by Martin Davey
Pain. Pain, cold and pure struck Landros once more as another image spiked into his mind. A woman, dark and wild as the rugged lands stretching along the coast of the Sea. Her hair thick and brown as it whipped about her face, her black skirts wrapping about her legs as she looked out across the Sea. His eyes felt as though they were going to burst under the pressure of the vision. He wanted to scream and claw at his face to tear away the pain. Instead he clutched Pascal’s shoulder in a grip tight enough to make his friend stoop and drop his arm away.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Pascal hissed, his eyes still fixed on the stage before them.
“...But death, my friends. Death comes to us all. The blessed Keepers are here to tend to us in life and once our souls pass to Insitur, then the Sleeper will be our guide on the journey. We miss and grieve our friends and families, just as we miss and grieve the fallen Keepers thousands of years after their sacrifice...”
Cold sweat clung to Landros’s shirt, the voice of the Clerk barely more than a murmur on the edge of hearing. All the bodies, the closeness of the crowd in the Hall made him want to vomit with claustrophobia.
The images flickered in his mind every time those eyes of night passed over him. First the woman, now the farmstead, then the woman. Each one accompanied by a spear of agony in his brain.
Woman. Farmstead. Woman. Farmstead. Quicker and quicker, one after the other until all Landros knew was pain, until it seemed as though the Clerk was silent and still on the stage, every other person in the crowd gone and he was standing alone in a pit and gazing up to the glory of the Clerk, staring down at him with eyes of pitiless black.
Landros blinked and gasped for air, his throat raw.
“...Glory in the wonder of our world as we mourn the loss of our friends, even as we glory in the victory of the Keepers while we mourn the loss of the Fallen Four...” Still the Clerk spoke and still he hadn’t got to speaking of his nightly commune with Keeper Jerohim.
“Ready the men.” Landros’s voice sounded strange to his own ears. More than one person looked at him in shocked outrage that he should dare to speak during the Commune.
“What?” Pascal looked at him in disbelief, his pale face almost white in the shadowy light.
“Ready the men.” At the moment, Landros wouldn’t trust himself to walk a single step through the agony in his mind. It was all he could do to speak. “The Clerk wants us to ride.”
Chapter 5
Life could be difficult for a woman living alone at the end of the world. Ysora’s day would begin before the first sun was even a tinge of gold on the horizon. There were the animals to feed; the house and the pens to clean; the gardens to tend. All before first light broke the spell of darkness.
She loved every moment of it.
She loved the solitude, the quiet. Never glancing over her shoulder in fear at every sound. Her only visitors were her fellow mourners from her husband’s funeral; or sometimes some of the villagers from Trottingley, an hour’s walk further inland. All of them were offered refreshment, ushered into the workshop and then hurried away again, more often than not clutching one of Ysora’s carvings to their breast like some wondrous heirloom.
Had she had the gift before Rhodry’s death? Or had the burning of the brute awoken some latent talent in her? She didn’t know; but when she woke in the morning after dreaming of some distant country or world or god, with some tower or building or face fixed in her mind, it was all she could do to finish her chores before she began carving and bringing it to life in the dim light of her workshop.
Those good in the eyes of the Five Dreamed the Keepers and were told of their place in life. What did it mean that she dreamed of faraway places with mysterious gods and unknowable temples?
But then such questions were banished by the fever of her work. All day she would carve, her fingers bleeding, her knuckles raw and peppered with sawdust, her back aching as she hunched over her worktable.
The sun was barely risen, still heavy and pregnant as it rested on the green hills when she heard the knock. Ysora’s cottage was grey in the thin light, all the colour bleached away as though wrung through too many washes. She knew who it would be; he had been coming more and more of late. Usually in the mornings or late at night when he knew his wife would be asleep: Gerard. Just because he had read the rites at her husband’s funeral he seemed to have taken it on himself to become her protector. She didn’t need protecting. Her fingers were already itching to be on with her latest carving; a temple on four levels with a hundred supplicants winding around its walls all reaching to the sleeping god on the summit. She smiled to herself as she thought of the horror that would spread across Gerard’s face were he ever to see such a blasphemous work.
More knocking; three knocks, a slight pause and then three more knocks.
She sighed and smoothed her skirts. Anybody would think a woman would get more peace living alone at the end of the world.
“Ysora…” Gerard had his concerned expression at the ready when she opened the door. “I was beginning to worry about you.” He was a young man who couldn’t wait for the respectability of old age. He was aided in this by his prematurely receding hairline; but he also affected the ways of a more worldly man than one yet to see his thirtieth summer and who had never travelled more than thirty miles from the single-storey cottage he‘d been born in.
“What is it, Gerard? I’ve been busy this morning, the gardens don’t look after themselves you know.” In the six weeks since Rhodry’s death, she had felt her manners with Gerard become more and more abrupt. Before the funeral she had been pathetic in her gratitude for his pleasant manners and warm smile, such a contrast with her beast of a husband. And now here she was snapping at the poor man on her doorstep. She ran a hand through her wild hair. “I’m sorry, Gerard. I haven’t had much sleep.” She tried to offer him a smile; it was a weak one at best. “What brings you here, anyway?”
A smile; one she had always thought warm and sincere, but now only reminded her of the pouting lips of the white fish Rhodry used to gut in the kitchen. Gerard’s pink scalp gleamed dully in the thin morning light. “Do I need a reason now?” He smiled the same wet smile, but seeing it not returned, he stood on his tiptoes to try and see over Ysora’s shoulder. “I er…I…” Gerard wasn’t a tall man, all of a head shorter than Ysora. “I was at home thinking I haven’t seen any of these famous carvings of yours.”
“Were you?” So why was he trying to look over her shoulder and into her kitchen? It was even too early for the berragulls; she could only see two or three swooping and swirling over the Sea. Though perhaps they were just being wiser than Gerard; the fat dark clouds forming rank on the horizon told of a dank and wet day ahead. For now the morning was sharp and cold. “I really don’t think you’d care for them, Gerard.” She remained standing in the doorway, knowing from experience that if she let him in she might well lose a full day’s work to his simpering company. When Rhodry had been alive she couldn’t have wanted anything more than a man who was considerate and polite and thoughtful. Now she looked at Gerard and thought him womanish and weak.
“No!” Gerard looked horrified at the thought. He was dressed as neatly as always, silken green shirt under a brown waistcoat with a darker brown three-buttoned jacket; his shoes and the ankles of his black breeches were smeared in mud. He obviously hadn’t thought to pull on a pair of boots before he sneaked out of his house. “You’re becoming quite the talk of Trottingley these days. Old Hettie says she’s never seen work like it, that it is as though the Keepers themselves have blessed your hands.” His eyes, blue as a cold winter’s sky, fell to her hands as though he wanted to grasp them in his own.
Ysora folded her arms tight across her chest. “I’m sure the Keepers have greater concerns than worrying whether I’m keeping myself busy and selling a couple of ornaments, Gerard.” She could feel herself pursing her lips. She hated doing that; it made her look like her mother.
“Yes, well, be that as
it may, Delita has been hankering after a piece of your work for our mantelpiece.”
Delita? Was that his wife’s name? This was the first time he had actually said her name to Ysora. Somehow Ysora doubted he had even mentioned her to his wife, but she couldn’t think of a polite reason to turn him away. “I work in my workshop.” She nodded to the building across the yard. Did she have to sound so surly? Had Rhodry beaten all the ladylike manners out of her like a blacksmith hammering the impurities from iron?
“Shall we?” The ingratiating smile was back; a nervous confidence in Gerard’s round face that made Ysora nauseous. He made a crook of his arm, inviting her to loop her arm through his. She pretended not to notice and set off across the yard.
Rhodry had built four buildings around the yard; the two-storey house, the workshop which had originally been a barn, the pen for the cows and goats and the stable. That was the second time she had met him, stripped to the waist, sweat-slick skin shining in the sunlight, a pencil behind his ear and sawdust speckling in his dark hair. She had marvelled that he could measure and cut the wood to such perfection, that he could create something from nothing, had marvelled that a man could be so sure of his place in the world that he could build his own house with his bare hands. She had thrilled to watch the muscles rippling in his back as he strained to heave the beams into place, as he lashed them together with rope as thick as her arm. Even crossing the yard now, with Rhodry six weeks dead, she blushed at how forward she had been in offering to help him build his home.
The wind was picking up, the door of the stable banging out a rhythmic beat. Another one of the jobs that had been building up over the past six weeks. Rhodry would have seen to that the first day the hinge had snapped.
No! No, she couldn’t miss the beast. She couldn’t be so pathetic as to want him back. Never! Not when every morning her ribs ached as she struggled out of bed, a memory of the time he had kicked her as she lay curled on the kitchen floor; or the blaring pain in her fingers at the end of a long day in the workshop, a memory of that same attack when he had trod on her hand on his way out of the door to find a whore in Trottingley.
“I suppose you must miss him terribly?”
Ysora hadn’t noticed Gerard had been watching her as they walked.
“Mmmm…” she murmured. The green paint on the workshop door was peeling away and showing scattered bruises of brown beneath—a reminder that most of the wood Rhodry had used had been salvaged from some abandoned hamlet further along the reach. Ysora made a mental note to add that to her ever burgeoning list of jobs. Perhaps Gerard would…she looked at the younger man and shook her head with a faint smile as she retrieved the key from the pocket of her threadbare cardigan. Gerard looked ridiculous with his carefully combed hair billowing in the wind, his polished shoes muddied beyond recognition. She doubted the man would know which end of a paintbrush to hold, never mind helping her with repairs. She unlocked the door, pushed it open and stepped aside to let Gerard through first.
“Oh my…” Gerard turned full circle as he stepped into the workshop, his feet whispering in the straw still strewn about the floor. His reaction was for her benefit entirely, Ysora knew. The sunlight was thin and the shadows long, the carvings scattered about the rickety shelves she had managed to erect looked like nothing more than lumps of wood. Which, she supposed, is exactly what they were.
She left the door open as she followed him further into the workshop. “So, your wife, Delita, she wants to see some of my work?”
“Hmmm?” Gerard looked back to Ysora with a smile she didn’t like. Not the simple, simpering smile that always annoyed her, more a confiding, confidential smile as though they had just shared a joke she wasn’t privy to.
It was a large workshop, but Ysora suddenly felt claustrophobic. She glanced back to the open doorway, took a single step towards it. “Well, if you’d like to bring her back with you one afternoon, then maybe—“
“This is nice, what is it?” Gerard had plucked her current project from the rosewood table.
The temple. She had laughed earlier in the day at the thought of his look of horror when seeing such a work. Granted, the thing was still less than half finished, but Gerard hefted it and weighed it in his hands like a melon at market. And then Ysora realized: the man was a shell. He primped and preened and smothered himself in airs and graces like a whore showering herself in cheap perfume to banish the smell of earlier clients. He spouted the tenets of the Keepers and never concerned himself with the intricacies of the world outside his little fishing village.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just something I’ve been playing around with.” She took the carving from him. She could feel two of the supplicants to the sleeping god pressing into the heel of her hand.
“Perhaps,” Gerard stood close behind her as she placed the carving back onto her work table, his shadow towering over her. “Perhaps you could carve a likeness of me? Delita would like that.”
The mere thought turned Ysora’s stomach cold. “I’m afraid I don’t work like that, Gerard. I can only carve what I dream. If I try to carve something I see in the day, it is like trying to sculpt with mud. When I carve something from my dreams…” she shrugged. Took another step to the doorway; the thick grey light beyond seemed an infinite distance away.
Gerard smiled; his eyes looked dark in the dim light. He reached out a hand, trying to touch her cheek. “Somebody should make a sculpture from such beauty.” He almost gasped the words, speaking as though his throat was being crushed by a mighty fist.
Ysora leaned away from the touch like a woman suddenly confronted by a giant spider web spread across her garden path. “I think you should go, Gerard. Delita will be wondering where you are.” She backed away, two steps closer to the blessed relief of the door. She could hear the first drops of rain drumming against the tin roof of the workshop.
“Delita is nothing, Ysora, a shadow on my shoulder, a funeral shroud shielding my eyes from the glories of the world! She is sour and bitter when she should revel in the beauty the Keepers bestow on us. Like you, Ysora, you radiate the wonders of the world with your very presence; with a smile you bring gladness to my heart!” He reached out to touch her once more, his eyes bright with fervour, his hand cold as Rhodry’s fish. “When I saw what that fiend did to you…” Gerard shook his head. “But then you found a way, with the will of the Keepers you found a way to escape him.”
Wait, what was he saying? That he thought she had something to do with Rhodry’s death? Without a thought, she struck, hard and fast at his cheek. He caught her wrist in his cold hand. Had she really thought him womanish and weak? She could feel the bones in her wrist grinding under his grip, her hand felt chill and limp as the blood drained from it. She tried to pull her hand away; he only jerked her closer, close enough to smell the honey on his breath, sweet enough to make her want to retch. “Let me go!” His other hand snaked around her waist. She kicked at his shin. No effect. His strength seemed unnatural for his size.
“We are one, you and I, Ysora!” His breath sounded caught in his throat, a thread of sweat trailed past an eye, his breath hot on her cheek. “I speak of the wonders of the Keepers, and Delita smiles and nods. I come to her in the night and she smiles and nods while I plow her! She is nothing, Ysora! I Dreamed Keeper Jerohim himself!” His dark eyes were blazing bright now. “He unmasked himself before me, showed me the Starlight Path! Showed me a meadow of green with a golden face! And he spoke to me, told me wonderful things…but it is nothing without you. I am destined for greatness, but it will be nothing without you by my side.” He was tearing at her clothes, releasing her hand to reach around and grope at her buttocks.
Ysora kicked and hit out at him, she might even have bitten his arm in her desperation to be free. For a moment she considered how alone she was out here—there wasn’t another house for two miles in any direction. The rain was a wild cacophony hammering against the roof. And then, with Gerard’s nails clawing at her cheeks, her back, Ysora
was free and running for the pounding rain, her heart beating in sympathy with the wild rain on the roof.
“Ysora!”
She heard Gerard stumble and stagger, cry out as he hit the floor. She didn’t look back and belted through the door, rain cool and cleansing as it sheeted down her face.
Where to run? Ysora skidded to a stop, the rain bouncing ankle height from the hard-packed dirt of the yard. It was as dark as a summer’s night—thick shadows stretched grasping fingers across the yard. The wind whipped her soaking skirts about her legs.
Where to run?
“Ysora!” Gerard had stumbled out of the workshop, his thin hair plastered to his head. His appearance answered her question.
Just run. Run anywhere.
She headed to the west, past her house. Try to make it to the path along the cliffs—it was treacherous at the best of times; doubly so in the dark and the rain. A path she took at least once a day—surely she would outrun Gerard there?
A shrill barking and Godie barrelled of the house. The great black and white dog, his fur already wet and stinking, jumped up, hitting her with paws the size of Ysora’s palm. “Get lost, Godie!” Rhodry’s dog—he had treated the thing like a princess. Ysora had resolved to get rid of the hound straight after the burning. Somehow she had never found the time in the past six weeks.
Godie dropped to all fours, paws splashing in the mud, and darted forward between Ysora’s legs, sending her sprawling, hands spread out before her in the muck.
