Navarin, Thunder and Shade

by William Stafford

  “Can you stand, boy?”

  “I don’t know, sir.” Broad accepted the man’s hand and struggled to get to his feet. The man, his face a mask of concern, assisted the boy.

  “We must get some hot food inside you,” the man smiled. “And get those clothes of yours cleaned, eh?”

  “Thank you, sir; I don’t want to be any trouble, sir.”

  “It’s a pleasure, my boy!” laughed the man. He steered Broad away from the market stalls and led him along a path to his house. Broad felt his conscience pinch him like a stitch in his side. The man was so kindly and generous and -

  “Come and sit on my knee, boy, so I may comb your hair.”

  Broad, fresh from a bath and wrapped in towels, demurred. “I just want my clothes, sir, and to get on my way. My folks will be worried something terrible, sir.”

  “Oh, really?” The man’s eyebrows leapt up. “You know and I know you’re nothing but a runaway and a thief. Your clothes are drying on the line. Now come here, before your hair becomes knotted.”

  He reached out, his hand darting like a striking snake, and seized Broad by the wrist. “Your folks aren’t missing you. They’re probably rejoicing you have gone.”

  “No!” Broad cried for a number of reasons. He struggled to get free but the man pulled him closer.

  “You’re a pretty thing when you’re clean,” the man leered. “Give me a kiss.” He tilted his cheek and pursed his lips.

  Broad was horrified. There was no way he was going to kiss a man who wasn’t his father. Desperate, he cast around looking for something - anything - that might help. There was nothing. He scratched the man’s face, drawing blood.

  “You little-” The man cried in surprise, releasing Broad’s wrist. The boy backed away. The man lunged at him; Broad shrieked and threw a chair. It glanced off the man’s shoulder. He grabbed the towel; Broad held onto it. It was all that was between his bare skin and the man’s grasping fingers.

  “Ungrateful little turd,” the man snarled. “You owe me. For the meal, for the hot water, for saving you from those angry stall keepers. You owe me!”

  “No!” cried Broad, seeking an escape route. The man was between him and the door. Broad was backing into a corner. Through the window he glimpsed his clothes, flapping on a washing line. Where was Shade? Was he still in the shirt pocket?

  The answer was no. A plume of smoke coalesced behind the man’s back. Shade’s face, flickering and unstable, appeared. He nodded at Broad.

  “Let him go...” Shade’s voice was weak but distinct enough. The man spun around and was startled to see a boy-shaped mist in front of him. Shade winked and it was the last thing the man saw before he toppled face down on the floor. Broad stood over him, holding the remains of the chair he had smashed over the man’s head.

  “Is he...?” Broad couldn’t look.

  “If you mean dead, no. If you mean bleeding, yes,” Shade swooped over the man.

  “We’ve got to go!” Broad urged. “Before somebody comes.”

  Shade nodded at the window. “Go and get dressed,” he said flatly. “I’ll finish up in here.”

  Broad did as he was told. The shirt and breeches were still a little damp but at least they no longer stank like a compost heap having a bad day. His boots too had been cleaned and were pegged up to air out in the breeze. By the time he was dressed again, Shade was beside him, looking fuller and more solid than he had in days.

  “That’s better,” said Shade with a grin. “What a pervert! The things he was going to do to you!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, you don’t want to know!”

  “No, I don’t. I mean how do you know?”

  Shade shrugged. “It comes with the feeding, I suppose. You get to see their thoughts.”

  Broad gaped. “You ate him?”

  “I wouldn’t say ‘ate’ exactly,” said Shade with more nonchalance than Broad was comfortable with. “I prefer ‘feeding’. It’s not like I drank his blood or took a bite out of his flesh. Ugh.” He shuddered in disgust.

  “But you’re better now; I suppose that’s the main thing.”

  “We can talk about it later. If you like. Right now, we have to get out of this place. The man had neighbours and maybe even friends.”

  “I don’t know about friends!” Broad shivered and not only from his damp clothes.

  “Come on,” said Shade. “It’s too bright out here.”

  They ducked off the road and into the trees. Shade was ebullient, invigorated by his feed but he was finding the daylight hurt his eyes and made it difficult to keep his shape.

  “It’s because I’ve fed,” he explained. “I’m fully fledged now. My people prefer the night. We can be invisible in the shadows; it makes us better hunters.”

  Broad was uncomfortable to say the least. “I don’t like it,” he said. “We can’t go around killing people. It’s wrong; everybody knows that.”

  Shade held up his hands. “I know, I know. Killings for toy soldiers - you can just pick them up and make them fight again. But that man deserved it, Broad! He was going to kill you, you know. When he’d finished.”

  “He wasn’t!”

  “I saw it in his mind. The world’s better off without him.”

  “All right, he was a bad man. But not everyone’s like that.”

  “True. But I need to stay alive.”

  “Tell you what: you can have all the bad ones we can find. That would be all right, I should think,” said Broad.

  Shade laughed humourlessly. “How very gracious of you! You don’t know what it’s like. You can eat plants and animals and all sorts of disgusting things like that.”

  “Couldn’t you? Couldn’t you try?”

  Shade shook his head. “I’m not like you. I have no teeth, no stomach. I don’t even poop. I feed on energy, Broad. The life force as it leaves the body.”

  “Couldn’t it work with animals? Couldn’t you try that?”

  Shade thought about it. “I could give it a try, I suppose. Next time, I will.”

  “Good,” said Broad. “Now get in my pocket and I’ll find us somewhere to sleep.”

  ***

  The next settlement they came to was even more remote. With fewer people around, it was even less likely that Shade would find a candidate suitable for his feeding. He agreed to try an animal although he remembered vague and dire warnings about it from his parents when they had found him at a very young age toying with a weasel.

  “Are they poisonous, do you think?” said Broad. “Humans eat them all the time - animals, I mean, not necessarily weasels.”

  “I don’t know,” said Shade, “but there’s one way to find out.”

  They waited until the sun went down and the pasture was under the blanket of the night. Sheep were penned in an enclosure, huddling together and letting out the occasional bleat and grassy fart as they slept.

  “How are you going to do it?” Broad whispered.

  “I’m not entirely sure,” Shade admitted. “I’m hoping instinct will take over.”

  It had been different with the man. He had been rendered unconscious by a blow to the head and was teetering between life and death, making it easy for Shade to take him. But the sheep were unharmed - perhaps being asleep would be enough.

  Shade gestured to Broad to keep back lest the sleeping creatures catch wind of him and, elongating his legs, moved with exaggerated stealth toward the pen. He chose a small one near the fence; its eyes were shut and its head was resting on the neck of its neighbour - its mother perhaps? Shade told himself not to think about it; he couldn’t afford to be sentimental if he was going to survive. He concentrated on the animal’s breathing and singled out its heartbeat from among the flock. Dissolving into mist, Shade swirled over the lamb’s
head and, almost involuntarily, stretching out into one long tendril, he darted into the lamb’s ear and through its brain and nervous system.

  Broad watched from a distance, holding his breath. The lamb let out a squeak and went rigid with its eyes wide open - Broad was sure it was staring directly at him.

  Accusing me! Broad felt sick.

  Shade poured from the lamb’s other ear and reshaped himself in the air. The animal slumped, dead, held up only by the press of bodies around it. Shade floated to the ground, blinking slowly. Broad scurried over to him.

  “How was that? How do you feel?”

  Shade paid him no heed. He stared ahead, docile and blank.

  “Shade?” Broad reached out to touch his friend’s arm - the smoky mist had taken on a fluffy quality and - Broad recoiled - his friend’s features were drawn out, giving him a decidedly ovine appearance. “Shade!” Broad cried. “Speak to me!”

  Shade didn’t even blink.

  From the farmhouse at the edge of the pasture came shouts and the glow of a lantern, as though an angry firefly was approaching.

  “Come on!” Broad urged. “We’ve got to go!”

  But Shade did not move. He gave no sign of understanding a word Broad said. Broad tried to shove him but after some slight, almost woolly, resistance, his hands went right through and closed on thin air.

  “Hoi!” cried the farmer, stumbling ever closer. “Who’s there?”

  “Come on, Shade!” Broad cried. “Can’t you at least dissolve or something?”

  The lamplight was brighter now, casting one side of the farmer into shadow. Broad sprinted to the hedgerow, leaving Shade where he stood, blinking slowly and somehow absent. The farmer arrived on the spot and recoiled in terror as his lantern illuminated an eldritch figure hovering near the pen.

  “A sprite!” he cried. “Stars bless us and save us!”

  “Mehhh,” said Shade.

  “Avaunt!” the farmer commanded. “Foul spirit!”

  He hurried to the pen to conduct a swift head count. The sheep were awake and bleating their complaints. He saw the dead lamb and, cursing, rounded on the apparition. “Be gone! You’ve had one lamb but that’s your lot! I can’t afford to lose another. That’s my livelihood you’re messing with.”

  Shade wasn’t even paying attention but, behind the hedge, Broad was and his conscience was pricking him. Killing the lamb was like taking food from the farmer’s mouth or his family’s. And so farm and domesticated animals were off the menu.

  And wild ones too. Broad knew now why Shade’s kind did not feed on animals. They took on the last thoughts of their food and some of their characteristics. Shade had known what that awful man had got planned for Broad - but it had worn off, and the lamb would wear off too given time - but for now it was too late: Shade had been seen.

  The farmer took up position, guarding his livestock and not taking his eyes off the sheep-faced, boy-shaped spectre. Broad watched them both until he could no longer keep his eyes open, fight against sleep though he might.

  He woke, his head snapping upwards to find it was morning. The farmer was asleep and his snores blended with the sounds of the sheep but Shade was nowhere to be seen.

  “I’m in here,” came a whisper from Broad’s shirt pocket. “What did I get up to last night?”

  “You’re back!” Broad was delighted. He described what had happened to Shade.

  “No wonder I can taste grass.”

  “I was worried you’d be like that forever. A dumb animal.”

  “Good job it was only a little one. I won’t be doing that again.”

  “I don’t blame you,” said Broad.

  But it still left them with the original problem: how to find food for Shade.

  ***

  “We should go to prison!” said Shade. They were walking through a wood - or rather, Broad was; Shade was in his pocket.

  “We haven’t done anything,” Broad protested. “Apart from scrumping a few apples.”

  “And all the rest,” laughed Shade. “You’re hardly wasting away, are you? But I don’t mean that. If we find a prison, it will be full of men who deserve to die. It will be like a buffet.”

  “I suppose...” Broad sounded doubtful. “What if somebody’s been wrongfully accused?”

  “Oh, for crying out loud!” Shade cried out loud. “Do you want to me starve to death?”

  “No, of course not!”

  “Then you come up with a better idea.”

  “I will.”

  “Let’s have it.”

  “Let me think!”

  They carried on, in embittered silence, for a couple of miles. Broad was torn. He didn’t want to lose his friend but he couldn’t countenance the idea of Shade feeding off other people. It was monstrous. It was the stuff of nightmares.

  “Very well,” he said eventually.

  “Very well what?” said Shade.

  “I’ll take you to a prison,” Broad’s jaw was set and his young features showed a hint of the man he would become, “and I’ll leave you there.”

  “What? For how long?”

  “Forever.”

  “No!”

  “I’m sorry; I can’t go on like this, Shade. You eat people.”

  “It’s not exactly eating though, is it?”

  “They still end up dead.”

  “And so do the animals you tuck into. But somebody else does the killing for you so that makes it all right, I suppose.”

  “That’s different.”

  “I can’t see how.”

  “Well, then.”

  The silence resumed. They were out of the woods now, but only in a literal sense. A town lay ahead, circling a hill, and skirted by fortifications.

  “I bet there’s a gaol here,” said Broad. “We’ve reached the end of our road.”

  ***

  The streets of Boglund were steep and narrow, winding up the hillside to the prefect’s palace at the summit. Broad strode through the gates, whistling almost a little too nonchalantly. Among the traders coming and going, no one noticed a young boy on his own. If you act like you belong, you can go anywhere, he realised. I’m going to have to remember that if I’m to survive on my own.

  Shade had given up trying to persuade Broad to stay with him. He sulked in cold petulance in the boy’s pocket. Let the fool try to get by without me; he won’t last five minutes.

  It was market day and the square was bustling with bodies and noise. Quite a banquet, thought Shade. If I could find someone alone in a dark alley...

  “I know what you’re thinking,” said Broad. “Not here.”

  “Do you know what I’m thinking now?”

  “I don’t repeat foul language,” said Broad. “My mother always-”

  He stopped. Even thinking of his mother was too painful.

  “You’ll be all alone,” Shade pointed out.

  “Shut up,” said Broad.

  ***

  At sundown they parted without saying a word or looking back to see if the other was looking. Shade floated over the high wall of Boglund Gaol to seek a felon solitary in his cell; Broad tramped down the hill, his pride overriding his conscience for once - until he was forced to face the fact that he had nowhere to spend the night and nothing to fill his belly. The shops were closing; goods were being taken indoors. Broad seized on a stray cabbage leaf but the vegetable vendor snatched it back and told him to ‘get out of it, you miserable urchin’.

  He had the idea of going back to the woods where the foraging might prove more fruitful - fruit in the form of red and black berries, for example - but when he reached the gates they were barred for the night. No one was getting in or out of Boglund without special dispensation. I am as much a prisoner as any in the gaol, Broa
d thought with a shiver. He wrapped his arms around his chest and sought a corner or a doorway in which he could curl up for the night.

  Heat and light drew him to a shop that appeared to be open still. Clanking sounds and the smell of hot metal told the boy this was a smithy. He stood in the doorway, watching the smith, whose arms were wider than Broad’s torso, raise a heavy hammer and transport white-hot horseshoes from furnace to anvil in a pair of long-handled tongs. Broad was fascinated as the hammer beat the horseshoe into shape. When it was done, the smith plunged it into a pail of water, giving rise to a cloud of steam that reminded Broad of Shade.

  Another man approached; he had been watching from a corner, out of reach of the sparks and flames.

  “You are running late, Hoglin. The Duke shall be displeased.”

  “The Duke be hanged!” grumbled the smith. “If the Duke wants them properly made, the Duke should be pleased to wait.”

  The other man held a handkerchief to his nose and mouth. “I am willing to overlook your treasonous remarks if you finish the order in double-quick time.”

  The smith gave him a withering look. Broad observed the difference between the two: the one was all meat and muscle, his bare shoulders grimy with sweat and dirt; the other a preening fop in fancy clothes, all lace and satin and little else.

  “If you want me to finish, you ought to keep your pretty mouth shut and let me get on with it.” The smith picked up a fresh rod of metal and bent it around the nose of the anvil. The man withdrew a couple of paces.

  “Have you no apprentice to assist?”

  The blacksmith looked around in a sarcastic manner. “He died,” he said. “From asking stupid questions.”

  Before he knew what he was doing, Broad stepped over the threshold. “Excuse me, sir, but what does an apprentice do? I should like to assist.”

  The man raised an eyebrow and pouted. “There you have it. Well done, boy. The Duke shall-”

  “The Duke can go and shit up a pole,” said the smith. “You won’t do, boy; you’re too skinny.”

  “I’m stronger than I look, sir!” Broad approached the furnace. He squeezed the bellows that fanned the flames. It was a struggle but once he got started, Broad found he could pump a regular supply of air.