Blood Of The Wizard (Book 1) (44 page)

Chapter 92

“Madness serves some men well.  I, for one, would not do battle without it.”

—attributed to Ivorlas Finn

_______________

When Cullfor emerged into the crisp, midnight air, he paused.  The temperature was wonderful, cool and perfect.  A filtered glow shone from the windows of the pub.  There was a nest of smaller noises mousing out of the brickwork and thatch now, some snoring, and a little bickering.

Below his booted feet was a nicely hewn stone walk.  The narrow lane wound into the thin darkness, disappearing into the witch’s death-smoke.  As he walked into it, the trail kept to the edge of town, winding downward, creekward, until it met the water and a cobble-sided building that straddled the banks.  There was a low cutaway door near the center.  It hovered like a window, less than a foot over the surface.  It was the bathhouse. 

He neared it, walking to a pair of small changing-shacks.  There were bolts of wool on shelves and hooks for your clothes.

Cullfor waded out toward bathhouse, then paused.  Screams were rising here and there throughout town.  People were emerging from everywhere.

“For your lives!” he heard some distant voice yell.

He stared while forms scurried in the dark streets, then growled a low symphony of curses as, around him, the darkened town became alive with motion.  He looked downriver a bit.  Frozen, five warriors stared back.  There were foreign…
kilted
.  Their eyes were sullen and deep with something in them that calculated him as more than a danger.

They were just standing there.

Cullfor breathed, shaking his head.

Then fear hoisted them in stupid ways.  They were just runners, lacking any weapon but their fists.  And yet they came, hobbling like made along the bank, squalling.

With each step closer, they glanced at each other.  He could feel the ancient blackness of their fear.  They were upland rangers, if he judged correctly, which meant they posses more pride than logic.  He backed up into the massive timbers that crowned the bathhouse, tracing the streams edge. 

For another moment, he ran, until the darkness surrounded him.

Then he halted, the warriors coming still.

Cullfor pulled his cape around him and ducked into the undergrowth.  The first warrior tripped over him.  Then the man stood, confused.  He was shockingly young.  Cullfor whispered the lie that he was sorry.  He rose and brought his dirk into that young, panting chest. 

The young man sat.  Cullfor yanked it out then ripped him across the throat.

The boy rocked back and forth, rubbing his head as the others caught up.  And they saw their friend, a young dog who had come to believe he was a wolf.  He was waving to them.  Looking past them at Cullfor, who retreated further into the forest.  They could see the doleful pleas looming inside his head, but the sounds were frozen in an excruciating replay of a snake hissing.  They shook their heads no.  This was not supposed happen. 

In shock or fear, they just continued to stare.

Cullfor frowned.  It was never a good thing, the death-rocking.  He was snoring with in the blood in his chest, slumping slowly, nearly motionless.

Another group of runners emerged from the brambles near him.  An understanding descended on Cullfor:  that this town was minutes away from being fully seized. 

The second group charged, roaring. 

Cullfor rolled around on his heel and jabbed the first of them on the neck.  With surprising strength, the man fought back.  Rattling at the others to run, he grabbed Cullfor by the face, putting the pummel of his sword in his eye.  Together, they rolled into the water.  Cullfor stabbed the man in the back, then ripped the blade in a deep awkward gouge through his liver.  The man’s body seized and fell away.  It was jerking as it rolled with the slow current.

He rose, grabbing the sword.

Before Cullfor could turn, another man came with his sword raised.  As Cullfor ducked, he planted his foot and swiped with his new sword across the man’s stomach.  The move was off and weak, and far too slow.  The man’s blade came down on top of him.  As he fell backwards into the water, Cullfor’s lips were curled in pain.  A pain he was surprised to feel.  He scrambled to stand.  The man was grabbing at his own stomach.  Cullfor turned, tackling the last man.  As they dropped, he stabbed backwards, severing the man’s spine before he turned and grabbed the gutted man once again.  He gripped his hair, shoving him into the water.  Cullfor looked around, grunting.  Holding the man’s face underwater, he saw an army out there in the forest.  Thousands of them were gathering.  As his eyes adjusted, he saw that some were only a couple hundred yards away. 

The man under his hand shook terribly, undulating as he grabbed his wrist and tried to snap it.  Cullfor growled as the body flopped and rolled, fish-rolling like mad.  When it finally ceased, he stepped out of the water.

Then he halted again, and winced. 

Bunn was running toward the bathhouse, running to find him.

Damn but he loved her.

A certain brunt of the army was making its way out of the forest toward her.  Several had spotted her and while dread danced in his brain, he ran to her. 

Bunn screamed, then disappeared into the bathhouse.  The steam from the river hung in the air, unholy in the glow of a sudden fire at the pub.

He ran to her until a pair of warriors merged from the other side of the building.  He kept running.  As he barreled sideways into the warriors, one of their shoulders felt like a stone mashing into his sternum.  His shins slammed into the face of the other.  They rolled nearly to the water.  Cullfor slashed wildly.  He missed the first man, but recoiled quickly.  Stabbing the second man in the jaw, he saw the first man had jumped away.  Still rolling, Cullfor stumbled.  The massive army was emerging now from the black of the woods.  The horde seemed to heave a moment, then the great mass rushed toward him.  Livestock scattering and crushed before them, the crazed noise of it all was pulsating and flooding over the town.

The second man retreated.

Then Bunn emerged, frozen in the odd pose of shock, her eyebrows raised, her hands over her lips.  He grabbed her hand.  Both of them panting, they skirted nimbly, impossibly fast, through the forest behind the bathhouse. 

Suddenly they were in another section of town, in its thickening streets and alleys. 

Tromping nearly naked, more runners were coming, yelling out loud to guide the horde of warriors behind them.

Bunn was utterly encased in panic, which was good.  He had no idea she could run so fast. 

Yet a pair of runners was closing in.

More and more men were gathering in from the second arm of the horde, veering toward them from the pastureland north of town.  Shocked at the size of the army, he squeezed her wrist and led her from the edge of the town into a thick brake of maple on a hill.  Retreating as best they could through the trees, the runners were coming yet.  And they were gaining on them.

He halted. 

She tumbled and turned to him.

“Run, wife!”

Bunn grabbed him, kissing him.  “No.  God no.  If you don’t come, you know I’ll die with you.”

Cullfor stood, watching the warriors of Delmark run toward him.  He thought of how watching her die would be like sitting still amid the gathering of a million evils.  He wouldn’t bear that,
couldn’t
. 

He roared silently and shook his head, then tore with her into a swimmy and complete blackness. 

They were partly disappearing, but the others had been in the woods all night.  Their eyes were adjusted, or would adjust in a minute.  Without words, he and Bunn ran alongside a narrow black path with little forks that careened from it into creek beds or deer trails, winding between encroaching roots.  Soon they were going up a hill.  Then edging along its slope.  Then suddenly they stood amid impossible terrain, wondering how they had even emerged so deeply into the thick brush.  They could scarcely move without stumbling.  Despite a sensation of complete ruin, he found it almost laughable when he halted, huffing and spent, atop briar-filled hill. 

The Dellish had halted.

He could see them through the greening trees below.  Most were gathering back into town.

The lofty hill dipped again behind him.  He turned and watched Bunn struggling for purchase down a rooty and vine-carpeted hill.

“They’ve stopped,” he said with some gallows satisfaction. 

Bunn rushed upward and yanked him down toward her.  He was too weak to resist.  The shove sent him sliding into her, and together they collapsed and tumbled into unseen black brambles at the bottom.  The vines seemed to grab at them.  Graceless and jerky thrashing ensnared them both.  They struggled there for a moment, stuck. 

He had dropped the sword and had to bend down threw thorns to pick it up.

“Blister my nipples,” Bunn said.  “What a mess.”

Cullfor shook his head a bit, unable to comprehend what, precisely, he found so humorous.

“Blister your nipples,” he said, laughing, and together they began running through briars as woven and chaotic as a drunkard’s tale.

_______________

They slowed now, progressing past the thick brambles under a large tree to a shelf of stone that looked like a sideways dog mouth.  He immediately got the strangest sense that this was a place that should not be:  while unseen movement scuttled everywhere out in the blackness of the wood, Cullfor stared at a pile of bones.  A stone likeness of a saint was carved into the little stone wall.  Skulls arced away in a great sweep on the very ground, half-buried and mostly busted.  There were thighs.  Ribs.  Dirt.  He felt criminally aware of being in this holy place, this Altar of Alone, which seemed dropped down into the thicket as if it had fallen out of the talons of a bird that was trying to move it.

He turned at the sudden noise of rain in the trees.  He turned back to the little tombstone altar to find Bunn’s feet appearing before him.  Then her face dropped to floor in front of his feet.  She kissed the stony dirt, drank from a muddy little hole in the ground, and looked up at him. 

“Do you know where we are?”

“Solitude,” he said.  “The Bottomless Puddle.”

She said, “We’ve found Solitude in the middle of an army.”  She stood, smiling at him.  “Well, you’re right at home then—my beautiful, you do seem to love a good round bottom.”

“Damn.”

Chapter 93

“Thank God we are slower than trees to learn.
Folly?  Yes!  Folly is wonder and beauty and awe; to see all the world in a smile, this is folly.
”

—Lord Uncle Fie Wyrmkiller.

_______________

Far too soon, Bunn and Cullfor found themselves back under the spell of reality. 

They were sore and muddy, and surrounded by a vast army.  They each held each other as if they could fade noiselessly into the other, but as Cullfor held her, he looked past a busted pig pen, back downhill. 

The camps were enormous, and they were scattered everywhere.  Every window was flickering with light.  He patted her buttock. 

A good round bottom.

Rains were gathering and starting to dampen the thick countryside as they walked.  It was noisy weather, too boisterous to worry about the sound of their footfalls as they trotted tree to tree into the greening brambles.

_______________

They passed several cottages, thrumming with the drunken noise of warriors.  They slunk through a small patch of forest, but the little borough expanded again.  A road from the east met with the toll houses at the northern edges of town.

They halted at the edge of the forest, looking at the towers into town.  They were high fortresses of wood with a series of double gates. 

The rain halted, and as they stood in the wet and moonless wood, hey could feel of the wet forest floor through their boots.

Approaching the drunken laughter of soldiers, they spotted yet another gathering of warriors.  He and Bunnd crawled backwards a step, then slunk, very slowly, deeper into the hollow.  Further away, they stood and slunk back up the ravine to the opposite slope.  Crooked trees jutted across their path.  They would be hard to see, but not impossible.  They pulled themselves along a fallen tree, the bark staining their hands like soggy parchment as they edged alongside it toward the road.  He held the sword close so that the glint of steel would not catch in the faint light of distant fires

There were a dozen or so men coming to join the others, talking lower than the rest.  They were more halted than the others.  They looked around often.

Through the better part of the night, he and she waited there, breathless and dripping from the intermittent fall of rain. 

The night was no small eternity, being so still, and being so very well surrounded and cold.  But at the far end of the night, the men began to sit or leave.  Some just got up to play dice, while others pulled their supplies in brown fiber packs beside them and slept.

Cullfor and Bunn moved with great slowness, but under the new morning light, two of the men stirred. 

Several conversations ceased at once, and, panting, he and Bunn froze.  When they at last returned to talking or sleeping, he pulled Bunn down across the road and into the far woods.

No one followed.

But Cullfor had a peculiar feeling.

_______________

After too much stillness, Cullfor found walking oddly pleasurable.  Strange how much less tiring it is than standing.

They padded quickly through a long forest that gave way to grassy slopes.  To travel the hillsides in the northwestern reaches of his country was a marvel. 

He loved it, the vast, plunging openness of it  But he was far from comfortable.  He sensed now they were being tracked.  It was the certitude that bothered him—the quickness of that quiet that had followed the men’s stirring.

It seemed
forced
.

Under the fabric of low clouds, they halted.  There was a thin grove of cedar at the edge of a wild stream, which spilled from the earth near the pinnacle of two hilltops.  The water falling wildly past their feet, they edged alongside a cool blue wall of rock and sat.

With his back against the stone, he held her hand. 

And she talked to him.

_______________

In childhood she is forced to an uncle’s home.  She has seven or eight years on this Earth.  She has to tell her uncle something awful and ask him something worse.  She looks away from the long, pale face that is looking down at him.

“Yes, yes,” Bunn’s uncle mumbles down to her.  “What is it you need, boy?”

Boy?

The old man stares at her in the confused silence of that moment.  There is a terrible stink.  Her father has died just this morning, and she is still numb, still newly charged with the shock.  She does not know the right way to say things, so she holds her breath and speaks it quickly.

“Your brother died on the wall last night.”

The old uncle says nothing. 

He shuffles back inside.  A tremendous clanking precedes something she believes is a squawk.  Then the white-haired man is crying and screaming.  Bunnr wants to run away but she cannot.

“Oh damn,” she hears.  “Oh damnit.”

The uncle is still crying as he comes back to the door.

“Well what do ye want?”

“Board, sir.  A roof for my cousin and I.”

“Ye mother?”

“She tried to strangle us, then, I don’t know… she stopped, then sent us here.”

“And so it goes?”

“So it goes, yes,” she says. 

And it is no lie.  She and her cousin have nowhere else to go but into this house of madness. 

In all those days Bunn dreams of orderly things, but spends her days in a cottage crowded with dogs, working to imitate normal women.  As she sees women hanging laundry or chopping wood with their daughters, she offers to help. 

It does little to help her.

Too often, the old man shakes his head at her, as if it is Bunn doling out all the nonsense.  Her waking life seems filled with odd conversations that always end in her pleading to God.  Which seems to have helped.  It is here that she learns herself, and she learns this religion of certitude, despite life’s lack of it.  For a time there will be no noise in the home.  Nothing.  Then that time will pass, and the uncle will knock around in the halls of lunacy again. 

It is also here that she learns battle; here, she learns to conquer herself before she conquers others.  Knowing what things can be conquered and what things will shatter a man.

And she gets older, learning this. 

She is older now.  A woman, she thinks.  She starts sneaking out, and once, she gives a whore a pair of her uncle’s boots to watch her bathe.  She undresses, and with great, almost divine joy, her eyes relish her.  Her nose and his fingertips take her in.  The prostitute breathes in her ear, and she giggles.

She lets her keep the boots.  The mutual scheming of it invigorates her.  When he tries it again with another woman, a much darker lady, she keeps the boots but teaches her things.  Things that men like.  And it is here that she learns a very important lesson:  she has learned nothing.  In her own little home her cousin Rheane is doing the same.  The oddness of her world is getting smaller, closing in.  It is almost too much, then she meets with a new and larger madness.  With cruel bluntness comes the truth that her cousin is getting money from the local men. 

They are paying her to do things with them.

It is precisely the lack of mutual scheming that deflates her.  Infuriates her.

Next night she follows her.  She tracks her through the lewd crowds behind the church, past the local stronglaw’s home and the pubs, to an array of fires.  Night watchmen burn them at the edges of the woods.  There, the men do not look at her the way men should look at a child.  They know the pale, thin girl does not have a girl’s innocence.  Nor a woman’s wisdom.  She is something in between, at the merciless fodder of drunkards and poets. 

It is the thickest part of night when the first man approaches her.

“Have ye eaten, girl?”

“I’ve not eaten,” she says.

He rubs her stomach, but she does not pull away.  He pulls bread from his coat and offers it to her with his large hands.  He rubs her head as she chews.  Then they sit together.  He is drinking from an earthen bottle.  Then he is rubbing her head again, fisting her hair softly.  She puts her face in his lap.

Bunn rushes the man, silently.  They tumble into a woodshed.  The man knocks her to the dirt floor, and he looks over her head at her cousin.

But Rheane apologizes to the wrong person. 

“My cousin has grown mad with our uncle.”

The word ‘mad’ is an odd thing, a damned odd thing, to say about someone trying to help you.

“Go away, girl.”

She looks at her cousin, seeing that this is what she wants, and Bunn does so, and she prays for her in the forests. 

In the morning, when she peels off her clothes and crawls in the blankets, her cousin tries to hold her, tries to console her but Bunn hands her back all of her words with the grunt.  She says soon she will retreat to the forest to live as a hermit forever.

“I will do things for you, too,” she whispers to Bunn.

“What?”

“I saw you with Lady Pete.”

Bunn tingles at the indisputable sincerity.  She turns toward her.  In those little frozen pond eyes she sees a kindred imp.  Then they just look at each other.  For a long while.

Rheane takes off her shirt.

Bunn, somehow, feels powerless, looking at the freckled arms and white stomach before her.  There is a feeling in her wrists and temples.  She has seen this a thousand times, but only now does she remind herself that Rheane is not really her cousin.  After some riddling business about a blood-debt, her mother had taken her in.  Say thing to herself, Bunn feels Rheane’s elbows.  It makes absolutely no sense to her why she is bringing all this into their lives.  Yet for a moment, she sees beneath the veneer of logic, as if with evil eyes.  And she understands something that she cannot put words to.

She looks at her.  And she turns, telling Rheane she should kiss her first.

Rheane kisses her on the chin and then the mouth.

Bunn feels her head lighten.  He stomach pulses unhappily, but she is vaguely hopeful, or perhaps fearful.  Maybe she should make her stop kissing her.

“But I do love you,” Rheane adds.  Then she kisses her forehead.  “I’ll do whatever you want me to do.”

“Will you stop letting the men touch you?”

Rheane stops, looks at her.  “Of course not.”

Bunn closes her eyes as Rheane kisses her neck and stomach.

She keeps them closed.

“But I do love you too.”

_______________

As a vigorous rain began to fall, Cullfor gave up trying to sleep and opened an eye.  He pushed the sword further from his side so that the unsheathed weapon wouldn’t rip his flesh.

It was only afternoon, but he needed sleep.  Impossible sleep.  The sun was like ice.

As the afternoon passed away to a cold, dim evening, Cullfor and Bunn sat up.

Slowly.

For hours, he tenderly rubbed her scalp and held her. 

But he never quite slept.

_______________

They pressed northward, warily, but not unhappily.  They talked little when he was thoughtful. 

Still trailed by the silence that had seen them out of the night prior, he thought about a home with her.  How to make it, and where.  When he gave it some thought, there was something more than the crisp and charming emptiness between them.  Something writhed in his skull in the stead of an answer.  The cheerful knowledge that it did not matter.

But with this, again, came the sensation of being followed.

The feeling of being followed is different from being watched.  It was not like eyes crawling on him, more like a feeling of confinement.  He could make the feeling dissipate, gripping his sword. 

But he knew better than to dull the feeling.

And there was something else about that.

It is an odd thing, the tool for carving human meat.  In carrying it without a scabbard it loses something of its dread, its willingness.  The sword must be kept blindfolded.

But he could not offer it that, and by morning he stood holding it near his leg in the broad highland.  The wind was hurrying clouds overhead.  It felled the grasses in wide sheets and brought a wet coolness from the North that smell faintly of salt. 

Cullfor squinted at the first rays of dawn.  He turned south, then east.  He could see no one, nothing, following.  He turned back northward, trying tried to comfort his mind with the ridiculous hope that their senses seemed to intertwine.  But the only unspoken focus between them was each other’s care.  Any sudden and necessary stillness was to look at each other.  And if his mind peered too far out, far into distant and magical thoughts about what he was now, then disquiet would swell with thoughts of rangers tracking them.  Rangers that would need no unearthly skill to track them but possessed it nonetheless.