The Foundling's Tale, Part Three: Factotum

by D M Cornish

  Regardless, the swift familiar hatred expanded within Rossamünd’s bosom. Drawing away, he had the strangest impression of a subtle almost-witting, not the stark frission of a neuroticrith, rather something communicative fluttering on the boundaries of sensation.

  Gurgling, the jackstraw sprang at him, reaching with arms ending in long fiendish blades scissoring where palm and fingers should have been, their filthy corroded edges glinting dully.

  Reeling, Rossamünd pitched the Frazzard’s at the thing’s head with a deft flick, the repellent bursting with blue-flashing detonations right upon its sack-draped face. The jackstraw stumbled briefly yet righted itself, dribbling fizzing mucus from a rent scorched in the cloth. The young factotum retreated through the remnants of a door, reaching into his stoup for a lepsis of greenflash, putting a broken stub of a wall between him and his hunter.

  In a glimpse of something incongruously pale above, he spied the white woman in the summer dress who had first hailed them on the road, now standing several yards farther up the incline, her eyes knotted closed in an expression of severe—almost ravenous—concentration. Arms bent out at the elbows, both her hands were stretched and grasping at the blank air with jerky and ferocious passion.

  A JACKSTRAW

  The thin witting sensation fluctuated. Surely she and the cloth-man were connected. She witted, it moved.

  Was such a thing possible?

  Attention fixed on the jackstraw stalking before him, Rossamünd found and clasped the caste of greenflash. As he drew it forth, a crushing blow slapped him upon the side of his head, sending him sprawling, skidding across the moss and paving to crumple into the roofless remains of a small room. Intellectuals swimming, he shook his head to right himself, a sharp iron tang in mouth and nose. Sight blurred and swimming, he forced himself to his feet even as he realized that there was a second cloth-made reverman coming at him, leaping over the wall, the newcomer possessing a wooden box for a head. They were on him just as he understood his peril. With no time to think, Rossamünd clapped the egg-caste of greenflash still in his grasp on the chest of the nearest jackstraw.

  In a white flash, a thousand writhing agonies tore at him within and without. All notion was obliterated in a vast, ringing nothing . . . Something heavy in his hearing reverberated with a damp gonging. His skin crawled; his innards writhed. With a nauseating heave the cosmos reformed again, leaving Rossamünd anguished and beaten, gagging for air against a sucking wetness about his mouth and nose. He clawed clumsily at his face with limbs sluggish and unhelpful, half tearing the vent away in suffocating distress to let blood flow unhindered from his nose. He looked in amazement at his hand, discovering the palm of his glove scorched completely away, the flesh beneath blistered and bloodied, and marveled dumbly at how little it hurt.

  Burnt and torn, the two jackstraws had been thrown back too, sprawled akimbo against the farther wall. The rever with the wooden head was missing an arm, but far from undone, it staggered to stand, trying to reach for him with its remaining hand, mummified and black.

  Suddenly, over the near wall of the ruin, only a few yards from Rossamünd’s shoulder, a third cloth-man reared. With cruel deliberation, it pulled itself over the stonework to crouch upon the crumbling masonry on what appeared to be the legs of a donkey. Giving voice to a hissing ruttle through sagital teeth of befouled iron set in gums swollen and diseased, it reached for him.

  Rossamünd shrank from the vile grasp, pushing wildly with wounded hands and aching legs to win clear, the tenuous, clutching witting all about.

  His two original corpse-made assailants righted themselves and the three cloth-men pounced at him. Pitiless claws seized him. Iron bit at his proofing. But the costly gaulding proved its worth and held. He kicked and felt something squish and yield, yet the more Rossamünd struggled, the more he seemed to be ensnared. A loathsomely cold hand clamped across his throat but did not squeeze. Without the vent to shield his nose, he inhaled the purulent fetor of his half-rotted foes and screamed a loud, long wordless terror.

  A distant chirruping fury grew rapidly louder, a strange and angry chatter-chatter-chatter in the boughs above clear in the nearly silent struggle below it.

  Darter Brown!

  Impossibly, his tiny friend had not perished in the great blast on the road.

  Right in the madness of the struggle, pressed down in the corner of a broken building, Rossamünd could hear the vehement chattering, swooping and harrying just above.There was a sudden ferocious whirling and much of the overpowering assault was abruptly released.

  Jerking free from the confusion and heaving himself upright on the foundation wall, Rossamünd perceived a small, oddly proportioned figure in what would have once been the very next room, grappling viciously with the much larger donkey-legged jackstraw. Dressed in a frock coat of peacock blue, it had the greatly enlarged head of a sparrow. In an astonished inkling, Rossamünd knew that he had seen this creature once before and heard of it many times more.

  Cinnamon!

  Here, surely, was the very creature who had deposited him, pink and wailing, into Fransitart’s reluctant arms, now bartering mighty buffets with a jackstraw, terrible hits of hoof and beak and claw that sent the other reeling.

  Thrown to the weedy cobbles only a few feet away, the other two clothmen righted themselves. Dribbling maddened spittle, Sackhead scuttered forward on bladed hands and toes to pinch the young factotum about his ankle with cruel iron fingers. Tripping back, Rossamünd was saved from a fall by the stub of wall behind him. Levering against it, he kicked and lashed with his unhindered leg, pounding the jackstraw’s arm and wrist, feeling bone and desiccated tendons crack and crush under heel. Above, Darter Brown flapped, cursing in the abominable creature’s face and soiling on its already filthy clothes.

  With a spang! of metallic joints, the wood-headed jackstraw rose sluggishly from the remains of the doorway where Cinnamon must have thrown it down. Its box staved in at one side, and seeping black, it fixed the appallingly vacant hole of its single eye upon Rossamünd.

  Rossamünd heaved on the wall to flip himself over and was seized by the foot once more. Twisting away from the rotten merciless grasp, he tripped and slid jarringly down the wall onto his side.

  Abruptly, a sizeable stone smote Woodenhead on its already damaged cranium panels. Another struck it an instant later and the jackstraw faltered in midstep. At this a veritable rain of rocks, branches, pinecones and dried dung began to hail on the cloth-man rever. Beyond the tumbledown wall Rossamünd spied a tiny figure on the other side of the level, its yellow eyes angry-wide.

  “FRECKLE!” he cried involuntarily, kicking with fresh vigor at the sack-faced fiend trying again to stand and lift him by his leg. Dear Freckle!

  Flinging whatever came handy at the pestilent creature, the glamgorn blinked at him in recognition. Many of the lighter missiles bounced off harmlessly, almost comically. Some showered around Rossamünd, but with the muffled clunk of rock on metal and wood, many stones flew true and the rever’s body began to buckle under the mucky, stony sleet.

  The flat staccato cough of a volley of firelocks sounded from the heights, accompanied by shouts and a single dull pop. Just as dread for Europe and his old masters rose, a blitz of lightning struck again, three swift strikes hitting the hill above, silencing all else as it shattered the very air.

  With a mighty wrench of his fettered leg Rossamünd pulled free of Sackhead, clawing and pulling at the cobbles to get himself away. Woodenhead collapsed to its knees but still crawled on. In that instant the young factotum glimpsed Cinnamon through the door gap of the other room, skipping under the third jackstraw’s wicked grasp. The nuglung seized the abomination by hip and chest, and in a twinkling tore it completely in two.Without a pause the bogle-princeling tossed the top half of the rever far into the precipitous woods and, swinging the bestial legs, rushed to Rossamünd’s aid. Leaping lightly over boy and wall, he bore down on the limping jackstraw clutching relentlessly for its pr
ey with a click-clack of its metal talons—battering the vile thing with the riven legs, hitting again and again with such savagery that bits of jackstraw quickly began to flick and spatter.

  Arms full of old debris, Freckle sprang onto the top of the adjacent wall, pummeling Woodenhead with stone after stone. When his armload was spent, he jumped down to bounce upon the cloth-man, yipping loudly and with relish as he pounded the thing to bits.

  In awe, Rossamünd strove to stand, his whole body thudding with hurts, blasted hand slick with gore slithering off whatever they touched. Another pop of a firelock from the woods and he revived. At the left side of the level he saw a sheer flight of crumbling stone stairs that climbed the hill from the edge of the foundation. Running out of the ruin’s vestigial entrance, he mounted this stairway, Darter Brown winging to join him. Sucking at the air in rasping gulps, Rossamünd clawed up the sheer path. Many yards to the right, half hidden in a grove of pine trees, he caught sight of the woman in the white dress, sagging where she stood—heedless of the world—braced with one gloved hand upon a trunk, her face a sickly gray under its pretty bonnet.

  A close clash of weapons and Rossamünd had a brief sight of Fransitart higher up the bank, standing at the threshold of an enormous bush of olive that grew beside the steps. White hair flying, musketoon in one hand and his hanger in the other, the ex-dormitory master was sparring sword to gabelüng with a fictler who was flailing with a young man’s impatience against Fransitart’s watchful defense. Across the curve of the incline, a wild Piltdowner man, bloodied and angry-eyed, crouched in the concealment of the tipped and broken landaulet to level a firelock on the old vinegaroon. Snatching up the first projectile handy, Rossamünd pitched a pinecone, the seedy bullet humming smartly as it flew, hitting the Piltman on the cheek in a mighty spray of splintering cone at the very instant of firing. In the CRACK! of the shot, Fransitart struck his adversary a telling cut upon the neck and toppled with the dying foe to the ground.

  The Piltman staggered off down the hill, tripping on weeds and roots. Rossamünd did not wait to know the man’s fate but pivoted and dashed to the great olive where Fransitart had fallen, terrified of what he would find.

  Between him and his purpose crawled a lone jackstraw, legs torn away, pawing at the weeds and dirt, scaling the hillside with arms alone, metal teeth gnashing, more the mindless unrelenting predator now.

  “ENOUGH!” Fury boiling in a red instant, Rossamünd snatched at a broken piece of wall embedded in the hillside—a stone as big as his own chest—and heaved it from the soil with both hands. In a spray of worms and wood-lice and soil, he hefted the stone high, and, dropping to his knees, brought it down with all his monstrous might right on the wretched laboring abomination’s sack-cloth skull, burying the stone and putrid flesh with it a hand span deep into the mold.

  About him silence settled on the woods: no crack of firelock, no clash of blows, just the anxious hush of an aftermath.

  “Well done, dear lad . . . ,” Fransitart’s voice broke through his desolation.

  Heart leaping, Rossamünd looked up.

  The old vinegaroon was limping toward him, clutching at his stomach and using the musketoon as a crutch along the uneven ground. His face was dreadfully swollen about the eyes, his bottom lip split and gory, his hair congealing with red.

  With a sob of relief, Rossamünd sprang the scant yards and clasped arms with the startled sea dog. “And Craumpalin. . .”

  In the cool of the enormous olive, Fransitart revealed the dispenser, propped in the deep bole of the tree, partially concealed by the roots and a smooth stone about which the olive had matured, making it almost a part of itself. Craumpalin was disconcertingly still, his eyes closed, his beard bedraggled with blood, his breath shallow huffs. A soaking bloodied scarf lay near, and another was bound about his throat.

  “Master Pin ...” Rossamünd dropped to his knees beside the fallen fellow.

  “He’s been poorly handled, lad.That bang let off by them filthy scupperers gave ’m a prodigious bad gash in th’ neck ’ere—” Fransitart drew a line on the left side of his neck with his finger as he spoke out of the side of his wounded mouth. “I reckon ’is legs are broke . . . but ’e’s holdin’ together, though ’e’ll need a seam-stitcher an’ two good splints afore too long.”

  “I have thrombis and strupleskin.” Rossamünd reached for his left stoup. “We can stop the holes at least.” Only now, in the numb astonishment after hand strokes, did he become properly alive to the sharp hurt of his own hand, finding too a vigorous ache in his shoulders, as if someone had tried to unattach his arm at its socket. He gingerly hooked the partscontainer—baldric and all—from his shoulder. “Could you please find them?” he asked his old master sheepishly.

  “What have ye done to yer paw, lad?” The ex-dormitory master scowled at the burnt flesh as he took the stoup.

  “I—I broke a potive.” The young factotum made a wry face at his old master’s sharp astonishment. “Where are your hurts?” he inquired evasively.

  “I’ve got a prodigious crack on me crown an’ a smart thump to me chest beams,” Fransitart explained as he fossicked for th’ right items. “We were pitched cap o’er end down the hill. After clearin’ me intellectuals, findin’ an’ a-haulin’ dear Pin into th’ bush, I found this ’ere musketoon still fit to fire an’ took one of them baskets aimin’ on yer miss with it, then swapped a swing o’ blows with another. Did th’ same again shortly after, then ye showed yerself . . .”

  Underbrush rustled and a small form pushed into the haven of the dense olive boughs.

  Fransitart almost dropped the stoup as he reached in fright for his hanger.

  “You can keep your blows to be kept to themselves, master seaswimmer!” came a bleeble-blabble voice, its merry speaking at odds with the stern warning.

  “Freckle!” Rossamünd whispered.

  Sheepishly, the glamgorn revealed itself, alone.

  Where Cinnamon was the young factotum could not see. In unabashed wonder, the ex-vinegaroon regarded the little barky-skinned bogle wearing a child’s longshanks pulled high about its chest rather than the usual swaddle of rags. “So ’ere’s th’ little fellow ...”

  “It is we who win this day, yes we do, and the day is won!” Freckle smiled, his huge eyes disappearing in the wrinkles of its grinning. “Oh . . .” Its gaze alighted on Craumpalin and he became instantly solemn. “Keep your powders in their pots, Rossamünd who is Rossamünd even more than before; we shall tend all hurts . . .”

  A heavy boom of thunder rumbled some distance to the north, exciting a discord of startled crows high in the trees. From somewhere far off came a faint cry of anger.

  “Miss Europe!”

  “Bind yer hand first, lad,” Fransitart advised, holding out some bandages to him, “and then go find ’er—she probably reckons us all dead ...”

  “Yes, yes!” Freckle enjoined, squatting at Craumpalin’s side. “Find your angry mistress and flutter not for your seaward fathers; they will have their bashings mended.”

  “My hand can wait,” Rossamünd insisted, and dashed away.Tugging his torn and bloodied vent from his neck, and his stock with it, he clumsily wrapped his stinging palm as he went. Halting momentarily to listen and to tie off his bindings, he climbed watchfully to the road. Drawing near the epicenter of the ambush, he peered over the brink of the way, gaping saucer-eyed at the wreckage the fulgar had brought. Bodies lay shattered, some flung down into the pines or foul culvert slime, some still quick, sniveling, trying to claw themselves away.

  A sullen hint of asper hung yet over the road, lingering threateningly above the steaming remains of those it had slain—that he had slain—as if to make certain they stayed dead. Yet no other threat seemed obvious in the dreary silence of the woods. The higher bank across the drain was unnaturally still. A white mask lay in the shadows and some yards to the right the splintered, smoldering stumps of several lithe pines spoke of the gap-leaping success of the fulgar’s deadl
y lightnings.

  In the hush of whispering needle leaves and squeaking, softly clacking boughs, no new contestant stepped upon the path or took a shy at him from cover. Darter Brown alighted on the chest of a fallen fictler splayed upon the path. Hopping forth and back on its grisly perch, the sparrow flicked his wings, perhaps to show that all was safe.

  Satisfied, Rossamünd ran beside the road, skirting the sooty fizz of asper, returning along their original route, finding more ruined fictlers and wildmen thrown down in the dust and needles. Among the fallen, he found an uncanny figure stained red, spent pistols still in scarlet hands, lifeless face aghast.

  The reddleman! This frowsty discolored dye-seller had been lurking them after all.

  A glaring blue flicker lit up the darkening trees ahead about the bend. Scrambling onto the road itself, he hurried stoutly to it, half in hope, half in fear.

  The Branden Rose hove into view, grimed with gore, hair askew, proofing starkly bruised, boots scuffed, the weep of dark green tears lining each cheek like ghastly spoors. The fulgar was bent over a slouched figure, Featherhead, the chief of the fictlers, feathered hat discarded on the road. Four-bar mask plucked away from his very normal, very human face, now clenched in pain, his eyes were rolling with blank fear. One arm was raised feebly to keep the fulgar bayed.

  Yet even in defeat, the abysmal foulness Rossamünd had first felt when they had passed the fictler-lord standing on the side of the road the day before still issued from the fallen fellow.