Elsa met Sanrick’s gaze and then looked away.
“Yes, whatever you say is true, I no longer have the strength to argue with you. I want power. But not just for myself, but for Harduin. Throughout the ages, in every battle, every war, we were betrayed, ridiculed, thought of as a kingdom good enough to just catch fish, while other kingdoms grew wealthier and stronger,” Elsa once again met Sanrick’s gaze, but the sadness in her eyes was replaced with rage, and for a moment, Sanrick was scared of his sister, “our merchants were made to pay far more than anybody else just so that they could sell their goods in Starhelm, while bandits plundered our villages and raped our women. We were choked by our throats, and the fingers that choked us were Calypsos, Maeryn and Indius. Enough, I say! It is time I did the choking.”
Sanrick felt a wave of grief wash over him. And then, all he was left with was pity for his sister.
“Diyana did choke to her death,” he whispered to himself, “but I am glad you finally told me the truth,” Sanrick said as he sped forward, leaving his sister breathing heavily with rage and vehemence.
The siblings rode in complete silence after that, as the lands around them began to change drastically. The earthy soil of the forest began to change its color and texture, until the hooves of the horses were no longer trudging through sticky mud, but were falling on coarse black sand, with tiny white spherical pebbles scattered all around like hails after a hailstorm. The smell of salt in the air was no longer an undertone, but dominated the scent all around them, while the blanket of sky above them was devoid of the whites of the clouds, and a golden sun hung among the blues like a golden goblet floating in a pool of water.
Sanrick began noticing queen palms, standing a hundred feet tall, among the cluster of pines that were slowly outnumbering the oaks that had accompanied them ever since they left the well. And if he really paid attention, then Sanrick could hear waves crashing in the distance somewhere. Or was it just his imagination?
The anticipation of seeing the end to this miserable place is making you imagine things, one-arm Faerson.
One-arm Faerson. Sanrick had given the name to himself. He had read a lot about kings and knights losing an eye, or a hand, or a leg in a fierce battle, and then being called all sorts of fancy names like One-eye Mattis, One-leg Harrod, and One-nipple Stef, except the last one, perhaps. There was nothing song worthy about getting your nipple sliced by an arrow which left your own bow. How Stef Faerson ever managed to accomplish that feat, Sanrick will never know. The man had died four hundred years ago.
One-arm Faerson, The Scholar King, The Fat King, Sanrick had stopped worrying about how he will be remembered. Except if he reached the sea. Perhaps being remembered as the king who reached the end of the world would not be so crummy.
Sanrick and Elsa rode day and night, through hunger and exhaustion. Elsa did not want to take long breaks. She could almost see the end of the voyage, and Sanrick did not argue with her. He wanted this to end as much as her, for better or worse.
It was after a fortnight since leaving the well, that Sanrick first saw the child. On a starlight night, with queen palms swaying gently in the salty wind, was when he noticed him, hiding behind the trunk of a palm tree, wearing a black roughspun tunic that fell till his knees. He was bald, with scrawny twig-like arms and a neck that was longer in proportion to his body. Sanrick first thought he imagined him, just how he imagined the sounds of the crashing waves a few days back. But the child’s pale ghost-like skin and his bald head shining in the moonlight were as clear and real in front of him as Elsa sleeping beside him under her cloak. And since then, he had seen him every night, always hiding, peeking from behind a tree, a mischievous smile playing on his rosy lips.
Sanrick had almost soiled himself when he first saw him. And since then, he had been too terrified to do anything about it. Apparently, his new-found courage had abandoned him just when he had found it. He had thought about telling Elsa, but his pride stopped him, along with the fact that it was evident Elsa could not see him. Sometimes, he would see the boy running alongside him, a few feet away, jumping over fallen trees and ducking under low hanging branches. The sound of his laughter would later haunt Sanrick’s dreams, and he would wake up shivering, drenched in sweat, his head moving left and right, trying to find the little devil.
After a few days, Sanrick stopped seeing him. The gods seemed to have heard Sanrick’s prayers. Days went by without Sanrick sighting him, and he finally breathed a sigh of relief. But his relief was short-lived. On a particularly hot day, with the wind humid and the sun blazing, their magical water from the ‘well of remedies’ was finally spent, and they were no closer to finding the sea, if it even existed. That is when Sanrick started praying again to Garandyll, the wizard-god of Harduin, but this time, he prayed to see the child once more, and he decided he would muster up the courage to approach him.
He saw him the next morning, crouched beside a tree and giggling, a large white pebble in the palm of his tiny hand, which he kept scratching with his long sharp nails. Sanrick did not look away this time. He looked straight into the boy’s eyes. That is when he noticed they were mismatched, one was red while the other was black.
The boy stared back and stopped giggling. Suddenly, he looked angry. He stood still as a stone, a frown etched on his forehead, a menacing fire in his mismatched eyes.
For a moment, Sanrick felt the world around him spin. He felt his body go limp, as the child’s gaze pierced his armor, his soul, and left him naked. For a moment, Sanrick felt all the agony and the suffering of the world filling his heart and crushing his soul, he heard the screams of women being raped and men being flayed, the cries of children being burned alive, he felt his joy being shredded to pieces by the weight of the world’s misery, leaving it torn and fragmented like the black roughspun tunic donned by the child. For a moment, Sanrick wanted to cry his eyes out, but in an instant, it was all over, and the sound of the boy’s laughter floated back to him like water flowing down the walls of a parched throat.
Sanrick had to hold on to the reins of the horse with his good hand, to keep from falling. With droopy eyes, he saw the boy gesture with his hands.
He wants me to follow him.
Sanrick turned a hard left, and galloped after the child, who started to run with great speed. In fact, he was running so fast that Sanrick’s horse was having a hard time keeping up with him. Sanrick only had one arm to control the horse, and he kept thinking he would fall to his death any moment. He heard Elsa shouting behind him, and soon the sound of wind rushing to face him drowned her screams, while the boy kept sprinting, almost floating over the ground as he ran. Sanrick soon gave up on trying to maneuver the horse and clung on for dear life. The horse appeared to follow the boy on its own, neighing and whinnying as it sped through the palm trees, galloping on black sand and jumping over white quartzite rocks. Sanrick looked back and saw no sign of Elsa. And then it hit him. If the child turned out to be a figment of his imagination, or the work of some evil sorcery of the woods, then he would be left alone. All of a sudden, he felt his heart sink into a sea of fear.
I am about to die alone. This is how the Endless Forest will claim my life. It is all over.
Sanrick Faerson closed his eyes. It was better than to look at the child disappear into thin air while he ended up leagues away from Elsa. He felt the jerks as the mare jumped over a rock, he heard the sound of the wind whistling past him and the sound of the hooves thundering on the ground and every now and then, heard fragments of the child’s laughter float back, assuring him that he was real, for now.
Sanrick did not know for how long he rode after the child. It could have been a few moments, or it could have been a few hours. All he knew was that his body was slowly breaking from inside, and he thought he would die from broken bones before anything else. Suddenly, he felt the speed of the horse dwindle, and the ferocity of the wind slacken. He felt the horse come to a halt.
He heard the wind blowing freely around h
im, uninterrupted by the web of leaves and branches.
He heard the cawing of a gull somewhere far above his head.
And then, he heard the sound of waves crashing all around him, and this time, One-arm Faerson was certain he did not imagine it.
∞∞∞
Elsa Faerson did not usually smile much. Her face never unveiled the thoughts or feelings that usually besieged her heart. But she did smile ear to ear when she saw the body of water before her, lying vast and endless, light aqua in color where the water was shallow and a deep blue far into the distance. Seagulls circled over the rocky black caves that lined the seashore in both directions, interrupted by a few rocky cliffs and inlets where the water flowed into the caves and then disappeared into the darkness within.
It had taken a while for Elsa to find Sanrick, but in the end, it was a task that Elsa accomplished with ease. The black sand bore the tracks of Sanrick’s stallion, and all the Harduinian princess had to do was follow them, until she emerged out of the trees and onto the shore, where the waves crashed and merged with the black shore. Sanrick was standing with his feet in the water, relishing the feel of the cold waves that flowed over his blistered and bloody legs, when he heard Elsa’s horse trot up behind him. Elsa had leaped off her mare, her golden hair flirting with the wind and stripped her armor until she was wearing just her silken tunic and linen tights which showcased her strong, shapely legs. And then she had joined her brother in the water, that came up till her knees, and stood like that for some time, luxuriating in the feel of the water caressing her legs.
“What do we do now? There is nowhere left to go. We were promised a temple, but we found a sea,” said Sanrick after a moment, walking back to the sandy shore with Elsa by his side. He had decided to be cordial with her, and no matter how hard he tried to ignore the fact, but deep in his heart, he knew he loved his sister.
Elsa shaded her eyes against the sun and scanned the shoreline, first to her left and then to her right. On their left were the caves, black and dark, some opening right onto the sea, while some were situated on the rocky slopes of black hills and cliffs that gradually rose from near the growth of trees from which Sanrick’s horse must have emerged. On their right, the shoreline extended till as far as the eyes could see, with a dense growth of queen palms that hugged the shoreline, covering land that was even and without any elevation or depression for miles.
“This is not the end of the journey, this is just the end of the forest. I think we need to climb those hills.”
“Then my relief was for nothing?” said Sanrick, exasperated.
“I won’t say that. At least we won’t die of hunger,” Elsa said as she notched an arrow, pointed it toward the group of seagulls taking flight from a large boulder a few feet into the sea, and loosed. The arrow caught a gull in the throat, just as the bird was about to take flight, as the remaining birds flapped their winds in fear and took off as soon as they could.
“We don’t have firewood. How will we cook it?” Sanrick inquired.
“Did you cook the worms, little brother? I think uncooked birds would be an improvement over uncooked worms, don’t you think” Elsa said, as she waded toward the boulder, its black surface spattered with the gull’s blood.
And it almost killed me. This time, I will make sure you eat them first.
Elsa found a nice spot in the shadows of a massive cliff, beside the mouth of a cave, where the sun could not touch them, and they could enjoy their gull without beads of sweat burning their eyes. Watering and feeding the horses became a problem as there were no patches of grass or even shrubs that grew for miles. The horses had hardly eaten anything since the grass disappeared and was replaced by tracts of sand. Sanrick’s wild horse was still holding its own; however, Elsa’s mare had dropped to its knees and collapsed with a thud. It was still breathing, but not for long.
Elsa had found some driftwood floating about, and Sanrick was glad they would not be eating a raw bird in the end. Elsa had lit a fire with by scraping a small black rock on the back of her dagger, as Sanrick lay against the hard-coarse surface of the cliff, admiring Elsa’s work.
“The horses need feeding,” Sanrick said as the mare neighed in pain.
“The horses need killing,” Elsa replied as she set the bird down on its back and parted its feathers to make a small incision on its collar bone.
“You are not serious, are you?”
“I am. I am not going back into the forest. I have had it with trees and branches and leaves. We need to do some climbing now, and we don’t need horses for that,” said Elsa, dragging the tip of her dagger from the collarbone all the way to the bird’s anus, slicing the bird open.
“How do you plan to travel back?”
“We can walk. And also, I am not saying we should kill both the horses. Your horse seems strong enough. We can just tie him and hopefully, he would still be here when we return.”
Sanrick knew the chances of that were bleak. He wasn’t much eager to climb anything, especially with one hand and a swollen shoulder.
Perhaps the boy will show me the way again.
He was nowhere to be seen when Sanrick had opened his eyes and gazed upon the aqua blue sea before him, and ever since, he had been on the lookout for him. Sanrick expected him to come running out of a cave any moment, and giggle like the way he did back in the forest.
But this time I won’t look into his eyes.
“How did you find this place?”
“Hmm? What?” Elsa’s voice broke his trance.
“How did you know where to go? And why did you not wait for me? It appeared as if you were not you at that moment. It appeared as if something else was controlling you. The Sanrick I know would never have dashed into a different direction, alone and fearless,” said Elsa, pulling out the bird’s intestines in one quick motion.
This is a tricky one.
“Something did take hold of me. Perhaps it was the hunger, or the pain in my shoulder that slowly wandered its way into my head and made me act the way I did. All I knew was, I wanted to feel the wind in my hair, and break the shackles of torment that haunted me day and night. I suppose I wanted to feel like a king for once, galloping into the battle one last time.”
“Do you want me to believe that horseshit?” Elsa said, her eyes glued to the bird, her blood-soaked hands working the dagger with precision as she started peeling the skin off the gull, “you have never lied to me before Sanrick, now would be a very bad time to start. I don’t care if you don’t agree with me on most things, that won’t stop me from loving you, but do not take me for a fool. That will certainly hurt me.”
Sanrick turned his head away from his sister and stared at the sea. The waves were now arriving with ferocity, and the sea was rising with each passing heartbeat, its waters becoming tumultuous and frenzied as the sun began to sink into the horizon where the dark blue of the ocean met the coral and golden hues of the sky.
“Keep your secrets if you want. And I shall now keep mine,” Sanrick observed the ire in Elsa’s tone, but he decided to remain silent.
There was never going to be a good lie to her question. It is better this way.
The bird tasted like food blessed by Garandyll himself, and for the first time in many days, Sanrick ate until he thought his already massive belly would burst open and whatever remained of the gull in his stomach would burst out like water released from a dam. However, Elsa ate meagerly, her hands tearing tiny pieces of roasted flesh from the bird, her eyes moving back and forth between her food and the sea.
Sanrick had relished the view before him for the first few hours, but now, he was impatient to get a move on. The short burst of joy he felt when he first reached the sea was now extinguished, and the constant fear of never finding the end to this dreary world had once again assailed his heart. He finished off the last scraps of his food, and then realized they still did not have water.
“There must be a river flowing into the sea nearby, or a small pond in one of thes
e caves,” Elsa explained when Sanrick posed the problem.
The lay of the land is too impractical for a river, thought Sanrick. Along with reading about the history of the realm, Sanrick had also tried understanding the ways of nature. And all of his accumulated knowledge acquired through spending time in the great library of Timehall told him that there was no river for miles around.
There is only a great vast blackness all around. Black sand, black caves made of black rocks, and the lingering fear of impending black death.
Sanrick ran his fingers on the coarse grey-black surface of the wall of rock behind him, as his eyes followed the trail, studying the texture in detail. The rock was fine-grained with tiny white spots dotting the surface haphazardly. Sanrick studied the rock for a few more heartbeats, scratching the surface with his nails, bringing his nose close to the surface and taking a long sniff of the ashy smell emanating from the black expanse before him. And that is when the realization struck him like thunder on a stormy night.
“These are basaltic rocks with tiny crystals embedded in the surface,” Sanrick exclaimed.
“Basa-what? Are you inventing words now?”
“No, these are basaltic rocks, or volcanic rocks to the common folk. They are found near volcanoes. Mount Shadowhorn, one of the mountains of Zaeyos, the volcano which consumed the city of Silentgarde a thousand years ago, is made up of these rocks. The white crystalline dots on the surface is their distinct characteristic, you see them, don’t you? There has to be a volcano not far off, a large volcano at that, for it to make this large expanse of hills and caves all around us.” Elsa had a confused expression on her face, “splendid, but how does that help us?”
“Well, wherever there are volcanoes, there are hot water springs. Fountains and jets of hot water that burst from the surface of the ground, steaming and sizzling, they flow down the slopes of mountains and are sometimes known even to create small lakes, capable of melting the skin of a man, if a poor lad ever decided to take a swim, but they are also known to be found in volcanic caves that surround a massive volcano like Shadowhorn, much like the ones that surround us at the moment. There can be water in one of these caves.”
The Passage of Kings Page 17
