by A Van Wyck
“Really?” he whispered, appalled. “Horse riding?”
Helia guard me!
He could already see himself, covered in muck and bruises from his frequent falls, smiling through the dirt and pain so as not to hurt her feelings. The image was so clear in his mind he could taste the mud. Dennik’s laughter intruded.
“It’s not funny!” he whined, feeling the panic churn in him.
“Maybe not to you,” the guardsman chortled in delight.
“I’m serious! I’m supposed to be looking after her! Not the other way around!”
“Oh, relax!” His friend swatted at his objections. “She’s trying to be kind. You’ve spent enough time around her to know it’s her defining characteristic. Just accept with good grace. And don’t spoil it for her!” the man added with a warning finger.
What choice did he have?
“I guess,” he sighed.
“And take my advice,” his friend continued in a quieter tone, “don’t tell anyone else about this.”
“Why?”
“Well, the princesses aren’t in the habit of singling anyone out. And most of this lot,” eyes raked over the half-filled mess hall, “haven’t gotten over your last bout of popularity yet. So don’t go bragging.”
He hadn’t even thought of that. “I wasn’t planning to,” he professed.
“I know. You’re not the type. But, for a smart kid, you can be a little dense. So. Fair warning.”
“Thanks, Dennik. You’re always looking out for me. It’s more than I deserve.”
The young guardsman grimaced. “Don’t mention it,” the man mumbled, clearly uncomfortable with the emotional display. They ate in silence for a while.
“So,” his friend said at length, “you excited about the festival?”
That caught him off guard.
“The what?”
The young guardsman’s glance was disbelieving. “The festival? The festival of Marliev! It’s a week from today! Honestly, Marco, the palace has been buzzing with talk of nothing else for days. Haven’t you noticed?”
It has?
He’d noticed the servants bustling about the palace at all bells of the day. But they were always bustling. Plus, he didn’t get to see so much of the palace these days. His free time was mostly spent sleeping.
“No,” he admitted honestly.
His friend studied him in silence, astonishment slowly devolving into understanding.
“Well,” the man drawled brusquely, stabbing at the congealing stew, “I suppose you wouldn’t have.”
“Festival of Marliev,” he mused, rolling the familiar name around in his head. It sparked a memory, one of the many histories he’d read at Father Justin’s instigation. “That’s the celebration of King Ullusik’s triumph over the desert hordes at Hanging Cleft in the year of the Rising Moon – Renali calendar,” he allowed. “Interestingly, the great channel was completed on the same day almost two hundred years later. The name was still appropriate, since the original margh re’leff meant the final day. Though the term Marliev was only…”
He trailed off as he became aware of the silence. He turned to see Dennik staring at him blankly, spoon frozen halfway to an open mouth.
“Oh?” the man managed eventually. “That’s… interesting.”
He felt himself coloring and hastily scooped up another spoonful. It was so easy to forget that not everyone had had the advantage of a Temple education. He hoped he hadn’t offended (or worse, embarrassed) Dennik.
But after another moment, the man laughed wryly. “You,” the young guardsman accused with a smile, “are so normal, sometimes it’s easy to forget you’re a scholar.”
He smiled, relieved. “Priest,” he corrected, “not scholar.”
“Priest, then.”
“In training.”
“Whatever.”
He decided to change the subject before Dennik could do the same mental arithmetic as the invigilator and ask why a novice should be able to immobilize royal guardsman two at a time.
“So,” he questioned, trying to sound nonchalant, “what happens at the festival?”
“Oh!” his friend enthused, seizing upon the invitation. “You’ll love it! There’re puppet shows and mummeries and dances and music! The best minstrels and bards travel from all over to play the festival. And there are jugglers, fire eaters, acrobats and animal trainers! The entire Acreage is converted into one big market where all kinds of foreign people sell the most outlandish things! And then…” the guardsman paused for effect, “…there are the lists!”
The young man’s eyes shone with anticipation.
“Lists of what?”
Dennik gaped at him like he was simple. “The lists! The lists! You know,” the man tried when he clearly still failed to understand, “Jousting?”
Jousting?
He thought a moment.
“A knightly sport played on horseback?” he recited from memory.
“That’s the one!” his friend exclaimed. “It’s the greatest gathering of nobles at any time of the year. Loads have arrived already. Some are even staying here at the palace. You’d have seen them at the dinner table if you weren’t eating with us grunts every day. Oh…” he sighed in nostalgia, “you should have seen the bout between Duke Scholos of Etchmund and the Raif of Rayborn last year…”
The man shook his head, excited eyes fixed on the past.
He regarded his friend seriously.
“I don’t think of you as a grunt, Dennik.”
The young man eyed him strangely.
“Eat your dinner,” Dennik finally commanded, turning back to his own bowl.
He did the same.
A festival. Well. Good for everyone else. But he knew where he’d be, come the celebrations. Ten paces or less from the princess, that’s where. Oh, well. At the very least, if it was really so popular, he might get to see the joust.
CHAPTER 11 – CAMOUFLAGE
This was not going to end well. His eyes roved again over the band of young men approaching their little group. He recognized the type. The village they’d stopped at was small. It offered little in the way of distraction for the malignant and casually malicious among its youth. These were forced to find… other outlets. The small band of lepers was a prime target, arriving at an opportune time.
He shook his head as he watched the five village youths swagger closer. This was what became of bullies when their parents didn’t take the strap to them early on. His own deep-seated hate of bullies stemmed from being small and smart and growing up in a place where tender age wasn’t the shield against violence it was supposed to be. As a rule, bullies were dumb as stumps, driven by fear and an unerring instinct for finding those who could be bullied. It could pass for intelligence in a bad light but in his book they were only slightly more aware than pond scum.
And yet you had to marvel at how they gravitated toward the easy target, like a school of bats toward a moth cloud. The moths being the poor lepers. It was a threefold game. They got to beat defenseless invalids – always fun. They got to show off their bravery to one another, daring their friends to get closer and closer to the unclean lepers. (Usually no more than the length of a good, stout stick.) And, best of all, they could do this with impunity. They knew very well the village elders might condemn their actions but only in hushed, mumbled tones. Despite professed good intentions, no one really wanted the lepers camped out on the edge of their village.
Maybe he gave this lot too much credit. Often there was an older, slyer mind at work somewhere behind the scenes. Even bullies grew old, after all, and all that bitterness and spite didn’t just disappear along with the ability to push someone around physically.
He didn’t fully understand these wetland peoples’ seeming outrageous fear of lepers. It was tied in some way to their bizarre religion. ‘Unclean’, ‘cursed’ and ‘forsaken’ were only some of the abusive terms he’d heard hurled at them in the last couple of weeks. They usually counted themselves
lucky if the only thing hurled was abuse. Some villages and towns were fairly direct in their desire to have the little mobile community move on.
In the desert cities they had a different sensibility about leprosy. He knew he had a better chance of being struck by lightning than contracting the disease from his new traveling companions. But they provided the perfect camouflage.
The Empire practice was for lepers to wrap themselves in dirty yellow cloth, often from head to toe. Whether this was to hide their growing deformities or to warn off others, he didn’t know and he didn’t care. It suited him perfectly. Some Imperials wouldn’t even look at lepers, like it was a disease communicable by sight. That had been what had attracted his attention to them in the first place.
He’d been watching one of the smaller city gates from hiding. A safe distance away, in the pre-dawn dark, nestled among the belfries of one of the innumerable temples. He’d hoped the Imperials’ goddess might cast a kindly eye upon a hunted thief. At a time when only insomniacs, bakers and – well, thieves – should be awake, he’d been surprised to overhear two men conversing below.
“Again, my thanks for your hospitality, Etrigan.”
“I imagine there has been little succor for you and yours this season.”
“We have had a rough time of it. Our curse – and I sometimes think, our one blessing – is to be beneath the notice of all.”
He’d frowned at hearing this and had crept to a lip in the overlapping roofs to see the speakers. One dressed in rich ceremonial robes, the other, only half-seen, swathed in ragged ends of faded yellow.
“Not beneath the notice of all,” the richly dressed man – a priest? – had argued sorrowfully.
“And praise Helia for that,” the ragged man had conceded.
“Will you have any trouble getting out of the city?”
“I imagine not. Although we are not always welcome, we are always welcome to leave, wherever we are.”
“Goddess watch over you on your pilgrimage, brother.”
As the ragged man had turned to leave, he’d at last seen the (even more ragged) face. A visage moth-eaten by disease. He’d watched the leper join a rag-tag bunch of figures. Their yellow-wrapped frames had belied differing states of decrepitude. Together, they’d set off in the direction of the nearby gate. They’d appeared ghostly, lit only infrequently by the widely spaced, road-side braziers. Their misshapen shadows, cavorting across the dirty brick, showed them to be a mutilated, marching menagerie. And he’d seen, as the ragged group shuffled slowly along, a hesitant figure emerge from an alleyway, clutching a ruined arm to its chest. And while the rest of the group had paid the newcomer no mind, the ragged man who’d spoken to the priest had stopped, waited. And when the pathetic figure had come near, the man had shrugged out of his own frayed yellow cloak to drape the newcomer’s shoulders.
He’d purloined enough garish cloth to copy their dress. He’d obscured his face with well-practiced motions, trying not to think how a bedsheet came to be such a putrid yellow. At least it was serviceably clean, hung from an inauspicious line and damp with morning dew. And if his cloth had seemed a little new and clean compared to the yellowed rags he’d seen, well cloth did not start out old and worn, did it? He’d be newly expelled by family, scorned by friends and seeking solace among the only people that would still have him. Not yet ground down by the endless journey that seemed to be the only sort of life left to these poor outcasts. Besides, he’d dirtied up nicely within only a few days.
Nerves had done much to aid in his skittish shuffle as he’d first approached them. Even at their best, the little group moved at little better than a crawl. Many were missing one foot or both. He’d had plenty of time to deck himself in yellow and catch them up before they’d reached the city limits. He’d followed and fallen into step with the rear of their little procession. Together, they’d cut a swathe through the recoiling, early morning crowds. Whether the lepers had been indifferent or ignorant of his presence, he did not know. And though he had never before considered the properties of yellow as camouflage, they’d passed through the city gate without incident, the gate guards wafting them through as though they were an inopportune fart.
It had been his intention to go his own way once he was safely away from Genla but the little party moved so torturously slow that they had made it little more than a league or so down the road – not even out of sight of the crenellated walls of Genla – before he was discovered.
The ragged man, who seemed to be a leader of sorts, moved among the lepers as they limped and stumbled their way along, dispensing quiet words of encouragement. Reaching Jiminy, the man had said not a word but had merely rested a kindly hand on his shoulder for a moment before passing on to the next in line.
His feet had begun angling toward the nearby tree line when the sound of hurried hooves on the cobbled road had sent the lepers scrambling – as snails are wont to scramble – to the side of the way. Three riders had come pelting up the road from Genla. Though they’d worn no uniform, they’d been alike in the functionality of their dress and the set of their jaws. And they’d been armed. With distinctive crossbows.
At the sight of them, his sense of self-preservation had drawn taut as a bowstring and he’d hunched his shoulders and dipped his head beneath notice.
One of their number had slowed beside the lepers.
“You there!” the rider had demanded, barking in their direction.
The stillness of fear had settled over the lepers then. The ragged man had stepped forward, throwing his arms wide. He’d looked as though he might shield his fellows. Or as though he might try to embrace their accoster. The rider had certainly thought so, giving his full, wary attention to the lead leper.
“Good morrow, sir! How may we be of assistance?”
Disgust had pulled at the rider’s face and a pull on the reins had backed the prancing horse a few paces.
“Keep your fucking distance, for one!” the rider had hissed. The ragged man’s arms had lowered. “Have you seen anyone else on the road this morning?” the rider had demanded.
“No, sir,” the ragged man had said. “Those of us who still possess eyes and ears have neither seen nor heard anyone else this morning – saving your honored selves – and we have been upon the road since before sunup.”
Not bothering with a reply, the rider had hawked and spat at the ragged man’s feet before spurring the horse off down the road.
He could, of course, not be certain that these had been the same men as were looking for him. But the coincidence had been too remote to discount. The encounter had enticed him to re-evaluate the usefulness of his leper’s guise. Even so, had it not been for the fact that the little group had forsaken the main road later that day, in favor of a much less traveled dirt road, he would probably not have risked remaining in their company.
At their campfire that first night, no one had shown him any special interest and no one had spoken to him. But two rag-wrapped figures had shuffled sideways to make room for him by the fire. Their wordless welcome had been as touching as it was unnerving. He’d settled in the space allotted him and spent an evening in silence... except for one mad cackle of laughter. It was a mercifully short-lived explosion of hilarity and seemed to shock only him. He’d been unable to ascertain which yellow-swathed figure had been the originator and the cackle was never repeated. After that they’d whiled away the evening in silence, staring into the flames, no doubt thinking of former lives, now lost. All except him, who’d been furiously planning how to prolong his. They’d succumbed one by one to sleep, most simply keeling over where they sat.
That had been more than a fortnight ago. The little group of a dozen or more followed Amm – the ragged man. A failed priest, if the man told it true. The rot, slowly climbing Amm’s neck and eating that kindly face, had cut those aspirations short. Apparently leprosy earned you the disgust of the empire’s goddess as well as her flock.
The priest-part wasn’t hard to believe. The
man had an ethereal manner and light eyes hinted of an acceptance so complete it defied comprehension. You only had to see him at the head of his motley following – striding purposefully through the dust with staff in hand – to believe. All in all, an impressive man. Or most of one, anyway.
Amm had introduced the flock, some fourteen souls, in an unbiased fashion that forgave their many shortcomings – limbs included. Old Paroke’s right leg ended at the knee and the man walked like a scrawny monkey, swinging himself around a crutch again and again. Mad Bergha had no legs and traveled in a knee-high wooden cart with uneven wheels and a squealing axle. She propelled it herself – when no one could be browbeaten (quite literally) into pulling her. With two wooden stilts strapped to her forearms, she basically rowed her way down the dusty roads. The mad cackle belonged to her – a noise like a deranged crow. An oddly fitting image, since Mad Bergha was wont to leave her cart at night and walk around on the palms of her heavily calloused hands, swinging her upright torso around the camp. The sight of her waddling towards you, like some deranged bird, cackling all the way, was a nightmare image.
Hersh and Pant, two brothers, had a true symbiotic relationship. Hersh had lost the use of his legs, though they refused to give up and drop off. He rode the back of his handless brother, who would be reduced to eating from the dirt like a dog if Hersh didn’t feed him every day, patiently waiting for him to chew and swallow before passing the next morsel. The rest were an equally broken collection of wretches, slowly decaying while still alive.
It was a strange existence, living with the lepers. They were true equals. Among them were men and women of all ages. Leprosy didn’t discriminate the wealthy or the corrupt from the poor or the innocent. They existed in constant motion, since no one place would tolerate them for long. Like nomads trekking from oasis to oasis, the lepers made their slow way from temple to temple, seeking alms. But, Amm confided with worn piety, most rural temples, though willing, had little to spare. While their larger, wealthier cousins were inaccessible to the lepers, walled as they were within unwelcoming cities and towns.