The Legend of El Shashi

by Marc Secchia

  Recalling my Roymerian manners, rusty from anna of disuse, I signed the full buskal of pleading. “Please, Ferryman. The matter is urgent.”

  Urgent, as in less than a quarter-makh behind me. All that fooling with the ravines, I berated myself angrily. Cutting back and forth had cost me time. Trying to keep the Wurm off the road and away from a few farmsteads! Had I run straight and true, the Wurm would not be sniffing my scent right now.

  “What make you of the weather, Ferryman?”

  “More rain in a season full of Rains,” said he. “What does it matter?”

  How would I convince this man? Threaten him? He did not seem the type to be threatened by the likes of me. Try to explain? There was no time. Swim the river? I’d turn into an icicle before I reached the halfway mark. Never mind being swept onto the rocks below the ford. This was the Ry-Breen Crossing, near where my parents had been killed all those anna ago. Exercise my fist upon the point of his jaw? Ay.

  I dropped him with a dyndigit-perfect right cross. I’d learned this technique in the Lymarian border war, but was surprised to discover the strike did not hurt my knuckles at all. “Forgive me.” I checked him. Nought but a bruised jawbone would he suffer. But a longstanding inflammation of his lower bowel–that I could set right.

  Leaping aboard the ferryboat, I cast off the mooring line. A pulley-and-ratchet system worked the ropes. As I had watched the Ferryman do a hundred times before, I released the brake and then turned to his brace of jatha. They lowed dolefully. Unhappy at my scent, I supposed. Each was tied inside a large wheel, side-by-side either side of the ferry rope that ran across the river, and carefully blindfolded to ensure they did not turn upon their fellow-beast.

  “Ge’on, you!” I gave them a sharp slap on the withers each. “Ge’on!”

  The jatha lurched forward. Plodding. Plodding! The ferry pressed forward into the current. I gritted my teeth.

  “Ge’on or I’ll set Ulim’s Hounds chewing your sorry hides!”

  This was no good. I watched the gap opening steadily between us and the shore, and prayed that the jatha and I were not about to become an eventide snack for the Wurm.

  “Ge’on!”

  Ah, here was a boon! Next to the pulley-stand, I discovered a small bucket, and inside that bucket, blocks of salt. There’s nothing a jatha loves more than a good lick of salt, an old trick my father taught me. “Here, get a whiff of this, you!” I teased the jatha with a block of salt, one in each palm, holding them just out of reach of those startlingly long tongues that could strip a sulg bush of its leaves and berries in a trice. “There, now we’re pulling, eh? Cheeky beasts! Nought but stomachs on four hoofs, I’ll own!”

  But my eyes were riveted on the bank I had left, on the ferry master’s small cabin and the dark shape lying sprawled on its front porch. ‘Please Mata make the Wurm pass him by,’ I thought. ‘He’s innocent; don’t leave his blood on my hands too.’

  Was any man truly innocent? Not according to the yammariks. Not according to the life’s experience I had gathered in my travels. Should I have tried harder to convince him?

  In the gloaming, Suthauk’s dying rays clearly delineated the advancing cloudbank, setting it aglow glowing with that luminous quality that at twilight, catches every mote and particle in the air and turns it into golden sunbeams. I caught sight of a disturbance in the trees. A rending, crashing, grinding sound carried to my ears, even over the steady gush of the Ry-Breen River. The jatha lowed again. Did they sense the beast as I? I patted them inanely. Dear Mata …

  And then the Wurm came bursting outward and upward from the darkling forest beyond the ferryman’s cottage, rising into the path of those golden rays, dribbling from its lower jaw trees and boulders and nameless things from the underworld. The sunlight burnished the burgundy red of its multi-segmented carapace into the most enormous of rubies. Its blind head turned slowly, side to side. The enormous, jointed mandibles waved in the air. I heard the rush of its breath, in and out, a rushing gale tearing at the leaves of a forest.

  It was monstrous. It was unbelievable. It had a terrifying majesty unlike anything I had ever, in all my travels, experienced. Before it I stood not only mortal, but tiny; a speck of humanity about to be rolled beneath a mountain.

  I have heard people say of a moment or an incident in their life, that it is imprinted forever in their immortal quoph. The Wurm was all that, and more. Was this the most enormous creature in Mata’s creation? The sheer size of it struck me dumb with awe and terror–and with an unreasonable spurt of delight. For was this not my Wurm? My nemesis, my stalker, and possibly even my own creation? P’dáronï said it disappeared when I was unconscious. Was this … me?

  Truly told, it was larger again than the beast I had raised in Darbis, and eluded in Hollybrook; visibly enlarged. I had to put that mouth at fifty paces across and twenty high. The bulk of the Wurm’s body was thicker still. Not that it would matter once it swooped upon me.

  The creature vented its hunting roar: SSSHHHWWWEEESH-ARRRRR!! The sound started as a deafening whistle before developing into a full-throated roar that made the very waters of the Ry-Breen frolic to its tune.

  I have seen jerlak run, but never jatha, until that moment upon the Ry-Breen. Snorting and foaming at the nostrils and bleating as though they were calves trapped by a wolf, the twin jatha tried to bolt out of their harnesses. The Wurm oriented itself upon this noise. Its head swung about with ponderous inevitability, as though a mountain had turned upon its roots to face another direction.

  We were three-quarters of the way across the ford. The sweating jatha were working up a little bow-wave–probably the fastest the venerable ferry had ever been forced to travel. The rope hissed through the pulley. Suddenly, a crazy thought leaped into my head. I could save the dumb beasts. I should save them!

  The Wurm lunged forward and down. Its belly flattened a great swathe of forest and missed the ferryman’s cabin by a salcat’s whisker.

  I flung myself headlong into the Ry-Breen.

  Gasping and shouting at a cold so intense I feared my heart should stop beating, I was swept downstream and tumbled under. I collided with a rock. I thought I had been swept past it, but the current gripped me with cruel fingers. My head bounced off something unseen. I pressed the pain away instinctively. Which way was up? In the darkness, it was impossible to tell.

  A shock punched me in the gut and beat against my eardrums. Was that the Wurm falling?

  Water roared around my ears and dashed me against the rocks a third time. I distinctly felt a rib crack on my right side. Then, unceremoniously, I was dumped on my head on solid ground. Water ebbed around my prone body. Pushing myself up to my hands and knees, I saw that the Wurm had dammed the entire Ry-Breen River–temporarily. My power coiled inward, seeing to my hurts. At another level I felt lillia surge into the beast. For several long heartbeats I just stared. My legs would not obey the screaming in my mind. And then the Wurm’s head began to swing toward me as if it sensed whence its power had arisen.

  I bolted for the southern bank, a headless lyom running loose after the butcher’s knife has struck. Scrambling, slipping, and skinning my shins; shouting, leaping over cracks in the riverbed, splashing through a final dip before finally reaching the far bank. Something struck my left thigh, and twirled me mid-air. The river and the stars swapped places before the ground struck my left shoulder a violent blow.

  This time, I deliberately checked my response.

  The Wurm’s hot breath seethed over my back and shoulders. I bit the inside of my cheek as hard as I dared. I was right between its mandibles. If the mouth closed, or if the creature chose to move forward again … Arlak Sorlakson would find out what the Wurm’s belly looked like from the inside.

  For a breath of time, I sensed what was happening within the Wurm. I felt the insatiable desire to track and kill the wisp dancing at the edge of its senses, the creature which fed it and tormented it in equal measure. I understood in some measure the burning ocean of
lillia contained within the Wurm, so concentrated that its breath gasped magic back into the air around me in mauve waves. I flinched at the racking pains of super-fuelled growth. And I knew the instant the great muscles contracted, ready to propel the beast forward. I perceived the ripple coming from afar, perhaps originating near the tail.

  I left the Wurm grasping my dust. I thought I would be clever, angling sharply to my left hand to try to force the unwieldy beast into a turn, but its mandibles very narrowly missed cleaning my head off my shoulders.

  I thought I remembered this road, but I tripped headlong over a ditch and measured my length along the paving stones. Stones? That was new. How many anna since my boots–or at least, the wheels of my trading cart and the hooves of my jatha team–had trod this route?

  Even as I burst forward off my skinned palms and much-abused knees, the Wurm took a great bite out of the road so close behind me that I fancied it plucked the flapping tail of my shirt. What did happen was that the ground bucked beneath my feet, a flurry of dirt provided me the first shower I had enjoyed since fifteen days afore, and I departed Ry-Breen Crossing much faster than I had come upon it.

  Chapter 30: The Old Hearth

  3rd Levantday of the Rains, Anna Nol 1407

  I may boast no man has travelled faster between Ry-Breen Crossing and Telmak Lodge than I. One day and five makh, upon my honour and my grephe too, from the ferry to the southern fringe of Hadla’s Skirts. That man outran a pack of timber wolves and laughed in the face of a snorting jerlak. Perhaps the jerlak moved the faster due to the mountain moving behind the man. But the wolves waited for the Wurm to leave before they made their move.

  I thought the Wurm would never relent. But in the early makh, it vanished underground, leaving me to flee the eager wolves. More running. As if I had not run enough.

  Unfortunately, that same man found himself unable to enter Telmak Lodge.

  I stared at the front gate for nigh on two makh. I suppose people thought me simple … or too far in my cups. As had been the man who overnighted here, who had eloped with the daughter Telmak. That callow youth! That vain, strutting lyom! He was a lifetime estranged from the man standing outside the gates this day. I touched my chin. I still bore the mark of Rubiny’s ire. That nub of scarred flesh was part of me now, a part that I would never smooth away, no matter how many times I renewed myself. I was more battle-scarred, and life-scarred, than that boy could ever have imagined, but I looked hardly older than the night Rubiny had run away from her home.

  What would have become of me had I not ignored the trader’s grephe that fateful day?

  Would Jyla have found Janos?

  Would I have become El Shashi?

  Yesterdays and yesterannas. I had to live in the present. That man had treated his responsibilities as if they were poisonous snakes. This man would do better. He might kill those snakes. Or one particular snake–Jyla!

  Seeing a trader about to enter Telmak Lodge, I called out, “Good trader, a boon!”

  His eyes registered surprise, flicking over my torn, stained robes; perhaps taking in the dark circles of exhaustion beneath my eyes. “A Solburn Brother! You’ve come a long, hard road, by my grephe.”

  “Had some trouble with wolves,” said I.

  Staying his jatha with a strong hand, he paused and looked kindly upon me. The skin around his grey eyes wrinkled until his whole face smiled, not just his lips. “Have you ought for a rheumatic knee? It troubles me in the cold seasons. Even so, here is a ukal. Get you to the pumphouse, brother-mine; get you a meal, and a cloak which has seen better times.”

  I gulped. “May your blessing be returned tenfold, brother,” I said, signing the full buskal of Mata’s mercy. Though I was rich in power, I was poor even by the standards of Roymere. Should I be amazed at a small act of mercy?

  I fussed over his knee, muttering a cartload of tripe about pressure points and massage, meantime, secretly extracting a scrap of bone from beneath the patella, through his numbed skin. I soothed the angry joint and made it good.

  “What news of the Honoria Telmak?” I asked meantime.

  “The Honoria passed on a gantul ago,” said the trader. “Twenty-three anna, I make it. But the old Master Telmak–he lives yet, and a miracle it is. One hundred anna if he’s a day. Hundred and ten were not short of the mark. Rumour has it he was born in 1297.” The trader spat to ward off bad luck. “That’s a mighty age for a man, Brother. Mata preserve him.”

  “Mata preserve him,” I agreed, smiling inwardly. “Would you try your knee, good trader?”

  Truly told! My father lived! My quoph charged into a rowdy round-dance. As the trader swung down from the cart and flexed his knee with a grunt of surprise, I had to restrain myself from running within. I must not tarry long upon the road, I felt. A grephe? If so, I should listen with care. Had I not enough of fate sweeping me away?

  “Never was a ukal better spent!” declared the trader, clapping me upon the shoulder. “You’ve healing hands, Brother!”

  “Mata be praised,” said I. “Now, I shall spend this ukal as you recommend.”

  But I did not tarry to find my father.

  Yarabi Vale was untouched by time. Truly told, I had forgotten how steep and long was the road that led up to that high valley. But as I paused upon the crest of Hadla’s Pass, it seemed to me that time rolled back and I was twenty anna old again, concerned with little more than chasing skirts, the beauties of my own nose, and finding a way to leave the farming life behind. I would watch the weather, fretting over my high-grown vegetables–the kale, lohki, renj, and limmerwort–which put bread upon my table.

  The village was smaller and busier than I remembered, bustling with carts, children playing and squabbling outside the pale sandstone houses, and even a small market at the near end of the only street. The Songstrel spire was new. The tall tower gleamed its newness, as though it aspired to sing the dioni and daimi orisons from its own slender throat. Despite the lateness of the season, in the bright late-afternoon sunshine the village glowed with a golden splendour. A vision of Mata’s paradise? I marked this a good omen.

  At the inn, I spent my last terls upon a bowl of gravy and three roundel sweetbreads, and ate heartily. As was my custom, I asked the innkeeper if I might work for my bed. I had few tools of my trade, so I had to make do with a great deal of subterfuge and the invention of creative stories to explain what I was doing to peoples’ ills. My price, as ever, was three brass terls. No more, no less. A Wurm-proof price.

  Before the makh of dawn I strode down the road into the vale itself. I marked at least a dozen new farms. Rock-eagles soared overhead, and the ever-present yaluks warbled sweetly in the dwarf pine and stinge woods alongside the track–just as I remembered. The scent of sathic was thick upon the air, mingled with the scent of yellow phuletips and tiny, turquoise clusters of liplin flowers along the roadside. The cold season must have been mild up here, I reflected. Strange indeed for these mountains.

  Janos’ lantern stood yet upon the stump of that ulinbarb tree next to his turning. I almost expected him to appear to give me greeting. Then I laughed. Absurd, Arlak! That was nigh sixty anna past. The lantern was a different design. I saw fresh cart-tracks carved into the road to his house. No surprise someone had taken over a place with a forge in the back.

  My boots turned once more to that road, as though the dirt and I were old friends.

  As I approached the place, I recognised little. Janos’ house was gone. In its place stood a neat four-square log cabin, boasting perhaps as many as five rooms inside, and a wide, comfortable porch upon which sat a boy of fifteen anna by my mark. His chair had wheels. I saw his legs, even though tucked beneath a blanket, were twisted as with the polio. My quoph lurched. Could I never learn to bear the suffering of any of Mata’s creatures? His dark eyes fixed upon me as though, having seized their target, they should never let go. I wondered if the boy had a sense of grephe, as I did. Here was a work to be done.

  I halted perhaps
four paces shy of the porch. The door banged open and a man charged out, garbed in the smock of a working Smith.

  “Clear off, stranger!” he snarled. “Ain’t nothing to see here. Laydon, get thee inside. Now!”

  I burshingled low and, rising, signed the buskal of Mata’s peace. “May I speak to you, good–”

  “Have you ears in your head, stranger? Clear off!”

  “I’m a Solburn Brother, and–”

  “Laydon! Inside!”

  I heard another voice call from inside, “Termar? What’s the commotion?”

  “Just some common beggar, Helya. Laydon!”

  The boy said, in a voice clear and low, “No. Father, I think you should–”

  “You think? You think?” The Smith was a big man. He clearly had a temper to match. I should not like to meet him in a tavern brawl. “Some religious buffoon comes to our porch and you think–what? He’ll strike your legs and make you walk again? Don’t be a fool, boy!”

  “Father, by my grephe–”

  “A pox upon your grephe! It means nothing! Nothing, you hear me, boy?” Grabbing his son’s chair by its handles, the Smith yanked it about and gave a great shove.

  He meant to propel him inside the house. But the boy Laydon was flung loose. He spun out of the chair and sprawled across the wooden porch. The Smith froze. His son looked up at his father, bleeding from his cheek and forehead.

  “I’ll beat you with my belt, boy! Get thee inside!”

  “Shall I drag my crippled body hence, Father?” he said quietly. “Or would you prefer to beat me where I lie?”

  The Smith glanced at me. I’m afraid my face said far too much.

  “You stupid narkik, look at what you made me do!” he screamed, turning a colour so rich his face looked bruised. And he came for me, swinging his great fists like runaway jatha-carts.

  I ducked beneath his blows, gasped as I was struck by a knee in my chest, but flipped him over my shoulder nevertheless. Janos’ training, used many a time to save my neck from wild sword-blows during the Lymarian border conflict. This day, it saved my blushes.