by Thomas Head
He kissed her cold forehead and he slept well.
__________
In his brief dreams, he was faced with the question of what separates a man from a beast. An answer came to him from his dead uncle, the old dog mumbling loudly that the difference was simply the ability turn a strange phrase, though for the life of him he knew not from whence, when, or where the ability came.
His dreaming face grinned, laughably aghast at why it should wonder such a thing.
__________
Just before morning, Cullfor woke with a raw cold piercing his joints. He had a rattle in his chest, and while he lay nestled in the grotto he barked a thin cough, studying Bunn’s slumber. Her snoring nostrils flared. When she groaned, grabbing for him, he got up and went outside of their primitive shelter to relief himself.
The cold was surprising. He made quick work of a pee and walked back staring back at the crude, broken wall. How had it kept them so warm?
As he laced his trousers back, he ducked inside, just as the noise of thin sleet erupted like tine beads of glass rolling down a tin roof. In the dim tumult, he noticed that his leg no longer hurt, so he pulled the trousers down again and unbound the dark wet dressing. The arrow-hole was full and purple. It had shrunk to a little flower around the wound, like a small purple octopus.
He lay back down, and he thought about the first time he saw an octopus.
__________
He is on a smallish windswept island. It is nearing sunset, and the dusk of his first year of training with Dirty Gig, the halfling witch. He has already learned to write and to read. He has enjoyed it immensely, but now his small teeth are bared in anguish.
Something has gone wrong...
And now he is squeezing an octopus.
For all his youth and inexperience with anything scholarly, he has learned too quickly. Without enough frustration. There has been no real growth, Dirty Gig tells him. And he senses the truth in her even if he doesn’t understand it. There is no envy in her voice. No meanness. But, buried like crops that have been planted to late in the season, there has been this sense that his training is at a standstill.
And now, without knowing precisely why, he has sequestered himself.
In this, he has started thinking he may have been duped. It had been the means all along, his hungry mind tells him. He realizes it now. Dirty Gig wants him out of the way so that she can practice her craft with being told by the Halfling-King to train him. Out here on this bleak island, he is at the mercy of that miserable old woman. Flirty, dirty old Gig. The horny old bitch. For twenty days, her henchmen have not come with the grains for his beer and bread. So in his remarkable animal-hunger he is beyond the human recoil of the octopus’s grip. Yet it has taken the summons of something foreign and repulsive in himself to seize it from the tidal pool. Ripping and sloshing onto the heat of the black sands, there is no pity. No fear. Only the notion that he has devolved, somehow, and it is an open question as to what this new thing will not eat. Cullfor hunkers. He does not know what he is holding. For a savage moment, he sneers as he holds it aloft. Surf crashes without cease behind him. Ahead, all around, uncomfortable trade winds shake an endless blanket of grass. There is a notion, sudden and wicked: That eye. There is a quality there. Is it evil? No. This thing is not evil. But nonetheless it is as if the creature has strayed from the frozen caverns of hell to be purposely caught. As if by virtue of this, hell-colored waves ripple away from its head. Again the wind brutalizes him for a moment. Like no place known to him, the wind does not retreat from the sea here. It rushes to it. Out from the temped green grass to blast away the cool. When it relents, it is replaced by the bake of the sun.
He licks white lips and struggles to think.
“Oh little beast,” he whispers, the thin and creased bur of his voice lost to a break in the surf behind him. “Let’s hope you don’t taste as hideous as you look.”
That improbable eye blinks. Otherwise, its stare is unrelenting and as certain as an afterlife. It has more gravity than it should. Something in his Cullfor’s sturdy young nature is failing under the gaze. He finds it strangely necessary to seize the gasping beak before it might answer.
He needs this to be done.
The preadolescent wizard seeks a smashing rock. His search is too frantic, too long for comfort. It must be a suitable stone. It must have a jagged tip. Death-writhing might sadden him in this pitiful mind.
He bends, an action made easier with a shrunken waist and the thinning remnants of his robes. Then he freezes.
Instants erupt quickly: The octopus warps. Curls around his thumb. Blackens. It bites. Or stings. He is never certain. Only that it is an utter and choking pain.
He swallows his shock, tosses the beast back into the tidal pool.
“Oh, precious balls of the old gods.”
Cullfor grabs the base of his thumb. He has thought things over, and over. He has built a fire to combat the sting of night things and his immutable fear of the dark itself. But he has not anticipated being attacked by such a thing.
“Hoo, the pain.”
There is a thick wet ribbon of red, snaking from a little X-shaped hole. Soon it is curling down his wrist to the sea. There is a faint feeling. Surges of light. The feeling passes.
As something in his tonsured head rises sharply, his soul seems to soar for an instant. He looks around with the vaguely hopeful sensation of lift. Everything is wonderful and terrible both.
Just as drastically, his mood dips.
“Damn beast. What have you done?”
Still holding the base of his thumb, he plunges his hands in the water. He shakes off the blood and stands.
Suddenly his body is awash in cold. But the wound throbs of heat and itch, and there is that giddy feeling again. Cullfor laughs, gazing around into a mounting fog. It is a fog he knows does not exist because the wind still shakes the grass under a blue sky. The ocean seems tilted. Night comes with unusual speed. He clenches his jaws and shakes his head, and he bumbles up the rocky beach to his fire as the flame whips and gasps for its life. He plops down with an odd sensation. His blood feels syrupy. His chest hurts. He peers up, eyes watering. Stray sparks winnow aloft in clusters, vanishing as they fly toward the starry sea.
His morale crashes again. This time without a bottom to catch it. Weeping, he thinks about the witch called Dirty Gig. He thinks about the two of them at the table, quietly eating breakfast cakes. One of her breasts is out of her sleeping gown, but it is the cakes that hold him rapt. Their buttery crisp edges. The lusciously soggy middle. Greasy sausages. The bleary sun, rising to the chimes out in Dirty Gig’s large walnut tree. She is humming a ridiculous song.
A dog, a woman,
and a walnut tree.
The better you beat them,
the better they be…
So tie me up,
and I’m bound to thank ye
lift my gown
and proceed to spank me…
He smiles to think of it now, just as he had smiled long after they set down their wooden spoons and he lifted back up. He had thought it was a hint, the song, for when she reached over to gather his plate, he seized her. He pinned head to the table with a wall of the unseen verve. When she offered no protest, he lifted her gown, exposing what was a surprisingly smooth, full backside. She merely turned her head and looked back at him, not angrily, not even terribly surprised, but more as if merely curios at his next move.
He smiled. “You’re a terrible trainer.”
“Aye, true enough, boy. What will ye do about it then?”
He looked at the spoon in his hand, looked at her bare buttocks, paddled her.
Hard.
Perhaps too hard. It is hard to say. For nearly an hour, she did little by way of reaction except to close her eyes, whimper and writhe slightly. When they were done, she said nothing and did little but rise afterward without so much as a nod and get back to her chores.
It was never talked about. Never repeated.
All he knows is that not too long after, he is squeezing more blood from the octopus wound. There is a fleeting suspicion that life is holiday, or a journey for a pious life he had led prior to this one, and in his delirium he tells himself a promise: One day he will get back. He will get a spoon. He will know that breakfast-time joy of life again.
The wind, which had been blowing for twenty-seven days, ceases. With a branch and a thin sheet of dry bark, he writes the promise to the beach itself, and the world wriggles and seems to swallow some of his pain.
But he does not let all of the pain go.
Something deep inside him needs to feel it.
And Cullfor while suspects God offers all men such wisdom, he thanks Him for this quiet place to accept it.
__________
Cozy in his grotto, Cullfor managed what felt like another hour of sleep before he woke, smiling, but with a strange taste in his mouth like rotten dairy or octopus slime.
He hawrked and rubbed his eyes.
He reclined once more beside her, nestling against her, feeling her cold nose, her sweaty hair, and for the first time in years, he offered up a prayer of thanks.
Chapter 85
__________
It was unusually cold out as Cullfor and his newest, strangest, and dearest friend in the world, stood and bundled themselves against a patina of spring sleet, which still fell sideways out of the white sky. Their oats were gone, and the fire was just a black scar on the rocks.
They looked at one another, each red-faced from the cold and each one’s hair a crazed gnarl of straw.
He had never seen a woman quite so beautiful.
Then they snorted, laughing.
__________
Twisting down a creek bed, hunkering, they paused before the dip of a dry waterfall, where they shared a hand and trudged up out of the spongy creek until they crested its rocky ledge. Bent and low in a surprising cold breeze, they stood staring down the opposite slope at a lonely little hovel. It met the eye with as much grassy roof as pub. But it was, indeed, a pub. As sure as his dry mouth, it was a pub.
They were in the borderlands between his beloved Arway and Delmark now. This was still relatively flat country. A small road ended or began at its door, as is known to happen. Cullfor could smell the beer.
“Where there’s beer, there’s breakfast,” he whispered.
She smiled.
Knowing they needed supplies, namely oatmeal and matches, he looked at his pinky, at Dhal’ birthday ring. It should be more than enough for each. It should also buy them some new shoes and a change of clothes, both of which they could use—not only for their wear, but for the notion of looking different, however slightly, than the last time the monk had seen them. He could head out west from here, but it was unlikely that a dwelf and a halfling could ever fully immerse themselves in the land of men. If he went north, up into the more mountainous borderlands, they could travel without sticking out like a pair of miniature thumbs, for halfling and man lived together, somewhat peacefully, in these borderland burgs. Tenholly, Bonny Fumbling, et cetera, they were all were made up of equal parts human and halfling.
In time, he settled the matter in his head.
North it was. For now. Perhaps all the way to the wilds of Dragonfell, then west and south… that would be safest.
But that would also take months.
He put it out of his head, set his gaze beyond the pub, further downhill. The road curled down, falling away to an ancient confusion of hedges. The browning sprawl of a town formed beyond. Bonny Fumbling, if he was not mistaken, which meant they had somehow skirted Tenholly altogether. He knew Balturshot was just a bit further north of that.
He focused.
Yes, this was Bonny Fumbling, named for some peculiar snow or some such, which had fallen during the summer, just after some human had defeated some halflings but let them live… It was not far off, maybe two miles. He could see the entirety of its sprawl from here—its scattered and wooden squalor thickening until it congested nearer its center. Beyond that, the sullen murk of a wide grim castle rose.
He again looked at the pub, licking his wind-cracked lips. From the dark rosy windows spilled thin claps of stomp-music, rising and falling out of tune with the distant snorts of wild laughter. There was something happy and tiresome about it, something that let him know that the people inside had been there all night.
He smiled, kissing the top of her head. Then he once more smelled the pub’s pleasant stink on the wind as they walked swiftly past the bittersweet clamor inside. The wind blew the grass around their feet. He could not look back. Not with so few steps between them and all that wonderful beer.
With quick, thirsty carelessness they went without words until they reached the hedges. When he turned and looked uphill, a pair of thin gray figures stood outside staring at him.
There was an odd stillness in their silence. And there was something lonely and menacing the way their frozen little eyes contrasted the gay noise behind them. He shivered and thought to nod, but turned.
He had felt stares like that before.
He thought he could smell the crisp, animal-blood scent of a fight floating now on the wind.
__________
It was a shock to see a plank road of steps, cutting through the hedges. Commerce or convenience, with time, had superseded what was likely once planted as a system of defense. It was difficult to say if it was refreshing or depressing. They stepped onto it the planks sinking or sliding underfoot until they were practically dancing to stay on the trail.
At its end, near the edge of town, an enormous white startled them with a large woof.
Their startled leap made it leap back too.
When he saw the tail go down and the head drop, he patted the wet jowls and looked up. The town was razed not so long ago, evidenced by a meadow of new roofs that was sprouting from the roots of the old foundations.
He looked at Bunn.
“What do you want?”
“Oats and clothes.”
He laughed. “We need oats and clothes,” he said. “What do you want?”
As she winked at him, he felt a cool lightness wash through his stomach..
__________
He walked lightly with her through wispy crowds, looking. Throughout the potted streets cauldrons were alive in upstairs rooms. The aromas began slithering around his senses, a warmth of smells: Ale and melting butter. The smoky roasted scents of all manner of meats. And the ghosts of last year’s vegetables boiling amid a bouquet of cabbage and pork-fat stock.
Everywhere, it seemed, people were looking at them without actually setting their eyes on him. He hoped it was only because they were strangers. As the roads thickened with more and more people, he took her hand again.
Cullfor halted, another sense buzzing. It was not terrible here, but there was a current. A halting behind the casual movements. But hunger could do that sort of thing, he told himself.
Attracted to a human monger, who was standing some nice red fillets in stalls at the front of his store, he looked at Bunn.
She seemed to understand he was uncomfortable with her watching him haggle.
“Go ahead, sweetness.”
He worked himself across the mud of the alleyway, then halted and stooped over the edge of the stall. Gently surveying the wares, it felt like sizing up a new lover. He had to curb a simmering sense of joy. Aside from the fresh fillets, there was huge a selection of salted fishes inside.
“Three copper a pound,” the monger said. “Netted and dried week last.”
Cullfor said nothing. He realized suddenly that fish were too inexpensive—he was going to have to buy the clothes first, just to get enough smaller monies to buy them.
“Three copper then,” he said. “I’ll be back shortly enough.”
The monger harrumphed. “You wear a ragged cloak,” he said. “Too ragged, I’ll wager. The wealth behind that confidence is an easy thing to spot to a veteran-enough eye. Take the f
ish, master, and come back when you have small enough coin.”
The monger tossed him a bundle of the fillets, and thought the words were kind enough, the way he tossed the bundle of fish as his feet felt hot-tempered and impolite, as if throwing alms to a beggar. Cullfor looked down at the fish and cocked a narrowing eye.
In the end, he just bent and scooped up the bundle. When he stood, looking for Bunn, he saw a human man running at him. And the man never slowed. Not wanting to draw attention to himself, he decided to fight him without magic. Which was more or less precisely when he threw Cullfor violently onto the stall. As he flew, Cullfor grabbed at the man’s wrist. Taking hold, he snatched the man’s thumb and bent it back until he heard a crack.
The man squalled.
Cullfor stood, breathing.
The fellow was holding his hand. The monger was wide-eyed. Cullfor saw a second face, then in the next instant a lengthy piece of wood. A blow caught him crookedly across the forehead. He felt himself crash backward onto a cart, pain exploding down his face. Something slimy was spilling all around him. It was eels, he noted with some horror. Lots of them. Hundreds. He stood again. Trying to get away now, footing was impossible. He slipped and fell into the wriggling and living slime of the eels. Then a third man sat on him. He was chunky. Tough. Cullfor growled and rolled, throwing the man to the ground. Amid a flourish of grunts and strangely sincere apologies, he twisted the large man’s arm until he felt the shoulder pop loose from the socket.
Staring at a fourth attacker now, a very fat man, Cullfor crouched.
“Hell’s black fire, man” Cullfor grunted. “Think about this. Think very damned carefully, fellow.”
The fat man nodded, drawing a blade.
“Not what I meant, ye idiot.”
