“No,” Audra interjected, “he’s not.”
There’d be no argument on this. Audra triggered a boot-knife and kicked into the meat of Jenn’s outer thigh.
The second counsel gritted her teeth, but didn’t cry out.
“Your next choice will leave a lasting impression on your son.” Audra twisted the knife inside Jenn’s flesh. “Think about how you want him to remember you.”
Jenn glared true hatred at Audra. But in the time it took to turn toward her son, her face changed. Softened. Bur patted Kaleb’s back, and the boy ran into his mother’s arms. There are times you see the face of regret and loss. Usually it’s over the barrow of someone gone to their earth too soon. Audra saw it more often than that. And saw it again now.
“Da says we have to leave.” Kaleb sniffled against Jenn’s breast. The words were hard to understand. The feeling wasn’t.
Jenn didn’t find anything to say for a long moment, then she whispered, “I’m sorry, Kaleb.”
The boy pulled back. “Do we have to go?”
Perhaps the hardest thing a parent does is give the answer they know is right when their heart would have it another way. “Yes, sweet boy, you do.”
He grabbed her close again. “Fix it, ma.”
She wrapped him up, breathing in the scent of him. “I love you. All my silent gods, I love you. Don’t ever forget that. No matter what you hear. Don’t ever forget.”
“I won’t,” he promised.
She hesitated to let him go, but released him at last. The boy returned to his father. Jenn looked up at Bur. There was regret in her eyes toward him too. But the damage was a long one. And not something to forgive in a parting moment. Then he did something Audra had rarely seen. He gave Jenn a smile. A small one. And there was a measure of forgiveness in it. Maybe some weariness, too.
She nodded, seeming to accept the small grace of it.
Then he took his son by the hand, and they departed down a row of empty grape vines.
Dinner conversation rolled back in. But Jenn and Audra held a long silence at their table. The wine—a featured centerpiece to their days here in the vineyard—now stood impertinent on the linens between them. All its considerations—latitude, altitude, soil, fertilizer, irrigation, harvest time, yeast—all of it so thoughtfully chosen to produce this vintage. So like the many things Jenn had controlled to create the life she’d known. And none of it meant a good gods damn to her now. That was the look in her face. That was the feeling that encircled them.
Audra had taken everything. But taking family cut deepest. It made the grief complete.
“This is the Dannire way then, isn’t it?” Jenn said. It wasn’t really a question.
“Not always.” Audra pulled the knife from Jenn’s leg—the woman didn’t even wince. “But usually.”
Jenn looked at her through vacant eyes. “So what now? Take me back to my rooms? Cut my throat?”
Audra considered a hundred replies, and used none of them.
Jenn nodded to some internal thought. “My last hell, you’re all I’ve got left.” Her laugh came weak and empty.
The feeling circled back in. That absence. It was failure and anger and sorrow and aloneness. It was empty husks when autumn harvest was gone and stalks stand dry against the coming of winter.
Jenn’s gaze sank to the dirt below them. “I’d prefer if you killed me.” Her tone had a plea deep down inside it.
Audra took up her glass. “Let’s have another glass of wine.”
The Carathayan
- Second Apocalypse -
R. Scott Bakker
Uster Scraul drummed his fingers under his nose the way he always did when events took perplexing turns. They smelled coppery...sticky. And this was not a good sign anywhere, least of all here, a timber hostel abandoned for the winter, marooned way out where the forest crawls. The structure was windowless, but raised crudely enough to be threaded by lines of outside light. The flame in the great fieldstone hearth in the common-room had finally taken, so they were warm at least—those still alive that is.
The little Master was dead, his little left hand amputated and his little skull transformed into a grisly little flower pot. The Lady had slumped unconscious after he had gagged her, praise Seju. But her husband, the rotund Angle-Lord of Bayal continued his vicious assault, weeping at Uster’s feet, pawing at his knees, blubbering like a leper at temple. Uster kicked the caste-noble, not savagely, but the way a hard yet decent man might kick an annoying dog. Perhaps this was what unlatched the outrage.
“Madman!” the breasted Lord bellowed to the rafters. “I curse th—!”
Words, Uster had learned, were easier to spear than fish in icy water. He lurched forward in his bobbing way, raised a boot to kick the jerking caste-noble clear his sword...
He scratched his head, attempting to recollect how his blade had found its way into Lord Bayal’s stomach. Nothing came to him, so he shrugged, reckoning it meant more heat for the rest of them.
The Lady Bayal pulled herself from her slump and resumed screaming as best as she could manage with her little boy’s severed hand jammed into her mouth. Uster graced her with a rare smile that became a frown when she shrank at his approach. He reached out and tugged the little left hand from her mouth.
“My sister Yild,” he mumbled, persevering despite her rudeness, “says to tend honest effort like a garden.”
The Lady Bayal gagged for breath, for sanity, then resumed her screeching.
Uster beamed his appreciation, not so much celebrating her racket as his own spirit of generosity. Nodding, he turned and strode across the vacant common room. Uster never walked, you see. He strode, taking vast stomping steps, as though the ground drummed a special song just for him, a boom that only his ear could detect. He was tall, yet narrow shouldered, large of foot, face, and hand. He should have been rangy, the grizzled product of a gangly youth, some Galeoth yeoman’s son, perhaps, shy for involuntary looming, stooped for low ceilings, humble for being so slight-shouldered. He should have occasioned hilarity. But when he strode, or when he peered, or when he talked, a shadow fell across all hearts present, for he betrayed a peculiarity of manner that blotted the holy borne between life and death, good and evil.
As Yild liked to tell him after this or that accident, “Uster, you are aimed all wrong.”
He swallowed the length of the hostel’s common-room with seven great steps, cracked wide the oaken door, lowered his face against showering winter light. It was the solstice, no less, and the days were short to begin with in Galeoth: the sun was already shimmering across the snowy back of the land.
“Safe now!” he boomed in a crooning holler. Then he clomped back to regard the Lady Bayal. Subdued by this unexpected turn of events, she now stared at the open door with a look every bit as hopeful as it was terrified.
A shadow darkened the sunset glare behind him, one smaller, more slender. The Lady Bayal expelled an audible gasp.
“Sorry about your little brother,” Uster called out over his shoulder. The door clapped shut, a sound like kindling rattling across the floor. “Like a vicious little monkey, he was. Course, killing him got your mom squawking like a goose and I was... I don’t know...nervous, I guess, jumpy so—I mean, it was in my hand already!—so I just shoved it—your brother’s hand, which was in my hand—into her mouth... Then your father...he comes roaring out the back door, there, and he...got killed...somehow. After I shoved your brother’s hand into her mouth, his...mother’s mouth...that is... Before I took it out, there, just a moment ago... It’s over there, now.”
The slow clump of clapped boots resolved into a tall, raven-haired adolescent, girt in ermine-trimmed, Oswentan winter-fines the same as everyone except Uster.
“I’m explaining it wrong...” he mumbled.
The girl looked to him in horror. The now roaring hearth-fire laid bare her and her mother’s impeccable beauty, and Uster found himself cowed, as he so ofte
n was, by the evidence of breeding. The House of Samp had enjoyed their fair share of unlikely prosperity, given that Bayal was little more than an impoverished frontier march. No House so far from the capital could boast such blood—nor such returns from such savage lands.
“But, you see, the thing to understand, Mirrim, is that’s the way these things quite often go...” As his sister Yild would say, people were always following the wrong nose, thinking they’re aimed this way, when they’re running that. “That’s why people like me charge more for these jobs, because, you know, of all the people like them they end up kil—”
“Shut up, Uster,” the girl said, her voice as glassy as her gaze. She turned to peer at the quivering, buxom heap that was her mother. “My brother was a little turd. And my craven father soiled his breaches before he died, I’m sure. Smell’s li—”
“That sometimes happens,” Uster interjected.
Mirrim cast a glare over her shoulder. “Why must you expla—?”
“My sister Yild says that I can only understand things by saying them, that I’m not really explaining anything to anyone bu—”
“Time to shut up, now, Uster... My Mom and me...” She paused, turned to the Lady Bayal with a slack grin that shouted malevolence and a love of sport. “We have a few matters to discuss...”
The Lady Bayal had watched their exchange with lunatic fascination, her lips trembling about a sob, a snarl, a grin. Uster, who was mystified by expressions most of the time, found her difficult, even painful, to look at. Faces, he had long ago decided, were far and away the most obscene things. Wrinkled. Gnarled with knobs of flesh. Flabby about wet orifices. Pimpled with kinked hair.
“I—I very much liked your husband, Lady,” he hooted down at his feet. “I knew him for only fifteen and a half days, yet he became as a father to me...”
Even though this was entirely true, its significance was diminished, somewhat, by the fact that Uster felt that way about almost all older men in his company—as if they were his fathers. He had no less than 477 fathers by this point in his life.
He was collecting them.
The Lady Bayal blinked. “But you just murdered him, murdered his—his...” She had to pause, look out on an angle to life to find her way back to the matter at hand. “Son.”
“No. That was an accident, Lady. I had nothing to do wi—”
“I just watched you murder my husband and my-my—!” Her face crumbled into anguished creases. “His son.”
“Noooo. Murder? Noooooo. My body, Lady, it does whatever the bodies about it tell it to do. Your husband and your son are only dead, I assure you, because they made it so.”
Both Mirrim and the Lady Bayal squinted at him.
“Uster,” the girl said, “you murdered them. Let’s not count straws of ha—”
“Noooo. It onl—”
“You murdered them!” Mirrim screeched. “You did it! Sweet Seju, will you just shut up!”
Uster Scraul’s face froze in comic indecision about an unspoken retort.
“I would tell you he’s a madman,” the Lady Bayal said, turning to regard her daughter, “that you are doomed to kill yourself using the likes of him...”
“There she is...” Mirrim said, resuming her dark scrutiny.
“But then we’re doomed anyways.”
“There’s the hard, heartless woman I know. My Mummy.”
The Lady Bayal laughed. “I’m the wife of a soft-hearted Angle-Lord! What else could I be? I’ve speared Sranc in my very nursery, child. And what have you done, aside from seducing this ungainly wr—”
“That was not her fault!” Uster cried. “Her body was simply doing what my body wa—”
“Shut up!” Mirrim cried. “Aaaaah! I will rip off my ears if you do not shut up!”
“But I like your ears!”
Mirrim searched the rafters. “Then! Shut! Up!”
Just then, the fire coughed like an old man buried under powder. A coal bounced smoking across the greased floors.
“Yes...” the Lady Bayal said, regarding Uster narrowly. “He likes your ears...”
“Uster and I are in love, Mother.”
“My bosom heaves for you...as does my stomach.”
Mirrim chortled in disgust. “Yes! There she is! The woman who told his daughter’s father that it was for the best because... What was it you said Mo—”
“I said you were becoming tiresome!”
“Ah ye—!”
“I said what I needed to say to be able to see this through!”
Real regret had bubbled up about these words, the bovine dismay of a mother aghast at what she had done, incredulous... This shocked her daughter enough to winch uncertain fingers to rigid lips, and throw questioning eyes toward Uster Scraul.
* * *
“The Odd hear no lament,” the Chronicle of the Tusk warns. “They frolic where the righteous weep.”
Uster Scraul was Odd.
He knew this not because he could feel it (he felt as normal as normal can be), but because he had been told as much by countless people. “Odd! Odd! Odd!” the other boys would cry after Temple. “Odd in the ‘ead’! Odd in the rod!” He had thought it a game, at first, one celebrating his gifts. He had nodded in confirmation, giggling for all the divine attention. They were laughing—he could tell by the sounds they made, how their cheeks tried to touch their ears—and he loved nothing so much as making people happy, (because that, as his sisters always told him, was his special gift, the ability to bring joy to others).
The game only turned sour when they began throwing rocks at him. Not that he minded, it was just that he could throw so much harder than they could, and more accurately too. At first, he had thought the fathers had simply joined in the fun, what with so many mouths pinned to so many ears. And the blood! And then his sisters had to go burn the whole town to the ground... Ugly stuff, that...but, kind of beautiful too, the way they all danced shining out across the snow.
“Uster,” Yild said, “we had hoped to send ye to some Heaven, but it looks like you’re built for Hell...just like the rest of us.”
To which he hooted, “It wasn’t me!”
* * *
“Ware him,” the Lady Bayal said to her daughter. “Death falls from him like potatoes from a skirt.”
The tracery of pale lines had vanished from between the timbers of the hostel. Either the fire had brightened, or the sky beyond the walls had grown dark.
“You don’t know Uster the way I do.”
Her mother chortled. The violence of her communications had loosed hair after hair from her felt habit, so that a blond nimbus encircled her face and jowls, alternately deranged and angelic, depending on the firelight.
“I know you think him simple...” the Lady sneered. “Simple and ferocious. I understand that feeling—I think all women do. The fierceness of a man, the violence—these are things that should warn us away, and yet we’re drawn to them like moths to candle-flame. We think we can seize such men, tame them, especially when they’re simple, make a harness of their desires, aim their danger as proof against a dangerous world, not realizing that they are lodestones for strife and discord, that the hand quick to beat the stranger is also the hand quick to beat the child, take the lover, choke the wife!”
“Such fine sentiments,” Mirrim said, her gaze cold, “for a woman who endlessly savaged her husband for being weak...”
The Lady Bayal smirked. “Avoiding the dangerous, my dear, does not mean loving the tender.”
Mirrim shook her head in wonder and pity. “Such an empty life you’ve lived.”
“Because I dwell in emptiness!” her mother roared. “Pompous, entitled brat! What do you know of my world? I’m a child of the capital, sent here the very year she dripped, to while away her days being pumped by a wheezing old brute! I should be gossiping on the Floating Court, making eyes and passing droll on the Ay-Dinai! But there I was, larded with an heir to the House of
Samp—you, Mirrim!—thinking, maybe, maybe I could squeeze some joy out of such a bitter fate! Only to be told that child did not belong to me! That I had no—”
“You had a choice! Mortgage the Estate! Pay for a Schoolman to come and protect me!”
“Child... There is no protecting you. You think me cruel—me!—the one who has loved you, cherished you! knowing this day must come!”
“Then why have me at all?”
“I didn’t want to!” the Lady Bayal cried on panic’s edge. “I did not want to, but then you came, and you were so...so beautiful, so perfect, and what was I to do? Drown you? Brain you with a stone? Or let you live and love the span allotted?”
“I don’t believe you!”
“And even if I had possessed the will, none would have allowed it! Why do you think they always adored you, the menials, always hovered like protective hens? This whole country knows what you are! This whole country understands what your death means, Mirrim. They know which way the trencher tips! For them, your blood is harvest, heavy purses, children rollicking safe in the meadows.”
“Liar!”
“Then kill me and be done with it! The sun is setting! The Carathayan knows by now! She’s likely racing here even as I speak!”
Mirrim turned to Uster apprehensively. “What do you think?”
“She looks a lot like you...save the hair and fat.”
“No... What do you think about the Carathayan? She obviously believes it.”
“I think so too.”
The girl fairly stamped for exasperation. “So should we...you know...flee or something?”
Uster shrugged. “It’s just starting to get warm.”
The Lady Bayal began laughing in her delightful, savage way. “Your idiot is wiser than you know, dear. There’s no fleeing the Carathayan. She will take you because you’ve always belonged to her. Why do you think your hair is black? Her finger was there the very moment you were born!”
“Shut up! Shut up!”
“She’s your mother now!” The Lady shivered for the sincerity of her mad cackle. Her bosom sloshed like beer in a barrel. “I’m nothing but a common thief—as are you, Uster Scraul! None of us shall live to see morning!”
Evil is a Matter of Perspective: An Anthology of Antagonists Page 46
