by A. L. Brooks
But this open, alien world, a place she had never seen, nor set foot, proved daunting, terrifying, overwhelming for Melai. The vast unending sky, so high above her head, so immense and unbroken, felt like an unbearable weight upon her. That it might come crashing down without the strength of her woodland home to hold it up. There were also the sensation that, without Mother Thoonsk to contain her, she might suddenly be yanked from the shoulders of Grimah and thrust out there into the clouds. With either thought, she had to keep taking deep breaths. And concentrate her gaze upon the ground; to look up were to turn her light headed and faint.
Yet, staring at the alien ground also proved disconcerting. Where Melai had always known water, where below her she had been familiar with small waves of water serpents, or the bubbles of gupping fish, the ripples of swimming frogs, the splash of swamp turtles, the eddies left in the wakes of Buccas, here there were naught but rigid dry ground: stone and thistle, rock and shrub, boulder and grass, all without the comforting bowl of a lagoon to lie within. This were a world apart from what she knew. It frightened her. She knew no comfort here. How do folk beyond Thoonsk survive here? she wondered. With no trees to climb, no deep water in which to hide, to where do folk flee when there is danger? It confounded her.
The reaction of her new friend she found curious too. He whistled, oh so jolly like, as if he had just been delivered the most cheerful news.
‘Should we not be wary of predators?’ she questioned him hushly, as though any word would call on some beast, or that they were being watched; she could not stop scouring the lands around them. There looked to be naught but scrubland as far as her eye could see; on their mount they of course towered above the scrubby bushes that grew out from bare sand and rock and weeds and wilting grass. But up there she felt so conspicuous and exposed.
More than once she wondered how far Mother Thoonsk lay behind them, and could she, if she turned and looked, still see her. Would Thoonsk be there like a fretting mother awaiting her child’s return? Melai would not turn for fear that she would feel an overwhelming and crushing longing to flee back home. To see Thoonsk beckoning. Or to see she were no longer visible. Either one might frighten her and quash her resolve.
2
They stopped to take their bearings on a small hillock where a warm wind swept across the dry grasses, hissing at them as if it did not wish them intruding. The view overlooked the lands westways and gave a good view as well of the way they’d come. Melai took a deep breath and looked back. Thoonsk were vanished she saw. Her body tingled with dread. And for several moments she could not breathe.
It were the way forward however that stole Gargaron’s curiosity. He had hoped that he might spy the realm of Hawkmoth. But from the base of the hill, a land of barren salt-washed sand and weed stretched off before them.
They had reached the shore of what Gargaron knew once as the Claraville Sea, the great southwun inland ocean, the largest of all lakes of Cloudfyre. Though an ocean it were no more. The rivers that once fed it had long ago been rerouted for irrigation and thus her waters had dried up and the fishing villages that once thrived on her shores were abandoned. Now it were a desolate lonely place of salt and death.
‘What be this strange realm?’ Melai asked, a lonely wind lifting her hair.
‘What used to be the great sea of Claraville,’ Gargaron answered. He had never set eye upon it but in his travels his father had recounted many a tale about its sad demise. ‘It were brought to its knees by mismanagement. Greedy regional kings, landowners of the surrounding shores, stole her water source so that they might irrigate and maintain their lush gardens while the poor fisher folk lost their livelihood and starved.’
Melai cast her gaze across the region before her. It were barren, dotted with islands and what she guessed were the hulls of ancient ships—vessels she’d only ever heard the trees of Thoonsk whisper tales about. But here were Thoonsk, she thought, if the Rjoond had ever had their way.
‘If I recall it correctly,’ Gargaron said, ‘the metal man I met in Autumn stated that Hawkmoth resides upon a place called Barren Hill, a spot conspicuous by some landmark known as the Dead Man. Barren Hill lies beyond Thoonsk and the Murdered Sea both. It be a safe bet that this were the sea it were referring to.’
Thus they began their crossing.
3
Grimah stomped out across sand, and patches of crumbled and cracked salt crust that were dirty white but pinkish in places. Weeds that grew here were spindly and wilted and some shrubs lay entirely encrusted in salt. In the distance as they pressed on they spotted more wrecks of ancient lake trawlers, old wooden ships that leaned this way and that in their sandy, weed strewn graves. Much closer were the sun bleached and dormant skeletons of enormous lake monsters: snapping turtles; marine vipers; tusked water horse, some whose empty skulls dwarfed even that of Gargaron himself.
There were also islands. Tall rounded toadstool humps of land that arose up out of the old lake bed. Some of these islands still possessed the remains of long deserted fishing settlements, crumbling shacks with rooves long eaten away by unbridled winds, and some, particularly where the bed of the lake proved far shallower, still bore crumbling wooden jetties jutting out across what would once have been waters teeming with fish and shrimp; nowadays they spanned naught but barren rock and sand and empty shells from long dead crab and cockle.
It were upon one of these such islands that Gargaron and Melai set up night camp as the suns began to set.
4
Gargaron set a fire alight having gathered up kindling of salt crusted twigs and leaves, before laying on heavier, thicker chunks of deadfall. He did not mind that Melai sat back from the flickering, crackling flames. But as the flames took to the fuel and engulfed it he thought it odd that she looked so fearful.
‘What be your concern?’ he asked her as he sat down, pulling both his great sword and the hilt of Hor’s hammer close beside him. (If there were bandits about they would have nothing off him without a fight.) ‘The fire does not seek you.’
‘Fire be the mortal enemy of Mother Thoonsk,’ she told him, ‘thus it remains my enemy.’
Gargaron shrugged. ‘Aye, but in a way it is everyone’s enemy. It bears no loyalty to any save, I hear, the devils. Yet, for eons, folk have learnt to control it, and bend it to their will.’
‘Still, I do not understand why you would invite such a soulless demon here.’
He frowned. ‘Why, for warmth. And if I had hunted some beast for dinner then fire shall have cooked it. Also, it be a social mechanism, a means for folk around which to socialise.’
She laughed. ‘Now I know you fib.’
He smiled, more at her laughter. ‘I fib not. A central fire will bring folk together at night, or during winter months. Banquets, special ceremonies, rituals. All may be had around a fire.’
‘Strange customs then.’
‘You do not utilise fire, I gather,’ he said. ‘How then would you keep warm during cold nights in your Thoonsk? And do you have no need to cook?’
‘Much warmth and social communion and spiritual sustenance comes from our joining with our willow home trees. And have you not observed? I eat no thing that is dead or has been slain. I eat only of living plants as Mother Thoonsk has offered.’
5
The moons lit the lake bed, and the lake bed seemed to glow in a dreamy kind of elf-light. The night proved cool but the fire kept their little space on the island warm long beyond the witching hour. Melai though refused its warmth. She slept away from it, beyond the huge hump that were Grimah. And had her back turned to the giant for she could not stand to look upon his Nightface whose large eyes seemed constantly to watch her.
She slept fitfully and dreamless and the night to her were empty and silent. All her life she had slept within in her home tree at Willowgarde. At night she would sprout root and reconnect with it, and until dawn, while she slumbered, she would hear the protective voice of it conversing with other trees, would hear their secr
ets passing back and forth across Thoonsk; she would also hear the owls and the howler bugs and the tooting frogs and the hunting turtles snapping and splashing. An entire cacophony of sound had filled her woodland during its wee hours. That first night away from Thoonsk, on that little island, she had never felt so alone, so exposed, so isolated, and when her limbs sprouted root they had nothing with which to connect. She wept alone under the moonlight while the giant and his steed slumbered without trouble.
6
The following day they came across first a stone fort situated on yet another island. It looked but the ruins of a castle, ancient and salt layered. And to pass by it closely were to see tortured remains of folk preserved by salt within.
Later, at midday, when the warm wind off the lake bed threw sand grit and dead crystalline insects at them, they passed by an island situated to their north where Gargaron slowed his steed at the sight of a peculiar spectacle; one Melai had never set eye upon before. She watched Gargaron pull out his spy glass and put the object in view.
To her it looked like a huge pile of skulls. She asked what it were.
‘A Creep Mound,’ he told her.
‘Creep Mound? I have naught heard of such things.’
The absence of a ghost raven guarding the mound intrigued Gargaron. Though did not surprise him. It were most likely dead. ‘It be an object we would do well to steer clear of. For it marks the region of some terrible illness.’
‘Illness?’
‘Aye.’
‘Could it be to blame for all the death we have seen?’
Gargaron shrugged. ‘Anything be likely.’ It occurred to him then that the entire realm these days it seemed like a Creep Mound. The dead piled up daily around them.
7
An hour later they arrived at the remains of an old ocean trawler. They had spied it from a distance, and like the castle, it had remained a conspicuous lump on the horizon until, the closer they drew to it, it had taken on a more defined shape.
Unlike the castle however it were not encrusted in salt. Suggesting that perhaps it had sailed these parts long after the castle had been abandoned.
Gargaron pulled Grimah to a halt, studying the vessel where it lay bogged in the weedy sand, its starboard hull tilted groundward.
‘This ship be cursed,’ Melai murmured. ‘Do you not feel it? Why do you stop?’
‘There may be resources to pilfer.’
A lively breeze whined at them through the ship’s wooden hull.
‘I would rather we press on and leave it to its ghosts.’
Gargaron felt her consternation. And sensed something further. But not from Melai. An odour. Some smell wafting from the bowels of the ship. And when he saw a face watching them through one of the portholes he tightened his grip on his reins.
It came out at them then. One first. Then another, and another. Three cursed and crusted folk, with little flesh left on their skulls, chests, arms, legs; clad only in tattered robes and leather boots. Their rancid briny stench wafted at Gargaron on the breeze, and Grimah whined and fought against the pull of the reins.
‘Take us from here!’ Melai screeched.
Gargaron finally set Grimah into a gallop as the skeleton folk rushed at them, bones clicking, jaws chattering and snapping shut. One wielded a mace, the other two were equipped with swords.
They chased Grimah most of that day. Whilst they were not fast across ground, they were persistent, and chased and chased, until one by one… they fell into the hard packed salt. And did not rise again.
By late afternoon the distant horizon began to spike up with some far off line of mountains, snowcapped and jagged. But any notions that this dead-sea wilderness stretched all the way to their foothills were soon interrupted by a vast shore line forest, and soon Gargaron and Melai and Grimah had left the ghosts of Claraville behind them and were roaming through grassy green hills.
THE WITCH
1
NEAR end of day they crested a rise and saw northways’n’east the land dipping down into a shallow vale, to what looked to be a running brook, and beyond that lay a tall tree covered hill poking into sky like the hump of some great sleeping beast.
Gargaron pulled Grimah to a halt and both he and Melai stared wide-eyed at the scene before them. There were a cottage they saw upon that hill, nestled amidst the trees, and an enormous statue, (the Dead Man, Gargaron guessed) towering into the sky perched at hill’s flattened summit. But the most heartening and intriguing aspect were the wandering livestock: goat and deer. And the presence of birds flitting from tree to tree. And the sounds of bugs twittering, cheeping, whistling.
Gargaron recalled the words of the mekanik. “We must traverse beyond Thoonsk, and cross the Murdered Sea… Not until Melus and Gohor again hang directly over our heads shall we reach Barrow Hill upon which the Dead Man sits and watches all. There, in his cottage, Mastaer Hawkmoth resides.”
So, we are here at last, Gargaron thought. ‘Do you see this?’ he asked. ‘Do you hear it, Melai?’
‘Aye,’ the wood’s nymph replied. ‘Does life flourish here?’
‘I have no idea,’ Gargaron said. ‘We can only hope.’
2
Gargaron took Grimah down grassy slopes toward waters of the brook. Something of a canoe listed peacefully upon water’s surface, strands of black algae clinging to its sides like witch’s hair.
Red crabs wandered the stony shore. But hundreds of them also lay face down, or belly up; some of them with legs still kicking pointlessly at the air. A murder of ravens skipped through the stones, pecking remorselessly at the dead. But they too had a number who had succumbed and lay, with their feather’s sodden, rotting at water’s edge, tugged at gently to and fro by the current.
The sight were a dent in Gargaron’s hopes—perhaps this Hawkmoth had not found a way to counter the blight after all.
He had a mind to shoo the ravens, to flip over the toppled crabs for their own salvation. But he knew better now. What had stricken the rest of his realm had begun to stricken these water dwellers. Pond skaters and frogs and fishes and salamanders all. None spared. All dying or dead. And as Gargaron and Melai drew closer the stench of rot came to them, thick and pungent and cloying.
Melai clapped a hand over her face, Gargaron coughed and spat. Grimah snorted nervously and for a time put in a fight, refusing to step near these fetid waters.
Gargaron urged Grimah on with a gentle heel-jab to his ribs, and a determined ‘Yar!’ Grimah reared up on his hind legs, squealing. Melai screeched and her wings beat in a reflexive response.
Gargaron made to push Grimah forward when at last he spied the object of his steed’s consternation. And it made Gargaron haul his mount to a standstill quick smart.
A water hag watched them. She lay very still. Half submerged, her face and one shoulder free of the rippling brook. Her sodden hair hung in straggled clumps, her lips had withered, her brown teeth grew with green moss and yellow rot, her sunken eyes held a bleak opaqueness, yet appeared to glow with a faint magical green witch light. A hole in her neck, ragged flaps of skin doing almost nothing to hide it, swarmed with black beetles that nibbled at the lips of flesh and when she realised she had been spotted she appeared to grin.
‘Back up, I warn you,’ Melai commanded Gargaron, who had not moved since laying eye on the hag; he had rarely seen one such as she, and were fascinated. ‘Back up,’ Melai urged again.
As Gargaron took heed the hag attempted to move.
‘She comes for us!’ Melai hissed.
Though all the hag succeeded in doing were lolling over. As if whatever life left to her, were swiftly waning. She continued to watch them though, most of her face now claimed by the brook, her stringy hair caught on the flow, the beetles in her neck drowning. The witch light in her monstrous eyes fading like sunlight beyond a storm.
Gargaron pulled Grimah back up grassy slopes. Steadied him. Settled him. ‘Be fine, Grimah,’ he spoke soothingly into his ear. ‘Be calm now.’
>
3
They traipsed across vale, tracking the course of the brook, hoping to find a fairer waypoint to traverse. They located one further down where the belly of the brook shallowed upon a bed of smooth stones.
Crab dead littered the banks here too, and frog dead floated with naught but legs poking above water’s surface. Carrying Melai and Gargaron, Grimah hurried across—crab shell crunching beneath his gigantic hooves, rotting crab guts squishing out across the wet stones.
Ahead of them now, deer and goat roamed, watching Melai and Gargaron and steed approach; and birds swooped and soared, and crickets and cicadas chirped and hissed in the grasses and shrubs. It were overwhelming to Gargaron’s senses, to have been caught in a vacuum without such sights and sounds of animal life for many days. He quickly forgot the dead crabs and frogs of the brook, and felt his eyes watering and were glad Melai sat in front of him so that she could not see the tears on his cheeks. He felt salvation were close at hand. He felt certain this sorcerer had uncovered the secrets of the doom.
Still, hope turned to confusion at the sight of many a dead folk poised in a most peculiar fashion. ‘What be this?’ he wondered aloud, frowning. He had not noticed them from his previous vantage point on the adjacent hill. He had taken them for shrubs or stunted trees.
‘This be the work of the Dead Man,’ came Melai’s voice. ‘Do not look upon it.’
Gargaron frowned. ‘Oh, and tell us what you know about it?’
‘I have learned many secrets from the trees of Willowgarde. The Dead Man sits, they say, on Haitharath’s hill. Rumours tell of folk matching its stare through sheer curiosity, and to their doom. For, sooner or later, folk who stare at him be not free to avert their eyes, and by some invisible force their eyeballs are sucked from their skulls. And dark roots grow from their legs and tether them to the earyth where death eventually visits them, an awful painful death perpetrated by the Dead Man as his arms reach out across the hill from where he sits and scratches out their innards.’