The Pale Maraud

by Andrew McEwan

  The landscape was desolate. Nothing grew. In the distance the rocks rose up to form a jagged horizon, the semblance of fractured wrists and elbows.

  The whole was an unhappy scene.

  Jerian walked as he had all his life - beyond life, his footfalls breaking the silence. The air was fresh and crisp, imbued with a bitter tang, like some acrid fruit. The sky was an eggshell blue, uniform and hard, as stony in its way as the earth beneath. Truly then, this was a lonely place.

  The battle seemed impossibly distant. He had taken one step and was no longer part of it, the rage subsumed by the quiet, the violence by the stillness, the wave of damned souls lifting him above even the tallest heads. There had been no identifiable border, just a change of everything constituting one locality for everything constituting another. Briefly, Jerian's thoughts filled with those he had abandoned. But he felt no guilt. It was vital that he get here, to find and kill.

  The horizon drew closer as the going steepened and he was slowed by the climb, rocks piling on rocks as if tipped from a barrow. Behind him the yellow sun dipped below an ocean as dull and featureless as the bare ground he had crossed, a surface now tinged violet, shaded with false rivers of crimson, the red sun ascending a sky less blue than pink. He wondered if night ever truly came. No stars were visible, no moon to echo his dead heart.

  Reaching the top he paused. This world presented him with its stark interior, a panorama of stone stretching as far as the eye could see.

  Peering intently, the shades thick, the wanderer descried the rounded face of a keep. A second, farther away, and a third and fourth, perhaps more, others screened, hidden from view

  Must he lay siege to every one? And, on finding the first empty, travel to the next? The prospect of searching endlessly through all these circular monoliths daunted him. Surely, he would wear his bones to shale before happening upon the prize of his enemy...

  But there was no alternative, he told himself, and in so doing began the descent.

  His shattered features bore the imprint of a hammer, the most recent of countless blows which had shaped him. His face was as ugly now as it had been at the beginning. The visor had fallen away completely, the bone around it cross-crossed with tiny fissures not unlike those threading the rocks over which he travelled. He set his gaze on the keep closest to him and walked unhurriedly in that direction. In this world, he knew, the outcast had no end of time.

  Nearing the structure, its brickwork clean, its windows narrow and high, Jerian caught sight of a lone figure on the battlements. The entrance was unbarred. The keep's foundations blended with the surrounding stone. A central courtyard, a well, the darkened interior visible through a single arch. He passed under its curve, its width sufficient for two horses, its length three loping strides, and emerged facing an old man, his back bent, his hair matted as with difficulty he cranked an iron handle, slowly raised a wooden bucket, the rope frayed, winding to a stop as the bucket jounced against a spindle. Jerian approached the man, who laboured blindly, struggling to keep the handle from spinning loose as he reached for the bucket, and failing, the mechanism turning wildly as the old man's grip weakened, the rope burning his fingers and the bucket dropping out of control, the sound of a splash reverberating up the chimney of the well. It was a sight, which filled Jerian with pity.

  He took hold of the handle, but was pushed off. The old man wanted no help; his hands were a ruin, yet he persisted, his body radiating pain as he began once more to lift the heavy bucket from the well. Jerian stood aside. Suspicious, he glanced over the stone lip and saw not water but gold shimmering, the bucket full to the brim with refulgent metal. He wondered how many times the man had lifted his greed only to see it fall. Surprisingly, his pity increased. And what if he succeeded? Or what if the rope snapped? Jerian was refreshed by the old man's sadness. Neither of these things, he presumed, could ever happen.

  The gold was gold nonetheless, retaining both weight and colour in the purple light.

  The figure he had glimpsed earlier appeared now at the foot of some steps, an old woman whose eyes bulged from their orbits like dappled eggs, bloated and intense, diseased as was her flesh, her gaunt height barely covered by a filthy garment, her arms outstretched as she greeted him, her stench taking hold of him moments before she herself did, a stiff embrace he found impossible to avoid. The old woman kissed him, her lips flaking as they pressed his, her tongue swollen and vile as it entered his mouth. She repulsed him, but he could not escape. Bile stung his throat as he retched uncontrollably. He swallowed hard, her foul spittle locking his teeth, his jaw hers alone to open as she made him drink, her own acid liquids twisting like gutted snakes as he swallowed again, the reflex overwhelming any desire to vomit, his legs shuddering, his entrails polluted, contaminated with all the woman ejected, her wastes and hatred, her years and sickness churning his blood as he shook.

  Victim to her poison, his fine scales of armour began to rot from within, their bony roots turned soft, their smooth outer layers speckled like exotic fungi as each contiguous plate distorted, warped and powdery as they loosened...

  Thus was he naked.

  Standing amidst this debris, stripped of protection, Jerian was vulnerable: the red sun burnt his neck, the skin of his shoulders a mirror reflecting its vanity even as the yellow sun rose above the wall in front of him, streaming into the courtyard, its passage much the quicker, its direction opposite, the two destined to forever merge in their cycles. The paler light drenched him, crawled over his chest and thighs like the hot sweat of a dream, melded to a deep orange around the joint horizons of his limbs. The hair was next to fall from his body; then the teeth.

  And underneath it all he was beautiful, made firm and young again.

  The old woman smiled; she had mastered him. She shed her clothes and her age and holding the supple palm of his hand guided him back through the arch, the old man still at his task, for this was his keep, and she led Jerian out amongst the bare rocks and displayed him to a third primary, a life-giving green. This third sun was larger than the other two. Its light was soothing and cool, his shadow muted. It crossed the sky at a different angle than either red or yellow, whose paths, albeit contrary, diverged only slightly. Even so, it was possible for all three to be aligned. And where there was a green sun, might there not also be a blue?

  And was this new body a gift or a theft?

  Jerian was left with these imponderables.

  The old woman had deserted him, taken her restored youth, leaving him with his.

  She had muttered only a few lines of poetry.

  Chapter Thirty - THE NINTH WORLD

  The second keep he approached with no more caution. His gums felt bony and even; his tongue tasted sweet. Within its circular wall the rock gave way to a plot of rich earth and the well to a great tree, a towering fir whose cone of branches blocked most of the light, whose silvery foliage captured a moist gauze of dew. Jerian wandered a while beneath its generous eaves, imagining an array of sounds, vague stirrings in the living wood, the rustling of innumerable needles.

  Was this a tree of fate then? In just such a place had Hell been woven, his own unfulfilled weird...

  If he had the Chalian axe, would he have cut it down? He could not say.

  Outside the green sun had risen imperceptibly, the red and yellow setting on opposite horizons.

  He continued on to the third.

  Inside a lone buck deer grazed a stunted bush, the deer placid, methodic in its chewing, the leaves of the shrub on which it fed small and curled, the young fronds of a potted bramble.

  The juice of blackberries stained the deer's tongue. The wanderer thought there was nothing to learn here, unless the animal was offering him clues to the nature of its flesh, and so he carried on.

  The fourth keep was considerably farther removed, the rocks about it cracked and steep. He had to climb, groping for holds in the slope. And the blank wall was higher, its circumference enlarged, sat atop t
hese folded cliffs and crowned with singing birds. The well at its heart was shallow and full; no old man laboured here; finches and starlings bathed and drank, flicking bright water from their wings and rising into the skyless heights of the fortress. Jerian stared upwards. He could see many a flickering silhouette, numberless feathers like sparks briefly illuminating the upper reaches. But these were creatures of the air, and their world he could never really know.

  Next was a pond, the keep the fifth, its proportions equal to that before save for the much decreased stature of its ring wall. The interior was resplendent with spangled hues, the coloured light bent and refracted by the water that in a variety of ways paralleled the sky of the fourth, as remote and deep, only here there were not feathers but scales and the singing birds were dancing fish. Jerian lay on his belly for a closer look. Bubbles dotted the surface. There was a splash of fins and tails. He accepted the gift of a drink, realising then how like dreams the birds had been, swift and aloof.

  An engine was housed in the sixth, its complex whirrings and slowly turning gears suggestive of old age and reason. But there was youth here too, spinning cogs and blurred weights falling and gyrating, levers and springs of greased metal, brass and steel, a flurry of assembled motion whose purpose seemed intrinsic, as much a part of itself as the bones occupying Jerian's newly fortified limbs. Perhaps this machine kept the suns rolling across the firmament - or the suns the machine animated, powered by invisible windings. It was a mystery he carried with him to the seventh.

  First he had to cross another escarpment, the steepest yet, its gradient, like its fissures, perilous.

  Secrets were in the keep of the next world, its precincts riddled with holes. In truth there may well have existed more than one interior, for the bricks and the niches appeared to shift before his eyes, a trick of the green light that was prevalent.

  In the fullness of the sun's bloom he felt the woman had returned to his side. She stroked his neck, her fingers cool, his muscles lean and taut. In her presence he was able to focus solely on the aspect of the niches, placed in each a small jewelled casket.

  She begged him to choose one. What was it he wished? What information? Which question was uppermost in his mind? If he could begin to comprehend his life and death, in whose coffin might he look?

  His own? His father's?

  Yes...

  But although sorely tempted, the wanderer did not lift the lid.

  The woman was furious. Tearing the casket from his hands she opened it for him.

  But all that came out was dust.

  And the seventh keep became the eighth, which was death.

  Jerian proceeded to the ninth, this the last he could see on the rocky plain, the exterior wall seeming to flatten as he neared, to broaden, the suns grouped close, a swelling of hues at his feet as he moved towards the arch that had eluded him for so long, beyond it the future he sought, all possible futures from which crop he had to pluck a single day, a single blade of grass from a meadow as wide and full as the heavens, for in the future lay the ninth world, and it was power.

  Chapter Thirty-One - AMBELLA'S GARDEN

  So this was where summer was hiding, in all her fecundity and growth. Jerian wandered casually through the garden, naked as a newborn infant, bloody and unbowed as he burst from womb to wilderness - wilderness to womb in this instance, for the Lady whose realm he violated strove to pry apart the nine worlds and separate earth and sky. Jerian understood the many keeps to be a model of that scheme. Ignorance was its every tool and design. Deliberately, he plucked a flower, a radiant orchid, and heard in the distance a cry.

  He might have plucked a hair from between her thighs.

  The glorious vegetation was static. A huge blue sun filled the void.

  Everything complicated was simple: it could live or die. Except here; here nothing was alive and death was banished, claiming her every work by its absence, as this was a garden doomed to fade.

  Her name was Ambella.

  Jerian crushed the perfection of grasses as he strode, brushing aside streamers of ivy, plumes of colourful vines whose bulbous fruits were always ripe, florescent walls of greenery from whose generous cups spilled not insects but odours, scents vivid and pungent that gave the hideaway the air of a seraglio, a privileged haven out of which marched a vicious doctrine, a many-toothed ideal of universality, a fear of truth in all its diversity, a shame and a weakness that would destroy before attempting to investigate, that wished to blame and deceive, and which succeeded in creating only hatred.

  And yet perhaps she was well intentioned, credulous, the Lady Ambella who shied from her navel.

  It made no difference...

  From the viewpoint of the garden Jerian embodied negation; the abundant flora quickly blackened, withered and falling to ruin as he passed, turning the atmosphere fetid. But still he walked unopposed through the verdant scenery, the great mass of plants unaffected, the route of his wanderings etched like a maze in the vestments of summer. He might become lost in these reaches, vanished in a labyrinth of his own making, or he might triumph, find his right fist squeezing the blood from her heart.

 

  *

  Five horsemen faced him. Their raiments were plain, bleached white trimmed with gold, their horses snorting, heads shaking as they scraped the hard earth.

  He thought it a dream.

  Then where did he lie?

  Udioe placed the axe in his hands, her spirit inhabiting the blade, its two edges her two souls. Jerian felt once more its balance, a precise orientation of ghosts.

  There was no army at his back, no boots on his feet. He swung the Chalian steel and the ocean cracked, spuming foam, assailing the stalwart cliff.

  The tall men drew longswords, steadied their mounts and advanced. One broke into a gallop, his sword flashing in a lazy arc as man and beast bore down on Jerian, who spread his heels prior to chopping all six legs from his attacker. Others came at him, in that moment realising their destruction. And yet they charged...

  So cowardly. So brave.

  *

  The garden opened onto a ripening field of golden corn. The growth was lush and tall. Jerian cut a fatal swathe, snapping stems between his toes, bringing famine to those people who had ploughed and sown this ground. Rain turned the soil to mud, what was harvested soon to rot, home to vermin and disease, stinking and black like the sores on the arms and backs of the townsfolk.

  He wandered through cramped dwellings touching the foreheads of young and old.

  He watched as a militia was raised, and rode with it, bringing war to neighbouring lands.

  A pestilence took the swampy earth in its grip, lurid and final.

  Desolation leaked from his bones.

  Ambella taunted him from afar, her children spitting phlegm as with their voices she mocked his efforts, blaming him for each injustice, citing him as the cause of so much pain. And viewing his actions Jerian could think of no retort. Everything in the garden was now besmirched. But he was not dissuaded. He knew the virtue of flames.

  *

  She challenged his morality. He her hypocrisy. She stroked the chins of her breasts and attempted to bribe him with gold. Jerian held fast to his purpose. The air in the world grew charged. This was her hold. Summer enveloped them both. Snow exited with his breath and spring and autumn were present in his gaze.

  He held up his thumb and Ambella dissolved.

  The shrill note of a whistle crashed in his ears. The blade of the axe quivered.

  Out of a gentle woodland his nemesis staggered, transforming the dark.

  Night came as a surprise to Jerian; he had not thought to see it here, in the garden. Now, however, the truth of the dark was interpreted differently.

  A howling rose, then quiet. It moved slowly, circling, sniffing, the beast he could no longer avoid. It had followed him from the first, the outset, the birth. His smell was at home in its nostrils and it would devour him. And Jerian was
caught.

  Deafened by the piping that had summoned the monster and robbed of his sight in the blackness, he found he could not draw air and odour through his nose; the bellows of his lungs remained folded, collapsed in his chest like ancient pears. His hands were numb and his body cold. No sensations fed his brain. He was stranded, disabled, his senses nulled, without warning as the beast closed. Unaware of the act he raised his fingers to his mouth and licked the skin of knuckles and palm. It tasted salty, the sea's bitter tang on his tongue, the strength of tides and currents extant in his saliva as he swallowed, waves of foam surging outwards, surrounding him, rebuffing his nemesis with squalls of spray and sand and wind.

  Gulls spun through his flesh, wheeled and dived, snatched at fish, thus joining two worlds.

  Man in his hunger brought down the deer where it grazed, roasting the meat, birds and lesser mammals to scavenge the remains.

  Lightning had uncovered the secret of fire.

  Trees were felled, the ax of stone, copper, bronze, and from villages cities were born.

  There were ever more complex engines of war.

  And power was always the goal.

  That left death. Without death the unfolding world would be overrun.

  Chapter Thirty-Two - THE FALL OF SUMMER

  Jerian walked amidst the corpses of the tall, slicing open bellies and finding neither guts nor stomachs. The puzzle did not baffle him for long. And whereas they did not eat, they were not sexless, able then to procreate and raise their numbers. Men and women, in life so graceful, here reduced to the status of cadavers, their nascent souls huddled together in cloying mists, their flesh reclaimed and dismantled, such treatment a fact of defeat.