Marrying a Monster

by Mel Dunay

There were no chairs inside the tavern, just a line of tables that separated the customers from the cooking area-an open fire pit beneath the central chimney-and the opening into the cellar where the beverages were kept.

  There was a rotating spit above the fire pit, worked by a sullen-looking teenage girl. The spit held a large chunk of meat, probably goat, and next to it a flat iron griddle covered part of the fire pit.

  The owner of the tavern had just taken up a flatbread from the griddle and was slicing meat shavings off the spit onto the flatbread. He handed the flatbread and meat off to a customer just as Rina pushed her way past a couple of silent men with mugs to talk to him.

  “What will you have?” The owner asked.

  “Dinner and water, please,” Rina said.

  The owner grunted. “It’ll give you indigestion,” he said. “Water makes the food set up hard. You’d better off with the milk.”

  “Thank you, but I’ll take my chances,” said Rina firmly. She had mostly drunken sheep’s milk growing up, and had never quite adjusted to goat’s milk.

  “What about you?” He asked Vipin.

  “Dinner and fresh milk, please.”

  “That’s not a man’s drink.”

  “I don’t feel like drinking alcohol when I’m new in town,” said Vipin. That growl was back in his voice now.

  The owner threw up his hands in exasperation. “Fine, whatever. Suit yourself.” The gruffness in his voice made him sound like he was reasserting himself after being thrown off balance by whatever he heard in Vipin’s stern voice.

  The sulky teenager had gotten two tin plates off one of the tables and loaded them up with flatbreads and shaved meat, while the owner filled a mug with tepid water for Rina.

  He had to call down to the cellar to have Vipin's milk brought up, but soon a small boy emerged from the opening with a pitcher of milk and filled a mug.

  The warm food was exactly what Rina wanted just now. She burned her mouth on a bit of hot meat but after taking a gulp of water from her mug and setting it back on the table, she went back to gobbling up her dinner.

  Vipin ate more slowly, and sipped his milk from time to time.

  “Do you like it?” She asked.

  He nodded. “Just want to enjoy it as long as possible.”

  When she was almost done eating, she asked the owner of the tavern: “Could my friend spend the night at your place?”

  “We have a clean goat shed out back,” The owner said. “All the goats are up in the high pastures this time of year. The shed doesn't even smell like them right now.”

  “What’s wrong with letting him stay inside? His money’s good.” Rina argued. She stole a glance sideways at Vipin to see if he disapproved of her interfering, but mostly he seemed amused.

  The owner shrugged. “He’s not from around here.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Vipin reassured her. “It won’t be the first time I’ve slept in a goatshed.”

  Rina decided to let it slide, and asked the owner her second question. “Do you know of any place that would put me up for the night?”

  The owner shrugged again.

  “The town’s just about full up, with the festival coming on, and you outsiders passing through. Tell you what, you can stay in the goat shed if you like. Scream for help if he gives you any trouble. We’ll take care of that problem, even for an outsider.”

  The owner grinned, showing an alarming shortage of teeth. “But I don’t think a milkdrinker like him will give you any trouble.”

  Rina looked over at Vipin.

  He wore a carefully bland expression. “As I said, I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to split up.”

  Rina sighed. “Alright, but I do have pepper spray and I will kick you in the privates and scream if I have to.”

  Vipin did not seem offended. “Fair enough,” he said.

  The owner of the nameless tavern had not been telling the whole truth about the goat shed.

  It was pretty clean for what it was, and the sulky teenager had put down a layer of fresh straw at the tavern owner’s insistence, and stood outside with an oil lamp so that they would have some light to get settled.

  But it did smell of goat. Certainly the whole town smelled of goat, and this place did not smell as goaty as some spots in town. But the goat smell was just a little bit more pronounced here than she particularly cared for.

  The shelter itself was minimal-a straw roof over a wooden frame, with a gate and no walls, just enough crossbeams to keep the goats from getting out.

  The nights were cool on Mount Snarl, even here at high summer, and for a moment, Rina wished that she could stomach the taste of kefir. The alcohol buzz would have left her feeling warmer. But she dug out a light jacket out of her bag and did her best to make due. It was a good thing she’d decided to wearing jeans today-nothing else in her bag was suitable for a half-mile hike and a nap in a goat shed.

  “Sure you won’t get cold?” She asked Vipin, who seemed not to feel the brisk air, in spite of his rolled-up sleeves and partially unbuttoned shirt.

  As if on cue, he started to roll down his sleeves. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “I might burrow pretty deep into that straw if I have to.”

  “I do have a spare jacket-it wouldn’t fit you but you could use it as a blanket, roll it up as a pillow maybe.”

  “Thank you, I’m fine,” He repeated.

  The shed was at least big enough to allow them to put some distance between each other. Rina picked out the side closest to the tavern building, and snuggled down in the straw as best she could, with her bag for a pillow, and both arms wrapped tightly around her purse.

  She caught a brief glimpse of Vipin burrowing into the straw as he put it, before the sulky teenager disappeared back into the tavern with her oil lamp, and darkness descended.

  There was a long period of lying uncomfortably awake in the darkness for Rina. Goatsfart was a dour, silent town even at festival time, and the only sound she heard was Vipin’s steady breathing.

  The dream that came to her out of this sleep was not a pleasant one. It was her turn to be stretched out on a stone in a corral.

  She wore a long imperial-style nightgown that covered her from shoulder to foot and left only her arms bare. She touched her face, afraid it had been slashed like Vipin’s in her last dream, but she found no damage.

  The mountain side around her was mostly dark. As best she could tell, she was on one of the grassier, more level slopes of the peak, just at the hour when a first, faint light was showing in the east.

  But something was out there with her...something was looking for her. She wanted to desperately to run away, but she was frozen in place in the manner of dreams.

  She only heard the thing as faint scufflings and caught a strange smell on the wind once, but somehow she knew that it was shaped like a man, but would be far taller if it stood upright.

  An impossibly lean, sinewy thing crawling around the slopes in spider-fashion, its skin shining black as obsidian or dark amethyst. Two orange eyes flamed in the dark, and she knew it was coming for her.

  It growled, or maybe something else growled-a weird sound that seemed to come from the bottom of the growler’s diaphragm and the top of its nose at the same time. The orange eyes went out, and the sky began to lighten.

  She saw Vipin of all people walking towards her. He looked stern at first, almost sinister. He paused in front of her, smiled, and picked her up. She wanted to put her arms around his neck, but she still couldn’t move....

  A terrible wailing scream jolted her awake. She thought that a high-pitched chittering, too faint to hear clearly, followed it. Then came the strange, nasal growl she had heard in her dream.

  “Hey! What’s going on?” She demanded.

  It was early morning, with light enough to see by. But there was no sign of Vipin.

  Her traveling bag was still behind her head, and she still clutched her purse tightly. When she opened the purse and check to see if anything was missing, e
verything was there.

  There was no sign that Vipin had tried to tamper with her or her belongings while she slept. But where was he?

  “Hey Vipin!” She called out.

  She hadn’t gotten his phone number-that would require her to give him hers as well, and she had not been ready to do that. She was scrolling through her directory looking for Amita’s phone number when Vipin reappeared at the gate of the goat shed.

  “Did you hear that noise?” She asked.

  He nodded. “The villagers wouldn’t tell me what it was, they just said it wasn’t them. I believe them, for what it’s worth.”

  “And where did you go?”

  “Outhouse.” He said.

  “I’m surprised you managed to crawl over me and get the gate open without waking me up,” She said.

  He shrugged. “I can be quiet when I want to be, and you were dead tired after yesterday. All I had to do was take one long step over you and then open the gate.”

  That was plausible. She wondered if maybe the reason he’d been in her dream was that she had heard him in her sleep when he went out.

  Or smelled him maybe, although she didn’t think sweaty human male would really register above the goaty smell of the shed.

  “Where were you when you heard those sounds? Could you tell where it came from?”

  “Overhead maybe, on the slopes above us?” He blushed. “I was um, still in the outhouse when the screaming started.”

  She giggled. “That would be an awful place to be when a sound like that started up. What do you think made it?”

  “Well, they say panthers can scream like a woman,” He said. “Barring that and murder, I don’t know what would make that noise.”

  “Neither of those are good,” she said somberly. “If it’s murder we want to talk to the local constable and then get out of town as quickly as he’ll let us. If it’s a wild animal, we should probably wait until the sun’s a bit higher. Anyway, let me call Amita.”

  “Is she even awake yet? She would be pretty tired after yesterday, and she must have had a more comfortable bed than either of us did.”

  Amita, it turned out, was not only out of bed, she was on her way out of town already.

  “I borrowed a scooter from my cousin," she said. "I figured I'd get an early start on this."

  YOU FREAKING TWIT! Rina wanted to scream. Instead, she counted to five while Amita said, “Hello? Hello? Can you still hear me?”

  “I can hear you fine,” Rina said. “What I want to know is why you didn’t offer us a lift.”

  “Well, you know, it wasn’t big enough to carry two people, let alone three. I thought little Miss Prepared would figure something out on her own.” And then Amita hung up.

  “Don’t worry, I will,” Rina snarled into the phone.

  “Did she even hear that?” Vipin asked with amusement.

  “No, she’d hung up by then. It was just to make me feel better.” She explained what Amita had done.

  Vipin looked somber. “I take it there aren’t going to be that many people in town with scooters or motorbikes we can borrow.”

  “No. Just as there aren’t that many people with electricity in this town. But we can ask.”

  “How about we check in with that constable you mentioned, make sure someone’s at least reported the noises and that he doesn’t want us to stay in town?”

  They did, and found that every single other passenger from the stopped bus was lined up outside the constable’s tiny office.

  When an older woman from the bus stepped out, Rina asked her: “Is this about the screaming? And the other noises?”

  “Yes, he says he knows all about it and he doesn’t need us telling him what to do or how to do it.”

  “Will he let us leave town?”

  “Let us? He’s encouraging us!”

  Rina and Vipin went back to the tavern. The owner was frying up some mixture of meat, vegetables and cheese for his breakfast, and offered to make the same for them, for a price. Rina agreed, and asked him if he knew of anyone who would rent or sell them a bike, a scooter, “Or even a buffalo cart?” as Rina put it.

  The man sent the small boy out to ask around town, while Rina and Vipin ate breakfast. She was, frankly, getting tired of eating her meals standing up.

  The boy came back about forty minutes later with a heavyset man in tow.

  “I hear you could use a ride on a buffalo cart up to Barleyfields,” The heavyset man said. “Name’s Jabar. You won't find anyone here willing to take you but me. People around here don’t like that town.”

  “And you do?”

  “I used to live there, now I live here. What’s it to you, lady?”

  “Jabar, would you step outside for a moment?” The tavern keeper asked. It sounded more like an order than a request.

  The heavyset man glowered at him, and the tavern owner glowered back.

  “I’d like a private word with my grandson and my customers if you don’t mind.”

  Jabar left the tavern, and the owner shouted at the boy vigorously for several minutes. “Have you got rocks in your head, boy, that you bring that man over here?”

  “We want the strangers gone, don’t we?” The boy said grumpily. “Besides Jabar is bound to make the tall man angry, and the tall man will thrash him black and blue.”

  The tavern-owner looked over at Vipin dubiously.

  “If he does manage to make me angry,” Vipin said in a soft voice. “Yes, I probably will thrash him black and blue.”

  “See it’s all good, grandfather. We get the strangers out of here, and Jabar gets punished for it.” The boy seemed to think this was an unanswerable argument.

  “Boy, you’re too young to know all the details, but you do need to know that Jabar was thrown out of Barleyfields for misbehaving with a woman and doing things she didn’t want to do.” The tavern owner hesitated and then went on.

  “Their constable would have arrested him and sent him to prison if his father weren’t on the council of elders over in Barleyfields, so instead they dumped him on us. But we can’t just dump him on these two strangers like that. They don’t deserve him.”

  “That is very kind of you, sir,” Rina said. “But I believe we can handle him.”

  The owner looked dubious again. “You seem to know your way around pretty well,” He said. “You could try calling someone in Barleyfields to come get you.”

  Rina shook her head. “The trip there and back would take too long,” She said.

  After what she had seen and heard, she had no desire to travel by night. “And most of the people I know over there would have their hands full preparing for the festival.”

  “Besides, we don’t want Barleyfielders over here,” The boy said. “There’d be fighting.”

  “It’s better than sending them out with the likes of Jabar,” The tavern owner protested.

  Rina exchanged glances with Vipin, who looked dubious, but said: “We’ll be fine,” and called Jabar back inside.

  Jabar’s rates for taking people anywhere in his cart were exorbitant, but Rina managed to get him to agree to a more reasonable amount...even if he kept staring at her while he agreed to it.

  He was a tough enough man to where Rina would not have done business with him alone, but with Vipin glaring at him she felt moderately safe. Jabar was not entirely happy with the idea that both of them wanted to ride in his cart at the same time.

  “It seems to me that it would be more proper to let the lady go first, don’t you?” He asked Vipin.

  “It seems to me that you don’t have any clear ideas of what proper is," Vipin said, in a voice that could have frozen the live coals in the fire pit.

  “But the whole reason I’m going over there is to sell a load of kefir to Barleyfields,” Jabar protested. “Think of my poor animal.”

  “Well, you’ll just have to take less kefir on this trip,” Rina cut in. “You’re getting most of your profit out of us, after all.”

  Jabar lee
red. “Oh, I aim to get plenty of profit out of this trip.”

  Rina braced herself. This was probably going to get unpleasant, but she thought she could handle it, and she didn’t want to back out now.

  There was nothing wrong with Jabar’s buffalo at least-it was a sleek, healthy animal that could easily pull a cart with three people sitting up front and a couple of barrels of kefir in the back.

  Vipin somehow maneuvered things so that he sat to Jabar’s right, by Jabar’s dominant hand, while Rina sat next to Jabar’s weaker hand on the left. She kept her own right hand inside her purse, holding onto her pepper spray.

  Jabar waited until they were well outside of town-well outside of screaming distance, Rina thought-before making his move. He grabbed her right wrist before she could bring up her pepper spray and then tried to shove Vipin off the cart.

  Instead, Vipin grabbed Jabar’s arm and half-jumped, half-tumbled into the back of the cart, pulling Jabar backwards with him. Jabar still gripped Rina’s wrist, but she punched him in the stomach with her free hand.

  She couldn’t hit very hard but in that spot she didn’t have to. He gave a strangled shriek, and let go of her wrist in order to grab his stomach.

  Vipin leaped out of the cart and landed neatly on his feet, dragging Jabar with him. And then, as the boy had predicted, Vipin proceeded to beat the man black and blue.

  Rina had seen some hints that he knew how to handle himself, but this was the first time she had seen him get the chance to actually do it.

  His skin had flushed to a dark bronze all over. He moved with both speed and grace, blocking or dodging every punch that Jabar threw at him, breaking every attempt at a wrestling hold with a squeeze of his long hands. His punches landed in a flurry and Rina thought there was something downright beautiful in his kicks-or maybe it was just the fact that he had really nice legs.

  Finally Jabar stopped struggling and tumbled to the ground in a heap. Rina jumped down. The man was still conscious, as Vipin held his shirtfront and glared down into his eyes. A chill ran through Rina.

  She had been too intent on surviving to let herself feel fear when Jabar grabbed her, and there had been a bloodthirsty pleasure in watching Vipin give him what he deserved.