The Pale Maraud

by Andrew McEwan

  Jerian walked through its midst. Leaves red and gold lay piled, awaiting the collection of worms. Fruits filled the grateful bellies of thrushes and crows, their seeds cast out and their flesh transformed. Jerian strode along a ruddy vista of trees. The sky was grey with cloud. His eyes tracked every motion. The undergrowth disguised movement, but his nose discerned the spoor of foxes, his sight the tracks of a bear. He was both the hunter and the hunted. He elected to tackle this wood closer to the earth, feet and hands thickly padded and the likenesses of paws.

  Better attuned to his environment, Jerian turned a full circle, shuffling on stout limbs. To run on four legs was to cover a greater swathe of ground, and through waves of speckled ferns he ran, muzzling aside branches and vaulting streams, the scent of his quarry deep in his lungs, a bear like himself that was this season's most fearsome combatant. But this was to be no contest of arms, rather a test of strength, of skill and guile, autumn's native cunning against the wanderer's given ability to learn and survive. So far he had successfully adapted to the conditions. It would be easy to grow complacent in such a powerful guise; however, Jerian remained cautious and sought only to maximize those advantages inherent within an essentially human mind.

  He rested frequently and ate of the generous windfalls, drank from a stream whose depths were streaked with the silver of fish, lodes he had the inclination, if not the leisure, to mine. It saddened him to depart from the feast, but then maybe the enormity of his hunger was a means designed to slow him down. Truly there was much to harvest, and by the wealth of nearby odours, many bears to oblige.

  Perched on an outcrop of stone upstream from a rapids, Jerian counted a family group of six, the largest more black than brown, an individual whose restless instincts warned of danger, but remained unsure of its source. The animal was old, yet unchallenged. Still, it took all that bear's voice and commotion to rouse its subordinates, waking some and discouraging the others' mischief.

  Jerian climbed from the rocks, a roar in his throat as he went to meet his adversary. Autumn's diffuse light sent a ripple through his fur, silver-grey around his intense eyes, the cubs scattering, afraid, the dominant male answering his call. Next the wanderer felt his host's impulses taking over, choking him, blotting his senses, his responses. Almost too late did he realise the trick. He struggled with the bear he had become, the other closing, perhaps aware of his difficulty and prepared now to exploit the weakness where earlier it would most likely have growled angrily, sadly, lacking the will to fight, the outsider younger, stronger - yet inhibited, for there might be no way back.

  Quickly he shed those heightened reflexes, lost the shape of the ursine body that had carried him here. His rival, no longer crestfallen, newly emboldened, stood erect before him, forelegs raking the air. Jerian slid on the shore, retreated into the water. The bear charged. He dived under, kicked clear as the superior weight of the animal crashed the liquid surface, opening a wound in the river that gushed foam and spray, a white curtain of bubbles drawn above and below. The world of fish erupted. The bear scrambled furiously, its body slowed. The man deployed his own elongated fins and paddled out into deeper water. He was unsure if he needed air; it filled his lungs, giving him buoyancy. But was it necessary for him to breathe? He could ponder it later. Now his head emerged into the dry, giving the bear sight of him, and the creature gave all its power, reaching him as he went under, spewing gases, pulling the enraged beast down. Surrounded by water they embraced, and Jerian felt every bone and fibre of his being protest in a crushing grip that lessened only gradually, for the bear was distressed as much as he and this territory so near to dark was not its own; here it wore the strange flesh, but unlike Jerian in his bear coat the mantle of water was not one the bear could remove. Its heart burst, the hold relaxed, and the wanderer allowed the river to carry him on his way...

  *

  Winter was that season most vehemently opposed to summer and as such would be the hardest to placate. Winter sought to trap him not in flesh, but ice. Its grip was fierce and cold. The waters of the world became sluggish. Jerian melted them with breath, its uses stretching beyond life. He drank much and urinated, the insulation of his bladder providing warmth. But it was not enough. Icicles grew from his own stream and the heat of his body was sapped. The wanderer began to freeze. And yet winter's hold was fragile, easily broken. The rime in his nostrils and the snow in his mouth was loosened by a scream. The scream rose through him, the man a conduit between earth and sky. It was the moving of rocks, the bubbling of strata, all the pressures of the crust amassing, the man a volcano as he disgorged lava and flame, the serpent rising in him as the winter condensed into turbulent clouds and the elements were free again to pull at themselves and each other, wreaking havoc and soothing brows as they created waves and converted gases, a sibling rivalry whose consequences extended into every peculiar niche of humanity, populated night and day, joined men and women together and pole-axed trees, reduced mountains to rubble even as stone was laid on stone and new ranges forced up...

  The tall men might easily have taken winter as their model, for winter and summer were much alike. The elements drove them both, as they drove autumn and spring, a chemical engine of eternal youth, fuelled by stresses and governed by the elasticity of space.

  *

  Spring.

  A celebration of life, rich and varied, colourful and aromatic, was inaugurated by the rise in temperature, the sweetening of rain, the spreading of seed and pollen on wind and wing. Jerian watched as flowers burst through the tumbled soil and stretched, unfolding leaves and fronds, petals in every shade to compliment the green of the meadow. Trees ached and groaned, stiff from sleep, inhaling great draughts of light and air as they drew forth the quiescent sap from their toes. The buzz of multitudinous insects and the secret laughter of mammals filled his ears.

  There was abundance, a wealth of living - he passed as a nemesis, sad and resigned.

  Now the most vibrant of seasons offered no overt resistance, sending out no representative to match him. It had no need. It did not desire conflict, only growth, succession, and made an unwilling opponent. Like autumn, spring was weak, being too self-possessed ever to enjoy the rigours of war. Nonetheless, its arts were subtle, and the precursor of summer, although lacking ambition, was eager to claim its share...

  Spring would seek to win him over. Jerian was presented with gifts in the forms of happenings, burgeonings, conceptions and manifestations. Images of splendour were his to enjoy. An aura of fine perfumes composed a medium on which his mind could float. All was love. Blossoms tinted his pale cheeks and grasses appeased his feet, their echoes infusing his lips with a smile. His sorrows were taken up into bushes whose yield was poison and so remained untouched, those sorrows transferred to branches and suspended like hanged men.

  All except one.

  This fruit swelled prodigiously, drawing nourishment into itself from the bush on which it grew, threatening to break its gallows as it sucked the juices of its shrivelling ilk and squashed them under it, a drupe whose poison was stronger than its host's, an unease spreading through the ground as that bush died back, strangling amongst roots, infesting soil and bowel and causing many a creature to abort. It was a perversion of everything that was spring, a canker, a foulness crawling through animal and plant. In trying to absorb his presence, spring had exposed its soft underbelly, and the consequences of its folly struck like a late frost or a violent storm, clogging its veins and piercing its heart.

  Jerian watched in horror as the fruit matured. His fear meant he could not avert his eyes. A girl's flaccid limbs came into being; a smooth torso was shaped, the skin contracting as if round a frame. He trembled as hands emerged, small and delicate. The form was rightly beautiful, but lacked a navel. Her neck came last, the body stirring. Yet there was to be no face, only a woody mass that as he gazed parted from the branch which snapped back, whipping the assembled flies. The child sat, her movements slow. Jerian already knew
her name. The buds of flowers, compact and opening, bloomed from a nest of twisted stems between her gently sloping shoulders. But this show of life was an abomination. Spring could not tolerate such a warping of its design. It sought to take back the love with which it had attempted to bribe him, for the year's thumb might do permanent damage to spring's brittle character. The wanderer meanwhile had knelt and she had risen above him, a woman crowned in thorns.

  What could come of their union? This was the realm of new beginnings, Jerian thought. He peered at her ripening femininity, felt a quickening in his loins, a yearning to communicate that wakened seed, to impregnate her.

  But what life he had been given was not his own. He was dead once already, and only death could rise in him. Yet the lust he experienced was great.

  Taking then his sorrow and holding it to him, he absolved this season, swallowed his pain, endured his grief. He denied she was Udioe, denied his flesh and hers, placed that sadness again in his mind, a weight under which he struggled to stand, water spilling from his eyes...

  And reflected in each tear was the cruel beak of an owl.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight - TWOCHILDS

  The armies of the dead assembled on a field of bleached yellow stalks. Much as the clatter of arms raised a tumult echoed by the carrion-eaters above, the shoeless feet of men and horses lifted clouds of fine dust that found their equal in the red and white plumes of the enemy ranks glinting wetly under a remorseless sun. The tall occupied the only hill, their host arrayed with a precision so exact it was like a first blow, the true and the dark reeling, blinded, colliding one with another as the leaders amongst them clambered up onto their mount's backs in an effort to speak and see.

  As the dust settled the sun was still, a sharp facet of summer whose raw illumination was perpetual.

  The moon appeared vague and faint, somehow less than full; but it remained in place.

  Jerian sought to empty his mind by threading grasses, his fingers weaving and bending the arid spears.

  Nothing breathed.

  To his rear the souls of the damned awaited his order. A single word...

  The Lady of the Tall had altered her colours. No longer did her standards bear the twin stripes of black and white, or even carry the motif of the blue star; these had been false and deceitful, that secret unveiled by the insult the champion of the marsh king paraded, those colours soon his own. She displayed red now, stark and bright, the white reduced to a shadowless neighbour, a mere gap between bars. The smiling Lady was revealed; high on her hill her head was uppermost, her painted breasts seeming to dance in all the glitter of day.

  *

  To begin, each man and woman would fight their own battle, fight to be born, fight for air, for sustenance. Jerian lived once more the blur of his younger days.

  Thereafter each fought against death - Jerian died as he searched, dispatched by an unseen foe, a man or woman whose faith and cause were directed by an unknown fear.

  His body fell, his spirit rose, the worms devoured, the breeze instilled, the flesh withered, the strength returned, the arm in its newness reached across a distance greater than either pain or hope.

  The dead walked the earth, conscripted into the armies of seasons whose hearts had never encompassed warfare. They were ignorant if not innocent generals. It was an alien order the tall wished to impose, an order not of this world.

  The wanderer pulled it down, defiled it. He straddled the horse that, like every other, would fight next for the chance to be made anew, recast in its own image, its faults intact and its hide blemished, men and beasts in this company who fidgeted, grinding hollow teeth as they fixed their sight on the high ground the enemy had surrounded with steel and ditches. A large number, perhaps two thirds of their strength, might be spent in crossing trenches too wide to jump; but whether a thousand or ten thousand were needed to bridge the gap, many hundreds more would be left to grind bone against metal in an assault upon the hill Jerian knew with a certainty would prove unsuccessful, a failure not of tactics but objectives, because the central figure and the focus of this conflict, would no doubt escape. He understood it as fact, and yet the agony of the charge was necessary, for it was the wave that would carry him past the physical barrier and beyond, propel him far into the country of the tall, a land that was encircled by an ever more wrathful sea.

  *

  A cavalry of the brave and the foolhardy advanced at a trot, the dust shielding those behind whose horses dragged wooden planks and poles, the rudiments of countless bridges. Behind these marched a ramshackle assemblage of once-dead soldiers and defeated warriors, their peeling faces and vacant eyes slack and expressionless, their voided minds slowly filling with the sound of grating armour, the stink of faeces, the terrible images of battles fought and lost. Ghosts inhabited their shells, human and warm, throats drying as they neared the pit and the wall. The summer rekindled their lives, but few were convinced of its permanence. Those who broke rank soon collapsed, wasted, dead a final time, damned for eternity. Redemption lay in a single direction.

  They were grey and pitiful, line upon line of dispossessed individuals united for a common purpose. Jerian rode with the first, waving a crude banner imprinted with blood. He could not read what was written there, but delighted in the message, its letters black until this approach, running red as he closed, red as the blood in his veins, red as the gaudy plumes on the helmets of the tall; yet as long as he persevered, a red the Lady could neither order nor control.

  Hooves pounded, the speed increased. All hell was loosed, swamping the ditches, the ramparts, arrows singing from the hill, the circle of metal at its base undented. Jerian wheeled his mount, saw chaos around him, exulted as the armies of the doomed crashed to every side, spilling heads from shoulders, piling limply into the ready grave. The dust shortened his vision, panicked his captains, some hacking at their horse's skulls, most of the bridge parts lost amidst the yellow grass, what remained scattered randomly, waiting for men on foot to raise them.

  The defenders front appeared seamless, each man joined to the next as if welded, volleys of heavy arrows arcing over the attackers. Through the choking grime these men took on the aspect of a machine, a glinting engine of war that fired without pause. The idea sickened Jerian, for his infantry surge risked breaking apart on meeting that formation. The battle was overly one-sided. But then the arrows became fewer, the fusilades less devastating, the ground spiked with shafts and corpses. There were no archers in his company; he had doubted their effectiveness; they would re-supply the enemy. Instead, what was recognizable as his vanguard divided left and right, riding to either flank as the soldiers behind arrived under cover of their retreat, men to slide pole and plank out across the stacked bodies of the fallen. This done, two or more crossings established, the horsemen charged again, no few stumbling from the makeshift bridges, toppling under the pitched weights of their terrified steeds even as others continued the onslaught, lances scraping, sweat pouring, full in the throes of death and their voices.

  A significant throng hit the wall and were repelled. Gaps opened. Men rushed over the ditches, Jerian amongst them, his mount lost, having buckled, tripped by the punctured carcass of another. In a frenzy he tore at the red verticals adorning shield after shield, swinging no mace or sword but his fists, battering the image of the invincible machine, his madness pumping, spears clattering off his chest and arms as the dead pressed forwards, disadvantaged by the gradient, their sheer numbers now beginning to tell, although at a price beyond counting, those killed a second time providing the steps by which their comrades ascended.

  Farther up the hill the dust thinned considerably and Jerian caught a glimpse of the figures central to his efforts, the Lady highest in their midst, her naked torso boasting the twinned heads of children, a boy and girl whose mouths foamed, whose eyes rolled in greed or anguish, the truth of her breasts he had thought painted, obscene jewellery - a boy and girl, their features twisted, innocents he recog
nized from untold villages. The twins seized his awareness. A blow dented his helm, fractured the toughened shell enough to explode pain in his skull, robbing him of any view of the summit. Jerian tumbled backwards, mind reeling, fighting harder than ever, desperate not to lose consciousness. The line of the attack faltered. Panic spread further. He had to tear away a piece of the visor before vision was returned to him. And with that redoubled his fury.

  In everything he saw now those breasts swung, heads whose necks gave into the ribs of the tallest woman. She had taken them as her own, as her people had endeavoured to take this world, making it part of their domain, its destruction from the roots up their mode of conquest, once scoured of all its species to be reconstructed in a manner best suited to their goals. It came to him then that this was but one fragment of a larger campaign. Perhaps not the first, for there were many worlds, many lands. The scale of the tail's ambition, the ruthlessness of their rule, the two heads of the children made redundant any lingering doubts concerning his role, his fate written at length and in a language he could not fail to comprehend.

  Necks he wrung, his grip on the pale hordes unbroken. A flash of blue at the hilltop called on his every resource, for the axe was another treasure Jerian would regain...

  Chapter Twenty-Nine - A STRONGER FLESH

  Loneliness was his strength. He had to believe that, for however he yearned, for whomever he reached out, he knew no strange hands but his own.

  He walked across a naked expanse of rock, faults and crevices offering the only comfort to his eye, the sun to his rear, a yellow blot tainted red-orange, the wound like a pupil, his shadow divided before him, a lesser and a greater, although the two overlapped for most of their area, the result a hazy blur. He did not realise it then, but these shadows would move apart; there was not one sun but two.