The Legend of El Shashi

by Marc Secchia

  With what tiny portion of lillia that remained to me, I righted that wound.

  And then a strange thing happened, which I had never noticed before. As I healed myself, I sensed a ripple pass along that impossibly tenuous connection back to the Wurm, wherever it lay. I felt the beast stir. Even at such a great distance? I knew we were linked. It had been so for more anna than I cared to remember. But this day I was struck with a new insight.

  Wonderingly, I dredged up a little more and used it to soothe several of the deeper scrapes upon my body, gained in the caverns beneath Hollybrook. This time, I observed with my utmost attention the Wurm’s response. Was I healing the creature? Was Jyla’s Web of Sulangi multiplying my strength into the creature? A drop here; a humungous wallop there?

  I found myself smiling a madman’s grin.

  “Try this, Jyla! With fondest regards from El Shashi.”

  I know not what possessed me, nor can I describe it as other than this: I emptied myself into myself. Now it was as though I had released a firebolt back into the Wurm. Ripples washed within me and over me. I knew the creature roared, blasting the clouds with its overheated breath. I knew the moment it dived underground. I suppose I imagined the earth trembling all the way to where I stood, half a continent away, although that was physically impossible.

  I had rescued my nemesis. Torn it away from the Sorceress.

  Now, the Wurm was coming for me.

  Chapter 29: Running Home

  Home is the hearth,

  Warming both body and heart,

  For story and friends,

  And children upon my knee.

  Omar Saymarson: After My Travels I Rest

  Given I had entered the seventy-ninth anna of my life, mark my words, should I be forgiven a modicum of complacency?

  I thought the Wurm far distant. I had not slept in eight days.

  The eventide was chill and the snow crunched beneath my boots, a delicate crust easily crushed, sign of a freezing night to come. My fingers and toes began to tingle, as if the life driven within by the cold had now returned to my limbs and extremities. The feeling reminded me suddenly of Chiliz and how I had come upon her in the makh of her extremity, struck down by the plague P’dáronï of Armittal taught me was called smallpox. Had Maikal ever found her again? And what of the jerlak lord I had treated? Did Thurbarak, the white thundering mountain, still roam the lands?

  As eventide drew toward full darkness, I happened upon a cosy wayside inn but a stone’s throw north of Herish Town, whose craftsmen produce the finest pipes and flutes in the Fiefdoms. At least, as I leaned upon the counter to spend a portion of Sherik’s coin upon a dark, earthy beer much favoured by the Hakooi, which is so rich and thick and spicy it makes almost for a meal in its own right, that is what the innkeeper averred. He was, as the saying goes, fishing.

  “A Solburn Brother, eh?” he roared cheerfully, alerting half the inn to my presence. “You’s welcome in Mata’s name!”

  “Ay,” said I, thinking that by my mark, given the tenderness with which Sherik had handled Lailla and her children, he might not remain Brother Sherik for much longer. Why did that bother me? Did it? I peered into the depths of my quoph, and found myself taken aback by a wash of Mata’s peace. Truly told?

  I needed to return to Imbi Village. But not too soon. My route should take me not far past it, for had I been able to fly, I could have traversed the Lyrn Massif to the east and dropped almost directly atop the village. Instead, I must perforce travel some sixty leagues north before reaching Wrybreath Pass, almost touching the tiny pinprick of a Fiefdom called Finstrel, before I would be able to turn east to enter Roymere, that sleeping giant which dwarfed all other Fiefdoms.

  “Will you work for your boon?”

  “I’ve no medicaments.”

  “We’ve a bag left by our athocary, Jerbis, who passed into Mata’s service last anna,” pressed the innkeeper. “Come, it’s a Mataboon you’re here, good Brother. Let us do what is right.”

  I nodded–sagely, I hoped, “Ay then. A bargain well made.”

  The innkeeper busied himself keeping me busy.

  I, with an inner eye turned toward my connection with the Wurm, set about dealing with a host of common complaints–gout, rheumatism, cataracts, menopause, four ingrown toenails, and a broken wrist, all before my meal. After, I performed several tooth extractions, treated an infected eye, dealt with a case of infertility, a canker of the spleen and another of the breast, and many more maladies besides. Truly told, did I not enjoy my work? Few things satisfied me as well as a growth set right, an ulcer treated, sight restored, or a bone set straight and cleanly splinted. It accorded me rare pleasure to employ the skills Mata gave me.

  Or was that Jyla’s handiwork?

  I wondered: had Jyla ever intended for me to have healing power? What had she intended before the blue condor intervened? Surely not to be my benefactress! Was the condor Mata’s sign that something more had been planned for my life, from the first?

  As I worked steadily, and the long, slow link with the Wurm pulsed equally steadily, I grasped for the first time that it was not only my selfishness which fed the Wurm–destructive as I had been over the anna. Every healing fed it lillia. Every touch strengthened the beast more. My hands laboured under a strange kind of hypnosis as this idea worked its way into my brain. Dear sweet Mata! My acts of goodness nourished the Wurm, as though it were some ghastly infant sucking at the teat of my life?

  The word which kept hammering my conscience was perverse. It was nought but perverse that what Mata worked for good, Jyla should supplant for evil!

  Unless I used the power first.

  Perhaps I only felt it now, I reasoned, because at each failure the curse doubled. Double the penalty. Each summoning of the Wurm acted as a kind of multiplier–this I understood from Amal and Eliyan’s too-brief tutoring in the ways of the Web of Sulangi. If I kept doubling the effect … I bit my lip–wrenched a tooth free with the pliers and set it aside–how many times had I summoned the Wurm? Eight times? Ten? During the Lymarian war, I could remember at least four occasions upon which I had … six, my conscience pricked me. Six, from killing the Sybali trance-warrior to the final time, when I made my escape from Freyal and his plans for domination of the Fiefdoms.

  “Larathi!” I swore under my breath, despite having taken a Solburn vow never to let an unclean word pass my lips. I have a trader’s grasp of numbers. How common, the old joke: that if a trader should double his profits every day, starting with just one brass terl, how many days would it take him to become drown in an ocean of terls? Precious few.

  By my grephe, what an ill thought!

  But Eliyan claimed a Web of Sulangi was by its very nature, self-limiting. How had Jyla overcome that problem? Because the Wurm was uncontainable, immeasurable, a force as elemental as those which shaped the oceans and the mountains themselves. And even this force had failed to break the Banishment?

  Perhaps force was not what was required. “Then what, Janos?” I asked the heavens. “Then what? What did you bury within my quoph? Am I truly the key?”

  At length, late in the eventide, the press thinned and the innkeeper offered me a warm bed for the night. I could not resist. I slept a depthless sleep.

  I awoke to the aftermath of a dream I could not possibly have had. A knife cutting me from my dying mother’s womb. The first flash of light upon my eyes; the burn of breath in my lungs, the horror of not passing through the birth canal, but being wrenched untimely from the safe warmth of the womb into a cold, unfeeling world.

  I awoke tasting my own blood.

  I awoke to perfect clarity, shifting from sleep as deep as the grave to full, alert wakefulness quicker than the beat of a hummingbird’s wing.

  The sound of my panting was the only sound in the world. The rest was a pre-dawn so cold that even the sounds of animals and night birds seemed frozen into stillness. A deadly serenity, I realised, rising from my pallet to draw aside the drapes.

&
nbsp; Truly told, somehow I sensed what I would see.

  The tiny window of my chamber cased a view over the whitened fields to the western horizon. I saw a bank of clouds hanging there, obscuring the stars from north to south, rising perhaps to the height of a league above the ground. The tops of the clouds were bathed in gentle moonlight, a delicate effulgence utterly at odds with the midnight-blue underbelly of that cloudbank, ignited as I watched by a succession of thin yet unbearably bright threads of lightning–more strikes than I could count, even in the brief breaths my eyes lingered upon this phenomenon.

  I crashed to my knees, scrabbling like a lyom pecking at corn as I collected together my meagre belongings. The boots were an imperfect fit–they would torture me before the makh was out, I knew from long experience.

  The front door was locked and bolted, but I saw lamplight in the kitchen. Praise Mata, the cook was already kneading the dough for the day’s roundel sweetbreads. I prevailed upon him for a few supplies, brushed aside his questions with a lie about Solburn Brothers praying in the early makh, and hit the icy road. No way, if I could help it, was I bringing the Wurm’s devastation upon these good people.

  The Wurm approached from the northwest, I judged. My path led due north. Unless I chose to brave the snowbound Lyrn Mountains. My eyes tripped across the nearby peaks, knowing what lay beyond: an impassable cliff-face many trins high, barrier for no bird but barrier aplenty for El Shashi. Suicide, truly told. A fool’s choice. The first pass lay thirty leagues north, and Sherik spoke a true word when he said that would be impassable too.

  So I must run toward the Wurm. Speaking of the choices of fools!

  My boots thudded steadily on the cobbled road. After a short time I took to the grassy verge, which was slightly the less slippery option.

  Ay, did I presume to judge Lenbis? Monster that he was? What father would not do the same, I asked myself? I did right by Lailla. Also by my grandchildren. And, Mata curse him, did Lenbis not deserve far worse? Father Yatak would not have agreed. I thrust that thought from me as though it were a drunken beggar who had accosted me in the marketplace. What my heart needed was a good burn, a space for the hatred to flower …

  ‘Curse you, Lenbis,’ spoke my boots. Four strides. And later, ‘Curse you, Jyla.’ Another four strides. And another, and another … as for Janos, I knew what he would have said. ‘Do not mistake hatred for strength, Arlak. True strength is found in forgiveness.’

  How many anna had hatred not been the coin of my heart, and where had it led me? To the annihilation of Bralitak Crossing. To the destruction of the madman Sathak and a stampede which killed so many in Sillbrook Town. Now, should hatred lead me yonder?

  Man was not made to run in boots. As I shook the dust of the long leagues off my feet that morn, through noontide into eventide, the chafing upon my ankles and toes grew ever more intolerable. I accepted it as a punishment. Every hint of pain should remind me to never, ever again, commit an act that would summon the Wurm. Through the long makh of the darkness I ran–the seven makh of darkness from Rains through Alldark Week to Thawing, which would shorten to five by Highsun, in a miserable drizzle that obscured any sign of the Wurm’s approach. By the morn following my nose was trained eastward like a hound on the scent. But I needed no reminding. The Wurm was out there, and it was drawing closer.

  As I pounded down a long slope out of Wrybreath Pass into the gentle foothills, a forest of bragazzar, lyrithbark, and ulinbarb closed about the road as though intent on strangling it in an overabundance of vegetation. I smelled the herb sathic upon the breeze. My quoph sighed and declared, ‘That is the smell of home.’

  What strangeness to pause to pick a handful the last of the season’s loganberries from the wayside and stuff my stomach full of their sweetness. My legs twitched as though I should still be running. I dipped my head into a small brook, which greatly refreshed me. I healed my feet and legs, eased the tiredness from my muscles, and stretched my legs upon the stone-paved road. I passed several traders asleep in their wains beside the road, and watched Suthauk bend his soft glow upon the heads of the forest giants.

  A glance behind, however, showed storm clouds gathering over the peaks behind me.

  I had set a bruising pace the whole of the previous day, afeared of intersecting the Wurm’s path. Now I tried to ease my stride, not least to save my thighs and knees.

  After noontide I left in my wake the road I would have taken southward to Solburn Monastery and eventually Imbi Village, seventy or more leagues beyond that, and I nibbled upon the last of my bread and tried not to think upon the days I had yet to run. I thought much upon my family. Were they safe in the village? Had Jyla forgotten them? What would my grandchildren be doing right now? It must have been passing strange for the travellers upon the road that day to see a Solburn Brother jogging past them. Monks are not ordinarily in any hurry!

  The mind was not lost in the simple act of running. Once the thudding of my feet and the rasping of breath faded into the background, my mind could soar unfettered to places unimagined. My quoph reflected upon the past. I had makh to miss Janos, to wonder if my father were still alive, to dream of a reunion with P’dáronï. I was running away from her. League by league, I left Eldoria to the rear. That life seemed but a pipe-dream now, the ways of the Eldrik a fantasy of soulless beauty, and my love for an Armittalese slave, an aberration that could not possibly survive the many, many anna of our separation.

  Ay, there was ample opportunity for despair to force its cold roots into my quoph, and for Jyla’s cursed face to haunt my waking visions.

  Sometimes I felt, in the aching of joints and muscles caused by makh upon makh of running, as though I was the vessel that carried the pains of the world. Ay, truly told, my pain was small compared to the anguish of many. I wondered: Why did Mata create the human form so frail? And why did we suffer so? The Hassutla of Herliki had it right when she asked, ‘Why do we live?’ From inception, even within the womb, life was set to struggle, to strive, and to fight against the odds. The Solburn Brothers told me one in four conceptions results in a miscarriage. Perhaps many more go unreported. And I speak not of stillbirth, that silent stealer of lives. So many, many women silently suffered this grief–let alone a host of others I could name, names weightier even than my own. Moreover, should I rescue a child destined for death, was I committing a crime against Mata’s will? Interrupting the natural order of life? I stood in the breach, as it were, battling the ceaseless, overwhelming tides of death–Ulim’s hordes and their endless harvest of sorrow. In the end, did it matter that I saved one more life? Today? Healing granted but a brief abeyance, for in the end, all men die. Whether this anna or next, what does it matter against the great tide of history?

  How should I counsel the bereaved and the broken?

  Somehow, in ways I did not fully comprehend, it mattered to me. Each and every soul succoured, mattered. Was this to atone for my guilt? Or did I sense greater forces at work? Perhaps Arlak Sorlakson should have been a yammarik–then, perhaps, he might have gained understanding.

  Ever eastward I forged, up and across the high, still moors of western Roymere, home to many treacherous bogs, and in the warmer seasons, such a population of biting flies and insects as would drive a man insane. Thereafter, I followed the road’s curve a little northward around the rockwood and lurmint forests of Roymere’s interior for a further two days and a night, until I came to the brow of a small ridge that marked the outskirts of Hadla’s Skirts.

  Ay, I could almost smell my birthplace from here.

  As if preparing for my arrival, the weather cleared from the east. There, far over the dark heads of the immense forest, I at last laid eyes upon the serrated wall of the Yuthiyan Mountains, with its distinctive mauve patches of fromite that winked the sunlight back to my eager gaze.

  How long exactly I stood stock-still, bursting with awe and longing, I know not, but at length I became aware of a faint trembling of the ground beneath my feet. I whirled. Narrowed
my eyes, searching. A cool wind ruffled my simple linen shirt, making it stick to my perspiring skin, and a drop of rain struck the top of my head. The clouds were overtaking me, I realised. And there, not half a league behind, I beheld a sight that stuck a spear of fear into my belly: the ground heaving, cracking open exactly as though a mole were carving its run beneath the lawn of a Hassutl’s mansion; only, these cracks rent trees from their footings and cast house-sized boulders aside as though they were grains of sand.

  The Wurm had grown.

  It was carving its own road beneath Roymere, a road so huge–I could hardly guess, at this distance, perhaps sixty or seventy paces wide? I scratched my stubble and willed my eyes back into their sockets. Flashes of lightning and the dull, distant growling of thunder marked the Wurm’s progress. Whether that was the earth cracking asunder or the clouds speaking, I knew not.

  But I knew I was not about to stay put and find out.

  Worse, I saw a caravan of traders ahead of me upon the road. The Wurm would not wait for them either. That decided me at once–if possible, I must run a little aside of the road, which thankfully wound its way along the periphery of Hadla’s Skirts rather than diving within, for nought but a snake could have made swift passage within that ferocious, bramble-ridden tangle. So I directed my boots to the meadows. I wound my way, as though I were indeed a snake, between clumps of ulinbarb and bragazzar trees and the towering, ancient rockwoods, which soared to a height of a trin and a half–a hundred and fifty paces.

  Twice, three times I was forced to turn back to the road as impassable ravines yawned before me. I hoped the Wurm would not destroy the precious bridges. Truly told, I had left worse legacies scattered about the Fiefdoms. I had no desire to add another.

  “I must cross now!”

  The Ferryman crossed his arms and scowled up at me. “Brother or none, monk or none, you can wait like the rest. The river’s high and I’m not crossing that torrent for one man.”