Ashes Slowly Fall

by Katya Lebeque

  I am an “I” again.

  I feel around in this body, through the pained head and beyond the weakened muscles and bones crying out… There.

  In my head, there is a door that should be shut, but it is open. It is casting a rectangle of harsh white light on the mind, all the way down to the mouth.

  I cannot let that door stay open. I cannot. But I cannot close it. I do not know why but the bars that have kept it shut all my life are gone. Bad things will happen from this, I know it.

  The light is coming. Pouring down, now. And I cannot keep it out.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Wild animals

  Vanita.

  The word was familiar, soft and worn as an old cloak. It seemed to fit the contours of her perfectly, although she could not make out what it was or who was saying it.

  The word came again, as though through fog and rain but, this time, a little clearer.

  “Vanita,” said a voice again, somewhere far away.

  When was the last time someone had called her aloud by her name? No wonder it had seemed familiar. What a strange dream.

  “Vanita!”

  She opened her eyes.

  A blurring stretch of brown was just in front of her gaze, cold and hard to the touch. Then she blinked and the blur righted itself into the Rhodopalais kitchen floor. She had slept right there on there floor, waiting for her mother to wake. When she had not woken, Vanita had tried and failed to pick her up. Instead, she had spent an agonising hour with her hand pressed to the left side of her face, inching up the stairs gingerly through her pain. She had come back with a meagre pillow and quilt and had made her drooling mother comfortable on the floor. Then she had lain back down on the flagstones again.

  Now, harsh bright light was pouring in through the windows - almost white it was so crisp and clear. Morning light. She must have slept the whole afternoon and night through and it was now the next day. She was fine with that – a day in between her and that horrible encounter, and more to come. Something to look forward to. She looked over at where she had let her mother lie.

  What she saw did not make sense for a moment. It was the hazy form of her mother propped up against the doorway looking straight at her.

  She blinked again, but the image did not change. It was her mother, or at least, looked more like her than this grey-haired woman had in weeks. There was a stern expression on her face and she was shaking her had agitatedly, smoothing down her dress crossly as her jaw clenched and unclenched.

  When she saw her daughter awake, the woman looked her full in the face and said again: “Vanita!”

  All the world stood still for a moment. The kitchen was silent, there was no music, no fanfare, but Vanita felt there should be. Her mother had recognised her.

  She slowly lifted her aching body off the ground and came towards the woman tentatively, afraid to chase away the dream. But it was no dream – a sharp, animalistic, almost chemical smell hit her nostrils as soon as she was close enough to the woman.

  Her mother looked up at her. “Vanita, I have wet myself.” She said it calmly, pragmatically – words Vanita never thought she’d hear her mother say.

  “I am distressed by this. I have only ever wet myself thrice in my life. And once was during your difficult birth, difficult child, and I was ashamed then too. And Vanita, what happened to your face?”

  Without meaning to, she lifted her hand and traced the scarred edges of the left side of her face. Her mother watched without shrinking. “There go my hopes of a moneyed son-in-law, so I didn’t have to work so fiercely all the time.” She sighed crossly, as though Vanita had dropped a teapot. Irascible, unreasonable – but still, it was her. She was back.

  “Can you stand, Mother? We should get you cleaned up.”

  “I can. I must say, I am rather bemused by this turn of events - me leaning on you, of all people. Such a sickly, weak girl. How did I ever make such a weak girl?”

  She had not been ready for this part of being with her mother, the stinging insults. It usually wasn’t words like this, it was usually more hidden blades, but this cut all the same. She ducked her head into the old bowed position, without quite meaning to.

  “Well come on then, let’s go up.”

  And, leaning on each other, they did.

  ***

  “I am so damn hungry all the time.” Bellowed the lady of Rhodopalais like fishwife at a market, pacing in amongst the rubble that was once the front room.

  Vanita turned away from the timbers she was stacking against the massive hole the carrior had made in the front wall. She had never heard her mother say “damn” in her life. She narrowed her eyes.

  “What is the matter with you today, Mother?”

  “I’m hungry! And I’m also grumpy. I’m slightly envious of your youthful strength and resilience, though I’d hate to have those scars on my face, and I am watching your timber-stacking and thinking you’re doing a terrible job.”

  Vanita shook her head. It was as though overnight Mother had turned into Ash, saying the most outrageous things. And that was just what she said. Earlier she had shocked Vanita properly. At the first mention of cleaning up, once they’d got upstairs, her mother had immediately and without hesitation taken off all her clothing. Vanita had never seen her mother naked before. Then, she had seen her naked for twenty whole minutes while she’d filled the washbasin.

  “Sit down, Mother.” It always worked to be firm with Ash, no “please” and “thank you”, so perhaps it would work with this new version of her parent.

  “No, I won’t. I feel as though I’ve been sitting for a hundred years. Just where is everyone?”

  “Everyone is dead. Old Merta, Tansy… all the other servants. Except Derrick and Ash. They are gone to the palace – or, no, the castle, actually.”

  Her mother sniffed. “Never liked that girl. Derrick’s a fine enough specimen, for a servant boy, when he shuts his mouth. Muscles as pretty as a picture!”

  “Good grief Mother! That’s Derrick you’re talking about – it’s practically incest!”

  “So what? I haven’t had a roll in the hay for more than ten years, and you – why I’ll be damned if you don’t die a virgin!”

  “Die a virgin? What in the hell is wrong with you, Mother?”

  “Don’t say “hell’, Vanita.”

  She let the timber she was holding drop. It was all she could do not to let it drop on her mother’s head. She rounded on the old woman, satisfied to see her take a step back.

  “What is this? You act like a ghost for weeks, ever since waking up after the carrior, then you get hit on the head by a marauder and – magick! – you are suddenly an entirely different person. Just like that!”

  For one blessed moment, silence reigned. Her mother puckered up her wizened mouth into a little “o” and stared at Vanita, her green eyes wide. “I was hit on the head?”

  “You don’t remember that part? You were trying to save me, the one man who broke in was about to… To…”

  She looked at her daughter sharply. “To what?”

  “To what, Vanita?” she asked more quietly, coming closer.

  Vanita felt suddenly tired and wished she had stayed asleep on the chaise lounge for a week after all. “You know very well what, Mother.”

  “And did he?”

  “No.”

  A sigh. “Thank the Path. Pathetic as you are, you’re my only daughter. I don’t know what I’d do if…”

  And suddenly, incredibly, Mother was crying all over the floor. Her Mother, whom Vanita had never seen shed a tear in her life.

  “Shh Mother, it’s alright. Nothing happened. We’re safe, although hungry… And what’s this nonsense about the Path?”

  “It just slipped out. I’ve been saying such a load of… I don’t know why, I try to keep it in, but the words just come out. They’re like wild animals that can’t be leashed, and they run out of my mouth before I can stop them.”

  Wild animals to fear outside, w
ild animals to fear within. Vanita sighed. She had scraped the last of measly pumpkin that had splattered to the floor up in her own hands, had put it in a bowl and it had barely covered the bottom. And she had watched with growling stomach as her mother ate it, unselfconsciously licking the bowl afterwards. When Vanita took the bowl downstairs later, she looked to make sure no one could see and then she licked it too.

  That same mother was now striding around the parlour’s rubble talking in nonsense. She couldn’t stop her mother’s madness, but she could hopefully stop her from starving.

  “Hold on, Mother,” she said to no one but herself.

  ***

  There was a rare afternoon mist rolling in, the moment Vanita stepped outside to die.

  She left through the servant’s entrance by the kitchen, because that was where she felt safest, and was immediately confronted with memories that only made it harder to walk out into the grey. The patch of dirt where the Pathfinder had changed the pumpkin into a carriage. Ash’s old withered hazelnut tree where she used to pray. Their emptiness without the people who gave them meaning, and the barest puffs of white from the mist starting to come in, made them ghosts of things. Vanita hurried past.

  She had found what kitchen knives she could and dressed in the old burlap sack Tansy used to sleep on – another memory sore to the touch – to disguise the raggedy dress that even still may be more than many had. She was as prepared as she was ever going to be, she supposed, and there was a quiet sort of tension and curiosity in her head that for now held back her fear.

  Quiet, all the way down the main drive was quiet. The trees here were bare but not cut down, the broken remains of statues peppering the edges of what were once mazes. White wisps curled around the floor. It was like stepping into some holy church, it was so unfamiliar, but at the same time Vanita recognised the shell of her former life in each detail. She had not known how much it would disturb her, wandering out into the ghost of her former life.

  At last she arrived at the wrought iron remains of what was once the estate’s main gate. Ornate curls, long stripped of their gold leaf, they seemed to look down at her sternly in the bone-white light. No going back now Vanita, she thought to herself, and stepped over the threshold, out of Rhodopalais.

  It took a while for the landscape to change; but change it did. The trees were replaced with blackened stumps – first a little, then more and more, until Vanita was surrounded by a forest at knee height. It left her feeling both a giant and very small. She hurried as fast as her new lack of balance would allow, to get to where she remembered the fields started. She was almost there...

  “Oh.”

  She hadn’t meant to speak aloud, it had just happened. The wind carried away her “oh” as she looked at the devastation around her. She hadn’t been out here in more than a year. She hadn’t known what she’d expected but… this…

  When you see the same thing in ruins every day, like your bedroom or parent, it ceases to shock you. But something freshly full of childhood memories like this old meadow – it brought tears to Vanita’s eyes. The once-green grass was a brittle brown thing, stunted, high in parts and then hacked away in others by some peasant’s hand. Blackened tree remains darkened the brown listless spread in parts, contrasting with glimpses of white that Vanita had thought were pebbles but, when she got closer, turned out to be bones. With the white mist obscuring the usually blue sky, it all conspired to look like a graveyard – no, worse. Graves had flowers. This place looked like it would never see colour again.

  Reason returned on the heels of sadness. If this was such a colourless place, Vanita would stand out sorely, even in her sack. She must keep moving.

  Stick to the plan Vanita, she told herself, trying to wade as quickly and carefully as she could through the dead grass. Her shoes were thin, mere house slippers, and irrationally she didn’t want to touch a bone. Remember – head to the cottages, see if any look obviously open and unmanned. There’ll likely be corpses but maybe, just maybe, food too. Keep moving.

  The houses, once she reached them, were even sadder than the old meadow. They had been farmhouses, for the few working the fields just outside Rhodopalais’ jurisdiction, the Cerentolas had been their liege lords. Vanita had never seen them except from her meadow play spot, and in truth had never looked that closely at them at all, but these ruins she would have noticed.

  The four or so farmhouses still standing were leaning, ruinous remains, each seeming a separate still moment captured of a house slowly falling. Varying degrees of angles, but they were all leaning to the right as if gracefully dying. What thatch remained on top of them blended well into the dead brown grass below, so long it came up to the windows. More than one was completely gutted, front splayed wide open by a carrior or a mob or both. It looked like carnage, although it was stone and straw and not blood, and suddenly Vanita was certain she would have nightmares about this place.

  Still, she could smell smoke, and that meant that at least someone had been alive in here very recently. Whether that was good or bad, she could not tell. But she kept on walking all the same.

  The first house, the middle one, was nothing but stone and dust all over the floor, cold and vacant-feeling, but also devoid of all food. The second house was the same but boasted a lean-to outside that was rank with a rotted smell that, when Vanita went near, turned out to be the remains of chopped-off horse legs, writhing with maggots. She tried as quietly as she could to turn away and retch on the floor.

  The third house she did not go far into. It was a tiny thing and guarding it was the corpse of an emaciated old woman sitting in her chair. Despite the boniness of her, her hands were folded correctly, her smock neat, and her face lightly smiling. Here was someone at least who had died on her own terms. Vanita wished there were flowers outside so that she could leave some for her, but there weren’t any, so she picked a few of the greener stalks of brown grass and bundled those together instead, laying them in the corpse’s lap.

  As she was leaving, a smell caught her nostrils. It was faint and would never have registered in her senses at all but for the sharpness hunger had taught her lately. It was the smell of old grain, ground on stone and ready to be eaten with water as gruel.

  The smell must be coming from the next cottage over, one of the last ones. Vanita forgot herself and stepped too quickly. She stepped into a place that this time looked neat and surreptitiously boarded-up inside. She stepped, almost directly, into the point of someone’s knife.

  “Oh!” Her hands came up in surrender without quite meaning to. It was a young couple, filthy, the man and woman both no older than Vanita. The boy-husband’s dark eyes beneath dark hair glowed fiercely as he pointed his peasant knife at her, but they were shining with fear instead of hate. Behind him, a girl grey with hunger shrank into his back, clutching a knife of her own.

  “Unarmed. See? I mean no harm,” Vanita said, making a mime of searching for pockets and finding none. But when she looked at his face she realised he did not fear her, some slip of a girl close in age, and his shining eyes weren’t pointed at her.

  Then she heard the flapping of wings.

  Forgetting all about the couple’s knives she turned, just in time to see a hulking black shape land squatly in the brown grass. It looked like the raven that had crashed through the Rhodopalais parlour, except where that bird had had a slender neck near-crushed on impact, this bird’s flesh and feathers ballooned out below its skull into a meaty, thick mess of scraggly feathers that resembled a beard, rounding into a fat teardrop-shaped body of pure muscle. A crow, it must be a crow, although Vanita could have sword it was even bigger than the raven carrior had been, and ravens were supposed to be bigger, she thought, although it was impossible to remember her lessons when looking at this thing. It was near as tall as all the houses, as it began to walk among them.

  A hollow thwack, thwack sounded out as the bird began to move systematically from the left-most house down. The noise must be the sound of its beak
. Vanita took only a fleeting look at the couple again before crouching down and creeping to a side window, peering up carefully to see.

  Sure enough, the crow was picking on its next house. It stretched out its beak and pecked at the thatching it could reach, clearly having learned that this made more noise than the stone. The carrior thwacked again, tilting its head up to the side at a boneless angle, listening. Then it moved on to the next house, seeming to disregard the old lady and any other dead meat. This one wanted fresh, living meat, and Vanita was sure it could smell them.

  To Vanita’s left, the boy-husband moved in the dirt. It was a quiet sound, an infinitesimal sound, but the carrior paused before its third house, then turned and came straight towards them.

  Vanita looked fiercely at the ground, as if somehow not looking at it would make the carrior not look at her. When she did peer up, she saw only the black legs thick as her own and the beginning of the monster’s enormous breast. It was standing, dead still, in front of the open doorway without moving. The boy was waving his hands to his girl-wife, who was backing away slowly toward the back of their hovel. Vanita thought it looked like a good idea but found she couldn’t move.

  Suddenly the legs were gone. The crow had walked off, perhaps to try the next house. Vanita’s shoulders relaxed and she sank her knees to the floor. The boy-husband stepped slowly, quietly over to close the front door.

  Then the screaming began.

  Vanita saw for a second in her mind’s eye the sneak of a single crow talon at the open back door. As she saw it puncture the bony girl’s back, the girl near her began screaming. Visibly, nothing looked wrong with her, although she was bleeding and screaming, and the boy-husband rushed to her.

  “No, don’t!”

  It was too late. As he reached his bride, the crow crashed through the stone wall as if it were nothing. Vanita could only watch as the bird monster, eyes bright, took the bleeding girl in one claw, crushing her into the floor, and snatched the boy with its beak, piercing him straight through. It cocked its head at her beadily too, but it had its full, and with a thick, feathery sound it launched off into the air.