The Pale Maraud

by Andrew McEwan

  The gift of life had spread from his arm. Together with an urge to eat came the heavy tiredness of the endless day. He stumbled inwards, head bowed, yet filled with such a powerful well-being he could not imagine lying down or feeding on anything less than the excitement of these dirty streets. Livestock, tethered and loose, created a raucous din that was both provocative and satisfying. Workshops resounded with the sounds of metal on metal, an industrious clangour as rich as that of bees overburdened with pollen, a surfeit of nectar, energy to brace the shadow-fixed afternoon as surely pillars did an ornamented ceiling. It was hard work he sensed, and pleasure taken in it. It was strength and confidence, a belief that they had overcome their enemies. They were not concerned with palisades. The hills about them were not crowned by watch-towers. It was the arts of peace occupying the citizens of this fenceless borough.

  Jerian was distantly suspicious. Despite his fears, he continued, pausing outside the wide doors of a carpenter's shop, a number of men greeting him, next moving on to the similarly broad threshold of a house with many windows, by the noise and smell a tavern, this knowledge granted him, he reasoned, in exchange for his patronage. Grateful, he stepped inside and sat at a hurriedly cleared table. Others there raised pitchers and hands; he was to be their guest, they implied, although if they spoke using words or communicated entirely through gestures, augmenting this physical language with clicking tongues and the rap of fingers on benches, he could not say, a mirth of knuckles and pine that swam as the froth on his beer, choosing a variety of routes to his brain.

  *

  Half awake, he groped for his sword, but it was not by his side. He lay on a rough mattress in a lit room, shafts of sun like bars of gold through the rafters. The room was full of sacks of apples, the planks of its floor warped and knotted, the ground visible beneath, the height of a man separating his face from a stream into whose musical passage Jerian manage to interpose a chorus. His head throbbed with a separate rhythm, the joy of his pulse in his ear.

  He was dressed no more in broken armour but in supple leather, boots and gloves that were an exact fit to feet and hands, the latter poking from the former as he had slept with the extremities of his body uncovered. He lay for a while on the mattress, but the light did not change, until finally he recalled the permanence of the day-star.

  Taking an apple and biting into it, Jerian opened the door, was swamped in brilliance. There were neither steps nor a ladder. He shrugged, puzzled, and flexed his toes in the finely tooled boots, removed the gloves and stuffed them in a pocket before jumping to the grass below.

  His arrival amongst the people of this dwelling caused no agitation. Indeed, attired much as they, Jerian received nods of greeting, smiles from girls and laughter from children, so that he soon felt at home and forgot all about the flagrant purpose of his mission. He had no need of a voice here and yet was indulged, it seemed to him, in a dozen or more pleasant conversations. These people knew and understood him. Their happy faces conveyed familiarity. More than one enquired as to the health of his mother.

  She was fine, his eyes informed them, he had just this moment left her.

  Jerian met with friends outside the smithy. Together they boarded a cart drawn by oxen and rode out to the forest, there to resume the felling of maples, the stripping of twigs and bark, the collection of sap in barrels. The gloves were a good protection against the heat and rub of a saw. A snowstorm halted their labour only briefly, and the cold was outdone by the warmth. The woodsmen stopped again to make a meal of bread and cheese spiced with vinegar, joking and throwing acorns at one another before returning with renewed vigour to the tasks of marking and cutting, the strongest amongst them dragging whole trees to the river where they were floated downstream the short distance to the mill, the best timber selected and the remainder burned for charcoal.

  The light unaltered, blanked by cloud at irregular intervals, the men nevertheless left for home after a good day's work, a vitality in their lungs as they collected their tools and once more boarded the ox-cart, squeezed between barrels for the journey. The ride was slow and bumpy. Jerian did not care. He was fully absorbed by the to and fro, the messages and tales of wrists and elbows, shoulders and fingernails, a host of scrapings, drummings and inclines to speak of beer and boast of women and assignations...

  On returning to the community he immediately sought out a broad variety of vegetables, carrots, leeks, potatoes and a quantity of oil, long-beans and cabbage and mushrooms to stew with the beef, the liquid a soup for his ailing mother, her pallid flesh in need of support, Jerian himself chewing the meat for her to swallow, feeding her, head propped against a sack of apples, the breathing of the fruit to calm her chest, from his own bowl with his own spoon, that which his father had carved on his son's birth, his coming into the world that was his the everlasting day, his father past, drowned, his mother taken sick having survived the flood the child recalled via the memory of snapping trees, his frail young body saved by its closeness to hers, sucking at her nipple through the storm.

  The walls were washed by rain now. Baked by sun, they buckled and cracked. Jerian bounded down the steps, lingered at the bottom, scratched his chin and then wandered blithely to the tavern.

  Once inside everything was as it had always been. The beer flowed and laughter, high and merry, spilled across floor and table. There were arguments, but few. The people here had all worked hard to earn these draughts, so any dispute was quickly suppressed; nothing could be allowed to spoil the enjoyment of the men and women whose hearts and minds were in concord with the moment. And yet Jerian felt a nagging sense of loss, of abandonment, as if to smile with an honest benevolence was more and more difficult, more and more at odds with his true feelings. He became uneasy; shuffling on a bench, hip to hip with a girl he had known all his life, he was suddenly afraid, inexplicably outraged by the suffering of his mother. The girl took his face in her hands and kissed him on the lips. He closed his eyes that she might not look in them, look and see the wild thoughts behind their glaze, perhaps her own image there, starved and ruined - images unknown to her, of his worst nightmares, those dreams of which he had never told, the fire and death of the world.

  Troubled, he ran from the tavern, shuffled aimlessly through the wheel-indented streets, and came as if guided, no-one there to witness, to the hidden door of the narrow building, its brickwork pristine and neat, that door leading, but once in a lifetime, to the throne of the dark and the truth.

  The building appeared little wider than the spread of his arms, the door occupying half its width. The stone lintel jutted out, a warning to any passing that a great weight, if wrongly shifted, altered the balance to the detriment of timorous bones. Only the brave might seek advice at this altar; but other things than bravery could drive a man inside.

  Did he dare it? What evidence were stories?

  Jerian gazed back twice, once over each shoulder. There was a simple latch mechanism. He was alone. Lifting it, red flakes of iron stained his fingers. Pushing the door open, grey splinters of wood fell in his eyes. And within resided blackness, the emptiness of a cave...

  His mother's skeleton, marked with the scores of his teeth, lay amongst rags and animal skins, a clutch of lesser skulls abutting her own. Her flesh had sustained him. A golden light uncovered her now, its source a figure whose armour-plate was studded with emeralds, traced with fine shell-like spirals, a great axe between his knees, its double head resting on the floor, the shaft curving gently, as if fitted to his shape in his chair, the blue of its twin edges alluring. Jerian did not know what to make of him. A king of Summer, perhaps; yet his brightness was cold.

  It was this absence of heat which betrayed him. Sat upright on his throne, the golden knight was exposed. The luminescence of his armour revealed its flaws, its base nature, the peeling veneer cracked like baked mud and seamed with the tell-tale coral of rust. The throne was painted and his helm, composed of flames and serpents, was wood. Seeing through the fraud
, Jerian approached. The massive axe was blunt, the emeralds fractured shards of glass, the plate thin iron hammered flat over a scaffold, the knight's prominent knees immovable, solid, fixed like all his joints, without pivots or hinges so that he could not have stood had any petitioner challenged his authority, questioned his power to wield boons and curses, mocked the frailty of his expression behind the patriarchal sternness of his mask. Still, the golden light of his mien was intimidating. Jerian circled to the figure's rear, the illusions collected about him falling from his mind, the bones and flesh of his mother slipping from sight. Aware he had been fooled, blinded by more than the clever reflection of fire in a mirror, the wanderer discovered his multiplication smeared across walls of silver, the aspect returned him sanguine, if hollow.

  Stepping outside he found the buildings much as before; but the people were missing.

  Walking around the settlement, the streets fading, the houses decayed, he was accompanied by an absolute quiet. Not a bird called or a breeze stirred. The sky was void of cloud. The sun warm, the moon full and his breath held as it seemed that at that very moment it would either crumble to white dust or fall as a hammer on the world...

  Neither happened.

  Sounds came, borne on a hot wind like the breath of an oven, a temperature sufficient to ignite the thatched roofs of these empty dwellings, to cast sparks amidst the ready tinder of beams and panels, frames and carts. The wind gorged on moisture, devouring the bubbling stream that ran under the stilted house of apples where he had thought to nurse his mother, she from whose dying womb he had sprung, whose ghost he had fed soup, a lie hidden amongst lies as the thirst of the wind sucked dry buildings and earth.

  Jerian was blown along, buffeted repeatedly, unable to turn and face the gale. Trees, bled of sap and split down the middle, divided as if by lightning, had their hearts stolen, branches and leaves burnt to ashes. Animals scattered, but the air was consumed in their lungs and they died without a scream as the hot wave advanced cross-country like an invading army, a maddened horde whose sole aim was to reduce everything to a colourless sand, to lay waste forest and pasture and raze every construct of man, to scour the land with a cruelty that was savage in its momentum, to push before it he who was fool enough to question the ravening of the dead, those sublunaries to whom he was champion, an unwilling advocate, a soul compelled to wander, he who had failed them even as he failed them now, the heat at his back scorching, the many tongues of a molten lash.

  Numb with pain he ran, while all about him was wrapped in flames and the wind beat him, a spreading desert indented with no other footprints than his own. He ran on, mind purged of thoughts, continuing long after the flailing of his shoulders had ceased and the oven-breath mellowed. He ran until he dropped, tripping at last on a shred of hardened leather, a twisted remnant of his boots. The desert captured him then, rolling him like a baby in its arms, sharp and arid as it cut open his cheeks and palms and invested a harrowing soreness under his skin, his hands and face becoming so inflamed Jerian was sure they would burst if he made any attempt to soothe them. And in his reveries he imagined the bars of this fantastic cage were dripping icicles, and the agony of their closeness, near yet unattainable, compounded every suffering, the damned and their misfortunes his to experience through eternity, for it was certain there would be no end to the drought...

  A bitterness filtered through him. The desert was summer at its most extreme, and whoever had control of it tipped the balance, siding with one of the four in a bid to unmake sky and earth, to shape anew stars and continents, to usurp the role of nature and fashion out of these rendered carcasses a perfect, singular existence, building into the new world's fabric a mechanism by which to order and determine the number of its inhabitants, to maximize production while minimalizing aggression, the whole to function as a stable unit, pure and static and without the need of blood to run from veins. A magical garden of reason in whose pungent arbours the outcast, once glorious death, had no part.

  Not a leaf could fall without him. Perfection tolerated no mistakes.

  Chapter Twenty-Five - THE WATER'S FAR CRY

  Many shells began to appear, pale or florid, small fans and larger spirals, hard and knife-sharp. Jerian would pluck them from the dunes and gaze at their contours, curved and iridescent. The desert began to take on the aspect of a beach. Indeed, the air rippled like water on the horizon, wisps of surf towards which he shambled. But he never reached the promised strand, only plodded soundlessly, the burning sun a constant companion, until his eyes could see no more. No shade was offered him, nor sustenance beyond the pain of wretched souls. It was the restless ghosts of the damned who maintained Jerian, their cause and their agonies which gave him strength, as he suffered what they had suffered. And it was their will he go on.

  In the midst then of the desert he found and raised a shell as big as his skull, and pressing his ear to its out-folding mouth heard the cool, deep voice of the ocean.

  Words swelled on a damp breeze, the lilt and song of rain and fishes.

  The truth and dark in a whisper.

  Chapter Twenty-Six - MOUNTAIN TALL

  Night fell, bringing with it chaos. There was neither moon nor sun to light his path, only lightning, the crash of thunder reverberating.

  Blue flashes revealed naked rock, upthrust peaks like the notched blades of swords.

  Elsewhere a giant's head was hacked from his body. Yet the giant stood, arms and legs invigorated, a health in his bones as Fass began to once more turn the earth on its axis, free at last of love and dreams, unburdened.

  The woman who had returned his heart, the same who had cut through his neck, discovered herself trapped now in the thick mesh of his beard and hair. Tears of defeat slid over her cheeks; she could not free herself as she had the giant. She was made to drag the head of Fass, joined to it by the chains of love's denial.

  Her cries and lamentations shook the ground.

  They listened in the keep, the tall men, as she was one of their own. But they did not leave the enclave to help. They polished their weapons, curried their mounts. They could no longer hide, and had the dead to fight.

  Rain drenched everything. No army marched, although many were abroad, slowed and sinking as they clambered upon stone in the hope of making camp above the mud.

  Hell was afoot.

  Jerian laughed.

  The wanderer had chosen the highest mountain to climb. He squinted against the downpour. The heavy rain pummelled each profile of rock and armour.

  He was followed...

  The ascent proved treacherous, slippery, but he never once considered abandoning the attempt. Jaws slavered beneath him, while overhead clouds tore sparks off the upmost peak.

  Jerian was sheathed, brow to heel in a hardness other than metal. He carried no sword or lance, nor any weapon besides his feet and hands. Encased in his own shell, flesh screened behind a grown shield, he progressed upwards into hail and ice, wind tearing at the rigid hull of his carapace, brown, black, yellow and green, an extruded covering his body had assembled about him...

  And the salt of his skin was the salt of the sea.

  Time had wrapped itself around Jerian, shifting the disputed centre of the world, raising the stone faces up whose howling nostrils he dragged his flesh, ascending with screams and odours. His visor had become one with his features, just as these rocks had sprouted like granite horns from the vast relief of the surface, ossified crags and flaking points of quartz and silica, flint-severed tendons and cartilaginous ears, the roots and folds of exotic limbs. Both the mountain and Jerian carried their skeletons.

  The rain tore at them with equal vigour. All the winds ever born sounded notes brash and eloquent, calamitous tones and surprising music through the reeds and turns of gauntlets and crevices, the fingers within dictating the passage of often deafening, occasionally beautiful tunes.

  Jerian climbed.

  The beast at his ankles flittered between light and
shadow, the flame of its breath glinting, echoed by the fiery tongues above.

  *

  A great stone tower housed his footfalls, the spiral's massive newel to his right, each twisting, chiselled step representing a day in his life. Below him, lost beyond the turn, was his fated birth, and ahead the certainty of his death - but the steps did not end there. Blood ran over the stone, his own mixed with others, the moment of his killing lost to him. Iron sconces set into the outer wall held orange bowls of light, a heat without warmth.

  He walked on through smoke and darkness, a number of the lights having expired. The stair became greasy underfoot, but always there was the promise of a roof or gallery so high he might view the entire world, even past the horizon to where lingered the sunrise...

  No sound of the storm reached him. The air, although stale, was quiet.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven - THE THUMB OF THE YEAR

  At the summit, in silence and darkness, it was as if the world had never existed; or had come to a close: the snow at his feet was as black as the yawning emptiness and he could see neither land nor stars. All might never have been but for the presence of a fifth season.

  This season had no name, was like a thumb to the year, able to grip and oppose, the fingers of Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer its daughters and sons, brides and uncles as each was tempered and reborn.

  And the thumb employed Jerian now. He was to confront the four, to do battle with their strongest. He was to redress the balance and defeat the insurgent tall. Shelled like a crab on the peak, the wanderer called forth the dawn...

  *

  Autumn wept like a thief. The drizzle of its remorse scoured his cheeks. Next to winter, autumn was farthest removed from summer's arbitrary passion. Many were the colours of autumn, hues displayed in grasses and trees, its homeland the forest and the lesser hills, moss its sponges and heather its fur, a shy creature goaded by frost to shed the blazing canopy of its fastidious art, all that it had leached from the soil returned. A season of transition then, a buttress between short and long days; animated, a minor divinity.