Roughly
fifteen paces of polished wood separated the place where Brine stood gawking at
his older brother and the place where the door-shaped darkness led to his destiny.
And not surprisingly, when finally urged to cross that pristine, yet ominous
distance, Brine did so in a cloud of black affect so magnificently dense that
it muffled sound, muted feeling, and muddled all images into various shades of
brown.
At the time, he noticed none of this, but
later—while recovering from the emotional windstorm about to unfold in the
adjacent room—he would sit on the bed in his old sleeping chamber, elbows on
knees and eyes on the floor, and he would recall the soft press of Mums’ palm
against the small of his back—dark auburn—the dull scuffing of sandals on
hardwood floor—soft umber—and, of course, the lumpy cord of hair sweeping down
his back—bright and brilliant copper.
The emptiness of the doorway, however,
remained black in these memories, a depthless and looming black that seemed to
advance from the walls. The trim along the top and sides of the door were
composed of leafy green vines—blurred rust—and twisting red briars—dirty
orange—and the nails had appeared as a pattern of ancient gray dots—wet
bistre—but the doorway itself remained a stark and impossible black.
Again, it wouldn’t be until much later
that these colors would occur to him, not until the potency of his fugue waned
and the powers of his cognition returned. Until that time, the only thoughts
strong enough to filter through his fog of disillusion were those involving the
stranger that Mums had called Jashandar.
Because, to be fair, the Jashandar that
Brine knew never answered to Jashandar, not unless throwing dirty looks
and mud clods was considered an answer. And it was only their father that
called him by that appellation, and only then because the man had expected
greatness from his eldest son, a sort of prophetic appointment so to speak.
What better way to stoke the flames of
success, Brine grumbled, than to name your favorite after the land he
would one day rule.
In his brother’s earlier ages, the
auspicious title seemed to have the desired effect, even as Brine was leaving
for Valley Rock ten ages ago. He distinctly recalled a boy in this castle who
stood half-a-head taller than him and who out-weighed him by two or three
stones. The boy’s face had been smooth and hairless and his locks had been neat
and clean and, more importantly, the boy had been fond of wearing his royal
attire, a fancy purple tunic with gold thread stitched down the arms.
With regard to pants, Jaysh held no
preference, but the tunic was a must and, therefore, the advisers had ordered
several of these majestic shirts tailored so that daddy’s precious boy would
have a fresh set for each consecutive day.
During Brine’s absence in the F’kari,
however, the influence of his brother’s illustrious designation had apparently
worn thin, because the pristine boy he remembered had, at some point, exchanged
his extravagantly embroidered tunic for a set of soiled rags.
But never mind his looks, Rug Boy,
said a dark and distorted voice deep within his core. Look at the way he’s acting.
But Brine dared not to look across the titan at his brother, at least not if he
hoped to keep his calm as he reached his destination. At the same time, though,
he didn’t need to look at the man.
He’d been observing his brother since he’d
entered the anteroom with Serit and he could say, with some authority, that the
dark voice was correct. The man on the other side of the titan—the one who
rarely spoke and, if not for the rhythm of his jaw, rarely moved—did not act
like the Jashandar he’d grown up with.
The Jashandar he’d grown up with—the bad
Jashandar, for want of a better word—was much louder and much more apoplectic.
That Jashandar used to get mad at the servants and throw dishes at the walls,
or get bored after lunch and set fire to the outhouse, or sometimes, for no
reason at all, he’d sneak onto the parapets with a bucket of water and drench
one of the royal advisers.
It was usually Godfry who received the
brunt of these watery pranks—since the others eventually caught on and
remembered to look up—but Jashandar had special mistreatments for the rest of
the council as well. For Mums, he would follow her through the halls and wait
for someone to wander by so he could scream “Beast-woman!” and then shriek
for them to run. And for Reets, he would hobble along behind the halfling—in
perfect imitation of his limp—and wait for the halfling to lose his cool and
give chase.
And let’s not forget what he did to you,
the distorted voice teased from somewhere deep inside, all the names he
called you, all the toys he stole, all the things he did in the gar—
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Brine cut in, not
wishing to revisit the incidents in the garden. The ugly voice had a point
about his brother—one which Brine himself had disclosed to Miriana during his
first season at the Rock—but the voice was also wrong as well, wrong in that
Jashandar hadn’t been all bad.
It was true that Brine’s
brother had a mean streak and that his playful antics bordered on cruelty, but
what the voice didn’t talk about—and what Brine had failed to mention to his
woman-friend—was that there were times when Jashandar had actually been nice.
Like the times when the winds howled or
the floors thumped and big brother had allowed Brine to crawl into his bed.
Brine remembered the two of them pulling the covers over their heads and
spending half the night telling each other that the noise were probably
nothing.
Similarly, there were the holy days when
Serit led them to the temple and when Jashandar would entertain them with his
many silly faces, occasionally causing Brine to laugh until he couldn’t
breathe.
And the pie-song!
Brine thought. How could I forget the pie-song!
The pie-song had been a
wonderfully cheery tune that both brothers sang while desert was being served,
regardless of whether the desert was pie, cake, or candies. In fact, Brine had
loved the song so much that he remembered humming it while playing in the
garden.
And Jashandar had come up with it,
he thought, chancing a look from the corner of his eye and wondering absently
if the titan had not lied to him about the man beside her. Well, he doubted she
would out-and-out lie to him—especially at a sobering time like this—but she
very well could have made a mistake. She was getting old, after all, and
eyesight was one the first senses a titan lost. Brine simply needed to
get the monocle to his eyes and take another look. If he could do that, he
could prove—beyond a shadow of a doubt—that something as spirited and fun as
the pie-song could not have originated from someone as drab and
distasteful as this woodsman.
But before he could do that—before
his hand ever touched the leather pouch at his hip—he had entered the chamber at
the back of the room and the door was shut tight behind him.
Brine stopped walking and turning quickly
to his ears to assess the activity of the room. Somewhere to his right, he
could hear his bushy-faced brother scuffling with the cat-thing—who apparently
liked the sheer darkness and acidic smells no better than Brine—but the lack of
footfalls told him Jashandar wasn’t moving.
He probably has his hands full
wrestling that thing in the dark, he thought, and considered, for a moment,
feeling his way over there and making sure big brother kept hold of the little
monster.
In
the end, though, he decided against such a move. For one thing, there was the
possibility of permanent maiming and, for another, there was the steady shift
of focus occurring in Brine’s mind, a shift from his brother’s patchwork animal
to the gut-wrenching letter he had received in the F’kari.
This is it, he thought, his eyes swelling
in the murk. This is the reason I came.
At the moment, he couldn’t see
the reason that had drawn him home, but he knew it was here. They wouldn’t have
sent him in, or made such a fuss about being strong in the face of adversity,
if it wasn’t here.
Bearing this in mind, he stood perfectly
still and waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, aware that the only light
source in the room appeared to be a solitary candle in the center of each wall,
flickering weakly from its sconce and flanked on either side by two candles of
equal length and diameter. These additional candles, Brine noticed, had been
left purposefully extinguished.
And have the window shutters been
nailed shut? he wondered, squinting in alarm. And is that putty pressed
into the seams?
When his pupils had finally dilated, he hazarded
a step forward and noticed that the darkness was no longer a hindrance, at
least not to the eye with the monocle. To the eye without the monocle, he was
still as blind as the creature for which his brethren at Valley Rock had named
him.
Brine closed the worthless
orb and focused on the images in the lens, seeing right away that the room had
changed very little since last he had visited. Of course, that had been many
long ages ago and the visit had lasted for no more than an instant, but if he
had to guess he’d have said it looked the same.
The
greatest mystery, actually, was the purpose of that long ago visit. It seemed
like he’d been looking for someone, but he couldn’t remember whom. It also
seemed like he’d been hurt or scared—because he was definitely crying—but again
the cause of those tears was lost to him. He remembered only the sprint inside,
the sharp shriek of despair, and then one of the servants sweeping him up and
carrying him away.
But what about now? he wondered,
creeping inside the room. If I screamed now, would anyone come?
He decided he wasn’t ready
to find out and made an inventory of the room, picking out the furniture and
décor materializing from the gloom. Against the far wall, a four-poster bed lay
pressed beneath one of the four candles and on his right the outline of a chair
haunted the adjacent wall. There also appeared to be ghost-chairs in the
corners behind him and directly beside the door. The only table, however, was
squatting to his left and supported the silhouettes of tins and bowls upon its
surface. These, he assumed, were producing the stringent fumes and odors that invaded
his nostrils, likely the medicines used to care for the owner of the room.
So maybe there is no owner, he
hoped, his sandals scraping along the floor. Maybe that letter was just a
big mistake and the owner is outside in the garden enjoying a nice lemonade
with my real brother.
Over the headboard of the bed, a
window-sized square materialized on the wall. It was four-hands wide and
six-hands tall and instead of hinges on the sides and latches in the middle, it
was smeared with various shades of paint and hung from a black spike driven
into the wall.
As he continued to approach the bed, Brine
watched as the paint-strokes took on definition and the shades became colors,
watching until the painting showed him a dark-skinned man standing in a rolling
green prairie, a dark gray axe clutched overhead and dirty-white monsters
springing from the reeds.
Brine assumed the man with the
double-headed battleaxe was Arn the Great Warrior and, turning to the walls on
either side of him, found that he was right. On his left, he saw the portrait
of a man leaning over a stack of intricate designs, an ink quill in one hand, a
measuring stick in the other. On his right, he found the depiction of a man in
green military attire, standing stiffly atop a hillside and shouting orders at
his men. These were, indeed, the Great Kings of Jashandar, the three men who
made possible the hopes and dreams of the Jashian people.
There would probably be a fourth painting
hanging on the wall behind, but Brine made it a point not to look at
that one. He knew that there had been a myriad number of kings since the time
of Arn, but that only three of them had been Great Kings, which meant
that the painting against the rear wall—the wall that the owner of this room
would see as he awoke from slumber—was likely reserved for the current
magistrate.
And if that’s the case, he thought,
morosely, then there is no way I can look at the thing and still make it
through the ceremony. No way.
But as he managed a few more baby steps
towards the bed, he was still not convinced there would be a ceremony.
As far as his one good eye was concerned, there was no one in the room. The
ghost-chairs were empty, the floors were barren, the bed looked abandoned.
At some point, there had been a
body occupying the mattress—he could see the residual effects of its presence
still marring the sheets—but whomever that had been was now long gone, leaving
behind a wad of disheveled blankets, a bowel of keepers salve, and a handful of
darkly-stained rags that…that looked…
Brine stopped, his sandals catching on the
floor as his breath caught within his chest. Up near the headboard and coming
from the center of the crushed pillows, he saw a dull and purple light leaking
out from the depression, a faded lavender glow that put him in mind of a tiny
purple moon setting beyond the headboard.
Staring at it brought forth the feelings
of dread that had been pounding at his heart and screaming to be let in. Because
it’s so weak, he thought, helplessly, so very, very weak. But hadn’t
the healer warned them of this? Hadn’t he told them to hurry after Jashandar
refused his summons? Brine thought that he had. At the time, the little man’s
words had made no sense, but now they rang in his mind with an awful crystal
clarity.
Purple most gone, Kowin had told
them, and as Brine winced at the muted lilac glow on the crumpled sweat-stained
sheets, he saw that the healer was not wrong.
