Gel took a slow, relieved breath as he reached the bottom of the steps, breathing deeply from the effort of his success, and looked up towards the front door.
The door had been heavy, solid. When Gel was younger, he used to have problems pushing it open, or closed. The old wooden door had stood as long as the thick stone of the rest of the house, and had always seemed like it would last as long as the rest of the house.
Now it stood split open. A good part of the door around the latch had been broken through and lay on the ground in a pile of splinters. The rest of the door hung at an angle, creaking occasionally as its weight fell on the one good hinge left at the bottom of the door.
The rest of the house looked the same. It looked as if a whirlwind had torn through the place, destroying everything. There were plates and dishes and vases smashed to bits on the floor. As Gel looked into the kitchen he could see that the kitchen table, where he had eaten almost every meal of his young life, lay overturned, one of its legs gone.
In short, the house was destroyed. Sure, the heavy stone walls and roof stood, but every other fixture of the house had been torn asunder. It was chaos; pure destruction, furious and wanton. It was scary.
His parents though, were nowhere to be seen. He had been sure his father would help him. Would comfort him, make the memories of the bearded man go away, make the world right again. His mother would hold him in her arms, and stroke his hair, and his troubles and pains would melt away.
But his fingers and his face, these weren’t the scratches one gets falling from a tree. His parents couldn’t hug his wounds away, even if they were there. And they weren’t.
Gel wanted to cry; felt like he would retch. The feelings of sadness and sickness clashed and fought with each other, and he didn’t know whether the tears or the vomit would come first. Why was this happening to him. No-one ever got hurt in the stories his mother would tell. People weren’t supposed to get hurt, especially not him.
He stumbled slowly, as if drunk, out of the house, passing through the shattered remains of the door. He knelt in the front yard, his one good eye blinded as sadness beat sickness and the tears welled in his eye. His body was choked by sobs, his left hand balled in the grass in front of him. They were gone. Somehow they were gone. He needed them, and he couldn’t find them. They were supposed to be permanent, there for him forever, but his parents were gone. Right then he didn’t notice the pain of his hand, or his head; he somehow didn’t feel the rivers of fire that shot through his arm each time he brought his right hand pounding against the ground in fear and anger, in sorrow and pain.
Time passed. Anger and frustration, sickness and sadness, slowly gave way to a mute acceptance, and a weariness. His body still heaved with bitten back sobs, but they were less frequent. The tears had stopped; their last vestiges blinked out to clear his vision, the dampness of their passing still evident on his cheeks.
The low hill of the Mayor’s manor offered Gel a view of the village when he finally looked up from the ground, his fingers tightening on the grass as he pushed himself up to his knees. Fires still burned, and smoke rose thickly into the sky, and even from a distance he could see the bodies of the dead in the streets. It was strange. In stories, when something bad happened, the skies would be dark and swirling with clouds, thunder and rain would fall from the heavens like leaves from a tree. But the sky above the smoking village was a light blue, clear, and the sun was slowly rising towards its zenith, bright and brilliant, lighting the wispy clouds and floating birds over what would have been a beautiful day.
Then again, in the stories, no good people died. He stared out over the smoke and the fire and thought nothing.
Eventually, Gel started to walk. He wandered the village aimlessly for a time, unable to think. Everywhere he walked, he saw destruction, and fire. And death. There were not many bodies, and those that lay in the streets Gel’s eyes skipped over, trying not to recognize them, and failing. He spotted the body of Del, the baker, lying against the doorframe of the bakery, his eyes wide in surprise and his hands limp near one of the two ragged red circles in his dusty white apron.
There were more of course. Dozens of bodies in the streets, that Gel could see. But he didn’t count them. It seemed like everyone he knew. But then, he knew everyone in the village. Every dead body was someone he knew on sight, if not by name. His eyes and mind skipped over anyone he did not see, anyone who might have escaped, just as they missed the few signs of struggle.
Through it all, through the death and destruction that he saw, through the evidence of violence that tortured his eyes, what disturbed Gel the most were those people that looked like they had simply gone to sleep. There were not many, but he found Daeny, one of the Thatcher’s older daughters, lying on her side in a ball outside her house, her eyes closed. She looked like he could shake her, and she would wake up. But she wouldn’t. She was dead; they all were. She was marred only by a purplish bruise on the side of her plump face, but even that looked like it could have come from a bad fall.
Many of the houses were still smouldering, many others still burning, as he walked the dead streets. Only the stone buildings, the Mayor’s house and the church, had escaped the destruction lent by fire.
Gel went to the church in his absent wandering, wondering if maybe the Fulhar had locked the heavy, metal banded wooden door, if he had possibly survived. The door was broken open, slashed and hacked at and through, so similar to how his own door had been broken open. The inside of the church had been ransacked; many of the holy symbols of Ragn were missing. But the Fulhar was nowhere to be found. Gel wondered absently where in the village his body lay. No-one had escaped; no-one could have.
***
He stumbled through the broken streets for a while, occasionally stopping and staring, eyes unseeing, at something in front of him, some person or place he remembered, but eventually Gel went in search of Sheane and Mae. He hoped and prayed, but knew what he would find. But he had to face it; he had faced everything else.
The garden around their house had been trampled. The front window was smashed, and the walls around the window were blackened and charred, but Gel was still able to make it in the front door and upstairs, ignoring the sisters’ dead parents as he passed. Their fathers head had rolled into a corner, and their mother lay in a bloody heap, her dress ragged and torn.
Still, he made it inside, and up the stairs to the girls’ room. The door to their room looked like it had been kicked in, much like his had, but he barely saw anything. His mind seemed to be wrapped in a haze of fog. The girls’ room was as destroyed, as the rest of the house. The bed had escaped somehow, the covers still neatly made. It looked like it could be slept in anytime. It stood in sharp contrast to the broken odds and ends that scattered the rest of the room.
But the girls weren’t there. His parents were gone, his friends were gone. Gel was alone.
Gel walked, and his body shook with laughter and tears as he left the twins house. He knew what he had to do now, he thought as he left the house, his eyes and mind ignoring the carnage around him.
He stopped laughing as he walked down the familiar cobblestone streets, now patched in places with blood. Somehow he stopped feeling. He barely noticed as he walked past Lady Vaen, sitting on the front steps of her house, her head leaning against the wooden doorframe. Her eyes stared straight ahead, and her hands were pressed against her stomach in what had been a vain attempt to keep its contents inside, but Gel didn’t care. All that concerned him now was inside her house. Somehow her house had escaped the worst of the destruction and fire, and Gel would have thanked Ragn if he had cared enough to. True, much of Lady Vaen’s fancy art, her sculptures and paintings and vases, were either gone or broken, but as Gel searched her house, he found what he needed. It was in the music room, which made sense, hidden under a painting of a pretty lady in a rose hat sitting in a boat on a lake that had fallen from the wall.
The lute case itself was slightly battered, it had a dent an
d scratch or two from when the painting had fallen on it, but when he flipped open the latches and looked inside, the instrument inside was pristine, and beautiful. Gel had always loved his old lute, he had cherished it for years, with its worn frets and top, and much replaced tuning pegs, but Lady Vaen’s was a masterpiece, with more than two hundred years of storied owners, and it was his now. He laughed wryly again at the thought. It had to be his. There was no-one else left to take it.
Gel left Lady Vaen’s house and walked down the cobblestone street, the lute case clutched tight to his chest as he left the village to burn behind him.
***
Gel sat when he reached the old Oak, and he was happy it still stood. What with everything else in his life that had been destroyed, he was glad to have one place that remained free of blood and death and smoke and fire.
Horse tracks were left all throughout the plains around the city, and even Gel’s untrained eye could tell there were many. Gel noticed, but he didn’t care. He didn’t care about revenge, or justice, or anything really. It did not matter who had destroyed his village, if they had ridden in on horses. Gel wouldn’t even have cared if they had flown in on dragons. As he opened the lute case and lay it on the ground beside the old Oak tree, he knew he had only one thing left to do.
His hastily bandaged right hand and missing fingers gave him some pause, they still hurt, but he unwrapped them anyway. The blood had scabbed over the stumps of his fingers, and he could see that he was missing half of his fourth finger, and all of his fifth. It was a small thing to be missing, to cause so much pain, he thought, but he could play without them. He picked with his right hand, and he could pick almost as swiftly with three fingers as with five. Gel was absently glad that he had not lost fingers on his left hand; he didn’t think he would have had time to relearn the lute.
It didn’t matter though, he thought as he picked up his lute and began to play. The pain in his face as his one good eye looked out from under the Oak, watching his village smoke and burn in the distance, the pain in his hand as his three remaining fingers picked unsteadily over the lute strings, slowly adjusting to play without two fingers as he went. Even the pain in his heart. None of it mattered.
As he sent a dark, sorrowful dirge out across the plain, he played not for himself, or for the tree, or for anything he had ever played for before. He played for the town, for the life he had just lost. For everyone he had known and loved. The song was slow, mournful, and above all, black. He had never played a song as black before, and it tugged at his heartstrings even as it helped him. He wove into the song everyone he had known. He played for Lady Vaen, for Sheane and Mae, for his parents. He played for the town as it burned, and as it smoldered. He fell asleep and woke again, and played as the town smoked. He would play for his village until he could play no more, then he would lay down and wait for death to take him to the people he loved.
II
Erris woke groggily as the wagon rolled to a quick stop. Just as its steady rocking had lulled her slowly to sleep, the wagon’s sudden stop had her awake and blinking the sleep from her eyes. They couldn’t be home yet, she thought as she slowly rolled to her front and, pushing on the rough wood of the wagon and sat up. In between sleep-crusted blinks of her still-heavy eyes, she could see the canopy of a forest all around the wagon. It placed them in one of the small, patchy forests that dotted the path from Oortain’s Copse to the farm, but gave no reason for the stop.
Before she could sit up herself, someone unseen grabbed her shoulders and lifted her up, turning her to face the side of the wagon. Her mothers face was frantic, her brown eyes touched with fear as she thrust a large, canvas sheet, normally used to protect goods in the back of the wagon in case of rain, into Erris’ hands.
‘Quick’ she said, looking towards the still sleeping Joahn and Boll, curled up side by side as they slept, ‘Hide them.’ Then she moved to the front of the wagon, where Erris could hear loud, indistinct, angry words. She unfolded the canvas sheet as she looked at the children, wondering sluggishly, sleepily, why she should have to cover them.
The two children had their arms wrapped around each other as they slept. Joahn had one small hand laying across the side of Boll’s face, clutching his earlobe. Erris thought of how many times she had been the object of the same attention from Joahn; earlobes were soft, and for some reason caressing one helped Joahn sleep. Boll on the other hand had one of his fingers wrapped tightly in his sisters’ still curly hair. They barely stirred as Erris spread out the sheet carefully, covering them as gently as she could.
She shifted towards the front of the wagon, slowly as to not wake Joahn or Boll, and the angry voices came fuzzily into focus as she looked forward.
‘We don’t want any trouble’ her father said as he stood a few paces ahead of Marmot. Omah was with him, one hand on his shoulder, the other hugging tightly to his arm, as if to both calm him and use him as protection. In his other arm Johan held the short, heavy hammer that always sat in the wagon bed, in case repairs had to be made en-route.
‘Yeah, well that’s just too bad, isn’t it?’ a man in front of her father said. There were five of them standing in the road, five broad-shouldered soldiers in bright red coats, and Erris recognized them from the tavern. She saw the one that had grabbed her, and the one that had drunkenly leered at Serah, and the one her father had attacked, his arm bandaged and held in a sling. She looked around quickly. Yolan and Serah were both sitting in the front seat of the wagon, arms around each other, and past them Erris could see Jayke and Johan the younger, standing to either side of Marmot. Johan was holding Marmots reins, calming the horse with soothing words and slow strokes to his nose, and Jayke was on Marmot’s left, slowly untying the straps of Marmots saddle that held her fathers old rifle in place, clearly trying to do so without being noticed.
Erris had been looking around, but the soldier confronting her father had not stopped talking.
‘Y’see, we’ve got a problem’ the soldier continued, walking slowly towards her father as he spoke. ‘You hurt one of my brothers here,’ he said as he pointed back aimlessly, and the soldier with his arm in the sling, possibly broken from when her father had hit him with the chair, grimaced and spat noisily on the ground, his lips curling up in disgust, his brow furrowed in anger, as he glared at Johan.
The first soldier, the one doing all the talking, had walked close enough to put an arm on Johan’s shoulder, her father stepping back with one foot and lifting the hammer slightly.
‘We won’t hurt you, we just want some… compensation’ the soldier grinned.
‘We’ll give you what gold we have, if you’ll leave’ her father replied angrily, reaching for his purse with one arm.
‘Ah, you misunderstand,’ still smiling, the soldier looked towards the wagon. He didn’t seem nearly as drunk as the soldiers had all been at the tavern, and he was smiling entirely too much for Erris’ comfort. Not for the first time that night, Erris wondered why she had ever liked soldiers.
‘We want your daughters.’ Erris went cold, and could have sworn he looked straight at her when he spoke. ‘Just for a while, you understand.’ He said, looking back at Johan, still grinning. Her father was turning bright red with anger, but the smiling soldier continued anyway. ‘An hour, maybe two, and we’ll give them back to you, mostly undamaged. Maybe.’ The grin was still there, but it slid off like melting wax as Johan growled furiously. Without the grin, the soldiers’ face matched his eyes: cold.
‘You sick bastard, I’ll give you nothing. You touch any of my daughters and I’ll…’ Johan started, knocking the soldiers arm from his shoulder with an angry wave of his arm, the one carrying the hammer, now clearly more of a weapon than a tool.
For a second, Erris thought everything would be alright. Her father had denied them, and Jayke had a gun. They would drive off the soldiers, return home, and forget that any of this had happened. They would go to sleep, and wake up early the next morning, and farm life would continue, and Er
ris would never ask to leave the farm again. Erris thought that it could still happen, that everything would be alright.
Then the soldier did something, somehow wrapping the arm that had been on her fathers shoulder around her father’s arm, the hammer falling slowly, heavily to the ground as the soldier twisted her fathers arm upwards.
‘I knew you’d say that’ the soldier said, interrupting her father mid-sentence, and there was no emotion on his face as he stepped into Johan.
Erris couldn’t see what happened next, her father’s body blocked her view, but her mother started screaming as the soldier stepped back, and Johan fell slowly to his knees, his hands grabbing ineffectually at the hilt of a dagger that protruded from his chest, just under his ribcage. Time slowed to a crawl again as Erris moved to hold the children down, keep them hidden under the canvas cover, to keep them from waking and running to their mother as she herself wanted to.
So much seemed to happen at once. Erris’ mother dropped to her knees and started crawling, her bundled skirts slowing her, towards her husband, her eyes full of tears and disbelief. Johan, no longer the younger as his father died several paces in front of him, yelled and reached a useless arm out towards his fallen father as Jayke swore, and lifted the rifle from Marmots saddle. Serah buried her face in Yolan’s arms, trying to shield herself from the violence, and Joahn began to cry, startled awake by the screams and yells.
The man who had just killed her father slowly looked down at Erris’ mother as she crawled painfully forward. He frowned, as if considering, and then backhanded her hard across the mouth. Omah went down, blood flying from her cut mouth as an explosion rang out through the forest around them.
The explosion was loud, louder than Erris could understand, and it echoed painfully around the trees on either side of the cart. It hurt Erris’ ears, and she went to cover them in pained reflex as another explosion rang out, just after the first one. The explosions were loud, they were painful, they were death.
The Fire and the Fog Page 9