by Andy Giesler
Right about then, it occurred to Rover Jon that in all his aimlessness, he’d gone and wandered himself all the way to the northeastern edge of the World That Is. Wandered right past the great cairns of warning stones without taking notice. Wandered all the way to the heart of darkness, and the home of all chimeras.
All the way to the very center of the Somber.
Well. Rover Jon yelped and ran the whole way home.
When at last he reached Where’s gate, Watcher Wary called down, “Who’s that?”
“It’s—gasp—Rover—gasp—Jon!”
“Rover Jon?” Watcher Wary replied. “Where have you been all these days? Your grandma’s been quite worried!”
“To get—gasp—chamomile—gasp—for Grandma,” Jon said.
Watcher Wary sat quiet for a spell, then he said, “Rover Jon. Mender Mercy has chamomile right here in her garden for any who care to use it.” He opened the gate and let Rover Jon in.
When Rover Jon returned home, his grandma jumped up from the chair where she’d been knitting. “Dear Jon!” she cried. “We thought you dead! Where have you been all these days?”
“I’ve been to get this,” he said proudly, and he handed her the bundle of chamomile that Mender Mercy had just shared with him.
His grandma took the flowers from him and pulled his head down to kiss his brow. “Thank you kindly, dear Jon. I do wish I’d had this back when I was ill, but we’ll keep it for next time. Now, honeybee, you go right back to Mender Mercy and have her look you over. Good gracious! If it took so long to get to her garden and back, you must be feeling poorly.”
2
The Long Road
Three years.
Well, not quite that. Very nearly though. I stayed with Aylee and Eulee for three years. So much happened during those years, I’m not sure what to tell you of it.
Let’s see.
I guess I most want to tell you how, despite the way it started, it came out all right in the end. Both of them were rough on the outside but soft on the in. Eulee, he wouldn’t have done nothing to me, really, and even if he’d cared to, Aylee wouldn’t have let him. Aylee and Eulee had hoped for children many long years, and having none of their own, they treated me like their own daughter. When I finally left, I left with their blessing, and with supplies enough to get me where I needed to go.
That’s what I most want to tell you.
But as I’ve said, you oughtn’t ever lie except at great need and for great purpose. And that would be one of the biggest lies ever told in all the World That Is, and a lie without no need nor no purpose at all. Because Aylee and Eulee were every pinch as horrible as they seemed when first we met.
I thought one of them might kill the other before we reached their home. It took five days over rough country to get there, with two river crossings along the way. My best guess ended us somewhere in the Highlands. But it was an empty guess, and we might have been someplace else entirely.
And oh, what a trek. The cruelty between those two. Five days of it. When we finally reached their home, I was sure they were the most hateful, coarse, violent folk in all the World That Is. But I only thought that because I hadn’t met their ma yet.
So, no. It didn’t turn out well for me. But I guess a part of what I said was true.
“Be nice to have a young critter around the place. It’ll make the place feel young again, like it was,” Aylee said as we crested the last hill. “Been so long. Hey there, Eulee. How long’s it been?”
Eulee spat. “Eulee don’t remember things for you, woman.”
“Fine. I can figure it myself. Let’s see.” Then she got quiet with recalling. “Finlee was youngest, and I guess he died…when was it…?”
“Maylee, woman,” Eulee said. “Maylee was youngest, not Finlee. Finlee was next.”
“You just shut that pestilent hole of yours, you boar pimple. I guess I’d know better than you when Ma bore our brothers and sisters, wouldn’t I? I helped her deliver most of them. Anyhow, Finlee died…must be twenty years back, or more. Grandmother’s tits. It been that long?”
“Eulee don’t care. They’re all dead either way.”
“There was nine of us to start, then the others went. By ones and twos they went, along with Pa, too. Sickness, runners, watchers, wolves.”
“And a chimera,” Eulee said.
“Aw, Eulee, don’t start on that. It wasn’t no chimera.”
“Was too, woman!”
“Well, whatever took them, it was Gebohra Muerta’s work to take so many from us.”
“You’re Gebohra Muerta’s work,” Eulee muttered.
“Anyhow. Be nice to have a young critter around again.”
You ever hear some little thing crawling in the brush, and you know you ought to leave it be, but you just got to reach in there and find out what’s what? It was like that when I asked, “So you two got no children?”
Aylee laughed. “Grandmother no, though we do try, don’t we, Eulee?” I think she swatted Eulee, but only gentle. Eulee didn’t say nothing. “We try and try, but it don’t go as it ought. It’s an awful shame. Poor Eulee’s squirter don’t work right.”
“You go too far, woman!” Eulee yelled. “Eulee’s squirter works just fine, Grandmother bless it! Nothing wrong with his squirter! It’s that angry, withered pricker-bush of a maw ’twixt your legs that’s don’t work right!” Then he mumbled, something to hisself.
And so, in the company of these two fine folks, I came to the place I’d call home for three wretched years.
3
Outcast
You know what?
I suppose, if there was a way to do it without lying or thieving or murdering, and without Aylee or Eulee or their ma, I might have come to love the Outcast life.
No, truly. I wasn’t being funny.
I didn’t enjoy those years. But think on it. Out in the woods, where I loved to be? In a snug house on a happy little creek with old willows running up and down along the way? Wandering whenever I wished, without no walls to climb? Gardening beans in the morning, gathering nuts in the afternoon, mending walls in the evening? It was always hard for me to imagine taking up a trade in Surecreek and doing that one trade for all my years. No mistake, I loved working wood. Still do. But I loved other things, too.
Aylee and Eulee didn’t feel that way. Thieving seemed the only thing to give them joy. Everything else was a burden. Growing. Gathering. Mending. Tending their ma.
Anyhow. When I got to their home, the smell of it nearly made me pitch my breakfast. It seemed their family had never cared much about outhouses or modesty pits. So when they felt the urge to empty, they just wandered out of their home and picked a likely spot, or sometimes an unlikely spot, and depending on the weather, sometimes they didn’t wander real far to find it.
So I started to piece together how I might be useful. Because, clear as pain, my only hope lay in being useful.
I never did tell them I’d been trained at woodsmithing and the weaver’s craft. But if I knew some of this and some of that, it was easy enough to explain. I’d just learned it one way or another. There was no knowing what they’d do if they worked out who I was, so besides telling them false of my name and trade, I never said where I came from. I was grateful they never asked.
Maybe I should have wondered why they never asked.
First thing I did was dig them a proper modesty pit. That was no easy task, as their collection of tools came not from what they needed, but from what folks happened to be carrying when Aylee and Eulee surprised them on the road. They had eleven metal axes, rusted and dull, no doubt pilfered from unfortunate lumbermen off in the woods too far from a village, yet they had not one single mortar and pestle. They had countless needles of bone, wood, and even metal, but they had neither spindle nor loom. They had endless lengths of string, cord, and rope, enough to run around the girth of Surecreek thirteen times, but to my great regret, they had not one single shovel.
Still, I got by. Between one
of the rusted axes and a wooden bowl that I hardened up with sap and coals, I dug a respectable modesty pit. I hoped that would make my lie of honeydipping seem more true.
Thankfully, they had several buckets which were “gifts” from folks who no doubt needed them. That made my job as honeydipper a good deal more pleasant than it might have been otherwise.
Aylee took to the modesty pit right away, speaking of it as though somebody was giving her a warm scrub bath and sprinkling her with flower petals. As for Eulee, I think it was a month or two before he finally gave in. He never once commented on it nor thanked me for it, but the absence of his scat around the place was thanks enough. And their ma, she never left the house if she could help it, so she emptied herself in a bucket and I carried it out. Those buckets of her leavings were probably the nicest things their ma ever gave me.
Gracious. Their ma. Kattie.
I hope you never hear the likes of her cursing. Most of the time I could hardly make out what she said, but whenever I could, it was curse words. Maybe she just cursed all the time, whether I was there or not, like Mender Vernie did toward the end. But I figured she was cursing specially for me.
Now and again I’d ask Kattie what she wanted, or how I might do better for her, hoping not to wear out my welcome and so to end my life. But she never answered me clear, so most often, I guessed. Most often, I guessed wrong.
In time I understood she could hardly hear a thing, and could hardly speak no more, and though she could get around, it seemed to be with a good deal of discomfort. So all that was left to her, really, was wanting things, and hating things, and cursing me.
Kattie could hardly care for herself no more, and it was a marvel to me that she hadn’t died from neglect every time her children left her. That’s why Aylee decided I might be of some help to their ma. She told me I was to help that angry, withered, sinewy pile of spitefulness to curse the World That Is with her hateful presence a while longer. And those words are just how Aylee said it.
Aylee also made clear that if their ma died, whether by illness or old age or some entirely surprising accident, they’d have no more use for me, and my reward would be to visit the stars and care for dear Mother Kattie in the Village of the Dead. Those words are just how Aylee said that, too.
What’s that, lamb? Say that again, I didn’t hear you.
Her children? Yes, they were Kattie’s children. They were brother and sister.
Husband and wife, too. Yes, you’re right, they were that as well. You’re paying good attention. You young ones ask such good questions. Your mas and pas did, too, when they were your age.
And you’re very right. That sort of thing is just not done.
But neither is lying and thieving and murdering. I sort of lost track of all the things they did that was just not done. But you’re right, and thank you for asking about it.
That is just not done.
Anyhow.
One time, I asked Aylee why they were Outcasts. She didn’t understand my question. When I asked it different, she just laughed. “Eulee and I didn’t flee the Pit, girl, and we wasn’t cast out, neither. We was born to this life, as was our brothers and sisters. Ma and Pa was cast out of their village before we was born. They never said why. You’re welcome to try asking.”
I never asked.
Sometimes Aylee and Eulee would forage the woods and fields, acting as any honest forager might, though they did it with great grumbling.
Sometimes they went to a village, and even to Market itself, pretending to be Forager Nettie and Forager Ned, trading goods and news of the World That Is. They grumbled less about that, but they grumbled.
But sometimes, whenever they felt the time was right, they went out thieving. I call it thieving. They called it “gathering gifts.” And about that, they grumbled not at all.
So between all those trips, often it was just Kattie and me alone at their little homestead. Their home, for all its filth, was warm in winter, built as it was down under the sod. Besides their home, they had three small sheds nearby, sheds where they stored their abundance of “gifts.” After some months there, on a day when I asked too many questions, Aylee moved me into one of the sheds to “remind me of my place.”
That was a blessing.
By the time next winter came, I’d made those walls tight and warm as I could, and I’d banked the shed’s walls three feet high with dirt and moss. When I moved things about in the shed just so, I could even have a small fire at the center of it, drafting through a vent I made in the roof.
So that’s where I enjoyed my brief times away from those awful folks.
And that’s where I began to plan my escape.
4
Eulee’s Wisdom
Now, Aylee and Eulee made the Strong Drink.
Eulee enjoyed drinking it whenever he could find an excuse, and often when he couldn’t. Aylee and their ma only sipped it now and again. I never heard the whole story of it, but they seemed to think the Strong Drink had killed Kattie’s husband, Ned. Whether he poisoned hisself of it, or drank enough to be careless in his thieving, I never heard, and I never asked.
Sometimes when Eulee was ’specially rowdy from the Strong Drink, if Aylee got tired of being near him, she’d go off to bed and leave Eulee and me sitting by the fire. Maybe it worries you to wonder what he’d try, us being alone like that. But of all Aylee’s awfulness, I have to give her this: She kept that skinny, greasy old hog Eulee in line. I do not know what warning she’d given him, but he never so much as touched me. I suppose she threatened him from jealously, but I didn’t much care the reason, so long as it kept him away from me.
So instead of trying something, he used that time around the fire as a chance to go on about the World That Is, telling me his thinking on it, no doubt enjoying an audience where Aylee would just have smacked him and told him to hush.
And through those years, I learned many things from Eulee the Outcast. Some were narrow, like trades where he’d come out the better. Some were puzzling, like Festival getting delayed for no clear reason, which made me wonder on Shepherd Gabriel. And some turned out to be real important. For one thing, I learned where we were.
I was careful not to let on that I was learning it. But if Eulee wanted to go on about the wondrous things he got thieving near Overlook? Why, I might ask him, real impressed: “Gracious, Eulee, however long did you have to wait by the road before such lovely gifts came to you?” Then to myself, if I thought about how long they were gone, then I took away how long they waited by the road, and then cut what was left in half? That gave me some idea how long it took to walk to Overlook. And if I knew the direction they left in? Well, then I had a much better idea of where I was.
I had no map of the World That Is with me, of course, nor could I see one if I had. But often enough, Ma had drawn them in clay for me to feel before we went off on pilgrimage. And I’d spent so many evenings doting on Leeleh and Woodsmith Abram’s carved basswood map, learning it by heart and imagining all the places I might visit one day. And, by the by, I’ve visited them all by now.
Anyhow. Trip by trip, I puzzled out nearer and nearer where I was. By the end of my time with the Outcasts I knew more or less where I needed to go, how long it would take to get there, and how much food and water I’d need for the journey.
But the most interesting thing I learned was about chimeras.
When Eulee was a boy, his eldest brother, Jolee, went off raiding and didn’t come back. Eulee thought Jolee was the most wondrous person in the World That Is. He kept asking after him, over and over, of what became of Jolee. Finally, his pa hit him and said, “A chimera got him.”
Eulee believed that was so. But Aylee said their pa knew no such thing. She said a great many things might have killed Jolee, and Pa was just saying the scariest one he could think of to shut Eulee up.
I wasn’t sure which of them to believe. But whatever the truth, from a young age Eulee was fascinated with chimeras. Whenever his family came back from t
rading at villages, and later when he was old enough, whenever he went there hisself, he’d ask all he could about chimeras. When they happened. Where they happened. Who they killed. How they were killed.
It seemed to me Eulee’s way of thinking wasn’t like most other folk’s. So many things had trouble getting into his head and staying there, just as with Runner Zeekl. But once Eulee did get something in there, he was fiercely proud of it. And as little as I cared to stoke that pride…I was awful curious to learn about chimeras for my own reasons.
Because of what Shepherd Gabriel said. That whatever made the chimeras is the same thing that made the shepherds. The same thing as changed me just after my Honeynock. The thing I hoped might change me back to the way I was.
The Nothing within me.
Eulee was able to recite every chimera that happened in the last twenty years. For all of them, he could say where they were found and when. For most, he knew what they did, and how they were ended. For many, he knew something about their shape. I wasn’t sure whether I believed every last bit of that list, but there was something about it. About how he bent hisself to it. I don’t know. I did believe most of it.
So I asked him to teach me. He must have recited that list for me two hundred times during my years as an Outcast, repeating it for me long after I wished to hear it.
One evening after a bland and gristly dinner, Eulee started reciting for me, but after a half-dozen chimeras he stopped. “Tell me, girl,” he said, and he said it with his light, carefree, smarter-than-me voice. “Where is chimeras from?”
Well, that didn’t take hardly no thought at all. “The Somber,” I said. Because everybody knew that.
Eulee chuckled. “And why does she think it?”
“Because everybody knows it,” I answered, a little hot. “Learners, weavers, shepherds. It’s in the good-old stories, too.”