The Wanderer's Tale

by David Bilsborough

  Dogs backed away at their approach, then growled cravenly as they passed by. All looked flea-ridden and stinking, and scratched despairingly at the hairless, scabby skin that patched their sides, driven mad by whatever itchy condition would doubtless eventually kill them.

  Soon they emerged from the suffocating labyrinth of the shanty town, and found themselves upon a broad dyke. This earthwork, probably as old as the inner town itself, ran around the knoll on which it extended. A wide road (wide by Myst-Hakelian standards, at least, meaning three people could stand abreast) ran along the summit of this dyke, and several rickety old bridges, and one large covered bridge, spanned the moat lying between it and the knoll. The ditch itself was a channel of unspeakably abhorrent effluence, a thick black soup interspersed with islands of crust with livid red and green fungi growing on them. Things floated (or, rather, sat) in it: dead things, bits of dead things, and things that fed on dead things. There was an audible hum that rose from it which caused the six strangers to head straight for the covered bridge beyond instead of the smaller one Job had led them to.

  Once inside the covered bridge they marvelled at just how spacious in extent it was. Stalls and kiosks were set up along either side of the central walkway, just like in a marketplace, and at this time of the evening it was heavily crowded with all sorts of people. The wayfarers had to push their way through a throng of shouting, haggling, sometimes fighting vendors and customers, though they themselves gladly seized the opportunity to avail themselves of some of the produce on sale. There were heaps of every sort of fruit and vegetable imaginable, and many more besides. There were large baskets of cheeping, yellow chickens, and glass tanks containing adult pike that were too big to even turn around. There was an entire menagerie of rodents, reptiles and birds, kept in unbelievably tiny cages and squealing and hissing for all they were worth. And there were stalls that served up highly animated bowls or kebabs of live food, also squealing, hissing and shitting for all they were worth. The entire edifice trembled and groaned alarmingly and sometimes even lurched under the weight of so many.

  Several silver zlats lighter and loaded with a veritable festoon of provender, the travellers emerged red-faced and sweating from the covered bridge and into the cooler air and relative calm of the ‘upper’ town.

  ‘Heathen bastards!’ Nibulus exclaimed. ‘I swear if I’d spent a second longer in there I’d have killed someone!’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Job assured them as he led them cheerfully up a narrow dirt lane, ‘These Stroda are very bastards. But here good. Stroda not bother you here. Not steal horse.’

  ‘Stroda?’ asked Nibulus, ‘You mean Polgrim?’

  ‘No, no, Stroda . . . We! Men of Marsh. Polga no Stroda. Polga new. From East. Trap, get meat, but bad men. Say we beasts!’

  Sure enough, the Polgs did appear to wear an air of superiority about them. They hung about lazily and glared at any humans and Haugers who passed near to them. Racially, though, they were similar to the Haugers, roughly the same height and of similar build, and it was said they were distant relatives. But culturally they were worlds apart, for Haugers lived in highly civilized, settled communities, usually located in high places or escarpment villages, and they would rarely travel more than two miles from their homes. Polgs, however, were a barbarian race, nomads who roamed the vast, flat grasslands to the East, hunting the plains herds. They were fleet of foot and said to be unsurpassed amongst all the races of Lindormyn in fortitude and endurance, doing their hunting entirely on foot. Their chiefs might ride upon stags occasionally, and some of their more powerful warlords even rode the dreaded ‘Sailam’ horse, but for the most part it was not their custom to use steeds.

  Along with them, the Polgs had brought their slaves, the hairy, degenerate, sub-human Boggarts, whom they kept on leashes. Here, by the outlet of the covered bridge, a series of small treadmills had been set up to turn the spits of roasting game that the Polgs inside were selling, and it was in these that the Boggarts were patiently and uncomplainingly toiling.

  Finwald paused a moment to regard them with sympathy. ‘I often get the feeling they know something we don’t,’ he said to Nibulus. ‘Why else would they be so calm under all the ordure we pile on them?’

  On encountering any Polg, Bolldhe would return their haughty stare. He was reminded of the Leqather hunter-nomads of the forest-hills of Rynsaker, way back east. Every so often they would come down from their rainy highlands to trade meat and pelts for the iron arrow-tips and farm produce of the settled communities, and would parade down the streets half-naked and proud, as if they owned the place. The settlers detested them, calling them animals behind their backs, but Bolldhe found out that in the Leqather tongue the words for ‘settler’ and ‘cattle’ were one and the same. Such appeared to be the case with these Polgs, and few communities would tolerate them for any length of time. But an already racially mixed town might not be so quick to expel them, and meanwhile they did as they pleased.

  On a whim, Bolldhe suddenly decided that he wanted to make closer contact with these locals. He kicked one of the lounging Polgs hard as he passed, then immediately hefted his axe threateningly as the Polg and his companions flared up. Bolldhe loomed over them, looking down from on high, and sneered as they bitterly backed down.

  Job Ash led them futher up the narrow earthen lanes of the old town. Here the ground was drier and the air was cleaner. Even houses were larger and built to last, yet the place appeared much more sparsely inhabited.

  ‘I can’t understand how those people can live down there in all that filth and noise,’ said Appa, ‘when it’s so much more pleasant up here.’

  ‘Probably they prefer to be on top of their work,’ Nibulus suggested.

  But Bolldhe guessed the truth of the matter: this old town was now the domain of the craftsmen, who were principally Haugers. Racial segregation was apparent in Myst-Hakel, and, though the different races looked as if they got on reasonably well together, it was clear that the humans had been handed the swampy end of the stick.

  They soon arrived at the temple. Standing below its soaring walls and strangely shaped crenellations the six southlanders were awed. It looked so utterly out of place here in the Rainflats. The baked-mud walls, glowing a faint red in the last of the sun’s light, still radiated heat.

  Job urged them to follow and led them through the open gateway of the temple’s west wall. There were no actual gates left, just a high, arched opening, but the rusty old hinges could still be seen.

  The whole courtyard inside had been taken over by Hauger craftsmen. Cloisters, casemates and small antechambers lined all four inner walls, each with a separate artisan plying his trade within. There were furriers, coopers, tanners, numerous tailors and, at one end, even an artificer. The whole of the north wall must have once been devoted to the altar, for there upon its surface could still be seen a large bas-relief of a blaze of flames. But the stonework was now chipped and the old decoration faded or blackened by soot, for this area was now, suitably enough for a fire-god, the property of the town’s one and only blacksmith.

  As they looked on, the party realized that he was at least eight feet tall, and concluded that he must be a Tusse.

  ‘Must be at least one member of every race inhabiting the Northlands gathered in here,’ Nibulus concluded. ‘I’m amazed they aren’t at each other’s throats half the time.’

  ‘Mongrels, deviants and scum,’ Paulus sneered. ‘Crossbred bastard outcasts of civilization. Let’s buy what we can afford, take what we can’t, and leave them to their foul, swamp-dwelling squalor.’

  Despite the distrustful Nahovian’s vehement antipathy to their present situation, the company allowed themselves to be ushered into a large room just off the main courtyard. There were dry straw mattresses, a long table, several stools, and amphorae full of relatively clean water standing in each corner. Three large windows gave them a good view of most of the town below them, and it looked a light, airy place to lodge in.

&n
bsp; ‘Job Ash,’ Nibulus called over to their bustling host, ‘does your family rent out this room?’

  The boy looked up in smiling incomprehension.

  ‘You. Father. Mother. Here?’

  Job grinned. ‘This all Stroda own. Parents dead now.’

  ‘Ah, I see.’

  That night they made themselves as comfortable as they could in their new dormitory, recovering from their ordeal in the marshes. Now that they were washed and reclining upon mats, waiting for Job to finish cooking their meal, it seemed incredible that that very same day had seen them still imprisoned in Nym-Cadog’s dungeons waiting to be fed in turn to the Afanc.

  There had been moments down there in the ‘wooden’ part of town, and especially in the covered bridge, when, after so long in the wilderness, the noise, commotion and closeness of this town had almost brought the travellers to blows. But up here within the thick walls of the temple, with the sturdy door of their room shut and firmly bolted, they found they could relax in a way they had not been able to since Wyda-Aescaland.

  Apart from the boy, the only locals in here at the moment were a party of rats that had dropped by to check out the newcomers they had obviously heard about. They seemed affable creatures, which surprised the Aescals, for back in Nordwas, despite a certain level of coexistence, the rats generally had little to do with the human population as they did not want to risk catching anything off them. Here, though, they appeared to get on fine together.

  The muffled noises of hammering and sawing from beyond the door, the more distant sounds drifting through the windows from the town below, and the gentle sizzle of cooking nearby induced in each of the company a feeling of safety and well-being that they had all but forgotten even existed.

  They did not know what half the items purchased at the bridge-market were exactly, but there was certainly no lack of variety. When Job was finally ready to serve up their banquet, he proudly went through the list of succulent dishes that he had prepared for them. There may have been some misunderstanding with the translation, but apparently they were about to feast on head and neck of sandpiper served in blue marsh-weed, skinned mouse rolled in multicoloured pulses, dog’s legs marinated in Riverhaug medicine, tentacles from . . . something or other, deep-fried arachnid and (this was Bolldhe’s favourite) fragrant weasel served as a false frog-meat dish.

  Actually there was a lot Job said that they did not or could not understand. The boy’s grasp of Aescalandian was somewhat rudimentary, and wherever he did not know a word he would automatically substitute it with one from his own language. Myst-Hakelian was an idiosyncratic tongue that had developed to suit the needs solely of its inhabitants: for instance, there was no generic word for ‘toad’, but eighty words for the different species of it; many words for types of mud; similarly, no verb just for ‘fishing’ but instead, the various methods of fishing, such as ‘fishing with a pole’, ‘—with a net’, ‘—with a bludgeon’, ‘—by night’ and so on.

  And an entire nomenclature devoted to ‘idling’.

  But no words were needed after the company beheld the spread that Job laid out before them. Indeed, none would have been heard above the tearing, crunching, slurping, choking, belching, whimpering and heaving that filled the air for the next half-hour or so.

  It was only when Nibulus suddenly paused in his eating – something the others had never witnessed before – that this engorgement was interrupted as they stared at him in surprise.

  ‘Did any of you boys hear stories about Myst-Hakel women eating their own dead babies?’ he enquired, peering curiously into his bowl.

  They paused.

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Oh, it’s probably nothing,’ he replied, and went back to his meal with a resigned shrug. After a dubious interval, they did likewise.

  Bolldhe was already tired of staring up at the ceiling. Things kept dropping from it onto his face, and scurrying away. Instead he contented himself with staring out of one of the windows at the benighted town below.

  It was a peaceful night, warm and fragrant. The evening breeze brought to Bolldhe’s nose a distinctly Myst-Hakelian blend of odours: marsh-weed, cool, green and leafy; fish, fresh, cured and rotten; latrines, overflowing, crusty and disease-ridden. It was not the most pleasant of aromas, but after weeks in the wilds it was more welcome to the wanderer’s nostrils than a hundred garlands of jasmine.

  A low mist enshrouded the marshes, tendrils of which drifted up through the streets towards the temple. But right up here it was still clear enough to see the heavens, and the waning, gibbous moon whose light reflected off the mist like a silver blanket.

  There were still people about, even at this hour, he saw. Far out in the marsh, fishermen called out to one another in the darkness, and closer by the more distinct sounds of conversations and artisans’ tools could be heard. Even the rats below his window sounded contented, getting ready for their night shift of running messages for the townsfolk, or just idly grazing for morsels. These all mingled together to produce a soothing hubbub of settled existence that the traveller found unusually comforting.

  Maybe tomorrow night he would go out and mix with strangers again. Maybe Bolldhe had spent too long in the enforced company of the Aescals.

  Bolldhe turned from the window and walked over to his mattress. At that moment, in walked Job Ash. Like every good host, he had waited to make sure that his investments were comfortable and wanted for nothing. Bolldhe glanced involuntarily at the makeshift stall he himself had constructed for Zhang, but the horse was still safely there.

  ‘Where you from, cyneherjar?’ the boy enquired with obvious interest. He had already given up on trying to find out their destination, so contented himself with trying to discover where they had come from. That might at least provide a hint at the direction in which they were headed.

  ‘Shut up and get out of here, you little sod,’ Paulus snarled.

  Most of the company were tired of the boy and his constant, incomprehensible and high-pitched chattering. But Finwald did not mind humouring him. The little wretch reminded him so much of the esquire they had lost.

  ‘We come from the great mountains in the South,’ he explained slowly and with gestures. ‘Many days’ travel.’

  ‘From South?’ Job’s eyes widened in apprehension. ‘Travel through fairy-haunt?’

  At that, the others, sitting or reclining upon their mats, propped themselves up and regarded the boy, attentively.

  ‘Where is this fairy-haunt, Job Ash?’ Finwald asked. ‘Does it lie in the woods south of here?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ Job stammered excitedly. ‘One day, two day away. Grandt Beorh of Old Thaine. Only dead live there. Then huldres. Bad place, very bad. She come. Huldre-she. Live in beorh like house. Monster keep in water to shoo Stroda away.’

  Finwald stared through the window away into the distance, to where he guessed lay Nym-Cadog’s place. ‘It’s the barrow of some old chieftain,’ he murmured, either as known fact or merely speculation. ‘They do say the huldre-folk like to live with the dead.’

  ‘And . . .’ Job went on, but was having difficulty with the words. He made a series of two-handed, downward, chopping movements.

  ‘Miners?’

  Job shrugged. ‘Minas,’ he repeated, nodding. ‘Wealh go in hole . . . dig . . . take – no, thief – thief house of dead. Belleal! No good wealh.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Finwald said to the company. ‘The barrow seems to have been desecrated by grave-robbers. Made it ideal for the huldres.’

  ‘Job, who were these miners? Same as ones who made . . .’ He paused, trying to recall the words written on the signpost they had passed earlier that day, ‘Bac-Bermak?’

  Job hesitated, then nodded his head vigorously.

  ‘You’re just confusing the lad,’ Nibulus objected, ‘leading him on. Miners don’t go breaking into barrows. He probably doesn’t see any difference, men going down below ground to dig for precious metals. Miners, grave-robbers, they’re all
the same to him.’

  ‘But the mine – Bac-Bermak?’ Finwald went on. ‘Long time not used, yes? No?’

  The boy stared dumbly at the black-robed priest. Then he said, ‘Long, long time no Stroda in Bac-Bermak.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Finwald repeated, this time to himself, and stared out of the window again.

  The following day was a day of rest for them. The company arose separately, as they pleased, went down into town to find their breakfast, and then either wandered about the shanty town watching the fishermen at work or explored the old town with its alleys and strange, ancient buildings. They had agreed to meet at noon, and then again convene every second hour back at the temple, just to make sure that if anyone went missing he would not be missing for too long unnoticed. It was an arrangement that suited everyone, as they were glad of the chance to be free of each other for the day.

  However, it was also agreed that a celebration would be held at the town’s only pub that night. Hauger-ale was served there, they were informed, a brew the secret of which lived and died in the heads of the few Haugers who brewed it. It was one of that diminutive race’s closest-kept secrets, and one that had ensured their welcome among any non-Haug community for centuries. It was an opportunity not to be missed, one that Nibulus hoped would bond the company together a little and perhaps even lead to cooperation once or twice in the hazardous days that lay ahead.

  Also it was a good chance for him to blow his brains out on one of the pokiest ales known to Man.

  Generally the day went well and proved very relaxing. The company went their separate ways, and re-met only every two hours as agreed. Nibulus spent most of his time sunning himself upon the flat roof of one of the temple towers, looking up into the blue sky or gazing half-interestedly down at the busy town, whilst listening to the happy whistling of Job Ash as he polished the Peladane’s Tengriite armour down below in the courtyard.