Iron Sun, Silver Moon

Chapter 1: Passage 1-3

One

"Though death did lead Him, love called more, this we know

For in love is there purpose,

And in bloody death but lust,

Both were held tight in His hands, yet by those hands was He led,

How subtle that guidance,

How cruel,

But came He did, for his gaze was set not on the world, but beyond,

And little did They know then,

But sore did They care afterward."

Ch. 14: 20-23

Atop a dusty wall in the full morning sun, a man sits.

He is still. Quiescent. His eyes blink slow. To the set beat of his heart does he softly sway, unaware of the movement. Vision and noise are distant companions.

He is numb, momentarily absent from a world where all souls, lifted from realms unimaginable and unremembered, journey from the womb to the soil content to allow few of the true treasures of achievement to be conferred upon them, as most are made willing slaves, cowed and driven by the travails and fetters of the flesh by its words, its laws, and are reduced for them. Yet this man is set apart, swathed in a mantle of potency and vigour undeniable, a figure incontestable, now made latent, unsprung as a hunting beast will lay satiated and slow when bloated with the spoils of the chase. But that is not why he waits.

The journey he takes is a wake set in the world, and recent marks where he trod measured and steady are almost wiped clean by wind and tides of sand as from sun blasted and brilliant plains of silica has he come, where the deaths of men are dealt swift by heat and claw. Yet the death that he witnessed last was dealt by him alone.

Behind him, a great wall of cyclopean stone encircling a city. Below, where he gazes, a swathe of hovels whose leaning walls are fleshed by mud and whose bones show through as bleached wood. Winding alleys of dun and dust awash in filth and seething with wild-eyed children, and older, watchful eyes gazing into the light from smoke-hazed shadows. The timeworn sitting silently in the shade of ragged awnings, waiting, running the beads through their fingers, the younger bowed and sweating, dragging rattling carts and thin-haunched beasts with callused hands and thin arms. Sweet-sickly stench of offal and human spoil, lowly pottage and thin gruel rise in the heat.

There, from the narrowness of two shacks almost touching, he hears the reedy wail of pipes and shuffle of unclad feet, the coppertinkle of home-wrought bells and the sees the sudden brightness of flowers. A body small and slight swaddled tight in unbleached cloth held aloft by gentle hands. Sad faces followed. Lines of tears outlined by dirt. Faces given in to the inescapability they are witness to, reminded pitilessly of their lot by the passing of one whose kin run and scream breathless and oblivious of death among them, brazen in their youth, unseeing, uncaring. A bearded priest amid the mourners wreathed in incense from a brass crown upon his staff, intoning, thoughts elsewhere a purse weighted by coin given by the bereaved hung from a silk rope around his round stomach. Soon the procession is gone in a wake of dust and rags and plaintive airs.

The man jumps down cautious into the courtyard and winces deep, breathing out hard, adjusts a sack slung across his back and the blade worn bare in a loop of leather on his hip. He sees some watch, a man and a woman who look like siblings, squatting on sun-baked clay in the darkness of the nearest doorway, both passing curious of his hair matted to daggers by sweat and sand and sand white, his skin showing in sunblacked patches beneath a coating of dust, his eyes peering from a mask painted by the desert he has walked from, a shadow shortening as the sun rose. Curling smoke rises through clay tiles above them. A bony goat tethered under a straw roofed pen too small shared by chickens that peck at the dirt outside. He meets the couple’s gaze but they do not look away. He nods barely and they do not acknowledge him, as he is so foreign that he is but an image to them, an idea, something they hear of but do not understand.

Then he is across the yard and down, deep in the alleyways travelling without direction, taking in all he sees. Feral children harry him laughing unchecked, their lack of years making them braver than their elders yet they keep a small distance from the pitted edges they see slapping his thigh. He throws coins brass and smooth over his shoulder without care, dispersing them, sending them yelling and fighting. A crone comes angrily from one hut, hands raised and shouting, slapping them away as they dive among her meagre belongings where the distractions fell.

There is no intention to the passageways and lanes he moves through. All the dwellings seem the same, as are the faces within and without. A fresco of handprints within the wattle, one after another passage after passage, hardened descriptions left by those who dragged each square of space up from the very soil holding the slums together, clasping the residents tight. He walks listlessly, this stranger, as if time meant nought yet his eyes tell different. Behind them is anger, but more than that agony and he walks wreathed in it and cannot move any quicker for it. The day is warm yet he was sweating through the coolness of the night and now his face is drenched. Sand beads on him thickly.

He is looking for someone.

A dark stain spreads across his shirt and along his ribs, old blood with fresh seeping through simple thick linen taken from the sack of the man who gave him the wound, as his own shirt and flesh was rent by that man’s blade. Yet it is not him that he hunts. That man lays cleaved, limbs strewn to free the daevas of madness within, picked to blackened tatters and dry whiteness by black-winged carrion-eaters in the sweeping dunes many day’s walk from this settlement. That dead man’s coins are now held hard in childish fists. There is another whom this man seeks, one upon whom he will wreak murderous vengeance.

A watering hole. Dark boards of a barrel held by rusted bands of iron leaking slow, and a much haunted well of balanced stones and rope and tin pails. There are people there and wasted beasts tethered and all drinking, from troughs from cupped hands, and the man pushes amongst them rough and desperate. They part from him without complaint, beast and man alike, as the look in his eye is of near thirst-borne madness and they have seen it before. Those few who know not the intolerant ways of the wastes that border their home but who have walked or crawled from it dried to the bone skincracked and blistered all wear the same gaze. Water calls as a siren they willingly and madly run to.

The man kneels heavy and sighs, bracing his hands on the trough where animals drank, pausing for the briefest moment and staring at the muddied ripples as a prize long sought and dearly paid for and then thrusts his head into it and those who watch him hear the long draught he takes for it is a sound of conquest. He comes up choking, swallowing hard and drenched but wearing a smile that some step back from for it is primal and raw.

Back into the town he moves.

So many faces, so many lives ensuing from the pursuit of a goal unseen and unformed. They look. He returns gazes dismissing them, skimming tired visage and shameless glare alike for it is not the documentation of their shared past he takes interest. The aspect he seeks is as his. Wider. Rounded. Thin-lidded and clear-eyed. But there are so many of these desertborn. They are a sea and among them he cannot fathom how to find that which he seeks.

Down ranks of winding walls and up rough cobbled knolls where the huts and shacks lean on bowed stilts to defy the incline and to the tops he goes, where he stops, panting. His hand brushes his wound and it is warm even above the heat of the day, or his own. It is nauseating in its soreness.

There is a haze of smoke above the undulation of thatch and shingle tile and sacking, oiled and resonant, and on that scene the smoke imbues an otherworldliness, supplies to him a detachment from the reality he knows and he wonders at it for some time for he has never seen the world like this. He realises he is swaying, being beguiled in body and mind by the pollutants raging under his skin as a wildfire, and knows his time is shortening. His hands go to his head, running thick fingers through snarled locks, holding himself still. He concentrates.

Where would his prey go, once he had made it to this city, for surely it was to here he had come for his trail suggested so, so strongly before it faded under scouring breezes? Where would a man go, a stranger to this loutish confabulation, after finding himself here having negotiated the sere dunes and sinks beyond the walls? The man walks on, shaking his head to dispel the faintness and dusted sweat flicks from his hair sparkling and bright.

He finds an inn. Looks within. It must be one amongst many, for this is plain not a town where the gods forbade the wantonness of grape or grain. Too many to seek out. He moves on, pushing through crowds scowling and in his gaze can be seen a denial of his own mortality, a refusal to take the chill hand of death and be led beyond for it is, he is sure, not his time, not yet, not here. Before the buttressed walls of a trunk-built commorancy, where the conjoined swell of bodies from many families occupies its wilting piers and smoke from cooking pits boils from shuttered windows, he stops. There, thin and sinewy men sat, rough in nature chattering quick to each other accusatory, defensively, laughing and in their hands the ropes of hounds who snapped and snarled foaming at one another or those who passed too close, and on those fell beast’s hides and muzzles were old scars and new.

They watched him, these roughs, as the man pointed to the nearest hound and it turned to him murmuring deep in its throat and the sound was low and then shrill.

‘Qur’oh ah chent?’ he said.

The ruffians quietened and regarded him inquisitively.

‘Uoachar?’ one said.

The man knew the word, and that by it he had not been understood. He straightened frustrated, winced from the pain and his mouth was swamped sudden, looked away and spat and all he could taste was a coppered tartness. He wiped the sweat from his brow.

‘Chent?’ he said, jabbing a finger at the hound. The rough nodded whilst the others sniggered quietly, cruelly. The man brought his fists together hard once, twice, pointed at another hound. The rough turned slight so as to regard the man better, pulled on the rope as his hound strained against it and the hound twisted quick snapping but a hand met its muzzle sharply and the beast yelped and cowered.

‘Paskar a chent, paskar aol ur iha’etuie.’ The rough.

The man rendered the response against other tongues he knew used in the desert and could not decode it full.

‘Do they fight or not, you sack of bones.’ He sighed. Looked down at his belt. Withdrew some coin from his pouch, held them out, pointed to the hounds and his fists met one another again.

‘Chent … fight.’

The roughs looked to each other, muttered the foreign word in tones quizzical and imprecise. Then one laughed, slapped his thigh, said a word that elicited toothless smiles and a nodded affirmation rippled among them. The ruffian stood, flicked the rope and the hound scrabbled to its feet taking the cord in its maw shaking it viciously, then gestured for the man to follow as he walked away.

The man did follow, watching the others rise and trail behind and as they traversed sparsely populated lanes in near silence he listened for them to approach too near and his hand did not stray far from the hilt of his blade.

Soon, along channelling wattled walls the sound of antagonism, shrill and high came. Impassioned roars of men lost in ferine carnality looking on as tooth and claw tore and shredded and above those savage exaltations the abominable, baleful stridency of animals closing in on death.

They entered the shack from whence this tumult issued and in that darkened charnel tomb lit poorly by cheap oil the smell of fear and blood and excrement was physical. The rough smiled, gestured to the pit where a twitching body was being dragged away leaching ichor into the blackened sand, to be draped across a crusted altar upon which sat a wooden figure concreted in blood whilst other men wrapped in hide held the frantic victor down with sacking until it calmed.

The man nodded his thanks and entered the crowds. They were all native, short. They watched him pass among them with veiled eyes, for his presence even midst such offerings to distant observers of the fervent persecution of death was a certainty binding. They part around him, but he does not see it, for he is swelling with the heat and sound and feeling are detaching from him. Then he spies a foreign face, lined and roseate, flat nosed and wide-eyed among the natives and there are coins in piles before him on a bench. To his face this stranger holds a cloth.

The man pushes through the crush and in that other man’s tongue says ‘Hie, friend. The gods of the seven rivers smile upon you.’

The stranger looks up from behind his veil, backs away slight, closes a fist over the coin.

‘I do not know you.’

‘True. I will not take up your time.’ The man leans in close, smells perfume sweet and strong emanating from the cloth. ‘I am looking for a westerner. New to this town, perhaps in the last two days. He likes dog fighting. He has a scar along his forehead from a blade forged in your lands and his left ear is missing.’

The stranger considers. The lie has intrigued him.

‘Forged in my lands?’

‘Yes. The man I seek defamed a priestess. Was caught by a guard, took a blow yet killed that guard.’

The stranger sat up. ‘How do I know what you say is true?’

The man indicated the shack, the crowds, the stranger himself. ‘Here I find myself seeking a man who has slighted me, and I find you, a noble riverman upon whose people this dogsoldier has committed a foul crime. Am I not, therefore, guided here by the seven sisters themselves, and therefore thankful unto them? Is it not true events one wishes to occur happen less than beneficial ones one does not expect?’

The riverman nodded, touched a wooden symbol suspended by cord from his neck.

‘There has been a man. Scarred like you say. Yesterday and today. Still dredged by the sands of the flats. He took coin aplenty from here. Knew the dogs well, he did.’

‘He was here today?’

The riverman nodded again.

The man said ‘Where does he lodge?’

‘I do not know that,’ the riverman replied. ‘And I do not care, nor do I care if I do not see him again. He stinks like a sewer, made me nauseous. Did he give you that wound?’

‘He did,’ the man lied again.

‘Then I wish upon you the blessings of the fifth sister. May she wash your poisons away, and his stench from this world.’

Two

"Kindnesses did He know, though a stranger He was among them,

Perhaps in such innocence’s offerings,

His thoughts were quelled,

Yet in unkindness were they tempered still, as He was as the bear,

Afraid yet terrible,

Of the world, but alone."

Ch. 15: 8-9

The man left the shack and paused, looking down at his feet. He stood on a worn slab set into moist soil where broken gutter runnels lay. Ahead of him, a long path inclined and stretching away, dictated by that damaged course. At the foot of the incline where the runnels converged with other gutters, the flow of malodorous waters became deeper and where they did not seep into the sand from the cracks of long worn fissures, they flowed sluggish and thick as this was an old course, laid by proficient hands and though the ages had eroded it down, its employ was still in use.

He trailed the flow, snaking along rutted footpath where the gutters went beneath newer buildings and finding them again on the other side, until at last he came upon a tumbled stone structure where once that current encountered the end of its journey there to be channelled away deeper, but now it sputtered pale brunneous into a wide river, running over shattered boulders once fine hewn now smoothed, to drip clotted into the water below. The man slipped into a shadowed lane and sat on the step of a hut, watching.

The sun rose higher.

His head drooped. Once, again, again. All sound subtly distorted, became softer, more distant, then attached itself to impossible sights and old faces long dead peered at him curious and scolding and he jerked awake and ground his teeth as pain surged unrelenting. His hand, when removed from his wound, came away wet with blood and foul water and stinking. A sudden, slight touch on his shoulder. He flinched, swore, looked around. A small boy holding out a wooden cup, in the darkness of the hut a woman with smiling eyes that could not quite hid the uncertainty of this foreigner on her threshold. The man took the cup, drank, handed it back.

‘Thank you,’

The boy did not respond, but looked to the woman, his mother surely, for direction and when she held her hand out he ran within and the reed door closed slowly and they watched him as it did.

The sun moved, dropped. The man slumped against the hut and his eyes were heavy.

He awoke from torpid awareness when a stone shifted gratingly in the pile, a thin slab pushed out from beneath, and under it, peering intently along the overrun banks, a scarred visage. The man did not move. Did barely blink. He was engulfed in shadow, existing in a blackness near complete but knew that if he moved even that darkness would separate, become different, and as his prey eased cursing from the confines of the sewer, the weight of his ailing body was forgotten as his soul stirred in its own dimness, changing, shrugging off the lethargy brief rest had instigated, instead rising enraged and in that shadowed place all that could be heard was his breathing, ragged and raw and with each breath wrath became all he was, all he could consider and his hand slipped oh so slow to the hilt of his blade and encased it squeezing, squeezing.

Once free of the stones, the earless man brushed at his stained clothes, sniffing at his stained fingers with distaste and looked about, a rat drawn from its hole by hunger, by need. He had taken no more than two steps when the man emerged into the falling sun blade in hand.

‘Oh.’ The rat.

‘Where’s the coin?’ the man said.

The rat spread his arms, smiled. Fear was not a part of him, nor was humour feigned.

‘Gone the way of all things. What can I say? Wine. Dogs.’ He grasped his crotch, squeezing. Danced from one foot to the other. ‘Pleasure aplenty. It might have been a pretty sum to you, but it wasn’t actually all that much, when all things are considered.’

‘Half was mine.’

The rat flapped a hand in dismissal. ‘Oh, Shabb, Shabb –‘

‘Do not call me that.’ The man spat the words. His blade raised, pointed.

The rat paused in his pantomime, screwed his eyes tight, lifted a hand to shield them from the sun.

‘You don’t think I have forgotten those drunken nights? When words later regretted flowed as easily as the wine.’ The rat laughed. Peered closer. ‘Are you wounded? Did the bear take another blade to the flesh? Come to think of it, you do look pale, if that’s possible.’

‘You owe me.’

‘I will give you nothing.’

‘You’re a dog. We were in the same battalions, the same field of battle. I saved you scrawny hide more than once.’

‘Should have let me die.’

‘I will.’

The rat slipped a hand behind his back and it came back with a wide bladed bronze edge gripped in a white-knuckled fist.

‘You know something, Shabb, I only ever clung to your company because you are good at what you do, you could always be relied upon to get me out of trouble. You were my shield. And yes we made coin, but I always made more.’

‘I trusted you.’

‘Everyone makes mistakes.’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the sewer. ‘Including me for using the same tactic we worked in that city … what was it called?’

‘I trusted you.’

‘We called it a shit hole, and as providence will have it, that’s exactly where we had to hide from the city spearmen. You know, I probably realised you would find me.’ He glanced at the pile of stones. ‘Definitely should have used a different tactic.’

The man came closer and the rat backed away, smiled and ran.

They raced into the crush of alleys, the rat skipping and jumping across the wretched spillage of possessions outflowing from hut and shack, pushing forcefully past shuffling lines of chanting penitents bare headed and ash marked whilst his pursuer reeled and caromed from wall and pillar, teeth bared his face drawn in fury, in agony, breathing ragged and together their passage was riotous, their foot fall precipitous, shouts and cursing peppered by the one-eared man’s wild laughter and his pursuer’s dire threats summoning spectators from the shadows and those natives found all curiosity driven from them and they shied away as the two drove past for in them they saw antagonism that was not theirs to join with for it was plain it would end in blood.

The two men pounded across a square where singers slight and gentle and bound in robes once colourful span slow under the tempo of lyre and flute and drove through them as they were propelled by desire, their course now set, chaotic and untamed. Into a stone channel they rushed, where the walls were high and old and upon their flight gazed windows unused and empty, until they came sudden from a long pathway to a terrace fenced by tall partitions, an enclosure for swine who foraged and ploughed in filth and straw and there the rat came up hard against the wattled barriers, his edge in his haste driven from his hand as the swine squealed startled and trotted away. He jumped to reach the highest point but could reach it not and he slumped sucking wetly at the stagnant, fetid air and watched the man, his pursuer, enter at the gate.

The rat held up a hand, found his voice at the depths of a breath, said

‘Shabb … wait…’

The man approached, blade still held tight, on legs treacherous and heavy. His shirt was black and glistening. He stood before his prey, and prey looked upon that apotheosis and waved a hand beseechingly and though he tried, a smile small and doubtful wavering on dripping lips, all humour was now found to be gone.

‘Shabb, we can …’

The blade came up sharp and the rat’s right hand spun severed and his scream was that of the swine and they milled and nipped at one another in confusion at its sound and the abruptness of blood in the air. The rat gripped at the stump with his left, gasping and sagged to his knees. Despairing eyes locked with the man’s.

‘For the gods’ …I’m ruined.’ He waved the stump. ‘Is this not payment sufficient?’

The man’s blade flicked out in answer and severed the left hand and it clung briefly to the arm but then dropped, relinquishing its grip gently, almost reluctantly. A black nosed swine snuffled and clamoured to the shrilling rat and took up the hand in a wet maw and trotted away, crunching bone.

‘I trusted you,’ the man said slow as the rat fell to the straw, there to gasp and stare at his streaming wounds, uncomprehending, weeping, mouth wide and set in a grimace of utter misery.

‘You … lie … constantly,’ the rat whispered, choking. ‘You know … nothing else … even down to your … name. There is no one … who could … trust you for long. You cannot … be truthful unto … yourself. Your life … is a … lie. Know the truth … of yourself.’

The man straightened, felt the edges of the world darken and his senses drawn from him cruelly then returned dulled and he said

‘I cannot take the advice of a man in such difficulties.’

His blade rose and fell and the rat’s head lolled on a thick fillet. Fading eyes blinked and stared as the man walked away and the swine came closer.

Three

"Unbreakable was His heart, undauntable, the pace of all time,

Hear it skip now, aquiver,

The bloom shaken in summer winds,

For upon her was the mantle set, fate redressed, and perhaps They smiled then,

Those of a gaze benign,

Watching thoughtful,

As pieces moved alone on the board, their path’s sovereign and afresh,

Perhaps They smiled,

For in pairing was promise."

Ch. 16: 40-43

He left the stone alley.

Marching swift and unsteady into the nearest shadows, he now moves with another purpose for time has become all to him for it is becoming scant, and as he walks in dread pain he hears the words of a man whom he once called friend and they stir within him deep sorrows, for in them were truths he could not bear to be given unto the world in such manner. The inhabitants of that purlieu, that suffocating crush of shanties, who chanced to watch him pass thought he did so imbued with coldness well-forged but they did not see beyond the façade of his making for in truth he walked weighed by sadness profound.

A string of poor stalls. Winding vines dusted and green with scant fruit. Withered leafs as broad as his hand piled tall. Measures of toasted seeds and spice. Not what he seeks.

He stops soon, breathing hard. A small hut across a small, cobbled plaza, chatter within, a sagging veranda hung with long strings of dried herbs leeched of colour, twirls of bark gathered in bunches, rough clay jars full of seeds. Pungent, astringent scents draw the man closer, smells he knows well. Memories of raw leather tents pitched on rainswept, bitter hills and the company of grim-faced men with piercing iron in their hands come to him. Outside those sodden walls and beyond hewn timbers hastily erected and sharp, forests cimmerian and dank spread impenetrable, dripping, serpents of smoke curling and mating with chill tendrils of fog. Drums, always drums under barbarous hands rolling through that dark land, denying sleep, bringing nightmares. Savage eyes never far away, watching, always watching, with poisoned stone blades clutched in painted fists. He remembers his own companions, stout men, seasoned, dour, screaming and convulsing as the blends of venom and excrement frothed within open wounds dealt by those stone blades, crying out for succour then their voices dimming as thick, soothing salves were applied. Some men cried the relief was too great. None felt shame, and no charge of disgrace was ever levelled.

He stands in the doorway of the hut, filling it. The voices within stilled. Three people bent over grinding stones and heaps of kernels, and their heads turn. One, an old woman wizened and grey, stood, clasping her hands before her. He leant against the doorway, making the leather-hinged door sway, not because he wished to lean but because the world suddenly swam. She came to him, muttering under her breath as she waved a hand in dismissal at the sight of his blade, holding her head back and sniffing, leant close and he watched her. She drew in a deep breath, close to his chest. Dust swirled. Her hair was braided, sewn through with cord red and yellow. Faint tattoos across her brow, syllarbary faint and powerful.

‘Keow chet?’

He did not understand. She pointed to his wound, made a chopping motion with her crooked hand, pointed to the sky and made a circle with her fingers, swept it over her head from one horizon to the other, east to west. He nodded, held up his hand, and folded two fingers down.

‘A’haon chet? A’haon?’ she said.

He nodded again. ‘Three days.’

She tutted a quick high sound, took his hand and he allowed her to pull him in to a heady interior lit by slatted, mote-filled light, shooing the others away and they moved to the edges of the room there to sit alongside jars and frayed baskets against the smoothed walls, watching. There was a small cot of turned, ochre wood salvaged from something once grand and she bade the man sit on it. It creaked and he groaned. She chirruped something to a young girl, huge eyes darkened by kohl, who was staring at the man and the girl breathed a response, shuffled to a curtain nailed to a wall and slipped into another room beyond. He heard water being poured.

The old woman motioned the man to take off his shirt, and he did with difficulty. The young man crouched small and quiet at the wall made a noise. He leant forward, marvelling open-mouthed and gap-toothed.

Where dusted aridness had not touched the man’s skin, there was the price of a thousand days spent beneath clear, open skies and a cruel sun, but more than that, scars, runnels of white and pink cables woven with black tattoos, each part of a whole, a map, earned through blood and pain worn without conceit, there for reasons forgotten or long unspoken. The boy stood, glanced toward the curtain and then ran out of the door grinning wide and foolish.

The old woman removed the stiffened and sour strips of cloth from his ribs, exposing the man’s swollen wound. It ran across three ribs, near exposing the bone on one and smelt of raw meat left too long in the sun. He looked on as she smelt the cloth, turning it in the mean light to discern the viscous clot’s colour and the state of the few cleansing herbs he’d placed there, then touched it with a finger and dabbed it onto her tongue, spitting the foulness on the floor. She tutted again, shaking her head. He lay down, tiredness sweeping in hard and relentless, one hand laid around his blade’s hilt, settling his head against the straw mattress, smelling other scents of nightsweat and sweet oils.

Though pain lanced him, he could barely manage to stay awake for the time it took her to bathe the gash with vinegar three times, watching her careful actions distractedly. He felt the stinging coldness of a salve, saw the twitches she made as she squeezed out the pus. Then his eyes fell on the young girl at the back of the hut where she lingered, framed by light pouring in through the doorway, a wooden bowl clutched in small hands.

Her eyes.

They were the deepest green he had ever seen. The darkest verdancy. The colour of a world without the taint of man, of nature left alone, run amok with all its vivacity intact, unconstrained, timeless and unchanging, the colour of sealed places where footfall had never happened, where sight had never fallen, of unknown landscapes, the places where only the breath of the divine had visited.

Her eyes were windows. A vista of somewhere else.

He knew he was slipping. Falling. Fire burnt within him relentless. It would be easy to let go. So very easy. Then the burning would cease and he would be free.

But her eyes lead somewhere.

There had been times in his journey when he had found himself alone, in places so remote and devoid of life he believed they were not of the world for no sign of man could he find. Not a sign or a scar. But he was not disappointed by this, for he had gone there by choice, to those lost places, curious of new experience for experience was the pinnacle of existence no matter where the path of life lead. Could he now afford to let a new one go?

Through blurring sight he watched her as she regarded him and her eyes were beacons.

An entrance, a choice.

A gateway.

Without a second thought, he stepped through.

Four

"The wounded bear is easy prey, so thinks the lazy, circling wolf,

He sees the great fallen,

He sees vigour reduced,

But the lazy wolf learns quick, for the bear retains all celerity,

In it resides defiance,

In it resides life."

Ch. 16: 51-52

In fevered dreams he toiled.

Someone waits for him to stagger free of the waking world into the sleeping realm.

Discordant sounds, his own voice shouting but with words that were not his, distant laughter cruelly mocking, deriding his plight and his fallen state. How fares the fighter now, driven by iron and greed? One so proud now brought down, felled like porous wood, crumbled to dust, the sum of nought lying at the feet of all that shunned him.

See a cruel father, there, looming from a blinding sunrise of rainbow colours making the bewildered man sweat under its glare, trying to shield his eyes but he cannot as his body lies in repose, drained and seething from the fire in his blood. This is a father in name alone, who never spoke in praise or care, but came with hands slapping and fists balled tightly swinging. See him slowly shake his great mane and wear a sneer that speaks of disappointment made flesh.

This fevered man, even after so many years, still wished to take the sneer from that face with force unrelenting met out by fists now harder than his father’s ever were. But he could not, as the dog who had been the man his mother shared a bed with was long gone, turned back to the soil and made fodder for root and branch for he was faithless and surely shunned by the gods. His fate was to be felled by unknown men and pitiless blades on a spring morn, left to rot on a hillside for some unknowable slight, meat stripped, there to be found by the child he had reluctantly called his son. A child too young to see such butchery, yet, when seen, that foul sight left in that innocent boy no feeling but frustration. Such innocence spoiled. A future was set by that morning.

Now his father, a ghost brought forth unbidden and crude, turns away, becomes a shadow his head still shaking and fades back into memory. As time passes immeasurable as the fever burns wildly, he comes again and again.

The man toils, flailing and pale drenching the cot beneath. He hears water running nearby and a bears a terrible thirst, an aching for water cool and clear. He believes he wakes and through eyes that cannot focus sees, fleetingly, unfamiliar sights. A crone bent over him, misshapen and wrong, naked and with paps dried flat and sunblack cackling and black eyed her hands flexing like a great cats with filth impacted beneath brittle sharp talons stinking bitter, dripping foul ichor into his mouth from her palms. Its taste is sour, burns, chokes him and is far from the water he craves but he cannot stop its progress as it slips gelatinous down his throat.

If he could move now, if his arms would just lift, he would grip her twig neck and snap it quick. But he cannot. He cannot move, his night-thrashings driven all strength from him.

There is darkness for so long, then. Tears fall down. Surrender. He lays in sickness’s fervour still, cowed by it, driven back to a child by it. Made young but with the weight of all he has done, all he has seen yoked to that earlier him. It is a great weight, unbearable, crippling. Why would it not be? As he has passed through the world, the fates have noticed him, tried him, tested his mettle time and again. He left his mark on time and man’s flesh. He has been bettered, but never for long. Could he count the times he had lain under the rule of ailing wounds? They were many, yet he prevailed.

Moments of lucidity punctuated his labours. Beyond the hut’s barred door where moonlight slips beneath and above he hears the shouts of men and running feet, a clash of blades and a woman screams. The old woman appears, moving the curtain that covers the hut’s lone eye and