The wilderlands, p.4
The Wilderlands, page 4
He didn’t reason wrong neither. You and me don’t have much tied to life, and Knalc had even less. His sword and skin was all he had save his stories, shameful though they were. If a Valforian killed him, no one would ever whisper his name again—and much as some of his stories cut him, he couldn’t bear the thought they’d stop; once you lose a man’s story you lose all else, and oft times a man can stand to lose himself but can’t stomach losing the things he keeps breathing, like children or tales of glory.
“You kill me, they kill you.”
Red smiled. “I already died once. I don’t think much of having to do it again. I’ll lose even less this time.”
Dhorena was starting to sit up now.
Knalc sniffed the air. He’d never seen an undead before, but he’d heard they smelled of burned blood and couldn’t help but shed their skin so as not to be much more than sore muscles and crimson bones. Stories say their eyes are more vacant than those who are true-dead.
“You don’t look dead. Not by what I heard. Not by what I see.”
“A man dies many deaths before his flesh goes cold and some still afterward. My flesh hasn’t gone cold yet, but I know the flavor of death.”
“You want more of the flavor?”
“No, but it wouldn’t sit poorly with me to have some more, I think.”
She was groaning and her brother was at her side. Blood had made a nice mess of half her face. Her eyes were trying to find Knalc, but she was still stun-struck. “… you hit me.”
“I’m sorry,” Red said quickly, before looking back at Knalc. “I want you to make a deal with me now. You take us to the walls, to Illmiv, and we won’t kill you here and now.”
Knalc grunted. “Just kill me later then?”
Dhorena said, “… I’m blood. There’s bleeding.”
“We’ll patch it in a minute,” Red said, then to Knalc, “I didn’t say that.”
“But it will happen.” He had a sense of how fast the man was, where the children were, and where his sword was waiting.
“I didn’t say that. I did not say that.”
“But it will happen.”
Red sighed and rattled his skull. “I don’t like what you did, and I’d like to kill you. I’d like to kill you right now. That’s the truth. But I won’t. Because you’re the only one who can help us right now. When we get back to the walls though, I won’t mind much killing you. But I understand what you did, you barbarians don’t know any better than to do what your leader tells you, and you didn’t realize who you were killing. I understand that. So—if you can lead us to Illmiv, safe behind brick—then I’ll call all things even. The people where we’re going, though, they won’t see it that way. I’ll say what I can for you, but they won’t care to hear it. No one’s cared to hear me for a long while and my words now couldn’t buy a hand of corn. So I promise, I will tell them not to kill you, but if they do kill you to spite my words then that’s no oath broken for my part.”
“This is a kind way to say you will see me dead,” said Knalc. “A cruel way to tell me I’ve been speaking right.”
“It just works out like that. It’s not much, but it’s what I can promise. Do we have a deal?”
But Dhorena got to murmuring. “No,” said she, through blood-rinsed lips. “You said that when we brought him home we’d see him hanged.”
Red looked back at her to send her a scolding look, and that was all Knalc was waiting for.
He jumped for his sword. Landing dirt-bellied, he grasped it in his hand.
The boy cried. Red turned. The girl tried to find her feet but fell.
Knalc looked at the brother for just a heartbeat and knew he could snatch or stab him. Oh, children, he thought about it.
But Red reeled at him, blade-bidden, and Knalc faced the more fatal foe.
Without a look, he slashed at Red. His blade licked flesh—lapping up a wholesome chunk.
No sooner had he felt his steel dig deep than that Valforian blade, always cunning, slipped neat-like into his ribs.
He screamed and he roared and he cried and they fell and the world went black and red.
Knalc had been looking to slash Red’s heart clean and beating from his chest. Yet the way Red had slung his arm—oh, children—that had saved his life. That arm offered something for Knalc’s sword to slash that wasn’t the man’s chest. Knalc’s blade had licked through the muscle and bone of Red’s arm, leaving it a mangled mess, but Red’s human heart was untouched.
For Red’s part, his Valforian steel had lunged clean through Knalc but only tickled and bled the ribs, a place most don’t keep hearts.
The encounter left both life-limp but for their breathing.
The girl had wanted to kill Knalc, she’d wanted to kill him with mightsome intent, but with everyone bleeding but her brother, she knew that Knalc might be all that could save them. So she and her brother had worked long and hard to drag Red and Knalc deeper into the Wilderlands. There, they built a fire to ward off cold and dark, and bloodthirsty beasts.
It was not long later that Red took to screaming and woke Knalc.
Upon unfastening his eyes and rising from his battle-rest, Knalc found himself rolled fireside (his bleeding clogged by leaves) and when he was able to look past the flames, he saw why Red was howling so. Such a slaughtering had been visited to the man’s arm that Dhorena was having to slice him free of it.
She undid Red’s belt from his britches and fastened it tight around the injured arm.
The man chewed fitfully on a rag but his screams slipped through while his feet did a pain-jig. With his remaining hand, he throttled a tree branch, wicked and thick, with such panic that blood was rung from palm-flesh.
Sorrowsome to say, the girl had no great strength. From how she hacked at Red with Knalc’s blade, she knew how to handle steel; but from how she bit harder on her own lip with every scream the man let loose, it was clear she hadn’t grown to stomach blood and wriggling muscles.
Knalc tried to stand, but pain frosted his chest when he made to move. He looked down and saw that he was slick and red and glowing in the firelight.
The boy was looking on, drinking from Knalc’s water skin. Watching. Silent and no longer crying. Knalc licked ash-lidded lips, trying not to want for water.
There was a splintering and ripping sound. A curdling yorp and a flesh-thud as Red’s arm fell to the dirt. Tears were in both Red’s eyes and Dhorena’s, their weeping dripped into the blood making it thinner, clearer, and more abundant.
Red looked at Knalc, and hissed. “Bastard born … bitch son.” Red’s voice was already getting faint. He crawled to his belly and lay opposite fireside of Knalc. In no time, he was still and quiet as rest enraptured him.
What passed for silence in the Wilderlands fell unto their camp, the click-tick of bugs gnawing and singing while owls swooped on shrieking voles and beasts with front-set eyes and fanged teeth growled and sniffed and hunted—making no sound they didn’t mean to.
So much blood had been spilled by them that was now lying in the camp that the trees could be heard growing. The roots had lapped up the spilled blood and longed now for fresh flesh as food for growing strong.
The noises did not distract Dhorena, tired and torn though she was.
She stared through flame and smoke at Knalc, lying there. Knalc’s sword and the arm of the man in red were both still at her feet. She was gore covered and her hands were still shaking, but her baleful glare was untrembled.
Knalc looked back at her and spat and laid his head to dirt, staring at leaves and the star spotted sky. He didn’t hear her come over and didn’t know she was there ‘til she was looking down on him.
He growled and shut up his own eyes from her and set to sleeping.
The audacity.
Not long had his eyes been shut when he felt a flame-stone in his chest. He chewed his own teeth to keep from shouting. Eyes still closed, his hands searched first for his clay heart. When he found it safe, he quickly searched for the pain bringer and felt the girl’s foot grinding into him, plowing and stomping tender wounds. Each heel-slam and foot-thump were like coal splinters being seeded into flesh.
He let that pain sprout and spout inside, trying to keep it from bursting past his lips. That made her lean into him all the harsher. The more wretchedly he wrestled to keep pain down, the more passionately she pressed him.
He grabbed at her. He tried to shake her off. But he was wound-spotted and weak and couldn’t do more than bat at her.
Finally, her efforts ripped his lips to lose a scream as mangled as his body and shattered as his soul.
She gave her heel one final twist as the last of the shout leaked from him, spurring a less than mansome whimper. This seemed to satisfy her.
Her brother finished the water in Knalc’s skin and curled up for sleep.
Knalc squinted through tears and tremors, he saw the girl sit against a fireside log and, smiling content, she began to slumber.
She woke thrice through the night and wound-stomped him each time.
It’s hard to total how long they were in that camp. Each of them were spent, either by cuts or sorrows or both. Some tellers say they lay there a week. That’s hogshit. Ain’t no beast in the Wilderlands that’d let humans stay in the same place a week without accosting them—even them creatures that don’t eat meat would have nibbled on ‘em thinking they were ill-grown plants. Just a day don’t seem quite right though. They was so bled and bruised, moving after just a day would have been a miracle. Some tellers amend this through mid-meeting and say they stayed three days before leaving. Them’s the dumb-tongued tellers. All who’s ever been Wilder-ward, Waste-ward, or even bed-ward knows that after about three days your body gets water starved and can’t go on. At most they were sitting two days. Not a minute more, I tell you true.
Over those two days the girl and her brother found a river and a rich water-bulb plant. The next thing Knalc knew was the taste of sweet water sliding down his throat like rain on cracked earth. His eyes flicked and fluttered, and he was able to make out the shape of the boy standing over him. He tried to say something and coughed, sputtering up some of the water he’d gulped.
He heard the girl’s voice somewhere. “I wanted to pour piss down your throat.”
Knalc didn’t say such, but he knew that if they’d piss-drowned him, he probably wouldn’t have noticed it wasn’t water. He was so parched, he probably wouldn’t have cared much.
“What stopped you?”
“My little brother,” Dhorena said. “Even if you deserve to die, that doesn’t mean he does. You need to be the one to take us back or we’ll die out here. He’ll die out here and I don’t want to lose anyone else I love to this place.”
Knalc tried to sit up again, still impossible but this time it was just because his muscles were fitful and held him down. His wounds, he noticed, had been well tended by Wilder-standards.
“Why not … let me die here?” Knalc managed to say. “Take your red man. Have him cut your way home? With fancy Valforian steel.”
A scoffing sound. “He isn’t going to cut a thing. He’s had a fever since we made camp. Just look at him.”
Knalc may have been back-stuck, but he could move his head and neck. He swiveled about to catch the man in red.
Pale and sweat soaked, Red had a cold shaking about him. The man toed the bridge to death even as he sleep-clutched at his bloody stump.
“We’re best off leaving him for … the silver tips,” Knalc said. “Miracle they haven’t sniffed us up already.”
“What are silver tips?”
“Beasts,” he said. “Nasty beasts. Know your own scent better than you do after a whiff.”
“We’re not leaving him behind.”
“Why? He your father?”
“My father’s dead.”
“Not because of me, I hope.”
The girl didn’t answer him with words or pain. And he didn’t plea sorry for his slights. Back then folks didn’t go sorry for what they doled; you can’t fix flesh with sympathies or wish back whispered hate with words. Knalc wouldn’t have gone sorry even if he’d known how. He was lying closer to Death than he liked and didn’t want it to take him with the girl having wrung his failures from him.
Knalc asked. “What’s your name?”
“Dhorena,” said she spitefully.
He looked at the boy, gumming the mouth of his water skin. “And your brother?”
“He doesn’t have a name.”
“Boy must be seven-winters-old. Why no name?”
“He’s mute. He doesn’t have a voice, so he doesn’t have a name.”
Knalc bobbed to the man in red. “And him?”
“He doesn’t have a name either.”
“Why’s that?”
She drew a long sigh. “He did something horrid.”
Knalc looked long at Red who twitched and shivered. “You want to let him die?”
Oh, the moments that ticked away afore she answered. “No … for the same reason I don’t want you dead. He can help me and my brother.”
“He can help tree root. Worms, too.”
After he spoke this she stepped where he could gaze on her. Knalc saw how the Wilderlands ain’t easy on Valflings.
Her face was scratched from Wilder-thorns and her scuff with Knalc. Her hair—brown and rare as butterscotch—was in snake-twists and hedge-tufts. Her clothing, cotton shirt with a Valforian blue cloak and wool trousers, was blood-smitten. It was plain she’d tried to soak the sanguine out, but all that did was make the red fainter. Around her waist she’d taken Red’s belt (tying a vine around his stump instead) and wrapped it twice-thick around her own waist. Her mother’s knife and Red’s tricksome steel hung from there, both yet bearing blood beads.
“You know how to use steel?” Knalc asked, though his very skin told that tale.
She thumbed the knife handle and smiled death at him; eyes patient now.
There’s a place to the far south called the Green Fire Battle Field. It’s told, back when the Green God swallowed earth, that two-faced Fire turned jealous of the conquest. So Fire aired-up and let its belly bubble, boiling until it was hot as could be stomached, then it belched up a black and red and yellow storm of flames and ash and ember as you ain’t ever seen or heard of, trying to scorch Green away. Whether Fire was just spiting Green or was wanting to steal the pleasure of gobbling humans, it’s hard to say. The sky turned sin-black as Green and Fire duked.
It was only when Grandma Dirt couldn’t tolerate their noise that she slapped them both back into place. She told Fire that the Green God had gotten there first and sent both to peace-making.
You might know that abated battlefield as Man Stone Garden—it’s the wrong name for it, but some false-names still say truth and Man Stone Garden was called so ‘cause of the humans turned to stone in the fighting. Those souls were sent burning by Fire’s belch and touched by Dirt to stop their suffering, though they were kept from Death by her doing so.
But now I’m weaving myself out of my first story. What I want to tell is that Dhorena had hot-stomached her hate for now. Letting it build and brew inside her so as when she spit at Knalc her hate would be so hot even Grandma Dirt couldn’t hope to cool him before he was ash-dead.
“All Valforians are taught to handle a knife well enough to skin Wilderfolk,” she gloated. “My father taught me how to use a sword before he died. Which is why I’ll be able to protect you while you figure out how to help him.”
She pointed to the man in red, and Knalc gave a belly-laugh so hard he thought it might’ve further cracked his rattled ribs and ripped new wounds in him. Eventually, the boy smiled with his laughing.
Dhorena couldn’t catch a funny spot in what she’d said. She waited ‘til he was breathing right again.
“Are you finished?”
“Not half as much as him.”
“That’s the man we’re going to save, or else you’ll die trying.”
Knalc sneered. “If I lead you back, if you know your steel, why save him?”
“Because he—well—no one deserves to die in the Wilderlands.”
You must forgive the girl for saying such, she knew nothing of the world and didn’t see which way the shadow of Fate leaned from her.
Knalc asked her, “Where’s a soul to die then?”
Her grin grew grimmer. “A worthy soul should die at home, on a mattress, at kindly age.”
Knalc had never been on a mattress, or in age, or of the kindly kind. He laughed again despite her smiling and his suffering.
“Laugh all you like,” Dhorena said. “You won’t find it funny when you die out here or when your spirit is eaten by the Goat-Below for pre-supper. You won’t laugh then.”
“Neither will you. Not when you die. Not when you’re soul-smashed below Hush-bee.”
She closed up her ears and the gods-that-ain’t made her bar up her mouth and hiss. “Heathen.”
“Cunt.”
“What?”
“Cunt.”
She loomed over him again and he readied himself for another kick. Instead, she reached behind her, pulling a water skin he hadn’t seen from her belt. She shook it, so he could hear it sloshing and full of water. Slow-like, she uncorked it and took a long swallow. Once she’d gulped a healthy dose she held it out toward him. When he made to take it from her, she poured the leftovers over his hair. He jaw-gabbed at the spittling drops, but came up tongue-dry and gasping mad.
“We’re going to find a way to help him soon,” she said. “And you’re coming with me. If you don’t feel like you can walk, I’ll chop you up into more manageable chunks and drag you along with me.”
