Tales of the Zodiac - The Goat's Tale

by PJ Hetherhouse

  “We are here to arrest Ser Gruffydd of the Green, Lord Morrigan.”

  “Oh, I see…” he replies. “He was certainly here last night. I was drinking with him. I haven’t seen him this morning though. I’ve only just woken up. Gruff?! Gruff?! Where are you?!”

  “Yes, we know he was here last night. We are told he is still here.”

  “He should be, I suppose. He has nowhere else to stay yet,” he replies coolly before shouting my name again “Gruff?! Gruff?! There’s someone here to speak to you! What has he done, out of interest?”

  “He is a heretic. As for why? Only Our Saviour and the man himself know the answer to that question.”

  “Then it must be so,” is his considered reply. “I hope that he burns in the lowest level of hell. Gruff?!”

  “He will be tried for heresy. If guilt is proved then he shall be burned.”

  “And rightly so. It is the will of God,” he replies. I alone am privy to the flippancy of his tone. Masked beneath translation, his words can only be interpreted as sincere by these gold men. But this is scant consolation; I know that all he can do is buy me some time.

  I pad as quickly as possible across the corridor and through the door opposite. From the musty smell and disordered bedclothes, I can only assume that I have entered his bedroom. The window, across the room from the door, seems to be my only option. It looks a tight squeeze but I trust myself to move quickly. The hot blood, coursing through me as if I were in battle, takes over. This sensation makes me realise that I have forgotten my sword, my shield and my armour. I know now that they are lost to me.

  One cautious glance out of the window is all I need to know it is safe to leave. It overlooks a small back alley leading to the market square around the front. The alley has a few people passing through but not, as I had feared, any guards. From the second floor of the building, the jump could quite easily be fatal. Instead, I look upwards and decide to take the risk of climbing to the roof above. Instinctively, I feel that this is a better option than the ground; it should be easier to hide up there. I clamber up quickly, almost possessed by the instinct to survive.

  The next decision is to hide or to move. If I move, I might never be able to return to this part of town. If I hide, there is a good chance that they will eventually consider the roof. Ultimately, the fact that it is a poor hiding place is what swings it for me; there are several higher buildings around which I can tell that I will be clearly visible from. I have no choice but to keep moving. I jump onto the roof across from me, moving further away from the market square.

  It only takes several of these jumps before I begin to find myself heading back into the more rundown part of town. Here, there are precious few roofs to climb on and even the ones that do exist are not the kind that one would trust one’s life to. Somewhere in the distance bells ring, and I begin to wonder if they are anything to do with me. Clambering down to the ground, I take a few deep breaths and try to calm my beating heart. I know that now there is little I can do other than try and look like I belong.

  By my estimations, I am not too far from the district that I passed through yesterday - the derelict part of town full of the desperate and the dying. My luck could probably be worse. This godforsaken place should be somewhere I can simply melt into. The faces of Brightstone, with the exception of a slightly better sun tan, are equally as varied as they are in Tallakarn.

  I walk casually through the broken streets, changing direction the instant that something feels wrong. I do this for the entire day, ultimately losing myself in Brightstone’s underbelly. Throughout this ordeal, it takes all my reserve and self-discipline to control the panic and fear churning inside me. Indeed, the only method of control that seems to work is the repetition of one simple dictum: no one will notice someone who looks like they’re supposed to be there.

  As dusk begins to fall, my focus changes from escape to the consideration of my more animal needs. But these are not easily met in this desperate urban scrapyard. Not yet prepared to steal or beg, I am ready to sleep long before I find myself a single scrap of food or drop of water. Nestling down amongst the rubble of a fallen house, I tell myself that it will only take me a few days. After a few days, I’m sure I will be able to return to Morrigan.

  Thirty-one

  The next day is spent scavenging for food and drink whilst trying my best to remain anonymous in the roughest parts of town. This experience humbles me. I realise that my life, one that I had always considered hard, is nothing compared to the plight of the people around me. The few adults that don’t leave early in the morning seem to be merely shells, lingering in the shadows, waiting to die. The children, many of whom must be orphans, spend their entire waking lives trying to find food. The vast majority of them head to the busier parts of town – the markets, the harbours, the thoroughfares – desperate to come upon some scrap, begged or stolen, that will make the trip worthwhile.

  The only progress that I quickly make for myself is finding a few puddles that look clear enough to drink from. That done, I follow the orphans for a bit, trying to find an honest way to earn something. As ludicrous as it sounds, I still consider myself to have personal standards that I won’t drop. My actions on the journey here – dishonesty, theft, murder – were actions forced on me by absolute necessity and, even still, I feel shamed by them. I won’t repeat them until I am certain that there is no alternative other than death.

  Perhaps the most honest method of making money that I discover is salvaging. A minority of the orphans spend their time sifting through the rubble of fallen houses or through the waste that has been disposed of in the street. They might discover the odd thing, a piece of metal for instance, that they can then attempt to sell. I spend the afternoon doing this, still being careful to slink out of sight whenever I feel it necessary, and eventually sell enough scraps of fabric to buy myself a small piece of bread.

  Almost as soon as I have bought it, I am set upon by an emaciated youth wielding a knife. The poor creature must have been waiting outside for me like a starving hound. He cannot be much older than me but his features are drawn and he has so little flesh upon him that his bones poke through at disturbing angles. Having seen the things that I’ve seen and done the things that I’ve done, I am able put him down without much fuss at all. I take his knife and the coinage from his pocket. Not a single witness passes comment. Desperate or not, he still had a choice. He made the wrong one. That loaf of bread is the single thing I eat all day.

  Thirty-two

  I awake the next morning so weak that it is, in fact, rather fanciful to suggest I have woken up at all. The deathly fatigue that rides through my body reminds me of some mornings out in the frozen waste, those mornings where it felt that the cold had drawn my very essence from me. My mouth is as dry as stone. Nevertheless, in the same manner that I would have done on any other morning, I drag myself from the rubble and stagger down into the street.

  My thirst is beyond description. The need for water consumes me and yet, for some reason, instead of heading to the nearest puddle, I choose instead to collapse in the street. My legs give way only an instant before my mind fades, sending me smashing into the dirt track. The last thing to pass through my mind as I drop is nothing more than the recollection of a taste - the taste of wine.

  Multi-coloured memories flash through my mind. There is no order to them. Instead, I seem to experience them all at once: the cold whip of a frozen wind, the salty smell of my father’s skin, the greenness of the grass of home, the euphoria of the finishing line at Tallakarn, the searing pain of the arrow in my knee, the bleakness of the frozen sea, Morrigan’s smirk, Shara’s scowl, the pain that comes from killing another person, the magical lights of the sun palace, the distorted voice of God himself, the sour taste of wine, a voice I have never heard before.

  “Drink, child. Drink so that you do not die. The blood of Our Saviour compels you to live.”

  The lady’s voice soothes me. It has a singing, magical quality t
o it. Alongside her voice is the taste of wine trickling down my throat. The familiar burn that accompanies it is a warm and welcome one.

  “Thank you, O kindest and wisest of Gods. This man does not have to die today,” whispers the woman softly. My eyes open before closing again, scared of the sun blazing overhead. In this briefest of glances, I learn that I am surrounded by a crowd.

  “It’s a miracle!” shouts one voice.

  “A miracle!” shouts another.

  “The Mother brings life to all!”

  “He shares his blood with us so that we all shall live!”

  “A miracle!”

  “O, Mother!”

  My eyes open. The noise of the crowd begins to whip up into a frenzy of excitement. My ears are filled with shouts of ‘miracle’ and ‘Mother’ and ‘life’ and ‘blood’. Before I know it, I am being hauled to my feet by the crowd that has amassed. The woman in front of me is obscured from view as hands reach out to touch her from all angles. Through the groping hands, I realise that I recognise her uniform. Although she is definitely much younger, she wears the same as the lady attending to ‘Our Saviour’ in the Sun palace, a blue tunic with a white dress . Embroidered on the centre of the tunic is a turtle.

  I manage to mouth the word meaning ‘thank you’ before she is swept away by the mob that engulfs her. For a moment, I am overcome by this most euphoric sensation. It is a sense of deep reverence, of gratefulness, of excitement – the realisation that I am still alive. It all seems to have happened so quick - from life to the verge of death and back again. I smile.

  The smile only lasts for an instant as the seriousness of life drops back down upon me. I remember once again how vulnerable I am, how desperate my situation is. There is no time for useless smiling. The crowd that now surrounds me must surely contain one person who knows who I am. Even the girl herself, my rescuer, may have seen my face under the glare of the Sun Palace. This is a dangerous place to be.

  The crowd is dense and growing. A ‘miracle’ must be one of the very few things that these wretched people have to live for. Fortunately, once I have slipped past the first few layers of people, the new arrivals blocking my way aren’t even entirely sure what they are joining the crowd for; they do not know that the subject of the miracle is a fugitive, ducking his way through them. Then a shout goes out from the other side of the crowd.

  “Stop the heretic! Stop the stranger! He is the devil! He wears the sign of the Goat!”

  This word seems to bubble through the crowd, changing the mood, changing the cries. In an instant, the crowd are baying for blood. Extreme reverence and extreme hate, the two emotions that crowds do best, are not that far apart here today.

  “The devil walks amongst us!”

  “He was a heretic and still He gave him life!”

  “Stop the stranger! He is not of the Brightstone!”

  “In His name, stop the heretic!”

  Instinctively, I stop in my tracks.

  “Kill the stranger!” I shout angrily, turning back towards the centre of the crowd, joining in the cries. The noise, the growing bloodlust, seems to just merge into one angry, hateful roar - truly the voice of the God that has inspired it.

  The whole crowd seems to be eyeing each other. People stand on their tiptoes, peering over the shoulders of their neighbours, desperate for a glimpse of the heretic moving amongst them. I try to only shout when other people are shouting, hoping that this will mask my foreign accent. As I peer into the crowd, I catch a glimpse of gold. Then another. Then another. Gold men. Behind me is the same, they are encircling the area.

  My options are limited. Move and I attract attention, stand still and they will find me. The rubble-littered street is a tight winding one, as full of people as it is possible to be. Escape does not appear likely. And what if the crowd were to catch me, rather than the gold men? It only takes a look into the frenzied faces around me to hazard a likely guess.

  As the gold men move nearer, I can tell that it is not only they who are surging towards me. Others have joined them, presumably the people who witnessed my healing. The only thing that comes to my mind is to turn and move in the same direction, shouting the same things as them, trying my best to look like the hunter rather than the hunted.

  This plan works well until I reach the margins of the crowd. Here, it is clear that some of the gold men are simply holding their position, surrounding the crowd and watching it. As I reach the nearest one, I drop to his feet.

  “It is me you want. Show me Our Saviour’s mercy. He has saved me once. Let Him and only Him be my judge.”

  As I say this, he grabs me roughly by the scruff of the neck.

  “I have him!” he cries. “Stand back, only God himself can judge the devil!”

  The other gold men all rush towards him to add to his formation. The crowd jeer and heckle, shouting all sorts of abomination towards me, wishing me the cruellest deaths imaginable, cursing me to the lowest levels of hell. Not a single man, however, makes a step towards The Golden Brigade. Not for the first time, I witness the absolute power of these men.

  Thirty-three

  I am not in the gaol long before I am attended by Brother Gemin. My cell is a different one this time. There are no luxuries here; the toilet is a clay pot, there is no bed and blankets and there is just a tiny window at the top of the room for light. It is cold and damp. The albino enters the room dressed, as always, in his white ceremonial robes.

  “Gruff. I am sorry that it has to be thus,” he says sympathetically. In all the time that I have spent with him, he has never been cruel. Instead, he has a charming and easy manner, always probing, always interested.

  “Then is there nothing you can do?” I grunt.

  “I am a student of people, Gruff, and I understand that you are no more evil than I. But you have a problem.”

  “Which is?”

  “That part of you that cannot change. You will never settle here. As you have told me, you have a job to do, a point to prove. I understand now that until you have achieved this goal, you will never rest, you will never change.”

  “And neither will you. You will never let me.”

  “I carry out God’s will.”

  “If that is so, then I suppose I shall die.”

  He smiles gently and remains silent for a moment, as though he is too kind to say yes.

  “Tell me, Gruff. I do not understand. You have seen Our Saviour in the flesh. You have seen his miracles. Why will you not bend to His will? What is so difficult for you to believe?”

  “I see no miracles. I never have and I never will. I see nothing here but the cunning of man. I see a charlatan devising devilry. That is all.”

  “What makes you so certain?”

  “If that man was the saviour of the people then he would be helping them. He would be out amongst them. Instead, he sits in his palace setting them on fire, poisoning them with wine. Meanwhile, orphans outside his palace fight for scraps of bread. Pah!”

  “Poisoning them with wine? But how? You have seen first-hand the healing power of the wine. One of the Mother’s Maidens fed it to you as you died. Did you not feel its power?”

  “What is a Mother’s Maiden?”

  “They are the sacred order that serve The Mother,” he replies, presumably referring to Mother Maryam.

  “Well, I don’t deny it healed me. I don’t deny that I felt something. But that doesn’t mean the healing was divine. I haven’t understood it yet. But you mark my words, I will.”

  “I will pray for you. There must be nothing lonelier than to only feel doubt. You still have time. Whenever you are ready, Our Saviour will accept you. He loves us all.”

  “So I am not to die?”

  “By His grace, he has granted you a month to reflect. Then you will be tried. I will pray for you during this time.”

  Thirty-four

  Even as time passes, the words do not sink in. I begin to think that there is a barrenness in me where other people’s souls mus
t be. I cannot believe. I cannot accept. Even if it means my life. I could pretend, but a pretence is all that it will ever be; I will never be able to leave, to talk freely, to be myself again. And if that sorry existence is the best that I can hope for, then death is scarcely less preferable.

  Even with this dark cloud hanging over me, I force myself to prepare. Even for the tiniest chance, I must be ready. Golden opportunities, after all, come more often to those who expect them. Fitness is crucial. Within the confines of this cramped cell, I must keep myself as sharp and ready as I was in the wilds.

  As autumn heads towards winter, the days grow shorter and shorter. Without any form of bedclothes, keeping warm is virtually impossible. As uncomfortable as this is, I am glad for it; if I am ever to get home, it will be through the snow once more.

  As if things could be any more miserable, the room, with its tiny window, is cast into an almost perpetual dusk. To combat boredom, I spend hours a day teaching myself how to move without noise, honing my reactions until I am quick enough to pluck roaches from the floor. I grow to realise that there is always something to learn.

  These habits are, however, only peripheral. There is only one task that obsesses me; I must learn to understand the mystery of the wine. Even in this prison cell, I still receive bread and wine daily. This gives me the opportunity to experiment. For two days, I abstain from both the bread and the wine. Once again, as in the street on the fateful day of my recapture, I am almost dead by the second morning. I greedily swig down the accumulated wine from the side of my bed and the feeling passes.

  I then abstain from only the bread for two days, just to ensure that it is the wine and nothing else. The wine I am served is weak, much weaker than the kind Morrigan would drink for pleasure, but without the bread, I find that I very quickly become quite unwell. However, the symptoms are more akin to drunkenness than death.