A worthy theft to my mind, for I knew this tale. Indeed, I knew the poet whose version Calap was now recounting. Stenla Tebur of Aren managed to fashion a dozen epic poems and twenty or so hearth-tales (or garden-tales, as the Aren knew them, having long since abandoned such rustic scenes as sitting round a hearth beneath stars unmarred by city smoke and light), before his untimely death at the age of thirty-three. The altar upon which he breathed his last, I am told, was naught but grimy cobbles behind the Temple of Burn, and the breath whereof I speak was a wheezing one, thick with consumption. Alcohol and d’bayang had taken this young man’s life, for such are the lures of insensate escape to the tormented artist that rare is the one who deftly avoids such fatal traps. T’was not fame that killed him, alas (for, I would boldly state, death in the time of fame is not as tragic as it might seem, for lost potential is immortal; far greater the sorrow and depression upon hearing of a once-famous life ending in the obscurity of the obsolete). Stenla had given up his siege upon the high and solid walls of legitimacy, manned as it was by legions of jaded mediocrities and coddled luminaries. Forays of vicious rejection had crushed his spirit, until senseless oblivion was all he sought, and found.
‘What terrible crime had so cruelly cast her out from her own people?’ Calap went on, quoting word for word and thus impressing me with his memory. ‘The wind howled with the voices of a thousand spirits, each and all bemoaning this fair maiden’s fate. Tears from the sky lost the warmth of life and so drifted down as flakes of snow. The great herds in the distance had wandered down to the valley flanks to escape the wind and its dread voices of sorrow. She curled alone, dying.’
‘But why?’ demanded Sellup, earning venomous glares from Pampera and Oggle Gush, for in showing interest in a tale not told by Nifty Gum she was committing a gross betrayal, and even the Great Artist himself was frowning at Sellup. ‘Why did they leave her like that? That was evil! And she was good, wasn’t she? A good person! Pure of heart, an innocent – she had to be! Oh, this is a terrible fate!’
Calap raised a hand in which was cupped borrowed wisdom. ‘Soon, my dear, all will be known.’
‘Don’t wait too long! I don’t like long stories. Where’s the action? You’ve already gone on too long!’
And to that criticism Pampera, Oggle and Nifty all nodded. What is it to trust so little in the worth of a tale well and carefully told? What doth haste win but breathless stupidity? Details of import? Bah! Cry these flit-flies. Measures of pace and the thickening of the mat into which the awl must weave? Who cares? Chew into rags and be on to the next, spitting as you go! I look upon the young and see a generation of such courage as to dare nothing more than the ankle-deep, and see them standing proud and arrogant upon the thin shorelines of unknown seas – and to call this living! Oh, I know, it is but an old man’s malaise, but to this very moment I still see Sellup and her wide-eyed idiocy, I still hear her impatience and the smack of her lips and the gulp of her breaths, a young woman who could pant herself unconscious in her haste to see her mind transported … elsewhere. A stutter of steps, a stagger of impetus, oh, so much she missed!
‘Would she lie there unto death,’ Calap asked, ‘nameless and unknown? Is this not the darkest tragedy of all? To die in anonymity? To pass from the world unremarked, beneath the notice of an entire world? Oh, the flies wait to lay their eggs. The capemoths flutter like leaves in nearby branches, and in the sky the tiny spots that are ice vultures slowly grow larger with their cargo of endings. But these are the mindless purveyors of mortality and nothing more than that. Their voice is the whisper of wings, the clack of beaks and the snip of insect mouths. It is fey epitaph indeed.’
Steck Marynd limped close to the fire and set down another branch collected from somewhere. Flames licked the hoary bark and found it to their liking.
‘So we must turn back, outracing the cool sun of spring to the colder sun of winter, and we see before us a huddle of huts, humped upon the bones and tusks of tenag, thick bhederin hides stretched tight over the skeletal frames. The camp crouches not upon the highest hills overlooking the valley, nor upon the banks of the melt-water stream in the basin of the valley itself. No, it clings to a south-facing terrace a little more than halfway up the valley side. The wind’s fiercest force is cut in this place and the ground is dry underfoot, draining well into the soggy flats flanking the stream. The Imass were greatly skilled at such things; perhaps indeed their wisdom was a bred thing, immune to true learning, or it may instead be true that those not yet severed from the earth know full the precious secrets of harmony, of using only what is given—’
‘Get on with it!’ shouted Sellup, the words jumbled by the knuckle bones she was sucking clean. Spitting one out she popped another one in. Her eyes shone like candle flames awakened by a drunkard’s breath. ‘It was a stupid camp. That’s all. I want to know what’s going to happen! Now!’
Calap nodded. Never argue with a member of one’s audience.
Well, perhaps he believed that. For myself, and after much rumination on the matter, I would suggest the following qualifiers. If that member of the audience is obnoxious, uninformed, dim, insulting, a snob, or drunk, then as far as I am concerned, they are fair game and, by their willingness to engage the artist in said contest, should expect none other than surgical savaging by said artist. Don’t you think?
‘These Imass in this camp had suffered a terrible winter. Their hunters could find little game, and the great flocks of birds were still weeks away. Many of the elders had walked off into the white to save the lives of their children and grandchildren, for winter spoke to them in a secret language only the aged understand. “In life’s last days, the white and the cold will lie in the bed of the old.” So said the wise among them. Yet, even for this sacrifice, the others weakened with each day. The hunters could not range as far as once they could before exhaustion turned them back. Children had begun eating the hides that kept them warm at night, and now fevers raced among them.
‘She was out, upon the high ridge overlooking the camp, collecting the last autumn’s mosses where the winds had swept the snows away, and so was the first to see the approaching stranger. He came down from the north, thickly clad in tenag furs. The long bone-grip of a greatsword rose behind his left shoulder. His head was bared to the winds at his back, and she could see that he was dark, stone-skinned and black-haired. He dragged a sledge in his wake.
‘In the time before he drew closer, hard thoughts rattled in her mind. They could turn no stranger away in times of need. This was a law among her kind. Yet this warrior was a big man, taller than any Imass. His hunger would be a deep pit, and weakened as her clan’s warriors now were, the stranger could take all he wanted if he so chose. And more, she was troubled by that sledge, for bundled as it was, she knew it bore a body. If it lived it would need caring. If dead, the warrior was delivering a curse upon her people.’
‘A curse?’ Sellup asked. ‘What kind of curse?’
Calap blinked.
Seeing that he had no specific response to this question, I cleared my throat. ‘Death leaves such camps, Sellup, and that is well and as it should be. This is why the elders, when they decide it is time to die, walk out into the white. It is also why all kills are butchered well away from the camp itself, so that only meat, hide and bones intended to be made into tools – gifts to life one and all – enter the camp. Should death come into the camp, the hosts are cursed and must immediately make propitiations to the Reaver and his demon slaves, lest Death find the camp to his liking and so make it his home. When the Reaver finds a home, the living soon die, do you see?’
‘No.’
Sighing, I said, ‘It is one of those rules couched in spiritual guise that, in truth, has a more secular purpose. To bring someone dead or dying into a small camp is to invite contagion and disease. Among such a close-knit clan, any infection is likely to claim them all. Thus, the Imass had certain rules to prevent such a thing occurring, yet those rules, alas, conflicted with
that of never turning a guest away in times of need. So the woman was with troubled thoughts, yes?’
‘But he’s evil – he has to be! He’s the Reaper himself!’
‘Reaver,’ I corrected, ‘or so the citizens of Aren so call the Lord of Death.’
Calap flinched and would not thereafter meet my eyes. ‘So she stood, trembling, as the stranger, who had clearly chosen her as his destination, now drew up to halt nine paces distant. She saw at once that he was not Imass. He was from the mountain heights. He was Fenn, a giant of Tartheno Toblakai blood. And too, she saw that he bore the marks of battle. Slash wounds that had cut through the woolly Tenag hide had encrusted the slices with the warrior’s own blood. His right hand and forearm were blackened with old gore, and so too was his face spattered in violent maps.
‘He was silent for a time, his heavy eyes held upon her, and then he spoke. He said—’
‘Finish this tomorrow night,’ Tiny Chanter said, cracking a wide yawn.
‘That’s not how it works,’ Tulgord Vise said in a growl. ‘We can’t very well vote if one of the tales remains incomplete.’
‘I want to hear more, don’t I?’ Tiny retorted. ‘But I’m falling asleep, right? So, we get the rest tomorrow night.’
I noticed that Nifty Gum was endeavouring to catch my eye. In response I raised my brows and shrugged.
Oggle Gush said then, ‘But I want to hear Nifty’s story!’
Nifty made to silence the girl, if the twitching of his hands and their spasmodic clutching (miming throttling a throat) was any indication, though who but Nifty could truly say?
‘Tomorrow during the day then! Same for the other one – we got time and since there ain’t nothing to see anyway and nothing to do but walk, let’s have ’em entertain us till sunset! No, it’s settled and all, ain’t it, Flea?’
‘Aye,’ said Flea. ‘Midge?’
‘Aye,’ said Midge.
‘But the night is still young,’ objected Arpo Relent, and one could tell from a host of details in his demeanour that the sudden dispatch of impending death-sentences had frustrated some pious repository of proper justice within his soul, and now in his face there was the blunt belligerence of a thwarted child.
Purse Snippet then surprised us all by saying, ‘I will tell a tale, then.’
‘My lady,’ gasped the host, ‘it was settled – there is no need—’
‘I would tell a tale, Sardic Thew, and so I shall.’ With this assertion muting us all she then hesitated, as if startled by her own boldness. ‘Words are not my talent, I admit, so forgive me if I stumble on occasion.’
Who could not but be forgiving?
‘This too belongs to a woman,’ she began, her eyes on the flames, her elegantly fingered hands encircling her clay vessel. ‘Loved and worshipped by so many—’ She sharply looked up. ‘No, she was no dancer, nor a poet, nor actress nor singer. Hers was a talent born to, yet not one that could be further honed. In truth, it was not a talent at all, but rather the gathering of chance – lines and curves, symmetries. She was, in short, beautiful, and from that beauty her life was shaped, her future preordained. She would marry well, above her station, and in that marriage she would be the subject of adoration, as if she was a precious object of art, until such time that age stole her beauty, whereupon her fine home would become a tomb of sorts, her bedroom rarely frequented at night by her husband, whose vision of beauty remained forever youthful.
‘There would be wealth. Fine foods. Silks and fetes. There would be children, perhaps, and there would be something … something wistful, there in her eyes at the very end.’
‘That’s not a story!’ Oggle Gush said.
‘I have but begun, child—’
‘Sounds more like an end to me, and don’t call me child, I’m not a child,’ and she looked to Nifty for confirmation, but he was instead frowning at Purse Snippet, as if seeking to understand something.
Purse Snippet resumed her tale, but her eyes were now bleak as she gazed into the fire. ‘There are quests, in a person’s life, that require no steps to be taken. No journey across strange landscapes. There are quests where the only monsters are the shadows in a bedroom, the reflection in a mirror. And one has no companions hale and brave to stand firm at one’s side. This is a thing taken in solitude. She was loved by many, yes. She was desired by all who saw the beauty of her, but of beauty within herself, she could see nothing. Of love for the woman she was inside, there was none. Can the pulp of the fruit admire the beauty of its skin? Can it even know that beauty?’
‘Fruits don’t have eyes,’ said Oggle Gush, rolling her own. ‘This is stupid. You can’t have quests without mountain passes and dangerous rivers to cross, and ogres and demons and wolves and bats. And there’s supposed to be friends of the hero who go along and fight and stuff, and get into trouble so the hero has to save them. Everyone knows that.’
‘Oggle Gush,’ Apto Canavalian said (now that he’d done plucking cactus spikes from the back of his head), ‘kindly shut that useless hole in your face. Purse Snippet, please, go on.’
Whilst Oggle gaped and mawped and blinked like an owl in a vice, Steck Marynd appeared to add more wood to the fire and it occurred to me that the stolid, grim ranger was indeed doing woodly things, which meant that all was well, though of greater tasks and higher import something must obtain with this personage, sooner or later. One hopes.
‘She would stand upon a balcony overlooking the canal where the gramthal boats plied carrying people and wares. Butterflies in the warm air would lift as if on sounds to gather round her.’ She faltered then, for some unknown reason, and drew a few breaths before continuing, ‘and though all who chanced to look up, all who set eyes upon her, saw a maiden of promise, indeed, a work of art posed thus upon that balcony, why, in her soul there was war. There was anguish and suffering, there was dying to an invisible enemy, one that could cut the feet beneath every mustered argument, every armoured affirmation. And the dark air was filled with screams and weeping, and upon no horizon did dawn make promise, for this was a night unending and a war without respite.
‘A lifetime, she would tell you, is a long time to bleed. There is paint for pallor, the hue of health to hide the ashen cheeks, but the eyes cannot be disguised. There you will find, if you look closely, the tunnels to the battlefield, to that unlighted place where no beauty or love can be found.’
The fire ate wood, coughed smoke. No one spoke. The mirror was smudged, yes, but a mirror nonetheless.
‘Had she said but a single word,’ muttered someone (was it me?), ‘a thousand heroes would have rushed to her aid. A thousand paths of love to lead her out of that place.’
‘That which cannot love itself cannot give love in return,’ she replied. ‘So it was with this woman. But, she knew in her heart, the war must end. What devours within will, before long, claw its way to the surface, and the gift of beauty will falter. Dissolution rots outward. The desperation grew within her. What could she do? Where in her mind could she go? There was, of course,’ and inadvertently her eyes dropped to the cup in her hands, ‘sweet oblivion, and all the masks of escape as offered by wine, smoke and such, but these are no more than the paths of decay – gentle paths, to be sure, once one gets used to the stench. And before long, the body begins to fail. Weakness, illness, aching head, a certain lassitude. Death beckons, and by this alone one knows that one’s soul has died.’
‘My lady,’ Tulgord Vise ventured, ‘this tale of yours demands a knight, sworn to goodness. ’Tis a fair damsel in deepest distress—’
‘Two knights!’ cried Arpo Relent, although with a zeal that sounded, well, forced.
Tulgord grunted. ‘There is only one one knight in this tale. The other knight is the other knight.’
‘There can be two knights! Who is to say there can’t?’
‘Me. I’m to say. I will allow two knights, however. The real one, me. The other one, you.’
Arpo Relent’s face was bright red, as if swallowing
flames. ‘I’m not the other knight! You are!’
‘When I cut you in two,’ Tulgord said, ‘you can be two knights all by yourself.’
‘When you cut me in two you won’t know which way to turn!’
Silence has flavour, and this one was confused, as follow certain statements that, in essence, make no sense whatsoever, yet nonetheless possess a peculiar logic. Such was this momentary interlude composed of frowns, clouds and blinks.
Purse Snippet spoke. ‘She came to a belief that the gods set alight a spark in every soul, the very core of a mortal spirit, which mayhap burns eternal, or, in less forgiving eyes, but gutters out once the flesh has fallen beyond the last taken breath. To sharpen her need, she chose the latter notion. Now, then, there was haste and more: there was a true edge of possible redemption. If in our lives, we are all that we have and ever will have, then all worth lies in the mortal deed, in that single life.’
‘A woman without children, then,’ Apto murmured.
‘What gift passing such beauty on? No, she was yet to marry, yet to take any seed. Only within her mind had she so aged, seeing an end both close and far off, ten years in a century, ten centuries in an instant. Resolved, then, she would seek to journey to find that spark. Could it be scoured clean, enlivened to such bright fire that all flaws simply burned away? She would see, if she could.
‘But what manner this journey? What landscape worth the telling?’ And upon that moment her eyes, depthless tunnels, found me. ‘Will you, kind sir, assemble the scene for my poor tale?’
‘Honoured,’ said I mostly humbly. ‘Let us imagine a vast plain, broken and littered. Starved of water and bare of animals. She travels alone and yet in company, a stranger among strangers. All she is she hides behind veils, curtains of privacy, and awaiting her as awaiting the others, there is a river, a flowing thing of life and benison. Upon its tranquil shores waits redemption. Yet it remains distant, with much privation in between. But what of those who travel with her? Why, there are knights avowed to rid the world of the unseemly. In this case, the unseemly personages of two foul sorcerers of the darkest arts. So too there are pilgrims, seeking blessing from an idle god, and a carriage travels with them and hidden within it there is a face, perhaps even two, whom none have yet to see—’
The Second Collected Tales of Bauchelain & Korbal Broach: Three Short Novels of the Malazan Empire Page 18