by R. R. King
“A warrior forgets. He must. For instance, he has to forget about his battles in particular, or his restless mind will never permit him to sleep.”
“True,” he chuckles, probably because I changed the subject. A warrior’s need to forget a battle doesn’t necessarily explain why I forgot the name of a book I quoted. But he is in too deep. My story has him wrapped within a carcass of spiderwebs. “Tell me, Shadow. Why does a warrior like you read?”
A question I didn’t expect. It may seem like an ordinary question to anyone, but it’s personal to me. “I read to kill time.”
An answer he didn’t expect. “I find it hard to believe,” he says. “I think you read because you’re curious. You want to learn. You want to know.”
“I do, but it started with me killing time—”
“Even so,” he interrupts, not for the sake of interruption, but to have silence on his side. He needs to stop me feeding his mind. An interruption helps him think, like a warrior in a battle, one who needs a moment to think, to reflect, and to contemplate when there is so much going on all around. Then he asks a question that confirms my fears, “Have you been raised alone, Shadow?”
My gritted teeth are iron bars over my window of a mouth, keeping my words jailed inside.
“You have,” he says. A sense of victory sweetens his tone of voice. “In fact, I think you’re an only child.”
My gritted teeth are iron bars, unable to handle the pressure and weight of the moment. Of my memories.
“And you said you were raised by a mother. No father?” It’s not a question. It’s a statement of a man who now reads into me. Imagine a reader reading the author’s mind. It excites him but deters from the joy of reading. If the reader knows the author’s next move, what is the point of a book? If King Thorn knows who I am, what I am, why I am here, he will kill me.
“I imagine she isn’t your real mother,” he will not stop. “Your family is dead, I think. Killed as a child? In battle? In war? Oh,” he snaps two fingers in the air. His guards stand alert. “You have never seen them.”
The bars of iron are about to break from the weight of the moment. I part my teeth — or I will lose them. “I’m an orphan, yes.”
“Ha!” Dragan interfers. “It explains why you read so much. Lonely child. Only child. Orphan. Lurker. Nothing worse than that.”
A man without a traceable family is an outcast in the Seven Seasons. No one respects a man with no roots. A man they can’t judge. A man who could secretly be a stranger from another land or Season. A spy. Even worse, a bastard son. A man who is not a man, but a shadow.
15
Battle of Silence
What I consider an epiphany, reveals itself as my darkest hour.
Just when I think I have the King in the palm of my hands, ready to mold in every which way I want, he reads through me, enough to expose my past.
I breathe with a parted mouth, but the muscles around my lips remain tense. A pain surges through my neck. The effort to conceal my feelings is greater than I have expected. In the court’s eyes, I am lower than a low-life Lurker now. I remember my mother telling me about orphans being hunted and buried alive in the Season of Sacrifice.
Surprisingly, it’s the King who lifts the weight off my shoulder.
“Orphan or not,” he says. “I can only admire your knowledge.”
“Thank you.” I bow my head with gratitude.
“Which brings me to my next concern.”
I say nothing.
“Your storytelling amused me in the beginning,” he says. “Flowery words, a few metaphors, great attention to details, and a lot of intriguing situations and characters.”
I nod.
“All until you began the part where you visited the Mile of Melodies.”
I squint. Tilt my head.
“Do you know what you did wrong, Shadow?”
“Not sure.”
“You started telling, not showing. In the art of storytelling, which you seem to have quite mastered, a storyteller will show his story with words and details. A poor storyteller, only tells.”
“I know.”
“But you’ve been mostly telling me things, events, and things said. You skip details, whole scenes I want to explore. I want descriptions. I want to see with my mind’s eye the things you saw.”
“And that concerns you?”
King Thorn leans forward. I can see it now. My eyes got used to his figure’s movements from such a distance. I wish I could see his face though. “A man who tells a story and not show it, has one intention on his mind. Can you guess what?”
I know, but I keep it to myself, my eyes staring back at the King.
“A man who only tells a story is usually lying,” he says. “If I tell you I took a swim in the ocean today and fought a great whale and killed it, without mentioning the ocean’s name, the whale’s breed or color, without expressing how I felt, then I’d be telling a story, not showing it. It means I am lying. Because the devil is in—”
“The details.”
“Exactly. So do you have an explanation why you skipped the details, or should I feed you to my dragons?”
I answer right away. Sometimes it’s wiser to break the rules and talk.
“Time is running out, my King,” I say, using the my King phrase for the first time. “I could bore you with the details, but I have seven stories to tell. I assumed you only cared for enough details to know my words are real, not so much to bore you with the geography of the Mile of Melodies or its most cherished traditions. I could bore you if you so would like.”
The King leans back. Another battle of silence.
He says nothing.
I say nothing back.
We need each other, like the hero and villain of any story, one cannot be without the other, except we don’t know who is who yet.
The King holds longer onto his silence. I am self-conscious, listening to the beating of my heart.
“Let’s hear it then,” he signals for me to continue.
16
Warrior’s Shadow
Learning to play the Harp softened my warrior’s heart a little. Not that it was my intention, but it helped me understand the delicacy of a musician. I learned they were cut from a different cloth, not one bit as cruel as a warrior. A knowledge I cherished and respected.
Eventually, I returned to the Season of Rain.
Once I rode back, I realized why the people of the season needed Ellianna’s music. Such a gloomy land with its perpetual rain and morbid cold needed some release. Salvation or redemption, if I may say. What better than the melodies of a Harp to enchant people forever buried in the rain?
One day, I caught Ellianna practicing her Harp outside in the fields. My presence insinuated fear at first — I didn't know how she recognized me, my odor maybe? She thought I came for revenge, so I strummed a few notes on my Harp as a gesture of peace.
“You play music?” she said, her blind eyes moist with fascination.
“Thanks to you,” I said.
“To me?”
“Since that day I lost the battle to the strum of your melodies, I’ve become obsessed with the power of music,” I said. “I have been learning how to play for some time.”
“Ah,” she sighed. “Who knew that the heart of a warrior would melt for the melodies of a lonely Harp?”
She still didn’t quite trust me though.
“Would you care if I played something?” I said.
“Please do. Any song you have in mind?”
“Actually, yes. A rare melody I have been taught.”
“Rare?” she laughed, her hands shielding her mouth. “I think I have played all melodies, so none of them are rare to me.”
“This one I have learned in Meroothamaria.”
“Oh,” she sounded mesmerized. “You changed from a warrior to an artist, and traveled that far?”
“Like I said. You changed my life.”
Ellianna blushed. I wondered if she knew ho
w beautiful she was.
“Please play your rare melody.”
Once I did, she looked in my direction. Though she couldn’t see my face, I saw she looked hypnotized. Never had she listened to such melodies.
She listened all afternoon.
By sunset, she begged me to teach her how to play that song. I did.
Teaching Ellianna to play melodies on an instrument that needed embracing, neared our bodies closer. I sat behind her and gently held her hands and pointed them to the notes on her harp. I could smell her scent and was aroused by it. But it was her fascination with me that mattered.
It’s hard to explain how a warrior’s feeling about a woman he likes. On the surface, all you would see in his is lust for the flesh. For why would a warrior look for more than that in a woman? I am a man who will never settle. I will never call somewhere home. I’ll either hunt and kill someone, or escape those who seek vengeance.
Still, underneath it all, a warrior’s exterior of seeking lust is driven by his deeply suppressed longing for love. His longing to feel and touch and even shed precious tears. Something he will never be able to do.
Love for me was a sin. Not because I was religiously fanatic, but because I didn’t deserve it. I was a killer. There were no two ways about it.
That night, I made sure to elevate Ellianna’s emotions with my rare melodies. She finally loosened up and stopped resisting my charms. The moon shone full in the sky. With each note she strummed, we grew closer to each other. The warmth of our bodies touched over and over again.
First, it was the hands and fingers, then my chest to her soft back, then my chin to her neck as she played, and then…
It was inevitable.
The beautiful Ellianna ended up in my bed, enchanted by irresistible melodies that I had been learning for two years.
I have to admit it was a night like no other. Making love to her was like swimming in a river hung up in the sky. A beautiful melancholy that truly changed me as a man. Ellianna wasn’t deliberately cheating on Rodmordt. She was under my music’s spell.
Being with her could have melted my warrior’s heart, but I didn’t succumb to this feeling. If she had used the magic of melodies to defeat me in Rodmordt’s favor, I used her same poison — or enchantment — to force him to eventually draw first.
At dawn, I went to wash my face in the river. There I glimpsed my reflection. I had hardly ever reminded myself of my looks. In my mind, the way I looked was how someone looked back at me. I could see who I was in their eyes.
The reflection in the water wasn’t definitive enough to show my features. As usual, all that the water gave back was the silhouette of my shadow.
That was when I realized that bedding Ellianna had a darker side to it. Not only was it meant to anger Rodmordt and weaken him in the next battle, but it satisfied the darker side of my shadow. Sleeping with her was taking something from him. Something precious. A trophy of war.
Warriors, however strong and resilient, never cease to have one of two weak spots you could poke — sometimes both. The first was their children, which Rodmordt didn’t have. The second was their loved ones, which Rodmordt had and I took advantage of.
Call me good. Call me evil. In the end, I’m the Shadow.
The next morning, after I left Ellianna, Rodmordt smelled my scent on her. My work there was done. Not only did he draw first, but, in a moment of wrath, he asked for the second Feud himself.
17
Lucian’s Third Law
“What kind of man are you?” King Thorn says.
He is both pleased and disgusted by me. A great conflict like so many in our lives. He must have been pleased by my deceitful tactics and determination, and disgusted by my immoral behavior towards his brother’s woman. As much as the King wanted his brother dead, he was keen not to disgrace him. They were the same blood after all.
Like I said, a compelling yet unreasonable paradox of life. To hate and love someone at the same time.
“I am not proud of myself,” I say.
“You should hang yourself,” Dragan says. “And I thought you were a man of honor, burying the guards and praying for them?”
“I promised my people I would save them. I needed Rodmordt to draw first.” I could add a few words of sentiment, asking for forgiveness, or to be understood, or even forgiven. But I don’t.
War is a grey spot in a man’s heart, and the things he’d do to win it are unimaginable.
“You’ve surprised me,” the King says. “In a million years, I wouldn’t have imagined hearing such a story.”
“You believe him?” Dragan says. “He is a liar, trying to impress us with his stories so you’d be able to give his people salt and bread, and also shelter them from the evil coming upon their land,” his voice is hoarse, a staccato of bitter syllables, scattered like tiny wounds all over a sick man’s tongue. “From what I heard about her, I doubt Ellianna would have slept with him.”
“You have a way to prove him a liar?” the King asked Dragan.
“Let me send a messenger to investigate the Season of Rain,” Dragan offers. “If he sees Rodmordt alive then the Lurker is lying.”
“How long will it take him to get there?” the King says.
“Three days.”
“I’ll know if Shadow is a liar or not much earlier. But still, send the messenger.”
Dragan smirks, happy to kill me anytime the King wishes. I don’t react. The feud between the King and his brothers is working in my favor. None of the brothers — and the Seasons they rule — want the King to know anything about them. It is more than likely that his messenger will be captured as a spy and tortured to death.
“So Rodmordt was angered upon knowing that Ellianna spent a night with you,” the King says. “And it forced him to ask you for another Feud himself, drawing his sword first?”
“His pole,” I correct him. “He had no choice. I scratched his pride.”
“I wonder why he didn’t just hunt you down and hang you from the highest towers in the Season of Rain,” the King remarks.
“Rodmordt is an honorable man,” I say. “He would not kill a man, let alone a warrior, without a fair fight.”
“And you, were you an honorable man?”
“As honorable as a—” I bow my head with shame. “warrior can be.”
“I know. I know,” the King puffs. “And Ellianna? Did Rodmordt forgive her.”
“I wouldn’t know about that, but that’s when the Bound of Love came in my favor.”
“Ah, in the Season of Rain a man and woman do not marry, they are bound,” he contemplates. “So he could not hate her. He had to love her forever — and live with it.”
“Whether he did or not, he needed her in the Feud to play the music that would elevate his soul.”
“Hmm. Another conflict. How about this Elevation melody? How were you planning to win? It’s one thing that a man who draws first probably loses, and another to use cunningness and tactics.”
“The melody elevated Rodmordt’s soul, up to the Second Plane of Consciousness. Ellianna had perfected the melodies over time — meaning I had to elevate with him if I wanted to ensure that I kill him with my advantage of his first draw of the sword.”
“Don’t you think that would have been impossible? Killing a man who has his soul elevated while you don’t, drawing first or not?”
“I told you about memorizing the melody. I knew every piece of it by heart at the time. Also, when I learned how to play the Harp myself, I gained more power. I am not talking about the Song of Urges. Rodmordt was going to draw first anyway. I’m talking about the Obsolete Song of Elevation. My soul was ready from studying the Harp. I could use part of the power myself.”
“Confusing, but interesting,” the King says. “So it would have benefited Rodmordt if he’d spent the two years learning music instead of training with his pole.”
“Rodmordt would have benefited more if he’d not been an honorable man and just killed this Lur
ker,” Dragan says.
“Tell me about the fight,” King Thorn says.
“I will. But first, I should tell you about the night before the Feud. The night of preparation.”
“Hadn’t you already been prepared with such an advantage of not having to draw your sword first, let alone your knowledge of music and Harps?”
His question bothers me somehow. He also contradicts himself, as he has earlier mentioned that drawing first does not guarantee my win. A great warrior knows that nothing is guaranteed in war. Plans and prophecies, even the Science of War, are never set in stone. Having Rodmordt draw first is one advantage. That is all. Rodmordt could have been taught better. He might have found a Magical Antidote for my accomplishments. Enemies don’t just wait for your to pick yourself from the ashes. While you have been planning, they have been planning too.
I remind myself of a quote from the Book of Factual Necessities Beyond a Warrior’s Belief, written by Lucian de Lore. Lucian is a Lurker like me, raised outside the Seven Seasons. Lurkers come from the valleys and villages in between where no Season dominates. We call them Lands, not Realms, since Realms are a place of magic. Lands are just barren, magic-less, a gutter of rugged realities.
Some Lurkers come from Land Beyond the Light, named after the fact that since we rarely have houses for shelter, we are always exposed to the light of the sun and moon, day or night. Land Beyond the Dark is the place were Lurkers are darker rebels without causes against all forms of life. Lucian and I come from that place.
