Foundling (29 page)

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Authors: D. M. Cornish

BOOK: Foundling
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“Ah, your name is obvious by your weepy, weepy tears, little Rossamünd, that is all, nothing more.” This little fellow was very hard to understand. “And now we’re done our meetings,” it concluded. “I expect you’ve learned it that hands are shook together, to show a meeting met?”
A hand came out from a lower gap in the wood. This hand was about the same size as Rossamünd’s, though the fingers were longer, the wrist much thinner and the skin far rougher. Rossamünd gawped at it: this was most definitely not a person’s hand. He remembered himself, took it in his own grasp and politely shook. It felt warm and very much like the bark of a tree. Its grip was strong but gentle.
Looking into those bizarre yellow eyes, Rossamünd tried to show trustworthiness and friendship in his own. If he had to suffer imprisonment and oppression, then getting a chance to make friends with a kindly bogle was an odd yet amazing consolation. “Very pleased to meet you, Mister Freckle,” he said solemnly. Abuzz with curiosity, he could not help but go on and ask. “Excuse me, Mister Freckle . . . but are you a nuglung?”
Freckle laughed again. “They’ve taught you to divide and conquer too, I see—rule by division, divide by rules—the everyman creed. Ah, ’tis only fair. I named you first.” The eyes blinked again. “As it is, you make me much bigger than my boots. No-no-no, a nuglung princeling am I not. I am just what I am, what the everyman might go calling a
glammergorn
—though really, I am just one lonely Freckle. There is no other Freckle, just this one Freckle, until he is no more.” The eyes look skyward.
Rossamünd had
seen
a nuglung earlier that day, the sparrowling in the olive bush, and now he was actually
talking
with a glamgorn—which is what he understood Freckle to mean by “glammergorn.” These were even smaller than a nuglung, less powerful. Again he remembered the almanac’s warning, that it was best not to get too close to one.
Well,
he wondered,
what would the writers of
Master Matthius’ Wandering Almanac
say if they were watching me now?
“Give it to meeee,” hissed a new and broken voice.
Rossamünd started. The yellow eyes of Freckle blinked several times rapidly.
This new voice had come from the lonely crate on the steerboard side of the hold.
“Quiet, you!” Freckle warned.
“Give it to mee toooo.” The broken voice came again, full of creepy, lugubrious longings. “And to meee—we want to suck out its marrow . . . ooh yes, and squish its eyeballs a’tween our rotted teeth.” The crate from which it spoke rattled vigorously.
Rossamünd peered at it. A hunched darkness thrashed about spasmodically within. Fortunately its cage was chained fast to a thick oak beam. Nevertheless he shuddered and began to pry at the lashings that gripped his wrists.
Freckle’s voice became commanding and hard, contrary to his normal soft singsong. “His marrow is too well needed inside his bones, and his eyes are too busy at looking and weeping to need your gnawings!” The glamgorn’s golden eyes disappeared. “Now to quiet with you!” His voice spoke from the other side of its box.
There was a
thwip!
and a curse and an extraordinarily loud hiss from the lonely crate. “That struck us in the eye! Now we must have an eye, an eye for an eye, an eye . . . lov-er-ly eye . . .” Rotten lips smacked together.
“I know it did, and this I know, for it was sent on its mission so,” Freckle said proudly. “And even less eyes will you have if you don’t be leaving us be!”
There was another loud hiss. “You’d not be so brave if we weren’t bound so hard, scrumptious morsel. We plan to chew on your twiggy bones too . . . oh my, and me too . . .”
It became quiet.
Freckle’s yellow eyes reappeared.
“What
is
that?” Rossamünd whispered, still picking uselessly at the rope.
“
That
is an ill-made rever-man, all bits and bobs and falling apart. Those wicked ones who made him do not know their wicked business. He’s not knit too well at all, and none too sharp in the knitted noggin neither. Oh how he hates, full of grieving over half memories and wild hungers! They hate we natural ones most of all, ’cause we are made all right and they are made the everyman’s way—all wrong . . .”
A rever-man! A revenant!
Rossamünd knew of these things. They were put together by wicked people taking bits of dead bodies to make new creatures from them, all rotting limbs and ravenous. So that was Poundinch’s secret trade, the reason for his suspicious conversations and the crazed flight from the Spindle. At last Rossamünd had discovered the truth. Rivermaster—or Captain, if that was how it was to be now—Poundinch was a smuggler for the dark trades, a trafficker of corpses and half-made undead. That was why he pretended to haul such odoriferous cargoes as swine’s lard and pungent herbs, to hide the stink of the contraband.
The foundling shuddered once more. He had to get away!
The hold of the
Hogshead
had now taken on a greater aspect of foul wickedness. Had it not, it still held a rever-man. Rossamünd did not care how poorly made it might have been. He did not like the idea of being confined so closely with one. Its rotten reek was beginning to overpower the other rancid airs in the hold—even that of the swine’s lard.
“Cut me loose!” he hissed to Freckle. “I have a knife still, hanging on my baldric. See?”
“Yes, I most definitely do see and see I do.” There was a tug on Rossamünd’s scabbard. “Yet my own hands are enough to do a knife’s work. Hemp and wood are one thing, Rossamünd, but iron just another. I can loose your bonds but mine I cannot, unless you have learned your strength as well?”
The foundling frowned. He was not strong enough. What was the glamgorn talking about? His hopes dimmed, and he sat for a time in a gloom. Gradually he became aware that his bottom was beginning to sting, as if he were being bitten by a thousand little ants.
“Ow! Ow!” Rossamünd realized he was experiencing the caustic nature of seawater for the first time. He had been sitting in the bilgewater long enough for it to start to eat at his skin. He stood as best he could, the rope bindings preventing him from achieving more than an awkward stoop. His backside stung.
A wicked, strangled giggle came from the lone crate.
“Not good for clothes nor delicate pink skin either,” observed Freckle, ignoring the rever-man’s malicious glee. “That’s why I like my barky hide. It hides me better from sneaky eyes and stops the stinging of the water.”
“Aye, I wish I had your skin,” Rossamünd agreed with a sagacious nod, “but just on my rear end.” Wanting to pick up a previous thought, he continued. “Mister Freckle? Which nuglung do you serve?”
Freckle sniffed in a breath. “My, my—there’s an everyman question if ever a question was one. No prying in private things! I’ve not asked you your private things and you shouldn’t go asking upon my private things. They’ve taught you far too well, I can well see, too well.”
Rossamünd hung his head in shame. Somehow it made sense that this glamgorn would not want to be telling an everyman child—even one as friendly and open as Rossamünd hoped he was being—much of secret bogle ways. The foundling was certain that if
he
were a bogle, he would not want to say a great deal to a person either—not unless he knew without a doubt that the person could be trusted. He apologized with a mutter, but pressed on to another mystery. “Please, at least, tell why my crying means you know my name?”
The glamgorn laughed his strange laugh. “Knowing, knowing—sometimes there has to be trusting too . . .” Freckle’s golden eyes frowned, then became kindly once again. “I can see you ain’t ready and I know there is a time and a place, a place and a time. I might be lowly, but even I know what to say and when not to say it. Yet the time might come for knowing things, and when the need of knowing’s nigh, you’ll know then what I do now.”
This was no help at all. Rossamünd wanted to push for more when there came the familiar thumping of boot steps on the deck above.
What now?
Rossamünd quickly became quiet and the glamgorn’s eyes retreated into the obscurity of his prison.
Rossamünd followed the steps as they thudded overhead and trod toward the hatch. It opened and Captain Poundinch peered down, his attention darting to each crate before stopping upon the foundling. “Well, Rosey-me-lad, I see ye’re still in whole pieces.” He grinned leeringly. “I’ve come back sooner than I said, I know, but I figured ye’ll do yer thinkin’ just as well upon me other tub, th’ frigate
Cockeril
, as ’ere. Ye’ll like ’er, she’s a mite more spacious than th’ poor ol’ ’
ogshead
.”
He waggled a short-barreled pistola hidden beneath his coattails. Eyeing the firelock in fright, Rossamünd saw that its barrel was wider than usual—a weapon designed to knock a person down, to bludgeon him to death despite any type of proofing. “And I reckon
this
might serve as th’ best gag for our little stint to the
Cockeril
. No ’ollerin’s or screechin’s from ye, an’ there’ll be no shootin’s from me.”
Poundinch released the knot that held Rossamünd’s wrists to Freckle’s crate and jerked the foundling after him and back up the ladder. “So follow me lead and a simple jaunt from ’ere to there is all for ye and me to enjoy.”
Rossamünd strained his neck to try for a glimpse of Freckle. The glamgorn’s now sad eyes showed briefly.
“Farewell . . .” the foundling mouthed, just as he was hefted clear off the ladder by the easy might of the lumbering captain. He caught one last sight of Freckle blinking a solitary sorrow-filled blink.
15
DECISIONS, DECISIONS
glamgorn
(noun) one of the smaller kinds of monster, a true bogle. They come in all manner of shapes, pigmentation and hairiness: big eyes, little eyes; big ears, little ears; big body, little limbs; little body, big limbs; and all the variations in between. Often feisty and jittery, certain kinds can get downright nasty, the worst of them being known as blightlings. One of the bizarre idiosyncrasies of glamgorns is that they like to wear clothes, everyman clothes stolen from washing lines and unguarded trunks. There are rumors that, dressed like this, glamgorns—and worse yet blightlings—have been able to sneak into the cities of everymen to spy and cause mischief.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
T
HE cord that once tied his wrists now cut, Rossamünd was forced to walk before Captain Poundinch, his fear of that large pistola the only leash.
Mighty thunderclouds boiled in the west and cast High Vesting in early gloom. It was clear that Poundinch thought the hour already dim enough to move his captive.
Why else would he have returned to get me so soon?
Rossamünd reasoned.
One consolation was the fresher air, happy relief from the cloying, rotten fumes of the hold. As he was forced down the gangplank, Rossamünd sucked in several headache-clearing breaths through his nose to cleanse it of the stink.
There was hardly another soul about as they went along the piers. Most of those they did pass by paid them no attention, and the few who did saw Poundinch and quickly stopped looking. Generally, the vessels berthed in this region of the docks were in bad repair, similar to the state of the
Hogshead
when Rossamünd had first gone aboard, way back in Boschenberg. There was a strong sense that the authorities did not visit this part of the harbor very often. Consequently, Rossamünd guessed that they were likely to be captained and crewed by the likes of the
Hogshead
’s master, and were not places to flee to for help.
Between the stone and the sty, again! And what of poor, lonely Freckle too
. . .
?
The foundling walked on with his hands pushed hard into the pockets of his fine frock coat. It occurred to him once more to use his knife. Poundinch had still not taken it from him. Rossamünd could not fathom why; perhaps he figured that the pistola, his great size and greater experience would all be deterrents enough. They were, and Rossamünd let the idea go in despair.

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