Diodorus was silent a long moment before answering.
“That’s not possible, Meric.”
“Of course it is. We can–”
“If I were to go back, the Plutarchs would kill me.”
Meric was momentarily speechless.
“They would never do that,” he said, brow furrowing.
“Abraxas. You’ve heard the name? He’s head of their highest council. He would have me killed the moment I returned.”
“For Fog’s sake, why?”
Diodorus tongued his cheek in thought.
“Perhaps he wasn’t a fan of barroom philosophy,” he said.
Meric stared at the older man, bewildered.
“And you’re wrong. Trajan is a Plutarch. Or was, anyway.”
*
Meric was moved aboveground, as Trajan had promised. His new quarters were in one of the old American buildings. He met a dozen men inside. Six were at a card table playing Fate. Six lounged and talked amongst themselves.
“Welcome to Club Fogborn,” Diodorus said, entering behind Meric.
There was an uproar. Men moved toward him, smiling or laughing. A tall, vaguely effeminate man shook one of Meric’s bound hands.
“Lucretius. About time we had a new face around here. I don’t suppose you play much chess?”
“Now and then with my brother,” Meric said.
“Some’s better than none. These poor brutes are no competition at all. We’ll have ourselves a game when you’re settled in.”
Lucretius patted Meric’s arm and stepped aside. Another man shook his hand. Names and faces passed in a blur. The card-players remained seated as Diodorus made the introductions. It was too much to take in.
“I told you there were other Plebians,” Diodorus said, shrugging.
One name stuck out.
“Aureus,” said a brown-haired man with a crooked nose, his feet up on the table.
Where have I heard that name?
Then it came to him. The mangled captive…
But it had to be a different Aureus, because that man was dead … unless they’d lied in training. Or the man was an imposter. Perhaps they were all imposters–but to what end? Meric was overwhelmed. The men sensed it. They trickled out. Within the hour, the card-game had finished and the supposed Plebians were gone, leaving only Meric and Diodorus.
“Club Fogborn?” Meric asked.
“It’s our little joke. Trajan tells the savages they’re one people. He united two tribes, the Treeborn and the Mudspears. Tried to bring in the Bloodrats too–but the Bloodrats are strange, more rat than human. Despite that, we are still treated like outsiders. To the People, there are no Plutarchs and Plebians. There are only the fogborn and their silver-eyed sorcerers. Whenever we get someone new–someone like you–they’re kept here until they adjust. This is the only place that really feels like ours.”
When Diodorus left, there was nothing to do but sit with his thoughts. The cabin was dim, the windows few. A guard watched it from the outside. In the dim light, the dead began to visit. Meric saw Avigon dueling. Horus sick on whitecrowns. Gnost telling stories. The men in his pentacrus. He wondered where Dominus was, and if the other two centuries were still trying to link up with Thrace. At the ravine, there’d been scores of familiar faces Meric had known less well. Men he’d shared meals and jokes with. Men he’d sat by the fire with. Men now broken beneath mounds of fallen stone, or rotting in the mud and dust, entrails poached by scavengers.
They died for the Plutarchs. God will honor them in Paneden.
But it was small consolation. When death had seemed imminent, there’d been no grief. Now that he lived, the loss was keener.
In the afternoon, Diodorus returned. Even a few hours sitting alone with his regrets had left Meric wishing for some distraction. He opened the door to the older man…and started, feeling his tongue grow thick. Behind Diodorus was Meliai, still covered in patterned ash.
“Greetings. Meliai has expressed a desire to help cure your insufferable personality–er, insanity, I mean,” Diodorus said.
“How are you going to do that, eat my brain?” Meric asked, glaring at them.
“No, that’s taboo. We’re going to drown you. Ready to go?”
“Drown me?”
“Yes. Unless you’d prefer to remain here. I’m sure the place is very exciting when no one’s around. Lots of things to do?”
“You’re an evil man.”
Meric followed them outside, despite the flippant answers. They set off through the trees, Meliai leading the way.
“Where are we going?” Meric asked.
“A healing place,” Meliai said. Her accent still sounded strange; “a hay-ling pleece,” Meric heard. He remembered her whirlwind assault on the battlefield. He couldn’t reconcile it with the present moment. She walked barefoot over hard ground, untroubled by rocks and sticks underfoot. The soles of her feet were as tough as leather. His eyes travelled up her athletic legs, her supple behind, the curve of her bare back…
He looked away, clearing his throat.
Just a savage.
They passed through the outskirts of Red Oak. A man was harvesting demongrass, chewing a stalk as he did so, eyes red and glazed. Naked children ran laughing across a rope-bridge spanning the trees above.
Animals.
Smoke curled from the pipe of a wrinkled man in a loin cloth. He was crouched before a mudstone hut. A star-spangled flag was tattooed across his arms, an eagle holding arrows and an olive branch on his chest. Many savages had similar tattoos.
“Symbols of their ancestors,” Diodorus explained. “They believe it pleases the dead to remember them. Once each spring, the Loremaster recites the story of the fall of the American Empire. Many are inspired to adorn themselves at that time.”
“How come she doesn’t have any?” Meric asked quietly, nodding toward Meliai.
“Does a tiger change its stripes? Does a tree carve itself? Even among the People, Meliai is considered wild. The young men vie for her, but she shows little lasting interest. She sleeps in open trees. She disappears for days at a time. She’s uncontrollable. There are many who’d prefer she was a bit tamer, given her position, but…”
“Her position?” Meric asked.
Ahead of them, Meliai stopped suddenly.
“Here,” she said.
They’d moved beyond Red Oak into a verdant forest on the mountainside. A creek babbled and jumped over moss-covered rocks, spilling down a twenty-foot drop. It poured into a small pool before winding its way through a shallow streambed. There was some inherent feeling to the place, even beyond its natural beauty, but that only made Meric wary.
A spell lies over this place.
Meliai led the way down the rocky incline beside the small waterfall. Meric and Diodorus joined her on the bank below. Without a trace of self-consciousness, she removed her scant clothing and stood naked on the mossy bank. She closed her eyes and lifted her face and arms to the sky. Dappled light filtered through the trees. Tears sprung from the corners of her eyes. Slowly, she tilted forward and fell face-first into the water. She came up under the waterfall, yellow hair darkened, plastered against her skull. She scrubbed the ash from her body with a slow, sad reluctance.
Diodorus nudged him, and Meric closed his mouth, shifting uncomfortably.
“Don’t look too long, you’ll fall under her spell.”
The levity was lost on Meric.
“I’ve heard the savages mate with forest-spirits. Is she one of their offspring?” he asked.
Diodorus laughed for far too long. Clearing his throat, he asked:
“Wait, her parents–you don’t know?”
“Know what?” Meric asked.
“Nevermind. I’ve been in the Wildlands many years now, Meric, and the only demons or spirits I’ve met are those in my own head. If Meliai has magic, it’s the oldest kind of all.”
Meric averted his eyes as she left the waterfall and waded toward them, a silent sire
n. The pool was only a meter and a half deep. She held out her hand, gesturing to him, and he could no longer avoid looking at her.
“This is a holy place. The water is full of gaija,” Meliai said.
“I knew there was some magic here,” Meric muttered, glancing reproachfully at Diodorus. Again, the Plebian laughed. He did that far too often, in Meric’s opinion.
“Gaija is the unseen energy that binds us to the Goddess,” Diodorus said. “The People believe it’s what gives us life. They say in some places it’s more concentrated than others. It can have different aspects; it can bring healing or desire or … bloodlust.”
“Belief? It is no belief. It is the way of things. There are those who can see gaija. The Priestess Ishka spent many years alone in a cave learning the way of the Lost Eye. She’s may teach me one day,” Meliai said.
Meric spat on the rocks.
“Savage blasphemies. If there’s anything here, it’s an evil spirit,” he said.
“Goddess have mercy. Meric, your madness sinks deeper, you must come into the water!” Meliai said.
“There’s only one God, and only the Plutarchs can speak to Him, and only through the Fog,” Meric told her.
“You’re the supreme authority on that subject, are you?” Diodorus asked. “I’ve had my fill of gods and goddesses and demons and spirits. Long as they leave me alone, they can all throw an invisible party on the head of a pin. But if I was to worship some ineffable deity, I’d rather stand under the open sky than in some stodgy temple. And when a beautiful woman invites me into a ‘healing’ pool, at least I have the sense not to throw it in her face.”
Diodorus turned as if to walk away, then paused and shoved Meric forward with his boot. Meric plunged into the cold water, gasping. He came up thrashing, outraged.
“Bastard!” he shouted.
“You’re welcome,” Diodorus said.
Meric wanted to strangle him. Meliai’s hands on his shoulders gave him pause. Her green eyes chained him. Words evaporated. Droplets clung to her skin, trickled down her arms, her neck, her chest. The patterned ashes were gone.
“You must cleanse the madness,” she said.
Meric meant to say something. Instead, he let her turn him around.
“Ishka taught me a ritual of the Old People. First you must close your eyes. Bring to mind your troubles. Don’t judge them. Just hold them. Then let them go. As you do, I will dunk you back in the water, and the madness will seep from your body. It will be absorbed by the gaija in the water. Then I will lift you, and you must say ‘Ahmen.’ ‘Tis a secret word of our ancestors,” Meliai said.
“I will not participate in ungodly rituals,” Meric said quietly.
Meliai was silent. Diodorus walked along the edge of the pool, looking into the trees.
“Why didn’t you kill me when we fought?” Meliai asked.
The question caught him off-guard.
“The fight was over. There was no point … and I thought you were a man. In Panchaea, only men are soldiers,” said Meric.
“I know this. I thought maybe you’d remembered me.”
“Remembered…?”
“From the forest. At the edge of the clearing.”
Meric looked at her sharply.
“You–it was you in the trees!” he said.
“You were the boldest of the new soldiers. I watched you practice with the blade. You were never beaten.”
Weapons hadn’t been introduced until weeks after that first outing; she must’ve lingered in the forest long after he’d spotted her.
“They sent you to spy on us?” Meric asked.
“No one ‘sends’ me. I go where the Goddess wills.”
“If you knew I was never beaten, why did you attack me at the ravine?”
“I was mad with grief and filled with the gaija of war. The Goddess willed that I act for my people. A woman and a man I called friend died in the dust that day. There are others I knew less well whose smiles and stories will be missed by the night-fires. Maybe it was you who slew them.”
Meric’s mouth worked soundlessly. She gazed at him with unnerving directness.
“I cannot know, as I did not see them fall,” Meliai went on. “Maybe I slew some of your friends too. War takes what it will.”
“The ashes–you washed them away. Why?” Meric asked.
“I have burned the first fire of grief. It is best done quickly in a blaze of feeling, else it smolders in hidden places–has no one taught you this? You have strange customs. The Fog gets into your head, I think. Grief belongs to the body. The Goddess has no use for it. When the body dies, gaija is returned to her, and nothing worth keeping is lost. But the other bodies do not know this. The bodies pity themselves, so they wail and cry as the grief is burned. I have burned the first fire for my friends, and the first fire is always the greatest. So today I have come to the waters to wash their ashes away. Perhaps that is where your madness comes from–you were not able to feast your dead, nor wear their ashes. You have not burned the fires of your body’s grief.”
It sounded like savage nonsense, and Meric was ready to say as much. Yet a lump formed in his throat, and he could not speak, only stare into those grass-green eyes. The faces of his brothers-in-arms returned unbidden, and the knowledge of their loss was more fundamental than any concern over rituals. They were gone–all those legionnaires with whom he’d trained, marched, eaten, and laughed. The men in his pentacrus. The men in his century. He had failed them. They had died … for the Plutarchs.
The Wildlands test the faithful.
What kind of test was a landslide? They’d had no chance at all. Thrace had been the worthiest among them, and the First Marksman had been buried without even drawing a weapon. Meliai was at Meric’s side, looking up at him, one hand on his chest and the other on his back.
“Close your eyes,” she said, and he did, even as a small voice whispered that he must not participate. Grief drowned the objection. It yawned like a great mouth, a hole into terrible places where ancient things wailed.
“Think of your friends,” Meliai said.
Dominus came to mind–thank the Fog his old friend still lived. Then the others, the members of his pentacrus, the men he’d trained with, their small triumphs in the field, the wonder and adventure they’d shared on the march north.
Lysa would love these birds, Avigon had told him in the forest, speaking of his sister.
Snatched a tooth from the panther Frost caught. My daughter has a whole necklace full, Gnost had told him at a campfire, smiling wistfully, turning the tooth in his hand. Memories came by the dozen, flashes of conversation, forgotten moments. Horus laughing over a poor joke until his drink had sprayed through his nose. Meric was shaking his head, denying it all. The grief was more real than the pool and the forest around him.
“Let them go,” Meliai whispered, a voice in the darkness.
Meric wept. He couldn’t stop it. He wept even as it shamed him. A wall collapsed in his mind, and then he did not care. Meliai whispered about his friends and the Goddess and his captivity and all things lost, and she screamed to let it go and thrust him back into the water. He hit the pool’s surface unresisting, floating there, spread-eagled. Time broke, each moment a dimensionless rift between past and present. Then Meliai raised him again with a hand on his back and told him to say the ancient word. He said it and stood shivering, blinking at her through the rivulets of water and tears.
“Good. Some of the madness has drained into the water,” Meliai said. For a moment he did not see her as a savage. Only then could he admit, for the first time, how indescribably beautiful she was.
*
Trajan visited him the next day. Meric was sitting with his memories and his melancholy in the darkened cabin, his grief lessened yet more tangible, when the savage-king opened the door. He was wearing his silver shades again.
“Come. We’re going to break your mind,” Trajan said.
If Meric’s feelings had softened toward Meli
ai and Diodorus, it was not so with the savage-king. Maybe some of the savages really weren’t so different from Plebians, but that only made Trajan worse, as he was manipulating them, directing evil works against the Plutarchs.
“I think I know why you wear those,” Meric said, indicating the sunglasses. “You can only work the magic for your silver-eyes a little while at a time.”
Trajan laughed.
“When it comes to denial, the mind is endlessly inventive. If only you’d put those efforts toward revolution instead. The color of my eyes makes my people uneasy. They believe me a sorcerer, and they’re reluctant to look at me without the glasses. Now let’s go. As I said, we must break your mind.”
“That sounds really helpful, but I’m a little busy at the moment,” Meric said, looking around the empty cabin.
“Is that a trace of humor? That’s new. Have you ever broken a bone, Meric?”
“What does that matter?”
“I’ll take that as a yes. But I suppose you just went to a Bathhouse to get fixed up, am I right? Well, if you’d broken one out here, you’d know that it has to set properly to heal. If it sets wrong, it has to be re-broken, else it will never be straight. The mind is no different, Meric. The Plutarchs broke your mind when you were young. If you’re ever going to think straight, we must re-break it to set your thoughts on the proper path. Only then will the healing begin.”
“Right. How do you plan to do that?” Meric asked.
“I’ve already told you. Truth. Sharper than any scalpel. More bitter than any pill. A painful surgery, but it must be done. Come. There is something I must attend to regardless. We’ll catch two fish with one net, as they say.”
Meric hesitated. A movement behind Trajan caught his eye. Meliai.
“My daughter insists on joining us,” Trajan said, gesturing over his shoulder.
Meric’s eyes widened.
“Daughter?”
*
Six more savages fell in with Meric, Trajan, and Meliai as they walked. Nog was among them. He hailed Meric good-naturedly. His squirrel poked its head out of his pack, wrinkled its nose, and darted back under cover. Meric glanced back at Meliai.
The Last Plutarch Page 10
