The Pale Maraud

by Andrew McEwan

  He did not touch his face. He would rather his features remained anonymous.

  The door opened, startling him. It had come ajar, pushed by a curious wind, an intrusive draught that washed the cottage of its pleasing garden odours and replaced them with a harsh smell of burning. A haze of soot discoloured the fresh linen, shadows deposited in its gentle folds.

  Jerian climbed from the bed, the legs under him insecure at first, their memory of walking dulled. He stumbled nakedly to confront the breeze, the outside world a familiar one of uniform firs, steepled green. It occurred to Jerian that he had dreamed of the city, its vanished rulers, the keep at its heart behind an inner wall. Bt the death he had sown was real; the stump of his right arm not without pain. How long had he lain here, and who had tended him that time? There was no sign of anyone. A lone chicken, the heads of cabbages and onions, a broken-wheeled cart; these were the clues to the identity of the cottage owner. He walked around the building, discovered warm bread in a metal oven to the rear of the chimney, some rusted farm tools abandoned in the long grass, and an ax.

  A chopping ax, it nevertheless caught his attention. He wrenched it loose from the riven trunk into which it had been swung. The edge was blunt, the weight good. There was nothing to suggest the presence of his saviour, that person to whom his life was owed.

  It amused him, thinking himself mortal after all.

  Yes, he whispered inwardly, a dream.

  *

  He set out at dawn the following day, choosing a direction contrary to the prevailing, soot-laden wind. If that wind blew from anywhere, Jerian imagined, it was the past.

  The now polished, sharpened ax rested across his shoulder. He went barefoot, dressed only in bandages and rags. The sky was crisp and high, scarred with the remnants of clouds. It felt good to be walking again. His naked feet offered a fresh perspective on the terrain, images of a pristine land jouncing up his spine, a land yet to experience the travails of man. Its edges were soft, its colours soothing, its contours idealised. The surrounding trees looked almost as if they had been planted, deliberately arranged, as if to some grand design, features, along with the grasses and flowers, of some wondrous garden, a manicured paradise - lacking animals. Birds there were. He had seen finches, heard thrushes; but there were no squirrels, foxes or moles.

  Jerian did not let it worry him. If he were in some cage, artificially contained, then that caged world was a fantastic place. And he was here for a purpose. The land sloped ever upwards, its camber easy, and he longed to know what lay over the horizon, there perhaps to discover the truth extant in his bones. He was strong this morning, having breakfasted on the last of the bread, on fruit and cheese he found inside the cottage, sat at the fragile table as the sun rose to the east. His severed right arm caressed by warm rays, Jerian stepped from the welcome sanctuary of those stone walls, his thoughts drifting to others, his body restored, healed, the arm a stubborn figment, administered to by unknown hands.

  The trees thinned as the distance unrolled and soon he was passing through lush meadow, vibrant greens and scintillating yellows, each of many hues and shades, the billowing grassland awash with scents and blooms, winged insects, the colour-heaped imagines of once lazy caterpillars. Onwards he marched, the breath potent in his lungs, firing blood and heart as the mellow skyline beckoned, an undulating curve naked of all but waving grasses, dancing amongst these the fine shoots of iris and poppy...

  Finally, the rise gave out to pale air, a precipice as sheer as it was sudden, a lip of green overhanging mica dotted limestone. The drop was ten times the height of a man. Jerian sensed the cool updraught under his toes. And saw in the space beyond, removed by many a stone's throw, the city keep, blank and aloof on a hill.

  There was no visible moat. Nor did horses scamper at its foot. There was only the cylindrical tower, without windows, the sun cast above it like the flame of a candle, detailing the ground it stood upon as dusty and black.

  The cliff here reminded Jerian of another, one perhaps in a world related to this; only beyond that cliff raged and ocean. And beyond that ocean?

  He could not answer.

  Did and army, still and crumbling, occupy the strata at whose top he stood? If yes, was that army any less resilient for being composed of sediment? True, granite was tougher, but there were no battering waves at this site, just metallic glimmers.

  As before, the wanderer made his way carefully down the near vertical slope, stepping in daylight, the shoulders of infantrymen and the cracked helmets of legions his precipitous rungs, armour draped to their knees. The way was narrow and the stone brittle, his weight against their shields and chests, his face close to the faces of an embattled host, locked and thwarted defenders of a land that once must have resided at the seabed, lifted by gargantuan forces, staring now into emptiness. He did not want to look too closely, afraid of what he might see in their eyes. He had been petitioned on that prior occasion, begged for a release he did not believe to be in his power to grant. He had no wish to travel at the head of an army, no matter what the cause, no burning desire to set into motion a fractured, silent escarpment. Jerian's sole aim was to redeem Udioe, to acquaint himself once more with the poetry of the shining girl, whose body at least he thought to lie in the keep.

  Continuing from the base of the cliff, not turning to regard its formations, he found the earth rougher, the grass thinner, the flowers sparse, as if a poisoned stream leaked from hiding between the rocky feet of the lowest ranks of soldiers, the verdant stalks above out of reach of its strangling tendrils, while here the ground sloped downwards, prone to assault and flood. Even the air tasted stale in this false valley. Boulders, a number scarred with what looked like the signatures of swords and spears, patterns the result of anger, lay scattered at random, some as tall as himself, mighty stones abandoned, smoothed and rolled, deposited, maybe, by the coursing of a vanished river, engines of attrition left surrounded by foul gases as the torrent lessened and disappeared, the mud of the bottom dried and contracted, hard enough now to walk on. Had this been the moat? Exaggerated, grown, as the keep seemed grown. Indeed, the edifice, what he could discern of it, appeared suddenly no bigger, but much farther away. And Udioe? Might she have grown also? A woman, imagined Jerian, not unlike the milky lady of the elm wood, lithe and illusive as she danced, a storm tumbling from the sky in her wake.

  Or were there more falsehoods and untruths in this life than arms of oak and helms of moon silver could explain?

  Whatever the answer, and he was convinced the question's basic nature was one of change, Jerian advanced, bare feet impressing sediments, his passage written into rocks not yet formed; for regardless of the world awaiting his arrival, a world he could neither name nor know, he remained certain that a world there was, perhaps even an end to his road, beginning at the next shore.

  *

  The sun rested like a wheel on the western horizon, its thin rays warming his ghosted right arm, dusk as dawn, a spectre of feeling whose true home was amongst the forest roots where it had fallen, separated from his paralysed body by the swift downstroke of a Sea Lord's ax. Jerian faced the opposite direction, but those rays were the same. Everything turned, he thought.

  The twilight served to further blacken the earth. He stood ankle deep in coarse sand, splines of wood or bone protruding, suggesting the buried carcasses of men or boats. Before him the keep shed its vague shadow across the world, the uniform curve of it slipping unseen to Jerian's left. Something moved there, a shade concealed, a stygian guardian to this impassive fortress. A limbless worm.

  Jerian leapt from its path, the giant creature twice his breadth, sinuous and loud as it uncoiled. Stumbling backwards, he offered no threat, and the rippling beast did not attack. The ground rose sharply prior to abutting the wall, the worm above head height as the wanderer once again planted his toes in the black sand. That the serpent had lain so close and yet remained invisible caused his heart to stutter, the blood to thump in his he
ad. Regarding it now, the thing as if newly born, coated in mucus, Jerian found he could not trace its full length: shadow was its mother and its mother its tail. Did it encircle the keep? The features collected about the worm's visible extreme were ill-fashioned, half-made. As it uncoiled the nascent stumps of legs appeared. Next, the soft, folded membranes of crude wings. But it could not fly. Perhaps once it had swum, a true serpent of the deep that had become trapped as the river dried, a magical beast whose adaptation, from water to land, was unfinished.

  Vulnerable, the worm arrayed its twisting body in defence of the keep, a wriggling newborn whose transformation had not run its course - but still a formidable opponent for a man whose one arm toted an unproven blade, whose naked flesh wore only the loose armour of bandages, whose staring eyes slid helplessly off its growing extent. If then battle were to be met, it had better be this side of dark.

  The shimmering worm ignored the interloper, however. Did it perceive him at all? Or was there another reason for it coming forth, mused Jerian, not his presence but the closeness of night? Could it be the swelling mantle of stars coaxing the beast from its lair, the now gibbous moon to anneal its scales?

  So, he might pass unscathed...

  Slowly he climbed towards the wall. The sand rasped beneath his soles. The sky darkened, its host of stars bright and silver. Silhouetted against the deepened firmament the worm's rounded head was raised, the culmination of its wide blunt body lifted as if drawn by a thread to the heavens. Jerian allowed his own head to tip back, his short neck to curve as he peered upwards. Over the keep was suspended another light, a star coloured blue, its gentle luminescence mirrored in the long flank of the serpent, icy points under a liquid surface whose sheen passed through the beast, a glowing tidal procession infusing it from the nose, enticing his sight to the left, following the prickling blue light along the creature's side.

  The day's last vestiges were finally smothered, the keep a tremendous weight against the sky, black as the sand around his feet, the spangled tail of the worm casting the merest gleam; enough for Jerian to see by, enough to illuminate this latest twist in his path.

  And then the tail was whipped away, Jerian knocked to the ground as the last of the beast emerged in a sheen from the darkness, a brief squall of dust forcing shut the stranger's eyes, burning his skin, hot air dragged from an opening, a hollow in the rise whose brittle collar yawned blindly about a hole.

  *

  Glistening, fair Udioe...

  Chapter twenty - The Hollow Sky

  Movement was inhibited by the suffocating closeness of the walls. Jerian crawled on his belly much as the worm, the ax pushed ahead, the tunnel slick with the half-formed creature's excreta, a cloy and lubricious substance whose own dank odour was subsumed by the stinking hot breath of the keep itself, a raw, noxious stench that cut into the back of his throat.

  Eyes stinging, tears streaking his mended cheeks, he dragged himself deeper and deeper, following the worn contours of the worm's passage. He wondered if it might not return before he was clear, expecting at any moment to be forced into its oily lair. But nothing came behind him. And soon the tunnel widened, enabling Jerian to rise to his knees, catch his breath, a branching of the passage teasing his nostrils with a sudden variety of temperatures and scents, some cool, fragrant, some scorched and foul. All mingled in the blank space before his newly contorted features, hopelessly mixed so that he feared he would have no choice but to gamble, choosing a route at random as opposed to trusting the confused evidence of touch, smell and taste.

  There were no turns visible. Everything was black.

  This first tunnel emptied into a larger, rounded space, a bulb whose surface was pocked with openings, a number smaller than his head, the biggest an arm's length across, a stinking pit into which Jerian barely avoided tumbling, as it occupied the invisible sphere's nadir. Aside from those inaccessible, and the hungry void at his feet, there was nothing to distinguish one narrow corridor from the next. In fact all seemed equally dire, mouths without promises. He attempted to trace those exits most frequented by the worm - although whether he would choose either the beast's favourite or least favourite path he could not say. Only no such choice was there to make; each felt damp, sticky, vile. He shrugged. Did it matter? All the tunnels might join, all lead to the same place. So what to do? Let the ax point? Again, questions clouded his mind. Jerian turned around. He clambered into the glutinous shaft to the left and above the original channel; somehow, a decision made...

  The blade bit deep and he pulled himself up, squirming between layers of stiff clay. This was a passage unused by the worm, or else shaped, forced through the packed mud some time ago and since dried. Whichever, he was pleased to have escaped the viscous trail.

  The shaft levelled off after a short distance, its sides becoming flatter, harder, dusty, as if hewn from solid rock. Filled with the same stagnant air, the fetid mixture his lungs had become accustomed to, Jerian found his nose still lacking clues, information that might lead him to the surface. But any discernible movement in the air seemed to be caused by his awkward progression, his stirring of dormant gases. Or another's. The image stiffened his limbs. Locked, the joints of legs and arm radiated their discomfort. It was probable other tunnels connected with the one the stranger inhabited. And inhabiting those? Perhaps beasts less passive than the half-made serpent whose darkened burrow he had found. Jerian's real enemy lay in the absence of light to fuel his vision. Without that precious commodity his eyes were useless, and the black left to be furnished with creatures dwelling beyond any natural framework or posture.

  He started moving again, fear contracting his throat, a chill weight over his heart as he imagined the maze of passages surrounding him, broad and narrow, an invisible labyrinth through which he crawled, bleeding and grazed, faced with the very real possibility that he may at any moment be called upon to defend himself from attack, his assailant man or animal, grouped or alone...

  The sweat poured off him. His breathing grew ragged as the foul air burned in his lungs. The massive presence of the keep's foundations squeezed him like an orange, the pips his organs pressed through his sides while his skull resonated, abruptly the destination of a multitude of frantic noises. Jerian screamed, his own pathetic sound rushing past his lips like vomit.

  But unheard?

  Dogs barked, their slavering at his heels, jaws snapping, claws raking stone, hot tongues against his thighs.

  Birds dived, their wings buffeting him, a storm from their breasts that deafened him with thunder and seared him with vivid blue stalks of lightning, their sharp beaks striking him like hail.

  Horses charged, mounted cavalry, a thousand spear points whose gleaming heads sought to transfix his own, whose long hafts would shatter his ribs, force them apart, his guts to spill like rotten fruit, his blood to spurt like wine from a punctured gourd.

  Old women, their features writhing, their flesh bubbling with gorging maggots, stabbed at him with sharpened sticks, their hideous voices accusing, warped and shrill, morning the loss of their sons. But one amongst them fought against the others, her thin arms seeking to embrace him, to defend him from the shrieks and outpourings of their combined hatred, the wounds opening in that woman a match for the most defiled of corpses - yet her body, however corrupted, would heal itself, her protection continue even as the assault continued, her arms thrown about his neck, her warmth smothering him, the pounding of her heart now the pounding of the horses' hooves and the birds' wings, the thunder her protests, the lightning the dagger-sharp sticks the old women had cut from the saplings marking the crude graves of their loved ones, their frenzied accusations the myriad greedy barks of the dogs whose bloodlust spilled over their teeth even as the maggots seethed in their twisted mouths...

  But his mother would not let him go.

  His mother had brought him into the world. Of his father he knew nothing, a soldier, perhaps an adventurer, his bones like any bones, his grave anonym
ous, his mother amidst this madness that filled Jerian, the outcast the focus of a thousand daughters, a thousand mothers, a thousand matriarchs, tears whose diamond edges fell like rain.

  And he could see them clearly, the thousand stood before him, another thousand behind each of them.

  And he crawled like a maggot through every spleen and liver, a maggot whose gorging was life.

  The strangeling worm, he was no more complete than that other outside the keep, a creature whose limbs were unformed, whose eyes were raised plaintively to the stars.

  But for what did he wish? What did he mourn? Was his loss great or small?

  As the walls grew apart he climbed unsteadily to his feet, the ax in his single hand.

  Under his dirty skin wriggled a thousand souls. They burst from him, ripped his tired flesh, a thousand angry cries, a thousand laments, each as old as the sky. And when the last had prised its way from his body, the maggots devoured in turn, Jerian recognised himself as the corpse.

  Death though, made him whole again.

  Father?

  The souls illuminated the stone walls containing him. They sparked, colliding, giving shape, lifting the darkness even as they intensified the cold.

  The souls reflected on water. For a moment they hovered above the liquid superficies, then, as a single entity, they extinguished themselves, flooding the passage, sucking him under, boiling the medium in which he had already failed to drown...

  Jerian floated, not even the heavy ax weighing him. Light played across his damp face, tugged open his eyes. Stung by the naked glow, he squinted, but there was no mistaking the hollowness of the space above him, a perfect circle of blue atop a chimney whose sides were green with lichen and moss. A lone cloud crossed from left to right, and on the rim of the well, perched on her elbows, was the face of a young woman.