Meelar turned off the main road to the track cutting through the meadow to the copse their house hid away in. Halfway across he veered off the path and stripped off his heavy jerkin, billowing his sweat-darkened tunic to dry the sweat between his shoulder blades, covering the distance to the pond in long strides. Placing the sun behind him, he sank to the dry, scratchy grass and pulled his satchel onto his lap. He drew the memory ball out, his hands shaking in excitement, and it sparkled in the bright, warm light. He closed his eyes and calmed himself, listening to the faint whir of insects and rustle of the wind through the tall grass. It wouldn’t do to miss details because he was too excited.
Once his breath was coming in a slow, even rhythm, he opened his eyes and caressed the old bit. Sun-warmed, it felt happy in his hands. Snorting at his whimsy, he took one more breath then spoke the words Nerylla had taught him.
The meadow faded to black, and his breath caught in his throat. Had he said the words wrong and trapped himself inside the ball? He really should have learned more about the magic involved before recklessly invoking it. Nerylla had warned him against using the thing. Several times. Three heartbeats boomed in his ears, and then the blackness shimmered to grey.
No it wasn’t grey, it was fog. He could feel the wet grass beneath him, but his breeches remained dry. He could hear frogs croaking, and the occasional faint splash of a fish feeding from the surface of a pond. The temptation to get up and explore was overshadowed by confusion, keeping his buttocks planted in the grass. It was strange for there to be so much fog so late in the day. And fish always fed at dawn.
A distant howl broke the quiet, followed by a nearby muffled shriek. Icy fingers of dread brushed the hairs of his neck upright and he shivered. Just steps from him a white haired woman broke through the underbrush, her bronze face scratched and bleeding from her passage. Leaves and twigs fell from her strangely cut clothing as she stumbled to a stop and stood bent over, hands on her knees, breath coming in heavy gasps. Another howl from the brush loosed a sob and set her in motion again, staggering across the meadow and disappearing into the fog.
No, not a meadow. He sat between a crop field and the pond, a waxen hose running from the hand pump he hadn’t noticed before out to the field. She had run into the crop field, knee-high corn stalks swaying in her wake. That was odd, Lurda had only finished the first planting two days ago. It would be another week before she had the whole family out in the fields weeding so the new sprouts could come without a fight.
One more time a howl came, this time much closer. He got to his feet, unsure of whether to run or hide. He backed a few steps toward the pond, stumbling over a fist-sized stone. His throat dry, he scrambled for the rock but it wouldn’t come away from its bed.
He whirled when a man in an old-time Obergan army uniform crashed out from the thicket, a leer marring an already ugly face, a nasty looking axe in his hand. Lank and greasy dark hair obscured the soldier’s eyes above a nose hooked and bent from repeated breaks. Meelar couldn’t tell if he’d been spotted when the man quartered the area. With a sudden bark of triumph the soldier surged after the woman, letting loose another howl as he ran. If he’d seen Meelar, he’d ignored him.
Meelar stood for a moment longer, breathing hard. The woman hadn’t reacted to him either, though he couldn’t be sure she would have noticed him sitting so quietly by the pond. Emboldened by this thought he jogged after the pair. Just what he would do when he caught up with them a thought he pushed aside.
Their footsteps were easy to see, dark against the dew-bright soil. The soldier’s boot heels cut much deeper into the damp earth than the woman’s light shoes; a glance over his shoulder showed that he hadn’t left any tracks at all. Unnerved, he kept on.
A stitch in his side protested his lack of fitness and he pressed the heel of his hand into it. If that woman could keep running despite being on the brink of exhaustion, so could he. To the east, the morning sun was burning through the fog and he had to squint against its brightness. His labored breathing was coming loud in his ears, and he couldn’t hear anything over his panting. It didn’t take much to convince himself that he had best stop so he could listen.
Pointedly ignoring the voice in his head that berated his weakness, it dawned on him that he couldn’t smell anything. Not the damp, disturbed earth beneath his feet, not the green smell of growing corn, nothing. Shame swept him when he realized that his inability to smell rattled him more than the probable fate of the pair he was following.
Through the thunder of his pulse, he could hear a deep voice punctuated by grunts. Dread filled him and he walked on, his legs trembling with fatigue. The sun burned away the last of the fog and he could see them ahead. It took him a moment to grasp what he was seeing, and when he did he turned away, retching. Guilt wracked him for the relief he felt that he couldn’t hear what the soldier was doing over the noise of his choked coughing. Seared into his eyelids were the woman’s pale eyes, shadowed with pain and torment, leaking helpless tears while the soldier moaned his orgasm into her face.
Sound faded away, and he opened his eyes to blackness. Relief that he couldn’t see any more of that terrible violence warred with the realization that he had done nothing to stop the horrific crime. The hammering of his pulse slowed, and his gasps for air slackened. How long the blackness stretched, he couldn’t have said but when it faded he stood in a gallery above a crowded room thick with the reek of unwashed bodies. Rows of black-haired townspeople clad in dirt-smudged fieldwork clothes sat on benches facing two long tables placed before a podium. Storm-grey clouds let little light in through the high windows lining the sparsely-peopled gallery, and the lanterns were set too far apart on the wall below for him to make out much detail in the crowd.
Meelar let his hands rest on the balustrade rail, his thumb flicking against a gouge in the wood rubbed smooth with the wear of hundreds of others’ hands. He’d been here before. This was where he’d appeared to swear his oath to the college before the Council of Elders; to teach the youth of today the world of his fathers’ so they may learn from the mistakes of those past. He’d sworn to pursue his scholarship with rigorous testing, abstaining from the temptation of allowing opinion to taint fact. In this great hall, the Code of Freedoms had been written and ratified; the signatories’ portraits should be hanging about the gallery walls behind him. Those walls were bare now.
At a creak of hinges below he craned over the rail, waiting for the white-wigged judge in red to take his place at the podium. A rustle from the crowd accompanied the rise to their feet. Meelar’s brow furrowed when he realized the man taking the podium wore no wig, his long hair tied back with a simple red ribbon instead, the splay of his iron grey hair stark against the blood-red of his robe. A reed thin man in a knee-length robe the same hue followed him and took up station next to the podium, a board clutched to his chest. The judge struck the gavel against its sound block, and the crowd resumed their seats without speaking.
The vestibule doors behind the benches swung in and the soldier from the crop field stepped through, his royal blue robe swirling around his ankles, and took the table to the judge’s right. Moments later the woman was led in, her escort stern and tall in white. The listlessness in her own white-robed slumping shoulders lodged a lump in Meelar’s throat. Her escort appeared to be the only reason she was upright at all. Her bright white hair was pulled back into a loose knot, wisps drifting about her bronze face and waving in the wind of their passage. When the accused and her counsel reached the table to the judge’s left, she stood still as death, staring at her intertwined fingers, defeat written in every line of her body.
“The court is convened,” the judge’s voice boomed out. The only answer was the shuffle of feet on the plank floor. Meelar realized his grip on the rail had tightened until his knuckles showed as white as the accused’s robes. The soldier, standing with his feet shoulder-width apart and hands clasped before him and bearing the scratch marks of their struggle upon his face, radiated
such an attitude of affronted dignity that it stunned Meelar into speechlessness.
“State the charges against the accused.”
The reedy man cleared his throat, glancing at the crowd to be sure he had their attention, and called out, “The accused stands charged with obstruction of the war effort, obstruction of justice, and assault.”
“How does the accused plead?”
The woman raised her tear-streaked face and stared at the judge, her answer barely more than a whisper. “Not guilty.”
The judge sighed and swept his hand towards the soldier raising his voice to speak above the murmurs of the crowd. “What proofs of these charges do you offer?”
“If it pleases Your Honour, I offer my own testimony. The accused’s husband refused the press of a horse, then struck me from behind when I took the animal forcibly. She then left the marks you see upon my face when I succumbed to her efforts to distract me from taking the horse.”
Meelar was torn between laughter at the man’s ludicrous claims, and the need to repudiate them. All he could manage to actually do was gape, his eyes threatening to bulge from their sockets.
“Counsel for the accused, how do you respond?”
“The accused denies that she struck the plaintiff for taking the animal. She struck him to prevent him from escaping the charge of murder. He killed the man during the altercation that arose during the press of the horse. Furthermore, she claims that the marks you see inflicted upon the plaintiff result from self-defense during an act of rape by the plaintiff.” The counselor clasped his hands before him and stood passively.
“So she does not deny the charges, only the motives stated by the plaintiff?”
“That is correct, Your Honour.”
Silence hovered in the hall, preventing Meelar from drawing a full breath. The charge of murder should be enough to end this silly trial. Imagine the gall of that wicked creature, pressing charges in the hopes of obfuscating the real crime.
“It is my considered opinion that all crimes stem from one - the original - crime, which was refusing the press of a horse. The motivations for the accused’s crimes are immaterial to the case because a man’s family is liable for his crimes under Obergan law. Londapta is a protectorate of Obergan and therefore subject to its laws. A man cannot rape his own property.”
Meelar sank to his knees, aghast. That was not Obergan law! The rights of the individual were sacrosanct, regardless of associations, unless that individual caused harm or loss to others. Below him, the woman was weeping into her hands, denunciations of Obergan barbarism spilling between her fingers, barely audible above the jeers of the crowd. The soldier preened, the triumph on his face forcing bile up Meelar’s throat.
The crowd was silenced by the judge’s upraised hand, though the woman’s moans kept on. “I sentence the accused to three days and two nights in the pillory for the charge of obstructing the war effort. For the obstruction of justice, I sentence the accused to fifty lashes. Lastly, for the most serious charge of assault on an Emperor’s officer I sentence the accused to hanging by the neck until dead. The sentences will be carried out consecutively and will begin tomorrow at dawn. The accused’s property will be awarded to the plaintiff in settlement of damages.”
The gavel banged down on the sound block, and the crowd broke into cheers as the judge marched away from the podium, the reedy man dogging his footsteps. The counselor took the woman’s arm and, loudly demanding a path be cleared for them, pushed her through the crowd and out the vestibule doors.
Meelar stayed where he was, tears of shame and disbelief leaking down his cheeks. Lies. He’d been teaching lies. Everything he’d learned about his history had been lies. Nerylla had been right. He pressed his forehead against a baluster wishing away everything he’d seen, wanting nothing more than to go back in time to the comfort of his ignorance.
The noise of the exiting crowd congratulating the soldier below him shimmered away, leaving him sitting in the sunny meadow. He sat shivering until the sun went down, the memory ball in his limp hands collecting his tears while the wind brought him the fumes of the dinner fire.
Meelar swung the door open to stop the insistent banging. The sun burned into eyes grown used to the darkened cabin. Instinctive obedience to Nerylla’s commands moved him aside to let her through, still blinking the spots in his vision away after he swung the door closed again.
“Lurda’s right. You’re a mess, and you stink. Boil the kettle and wash.” The old woman wrinkled her nose at him, her mouth set in disapproving grooves. “You’ve wallowed in self-pity long enough. Tell me what you saw.”
He told her. He told her everything, pausing only to empty the whistling kettle into the wash basin. He continued talking all through his ablutions, her shadow on the privacy screen motionless throughout. “Every text I read - every single one - stressed how terrible the Londaptan invasion was, and how oppressive their laws were. Generations made to pay for the crimes of their fathers!” Meelar’s hands shook so badly with emotion he gave up on the buttons of his tunic and just belted it closed.
“It wasn’t the Londaptans at all! It was us,” he said, shouting in his despair as he came around the side of the screen, “we were the horrors of history.”
Nerylla watched him sink onto the bench across from her, her eyes soft with sympathy, though her mouth was still set in disapproving lines. She drew a mighty sniff and poured them each a cup of tea. The tiny flicker of embarrassment at his bad manners wasn’t even enough to break his fugue.
“How does moping and groaning in your bed all day change what happened?” she asked, drizzling honey into her cup.
He stared at her. “You knew. You know and yet you still teach the fabrication that’s our history.”
She didn’t answer him. After replacing the honey stick into its pot, she raised her mug and puffed at the steam swirling up, her eyes bland and steady.
“How can you do it? How can you teach a false history?” Disillusionment burned from his toes to his scalp, betrayal leading the next charge of boiling blood. He wrapped his hands around the steaming mug, battling the temptation to throw it against a wall. Or at Nerylla.
“What good would I be able to do if I taught what you saw in the memory ball?” She slurped at the hot tea, winced at its heat, and lowered the mug. Cocking her head, she narrowed her eyes and went on, “What difference will it make to know who committed the atrocities we teach, who drove events we so despise? Will the students find it more terrible if it was their own ancestors that slaughtered a peaceful people, or less?” Nerylla shook her head. “Teaching history is not just about facts, dates, and places. Teaching history is also about guiding the future away from horrors happening again.” She leaned forward, eyebrows crinkling to meet in the middle. “That’s how I can do it. Blame and guilt for something that happened long before our grandparents were born helps nothing and no one now. The Londaptans are long dead.” She paused, tested the tea against her lip, then sipped. “Getting myself recalled and expelled solves nothing. Before you found the ball, were you content with your life? Were you oppressed?”
Meelar looked down at his own mug, the steam whirling and dancing over the amber surface; nebulous and fleeting. The fire that had coursed through him during his outpouring, tingling in his fingertips and toes, faded away, leaving him limp and numb. His eyes flicked to where the swathed memory ball lay on the shelf under the window. “I was content, happy even. Now all I do is wonder what other horrors are being hidden until time forgets.”
“Ah. Now we come to what matters.” Nerylla’s lips lifted in a faint, sad smile. “Here is where you must decide what you must do with the knowledge you have. Teach it and be silenced? Or bury it where it can be found so it won’t be forgotten?”
THE END.
BOOKWORM by Matencera Wolf`
Captain’s log 001,
Friday, April 07th, 2000
Dear Future Marcus,
Ever since my accident I’ve always been
able to enter the worlds of books. It’s like I’m a spider with threads of lives stringing out in all directions, as Marcus Nguyen sits in his wheelchair living through the webs. I’ve studied the world with an elf’s wisdom and fought through battlefields with an orc’s brawn. I’ve embraced the shadows as a thief in the night and traveled the land as a champion of the light. I’ve even ruled all three realms; the sky, the earth, and the sea, as a giant, acid-breathing dragon.
It happens whenever I read a book, so I’ve taken to calling them wormholes. Once I’m inside a wormhole, I have to live out the entire lifetime of the story’s protagonist, from birth to death. Because it isn’t something that I can control, I avoid risking wormholes with protagonists any younger than the age of five. You can’t imagine how boring it is to inhabit the body of an infant with the mind of an adult. To have thousands of ideas and plans, but no way to take them beyond the stage of conception. It reminds me too much of my real life.
When my life in a story ends, I close my eyes as one person and open them as Marcus Nguyen. No time passes in the real world while I’m gone, but it’s difficult for most teenagers to remember what’s happening in class after a weekend passes. Imagine how difficult it is after an entire lifetime. Returning to my real life can be…difficult, to say the least; which is why I keep a journal. At first, it was simple to keep my powers to myself. I had no friends at school and it was just me and the Judas at home, and he was always too busy to take much notice of his crippled son. The wormholes I entered when I first came into my powers were soft-hearted escapes that made existence in a wheelchair bearable, but that all changed when I read Altered Blood.
I was Liashi Hulsung, second son of Arundine Hulsung, Lord of Zolithia. I had been tasked with entering Hades to learn the mantra of my namesake. Confident in my abilities, I had considered myself equal to the task which had been my elder brother’s downfall.
9 Tales From Elsewhere 10 Page 9
