of chickens and pigs, fat-smeared packages of bark and toothless lower jaws. He had opened a package once and found it to contain a set of wrinkled toes, ten in all, bound together with human hair. All the world passed down the road.
In winter fewer travellers braved the mud.
Sat on the rock or in the cave he would picture their many faces and compare them to his own. He had run alongside a cart one year and the children riding in it had thrown apples at him. A horseman had tried to crush him under metal-banded hooves, mount spitting foam, eyes rolling, the boy too fast for his whip. The episode had taught him to be cautious; but the apples were good.
Autumn found him picking more.
He tied his hair in a knot, strapped his spear to his back and the silver object about his waist. The owl, gliding from branch to branch, was leading him through the woods. Its beak instructed him to follow, having scratched his name in the scales of a fish, silver like his find, blue and gold as it shimmered towards death. Jerian understood the owl to be his friend. He was not afraid when the bird led him from this valley to the next, out of the wood and out across a wide grassy plain. The day was warm and long, sweet-smelling, the clouds as thin as frost in the sky. The owl hovered high overhead, sweeping down on occasion in order to steer him in the right direction, the boy easily distracted, apt to stray, such were the many delights of the open, toads and flowers whose names Jerian did not know.
He walked into summer again...
The rush of a stream cooled his feet, bright water trilling as it plunged the length of the valley wall, slowing as it coiled like a snake through the village. People meandered between brick and thatch, busy with saw and brooms, wood dust forming clouds to be swept. Jerian watched everything, himself unobserved by all save the owl, an eye to jutting elbows and stunted horses, woven baskets and threadbare skirts. He watched as a girl ran screaming in circles, hands in the air, chased by a boy even younger, naked to the waist and streaked with dirt. Painted, other children crawled about the shadows gripping mock weapons, twig spears and plank swords. Old men laughed and wheezed at even older stories, and young men kicked stones, restless and bored - condemned to a life of ploughs and herds, steel ax death the option favoured by those bucks still hot below the belt for spilt blood of any kind, the truth of their lusts always close enough to come as a surprise.
Jerian felt no kinship. Was that why the owl had brought him here? He was aware of these people, singularly and in small groups, having witnessed their passing over numerous seasons, walking, riding, trundling along the road. He knew himself to be like them, of their kind. But no greater ties bound him. He was alone.
He sat and watched them the long afternoon. The bird was never far away. Jerian absorbed the lesson, although he remained puzzled. The owl, however, was well satisfied. It puffed its feathers and disappeared over the irregular valley horizon, a brief flurry of brown-white plumage set off against green-mottled stone.
*
A figure moved clumsily through the dark, upsetting rocks and snapping the limbs of trees, trampling vegetation while leaving no mark in the soft earth.
It was shapeless and far from home. Lost, the figure dragged its mournful head, cast its blind gaze around, sighting nothing but stars. Deaf to the complaints of the forest and forgetful of the cause of its wanderings, the figure shouldered its way, mumbling like thunder.
Jerian was shaken from his perch. He had been dozing between branches, the night no different to the day, simply cooler and blacker. His fall slowed by leaves, the boy rolled to his feet as he had seen the fox cubs do, then scrambled after the intruder, shaking dreams from his eyes as he had been shaken awake. But no matter how fast he ran or how keenly he listened for clues, the source of the disturbance was not to be located. Instead a soundless release, a collective, easy sigh emanated from the woody milieu, and in place of chaos there was tranquility, relief in the wake of a storm. All traces of damage were eradicated by sunrise, light spilling like new flesh over minor wounds.
He hunted for lizards that morning, knowing them to be slick and fast, catching four by midday, not one now longer than his good arm. The character of the surrounding trees was changing, reddened towards slumber as if subtly coloured by age, his own skin and bark a deeper shade, strengthened with threaded hairs, further toned, the lizard meat insufficient to fill his rapidly expanding belly where a year ago four such lizards would have been food enough for two days. Jerian’s hunger was becoming more than a match for his skills at stalking prey. Endowed with the arts of a man, this once-boy looked back at the winters he had survived, the passing of each marked by unmistakable signs. It seemed to him he was possessed of a full set of memories, the past thus arrayed, composed of images and thoughts. What he lacked, Jerian realised, was a place outside, a place to go. The owl had shown him the village that lay at the end of the dirt road; but the road ran elsewhere, away from that one drab source. Deep into the heart of the world it stretched, winding like a stream - with a current like a stream, weak or strong, a human flow dependant on factors not necessarily related to the seasons, linked rather to questions Jerian was unable to verbally pose, the answers scattered across country, there to be harvested and graded, fruits and berries and fat round worms the man himself was called upon to pluck and gauge. A whole new feast over the border...
A dangerous place.
Perhaps the figure was headed there, deaf and blind. And the outcast, mute and deformed: ought he to follow?
Chapter Two - The Chalic Horde
Washing up on the beach like surf, the armies of the Chalian king gathered momentum for the climb, the defeat of nature’s obstacles a first test, the plundering of village and town the prize. They had raided before. The pickings were easy, the coast several day’s ride from the nearest city, and that a mud-hole thrice ransacked. No, these coarse lands held little fear for the Sea Lords.
They rose with the moon and the quiet tide, secured the headland before daybreak, assembled like green-blue blades of grass on a sandy plain, the tree country beyond awakening to steel and blood, its brown earth reddened before nightfall, when the beacon fires cast silent fists at the stars and the dead were newly tall...
Their scales were hammered and their horses decorated, not one less than twenty hands.
They came from another world. The seabed, some would say, man and beast with fins and gills beneath armour fashioned from crab and turtle shells.
Whatever the truth, the army’s advance was as swift as it was devastating. In two days they had driven all but the most foolhardy and adventurous deep into the forest and high into the mountain chills, taking what they would of those belongings left behind, of homes and families, dealing harshly with any who challenged, the few motley groups that remained scoring disproportionate losses. Ruthlessly, these were hunted down, put to the sword and other uses as night by night the fires changed from yellow to green, the communities, the farmsteads and animals burned, slaughtered, tinting the flames along with powders and invocations. The gods of the Sea Lords rampaged.
The fighting men wore massive helms, stony basins studded with melted copper and ornamented in complex designs, outlines highlighted, jewelled, garnets and aquamarines prevalent, also beryl and onyx, topaz denoting lower ranks, sapphires and tourmaline the higher. Their faces were obscured, completely covered, protected by a heavy metal gauze, and their hands shone equally brightly, seeming extensions of the blue-stained weapons they bore. They had no need for reins, steering their mostly grey horses with their knees, the panting beasts clawing this foreign soil with shod hooves as silver manes were tossed. Neither did these horsemen employ a battle cry, or were they ever heard to shout between themselves, or offer instruction, instead charging as one individual, no matter if they were ten or a hundred. Indeed, it was rare to find one of their number alone.
Supported by lesser men on foot whose leather cuirasses were crude and unembellished, whose voices and hammers were heard to ring out, who built the fires and butchered the swine, who were, if anything, more vicious than their masters, gaming with woman and child, the host of the Chalian king spread terror in their wake as they marched.
At the gates to a city they raised strings of flags, colours of every shape and size emblazoned with lurid devices. These they tied to lances rising stiffly from the backs of captured woodsmen, shepherds, any poor man or woman unfortunate enough to find themselves or their works in the army’s path. A cutting swathe of smoke and ruin heralded their coming. A cruel passage, stripped of life and sowed with pain.
*
He carried a great shining ax, Jerian saw, its blade finely honed, rippling the severed air like the moon’s ocean reflection. The horse’s head, slack through injury or exhaustion, hung as low as his own, blood marking the creature’s neck and side, an arrow buried deep in this lord’s thigh. The ax was borne over his shoulder. He sat motionless, surrounded by darkened trees, the night pricked by stars and fires. Jerian circled him three times and then emerged from cover to his left with his spear balanced across his palm. He circled a fourth time, closing, not taking his eyes of that magnificent helm. The horse watched him intently, snorting with apprehension, yet receiving no command, remaining steady, holding its ground, the rider tall on its back and disdaining to either to run or fight with what appeared little more than a boy.
Or was there another explanation? A trick to lure him into striking distance, the lord’s strength almost gone? Jerian could not be sure.
The man was perfectly still. Dead still, he thought, stood now before the horse.
A knight of the Chalian king; there was much blood on his soul, the weave of it coloured a virulent red, a tapestry depicting unknown glories, numerous campaigns. His armour, flowing like the sea it championed, an elaborate housing, sheathed him from the skull down, a rich overlapping of curves, polished metal the hue of oil-fired steel, all but the most prominent details confused by dancing shades.
Jerian never let his spear waver, nor lost his aim. As previously he had grown in body he grew in mind, strong and patient as he waited for the warrior to fall. For fall he must, the outcast was convinced. He had sought an isolated place to die. In peace he sat upon his horse and in peace Jerian spaced his feet before him, as still as the rider until that rider slowly leaned, dragged from his delicate saddle by the rising sun, illuminated as light stabbed through leaves, dealing the final blow to his years.
The ax stuck in the ground.
Jerian pulled it free, weighed it in his hand, his single hand that had known only the rough shaft of the spear. It was heavy, smooth and sharp, a blur at its edge enhanced by the blue tinge. Its balance was surprising, however, and Jerian found he could swing it with ease.
Standing the ax he once more regarded its bearer. The lord was truly peaceful, the first time on this shore, his bloody soul leached, his life unwound. A dewy gauze not dissimilar to that encasing his features shrouded his metal corpse. The armour was punctured about the throat and beneath one arm, wounds made by a straight thrust sword, the owner of that weapon a rare individual, quick of wrist, precise of eye and nerve as he ducked under the slicing ax and bunched his shoulders. Jerian wondered briefly who he may have been, the soldier who dealt the killing blow. It was not important. Neither did he wish to strip the plate off the dead rider and peer at his face.
It might be beautiful, he reasoned, pleased to have met its end, happy in the defeat of its threat...
The horse turned in circles as if lost. Its load eased, the ashen beast searched for purpose in the dew-soaked grass. Finally, as Jerian looked on, it lay down on its stained flank and slowed its breath, coiling steam about itself until its lungs slackened and its heart ceased to pump.
He took the ax, having waited the night for it. He left the spear, its uses waned - but he would fashion another, as no ax was much use in catching fish. The spear was all he had to barter. To the ghost of the Chalian knight it was fair exchange.
Birdsong lifted him and he began to move faster through the wood, ears alerted by tunes of a different order, the day’s work started, abutting flimsy walls, the flesh and leather of foot soldiers bracing spears and stretching bows, their voices raised, joined, raised again, giving pitiless battle to those seeking only to defend their homes. The city lay over the horizon, rocky outcrops deflecting sound while blocking vision. Jerian chose not to run in that direction. He had followed the army’s progress, hiding in brake and tree as both master and thrall laid waste to field and hovel, leaving nothing to stand, nothing to breathe save the crows, black wings spinning mockingly, false combat in the sky. And Jerian had tired of their laughter. He made his way back to familiar land, amongst trees he knew to be friends. The air was freshening by the day and soon snow would fall, yet he had not been able to desert the place of his birth. He knew he must, had no wish to be tormented by a summer owl. Only it was harder than he had imagined. Something bound him to the soil and the cave. Returning there, he lay on the rock where he had dozed away so many afternoons. The silver object clanked against the stone. Holding it up to his eyes, the light just then failing, Jerian at last saw a use for the thing. Wasting no more time, he chipped at the rock, lodged a dull shard down the silver throat, blocking one end. Next he rushed to the cave and, on hands and knees, located other tokens there, pushing them in turn after the stone, eventually jamming it full, grains of sands and scraps of cloth, strands of hair and splinters of bone making of that object a symbol, a source in miniature of the force binding him to one small corner of a larger world.
Chapter Three - The Damned
Their feet were naked and cold. Their hands twisted, thin fingers bunched packets of sharp bone. They wore only grey. Jerian passed amongst them. They hid their faces, covered their wounds, hugging their guts to them and gripping their still hearts. They were the dead of the wars. No rest awaited them. A pall of souls, they drifted throughout the forest, clinging like fog to bark, sticking in the outcast’s lungs. He saw the damned as no living man did. They touched him. A few even dogged his heels. They recognised him, understood his gift of perception. He was alive - the world of the dead shrouded him.
The damned whispered as once had the flowers and leaves, speaking their names in a thousand tongues, expressing their need of Jerian. Their entreaties assaulted his ears, his other senses. He shut them out.
Jerian marked his path and followed. These wasted spirits, abused in death as in life, would not leave him alone. But he ignored their words. He did not wish them for a cause. Brighter things occupied his mind. Richer things danced across his consciousness, colourful spectres whose lures were far more inviting, teasing the youth whose innocence was strong, his fate yet to manifest; always just out of reach, like his manhood.
All winter he travelled south, the snow a blanket, the trees bent by its weight, the rivers frozen and the sky bleached with cloud. He crossed vast icy plains, rolling hillsides, skirted villages and battlefields, the two often one, strewn with pathetic corpses, men, women and children gutted by swords and transfixed by arrows, their homes burnt, their flesh given to the fire. Often Jerian would come upon a settlement, and, moving carefully, not wishing to be exposed, find the dwellings empty, the surrounding woodland torched, overturned carts pulled by rotting oxen, geese and chickens silent, necks broken, filling the stomachs of Chalian lords. What emotions he experienced were confusing. The destruction sickened him; yet to Jerian the victims were far from quiet. Rising from the earth, the ashes, the mounds, the dead enveloped him, part of the land, a land haunted now, irredeemable, the armies of the ocean having swept far and wide, scattered feathers and scales, flights and armour green-blue and visible despite the snow, shining like gems at the bottom of a pond.
He did not linger. Jerian pressed on, curious, fascinated, the razed villages, the larger towns, the cities made with dense black smoke...
The world was one of sadness.
Tiring, he curled above ground, lodged in a tree, at rest midst naked branches, fingering the withered hand of his lame and shrunken right arm, tracing the ciphers engraved on the silver object’s casing. Those tokens of home he carried were comforting. The metal was warm to his flesh, bound to that useless limb. Part of himself, as bone and sinew. His strength in some measure derived from it. He bore his wretched mother much as she had borne him.
Sleep was freedom. Ensconced in the tree, the traveller was beyond the realm of ghosts and pleadings. The world of sleep, separate from the world of waking, was as yet uncontaminated by souls whose restless nature barred them.
A brief respite, but a welcome one.
Coming awake the chorus of stolen lives rose anew, drowning even the crows, lost and stricken.
Jerian continued as before, swinging the ax and spearing fish with saplings cut and sharpened, eating them raw so as not to occlude the sky further. His progress was neither hurried nor slowed by the grey-clad petitioners, their number dwindling as he crossed into mountainous regions, fording a river whose banks were sheer and water thunderous, chill as death itself, a current he went against with equal vigour.
Into spring he walked, the mountain’s southern slopes alive with heather and roses, a feast of purple that softened his features and reflected in the ax’s steel like sunset.
A new land, across the border.
Chapter Four - A Wood Carver’s Marionette
Twilight quilted his eyes and the smells of juniper and honeysuckle suffused his lungs. Here, he imagined, was peace in abundance.
The days were warm and quiet, the wind soft and the rain, when it fell, gentle, welcome. Slender trees sprouted crowns of a lush green, fruits dangling like thorny baskets. They protected their seeds well, as most of the trees were slick and dangerous to climb. Jerian slept beneath rock-faces and upon broken slabs of land. Rabbits skipped from shallow burrows and deer paced him without fear. Jerian then, could not bring himself to kill either.
It was on his fourth day that he began to notice signs of human habitation. First was a red scarf, torn and spiked on some bushes. Second a doused fire, cold ashes that took his mind beyond the mountains. And thirdly, colouring the afternoon, a young woman. More girl than woman, she danced happily, vigorous and alone, twirling long skirts of green and yellow, her skin the hue of pine. Her eyes were a vivid blue, and as Jerian watched her they grew bright and wide. The girl spun on a hilltop thirty paces from him, open mouthed, a trilling laugh that disappeared with her over the rise. Unthinkingly, he chased her, this apparition, drawn on by those eyes, swept along with the afternoon on a warm tide of deception. The girl vanished into a deep hollow. Jerian never hesitated; he plunged in after, the sky darkening as the sun was blotted out by successive layers of ponderous, mouldy leaves. The hollow was steep-sided and the vegetation thicker the farther he descended, slashing with the ax, angry swipes at heavy limbs that spilled putrid sap, greasing the earth under his naked feet. Occasional rushes of colour marked the girl’s winding passage. Jerian pursued her stubbornly, moving in near blackness about the slick wall, sliding deeper, unable now to clamber out, fear and panic discovering fertile soil in the confusion he felt, the light of day, the freshness of the country above lost to him as he slipped helplessly towards the hollow’s rocky centre. Blind and desperate and unable to stop as the ground subsided beneath him, he was then falling past wooden expressions, masks adorning smooth verticals, lit from within like garish lanterns, blurred smiles and mocking snouts as he tumbled towards seeming death.
A net caught him, snatched him, hugged his arms, the whole and the wizened, buckled his legs, stiff fibres cutting him much as the ax cut the enfolding strands, tipping Jerian unconscious into a thick bed of suffocating moss.
The wanderer bled and dreamed. The laughing, dancing girl was hung on a hook.
*
On a broad tree stump in a watery, sonorous cavern, the wood carver sat below the earth, hinged sections of dark oak between his like-coloured knees, a glinting chisel in his hands, a family of tools, sharp planes and fine knives, elegant racks to house them cut from the ancient rootstock at his feet.
Jerian watched passively, legs crossed on a polished stone, a child whose eyes were beech knots quietly braiding his washed hair, her fingers cool against his neck. He was clean and refreshed, his one hand occupied with a puppet of sticks that swam clumsily through the moist air, attached by rough lengths of string to his playful digits.
The carpenter’s name was Odil and his children were young and many, some splashing like otters, others motionless on rock shelves or leant against the aged stump awaiting repairs to lost ears and damaged thumbs, their features as their patience, stolid and lasting. Presently Odil was at work on an arm for Jerian, its lustre matching his own, smoothed like him with pungent oils, its texture that of flesh scrubbed and exercised to a healthy tone. The shoulder was bound in thick leather, part of a brass-pinned corslet, light and flexible. Brass links formed the joints of the oaken limb, enhancing the wood’s crafted subtlety. Anxiously, Jerian anticipated its fitting.
His actual shrunken right arm itched and trembled with a song. The cavern echoed, resonant with ardent music, a host of children’s voices uplifted, stemming from the resolute carver and his array of chisels. Odil had fashioned those voices, throat and tongue. He might have given voice to the wanderer as easily, but chose not to. A strong arm was what Odil required, and a strong arm was what he had in Jerian, separated from his ax, weighted by new burdens and bathed in the cloy waters that ran through the demesne, bathed now a second time, hand grasping hand, a greater strength to each as the dead mass of the sculpted limb dragged its wearer down. Underwater, the song glinted in silver ribbons, pearly verses that implored him to rise - but to rise Jerian had to master the heavy arm, make it his.
Breath held, he struggled. The leather creased and tightened, crushing heat from his torso as it moulded afresh the contours of skin and bone. The arm felt numb, but that it was felt at all encouraged him to focus his thoughts. Steadily life drained into the hard oak, softening it, making pliable its gifted sheen. After a few moments he was able to bend it. Surfacing, opening his lungs, he reached with both hands and was helped from the pool, the children grinning, silenced, next returned to their shelves.
Odil rubbed his chin. He looked the young man, the remade man over, ran the heel of his knurled palm from chest to elbow, twisting and shaking the newly fastened appendage until satisfied the bond had taken, a compact of flesh and wood that he meant to finish in metal.
The grip was sound.
Jerian had never been in a position to bargain. From the moment of his enticement, his sighting of the dancing girl, the moment of his fall, he owed his life to the purposeful shaper of smiles and gulling laughter.
Jerian was tricked at heart. Defenceless, he was easy prey. With the unfamiliar arm at his side, unpractised and solid, he slept as the carver bade him, troubled by spurious dreams.
*
A crystal sky, it stretched impossible distances, pale and hazed, the sun a languid yellow as it leaned over the grubby trees comprising the horizon. Where the sun sat, quenched in fiery ocean, was Jerian’s goal. The road he followed had for the first time a destination; not an end in itself, he knew, but a point of calling. The wood carver directed him there. Odil asked that he return with the severed head of that sun’s ephemeral mistress, for she had stolen from him in the past and so indebted herself to his chisels.
Jerian did not question this task. The girl whose skirts had entrapped him blew him kisses now from the depths of the hollow, tokens that would lead him back. He carried no weapon, neither blade nor ax, the latter’s presence missed by his left hand and craved by his right. The carver had explained that such needs would be filled in time, weapons brought to him, as Jerian understood, when he had proper need of them. How Odil planned their transportation, the placing of blue steel in his doubled fingers at the necessary instant, puzzled him. The father of so many children, however, had other ends in sight. He cherished the Chalian ax. It bit deep into the hardest wood. He sent his assassin off quickly, the sooner he might return, kicking his feet from the leather sandals Odil had furnished him, continuing west, inland, the journey long to the ocean...
Threads of parting tugged at his neck and the wooden limb quivered, fist clenched, tendons proud, swinging fitfully at his hip.
The sun drew in his shadow as it climbed to overtake him, peering in his malformed skull as it dropped. The world was wide, unfamiliar beyond the mountains.
Time had contracted below ground.
The wanderer scratched.
Chapter Five - Pale Weavers’ Mare
The land was rugged and unfriendly. Bears prowled the night, their breath a crackling storm. Jerian no longer slept in trees, for these had grown twisted and stunted, ugly boles and knotted limbs that the birds themselves avoided. If he were to spend his dreams in their embrace he might never wake come morning. The grass too was flawed, sapped of colour - everything about the land was altered.
As the ground rose the summer waned and a perpetual mist clung round his shoulders, new and old. His oaken arm pulsed hotly at times, further warping his features, a deformity Odil had not sought to correct. Perhaps it suited the wood carver’s purpose. An assassin should not be beautiful, thought the wanderer. The single direction Odil’s bequest had imposed on him angered Jerian. But he could not turn aside. He would return with the head of the sun’s mistress, or not at all. A sadness rooted in his stomach. It had not been his intention to become indebted. Odil had tricked him, lured him from the over world to the under. The true debt was to himself, for he had fallen prey so easily...
*
The stars accused Jerian. They bubbled like running water and shone like diamonds. What was it he had killed? A fox? Not a rabbit. His hands were sticky with blood. He did not recognise the animal. He was hungry. Names were forgotten.
The silhouettes of tall trees and steep rock walls were a tangible weight about him. The air’s dank chill caused him to shake like a wet dog, hair whipping, leather darkened with sweat as he tore into the carcass. Thus sated he rose from his crouch and turned a circle. Was he followed? Something moved around him, stepped quietly through the leafage. Rocks deceived Jerian. Their stone faces, wholly black, gaped momentarily as if at a passing lantern. Dismissing his fears he continued walking. A stream ran, the walls narrowing, its bed cold and slick, affording the only path. Jerian clambered upwards, feet frozen, ankles numbed by the liquid, searching out fixed stones while those he loosened tumbled down. There was to be no rest this side of the mountains. Did these swing north to join the others he had climbed? Was he crossing back? If so, then he might count himself amongst the damned.
He reached a plateau, the stream widening above a shallow fall, and lingered a while before again pushing west, the new sun at his back, tormented in his soul, wondering how many times that sun would overtake him, quenching itself in the distant ocean, its mistress’s loins a destination they had in common, the sun to seed, the assassin to rob of its blossoming. The wood carver wished darkness on the world. There could be no greater motive. That this woman had done him ill in the past was, he believed, a deception, a romanticism Odil perpetuated in his vanity. Jerian, as his tool, would not avenge an insult or correct a misunderstanding. He would murder the dawn, make it barren. His was a bold destruction. Whatever she had stolen, her theft was nothing, the lesser crime.
Hands caressed him, questioned his crooked features and probed the juncture of flesh and wood. Their questions were manifold and indecipherable. Jerian was blind, lost, the ground beneath him softened, fallen away. He could neither walk nor breathe with certainty, as the mist clung to him ever more tightly. If he had had some sharp weapon, a blade, something with an edge, he may have been able to cut himself free; but he possessed not so much as a knife, and the ax had been denied him. He was helpless, struggling in the winding grip of a living vapour...
Out of this miasma transpired an equally living horse.
Chapter Six - The Burnished Moon
The horse’s girth was deep and its shoulders full, its mane drifting like the mist from which it was made, its back short like that of a Chalian steed. Jerian had never ridden before and the experience served to mitigate and fears he had as to the nature of the creature speeding him towards his master’s goal. Buffeted, he gripped the mane in both hands, its diaphanous strands slipping through his fingers, the horse running silently as its hooves did not strike the earth but whispered across it like a gloaming, its coming a motion that reduced the day to a blur of greens and browns. Clouds scudded, filling the sky with a cold offering of rain.
Such dampness was this creature’s medium.
Jerian relaxed his new hand and stretched the muscles of wrist and elbow, soothing aching ligaments, their brass origins invisible. He pulled the hair from his eyes, rubbed the wire of his beard. The world formed and reformed about him, blended one incarnation with the next, like stirred images in a pond, the scents of animals caught fleetingly and confused, spoors mixed to suggest a truly extraordinary predator, the monster trailing him and his mare, outpacing them as if in the sun’s employ, a servant raised as the horse had been raised, given shape and instruction, perhaps charged with protecting the woman at the edge from Odil’s wandering lion.
The sensation grew with his thirst; a threat perceived. The light strove to weaken the mare, stubborn rays dispersing the body that had formed between his knees. Jerian moistened his lips and fixed his gaze ahead, splitting the horse’s fading ears, poll and forelock waning as noon passed and the ground sloped steeply downwards.
As the sun came level with his brow, shaping concentric circles before his eyes, and the horizon appeared as illusive as it had that morning, he felt the magic begin to waver, the horse’s breath no longer visible, its flanks heaving, warm under his thighs. The world turned more brown than green, shading to gold, amber and red, orange tufts of grasses and vermilion sands replacing stunted bushes and crazily angled trees, the land flattening, the mountains dwindling to his rear - their cloak of dense fog beginning to unwind. The wool was spun backwards, gathered in, trailing like smoke from a torch. The wind, salt-laden, was unravelling.
He was aware of the white mist-flesh weakening, its labour drawing to a close.
Twilight promised dissolution.
A last rise presented Jerian with a glimpse of the sea, the sun choosing that moment to settle upon it, basking in glorious munificence, its fiery head meeting the spangled pillow beyond an island crowned with windows, smothered with steam, a silver wave shot through with yellow and purple. A host of vying colours rebounded upwards from the cliffs that locked the beach, washing Jerian from his vaporous mount and laying him flat, prey to beasts of every order, the night, the world, all creation passing over his supine form, the tail of it, the present time, disappearing to be at the van of a new day in the east as the silver quietness settled in behind, its source and guardian the bloated, smiling moon.
Steel reflected in the brass studs of his corslet. Jerian stood and walked to the cliff edge, peered at the fortress, the island he must reach and conquer.
Languid on the black water was a sail.
And behind him? Turning, he filled his eyes with emptiness, as the world had vanished, the mountain ranges sunk into the earth and the sky curved to shroud that vacancy, permeating his senses like the bars of a cage, a cage he shared with another, the haunter of his waking hours and scatterer of his dreams. Facing that monster, wooden arm twitching, he did not see the moon’s smile change.
Chapter Seven - Shadow And The Walker
The darkness shone, populating the night world with smooth curves and jagged points, rock formations and reflective vegetation.
Jerian sank to his knees and cupped his hands beneath the hidden surface of a shrouded pool of fresh water.
Drinking, he listened.
The stars no longer cared what he did. They were higher now, distant memories. No clouds interfered with their vision; but what they saw lay beyond this mute outcast, resided below the ocean. As every night, they mourned their brother.
No sound reached Jerian.
Splashing fingers broke the silence. The noise of his washing was answered by an incredible, agonised roar. Jerian froze, expecting the beast to seize him - but no, the roar diminished, the terrible pain it carried hanging all round him, poised in the air like a blade, one whose arc ran incomplete as he crouched defencelessly, awaiting its bite, suspended in space and time, the moment his life, his life prolonged by something he had neither the will to fight nor the energy to flee, the predator of many spores that stalked him.
Would the beast prey on another?
It could not, thought Jerian; it was his own monster, his mistaken invention...
Rising, he moved slowly towards the edge, careful not to get too close, and stared at the one lit window that marked the fortress. When the sun had set there had seemed hundreds, glass portals blazing, the island a pillar of lights at the world’s end. He let his eyes fall to the beach, rocks there glinting in the gentle swell.
There was no sign of the sail.
The roar again. Jerian spun to face it. Quickly he shifted position, hunched low as he ran from the precipice, his right hand clenched in an oaken fist. He could feel every ripe muscle of that arm bunch powerfully, his shoulder hard against the brass-pinned corslet. Using his left hand he massaged its length, the wood yielding and warm under his fingers, skin tight against his palm, the veins therein pronounced ridges. His tongue flicked, tasting the air.
Nothing.
*
Shadows pressed him. His feet naked in the heavy sand at the water’s edge, the cliff overhanging him appeared composed of an army of stone shields, flaking lances behind which stood the incised faces and buckled limbs of men and horses, packed bodies that peered defiantly out to sea. A forgotten bulwark against an aggressor whose encrusted hordes had passed elsewhere, the result of their stout defence, a static victory on a bloodless beach. Jerian was taken by their black stares. The tide threatened. There would be no rest on this front. The stone army remained vigilant, patient, eyes across the tempestuous ocean, their numbers reduced, crumbling - but there were always others to take those places, jostling from behind like eager salmon.
As dawn broke, swallowing the sky from the east, the army began to move, its shadows deepen, metal glint, ranks assemble from half-slumber, preparing for the assault all were convinced the waves would bring.
Jerian lifted his feet from the swirling tidal water. The sea was their sole enemy. Perhaps unknown to them, they fought a battle they could not win. A multitude of hopeless eyes set deep in stony faces, arrowheads chinking, swords fingered, the forgotten soldiers gazed down at Jerian, he who walked like a commander before them, a leader who had crossed this continent from ocean to ocean. Leaning on their spears they watched him. In their anticipation they viewed him as the embodiment of a cause expressed in every bone of their situation, rank upon rank of men, ageless and waiting, fractured and tumbling to sand.
Meekly, he turned his back on them. He felt neither pity nor contempt, he simply had no wish to heed their campaign. They grew increasingly animate. Jerian ignored them. He spied his sail and chased it, borne in on the tide a small boat whose slats were green with seaweed as it nudged ashore between cliff-fallen horses.
He climbed on board without hesitation and pushed clear of the strand. The wind barely disturbed the sail. Jerian fumbled with the oars, eventually positioning them correctly in the rowlocks. He had observed such craft on a river, fishermen casting fine nets from their bobbing sides, and understood their method. In practice though he slipped clumsily, the boat spinning as the dour soldiers looked on, silently massing, fathers and sons, the salt spray eating their shoes.
Jerian had located a crude path during the night, a stairway composed of helmets. The shadows had not inhibited him; had, in fact, bent their many necks to his feet, the quicker he might reach the corpse-strewn apron where their dead were unchained by the sea.
The day was full now, the sun concealed behind that host, the sky a whitened blue. Struggling with the boat, Jerian cast glances instead of nets, fishing for currents, sunken rocks in the emerald swell, the island elusive, apparently shifting with the light, seeming to float. The ocean’s surface gave no hint of its depth, and while he could swim, he thought it unwise to range his skills against the cunning water. He pulled harder on the oars, steering as best he could, striving to narrow the distance between himself and the fortress. Clouds advanced from the north, harried by gusts that rocked the boat and speckled his cheek with icy rain. Disregarding the portent, he rowed. Waves raised him almost to cliff height, the soldiers bedecked in gulls. His right arm, distant kin to the vessel, worked to turn his course, direct the boat, its sail stretched as it caught the wind and lurched, tipping Jerian forwards. He sensed the wakened empathy of the boards, oak fingers next gripping the rudder his flesh had failed to put a use to previously, riding the elements...
A reef guarded the island. The water was quieter on its southern quarter, sheltered from the rain that blurred the ocean and frosted the army of the shore. He jumped from the boat, fearing he would be swept out to sea. A gust threw him. He stumbled, and the craft was lost. Jerian watched it drift back towards the mainland, the current tossing it, conducting the weed-coloured vessel to a rendezvous with the stone horses that lay crumbling on the beach.
The day had turned the shade of granite now, and he sought purchase on the slick foundations of the cloud-topped edifice, cautiously circling its girth as he looked for an entrance, some means of gaining access. Any doubts he had were put from his mind. Concentrating on the task, the assassin, pelted by rain and seawater, advanced up the pile whenever opportunity afforded progress, clinging desperately to the near vertical stone, hoping his life would not be falsely spent on the rocks below. Hands raw, he clung on, leaning out in order to see higher. Above him, the stone dressed at its base, a window made an arch, a depression in the increasingly uniform wall. Jerian stretched his right arm, that newly created, the palm of his left flat to the stone. Every tendon in his body ached. He teetered painfully, muscles protesting, legs strained, feet bleeding as fingers brushed the ledge. The weather steadily worsened, peeling him loose, undermining his grip. Lowering the arm he manoeuvred to one side, found a hold that enabled him to slide his body higher; only now the window was further out of reach. Although its glass was visible, tantalising, he risked a fall greater than that from the boat should he miss this jump.
The sun broke through the clouds then, blinding him. And a howling, the storm’s death, tore at his ears.
The casement rattled invitingly. There was a moment when everything, sun, wind, ocean, was still. Jerian filled his lungs, tensed involuntarily, released his grip, and lunged, oak hand fastening while flesh slipped, the scream his own as the wood violently jarred his merged shoulder, wrenched it loose. His face scrapped the wall as he dangled. He swung briefly, then hauled himself up.
Standing amongst the litter of broken glass, Jerian let his breaths come in ragged bursts. Exhausted, he wanted to rest, but could not risk sleep in this place. He had his task to perform. The wood carver influenced his actions through the oaken limb. Even strained and torn, the polished muscles made a fist of his hand, the blood squeezed between chiselled fingers, knuckles darkened with what he recognised as a falsehood: the red drops a lie.
The corslet had ripped, spitting brass pins to the smooth flags. The room was square, six paces wide. The heavy door was unbolted and he moved straight away into a dim passage, feet making wet prints that quickly dried, creating flimsy ghosts in the crisp air. A draught stroked his calves. Stray noises echoed from wall to wall, diminishing as he walked the bare stretches, winding deeper into the fortress past other doors that looked not to have moved in years, rust eating their hinges, boards rotting and nails corroded. None of these boasted locks. Turning at random, Jerian was puzzled by the vague constancy of the yellow light. He pressed his face to gratings and searched the spaces beyond for windows, but found none. He retraced his steps at one point, yet failed to find his way back to that first corridor. He could not believe Odil would aid his mission so far only to allow him to be casually trapped. One door here must open onto a stair. Whether that stair wound down or up was of little consequence. Jerian battered the nearest with leathered shoulder, the shock hurting his teeth. The portal, for all its obvious age and decay, proved immovable. He tried a second, a third, angry and desperate as his head spun and his body objected. But he succeeded only in wasting his strength. No door opened more than a finger’s breadth, those that gave spilling choking dust as he shifted their ponderous lintels. Should he manage to force one, the wall might topple and crush him.
What choice did he have? Sweating profusely, he forced a likely door inwards. The darkness on its far side spewed fetid odours, which his jaded mind judged favourably. A good sign. A promising difference. The door budged minutely, coaxing a grotesque smile from his contorted features. Saliva ran out of his mouth, but the gap remained insufficient. He stood back. As with the window, he realised, there was one chance, a single valid attempt at access, and to take it, to gain, meant risking all. He must throw his whole body at the door, break it down, unseat the stones above it, and in doing so gamble, hazard failure. If his effort was not great enough, if he lacked the will, then he would not make progress. It was a test, he saw. The woman, Odil’s enemy and the sun’s mistress, had contrived this defence. Perhaps if he walked along every passage he would discover any number of corpses, the fractured spines of earlier puppets, those that had balked and become stranded, not able to find their way out again.
Jerian had no wish to add to that failure. He stared hard at the door he had chosen, measured its parts, its steel, the solidity of its frame. There was a delight in the challenge. The obstacle was possessed of a grim perversity.
And what of the woman who had planed it? Jerian charged the braced timbers, seeking her.
Chapter Eight - The Fey Woman Of Orange
The sands in her glass trickled, a bright stream of moments, tiny granules whose precious hearts beat the rhythm of the hours, structuring the day and wheeling the sun and moon on an axis that itself turned in accordance with the prevalent season. She was alone but for her instruments. Clocks and compasses and telescopes occupied the garret. Gold workings oiled the gloom. She often wept until nightfall.
Her lover rode the heavens, came each morning to quench his lust in the ocean.
Her name was Ista. Aware of the intruder, the man even now walking her orange-painted halls, a glinting madness, a barely suppressed fury in his eyes, she sat with her neck bared in a window, facing west. The window was tall and wide, casements open to the blue horizon. Ista’s orange dress spilled at her feet, a match for the orange carpet. Orange tapestries hung on the walls, filling the room with fire - still the gloom dominated.
A broad ladder angled to a hatchway in the ceiling. On the flat roof stood a golden sundial, black numerals of inlaid jet dividing its fringe.
The day represented a glut of time. The sands could not move quickly enough. When at last the sun touched the sea Ista felt she would live the instant forever, the blood stopped in her veins. But it was not to be. Her existence at the world’s end was most vulnerable as long as the sun remained in the east, hidden from her. She lived in a fugue, soul adrift above the island, supported by her dreams.
It had not always been such...
Once the sun had circled the earth, brash and new. It cared little for those who would make of its image a tool for gain, either the trees whose fruits and foliage stored its energy or the men who later released that force, spawning flame. The sun was tireless, yet sleepy. Summers divided, became autumn and spring as the youth it had long enjoyed matured towards middle-age. It grew lazy, and winter came. Beneath the earth the sun was deaf to cries. It languished, subdued, until the cold seeped down through the rocks and threatened to snuff it entirely. Afraid, the sun rose, weakened by its long rest, impaired through idleness. It found a world sickened, hateful, ravaged by war, its people starved, itself enervated. The sun took its rightful place in the sky and there began a healing process; but it lacked the vigour of old and could not maintain its original cycle.
And so patterns were laid. The summer was no longer predominant, and winter, having established a presence on land, now had its place on the calendar. In despair the sun waned further, sliding from its central arc, and the snows fell heaviest on the mountains. The moon, which shone on the dead as the sun on the living, seeing this, asked of its cousin the reason. The sun answered that it saw no purpose in its daily regeneration if it served only to perpetuate the business of dying. Would the moon not be pleased to have the world under its silver aegis? Tempted, the moon gave this thought. However, a balance was necessary; it argued, that only that way could it guarantee its own survival, for death followed life as surely as night followed day, and if life were to cease then ultimately stagnation would triumph and the very stuff of its being would disintegrate. Moreover, that life in all its complexity was the sun’s true purpose. Even diminished it had a duty to those sustained by it. And the sun, chagrined, agreed. But sadness clung to it and it drew no pleasure from its journey. The heart was gone from the sun. Blinded by its own light it failed to recognise the offers made it. The moon intervened a second time, telling of how the dead had become a part of itself, its feet and hands upon the surface. Could not the sun do likewise? Did it not sense the worth of its power? Surely it was entitled to some role, a position amongst men relative to its value? But such direct involvement with the lives it made possible did not interest the sun. They were too many. Unlike the moon, it saw no profit in being intrusive. Filled with remorse, the sun wished to mellow and die. But it could not. Life was bound to it after all. Life treasured it, shaped its image. All that was born owed its birth to the sun. Its breath and growth derived from just one source. And life, comprehending this, reciprocated in turn, giving up its past for fuel...
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