Torrodil

by Luke Geraghty

  ‘What is wrong with my appearance?’ questioned the boy, examining every inch of himself from leather boots to messy tresses.

  ‘You look a little…gaudy.’

  ‘What is this “gaudy”?’

  ‘Garish.’

  Cesar’s face was blank.

  ‘Extravagantly dressed.’

  ‘Ah!’ His face lit up. ‘You like?’

  Her downturned mouth said it all. ‘We’ll buy you some other clothes – please let me do the talking – and then we’ll gather supplies for your journey home. I take it you intend on going through the Ashvale Mountains?’

  ‘That is not wise, deserters as we are.’

  ‘Somehow I think your friends are past caring.’

  ‘You do not understand. We were not just bandits. King Barbosa is keen to know the strength of Carrigan’s outlying towns and sent his men from Mesinos as a scouting party, but the others were not content to come all this way for nothing. If Barbosa finds out your towns are vulnerable, he will be keener still to plan a full-scale attack.’

  ‘Joy.’

  ‘Quite. That is what you Carrics say, isn’t it? “Quite.” Oh my teacher would be proud if he could see me now.’

  Anna decides against an outburst and plods downstairs, Cesar following. While he gathers his men, she contemplates running back to tell her parents, but it would take time and with any luck she can be back for nightfall, hitching a cart ride on a kind local’s charity. The Venecian men come up from the basement and exchange pleasantries. For outlaws they are extremely well-mannered. Anna opens the door and hears a hubbub on the streets in front. Telling the men to stay put, she steps out and is greeted with a pail of water to the face.

  ‘There’s the witch.’

  Seriously?

  The wailing man from last night, Bale, stands in front of a band of villagers, wickedness in their hearts.

  ‘You’ve got the wrong girl, m’afraid. Easy mistake to make.’

  ‘Don’t play dumb with me. Your John Gray’s daughter, aren’t you? I saw you lift that Venecian off the ground with your hands. I know I did. And then you tried to kill me with your magics.’ He points to the wound on his leg. ‘Conjuror. Sorceress. You brought the Venecians here. You tried to kill us. You tried to kill me.’

  ‘Tried and failed, I put my hands up,’ Anna says, walking forward and trying to jostle her way through the crowd. ‘Now if you excuse me I’m quite busy.’

  The villagers push her back. When they start chanting, ‘Burn the witch, boil her blood,’ Anna realises she’s in for a sticky time.

  ‘What is going—’ An emerging Cesar freezes stiff.

  ‘Who is this? A Venecian? See. She conjured them and now she’s protecting them. Helping the men who murdered our loved ones. Traitor! Horned woman! Dark Queen! May your passage into the Shadowland be swift this day.’

  ‘I think I’ll go back inside.’

  Before Anna or the Venecians have time to act, the mob swarms them, pushing them to the ground and dragging them through the streets to the town square, where they are put into stocks and pelted with tomatoes. With pulp sliding down her face, Anna looks at the pyres that are being constructed and prays they burn Cesar first.

  ‘Any ideas?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’

  ‘I may be the last person you can talk to.’

  ‘I’m sure those zealots are mulling over their words as we speak. Believe me, I have a few choice ones of my own.’

  Cesar and Anna bickered while the villagers discussed décor and arrangements:

  ‘Can you have flowers at a witch burning? I’ve never been to one of these things.’

  ‘Those dove-engraved chairs are lovely, Beth, but I don’t think they’re suitable. I’ve some ones of starving virgins that I bought for my mother’s funeral. They’ll fit the occasion much better.’

  ‘Could we possibly dress Anna in a white flowing gown with lace trimming? I think the juxtaposition would be positively divine.’

  ‘The men have had to go and chop down trees, Flo, can you believe it?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There was no wood left in the heretic stockpile, was there? Went up in smoke last night.’

  ‘How obscene.’

  ‘I’m sitting down, Owen, because I quit. You do it. Orchestrating a part foreigner, part witch burning is impossible. You gave me no advance warning and now you jibe that technically the girl is half traitor, half witch and I just can’t cope. I’m going for a lie down; I feel one of my migraines coming on.’

  When the pyres were ready, Anna was strapped to a stake amid a pantomime chorus of boos and hisses, along with Cesar, his men, and the Venecian found “misplaced” on a roof. With Bale as their chorus leader, the tune took on a refined air, alternating between, ‘Witch, witch, witch,’ and, ‘Foreigners, foreigners, foreigners,’ so as not to offend the Venecians. The turnout was excellent, with the survivors of last night’s fire bolstered by attendants from neighbouring towns and villages. Yes, a good burning was an event not to be missed and would set the world right again.

  Picking out faces from the crowd, Anna sees her mother crying, her father trying to separate her squabbling brothers nearby. There’s Vicki with her hipster friends poking out her tongue. Muy cool, Vicki, muy cool. Oh and Jack Thorogood snuggling with two shrews; and best friend Tommy acting like he has worms in his trousers; and holy braless wonder! Wow. There, with a prime seat in the middle, is lobster-skinned Mary Munslow, slashing mercilessly through the air with her knife-like cackle. If smocks could kill, they’d all be stone, cold dead.

  ‘We are gathered here today— Wait that’s not right, give me a moment.’ Bale pauses. ‘These heathens have been accused of heresy. Look at them. Let their faces imprint on your mind, for they are the faces of sinners, worshippers of Pagan gods. By their hands our beloved town burned last night and a terrible evil was wrought. Wicked woman,’ he says, turning to Anna. ‘You have sent hundreds of lives to the grave, babes and aged alike. How do you plead?’

  A voice from the crowd reminds Bale this ain’t a trial.

  ‘Oh right, yeah.’ Bale flushes a little. ‘How you plead is not important. Your crimes will stand forever, miserable fiend of a fiery fiefdom. And you,’ pointing at Cesar and the Venecians, ‘you have come into our lands, slaughtered our people, given them no quarter—’

  ‘Actually, I haven’t killed anyone.’

  ‘Me either.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Silence! Did I say you could speak? Disease-ridden men. Effeminate swine with more adornments than any of our womenfolk. May your oil-laden hair be your end on this day when you burn for your crimes against Carrigan. On this day when you burn for your crimes against our Queen. On this day when you burn for your crimes against,’ searching for something suitable, ‘manliness! Before I consign you to the lowest region of the Shadowland, do you have last words for the good men and women you leave behind?’

  Anna coughs.

  ‘What is it, witch?’

  ‘Terribly weak. Closer.’

  Bale puts his ear to Anna’s lips. She sniffs him and whispers: ‘I didn’t have time for a wash this morning. What’s your excuse?’

  ‘Light the pyres! Burn the meat from their bones!’

  Two executioners, upset that it wasn’t a hanging where their roles were larger, put a torch underneath the pyres, causing the faggots to combust and sending stacks of smoke into the air for the second time that day. The fire grew and the town square became hazy. Save for the Venecian bandit-cum-thatched-roof-aficionado, none screamed, much to the dissatisfaction of Bale and his fellow fanatics. As the flames began to cook Anna’s feet, darkness befell the lands, clear skies turned to cloud, and a faint crackle sparked in the ether – a grave portent of what was to come.

  Four – The Reckoning

  Cloudburst showered down from the sky, pelting the citizens of Leitrim and quenching the bonfire at the youths’ feet. Gone were Anna’s irises.
She had ascended to an otherworldly plane, cleansed from fear and anger and pain, with a perfect clarity of mind that was neither good nor evil. It was the void. It was oblivion. And it engulfed her as its instrument of destruction.

  The first bolt of lightning hit the town hall, bombarding the crowd with brick and glass. The pack fell backwards off their chairs in a domino effect, two people on either side starting the chain. Getting up, shoes falling off and being carried along with the rain, the penitent imploring the Shaper for forgiveness, the unrepentant cursing their bad fortune, and Mary Munslow getting trapped under a deluge of chairs, her best frock soiled by rainwater.

  Before they had chance to escape, a second bolt flickered like ephemeral fire. Surrounded by spectators, Bale was the lone member of the pack left standing and none could avert their eyes from his reckoning: the lightning singed the hair from his scalp; it tore the black look from his eyes and the tissue from his face; then travelling in a piercing beam, it popped his life-threads, organs and skin, atrophying him into dust. In a flash of light, he was no more.

  Mary Munslow would have been crushed to death if it had not been for a member of the low caste, who pulled her from her chair prison just before a pillar from the town hall fell where she was lying. Saying thank you to the birth-branded man and meaning it, Mary was guided out of the square, vowing to keep that olive branch of empathy alive in her chest, kindling it when need be with altruistic acts of her own.

  From the sky came deliverance for the five on the pyres, apart from the true Venecian bandit, whose pyre had been the first to be lit and thus expired before the rain could save him. Weakened by flames, the ropes binding Anna, Cesar and his two men were easily broken and the four climbed down as water washed over their tender skin. The void that consumed Anna had evaporated from her eyes but the storm raged on. Everywhere villagers fled, smoke and rain obscuring the horde.

  ‘Anna!’ Cesar grabbed hold of her arm and pulled her towards him. ‘We need to get out of here. Which way?’

  ‘Go left.’

  Panicked villagers clogged up the four exits. The others started to move, but Anna stood rooted to the spot, water running off the end of her nose. Cesar said there was no time for that. Kept talking while she watched a brown-haired boy help his mother up from the ground and join the river of people.

  When she still didn’t move, Cesar dragged her away with the company of Venecians, carving a way through the crowd as they went. Fire-weakened buildings that would have crumbled in the coming days chose now as their time and collapsing roofs sent out stray tiles into the fearful throng ahead of them. Few cared to look at the four, but those that recognised Anna as the witch shuddered at the very sight of her.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ said the Venecian Andres to Anna. There was something like pity in his tone. Hard, heavy pity. The kind that is given too freely without thought of its burden. The tiles smashing down escaped her notice because she was clothed in it, body dripping.

  Someone calling to watch out. The tile drifts slowly onwards and she doesn’t know why but she cannot move. Pushed away, down, tile shattered and rainwater in her mouth. Andres pulls her up and decides questions can wait, the two of them hurrying to catch up with the group.

  The narrow street widened and the crowd lessened, many taking refuge in houses and buildings that were sturdy. Some of those that were unlucky enough to live outside of the town smashed the windows of shops to gain entry and hide; others bought their way into sanctuary via expensive purchases and the exchange of sovereigns, locals profiting in the process. Criminals who had learned nothing from the reckoning took the opportunity to loot what they could, stealing jewels, gold figurines, artwork and timepieces. Two such criminals fought one another in a jewellers to Andres’ side, obstinate in the face of danger.

  ‘Tommy, are you alright?’ Anna tore herself away from the creeping doubts to help the boy up from the floor. He was covered in mud, having been pushed to the ground by a man of considerable bulk.

  ‘Am I alright? You’re the one that was almost burnt to a crisp.’

  Cesar gestured for his countrymen to wait and the two Carric kids quickly caught up, running alongside two men who ran and held hands. When one tripped on a broken market stall, the other went down with him, laughing and kicking the silly wooden thing.

  Reaching the outskirts of Leitrim town, the cohort paused to catch their breath, walking towards the church near the lake path and quietly allowing their hearts and minds to settle.

  The church was the scene of nature’s final display of power. Sky-energy ripped apart a stained-glass window and set a lectern inside the church alight. Shards of glass from the window scattered across the cemetery, concealing themselves in grass and soil. A single fragment flew as far as Anna’s feet and landed with a thud, shattering into four pieces. Though broken, the outline of a lamb could be seen, its woollen fleece blackened by the bolt.

  ‘What happened back there?’ asked Tommy, his habitual fidgety energy morphed into full-blown shivering.

  ‘Don’t ask me. I don’t know,’ replied Anna.

  ‘Like kruk you don’t. You lit that man up like a Yuletide Fair. Your eyes. Pitch black, they were. You saw it,’ he said, pointing at the Venecians. They met his inquisitiveness with concern. ‘Have you always been this way?’

  ‘Been what way?’

  ‘This way inclined.’

  ‘A witch?’

  ‘You said it, not me.’

  ‘Why? Because if you did I’d turn you into a toad, right?’

  ‘You couldn’t. You wouldn’t.’

  ‘Half true,’ replied Anna. Tommy gazed pensively at her. ‘Don’t brown your trousers. I’ve no idea what happened back there, alright? I don’t know what I did or can do. My mother told me yesterday – yesterday, can you believe it? – that I am part of some cult or something. They call themselves the daeva. Or daevas. Or daeva.’ A pause. ‘I think I may be cracking up.’

  ‘Daeva,’ Andres answers, trying to settle her. ‘One daeva, two daeva. Like sheep. They exist in our culture, but as myth and legend, or at least that is what we were led to believe.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t trust me; that you thought I wouldn’t understand,’ said Tommy.

  ‘If I had known my whole life that I had this power, do you think I would’ve waited till now before trying to turn Mary Munslow into hot ash?’ Anna’s word flared up in her mind the parting shot of Bale. Get a grip. Shut it away, push it down. ‘There were signs, looking back. Remember that odd snowstorm? The one that came at the beginning of Eostre two years ago? My cousins were arriving the next day. One of them was a vile boy. Grubby, prying hands. Dirty mouth too. When I climbed into bed that night I shut my eyes and prayed to the Shaper to keep them away. And then when I woke up the next morning there, outside, was three feet of snow. Our cousins’ travel was delayed. They had to turn back in the end.’

  ‘Maybe it is a gift,’ offered Andres, pointing to the sky.

  ‘Gifts can come from many places and many entities,’ said Cesar. ‘All we know is that it saved our lives. We should be thankful.’

  Tommy was asking what they were going to do, but Anna did not hear. Her hands were trembling with a mania that drummed hard under her skin.

  ‘They’ve seen me with you,’ said Tommy, trying to get her attention. ‘They know we’re friends. And say they come for me in the night and drag me away, well I’m not going to have you there, whatever you are, to roast ‘em like hogs on spits, am I?’

  ‘That’s not exactly what I—’

  ‘I can’t go back home,’ he continued. ‘I can’t see my family again. And my cat had a litter two days ago. I was going to name the black one Mittens and the grey one Anna. That’s your name. Now I’m doomed to wander the earth and grow old and die and I’ve never even smoked a pipe or dyed my hair or been kissed—’

  Cesar covered Tommy’s mouth with his hand. ‘This Old Haven is twelve miles south, yes?’ Anna nods dully. ‘We will not make it there by
nightfall and we do not have any provisions.’

  ‘We can forage for berries and nuts. They’ll be plenty of both at this time of year.’

  ‘And where will we sleep? Under a bush?’

  The black look Anna threw Cesar persuaded him that now was not the best time for sarcasm.

  Letting out a collective sigh, the five started walking. Though they roamed over emerald grasslands and hills, through sweet-smelling meadows and trails, they were not enchanted by the environment around them, but reminisced about the delicious food they had had in the past, whetting one another’s appetites, growing hungrier and hungrier. When they came to the top of Sugar Loaf Hill, gazing down on the land beneath, each licked their lips at what they saw: Riverdale Farm with its Kettering boar meat, orchards, rhubarb and Carrigan-churned, creamy butter.

  ‘That’s Mr Peterson’s farm,’ said Tommy. ‘They say he likes to string trespassers up and feed them to his pigs. They’ll eat anything those pigs. Anything.’

  They were already walking down the hill.

  ‘Jenny Boxall told me her brother Joe knocked on his door after one of the wheels of his cart snapped off outside. When nobody came to the door he went round back and found the kitchen door swinging in the wind. And he could smell something. Something sweet. There, on the kitchen table, was a Katty Swirl – you know that new-fangled recipe with jam and redcurrants – and he couldn’t help but try a piece. A tiny sliver. The second he’d gulped a bite down, I mean the second, Ol’ Mr Peterson’s voice boomed in his ear and his hands grabbed a hold of Joe’s collar and threw the boy out on his behind. He’s not been the same since.’

  ‘We are not boys, Tommy. We’re men,’ said Cesar.

  Anna cleared her throat.

  ‘Er, with one important exception.’

  At the bottom of the hill the group pushed through brambles and thorny bushes, getting several small cuts in the process. Climbing over the fence into an empty pasture, Andres’ satchel got caught in a hedge and yanked him back. The third Venecian, Mateo, tried to untangle it. Unlike his brethren, he was unfettered by decoration, possessing a comeliness they could not match, the lone linking feature being his regulation stubble.