The Legend of El Shashi (12 page)

Thank Mata for long legs and a fit body. I stretched my legs on the uphill run toward the main Lymarian force. I sliced my roundshield’s leather stays off my left forearm and dropped the weight without second thought. No need for that anymore. I yanked my helm loose. Several more pounds of metal tumbled away. Given half a chance I would ditch the thigh plates as well. Men were not meant to run in armour! Our unit Onelead believed in running through muddy fields in full armour was essential training for ‘soft farm boys’–and while I had cursed him for a whole season, which was the length of my induction to the ranks, now I thanked him with my every breath.

Once I broke into the clear, I slowed. Where
to now? I could not hear the Wurm, could not see it. Larathi! Keep moving, Arlak. Two brass terls to a Lortiti Real said the beast was somewhere nearby. I trotted on, scanning the ground ahead, trying to regather my breath. Be cursed to Nethe if I was going to let some overgrown insect get the better of me!

I
too was minded of a shadworm. The interlocking body rings, the burgundy hue of its armoured carapace, the multi-jointed feelers … how under the heavens did Jyla plan to use the power the Wurm garnered from these events? I had to find out more about the Sorceress and her designs on my life. But where to begin? Was it magic that allowed her Wurm to move so easily above or below ground, through soil and even rock? Why did it feed so voraciously upon people–was that the source of its strength and growth? Since my last run the creature had doubled its length again, or I was no judge.

Filling my boots with scorn, I
said to my surroundings, “What are you planning to do, Arlak? Take a tailor’s measure of the beast for its new robes? Ha! Robes of sallinen and the finest burnoose for that overgrown maggot-body?”

Ah! Just a trin or so ahead was a clump of
boulders in which I could hide; see off this appearance of the Wurm.

What was that? My legs halted of their own accord. I peered at the rocks. How queer
–was something moving in there? My nape prickled as though a troop of fire-ants were investigating my collar for food. I felt a flicker of grephe at odds with my rational self. “Don’t be silly, Arlak,” I grunted. “Conserve your energy.” Two more paces, just ten or so short of the boulders now. Halt again. Peering. “That’s no branch, stupid. That’s–”

KERUMM!
The rocks exploded outwards, slower than I believed possible, yet faster than I could react. Desperately back-peddling, I tripped and thumped down on my rump. A boulder spun end-over-end toward me. My eyes had time to widen before it briefly trapped my foot, and rolled on. Unthinking, I used my power to slam down the pain.
No! Go, Arlak!
Diving to one side. Rolling over and over, using the slope, my arms and legs flailing to keep me moving as fast as possible.

The ground heaved and buckled as the Wurm ravenously gobbled up the earth behind my tumbling body. At least half its length lay buried in that single movement. I scrambled away, bad foot or none.

I must heal myself. I forced the power inward.

The ground
shook again.

The wind
fluttered in my ears as I found my stride. My crushed foot, I healed instantly. A burst of sheer terror bought me a lead, but at a pace I could not hope to sustain. Soon, the beast closed in again.
‘Sherrwweeeekk!’
was the sound of its shriek, like the call of a hunting falcon, but ten times greater.

I forced myself to slow, to regulate the frantic rhythm of my heart. I looked inward. And it seemed
to me then that I began to hear Janos’ voice chanting indistinctly in the distance. The haunting cries of sea-birds tingled in my ears. By degrees, my feet began to strike the ground ever more softly until it felt as though I were flying rather than running; that my arms were wings and my mind observed my flight from a place apart from my body; that the hypnotic flow of Janos’ voice had transported me to a place beyond myself, a place where no effort was required to outrun the wind.

That makh, I discovered a certain joyful purity in the act of running. The smooth inter-working of ligaments and muscles, the flexion and extension of joints, diaphragm
, and ribcage powering the lungs, heart pumping gouts of life-sustaining blood through my system–I grasped how marvellous an organism was my body, appreciating it in wholly new ways with the benefit of Jyla’s curse.

I felt invincible. Though a few Lymarians spread out to try to catch me, and they cast their darts, to my heightened senses they
were slow and clumsy. I was a zephyr, blowing where I pleased. Instinct supplied my balance. Running stripped away the non-essentials; gave me respite from my cares. Even a dagger’s slash did not slow my headlong rush. I thought, and was healed.

So I blew through the Lymarian camp that day, and kept right on
sprinting into the deep forest beyond. Freyal would never find me. The noise of the Wurm slowly fell behind. Boughs and hanging vines slapped my face. Roots threatened to trip me, but I hurdled them with breakneck abandon. Cuts and bruises gave me no pause.

After a long time,
as golden Suthauk dripped into Belion’s white eye, peeping just above the forested, hilly horizon, and the better portion of a day had been expended in my flight, I realised that the Wurm was gone.

I was alone with my ghosts.

Love? A pox on the notion! Why, I buy it by the potion,

And toss it into the ocean.

Is love not born inside a lie, a pretty pastime till we die?

Mark it mine? Fie!

Then why do I pine, stare into my wine, refuse to dine?

If I be not
… thine?

Popular Hakooi Ballad,
Anon

As I recall, that day set my feet upon a fresh course. No longer was I Arlak no-name. I was Arlak, Scourge of the Westland. That, if I could, I would have cast this title to the ground, spit upon it, and crush every last syllable into dust with my boot-heel, mattered nought. What I had wrought in the seasons of the Lymarian war felt abhorrent. That boy I had been before, that puppy in the pleasure-house, was dead. Now, in the season of my ruin and Ulim’s triumph, I understood at last what I was not. Jyla would have me become that monster of the Westland. Give her the pleasure? May I wither and rot at the thought!

The drive to make atonement
exhausted me. For the sake of my quoph and my sanity, I took upon myself a new mantle and a new name. As I tramped the byways of rural Roymere, plying my new trade, I began to call myself El Shashi.

Janos spent anna schooling me in Dusky Fahric, which is the scholarly tongue, seldom known by common folk. But a few phrases
enjoy wide renown. They are woven into every ulule’s repertoire. This phrase ‘El Shashi’, which means ‘worker of wonders’, is oft used on stage and in fable to signify a moment at which a story changes either through supernatural intervention or unexpected circumstance; its cusp or turning-point. The ulule or actor will don a blue cap or ribbon that denotes Mata’s favour, or dress in white to denote Ulim’s vindictive pleasure. For me, El Shashi stood for all that I wanted to become, both in quoph and in deed.

Solemnly, I sold my sword. With its coin I
purchased the robes and accoutrements of an athocary. I became an itinerant healer. Not for me the setting up of chambers–that mistake I had made in Gramyre Town. Never again, I vowed.

After a time I chose to put the dust of the long leagues upon my boots, spending the coin of my penance the length and breadth of the Fiefdoms, far beyond the borders of my native Roymere.

But mark this: how should a man choose whom to heal?

Or where to ply one’s trade?

For I bear witness that the Fiefdoms are many, and many more the towns within their borders, and their villages and hamlets, innumerable. Jyla’s bequest opened my eyes twofold: to the myriad faces of our human needs, and to my pitiful inadequacy in the face of them.

S
hould I choose this path, I choose not that.

Should I choose this hamlet, I
leave five more in my wake.

Who could know how best to locate the suffering, the weak, the destitute
, and the dying, save Mata Herself? Who would presume to judge one worthy of succour and not another? Should I heal the pickpocket, the swindler, or the woman suffering from cataracts, who nightly beats her husband raw and bloody with switches of hand-tied darkthorn? Should I succour the rapist, the drunkard, the village layabout, or any and every manner of scoundrel that plagues the Fiefdoms?

I had no answers to these questions.

Truly told, even the knowledge of power must change a man. The name of El Shashi was at once a mantle, a scourge, and such a terrible burden of responsibility as I could never have imagined. It alienated me from my fellow Umarite. Without noticing it, I became a social recluse, keeping my robe closed upon my chest. I feared even a simple touch, for that was how I dispensed healing. That was how I made my diagnoses, how I transformed lives.

My touch brought relief a
nd hope, or despair.

That
boy-farmer of Yarabi Vale had vanished, consumed by the Wurm. I felt transient, a nomad, a wind blowing unseen, never-may-care, through the myriad affairs of men.

When had this despicable conceit developed, that I should judge the needy? Utter presumption. Bald-faced arrogance. Mata’s sweet name, that I could excoriate it from my quoph and start afresh!

Ay. I recall a beggar I healed of ulcerated sores upon his legs, which he displayed openly the better to solicit pity and the coin of passers-by. He spat upon me, beat me about the head with his lyrithbark cane, and called down the most dreadful curses at my importunity. How dare I rob him of his income and way of life?

I healed
a village Layik of a paralysed leg. The good woman proceeded to follow me for nigh ten leagues from village to village, begging me to become her Matabond lover. The more I refused, the more bitterly she wept and tore at her hair and cried to all comers the depths of my cold-heartedness. It culminated in the woman setting the town guard upon me for a fabricated crime–I received twenty strokes of a willow cane upon my exposed buttocks for my troubles. But I was free of her.

My reputation, I learned, could raise false hopes. One anna I was invited to spend the cold seasons over Alldark Week amongst the Frenjj people of the south-eastern Hakooi lowlands, a land of fierce heat and nigh unbearable humidity. There
, the rich, loamy soils supported two harvests an anna, and the Frenjj grew their gigantic vegetables–beets the size of a man’s head, corncobs the length of a forearm, giant kale which stood the height of a man, and much besides. The Frenjj themselves were a tall, proud people, dark of complexion and noble of brow. But along their rivers, many fell prey to a baffling malady, called ‘string-fly’ in their tongue–a kind of worm or maggot which burrows beneath the skin, and if drawn forth, resembles nothing more than a length of white thread. But over time, the tracks scar and stiffen the joints until a young man moves like his grandfather, and a woman can no longer work with her hands.

I fail
ed the Frenjj outright. Scar tissue was resistant to my power. It felt dead. I could not move it, remove it, nor change it. Of course there were other maladies to heal, but this matter of string-fly frustrated my every guile and I departed with the sour taste of disgrace in my mouth.

I
dared not travel further than Hakooi, for beyond the tinkling-chambers of the talented minstrels lie the dread plains of the cannibal Faloxx; but instead, turning my face northward, I passed the forested length of the Hakooi and Elbarath Fiefdoms, and travelled right up to the vast sands of desert Damantia and the wondrous mountain fastness of Mara-Kern, where they worship the great eagles and men have learned to glide upon wings on the fierce, scorching thermals that rush up past the edges of the city. It churned my stomach to see them leaping off cliffs half a league or more above the desert. I declined their enthusiastic offers to assist me in casting myself off the nearest precipice. I wish I could claim it was my own bravery–but, truly told, as thanks for healing his aged father of a severe liver infection, a young man arranged for his friends to abduct me, truss my hands, and take me for my first and only flight.

After I had finished cursing and howling, I did thank them.

Truly told, these and other wonders did I witness over the anna: wonders such as the sulphurous, burning pits of Sukan, which is the closest imaginable place to Nethe and the people mine the scalding calderas for gold as red as sunset; or the God-serpent of the Kren, an iridescent python of such tremendous proportions it feeds upon half-grown jatha; and when crossing the Straits of Adallan to Sulikarn, a land of teeming jungles and venomous snakes, the delightful play of sea creatures called porpoises, which sported around our boat and raised their heads from the water to gaze at us with eyes full of curiosity and intelligence.

But life without love is an empty vessel.

*  *  *  *

“Rubiny o’Telmak!”

My second cry echoed most satisfyingly around the forecourt of Telmak Lodge, which, seen from the perspective of a penitent kneeling in its dusty forecourt in the early eventide, was just as I desired it. I had chosen the busiest makh of the busiest day. I scouted the location several days beforehand and kept watch upon the gates to determine that the said lady was both at home and not yet promised to another–would not blue promise-ribbons adorn the gateposts to proclaim the news to all?

I was drawing a decent crowd.

“Rubiny o’Telmak! I humbly crave an audience!”

I mopped my brow.
Despite it being the makh of eventide, it was early Doublesun and Belion’s heat and light reflected fearsomely off the clay-white plasterwork of Telmak Lodge. That brilliance cast deep shadows across the main entryway, where I expected Rubiny to make her appearance.

Q
uite suddenly, my heart leaped like a jatha scored by the branding-iron. There! The woman herself, as striking as ever I remembered. The suns lowering behind my shoulder burnished Rubiny’s unbound hair into cascade of titian flame, wherein her eyes were as luminous as jade pearls.

This moment I must have imagined
… oh, a thousand times. The dust of four Fiefdoms’ journey suddenly became as trifling footnote upon a forgotten scrolleaf.

I was dumbstruck.

Rubiny dusted her floury hands upon her apron. Her cheeks were flushed. I imagined she must have been in the kitchen, perfecting the cakes and sweets for which the Lodge was famous–one of a true lady’s skills, if ulules’ moral tales are to be trusted, lay in ruling the household. For that she must know it inside and out.

All this gushed through my mind, and out gushed my carefully prepared speech. The silence deepened.

She, squinting against the suns’ light, said, “Why do you call my name, stranger?”

Now her mother
appeared too, and the Master Telmak in her shadow. The two women turned aside to confer in whispers. The Master stared directly at me. His eyebrows arched, and I saw the corners of his mouth tighten.

Courage infused my backbone.

“Honoria Telmak!” I cried, dipping my forehead to the flagstones. “I kneel before you to beg your pardon! I abase myself. Before all present, I declare that I am the most wicked and corrupt of men, who once dared slight the good name and reputation of the daughter Telmak!”

The Honoria returned my bow with a
miniscule inclination of her head. “Well and fine, stranger, but that does not explain why you are wiping my courtyard with your brow, and causing this ridiculous scene.”

I spread my hands in the full buskal of abject pleading. “Great Lady of Telmak Lodge, I beg your forbearance. On the last occasion I supped within your halls, when deep within my cups, this dung-shovelling simpleton
–” deliberately borrowing Rubiny’s own words, “–did make occasion to cravenly insult the peerless daughter Telmak after she greeted me with nought but kind and gracious words.”

“Arlak!” Rubiny squeaked. Her hands flew to her mouth. “Oh my
–”

“Arlak Sorlakson!” the mother shrieked. “You!”

“In apology for my boorish insults and drunken advances, I shall three times grovel in the forecourt of Telmak Lodge like the wicked wastrel I am and here declare to the heavens and before all assembled, the depths of my depravity. I plead that the daughter Telmak should grant me the slipper’s toe to kiss.”

Slowly, holding my breath, I raised my head. Truly told, my boldness was plain for all to see! Rubiny’s eyes
glistened–whether with tears or embarrassment, I could not tell. The Honoria’s face was a mask of dark fury. And the Master Telmak? He gestured with his chin.
Up here.

As
I cast myself upon the topmost step, I knelt on a sharp piece of flint and hissed in pain. Rubiny’s stifled giggle fell like cool rain upon my fevered head.

At last, after all these anna, I had done something right.

Her slippers were informal ladies’ wear, red velveteen slip-ons with a very low heel, but the silver stitching on the seams betrayed her station. I addressed them with great fervour.

“Rubiny o
’Telmak, how I have wronged you,” I declared. There was nothing for it now but to play this scene out. “I am a worthless male who deserves nought but your scorn and contempt. I grovel–”

“As well you should!” hissed the Honoria.

“Rubiny o’Telmak, I brought shame on both you and this illustrious Lodge, undoubtedly the finest in the many fiefdoms of Roymere and beyond. I abused your hospitality to a guest and heaped the shame of irremediable selfishness upon my own head. I grovel before you. I pray your forgiveness.”

I was fast running out of adjectives.
Would I lie for love? Ay. But that was not my heart. I despaired. How should I better dress my stupid, stilted words …? Before I knew it, my third apology slipped out thus:

“Rubiny o’Telmak,” I said, “I
have become a fool for love. From the moment I first laid eyes on you, to this day, this love has been as immutable as Roymere’s great mountains. Truly told, you know my feelings, my beloved.” Grief, what had I done? I wanted to sink through the steps. I continued miserably, “Why else grovel, if not for love? Grant me the slipper’s toe. Please.”

The silence became deafening. Even the clucking lyoms held their beaks.

A tiny scraping sound. Rubiny’s slipper prodded my nose.