The Burden of Memory

by Welcome Cole

  When the flames in his chest subsided, he braced himself against the wide trunk of the great tree and struggled back to his feet. It was going to be a rough haul. Despite the excellent treatments of the Baeldon, he was still badly hurt.

  He pulled his shirt from his pack and shook it out. As he prepared to don it, he spied the bloodstained slit left by Maeryc’s knife and wondered how so small a tear could yield so great a misery? And yet, it was one of those mysteries that stymie men and steal their time, because those answers, even if found, yield absolutely no insight.

  Once dressed, he walked out under the dripline and into the sunshine on the backside of the tree. True to the runner’s word, another warhorse stood in the grass a dozen yards north of the camp, bridled and saddled and ready to ride. It wasn’t even hobbled. Mawby patted its neck as the horse ripped the grass at his feet. With no little effort, he hauled himself up into the saddle, took the reins and pulled the horse around to the south.

  Moments later, they loped down across the swales and through the tall grass. As he passed the next hill, he considered going up to see Maeryc’s grave, but quickly abandoned the notion. The best way to express his respect was to get the sorry news of the caeyl to his brother clansmen. The Faht had to be warned.

  He prayed to Calina that it wasn’t too late.

  III

  THE PIRATES

  MAL TOOK A SIP OF HIS COFFEE AND DAMNED NEAR SPIT IT RIGHT BACK OUT.

  It was cold, bitter, and thick as calking pitch. A perfect complement to the tack his morning had already taken.

  He set the tin mug on the ornate wooden table standing at attendance beside the stuffed green velvet chair he sat in. Then he leaned back, threw his legs up onto the padded stool, and made himself as comfortable as he reasonably could under the circumstances. Time to watch his brother fuss through his usual morning ritual.

  Lucifeus stood before him aboard a squat stepping stool, fists berthed on his hips, slowly turning side to side as he studied his reflections in the three full-length mirrors angled before him.

  He wore a fine deerskin jacket dyed nearly black, with lines of leather fringe dripping from the seams of each arm and across the breadth of his back. Black boots polished to a blinding sheen rose to knee length over his dark blue cotton britches. Straight shoulder-length black hair rimmed his face. Fastidiously groomed eyebrows punctuated each of his steely blue eyes, and a finely groomed moustache rode down the curve of his smile lines before coiling up over his cheeks.

  A short, elderly servant stood on the carpet behind him, holding up an additional hand mirror for extra measure. This vanity dance would go on until his brother either passed his blessings on the man-god in the mirror or burst into a tirade about this trespassing wrinkle here or that unruly seam there.

  Mal slouched lower in his chair and took another slug of the wretched coffee, more out of boredom than interest in the vile brew. As he did, he pondered a familiar question: when had his brother’s vanity had grown so obscene? In the years they’d terrorized the Sea of Hope he’d been called the Pretty Pirate, though never to his face. At least, not by anyone who valued their skin. His brother once overheard a crewmember jestingly refer to him by that title, a mistake that resulted in the poor sailor suffering a near mortal keelhauling. The barnacles on the hull tore the sailor up so badly, it’d ended up costing him an arm. From that day forth, no sailor within shouting distance of the Laughing Molly ever dared to whisper that nickname.

  Mal tolerated his brother’s narcissism because, in spite of it, he was supernaturally charismatic and profoundly compelling leader. Men and women would fall over each other for the opportunity to serve him, men because of his ungodly magnetism and women because of his everything else. Yet, in the ten years they’d been landside, his arrogance had evolved into this hour-long morning ritual, this loving, pathetic dance with himself before those damnable mirrors.

  “Is Hoot ready?" Lucifeus asked as he adjusted the tufts of white linen flowering from his jacket cuffs. His manservant stood before him securing a wide black belt around the waist of his jacket.

  “Hoot's in the brig,” Mal told him once again.

  “Excellent. He’s readying the interrogation, then?”

  “No, Luce. He’s making you breakfast. What do you think?”

  His brother offered no sign he’d heard. He and his reflection leaned toward each other and each of them carefully smoothed the long hair back from their temples. It appeared his brother was finalizing his dress, and Mal thanked the gods of Pentyrfal for it. The man-god has passed his blessings; let the day’s festivities begin!

  Unfortunately, just as his hopes had risen, it appeared the gods were not with him at all. Just as it seemed the ritual might finally be ending, Lucifeus abruptly lurched upright and cried out, “Gods’ hooks! What in the name of the Calina’s flower is this?”

  Mal covered his eyes.

  “Graeve!” Lucifeus barked at his elderly attendant, “Look at this! Look right there! What the hell is that?”

  The short, portly old manservant nearly jumped from his skin, but quickly recovered and dove into the fray to examine the indicated hairs. He stood on his toes before the stool, picking through the offending strands.

  Mal clenched his teeth. Please, he prayed, not this. Not today.

  “Is that a… a white hair?” his brother bellowed at the mirror.

  “I-I don’t see anything, sir,” Graeve cried.

  This was the absolute worst-case scenario so early in the morning: his brother sifting his manicured fingers through his perfect hair in search of renegade gray. His hair was as black as coal tar with the bluish patina of a well-polished cannon. The last time he found a white hair, he’d wasted two hours with a servant creeping through the rest of it in search of other stowaways that must surely be hiding there.

  Mal had neither the time nor the patience for it today. “Curse you, Luce!” he said, slapping the padded armrest, “It’s already pushing eight bells. We don’t have time for this bullshit.”

  His brother smoothed his hair back with the palms of both hands, his eyes firmly anchored on the man opposing him in the mirror. “Sink me!” he said with a self-satisfied grin, “It’s merely a highlight, nothing to fret. And thank Pentyrfal for it. I’m too bloody young for the grays, don’t you say?”

  “You’re forty-one.”

  “The devil, too. I’m thirty-seven, not a minute older.”

  “Well, I’d call that a miracle of science, considering I’m your younger brother and I’m thirty-nine.”

  “You ought to send for Hoot,” Lucifeus said as he turned his face this way and that in the mirror, “We should begin the interrogation soonest. The day grows no younger.”

  Mal scowled at that. It was just the more of the same.

  “It’s a hell of a thing, don’t you say?” his brother said as he smoothed his jacket, “Finding the savages in the Nolands? And just two days before the festival?”

  “Blow the savages!” Mal said harshly, “And blow the cursed festival! You indulge the crew too much. They’re fat and soft, and they get fatter and softer by the day.”

  His brother glanced back at him as the manservant smoothed out his tapered linen collar. He was smiling that condescending smile he’d so effectively mastered over the years.

  “What?” Mal said, “It’s true and you know it.”

  “The Eve of Calistra falls but once a year, dear brother. When the Blessing of the Trees begins tomorrow, there’ll be seven unholy days of abstinence for most of the crew. They deserve to be coddled just a tad tonight. Gods know they'll be a disagreeable enough bunch over the next week.”

  “You never pampered a crew when we were shipside. When we were at sea and respectable, you—”

  “Respectable and damned poor, as I recall. Bloody hell, Malevolus, we're not at sea anymore. I'd have thought ten years ashore would've careened that manner of thinking out of your skull.”

  “I swear to gods, Lucifeus! Father s
hould’ve done the world a favor and pinched your head off at birth!”

  His brother flashed an ivory smile back at the mirror. “My, but wouldn’t that’ve been a waste?”

  “Hellsteeth!” Mal said, again slapping the padded armrests, “If you were any prettier you’d have a womb.” He considered grabbing the nearest sword and stealing that pretty head right off that primped body. The morning had started off badly enough, and now he felt a foul mood blowing down on him. And as always, his natural tendency was to steer straight into it.

  Lucifeus turned and sent him a look. “Mal, put away that scowl and listen to me carefully. I won't have you spoiling this day for the crew. The wood nymphs scare the men enough as it is during Blessing Week. I won't have you irritating them as well with your ‘I remember when’ stories, and berating them for failing your antiquated expectations. Do you hear me?”

  “Aye, Cap’n Fark! I hear you. My only wish is that you’d hear yourself. The Freehold won’t run itself. And capturing these savages doesn’t make our day any easier.”

  Lucifeus accepted his saber from the servant and slipped it gracefully into the scabbard on his right hip. “All right, Mal,” he said as he adjusted the weapon against his thigh, “Point taken. Have Hoot set up the prisoners. I’ll see them beneath the Dancing Tower in fifteen minutes.”

  “Are you deaf or stupid? Hoot’s already in the damned brig!”

  “Do say?” Lucifeus said, looking truly surprised, “Then precisely what are we waiting for?” With a sincere laugh, he walked toward the door, the short servant scrambling in tow behind him, smoothing out any hint of wrinkles following in his Captain’s wake.

  Mal squeezed the flesh between his eyes. They were complete opposites, he and his brother. Lucifeus was the handsome one with the commanding personality and clean hands. Mal was the plain one with the whip and dirty conscience. Lucifeus drew the men and women into their world and bade them do his will. Malevolus kept the world organized, the books straight, the wages paid, and the crew in line. It was the perfect marriage: they were each miserable in their own flavor.

  “And Mal?”

  Mal looked over at his brother standing in the doorway idly brushing the hairs of his meticulously groomed moustache with his bejeweled index finger.

  “Aye, Captain Fark?” Mal asked with no little acid.

  “Send for Esoria. Have her meet us in the tower as well.”

  Another pang of irritation seized him. “What in the Nine do you need the witch for? A hot poker and some pincers have always been good enough in the past.”

  “Just do it, will you, Mal? They’re Vaemysh trackers, and two of them are elites at that. I dare say they won’t bend at the sight of a bruise or a few drops of blood.”

  Mal saluted him with his coffee mug. “Your word, Captain,” he said before downing the remains of the cold, unsavory brew.

  “You’re a hell of a good partner, Captain Fark,” Lucifeus returned.

  Despite his sincerest wish to coddle his vexation, Mal was unable suppress a grin. With his brother’s footsteps fading down the hallway, he raised his empty coffee mug up toward the equally empty door and declared affectionately, “To Captain Lucifeus Taerrien Fark, patron saint of assholes everywhere.”

  As he pushed himself up from the chair, he caught his own reflection in the same mirrors his brother had been gazing so adoringly into just moments before. The difference in their faces was so stark, anyone who didn’t know them would never dream to call them brothers.

  While Lucifeus’s face was chiseled and polished, Mal knew his own was rugged and worn. He looked every minute the man who’d spent the better part of his life pacing the deck of a pirate ship while chasing down profits across the whole of the Sea of Hope and the oceans beyond. His hair was chronically tousled and the once dark and dashing brown had softened to the color of washed-out mud. His face was as lined and worn as an old leather apron, a stark contrast to the powdered perfection of his brother’s. His preferred attire was a suit of rough brown buckskin, faded and careworn, the suit of a man of work and callouses rather than pomp and circumstance.

  He wondered how they could come from the same belly and yet be so completely opposite in both character and design. Then again, perhaps they weren’t brothers at all. Perhaps one of them had washed ashore in a basket to be taken in by parents too generous of heart to refuse such a sorry event. That would mean there was no blood shared between them after all. What a divine thought that was!

  Cheered with his new perspective, Mal saluted the careworn man in the mirrors and stepped out of the room.

  ∞

  Mal walked out of the great log lodge that served as the fort’s headquarters, and stepped into the cool shade of the covered porch lining the compound.

  When they’d built the first few roughshod huts that were to eventually become Fark’s Freehold, Lucifeus had refused any more trees to be felled than absolutely necessary to clear space for the original buildings. He’d insisted that the forest’s grand trees with their bloated crowns whispering in the shoreline winds above them reminded him of the sails of the Laughing Molly. It was a grip of melancholy Mal had never seen his brother to fall victim to before that moment. But they’d only just left the wreckage of their beloved ship burning on the Widow’s Bay a few days earlier, and given the genuine tragedy of that loss, Mal could find no heart to refuse him.

  At first, Mal had serious doubts about moving their operations landside. They’d been born in the bowels of a ship, and he’d fully expected to find his return to the gods on the deck of the same. In the end, however, it turned out smuggling on land wasn’t much different from pirating, except perhaps for being immensely more profitable. As they prospered, the original huddle of shacks that’d made up the early Freehold quickly swelled into a self-contained village and, eventually, into a vast city-fort permanently housing nearly ten thousand crew and families. The grounds outside the fort often hosted several thousand more transient loyalists, their numbers constantly shifting as the smugglers and merchants came and went.

  They’d built Fark’s Freehold here in the Neutral Outerlands just beyond the jurisdiction of the Allied nations, who would never recognize them as a sovereign entity, but who also could never intervene due to the burden of their own treaties. With its back to the Sea of Hope, and on a craggy shore too threatening to be approached by any bullying fleet, the Freehold was nearly invincible. The vast, flat plains of the Nolands protected the prow of the compound, plains so exposed they would leave any aggressor with far greater wounds than the Freehold would ever sustain, should the foolishness of an assault be entertained.

  Through all these subsequent years of the Freehold’s growth, Lucifeus had adamantly refused to allow any trees be removed from within the fort grounds without his explicit permission. He’d even gone as far as to hang one new crewmember who’d unwittingly cut a particularly large branch from an ancient tree near his house without the Captain’s permission. That poor man dangled from the Dancing Tower for a week after his execution, punished harshly for the crime of ignorance.

  So, the trees were allowed to grow unharrassed, though the layout of the town suffered as a result. The garrisons, stores, and houses were arranged in odd clumps and angles, situated at the convenience of the trees, and none of the roads in the twenty thousand acre fort ran straight for very long.

  Mal walked across the dirt compound toward the front gates to inspect security, as was his morning routine. The air was chill and crisp, filled with the scent of morning fires and the sweet flavor of roasting bacon, onion sharpened potatoes, and freshly brewed coffee that fully insulted the mug of tar he’d just finished.

  He climbed the wood plank steps up to the gangway running along the top of the garrison’s forewall alongside the main gate. Twenty feet above the earth, he stopped and looked out through the sharpened posts composing the outer wall at the swell of green meadow that was the Nolands. From here he had a grand view of both the inner and outer groun
ds of the fort. He propped his boot on the muzzle of a cannon and leaned into his raised knee. Shading his eyes against the blinding white light of the sun, he surveyed the action surrounding the walls.

  As was usual, both sides of the wall were a hive of activity. Traders passed in through the gates with carts heaping supplies, while others passed out with purses tightened with gold. Dogs chased each other through the legs of the milling crowd. Shopkeepers swept the porches of the stores lining the parade route feeding into the fort’s heart. Produce and seafood sellers pulled their carts through the crowds and cried their wares. Militia officers barked orders at a few gangly squads of colorfully dressed recruits jogging in loose formation down the cobblestone main street.

  A hundred feet farther down the rampart wall, just on the other side of the fort’s wide gate, a guard clanged the old ship’s bell to signal a wagon entering the compound. This was the sign of a visitor of some importance. Minutes later, four massive Baeldonian warhorses clopped through the entrance towing a wagon of equal proportions. A worn and tired tarp covered the wagon’s bed, stretched to exhaustion over a heaping mound of contraband. A dirty old Baeldon with a long white beard and longer white hair drove the team forward with a song of clicks and whistles that flowed as easily as if he were singing in his native language.

  It was Morgan Cafsteel, one of their most dependable and most profitable smugglers.

  “Morgan!” Mal shouted down at the Baeldon, “You’re a week late. I was growing vexed. Word has it the price on your head’s up to two hundred treklas, courtesy of the new sheriff of Parhron City.”

  The Baeldon cupped a hand over his eyes and squinted up at Mal. “Is that so, Cap’n?” he called back in a rumbling voice.

  “Hell, yes! I’ve seen the circulars myself.”

  “Calina’s tits! Ain’t it about time those useless Parhronii finally realize my worth? What the hell took ‘em so goddamned long?”