by Thomas Head
Cullfor and Bunn moved with great slowness, but under the new morning light, two of the men stirred.
Several conversations ceased at once, and, panting, he and Bunn froze. When they at last returned to talking or sleeping, he pulled Bunn down across the road and into the far woods.
No one followed.
But Cullfor had a peculiar feeling.
_______________
After too much stillness, Cullfor found walking oddly pleasurable. Strange how much less tiring it is than standing.
They padded quickly through a long forest that gave way to grassy slopes. To travel the hillsides in the northwestern reaches of his country was a marvel.
He loved it, the vast, plunging openness of it But he was far from comfortable. He sensed now they were being tracked. It was the certitude that bothered him—the quickness of that quiet that had followed the men’s stirring.
It seemed forced.
Under the fabric of low clouds, they halted. There was a thin grove of cedar at the edge of a wild stream, which spilled from the earth near the pinnacle of two hilltops. The water falling wildly past their feet, they edged alongside a cool blue wall of rock and sat.
With his back against the stone, he held her hand.
And she talked to him.
_______________
In childhood she is forced to an uncle’s home. She has seven or eight years on this Earth. She has to tell her uncle something awful and ask him something worse. She looks away from the long, pale face that is looking down at him.
“Yes, yes,” Bunn’s uncle mumbles down to her. “What is it you need, boy?”
Boy?
The old man stares at her in the confused silence of that moment. There is a terrible stink. Her father has died just this morning, and she is still numb, still newly charged with the shock. She does not know the right way to say things, so she holds her breath and speaks it quickly.
“Your brother died on the wall last night.”
The old uncle says nothing.
He shuffles back inside. A tremendous clanking precedes something she believes is a squawk. Then the white-haired man is crying and screaming. Bunnr wants to run away but she cannot.
“Oh damn,” she hears. “Oh damnit.”
The uncle is still crying as he comes back to the door.
“Well what do ye want?”
“Board, sir. A roof for my cousin and I.”
“Ye mother?”
“She tried to strangle us, then, I don’t know… she stopped, then sent us here.”
“And so it goes?”
“So it goes, yes,” she says.
And it is no lie. She and her cousin have nowhere else to go but into this house of madness.
In all those days Bunn dreams of orderly things, but spends her days in a cottage crowded with dogs, working to imitate normal women. As she sees women hanging laundry or chopping wood with their daughters, she offers to help.
It does little to help her.
Too often, the old man shakes his head at her, as if it is Bunn doling out all the nonsense. Her waking life seems filled with odd conversations that always end in her pleading to God. Which seems to have helped. It is here that she learns herself, and she learns this religion of certitude, despite life’s lack of it. For a time there will be no noise in the home. Nothing. Then that time will pass, and the uncle will knock around in the halls of lunacy again.
It is also here that she learns battle; here, she learns to conquer herself before she conquers others. Knowing what things can be conquered and what things will shatter a man.
And she gets older, learning this.
She is older now. A woman, she thinks. She starts sneaking out, and once, she gives a whore a pair of her uncle’s boots to watch her bathe. She undresses, and with great, almost divine joy, her eyes relish her. Her nose and his fingertips take her in. The prostitute breathes in her ear, and she giggles.
She lets her keep the boots. The mutual scheming of it invigorates her. When he tries it again with another woman, a much darker lady, she keeps the boots but teaches her things. Things that men like. And it is here that she learns a very important lesson: she has learned nothing. In her own little home her cousin Rheane is doing the same. The oddness of her world is getting smaller, closing in. It is almost too much, then she meets with a new and larger madness. With cruel bluntness comes the truth that her cousin is getting money from the local men.
They are paying her to do things with them.
It is precisely the lack of mutual scheming that deflates her. Infuriates her.
Next night she follows her. She tracks her through the lewd crowds behind the church, past the local stronglaw’s home and the pubs, to an array of fires. Night watchmen burn them at the edges of the woods. There, the men do not look at her the way men should look at a child. They know the pale, thin girl does not have a girl’s innocence. Nor a woman’s wisdom. She is something in between, at the merciless fodder of drunkards and poets.
It is the thickest part of night when the first man approaches her.
“Have ye eaten, girl?”
“I’ve not eaten,” she says.
He rubs her stomach, but she does not pull away. He pulls bread from his coat and offers it to her with his large hands. He rubs her head as she chews. Then they sit together. He is drinking from an earthen bottle. Then he is rubbing her head again, fisting her hair softly. She puts her face in his lap.
Bunn rushes the man, silently. They tumble into a woodshed. The man knocks her to the dirt floor, and he looks over her head at her cousin.
But Rheane apologizes to the wrong person.
“My cousin has grown mad with our uncle.”
The word ‘mad’ is an odd thing, a damned odd thing, to say about someone trying to help you.
“Go away, girl.”
She looks at her cousin, seeing that this is what she wants, and Bunn does so, and she prays for her in the forests.
In the morning, when she peels off her clothes and crawls in the blankets, her cousin tries to hold her, tries to console her but Bunn hands her back all of her words with the grunt. She says soon she will retreat to the forest to live as a hermit forever.
“I will do things for you, too,” she whispers to Bunn.
“What?”
“I saw you with Lady Pete.”
Bunn tingles at the indisputable sincerity. She turns toward her. In those little frozen pond eyes she sees a kindred imp. Then they just look at each other. For a long while.
Rheane takes off her shirt.
Bunn, somehow, feels powerless, looking at the freckled arms and white stomach before her. There is a feeling in her wrists and temples. She has seen this a thousand times, but only now does she remind herself that Rheane is not really her cousin. After some riddling business about a blood-debt, her mother had taken her in. Say thing to herself, Bunn feels Rheane’s elbows. It makes absolutely no sense to her why she is bringing all this into their lives. Yet for a moment, she sees beneath the veneer of logic, as if with evil eyes. And she understands something that she cannot put words to.
She looks at her. And she turns, telling Rheane she should kiss her first.
Rheane kisses her on the chin and then the mouth.
Bunn feels her head lighten. He stomach pulses unhappily, but she is vaguely hopeful, or perhaps fearful. Maybe she should make her stop kissing her.
“But I do love you,” Rheane adds. Then she kisses her forehead. “I’ll do whatever you want me to do.”
“Will you stop letting the men touch you?”
Rheane stops, looks at her. “Of course not.”
Bunn closes her eyes as Rheane kisses her neck and stomach.
She keeps them closed.
“But I do love you too.”
_______________
As a vigorous rain began to fall, Cullfor gave up trying to sleep and opened an eye. He pushed the sword further from his side so that the unsheathed weapon wouldn’t r
ip his flesh.
It was only afternoon, but he needed sleep. Impossible sleep. The sun was like ice.
As the afternoon passed away to a cold, dim evening, Cullfor and Bunn sat up.
Slowly.
For hours, he tenderly rubbed her scalp and held her.
But he never quite slept.
_______________
They pressed northward, warily, but not unhappily. They talked little when he was thoughtful.
Still trailed by the silence that had seen them out of the night prior, he thought about a home with her. How to make it, and where. When he gave it some thought, there was something more than the crisp and charming emptiness between them. Something writhed in his skull in the stead of an answer. The cheerful knowledge that it did not matter.
But with this, again, came the sensation of being followed.
The feeling of being followed is different from being watched. It was not like eyes crawling on him, more like a feeling of confinement. He could make the feeling dissipate, gripping his sword.
But he knew better than to dull the feeling.
And there was something else about that.
It is an odd thing, the tool for carving human meat. In carrying it without a scabbard it loses something of its dread, its willingness. The sword must be kept blindfolded.
But he could not offer it that, and by morning he stood holding it near his leg in the broad highland. The wind was hurrying clouds overhead. It felled the grasses in wide sheets and brought a wet coolness from the North that smell faintly of salt.
Cullfor squinted at the first rays of dawn. He turned south, then east. He could see no one, nothing, following. He turned back northward, trying tried to comfort his mind with the ridiculous hope that their senses seemed to intertwine. But the only unspoken focus between them was each other’s care. Any sudden and necessary stillness was to look at each other. And if his mind peered too far out, far into distant and magical thoughts about what he was now, then disquiet would swell with thoughts of rangers tracking them. Rangers that would need no unearthly skill to track them but possessed it nonetheless.
Maybe that’s the ultimate irony of love.
“Hoo,” he whispered.
She looked at him and winked.
As they began to trek the slope of a meadow, he found himself looking sideways at her and feeling happier. The long field was lined with a single high brake of evergreens, shaking in the breeze and dotted at their feet with a dull blaze of young yellow flowers. Beyond it, the hills were less grassy and some grassless altogether.
An unfamiliar horse was running free across a low side of the hill.
Cullfor paused. His forehead throbbed. The sudden sight of tracks, hooves of a dozen more horses that had meandered into the odd hills. They were overtrodden by the tracks of men.
Cullfor rubbed his neck. He pinched the bridge of his nose and knew that it can’t bode very damned well that the men tracking them had somehow follow them by staying ahead.
He looked at her.
She looked at the track, then at him. She folded her hands around his jaw.
“If this is all there is to be all of our life, then it is to be all,” she said. “I would not trade a minute of it for a lifetime with another.”
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you, and I love all of this. Whatever this is to be.”
Tiny hairs rose. A forceful moon hung still very low over a riding of hills, shining vaguely through a new rain in the west.
He wondered if all men were offered such a woman in life.
“Then to whatever awaits us, mage-guard,” he said.
Chapter 94
“Mushrooms may be poison or gold.”
—written, however unambiguously, on the doors of the Truffliers’ Keep, the Palace of White Oak.
_______________
They set out across the high hills laden with weapons but carrying nothing in the way of supplies, nothing to slow them down. Their movements in the wind and dark were hunkered and slow, but certain.
When they reached the last of the grasses, they meandered into stony cliffs. Blue and cold, the wrinkled landscape was sharp with loose and flaky shale. It was oddly reflective, and under a sky that grew yellow and gray by degrees, it undulated away to the north like a glacier of rock. Ever widening, it was consumed by the dreamscape of that bleak day. The difference was so stark that the land hardly seemed an extension of the same country he knew. It was more like something from a bedtime story, on that had more than a kernel of truth in it: this mad place was supposedly home to hobgoblins.
They were not far from the wilds of Dragonfell, home of the fiercest, but most peace-loving Elvish warriors in in the known realm, so fierce they had maintained something near sovereignty; it was almost its own land, and indeed it could have been—if they wanted to be. But fortunately for the king and the country of Arway, the elves were fiercely agrarian. In fact they considered themselves the First People.
Maybe three days north. Three days, and he would see these legendary warriors first hand.
He cupped Bunn’s heels and eased with her down below the cliffs into the stony waste. The blue-gray land was already a nightmare of knolls and pits as they labored down from the first slope. Here, the horizon closed around them. The blanket of cloud was thinning, the night sky creeping into a clearer silver, but it was only to offer a view of the hellish terrain before them. The ground rose or fell only. There were no trails to shoulder. Not a single regular feature for the eyes or mind.
_______________
As they descended further into the vast and stony way, it was difficult maintain any real sense of direction. Eerie squirts of sunlight made the sheer piles seem to lean, an illusion of motion that was sometimes real. Towers of rock sent pebbles scrabbling down beside them while they picked their through gap after winding gap.
They had traveled but some five hours in before Cullfor began to feel lost. Noise moved strangely. Butterflies of light landing on him, fluttering until looking at them made them vanish. Voices proved to be nothing more than their own steps, making him jerk his head.
Bunn sometimes moved ahead of him, ever cautiously. He thought of unseen voyeurs out there in the scree, perhaps laughing the way small humanoid things will do. Perhaps waiting to kill him.
_______________
He paused often, looked around. Now the vertical rolls of loose shale were less steep. But it was as if they only offered a better view of things to show they were endless. A hill that cast them in shadow looked like a wave of it jagged stone.
Slap my arse, but you could drown in this place.
The hillocks became steeper again, more numerous. They began to hear the distant yelp of some dog or wolf. The occasional crumble of stone. Always, the angled shadows did not seem to line up properly. More than once, he felt disoriented and dizzy. They were always leaning, always trying to avoid the deep and scattered cavities that may or may not have led straight to hell.
In time they were looking behind them as much as they were looking ahead. All day they could never see far off, not until they crested a rise. And by then there would be no sound or movement.
Just an endless undulating ocean of stone.
And now a rising fog.
_______________
Night came in a shroud of bleak mist, a shower of low comets flashing across the sky. In this awful place, Cullfor almost felt that they were aiming for him. He had kept panic in some corner of his belly, but now he could not always hold it down. He had once heard these incredible wrinkles were haunted. That carts even rolled uphill by themselves out here.
It is horrible thing, discover truth in horrors stories.
“I think we may one day return here to build a home,” Bunn said, tumbling down an impossible trail.
She was sweaty and exhausted.
“It is lovely,” he told her.
As they tended to, her words settled his mind. He took stock: Stillness underscored t
he moving fog. Soon they would arrive at the beach. Soon they could follow it to the slave bays.
No. Listen.
The distant lap of water. Familiar water. Anyone who has grown up on a river knows that river’s voice… They were back near the Gardenwater River.
A thump.
“Ooh,” Bunn said.
He looked around.
An arrow was jutting from her stomach.
Chapter 95
“Perspective is as much a vice as it is a tool. But then, a vice is a tool. Ask One Eye Bev, who I took in the dark.”
—Lord Uncle Fie Wyrmkiller.
_______________
Bunn bent, her face frozen in a silent howl. Cullfor leapt toward her, holding her upright as she went to her knees. Her face was a snarl. There was a noise like a hint of laughter squeaking out. She rocked back and forth as she leaned forward on all fours.
“Don’t dream me from this,” she said.
And he had no idea what she meant.
The bloody steel arrowhead protruded out of her back, just over her buttock. Her kidney perhaps. But there was no perhaps.
“Good,” he whispered. “Love, I need you to stay exactly like that.”
She was shaking.
Cullfor knelt opposite her. He was shaking too. There was a score of men coming, holding taut bows. He could see their small line of rowboats now, tied together down the hill at the beach of a foggy river.
He growled out a low rumble that halted them a step.
Bunn’s breath was making a strange mewling sound like a kitten. Briefly, he kissed the top of her head. Then he spat in his hand and grabbed the feathered end of the arrow under her. With the other he gripped the bloody head.
“I want you to breathe, love,” he said.
He was unable to look at her as he snapped the shaft just in front of her stomach.