The Legend of El Shashi

by Marc Secchia

  When my father rose at last, his eyes were wet with tears. But he stood tall. And unbowed.

  Chapter 16: A Matter of Mercy

  Research points to an early migration of the Umarite and Eldrik tribes from the north. The Pact of Syrik in the 79th anna saw the Eldrik claim the western territories, beyond the Gulf of Erbon, while Umarites turned eastward and began to settle Hakooi, Elbarath, Chasturn and Brephat. The tribes washed up against the great mountain range of Loibrak, and for many a gantul, this was the limit of their advance. But then the First Blood-Fever plague ravaged the lands from anna 456 to 461. A linchpin of Umarik history, those dire anna saw the founding of the first Fiefdoms, the retreat of the monkish orders to remote sanctuaries such as Feelthi, Termik, and Arrakbon, wherein their power and influence, once consolidated, spread swiftly across the weakened, fledgling Fiefdoms, and the first expansion into the virgin forests that would become the demesne of Roymere.

  Of the migration, historical record is scant. Our ancestors, both Umarite and Eldrik, appear to have colluded in the destruction of all scrolleaf of that time, and even the oral histories were violently suppressed. To what end? Briefly, three common threads emerge from ulules’ conjectures–the presence of giants, a terrible cataclysm in the north, and the vast, evil magic of a being we deify as Ulim the Godslayer. In this account my quim shall not speculate on these unknowns, save to note the mystery of Umarite and Eldrik origins …

  Lorimi the Historian: Introduction to the Umarite Histories (1st Scrolleaf)

  During the precious few makh we dared further, Orik convinced me to start my search at the Mystic Library in Herliki.

  It lies eight hundred and fifty leagues west of Telmak Lodge, but that hardly tells the tale. It is a migration worthy of the hardy laughing-swallow. Crossing the great forested breadth of Roymere, the traveller must scale the high passes of the Loibrak Range that divides Roymere from northern Elbarath and marks the northerly border of Hakooi all the way to the Gulf of Erbon, and pass through the broad, rich pastures and riverine lowlands of Hakooi to the coast, crossing many great rivers on the way.

  On the strength of his word, my boots tramped every last trin. A whole anna of my life thus consumed. I had to work my passage–for a man must eat–and though I made every enquiry after my family with weary fortitude, not a crumb of hope fell from Mata’s table.

  I wondered, of the myriad lives I touched in passing, how many concealed such a wounding grief as mine? People hide their true selves as behind a stagesmith’s mask. Who would know by sight alone the barren woman, the man who lost his wife to a tygar, the family riven by the violence of a father always too deep in his cups? Even my astute eye, and an ever-sharpening sense of grephe, failed too often, and–Mata forgive me–how many people had El Shashi simply swept by, not even seen … and no amount of mining those paragons of local gossip, the ulules, could show me all.

  My hands touched so few.

  How had Jyla condensed the powers of a deity into flesh as weak as any other man? A man yoked to the unceasing demands of seething humanity, like a cart heavy-laden dragged uphill by a half-lame jatha. Too many conditions, too much hurt, too much suffering … I wanted to scream: ‘Curse you, Jyla! Lift this curse from me!’

  Perhaps it was Mata’s mirror, as the yammariks put it, which showed me how far I had withdrawn from my patients. I was growing cold of quoph, and uncaring, for the accumulated weight of their pain would otherwise slay me.

  During my great journey, the mirror first became apparent in the hidden valleys of Loibrak.

  I would not even have known of this route, save that a man I healed from the bite of a cross-backed adder gifted me an excellent map–compiled by the Feelthi monastic order, nicknamed the ‘Footloose Monks’–an eclectic band of wandering cartographers hailing from the six-hundred anna old fortress of Feelthi. As I followed the marked route deeper and deeper into the thickly-forested Loibrak foothills, I came at length to Soluk Valley, home to the fabled Soluk Mines, the only known source of the fabulous, costly gemstone known as Mataflower. The exact location of the mines has been a secret passed down from father to son for gantuls.

  The approach to Soluk Village meandered through diminutive but lush green fields, which lapped as a verdant pond up against precipitous fern-trailed cliffs to either side, themselves carpeted with turquoise-flowered olimoss, on a path hugging the banks of a burbling stream. At friendly intervals, small arched footbridges helped the traveller from one side to the other without need to soak his boots. Russet jatha dotted the knee-high sward, chewing their cud philosophically, while twittering purple jathafinches picked ticks and other parasites from the deep folds of their hide. Here I cast myself at the bole of a gnarled bragazzar, and among its roots spent several makh cooling my quoph.

  My children played in my memory. Rubiny kissed me. I wept.

  At length, travelling on, I came to a place where the broad-shouldered cliffs drew apart, and here in the thrice-cleft conjunction of two further ravines, I found Soluk Village.

  I was greeted by a pretty collection of slate-roofed wooden cottages literally besieged by flower beds, flower boxes, wooden trellises festooned with–ay–more flowers, window boxes filled to overflowing with life and colour, flower pots, flower barrels … everywhere the eye turned, a riot of gay flowers to please the eye and gladden the heart. The paths winding between the cottages had been swept religiously. Hardly a pebble was out of place.

  First I marked this, I wondered at their single-minded devotion to beauty. To me it had the subtlety of a hammer-blow which shapes metal in upon the anvil. But then my eye fell upon a most unfavourable plot, to the left of the beautiful cottages, whereupon stood a dozen or so rude huts abutted by a veritable forest of tall thistles, and a fronted by a mossy carpet spotted with liplin flowers. To this sight my quoph leaned. So there I went.

  Mark my words, during the ten days of my stay in Soluk Village, I found that the villagers suffered from a baffling array of maladies, ranging from hair and teeth loss in young men, to a shocking diversity of birth defects that were so pervasive in a small village population it was hard to spy a healthy man, woman, or child. Never before or again have I observed the like. Twisted or missing limbs, deformities, a boy with two heads, cleft palates … I remember it as though the day were yesterday, so seared are those images in my memory.

  Later, I would wonder if this marked the cost of mining the Mataflower.

  But it was a man called Torl, who I discovered in the last and meanest hut, whose plight smote my detachment such a prodigious blow, that I can scarce recall him without tears.

  I called from without his hut, but heard no response. So I dusted my boots loudly. Ducking beneath the lintel, I advanced into a low, dim room until I barked my shins against a low stool. I heard a stirring at my right hand. My eyes began to adjust to the gloom. I made out a tall, thin man lying abed on a rough wooden cot, and beside him on a pillow what I thought to be a salcat, or some other animal, sleeping beside his head.

  The animal moved. It gurgled.

  It took me a long, long moment to realise that the man had just spoken to me. I understood not a word. He tried to speak again. I leaned closer.

  Mata have mercy! My eyes fixated themselves on his lips with a grim absorption. Each resembled a Hakooi swamp leech–easily the size of my hand, black and grossly swollen, and completely in the wrong place, as if his entire face had slid sideways and downward from his head. The strange appendages writhed and something with the cadence of speech emerged. But I stood frozen in place as if Ulim himself had pinned me with his dread spear of ice. Was that his tongue bulging out … Ulim’s Hounds! That misshapen slash was his mouth? No animal … at once I realised my mistake and nearly gagged. I realised there was a bulbous mass of flesh drooping across the pillow next to him, a facial tumour, by leagues the worst I had ever seen. His eyes! Lolling in sockets distended by a weight of hanging flesh. Frightened. Helpless. Desperate. His whole face … dear Mata … was ther
e a nose buried in that lumpen pancake of flesh? Could he even lift his head? How did this man yet live?

  Most likely by the pity of his neighbours.

  I swallowed. This is was no mere road beyond my experience; this was beyond the next Fiefdom! I wanted to turn and run straight out of the doorway, but a strange force stayed my feet. I stood rooted, incapable of speech, while my heart squeezed within to the point of torture. I prayed, ‘Dear Mata, if you want me to heal this man, then grant me the wisdom of the divine!’

  At once, breath filled my throat and I was able to rasp, “Friend, I am the man called El Shashi. May I offer … healing?”

  Slow and inevitable, like the flaming of dawn after the legendary hundred-anna night called Ulim’s Despond, was the dawning of hope in this man’s quoph.

  And that is when I began to cry.

  Three days I laboured over this man–Torl was his name–in sweat and in tears. The first day, two neighbours stopped to inquire as to my business there. By the third eventide, the whole village stood waiting outside his door.

  “I want to see the sun,” said Torl.

  I raised his arm over my shoulders and virtually carried him to the door. After fifteen bedridden anna, there was no strength left in his legs.

  As we passed beneath the lintel, his whole body began to shake. There was a hush in the crowd. Torl turned his face to the yellow sun, Suthauk–for no man can look Belion, or whitesun, full in the face and not suffer blindness–and for a long time he stood there, motionless, just bathing in the light and warmth. His visage, never handsome by the common standard, appeared gilded in glory beneath Suthauk’s approving eye. It was a holy moment. Then he opened his eyes, and quietly regarded his friends and neighbours.

  “This man,” he declared, “has returned life to me.”

  Ay, how I laughed with Torl and his neighbours. Such joy! A font, a wellspring of unadulterated delight to break my stone heart! All I had accomplished was to restore his face to how it should be. It had taken me great labour to find the right form and shape of it, hidden by the tumour’s aggressive distortions.

  But what satisfying labour!

  I turned to the people. “Thank Mata, not me. Now, who’s next?”

  I was extracting a rotten tooth at Olimak Lodge, on the outskirts of Hoil Town, in the poor quarter where an itinerant athocary such as I could yet afford lodgings, when I heard a door crash open and woman scream. A man shouted, “Help! Somebody help!”

  When she screamed again I recognised the wail of a woman suffering the pangs of childbirth, which are unlike any pain a man will experience in his lifetime. Why should Mata give it to women to suffer so, I know not, but I knew at once by the tone of her cry that she was not merely in pain, but in trouble.

  I held up in my pliers a bloody tooth for my patient to examine. “Here’s what was causing your pain. Now, I must go.”

  The elderly woman glared at me. “Wait–what is the charge?”

  “No charge,” said I, stuffing the tool back into my pouch.

  She clung to my arm with surprising force. “If you’re considering helping that woman, stop!”

  “Why?”

  “It is Mata’s hand of judgement upon that prostitute and her bastard whelp,” averred the woman, not relinquishing her grip. “You should not interfere or you will be cursed too!”

  The other woman screamed again. And I am unable to bear suffering. It cuts me to my quoph. I snarled, “I do not share your crazy Elbarath religion, old woman!” I had heard of this belief, common to the Elbarath foothills, but had not encountered it in person. I threw off her hand. “I don’t care who she is, she needs help.”

  I tried to edge past her, but the old woman surged to her feet, blocking my path. Next moment she struck me across the brow with her cane! I put hand to my forehead, feeling a gash there, and stared stupidly at her. “You hit me.”

  “I’ll do that and worse!”

  So help me, I am a rational and educated man, but the hard point of my shoulder sent that old woman spinning and I felt a pang of vicious satisfaction at the deed.

  I charged out of the inn, casting about for the source of the screams. No-one answered my cries. I shouted at a passer-by and shook another by the shoulders, but they offered no aid.

  But the man kept bellowing, and thus I found my way around the back of a line of houses to a small carpenter’s workshop. Here I found Falak, his two children, and his startlingly pregnant wife, Izella.

  “I’m an athocary!” I flung at the carpenter as I stormed the ladder up to his house.

  “She’s too early!” he cried back. “Too early!”

  The carpenter–a vast tygar of a man–flung open his front door, built in the Elbarath style where craftsmen abide above their place of work. Taking my arm, he heaved me bodily into the front room.

  “The bedroom! She’s bleeding!”

  My hurried assessment of the situation took in a blood-soaked mass of bedding, an exhausted, half-naked and clearly hurting woman, and two small, very frightened faces peering down from a loft room above the bedroom. Dropping my pouch at once, I placed my hands upon her abdomen.

  “Placenta over the birth canal,” I muttered.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Hush.” I listened deeper. “The babe yet lives.”

  “Mata be praised!”

  “Ay. Now, fetch me linens and warm water. Woman, listen to me–”

  “Izella!” she gasped.

  “Izella, I am El Shashi. You and your baby will be safe. You need to trust me. I’m going to open your belly. You will feel little. And then I will heal you again.”

  She shrieked, “Oh, Falak! Oh! Oh!”

  Time was short. The huge carpenter, although clearly troubled to the core of his quoph, gave me a curt nod. I dove into my bag and plucked out my sharpest scalpel. “Hold on.”

  Other athocaries section infants in this manner when the woman’s life is endangered, but my advantage was that I could stanch the wound at once, and literally feel my way through the layers of skin, muscle and tissue with my power–and too, calm baby and mother with a touch. In moments, I had her laid open near the navel and reached within her belly.

  “Here she is,” muttered I, quickly passing a vernix-covered, squalling newborn to her mother. Eh? What? I grinned at the parents. “Surprise! Here, look … another babe!”

  “A boy,” Falak exulted. “Twins! Mata is truly good.”

  I hunkered back on my haunches, resting my wrists on my knees to prevent the blood from staining my burnoose. “Congratulations! Twins are a gift indeed. Two beautiful babes.”

  They did not hear me, I own. The carpenter sat beside his beaming wife, helping her hold the tiny babes to her breast. Twins are often early to enter the world. I should have known by the size of her. I had best close Izella up before she lost any more blood, or it would soon go ill with her.

  I laid my hands upon Izella once more and began to knit the flesh back into place. Then I felt something. Oh, larathi, I felt more indeed! Slowly, I reached one more time through the gash into her womb. There, right near the top, as if hiding from our regard, I found what I had feared. With great care, I reluctantly drew it out.

  Izella and Falak gasped in unison.

  “Hold out your hands.”

  Falak, as if in a dream, rose from the bed and cupped his hands to accept the third babe from me. Triplets! A vanishingly rare phenomenon in the Fiefdoms. This little scrap of humanity was no bigger than a newborn lumdog pup in his hands. His great, work-roughened palms wholly engulfed her, for she was smaller than the other two, and her colour appeared blue-tinged and lifeless. My questing fingers touched her clammy skin. Sometimes one twin will appear to have fed upon the other like a parasite, truly told, or one will live while the other perishes. But this was my first experience of triplets.

  “I’m afraid she isn’t breathing,” I advised.

  But even as I spoke, I thought I heard Janos’ voice in my ear. ‘Life ca
n be deceptive, Arlak. It is much more resilient than you think. It clings–and truly told, even thrives, where least expected. Can we know its nascent spark? Who can know when that spark departs the mortal vessel for the afterlife?’

  ‘Janos, is it possible to raise the dead?’

  Ay, I remembered that conversation well–late one Alldark evening, after a blizzard had reduced Yarabi Vale to a snowbound trap. ‘Truly told, solûm tï mik, that is a question for the yammariks or for Mata Herself. But know this: magic is born of life, not death. One day, when you become a father yourself, you will know there is magic in that first cry of a newborn infant. But there are legends which say that Ulim’s way is the magic of dying, and the capture of souls for his foul purposes.’

  I stirred uneasily at his sombre mien. ‘But the Gods are just a legend, Janos. Ulim lives only in ulules’ tales–’

  ‘Hush! Don’t ever say that! Don’t even think it. Until you have observed the secret rites of the Ulitrists, do try to refrain from braying your lack of knowledge to the world.’

  Ay, not our first clash. But with his scorn ringing in my ears, I laid my hand upon the babe in the carpenter’s hands and tried to probe for some sign of life, however dimly it might burn. I bowed my head, closed my eyes, and willed the power forth. Tiny heart, beat. Lungs, breathe. Mind … hear my call. Mata, I beseech you …

  She was so far gone, I gave up hope in the long waiting. I was unable to pray more, to think further than this: that if Mata was a lover of life, then she might succour this poor babe from the steps of Ulim’s throne and return her immortal quoph to the realms of mortal people. I felt nought in her flesh that should give me hope.

  Not a glimmer.

  Suddenly … I felt the heart flutter. Now her eyelids trembled.

  I gave a cry of amazement!

  And then I caught the babe deftly as the giant carpenter measured his length upon the floor in a dead faint. Now I would have to mend his head too.

  Chapter 17: Herliki Free Fiefdom