The Mermaid's Tale

by D. G. Valdron

  Arukh squatted before me. I let my eye roam. More Arukh. I opened them fully, feeling abrupt pain with the movement. I was in a circle of squatting Arukh. The little Arukh knelt beside me, her great bronze Troll sword out and ready. There was a Troll standing just beyond us. The young one. He nodded at me.

  “You should be dead,” he said.

  I grunted.

  Nothing seemed to be badly broken. I moved carefully, climbing to my feet.

  “It was not by your will that you are not. It was not by the will of Kakihish that you are not.”

  I stared at him, rubbing dried blood out of my eye.

  “Your will?” I asked. “Iron Pants?”

  Had they bargained for my life.

  Why? I wondered. What game were the Trolls playing with each other?

  Not with each other. With us. With me. With the Horsemen. My stomach filled with bile as I saw the Trolls for what they really were. My fists clenched, and in that moment, had I the power, I’d have slaughtered every single one of them.

  “Carrion creature,” I barked in the Troll’s tongue. I switched back to trade speech.

  “You are like the Prince. You play with lives.”

  A shadow crossed his face.

  “Not like the Prince,” he replied in Troll. “We play with lives. He plays with death. Only Arukh do not understand the difference there.”

  “The Prince...”

  “The Prince is inconsequential, as are you.”

  “You will not be saved a second time,” he said switching to the trade speech.

  He switched to formal Troll, uttering a litany.

  “I tell you this: The Interdict of Trolls has been pronounced upon you and the word is being spread. Every Troll who hears it shall be bound by the Interdict. The Trolls together shall bind all other peoples. Every creature that hears it shall be bound by our Interdict or shall be reckoned our enemy and marked for our vengeance. I tell you now so that you will be bound most of all.”

  “I have been hunted by Trolls,” I snarled. “And yet...”

  “The Lodge is forbidden you. The City will be forbidden you. All things shall be forbidden you. Even the air you draw breath from shall be forbidden you. We have pronounced your destruction.”

  “You are nothing to us and your power is nothing to us. There is no power that will defend you, and even if there were, we would destroy that power as if it were nothing. We pronounce the destruction of everyone who gives you aid, we pronounce the destruction of anything that tolerates you.

  “We poison the water that you drink and taint the meat that you eat, we burn the ground upon which you step. Any Troll... any being, that knows you, must kill you.”

  He paused, considering. It struck me that he was not speaking freely, but rendering a speech that had been given to him.

  “You have at most a few days before it is complete among Trolls. A few days after that before it extends through the City. You should go away. Flee while you may. Go as far from the City as you can, and hide yourself from the sight of anything that walks on two legs.”

  He stood then, and with that long loping gait of Trolls, strode back into the lodge.

  He stopped.

  “Gratitude would be too much to expect from an Arukh,” he said in Troll. “Pity.”

  I watched him vanish through the doorway.

  The Arukh stared at me. They hadn’t understood the speech. A careful move on the young Troll’s part to pronounce in a language the witnesses would not understand.

  My death had been ordained, and the best Iron Pants could do for me was to delay it.

  How much power did the Horsemen have if they could bend the society of Trolls? I didn’t want to reckon it, cold chills went up my spine at the thought.

  I could see the difference the Troll had drawn between their games and the Prince’s. I just could not love them for it.

  They were making a mistake, if they thought they could tame the Horsemen. Eventually, they’d die for that mistake. I took no satisfaction from that thought.

  I thought about running for the rest of my life. Running from everyone and everything. Fighting for every minute, buying my days at the price of others lives. Suddenly, I was weary, immensely weary.

  And the Prince would go on killing.

  “No,” I said aloud.

  No, he wouldn’t go on killing if I could stop him. My life for his. That was a fair bargain. Fairer than any other I’d find.

  “What did he say?” the little Arukh hissed quietly, just in case the Trolls might hear.

  “Nothing good,” I replied.

  The doorway of the Lodge lay before us, dark and inviting, if not my refuge, at least a safer more secure place than the street, now forbidden.

  There were fires everywhere. The dock was burning with a thick black oily smoke that rose billowing into the sky, the flames, dull orange, leaped and danced.

  Other places, buildings I’d passed and wondered at, burned. The fires crept down their tethers, smoldering blackly, peels of white smoke rising.

  Here and there people ministered to their dead or wounded. Others rushed back and forth. Some wandered about in shock.

  Near the dock, I came to the Captain. Zizga. He’d boasted that the city bowed to the Selk.

  He held the Selk girl in his arms. Fhala? No. Vhalala. She wouldn’t care what I called her now, there was a great empty hole in the centre of her chest. It was empty. She’d stopped bleeding a while back. He whispered in her ear, put his hand against her brow, against unseeing eyes.

  He looked up at me, his cheeks shining. His eyes were empty.

  “Hagrik,” he said. He knew what the word meant, but he could put no force in it. If there was anger in him, it was not for me.

  “No fish for you today,” he told me, “I’m sorry. No fish at all.”

  “Arrah,” I whispered.

  Past him I saw the fish wagons smashed. One of the oxen remained. Butchered.

  Near the wreck of one of the wagons, the female Vampire laid against a broken wheel. Her eyes were closed, and her left arm was cased in a bloody bandage. The sand beside her was stained.

  The Dwarf was hovering over her. Trying to wash away the blood with a broken crock half full of riverwater. He glanced at me.

  “Carrion crow,” he said, “come to loot.”

  “No.”

  “I served them poorly,” he said. “I warned them of Hagrik. I was wrong. The danger lay elsewhere. The Horsemen came. We tried to fight them.”

  “They aren’t your people.”

  “Everywhere,” he said, “they’re driven out or die. Once they were on every river and stream, now they are only in little places here and there. Only here did they prosper.”

  “You know what they call the city?” he asked. He didn’t wait for me. “They called it ‘the safe place.’”

  “There is no safe place,” I said.

  “Would that there was,” he replied. “Would that there was.”

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  The Vampire moaned softly, he forgot about me, returning to her with the tenderness of a lover. Which, I realized now, was what they were.

  I watched him minister to the Vampire. Her hand fluttered, and he folded it in his own.

  “She isn’t your people. They aren’t your people,” I told him. “Neither of you. What did you care? Why did you fight?”

  “You wouldn’t understand about people,” he said. “The Hagrik have no people.”

  The Vampire moaned. He touched her solicitously.

  “This is true,” I said. But he wasn’t listening any more.

  The Captain was still whispering to the corpse. I turned and knelt beside him.

  “No fish,” he whispered to me, “no fish, no fish.”

  “She’s dead,” I said
softly. I wasn’t sure he knew. Perhaps the Selk knew nothing of death. Perhaps all they knew were stately processions of funeral boats, drifting ceremoniously out to sea.

  “She’s my daughter,” he said.

  Vhalala who fished with her father and made love on beaches, who pulled up scuttler pots and laughed and swam and ate, was dead.

  “Arrah,” I said softly.

  “Arrah,” he said. “You say that. What does it mean?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” I replied.

  I stopped and thought.

  “I met a mighty Shaman once. His name was Forty Friends. He told me something,” I said haltingly.

  I wet my lips and continued.

  “He said the Arukh only had one word. It was their word for rage and for pain, for fighting and dying. It was a word spoken in sorrow and anger. It was the word they said to a world that didn’t want them, that had no place for them. It was loneliness and defiance and in the end it was sorrow and surrender. ‘Arrah’ he told me, it was all the words the Arukh needed.”

  He nodded.

  “Arrah,” he said. “It is a good word.”

  “Arrah,” I replied.

  “Arrah,” he shouted to the sky, tears running down his face, he held the body close to him. “Arrah! Arrah! Arrah!”

  “Arrah,” I said.

  Eventually, the Ublul came to get me.

  It was the big one. Slal. He was cut badly around the arms and head and shoulders. He could barely see out from under bandages oozing blood.

  He stumbled as he walked. He was very weak.

  “We couldn’t stop them,” he said gasping, as we paused to allow him to gather his strength. “They came on horses. I tried to hold a horse, but it was too big. It moved and I couldn’t stop it. He swung and swung and I had to let go.”

  “The Dwarves have lances,” I told him. “For Arukh. For Vampires. They use lances to fight horse riders.”

  “We will have lances,” Slal said fiercely. “Next time.”

  There was something harsh in his voice. He straightened and lead me forward.

  “They came riding, and they killed and killed and burned. And then they rode away,” he said.

  “All of them,” he concluded.

  All of them. The words rang painfully as confession. The famed Ublul had failed. They hadn’t stopped a single Horseman.

  He took me to a boat where Selk waited.

  “The Elders wait,” he told me. “They will not come on to land.”

  Nervously, I eyed the boat. I didn’t think that they were planning to drown me. It seemed... inappropriate. I got in.

  I sat alone in the boat with the Ublul as the Selk swam it out to the great offshore lodges. Docking, we climbed atop a lodge, walking up and across an immense made thing.

  It was thick with Selk, old, young, male, female. They milled about. I realized that many of these had fled the shore.

  I looked across the water. Fires burned, smoke rose in billows of black and white. Small shapes walked back and forth. Were funeral boats being loaded now, packed with corpses for the journey to the sea?

  The Elders awaited me.

  “Honourable Sirs,” I said, lapsing into Dwarf honorific. They looked confused.

  The Speaker for Elders stepped forward.

  “You have acted with honour,” he said formally. “We thank you.”

  I nodded carefully, not bobbing my head.

  “There has been a conversation,” he said diplomatically. He glanced at the fires.

  For a moment, nothing was said. We stood there, thinking of the conversation he’d mentioned but had not explained. It hardly needed explanation.

  “We thank you for your services,” he concluded after a silence.

  They started to turn away.

  “What?” I asked, confused. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  The lead Elder stopped and turned back to me, the rest continued to walk away.

  “We require nothing further from you,” he explained.

  “What about the Prince?” I asked. “He still lives.”

  “Yes, he does. It is not your concern.”

  “What about what happened here?”

  “It does not concern you. We do not blame you.”

  I remembered with sudden shame my first meeting with the elders, and my casual offhanded denial of the Mermaid’s murder. They still accused me of nothing.

  I no longer felt blameless.

  “That’s it then,” I asked. “What about the gold?”

  “You have earned it.”

  I snarled, half in shame, half anger.

  “Cowards.”

  He stared at me.

  “They will come back,” I said. “They will not stop.”

  I’d seen that in the Tavern. The Horsemen didn’t stop. They would just keep on coming until the enemy was destroyed.

  He nodded.

  “It will not be the same, next time,” he promised.

  “Then why?”

  “Terrible times are coming, we see this. You are free to save your life as best you can,” he told me.

  I started to speak, and then stopped. He turned and began to walk away. After a few paces, he stopped.

  “Save yourself,” he said, “if you can.”

  “We set you free from obligation,” another said, “do you understand that? We will not bind you if doing so is your destruction. You are free to run.”

  “You...” I wrestled with the thought, “you’re trying to help me?”

  Anyone else, it would have been hypocrisy, deception. But these were the Selk. I saw it. They’s summoned me and I had served them, I’d refused to let go and they saw me dragging myself down, clinging to my obligation, drowning with it. And they were trying to cut me free.

  “No,” I said. “It’s not for you, I hunt the Prince. This is not an obligation to you, you cannot release me from it.”

  But then, I wondered, what was it for? Why wouldn’t I let go?

  The eldest turned to me. “So be it. If you wish then, come back to us. We shall give you such shelter as we have.”

  “The Interdict,” I said.

  “We know the interdict,” the Speaker told me. “We offer our safety. Such as we have.”

  “But...” I started.

  What then? I thought. They would defy the Trolls. But, against the Interdict of Trolls, against the Horsemen, what could they do but die in piles as my enemies came for me? Madness.

  I thought of Zizga and his fishermen hung up on spikes, of the stonecutter I’d met, of Slal and the Ublul, Speaker and the Elders, all ground down beneath Trolls or Horsemen.

  No. I would not come back to them. I would never see the Mermaids again.

  “There is no safe place,” I said.

  “We do not know if we can save our people,” he agreed.

  All I could give them was time.

  I could not stand here.

  He stopped and bowed at me, his smile humourless.

  “So we have learned.”

  Selk milled about me, but I was apart. They were not my people. I had no people. Only the Ublul remained to take me back.

  “Arrah,” I whispered softly.

  Deep within me something ached that I could not put a name to.

  “I have questions for your King,” I told the Horseman.

  “You know where you can shove your que-”

  Furiously angry, I hissed and twisted his head around.

  There was a moment of stillness, as if every voice, even the wind had silenced. My fury vanished as quickly as it had come. I stared at the man I’d just killed, feeling somehow troubled. Something had gone from the world. He had lived in every moment I’d known. Now his trail was ended. I would know, that wherever I w
as or whatever I did, he would not be in those instants. He would not be somewhere else, doing something else in those moments.

  It was a troubling thought. I shook my head irritably and cuffed him. The head lolled, rolling with my blow. Dead eyes stared off sightlessly.

  I found myself wishing I had not killed him. I was not sure why.

  “Foolish man,” I sighed. I was so tired. “You did not need to die. You might have held your tongue and lived.”

  No answer.

  Irritated, I hit the body again.

  The Little Arukh waited patiently behind me.

  I looked around. There was another manling staring at me. Younger, this one was unbearded.

  I walked over to him.

  “They will be back,” he said trying to shift his weight away from me. His left leg was bent in funny ways. “Keep away from me or you’ll suffer for it.”

  I inspected him, squatting by his leg. He slashed at me with his knife. I took it away and inspected it.

  “Bronze,” I said. “Who has Iron knives?”

  “I know you,” he said, eyes widening. “You are the unholy beast that hunts the Prince for his iron. Why is a knife so important to you?”

  “You are not clever,” I told him, examining his leg. It was broken in many places, almost crushed. It would never heal properly. “Horse fall, you fall with it? Very foolish.”

  I looked at the small Arukh.

  “Remember this,” I said to the manling. “Ride a beast for its power and speed. But only fools ride great beasts as they fall, for in falling they crush what they bear.”

  He grunted as I pushed the leg, moving it back and forth, feeling the bones rub against each other. I could tell he was biting back screams. Good.

  “You are not a good rider. You will not ride again.” I paused. “You will not walk again, even if you keep that leg.”

  “Go to hell,” he snarled.

  I snarled back and pulled hard on the leg. He screamed.

  “Not clever at all,” I told him conversationally. “I do not hunt the Prince for his iron knife. I hunt the Prince because he deserves to die.”

  “Uh uh,” he gasped, “who says?”