The Pale Maraud

by Andrew McEwan

  Birdsong lifted him and he began to move faster through the wood, ears alerted by tunes of a different order, the day's work started, abutting flimsy walls, the flesh and leather of foot soldiers bracing spears and stretching bows, their voices raised, joined, raised again, giving pitiless battle to those seeking only to defend their homes. The city lay over the horizon, rocky outcrops deflecting sound while blocking vision. Jerian chose not to run in that direction. He had followed the army's progress, hiding in brake and tree as both master and thrall laid waste to field and hovel, leaving nothing to stand, nothing to breathe save the crows, black wings spinning mockingly, false combat in the sky. And Jerian had tired of their laughter. He made his way back to familiar land, amongst trees he knew to be friends. The air was freshening by the day and soon snow would fall, yet he had not been able to desert the place of his birth. He knew he must, had no wish to be tormented by a summer owl. Only it was harder than he had imagined. Something bound him to the soil and the cave. Returning there, he lay on the rock where he had dozed away so many afternoons. The silver object clanked against the stone. Holding it up to his eyes, the light just then failing, Jerian at last saw a use for the thing. Wasting no more time, he chipped at the rock, lodged a dull shard down the silver throat, blocking one end. Next he rushed to the cave and, on hands and knees, located other tokens there, pushing them in turn after the stone, eventually jamming it full, grains of sands and scraps of cloth, strands of hair and splinters of bone making of that object a symbol, a source in miniature of the force binding him to one small corner of a larger world.

  Chapter Three - The Damned

  Their feet were naked and cold. Their hands twisted, thin fingers bunched packets of sharp bone. They wore only grey. Jerian passed amongst them. They hid their faces, covered their wounds, hugging their guts to them and gripping their still hearts. They were the dead of the wars. No rest awaited them. A pall of souls, they drifted throughout the forest, clinging like fog to bark, sticking in the outcast's lungs. He saw the damned as no living man did. They touched him. A few even dogged his heels. They recognised him, understood his gift of perception. He was alive - the world of the dead shrouded him.

  The damned whispered as once had the flowers and leaves, speaking their names in a thousand tongues, expressing their need of Jerian. Their entreaties assaulted his ears, his other senses. He shut them out.

  Jerian marked his path and followed. These wasted spirits, abused in death as in life, would not leave him alone. But he ignored their words. He did not wish them for a cause. Brighter things occupied his mind. Richer things danced across his consciousness, colourful spectres whose lures were far more inviting, teasing the youth whose innocence was strong, his fate yet to manifest; always just out of reach, like his manhood.

  All winter he travelled south, the snow a blanket, the trees bent by its weight, the rivers frozen and the sky bleached with cloud. He crossed vast icy plains, rolling hillsides, skirted villages and battlefields, the two often one, strewn with pathetic corpses, men, women and children gutted by swords and transfixed by arrows, their homes burnt, their flesh given to the fire. Often Jerian would come upon a settlement, and, moving carefully, not wishing to be exposed, find the dwellings empty, the surrounding woodland torched, overturned carts pulled by rotting oxen, geese and chickens silent, necks broken, filling the stomachs of Chalian lords. What emotions he experienced were confusing. The destruction sickened him; yet to Jerian the victims were far from quiet. Rising from the earth, the ashes, the mounds, the dead enveloped him, part of the land, a land haunted now, irredeemable, the armies of the ocean having swept far and wide, scattered feathers and scales, flights and armour green-blue and visible despite the snow, shining like gems at the bottom of a pond.

  He did not linger. Jerian pressed on, curious, fascinated, the razed villages, the larger towns, the cities made with dense black smoke...

  The world was one of sadness.

  Tiring, he curled above ground, lodged in a tree, at rest midst naked branches, fingering the withered hand of his lame and shrunken right arm, tracing the ciphers engraved on the silver object's casing. Those tokens of home he carried were comforting. The metal was warm to his flesh, bound to that useless limb. Part of himself, as bone and sinew. His strength in some measure derived from it. He bore his wretched mother much as she had borne him.

  Sleep was freedom. Ensconced in the tree, the traveller was beyond the realm of ghosts and pleadings. The world of sleep, separate from the world of waking, was as yet uncontaminated by souls whose restless nature barred them.

  A brief respite, but a welcome one.

  Coming awake the chorus of stolen lives rose anew, drowning even the crows, lost and stricken.

  Jerian continued as before, swinging the ax and spearing fish with saplings cut and sharpened, eating them raw so as not to occlude the sky further. His progress was neither hurried nor slowed by the grey-clad petitioners, their number dwindling as he crossed into mountainous regions, fording a river whose banks were sheer and water thunderous, chill as death itself, a current he went against with equal vigour.

  Into spring he walked, the mountain's southern slopes alive with heather and roses, a feast of purple that softened his features and reflected in the ax's steel like sunset.

  A new land, across the border.

  Chapter Four - A Wood Carver's Marionette

  Twilight quilted his eyes and the smells of juniper and honeysuckle suffused his lungs. Here, he imagined, was peace in abundance.

  The days were warm and quiet, the wind soft and the rain, when it fell, gentle, welcome. Slender trees sprouted crowns of a lush green, fruits dangling like thorny baskets. They protected their seeds well, as most of the trees were slick and dangerous to climb. Jerian slept beneath rock-faces and upon broken slabs of land. Rabbits skipped from shallow burrows and deer paced him without fear. Jerian then, could not bring himself to kill either.

  It was on his fourth day that he began to notice signs of human habitation. First was a red scarf, torn and spiked on some bushes. Second a doused fire, cold ashes that took his mind beyond the mountains. And thirdly, colouring the afternoon, a young woman. More girl than woman, she danced happily, vigorous and alone, twirling long skirts of green and yellow, her skin the hue of pine. Her eyes were a vivid blue, and as Jerian watched her they grew bright and wide. The girl spun on a hilltop thirty paces from him, open mouthed, a trilling laugh that disappeared with her over the rise. Unthinkingly, he chased her, this apparition, drawn on by those eyes, swept along with the afternoon on a warm tide of deception. The girl vanished into a deep hollow. Jerian never hesitated; he plunged in after, the sky darkening as the sun was blotted out by successive layers of ponderous, mouldy leaves. The hollow was steep-sided and the vegetation thicker the farther he descended, slashing with the ax, angry swipes at heavy limbs that spilled putrid sap, greasing the earth under his naked feet. Occasional rushes of colour marked the girl's winding passage. Jerian pursued her stubbornly, moving in near blackness about the slick wall, sliding deeper, unable now to clamber out, fear and panic discovering fertile soil in the confusion he felt, the light of day, the freshness of the country above lost to him as he slipped helplessly towards the hollow's rocky centre. Blind and desperate and unable to stop as the ground subsided beneath him, he was then falling past wooden expressions, masks adorning smooth verticals, lit from within like garish lanterns, blurred smiles and mocking snouts as he tumbled towards seeming death.

  A net caught him, snatched him, hugged his arms, the whole and the wizened, buckled his legs, stiff fibres cutting him much as the ax cut the enfolding strands, tipping Jerian unconscious into a thick bed of suffocating moss.

  The wanderer bled and dreamed. The laughing, dancing girl was hung on a hook.

  *

  On a broad tree stump in a watery, sonorous cavern, the wood carver sat below the earth, hinged sections of dark oak between his like-coloured knees, a glinting chisel i
n his hands, a family of tools, sharp planes and fine knives, elegant racks to house them cut from the ancient rootstock at his feet.

  Jerian watched passively, legs crossed on a polished stone, a child whose eyes were beech knots quietly braiding his washed hair, her fingers cool against his neck. He was clean and refreshed, his one hand occupied with a puppet of sticks that swam clumsily through the moist air, attached by rough lengths of string to his playful digits.

  The carpenter's name was Odil and his children were young and many, some splashing like otters, others motionless on rock shelves or leant against the aged stump awaiting repairs to lost ears and damaged thumbs, their features as their patience, stolid and lasting. Presently Odil was at work on an arm for Jerian, its lustre matching his own, smoothed like him with pungent oils, its texture that of flesh scrubbed and exercised to a healthy tone. The shoulder was bound in thick leather, part of a brass-pinned corslet, light and flexible. Brass links formed the joints of the oaken limb, enhancing the wood's crafted subtlety. Anxiously, Jerian anticipated its fitting.

  His actual shrunken right arm itched and trembled with a song. The cavern echoed, resonant with ardent music, a host of children's voices uplifted, stemming from the resolute carver and his array of chisels. Odil had fashioned those voices, throat and tongue. He might have given voice to the wanderer as easily, but chose not to. A strong arm was what Odil required, and a strong arm was what he had in Jerian, separated from his ax, weighted by new burdens and bathed in the cloy waters that ran through the demesne, bathed now a second time, hand grasping hand, a greater strength to each as the dead mass of the sculpted limb dragged its wearer down. Underwater, the song glinted in silver ribbons, pearly verses that implored him to rise - but to rise Jerian had to master the heavy arm, make it his.

  Breath held, he struggled. The leather creased and tightened, crushing heat from his torso as it moulded afresh the contours of skin and bone. The arm felt numb, but that it was felt at all encouraged him to focus his thoughts. Steadily life drained into the hard oak, softening it, making pliable its gifted sheen. After a few moments he was able to bend it. Surfacing, opening his lungs, he reached with both hands and was helped from the pool, the children grinning, silenced, next returned to their shelves.

  Odil rubbed his chin. He looked the young man, the remade man over, ran the heel of his knurled palm from chest to elbow, twisting and shaking the newly fastened appendage until satisfied the bond had taken, a compact of flesh and wood that he meant to finish in metal.

  The grip was sound.

  Jerian had never been in a position to bargain. From the moment of his enticement, his sighting of the dancing girl, the moment of his fall, he owed his life to the purposeful shaper of smiles and gulling laughter.

  Jerian was tricked at heart. Defenceless, he was easy prey. With the unfamiliar arm at his side, unpractised and solid, he slept as the carver bade him, troubled by spurious dreams.

  *

  A crystal sky, it stretched impossible distances, pale and hazed, the sun a languid yellow as it leaned over the grubby trees comprising the horizon. Where the sun sat, quenched in fiery ocean, was Jerian's goal. The road he followed had for the first time a destination; not an end in itself, he knew, but a point of calling. The wood carver directed him there. Odil asked that he return with the severed head of that sun's ephemeral mistress, for she had stolen from him in the past and so indebted herself to his chisels.

  Jerian did not question this task. The girl whose skirts had entrapped him blew him kisses now from the depths of the hollow, tokens that would lead him back. He carried no weapon, neither blade nor ax, the latter's presence missed by his left hand and craved by his right. The carver had explained that such needs would be filled in time, weapons brought to him, as Jerian understood, when he had proper need of them. How Odil planned their transportation, the placing of blue steel in his doubled fingers at the necessary instant, puzzled him. The father of so many children, however, had other ends in sight. He cherished the Chalian ax. It bit deep into the hardest wood. He sent his assassin off quickly, the sooner he might return, kicking his feet from the leather sandals Odil had furnished him, continuing west, inland, the journey long to the ocean...

  Threads of parting tugged at his neck and the wooden limb quivered, fist clenched, tendons proud, swinging fitfully at his hip.

  The sun drew in his shadow as it climbed to overtake him, peering in his malformed skull as it dropped. The world was wide, unfamiliar beyond the mountains.

  Time had contracted below ground.

  The wanderer scratched.

  Chapter Five - Pale Weavers' Mare

  The land was rugged and unfriendly. Bears prowled the night, their breath a crackling storm. Jerian no longer slept in trees, for these had grown twisted and stunted, ugly boles and knotted limbs that the birds themselves avoided. If he were to spend his dreams in their embrace he might never wake come morning. The grass too was flawed, sapped of colour - everything about the land was altered.

  As the ground rose the summer waned and a perpetual mist clung round his shoulders, new and old. His oaken arm pulsed hotly at times, further warping his features, a deformity Odil had not sought to correct. Perhaps it suited the wood carver's purpose. An assassin should not be beautiful, thought the wanderer. The single direction Odil's bequest had imposed on him angered Jerian. But he could not turn aside. He would return with the head of the sun's mistress, or not at all. A sadness rooted in his stomach. It had not been his intention to become indebted. Odil had tricked him, lured him from the over world to the under. The true debt was to himself, for he had fallen prey so easily...

  *

  The stars accused Jerian. They bubbled like running water and shone like diamonds. What was it he had killed? A fox? Not a rabbit. His hands were sticky with blood. He did not recognise the animal. He was hungry. Names were forgotten.

  The silhouettes of tall trees and steep rock walls were a tangible weight about him. The air's dank chill caused him to shake like a wet dog, hair whipping, leather darkened with sweat as he tore into the carcass. Thus sated he rose from his crouch and turned a circle. Was he followed? Something moved around him, stepped quietly through the leafage. Rocks deceived Jerian. Their stone faces, wholly black, gaped momentarily as if at a passing lantern. Dismissing his fears he continued walking. A stream ran, the walls narrowing, its bed cold and slick, affording the only path. Jerian clambered upwards, feet frozen, ankles numbed by the liquid, searching out fixed stones while those he loosened tumbled down. There was to be no rest this side of the mountains. Did these swing north to join the others he had climbed? Was he crossing back? If so, then he might count himself amongst the damned.

  He reached a plateau, the stream widening above a shallow fall, and lingered a while before again pushing west, the new sun at his back, tormented in his soul, wondering how many times that sun would overtake him, quenching itself in the distant ocean, its mistress's loins a destination they had in common, the sun to seed, the assassin to rob of its blossoming. The wood carver wished darkness on the world. There could be no greater motive. That this woman had done him ill in the past was, he believed, a deception, a romanticism Odil perpetuated in his vanity. Jerian, as his tool, would not avenge an insult or correct a misunderstanding. He would murder the dawn, make it barren. His was a bold destruction. Whatever she had stolen, her theft was nothing, the lesser crime.

  Hands caressed him, questioned his crooked features and probed the juncture of flesh and wood. Their questions were manifold and indecipherable. Jerian was blind, lost, the ground beneath him softened, fallen away. He could neither walk nor breathe with certainty, as the mist clung to him ever more tightly. If he had had some sharp weapon, a blade, something with an edge, he may have been able to cut himself free; but he possessed not so much as a knife, and the ax had been denied him. He was helpless, struggling in the winding grip of a living vapour...

  Out of this miasma transpired an equ
ally living horse.

  Chapter Six - The Burnished Moon

  The horse's girth was deep and its shoulders full, its mane drifting like the mist from which it was made, its back short like that of a Chalian steed. Jerian had never ridden before and the experience served to mitigate and fears he had as to the nature of the creature speeding him towards his master's goal. Buffeted, he gripped the mane in both hands, its diaphanous strands slipping through his fingers, the horse running silently as its hooves did not strike the earth but whispered across it like a gloaming, its coming a motion that reduced the day to a blur of greens and browns. Clouds scudded, filling the sky with a cold offering of rain.

  Such dampness was this creature's medium.

  Jerian relaxed his new hand and stretched the muscles of wrist and elbow, soothing aching ligaments, their brass origins invisible. He pulled the hair from his eyes, rubbed the wire of his beard. The world formed and reformed about him, blended one incarnation with the next, like stirred images in a pond, the scents of animals caught fleetingly and confused, spoors mixed to suggest a truly extraordinary predator, the monster trailing him and his mare, outpacing them as if in the sun's employ, a servant raised as the horse had been raised, given shape and instruction, perhaps charged with protecting the woman at the edge from Odil's wandering lion.

  The sensation grew with his thirst; a threat perceived. The light strove to weaken the mare, stubborn rays dispersing the body that had formed between his knees. Jerian moistened his lips and fixed his gaze ahead, splitting the horse's fading ears, poll and forelock waning as noon passed and the ground sloped steeply downwards.