Fall of Light Page 10

  The failed hunt just past. The cruel pathos of the stories told at night out in the barrens. The hopeless search for hoof-sign. The wolves that did not come and did not howl with the fall of dusk.

  The long return to the forest, hungry and silent with shame. The smoke to the south, above the treeline. The sudden scattering of the parties, as family members drew together and then split away, rushing to the camps of their kin. The wandering among the slain. The dead wife, the dead sister who had made it halfway out of her burning hut before a sword slid into her back. The dead son whose neck had been snapped.

  The desperate journey to the monasteries of Yedan and Yannis. The beseeching of the priests and priestesses within. The bitter bargain offered.

  Bring us your children.

  The hunters wailed. They cried, What children?

  On that day, Glyph took for himself that vicious title the people of the towns and the city had given them. He was now a Denier.

  The name had become his promise. His destiny, in fact. Denier. Denier of life. Denier of truth. Denier of faith.

  Dusk had arrived when he finally found the camp of the Legion soldiers whom he had been tracking. There were three of Urusander’s ilk, travelling east, making for Neret Sorr as had so many others before them. Glyph crept his way closer in the darkness, safe beyond the dungchip fire’s pool of light. He still possessed all his arrows, a half-dozen of them bearing iron barbs. The others were flint-tipped.

  When he was in place, beside a stump and behind the tree that had toppled from it, he silently removed three arrows, the first two iron-headed, the last one bearing his best flint – long-bladed and sharp-edged under the single strand of gut binding it to the end of the shaft. Each arrow he set point-down into the ground beside him, making a neat row.

  Two men and a woman. They were talking. The two men were arguing over who would lie with the woman this night. She was laughing as she set one against the other. They sat round the fire, under the cold night’s bright stars. Glyph concluded, as he waited, that she wanted neither of them.

  He selected the first iron-barbed arrow and set it to his bow’s gut string. Lifted the weapon clear of the black trunk and drew on the string as he did so, pulling until it pressed against his lower lip.

  Then he released the arrow.

  The man directly opposite Glyph made a choking sound, toppling backward.

  His friend on his right barked a laugh, as if the dead man was jesting. But then the woman spied the fletching jutting from the dying man’s throat, and she cried out.

  Glyph was already drawing the bow. The second iron arrow sank deep under her left breast. With a small gasp, she fell on to her side.

  The last man unsheathed his sword, wheeling round, but blinded still by the firelight.

  The flint-tipped arrow buried itself in his stomach. He shrieked, doubling over. The arrow’s shaft tilted and then, at his frantic scrabbling, it fell to the ground. The long flint head remained in his gut.

  Glyph settled back, watching.

  The man sank to his knees, moaning.

  Shaking his head, Glyph spoke. ‘You will run.’

  The head snapped up, revealing a face pinched with fierce pain. ‘Come here, you fucking turd, so I can cut you down before my last breath!’

  ‘You will run,’ Glyph repeated. ‘Or I will put another arrow in you, and you’ll not be able to hold up your sword. Then I will come to you and with my knife I will slice off your cock. Then your sac, and throw them on to your pretty fire. I will drag you half across that fire, and add the remaining chips over your legs, and we’ll watch you roast down there.’

  ‘Fuck!’ The man groaned to his feet, still doubled over, and then he staggered out from the firelight.

  He was slow, his flight aimless. Glyph stayed fifteen paces behind him, moving quietly.

  In his mind he saw the flint arrow-head, buried deep in the man’s body, slicing this way and that with each stride the soldier took. And he imagined the pain, the raging fire.

  After a disappointingly short time, the man fell to the ground, curling up around his wound.

  Glyph approached.

  The soldier had dropped his sword early on in his flight, not that he could have done anything with it now. Moving to stand beside the prone form, Glyph sighed. ‘It is tradition,’ he said, ‘to use the arrow for beasts. An ignoble weapon. That is how we are to think of it. To down a fellow man or a woman from a distance is the coward’s way. But we Deniers are making a new tradition now.’

  ‘Go to the Abyss,’ the man gasped, eyes squeezed shut.

  ‘You made a few new ones of your own,’ Glyph said. ‘So really, you have no cause to complain. What new traditions, you ask? I will remind you. The hunting and killing of women and children. Of elders. Rape, and whipping little boys through the air. Watching a beautiful young woman burned in half, before one of you showed a last vestige of mercy and stabbed her through the heart. A sister, that one, always laughing, always teasing. I loved her more than my life. As I did my wife. And my son. I loved them all more than my life.’

  He continued looking down, and saw that the soldier was dead.

  Drawing his iron knife, he knelt and pushed the body on to its back. He cut into the blood-smeared gut, making the arrow-wound big enough to fit his hand, and then, carefully, he worked his hand into that hot fissure. The flint edges were sharp and he did not want to cut himself. Finally, the tips of his fingers found the blade. It had worked down into the man’s liver, slicing it almost in half. Gingerly, he drew it out, praying that it had not broken against a bone.

  But no, the arrow-head was whole, not even chipped anywhere along its edges. Glyph wiped it clean on the man’s cape.

  Then he straightened and began making his way back to the camp. There would be food there, and he’d not eaten in a week. This hunt had taken all of his strength and he was feeling light-headed.

  He wanted to retrieve his arrows from the other bodies, check the iron points, and then find the shaft that had fallen out from the last man.

  Here is my new story. Before the end, some fish had left the lake. They went upstream. When they returned, they found all their kin gone. In rage, one walked out from the water, leaving for ever his world, and blessed by the lake’s grieving spirit he was given legs and arms, and his scales fell away to be replaced by skin. He was given eyes that could see in this new, dry world. He was given lungs that did not drown when filled with air. He was given hands with which to collect weapons.

  Then he set out.

  The people who fished the lake had distant kin, out on the drylands.

  He would cast wide his net.

  And begin the tradition of slaughter.

  He realized that he would need a name. So he named himself Glyph, so that others could read the truth of his deeds, and so that the other fish that walked out on to the land and were given arms, legs and hands would join him.

  He saw before him a modest wall, there on the shore, between water and land. The birth of a tradition, in a place between two worlds. I came from the water, but now I walk the shore. And from the land beyond there will be streams of blood and they will bless this shore, and make of it a sacred thing.

  * * *

  Wreneck’s mother told him that he was now eleven years of age. That seemed a long time to be alive, since most of it had been hard. Always working, always worrying. Whippings and kicked shins from his mistress, and all the other little things she did that hurt him: it seemed that those things made up all the millions of days in which he had been alive.

  The burns from the fire had left smooth, shiny weals on his hands, his forearms, his shoulders, and on his left cheek just under the eye. He might have more on his head, but his hair had mostly grown back. Those scars were like places where the roughness had been rubbed away, and only when the sunlight was on them did they begin hurting again. The scar where he had been stabbed was bigger and took a lot longer to heal.

  He had not returned to
the ruins of the Great House. He had heard from his mother that ghosts had been seen there. But one day, ghosts or not, he knew he would make his way back. He would walk in the burned-out ruins. He would remember how everything had looked before the coming of the soldiers. There was a reason for having to go back, but he did not yet know what it was. The idea of it, of standing on the blackened stones of the Great House’s threshold, seemed like the end of something, and that end felt right, somehow.

  It was worth reminding himself, he decided, that whole worlds could die. No different from people. People who died left bones. Worlds left ruins.

  He had saved a girl at that estate, a girl he had loved, but she was gone now. Returned, he supposed, to her family, but as that family was not from round here no one knew who they were, or even where they lived. His ma wouldn’t tell him anything about any of that. It was just a truth he had to live with, an unhappy one like all the other unhappy ones: Jinia was gone.

  There were lots of burned places now. Black ruins on the skyline on all sides of Abara Delack. Looted farmhouses made blackened smears across the fields. He couldn’t see much of the monastery from where he lived with his mother, and yet, above all the others, it drew his eye the most: a distant hill toothed by a ragged black wall. He was curious about it. He wondered if he would feel the same about it as he did about the Great House, as a place deserving at least one visit.

  Ma wanted him close by these days. She wanted him going nowhere out of her sight. But he was eleven now. And he looked even older, especially with the burn scars. And this morning, when at last he slipped out from her grasp, and set off down the track that led to the road that led through the town and then back up again on the other side, to the old monastery, she had wailed behind him, reaching out with her hands as if to drag him back.

  Her tears made him feel bad, and he vowed to fix everything when he returned home. The soldiers were finally gone from Abara Delack. They had marched east, into the forest that had been burned down first, to make the going easier. But people were hungry in the town. They were leaving because there was not enough food there. When they left, pulling carts, they took with them whatever the soldiers hadn’t stolen from them. Wreneck had seen them on the road, all going somewhere else, but it seemed no one could decide where that was, as the families went off in different directions from each other. And every now and then one of them came back, only to leave again a few days later, heading out another way.

  So the town Wreneck walked into was almost empty of people, and those who remained were mostly staying in their houses. The livery had burned down, he saw. So had the land office. A few men and women stood outside the tavern, not doing much or saying anything, and they watched Wreneck walk past.

  Pausing, he looked into the narrow alley beside the tavern, thinking to see the one-armed man who had been Orfantal’s mother’s secret friend, since the alley was where the man lived. But he wasn’t at his usual place on the steps to the cellar. Then he caught a faint motion deeper in the alley’s shadows, something small and huddled, trying to keep warm beneath a thin blanket.

  Wreneck headed over, stepping quietly, as if sneaking up on a nesting bird. He couldn’t remember the man’s name, so he said nothing.

  When the figure started and looked up, Wreneck halted. He saw, shining out from a grimy face, eyes that he knew well.

  ‘Jinia?’

  At the name the girl shrank back, pushing up against the stone wall and turning her face away. Her bare feet pushed out from under the thin blanket, and their soles were black and cracked.

  ‘But why didn’t you go to your family? Ma said you did. She said you went off in the night, when I was asleep. When I was still getting better.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘Jinia?’ Wreneck edged closer. ‘You need to come back home with me.’

  Finally, she spoke, her voice thin and sounding tired. ‘She didn’t want me.’

  ‘Who?’

  Still she kept herself turned away, her face hidden. ‘Your mother, Wreneck. Listen. You’re a fool. Go away. Leave me alone.’

  ‘Why didn’t she want you? I saved you!’

  ‘Oh, Wreneck, you don’t know anything.’

  Confused, he looked around, but no one was in sight. The people in front of the tavern had not come to help, or even look. He didn’t understand grown-ups at all.

  ‘I’m broken inside,’ she said, in a dull voice. ‘I won’t have babies. Everything down there will hurt, always. This is my last winter, Wreneck, and it’s how I want it. There’s no point. No point to any of this.’

  ‘But,’ said Wreneck, ‘I’m broken inside, too.’

  She was so quiet he thought she hadn’t heard him, and then she sobbed.

  He went to her. Knelt at her side and put a hand on her shoulder. She smelled bad. She smelled like what the old men had begun distilling in their sheds, and only now did Wreneck see the rotting heap of potato skins nearby, that she had been eating. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to die. If you did you wouldn’t be eating that. And you wouldn’t be trying to stay warm. I love you, Jinia. And that brokenness. That hurt. It’s just what lives inside. That’s all it is. On the outside, you’re always the same. That’s what we’ll give each other – everything that’s on the outside, do you see?’

  She wiped at her face and then looked up at him, the eye that wasn’t wandering meeting his gaze. ‘That’s not how it is, Wreneck. That’s not love at all. You’re too young. You don’t understand.’

  ‘That’s not true. I’m eleven now. I’ve made a spear, and I’m going to hunt them down and I’m going to kill them. Telra and Farab and Pryll. I’m going to stick my spear in them until they’re dead. And you’re going to watch me do it.’

  ‘Wreneck—’

  ‘Come with me. Let’s go explore the monastery.’

  ‘I’m too drunk to walk.’

  ‘It’s just what you’ve been eating.’

  ‘It kills the pain.’

  ‘So you can walk and it won’t hurt.’ He reached down and helped her stand. ‘I’m going to take care of you,’ he said. ‘From now on.’

  ‘Your mother—’

  ‘And after the monastery, we’re going away. I told you. We’re going hunting, for the people who did that to you.’

  ‘You’ll never find them.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘They’ll kill you.’

  ‘They tried that already. It didn’t work.’

  She let him take her weight and when he felt it there was a stab of dull pain from the sword-scar. They tottered for a moment, and then hobbled out of the alley.

  As they turned to make their way up the street, one of the men in front of the tavern called out, ‘You’re wasting your time, son. All you’ll get is a lot of blood.’

  The others laughed.

  Wreneck swung round. ‘You grown-ups make me ashamed!’

  They were silent then, as he and Jinia slowly walked up the main street. She leaned hard against him, but he was still big, still strong, and where the soldier had stabbed him it only hurt a little bit now, not like the first time, when he thought that maybe something had ripped.

  Everyone was broken inside. It was just that some were more broken than others, and when they were broken bad inside, it was all they could do to keep the outside looking normal. That took all the work and that’s what living was – work. He had years of practice.

  ‘You’re sweating,’ Jinia said when at last they reached the outskirts of town and looked up to the hill and its summit where huddled the scorched ruins of the monastery, showing them a gap-toothed wall and a gateway with no gate.

  ‘It’s hot.’

  ‘No, it’s cold, Wreneck.’

  ‘I’m just working hard, Jinia. I’m used to that, and it’s good and you know why?’

  ‘Why?’

  He thought about how he would say what he felt, and then nodded. ‘It reminds me that I’m alive.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Wreneck,�
�� she said. ‘For your burns, from when you carried me through the burning rooms. I should have said that before. But I was mad at you.’

  ‘Mad at me? But I saved your life!’

  ‘That’s why, Wreneck.’

  ‘They weren’t much,’ he said after a moment. ‘Those rooms, I mean. There was hardly anything in them. So the places where rich people live, why, they’re still just rooms.’

  They had begun the ascent, much slower now. At his words, Jinia snorted. ‘They would tell you otherwise.’

  ‘I saw them. Those rooms. They can try telling me anything they like. I saw them.’

  ‘You were friends with Orfantal.’

  Wreneck shook his head. ‘I was a bad friend. He hates me now. Anyway, I won’t be that again. The nobleborn grown-ups don’t scare me any more. Orfantal wasn’t like them, but I’m sorry that he hates me.’

  ‘Nobleborn,’ she mused, and he smelled her sweet breath. ‘It seems I’ve found one of my own.’

  He didn’t understand what she meant. She was still a little drunk.

  Then they ran out of breath with which to talk, as the hill was steep and the track slippery under its thin coat of snow. The monks were all dead for sure, since they would have swept this clear. There was nothing living in sight. Even the crows had long gone.

  At last, they reached the summit, and Jinia stepped away from him, to stand on her own, but she reached across and took his hand.

  Suddenly cowed by her gesture, and the feel of her thin fingers and her pinched palm, so easily swallowed up by his too-big hand, Wreneck said nothing. But he felt very grown up.

  ‘I’m not so cold any more,’ she said. ‘Not so drunk, either. But the pain’s back.’

  He nodded. Yes, it was back, and not just where the soldier had stabbed him. It was back in other places, too, all through his insides. Aches. Deep, deep aches. When he could stand them no longer and he had to move, he stepped forward, and she fell in at his side, and they walked towards the shell of the tumbled wall’s gate.

  ‘They used to bring food into town and give it away to the poor,’ Jinia said. ‘But only once or twice a year. The years they didn’t, everyone hated them. But it was just bad harvests. When they only had enough to feed themselves. Still, everyone hated them.’