by Adrian Selby
In between the treatment of wounds and fevers in the medica, I worked with Loza on the field mixes. Aside from the captain who came in to look at his soldiers, Loza’s weathered and rather fraught wife would sometimes come with soup and rice while we worked, bringing with her their daughter who proudly showed us her latest weavings. He seemed happiest, however, as I was, alone with his pots, aludels and sand bath and paying the Drudha’s Share.
Within a few weeks I was led to the prisoners’ compound but not tied to the stake. I used this time to renew my acquaintance with my body and its ability to kill. I had the colouring of a soldier, I watched their soldiers being drilled from a rip in my tent, and I copied their movements, for my own drills were lost to me. These were hard enough at the beginning, as I was recovering the use of my body. It was an attempt both to prepare myself for an escape, but also to recover, if I could, some memory of the past.
I managed to take an interest in the camp through the mutterings and comings and goings of the injured, as well as feigning some sympathy for Loza, for the pressure the captain and his own wife put him under. He translated for me enough that I learned the warlord was readying for a test of borders, to resolve the dispute of more fertile land south with a rival.
We worked long into the nights now on the mixes, traders and scouts bringing greater quantities of ingredients in, the students of the thamir preparing them for us to distil, mix and separate. I now knew my way around the various bottles in the chests; poisons, curatives and the stores of the concentrates for the blade rubs.
Over two hundred men would be gone in two days, forty to stay. The world was presenting me with my escape.
Through a sharp, clear dawn I worked with Loza to pack the horses and fill the fieldbelts of the soldiers. The women here weren’t given to much wailing at their men departing; the children, as in all villages and settlements I’d been stationed at, cried. I vowed then I would go within the day, while the routine was broken and men were a few more measures of wine off balance.
I barely caught a glimpse of the warlord himself; Loza alone was responsible for the captains’ belts. I watched the men march away southwest, five riders spreading out ahead of them, moving off into thick brush.
The camp drifted back to its duties, the remaining soldiers jostling and laughing with each other while congregated. A whistle cut through them as the watch commander approached, using a black staff bookended with a dull metal lump to force them into a line and to sort them into watches.
The stables were near Loza’s tent, four horses left, any one of which would have to bear me out of the camp under fire from whoever I couldn’t kill. I had to hope these women weren’t trained to wield bows as they were in many of the hasts spread throughout the old countries.
Loza excused himself for something to eat at his own tent two hours after the last of the warband left sight of the camp. Alone, I drank a mix to counter their poisons and a fightbrew, then hooked a water flask to a belt I’d been given to hold up my breeches, worn by other slaves over the years to a state of filthy fragility.
I began to rise, the rush out from my belly, dropping something like white hot, agonising lava into my legs, a javelin of iron seeming to fix rigid my neck as the shell of ordinary thought and doubt burned to a husk. This was a far better brew than I could have guessed, confirming the vivacity of the plant in these parts, a spirit, a note of rawness, that seemed unusual and also powerful, perhaps because so much plant in the Old Kingdoms would have been heavily cultivated in farms to meet the demand of so many.
Also, the absence of powders in their recipes meant I did not need to fashion a mask as I waited for Loza to return. The use of sporebags or dust was unknown to them.
When he did come back he saw immediately from my skin and my movement that I was risen and was planning to escape.
“We can say you could not stop me, Loza.”
“They not believe me, would kill me. You work good, you earn trust, Sand. Don’t do this.”
“I am leaving, so I’ll be quicker with you than they would.”
He shuddered, shocked by the imminence of his death. He looked about desperately for a knife or some other instrument to defend himself. I caught his raised arm and broke it with a twist, before crushing his throat. I performed this murder calmly, there was something natural about it, something beyond the thirst for blood a brew gives. I understand how strange it is that the feeling of familiarity with myself I craved should be fulfilled so.
I had no time to try to remove his tob to disguise myself. I found a knife on a bench and tore open the tob to get at his journal. I pushed it into my shirt and walked out of the tent.
In the stable I met only a young man. He frowned as I approached, about to question my unaccompanied presence. I leaped at him and knifed him in his throat to keep him from raising the alarm. The horses were stirred, kicking at the ground as I intruded. I fought for some self-control to display to them, approaching them in a way I must have learned from somebody, some way to settle them as I neared.
I recognised one of the trader’s horses and put on her reins. I smeared poison on the necks of the horses that remained, enough to render them useless in pursuit in the few minutes it would take to sink through their hair and skin.
I walked her through the small clearing they used for a paddock and led her towards the slope I approached the camp from those weeks previously. The three guards watching this approach were sat talking outside the rows of stakes that marked the camp’s outer boundaries.
I mounted and charged the horse past them, holding myself low to it. They turned at the sound of the approaching hooves, only one with a bow, but sharp enough of eye that he loosed an arrow that caught me in the shoulder. It nearly punched me from the horse’s back, would have if not for the thrilling strength I’d missed since I last drank a fully potent fightbrew.
A horn rang out across the plateau. I turned northeast and rode across more open ground.
Taking the reins with one hand I tugged at the arrow but the barbs were firm. I snapped the shaft and kept going. The pain seeped through as the movement of the horse ground the arrowhead against my shoulder blade. The brew kept me alive, the wound bleeding only slowly. I ran the horse to death, there was no point in slowing until I had found either the jungle itself or somewhere to hide and trap. Two days’ ride to the edge of the jungle, Loza said. I could not be far.
The horse pulled up shortly after the sun had set behind us. We had passed through some trees that skirted a slope. I needed to scale it to get my whereabouts.
Her head bowed as her frame shook with her breathing, her sweat had soaked us both. Then she stumbled as I dismounted. I smoothed her nose down and brought her head to face me. I buried the knife in her skull with a heavy fist. She was too exhausted to react.
At the crest of this hill I fell to my knees. The great star was already risen and its silver light revealed the edge of a valley. Across this great rift enormous trees stood on the vast claws of their exposed roots, the edge of the Hanwoq jungle, an unmeasured expanse that Loza had said no drudhas or travellers had broached the full extent of in their search for a passage to the Dust Coast from the Old Kingdoms in the far east.
I managed to get the arrow out with my knife. I did what I could to stop the bleeding with the few mixes I had. After resting a short while I found a route down and up the other side that I doubt could have otherwise been followed without a good brew or two strong working shoulders.
I passed into the trees the following morning, the climb having exhausted me to the point of collapse.
The huge kapoks, as I later learned them to be called, threw out their vast roots across the earth, so boggy here at the head of this valley that the mist filled any route ahead. I had no idea where I was wandering, except that I needed to escape any trackers that the thamir’s people might have sent after me.
With the wound beginning to fester in this humid chaos, crawling now with midges and flies that filled the
air, I quickly withered as the brew’s claim compounded my thirst and slowed me. After two days my flask was dry. It was a further two days before I found a large stream, hoping that any people that used it might then find me.
Among the ferns and trees that killed my sense of direction I began to realise the strange and fearsome nature of this place. Some of the trees, the natives called them Chicle trees, had bark that wept a gum, ingesting the insects and birds that attempted to feed on the sticky fluid as they were caught in it and dissolved. I fled across the stream at one point to avoid ants each the size of a child’s hand swarming over a clearing from a landslide that had felled trees, building a nest from the detritus about them. I saw orchids of the most vivid colours and hoped for a closer look until I felt movement in the vines that grew out across the ground many yards around them, forming wreaths around the bones of animals and at least one man. They gave off a pungent smell of fresh meat. One of the vines split as I approached, some liquid seeping from it that gave off vapours that dizzied me. I held my breath and ran as other vines opened up, though the drudha in me wished to understand better the properties of such exquisite plant. Away from that nest of flowers, my progress into the jungle alongside the stream was then blocked by vast walls of webs some fifteen yards high stretched across the lower branches and trunks of a number of trees. To avoid discovering what lay within I had to double back and find new paths around and over the steep knolls, each a fight against the soft earth and slippery roots.
I had little defence against the mosquies and flies. Six days of climbing and descending these hidden hillsides and I’d only recognised figs and termites for food. The vines gave some water better than the stream’s but my hands were raw and swollen from the fine hairs they shed like barbs into my skin as I held them for cutting and draining.
Dizziness and then vomiting began on the seventh day. My shoulder was swollen and the hole wept, thick with maggots. I collapsed against a trunk once more near the stream I’d followed. I came to fully realise my solitude, the pointlessness of carrying on and the knowledge there was no way back. As the hours went by a howling grew in my head, perhaps some infection in my ears. The water chattered as though through a chamber, the damp trees and bushes seemed to be waiting, full of a presence, an intelligence. I could not stop or control this wailing of the things that lived about me, singing their instincts, a discordant orchestration of hunger.
Soon the phantoms appeared; soldiers, some whose faces eluded my focus, others in violating detail, their skin as dead and smooth as beach-worn pebbles. They cast a massive shadow all about them, as though mountains had elected to walk, at once six feet high and ten thousand high. I knew only that I knew them, no names or memories were otherwise tied to them. They weren’t welcoming, they were judging me. Thoughts passed between them, frowns and glances betraying a council passing sentence.
The man at their head brought debate to an end. His eyes closed as he stopped above me, closing out the sun, muttering old hymns I sang as a boy. Theirs was a cold wind in this suffocating and moist audience of trees. This was a reckoning of my life by monsters not fit to judge me or stand against me. They stood for a time in that silent confederacy. I did not care to look at them, I had had enough, so I let myself collapse, to die and be free or live to find and conquer the cause of my suffering.
A sweet nutty smoke brought me awake at some unknown time after. I was lying near a fire on a rattan slenka, the mat having bamboo poles at the side and drawn together at one end to facilitate dragging of supplies, or in this case my body.
I itched savagely, but felt cool. It was the noise then that invaded as I shed the doze I was in; the rattling and buzzing, the ticks, chattering and rasps of the insects and creatures about. I sensed someone was near, I heard a spoon tickling a bubbling pot over a fire, then I smelled the broth, a tang of meat.
It is a struggle to describe him for the noise in one’s mind and senses when one is near him. As a man he seemed at times forty summers, at other times more than sixty, his frame seemingly built from dock ropes covered with a paper-thin skin. His colour was in places iridescent; scarlet and dragonfly green mottling his skin. It all served to illuminate the close-cropped white hair losing its grip on the crown and a moustache like a shelf of snow on his lip.
He wore only some heavy cotton pants and sandals, a few pouches hanging from a belt. One in particular, when it opened and I was near, seemed to change the air; my hair stood up, a tickling on my arms, and I felt like I was slipping into a dream of that moment, not there awake. At one point shortly after I began to recover my strength he took from it some dull brown powder and sprinkled it like salt over me.
“You have no inclination to ask me of this pouch,” he said.
I smiled. Of course I was inclined to ask him about it, but looking back, I never did.
“You live. You must eat.”
He spooned the broth into a wooden bowl and stood over me as I eased myself up onto my elbows to better see him and this place.
His eyes were as white as his hair, or as close to it as I could settle on, but he wasn’t blind. The lean cheeks and jaw were a firm reference where the eyes and mouth felt indistinct; a paternal look in a moment switched to exasperated or sad. He noticed my scrutiny.
“I’m told my spirit, my nature, is of such power it turns the eye from me. The Etil, whom you shall meet shortly, no longer look, believing it bad luck. It is refreshing to meet someone’s gaze.”
This amused him, something I felt as much as saw as I took the bowl from him and tipped a sip to my lips.
It was fiery; I coughed hard but continued, savouring the fatty, salty flavour.
He stood back and at once the air became warmer. He smiled; I wondered if a frown played through it but gave up the speculation to finish the broth.
We were in a natural clearing, at the base of a kapok. For a short while I watched him as he picked at and rooted among the grasses here and climbed the trees about with the strength of a young sailor at the rigging.
Loza’s journal had been taken, as had the plant I carried with me from my escape from that camp.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“The tribes of Etil about call me all manner of things; beyond this jungle I think I’ve successfully managed to be forgotten. The name most familiar to you is Lorom Haluim.”
So unexpected was it to hear this I believe I just smiled.
“That cannot be. Lorom Haluim is the name of a magist, who cannot now be alive if the legends speak true. And legends are never true.”
“I understand. Well, it is my name, I am happy to have saved your life and I am happy to have your company if you are willing to share it.”
“I am greatly indebted, and wish no insult. I…” But what was there to say. He was the more convincing for not seeking to convince me. His plant, his drudhaic knowledge, must have been excellent to so quickly ease my pain and clean my wounds. His art was easily the equal of my own, from this first experience of him.
“You have paid the Drudha’s Share, as an old friend once told me it was called. Your hands and scars tell me you were at some point a soldier. You have burned more recently, I see coca milk was used to heal you, indeed I can still smell it, can you? You are of the Old Kingdoms, and your brand tells me a slave most recently.”
“You speak King’s Common well for a native of Hanwoq,” I said, sitting fully upright now as the broth brought me to.
“I’m not a native of this beautiful place. I did travel for some years about those lands, the Old Kingdoms. I prefer it here, the plant here is unlike any in this world, but I think I might not love it as much had I grown up here. Come, we have a few leagues yet to travel.”
He stood and began kicking over the fire, preparing to leave. I stood up slowly and noticed that the tattered shirt I arrived in was gone. I wore cotton leggings similar to his. Sandals also similar to his were on the ground near the stretcher, soles of a kind of serpent hide, straps softer, the skin o
f a deer perhaps, affording excellent purchase on the damp stones and, I would learn, the tree trunks themselves.
We left the stretcher he had brought, though he untied the rattan and rolled it up. He took up hammer, pegs and the cooking pot and fastened the lot to loops on his belt. I tested my shoulder; only a mild soreness beneath some clay that he must have soaked on. It would later crumble and leave only a scar, no worse than others I bore considering the cause.
The next few hours in the airless wet halls of the jungle beneath the canopy were hard. He seemed unaffected by it, climbing easily over wet rocks as we scaled ridges and slid down their far sides, crossing torrents flowing hard from deep in the jungle with the use of pegs he hammered into the rocks they flowed over, to give us steps. The ways he took I could see were paths of a sort, though to look behind me I could see little beyond the atap and bamboo we had somehow manoeuvred past. More than once he held my arm and bade me stay close as we approached dark thickets of vines and ferns. As my senses hazed the thickets seemed to wash around us, as if we had passed through a clearing, though to look back they seemed undisturbed. I was feeling exhausted by his proximity, the strange effect he had, but as my mind cleared from his stepping away I saw we were stood in a valley with three natives of the forest, the Etil. They were barefoot, much shorter than either Lorom Haluim or I, with only skirts of cloth, some with stitchings I later learned the significance of. Their colour was subtle, a greenish tinge to their bronze skin, their hair almost uniformly a ropy knotted black. They all wore finely carved wooden links and other fixings to their hair, which gave a clacking sound as they ran, the carvings on them a kind of history of their tribe, their favourite stories and teachings on them, as well as stories of their own that I later learned would be collected on their death.