Gleeman's Tales

by Matthew Travagline

  The thought of his mother’s warmth brought a tear to the boy’s cheek which froze with intricate cracks decorating its surface. He brushed it aside as one would a noisome gnat and continued walking on his journey. “Mommy would not be pleased to see us sitting here crying and wasting time,” he said, looking down to the baby who remained uncharacteristically quiet. Blocking the sunlight was the shadow trailing a hill, both magnificent and menacing. Despite the ache from his foot that caused the boy to hobble, he pushed through the snow as he climbed to the crest of the hill.

  Finally atop, he stood blinded for a moment by the intense sun that gave more light than heat. Before him and all around him, the reflective snow stretched from horizon to horizon in an endless blanket of white. After a moment, the boy, whose eyes were unaccustomed to the harsh direct sunlight, was able to discern the silhouette of what looked like a behemoth’s skeleton against the bright sun and snow. “That’s where we need to get to, little Lucille,” the boy said, cupping his hands to his eyes as though wielding binoculars. A noise, from the way they had come, startled him. The high-pitched squawk rose to the boy’s numb ears and he turned to see a family of birds breech the snow crowned treetops. Without further pause, he took off running towards the distant skeleton.

  As the boy closed in on the behemoth’s grave, he passed through the remnants of an old town. The tops of buildings jutted from the compacted snow. The boy passed one such roof, made of a fabric that had long prior surrendered its color to the hard sun and reflective snow. A thin layer of ice encased the fabric. He looked behind him to ensure he had a moment to spare, then pounded through the light coat of ice and punched through the fabric. He peeked into the hole but recoiled at the sight of a person frozen to the ground some ten feet below.

  Body forgotten, he resumed his quest and once again headed for the huge skeleton. Eventually he found where the curved spine sloped under the faux ground created by the snow and embarked. The boy cleared through a foot of snow and ice only to discover that the skeleton was not made of bone, as he had suspected, but of a hardened metal. It reminded him immediately of the tracks that allowed quick navigation through the prison from which he had escaped. The boy ascended the metal skeleton closest to the ground. Underneath a layer of snow rested its hard spine. Other bones, supporting the spine on which he now walked, descended straight below the white depths to the unseen ground. And as the boy discovered, stepping through and stumbling to the cold bone below, this spine, like the tracks that traipsed through his prison, was also uniformly divided with gaps wide enough for a foot to slip through.

  After climbing the massive skeleton for almost an hour, the boy and his infant sibling, both beyond shivering, found themselves on the summit of the beast. “This must be it, Lucy. The flat platform Mommy was talking about. Where she met Daddy.” An invisible weight appeared to drop from the boy’s shoulders. He stood tall and walked to the rail-guarded edge of the summit, looking out over the world farther than he had ever imagined he would see. He removed the wrap from his foot, extracted his frail baby sister from her pouch and wrapped her in the tough fabric. “I know you cannot see it Lucille, but it truly is a sight worth the journey. There,” the boy said, pointing. “A river rages. A real river. And back this way,” he said, turning back to the woods, “is where we escaped from.” He limped back to the rail protecting the edge of the summit and noticed a square plaque hanging limply by a loose rusty screw. “It’s a little hard to read, but some of the words are clear,” The boy squinted, scraping ice from its face. “Ragnarök,” the boy told his sister. “There are some numbers underneath: 220 feet tall, and 85mph. Don’t know what ‘mph’ means. It also says that it was built in 2018 and says something about bimonthly repairs, though that part is tough to read. What do you think this thing is, Lucille?” He looked to the distant snow below and thought he saw movement. “Well, whatever it was, it must’ve been magnificent to see. The snow probably killed it,” he added.

  The boy paused to look his baby sister in the face. Her expression was devoid of grimace or grin, her skin pale blue and she had stopped squirming half way up the climb. He smiled as a teardrop fell onto her cold forehead. “Can’t you feel it, Lucy? Mommy was right. It is getting warmer.” He blinked another tear away and for a moment, his vision filled with a rainbow of watered colors. He cradled the silent baby and sat down onto the summit’s snowy peak. Feeling the gentlest tickle of warm air on his cheek, he closed his eyes and pressed his lips to his sister’s head.

  Chapter 22

  Cleo was already scowling as she finished punctuating her transcription. She leaned over and whispered in Gnochi’s ear, “I thought you were trying to raise their morale. This story hardly will make them happier.”

  “I did not agree to make them happier. Morale is not directly correlated to happiness, though the two can be paired together. Look at them, Boli,” Gnochi whispered back. “They might not look happier, but they have one more reason to stay with the menagerie. Now, I’m not going to claim that I am some sort of savior, but if these pseudo-players take a minute to think about the story, or its message about the first age, then that’s one minute less that they would be thinking of quitting.”

  Cleo nodded, though she was not convinced.

  “I am surprised that there aren’t any quest—”

  “Gleeman, if you’re quite done necking with your apprentice, I think the stunned silence is enough to show that my players are not interested in your stories,” Dorothea said, a grin sprouting on his face.

  Nettles was making her way around, carrying a ceramic kettle refilling the sweet tea when she spoke. “I enjoyed it well enough, and the information beforehand was quite delightful.” Various murmurs of agreement arose across the small crowd.

  Dorothea frowned at the mutinous outbursts. “If you weren’t such a fine cook, I’d kick you right out for that mutiny.”

  Nettles gave Dorothea a solid smile, then winked to Gnochi and ducked under the tent’s flap. Following her departure, a loud whistle split the air and a few of the children seated around the crowd, got up and ran for the tent flap.

  One of the teens Cleo recognized from the inn, Roy, raised his hand and coughed. “I noticed something between this story and the one you told last night,” he said, his voice sounding hurried. “The boy could very well be the same. They each had an infant sibling, though their genders differ. And if your history is to be believed, then there was a winteryear immediately after the war that almost ended the world, a winter that is eerily similar to that which we see in this new story. Are they the same?”

  Gnochi smiled. “I wasn’t sure you or anyone who had heard my first story would pick up on that.” He proceeded to recount an abridged version of the story he had told the night before in the Pike’s Cathedral Inn. “The timelines seem to match but the characters are different. The unnamed boy and his infant sibling were escaping from what is believed to be a prison. From all accounts I have, that ancestor of mine waited until he was an adolescent before he left the library and he did not take his sibling with him.” Gnochi paused, running a hand through his hair. “So, if I had to guess, if both stories happened millennia ago, I would say that I’m only related to the first story’s character, not the unnamed boy from ‘Bifröst,’ though that’s basing this on the credibility of one story over the other. I don’t know for sure if what I said is actual truth, a mere fragment of truth, or entirely feigned, as it was not written down. My grandfather told me the story of ‘Bifröst,’ who was told from his grandmother. So, I suppose there is no concrete answer to that, Roy.”

  “Can you explain the title?” one of the players asked.

  “It’s alluding to a symbol from a first age mythology,” Gnochi explained. “The Northmen, or Norse, believed that the Bifröst bridge was a rainbow bridge that connected our world to the realm of their gods, and then to their heaven. According to their lore, the bridge was destroyed during the end of the world, which the Norse called Ragnarök.”
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br />   “So, it’s fitting that the two come together in that story considering it takes place after the world as they knew it would’ve ended?” asked one from the audience.

  “Indeed, though this story is related to the Norse in name alone. Popular worship of the Aesir, the Norse deities, faded long before the end of the first age, at least a thousand years or so before the war that tore the world to shreds. Norse myth became a staple in first age culture again starting in the latter half of the first age, though more for entertainment purposes and less for spirituality.”

  “So, Ragnarök was not a monster, nor the remains of one, but a part of the carnival?”

  Gnochi smiled at the outburst, but Cleo heard him suck in a quiet breath when his gaze shifted to Zara, the sword-swallower, who had made the connection. She had pulled her cloak back, revealing a bald head and a slight smile. The woman leant on a claymore as high as Gnochi’s chin as though it were a simpleton’s cane.

  “Yes,” Gnochi said. “A rollercoaster, which was a vehicle that people would sit in that traveled on a loop of tracks at high speeds. Whoever built it was hoping that by naming their ride after the Norse end-of-days, they would be unconsciously attracting more thrill seekers. I’ve found, in my extensive study of first age lore, that the theme of: ‘the-end-of-days,’ was another idea seemingly explored ad nauseam towards the end of the first age, so it makes sense that someone would use a title like that in naming their creation.”

  “I don’t suppose,” Cleo said, “that you would tell us what happened to the boy.”

  “Nope,” Gnochi said, which evoked more than a few huffs of frustration from the crowd.

  A minute of silence sat heavy in the tent. Finally, one of the performers asked: “What is a god?” A few mumbling conversations sprung up, echoing the performer’s question.

  After a moment, Gnochi rubbed his chin and said, “If I could answer that fully over the rest of my life, then I will have solved many of the first age’s questions.” He chucked at their obvious confusion. “The human race spent thousands of years in the first age proving or disproving, fighting for, killing for, and dying for the existence of God, or gods. I don’t know if I can answer that right now without having the proper story because ultimately, you will learn of it through my bias. What I want is to tell you of the idea of God, or a god, from as objective a stance as possible. I’ll sift through this bank of mine and come back to you on that question,” Gnochi said, wrapping his head with his knuckle.

  “Well, that was all fine and dandy of a performance that you put on,” Dorothea said, rising from his mock-throne. “Now these peasants will think they’re historians from the first age.” The ringleader clapped his hands. “Everyone. Finish packing up the tents. We make tracks within the hour.”

  As the crowd dispersed, hushed whispers tickled Cleo’s ears. She closed the journal and clutched it to her chest.

  Gnochi turned to her and beckoned her back toward their wagon. As he neared the exit of the tent, he stopped, his gaze returning to the cluster of players still mingling in the tent. “I’ll meet you back in the wagon. I need to speak with Zara for a moment.”

  For a moment, Cleo watched Gnochi approach the sword-swallower and lean in to speak with her. She ducked under the tent’s flap and headed for her shared wagon. Perogie perked her head up, excited at Cleo’s approach. “We’ll be riding soon,” Cleo said, climbing the stairs into the wagon. Once inside, she set the journal down on her cot and was drawing back the curtains to admit the sun into the dank wagon when Gnochi entered.

  He spied the journal and filched it before Cleo could protest. “Hey, as your master, I reserve the right to read your transcriptions.”

  “But I thought you said—”

  “I cannot read well, but it’s not entirely impossible, so hush.” Gnochi leafed through the pages, his fingers pinching the paper as though it was prone to shatter. Cleo noticed his brows furrow and his eyes squint as though struggling to decipher her lettering. A quaint smile perked up on his lips. “Cleo, why did you embellish your lettering with these symbols?”

  She hesitated, “Uh, I don’t know. That’s the only way I know how to write.”

  “Intriguing. That you write this way.” He squinted at a particular word or phrase on the page, his bushy eyebrows nearly touching the paper. “Yes, it seems as though you are writing with accents from a first age language. It might cause a double take for someone not familiar with these embelishments, but they should still be able to understand.”

  She said nothing, afraid that the pit turning in her gut would inch up if she opened her mouth to speak.

  “If you are used to writing this way, then by all means continue. I’ll have to make it a priority when we get to the library after this business to show you the accents in their native form and how they translate over. They actually are quite similar, but it will still be better for you to learn to distinguish between the two.” When Cleo did not respond to his comment, Gnochi turned and said, “Alright, well, I’m going to saddle up Fester. You ready to go?”

  “You go ahead. I want to put this away,” she said, gesturing to the journal. The moment Gnochi exited their shared wagon, Cleo thrust the curtains closed, cutting off the sunlight. She sunk to the floor, her back sliding down the wall. A heavy breath of relief slipped out of her mouth. She would not have to worry about being abandoned again. Gnochi would not grow tired of her and dispose of her. From his words, she could tell that he had plans beyond the menagerie. A tear trickled down her face, and, following the curve of her smile, trickled onto her lips.

  “You coming out, Cleo?” Gnochi’s voice was muffled but it sounded at the door.

  She stood and wiped the tear from her face before exiting the wagon.

  ◆◆◆

  A sore Gnochi and a wilted looking Cleo entered their wagon well after night had descended upon their camp. “I have to hand it to Dorothea. He pushes everyone hard to travel. At an army’s pace, I suppose.” Gnochi massaged his lower back. “Fester’s gait is a little odd. It’s going to take a while before I am used to that limp.”

  “Why don’t you take the cot then,” Cleo suggested.

  Gnochi waved her back. “Nah, you keep the cot. I’m content just having a roof over our heads and walls to prevent the chilled wind from seeping into my bones.”

  “At least take your pillow back,” Cleo said, shrugging out of the poncho and throwing it to her master.

  He removed it from his face and saw that she was working herself out of her leather armor, though she struggled to reach the straps tight across her back. Gnochi helped where her hands could not grasp. Cleo nodded in thanks.

  She was quick to throw a shift over her head, but not quick enough for Gnochi to miss seeing the marks left from the tight leather straps that had branded her unblemished back like ripened scars. Turning to offer privacy, he struggled to remove his own garb. After battling with a strap, still unbroken, for nearly a minute, Gnochi was able to peal the tanned hide from his skin. He pulled a shift over his head and was turning back to Cleo when he imagined he saw her eyes dart down to the lamp-lit book on her lap as though she had been watching him. He shook his head, figuring it to be the shadows flickering off her face.

  “Alright, lights out. Dorothea strikes me as one who will want to get an early start.” Gnochi settled with his poncho balled under his neck. “Good night, Cleo.”

  Cleo blew the tiny flame out and stretched out on the cot. After a moment, she whispered, “Good night.”

  Chapter 23

  Even though Gnochi expected it, waking up to find Cleo resting on his arm still surprised him. A quick glance to the curtained window and the streams of morning light peaking around the edges told him that he had about an hour before the sun breached the eastern horizon.

  The slight sounds of a camp bustling in preparation for travel were muffled by the wooden wagon’s sturdy frame, but they crawled to his ears nonetheless. His shirt was warm where Cleo’s nose rested, an
d he felt her slight breaths through the coarse fabric. He contemplated stopping the habit every morning he awoke to her head on his arm, but he feared the nightmares would return if she left. He shook his head, knowing that he would be unable to rely on Cleo to guard his dreams forever. He knew that he would have to face his grief, but he decided that he could afford a few more restful nights.

  He sat up, smacking the crown of his head into the underside of their table. The hiss from his mouth did not rouse Cleo, so he sucked in the pain. He bent over and cupped her small frame in his arms, then carried her to their shared cot and placed her as one would an child, making sure to tuck the poncho under her chin. If he was speaking frankly, he missed wearing it, but he also knew that it was better served keeping his companion warm and helping to disguise any curves.

  Gnochi eased himself out of the wagon and tensed as the morning chill embraced him in a hearty vice. Jutting from the first step down to the cold earth was a scrap of paper pinned by a knife. After looking to see if he was being watched, he stooped, retrieving the knife and paper. He prepared his eyes to read the note but was surprised to see one lone letter marking the otherwise unblemished page: ‘Z.’ He tucked the paper into his front pocket, slipped the knife into the top of his boot, its rough leather hilt sat flush with his calf, and then made his way over to Nettles, who he spied working over a cast iron pot wider than her shoulders.

  The cook strained as she stirred the thick broth. Thin veins pushed free from her loose skin yet hugged tight to her toned muscles. Her hands, powdered from kneading out the day’s bread, gripped the wooden ladle with more callouses than a seasoned knight or artisan.