Maledictions

by Graham McNeill et al.

  When the wind died down she headed back to the village. The low dwellings clustered like barnacles against the shore. The guarding totems on the beach gave a last sad clatter, their poles decorated with bloodshark skulls and carved ivory; apotropaic scrimshaw to keep the daemons at bay. The water shushed and rattled across the stones. She paused awhile amongst the dunes to listen to it, this endless music that underlay all life in the village. Some nights she had lain out here with Borys, serenaded by that sound. Now there was only a long and empty evening ahead of her; the meagre fire in the grate, the pile of stinking nets she still had to repair – for even widows have to earn their keep. Home, she thought. It was a bitter image.

  She heard it then: a noise in the dark.

  She clutched a fold of her sealskin. Silence, nothing but the sea.

  Her fingers fluttered to the bone charm around her wrist. After a sour moment it came again – low and strangled, burbling across the night. Her stomach was a shard of ice.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  A skittering against the stones.

  Crabs, she thought, picking through the surf. A seal, maybe, wounded and waiting to die. Something was out there…

  A sudden, twisted scream lanced out of the dark, and before Katalina could think what she was doing she had flung herself onto the ground, the breath ragged in her chest. The scream came again, agonised, fainter. It clawed against her skin.

  She peered through the dry grass. The sound came now as an awful, huffing wail, like a tortured animal, and it was this thought that finally put steel into her nerves. It took all of her courage, courage she thought she had lost the day they came to tell her Borys’ boat was gone, but slowly she stood and stepped onto the shore. If something was hurt out there, then surely it didn’t deserve to die alone.

  The beach lay before her like an empty stage, tenebrous and ill-lit. The totems were columns of shadow, and every now and then she caught a glimpse of light from a breaking wave – and there was something else there too; a pale, blue glow that pulsed and shivered and fell. She stared at its afterglow, almost willing it to return, and when it did – still in that same weak pattern of pulse and fade – she moved cautiously across the beach towards it; towards the low slumped shape that floundered in the tide, white-skinned and wounded, gasping for breath and croaking out a single word:

  ‘Help.’

  ‘Eat,’ she said. ‘You must eat.’

  She tipped the spoon against its blackened lips. The stew ­dribbled down its chin. Katalina had to still the fear that the thing was going to bite her when she reached to wipe it away.

  It coughed. Spit flicked from its mouth onto the blanket.

  She tried to make it drink, holding out a cup of water and supporting its head, her fingers splayed against its clammy, hairless skin. The rank feel of it tightened every muscle in her body.

  ‘Drink,’ she said. ‘You must drink.’ The thing snarled into the brimming cup.

  Sometimes when it looked at her its gaze was delirious and vague. Bubbles formed on its lips, and it emitted a moan that reminded her of the deep-whales’ mournful midnight call when they surfaced out at sea. But then the eyes would snap to her like steel traps, pale blue with bitter black pupils.

  ‘I want to help you,’ she said. ‘You’re hurt. I’ve done the best I can, but… I’ve never seen anything like you before.’

  It groaned and rolled away. Eventually, by the laboured rise and fall of its chest, she thought it must have fallen asleep. In the shivering firelight it looked for a moment like a wizened old man, but when the flames leapt higher it felt instead like an image drawn from an old dream she could barely remember.

  Her first thought had been of her husband – ‘Borys!’ she’d gasped – but then the tide had turned it over and she saw the pale, inhuman face, the sunken eyes and pointed ears, that narrow, tapering chin. It was wrapped in nothing but rags and broken scraps of what could have been armour, weird, conch-like whorls of metal that were tarnished with salt. On its chest were savage puncture marks. It had gurgled and retched, reaching for a caged shard of glass submerged in the surf. A jewel of some kind, she thought, the source of that dull blue glow she had seen from the dunes. She plucked it from the water and slipped it into her pocket, and despite the low, disturbing scent that clung to its skin, a smell like burning weeds or rotting fish, Katalina had managed to haul the creature from the water. It took her half an hour to drag it up the beach. A mariner caught in the storm, she thought. Flung by the currents towards our lonely shore. The realms were wider and stranger than anyone could understand, but even as she struggled into the dunes she knew this was no lost mariner. It wasn’t a trader from Aqshy blown off course, or a Ghurish merchant sunk with his cargo. This was something else.

  Once inside she had stripped off the rags and armour and cleaned its wounds. The creature’s eyes had flickered as she lowered it to the bed.

  She crept from its side now and settled herself into Borys’ old chair by the fire, a blanket drawn across her shoulders. A cold wind threaded through the cottage. She tried to rest, tried to ignore the gagging smell exuded by the thing that was sleeping in her bed. It was a scent, she felt, of brackish tides and dead weeds, of shorelines long abandoned.

  ‘Kattie! Are you up?’

  The widow Agata’s grating tones, the older woman screeching her name from the path.

  The melancholic light fell clear through a gap in the curtain. Katalina saw the shape in her bed, heard the moist clicking of its breath. She cast off her blanket and stood for a moment gazing down at the smooth and savage blade of the creature’s face, the frown of pain or sorrow that briefly marred it.

  There was a brisk knock at the door. ‘Still abed, girl?’ Agata muttered. ‘Up, up. Shift yourself, the day will near be done at this rate!’ Then, with the widow’s maddening familiarity, a second after that the door began to open. Quickly Katalina drew the hanging around the bed.

  Agata was stooped and wrinkled like the strings of bladderwrack the villagers hung above their doors for luck, but she wore her widowhood like a well-tailored frock.

  ‘What is it?’ Katalina protested. ‘You can’t just burst in like this, it isn’t right!’

  ‘And what do you think I’m like to see, hmm? With your Borys gone I’m sure there’s nothing to offend my eyes. And right or not,’ the widow said, ‘there’s work to be done.’

  ‘I’ll have the nets ready by tomorrow.’

  ‘More than nets,’ Agata grumbled. ‘There’s crab pots that need fixing too. The day’s catch needs sorted for market. Think you’re too good for that?’

  ‘I’ll help, I promise.’

  The old woman trundled about the cottage, picking at the mess on the table, peering into the dirty pot on the hearth.

  ‘I know your man’s gone,’ she said, not unkindly, ‘but so’s mine, a long time past. We all die, Kattie – Shyishans know this more than most. The village continues. So should you.’

  She was about to leave when she noticed the rags bundled on the floor. Quickly, before Katalina could stop her, the widow hooked them up.

  ‘What’s this? Been out beachcombing have you?’

  She held up the strange metal plates to the light, curved and barbed like seashells. There was something in her eyes then, Katalina felt; a lost memory resurfacing from deep places, an old fear finally confirmed. Like a change in the weather, the expression passed away. Agata cast the pieces down with a shudder.

  ‘Huh. They’ll make good flower baskets for your eaves come spring,’ she said. She squinted at the younger woman. For a moment her face looked drawn and harried. ‘Don’t suppose you saw much else out there?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Tracks on the beach, the young lads say. Something dragged itself from the sea last night, maybe. Or dragged itself back.’

  Katalina said nothing. The older woma
n stared at her, but under that piercing gaze she made her face blank. Only the thin material of the hanging separated the old widow from the truth of the rumour.

  ‘Well,’ she said at last. ‘Open a window, Kat. Get some air in. It reeks in here.’

  When the door banged behind the old woman, Katalina fell into her chair. She wiped the sweat from her face and stilled her breathing, and when she could hear Agata back at her drying green she drew the hanging. The thing was staring up at her, its eyes a richer blue, the dark lips parted to show a sliver of silver teeth.

  ‘You’re safe,’ she said. ‘I won’t let anybody hurt you. I promise.’

  She took the dull blue jewel from her pocket and placed it on the pillow by the creature’s head. It said nothing, moved not a muscle, but somehow Katalina was sure it was saying thank you.

  Later in the day, she entered into the life of the village again, as she hadn’t done for months. Warily, the villagers watched her. Men and women she had known all her life crossed the square to avoid her, and at the sorting baskets the fishwives shunned her attempts to talk. Some whispered as she passed. It was like her grief was contagious, a sickness no one wanted to catch.

  ‘Pay no mind to them, Kat,’ Radomir said later that afternoon, taking her aside and sharing his bread with her. ‘Half of them think you’ve a lover in your bed, and the other half are jealous!’

  Her face flushed red. ‘I’ve no lover!’ she said in a hoarse whisper. ‘And Borys not a year gone!’ Agata, she thought.

  Radomir laughed and wolfed down his food. ‘No matter to me if you did, girl! Village gossip, you know what it’s like. Now come on,’ he said as the horns blew from the harbour. ‘That’s the dusk catch back, we’ve work to do.’

  The day’s work laced her muscles with pain, but Katalina felt almost pleasurably tired when she headed home. She would sleep well tonight, she thought, and if she dreamed, she knew she would dream of Borys. He was close now, surely. All lost things will come home on the tide, in the end.

  Radomir walked her back as evening fell.

  ‘What will you do tonight then?’ he asked her. Did he fear she would haunt the graveyard again, a lonely gheist maddened by her grief? Or did he half-believe in that village gossip?

  ‘I’ve those nets to darn,’ she said. ‘And the cottage to tidy. Maybe it has been too long, Radomir… Today was a good day.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it, you need to move on with your life. Perhaps we could set up a memorial to Borys in the cemetery?’

  ‘Even without his body?’

  ‘Why not?’ Radomir offered. ‘I’m no philosopher, but do we really know that’s how it works? None of us have ever actually gone to the Placid Shore, have we? But he’ll be there regardless, I’d swear it.’

  They reached the turn-off for the path that led to Katalina’s cottage. The wind danced between them, kicking at the sand. From over the fretful dunes came the boom and mutter of the surf.

  ‘Agata said they’d found tracks on the beach last night,’ Katalina said. ‘Something came ashore.’

  Radomir did a good job of looking indifferent. ‘Oh, nothing to worry about!’ he said, airily. ‘Honestly, it’ll turn out to be nothing in the end.’

  ‘A ripperjaw, maybe?’ she asked. ‘One of them’s beached in these parts before.’

  ‘Nothing so dramatic! Just… just some things that were found on the beach. But they could have washed up from anywhere – it’s no real worry. There’ll be men out patrolling, just in case.’

  They went their separate ways, but when she headed down the path to her home Katalina knew something was wrong at once. The door of her cottage was ajar, and even in the gathering night she could see flecks of what might be blood against the doorstep. She moved cautiously into the gloom.

  ‘Are you there?’

  The bed was empty. She could see the impression its body had made on the mattress. She stood and listened, but all she could hear was Agata’s grumbling from the garden next door, the muted thunder of the surf.

  The music of the sea…

  She found it slumped amongst the dunes, not thirty yards from the cottage. If Agata had but raised her head when she was outside she would have seen it. The wounds had opened, and the bandages were wet. In the dusk’s flat light its pale skin almost seemed to glow, and the eyes it turned on her as it panted for breath were pained.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she scolded. ‘By the hammer and the throne, anyone could have seen you!’

  She wrapped an arm around its shoulders and gathered it up. It felt light, diminished. There was something desiccated about it now, like a stick of wind-dried kelp. It scrabbled at her with its fingers, moaning, clawing her skin.

  ‘I know, but you’re not strong enough yet,’ she said. ‘A few more nights, please. Let me care for you a little longer.’

  She heard the clank of metal, the tread of footsteps across the beach. Quietly she hunkered in the sand, drawing the creature down. Through the marram grass she could see one of the patrols Radomir had mentioned – two old salts and a boy, with gutting knives and a grimy lamp. The lad danced and slashed the air.

  ‘One quick cut with this beauty and I’ll be feeding it to the sharks!’ he shouted. The old salts mocked him, passing a leather flask between them.

  ‘Let me tell you now, boy, you wouldn’t last a breath against half the things in those waters!’

  The patrol ambled on, the old salts still laughing. When it had passed, Katalina breathed again. She was holding its hand, the clammy cold fingers in her own. The creature gulped for air and said only its second word to her:

  ‘Why?’

  She thought of Borys, flailing in the current. Alone.

  ‘Because who else is going to help you?’ she said.

  Every night, as it rested, Katalina would darn and weave the fishing nets, practised fingers moving quickly over the twine. In the mornings, she would slip out and throw herself into the day’s work, flashing her blade on the skinning bench or racking up the catch for the market wagons, ignoring the suspicious glances from the other villagers, the whispered conversations. Back home she would feed it fish stew, her every muscle tense as she heard the clatter of the beach patrols passing by her house. And in her bed, over the days, the thing grew stronger.

  ‘This reminds me of evenings I spent with Borys. My husband,’ she said softly one night. ‘Just whiling away the hours, content in our company.’

  The village was quiet. When she had checked the curtains earlier that evening she was sure she had seen a figure silhouetted on the headland, but when she looked again it had gone. There was no sound from Agata’s cottage next door, no sound of the beach patrols. Perhaps they had given up? Maybe it was safe to move it back to the sea, although when she thought of being on her own again Katalina felt the silence like a weight on her very soul.

  The creature breathed raspingly through its mouth.

  ‘He died?’ it gurgled.

  ‘Yes. For a long while I didn’t believe it. I wouldn’t accept it, but these waters are dangerous. Our people don’t always come back.’

  ‘Where do they go…’ it said. ‘Your people… when they don’t come back?’

  ‘We go to the Placid Shore,’ she told it. ‘On the other side of Shyish, far, far across the ocean. When we die, we wake on those golden sands, where it’s always warm and bright and the sea is always bountiful. It’s a wonderful place.’ She smiled. ‘I will see him there, one day, but…’

  ‘What?’

  She dropped the net in her lap. ‘Some say that… if there’s no body to bury, then the soul must wander above the waves forever…’

  She wiped the tear from her eye. She smiled again, a brief, brave flash of certainty.

  ‘But who can really say they know anything about the soul.’

  She took up the net again, her fingers flic
king over the rends. The creature stared. Was it smiling at her?

  ‘When we were married,’ Katalina went on, nodding at the window, ‘we were handfasted on that beach. Our hands tied together by the weeds of the sea, and a prayer to the God-King to keep us safe. He was so handsome… I will see him again,’ she said, suddenly fierce. She felt it burning in her. Let all the gods and monsters of the realms try to stop her, but she would see her love again, on this shore or the next.

  She looked at the bed but the creature was sleeping now. The fire was low, a scattering of embers. Katalina placed the nets aside, took up her blanket and closed her eyes.

  You really want to know…

  That strange, squelched voice. The hiss of strangled air.

  She snapped awake at once.

  It was cold. The fire was dead in the grate. Darkness, a thin spear of light falling from the curtains across the floor. She felt her heart shudder in her chest. A smell in the air of deep oceans, blackness. Death.

  There was a crash against the door – harsh shouts, the sound of breaking glass. Katalina lurched from the chair. The creature was awake. Had it been watching her? It dropped now from the bed, and from the counter snatched up her skinning knife. It hissed, the blade held back.

  ‘What–’ The room swam into focus. Something groaned and settled in her chest. She had been crying.

  Another crash at the door. Behind it there were voices she recognised. She could smell smoke.

  ‘Kat! Let us in, Kat, or we’ll burn you out – you and that monstrosity you’re hiding!’

  Old Kenning, she thought? Oleg, and Rafal? These men knew her, why would they treat her like this?

  ‘I’ve done nothing,’ she screamed. She cast about the room, looking for a way out. As the first panel burst from her door, and as the blades and cudgels were thrust through, she screamed again. ‘Leave me be!’