The Pale Maraud

by Andrew McEwan

  So they beat him, stripped him, threw him into a cell the stone walls of which were warm.

  The man's face hardened. He clambered back up the ladder and the rusted grate lowered. The yellowed light flickered and went out. As he had in the beginning, Jerian felt afraid. His mind drifted, pictured Udioe. Was she unharmed? Had he been betrayed?

  The stranger raised trembling hands to his mended features, his face that was changed.

  What was contained in those hands?

  The blackness revealed nothing. There was the punishing grind of stone against stone, the chill and shock of gushing water, what had previously been offered by the cup now whipping his enervated body like the squalls of icy whales. The liquid weight forced Jerian off his feet, submerged him, breath trapped in lungs as he was swept along, tumbling helplessly. He spun with the current as it seemingly melted the rock of his darkened cell, carrying him like a twig, flushing him from the city bordered in filth and trimmed with gold...

  Chapter Fifteen - The Marsh King

  The reeds were tapered and black; they shone like cat's fur beneath the stars some piercing the full moon to its silver heart.

  He lay in a shallow pool of darkest water, ripples breaking the vague plant shadows, cutting the fragile world into lesser and greater rings.

  He was alive, the breath creeping in his lungs.

  And then there were arms under his arms, his shoulders raised against wood, the scrape of bare feet, the suck and splash of a pole as it was dragged from amidst mud and rushes. A bird flapped noisily, hidden wings blocking the moon from view, a moment wherein the presence of others registered, their bodies a reality, their vessel solid, dry, mist-wrapped as yellow arrows scorched the near dawn sky...

  Jerian closed his eyes. In his head was trapped the sound of crashing water, a broiling maelstrom, its wakened memory casting a chill through muscles and joints. The boat ran smoothly, brushed the tall reeds aside, the man guiding it one of two, the second hunched, tensed, as the wanderer opened his eyes to admit the first light of a new day, patiently stringing a bow.

  *

  They did not bind him. They did not offer him clothes. They did not beat him as the men of the city had, nor did they make threats, or deprive him of food and drink; indeed, the men of the marsh welcomed him with a plate and a fire, meat and warmth to strengthen flesh and bones.

  He had recognised them from the first as being men of that power he had fought within the wood. And one of those three had survived, escaped, perhaps returned here - to describe his face? Tell of him as five or ten? The wanderer relaxed. Udioe had been their prisoner, their bargaining chit. They were the enemy the city feared. But so few? The men were squat and poorly organised. They hardly looked like the vanguard of a great army. They had only light weapons: knives and bows. They watched him eat, seemingly convinced he would not run away. Jerian lacked the strength; but they fed him well.

  As the fire died and the day advanced, sun burning through the mist, the sixteen men of this group shouldered provisions and fastened cloaks, made ready to abandon the small island bordered in spindly trees. They directed him to a boat larger than that he had travelled aboard earlier, and he sat cross-legged on a sack of flour or salt, made no protest, as he was keen to see more and learn of their quarrel, their motives for taking the shining girl, what they hoped to achieve in any war with the castle.

  The country hereabouts was much different to that higher up the valley. It was impossible to catch sight of the stark mountains, yet Jerian knew them to be near, the city below the tarn in which he and Udioe had bathed poised in their generous lap like a dish whose cracked base was shaped from clay scooped from its people's hearts, whose sides were the thickness of two separate walls, the keep at its centre resounding to the ring of swords and hooves...

  There was something; more than an expression, an intimation of violence, of blood in the streets, wounds screaming wide, blood a vivid red, clogging the gutters, spilling between his fingers, running over his hands, a sudden painful vision of blood and death and bone-white sand.

  *

  His skull quietly empty of thought, all gory spectres quelled, put aside, he sat erect in the gently rocking vessel, a tapered skiff bearing five others, six men, amongst them the stranger wan and pale. Jerian's fatigue washed the colour from his skin - but it was warm, the air moist, insects stirring in its embrace as the day nipped back the overlapping shades of plant fronds, green and brown here and there splashed with raw colour, red and blue, violet and orange blossoms, fruits, dangling petals like dogs' exhausted tongues, the marsh an environment distinct within borders of fern and alder.

  Three skiffs manoeuvred silently through reeds and over drowned grasses, nosing past broad floating leaves, scraping under branches that were perhaps random obstacles, perhaps subtle guides to hidden, aqueous roads. That the bowmen had a destination, that these roads led somewhere tangible, Jerian was beyond doubting. Their words were few and grunted. They mocked his nakedness, he assumed. They treated him, however, with a respect born of uncertainty.

  Into the winding marsh they ventured, farther and deeper, the pools shrinking, the way more convolute. A fog settled above the swamp, diffusing light and spangling the liquid world in all its guises, air and water, splashing and dripping rainbows that hung around them. The silence was hushed now, the boats gliding, massive trees standing like braces between the twin surfaces of earth and sky, as if to keep them apart, not to allow this space to be squashed from existence. A fragile reality, centred nowhere, into whose uncanny midst Jerian was escorted.

  They made land, the great trees a mist-woven horizon, this foreign shore muted in hue, although its ground was reassuringly firm. Jerian stretched, cracking joints. One man led him by an elbow along a path that soon turned to stone. The remaining bowmen dissolved to either side as if plucked from their boots. Staring intently into the near distance, he fixed his gaze on the farthest solid-seeming object and counted the paces until that object either proved false, a trick of the light, or reared up before him, a tree or a dwelling. Twelve paces; then nineteen... Thirty paces, the mist lifting, the shapes varied, an encampment. Fifty, and the few permanent features offered a secret cache of detail: the colour of a boy's avid stare, an inscription above a doorway, the carved faces guarding another portal, one through which he was steered into the mellow glow of a peat fire.

  A burly man greeted him, sat him down. His guide left him and the smiling occupant alone. There were numerous stools about the fire. The man had taken counsel. And decided? What was Jerian to them? Whose fate altered whose in this smoky building?

  Meat cooked in the subdued flames, causing the wanderer's belly to rumble.

  The smiling man slapped his knees and laughed.

  Once again Jerian struggled to gauge his circumstances. He took the meat, although none had been offered, burning his lips as he sought to tear the hot flesh with his teeth, flesh that was spitted, rich in blood-juice. His host's laughing subsided; he talked instead, a lyrical voice unlike the bowmen's crude utterings, his tongue expressive, and aided by gestures Jerian came to understand some of his meaning. Much he did not comprehend, however, but felt certain that at all times the man was talking about him, the stranger his men had attacked in the wood, to whom they had lost their booty, the swordsman that had returned the girl to her city. But what he expected of Jerian was a mystery. He stood, waved his arms, made walls he crushed with his fist. He feigned death and then rose from amongst the corpses. He brought the taste of wine of his breath, introduced his puzzled guest to the ruddy glow itself, the stranger at first gulping from the cup, only for the marsh king to admonish him playfully, his words suspended, grilled like the meat, sinking into the fire, warm and full and bleary-eyed as the unfamiliar drink coaxed him to sleep, lying next to his toppled stool, his dreams the imaginings of madmen...

  A cloak was draped over his naked form as the gathered lords retook their places in the timbered hall, some nervo
us of the heap, others excited. They numbered seven including the stocky king of the marsh into whose wide palm the stranger had foundered. Jerian was the eighth amongst them, weakened and unconscious. He had entered the tall men's city. They had ejected him, sought to cleanse their world within a world, perhaps hoping he would drown. The cold mountain waters were theirs to command. But when those waters reached the valley floor their power was spent and the marsh king had only to raise and lower his oar. Might not, he argued, the tall men be defeated also?

  They had failed to rid themselves of the stranger, after all.

  Chapter Sixteen - The Two Islands

  Divided against himself, the wanderer along life's road found he occupied two islands. The two islands rose, each the image of the other, from the clear blue waters of a deep ocean. They were the only land, two small outposts amidst the endless sea, the realms of man dwarfed by the realm of fishes.

  On either island stood a fortress, a walled demesne guarded by one man alone, crowned with jutting battlements and scarred with slit windows, the better for firing arrows. Each was surrounded by a moat. Each had a drawbridge bristling with spikes. Neither man had ever visited the other. They were enemies.

  Why were they enemies? Neither man knew.

  They plotted one another's downfall, had no purpose beyond their adversary's destruction. But how to go about the campaign? To launch an attack would mean leaving their fortress undefended. They were too wise for that. So, the tactics these implacable enemies settled on, each identical, revolved around the idea of somehow luring the other out into the open. But how? Again, the question dogged them. They could do nothing until one or the other made a mistake.

  The occupant of the east island built a great ship, armouring it with decorative shields, erecting a tall mast. His counterpart, seeing this, was unsure whether or not to do the same and construct a vessel of equal strength. Might not he be falling into a trap? Undecided, the occupant of the west island elected to set a trap of his own; he would not build an actual ship but a mock one, a facade incapable of sailing, its magnificent prow a dragon's head, its graceful oars facing the other's stronghold. The two ships completed, both men stood on deck brandishing their weapons, challenging their sworn foe to do battle on the neutral ocean whose intervening blue neither had ever crossed. But neither would put to sea first, and so battle was avoided.

  Some time passed, the enemies patrolled their fortresses and all was as it had been, until one night, the moon full and the waves slapping the rocks, there was an earth-shaking, a screaming outpouring of molten rock that boiled the ocean and shook the opposing strongholds, reducing them to crumbling stones.

  When the sun rose and the two climbed from amidst the rubble, they found the sea had vanished, that all that now separated them from their nemesis was a trackless waste strewn with rotting debris. Their first instinct on such a morning was to attack while the other was vulnerable. But as one was exposed was not the other? East and west, naked, bruised, discovered all obstacles between them removed. They tip-toed forwards, both injured, covering their wounds, hoping not to give the other an advantage, hoping not to show any weakness as the moment of final confrontation drew near. The two men were out of breath, shocked and dismayed by what had become of the world, yet nonetheless prepared to let the game run its course.

  Approaching noon they were starved and exhausted, their feet burnt on the searing rock of the melted ocean floor, their clothes fouled and torn, yet almost within striking distance of one another. They stooped to pick up stones, hurling these as the first drops of rain fell from a whitened sky, drops that exploded into steam, the two dizzy with effort as this meeting, so long delayed, was made the more difficult by howling wind and knifing hail. The storm was like none before, pelting them with water frozen and unfrozen even as they pelted each other, wiping one man's shape from his brother's half shut eyes...

  What became of the two men Jerian did not know. Perhaps they were not two but one, the real and the imagined, the ocean separating them a necessary veil, a sham. Whatever their true identities his sleep-spawned thoughts were mostly wiped from the mirror of his dreams upon wakening. The image left a residue, a soreness of tongue he found discomforting - but his surroundings provided no lack of water.

  Forgetful of his circumstances, this man wrapped about him the cloak under which he had slept and walked from the beamed hall out into the fresh light of day. A smiling man gripped his shoulders. Other men nodded or glanced away. There were clothes, two javelins, a shield. The smiling man made it plain he was to fight. But with whom?

  That he had enemies he was sure. Was it against one of these he was expected to perform? Then where was he? Jerian, suitably refreshed, did not know. He recognised none of the faces around him. He fingered his own, but failed to find any hint or clue in the features he might only see in reflection. A phalanx of squat soldiers marched with him to a small boat whose shrouded helmsman waited patiently for the warrior to clamber aboard, those left ashore to push the boat free. A drizzle began to form, seeming to hang in the tight air like beads, the world's own sweat deliberately flouting the natural laws of that same world's peripheries.

  Jerian was taken out onto the broad belly of a river, flat and grey. The vessel glided through the knotted vegetation that sought to bind its draught; but the boat was without a keel and not so easily halted. The helmsman leaned on a long pole, his back to the warrior, a figure obscured by a clinging mass of white strands, a thickening pall that laced the faded sky to every side. There was neither sound nor direction. He slid his wrist through the loop of the wooden shield and gripped its leather handle. The boat nudged solid ground and he stepped from its shallow boards.

  If anything the mist was thicker here, the light softer, the colours bleached, his shadow lost amongst the milky gloom. He walked an unknown path, perhaps stalked. And there was no noise, nothing, no true shade of plant or flower. His skin appeared waxen, translucent. It was an opaque land to which the helmsman had delivered him.

  The warrior circled, followed the barely discernible line of the island's perimeter, relying on a smudge in the clouded firmament to guide his steps, be his marker. Keeping the water to his right, the shield facing inland, Jerian moved cautiously, unsure if his enemy could hear him or whether he too was handicapped, placed on equal terms by this soundless medium. Or was the stranger at a disadvantage? His gaze to the barely visible trees, Jerian worked his way around the arena, guessing it to be no more than a cast of a javelin from edge to centre. But there was little chance of a clean throw. It seemed this was to be an uneven contest. For him alone? That remained to be seen.

  He snapped one javelin across his knee, stabbing with it as he started into the island's choked interior. Everything herein was half-made, yet oddly tangible. The white mist was pierced by steel-blue limbs. His feet sank intermittently. No shape was accurately definable, no surface without deceit. A smashing blow collided with him, cracking his shield and throwing him, a diluted wetness leaking from his thigh. He rolled instinctively, spied the wildly swinging arm of a man above him, his combatant dragging a curved blade through reeds and branches, decapitating an array of pallid stalks as he attempted to locate his wounded foe.

  He was blind, Jerian realised. Blindness to deafness; each was made vulnerable.

  He had done the only thing he could and lain in waiting, listening to his approach...

  Now he had lost that advantage. But was he aware of Jerian's limitations? Did he think him blind too? The man had frozen, his breathing still. Jerian could never hope to match that silence. The stranger, being deaf to his environment, simply had no way of knowing if he made any noise at all. He was forced to take the initiative.

  He flung his legs behind him, hips over shoulders. The blade sliced down. The atmosphere blurred his vision. But the blind man, his opponent, was not able to make use of the cover; the swordsman could not risk keeping still any longer; if he was the only one unseeing, as Jerian had spe
culated that he was the only one unhearing, then his enemy would know of that weakness now, and exploit it. The man had no choice but to rely on his other senses and charge, slashing, the sight of him elusive, a whirling mass of flailing arms to the stranger's rear, an adversary made all the more terrifying by the utter silence of his onslaught - cutting and trampling, craving the throat-torn blaze of noises that meant his weapon had drawn wounds in flesh.

  But Jerian voiced no such cries. Branches swept roughly over his face. Grasses threatened to trip him. Yet he kept is feet. The water promised an end to his running. Forced then to turn, he flung the riven shield to his attacker's left, and as the enraged figure beat at it, reducing the wood to flying splinters, the warrior leapt at him, the broken javelin gripped in two hands, a combination of the blind man's clumsy momentum and the deaf's resolute thrust driving the steel tip up through the lightly armoured belly, high behind the natural protection of sturdy ribs, exiting at the juncture of neck and chin in a spray of toneless blood that was absolutely, sickeningly quiet.

  Jerian twisted aside to avoid falling under the other's dead weight.

  Ominously, he was reminded of the two men in their castles, of the two islands those men occupied, about what he had dreamed: the real and the imagined - whatever their true identities...

  But this, he thought, was no dream. Standing, Jerian emptied his bladder over the corpse.

  It made no difference in the end, whether or not they were enemies.