The Legend of El Shashi (7 page)

The bread of playing God is but crumbs of misery.

Old Roymerian Proverb

“Mata’s timing,” averred Farmer Lak, in a slow, gravelly voice, resting his fond gaze upon his wife as she waddled out of the lyomhouse. He hooked
his stubby thumbs behind his belt buckle. “Need the extra hands, mark my words, stranger. Only ten weeks now. A daughter by the way she’s carrying. Blessings indeed.”

“Indeed.”

I signed the buskal of Mata’s peace, a circle made above the heart with one’s hands pressed palms together. Judging by the shrieks coming from behind the house, this family was a lively one and possessed of several older blessings as well.

“Can’t say as
to where you’d sleep.”

I glanced up at him. His b
rawny, work-stooped shoulders bunched together behind his neck as though twin jatha strained at the yoke. He was a huge man, fully half a head taller than me and twice as broad through the middle. He reminded me nought more than of an ulinbarb tree, weathered and durable.

“Had an outbuilding fire just last Rushday. Burned the place clear out. The other hands is sleeping in the barn
, but there’s no room there ‘less we turn out the animals.”

“Have you timber?”

“Nethe yes, but neither joiner nor fitter who costs less than this farm pays in two anna.” He shook his head gloomily. “It’s a sore trial of faith, mark my words.”

Just then, several shouts interrupted us. “Father! Father!” Two young tearaways burst around the corner and flung themselves at the farmer without a care for life or limb. I took a backward step, but he swooped on them with a great bear-hug, spun
them around, and settled them one on each hip before I could catch my breath.

“You scamps! What do you want?”

“Alila took my sweetbread.”

“I had it first!”

“Liar!”

“
Silence!” Farmer Lak roared. He glared at each girl in turn, and then smiled at me. “I gladly present my daughters, stranger.” Nodding left and right, he said, “Alila. Jeria.” Bare-limbed and dark-haired, the twins pouted identically at me. I marked them for perhaps six anna of age. “Girls, give greeting to our new farmhand …”

“Arlak,” I supplied.

They smiled sweetly and chorused, “Be welcome, Arlak!”

“Father, she took my
–”

“But I had it first!”

“Be still! By all that is holy, squabbling in front of a guest! Have you no shame?”

They were likeable rascals, I decided. A handful indeed. But Farmer Lak’s heart clearly
matched his jatha-girth. He must love his children as dearly as my parents had once loved me–before Mata had torn them from the world of the living and cast them aside like chaff upon the fire. And then Janos, too, leaving me with no-one in this life, save Jyla … why? Larathi, why?

I watched Lak dealing with the twins, settling the dispute, setting them on their way with a fond swat
upon each departing behind.

“You have children, Arlak?”

“No.”

My flat response elicited a knowing grunt. “Ah. Well then. You some kind of joiner?”

I shivered and rubbed my arms. Mild days as yet, but first frost was imminent. I needed to find a place soon or I would become one large ice-sculpture out on the road. “No, but I’ve built outbuildings and houses before. I was a farmer myself. Have you tools? I’ll have the roof secure before Alldark Week.”

The farmer squinted into the distance. “You say so?” I imagined he
sought to weigh up my promise against my threadbare cloak, tatty thexik trousers, and boots I had salvaged from a roadside ditch.

Catching his gaze, I looked him levelly in the eye.
“My word on it. My grephe too.”

He pursed his lips, looked me once more up and down
, and roared, “Done and a good bargain!” and crushed my fingers with his two-handed Elbarath handshake. “Get you to the pumphouse, Arlak. Be welcome.”

A man must be worth his word, a good and trustworthy tenet by which my father set much store. So I worked, and worked relentlessly,
from dawn till dusk outdoors in the rain, then after dark in the barn by the light of an oil lamp. I cultivated blisters and splinters by the dozen. By Alldark Week, true to my promise and fuelled by my anger, I had the roof up and the last chinks in the walls tightly wadded with winterbrush and sponghum moss scraped off the rocks that lined the drainage ditches alongside the fields. Farmer Lak pursed his lips, declared his pleasure at the result of my labours, and crushed my hand again.

I vowed nevermore to shake hands with an Elbarath.

*  *  *  *

A rude patch of straw in an unused cattle stall doubled as my bed, with a blanket scrounged from somewhere
–I dared not ask–by Alila and Jeria. I treated their exuberance with a gruff caution that shed off the twins like water off a marshlark’s back.

After being closeted indoors for the whole of a snowbound Alldark Week, while the family made their religious observances and burned potent Jartian incense to ward off Ulim’s Hunt, I began to extend and improve the lyomhouse according to a Roymerian design. After that I turned my busy hands to a new cradle for the babe a
nd a snug room beneath the loft eaves for the twins, reached by a ladder. This sealed their affection. Artlessly, they delivered me kisses in tandem that made Farmer Lak cluck disapprovingly … and I? I had to fake a fit of coughing to stay my weeping heart from bursting its banks like a river during Thawing.

The other farmhands gave me scant greeting. Perhaps they misliked my foreign ways, unaccustomed to their rough jesting
and tiresome Elbarath homilies; or, closer to the mark, because I had skills that brought ready praise from the Honoria Lak and her husband. I worked not in the fields, but close to the main farmhouse, which bred resentment and mistrust. For my part, I brooded over Janos and ignored their mutterings.

As the brief southern snows gave way to Thawing
season, I grew more and more of a mind to move on. It had been a good wintering. But I had grown over-fond of the place. The Lak family’s kindness was simpler and more honest than I could either bear or spurn. The long road beckoned. Yet I tarried, until I tarried one day too many.

O
cursed, fateful day!

On a chill Rimday at the makh of sunup, a
biting easterly breeze whined about the farm buildings. The other hands, swaddled in every stitch of clothing they owned, stamped their feet to keep warm and muttered imprecations against the bitter weather. We all pitched hay from the barn’s upper level down into a cart, ready to take to the mournfully lowing jatha in the paddock–they were hungry as always, and doubly so in this wretched weather.

I
felt Lurgo’s eyes upon my neck. He was the youngest hand, a big, raw country lad, and meaner than a tygar with kittens when riled. I made it my business to keep up with him though it cost me blistered hands and an aching back.

“Lurgo!” Farmer Lak held up his lantern. “Clean up down here, will you?”

I leaned on the haft of my three-tined pitchfork and grinned at Lurgo.

“Ulim’s Hounds,” he grunted, scowling back fiercely. “Ah have to clean up yer mess again, stranger!”

“Jeria, Alila, come down ‘fore you get hurt!”

Lak’s bellow elicited giggles from beneath the straw beyond where we
worked. Farmer Lak had an uncanny knack for knowing exactly where his daughters were at all times. In a trice two dark heads popped up, not unlike puppies at play with eyes a-twinkle and tongues happily lolling–the twins, who must have been spying on the men’s labours. They scrambled to the edge and looked down.

“We were just playing, Father!”

“I shan’t speak a second time! Arlak, you asleep up there?”

Glowering at the twins’ piping laughter, I set to pitching great forkfuls down to the men below. At their father’s growl, the girls ran along the edge of the loft,
as daring as hill-goats. Alila glanced back to make a silly face at me.

Imp!

In that instant, her ankle turned. I thought I heard a rat squeal. She might have stepped on it, or been startled as the rodent leaped from the straw. Whatever the cause, Alila was perhaps three paces beyond my reach when she toppled over the edge. I hurled myself forward. But quick as I was, she fell quicker.

Directly onto Lurgo’s upraised pitchfork.

The little girl had no chance to scream. She sighed. Alila looked at her father and he at her. Then a gout of crimson burst from her mouth. It surged over Lurgo’s shoulder and splattered down his back. The farmhand staggered beneath the unexpected weight. He dropped his pitchfork, eyes bulging. He stared stupidly at his hands, as if by their own volition they had committed an act of unspeakable profanity.

We as one man gaped in disbelief. Someone swore.

There came a piercing scream from the doorway of the barn. The girls’ mother, come to call them to mornsup, clutched her swollen belly as she screamed and screamed again, then sank to the dirt floor in a dead swoon. Farmer Lak thundered forward, swooped, cradled Alila’s body in his great arms.

“She lives!” he cried. “Alila! My Alila!”

“Dear sweet Mata,” groaned Lurgo. “What have I done?”

Jeria was howling too.

That Alila was yet able to draw breath was a miracle. All three tines of the pitchfork had knifed clean through the child’s torso. Grotesque metal fingers protruded from her back. Blood welled steadily from the puncture-wounds, trickling over the farmer’s forearms and pooling on the floor beneath her body. It seemed to me that a little more of her life drained away with each precious drop.

Truly told
, I saw much, but was inwardly preoccupied with a feeling I had never experienced before. My heart was being slowly crushed. I stopped breathing. My eyes fluttered in their sockets like a moth’s wings. And then a thrilling sound, the rushing of a great wind mingled with the piercingly sweet notes of a hunting horn, flooded from my mind along every course and weft of my being, raging and churning and sweeping away what had been before. It was glorious, irresistible music. Music to savagely liberate bonds I had never known existed, at once so painful and so pure that I began to sob.

I felt reborn.

Redeemed.

True as
the ten days of Alldark shroud the lands, it was music I could have abandoned myself to forever. But then in an eye blink, my world shifted. Suddenly I found myself kneeling upon a vast plain beneath cloudless skies of the same gentle mauve colour as the humble liplin flower, which grows in abundance upon waysides throughout the southern Fiefdoms. The vision caught me unawares. I have never enjoyed this grephe-talent. As in a dream I scrambled to my feet, casting about to gain my bearings.

Wind lashed my back. “Arlak!”

I staggered. Half turning, I saw a gigantic, disembodied head floating through the plane of this strange land, mantled in crimson velvet. This horror wrung a cry from my blood-bitten lips. A beautiful mask obscured the face, similar to those worn at the Festival of Yuthe, a Roymerian celebration of fertility and womanly power. But the eyes! Ah, the eyes! Boulders of obsidian, blacker than night, absorbing all light and giving nought in return, they were the orbs of my nemesis.

Jyla!

More frightening, even, was a weird stirring of grephe within my quoph; a slithering sensation, part-felt and part-imagined. I tasted smoke and blood. Memories flashed before me: the storm, the brazier, Jyla casting something upon its glowing coals …

Her mouth yawned
cavernously. “Mark you how the Wurm rises! Now is the makh!”

Was this how a
Sorceress toyed with her victims? Sending nightmares to suck out the very marrow of their existence? I stood no larger than a worm before a maw that could have swallowed me many times over.

I threw up my hands in a futile, warding gesture. “No!”

Through my fingers I saw her lips part. I cringed, expecting another blast of sound, but instead the mouth rushed towards me and in an instant, swallowed me as easily as the leviathan of the deep swallows a minnow. I tumbled, falling through space, into profound silence.

Soft as a womb, a foetal warmth enfolded me. Insidious as a snake, a silken embrace stole about my being and murmured treacherous endearments to my quath. Taste of this well, it murmured. Drink of the waters. Drink deep. Lose yourself in the great ocean billows, swim the restless surging currents, descend into the never-plumbed abyss and find there what you have
never dared imagine.

At Jyla’s brief nod, a slim plinth materialised before me. Upon its marble top stood a golden
chalice, encrusted with rubies, and stylised vines entwined about the bowl of the vessel in a chasturn patterning of glistening linnite crystals. Chasturn was of Lorimere origin, a trade secret, far too costly for a trader of my ilk. A Hassutl’s table could scarce command such exquisite workmanship.

A golden chalice. A nectar of incalculable power. I was one sip from immortality.