The Fire and the Fog

by David Alloggia

  The boy had yelled when he poured on the spirits, and struggled, but he was weak. Weaker than Dan’r. Now he lay on a cot Dan’r had moved to one side of the church, piled under blankets.

  The boy was lucky. The gash along his eye was straight, shallow, and leapt from his forehead to his cheek. The eye had been untouched. His hand though…he would still be able to use what was left of his fingers, but…well…nothing else could be done. Maybe if they had been in Alta, and the boy had been found earlier…but no.

  Still, he would live. He would sleep, deeply, until his fever broke. But he would live, he would recover.

  And until he did, Dan’r would stay with him.

  ***

  The first day, Dan’r mostly slept. While awake, he prowled through the village hunting for more supplies, found more food, some bandages, some pots and pans he could cook with. He managed to get food into the boy, cleaned and bandaged the boys hand and eye as best he could, then he cleaned himself. A knife and a piece of shattered mirror helped tame his beard, and his hair, both of which he had neglected for entirely too long.

  The second day though, Dan’r walked into what looked like every other house on the street, tall, clean, proper, only slightly burned by fire. He had long since stopped looking at the bodies still piled in the streets. Its windows were even all intact. This house was different though. Dan’r had no idea who might have lived there before, but whoever was had painted.

  None of the work was particularly good. It adorned the walls and filled a large room in the back of the house. Gaudy portraits, the colours muddy and poorly mixed, the backgrounds uniform, empty. The people themselves were flat; no detail or expression to them. They felt fake, without essence or ardor. But they were painted.

  And that room at the back…filled with painting supplies; oils, pigments, brushes, canvas. More supplies than Dan’r could remember having in years.

  So he took them.

  The rest of the second day, and the third day, found Dan’r painting. He ate some of the scavenged supplies himself, managed to get water and some bread into the boy, but the rest of the time, he painted. Nothing useful, nothing spectacular, he just wanted to paint.

  Time passed. Dan’r spent the days without speaking; there was no need to. But the small, burnt-out village was far from quiet. The quiet scratches of charcoal on parchment and the rustling and light moans of the hurt boy somehow seemed to fill the inside of the stone church, seemed to mix with the sounds of the world outside. The high pitched chirps and trills of small birds, the rustling of debris tossed about in light winds, even once the crash of a burned-out house collapsing, its charcoaled timbers unable to support itself; the sounds from the outside tried to invade Dan’r’s mind, tried to distract him.

  They failed.

  II

  Everything was on fire. Why was there so much fire. And why did everything hurt so? There was screaming, and fire, and he couldn’t find anyone. They were screaming for him, he could hear them. He could hear his mother calling his name. Was she? Was anyone? There was just so much pain it was hard to think stra…

  Gel sat up with a start, a light blanket falling slowly into his lap as he reached out a clammy, shaking, four-fingered hand to the cold stone wall beside him. It was a dream. He was at home, he was safe, and…

  Four fingers.

  He pulled his left hand, his only real hand, to his forehead as he started to sob. As tears began to fall.

  Well why shouldn’t they? He was broken, and he was alone, and everyone he loved was dead. Why shouldn’t he cry?

  ‘Because crying won’t help you’ the voice of reason in his head said. It was that calm voice, reasoning, his own mind’s way of thinking to itself, and its message was simple.

  ‘Get up, Gel. You have to get up.’

  Gel threw off the covers and stood shakily as the voice of reason spoke, his left hand going to the wall for support, for leverage.

  The stone wall was cool against his sweating palm. Blessedly cool. He put his right hand, his half-hand, up against the cool stone wall as well, partially for support, but mostly to soothe the fire that was all his right hand could feel.

  Gel stood there a while, both hands against the wall, head bowed, chest rising and falling in ragged breaths as the voice continued talking. As long as it was only in his head, he wasn’t talking to himself.

  ‘Get up, Gel. Get up and smell the ashes. Someone did this to you.’ The voice continued in his head, angry as Gel knew he should be. ‘Get up and find them. Find whoever took your life from you. Find them and destroy them. Make them pay.’

  And the voice in his head was right. Somehow he would do just that. He had given up, earlier. Thought that all he could do still for his family was play them out, until he played himself out too. But no, there was something more. Somehow he would make them pay. They deserved it. His family, his friends, and whoever had done this, they all deserved it. They deserved vengeance, revenge, and there was no-one but Gel who could bring it for them.

  The other side of his head wondered if he might be wrong, though. What could he do? He was young, weak, poor. Alone.

  But, he was standing now. And the fire in his hand burned less; the cool church stone had at least soothed that one ill. His voice of reason had gotten him this far, hadn’t it? What could it hurt to continue listening to it? He had nothing else.

  ‘I know what I have to do, now’ Gel thought to himself as he turned, looking slowly about the room, as he took in shattered and upturned pews, large hard wooden constructs carved generations ago, that had always seemed as eternal as the stone of the church. ‘I have to find them,’ he thought, his eyes passing quickly over several canvas bags, their outlines showing they were filled with something, ‘Find them and make them pay,’ he thought. His eyes narrowed in confusion at the sight of an easel, paints and canvas set up in the middle of the cleared area; widened in surprise as they found, and stopped on, a man curled against the wall opposite Gel. The man appeared to be asleep; at least his eyes were closed.

  Gel didn’t know who the man was, but he would start with him. He would find a knife, or a sword, and start getting his revenge right then and there. He would kill the man against the wall. He had to. He was part of it. He had to be.

  Looking quickly through the scattered bags on the church floor though, Gel only found food, paints, scattered brushes, a few small bottles of liquid. Nothing he could use against the man, nothing that would give him the advantage he would need. The man was bigger, stronger. Gel wouldn’t last. He wasn’t running away, he told himself, he was surviving to deal with the man later, when he was stronger. The rationalization helped.

  So instead, Gel grabbed one of the canvas bags full of food and left. He left the church he woke up in, left the house he grew up in, left the only place he had ever lived, left it all behind, and started along the cobblestone road out of the city.

  He looked back once, before he left the village entirely. Looked back at the square stone villa atop the low hill at the center of town; back at the only home he had known. From the distance, he could almost pretend he couldn’t see the door on its hinges, could almost pretend he couldn’t remember the inside of the house, that he couldn’t remember the destruction that greeted him when he woke. Part of him remembered the last time he had left the city, remembered that lovely day spent with Mae, kissing under the Tree. But he shook his head, banished those thoughts. They were gone, they would never happen again.

  He started to put distance between himself and the village, but the distance wasn’t enough. His eyes couldn’t ignore the destruction, and his mind couldn’t stop seeing it. It got worse every time he thought of it, imagining the fire, blood and destruction. It layered itself steadily over his image of the town, a dark filter of fire and smoke, getting heavier with every pass.

  Gel’s mood was dark, darker than it had been before he went to play under the Oak tree. He could no longer pretend that his house was okay, just as he couldn’t pretend tha
t the village behind him was now nothing but a charred and broken husk, a torn and shredded shadow of a painting that once was. He could pretend, could grieve, no longer. It was time to act.

  And so he left it all behind. He left the destruction and the terror, the death and pain, he left his life behind and headed out, alone, onto the open plain that surrounded Oortain’s Copse.

  Part of him wondered why the rest of the world should seem so beautiful, so pristine. A clear blue sky; birds and sun were in the air. Green-gold fields surrounded him. Why should the world seem so perfect when his village behind him crumbled slowly to ashes.

  But most of him ignored that. Ignored the sky, the birds, the sun, everything but the canvas bag held tightly in his hand, dragging jerkily along the dirt road underneath him, and the thought of how he would make them pay.

  III

  Dan’r woke slowly; the sort of crawling return to consciousness that ekes out of a quiet, dreamless sleep; where the first moment of wakefulness is indistinguishable from the last fragile grasps of unconsciousness.

  Even after waking, he lay still, curled against the wall, unable to be sure if he had woken or was just stuck in a calm, silent dream. Either way, he knew that moving would spoil it.

  Eventually though, Dan’r rose from his calm lethargy. Just as every dream must eventually end in wakefulness, so too must every moment of halcyon, where all seems right with the world.

  On this morning, light and quiet, Dan’r’s calm was broken when he realized the boy was gone. Gone sometime in the night or the morning, in the few unguarded hours Dan’r had slept. There was no way of knowing when the boy had disappeared, no way of knowing when.

  Just days out of his drunken stupor; just days into trying to do right by the world again, and Dan’r was already failing. He cursed himself for not grabbing wine when he was ransacking the rest of the village. He could use a good drink.

  ‘He’s not ready yet.’ Dan’r thought angrily as he looked over the scattering of supplies strewn about the church. He looked down at his hands, pale but steady in the morning light, ‘I’m not ready yet.’

  He hadn’t been ready to move yet. There was food in the town, supplies, but he hadn’t collected enough. And he’d spent his days painting nothing; landscapes. Vague memories of scenes he recalled from his drunken haze. Nothing he could use. He was losing valuable time already, not leaving after the boy immediately, but he couldn’t leave yet.

  So he sat at the easel he had found, threw aside the canvas that he had been working on. He had been painting the tree he had found the boy under, its dark and verdant leaves already painted, surrounded by a light outline of grass. He had been about to start the shading, had been about to start putting in the small details of feeling and colour that would make the painting seem more alive, more emotive.

  Instead, the painting landed on the floor of the church, the still wet oils sticking quickly to the cold stone, and Dan’r began to sketch on sheets of parchment. Days ago, in his delirium, he had thrown away his cloak; it was the first thing he redrew, and then he quickly sketched out the pieces that would fill the pockets of the cloak. Not all of them, he didn’t have time for them all, but the important ones. Water, food; the essentials.

  ***

  His Art finished, Dan’r began to sort through the supplies scattered among the broken pews. Much of the food he had scavenged on that first day in the village was gone. At least the boy had thought to bring supplies when he ran. The remaining food went into a bag with what art supplies Dan’r could fit: the brush and paints he had found; those would be hard to replace; charcoal, and some inks, scraps of parchment of varying sizes. The canvas and easel would have to be left behind. As glorious as it was to paint on real canvas again, it would only slow him down.

  No. For now what Dan’r needed would have to fit in the one bag, and into the pockets of his cloak, newly made and stocked with scraps of parchment. Days ago, it had been a weighty burden. Now its presence, its weight, was comfortable.

  Four hours after discovering the boy gone, Dan’r was on the move. He circled the outskirts of the village first, his back stooped, his eyes and hands intent on the ground beneath him. It would be faster to see if the boy had left the village, before searching house by house.

  He found what he was looking for. On the eastern edge of the village, where the cobblestones turned to the dirt highway that ran throughout Rognia: recent footprints; small ones. The boy had gone East.

  Dan’r stood and knuckled his back slowly, cloak billowing lightly in the wind around him.

  ‘What I wouldn’t give for a goddamned horse’ he muttered to himself, already wincing at the tight knots hardening in his back. Still, there were some things he could not make.

  ***

  ‘I hate walking!’ Gel yelled at no-one. The sun beating down on him, the blue sky above and the golden fields that grew on both sides of the road ignored him, just as they had each time he had yelled out before. ‘Hate it!’ The few birds in the sky ignored him too.

  He saw a clump of dirt on the road ahead, somehow held together in a vaguely spherical form. He wanted to kick it, just as he wanted a weapon of some sort to swing at the unoffending grain to either side of him. The last clump of dirt he kicked had broken apart. Unbalanced, he’d fallen, and lain dejected on the ground. It had taken him a good five minutes, and more energy than he thought he had left, to force himself to stand again.

  ‘I hate you!’ Gel yelled at the dirt as he walked slowly past it. The dirt ignored him, just as the rest of the world had. Yelling was just making him thirsty.

  He missed water already. He had two loaves of bread in the canvas bag, now covered in dust and dirt from being dragged along behind him for hours, and a lump of cheese. He’d already eaten the two apples, and wished there had been more. He should have brought water.

  Being thirsty, not knowing how to pack, made him think of Sheane and Mae. What he wouldn’t give for an afternoon with them under the shade of the old tree, with a picnic basket and a lute and not another care in the world.

  Vengeance wasn’t fair.

  ***

  It didn’t take Dan’r long to find the boy. He’d had much less of a head start than Dan’r expected, and he seemed to be stopping frequently to hate the world. Dan’r knew from years of first hand experience how much that could lengthen the pace of a journey.

  What took time was skirting around the boy, staying close enough to keep an eye on him, but far enough to not be seen. Dan’r left the dirt path, made his way through the fields on the left of the road, wading through the tall grass as if it were water. The land was flat, and Dan’r could make out sheep grazing in the distance, but he wasn’t worried that the boy would spot him. The boy was too angry to pay attention to the world around him. Anger clouded the boy’s eyes as alcohol had clouded Dan’r’s for years. Meeting him now wouldn’t help.

  Dan’r reached his hands into his cloak, his fingers touched parchment. He pulled out a water skein, uncorked it, and drank deeply. It wasn’t cold, but still it was water. The boy would need some eventually. He’d have to stay close enough to be there when he did.

  ‘Wish I had a hat though’, Dan’r thought to himself. Then he smiled. The boy had probably stopped to hate the world again. He had time. He lowered himself slowly to sit cross-legged in the middle of the dirt road, and reached his way into the bag at his side. Pulling out a large sheet of parchment and some charcoal, Dan’r started to hum, a vague idea of a plan forming as his hand moved the charcoal across the page in short, measured, controlled bursts, the scratching sounds coming from the parchment music to his ears.

  The Student and the Master

  I

  Gel wasn’t doing so well. The sun beat down on him, the lack of water…they were not helping his journey, especially not in his still injured state. He had no idea who had re-wrapped his wounds for him, and in a quiet, distant part of his mind he supposed it had done him well, but…still. He hurt.

  His
hand and face hurt, a dull, aching throb with each step he took. He had no water, and he still had no idea where he was going. Aimless vengeance was more difficult than he had anticipated.

  He’d given up on cursing or kicking at the ground a while ago, and now he just walked. As it was, he spent much of his time looking at the ground, watching where his feet fell so he wouldn’t fall. He had fallen several times already, too many times, and his feet were dragging now, putting rough, shallow furrows into the dirt of the road. It wouldn’t take much to put him face first on the ground again, and Gel wasn’t sure he’d be able to make himself stand from another fall.

  Because of his preoccupation with his pain, because of the concentration it took to put one foot in front of the other, Gel almost missed spotting him. Almost, but not quite.

  Gel was very close when he noticed the man on the side of the road. He froze immediately in mid-stride and crouched as much as his aching legs would allow, watching.

  He was just…lying there. Dirty clothes, his hands behind his head, one leg crossed over the other as he lay on his back, a wide-brimmed straw hat covering his face. He was…well, Gel wasn’t quite sure what, or who, he was. But aside from the man sleeping curled up in the church when he left, he hadn’t seen another person in…he wasn’t even sure how long.

  Gel stood there, watching the man for a good minute before he decided he must be sleeping, and wondered idly how long it was since he had talked with anyone other than himself.