Blood of the Land

by Martin Davey

  His shoulders were bunched into fist-sized knots and each step felt clumsy and unnatural. And yet still he walked to the desk. He needed answers. Feren had been full of life, of laughter, full of the wonder of the world the Keepers had provided for them. This, this...thing was far too cold and distant to have ever been Feren. He bent low to look at him, careful not to touch, the thought of accidentally brushing a hand against the cold flesh sending a shiver skittering down his spine.

  He wanted answers and yet he didn’t want to speak to the corpse, as though doing so would give credence to his own insanity.

  Squeak....creak...squeak

  He rubbed at his eyes with finger and thumb. Perhaps this was a test by the Town Clerk. That thought struck him with more fear than Feren actually having risen from the dead.

  And then the corpse spoke. And listening to the words, listening to the voice of the creature, Landros knew this was no test by the Clerk. “Inri akuh splenistor varum. He will make you wait. Waiting will quicken your heartbeat, give you time to fear the reason he has brought you here. He will watch and know you more than you know yourself.” The voice was barely a whisper, a cold breeze through bare winter trees. His blue lips cracked and flaked even as they formed the whispered words, his fingers searching, reaching about the table like blind white worms.

  A thousand snakes crawled up and down Landros’s spine. He turned away slowly, so slowly to where his friend’s fingers seemed to have been reaching as he spoke, reaching like a starving blind man searching for sustenance on a dinner table. But was it his friend? Had some foul demon taken hostage of the vessel that had been Feren’s body? That strange language had sounded alien; never had he heard Feren speak in tongues like that.

  The books the creature had been reaching for were larger than any Landros had ever seen, the leather binding faded, the pages yellowed and curling with age. He sighed and steeled himself to raise his eyes once more.

  Feren was already gone.

  But he had been there. Landros had seen the sun bright in the caked blood on his head. He had heard him speak that strange language. Even now he could see the faint sheen of dust disturbed by Feren’s searching hand as his fingers slithered across the surface.

  He had been there.

  The solar seemed appallingly quiet. The memory of that hushed, bleak voice slid up and down his back like a cold finger. He moved away from the table to the fireplace, the hearth as barren and bare as a butterbur field in the dead of winter. He rested his hands on the mantelpiece and looked into the polished glass mirror hanging on the wall. He didn’t look all that much better than Feren. He needed a shave and his hair needed a wash; it looked more black than brown.

  Either side of the mirror hung two banners bearing the crest of the Keepers: four burning stars flaming in a fire of pure red embossed on a blue sky. The burning fire for Keeper Jerohim. The purity of fire. The love of the people to keep the flames burning. Just seeing that banner made him think back to his Dream.

  “Landros Lisan Endrassi…” The Keeper’s face had been concealed behind a mask as red as the flames on that banner. Beautiful, it had been, with a smile of pure joy and happiness. Keeper Jerohim had worn a cloak of royal purple, bright and shining under some unseen sun. The most glorious of all the Keepers had held out a hand to him, the skin mottled and brown, the fingers long and many-knuckled…

  But Landros hadn’t remembered any reaching hands or many-knuckled fingers until now. Until he had seen the flames of Keeper Jerohim on the banners. Until Feren had spoken to him. Why? How? How could he forget a god reaching out and taking his hand? Why would the memories flood back when he looked at the crest of the Keepers?

  He ran a hand across his face. Squeezed his eyes shut. Opened them again. And then jumped like a maid caught with her fingers in the jewellery box when he heard the voice behind him.

  “My young Captain, thank you for coming.”

  Clerk Lovelin had arrived.

  CHAPTER 8

  “Marin...Marin...”

  A whisper in the darkness sounding like a bare branch scratching against a black window. It sounded from everywhere and nowhere; from the vast sable sky above, from the dirt beneath his feet, from the damp leaves rotting on the forest floor, from the cloud-speckled moon hovering just out of reach of the gnarled fingers of the trees.

  “No...” Marin moaned, bitter tears already wetting his eyes. “Please no, not again.” Every night for the past thirty years he had been brought to this place, this forest in the netherworld where no man could hear his screams. “Please...”

  Already he shivered; Keeper Martuk only ever allowed him the nightshirt he had worn for the first Dream. One of the many reminders of his betrayal of the gods.

  “You cannot run. We see all, see every face you see, feel every wind that brushes your cheeks. We are near, Marin. Watching and waiting.”

  His waking hours were spent reliving every moment of these torturous dreams, every death, every cut in his flesh, every agonized scream, whether his own or not. But in the dream itself, this was the worst moment, when he fell into sleep and stood before the black forest, felt the cool night caressing his skin, knowing he was only at the beginning, knowing what awaited him in the coming hours.

  He had tried begging. He had tried pleading. He had tried falling to his knees and grovelling at the feet of Keeper Martuk. He had tried all these and more, but there truly was no fury to match that of a scorned god. It was enough to burn the very stars from the sky.

  There was only one way, and that way was forward into the forest. Were all dreams like this? Windless and still and silent other than the voice of the god? Haunted by faces he knew and yet didn’t know?

  A vague memory that made his heart ache with yearning; was it memory or dream? A sunlit river bank, the path brown and the grass on the banks green, the river a shifting, sparkling blue. Marin walking hand in hand with a woman with short, dark hair. She was laughing, her eyes bright and her cheeks flushed. Memory or dream? Did it even matter anymore?

  It was the one thing he reached for, the one thing he clasped to his thoughts as he stepped into the forest. The one memory, because that is surely what it was, that helped him survive every night. He saw the first flitting shapes skittering between the trees, dark eyes watching him from the shadowy depths of the forest.

  “You think you can escape me, Marin? You think you can outrun the reach of your god? You are nothing. I chose you to plough a field and you think you can escape my judgement?”

  No more pleading. He had begged enough. Wet leaves that smelled of earth shifted under his bare feet as he walked through the forest. All around him shadows scurried amongst the trees, watching him, judging him and finding him wanting in the eyes of the Keepers.

  Marin ignored them all and thought of a swiftly flowing river on a summer’s day, thought of the smell of flowers that were red and yellow and white, thought of a woman with bright dark eyes and high cheekbones and short brown hair. Her teeth had been small and white and if he could think hard enough, clearly enough, he could remember her name...He reached for it like a desperate swimmer reaching for a rope thrown from a rocking boat, straining every thought, every muscle into his effort. He wondered if this was part of the torture of the dream.

  He didn’t rush anymore than a condemned man would rush to his own execution. He had tried running through the forest, but each time the torture of the dream only lasted the longer. The suffering not his own, but men, women and children that he should know but didn’t. Their torture, their screams all the more horrifying because he should know their names better than he knew his own.

  They are dead, he told himself. Dead. All of them, even the little girl with the blonde hair and blue ribbons tortured by the knives and the blades. She is already dead, he told himself. Even as he watched her tortured to death by the men wearing the red uniforms stained by her red blood. She is already dead.

  Furtive eyes flitted through the trees, long fingers gripping thick tr
unks. Still nobody came forward, no shadow stepping from the deeper shadows to challenge him.

  Had Keeper Martuk relented? Had the god decided that he had been punished enough?

  Marin pressed on through the forest, blood-red leaves sweeping about his feet into wet piles. Could a man win forgiveness from the gods? For thirty years, Marin would have said no, that there was no escaping the vengeance of a god. But this passage through the forest was unknown. For the first time he could feel his heart lifting, feel hope burning in his breast. Surely, when he reached the end of this forest, he would be born again. Born without sin.

  Never had the shadows let him travel so far without dark shapes emerging from the trees, shifting and blurring and moulding into the likeness of somebody he knew and yet didn’t know, into the likeness of their torturers. Sometimes the torturers would come to him, their blades and chains shining dully in the scattered light of the moon. But not this time, this time they watched him, peering round the trunks, legs bent and twisted as they ran from tree to tree.

  Surely this was the worst torture of all, feeding the hope rising in his breast? He walked on, leaning away from thorny branches reaching for his eyes, pushing others out of his way and letting them whip backward in his wake. The ground was uneven, pitching and swelling like a restless sea, knotted with roots as thick and dark as eels. More than once he stumbled to his knees.

  He staggered into a clearing, his face scratched, his hands grazed, falling on his knees into the sudden moonlight.

  A lone figure waited in the clearing, starkly lit in the cold blue light of the moon. His god awaited him and Marin remained on his knees before Keeper Martuk. Half as tall again as Marin and dressed in a robe of white which brushed the dew-wet grass as he moved, Keeper Martuk wore a mask of red with a long narrow chin that reached to the god’s breastbone. The arm the Keeper held out to Marin was thin, skeletally thin, and had two elbows, the white robe folding strangely as the god lifted his arm showing the brown, wasted body beneath, garbed in a simple tunic that belied the majesty of the robe.

  Keeper Martuk pulled a long, cruel knife from the belt around his waist with a many-knuckled hand. He turned the knife around in his hand, making impossible patterns in the air with it, his fingers and arm bending in ways that made Marin feel faint to witness. “Marin Deso. It has been too long.” The Keeper’s voice was a sibilant hiss, full of seductive menace like a scheming lover.

  The bright red mask with its long chin and beatific smile, at odds with the ageless intelligence of the black eyes behind the wooden guise, shifted, melded and moulded into an altogether different, an altogether more dangerous smile. The eyebrows were thinner, closer to the eyes and arced downwards, vindictive and vengeful. The smile was more of a leer, wider and more thoughtful and through the mouth of the mask, Marin could see black lips, thin and dry like cord, matching that same smile.

  The knife glinted in the air as the Keeper strode to him, the robe whispering as it dragged through the grass, the mask fixed with its greedy smile. This was Keeper Martuk, the god who had raced from the battle of the Fallen Kings to relieve the defence of Bannodin. Some said he had slain over six hundred men with his own hands in those two desperate battles against the Forsaken Kings.

  And now Keeper Martuk had fixed his black, black eyes on Marin as he strode across the clearing toward him, his knife held before him in his many-knuckled hand.

  Marin, the memory of a sunlit riverbank and a woman with short dark hair fixed in his mind, faced his god on his knees and resolved not to scream.

  #

  His throat was raw, his eyes bulged against their lids and he kicked and scrabbled against a cold stone floor. He sucked in great gobfulls of stale air and screamed enough to tear his throat. He thrashed against his bonds, against the ropes tied about his ankles and wrists, battered his head against the floor, felt something warm and wet stream past his eyes.

  And still he screamed and screamed and screamed, his face and hands hammering against the cold stone, his cheeks sliced by a cruel knife, the trunk of a tree pressed hard against his back, his nails breaking against stone, wet leaves soaking his breeches, a hard boot in his face, long fingers wrapped around his neck to hold him still, another boot in his face, another boot breaking his nose, a cruel silver knife glinting before his eyes, and then another boot in his face and through it all Marin screamed and screamed and screamed until all he could feel were the kicks raining down on him and somebody shouting with the guttural accent of a southerner, “Shut up!” A kick in his ribs. “Shut up!” A kick in his face. “Shut the fuck up!” Another kick in his face reopening an old wound on his cheekbone. “Shut the fu—“

  Another, calmer voice. More cultured, more refined, “I think you can stop that now. And I think it might be best if you find another way to wake our aged friend in future otherwise his stay with us will be a short one. You’ll find that he has a habit of sleeping like that every night. I find you get used to it after a while, almost becomes comforting in a way.”

  Retaj. So he wasn’t dead. Even through the pain and the terror, Marin wondered at the relief he felt at the thought. And only now did Marin become aware of the drums still beating, pounding like some godly hammer trying to break the world in two, beating in sympathy with his own agony. Something wet dribbled from corner of his mouth to land on the stone floor. Blood or spit, he wasn’t particularly concerned which at the moment. He thought of trying to rise, but his body ached in so many places that he didn’t want to move. All he wanted was to feel the reality of the stone, the sour smell of unwashed bodies, the damp chill of the morning seeping into his ageing bones. He wanted to feel the reality of life at the foot of the Andalian Mountains to soak in so he knew he was free of Keeper Martuk’s grasp for at least one more day.

  A memory of a cruelly curved knife slicing his forearm from wrist to the crook of his arm, the blade so sharp that it was a moment before the blood began to flow. Marin squeezed his eyes shut against the image, shaking his head to deny the agony he felt in his arm even now.

  “If he carries on like that through the mountains he’ll be the death of us all.” A deeper voice this time, though still a southerner. “The Paramin only knows how you two made it this far.” The southerner hawked a cough and spat, a wet splatting sound as it hit the floor. “You said this was a fighting man, riverman, not some shrieking fool who screams at his dreams like some child in the night.” Marin opened his eyes a crack, the pain of the thin light like a knife sliding into his skull. A tall blonde-haired man with eyes grey as a winter’s morning was looking down at him from an infinitely vast height.

  He closed his eyes, probed his tongue about his teeth to make sure that those torn from his mouth in the dream had returned in the waking world. All returned to their rightful places, though his mouth felt thick and metallic, almost as though he had spent the night drinking cold blood.

  “Believe me, you’ve never seen anybody fight like this man. Told you about the Farsling in Casteli, didn’t I? Ripped him a new asshole, Marin did. Literally.”

  Marin felt two pairs of doubting eyes turn his way. “The road will be dangerous. Not only the faithful travel the Seekers’ path. We need a strong sword arm and we need people we can trust. The Mahrata will know, riverman. She is a woman who cannot be fooled. Don’t waste my time and yours with this.”

  “She’ll know, my southern friends.”

  Marin pried his eyes open once more. Retaj was speaking with his back to him, his hands were tied with white rope but his loose fingers were beckoning to Marin, urging him to rise.

  Easy for him. How to convince his brain that his toes were still attached to his feet? That his legs and calves hadn’t been torn to bloody strips? Marin rolled onto his stomach, groaning aloud at the pain. Or at the memory of the pain. Every beat of the drums seemed to make his brain bounce in his skull.

  “He isn’t a morning person, no argument there. But once he’s had his breakfast, there isn’t a sword to match him this s
ide of the Winding River. We’ll see your Mahrata right, you’ll see.” Retaj carried on speaking as Marin struggled to rise to his feet. Muscle memory was an imperfect thing when those muscles had been dissected before your eyes throughout the night.

  “And what of you, riverman? If the Mahrata needs more swords, why should we need you to guide us to the Paramin?”

  Retaj’s laughter was loud in the confines of the...house? Basement? Wherever they were. “Why? Two reasons. One is that I’m the only one of us who has travelled the mountains before. A long time ago to be sure, but still I remember the paths. And the second is that you’ll need me for my wits. Marin here might be a brave fighter, a strong sword, but look what he brought us to. I told him not to come to this village and look what happened. Brains, wits, aren’t the fighter’s gifts, my friends. Had he listened to me, our paths would never have crossed, Marin and I would be safely ensconced somewhere far away from here. Fortuitous for your Mahrata that we did meet, of course.” Retaj’s beckoning fingers grew more urgent, like a newborn butterfly trying to dry its wings. “So,” had his hands been unbound, Retaj would have clapped his hands together, Marin knew. Retaj always clapped his hands together when he spoke of money. “About payment for our services?”

  Marin finally managed to prop his hands beneath him, lift his body so he was on hands and knees, swaying on his limbs like some aged dog. He looked down at the grey stone swimming beneath him far, far away. He opened his mouth like a snake trying to eat an egg and was lavishly sick all over the chipped, weathered stone, the contents of his stomach splattering across the floor like the load of a commode tipped from a high window.

  It was all the motivation Marin needed. He was on his feet in a moment, staggering more than once to keep his balance as he tried to focus on his companions. Three of them, two blonde, one red headed. They swam before him like promises of water in a desert. “Okay,” Marin held up a hand to forestall them as he bent forward to try and catch his breath, wiped a hand across his wet lips. The drums carried on beating, oblivious to his pain, the floor seeming to shake with each beat. “What,” he said, “in the name of the Keepers, is a Mahrata?”