by Martin Davey
The candle was lifted higher as Landros approached. “Captain Endrassi?” The flame fluttered with the breath of each word. “I don’t think you want to go in there, sir. The Clerk has asked for you to be brought to his house. He says there is no need for you to see what...to see your mother, sir.”
Finally some recognition of his new rank. A shame that it seemed to take the death of his mother for people to accept it. A dark crowd had gathered about the house, hooded eyes watching him at the doorway, voices quietened as people spread word of what had happened. Three Guardians of the Keepers muttered prayers to the gods. He found it difficult to concentrate on anything other than the sound of his heart beating in his ears. “I’ll be the one who decides whether I need to see my mother.” He was almost disappointed when the Guard stepped to one side. He was moving past the Guard and into the cool darkness of the house before he realized he had been fingering the hilt of his sword.
The house was still and silent. The thing he hated about coming to his mother’s house this past year was the creaking of her chair, and now it was the first thing he missed. It seemed wrong that the house should be so quiet.
“Captain Endrassi?”
Landros hadn’t seen the Guard standing in a corner. Only two candles had been lit in the room. It wasn’t large, but still the candles did little to fight back the cloying, smothering darkness. Little enough furniture in the house, a scratched and scarred table and the rocking chair facing away from him, still and silent. Landros thought guiltily of his own fine new house and bit his lip before he nodded to the Guard.
“A young lad found her in the street in her nightdress. Said she was shouting out your name, said she had something to tell you urgent, like.” The Guard coughed and cleared his throat, looked at the rocking chair and back to Landros. His cheeks looked hollow and dark in the flickering light, a scraggly beard was doing its best to make him look older than he was. “Lucky he was an honest lad, Captain. Some might have tried to take advantage, even despite her...er,” here the Guard trailed off, looking again at the rocking chair.
Landros nodded. “Lucky. So he brought her back here and sent word for me?” He walked closer to the chair. He could see the back of his mother’s head, grey and wild-haired. See one arm resting on the arm of the rocking chair, bare and thin.
“Yes, Captain.” The Guard had made no move to leave the comfort of his dark corner. “Then when he came back to her, only a few moments later he says, he found her like this.” He nodded to the chair, a sheen of sweat on his narrow forehead.
His heart loud in his ears, a roaring like the waves of the Sea at the edge of the world running through his head, Landros walked slowly around the rocking chair. He could see his image, stark in the black window, next to the body of his mother. A breath and then he turned his eyes to the woman who had given birth to him.
Squeak...creak...squeak...
She looked peaceful. For the first time he could remember, her face was unlined by fury, her eyes closed and quieted. Her head was tilted to the side as though she could hear a quiet melody and was straining to hear the refrain. Her hands weren’t knotted and pulling at her clothes. Apart from the blood on her chin, the bloom of blood on her hip, she looked no different to before the madness had taken her. Landros blinked and coughed. It looked like she had been stabbed once, the blade punching a hole through the nightdress. Who would do such a thing? “The lad says she was talking normally? She made sense to him?”
If the question was a strange one, the Guard didn’t show it. “So he says, Captain.” Finally the Guard made to move from his corner, “You want to speak to him, he’s just outside...”
Landros crouched down next to his mother and looked up at her closed eyes, all the madness wrung out of her like water from a cloth. Where did the madness go when it left his mother in those final moments? She was calling for you, had something urgent to tell you.
Squeak...creak...squeak...
He pulled the nightdress so it covered his mother’s knees. Already she was cool to the touch. Without rising, Landros looked over his shoulder.
And stopped.
Squeak...creak...squeak...
He must have walked past Feren as he entered the house. The corpse had chosen the darkest corner, next to a faded copy of the crest of the Keepers slanted on the wall. The light of the small candles barely touched the darkness surrounding him so he appeared little more than a dark shadow hunched against the wall. Feren looked weaker, not standing so straight and, it could have been Landros’s imagination, but there was the faint sour-sweet smell of death drifting on the warm breeze sighing through the open door.
Landros looked to his mother, but his words were for the Guard behind him. “Yes, fetch the boy. But I want a moment alone with my mother. I’ll call you when I’m ready.”
The Guard hesitated, indecision etched on his shadow-dappled face. “I’m under orders not to leave the bod...your mother, alone, Captain.”
Landros still didn’t look at the Guard, he didn’t want the man to see the cold sweat on his face, or the fear he was sure would be plain in his eyes. “Then it is good that my mother won’t be alone, isn’t it?”
More hesitation and then Landros heard the Guard leave, his footsteps loud until the house was left in silence.
Landros could wish that his dead friend had vanished once more, but the sickly sweet smell of death still hung in the air like a bitter memory. He spoke quietly, without raising his eyes. “Who are you? Why are you following me?” It wasn’t cold in the house, though his words felt cold on his lips, as though he breathed in the air of a bitter night.
A long time before any answer came; still Landros resisted looking into that dark corner beyond his mother’s body. For a wild moment he wanted to take her hand as though she could offer the comfort in death that she so seldom offered late in life.
“Lesun marlutor farum besa...” when the words came, they were less than a whisper, spoken with an effort that was terrible to hear. One moment Feren spoke in tongues, the next in the old language spoken in the world of the Keepers. “Our power is weak here, we cannot linger lest our body falls to dust. The Keepers watch this place.” An awful gasp from the dark corner and now the smell of death was enough to make Landros gag and he began to stand, hand covering his mouth.
“Do not look at us, Captain. You will not like what you see.” The voice was colder than any ice, sounding like a whisper of wind rolling across a bare field in the dead of winter. And the worst of it was that Landros could hear his old friend’s voice in there with the cold and with the death. What foul creatures had possessed Feren?
The sound of a snake slithering on a corpse. Perhaps Feren sliding down the wall.
“What have you done to Feren?” Landros couldn’t help whispering.
“Avum geli maris num...they are strong and you make them stronger still. Soon they will be here.” The creature sounded like a dying man gasping his last wishes. “Your friend Feren is dead. Your mother is dead. Just days after you become the chosen of the Keepers.” Every word a struggle, “We watch you Landros...mesun mara other...do not betray yourself...asun gera yires...do not betray your mother or Feren...breme...hison...lemun...” Now the words, the languages were shifting, mingling one into another, humming and droning like a swarm of wasps. A dull ache had spread through Landros’s head to match the humming and droning. His hand tightened still more on his mother’s cooling hand. He hadn’t realized he had held it.
Squeak...creak...squeak...
“Betray? How do I betray them?”
A soft sigh brushed his cheek, soft and cold and heavy with the smell of death. Landros sprang away from his mother, his heart left behind him. Did his mother move, her eyes falling closed once more? Or was it shadows flitting in the flickering light of the quivering candles?
“Who are you?” Landros asked into the darkness, though he knew there would be no answer. The smell of death was gone. Feren was gone. His mother was still once more.<
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“Captain Endrassi?” A dark figure silhouetted in the doorway.
Landros didn’t trust himself to answer.
“Tiernan found the lad who spoke to your mother sir. But the Clerk is wanting you to go to his house immediately, Captain. Says he doesn’t want any delays.”
Landros looked at his mother. He should feel sorrow, feel loss as he looked at her slumped in her chair, her hair dry and grey. She looked more like the woman who had raised him all his life than she had since the madness took her.
And yet he couldn’t feel sorrow. All he could feel was a sneaking dread that the chair would start to rocking again and his mother would start ranting and raving in some strange language.
“Then I better not make the Clerk wait, had I?” He left the house with his back stiff and straight and tried not to run out into the night.
CHAPTER 13
Ysora would have wanted nothing more than to stay in the bath until the water cooled and the thick steam dissipated from the air. Instead she was in the tin tub no longer than it took to scrape the filth from her arms, from her legs, from in between her toes. Steam billowed from her skin as she stepped back out of the scum-topped water.
Her mother was dead.
Cioran hadn’t said as much, but Ysora knew her mother was dead by the way the Guardian evaded her questions, by the way he hurried his servant to prepare her bath. “All questions can wait until you are clean and warm and at rest.” The Guardian had said. She had almost forgotten what it was like to be clean and warm. And to have clothes that fit. Her mother’s clothes, Ysora knew, as she looked at the dark green blouse and thick long woollen skirt, brown as the filth floating on top of the bathwater. When her mother wore that skirt, her hips would have looked bony and her feet large. Just as Ysora’s would as soon as she pulled them on.
Much as she hated the thought of wearing her mother’s clothes, there was no lock on the door of the kitchen so she rubbed a towel over her red skin, ran it through her hair and dressed as quickly as she could.
The kitchen was much as she remembered; the same small window looking out onto a crumbling grey stone wall, the same dented sink, the same stone floor that got so cold in winter. But then the personal effects were gone; the knives which her mother had loved so much, long and thin and sharp like her fingers, the carved wooden animals which she had loved to decorate the windowsill with. Every memory of her mother had vanished with the rest of Yerotan.
Strange then that Cioran had kept her clothes.
A soft, polite knock on the door. “Are you alright in there, Ysora?” Cioran’s voice, as quiet and polite as the knock had been.
“I’m fine. Be out in a moment.” Ysora ran her fingers through her hair, removed as many knots as she could. Her hair had wet the shoulders and back of her blouse. A last look around the kitchen. Everything clean and orderly, battered blackened pans hung on the wall, glass jars arranged in order of size, chopped herbs glistening and green heaped on chopping boards. And on each wall hung the crest of Keeper Liotuk, the saviour of the Weeping Walls, the hero of the Seven Nights.
Ysora sighed, ran her hands through her hair and pulled the door open.
Cioran was waiting on the other side, “You’re feeling better, my child? You look more like I pictured you these past years. I almost didn’t recognize you covered in muck and your hair tangled like that.” He looked at her hair now, his eyes clouded and grey.
“Much better, thank you.” There were only two rooms on the ground floor of her mother’s house: the kitchen and the living room. The living room was thick and smoky and just as unfamiliar to Ysora. Rushes covered the floor and the air was thick with the smell of lavender. “Godie. Where’s Godie?”
The Guardian smiled and spread his hands. His smile made him look younger despite the crow’s feet that spread at the corners of his eyes. “I had to tie him up outside in the garden. I think the smoke disagreed with him, poor thing. He couldn’t stop sneezing.” Cioran stepped to one side to allow Ysora into the room. “But you wanted to hear about your mother?”
Ysora blinked against the smoke from the fire that dominated the western wall, logs black and crumbling in the flames, crackling embers spitting onto the hearth. The only seating was three hard, straight-backed wooden chairs. Ysora chose not to take one. She couldn’t hear Godie barking. He always barked when he was chained up. “She’s dead.” Ysora said. A banner bearing the crest of Keeper Liotuk hung above the fire, the tassels fringed by black smoke.
A long pause. The flames crackled and spat. “I’m sorry to say that you are right, child. She was welcomed into the Sleeper’s embrace eleven years past.”
Ysora felt nothing. Nothing at all. The smell of orris root seeped from her mother’s clothes, thick and pungent as a bitter memory. She let the priest guide her to a chair, their steps whispering through the rushes. “So long,” Ysora said. The priest said nothing, only looked at her, his hair bright in the light of the flames, his green tunic looked thick and rich. “All the times I thought of her, wondered where she was, what she was doing, and she was already dead.”
Cioran knelt before her, looking up into her eyes. “She was a wonderful woman, your mother. Fearless. Where others hid behind shifting curtains and onions hanging from windows and doors, your mother would carry the stretchers, hold cool cloths to ease the burning pains.”
“The red death?”
The priest nodded and stood. “It was here only a year but by the time it was done half the village had passed to the embrace of the Sleeper.”
Ysora bit her lip. She could see her mother now, taking her long strides among the dead and the dying, seeing to the weak, offering no words of comfort, her mouth a long thin line as she held cloths to heads, poured medicine down burning throats. All done, not through compassion, but as some act of defiance. Daring the red death to take her.
And then it had. And she would have faced the pain and the horror in the same way she had tended Ysora’s childhood aches and pains, with a contemptuous disdain and quiet efficiency. Ysora knew she wouldn’t even have lain down to die. They would have found her seated in bed, her eyes defiant.
Cioran mistook Ysora’s silence for heartbreak. “She was a wonderful woman,” he repeated. “It was a privilege to have known her.”
The flames danced on the crest of Keeper Liotuk, the stars bright on their field of black. “You knew her well, then?” Ysora asked the Guardian. Her mother had always been devout in her worship of the Five, even to the extent of walking all the way to Jerusin when a Clerk had been visiting to speak.
The Guardian was smiling at her, carelessly attractive with his crow’s feet and his hair pushed away from his face. “You could say that, child. As well as a man can know his wife, that is.”
Ysora fought against a strange compulsion to laugh. “You were married to my mother? You’re no older than I am. A strange marriage that must have been.”
“Strange, perhaps.” Cioran straightened and leaned a hand on the mantelpiece, looking down at Ysora as shadows danced on his face. “Strange, but they were a happy two years. I only hope they were as happy for Kara as they were for me. My sorrow is that it was such a short time. If only we had met years before.”
“Then she could have placed you in the crib with me while you whispered sweet nothings to her.” Ysora felt flushed with anger, the Guardian obviously thought her an idiot, trying to explain away his possession of her mother’s house. A house that rightfully should be hers. And where was Godie? That dog had never gone this long without barking in his life. Even in his sleep he whimpered and twitched and barked at the dream-rabbits.
This time there were no crow’s feet as Cioran smiled. “You think that love is saved for someone born the same year as yourself? That love can only be found if the numbers in the censuses are the same? You think love is a choice, that we only love those who will be accepted by our families and friends?”
It sounded strange, hearing somebody use such a word when talking
of her mother. Ysora thought of her mother as apart from such an emotion, a cold gangly woman. Strong and independent. But not loving, never loving. “Forgive my cynicism, Guardian Mehat...”
“Cioran, please.”
“Cioran.” Ysora paused to gather her thoughts after the interruption. “But here you are living in my mother’s house and telling me that you were her husband when you look no more than a day older than myself. If it is the house you want, then keep it, I have no wish for it.” Even as she said the words, their truth struck her heart like love’s arrow. “My only wish was to be clean and rested and to be on my way. If you could just show me where Godie is..." she rose to her feet, pushing herself up with both hands from the arms of the chair.
“I’ve had four more naming days than you, Ysora.” There was no urgency in Cioran’s tone. “And your mother was capable of great love, whatever you may think of her. It was her sorrow at losing you that brought us together.”
“Sorrow?” Again the need to laugh. Strange that she hadn’t felt the need to weep. The tears were there, she knew she could force them if she wanted, but why should she shed tears for such a woman? “She told me she would be glad if I left, that she would have one less mouth to worry about feeding.”
“Words and air, my child, words and air.” Still Cioran didn’t move from the fire, still she heard no dog barking. “And what were your last words to her, Ysora?” Cioran might have raised an eyebrow to her, or it might have been the shadows flickering across his face.
Yes, what were her last words to her mother? Memories, suddenly as fresh as an open wound. She could lie, but the way Cioran looked at her, she was in no doubt he already knew the truth. “I told her I wished her dead.”
Cioran waved a hand before his face like a street conjurer revealing a card. “Words and air, Ysora, words and air. Don’t let words spoken in anger be your abiding memory of your mother.”
If not those words, then what? Her stony face? Her bony shoulders? Her swollen knuckles? “I shall remember my mother as I please. I thank you for the bath, but I’m sure you’re a very busy man...”