The Pale Maraud

by Andrew McEwan

  Jerian made no protest. Not having experienced such human kindness, lacking memory of his birth, he permitted the woman to do as she would. She fetched a knife, shaved him, cut short his hair, her expression unchanging, his fear of the blade insubstantial. If she wanted to kill him she had only to slice his throat. But that was not Ista's choice.

  His flesh scrubbed she left him once more, this time returning with food, bread and fruit and cheese on a tray, such things as he had not tasted. Jerian ate greedily. Ista smiled. She brought him sweet wine and drank herself from a cup of gold while her guest stood naked in front of a dying fire.

  When again she left Jerian followed her, encountering the array of burnished instruments, the open window, the ocean radiant as the sun neared its rest. A shallow flight of stairs had brought him to the garret. Ista was there, picking clothes, hauling armour from a chest incongruously bracketed in iron. Facing her killer, that future almost upon her, Ista held up a thick leather jerkin reinforced with bluish articulated plates. The gold light failed to colour its hinges. She dressed him first in a cotton shirt and leggings, then the jerkin, which snapped closed around his ribs. The leather was dark, almost black. There were breeches to match, threaded with strong, flexible wires. And unfamiliar boots.

  The sword came last, with it a helm as ugly as his face, hammered from the same dull metal as the blade that tapered symmetrically to a point; its hilt long, a hand-and-a-half, pommel spherical and without embellishment. This she laid on a table.

  The garret was swamped. Red seabirds speckled the horizon. The sun gazed in through the window, a brilliant furnace on a few bold wave crests, its reflection bleeding into the water - purple fingers caressed the ocean, dallied with it, tested its depth, and purple fingers laced in the woman's copper hair, smoothing it over her ears, draping it across her breasts, exposing her delicate, flushed neck.

  Jerian lifted the sword, unhurried. He took a step towards her, this woman sat before an open window, dress piled at her feet. The sun blurred her image, and yet, unblinkingly, she gazed upon it.

  Where there tears in her eyes? Jerian felt there were in his own. As the sun went down he swung the blade, cut the head from the body, the flesh from the wood.

  Chapter Nine - Revenant

  The shields they bore were many and richly decorated, hanging in the dark sky like pennons. The lances were inverted, their sharp points casting sparks from the stone. Jerian walked in the midst of this escort, responding to the acid pull of his soul. Death had renewed the world in his image and death was not to be thwarted. The outcast had an audience. His new clothes and his masked face, the bloodied sword and the fleshed limb that had wielded it, marched as one to their fate...

  The blows rang night and day.

  Summer was there for the taking.

  And the warriors knelt.

  He had made no speech in their presence. He was unable. But words were not required of him. It was deeds, and deeds alone, that would mark the way ahead.

  The future was his to behold - the wanderer's sad countenance had only to see.

  And believe.

  But did he wish it? Perhaps the owl could say. Death took the crooked in his arms and embraced him while the damned still walked the earth and the armies of lord's and city's prepared to engage.

  Jerian had no shield of his own. His gruesome helm exhibited no crest.

  These were things to earn.

  Chapter Ten - The Daughter

  He carried her severed head in a sack emptied of sea coal. The journey was long and his alone. He walked without sleep, boots softening upon the earth and stride balanced by the weights of arm and sword. Metal and flesh, the metal dulled and hard, the flesh blood-spotted and stiff. His belly went without food. Jerian walked and dreamed...

  Dreamed of death.

  *

  The stumps of dark trees gripped the cracked rocks at the entrance to a cavern, the stone wall it mouthed giving the lie to the low heavens, the perpetual night. What Jerian saw above were not stars but sparkling gems fixed in a black roof of granite. He had travelled below the earth, the wood carver guiding his quiet steps.

  Shapes emerged from the cavern, limbed and wooden; naked and small, they bore knives and short bows. Notched arrows caught the faint light, bobbing like fish in the wet heart of a subterranean pool. Were they blind? A fist clenched at his side. Once a forest had cloaked these dim surfaces. Trees had risen here, remote from the sun, branches supporting leaves whose metallic remnants clogged hidden watercourses, spewing onto visible mountain slopes like drowned, formless insects from a dead lizard's guts.

  Odil had felled the trees and worked the timber. The ax had made it easy.

  Jerian wrapped the neck of the sack around his left forearm, advanced with the sword in his free hand, the hand Odil had planed and hinged, smoothed and fitted. The heavy blade pointed downwards. He followed its weaving nose over fractured steps, the wooden shapes thin shadows at his back. Jerian had no fear of them. A waterfall splashed, its echo composed of green and yellow light, streaks of animate colour that painted the interior depths, hurling images of grief and pain across chest and helm. A sour odour reached him. The outcast gripped his prize firmly to himself. He expected the lean wood carver to spring from the black, to demand the head of the lady, Ista's human skull which had perched on a body of his making, her uplifted shoulders hewn from beech, her torso from close-grained ash. In fact Odil sat cross-legged amidst the tools and scrapings of his trade, immersed in false tones, ignoring Jerian as the man he had helped make whole stood before him. Odil cut grooves between toes, piles of sculpted feet disguising his ankles.

  The wanderer squatted; the sack unwound. Still gripping the sword Jerian tipped the head from its stained confinement and watched as its eyes rolled open. The wound was sealed, clean, the neck not so much as bruised. She seemed alive, pale Ista. Would Odil place her atop a new body, one he controlled? Jerian stared at the man, hunting for clues in his crumpled visage, trying to reconcile the reality of those lineaments with the memory of a much younger individual. The wood carver had changed. He appeared less sure, no longer trusting his environment. Perhaps he had anticipated failure - the dead woman's eyes, her gaze disturbed him.

  The waterfall was silenced. Motion stirred. The wanderer, now returned, tensed. He wound his fingers in Ista's matted hair and straightened. The head had grown heavier since its release. He could barely lift it. It was, he thought, as if the body were again attached, the true flesh, the mortal, invisible in the cavern, intangible under this sham illumination. And the wood carver, much aged, gnarled like the earth-pillars he had felled, crippled now as they, shambled aimlessly on all fours, a broken creature, his works undone. Arrows struck him, pinning his waxy limbs as he clawed at the bare stone, groaning, injured, wasted. His children, their numbers swollen, shaped from the trees beyond the cavern he had previously been unable to cut, his success with Jerian's ax his failure as what he had fashioned from those ancient boles took their revenge, sticking him with arrows and knives, their poison sap in his veins. His avid spawnings, the offspring of his arts and hands, assailed their father, their common parent, their maker, hacking and beating him, countless bodies swarming out of the quiet darkness, each to collect a piece of his skin, a sliver of his bone, stretching and pounding these materials until nothing of Odil remained.

  His scattered tools were gathered together, vanishing with this small army

  into the vaulted recesses outside the cavern, beneath the gem-studded

  firmament.

  Jerian lay Ista's head down, sheathed his sword. His own flesh seemed weakened and his mind reeled. The breath in his lungs, unnoticed for so long, suddenly gushed from him, throwing him off his feet, exhaustion slamming his every fibre as sleep finally overcame...

  *

  Now that Odil was gone, Jerian, voiceless, was freed from his bind. The arm remained - fingers stroked it. His sleep was without image, sound and deep, and her gro
wth went unseen by any save the few lost tree spirits who glided without purpose about the linked fastness of the caves. Most of their number had infused woody creatures of the carver's manufacture, their newfound mobility leading them inexorably groundwards, to that realm they had previously yearned for, denied passage due to the fixity of their roots.

  Some of the oldest had no desire to climb, however, and so lingered, perhaps to seed the forest anew. They felt no antipathy towards Jerian, even though he was responsible for the Chalian ax that had brought their destruction, as primeval trunks were felled by a steel whose edge they were unable to resist. The spirits discerned, and recognised, the torn features of another across the buckled slant of his face.

  The girl touched him, bathed him as her mother had, her mother's head from which, like a flower from its bulb, she had sprouted. As yet she lacked a name. As yet her womb was vacant. She was new, and being new wished to prosper. She lay with the man in his slumber, straddling him as ghost lights from the water coloured her flesh and her gentle rocking quickened the next life inside her.

  To kiss him, Ista's daughter raised the unlovely helm, only to lower it, afraid and shocked by the equal harshness of his appearance, the obvious disharmony of his mien. She pressed her belly, knowing the swell of it, and with her mother's eyes shed tears of hopeful blessing.

  *

  Jerian found the silence unbearable. He no longer considered himself safe in the cavern. Standing, a woman's corpse came into view, obscured behind the stump of Odil's earth-tree, her knees folded to her chin, cradling a child in her arms. A confused state overtook him. He knew her as a thing of wood, a golem dispatched by his sword; but clearly she was not. He had no memory of the babe. He listened to its breathing, mistaking it for his own, and then plucked the child from her cooling hands. He could not tell how she had died. He could barely see. Strapping the sword to his back he made his way carefully into the darkest regions of these hollows, towards fresh air and light, the former a draught he hitched his nose to, the latter what he hoped most of all to find.

  The infant was quiet against his chest. Jerian hungered for the scents of day, for an end to this oppressive stone, to once more feel grass under his feet. That he wore boots, was tall and whole, surprised him. Perhaps he had always been so and had imagined his disfigurement. And he had a brother - how could he not have known?

  Jerian halted.

  Mother?

  There was a gleam, the ax's polished head borne across another's high shoulder...

  He felt the child stiffen, and looking down, saw what he carried to be made of sticks; tied by strings to his fingers, a lifeless puppet.

  He yelled, a noise wrenched from his creased throat like a blade from a wound. And he remembered.

  Dropping the tight bundle, its clatter submerged below the tide of his anger, the outcast, truly abandoned, chased that mocking gleam out into the frozen night. Snow lay deep and cold on the surface. The wind jumped and laughed.

  A bird's silhouette, outlined against a drift of silver, inclined its hooked beak towards the new moon.

  Jerian coughed. Startled, he spoke the bird's name in a whisper.

  But what was lost?

  Chapter Eleven - The Castle Dawn

  Gifts. He pondered their nature. The bird was the owl of his youth, delivering into his open palm the rag and earth filled object lost by a nameless rider, prized by Jerian, its finder, and here returned to him.

  The patterned metal shone brightly. He tapped its length, pulled out stones and hair and other trinkets, scattering those tokens over the virgin snow. Emptied, he raised the instrument's thin end to his lips and blew. A single high note rang out, alerting the world to the use of a whistle.

  Perhaps he summoned the gloom, the rain and chill. It was not yet his to know.

  The owl left him to wander as before. Jerian picked the only visible star and followed it. After an uncertain time he smelled the sea. The rain had stopped and the clouds parted, drawn aside like curtains, uncovering the lank assemblies of sorry bushes to either hand, buds and fruit shimmering in icy wonder, clustered like dead mice. Where the snow had blown clear the ground seemed laced with sickly grasses. The moon waxed to full as he walked, its umbral brashness disdainful of the sun's rightful position. But did time move and that sun rise over this world? Or had he killed it? Were the gods whose works he attended, grim and petulant, squabbling? Or did mere men dictate the course of battles and win or lose according to their luck on the day and the thickness of helmets?

  He had no answers. As it had before, the ocean beckoned.

  Jerian found no army on the shore. No towering cliffs stood guard at this frontier. Was it even the same coast? He did not think so. The dunes rolled east in the direction of promise, dirty and pocked with large stones, which might have fallen in place of snowflakes from the sky. Moving between them, Jerian fancied they were extinguished stars, snuffed globes knocked from their pedestals. He dug one out with his sword and carried it to the water, where it floated.

  Standing ankle deep, the swell of hissing waves pulling endless threads of currents about his booted feet, he strained his eyes to watch the tumbling progress of the stone as it was washed out to sea. He could taste the salt, smell the corruption, the palsied fish in their liquid abode swept back and forth like shale, the stinking residue contained in some enormous drinking vessel. An inky line marked where the ocean joined the sky. The horizon undulated, broiled like the clouds. A freshening wind buffeted the sands, a burgeoning gale that tore at his helm and froze the salt into a thin glaze, a layer of rime that stiffened his leggings and whitened the leather jerkin. He might have stood there, without motion, dim and frosted, for past centuries, waiting as the waves thrashed in voracious torment and the tides rose and fell, climbing above his head, dipping below his feet, but powerless to move him. A storm brewed, its seed the fallen star, that floating messenger. At the horizon a violent union was to take place, a re-enactment, the fulfilment of a solemn pledge, the words of which leapt and spumed in the language of briny deeps, to the music of shells. A song to mark the greatest promise of all, the raw coming of day, the rising sun a magnificent castle of light, red and scorching, orange and hot, yellow and mild as it rolled in a lazy arc through the heavens, a melter of snows and a creator of wild, luxuriant gardens, the guardian of hearths and stoves...

  It burned his eyes. It branded his flesh. It turned the ice first to water and then to steam. It spread a soft blanket upon the earth and bade him lie down and rest. It grew food, stuffing him with its harvest. It coloured streams and trimmed rivers with the mazy images of leaves.

  He was forgiven. But not for his crimes.

  Chapter Twelve - The River

  Had he counted the stars, he would have found there to be an even number.

  They fell in pairs: in this world and another.

  Jerian waded inland against the estuary current, the water white and silver, the new dawn awakening its trilling heart, rousing the speech of fish and bees. Bubbles collected around wet stones like jewels. Birdsong freshened with the morning and the grass on either distant bank was young and green. The light falling across Jerian warmed the air trapped under his clothes. He loosened the jerkin, but was wary of removing it entirely. In his eyes, suspicion gleamed. To the wanderer, the outcast, it was like any other beginning, and a full belly served only to heighten his awareness. He watched the world unfold; and the world watched him.

  There was curiosity in leaf fronds. His stride through the water caused eddies that wound out to sea.

  Dunes rose beside the river, and beyond these could be glimpsed the tops of trees. Jerian had no immediate desire to abandon the watercourse. He continued to walk against the flow, the river's depth shrouding him to the knees. He wondered what awaited him on dry land; what, if anything, lay at the source of this bright stream. He had knowledge, Jerian imagined, of a rugged mountain gorge, of cloudy peaks and crested tors, of eagles and snow turned blue w
ith age. Maybe the river divided, upstream the confluence of many lesser flows.

  Maybe it had no end at all...

  Beneath the glinting riparian surface, lost in the dim thrall of weeds, shapes moved. Jerian felt their passing as fingers running over his calves, pressing his feet as they impressed the base loam, disturbing newts and sands. The river grew steadily rougher, its bottom rocky, the drag of those hands stronger as he advanced, the water climbing to thighs and waist. But still he held his course. Soon he would be submerged, the sun lost to sight, above a liquid roof that folded the world into a far smaller space, compressing light and sound, reducing his perception to brown whorls of foam as he struggled to move and breathe. That time had not yet come though, when the first bodies thrust themselves upon him. These were the drowned, unfortunates seeking life in flesh, his flesh that was occupied, the outcast's soul firmly ensconced in its lopsided abode. Jerian wrestled with them, the encounter turbulent and brief as the current levered their bloated grip from his bones.

  He came to a fall, the sun at its zenith making the vertical water shine. And standing behind this curtain, dripping on a smooth, polished stone, he cried.

  Tears filled the warrior's dark eyes. Visions of slaughter, of battles past and future, streaked through his head as salty runs spread down inside the mask of his second face. He allowed the display, knowing of no reason to halt it. Feeling no sadness, no single distinct emotion, and unable to explain his role in the bloody events of which his mind told, Jerian could do nothing but stand on the gleaming, slippery outcrop, stand and wonder at the pain leaking from his skull much as the water from the rock overhead, spinning and pooling in a great ferment of spray. His own sounds, if any, were lost in the spuming roar. A noise like stampeding horses, trampling hooves, crushing ax, divided shield-walls, split helms and throats, opened torsos, a screaming memory of every war, a bizarre reflection of those same.