He was slow, his flight aimless. Glyph stayed fifteen paces behind him, moving quietly.
In his mind he saw the flint arrow-head, buried deep in the man’s body, slicing this way and that with each stride the soldier took. And he imagined the pain, the raging fire.
After a disappointingly short time, the man fell to the ground, curling up around his wound.
Glyph approached.
The soldier had dropped his sword early on in his flight, not that he could have done anything with it now. Moving to stand beside the prone form, Glyph sighed. ‘It is tradition,’ he said, ‘to use the arrow for beasts. An ignoble weapon. That is how we are to think of it. To down a fellow man or a woman from a distance is the coward’s way. But we Deniers are making a new tradition now.’
‘Go to the Abyss,’ the man gasped, eyes squeezed shut.
‘You made a few new ones of your own,’ Glyph said. ‘So really, you have no cause to complain. What new traditions, you ask? I will remind you. The hunting and killing of women and children. Of elders. Rape, and whipping little boys through the air. Watching a beautiful young woman burned in half, before one of you showed a last vestige of mercy and stabbed her through the heart. A sister, that one, always laughing, always teasing. I loved her more than my life. As I did my wife. And my son. I loved them all more than my life.’
He continued looking down, and saw that the soldier was dead.
Drawing his iron knife, he knelt and pushed the body on to its back. He cut into the blood-smeared gut, making the arrow-wound big enough to fit his hand, and then, carefully, he worked his hand into that hot fissure. The flint edges were sharp and he did not want to cut himself. Finally, the tips of his fingers found the blade. It had worked down into the man’s liver, slicing it almost in half. Gingerly, he drew it out, praying that it had not broken against a bone.
But no, the arrow-head was whole, not even chipped anywhere along its edges. Glyph wiped it clean on the man’s cape.
Then he straightened and began making his way back to the camp. There would be food there, and he’d not eaten in a week. This hunt had taken all of his strength and he was feeling light-headed.
He wanted to retrieve his arrows from the other bodies, check the iron points, and then find the shaft that had fallen out from the last man.
Here is my new story. Before the end, some fish had left the lake. They went upstream. When they returned, they found all their kin gone. In rage, one walked out from the water, leaving for ever his world, and blessed by the lake’s grieving spirit he was given legs and arms, and his scales fell away to be replaced by skin. He was given eyes that could see in this new, dry world. He was given lungs that did not drown when filled with air. He was given hands with which to collect weapons.
Then he set out.
The people who fished the lake had distant kin, out on the drylands.
He would cast wide his net.
And begin the tradition of slaughter.
He realized that he would need a name. So he named himself Glyph, so that others could read the truth of his deeds, and so that the other fish that walked out on to the land and were given arms, legs and hands would join him.
He saw before him a modest wall, there on the shore, between water and land. The birth of a tradition, in a place between two worlds. I came from the water, but now I walk the shore. And from the land beyond there will be streams of blood and they will bless this shore, and make of it a sacred thing.
* * *
Wreneck’s mother told him that he was now eleven years of age. That seemed a long time to be alive, since most of it had been hard. Always working, always worrying. Whippings and kicked shins from his mistress, and all the other little things she did that hurt him: it seemed that those things made up all the millions of days in which he had been alive.
The burns from the fire had left smooth, shiny weals on his hands, his forearms, his shoulders, and on his left cheek just under the eye. He might have more on his head, but his hair had mostly grown back. Those scars were like places where the roughness had been rubbed away, and only when the sunlight was on them did they begin hurting again. The scar where he had been stabbed was bigger and took a lot longer to heal.
He had not returned to
the ruins of the Great House. He had heard from his mother that ghosts had been seen there. But one day, ghosts or not, he knew he would make his way back. He would walk in the burned-out ruins. He would remember how everything had looked before the coming of the soldiers. There was a reason for having to go back, but he did not yet know what it was. The idea of it, of standing on the blackened stones of the Great House’s threshold, seemed like the end of something, and that end felt right, somehow.
It was worth reminding himself, he decided, that whole worlds could die. No different from people. People who died left bones. Worlds left ruins.
He had saved a girl at that estate, a girl he had loved, but she was gone now. Returned, he supposed, to her family, but as that family was not from round here no one knew who they were, or even where they lived. His ma wouldn’t tell him anything about any of that. It was just a truth he had to live with, an unhappy one like all the other unhappy ones: Jinia was gone.
There were lots of burned places now. Black ruins on the skyline on all sides of Abara Delack. Looted farmhouses made blackened smears across the fields. He couldn’t see much of the monastery from where he lived with his mother, and yet, above all the others, it drew his eye the most: a distant hill toothed by a ragged black wall. He was curious about it. He wondered if he would feel the same about it as he did about the Great House, as a place deserving at least one visit.
Ma wanted him close by these days. She wanted him going nowhere out of her sight. But he was eleven now. And he looked even older, especially with the burn scars. And this morning, when at last he slipped out from her grasp, and set off down the track that led to the road that led through the town and then back up again on the other side, to the old monastery, she had wailed behind him, reaching out with her hands as if to drag him back.
Her tears made him feel bad, and he vowed to fix everything when he returned home. The soldiers were finally gone from Abara Delack. They had marched east, into the forest that had been burned down first, to make the going easier. But people were hungry in the town. They were leaving because there was not enough food there. When they left, pulling carts, they took with them whatever the soldiers hadn’t stolen from them. Wreneck had seen them on the road, all going somewhere else, but it seemed no one could decide where that was, as the families went off in different directions from each other. And every now and then one of them came back, only to leave again a few days later, heading out another way.
So the town Wreneck walked into was almost empty of people, and those who remained were mostly staying in their houses. The livery had burned down, he saw. So had the land office. A few men and women stood outside the tavern, not doing much or saying anything, and they watched Wreneck walk past.