The False Martyr

by H. Nathan Wilcox

“You two, get over here!” interrupted Dasen’s horror. One of the soldiers had spotted him standing at the end of the street with Teth. He grabbed her hand again and ran. “Stop!” the guard yelled after them.

  Dasen did not look back. He ran down the street they had taken from the temple to the next cross street, but the scene there was the same – more soldiers, another wagon, more misery. He did not stop to draw the attention of more pursuit. He ran – Teth at his side – past another block until they came to a dark tunnel between the rows of buildings.

  “Come on,” Teth said from beside him. She pulled him down the alley just ahead of the pursuing soldiers.

  They ran, shoes soon wet with mud and refuse, the stink clogging their noses and making each breath torture until they came to the patch of light at the end. A big shape emerged seemingly from the very wall of a building to block their path. Dasen stumbled to a stop, pulling Teth back with him.

  “You there,” the man yelled. They could not see anything about him in the shadows other than his broad shoulders, thick arms, and the club in his hand. “Stop! I can help.”

  Dasen pulled Teth back into the darkness. He was sure there’d been a side passage, and this seemed the one place that the soldiers refused to go. They came to the center of the alley, found the passage. Another shadow was waiting.

  “This’s our spot,” a wiry voice said. Its owner was lost in shadow, shape and age indistinguishable. He was smaller than either of them, but more shadows appeared around him. They held shapes in their hands that might have been sticks or knives or pans or tools. There true nature no longer mattered. They were weapons now, and they represented far more than either Dasen or Teth had to defend themselves. “Lessen ya got somethin’ ta pay, there ain’t no room fir ya.”

  Dasen grabbed Teth’s arm and started leading her back. “We don’t want any trouble. We’re just trying to avoid the soldiers.”

  “An’ leadin’ ‘em ta us.” The small shadow closed a few paces. Enough light made it from the street to glint off a line of steel in his hand.

  Dasen held his own hands up and started backing away, eyes bouncing between the shapes that only seemed to multiply and follow. The gang formed before them, and Dasen could only back away . . . and pray.

  “Is this part of your plan, you blind old fuck?” Teth breathed, almost unintelligible from behind him. A battle cry followed, strong and clear. She pushed Dasen’s arm down and threw him to the side. Baffled, he tried to stop her – a day ago she wouldn’t have bothered running from a burning house; now she was pushing her way toward a knife – struggled to hold her back. “It’s my choice,” she mumbled as she fought him. “Come on, you little bastard,” she snarled at the boys before them. “Let’s see whose alley this really is.”

  The one before them snickered, glancing to his sides. His gang joined him. They seemed to have no doubt whatsoever as to how this would go.

  The knife flashed toward Teth with no further warning. Dasen found the collar of her shirt and pulled her back, caught her just in time to keep her from the path of the blade that she had been doing nothing to avoid. Had she been leaping into it? The thought flew through his mind, but he had no time to consider it. The knife was slicing toward him now. He tried to dodge, but his feet got tangled with Teth’s as she fell back toward him. They went down together into the muck.

  “I’ll gut you!” the little man screamed, madness clear in his cracked voice. “I own this alley. I own it!” He spread his arms, shifted the knife, and brought it around to drive it into his prey. Lying on his back, tangled with Teth, Dasen could only wait for it to come.

  His fear took over. Everything slowed down and came into focus. He could suddenly see the young man before him. Not his face, his soul. He could see his hatred, his pain, his madness. But there was fear too. The gang was terrified of their leader. He was one of the smallest of their number, but he terrified them almost as much as the soldiers in the streets. Dasen eschewed the madness before him, wanted no part of that fire. He used the fear instead. He pulled it in, felt it fill him. He had the power again, and he knew how to use it. His own fear turned to anger in the maelstrom. His thoughts scattered. His teeth clenched. He focused on the madness before him, on the horrors he had seen, on the helplessness he had felt. Not helpless now, he thought as he focused the power, as he prepared his revenge.

  “Dasen, no,” Teth whispered from beneath him.

  The words cut through his mind as surely as the knife aimed at his throat. They nearly shattered his concentration, nearly ended it all. He held on against the tremble that Teth had created and thought of her. He could not let her see what he had planned, could not make her face that again. She would not survive it. But if he did not act, they would both die here/ among the rats in the darkness and filth. Rats, Dasen realized. He concentrated on the power ravaging his mind. What scares the rats away?

  He formed a wish in his mind, begged the power to make it come true, and let it go. Runes flashed through his mind. His hands moved. And the very air blazed with the light of the sun. In a singled, tremendous flash, the night was stripped away by a light brighter than a thousand candles.

  Dasen had not thought to close his eyes. He fell back, writhing in the muck, rolling away from Teth. He was blind, could not see the effect of the light, but did not wait long for his answer.

  Screams sounded before him. “I’m blind!” voices yelled. There were crashes and moans as the gang stumbled back, crashing over one another. They scrabbled in the muck like beetles on their backs. They were down, they were blinded, but there were no other places to go. Eventually, the gang would find them with or without sight. Dasen rubbed his eyes but saw only white light like he was staring still into the very center of the sun.

  Footsteps sounded behind him, squishing through the muck. “There they are. Grab them, get them inside,” a gruff voice yelled. “Hurry, that light won’t keep them down for long.”

  Strong hands lifted Dasen, one under each arm and another set at feet. Teth screamed, but it was cut short, muffled by a hand or a gag. “Stop . . . !“ Dasen started, but a hand ended the plea.

  Somewhere, a fist pounded on wood. “The white crane flies again!” a voice shouted. “The white crane flies again! Damn it, Mark, let us in.”

  Blinded and muffled, Dasen heard a bolt release, a door swing open. He was thrown through a door onto unforgiving stones. “Be careful, you idiots!” A voice yelled. He slid along those stones until the back of his head bounced against something hard, and the bright light that was his vision went dark.

  Chapter 35

  The 31th Day of Summer

  “Eselhelt is arriving today,” Juhn told Cary as they stared out the open window toward the shadowy mountains rising from the edge of the flat plain. “A runner arrived an hour ago. You should see them soon.”

  “What is the point?” Cary asked, turning from the window. Wearing the brown robes of an order keeper, he had been skulking about in the order passages for six days now with little more to show for it beyond images of old women speaking together in their native language, young women completing domestic tasks, and children learning numbers and letters. He had never thought he could be bored being the first outsider to explore a Morg lodge, but that was the truth of it. Every room in the lodge appeared to fit one of four or five variants, and all of them were sparse. Any titillation he hoped to get from eavesdropping on important conversations was ruined by the fact that he had no idea what was being said. Even simple voyeurism was prevented by the fact that the eligible men were all away for the summer, and even if they were Morgs, Cary had no interest in watching the lovemaking of people who could be his grandparents.

  “Eselhelt is the last of the distant lodges to arrive,” Juhn explained. “Mehret, Hvartin, and Ostoff are close enough that their Mothers will not come until tomorrow when the Thull and Callik are ready to begin.” The Order Master had explained this to Cary the day after their meeting with Nyel when they watched the representat
ives from Pada Por arrive. It seemed tradition dictated that the representatives from each lodge arrive in the order of their distance from Torswauk. Invermere and Stermspek had already been present when Carry arrived, so he had watched the others come day-after-day: Pada Por, Okotok, Inuvik, and now Eselhelt. Cary could not tell the slightest difference between any of them. Each lodge’s envoy consisted of a dozen or so women on ponies – only men, it seemed, were restricted from riding – and an approximately equal number of men on foot. Nyel and her daughters would be there to greet each Mother along with a strong showing of entirely female onlookers. From his perch in a hilltop window, Cary could see little more than that they looked exactly like the delegations that had come the day before.

  “Alright, but what am I supposed to be learning that will help you and Nyel? I can’t even understand what the Mothers are saying. How can I find out anything that’s useful? Ambassador Chulters keeps asking me what I learned, and I can’t tell him anything. He already thinks this is a bad idea.” Cary trailed off in the face of Juhn’s seemingly complete indifference to his frustration.

  “Are you starting to understand the passages?” Juhn changed the subject.

  “I have them memorized,” Cary answered with a sigh. He should have already known that it was pointless to argue with a counselor, much less a full di valati, as Juhn appeared to be. Still, it was true that his lack in pertinent information was not a result of any lack of effort. He had spent every moment he could creeping around the dark passages, finding every nook, cranny, and peephole.

  Juhn just nodded. “I must be there to greet the Mother as she arrives.” He stood. It was the same routine as the previous four lodges. Juhn brought him here, said nothing, then left. Cary watched the delegation arrive, watched Nyel greet them, then followed the new Mother through the passages to whatever rooms she had been given. He then spent the next hour listening outside that room, hoping to hear something that might be useful. And it was very likely he had heard useful things. If only he spoke Morg, he might know what they were.

  Cary sat back – the Eselhelt delegation was now visible on the horizon but wouldn’t arrive for another hour. He let out a sigh and looked around the room. It was empty except for a number of cushions arrayed on the floor and a rack of leather-bound books at the back. It was a room that the women used to educate their children and it was exactly like the nearly twenty others like it around the lodge.

  “Pay attention,” Juhn said as he approached the door. “Eselhelt is different. You will soon understand why. Until then, trust in the Order. Everything happens for a reason. The thread has no concept of the pattern around it, but that does not mean it has no role in creating that pattern.” And with that pointless bit of philosophizing the Order’s highest representative in the Fells stepped into the dark passage hidden along the side wall and disappeared.

  #

  The Mother from Eselhelt was certainly different. Cary watched the girl through the tiny peephole in the side of the room she had been given. Placed away from the secret entrance that led to the room, Juhn had told him that only the order keepers knew of them. They were intended to give the keepers some indication of what waited before they entered a room – even the Order could not protect them if they entered a room when a woman was occupied with her husband. No matter their purpose, Cary generally found them worthless. From it, he could view only a sliver of the room – typically the bed. Usually, he gave up after only a few seconds. Today, he could not take his eye away.

  Despite what he had told Juhn, he had gotten slightly lost in trying to follow the Eselhelt Mother to her room. In fact, the order passage had diverted from the path the Mother had taken. He had lost her then spent the next hour searching rooms until he found the woman he had seen arriving from the window.

  She was alone, which was unusual enough – the Mothers were typically surrounded by women – but even stranger, she was young. Standing with her back to him, Cary could see her long, golden hair hanging past her waist in waves created by the braid she had just untied. Her shoulders, broad and straight, stood out on either side of the cascade of hair that hid her slender waist before giving way to round hips that filled her tight wool dress. The dress ended just before her bare feet, which were small and delicate. Cary knew from watching her arrive that she was with child. Combining what he had seen from a distance with what he could see now from behind, he guessed she was of an age with Nyel’s youngest and every bit as beautiful. Imagination running, Cary silently begged her to turn, to slip off her dress. . . .

  A pounding at the door, made the girl and Cary nearly jump from their skins. Eye losing the hole, Cary clutched one hand over his heart and the other over his mouth. He was not sure that he had not made a noise when the knock sounded. And even if his mouth had not betrayed him, he was afraid his pounding heart or panting breaths would.

  “Wo bucht ta?” the girl called, voice airy with fright and slightly distorted even in a foreign language.

  “Zhurn ral Eselhelt,” a man’s voice announced. “Tal ar grebt.”

  Cary brought his eye back to the hole just in time to see the girl walk out of his view. She said a few words – a denial maybe but laced with fear. The man – Cary had learned enough of the Morg language to know that he must be her husband, Zhurn, the Father of Eselhelt – said something sharp. The girl asked a question – trying to be strong but failing. Her husband answered decisively.

  Though he did not know the words being said, Cary flashed immediately to the sounds he had heard through the wall of their quarters when he was a child. It was usually payday, every two weeks, when the men used their money at the taverns down the hill. The head gardener lived next to them in the row of three-room cottages that were reserved for the estate’s most senior servants. Cary always knew when Mr. Polk returned. That was when the yelling started, the hitting, the screaming, the crying. He had heard it often enough that he did not need to know the words. The tone, the pattern were obvious in any language.

  There was a pause. The man changed tactics – you can’t yell a locked door down. He said something gentle, probably, “I miss you.” “I want to see you.” “I love you.” “Please let me in. I won’t hurt you.” There were many variants, but the intent was always the same: This time it will be different. I’m a changed man. I won’t hurt you again. It was a lie, both of them knew it, yet it never failed to work. The girl was no exception. She sighed loudly enough to carry across the room. Like so many women before her, only the tiniest patch of wool was enough to convince her that the wolf had changed his coat. She unlatched the door.

  Her husband crashed through, slammed it behind him, and immediately started berating her in a harsh whisper. “How dare you?” Cary translated from his imagination. “I own you. You will never deny me. I’ll teach you, bitch.” He expected to hear the crack of a fist hitting a face, a body hitting a floor, the thump of a boot in a stomach, the cries, the names. A child would start crying after that and the sounds would begin again. The hitting, the yelling, the crying continuing until every member of the family had been subdued, until the gardener was spent, until he dragged his broken wife into the bedroom and slammed the door – and Cary would know that he had a few more hours to sleep before the crying started in the room where he and his sisters slept. Cary expected those sounds, braced himself to hear them, forced his mind to be in the present rather than the memories of Mrs. Polk and her children . . . of Alyssa years later.

  To his surprise, there was no sound of a fist hitting flesh. There was a whimper, a constrained cry strangled by a hand. The pair appeared back within the sliver of Cary’s view. The girl was on her toes backing toward the bed, face twisted around the huge hand that covered her mouth. Her husband was a big man, twice her size and strong enough to handle her like a doll despite his age. And he was at least forty years her senior. His long beard was more grey than blond. His head was bald. His face, red with rage, sagged around his eyes and cheeks. He wore one of the robes that Car
y and his fellows had donned after the baths, huge, meaty, age-spotted, arms half-covered by the silk sleeves; trunk-like, but vein-lined, legs showing from the knee, leading to white feet and crumpled yellow nails. His other hand was clamped on the side of the girl, big fingers squeezing her kidney. Hurting her without leaving a mark, Cary realized. And by the look of it, he was succeeding. The girl was in anguish. She wailed through her husband’s hand, but the sound traveled only far enough for Cary to hear. Her body was stiff and distorted, round expanse of belly jutted out in an attempt to escape the hand at her back, toes scrabbling along the planks of the floor as her husband carried her by her chin and kidney.

  Finally, he set her down in front of the bed and removed his hand from her back. It went to her hair, pulling her head back as his other ran gently around the child she carried. The girl panted with fear and pain, waiting, knowing that this was only the beginning. Her husband lowered his mouth to her ear. His lips moved. Cary could not hope to hear, but the girl’s reaction was enough. Her eyes popped beyond anything the pain had produced. She released a great heaving sob. Her husband just stared into her eyes as he pulled her head back by a handful of hair. His other came up to her throat and encircled it, fingers reaching all the way around the long, white expanse. He whispered another threat. She nodded, almost imperceptible for the grip he maintained on her. It was enough. He had won.

  Zhurn threw her onto the tall bed behind them. His robe went to the ground. Cary hated what followed, but it did not stop him from watching.

  #

  When he finished, Zhurn leaned over the back of his wife, clasping a handful of her hair so tightly that she squealed into the mattress beneath her, and spoke into her ear. As he spoke, he pushed her face into the sheets until she was writhing for lack of air. Finally, he let her go. She gasped to regain her breath but remained face down, back to Cary, body curved around her unborn child, as her husband replaced his robe, patted her on the hip, and turned to go. At the door, he made a final comment that had the tone of a compliment. The girl just moaned. The door latch clicked, but she did not move from the harrowing position, and Cary did not stop watching.