The Pleasure of Memory (62 page)

A drop of rain landed on his arm. He looked up into the wind, but there was barely a cloud to be seen. He looked back at his arm. His gloom deepened as he realized it wasn’t rain at all. The drop fell from the burn on his face. It was weeping again. He took some solace in the fact that at least this time the fluid was nearly clear. That was something. He’d have to apply more salve soon. He couldn’t afford a fester. Not now.

Bracing his side, he climbed against the pain, staggering awkwardly to his feet. The wind made the effort somehow harder, pushing him constantly off center and making his control over gravity more elusive.

He steadied himself and turned, cupping his eyes against the sun as he looked out over the tall, blowing grass. He needed a spot to tend his wounds, preferably some place offering a bit of cover from the wind and patrolling eyes. He spied a stand of poplars a quarter mile off. It wasn’t much to look at, a small copse of skinny saplings shooting up from a patch of rough, gnarled undergrowth. Nevertheless, it was in a shallow between the hills, sheltered and out of sight, and that was something. He’d just have to make due and keep low.

A few minutes later, he walked down into the swale and through the scraggy bushes surrounding the trees. There was shade here, and a much-welcomed break from the wind, but not much else. He protected his face with an arm and pushed through the dense brush. Once inside the copse he was surprised to find a shallow pond squatting in the midst of the trees.

He collapsed to his knees at the edge of the water. For several minutes he could only rest there with his eyes closed, struggling to find some semblance of peace amid the storm of fear and pain gripping him. There was a battle raging between the knife wound in his side and the blisters on his face to see which could bring him the most misery. The knife wound was mostly winning.

Eventually he opened his eyes and shucked the pack off his shoulder. Then he braced himself in the mud and bent close enough to the water to scoop a drink. The water tasted brackish and stale, but he was too thirsty to care. He’d downed a few handfuls before realizing there was something else amiss about it.

He scooped up another handful and let it dribble between his fingers. The water had a pink tint to it. He repeated the action, netting the same results. He’d seen this kind of water once before during a skirmish with Mendophian renegades in the Nolands. The bulk of the fighting had occurred at a creek nestled between two hills. When the battle was over, the creek ran red. Just like that creek, this water was tainted with blood.

He spit what he could from his mouth and wiped the memory of it from his face. Then he scanned the pond’s surface. The poplars in the middle of the pond were standing in two or three feet of water. There were no cattails. That alone should’ve tipped him off. This was a runoff hollow. It caught the rain channeling from the surrounding hills. This pond was little more than a large, stagnant puddle.

He cursed himself for being so negligent. People died from drinking the water in festering pools like this. He knew better.

There had to be a dead deer or coyote lying somewhere along the perimeter. He wondered if he should make himself vomit, maybe clear his stomach before it made him sick, but decided against it. His chest wound was too bad; he needed proof before putting himself through the agony of a self-induced retch.

He struggled to his feet. The pain was worse, much worse. His legs felt like rubber. He felt light-headed and couldn’t draw a decent breath. He braced himself against a poplar sapling and wiped the sweat from his cheek, noticing with some shame that his hand was shaking. He’d never suffered wounds as poorly as he was suffering these. He wondered if they might finally be his undoing.

No, he told himself! No treacherous thoughts! It was unacceptable. Notions of defeat and failure could easily become self-fulfilling. He couldn’t accept it. He was a better man than that, or at least he should try to be.

He was about to turn away and find a place to dress his wounds when he saw it. Off to his left, down the bank just past a honeysuckle shrub a dozen or so feet away. It was a mangled ring of grass and disturbed shrubs. His first instinct was to deny it, to write it off as a circle of deer bedding, but he knew it wasn’t so. It was the trail. It had to be.

He stumbled through the shrubs toward it. The bank was soggy here, the mud slick and pliable. It got wetter as he proceeded toward the site until he was sloshing through ankle deep water. As he got closer, he noticed several dark spots drying against the broken grass drowning at the water line. He carefully lowered himself to one knee, touched one of the spots, and then smelled it.

Blood! It was still sticky. They hadn’t been gone long.

He got up as quickly as he could manage. The trampled path led through the bushes and wove an erratic path up the hill behind him. This was no deer or coyote making the water pink. Goudt and Maeryc had fought again. He turned back toward the pond. The loser was still here.

He staggered toward the spot where the trail met the waterline. At first, he couldn’t see anything but a black mirror of water reflecting the sky and treetops. He waded carefully into it, walked out several feet until he was knee deep. His invasion troubled the pool’s surface, sending out angry rings that made everything below them invisible to him.

A few yards further out, he stopped and waited for the surface to settle. His heart was beating too hard. No matter what he found under that murky water, he knew it wouldn’t be good.

Gradually the ripples melted away and stillness again gripped the pool. The water was dark and bottomless, and greedy for the treasures it held at its breast. Just then, a cloud freed the sun above him. Something metallic shimmered just beneath the water’s surface a few more feet out.

He sloshed toward it. When he was nearly on top of it, his foot caught something beneath the surface. He tripped and stumbled forward, falling into the shallow water. His hands landed on something hard and slick. He rolled away from it and shook the water from his face. As the ripples again settled, he saw a pale, twisted face lurking in the muck just below the surface. Cloudy eyes gaped up at him from the silt. The mouth was agape in a voiceless scream.

It was Goudt!

He grabbed the warrior by the mail and pulled him up from the water. The body broke through the surface without its head. The neck was sliced through to the bone. The head hung back against the spine, kept in place by a bit of sinew and nothing else.

For just an instant, Mawby thought he was going to vomit. Still holding the corpse up from the water, he closed his eyes and willed the nausea back. “My gods, Maeryc” he whispered, “What…what have you done?”

Terror paralyzed him. He didn’t know what to do. His wounds were shrieking. He could feel the edges of his chest wound pulling against the stitches, threatening to rip wider. There was no way to remove the body from the water without killing himself in the process. He couldn’t release Goudt and he couldn’t hold on. He could only stand in that fetid water holding the mutilated corpse just barely above the waterline.

You can’t help him
.

Mawby heard the words, but couldn’t make sense of them. He couldn’t take his eyes from the gaping neck. He couldn’t get any air.

Lower him back into the water.

“I can’t,” he whispered. He was holding the dead warrior’s mail so tightly his fingers ached.

Lower him back to the water.

“I can’t!”

You can’t help him now. Lower him back to the water.

He suddenly understood. This was his voice, the voice of his reason. It grounded him. It gave him strength. He shook himself free of his terror and did exactly as it told him.

The dead warrior slipped back and quickly disappeared beneath a sigh of water. Mawby sloshed back from it and collapsed into the muddy bank.

For a time, he couldn’t will himself to move. He sat there in the mud with his feet in the cool water, staring out over the murky surface until the waves subsided, and the rippling rings exhausted themselves, and the pond was once again as still as death. He might’ve sat there a minute or an hour. There was no time here by this wretched pool. There was only death and suffocation.

For once, he was thankful for the pain. It bullied him back to reality. In time, he forced himself up from the mud and climbed onto the bank. But before he resumed the trail, he stopped and turned hesitantly back toward the dank water. He watched his dead friend moldering out there beneath that glassy surface, and he grieved his lack of options. There could be no consolation for a warrior buried in that soulless pit, no hope in so loveless a tomb. And yet, the argument lacked point; there was no time to honor him with a proper crypt or even a field funeral pyre. For an honored Vaemysh warrior, this was as bad as it got.

Resolved to the grim reality, he abandoned his friend. And as he staggered up from the pond, he made himself two promises. One was that he’d eventually find his way back to this horrid place and give that warrior’s remains the funeral pyre he deserved.

The second promise was that he’d find Maeryc, and when he finally caught up with that soulless hack, he’d kill him. He no longer cared whether the man was responsible for his behavior or driven by the darkest demon in all the hells. He’d kill him, so help him Calina. He’d kill him if it took his last breath to do so.

∞

Jhom had nearly shoved his way clear of the maddening crowd when he ran into a tall, thin Baeldon. The soldier stood outside the officers’ saloon at the distant end of the military supply stores lining this end of the tier. He was leaning against the corner pole of the plank promenade and effectively blocking the path to the stables. He was staring straight at Jhom. He didn’t seem intent on moving anytime soon.

Jhom stopped and studied the man from a distance. He was taller than Jhom, nearly ten feet, but easily a hundred pounds lighter. If the man’s slight frame wasn’t tip enough, he was dressed all in black with a tight leather shirt and britches, fingerless gloves and tall, soleless boots, all of which revealed him for the runner he was. He was twenty years younger than Jhom. Clean-shaven, he wore his shoulder length black hair all in tight braids so that his head looked like an explosion of snakes. A thin scar ran nearly horizontally along the length of his left jaw, though it didn’t detract from his rugged handsomeness.

Jhom began walking again, the clink of his spurs and the clop of his step counting down the distance. The runner didn’t yield as he grew closer, but only stayed propped where he was against that pole with one gloved hand planted solidly on his hip and the other tapping its index finger against the antler-handle knife parked on his belt. He was glaring down his pierced nose at Jhom.

Jhom stopped a few feet back from the man. He threw the glare right back at him, saying, “What the hell are you looking at, Runner?”

The man gave him a little snort, and said, “Looks like you’re the only one around, Pokey, so I reckon I must be looking at you. You got a problem with that?”

“Nah, I don’t mind,” Jhom said seriously, “Just move to the side so I can pass, then you can follow me around adoring me all day.”

“Adoring you?” the runner said with a laugh, “Adoring? Have you looked in a mirror lately, grunt?”

“I don’t have to. I see my beauty reflected in your eyes.”

“Beauty?” The runner pushed off from the pole and punched a finger into Jhom’s shoulder, saying, “You’re starting to irritate me, boy.”

Jhom seized the offending hand and twisted it so the runner quickly found himself on his knees with his arm wrenched hard behind his back. Jhom slipped his free arm around the runner’s neck and gave it a squeeze. The runner cried out.

Still holding him, Jhom leaned in close and whispered into the runner’s ear, “Say it.”

“Go to hell, you son of a bitch!”

Jhom wrenched the arm just a bit tighter. “Say it,” he whispered again, “Say it and I’ll let you go.”

“No, goddamn you!”

Jhom pulled harder. “Saaaay iiit.”

“All right! All right! You’re the handsomest soldier in this grunt’s army, you son of a bitch bastard!”

Jhom laughed and pulled the runner back to his feet. “You never learn, do you, Wenzil?”

The runner rubbed his shoulder and sent a clearly feigned frown back at Jhom. “No fair. You took me by surprise.”

“By surprise?” Jhom said laughing, “So, you want a warning next time?”

“Yea.”

“You were blocking my way as I recall. The warning should’ve been the sight of me coming.”

“You know what I mean,” Wenzil said, “You could’ve warned me before you jumped.”

“Oh, you mean like in the field?” Jhom asked, “Like when we count ‘one, two, three, go’ before the battle begins?”

Wenzil laughed. “Yea, just like that.”

Jhom slapped his arm. “You look good, Wen.”

“Of course, I do.”

Jhom watched him a moment, drumming his fingers on the head of the double bladed hand-axe sheathed on his belt. Then he said, “You know, it’s about high time you came out with me, don’t you think, Wen? There’s a lot of gold out there for a man who knows how to stalk a rogue and swing steel.” He looked down at the long, thin blade hanging at the runner’s belt. “Or a man who’s good with a pig sticker, for that matter.”

“Don’t even start on the sword,” Wenzil said, “If you’re close enough to smell a man’s breath, an axe won’t do you any good. Anyway, it looks like I’ll be joining you sooner than you think.”

“Bender got the orders to you that quickly, then, did he?”

The tall, thin Baeldon shrugged and smiled. “In a manner of speaking, I reckon.”

“In other words, no.”

The man’s sheepish smile matured into a full-grown, shit-eating grin. “I’m a hired scout with this army, Jhom. I’m not enlisted. Reckon I can come and go as I please.”

“Is that a fact?”

“It is. And here’s another fact. I got word they’re assembling something like thirty or forty runners to follow up on the sentry’s warning, but that’s not the action I’m following.”