Almost Insentient, Almost Divine

by D. P. Watt

  Once he was well wrapped in furs we trekked through the thick snow. He glided slowly across the top of it on his wide snow shoes. As much as I had wished to use a pair I had to maintain my appearance as the King’s Messenger. Our uniform is very strictly regulated, I could not appear before the seneschal wearing the trappings of local custom and convenience.

  I trudged through the thick snow drifts, up to my thighs. It took me twice as long to reach the seneschal’s hut as it did him, even though he moved with the slow drift of one who is still half-asleep.

  When we got there I was still surprised that a man of the seneschal’s status did not have a grander dwelling—one suited to the purpose of his role; to administrate, regulate and manage these lands—or even simply some emblem of official office upon the door. Perhaps this was the matter of the King’s Message to him: you must take it upon yourself to adopt the proper signs of your role, whose status is an emblem of my own. It would not, after all, be an unreasonable demand of one whose job it was to ensure that the King’s Laws and Edicts were communicated to the people of a wild and frontier land. Without the semblance of power how can there be power?

  The man was already in conversation with a hunched woman, whose face peeped out of a thick grey scarf through a crack in the door, just as he had greeted me. After a few moments, and just as I arrived at the deep porch and began brushing the snow from myself in preparation to deliver the King’s Message, she closed the door and he came over to me.

  “What, will he not see me?” I said, about to deliver an angry ultimatum.

  “Da, da… na, na… seneschal beroi szmercz,” he said slowly, sadly. He pointed up to the thatched porch roof. “Seneschal szmericzi… szmericzi!”

  I shrugged and shook my head.

  “Szmericzi…?” he looked about as though trying to find some other way to express what he meant. He drew his hand across his throat, “Sz… mer… icz… i!”

  “I do not believe you,” I said. “I warn you that to obstruct the delivery of the King’s Message is punishable by death. If the seneschal is using you to delay the delivery of this message then that is a very serious matter. From what I can understand you are claiming that he is dead. I will need proof.”

  He did not understand. He merely stared at me with his heavy eyes that looked so desperate to return to the gloom of his hut.

  “I… must… see…” I said, gesturing as best I could.

  He shrugged again, resignedly. He signed for me to wait where I was and went around the side of the low building. A couple of minutes later he returned with a wide wooden ladder and beckoned for me to help him.

  We propped the ladder against the porch thatch and he pointed for me to remove my breastplate and pack. I thought that he must be planning an attempt on my life and stepped back, gripping the hilt of my sword.

  He laughed and pointed to the rungs of the ladder. He made as though to be weighed down and heavy and then a sign for the rung snapping.

  I understood and removed them but made sure to keep my blade with me, and even unlatched the leather clasp on my knife—a gesture I made sure he had noticed.

  He indicated for me to climb the ladder with him. We did. I kept one rung behind him, checking continually in case accomplices of his had emerged from the hut below.

  At the top of the ladder a thick layer of snow sat upon the already thick thatch. In the middle of this there was a long lump. He used his stick to prod the new snow from it to reveal a body, wrapped thickly in sacking. He struggled to drag it towards him and, sensing that there was no treachery afoot, I helped him. He pulled a thick knife from near his chest and I panicked to reach for my own blade and teetered on the ladder, about to fall.

  Again he laughed and grabbed my arm to stabilise me. He pointed to the body and then repeated in his thick accent, “Ay… moosst… zeee…”.

  I smiled, “Yes, my friend, I must see.”

  He cut open the sacking around the face of the cadaver.

  A red beard, flecked with grey and crusted with frost was revealed, followed by a face as white as the snow about it. The corpse had purple, bruised eyes and a broken nose, stained with blackened blood. As the man cut the sacking further down he revealed the silver brooch of the seneschal’s office pinned on the tartan wrap across his chest. I was satisfied that they had not lied. I regretted insisting on this unseemly adherence to protocol. It seemed sad that my years in the capital had made me think firstly of deceit rather than truth.

  We wrapped the body back up and covered it with loose thatch and snow. I helped the man to return the ladder and we stood back on the porch for me to put my breastplate and pack back on.

  I was left with a problem though. Who was the seneschal now?

  “I must deliver the King’s Message to the new seneschal,” I said, patting my white bag.

  “Seneschal szmericzi,” he said, with a confused expression.

  “Yes, yes, I know,” I said, as patiently as I could. “But there must be a new seneschal. Who? Who seneschal now?”

  He shook his head, “Seneschal navra abora… Lotska.” Then in a very laboured way he said “Seneschal szmericzi… Lotska… Lotska… Lotska… novri seneschal n syrigna.”

  *

  Back in the mild warmth and darkness of his home I was unsure what I should do next. He did nothing but poke the fire gently a couple of times and survey the faces of his loved ones with a measured turn of the head as though he were scrutinising the detail of a fine work of art.

  “I will have to remain until the new seneschal is appointed,” I said, as much to myself as to him.

  He turned and frowned a little.

  “I… stay… until… new seneschal…” I said slowly, pointing to myself, the floor and then to where we had just come from, in turn.

  He smiled and nodded slowly, then turned back to the last embers of the fire.

  I heaped my breastplate, pack and the precious white bag of my station in the corner of the room and took out my last wineskin and joined him again by the fire.

  I offered him a swig. He refused.

  The timbers of the floor creaked a little.

  The wind blew mercilessly outside.

  A few disturbed noises could be heard from those slumbering just above us.

  Everything slowly returned to silence.

  He selected a small log from a drying heap before the fire and with his grimy black hands slid it to the edge of the remaining heat where it began a steady smoulder.

  We watched it together for an hour—or a day—during which he manoeuvred it gently into the centre, and then back out before it caught light fully. The trick was to manage the warmth so that is gave a constant heat; not a flame, not a surge, no fire, merely a continual barrier against the frost that sought ever to creep in beneath the door and through the cracks around the windows, which were heavily shrouded in sacking and blankets.

  His arm reached sluggishly down to a sack by his feet and he pulled out a cube of hard black bread.

  He opened a low cupboard beside the fireplace and took out a deep ceramic pot, covered with a white cloth.

  He dunked the bread into whatever was within and allowed it to soak a while. He pulled it out and handed it to me.

  “Daviri, lotski men cavralska,” he said, with a nod to the bread.

  I tasted it. There was a rich strangeness to it. A light red grease ran down my fingers. I licked them clean of the bloody fat. The bread itself was bitter and earthy, with a gentle tang of rot behind it. There was something timeless about it—as though it were the same bread the first men had ever made.

  With similar lethargy he dunked a piece for himself and raised it to his cracked lips and bit a small chunk off, grinding it between his few remaining teeth.

  Once he was finished, perhaps an hour later, he began the same task for each of his slumbering family. They barely woke as he pressed the fatty bread to their lips; like chicks in slow motion they opened their mouths and allowed him to aid them in chewing and
swallowing, each aspect of the process taking on the atmosphere of an intimate ritual. I watched as each person was cared for with love and patience and time seemed to collapse into the dull warmth of the space about us. How many hundreds had been cared for in this way—and cared for others in this way—between these simple walls.

  He resumed his post by the fire, occasionally prodding; staring at embers.

  Not a word had been uttered all day, or was it now night. I did not know. I felt neither tired, nor fully awake.

  We waited for Spring and the new seneschal.

  I waited to do my duty.

  We waited and watched.

  Perhaps it was the following morning—I remember a glimmer of light at the edges of the room—and as I had been previously offered some I reached for another piece of bread, almost as slowly as he had. Something in my bones had begun to adopt the same slightness of movement I had seen in him.

  His eyes followed my hand and in another slow gesture he brought his stick down as though guarding the sack. His head turned towards me and shook—it was a minimal gesture, but I understood not to take another piece.

  A smile gradually broke upon his lips and he gestured towards the sleeping family.

  “Lot…ska…” he said, like the slow ache of a mountain creeping through millennia.

  I nodded.

  With his assistance I climbed up onto the flat stone above the fireplace and wrapped myself in blankets amongst his family.

  Lotska.

  I finally knew the meaning of that word.

  Curled like an animal about the edge of their warm bodies I made to join them in that deep slumber.

  My sleepy eyes watched the white tufts of my guardian’s moustache flicker with each of his slow, deep breaths.

  *

  As I began my fire watch I noticed in the corner of our home a dusty white satchel, sealed with a silver chain and black wax. It looked so foreign, and yet something of its outlandish design seemed familiar to me. Who had left it here among our simple things was unclear, as was its purpose. It must belong to someone who had once visited—a wealthy stranger from other lands.

  These questions and fanciful thoughts did not disturb my mind for long though as I took up the watch stick and gazed into the barely glowing fire.

  I watched traces of orange heat thread about the cinders like luminous serpents.

  I watched fine dust settle upon a brown cloak.

  I watched the slight breathing of my fellows as it lifted their garments and blankets in the stillness and silence.

  In all the greys and browns of blankets and heavy clothes I discovered every colour I had ever seen—richer golds than all the soulless treasuries of the finest barons; deeper reds than the blood of the most valiant gladiators in the arenas of fabled Southern lords; more verdant greens than in the deepest, tropical jungles of the mystic isles; bolder blues than all the endless skies revealed by arduous journey to the mountain city.

  I tended my people through the days and gave them their dark bread, soaked in blood and fat, as they dozed.

  I watched a spider spin its thin threads down from one of the low beams and begin its web against the handle of a brush. There were no flies. It, like all of us, would have to wait until Spring was here again.

  I watched the pink of lips for dangerous blues and the corners of eyes for signs of waking.

  I listened for laboured breathing and whimpers of discomfort.

  I saw in the whitewashed walls all the history of a people’s toil—the summer hope and the delight of children playing in the fields; the crisp whiteness of winter’s pain and the ground too hard to bury the mounting dead.

  I brought them bedpans as they needed them, or helped them to the corner pot, and emptied the filth into the whiteness of tomorrow.

  I looked at the lines upon my dirty palms and found patterns there—a monstrous face; a smile; an eye; a horse; a sword; a book; a dream; a tear; a mouth open in a laugh, or yawn, or scream; a cat, a lantern; a fire; a bird; a child; children.

  I found the same patterns in the wooden floor.

  As thin slivers of cold rime crept across the windows I enlivened the fire and felt the relentless frailty of our lives.

  I had been called to my duty—to keep death from my companions; a duty they would honour in return when I came to rest among them again.

  About the Author

  D.P. Watt is a writer living in the bowels of England. His collection of short stories An Emporium of Automata was reprinted by Eibonvale Press in early 2013, a novella “Memorabilia” was published in The Transfiguration of Mr Punch, and his collection, The Phantasmagorical Imperative and Other Fabrications, was published in 2014 with Egaeus Press and is now available in a paperback edition. He won the Ghost Story Award 2014 for his story “Shallabalah” published in The Ghosts and Scholars Newsletter, no 26.

  You can find him at The Interlude House:

  www.theinterludehouse.co.uk

  Timothy J. Jarvis is a writer and scholar with an interest in the antic, the weird, the strange. He lives in North East London. His first novel, The Wanderer, was published in the summer of 2014.

  Flemish Mask Designs in the Grotesque Style (1555)

  A selection of stunning mask designs from the hand of Flemish engraver Frans Huys, rooted in the “grotesque” style and composed of shapes inspired from creaturely and vegetative forms (forming a style that would later become known as “auricular”). Huys apparently based these prints on original designs by the sculptor and architect Cornelis Floris (1514-1575), who is credited with inventing this particular Flemish version of the grotesque style in about 1541. The prints come from a set published in 1555 by Hans Liefrinck (about 1518-1573), an important Antwerp publisher and print-seller. The volume—bearing the full title of “Pourtraicture ingenieuse de plusieurs façons de masques, forts utile aulx painctres, orseures, taillieurs de pierres, voirriers, & tailleurs d’images”—is thought to have contained at least 18 images and, as the title suggests, seems to have been intended as a kind of sourcebook for craftsmen and artists looking for inspiration/templates.