by J. J. Faulks
With a hug that seamlessly reversed into a gentle push, his mother sent him on his way. “Off you go now! And work hard!”
Piprin jogged towards the farmhouse. As his mother had reminded him, it was best not to keep his father waiting. Before taking his seat at the front of the cart, he bade farewell to his brothers, receiving their playful punches graciously.
With a click-click of the tongue and a swat of the reins, his father spurred their horse onwards to a bouncing trot. As the cart jolted beneath him, Piprin fell back on to the bench, steadying himself with his hands.
“Where’ve you been all morning? Hmm?” His father demanded, though his tone did not ask for a reply. “How many times do I have to tell you? It’s time that you grew up, stopped acting like a child…”
Piprin stared out across the passing farmland, gazing lazily at the animals and the crops. As he did so, his father’s voice faded into the background of his mind. He did not need to listen in order to hear what his father was saying; it was the same lecture every day.
“…The world isn’t some children’s story as your mother would have you believe. You’re not a boy any more. You have responsibilities, and you can’t hide from them. You’ve got to face them, accept them, like a real man…”
‘Real man,’ Piprin mouthed the words in time with his father. They stung like barbs in his chest. His brothers were real men.
“…Running the farm, providing for your family, making sure that there is food on the table all year round, it’s hard work…”
Piprin stifled a yawn and nodded along to the rant. He dared not point out that times were easier than they once were, that all around them the fields were straining with crops that reached beyond their heads, that the animals were so fattened that they no longer gorged themselves on grass and feed. There was no fear of famine, not since Orleigh had gone. The whole world darkened, cast into a melancholic light. The villagers might have said that she was cursed, but Orleigh was nothing but a blessing in his life.
Chapter Sixteen
The inn bustled, the air thick with bursts of rowdy laughter and blooms of heady smoke. Piprin hovered near the bar, waiting for the payment. Although he tried his best to stay out of the way, patrons kept jostling past. Each time, he jumped back and apologised, but the men paid him no mind.
A crowd had gathered at the bar; its centre of focus was an old man, greasy and greying, who sat scrumpled over the counter. What had started as only a few men had thickened into an audience. The old man drank in the attention, just as he drank in the stream of drinks that his congregation supplied.
Piprin stood on the outskirts. The old man was telling a story, a story so lavish that it could have been mistaken for one of the great myths. Piprin glanced towards the doorway; his father would be waiting outside, growing evermore impatient.
“Here you are, love.” The landlady deposited a jangle of coins into his palm. “Send our best to your mother, won’t you?” Chucking his cheek, she sent him on his way.
He looked to the door again, his father’s snarling face vivid in his mind, but he hesitated, his ears pulling him back to the story. “Just a few minutes longer,” he bargained with himself and stepped closer to the throng, peering over shoulders to see the old man deliver his performance.
“…I couldn’t sit back and watch our people starve, not when I had the power to save them. So there was only one choice—” the old man raised one finger for emphasis, “I had to take the girl, I had to free our village of her curse. When night fell, I took her from her home—took her from the shadow of her father’s despair—and we journeyed to the borderland. I carried her there myself. I did not stop, I did not look back, I just kept on going until we reached the Land of Gods.”
The old man paused to loosen his tongue with another swig of ale. “As I waited at the border, the Great Forest shook, heralding Teymos’s arrival. Teymos stepped out of the trees. He was as tall as two men and built like an ox. As he crossed the field to meet me, the flowers bowed at his feet and the sun struggled to outshine his radiance. He greeted me at the border and asked me about my journey. He thanked me for my offering and promised me that the curse had been lifted.”
Piprin frowned. The girl the old man spoke of had to be Orleigh. “But,” he muttered under his breath, “Orleigh’s dead.”
“Do you really expect us to believe that Teymos, the great Earth God, spoke to you?” One of the men heckled, raising a riotous laugh from the other customers.
The old man offered nothing more than a smirk in reply. It looked as though he did not care whether anyone believed him or not, it looked as though such scorn did not bother him so long he was showered with attention and plied with ale, but there was a slight falter beneath the smirk, as if the man was damming a stream of vitriol.
With the entertainment over, the crowd dispersed, leaving only Piprin lingering nearby. His view no longer obscured, the niggle of recognition gave way to realisation. It was Scorlan. He seemed smaller somehow, as if withered by time, but he was definitely Scorlan.
The blush of fear that had washed over him as a young boy faced by Scorlan rose up inside him again now, though that fear had been scorching red and this had more of a pinkish hue. He took a step closer to the bar, sweat beading on his palms, but his courage deserted him. Wiping his hands down on his shirt, he retreated. As he stepped backwards, he bumped up against the table behind him.
The men at the table fell silent and glowered at him.
“Sorry,” Piprin stammered, and he withdrew to the corner. It felt as though all eyes in the tavern were staring at him, but when he glanced around he saw that no one had even noticed him.
The men at the table resumed their conversation, and Piprin could not help but overhear that one of the men was telling his friends the story of Amphion and the lion, though his words were slurred and the plot was wrong. Piprin knew the myth well: it was a myth about courage. He recalled the story, hearing the words spoken in his mother’s voice.
At the centre of the marketplace was a row of cages, each housing a wild animal, captured and displayed for the amusement of men. Amphion passed the cages each and every day, but he never stopped to look. He turned his gaze away, a show of his contempt for the practice. The animals, once majestic in the wild, looked forlorn and defeated.
One day, when Amphion arrived at the marketplace, there was a loud commotion. Women were shrieking, and children were being ushered away. Amphion looked through the agitated crowd towards the row of cages. The door of the lion’s cage was hanging open, and the lion was prowling about the centre of the forum. There were men with large poles, timidly facing the lion, trying to back it away from the crowds. But sticks of wood would not frighten the creature. The lion let out a ferocious roar. With its teeth bared, the men began to shake.
Amphion watched closely. As the lion walked, it limped. Amphion bustled through the crowd to take a closer look. The lion was most definitely limping. It had hurt its paw. Amphion continued on towards the cages, pushing his way past the people and the men with their poles. There was a collective gasp as Amphion, hands held aloft, approached the lion. People gawped and declared that they could not look, but their eyes widened so that they might take in more of the scene.
Amphion bowed before the lion. At first the lion snarled, but when met by Amphion’s patience, it was soon calmed. With the animal’s permission, Amphion took its paw in his own hand. He could feel the lion’s hot breath on his neck as he examined the delicate pads of the paw. He soon discovered the problem, what was causing the lion so much pain: there was a jagged thorn jutting out of the flesh. Carefully, Amphion gripped the thorn between thumb and forefinger and he pulled it out. The lion winced in pain, but held still.
With the thorn removed from its paw, the lion bowed to Amphion, a show of its gratitude. Then it turned and trotted away from the marketplace, returning to its rightful home in the
wild.
Scorlan was not wild and ferocious like the lion, but Piprin drew on the courage of Amphion as he stepped towards the bar, where Scorlan was squinting at the last dregs of his ale.
“Excuse me,” Piprin called out as he stood behind Scorlan’s stool. When Scorlan did not reply, he cleared his throat and repeated a little louder, “Excuse me. The girl? The girl in your story. What happened to her?”
Scorlan cast a contemptuous look over his shoulder. “You shouldn’t be in here, boy,” he snarled. “No children allowed.” Then he turned back to his drink.
Piprin rooted in his pocket for a few coins. He laid them out on the counter. It was enough to buy Scorlan his next drink.
Scorlan’s eyebrow arched and, after a pause, he motioned for Piprin to take a seat. He studied Piprin’s face for a long moment, but his eyes lacked recognition.
With a fresh drink in hand, Scorlan spoke. “I handed the girl over to Teymos at the border. He carried her away to the Land of Gods. I don’t know what happened to her after that.” He took a long swig of ale and shot Piprin a challenging stare.
“Is that it?” Piprin said. The drink should have bought him more information than that. “You must know more than that!”
Scorlan showed him his shoulder, the ale once again stealing his focus.
With clenched fists Piprin made his way to the door, chastising himself under his breath, “You shouldn’t have bought him the drink until after!”
“You could talk to the Seer.”
Piprin stopped. He spun back to face the bar, but found that Scorlan had not moved from his hunched over position, one hand clutching at his mug.
“What did you say?”
Scorlan kept his back to him. “The Seer arranged the trade. If you want to know more about the girl, you should ask him.”
“Where in the world have you been?”
The demand struck Piprin the moment he stepped out of the tavern. Fingers of dread tightened around his throat.
His father was stalking back and forth, his face as red as the bunch of radishes that Piprin had delivered. The horse whinnied, agitated by the pacing, and tossed its mane in the air as it strained against the cart.
“How dare you leave me out here, waiting for you like a fool,” Pityr said. “People have been looking at me, staring at me like I’m some kind of simpleton, wondering what I’m doing standing out here on my own. Meanwhile, you’ve been up to who knows what.”
Piprin kept his gaze low. “I had to wait for the payment.”
He tried to slink past his father and clamber up to his seat at the front of the cart, but his father caught hold of his collar. Piprin recoiled, but couldn’t free himself from his father’s grip.
“You’d better not keep me waiting like that again,” his father said, breath hot against Piprin’s cheek. “You hear me, boy?”
Piprin nodded, and his father released him.
The rest of the journey was made in bitter silence. Piprin kept to the edge of the seat, stretching the distance between him and his father as much as possible. He had witnessed his father’s anger many times before, but he had never seen him so enraged that he neglected to lecture him. Piprin relished the silence whilst it lasted. A small smile played on his lips, buoyed by hope. Orleigh might still be alive and if she was, there was a chance that he could find her. All he had to do was visit the Seer.
Piprin rapped on the door. Rap-tap. There was no reply.
He waited. His eyes darted about. Children were playing on the grassy land near the river, using the abandoned grain store as their den. Their squeals carried on the breeze, but there was no noise coming from the house.
Rap-tap, a little more forcefully this time. Piprin paused and then called out, “Ormoss? Are you there?”
The door was wrenched open, allowing light to flood past the giant of a man who blocked the entrance and into the gloomy vestibule. Ormoss’s skin glistened with an unhealthy sheen of sweat, and the wrinkles of his face marked his age likes rings of a tree.
Piprin jumped backwards, startled as much by Ormoss’s appearance as he was by the sudden opening of the door.
“Piprin.” The growl greeted him with undeniable hostility, and Ormoss’s sleepless scowl fell on him, barely veiling its resentment. The look accused him, echoing the question that plagued him: Why didn’t Scorlan take you instead?
“Ormoss.” Piprin’s belly fluttered. “I need to talk to you…Please…If you’re not busy.” He glanced past Ormoss into the shade of the house. He hadn’t stepped foot inside since the night that Orleigh was taken. It was better for everyone that way, his mother had tried to console him.
Ormoss folded his arms across his broad chest. “What do you want, Piprin?”
“I wanted to talk to you,” Piprin said, “About something I overheard the other day, in a tavern along the trade route.”
Ormoss shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Well, be quick about it,” he said. “I can’t stand here all day.”
“There was a man there, telling a story,” Piprin said. He spoke quickly, the fog of disinterest already beginning to marble Ormoss’s eyes. “He claimed that he had taken a girl, cursed by the gods, from her home and delivered her to Teymos. It’s been a long time, I know, but I am certain that the man was Scorlan and the girl he talked about was Orleigh. I spoke to him and he told me that Orleigh was still alive when he handed her over, and that she might still be alive, living in the Land of Gods. If it’s true, we could travel to the Land of Gods and—”
Ormoss shook his head. “Go home, Piprin.” He turned back to the darkness, his hand reaching for the door.
“But…” Piprin said. With his mouth agape, the breath upon which his dream soared escaped, lost to the breeze. “But, Ormoss. Orleigh! We could save her!”
“Don’t be so naïve, boy.” Ormoss spoke to the shadows. “It’s time to stop dwelling on your childish fantasies of myths and quests. You’re almost a man now. You have a family to support. Think about them before you embark on something so foolish. Orleigh’s gone; she’s been gone a long time. It’s time that we all moved on.”
Ormoss pushed the door to with a strengthless touch, as if the conversation had sapped what remained of his energy.
But before the door closed him off to the world once more, Piprin interjected into the gap, “How can you say that? How can you just…just give up?” His cheeks flamed. Orleigh wouldn’t have given up, she would have fought like a Guardian.
“Because sometimes you don’t have the strength to go on.” The words drifted through before the door clunked into its frame, punctuating the end of their conversation.
“Well, I won’t give up,” Piprin vowed. “I’ll never give up, even if it means travelling to the Land of Gods on my own!”
*
The Seer dashed the surface of the water, obliterating his own reflection. He steadied himself against the rocks, clamping his teeth together so tightly that it felt they might shatter. The water returned to calm, but his mind remained turbulent. He should not have seen his own face snarling back at him. He should have seen Orleigh. But Orleigh’s image never reappeared in the mirror pool.
Orleigh had arrived in the place where she would have been were fate never disrupted, but being in the right place had proved not to be enough to fix what was broken. In order to restore fate, Orleigh had to discover who she really was.
He turned his attention to the Land of Gods, and there he found what was holding Orleigh back. The lies that Teymos told stopped her from learning the truth. They bound her in her false life. But the girl had a sharp mind, and there were times that she might have cut through the lies and secrecy. There were times that she might have uncovered the truth for herself. She was so close.
Until the Dreamspinner appeared and wove his web that trapped Orleigh in her altered fate.
Th
e only way to untangle Orleigh was to remove her from her new home, to provoke her into finding the truth. The only way to do that was to send someone in, someone strong enough to lure her away from the Land of Gods.
He had been right: Scorlan would prove himself useful once more. He returned the porcupine to the board and set about carving a new figurine. The heroic mouse. It was perfect for Piprin. He edged the piece closer to the depiction of his home within the mountain. Then he took a step back to study the pieces in their new stations. The players glided across the map in his mind, manoeuvring into their final positions. Piprin would be the one to deliver Orleigh to her fate.
Chapter Seventeen
In the bruised light of predawn, Piprin propped up the note in the centre of the kitchen table. He lingered, aligning it so that his neat handwriting would greet his mother as soon as she entered. Slinging his bag over his shoulder, he took a bite from the stale loaf in his hand and he slipped out of the house.
The world looked foreign beneath the moon and stars. The darkness stripped the landscape of its familiarity, exposing its danger and its magic. He walked into the haze of dawn, filled with the heady mix of nerves and excitement. Just like the heroes of his favourite myths, he was on a quest.
What started as a single butterfly fluttering in his stomach grew to an agitated swarm by the time he reached the path approaching the mountain. His pace slowed and other travellers on the trade route began to pass him. When he stalled mid-stride, someone bundled into the back of him, sending him stumbling onto the grass verge.
“Watch it!” the other traveller shouted and stormed by.
“Sorry,” Piprin said, but the man was already several paces further down the road.
He lifted his gaze from the traveller, looking up towards the mountain and the unknowns that it held, and then he turned back to view the path that he had already trodden. The swarm had whipped itself into a frenzy, threatening to burst from the house of his stomach. He reminded himself of his vow. “I will not give up.”