The Pale Maraud

by Andrew McEwan

  The moon's likeness, her long hair shaded her brow, the girl's countenance trained on his own.

  Chapter Twenty-One - The Sundered

  And then she disappeared.

  Jerian tasted bile, a glue on his tongue. He did not know how he might escape from the well. Its bricks were closely fitted and in good repair, its sides too far apart to climb, his nakedness wedged between back and heels. The ax would be of little help to him. Could he wait for the water to rise? A rope, it dropped from the rim where Udioe had stood. She must have fixed the farther end, he supposed.

  Jerian began to haul himself up this narrow ladder through the efforts of his sound left arm. His toes dug like claws, finding purchase in the mosses, while the polished head of the ax lay hooked over his bunched and jolting shoulder. He feared it would shake loose with each sapping jump of his reddened palm.

  The yellow sun entered the shaft pausing to regard the emerging as he ascended, their struggles joined, the rays making light his burden as both advanced to the highest point of the day. But what that day revealed came as a surprise to Jerian, his belly scraped as he heaved himself past the low, crumbling lip of the well.

  The keep was a ruin. The rope he had clambered up was tied to a stunted tree, the knot worn, the end frayed, the skinny bole grown round rotting plaits of horse hair. Winding the length about his wrist Jerian gave the rope a sudden tug, and it broke, filling the air with dust.

  Time, he realised, had separated him, had parted him from the girl as surely as it had corrupted these strands. The security of his temporal existence was a mockery. His glimpses of Udioe proved malicious, manipulative. There was nothing of substance binding them.

  He could see beyond the toppled keep wall, the countryside warm and green, trees and bushes forming gnarled ranks across its undulating slopes. There was no evidence of the bleak landscape he had encountered prior to entering the worm's slippery abode. The black sand and desolation had been covered, populated by all manner of seeds, its poisons tamed or blown away. Perhaps if he were to venture outside the collapsed fortress he might find buried the scarred boulders of the sometime river-bed. Yet something told him he would not soon be leaving this place. There was more here than met the eye, Jerian felt sure. Hidden in the ruin, concealed behind fallen stone lintels and blocked stairways, locked in huge buckled chests or secreted in caches beneath granite hearths, was all the treasure of the tall, the gold and silver, ruby and emerald, ivory and pearl of their wealth. And amongst this, worthless, priceless, rested a simple metal flute, the patterned whistle whose intricate design might hold the key to his fate, its single note all he had ever heard, as he was hearing it now, high and clear, rebounding off the cracked masonry, absorbed and returned by the surrounding rock. The note, pristine and ageless, called from every direction, from future and past, swelling like a chorus of birdsong. The note, sustained, passed each way through his skull, inducing pleasure and rage, a note so pure he felt his flesh tremble as if at the kiss of a knife. A note, sharp and exact as that same knife piercing his unprotected side, skewering his liver, a note to herald the arrival of death as its thrust disturbed the order long held inside, the visceral parts of the wanderer to bind and writhe. His blood lubricated the blade, aiding its cut, opening the wound to spores of lavender and fennel, perfumes and flavourings whose addition to the remains of Jerian went some way to quelling the fervour of those swarming insects whose purpose was to speed the life-cycle within...

  But such was not his finish.

  Chapter Twenty-Two - The Walled City

  The seasons warred. Leaves, green and vibrant in the full throes of a heady summer, shared their boughs with the dead brown curls of autumn. Leaves also, but employing a different calendar, frost to nip their dry stalks, frost which threatened those tender shoots whose life was contrastingly ample. Roses might blossom in the snow, bright anachronisms, like red swans on a lake of marble; alive if cold.

  It was a thousand days in one. The sun and the moon were abroad, neither setting, and the winds howled and the rain poured while the heat of a long afternoon coaxed the heads of shy daffodils to blush and grow. Not that any of the seasons were allied. Each, although dependent on its neighbours for its works, felt it should be uppermost. By proxy then, did confusion reign. A throne set over the living.

  If anything could be said of the dead, it was that they were of a single purpose.

  Amongst them, Jerian, no longer mute, no more able to shut out the massed voices of the damned than to deny the silence of his heartbeat, sat in greyness, in perpetual twilight, a group of ten or twenty ragged corpses at his beck and call, his unspoken words relayed to countless others, as their oaths and pledges were received by him. No time passed for this rare assembly, and yet all of time lay stretched to the misty edge of the world, the onwards marching horizon like a great wave, its crest and clouds. The land seemed to rear skywards as if joined by prodigious strands of woven fibres to a pair of equally massive needles, all of the dead, their monuments and their possessions, piled in the knitter's lap, to the living world as the coarse, unrefined lining of an ostentatious jacket.

  They were the fallen, the wretched, the diseased, the abused, the vanquished, the blighted; the weak and the strong, the rich and poor whose restless bodies disturbed only stagnant gases; the murderers and the victims, all ghosts suspended in this place that was no place, a void given substance through the interaction of negative forces. They were forbidden peace, condemned to strive, driven to combat, to take sides and mount offensives, in thrall to the turbulent generals above. Soldiers, conscripts every one, of the armies of Winter and Spring, set against each other in an endless struggle, for they could die again and knew well the looming emptiness of oblivion. A fear as sharp and solid as a blade, a greater terror than death itself, as to be killed a second time would mean never to have lived. Such was the wanderer's fate then, to champion the dead.

  Hell was nearly spawned. Every occurrence here reflected another on the surface. This place did not exist. Yet it was real enough.

  War raged, and the pale tenants of the after, whose final moments had proved unnatural, their lives stripped from them, were drawn forth to fight. Many had fought before, losing the gift for a human cause. But what they faced now was far more terrible, and more final. No redemption beckoned, nor hope of reward. No, to die again was to lose for good, to slip from every world and be forgotten even by those who may have once professed their love.

  Hell was a landscape of memories. Indistinct and torn, the grasses and hills were coated in fog, clouds of forgetfulness and negation, a drizzle whose borders were advanced, in whose embrace was the dissolution of time and the destruction of light.

  The cycle of creation, halted, divided against itself, was engaged in a sinking process of despair. Like the wheel of a cart trapped in mud, it did not know which way to turn, and its failure, for whatever reason, was made worse by the unthinking nature of its spokes. There were no minds, no strategies behind these forces; only ignorance, and a desire, perverse without motion, to continue the essence of rolling while missing the fact.

  So did everything happen at once.

  *

  Across his road now stood a wall. Beyond lay the future, as yet a dream.

  But what of his task?

  Numberless sepulchral eyes fixed on him.

  But why?

  It was like a siege. Jerian had knowledge of that, of being camped outside a city. He wondered at the tall men's part in this. Did they peer down from some lofty vantage? Were they instrumental in the construction of the barrier, a defence against - against what?

  The wanderer, his journey curtailed, his life spent, his murder having exposed his ribs, knew then, if he were ever to dwell in that future, if he was to answer those myriad stares, he would first have to raise the wheel from the mire, his shoulder braced to its curve. The energy of that curve was the focus of life, of age, of growth, the turning of moon and stars, all of which had
stalled.

  All save the blue.

  Chapter Twenty-Three - Fass The Giant

  This giant named Fass, steeped in misery, walked the earth in search of its edge, a fruitless quest begun in the remote past after a woman had stolen his heart. Grieving, the giant put out his eyes in order that he not be reminded of her face; but it had not been enough: the birds singing in the trees brought him echoes of her voice. To escape their cries, Fass had blocked his ears with clay scooped from a river bottom; only the clay had dried and cracked and fallen out, leaving him with no alternative but to push sharpened tree-trunks in either lobe of his weary head. He bled tears, devoured whole deer, drank of the sea. He walked without pause, spinning the world beneath his feet.

  And then he stopped.

  That heart, having been returned to his chest, beat once more, sealing the blood in his veins, plugging the leaks in his skull, quelling the dread in his step.

  His cheek was kissed. He smelled her hair. Laughter, high and glad, coloured his thoughts, bloomed in his mind like lights.

  Stunned by such good fortune and dreaming incessantly, he slept.

  And the fog of hell was his breath...

  *

  Still the outcast had no wish to front an army. Dressed in some nebulous armour, sat astride a black horse whose flanks were caked in sweat, a hundred or more pale warriors at his back, Jerian could do no more than contemplate. In the valley below, spread across its dim floor, a battle was in sluggish motion, its speed that of an aged river, a resistance of dead bones, a reluctance on every side to maim and destroy, a realization that the sum total of their efforts was as nothing to the wrestling clouds above, those less turgid powers whose momentum was unceasing, whose passion and fervour had yet to slow, and perhaps would not.

  It was madness. Jerian proved stronger than most, but his strength was waning, a mimicry of life already in his mount, a false wisp of condensation about its face. Soon his own lungs would stretch and the hunger in his bowels rupture the fragile bubble of his will, robbing him of volition, sending him and his troop off in a disorderly charge down the hill, there to add to the mayhem, the butchering of corpses on a field briefly coloured red.

  The moment could not be held at bay. Its approach was heralded by limpid hues of yellow and orange, blue and green, as the mist was lifted like the hem of a skirt to reveal the spurious world of the living to the sallow countenances of the damned, their slack organs pulled taut like reins, their spirits intoxicated, imbued with a lust deeper than that for wine by a drunk, a bee for a flower rich in nectar, the glint and smell of honey as a promise on their swollen tongues as the hundred were goaded into the fray, apples shaken from a tree, their blood suffused with dire notes, sour music borne of an evil wind, helpless, like arrows from a bow, spears dipped as they rode towards their enemy.

  Jerian absorbed the slaughter. He watched in fascination as heads came apart. The business of war was a pleasure to him. Men, gouged, spit out their guts, ludicrous smiles on their faces as steam rose from the ground between their toes and the hardness of their loins proved their last. Men, hewn like timbers, sat with earnest expressions as amidst the chaos the tried patiently to refit their legs. Men, trampled by hooves and hacked by swords, danced with imaginary ladies, winked at their partners and even risked their fingers playing the secret game of folds. Men, dazed and babbling, picked over the burdens, now given up, of friends, as if looking for bargains amongst the clutter of a market stall. Men, unblinking through fear, prayed.

  Such was the madness of war.

  Fatigued, yet exulting, Jerian divided the length of a child. The boy fell cleanly in two, allowing his slayer to ride his foaming horse across the space vacated by his brain and kidneys.

  The stumps of limbs were waved and knocked aside by his sword, adding further hinges to the purple flesh.

  Skin was peeled to uncover old wounds whose puckered lips were again open to the press of metal.

  Joints were crushed.

  Such was the unending battle.

  *

  In his dreams, the giant was presented with horrors. He knew agony, the memory of pain-filled days reawakened as he slept, images of strife he had not witnessed for an eternity suddenly emblazoned over the blank, featureless tracts of his mind.

  Tears shook him, thick and salty - he did not cry out of loneliness, but remembered the turning world he had fostered, its lakes and forests, plains and mountains he had pushed behind him with his feet, his constant walking and steady pace that had night following day, sun after rain, new life growing from old. He experienced guilt and longing. There was a soreness in his muscles, a discomfort. Fass the giant was no longer content with slumber. But he could not rise. He felt his heart beating within, its rhythm lulling him to rest. The woman who brought him affection lay curled like a cat in the crook of his elbow.

  *

  Hell, by its nature, was perishable; nothing lasted. There was a contradiction in its being, for neither time nor space sustained it, but the actions of gods. It was always and it was never.

  The greyness permeated, blurring form and diluting colour until the battlefield resembled a swathe of dirty snow. The air was crisp and white, a clean haze whose roof was a murky sky. The black shape of his horse stood nearby, head lolling, snout closed to vapours. Jerian imagined he could see its bones through its hide. He peered at his own dead hand. His withered right arm twitched, the stubs of aborted fingers wet with frost, the shrunken wrist locked, shrouded in hair, the rounded shoulder a confusion of knotted flesh, thwarted nerves and bunched tendons. There had never been any use of that wasted appendage until now. Subsumed, its role miscast while yet in the belly of his mother, next usurped by the oak of the wood carver, the limb had remained undeveloped, quiet, unmoving, unfeeling till this moment.

  A warmth occupied its short length, stretching its feeble girth.

  Kneeling in the snowlike ruin of the field, Jerian sensed the arm's burgeoning vigour, its life, its belated maturation, growing here stout and firm, belonging without question to the world above, the living world to whose tints and dyes it was the key, even if joined to his tortured cadaver.

  He gazed at the fresh pink of his finished palm. Complete, the hand was a match for its opposite, but soft as a babe's, weak and unused to the heft of a sword.

  The skin seemed to burn in the chill, the knuckles proud and aching, their redness a harbinger of calm, so different from the fleeting red stain of war...

  *

  And she purred like a fire in a hearth, this lady who was tall.

  Chapter Twenty-Four - FASHIONED IN WOOD AND IRON

  The blade he toted was a hand-and-a-half. Jerian had no real knowledge of its pedigree, the steel polished till the letters of its name had vanished; but in his right hand the sword felt solid and with the buttressing of his left he was able to cut the air in ever broader arcs.

  It had passed through the dead with ease. How would it cope with the living?

  Time would tell. And time there was in this place, albeit time detached from the revolving earth, unhinged as the stygian lid of the sky.

  He walked towards an imaginary point, about where the nose met the forehead, the vacant eye of the moon on one side and the blinding orb of the sun on the other. It seemed the obvious direction. Both sun and moon remained where they were, pinned against the firmament like buttons, broiling clouds obscuring these twins like cilia, a winking procession of rain and wind and thunder, benign wisps and shady awnings depending on the state of the campaign, the uppermost general, each bruising encounter, carcass upon carcass, each subsequent, pointless debacle.

  Where the horizon ended, as surely it must, there would he find his answer. But Jerian was no longer so naive as to think his journey straightforward. If he had learned anything on his travels, it was that around every curve of the land there existed, or came into existence, an entirely new obstacle, a threat natural or man-made, through whose demesne he would have to pass, who
se challenge, whether playful or life-endangering would have to be met, and whose face was as much a mystery as his own. That his mortal life had terminated around just such a bend served to emphasize the unknown - also the unseen, Jerian thought, and gazed at limb and sword hanging from his newly balanced shoulder. He saw Odil's features ahead, the clouds forming his likeness about the heavenly eyes. Had the wood carver taken his revenge? The ghost of that arm the axe had severed, its weight not then forgotten, turned against its recent master by its old...

  Only at the very centre of the worlds could such a thing happen.

  It was away from that centre he walked now.

  In his path was a settlement: a large village, a small town. Surrounding this community were orchards, some hung with fruit, others lashed by hail. Ploughed fields, freshly sewn, and fields of ripe grain stretched between low walls and echoed to the shouts of children and the grunts of labour. Whether chasing or catching, planting or harvesting, all was apparently normal. These people had adapted to the seasons. Here were no violent upheavals; it was as if they could predict the temper of gales.

  The many houses were of wood thatched with straw. From the undefended perimeter of the settlement he descried two stone buildings, one circular and probably for grain, the other narrow, rectangular, with no visible entrance. Jerian stood like a fool, some travelling player. No one challenged him. A man nodded, his face home to a smile, and the wanderer felt his marrow stir and his body reclaim, for however short a time, his soul.