Gariel
Morlique pushed open the door to her dirty little hovel, eager to strip off her
smoke-laden clothes and wash the spilled drinks from her body, and saw that
someone else was already inside. Such a realization might not have been
alarming had she been one member of a ten-person household or had she been a
resident in a sprawling, multi-leveled complex, but she was not. Her family had
either died or fled the kingdom and her home was a two-room shack between a
handful of overgrown lots. It should have been empty.
Gariel staggered back, taking a better
look at the markings on her floor and wavering like a soldier who’d been
injured in combat. But if Gariel had been seriously injured, her wounds must
have been internal. She bore no external signs of combat, no cuts or rashes or
swollen purple bruises. These injuries might have been concealed by her
attire, but that was not likely.
The skimpy orange rag she’d stretched from
mid-bosom to upper thigh left very little flesh to the imagination. On display
for all was the splotchy brown birthmark on her left calf, the dried meat sauce
on her right collarbone, and the handful of shallow scratches along both knees.
Some of these scratches were old and scabby and apparently suffered days or
even weeks prior, but a few were fresh and bleeding and appeared to have been
inflicted on her trek home, possibly while tripping on the cobbles and landing
in the street.
She paid the scratches on her knees no
mind, her attention focused on the trail of brown smears littering her
floorboards, each the length of a forearm and the width of a hand and each
forming a queue into her abode.
“Wha’
the Pit…,” she began, lowering herself down for a better look and making it
less than halfway to her knees before falling sideways, landing on all-fours,
and nearly sticking her shoulder in the smear. She recovered awkwardly and
lowered her nose.
Sniffing at it tentatively, Gariel detected
a hint of nothing emanating
from the blob. When she sniffed it again, this time inhaling more deeply,
the lumpy brown smear again bore no
distinguishing odor, just like the dirt path upon which she lie, the
cobblestone street across which she’d trod, and pretty much everything else in Onador.
She lifted her head from the mess and
sneered at it. Even with her sense of smell impaired, she hadn’t honestly
believed the smudges were animal droppings, not unless they had come from a rather
large animal with a serious case of liquid bowel. And even then, she didn’t
believe any animal capable of relieving itself at regular intervals and in
equal proportions.
More than likely, the slathered muck on
her floorboards was nothing more disgusting than river mud, a trail of moist
soil tracked in by someone’s moccasins. What was more, as she crawled up the
door jam and regained her feet, she thought she might know the owner of
those moccasins.
“Come sniffin round, have yeh?” she said with
a slur, stumbling through the doorway and catching herself against the wall.
But if there was anyone inside, intent on sniffing her or not, they made no
reply.
Groaning at the silent intruder, Gariel
slid inside the hovel with her head and shoulder pressed against the wall. In a
way, this gave her the impression of a large and tropical bird that had lost
its sense of balance; the loss of balance due to the same stimulus that had
robbed her of her smell and the resemblance to a brightly-plumaged avian due to
her decoration and attire.
Her hair, for instance, was dyed bright
red and spiked into the air, giving her the distinctive look of a colorful fowl.
Adding further to the illusion of iridescent feathers were the multicolored
beads around her neck and the silver bands about her ankles, both of these
chittering and jangling as she struck the inner wall and slid along its face.
“An’ I tell yeh what,” she muttered, speaking to the room in general. “Yeh bes’
not’a ruint m’clothes again. Tha’s all I gota say.”
But as Gariel moved along the wall and
surveyed the trail of filth, she saw that the trail had somehow moved around
her many piles of laundry and even managed to avoid the assortment of
fly-covered food she’d left rotting on the floor, the melon rinds and chicken
bones and various pieces of bread. And even more impressive than this, she
noticed the trespasser had also succeeded to circumventing the plethora of
water skins littering the space between garments and garbage, water skins
which, ironically enough, had never been used to store water of any
kind.
Plowing through a pile of these sticky
containers, Gariel leaned against the doorway leading to the back and final
room and, with her head slumped against the wall and her glassy eyes taking on
fire, she tracked the remainder of the smears to the far wall where they ended
at a pair of mud-caked moccasins.
Blinking at the grimy footwear, she moved
her eyes up the equally-grimy pants to the rest of the unkempt attire and,
eventually, found herself grimacing at a hilljack-looking fellow with leaves in
his hair and grass in his beard.
He was seated in one of her two chairs
with his elbows on his knees and his head drooping down. Had she not known
better, she might have thought the hilljack was dragging himself in from a long
night of ditch digging or garden tending or some other form of manual labor.
Tha’d be the day, she thought, her
lips curling and her eyes narrowing.
Pushing herself from the
wall, she said, “An’ jus wha’d yeh think you’re doin’?”
Without moving a muscle, the leaf-strewn
man said, “Jus bringin yeh some sweet root.”
Gariel put a hand on her hip and glared.
She stood corrected. He wasn’t just sniffing around for love, but was willing
to pay for it as well. Not with money, of course—Oh, no! His
payments came in the form of roots or rocks or some other backwoods piece of
crap he’d dug from the ground.
The hilljack said, “Yeah like that
sas’fras tea, doan’cha?”
Gariel snorted disdainfully. “Yeh know I do,”
she said, watching the filthy man cock his head and peek at her from the corner
of his eye. “Wha d’yeh reckon I owes yeh fer it, Jayshy?”
The hilljack didn’t move, just stared at
her from his periphery and waited for her to calm down. When it was clear this
wasn’t going to happen, he gave his head another timid shake and said, “Yeh
doan’ owe me nothin. I jus fig’erd yeh—”
“Oh, I know. I know what yeh
fig’erd!” She felt her face flush with a warmth that had nothing to do with the
night’s debauchery. “There ain’t but one thing that brings yeh out’a
them woods, Jayshy, and we both know it ain’t got nothin to do with what
I want.”
Still peaking at her like a rabbit in a glade,
the hilljack said, “I thought yeh was okay wi—”
“Well, I guess I ain’t,” she spat,
lowering her petulant gaze to the footprints. “An’ I ain’t okay with yeh
trackin up my house neither.”
The hilljack glanced at his feet, staring
for longer than was probably necessary, then saying, “Oh.” He sounded not so
much apologetic as surprised. “I’ll clean that up,” he said. “Fore I leave.”
She threw back her head and cackled like a
crow. “Oh, I jus bet yeh will, Jayshy. I jus bet yeh will. But I tell yeh what?
Stead’a yeh cleanin mud off a rotten floor, why not get me a real floor,
huh? Why not get me out’a this hole? Sweet Pit, Jayshy, you get me a real place an’ I won’t care what yeh drag in here. You can fill the place
with muck an’ weeds an’ all the li’le black hai—”
She stopped, her head jerking towards the rest
of the room as a thought occurred to her. “Is she in here?” she asked.
“Is that li’le pest in here?”
Shaking his head very slowly, the hilljack
said, “I ain’t seen her since—”
“Bed’er not see ‘er,” the woman
warned, sliding down the wall and peaking behind a row of warped shelves,
“less’n you’re ready to pick them li’le black hairs off m’clothes.” She crawled
to a mattress in the corner and looked behind it, moving to the other items in
the room and doing the same. “I ain’t got no black outfits, Jayshy. I ain’t. So
that means I got’a pick them god-bannin
hairs off’a ev’ry las—”
She gasped and drew back.
Far to the right of her, tucked back in
the shadows of the little hovel, she spied a giant crystal thing lurking
in the corner, a creature so immense that its head touched the ceiling and its feet
bowed the floor. Gariel tried to imagine how she had missed it until now, but
could not. She was chemical impaired, and angry with Jaysh, but still…
It found them shaduhs, she thought.
It’s good at findin shaduhs. An’ ain’t that jus what Jayshy calls it? His
ever-lovin shaduh?
The shadow never looked at her, never took
its dazzling, pupil-less eyes from the hilljack. But that didn’t stop Gariel
from sprawling backwards on her butt and skidding towards the door. She knew
what the thing was, and what it did, and that she had no reason to fear it. But
there was just something overwhelming about the creature, the way it filled the
room with its mass, the way it stared blindly at the back of Jaysh’s head.
“Doan’ much care fer that neither,”
she said, nodding at the angular shape in the corner. “Cain’t it wait outside?”
Without looking at the creature, the
hilljack shook his head.
Gariel eyed the shadow a little longer,
fearful it might turn in a rush and come for her—those huge gemstone fingers
reaching for her throat, those huge cobalt eyes boring to her very soul—but
when it did nothing more than stand there and take up space, she moved to the
nearest pile of laundry and began picking through the clothes.
The sudden jolt of adrenaline and
subsequent tumble across the floor reminded her that she’d been up all night
and that it would not be long before her body shut down. Before that time came,
she needed to find an outfit with the fewest number of stains and leave it in
the window to ventilate. That way, when she woke this evening and started the
festivities anew, the garment would be ready for another night of wear.
“So when are yeh gettin me out’a
here, Jayshy?” the woman asked, her tone almost neutral. “I’m bout sick’a livin
like this,” she said, pulling out a tiny red rag and holding it up for
inspection. “Scroungin through clothes.” She tossed the crimson garb aside and
picked up a yellow one. “Eatin filth and livin like a dog.” She discarded the
canary-tinted garment and grabbed up a purple one. “Jus look at the dump, would
yeh?”
The hilljack did, and gave it a nod.
Holding up the lilac tunic, she studied it
with her head on one side and while chewing on her lip. Like the others before
it, the tunic was day-glow bright and two sizes too small, but in the end it
must have resonated with her because she clutched it to her chest and clawed
her way up the wall.
“Well?”
she said, shuffling across the room to a lumpy mattress. “You gona answer me?”
The hilljack shrugged. “I din’t think yeh
was here that much.”
“Yeh din’t think I was…Well, I’m
here now, ain’t I? Ain’t I,
Jayshy?” She tossed the violet cloth on the bed, followed by all her bands
and bangles and the beads about her neck. “I’m getting’ ready to sleep here,
ain’t I?”
The hilljack fumbled with his words, then
settled for a nod.
Peeling off her skimpy orange dress, she
said, “So doan’ give me none’a that ‘Yeh ain’t never here’ filth! I’m
here plen’y. An’ even if I weren’t, wha’s it to you?” She tossed the sweaty,
wine-soaked outfit in a random pile of other sweaty, wine-soaked outfits
and said, “Where’m I suppose’ to be, Jayshy? Waitin fer you? Waitin
while you waller in the muck an’ roll about in the sticks? Well, yeh can ferget that. If’n you leave, then I
leave. An’ if’n I leave, well, yeh know where I’m gona go. To the Wound,” she
spat. “To spend time with the same folk you used to call friends. Folk
like Beady an’ Danes an’ good ole Im—Oh!”
Her face lit up like a firework and she
came staggering towards him, naked as the day she was born, but seeming not to care.
She watched the hilljack look up and cringe, not at her naked form—which was
ostensibly why he’d come—but at the name she’d nearly mentioned.
“Iman,” she said again, clasping her hands
to her chest and eyeing Jaysh closely. “Iman said to tell yeh he was lookin fer
yeh an’ said to tell yeh it was about a job tomorruh, in the mornin. Somethin
to do with countin sheep or cows or…or somethin like that, he’s countin something. I’m sure he can tell
yeh the rest, but he said it was one’a them golden opp’tunities.”
The hilljack groaned.
“He said it’d be a good deal,” she said.
“Said it’d be good fer both’a yeh.”
The hilljack’s expression darkened
further. “He jus wants somethin,” he said.
Gariel blinked at him. “Well, yeah,” she
said, “I reckon he does, but tha’ doan mean it wou’nt help you too.”
The hilljack lowered his eyes to the floor
and Gariel took this as her cue to back away to the wash basin, backing away as
if the hilljack were a skittish cat and any sudden move might cause him to bolt
from the room. At the basin, she withdrew a damp rag and began rubbing the nastier
parts of her body, tossing the rag back inside the bucket when she finished and
slinking to the mattress, watching the hilljack from the corner of her eye.
“I told ‘im I’d tell yeh bout it,” she
said, dropping face-first on a wad of blankets. “An’ I told im you’d probably
do it.”
The hilljack stared at the floor, perhaps
listening to the muffled sound of footfalls outside on the street.
Gariel said, “So?”
Glancing over at her, the hilljack said,
“Huh?”
“You gona do it?”
“Do
what?” he said, furrowing his brow, but then realizing what she meant. “Oh. No,
I…I cain’t do it. Not tomorruh.”
Gariel lay there for a moment, not yet
ready to reassert her anger, then said, “Why not?”
Picking grass from his pants, Jaysh said,
“Tomorruh’s Scout Day.”
Gariel sat up on the bed, the flush back
in her cheeks. “What’s that gota do with anythin?”
The hilljack looked at her, seemed to
realize where she was coming from, and then lifted a muddy branch from the seat
beside him. It had a string tied to the tip and a hook tied to the end of the
string.
“I missed Fish Day today,” he said,
setting the stick back down and shaking his greasy head. “Cain’t miss two in a
row.”
Gariel felt an ice-pick of fear drill
through her chest, but managed to hold off the subsequent anger. Just once’t
more, she thought. Try him once’t more, now. She inhaled deeply,
rolled over on her side, and clutched her blanket to her chest.
“Jayshy, baby. Baby, this is your chance. This is the chance you been
waitin on, a chance to prove yourself to them uppity folk in the
castle.” She shook her head. “An’ I doan’ like ‘em no more’n you, Jayshy, but it’s
the only way this’ll work. An’ if I could do it fer yeh, yeh know I would. I’d
do it in a heartbeat, Jayshy. I’d do it right now. An’ doan’ think a night goes
by that I ain’t wishin to the gods that I had your chance…,” she trialed off,
her face growing slack, “…but I don’t, Jayshy. Them folk in the castle doan’
give two licks fer me. They doan’ know who I am and they doan’ care. Tha’s why
it’s gota be you. Yeh see that, doan’cha yeh, baby?”
The hilljack had been staring at the floor
as she spoke and continued to stare as she finished.
Gariel said, “Wha’ do yeh think, Hon?”
The hilljack never said a word, never told
her yes, never told her no. He just lifted his head and stared at
her, the rueful look in his eyes saying it all. And this time, when the
ice-pick of fear came back, Gariel did nothing to cushion the blow.
Clenching her fists and straightening her
arms, she pointed her head to the ceiling and screamed like a banshee,
screaming and screaming and then screaming some more, screaming until she
thought a layer of flesh might slough off from her throat and go spewing to the
rafters, screaming until she thought the crystal man in the corner might
shatter from the force, screaming until the thought the hilljack’s moronic head
might explode from his shoulders.
But it didn’t, and when she finished her
mad shriek, Jaysh was still sitting there, still staring at her as moronically
as ever. She rolled over and grabbed for the nearest water skin that had never contained water.
“Jus go!” she snapped, picking up
the skin and shaking it by her ear. “Jus go on back to your hill, go do
Sira-knows-what with that big, blue freak.”
Scratching his beard, the hilljack looked
to the crystal man in the corner. “Like what?’
“Like the same stuff yeh does to that
little pest,” she said, dropping the skin and turning to the next. But this one
was empty too and she quickly chucked it aside and made for one she spied
beneath the window.
Behind her, she heard the hilljack shuffle
his feet, then say, “Are yeh mad?”
“No, Jaysh, I ain’t mad,” she said,
grabbing the water skin and hearing it slosh in her hand. She yanked off the
drawstring, brought the leather to her lips, and tipped the bottom higher and
higher, tipping it until the contents were drained and her throat was burning.
She belched loudly and slung the skin against the wall. “I ain’t mad at all,”
she said.
“Yeh ain’t?”
“I ain’t,” she confirmed, pausing in her
crawl back to the mattress to grab his fishing pole from the chair and throw it
into the front room. “Now get the Pit out’a my house,” she said,
collapsing on the bag of poorly-packed straw and snapping shut her eyes.
But they weren’t shut entirely. She could
still see the hilljack through mesh of her lashes, could still see him turn to
look at the pole in the next room, then down at her naked form on the mattress,
the tiny wheels in his head spinning weakly and with effort.
“Yeh really doan’ wanna—?”
“Out!” she screamed.
The hilljack looked at his feet. “I said
I’s sorry bout th—”
“It ain’t the mud, Jaysh—It ain’t
the mud.”
He looked to the shadow standing in the
corner. “An’ there ain’t nothin I can do about that thing,” he said. “I can
take my shoes off, maybe come round here a little more, maybe make Zeph wait
outside when I do, but…,” he glanced at the glittering blue giant, “…but there
ain’t nothin I can do bout that.”
From the rumble of her heavy breathing,
she said, “Can yeh go with Iman tomorruh? Can yeh do that, Jaysh?”
The hilljack dropped his jaw as if to
answer, then closed it and dropped his shoulders instead.
“Jus go, Jaysh,” Gariel said, watching
through the screen of her lashes as he shuffled sulkily into the next room,
paused long enough to gather his stick, then plodded out the door.
From the corner of the room, the floorboards
groaned as if caught in the throes of a quake, the shadow marching after the man.
As it did, Gariel Morlique was quick to
shut her eyes.
