by Paula Guran
Smoke hung in the fumy haze of our torch. More slimy lichen covered the walls. More slimy white mushrooms puffed beneath our tread. My breath huffed forth, and I sucked it and the torch smoke and the pall of the mushrooms in again and my thoughts revolved around themselves and my mood lightened even as a tear of desperation leaked from my eye. Intoxicated, dear daughter – no matter the source – is one way to pass the time in hell, should you ever need to know.
Hurt and I struck it rich in a dead end passage. I leaned against the wall to rest my sore backside. The stone crumbled and sloughed away and there in a queerly shaped cell, were two-dozen obsidian eggs stacked within the remnants of rotted crates. I’d seen their like once at a jeweler’s shop in Victory City: hollow for the placing of a gem or prayer scroll while other others contained several smaller versions, each nested within its kin. Richies collected them in sets of fanciful design and jewelers crafted them in a drover’s dozen lands.
I lifted one and turned it over. Different from the fabricated pieces I’d encountered, yet similar enough to give me hope of high value. Hard and edgy as the obsidian it resembled and seamless as any true egg. Something inside rattled the way a musician’s gourd rattles.
“Why’n hell they got no latches?” Hurt said the way a child will of a Solfest upon discovering there’s no gifts on the breakfast platter.
Surely the exotic nature of the eggs would fetch a fair coin. We’d get double rations at camp and that pleased me well enough to clear my foggy brain. I admit to a larcenous nature – knowing well that Hurt was too dumb to count, I socked away three of the eggs with the intention of smuggling them back to civilization and brokering a fortune of my own.
Hurt gathered our comrades while I set about fashioning a travois to transport the other goods we’d gathered. Soon the others arrived bearing their own dubious treasures. We stowed our spoils and proceeded for the surface. A train of scout ants dutifully transporting crumbs back to the colony.
Somehow, and maybe the brain-fog returned to beleaguer me, I lost the way. I’d taken the hind teat of our column as I dragged a carpet-load of junk treasure and no one wanted to trip over it in the gloom. One moment, Hurt trudged a couple paces ahead, and then I stubbed my toe on a loose stone and the men went around the corner, gone. Grunts and laughter and curses quit upon an instant as did the glare of their lamps and torches. The sudden stillness sobered me right smartly.
I shouted to them. My voice echoed through the labyrinth. It didn’t rebound; it kept on going without answer. Then I felt in my pockets for flint and in moments ignited a brand from a sconce. A feeble reddish hue flickered from that ancient pitch. Nowhere did I spy Sergeant Bakker’s chalk marks. I thought of all those skeletons in their cells and the weight of the rock overhead, and of the mold and slime oozing in the cracks. Somewhere, wind moaned through a crevice. Dread coiled around me, sure as the noxious smoke.
Hold still, young Ruark. Someone whispered from the shadows. Hold still, child. I’m almost with you. My father’s gruff voice, though he’d died several winters before, crushed beneath the felled trunk of an oak. Later, I became convinced it was my imagination, but in the moment, that coldly eager whisper was enough to get me moving. I abandoned the load and set forth with alacrity.
The hall wound this way and that and tightened until rudely carved rock dug into my shoulders. I squeezed through and stumbled into a cavern. Saints know how big – couldn’t see far as the brand smoldered to a nub. Earth crumbled away from the toes of my boots into a pit. A foul breeze moaned up from that abyss and snuffed the dying flame.
Sapped of fight, I curled into a ball and fell asleep right there on the lip of oblivion. Chill and damp woke me. Didn’t know what else to do, so I crawled. Crawled because I dared not risk tripping into sudden doom. I rested often; so thirsty I sucked at water seeping through rock, so hungry I licked the salty blood from my scabs, so weary I’d slip into dreams of the home cottage and Mother’s honey porridge before the miserable cold roused me and I crept onward without direction or hope. The hunger became terrible. I sorted through my pockets, mad for the smallest crumb, and came across three of the obsidian eggs I’d stuffed in there and forgotten. I nearly pitched them away, until something stayed my hand.
Strangely, the jagged edges had smoothed and softened as unfired clay does over time. The shell curved, pliable as leather as I caressed it. In a daze, I obeyed a mindless command and cracked the egg and took its clabbered bounty in a gulp. The darkness was complete, thus I couldn’t discern what yolky, blood-warm mass sludged down my throat, nor what fine bones and bits crunched between my teeth. The taste of it, horrible and delightful, a rancid ambrosia, smoldered in my guts. The next two went down the hatch with more ease. I heard my own grunts and gulps echoing from the rocks around me. Horrible. And I licked my fingers and the ground for any drooling trace, and when I’d done, crawled onward.
The Dark looks after its own.
I found a chimney vent and wriggled my way until I popped out on the surface. I wept and rolled in that bog mud. You’ve seen the scars upon my back. You know how Captain Vanger greeted me upon my return to camp. After twenty lashes at the whipping post, they clapped me in the stocks for a night and chalked it off as a lesson learned. The Captain said I reminded him of one of his stupider nephews.
I wasn’t the only sod who disappeared. Only one who vanished and then came back, though. Vanger ordered the company to withdraw. Apparently he took a gander at the obsidian eggs Hurt and the other lads hauled out of the depths and made the call right there. Loose talk spread through the ranks – Jon Foot wanted the eggs, had sent us into the wilderness for the very purposes of securing them, gold and gems be damned.
Damned.
The company made good time on its return journey. The weather stiffened and that sent the blue-bellies into their warrens for the cold season. On the eleventh sunset when we camped near the Thrush Meadows, I went forth to fetch wood for the bonfires. Dreadful pains stabbed through my innards. A foul, sickly sweat oozed from my entire body and made my clothes sodden. Phantasms of delirium cascaded through my mind. I bolted from the work part and squatted behind a log and voided my bowels.
Women groan about the agonies of giving birth. Well, lass, they have my profound sympathy. Shite and blood burst from me. I thought myself liable to split apart at the seams, as it were. Miracles and horrors! Three eggs dropped from me and lay in the muddy stench. A clutch of my very own. Each glistened in the muck; roughly the size of a hen’s and translucent. Shrimplike embryos coiled in jelly. I recognized the black wisps of my hair, the imprint of my own coarse features, my own eye gone molten yellow that flashed with unnatural awareness. Within a few heartbeats, the eggs crusted over, sealed by a jagged black shell.
Feral cunning overtook me, reduced me to an animal. I scooped handfuls of dirt and dead leaves over the abominations, then slipped back among my comrades who’d made merry at my cries of gastric distress. Life in the Legion is cruel.
Nightmares lashed me, surely as Vanger’s whip. I was shorn of rest and sanity, condemned to drift as a voiceless spirit while doppelgangers assumed my life. Brazen, evilly grinning doubles doted upon by dear mother, my friends and colleagues. Each new dawn found me shaking in my bedroll. Only Jim Dandy and Hurt noted my ghastly pale countenance for I strove mightily to conceal the nature of my ills. The instinct that compelled me to bury the eggs also warned that I lived in the shadow of some obscene, circling terror. Should anyone discover my secret, I would be undone in spectacular fashion.
The moral I learned from this experience, is always heed your suspicious inner voice.
On the seventeenth evening Jon Foot himself materialized from the whirling smoke of our main bonfire. The dogs barked with insane fury and then cowered at his sandals. Two sentries pissed themselves. Most depictions of the warlock are exaggerated. Artists render him as a monster: red eyes, spiked horns, a death’s head. Eight feet tall, razor talons and a lizard’s tail. In private, he may
strip his costume and resemble exactly thus a demon. However, when I met him, he appeared altogether ordinary. Softening into middle age, his hair receded and his belly rounded. Brown of eye and mildly spoken. His black cloak smelt of sulfur and he smiled too much. He smoked a clay pipe. That was the extent of his nefarious comport.
Soldiers vacated a tent on the edge of camp. Jon Foot quartered within. Shortly thereafter he summoned, one by one, those of us who’d ventured beneath Castle Warrant. The interviews were brief. Men emerged from their audiences none the worse for the wear, although none would speak of what had transpired nor meet the eyes of those who inquired. Vanger’s lieutenants roamed among us and boxed the ears of those who pressed the point. Soon enough, the gossip stilled and the men fell into sulky routine.
My turn rolled round after midnight.
Jon Foot’s tent fumed with smoke from an iron brazier and his pipe.
He reclined upon a stone chair carved into the likeness of a centipede rampant. It much resembled the one I am told existed at court in the Privy Council. The warlock took my measure with a long polite stare. He finished his cigarette and lighted another from the small flames of the brazier.
In that lull, I realized the sounds of camp were not muffled by the tent walls. Nay, we inhabited a bubble in a sea of silent darkness. Cozier than my terrifying span trapped in the caverns, yet much the same.
“Master Ruark, so good to make your acquaintance. I’m sure this will be the high-water mark of my day.” He affected the cultured tones of a highborn. His politeness smacked of malice. Or, perhaps his tepid certainty and unwavering gaze preyed upon my guilt. His demeanor suggested that he knew everything about me all the way back to the rainy morn I dropped from Mama’s womb. He laughed and said, “Yes, yes. I know much. Much, however, isn’t the same as all. I cannot see what happened to you in the dim cellars of Henry Belfour. You were lost and now you are found. How does this happen?”
My intent was to mumble an inoffensive lie or three, to deflect and prevaricate as peasantry has treated with the rich since the beginning of time. Foot, black magician, must have cast a geas upon me, for matters took a bizarre turn.
“I got hungry and I ate three of them fucking eggs you’re on about,” I listened to myself say. Every other muscle in my body froze. I swayed, rooted in place.
“Damn. Captain Vanger counted the haul. A perfect set if not for the ones you abandoned. And the ones you devoured, alas.”
“Too bad. They hit the spot.”
“Thank you for your honesty, son.” Jon Foot levitated to his feet. “Apparently you met an old friend of mine down there in the cellars.”
“Aye, someone else was there. Whispering.”
Jon Foot nodded wisely. “Others sought the Clutch. Bad ones. Ethan, Julie the Fifth, Carling . . . Phil Wary. Black sorcerers, each. It would be no matter to disguise themselves and walk among your comrades. To divide and strike. You were befuddled and cut from the herd. Mere chance delivered you from doom . . . Did he speak to you? Surely, he did.”
My mouth opened again, though I resisted mightily. “Aye. My father came upon me in the dark.”
“Your dead father.”
“As a doornail.”
“This won’t do. I’m sorry.” He actually did seem a trifle melancholy. Then he took a small skinning knife from his pocket and sliced me from crotch to sternum. I cannot emphasize how disconcerting it is to watch in hapless wonder as the cut is assayed and one’s intestines slop onto hard-packed dirt. What’s worse? The warlock crouched, poking through the mess the way priests divine the future from pigeon entrails. The shock awakened my muscles. I regained sufficient control to stagger backward through the tent flaps.
Jon Foot watched me go, knife dripping in his hand. “Come back here, son. I want to hug the shit out of you!” He spread his arms and smiled with pure joy. His shadow against the wall coiled most unnaturally. It bristled with barbs.
Me and my train of guts paid no heed of his imprecation. Three steps took me across the threshold. I collapsed near a cook fire where soldiers just off watch gathered to warm themselves. The last moment I recalled of that particular life are their shouts, their expressions of panic and disgust. Sweet oblivion swept over me, and I was dead.
I revived, blanketed in slimy leaves, in the woods behind this very cottage. Naked and bloody and stinking, but whole. The pink flesh of my belly was without blemish, its cleaving wound had perfectly healed. They say that home always seems smaller when a man returns. This was the opposite. Trees loomed, the night stretched wider and deeper.
Guided by memory and habit, I emerged from the woods and knocked on the door. Ma swooned at the sight of her son, gone nearly two years. More than surprise smote her. More than alarm at my gory visage. Far more, as I discovered upon glimpsing myself in yonder body mirror. Upon departing to seek my fortune in the wide world, I’d attained middling height and shorn my whiskers daily with Da’s razor. Now, my form had reverted to that of a child of no more than five winters. My face had altered into a somewhat familiar stranger’s. Partially my grown self, partially a changeling’s. Mom would remark later that for a several moments she took me for her grandson.
Days of confusion followed. My thoughts buzzed. Waking proved difficult to separate from dreaming. I raved of centipede men and eternal darkness. Mother tended me as my strength and wits were gradually restored, and by the end of a week I’d grown fully into my father’s old logging clothes. I began to feed myself. I shaved again. She gently inquired what I recalled of the time between my murder and awakening. What she wanted to know was if I’d witnessed the afterlife, if I’d gone there and dipped in a toe.
I shook my head and claimed ignorance of aught save a smooth, formless void. How could I tell her the truth? I recalled the formless dark. Indeed, I also remembered the licks of fire shooting through its depths, the black rolling back to reveal a deathly white, an iris of bones of men fused together unto eternity. How could I speak to her of the awesome cold, or of the death groans of hidden stars? How could I articulate the sense of folding into myself, of being trapped inside an egg, drawing sustenance from its yolk as a chick does?
I lacked the courage to describe a vision of rebirth wherein my eggshell cracked in half and I floated upon a woodland stream near a summer twilight. Willows entangled themselves against a red sky. Other reborn souls rode the current in their shells. They cried to one another, mewling as babes. Bitterns jigged between the reeds, their tarnished bills poised for the killing stroke. The towering birds pecked and stabbed at tiny prey and swallowed piteous shrieks of my fellow travelers. I met the glaring, avaricious eye of fate as it plunged its bill toward me and the red sky cracked as the eggshell had, and tarry black spilled forth instead of light. I drowned in blood, not water.
My weary mother deserved a fairer tale. All mothers do. Thus, I spun a pretty yarn about warmth and quiet and the peace of the womb. I had changed enough from the son she bore and raised that she had little choice but to accept the lies as one might from a fresh-faced stranger. Wearing a new face and armed with bitter experience, my gift for fabrication was much improved. Despite the uncanniness of the situation, it proved easier for her than I might’ve suspected. We were able to make a fresh slate of it.
As the doldrums evaporated, I realized the starkness of Mom’s situation. Since Dad’s untimely demise and my departure, she’d become haggard and mournful. Our ancestral hut had gone to wrack and ruin. Where had my younger brother Marlon gone? Four summers my junior and a forester in the making, I assumed his absence meant he was afield cutting wood or away at the market in King’s Grove. Mom covered her face and wept. The gods demanded balance – three nights before my return, Marlon vanished while logging a nearby hillside. He’d been in the company of fellow woodcutters. They searched for him in vain. The men concluded he’d run afoul of wolves, which were particularly ravenous of late.
Immediately, I dressed in my father’s work clothes, gathered meager supplies, and
set forth with his bearded ax slung across my back. The hillside wasn’t far. I supped with the loggers who toiled there. These were men slightly younger than myself alongside whom I’d labored and feasted in days gone by. None recognized my countenance, although each embraced me as a Ruark for I bore an unerring stamp of the family bloodline. I introduced myself as a traveling cousin and was thus reborn full and true. Solved my problem with the Legion. The functionaries hate it when folks they’ve killed turn up alive and well. Their foreman told me how Marlon walked into the bushes and vanished. He didn’t figure I’d have any better luck turning up a corpse, but gods be with me in my task.
I sought my brother high and low. Scoured the nearby hills and hollows. Finally, I kicked over a pile of human bones deep in a thicket. Couldn’t tell whether they belonged to him or not – hacked and charred too badly. Reminded me of something. I buried the bones and said a few words in case the gods were watching.
Reinvention and a newfound loathing for travel served me well. I put my faith in the fates, relegated miseries to the past, and set to work. Strong whiskey and back-breaking labor kept me on the straight path and with scant time for contemplation on matters best left undisturbed.
Soon, I became an accomplished logger and attracted a crew of strapping lads. As you can see, riches didn’t follow. Nonetheless, we did well enough. I was content to dwell here in this cottage alone for a score of years. Over the years, I sought out Dandy, Hurt, and the others and introduced myself under this new identity. Never did I choose to wander, however. Nor did I pine for the company of a wife. Not until I met your mother in King’s Grove by happy accident. Charm, wit, beauty. Youth! Too good for a woodcutter with white in his mane and sap in his beard, I vow. She smote me with a bat of her lashes. Long after our honeymoon, I harbored the notion she’d merely taken pity on a poor boy. In hindsight, it’s more likely she fled demons of her own. City life is as treacherous as any bad stretch of the forest. Eventually you came along, my dear, our only child.