Fall of Light (64 page)

‘That cut is years old, Garelko,’ Tathenal said. ‘An eel made lifeless by age, flopping no more.’

‘Ravast, come to my aid. Young and old must ally, and by stinging rebuke savage the one who possesses not enough of either. Tathenal, by all means build your boat, but we must leave you behind, and rush to the moment when we stumble upon our disloyal wife, as she thrashes in the arms of Hanako the adulterer. You and I, Ravast, we shall unveil the cuckold’s razor beak, and see in our wife’s wide eyes that first flowering of fear and dread! And then, with her dignity squirming beneath our heel, we shall grind her into misery and remorse, and so win a cornucopia of favours!’

‘Bright fruit and venomous nectar, more like,’ said Tathenal, sneering. ‘When I see you both flounder in deep waves, and hear your piteous cries, why, I will blithely sail past you both, and offer up the meanest flutter of fingers.’

‘When next you see me in your dreams,’ Ravast said, ‘observe as I rush to the flood, inviting every lungful of sweet water. Welcome my carcass, Tathenal, as it rolls to and fro, and be at ease, knowing I died happy.’

Garelko grunted. ‘Ravast, you’ve not been married long enough to have lifeless eyes. In perusing my reflection this morning, in the lake’s mirrored surface, I was shocked at the dullness of my own gaze.’

‘Our shock is long past,’ said Tathenal. ‘Yours is a gaze, Garelko, that can blunt a sword’s edge, and by wit you bludgeon us all. My poor humour reels bruised and struck senseless. So by all means, take the pup and be off, both of you!’

Ravast turned back to the hut. ‘We’d best dismantle our abode, Garelko, since it was by our own hands that it was thus raised.’

‘A moment there! Where will I sleep?’

‘Why, Tathenal,’ said Ravast, ‘you can sleep in your boat.’

Garelko laughed. ‘Sweet dreams, Tathenal! Hahahaha!’

‘Very well,’ sighed Tathenal after a moment’s consideration, ‘I will accompany you, to ensure that you are safe, as I alone among the three of us happen to be in my fighting prime. The pup is too wild and wayward and still thinks himself a hero, whilst the ancient man of creaking bones can scarcely lift his weapon.’

‘Ah,’ said Ravast, ‘we can leave the hut then, for the next party of fools.’

‘You confess your spite!’

‘I confess nothing, except, perhaps, a sudden laziness. Now, have we not lingered here long enough? We have a treacherous wife to hunt down!’

‘I shall shake my fist at her most stentoriously,’ said Garelko as he collected his gear. ‘As a bear awakened from its cave, my lips shall writhe and my fangs gnash with eerie clicking sounds. Like a wolf in the deep snows, I shall shake my hide and free the hackles to rise. With all the remorselessness of an advancing crayfish, my pincers shall open wide in waving threat and snippery danger.’

‘Finally,’ said Tathenal, ‘in simile he finds the proper scale.’

A short time later, the three husbands of Lasa Rook set out, once again upon the trail of their wife.

Perhaps it was the dragon’s carcass, but Ravast’s thoughts were soon mired in memories of battle. He had been new to his weapons when Thelomen raiders struck their village. He could remember their blunt-prowed ships driving up upon the pebbled strand, and how armoured figures swarmed over the sides and began running up the slope. The village dogs were in a frenzy, rushing down to challenge them. Most of the beasts were wise enough to harry rather than close, but a few went down to spears, dying loudly, in a mess of blood and entrails. Ravast, rushing to join a line of men and women who’d collected up weapons and, here and there, some pieces of armour or a helm or a shield, had fallen into a gap between two kin. Readying his axe and shield, he only then realized that he was in the first line, the one made up of the most ancient members of the clan. They stood for the sole purpose of slowing the Thelomen advance, thus earning the village’s younger warriors the time to fully arm and armour themselves, whilst youths corralled the children to guide them into the forested crags inland.

The only defender not in his proper place was Ravast.

But it was too late, as the first wave of Thelomen reached them.

Widows and widowers, the lame and the bent, Ravast’s companions fought hard and in silence, long past all thoughts of complaint or fear. When they fell, they made no cries, and not one begged for mercy. It was only much later that Ravast understood how that battle, that savage defence of the village, marked for his companions a purpose to their deaths – a moment they had all been waiting for. When faced with the choice of sudden death or the lingering wasting away of old age, not one had hesitated in taking up a weapon.

Ravast alone survived, and fought with such desperation that he held the attackers back, until the now caparisoned warriors who had finally gathered behind him elected to advance to join him rather than waiting in their shield-wall.

The Thelomen had been driven back that day, without ever reaching the village. Ravast had been proclaimed both a hero and a fool, and on that day he had caught the eye of Lasa Rook.

Thereafter, Ravast fought that battle many times, in the tales told at the hearth, and in his dreams, where the fear took hold of him in ways he had not known on the day itself. He did well to disguise it, of course, as befitted the young hero of that day. But the truth of it was, he carried more scars from the dreams of the battle than from the battle itself.

Lasa Rook had won him with little effort, not knowing, he suspected, the lame, shivering creature that hid inside his hale young body. Fear had made a life of farming and herding most welcome, and if others noted how strange it was that such a natural warrior should choose to set aside his weapons and armour, it was easy enough to then consider the lure of Lasa Rook, the village’s most desired woman.

He had learned to hide that fear, and had raised high walls around his dreams. Tathenal could well dream of floods and devastation, and gather uprooted trees with which to build his salvation. But no such gesture existed for Ravast. Neither a ship built by any Thel Akai, nor one built by a god, could ride above the waves of fear.

Upon such seas, every vessel will sink, vanishing beneath the roiling tumult. Upon such seas, a man such as I can only drown.

And yet, here he walked, at seeming ease alongside his fellow husbands.

She will not risk the Jaghut’s unreasoning path. She will know when to turn back. Long before any battle. If not, then I will confess to her. I will tell her about the widows and widowers, the too old and the crippled, who rushed to their place in that first line. And the silence that took them, bittersweet with anticipation, and how they all gathered up their own fears, and sent them into the one man who did not belong among them.

I will tell her of my fears, and if I must fall in esteem in her eyes, then still I shall not hesitate.

Wife. You buried my axe.

But I buried it long ago.

You think me now dead. But I died in that line. I, Ravast, widower to them all.

We will laugh then, in our breaking of souls, and set our vision back upon the trail, to our distant, peaceful farm, which lies upon the heel of the Lower Rise, just above the veil of morning smoke from the village below.

The dogs are barking, I hear, but not in alarm. They are just keeping their throats ready.

Because the Thelomen will come again, in their ships, and I will take my place in that first line. Where I will stand in silence. And in blessed anticipation.

He thought back to the dragon’s carcass, and the frantic swing of his axe, that only by chance struck the beast’s taloned paw. The walls had held on that day, if only because the battle proved so brief in duration. The walls had held, but barely.

‘Another slope and another mountain and another high pass!’ Garelko groaned as they climbed up from the lake’s edge. ‘Ravast, I beg you, carry this old man!’

No, I already carry too many.

Tathenal said, ‘The saddle pass is high enough, I should think. That will see us safe from the flood. When next we camp, I have in mind a new idea. Ravast, consider this when you build our hut for the night. Hull-shaped, and sound of flank …’

Tathenal’s dreams of flood the night just past were not the first. For years, he had been haunted by visions of disaster, against which his will proved, time and again, utterly helpless. Behind the veil of sleep, the mind had a way of wandering into strange places, as if the soul knew that it was, in truth, lost. Landscapes arrived twisted, known and yet unknown, and he would see faces that he recognized, yet did not, and in walking through his dreams, in turning to him and speaking in garbled tongues, they proved little more than harbingers of confusion.

For all that, the sense of dread persisted, like the scent of a storm upon the air. The roots of a mountain grown corrupted and rotten – he alone could feel its tremors, its promise of imminent collapse. A tendril of smoke upon the breeze – none other noticed the glow of the raging flames deep in the forest, the growing roar of conflagration. Diseases among the livestock, birds falling from the sky, the village cats poisoned and dying beneath wagons. Each time, Tathenal was alone in seeing the signs, unheeded in his cries of warning, and the last to fall to whatever calamity – fleeing exhausted, whimpering, and yet burning with validation.

Prophets thrived on being ignored. They delighted in being proved right, and delighted yet more in seeing misery and suffering afflict every fool who dared to mock. Tathenal had long since learned to keep his fears to himself, barring the occasional confession to his closest companions – his fellow husbands. Their chiding and amusement comforted him, when he chose to not think about it too much. Familiar voices took the sting from dismissive words. Habits and patterns could be worn like old clothes.

There was little challenge in assembling each scene of destruction, plucking free the specific details, and then recognizing the singular fear hidden behind them all. Worse, he was hardly unique in his terror of death. Warriors marched into its face at every battle, and their courage was but the visible side of the mask, when the unseen side, flush against the skin of their faces, was cold and clammy with fear. Wives who commanded the hearth, as mistresses of the farm and its myriad denizens, wove blankets, or pushed the dust from the rooms; they dragged husbands or lovers to their furs and blazed like fires against the darkness. Herders counted their flocks and sought signs of wolves on the mountain paths. Wood-carvers gathered dead trees and fought their own kind of war, seeking resurrection in what they made. Poets and hearth-singers pulled threads from tattered souls, eliciting emotions which, in the end, were proofs against death.

The enemy forced every act, every deed. The enemy pursued, or stalked, or waited in ambush. It could not be defeated, and it never lost.

Tathenal understood the Jaghut, Hood. He understood this summoning, and the outrage that gave it such appeal. He understood, as well, the futility of it.

Middle among the husbands, he found himself upon an ever-moving bridge, with the youth, Ravast, carrying one end, and the elder, Garelko, the other. Their positions were fixed, but the march through time could not pause, not for an instant. Until death came to take one of them. Then, the journey would stagger, stumble and slide. In a predictable world, Garelko would fall first, and Tathenal would find himself taking the old man’s place, as the new eldest, and if Lasa Rook was as unchanging as she seemed, then Ravast would find himself upon that bridge, trapped in the middle, with a new youth upon the other end.

It was an awkward construct in Tathenal’s mind, and yet it held, stubborn and persistent. He did not particularly like it, sensing its lack of artistry, and, indeed, its lack of purpose.
It is simply how we are. A stupid thing to consider. A bridge? Why a bridge? What unknown torrent does it span? And why am I alone in finding my feet not upon solid ground, but upon an uncertain purchase? When I at last find myself the eldest, will I step with relief upon some future shore, some river’s verge or chasm’s blessed ledge? And, should I arrive there, what will I see ahead of me?

We carry our bridges, from birth until death. If I name it the soul, then it is no wonder I ever fear the flood, the fire, the avalanche. Or the gnawing waste of disease, and every hidden, unseen place of neglect. But these two companions, holding me up at either end, ah, I set too vast a weight upon them.

He understood the nature of love, such as he felt for his fellow husbands. They stood aligned and together, with Lasa Rook opposite them. The specifics were not relevant. No soul deserved to stand alone, and families both found and made served the same purpose. In his dreams, it was this that he saw swept away, time and again. In his dreams, he ever ended up alone.

There would be an army, clustered around Hood and his vow. Tathenal was certain of it. An army such as no world had ever seen before. Its enemy was impossible, but that did not matter – no, in truth, it was that impossibility that would give the army its strength. He could not explain his certainty; could make little sense of his faith. But he would see that army, and, perhaps, join it.

I will step off the edge of this bridge. Knowing what will come of that. And it may be that, when the end comes, I will understand. Death will defeat time, when nothing else can. Lasa Rook, beloved wife, will you see the glory of that?

He did not believe any of the others would follow him, especially not Lasa Rook, and he was settled with that final departure.

It would be better, he decided, if he dreamed of that army. He knew, when at last he joined the ranks, his dreams of disaster would leave him.
An end to my fear of being alone. An end to a soul’s solitude, when death at last arrives. There is something in that, something in there, that comforts.

Hood, your army will be vast.

Garelko made his way along the trail, taking the lead and so setting the pace. He deemed this the proper thing, since he was the eldest. He imagined himself the silver-muzzled wolf, the noble king, the wizened veteran of a thousand hunts.
Our quarry is elusive, to be sure. But my mind’s eye is sharp. I see her swaying hips, and those buttocks, smooth as damp clay, as giant pots, two fused into one, rolling as she walks. A behind to bury your face in, with breath held, of course. But still, I will lunge without hesitation.