Not much, but it did.
***
Erris was relaxing after the scare with Gel’s music and the fog, sinking herself into a book and the colourful notes of Gel’s playing, when the wagon jerked to a halt. Dan’r reached into the back of the wagon, grabbing a torch.
‘Stay in the wagon,’ he said, lighting the torch he’d grabbed against one of the lit ones on the side of the wagon, ‘there’s something on the road.’
Erris and Gel leaned over to look as Dan’r climbed down slowly from the wagon bed, and Erris knew immediately what it was. A sob, almost a gasp, broke from her chest, a tear started to roll down her cheek.
‘Erris?’ Gel said, looking over at her, suddenly concerned, and reaching a questioning hand towards her shoulder.
‘It’s…it’s my…’ Erris muttered, crying quietly as Dan’r and Gel both looked at her.
‘It’s my father,’ she said, and then it all came out. Gel and Dan’r watched her wordlessly as she told the story; how her family was attacked by church soldiers on her birthday, her father and brothers killed, the rest of her family run off into the forest, the soldiers sent after them.
It exhausted her to talk about it. She had tried to block it out entirely, forget that night had ever happened, but with Gel and Dan’r standing there, she let it all out, silent tears falling steadily. Gel looked shocked and sorry; he kept reaching a hand out as if to comfort her, but then pulling it back, as if he wasn’t sure how she would take it. Dan’r…Dan’r looked like a stone, but Erris could see his jaw clenching and unclenching as he listened.
When Erris talked about the Fog, how she heard screams from the forest, and how it burst out and engulfed the soldier who had been assaulting her before Marmot carried her to safety, Dan’r raised his eyebrows, then cut in.
‘How many of your family ran to the bushes?’ he asked, any traces of exhaustion in his voice hidden by a serious tone that seemed laden with barely contained anger.
‘What? Why…’ Erris started, looking up with tear-streaked eyes.
‘Just tell me,’ he said, forcefully, and Erris did.
She told him all she remembered of where her family had disappeared, of where the soldiers had gone to find them, and when she finished he simply nodded once.
‘Stay here. Don’t leave the wagon. And watch the torches,’ he said, grabbing two extra, unlit torch from the wagon, lighting a third, and disappearing off into the fog.
Erris had been shocked by his interruption, shocked by the ferocity in his voice, and she stared off aimlessly at where he disappeared, eyes wide.
She jumped a little when Gel put a hand on her shoulder lightly.
‘I’m…I’m sorry,’ he said awkwardly, ‘about your family.’
It was awkward, but he was sincere, and…
Erris found herself burying her face, and her tears, in his shoulder; found herself crying as he awkwardly patted her back, and tried to make soothing sounds.
As awkward as it was, it did somehow seem to help.
***
Dan’r stalked through the fog, furious. That anyone would attack a family. That anyone would try to…
He was disgusted. Words couldn’t explain.
He didn’t care how long it took. He would find them all. Erris’ family; the soldiers; he would find them all. And he would do whatever had to be done.
He started on the left side of the road. The first soldier, the one Erris had called the leader was there, just out of sight of the wagon, his fingers clawing through the hard dirt, his eyes empty, his face afraid. Dan’r pulled a large hammer from his cloak with one hand, and then he started on the soldier. This one deserved it most, so Dan’r took time to break him. He started with his fingers.
***
It took him time to find the next group, but the underbrush was heavily disturbed; he had a clear path to follow. He could see no more than ten feet on each side, but it was enough.
The first soldier he came across was on the ground. He had tripped over a root, trying to escape the Fog. One of his arms was up, his face and eyes bared in fear.
Dan’r took the soldiers’ sword from him, impaled him through the stomach. Strangely he felt nothing but curiosity as he did so; small tendrils of Fog tried to leak through the wound in the man’s abdomen, rather than blood.
Dan’r left the sword in him, moved on.
Four others were close by. Three had blundered into the Fog unaware. A fourth had tried to climb a tree.
Dan’r dealt with them all.
***
After Erris recovered slightly; after she and Gel separated, eyes cast aside in embarrassment, after they each sat against an opposite wall of the wagon, looking at anything but each other, they started to wait.
They weren’t sure how long, but Dan’r seemed gone for a long time. They waited, and waited. And then they started to talk. Erris asked Gel where he’d gotten the scars, and he told her, telling her all about the painful night, and about his village.
And then they talked about themselves. About Gel’s life in the village; about Erris’ life on the farm. They just talked.
***
It took him longer to find the children Erris had spoken of, but he moved in a slow, sweeping grid, and found them eventually. The boy lay on the ground by a tree. He might have been asleep, but for the large purple bruise on the side of his face.
The girl was held tight in the soldiers’ hand, one hand reached back to strike.
Dan’r took this soldiers’ sword as well, stabbed it under his armpit, left it.
By Erris’ count, he had three more to find.
***
He had to light his second torch just before he found one of Erris’ sisters. She had fallen, her face a rictus of pain as she held tightly onto her ankle, two soldiers standing over her laughing. They had been distracted, one with the butt of his rifle in the girls midsection.
Dan’r broke their knees and left them.
***
He had to pull the last soldier off the girl. He took his time with that one. Left him nailed to a tree.
***
When Dan’r finally came back and started to haul himself into the wagon bench, Erris and Gel stopped talking, clamming up tight. But their glances stopped being quite as awkward. Somehow, over misery and loss, they had bonded.
‘I’ve dealt with them,’ Dan’r said as he climbed up into the wagon again, slumping down in his seat, and motioning for Marmot to start moving.
‘What do you…,’ Erris started, but Dan’r interrupted almost immediately.
‘When we’re done, when we stop the Fog, it’ll disappear. And everything that’s in it right now will come back. It’ll be let go. If I did nothing, then…then everything here would go back exactly as it was. I couldn’t leave them like that. When the fog’s gone, your family will be safe.’
Erris said nothing for a moment, processing what he’d said, before hurrying and throwing her arms around him, and kissing him lightly on the check.
‘Thank you,’ she said, and she meant it.
When Gel started up his music again, it seemed a little more cheerful to everyone.
***
They travelled for days, their whole world closed in a bubble, twenty meters long, ten meters wide. They ate and slept in the grey bubble, used the wagon for occasional privacy when necessary. Gel played, Erris read, and Dan’r made sure their torch supply was always adequate. They travelled through towns, villages, and even a city, but they kept to the road, rarely seeing anything to their side. Dan’r would sometimes jump off the wagon, head into the fog with a single lit torch, but never for long.
On the second day of travel, Erris started to read out ideas from the books she read, though Gel and Dan’r rarely gave much comment.
By the third day, they started to get on each others nerves. With no new material other than the shifting grey expanse all around them, Gel’s music was beginning to grow stale, beginning to repeat, and he took longer and longer br
eaks between playing. Dan’r was touchy, and exhausted, and would react with anger to the slightest prodding. And Erris…Erris was fine. She had her books, and light to read them by, and her family would be alright.
On the fourth day, they passed through Vhindyar, the Regian capital, the light from their torches close enough to the houses on the side of the smaller thoroughfares to throw the sharp, solid construction, built to withstand a constant salt spray from the ocean, into sharp contrast. Here, they caught their first glimpses of people, seemingly frozen in time, gaping out windows or reaching for doors where the Fog rolled over them in the streets.
‘Why don’t they come back when the light from the torches touches them?’ Gel asked at one street corner, where a red-robed priest stood, his arms held wide. He seemed to be welcoming the Fog that had swept over him. He must have been sure in his faith, sure that his God would protect him.
‘It gets inside them, I think,’ Dan’r said, barely glancing at the figure as they rode past, Marmots hooves echoing endlessly off the houses to either side. ‘The light can take the fog off them, but not out of them, so they stay stuck.’
That revelation gave the statues, frozen in time and given wavering shadows by the flickering light of the torches, a new, unsettling light. Gel and Erris wondered if the frozen people might still be aware, still be able to see them as they rode past slowly through the deserted streets. Dan’r ignored it all and spent most of his time brooding silently.
On the fifth day, they reached the ocean.
III
The ocean had called to them for hours as they followed the road, their only net of safety in an otherwise grey, hostile world. They heard the waves crash against rocks somewhere below them, the ebb and flow of the surf the first outside sound they had heard since entering the fog. It was something different, something that wasn’t the ever-present creaks and moans of the wagon. The sound the waves made…it seemed glorious. Even Dan’r, dismal for days, came slightly out of his depression. He straightened out of his seat slightly, his face taking on a stern, yet hopefully determined, glint.
They followed a long, slow, winding road down the side of the cliffs. At some points, off to their right, the light of their torches would show a drop, would show the ground falling away into…nothing. It was unsettling, knowing you could fall, not knowing how long you might fall for.
Before long, they entered a small fishing village. The thatch-roofed houses and muddy roads echoed the chorus of water lapping against docks and the foreboding silence of the place. Its people were frozen in time as they went about their daily tasks. They must have assumed the Fog was just that, fog.
Dan’r stopped the wagon when Marmot’s hooves started to clatter against the wooden dock. The light from the torches barely made it over the sides of the dock; the waters on either side remained hidden in the fog.
‘Wait here,’ he said, lighting one of their few remaining spare torches and pushing himself off the wagon, ‘I’ll find us a boat.’
The fog swallowed him soon after, quickly filling the hole made by his torch, and it wasn’t long before even the muffled creaks of his footfalls against the ancient dock were smothered.
Erris and Gel sat, waiting, as they had many times in the days previous.
‘What’s going to happen to Marmot?’ Erris asked, realizing for the first time that it was unlikely they could bring the horse with them on the ship.
Gel looked at the horse thoughtfully, his young mind working. ‘Well…if we leave him here, then he’ll get covered by the Fog,’ Gel said, frowning, ‘but…he’ll be fine as soon as we stop it right?’
‘But he’ll be alone, in a strange place. And who knows what the villagers here will do to him. Maybe they’ll steal him, or sell him…’
‘It’ll be fine,’ Gel answered quickly, ‘We’ll stop the fog, and then come right back, and we’ll save Marmot before anyone can take him.’
Any further conversation was cut off as Dan’r’s muffled footsteps emerged from the fog, followed soon after by the man himself.
‘I found a ship,’ he said, grabbing his bag of art supplies and another lit torch from the wagon, ‘Grab what you can and follow me.’
Gel grabbed his lute, Erris her bag full of books, and both took a lit torch in either hand as they stepped off the wagon, and followed Dan’r closely.
‘Wait,’ Erris said, stopping as they passed Marmot. She stepped up to Marmot, nuzzling him with her forehead.
‘You be good, silly horse,’ she said, closing her eyes as the horse licked her, ‘you be good and don’t be afraid. I’ll be back soon, and then we’ll go back to the farm, with mother, and and…’
‘Let’s go, girl,’ she heard Dan’r call from behind.
With one last nudge at Marmot’s forehead, she turned, wiped away a tear with her shoulder, and nodded. Marmot disappeared silently behind them as the trio stepped into the fog, and walked along the creaking dock.
‘Here.’ Dan’r stopped and waved one torch over the side of the dock, illuminating a portion of the boat. ‘We’ll have to be careful getting in.’
Dan’r lowered himself slowly into the boat, then held onto the dock to steady it as Gel and Erris lowered themselves in. It was a good seven meters long, and two wide, with a sail furled up in the center, and oars stashed on either side.
For the next half hour, they busied themselves setting up the ship. Dan’r made more torches, littering the bottom of the boat with them, while Gel and Erris found ways to secure them to the boat, by wedging them between planks in the hull, or tying them down.
It took ten torches to light the boat, five on either side, equally spaced out, and when they were all set, Dan’r sat heavily in the center of the boat, leaning his head against the mast.
‘You two, sit at the back. I need to rest. You have to row.’ Dan’r said, closing his eyes.
‘When do I get to play?’ Gel asked, annoyed at being relegated to rowing.
‘What direction do we go?’ Erris asked, concerned about setting off into the fog with no heading.
‘Just start,’ Dan’r said, not looking up, ‘I’ll take over soon.’
Gel and Erris looked at each other, then Gel shrugged, moving slowly, unsteadily to the back of the boat, taking out one of the oars and putting it in its lock.
Erris sighed, and joined him.
And then they set off. It took a while to get used to rowing, and they made little headway, but they eventually got the hang of it. Rowing in unison, they even managed to talk quietly to each other, as Dan’r slept against the mast nearby.
***
When Dan’r did finally wake, he had Gel and Erris put up the oars, and quickly set about unfurling the sail on the boat’s single mast.
Then he sat, and beckoned Gel closer.
‘It’s your turn now, boy,’ he said, barely noticing Gel’s frown at being called boy again. ‘You need to play, and your music needs to do two things. One, you need to calm the ocean, keep the swells small enough for this boat to cross safely. Two, we need wind to fill that sail, and in case you hadn’t noticed, there is none right now. You need to make us some wind, and it needs to push us…’ Dan’r paused, pulling out a small circular compass from his cloak, ‘…that way,’ he finished, pointing off to the right of the boat.
‘I…I don’t know if I can do that,’ Gel said, suddenly afraid.
Dan’r looked at him, his eyes wide, almost feral. ‘If you don’t, we die,’ he said with frightening finality, picking up Gel’s lute from the side of the boat and handing it to him.
***
Gel was scared as he took the lute from Dan’r. The old man had changed, recently. Ever since they entered the fog he’d seemed…angry, impatient. Dan’r was already turning, working with the mast and sail, angling it to catch the wind that didn’t yet exist.
Gel moved back to the seat he had shared with Erris while rowing, walking crouched to not rock the boat. When he did sit beside her, he hunched himself over dejectedly
, stared at the lute, moved the stumps of his missing fingers back and forth strangely, remembering he was broken for the first time in days.
And then Erris put an arm around his shoulder. ‘You can do it,’ she said, and she smiled as he looked up at her.
And then he started to play.
He started with the ocean. Major key, low, calm. Measured and steady. The notes that rang out were low, calm, warm, everything Gel imagined the sea would be like on a clear day, the sun shining down and not a breath of wind to be felt. This was the refrain. Strong, steady, a melody he would return to constantly as he played.
He played the refrain twice through, and then started to play for the wind. This he started slow, just as slow as the refrain, but strong, and chaotic. Wild, and uncontrollable. He played for the wind, then returned back to the refrain, played it through, and started again on the strong, chaotic melody, but a little faster. As he played, he kept the two parts circling, the refrain ever slow and steady, the chaotic verse always chasing the refrain, speeding up, pushing it forward, trying to catch up.
He played until his fingers ached, the same two phrases, looping and chasing each other constantly, their notes flying out over the sea to be choked in the fog. Everything sounded muffled, dulled, and when at last he stopped, his fingers aching too much to continue, nothing had changed. The ocean still ebbed and swelled lightly, the boat rocked up and down with its crests and valleys as it had before, and the air was still dead, devoid of any wind whatsoever.
The Fire and the Fog Page 25