by Remi Michaud
Jurel's mood dropped like a stone in a well. Of course they would have to be discreet, he knew. They would certainly spend time together, comfort each other and hopefully grow closer, but it would be entirely too disrespectful for them to be seen traipsing about the farm hand in hand wearing the foolish grins so common to the newly enamored. Jurel was mourning too after all, and he knew that Erin had cared for Galbin as well. Of course. Everyone had.
“Well lad,” Daved said with a stretch, rising from his seat. “I think I'm off to bed. This day has been entirely too long. Are you coming?”
Jurel hesitated before shaking his head. “If you don't mind, I'd like to finish my cup and maybe have a tankard of ale. My thoughts are restless and I think I would like to stay this vigil a while longer.”
“I'll see you at home then. Good night.”
“Good night,” Jurel called after his departing father.
He added a log to the embers, blew until they glowed bright yellow and a flame licked up from the new fuel, then he drained his brandy and filled a tankard with ale from the tapped keg in the corner of the room before letting himself fall back into his brooding. He took a long draw from his tankard, his mind flitting like a hummingbird from thought to thought, from memory to memory.
Life under Galbin's leadership had been pleasant. His son kept it from being idyllic but all in all, Jurel had been comfortable, if often bored. The memory of Galbin playing his little jokes made him smile sadly. Galbin had once gone into the hands's quarters while the day was in full swing, and he had moved all the trunks that were at the foot of each cot and held the personal belongings of his employees, snickering all the while as Jurel watched, so that when the hands returned, no one could find their own belongings. It had taken nearly two hours to sort out the mess and Galbin had laughed uproariously the entire time.
His men got their revenge the next week however. As Jurel remembered, Merle had distracted Galbin with inane questions, questions that any farmer with more than a week's worth of experience would have known the answers to, and while Galbin answered these questions with growing exasperation, another hand—Porris? Or was it Kerv? Jurel could not quite remember—had replaced the ale in his tankard with very, very sour cider. When he had picked up his tankard from the fence post, and took a long swallow...
Oh, how his lips had puckered, almost disappearing behind his teeth while his eyes bulged and watered and his friends laughed, slapping him on his broad back.
The man had reveled in spreading happiness and mirth, lived for it, loved nothing quite so much as working side by side with his men, passing laughter and joy around.
He was conscientious too, almost to a fault. Always, always he had been the first up in the morning while the sun was no more than a hint on the eastern horizon, preparing for the day's work, and always, no matter the chore, he led the vanguard, getting his hands dirty as much and more as any of them. Never had he asked someone to do something that he would not do. Never, never had he ordered someone to do something he knew was dangerous. That fact alone explained why he was going cold at that very moment.
Jurel sat for a time, idly tracing the whorls in the oak table with a finger, not really seeing, pondering the nature of good and evil, of whether or not, the world was one or the other. Amazed, he mused at the way good things never seemed to last. Good days turned bad, good food spoiled, good people died. He would have wagered a great deal just then—he would have bet the farm as the expression went—that Valik, that vile little turd, that evil snot-nosed bastard, would live to be very, very old. A flame of anger ignited in his chest. Where was justice? Were the concepts of right and wrong, of good and evil, just that? Were they myths, some figment of the imagination? Perhaps they were. Or perhaps the world was evil to allow such atrocities.
He snorted disdainfully. No. The world was not evil. He saw that every spring when life grew again, and flowers covered meadows with rainbow carpets. He saw it when he had seen a she-wolf protect her cubs from the hunters who surrounded her with spears. She had been outnumbered—six hunters against one wolf—and yet she held her ground in front of her pups, teeth bared and snarling. No the world was not evil. Or good for that matter. It simply...was.
He blew out his breath and took another long swallow of ale, knowing that particular train of thought was useless. They were the kinds of thoughts that kept philosophers and scholars up at night, and they had no use on a farm. What happened to Galbin was no more than a tragic accident brought on by an ill-conceived notion. As tragic as it was, like the world around, it simply was.
The click of the latch at the front door brought him out of his reveries and he glanced up just in time to see a dark silhouette ghost by in the hallway.
Now who would that be up at this hour? His question was answered quickly enough.
“What in blazes?” roared Valik as he stepped into the dining room. “What in bloody horse bollocks are you doing here?”
He stumbled a step and Jurel noticed the wildly tousled hair and bleary eyes.
Drowning his sorrows. I wonder if it worked?
A knot of apprehension coiled in the middle of a shell of pity in his guts, like a snake coils under a cool rock as he stood to face his disheveled nemesis.
“Valik, I'm sorry. Your father-”
“Shit on you Jurel. Shit on you and your coward lies,” Valik hissed as he took a threatening step forward. “Here you sit in my dining room drinking my ale and you dare spout your shit? Why are you here, boy?” he demanded and spittle flew from his lips.
“Your mother told my father and I to stay as long as we wished. I thought to keep a vigil in honor of your father,” he rushed his words to get them out, needed to get them out, before Valik could interrupt. “Valik, please, your father's death struck all of us like a hammer and I truly am sorry for you and your mother.”
Valik glowered at him, eyes bulging with pent rage, body quivering like a dam ready to burst under unimaginable pressures. A low growl rumbled from his throat and it rose in intensity until, when it reached a fevered shout, he lunged forward fingers reaching like claws to grip Jurel's shirt.
“Shut up! Shut up you coward,” he shrieked. “My father kept me from beating you to a pulp as you deserved so often.” A terrible smile creased his face and the sweet-sour stench of stale alcohol washed over Jurel in humid, putrid waves. “But he's not here anymore, is he?”
Jurel could do no more than gape stupidly.
Perhaps his grief has unhinged him.
Certainly they had never been friends. Certainly, even Jurel had entertained the notion of putting Valik in his place but right now? With Galbin dead upstairs? What would he say to this...this farce?
“This is not the time to settle our differences Valik.”
“Of course not. It never is for you. You're a coward. That's why you always hid behind my father. That's why this is the perfect time to—how did you say it?—'settle our differences.'”
A flash of light erupted behind Jurel's eyes and the room tilted nauseatingly. His cheek flared into a white hot forge and he stumbled back a step, or would have if Valik had not had such a tight grip. Valik's fist flashed again, stars erupted, and again Jurel had to blink to stop the room from spinning.
He pried himself free, tearing his shirt in the process, and stumbled quickly away. That strange yet familiar ringing in his ears began to keen from a great distance while a bitter lump choked him, kept him from speaking. He backed away another step with his hands held up, a silent entreaty to the blindly raging man in front of him.
“I heard you were there when my father died,” Valik hissed, stalking forward like a hunting cat. “I heard you let him fall to his death.”
Am I to be the mouse again?
The ringing in his ears seemed to be getting closer, growing in intensity so that he had to concentrate to hear what Valik said. An image in his mind: a tavern lost in the mists of time, a father, his father wearing his white apron with a red flower that was not a
flower in the middle, gaping in shock.
Valik struck again and Jurel trembled, saw lightning, felt it.
“I'm going to hurt you, boy,” Valik growled and there was a sick satisfaction in his voice, a cruel skeleton's grin on his face. “I'm going to hurt you like you've never been hurt before.”
Jurel doubled over with a breathy “oomph” when Valik plowed his fist into his gut.
Behind his eyes, light flared like a lightning strike: Flash!
He gawked at his father who slumped into savage arms, his head sagging as though too heavy to be supported by his neck. The ringing in his ears deafened him yet he still managed to hear malicious laughter, like rocks grating on rocks.
Flash!
He staggered back, blood spraying from broken lips and Valik stumbled forward under his own momentum. Jurel fought. But it was not against Valik, it was against himself. He railed and he beat at the unwanted images that flashed through his maddened mind. He tried to speak again. He tried to halt Valik's insane attack. Valik spoke. He knew he spoke because his lips moved, formed shapes that were familiar, but he could not decipher them. He knew he spoke, but the ringing in his ears—more a deafening roar now—kept it away.
But then he did hear something. Later, much later, in another place far away, Jurel would wonder idly if Valik ever regretted his next words.
“You killed my father, you bastard,” Valik screamed.
Something in Jurel bent, threatened to break like a sapling in a hurricane.
Flash!
His father was hauled across the floor leaving a smeared trail of blood to mark his passage. Slowly the dead man—for as pale as he was, and as limp, he was most surely dead—raised his head and Jurel gasped, horrified.
Daved's hawk eyes bored into his soul and he grinned a grin filled with danger, and for some reason, exaltation.
“Defend yourself, boy. Nothing wrong with fighting for what's right,” Daved said grinning that mad grin.
That which was bent in Jurel cracked. He felt a tearing in his mind like wet cotton and he looked up to see Valik advancing, pressing his advantage. The ringing in his ears changed. It was still the same familiar jangling, but underneath there was a new element: a hum, deep and ominous and somehow victorious.
Valik's fist came at him as though it came through thick oil and it was with an almost casual motion that he raised his own hand and caught it, stopping it as surely as a brick wall stops a feather.
“I don't think so,” Jurel said and in the deepest recesses of his mind, in the place where he held onto himself, onto sanity itself, he was shocked by how calm his voice sounded. “I don't think I'm going to take your abuse any longer Valik.”
He said it with a casualness that was completely at odds with the erupting violence. I don't think it will rain today, Valik, he could have been saying. Valik's eyes widened, in shock, in...fear? If Jurel could have seen his own countenance just then, he would have understood. His face was twisted with a rage so deep, so complete, it seemed only possible for God's own face. And his eyes...his eyes! Moving with almost inhuman speed, Jurel gripped Valik's coat in one hand and hoisted him clear of the ground.
“I have never done you harm. I have never been malicious. I have never even defended myself against your bullying. Well except for that white shirt of yours. Do you remember that? That was me you know. Did you know? No matter,” he said quietly, calmly, through that wrath-of-a-god expression, “I will not hear your foul words anymore.”
Without effort, he hurled Valik over the table and across Galbin's dining room where he landed with a graceless thud and a tangling of limbs. Before Valik could reorient himself, Jurel lunged over the table and picked him up. Valik's eyes were wide, terrified when Jurel brought him near.
“Your father's death,” Jurel continued, still maddeningly calm, “was an accident. A tragic, terrible accident that I could do nothing to avert.”
He swung his own fist like a cudgel and Valik rocked and shuddered under the mammoth power of Jurel's rage. Without pause, Jurel brought his fist back around, his knuckles catching Valik on the jaw and his head snapped back around. Jurel distinctly saw two points of white glitter in the faint firelight as they flew across the dining room and it was with detached interest that he realized he had knocked out teeth. Valik slumped in his arms and he worked his broken mouth, gasping.
“Stop,” the bully croaked. “Please stop.”
“Oh you want me to stop do you?”
Jurel struck him again. Blood spattered on the floor. Valik began to blubber weakly, tried to raise his hands in defense but Jurel batted them away as one might bat at a pesky fly.
“For thirteen years, I begged you to stop,” he said glaring at the bleeding, pathetic lump he held. “For thirteen years, you tormented me.”
Another powerful blow rocked the weeping Valik who cringed away like a whipped puppy. And with one final punch, Jurel threw Valik back across the dining room where the injured man landed slumped against the wall like a child's forgotten rag doll. Jurel stalked to Valik's cringing form and glared down.
“It ends now!” Jurel roared.
He raised one fist like a terrible final judgment.
“Please, Jurel. Please,” sobbed a barely conscious Valik. He looked up to his lifelong victim who was now his tormentor. “I'll stop. I'm sorry. Anything you say. Just...please. Stop.”
Jurel froze. A new wave of emotion rolled in as he regarded the pathetic creature before him. A wave that was even more relentless than his rage was. Pity, remorse, horror. It was all mingled together in a jumbled clump like too many strings and he stepped away with eyes widening, confused by what he saw.
What am I doing?
There was no ringing in his ears anymore. It fled with his rage. He stared down at his handiwork. Valik was a mass of welts and blooming bruises under a coating of blood. His jaw seemed to sit the wrong way, hanging awkwardly down on one side, and his right cheek seemed sunken. He gaped like a corpse, terrified of the raging inferno that was Jurel.
He had, in just a few minutes, become exactly that which he despised most. He had become a weapon, an instrument of pain. His throat closed in self-loathing.
“I'm sorry, Jurel,” Valik muttered weakly, his words slurring through his shattered jaw. “Please stop. I'm sorry.”
Choking on his own bile, Jurel fled, stumbling down the hall and through the front door into the cold winter night. Sobbing, he fell off the porch, landed badly, his feet shooting out from under him. There were stabs of pain in his hands when they hit the rough, frozen ground. Choking back a sob, he clambered up, gripping the porch for support.
What happened?
He had enjoyed it. Enjoyed it? No. He had rejoiced every time his fist made bone crushing contact, reveled with every injury he had caused. He stumbled away into the darkness, clutching at his abdomen, got no more than a dozen paces before he fell to his knees and vomited violently in the snow, tainting it with his filth.
What have I done?
“Please, I'm sorry.”
Valik's words bounced in his skull, echoing endlessly like a shriek in a cave, and he stumbled on heedless of direction, heedless of the burst of pain when his ankle twisted on a buried rock, heedless, even, of his own inhuman grunts of shame and misery. He fell into a door without realizing it, opened it without knowing that he did. He moved forward in jerky motions through the darkness, shambling like some undead creature too long in the grave animated by vilest sorcery, not really smelling the scents of dung and dust that hung heavy in the stale air.
Up the rough wooden ladder he climbed on pure instinct alone for his mind was not his at that moment. It was too busy trying to run, to hide, to bury itself away where no one, not even he himself could find it. At the top he collapsed under a ceiling that rippled and flapped lightly in the remnants of the wind that gusted erratically by outside as if some mortally wounded dragon of ice were breathing its last breaths.
He clutched a piece of moldering
canvas that the farmhands had not deemed worthy of serving as a makeshift roof, and he wrapped it around himself because he was cold. So cold, and paradoxically though it was winter, it was a chill that started from inside and worked its way out. He huddled in a corner, burrowing under a mound of hay and shut his eyes tight, trying to will away the storm that raged within, trying to keep himself anchored, moored, for if he let go even for one instant, he knew he would be swept away as surely as a dead wood on a raging river.
As his thoughts tumbled and swirled, a blackness worked its way from the corner of his eyes, and as he fell into a deep sleep, as endlessly deep as an abandoned well, a thought skittered across the edges of his mind, furtive yet insistent:
What have I done? What have I become?
Chapter 20
“Wake up boy!” The grating voice reached down into the blackness of his torpor and he distantly felt himself roughly shaken, dragged from the depths of sleep. He surfaced like a drowning man, his eyes snapped open, and from under his blanket, he saw Daved's solemn visage eying him sternly.
“Father? Wha-what is it?” he mumbled. His head ached, his brain kept trying to escape the too small confines of his skull. His glazed eyes scanned the unfamiliar surroundings. “Where am I?” He was not in his bed, and he could not understand why.
“You're in the barn, lad. Wake up,” Daved commanded. “What in blazes is going on? What have you done?” A tinge of anger colored his voice and Jurel stared afar as his memory returned in bits and pieces, poking like an auger through the black shroud that resisted, resented wakefulness. One memory tore through, hard as granite, sharp as broken glass: a bloody fist, a broken face. Gored beyond repair, the black shroud collapsed. His eyes widened in shock as the last of the previous day's events came crashing down in a mangled heap around him. Bolting upright, Jurel gasped.