technically did write today. I just deleted it. I feel like a cat pawing at the crack under a door, knowing what I want is on the other side but I can't get it.
The formation of rocks was the highest point near the village. It jutted up in the middle of a flat plain with mounds of low-lying plants laying over the ground in ripples of emerald velvet. Beneath the shade of the rocks the plants thinned away into a pale sand hollow that was filled cool water from a spring trickling beneath the rocks. At the top of the rocks the sun and wind had scoured them bare and at the height of the day heat rose off it like an oven and the touch of it burned.
The old woman scaling the rocks had wrapped her hands in cloth, twisted and frayed fabric over twisted fingers, in order to protect herself from the worst of the heat. Her dress was plain and well-worn but around her head and shoulders she had wrapped a scarf woven in a delicate pattern of red flowers on a turquoise background and the fabric caught the sun in a silken shimmer.
"This is pointless." A second woman, younger than the first, stood tall and straight a little ways behind the first. Her dress was of fine, colorful cloth that was woven with intricate patterns and decorated with embroidery and beads. The ends of the scarf around her head had beads tied into the fringe and they clicked and glittered in the wind that endlessly blew over the rocks as if trying to wear them down to match the flatness of the plain below.
"It's none of your business, that's what it is," the old woman snapped.
"You'll kill yourself, dragging yourself up here in the sun."
"And you'll kill me if I stay below."
"We agreed-"
"You decided and made everyone else do as you said."
The younger woman frowned. Her thick, black brows drew themselves flat and a line almost as dark deepened between them. She continued to follow the older woman, taking easy steps where the older woman slipped and struggled, banging her knees on the rocks. "We agreed," she began again, "that the Signs pointed this way. Hard times are coming, food and water will dwindle and there won't be enough to see us through. The Signs pointed to you and the others, those whose time is already drawing to a close."
"I've got years left in me," the older woman said, stopping to take a breath, having been forced almost to crawl across the rock in her exhaustion.
"There are children who have their lives still before them, yet to do all the things you have already done. You've had your share. They are the future, you are the past."
"I'm the now!" the old woman twisted around to better shout at her pursuer, her face running with sweat and her lips cracked, "All of us are the now! Times will get hard, sure, but they aren't yet. When they come around you can kill me then but I'm not dying when our food stores are bulging with plenty. And why me? Why not a child who doesn't even know what they'll miss?"
"You're worn beyond use. Your legs can barely carry you."
"They still get me where I want to go, just as they are now." The woman turned away and continued her climbing.
"Your fingers are too twisted to spin thread or weave cloth." The younger woman persisted, relentlessly following.
"I can stir a pot, hold a knife, use a hoe to til my garden."
"You offer us nothing."
"Why should I?"
The old woman had reached the top of the rocks. She stood, hunched and fragile, the wind tearing at the hem of her dress and ends of her scarf. She rounded on the younger woman and shouted again, "Why should I? I want to live! I want to eat sweet things and watch the young ones dance while I keep time on the little drum my husband made for me when I grew too old to dance myself. I want to live until my sons come home again and bring me gifts and stories. I want them to see me wear the silk scarf they sent me and know as they've thought of me I've thought of them. I have fewer years but they're mine and I want every one of them. You have no right to take them."
The younger woman did not speak immediately. She let the wind take away the last traces of the old woman's words until there was space for her own. Shoulders straight, her face dark and impassive, she said, "It has been decided."
The old woman pressed her lips together, her face pinched with exhaustion, pain, and sorrow. She straightened her body as much as her twisted bones would allow and looked into the younger woman's eyes with a steady gaze. "I defy your Signs."
The younger woman was unmoved. "It does not matter."
"I wish ill on them, that they might twist and lose their form."
"They will not."
"I wish ill on them, that what they warn of becomes truth and they are hollow and useless because they cannot change your fate."
"If our fate is decided then it is decided that we will live and thrive."
"You will suffer and regret! You need my life to pave your path of good fortune and I deny you it. With what little worth is left in me I wish your fate twisted."
"You cannot harm us."
"But I can harm you."
The cold certainty of the old woman, her body trembling with emotion but her words firm as the rocks beneath their feet, made the younger woman take a step back. Power laced the old woman's words, power that the younger woman had not know she could call upon.
"Yes," the old woman said, her voice rising, "You cruel, inhuman thing. I wish your fate twisted, that you match in your body what you are in your heart, I wish suffering without reason and without end."
"Your wish is incomplete," the younger woman said, once again standing firm and impassive, drawing strength from her own power, the power that she used to hold herself above all other people and to direct their fates as she decided, "It cannot be without end."
"True, true. If your suffering is to end then you must be as useless as me, with nothing to offer, no worth, and your must be loved in spite of it. Only then will I be satisfied."
The younger woman had no time to speak words to counter this curse, for the older woman rushed across the top of the rocks with speed and nimbleness that defied her years. It was the last of her years, exchanged for this last burst of strength and to power the curse. The years that should have threaded into the path shown by the Signs and being denied them the path would twist.
For a moment the ragged little bundle that was the old woman, her head scarf shimmering as the wind rippled through it, was caught up by the wind and held for the briefest moments above the rocks, above the younger woman, above all the land that the eye could see.
The dust thrown up by the horses' steady plod filled the air around them completely in a blinding yellow-white, eye stinging cloud. When Caliban was set down he almost thought the ground would be nothing but a mass of shifting, scratching dust and not the iron-hard surface that his feet actually landed on. The impact from the short distance from horseback to the ground slammed through his knees and hips and he crumpled, the pain too overwhelming for him to catch himself or even gasp.
"Sorry," the man riding the horse said, his truly apologetic tone muffled but not hidden by the cloth wrapped around the lower half of his face. Caliban wished the man had cursed at him instead. Harsh scorn, a mocking vulgarity, or even a punch or a kick would have let Caliban give voice to equal hate, equal ugliness. The escort party, one to carry Caliban, two to guard any attempt of Caliban to flee, had been nothing but polite and a little apologetic the whole ride out from town. More than once over the past few days someone was saying, "Let's be civilized about this," or "This doesn't have to be ugly," and any hint of anger or resistance from Caliban was met with uncomfortable disapproval, as if to a child that was being willfully difficult.
Now, in that civilized way, the escort was dropping Caliban in the open plain and allowed him no water, nothing to cover his head, not even his walking stick. He wondered where it was, the stick that he had let dry for two years before shaping it into a serviceable tool and into it carved patterns that pleased him. Flowers, this time he had carved flowers and painted them with what colors he could concoct from the plants from his garden or foraged on the edges of town where dust hadn't yet wiped out all the plants.
"Well, then," said one of the escort, pulling the reins of their horse to turn its head back toward town, and given a respectful tip of his dust-powdered hat to Caliban's crumpled form in the dust. "You have our thanks." By the time Caliban got himself sitting up the three horses and riders were smudges in the dust and the rising wind whipped away any sound of hooves or bridles or any possible last words addressed to Caliban. The ground was hot through Caliban's clothing and dust scoured cruel, feverish rawness in his mouth and eyes and yet in the pit of his stomach was lump of cold like frozen metal. Until he was dropped from the back of the horse he hadn't let himself believe that this was being done to him.
"The railway might not come through after all, you see. They're looking at towns further away, where it's still green and people will settle and do business. If we just got some rain . . ."
Many different people had explained it to Caliban, that if the beast wasn't placated the rain wouldn't fall, and it was the collective failing of the town for having neglected it for two generations and they had to make up for it now, they all had to do their part. Caliban was of the opinion that the allotment of responsibility was not evenly distributed.
It had been another hot, dry day, the day they decided. He had spent the morning tending his little garden, dragging water from the well in the rusty bucket he had taken possession of when it was discarded by its previous owners, trickling water under the leaves of his small crop of food and the wildflowers he'd managed to get to take root around the one room shed he lived in. After resting and letting the pain in his legs ease a little he had been preparing to gather his tools and head nearer the center of town so he could sit and keep an eye on the children for the busy parents while he whittled on tools or toys. Most days he'd tell stories, sometimes teach the children letters and writing or the little of mathematics that he knew. The parents repaid him with leftover food, old clothing, shards of colored glass, bits of metal, and sometimes even rocks with strange spiraled creatures fossilized in them that they found on the plain. But that day a group of people came to him and calmly explained that since his legs were lame and he contributed nothing of real value to the town he would have to die.
Spitting out dust, Caliban looked toward the town. The dust covered it like a veil and he could not pick out a single building or landmark. If he went back, if he could walk that far, would they just put him back on a horse and return him to this spot? Pulling his shirt collar over his mouth and nose, he turned to look in the opposite direction. Mercy Rock jutted out of the ground, sharp black lines cut clearly in the restless movements of the dust-filled wind. Some people said there was a spring there, that had poured clean water into the base of the rock since the time when the plain was green with living plants and the wind blew clean too, no dust to choke the throat and scratch the eyes.
Mercy Rock was also the lair of the beast.
Twice the height of a grown man at the shoulder, the beast was scaled like a lizard, they said, those who claimed to have seen it. Some said it was big enough to snap up a horse, rider and all, with his bird-like beak and make of it no more than a mouthful. One the rare nights the wind died it was said you could hear it's call, a strange, grieving cry that sounded nearly human. It cried when it was hungry, the stories went, and calmed the wind so it would not interfere with its hunt. When it was fed it would sleep and when it slept it would rain. There was little to eat on the plain now, so the beast must be hungry and discontent and since it was discontent the rain would not fall. Older stories, told by grandparents who heard them from their grandparents, said the beast flew on leather wings like a bat's and the beating of its wings was what stirred up the winds and raised the dust, and that if you went out on the plain you could see it flying, a shadow is the hazed sky. Few had claimed to see if fly in this generation, so perhaps it was at the mercy of the wind and not its source.
Just the last year, though, a traveler who had risked crossing the plain to speed her journey, had come out of the billowing dust with new stories of an oasis at Mercy Rock, just like the old stories. Clear water, cold to the touch, and tender green plants clinging to the edges of it.
"Didn't stay long," the traveler said, accepting another drink from the townspeople that had gathered at the end of the day to hear what news she might bring, "There was a hole in the side of the rocks, where two slabs of rock leaned on each other to make a triangle, and I could hear something moving in it. Something that wasn't just the wind in the rocks. Scratching and dragging." The traveler shook her head, "I caught my breath, refilled my water and made for here. Yes, scratching and dragging and . . . a sound like a beast sighing, like how a dog does, only it was deep, like something bigger. A great deal bigger."
So, there was possibly a monster at Mercy Rock but definitely water. And Mercy Rock was where the townspeople wanted Caliban to end up anyway, in the gut of a monster. Pushing himself to his feet, testing how his weight felt on his aching knees, he turned his face to Mercy Rock, and started walking.
He retched up water, instinctively gasped to try and fill his lungs with air and instead choked again, chest and shoulders heaving with a desperate, blind drive to keep breathing. For a time that seemed endless he was at the mercy the convulsions of his body trying to expel the water and when they finally eased he went limp, every screaming muscle that had been corded with fear going slack and letting him slump forward when he didn't even remember sitting up. A feeble pang of fear stabbed him when he thought he was about to fall face-down in the water and begin the whole wretched process over again. Somehow he did not, and collapsed on his side, shoulder pushed against wet, gritty rock, and his entire body aching and burning, every muscle trembling so violently he felt like someone was bodily shaking him.
Panic had sent his thoughts scattering like birds startled into flight and they circled and doubled-back and zigzagged and refused to settle to any task greater than thinking about how much he hurt. The sun had beat down on his skin until he thought the skin on his face was drying to paper thinness and soon it would split and peel from his skull. Dust blasted him, sanding his skin raw and digging grains into his flesh line pinpoints of pain, and his legs were on fire, each step felt like it was ripping muscles from his bones and that soon he would fall, useless shreds of muscles dangling loose and unable to propel his bones one step further.
There had been dreams while Caliban walked or crawled, faced always toward the black shard of rock that never seemed to grow nearer. With his eyes open Caliban had seen wagons rattle by drawn by monstrous lizards that cried in the voices of little children. The unyielding ground beneath its restless layer of dust softened and Caliban's feet sank into moist dirt rich with the smell of crushed grass only for it to snap back to iron-hardness and send him stumbling. Out of the corner of his eyes he saw his father chipping at the ground with a hoe, his face averted from Caliban so that he could only see his slender back and the way his dark, blue-tinted hands with their pale palms and fingernails grasped and moved the hoe's wooden handle and how the muscles tightened when the blade struck the ground, chipping the blade and leaving the ground unchanged. The dust blew up curtains to cover the waking dreams but there was always another waiting for him. The townspeople dogged his steps, grabbing his arms and shoulders to yank him away from his path to the refuge of Mercy Rock. One held his walking stick out to him and snatched it away again when he reached out to take it. Women thanked him for minding their children, saying Caliban was such a blessing, such a help, they didn't know what they'd do without him, and the words were filled with mockery and behind the words he could hear their thoughts and they thought him useless, a beggar too foolish to understand that his life was a hollow imitation of real people and that he did not feel pain or love as deeply and truly as they did.
Caliban wandered through the scorching plain and wallowed, submerged in the water and without air, each in turn, never sure which was real or a nightmare, or if they were both true and he had died, fallen into the eternal suffering of hell. He didn't know when he stumbled out of the nightmares, only coming to the slow realization that the hard rock under his shoulder had remained solid and real for awhile and that the glare of the sun on the stark plain no longer burned his eyes. His blurred gaze was fixed on a slab of dark rock that he seemed to have taken for a pillow.
He tried to move his head and look around. This action turned out to be ill-advised and he squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his teeth to ride out the headache that banged away inside his skull. With great caution he braved another look around and found very little to reward the tremendous effort. He was slumped in a pool of water, upper body resting on one of the rocks that were laid around it. When he touched the bottom of the pool he felt the seams between rocks that seem to have been deliberately laid to line the pool. Outside the pool that ground was packed down and smoothed, raising slightly as they met the rough, black walls that rounded above Caliban in a crude arch, lowering as it led toward the far side of the room where light from some unseen source turned the walls chalky gray.
It was from that side of the room that Caliban heard a slithering noise that caused his stomach to clench and heart to slam into his ribs. He couldn't explain the fear that gripped him. Maybe it was from the influence of nightmares that had yet to fully clear from his tired mind, but he imagined snakes, twice as long as he was tall, winding their way to inspect the tastiness of the helpless victim in the pool, or one of the massive scavenger birds that circled dying animals on the plains, waiting for them to stop moving. A scratching, like what bird claws on hard ground might sound like, fueled this fear and Caliban struggled to pull himself out of the pool and retreat from the noise, but his weak body was as heavy as if he had soaked up the water like a heap of dirty laundry on wash day. The chalky gray patch of wall was cut into by a shadow that bobbed with each slither of something dragging across the ground. Shoved into the farthest end of the pool, Caliban felt the burning pain of his exhausted body drawing itself tight with fear and the air he had fought so hard for was suddenly in short supply.
An eye, black as obsidian and as big as Caliban's hand, floated in the air, it's gaze fixed directly on Caliban. Barely able to breathe, he didn't even dare blink, afraid that in the brief darkness of his eyelids closing that whatever creature the eye belonged to would seize the opportunity to lunge.
The eye blinked.
Somehow, some spell was broken and Caliban could see the eye was not hovering in the air independently. When the eye vanished he could see that it was resting in a head colored gray and black that, thanks to a trick of the lighting, seemed to blur into the similarly colored wall behind it. The eye opened and the head tilted, letting Caliban see it's long, slender head, and bird-like beak that had a dull shine when the light glanced off it. The beak opened and Caliban shoved himself backwards, fighting to get even an inch further away from the reach of that point on the downward curve of the beak. The creature came no closer, just let out a cry that made Caliban flinch. It cried out again, softer this time, and in a way that sounded eerily like a human voice. He stared, wide-eyed, an unable to move except for the uncontrollable trembling that seized his entire body. The creature ducked its head and it looked up from underneath ridged brows that tilted up where they met and gave the creature a pensive, almost foolish look. It looked at him in silence. The eyes closed and the creature let out a deep, whooshing sigh. Like a dog did, only bigger, A great deal bigger.
The ridge above the creature's eyes lowered, changing the foolish look to a stern glare, something like the looks on the faces of the townswomen when they'd caught a child slacking in their chores and were about to deliver a few sharp words to get things running right again. The beak opened and a deep, resonating voice came out, saying quite clearly, "How are you feeling?"
For a second Caliban felt his body freeze in place and his mind stall, unable to understand what it was hearing. Then his arms, braced to push him back against the edge of the pool, gave out and he fell back into the water, splashing and sputtering.
Hands grabbed Caliban under his shoulders and lifted him free of the pool and onto the hard dirt floor. Caliban looked back over his shoulder to see who had moved him and saw no one. He looked back to the creature and found it had not moved. It looked at Caliban impassively until he was breathing in a normal rhythm and was as still as his trembling body could allow him to be.
"You are my guest," it said, "Be at ease." And having said this it withdrew it's head and disappeared from Caliban's sight.
Its shadow, however, lingered within the piece of light that brightened the wall, telling Caliban that it had not gone far. His head swam as if the water of the pool had filled it and now sloshed around, washing away any effort he made to bring order to his thoughts. Seeing that the creature blocked the way outside he dragged himself to his feet to see if the cave he was in had other exits, even though he was aware that his earlier inspection had shown him nothing but solid rock walls. This assumption turned out to be false, for there was a hole in the wall furthest from the exit, cut and polished in a round arch slightly higher and grander than an ordinary door. Shaking hard enough to set his teeth chattering, Caliban braced his legs, stiff and sore and burning, and shoved himself toward the hole, leaning heavily on the wall as he did so.
Through the arch was a passageway and unlike the rough walls outside here the stone had been cut smooth and polished to mirror finish, dimly reflecting back the whites of Caliban's fright-widened eyes. The floor was smooth rock too and it was cool on his dusty bare feet. Ahead were steady white spots of light that came from niches in the walls that housed round balls like tiny full moons that seemed to be some sort of lamp. Too grateful for the light to question it, Caliban walked down the passage for what might have been a few minutes but also might have just seemed that long with pain distorting his senses. He was aware that there were more entrances, he found each one when the wall supporting him disappeared and he had to trudge two or three steps until it reappeared. He did not look inside, even though they were all lit, he wanted an exit and somehow knew that none of the rooms he passed would be one. The hall had looked endless, the lights illuminating only where he walked. When he looked back the lights he had passed had been extinguished and only the faint light from the place he had entered was visible. He faced forward again, to continue down the endless passage, and stopped in surprise. The passage ended only a few steps in front of him, leading into a brightly lit room, appearing there as if shoved in front of him by some impatient force that was tired of him passing by all the other rooms without appreciating them.
With no choice left to him Caliban staggered into the room, eyes seeking a door or an archway that would led him past it and out of this place. The walls were solid. He trailed along them, leaning on furniture he didn't really see, dragging his hand on the wall, looking for anything, even a crack, to guide him. There was a bed, Caliban noticed it when his knees hit it and he lurched forward, throwing his hand out to save himself from falling. His hands sank into soft blankets and he gathered up handfuls in his clenched fists while fought through the pain and dizziness that tried to rule him. There was no way out except past the monster by the pool.
Perhaps he simply didn't have the strength to despair, but Caliban felt an urge to lay down and sleep more strongly than any need to run or hide. The blankets were soft, thick, and clean and he imagined how wonderful it would be to burrow into them and dive into a sleep so deep that pain could not follow. Some trace amount of resistance stopped him from immediate indulgence, and Caliban stepped back to the arch and leaned against it, rummaging in his pockets and see if the contents had survived his hellish trek and ignominious bath. He was rewarded with a handful of oddments, beads made of glass, clay, and wood, tiny crystals, river-smoothed rocks, and pieces of brightly colored glass. Kneeling was easy, his entire body was inclined to collapse downward to the floor, but the smack of his knees on the floor left him struggling to breath while a new wave of pain washed over him. With the infinite caution of someone who knew how unsteady his hands were he placed his little trinkets in a line across the entrance to the room, touching each one with a gentle fingertip after it was set down. In the middle he placed a little fossil, a spiral creature. The unused oddments he left scattered on the floor, he had no strength left to spare for them. He did not even have the strength to stand again and crawled the small, excruciating distant to the bed. He could not pull himself up onto it and found himself crying in the hopeless way of a child whose limited means have been exhausted and has had to fall back on the instinct to wail and hope someone else would solve its troubles.
On the edge of fading consciousness Caliban thought he felt himself being lifted and placed gently under the covers of the bed. For some reason he thought the hands that helped him were the same that pulled him out of the pool. The vague impression melted away and Caliban thought nothing more.
***
The few memories Caliban had of his family were like time-smoothed stones that clicked gently together in his hand, details forgotten but the core still solid and lasting. The closest thing he had to a memory of his entire family together was of when he was very small, still small enough to be picked up, carried around and cuddled by any passing member of the family that felt inclined. He was sitting on the floor, a thick rag rug of dark blue and bleached white cushioning him, protecting him from the pain in his legs that afflicted him since the beginning of memory. A toy was in his hand but his attention was on the window, his head tipped back to look at the white, ruffle-edge curtains that glowed with the light of the early morning sun, suffusing the room with gentle light and striking the pieces of crystal on the windowsill and scattering flakes of light on the ceiling and floor. He knew that somewhere behind him his family were all doing the things that kept grownups busy and he knew that if he turned they would all be there, that if he cried out they would come running to him, feeling the comfortable security of a loved child. The memory tapered away into a feeling that someone behind him was about to pick him up and tuck him into a gentle hug and-
From where he lay on his back in bed Caliban could see white fabric fluttering beside him, light from some unseen lamp making the sheet of white glow like the curtains in his memory did, like they were holding back the sun with their delicate weave. He shut his eyes again and held on to the comfort of his memories. Another, business-like part of his mind automatically evaluated the pain in his hips and knees as he made a few inquiring wiggles. In a dreamy way he was pleased to find out that it seemed to be a Good Day. Sitting up and sliding his feet out from under the blankets he rested them on the floor an wiggled his toes, feeling a thick rug or carpet protecting him from the cold floor. Still dreamy, he stood up and walked around the room, ignoring his aches, and taking in everything around him. A little table with spindly curled legs held a collection of tan pottery jars painted in patterns of black and deep blues and an array of clear glass bottles of reds, greens, and purples, each with a little stopper like a crystal. On the wall behind them was a gray blanket or rug with a pattern assembled of squares and lines that overlapped and twisted around each other. By the bed the white curtain hung from the ceiling and brushed the floor. When Caliban moved it aside he found and alcove containing a chest of a similar kind to the one his parents had kept at the end of their bed to hold clothing and linens, only theirs had been a simple rectangular shape with a few flowers stamped on the lid while this one was of some rich, dark wood, the sides curved inward like the box was holding its breath, a bold repeating pattern of triangles carved over the lid and little triangle latch that shone yellow in the light hanging above it in the alcove.
Running his fingertips alone the smooth planed edge of the chest, he let his touch slide to the latch and fit his fingernail under the edge and flick it open. Inside the box was clothes. He pulled out a pair of deep blue pants and noticed they were well made and that the embroidery near the bottoms of the legs picked out in gold were of a far better quality than he had ever seen before. He dropped them, leaving them with one leg trailing out of the box, and went to look at a golden dish by the bed. The dish contained his oddments, or, at least, those that he had not used to guard the door. They were still lined up across the rooms entrance, seemingly untouched.
An almost imperceptible click had Caliban turning back to look at the alcove with the chest. The top had closed, maybe fallen back into place. But the pants were no longer hanging out of it. He went over and flicked the latch with his fingernail and raised the lid once again. The pants were inside, neatly folded.
Somehow the only thing Caliban felt was a sort of quiet curiosity and he merely said, "Hello? Who is it?"
Whispers rose from the corners of the room, more felt than heard, like curtains brushing the windowsill, or the change in the air that pressed down on your eardrums when the weather suddenly shifted, or voices in another room you could hear but not understand. A touch of air brushed across his cheek and his hand flew up to cover the spot, but there was another touch on the other side of his face, as light as an insects feet glancing off your skin. Touches on his hands, his arms, the back of his neck, and finally a feeling on his face like the memory of the pressure of someone cradling his face in their hands.
The whispers were distorted with an uneven note of laughter and Caliban could hear a voice in front of him say, "Oh, my, isn't this a prety one?"
The calm Caliban had felt since he woke up flew away like a wisp of grass caught up by the wind and in its place bewildered terror descended. He caught up a handful of his trinkets from the dish, scrabbling through them until an unremarkable little rock, rough and uneven, came to hand. He squeezed it tight in his fist and ran from the room, crossing the ineffective barrier he had laid across the entrance. He was pursued by a fluttering of whispers and the sensation of something tugging on his sleeves.
Don't let them see, he thought, clutching the rock and willing himself unseen, unheard, as his father had taught him long ago, as he had the day the townspeople came to take him onto the plain as an offering to the beast. It had nearly succeeded in turning their eyes aside but one of them got impatient and pounded on the shed door, shouting threats. The others hushed her but the noise had startled Caliban and the stone had fallen from his hand, its power broken.
The black passage with its soft white full moons of light gave way to the merciless glare of the noon sun over the empty plain so suddenly that Caliban felt he had been physically struck and he reeled, losing his footing and twisting his knee to pitch him forward into the dust. He kept his fist closed on the rock even while he rolled on the ground, old pains and new hurts colliding. He got himself to his feet, grit in his eyes, up his nose, and between his teeth. Behind him rose Mercy Rock, solid and washed out to gray in the sun. There was no sign of a hole or cave that would lead to black passageways, just a slab of rock.
A sound tickled at the edge of his hearing. He whirled, vainly seeking the source, afraid it was more of the invisible whisperers. It wasn't. I was a melody. But when he listened more closely it wasn't. The corners of his eyes caught a glimpse of something flying past him to the right, then to the left, and the right again, but he could not make out what it was. For a moment he saw the loom his father had woven on, remembering the soft, efficient little sounds of the yarn building length and pattern. In the blank, shifting dust threads moved in a melody, building on each other, twisting, coming together to form-
The melody cracked, like the string of an instrument snapping, like yarn tangling on the loom, fouling up the pattern with a knot. And in the midst of the failing weave there was a wail of anguish, not heard but felt in a chill that struck Caliban to his bones and overwhelmed him with a sense of not just one sorrowful tragedy but a host of them, repeated over and over in music cut short and weaving tangled and a struggle to bring it all back to rights and failing in the attempt, again and again and again . . .
Caliban clapped his hands over his ears and squeezed his eyes shut but the tragedy washed over his skin like he was being dragged through bushes full of thorns, and he smelled it like the fresh blood of a slaughtered animal and tasted it like rotten meat on his tongue.
And without warning, it stopped, and Caliban was left sobbing into the silence.
"What are you doing here?"
The voice was not raised in a shout, but it reverberated through the ground, through Mercy Rock, coming from everywhere and shocking Caliban into biting his tongue mid-sob, blood in his mouth like the blood in the broken melody. He realized his hands were empty and the rock had fallen to the ground. It had split in two to reveal it was hollow and lined with purple crystals that had turned dull in the dust. He snatched them up and fit the two halves together to hide the crystals, to will himself hidden too.
"You think your little trick will work twice?"
Something slammed into the ground in front of Caliban, throwing up a cloud of dust and knocking him back, the rock falling from his hand once more and becoming lost in the dust. Something moved in the cloud, something big enough for its movement to make the ground shake and shiver. Down from the height of the cloud came a beaked face, materializing like the dust had taken on a more solid form. The beak thrust itself inches from Caliban's face and he staggered and fell, sitting down hard on the ground like a clumsy child. He could see the monster's feet now, with long scaly digits like a bird, tipped with black claws. What should have invoked fresh fear in Caliban instead became frustration. It was just one thing after another, more terror, more crawling in the dirt, more pain to endure. It wasn't courage let him speak, but the peevishness of being too tired and hurting too much to care anymore.
"I don't even want to be here! If you're going to eat me then eat me already! It's what I'm here for, it's the only thing I'm good for. Tricks? I'm tired of disappearing doors and whispering ghosts and all your tricks. Just eat me and give them their damn rain!"
He stared up at the monster, blinking back tears and trying not to sob. It stared back, the ridge over its eyes tilted up baffled, foolish expression. It appeared to collect itself and a frown cut away the foolish look. When it spoke its voice no longer shook the air.
"I don't eat living things." It said in a tone that said it was being patient but wanted you to know it was offended.
Hugging his knees to stop the shaking that seized his tired body, Caliban asked, a little confused and little petulant, "So you'll kill me first and then eat me?"
It inhaled deeply, shutting its beak with a snap. After some brief, internal struggle, it said, "I am not going to harm you. You are my guest."
"What does that mean?"
The monster tossed its head and huffed out a long, deep sigh. It turned away, putting some distance between them and allowing Caliban to see it in its entirety as the dust settled. It's feet and beak were like a bird's but it was four-legged and had a long, thin body and legs like a cat, even a thin tail with its end flicking as the monster settled itself facing Caliban. As it's body lowered a pair of wings unfurled themselves slightly over it's back, the left one hanging lower than the right and did not seem to fold itself up as neatly as it's pair. All over the thing was mottled white and gray and at rest its still form began to fade into the dusty landscape.
"It means," the monster continued, crossing its front legs and lowering its head to rest on them, "That I have extended my hospitality to you and that no harm will come to you while under my protection."
"Oh." Caliban said. "Why?"
"Most people don't ask why."
"I-well, it's an odd situation. It isn't, um, expected."
"Just know that as long as you respect me and my home you will be safe here. That is the contract. I will not count your little trick as a violation but if it is repeated I may not be so generous."
"It's not a trick--um. Would you eat me then? If I broke the contract?"
Caliban didn't think the monster actually rolled its eyes but it managed to give the impression that it did. Patiently it said, "I would simply no longer guarantee your safety. Whatever you run afoul of will be none of my concern."
Hands still shaking, Caliban reached for his geode and checked it for cracks and chips. "I don't have to stay?"
"No."
"But I don't have to leave?"
"No."
"And I'm safe?"
"Yes."
Caliban considered these assurances, the whispering ghosts in the bedroom, the possible reactions of the townspeople if he returned and no rain came. He shoved it all to one side and focused on his most immediate need.
"Do you have a walking stick I could borrow?" He asked the gray monster that styled itself his host, "I don't think I can stand up without one."
*leaning on the sink and staring at myself in the bathroom mirror* you know you can skip right? you know you can just write the parts you want to you don't have to write it like the first draft is the final draft? You can info-dump in forced exposition you can just write fun conversations you can just do that in the silly thing that's just for fun please-
The formation of rocks was the highest point near the village. It jutted up in the middle of a flat plain with mounds of low-lying plants laying over the ground in ripples of emerald velvet. Beneath the shade of the rocks the plants thinned away into a pale sand hollow that was filled cool water from a spring trickling beneath the rocks. At the top of the rocks the sun and wind had scoured them bare and at the height of the day heat rose off it like an oven and the touch of it burned.
The old woman scaling the rocks had wrapped her hands in cloth, twisted and frayed fabric over twisted fingers, in order to protect herself from the worst of the heat. Her dress was plain and well-worn but around her head and shoulders she had wrapped a scarf woven in a delicate pattern of red flowers on a turquoise background and the fabric caught the sun in a silken shimmer.
"This is pointless." A second woman, younger than the first, stood tall and straight a little ways behind the first. Her dress was of fine, colorful cloth that was woven with intricate patterns and decorated with embroidery and beads. The ends of the scarf around her head had beads tied into the fringe and they clicked and glittered in the wind that endlessly blew over the rocks as if trying to wear them down to match the flatness of the plain below.
"It's none of your business, that's what it is," the old woman snapped.
"You'll kill yourself, dragging yourself up here in the sun."
"And you'll kill me if I stay below."
"We agreed-"
"You decided and made everyone else do as you said."
The younger woman frowned. Her thick, black brows drew themselves flat and a line almost as dark deepened between them. She continued to follow the older woman, taking easy steps where the older woman slipped and struggled, banging her knees on the rocks. "We agreed," she began again, "that the Signs pointed this way. Hard times are coming, food and water will dwindle and there won't be enough to see us through. The Signs pointed to you and the others, those whose time is already drawing to a close."
"I've got years left in me," the older woman said, stopping to take a breath, having been forced almost to crawl across the rock in her exhaustion.
"There are children who have their lives still before them, yet to do all the things you have already done. You've had your share. They are the future, you are the past."
"I'm the now!" the old woman twisted around to better shout at her pursuer, her face running with sweat and her lips cracked, "All of us are the now! Times will get hard, sure, but they aren't yet. When they come around you can kill me then but I'm not dying when our food stores are bulging with plenty. And why me? Why not a child who doesn't even know what they'll miss?"
"You're worn beyond use. Your legs can barely carry you."
"They still get me where I want to go, just as they are now." The woman turned away and continued her climbing.
"Your fingers are too twisted to spin thread or weave cloth." The younger woman persisted, relentlessly following.
"I can stir a pot, hold a knife, use a hoe to til my garden."
"You offer us nothing."
"Why should I?"
The old woman had reached the top of the rocks. She stood, hunched and fragile, the wind tearing at the hem of her dress and ends of her scarf. She rounded on the younger woman and shouted again, "Why should I? I want to live! I want to eat sweet things and watch the young ones dance while I keep time on the little drum my husband made for me when I grew too old to dance myself. I want to live until my sons come home again and bring me gifts and stories. I want them to see me wear the silk scarf they sent me and know as they've thought of me I've thought of them. I have fewer years but they're mine and I want every one of them. You have no right to take them."
The younger woman did not speak immediately. She let the wind take away the last traces of the old woman's words until there was space for her own. Shoulders straight, her face dark and impassive, she said, "It has been decided."
The old woman pressed her lips together, her face pinched with exhaustion, pain, and sorrow. She straightened her body as much as her twisted bones would allow and looked into the younger woman's eyes with a steady gaze. "I defy your Signs."
The younger woman was unmoved. "It does not matter."
"I wish ill on them, that they might twist and lose their form."
"They will not."
"I wish ill on them, that what they warn of becomes truth and they are hollow and useless because they cannot change your fate."
"If our fate is decided then it is decided that we will live and thrive."
"You will suffer and regret! You need my life to pave your path of good fortune and I deny you it. With what little worth is left in me I wish your fate twisted."
"You cannot harm us."
"But I can harm you."
The cold certainty of the old woman, her body trembling with emotion but her words firm as the rocks beneath their feet, made the younger woman take a step back. Power laced the old woman's words, power that the younger woman had not know she could call upon.
"Yes," the old woman said, her voice rising, "You cruel, inhuman thing. I wish your fate twisted, that you match in your body what you are in your heart, I wish suffering without reason and without end."
"Your wish is incomplete," the younger woman said, once again standing firm and impassive, drawing strength from her own power, the power that she used to hold herself above all other people and to direct their fates as she decided, "It cannot be without end."
"True, true. If your suffering is to end then you must be as useless as me, with nothing to offer, no worth, and your must be loved in spite of it. Only then will I be satisfied."
The younger woman had no time to speak words to counter this curse, for the older woman rushed across the top of the rocks with speed and nimbleness that defied her years. It was the last of her years, exchanged for this last burst of strength and to power the curse. The years that should have threaded into the path shown by the Signs and being denied them the path would twist.
For a moment the ragged little bundle that was the old woman, her head scarf shimmering as the wind rippled through it, was caught up by the wind and held for the briefest moments above the rocks, above the younger woman, above all the land that the eye could see.
The dust thrown up by the horses' steady plod filled the air around them completely in a blinding yellow-white, eye stinging cloud. When Caliban was set down he almost thought the ground would be nothing but a mass of shifting, scratching dust and not the iron-hard surface that his feet actually landed on. The impact from the short distance from horseback to the ground slammed through his knees and hips and he crumpled, the pain too overwhelming for him to catch himself or even gasp.
"Sorry," the man riding the horse said, his truly apologetic tone muffled but not hidden by the cloth wrapped around the lower half of his face. Caliban wished the man had cursed at him instead. Harsh scorn, a mocking vulgarity, or even a punch or a kick would have let Caliban give voice to equal hate, equal ugliness. The escort party, one to carry Caliban, two to guard any attempt of Caliban to flee, had been nothing but polite and a little apologetic the whole ride out from town. More than once over the past few days someone was saying, "Let's be civilized about this," or "This doesn't have to be ugly," and any hint of anger or resistance from Caliban was met with uncomfortable disapproval, as if to a child that was being willfully difficult.
Now, in that civilized way, the escort was dropping Caliban in the open plain and allowed him no water, nothing to cover his head, not even his walking stick. He wondered where it was, the stick that he had let dry for two years before shaping it into a serviceable tool and into it carved patterns that pleased him. Flowers, this time he had carved flowers and painted them with what colors he could concoct from the plants from his garden or foraged on the edges of town where dust hadn't yet wiped out all the plants.
"Well, then," said one of the escort, pulling the reins of their horse to turn its head back toward town, and given a respectful tip of his dust-powdered hat to Caliban's crumpled form in the dust. "You have our thanks." By the time Caliban got himself sitting up the three horses and riders were smudges in the dust and the rising wind whipped away any sound of hooves or bridles or any possible last words addressed to Caliban. The ground was hot through Caliban's clothing and dust scoured cruel, feverish rawness in his mouth and eyes and yet in the pit of his stomach was lump of cold like frozen metal. Until he was dropped from the back of the horse he hadn't let himself believe that this was being done to him.
"The railway might not come through after all, you see. They're looking at towns further away, where it's still green and people will settle and do business. If we just got some rain . . ."
Many different people had explained it to Caliban, that if the beast wasn't placated the rain wouldn't fall, and it was the collective failing of the town for having neglected it for two generations and they had to make up for it now, they all had to do their part. Caliban was of the opinion that the allotment of responsibility was not evenly distributed.
It had been another hot, dry day, the day they decided. He had spent the morning tending his little garden, dragging water from the well in the rusty bucket he had taken possession of when it was discarded by its previous owners, trickling water under the leaves of his small crop of food and the wildflowers he'd managed to get to take root around the one room shed he lived in. After resting and letting the pain in his legs ease a little he had been preparing to gather his tools and head nearer the center of town so he could sit and keep an eye on the children for the busy parents while he whittled on tools or toys. Most days he'd tell stories, sometimes teach the children letters and writing or the little of mathematics that he knew. The parents repaid him with leftover food, old clothing, shards of colored glass, bits of metal, and sometimes even rocks with strange spiraled creatures fossilized in them that they found on the plain. But that day a group of people came to him and calmly explained that since his legs were lame and he contributed nothing of real value to the town he would have to die.
Spitting out dust, Caliban looked toward the town. The dust covered it like a veil and he could not pick out a single building or landmark. If he went back, if he could walk that far, would they just put him back on a horse and return him to this spot? Pulling his shirt collar over his mouth and nose, he turned to look in the opposite direction. Mercy Rock jutted out of the ground, sharp black lines cut clearly in the restless movements of the dust-filled wind. Some people said there was a spring there, that had poured clean water into the base of the rock since the time when the plain was green with living plants and the wind blew clean too, no dust to choke the throat and scratch the eyes.
Mercy Rock was also the lair of the beast.
Twice the height of a grown man at the shoulder, the beast was scaled like a lizard, they said, those who claimed to have seen it. Some said it was big enough to snap up a horse, rider and all, with his bird-like beak and make of it no more than a mouthful. One the rare nights the wind died it was said you could hear it's call, a strange, grieving cry that sounded nearly human. It cried when it was hungry, the stories went, and calmed the wind so it would not interfere with its hunt. When it was fed it would sleep and when it slept it would rain. There was little to eat on the plain now, so the beast must be hungry and discontent and since it was discontent the rain would not fall. Older stories, told by grandparents who heard them from their grandparents, said the beast flew on leather wings like a bat's and the beating of its wings was what stirred up the winds and raised the dust, and that if you went out on the plain you could see it flying, a shadow is the hazed sky. Few had claimed to see if fly in this generation, so perhaps it was at the mercy of the wind and not its source.
Just the last year, though, a traveler who had risked crossing the plain to speed her journey, had come out of the billowing dust with new stories of an oasis at Mercy Rock, just like the old stories. Clear water, cold to the touch, and tender green plants clinging to the edges of it.
"Didn't stay long," the traveler said, accepting another drink from the townspeople that had gathered at the end of the day to hear what news she might bring, "There was a hole in the side of the rocks, where two slabs of rock leaned on each other to make a triangle, and I could hear something moving in it. Something that wasn't just the wind in the rocks. Scratching and dragging." The traveler shook her head, "I caught my breath, refilled my water and made for here. Yes, scratching and dragging and . . . a sound like a beast sighing, like how a dog does, only it was deep, like something bigger. A great deal bigger."
So, there was possibly a monster at Mercy Rock but definitely water. And Mercy Rock was where the townspeople wanted Caliban to end up anyway, in the gut of a monster. Pushing himself to his feet, testing how his weight felt on his aching knees, he turned his face to Mercy Rock, and started walking.
He retched up water, instinctively gasped to try and fill his lungs with air and instead choked again, chest and shoulders heaving with a desperate, blind drive to keep breathing. For a time that seemed endless he was at the mercy the convulsions of his body trying to expel the water and when they finally eased he went limp, every screaming muscle that had been corded with fear going slack and letting him slump forward when he didn't even remember sitting up. A feeble pang of fear stabbed him when he thought he was about to fall face-down in the water and begin the whole wretched process over again. Somehow he did not, and collapsed on his side, shoulder pushed against wet, gritty rock, and his entire body aching and burning, every muscle trembling so violently he felt like someone was bodily shaking him.
Panic had sent his thoughts scattering like birds startled into flight and they circled and doubled-back and zigzagged and refused to settle to any task greater than thinking about how much he hurt. The sun had beat down on his skin until he thought the skin on his face was drying to paper thinness and soon it would split and peel from his skull. Dust blasted him, sanding his skin raw and digging grains into his flesh line pinpoints of pain, and his legs were on fire, each step felt like it was ripping muscles from his bones and that soon he would fall, useless shreds of muscles dangling loose and unable to propel his bones one step further.
There had been dreams while Caliban walked or crawled, faced always toward the black shard of rock that never seemed to grow nearer. With his eyes open Caliban had seen wagons rattle by drawn by monstrous lizards that cried in the voices of little children. The unyielding ground beneath its restless layer of dust softened and Caliban's feet sank into moist dirt rich with the smell of crushed grass only for it to snap back to iron-hardness and send him stumbling. Out of the corner of his eyes he saw his father chipping at the ground with a hoe, his face averted from Caliban so that he could only see his slender back and the way his dark, blue-tinted hands with their pale palms and fingernails grasped and moved the hoe's wooden handle and how the muscles tightened when the blade struck the ground, chipping the blade and leaving the ground unchanged. The dust blew up curtains to cover the waking dreams but there was always another waiting for him. The townspeople dogged his steps, grabbing his arms and shoulders to yank him away from his path to the refuge of Mercy Rock. One held his walking stick out to him and snatched it away again when he reached out to take it. Women thanked him for minding their children, saying Caliban was such a blessing, such a help, they didn't know what they'd do without him, and the words were filled with mockery and behind the words he could hear their thoughts and they thought him useless, a beggar too foolish to understand that his life was a hollow imitation of real people and that he did not feel pain or love as deeply and truly as they did.
Caliban wandered through the scorching plain and wallowed, submerged in the water and without air, each in turn, never sure which was real or a nightmare, or if they were both true and he had died, fallen into the eternal suffering of hell. He didn't know when he stumbled out of the nightmares, only coming to the slow realization that the hard rock under his shoulder had remained solid and real for awhile and that the glare of the sun on the stark plain no longer burned his eyes. His blurred gaze was fixed on a slab of dark rock that he seemed to have taken for a pillow.
He tried to move his head and look around. This action turned out to be ill-advised and he squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his teeth to ride out the headache that banged away inside his skull. With great caution he braved another look around and found very little to reward the tremendous effort. He was slumped in a pool of water, upper body resting on one of the rocks that were laid around it. When he touched the bottom of the pool he felt the seams between rocks that seem to have been deliberately laid to line the pool. Outside the pool that ground was packed down and smoothed, raising slightly as they met the rough, black walls that rounded above Caliban in a crude arch, lowering as it led toward the far side of the room where light from some unseen source turned the walls chalky gray.
It was from that side of the room that Caliban heard a slithering noise that caused his stomach to clench and heart to slam into his ribs. He couldn't explain the fear that gripped him. Maybe it was from the influence of nightmares that had yet to fully clear from his tired mind, but he imagined snakes, twice as long as he was tall, winding their way to inspect the tastiness of the helpless victim in the pool, or one of the massive scavenger birds that circled dying animals on the plains, waiting for them to stop moving. A scratching, like what bird claws on hard ground might sound like, fueled this fear and Caliban struggled to pull himself out of the pool and retreat from the noise, but his weak body was as heavy as if he had soaked up the water like a heap of dirty laundry on wash day. The chalky gray patch of wall was cut into by a shadow that bobbed with each slither of something dragging across the ground. Shoved into the farthest end of the pool, Caliban felt the burning pain of his exhausted body drawing itself tight with fear and the air he had fought so hard for was suddenly in short supply.
An eye, black as obsidian and as big as Caliban's hand, floated in the air, it's gaze fixed directly on Caliban. Barely able to breathe, he didn't even dare blink, afraid that in the brief darkness of his eyelids closing that whatever creature the eye belonged to would seize the opportunity to lunge.
The eye blinked.
Somehow, some spell was broken and Caliban could see the eye was not hovering in the air independently. When the eye vanished he could see that it was resting in a head colored gray and black that, thanks to a trick of the lighting, seemed to blur into the similarly colored wall behind it. The eye opened and the head tilted, letting Caliban see it's long, slender head, and bird-like beak that had a dull shine when the light glanced off it. The beak opened and Caliban shoved himself backwards, fighting to get even an inch further away from the reach of that point on the downward curve of the beak. The creature came no closer, just let out a cry that made Caliban flinch. It cried out again, softer this time, and in a way that sounded eerily like a human voice. He stared, wide-eyed, an unable to move except for the uncontrollable trembling that seized his entire body. The creature ducked its head and it looked up from underneath ridged brows that tilted up where they met and gave the creature a pensive, almost foolish look. It looked at him in silence. The eyes closed and the creature let out a deep, whooshing sigh. Like a dog did, only bigger, A great deal bigger.
The ridge above the creature's eyes lowered, changing the foolish look to a stern glare, something like the looks on the faces of the townswomen when they'd caught a child slacking in their chores and were about to deliver a few sharp words to get things running right again. The beak opened and a deep, resonating voice came out, saying quite clearly, "How are you feeling?"
For a second Caliban felt his body freeze in place and his mind stall, unable to understand what it was hearing. Then his arms, braced to push him back against the edge of the pool, gave out and he fell back into the water, splashing and sputtering.
Hands grabbed Caliban under his shoulders and lifted him free of the pool and onto the hard dirt floor. Caliban looked back over his shoulder to see who had moved him and saw no one. He looked back to the creature and found it had not moved. It looked at Caliban impassively until he was breathing in a normal rhythm and was as still as his trembling body could allow him to be.
"You are my guest," it said, "Be at ease." And having said this it withdrew it's head and disappeared from Caliban's sight.
Its shadow, however, lingered within the piece of light that brightened the wall, telling Caliban that it had not gone far. His head swam as if the water of the pool had filled it and now sloshed around, washing away any effort he made to bring order to his thoughts. Seeing that the creature blocked the way outside he dragged himself to his feet to see if the cave he was in had other exits, even though he was aware that his earlier inspection had shown him nothing but solid rock walls. This assumption turned out to be false, for there was a hole in the wall furthest from the exit, cut and polished in a round arch slightly higher and grander than an ordinary door. Shaking hard enough to set his teeth chattering, Caliban braced his legs, stiff and sore and burning, and shoved himself toward the hole, leaning heavily on the wall as he did so.
Through the arch was a passageway and unlike the rough walls outside here the stone had been cut smooth and polished to mirror finish, dimly reflecting back the whites of Caliban's fright-widened eyes. The floor was smooth rock too and it was cool on his dusty bare feet. Ahead were steady white spots of light that came from niches in the walls that housed round balls like tiny full moons that seemed to be some sort of lamp. Too grateful for the light to question it, Caliban walked down the passage for what might have been a few minutes but also might have just seemed that long with pain distorting his senses. He was aware that there were more entrances, he found each one when the wall supporting him disappeared and he had to trudge two or three steps until it reappeared. He did not look inside, even though they were all lit, he wanted an exit and somehow knew that none of the rooms he passed would be one. The hall had looked endless, the lights illuminating only where he walked. When he looked back the lights he had passed had been extinguished and only the faint light from the place he had entered was visible. He faced forward again, to continue down the endless passage, and stopped in surprise. The passage ended only a few steps in front of him, leading into a brightly lit room, appearing there as if shoved in front of him by some impatient force that was tired of him passing by all the other rooms without appreciating them.
With no choice left to him Caliban staggered into the room, eyes seeking a door or an archway that would led him past it and out of this place. The walls were solid. He trailed along them, leaning on furniture he didn't really see, dragging his hand on the wall, looking for anything, even a crack, to guide him. There was a bed, Caliban noticed it when his knees hit it and he lurched forward, throwing his hand out to save himself from falling. His hands sank into soft blankets and he gathered up handfuls in his clenched fists while fought through the pain and dizziness that tried to rule him. There was no way out except past the monster by the pool.
Perhaps he simply didn't have the strength to despair, but Caliban felt an urge to lay down and sleep more strongly than any need to run or hide. The blankets were soft, thick, and clean and he imagined how wonderful it would be to burrow into them and dive into a sleep so deep that pain could not follow. Some trace amount of resistance stopped him from immediate indulgence, and Caliban stepped back to the arch and leaned against it, rummaging in his pockets and see if the contents had survived his hellish trek and ignominious bath. He was rewarded with a handful of oddments, beads made of glass, clay, and wood, tiny crystals, river-smoothed rocks, and pieces of brightly colored glass. Kneeling was easy, his entire body was inclined to collapse downward to the floor, but the smack of his knees on the floor left him struggling to breath while a new wave of pain washed over him. With the infinite caution of someone who knew how unsteady his hands were he placed his little trinkets in a line across the entrance to the room, touching each one with a gentle fingertip after it was set down. In the middle he placed a little fossil, a spiral creature. The unused oddments he left scattered on the floor, he had no strength left to spare for them. He did not even have the strength to stand again and crawled the small, excruciating distant to the bed. He could not pull himself up onto it and found himself crying in the hopeless way of a child whose limited means have been exhausted and has had to fall back on the instinct to wail and hope someone else would solve its troubles.
On the edge of fading consciousness Caliban thought he felt himself being lifted and placed gently under the covers of the bed. For some reason he thought the hands that helped him were the same that pulled him out of the pool. The vague impression melted away and Caliban thought nothing more.
***
The few memories Caliban had of his family were like time-smoothed stones that clicked gently together in his hand, details forgotten but the core still solid and lasting. The closest thing he had to a memory of his entire family together was of when he was very small, still small enough to be picked up, carried around and cuddled by any passing member of the family that felt inclined. He was sitting on the floor, a thick rag rug of dark blue and bleached white cushioning him, protecting him from the pain in his legs that afflicted him since the beginning of memory. A toy was in his hand but his attention was on the window, his head tipped back to look at the white, ruffle-edge curtains that glowed with the light of the early morning sun, suffusing the room with gentle light and striking the pieces of crystal on the windowsill and scattering flakes of light on the ceiling and floor. He knew that somewhere behind him his family were all doing the things that kept grownups busy and he knew that if he turned they would all be there, that if he cried out they would come running to him, feeling the comfortable security of a loved child. The memory tapered away into a feeling that someone behind him was about to pick him up and tuck him into a gentle hug and-
From where he lay on his back in bed Caliban could see white fabric fluttering beside him, light from some unseen lamp making the sheet of white glow like the curtains in his memory did, like they were holding back the sun with their delicate weave. He shut his eyes again and held on to the comfort of his memories. Another, business-like part of his mind automatically evaluated the pain in his hips and knees as he made a few inquiring wiggles. In a dreamy way he was pleased to find out that it seemed to be a Good Day. Sitting up and sliding his feet out from under the blankets he rested them on the floor an wiggled his toes, feeling a thick rug or carpet protecting him from the cold floor. Still dreamy, he stood up and walked around the room, ignoring his aches, and taking in everything around him. A little table with spindly curled legs held a collection of tan pottery jars painted in patterns of black and deep blues and an array of clear glass bottles of reds, greens, and purples, each with a little stopper like a crystal. On the wall behind them was a gray blanket or rug with a pattern assembled of squares and lines that overlapped and twisted around each other. By the bed the white curtain hung from the ceiling and brushed the floor. When Caliban moved it aside he found and alcove containing a chest of a similar kind to the one his parents had kept at the end of their bed to hold clothing and linens, only theirs had been a simple rectangular shape with a few flowers stamped on the lid while this one was of some rich, dark wood, the sides curved inward like the box was holding its breath, a bold repeating pattern of triangles carved over the lid and little triangle latch that shone yellow in the light hanging above it in the alcove.
Running his fingertips alone the smooth planed edge of the chest, he let his touch slide to the latch and fit his fingernail under the edge and flick it open. Inside the box was clothes. He pulled out a pair of deep blue pants and noticed they were well made and that the embroidery near the bottoms of the legs picked out in gold were of a far better quality than he had ever seen before. He dropped them, leaving them with one leg trailing out of the box, and went to look at a golden dish by the bed. The dish contained his oddments, or, at least, those that he had not used to guard the door. They were still lined up across the rooms entrance, seemingly untouched.
An almost imperceptible click had Caliban turning back to look at the alcove with the chest. The top had closed, maybe fallen back into place. But the pants were no longer hanging out of it. He went over and flicked the latch with his fingernail and raised the lid once again. The pants were inside, neatly folded.
Somehow the only thing Caliban felt was a sort of quiet curiosity and he merely said, "Hello? Who is it?"
Whispers rose from the corners of the room, more felt than heard, like curtains brushing the windowsill, or the change in the air that pressed down on your eardrums when the weather suddenly shifted, or voices in another room you could hear but not understand. A touch of air brushed across his cheek and his hand flew up to cover the spot, but there was another touch on the other side of his face, as light as an insects feet glancing off your skin. Touches on his hands, his arms, the back of his neck, and finally a feeling on his face like the memory of the pressure of someone cradling his face in their hands.
The whispers were distorted with an uneven note of laughter and Caliban could hear a voice in front of him say, "Oh, my, isn't this a prety one?"
I'm trying to vary my sentence structure so it's more interesting to read but it just keeps turning out weird and unwieldy. Ah, well, practice is for that purpose.
The formation of rocks was the highest point near the village. It jutted up in the middle of a flat plain with mounds of low-lying plants laying over the ground in ripples of emerald velvet. Beneath the shade of the rocks the plants thinned away into a pale sand hollow that was filled cool water from a spring trickling beneath the rocks. At the top of the rocks the sun and wind had scoured them bare and at the height of the day heat rose off it like an oven and the touch of it burned.
The old woman scaling the rocks had wrapped her hands in cloth, twisted and frayed fabric over twisted fingers, in order to protect herself from the worst of the heat. Her dress was plain and well-worn but around her head and shoulders she had wrapped a scarf woven in a delicate pattern of red flowers on a turquoise background and the fabric caught the sun in a silken shimmer.
"This is pointless." A second woman, younger than the first, stood tall and straight a little ways behind the first. Her dress was of fine, colorful cloth that was woven with intricate patterns and decorated with embroidery and beads. The ends of the scarf around her head had beads tied into the fringe and they clicked and glittered in the wind that endlessly blew over the rocks as if trying to wear them down to match the flatness of the plain below.
"It's none of your business, that's what it is," the old woman snapped.
"You'll kill yourself, dragging yourself up here in the sun."
"And you'll kill me if I stay below."
"We agreed-"
"You decided and made everyone else do as you said."
The younger woman frowned. Her thick, black brows drew themselves flat and a line almost as dark deepened between them. She continued to follow the older woman, taking easy steps where the older woman slipped and struggled, banging her knees on the rocks. "We agreed," she began again, "that the Signs pointed this way. Hard times are coming, food and water will dwindle and there won't be enough to see us through. The Signs pointed to you and the others, those whose time is already drawing to a close."
"I've got years left in me," the older woman said, stopping to take a breath, having been forced almost to crawl across the rock in her exhaustion.
"There are children who have their lives still before them, yet to do all the things you have already done. You've had your share. They are the future, you are the past."
"I'm the now!" the old woman twisted around to better shout at her pursuer, her face running with sweat and her lips cracked, "All of us are the now! Times will get hard, sure, but they aren't yet. When they come around you can kill me then but I'm not dying when our food stores are bulging with plenty. And why me? Why not a child who doesn't even know what they'll miss?"
"You're worn beyond use. Your legs can barely carry you."
"They still get me where I want to go, just as they are now." The woman turned away and continued her climbing.
"Your fingers are too twisted to spin thread or weave cloth." The younger woman persisted, relentlessly following.
"I can stir a pot, hold a knife, use a hoe to til my garden."
"You offer us nothing."
"Why should I?"
The old woman had reached the top of the rocks. She stood, hunched and fragile, the wind tearing at the hem of her dress and ends of her scarf. She rounded on the younger woman and shouted again, "Why should I? I want to live! I want to eat sweet things and watch the young ones dance while I keep time on the little drum my husband made for me when I grew too old to dance myself. I want to live until my sons come home again and bring me gifts and stories. I want them to see me wear the silk scarf they sent me and know as they've thought of me I've thought of them. I have fewer years but they're mine and I want every one of them. You have no right to take them."
The younger woman did not speak immediately. She let the wind take away the last traces of the old woman's words until there was space for her own. Shoulders straight, her face dark and impassive, she said, "It has been decided."
The old woman pressed her lips together, her face pinched with exhaustion, pain, and sorrow. She straightened her body as much as her twisted bones would allow and looked into the younger woman's eyes with a steady gaze. "I defy your Signs."
The younger woman was unmoved. "It does not matter."
"I wish ill on them, that they might twist and lose their form."
"They will not."
"I wish ill on them, that what they warn of becomes truth and they are hollow and useless because they cannot change your fate."
"If our fate is decided then it is decided that we will live and thrive."
"You will suffer and regret! You need my life to pave your path of good fortune and I deny you it. With what little worth is left in me I wish your fate twisted."
"You cannot harm us."
"But I can harm you."
The cold certainty of the old woman, her body trembling with emotion but her words firm as the rocks beneath their feet, made the younger woman take a step back. Power laced the old woman's words, power that the younger woman had not know she could call upon.
"Yes," the old woman said, her voice rising, "You cruel, inhuman thing. I wish your fate twisted, that you match in your body what you are in your heart, I wish suffering without reason and without end."
"Your wish is incomplete," the younger woman said, once again standing firm and impassive, drawing strength from her own power, the power that she used to hold herself above all other people and to direct their fates as she decided, "It cannot be without end."
"True, true. If your suffering is to end then you must be as useless as me, with nothing to offer, no worth, and your must be loved in spite of it. Only then will I be satisfied."
The younger woman had no time to speak words to counter this curse, for the older woman rushed across the top of the rocks with speed and nimbleness that defied her years. It was the last of her years, exchanged for this last burst of strength and to power the curse. The years that should have threaded into the path shown by the Signs and being denied them the path would twist.
For a moment the ragged little bundle that was the old woman, her head scarf shimmering as the wind rippled through it, was caught up by the wind and held for the briefest moments above the rocks, above the younger woman, above all the land that the eye could see.
The dust thrown up by the horses' steady plod filled the air around them completely in a blinding yellow-white, eye stinging cloud. When Caliban was set down he almost thought the ground would be nothing but a mass of shifting, scratching dust and not the iron-hard surface that his feet actually landed on. The impact from the short distance from horseback to the ground slammed through his knees and hips and he crumpled, the pain too overwhelming for him to catch himself or even gasp.
"Sorry," the man riding the horse said, his truly apologetic tone muffled but not hidden by the cloth wrapped around the lower half of his face. Caliban wished the man had cursed at him instead. Harsh scorn, a mocking vulgarity, or even a punch or a kick would have let Caliban give voice to equal hate, equal ugliness. The escort party, one to carry Caliban, two to guard any attempt of Caliban to flee, had been nothing but polite and a little apologetic the whole ride out from town. More than once over the past few days someone was saying, "Let's be civilized about this," or "This doesn't have to be ugly," and any hint of anger or resistance from Caliban was met with uncomfortable disapproval, as if to a child that was being willfully difficult.
Now, in that civilized way, the escort was dropping Caliban in the open plain and allowed him no water, nothing to cover his head, not even his walking stick. He wondered where it was, the stick that he had let dry for two years before shaping it into a serviceable tool and into it carved patterns that pleased him. Flowers, this time he had carved flowers and painted them with what colors he could concoct from the plants from his garden or foraged on the edges of town where dust hadn't yet wiped out all the plants.
"Well, then," said one of the escort, pulling the reins of their horse to turn its head back toward town, and given a respectful tip of his dust-powdered hat to Caliban's crumpled form in the dust. "You have our thanks." By the time Caliban got himself sitting up the three horses and riders were smudges in the dust and the rising wind whipped away any sound of hooves or bridles or any possible last words addressed to Caliban. The ground was hot through Caliban's clothing and dust scoured cruel, feverish rawness in his mouth and eyes and yet in the pit of his stomach was lump of cold like frozen metal. Until he was dropped from the back of the horse he hadn't let himself believe that this was being done to him.
"The railway might not come through after all, you see. They're looking at towns further away, where it's still green and people will settle and do business. If we just got some rain . . ."
Many different people had explained it to Caliban, that if the beast wasn't placated the rain wouldn't fall, and it was the collective failing of the town for having neglected it for two generations and they had to make up for it now, they all had to do their part. Caliban was of the opinion that the allotment of responsibility was not evenly distributed.
It had been another hot, dry day, the day they decided. He had spent the morning tending his little garden, dragging water from the well in the rusty bucket he had taken possession of when it was discarded by its previous owners, trickling water under the leaves of his small crop of food and the wildflowers he'd managed to get to take root around the one room shed he lived in. After resting and letting the pain in his legs ease a little he had been preparing to gather his tools and head nearer the center of town so he could sit and keep an eye on the children for the busy parents while he whittled on tools or toys. Most days he'd tell stories, sometimes teach the children letters and writing or the little of mathematics that he knew. The parents repaid him with leftover food, old clothing, shards of colored glass, bits of metal, and sometimes even rocks with strange spiraled creatures fossilized in them that they found on the plain. But that day a group of people came to him and calmly explained that since his legs were lame and he contributed nothing of real value to the town he would have to die.
Spitting out dust, Caliban looked toward the town. The dust covered it like a veil and he could not pick out a single building or landmark. If he went back, if he could walk that far, would they just put him back on a horse and return him to this spot? Pulling his shirt collar over his mouth and nose, he turned to look in the opposite direction. Mercy Rock jutted out of the ground, sharp black lines cut clearly in the restless movements of the dust-filled wind. Some people said there was a spring there, that had poured clean water into the base of the rock since the time when the plain was green with living plants and the wind blew clean too, no dust to choke the throat and scratch the eyes.
Mercy Rock was also the lair of the beast.
Twice the height of a grown man at the shoulder, the beast was scaled like a lizard, they said, those who claimed to have seen it. Some said it was big enough to snap up a horse, rider and all, with his bird-like beak and make of it no more than a mouthful. One the rare nights the wind died it was said you could hear it's call, a strange, grieving cry that sounded nearly human. It cried when it was hungry, the stories went, and calmed the wind so it would not interfere with its hunt. When it was fed it would sleep and when it slept it would rain. There was little to eat on the plain now, so the beast must be hungry and discontent and since it was discontent the rain would not fall. Older stories, told by grandparents who heard them from their grandparents, said the beast flew on leather wings like a bat's and the beating of its wings was what stirred up the winds and raised the dust, and that if you went out on the plain you could see it flying, a shadow is the hazed sky. Few had claimed to see if fly in this generation, so perhaps it was at the mercy of the wind and not its source.
Just the last year, though, a traveler who had risked crossing the plain to speed her journey, had come out of the billowing dust with new stories of an oasis at Mercy Rock, just like the old stories. Clear water, cold to the touch, and tender green plants clinging to the edges of it.
"Didn't stay long," the traveler said, accepting another drink from the townspeople that had gathered at the end of the day to hear what news she might bring, "There was a hole in the side of the rocks, where two slabs of rock leaned on each other to make a triangle, and I could hear something moving in it. Something that wasn't just the wind in the rocks. Scratching and dragging." The traveler shook her head, "I caught my breath, refilled my water and made for here. Yes, scratching and dragging and . . . a sound like a beast sighing, like how a dog does, only it was deep, like something bigger. A great deal bigger."
So, there was possibly a monster at Mercy Rock but definitely water. And Mercy Rock was where the townspeople wanted Caliban to end up anyway, in the gut of a monster. Pushing himself to his feet, testing how his weight felt on his aching knees, he turned his face to Mercy Rock, and started walking.
He retched up water, instinctively gasped to try and fill his lungs with air and instead choked again, chest and shoulders heaving with a desperate, blind drive to keep breathing. For a time that seemed endless he was at the mercy the convulsions of his body trying to expel the water and when they finally eased he went limp, every screaming muscle that had been corded with fear going slack and letting him slump forward when he didn't even remember sitting up. A feeble pang of fear stabbed him when he thought he was about to fall face-down in the water and begin the whole wretched process over again. Somehow he did not, and collapsed on his side, shoulder pushed against wet, gritty rock, and his entire body aching and burning, every muscle trembling so violently he felt like someone was bodily shaking him.
Panic had sent his thoughts scattering like birds startled into flight and they circled and doubled-back and zigzagged and refused to settle to any task greater than thinking about how much he hurt. The sun had beat down on his skin until he thought the skin on his face was drying to paper thinness and soon it would split and peel from his skull. Dust blasted him, sanding his skin raw and digging grains into his flesh line pinpoints of pain, and his legs were on fire, each step felt like it was ripping muscles from his bones and that soon he would fall, useless shreds of muscles dangling loose and unable to propel his bones one step further.
There had been dreams while Caliban walked or crawled, faced always toward the black shard of rock that never seemed to grow nearer. With his eyes open Caliban had seen wagons rattle by drawn by monstrous lizards that cried in the voices of little children. The unyielding ground beneath its restless layer of dust softened and Caliban's feet sank into moist dirt rich with the smell of crushed grass only for it to snap back to iron-hardness and send him stumbling. Out of the corner of his eyes he saw his father chipping at the ground with a hoe, his face averted from Caliban so that he could only see his slender back and the way his dark, blue-tinted hands with their pale palms and fingernails grasped and moved the hoe's wooden handle and how the muscles tightened when the blade struck the ground, chipping the blade and leaving the ground unchanged. The dust blew up curtains to cover the waking dreams but there was always another waiting for him. The townspeople dogged his steps, grabbing his arms and shoulders to yank him away from his path to the refuge of Mercy Rock. One held his walking stick out to him and snatched it away again when he reached out to take it. Women thanked him for minding their children, saying Caliban was such a blessing, such a help, they didn't know what they'd do without him, and the words were filled with mockery and behind the words he could hear their thoughts and they thought him useless, a beggar too foolish to understand that his life was a hollow imitation of real people and that he did not feel pain or love as deeply and truly as they did.
Caliban wandered through the scorching plain and wallowed, submerged in the water and without air, each in turn, never sure which was real or a nightmare, or if they were both true and he had died, fallen into the eternal suffering of hell. He didn't know when he stumbled out of the nightmares, only coming to the slow realization that the hard rock under his shoulder had remained solid and real for awhile and that the glare of the sun on the stark plain no longer burned his eyes. His blurred gaze was fixed on a slab of dark rock that he seemed to have taken for a pillow.
He tried to move his head and look around. This action turned out to be ill-advised and he squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his teeth to ride out the headache that banged away inside his skull. With great caution he braved another look around and found very little to reward the tremendous effort. He was slumped in a pool of water, upper body resting on one of the rocks that were laid around it. When he touched the bottom of the pool he felt the seams between rocks that seem to have been deliberately laid to line the pool. Outside the pool that ground was packed down and smoothed, raising slightly as they met the rough, black walls that rounded above Caliban in a crude arch, lowering as it led toward the far side of the room where light from some unseen source turned the walls chalky gray.
It was from that side of the room that Caliban heard a slithering noise that caused his stomach to clench and heart to slam into his ribs. He couldn't explain the fear that gripped him. Maybe it was from the influence of nightmares that had yet to fully clear from his tired mind, but he imagined snakes, twice as long as he was tall, winding their way to inspect the tastiness of the helpless victim in the pool, or one of the massive scavenger birds that circled dying animals on the plains, waiting for them to stop moving. A scratching, like what bird claws on hard ground might sound like, fueled this fear and Caliban struggled to pull himself out of the pool and retreat from the noise, but his weak body was as heavy as if he had soaked up the water like a heap of dirty laundry on wash day. The chalky gray patch of wall was cut into by a shadow that bobbed with each slither of something dragging across the ground. Shoved into the farthest end of the pool, Caliban felt the burning pain of his exhausted body drawing itself tight with fear and the air he had fought so hard for was suddenly in short supply.
An eye, black as obsidian and as big as Caliban's hand, floated in the air, it's gaze fixed directly on Caliban. Barely able to breathe, he didn't even dare blink, afraid that in the brief darkness of his eyelids closing that whatever creature the eye belonged to would seize the opportunity to lunge.
The eye blinked.
Somehow, some spell was broken and Caliban could see the eye was not hovering in the air independently. When the eye vanished he could see that it was resting in a head colored gray and black that, thanks to a trick of the lighting, seemed to blur into the similarly colored wall behind it. The eye opened and the head tilted, letting Caliban see it's long, slender head, and bird-like beak that had a dull shine when the light glanced off it. The beak opened and Caliban shoved himself backwards, fighting to get even an inch further away from the reach of that point on the downward curve of the beak. The creature came no closer, just let out a cry that made Caliban flinch. It cried out again, softer this time, and in a way that sounded eerily like a human voice. He stared, wide-eyed, an unable to move except for the uncontrollable trembling that seized his entire body. The creature ducked its head and it looked up from underneath ridged brows that tilted up where they met and gave the creature a pensive, almost foolish look. It looked at him in silence. The eyes closed and the creature let out a deep, whooshing sigh. Like a dog did, only bigger, A great deal bigger.
The ridge above the creature's eyes lowered, changing the foolish look to a stern glare, something like the looks on the faces of the townswomen when they'd caught a child slacking in their chores and were about to deliver a few sharp words to get things running right again. The beak opened and a deep, resonating voice came out, saying quite clearly, "How are you feeling?"
For a second Caliban felt his body freeze in place and his mind stall, unable to understand what it was hearing. Then his arms, braced to push him back against the edge of the pool, gave out and he fell back into the water, splashing and sputtering.
The formation of rocks was the highest point near the village. It jutted up in the middle of a flat plain with mounds of low-lying plants laying over the ground in ripples of emerald velvet. Beneath the shade of the rocks the plants thinned away into a pale sand hollow that was filled cool water from a spring trickling beneath the rocks. At the top of the rocks the sun and wind had scoured them bare and at the height of the day heat rose off it like an oven and the touch of it burned.
The old woman scaling the rocks had wrapped her hands in cloth, twisted and frayed fabric over twisted fingers, in order to protect herself from the worst of the heat. Her dress was plain and well-worn but around her head and shoulders she had wrapped a scarf woven in a delicate pattern of red flowers on a turquoise background and the fabric caught the sun in a silken shimmer.
"This is pointless." A second woman, younger than the first, stood tall and straight a little ways behind the first. Her dress was of fine, colorful cloth that was woven with intricate patterns and decorated with embroidery and beads. The ends of the scarf around her head had beads tied into the fringe and they clicked and glittered in the wind that endlessly blew over the rocks as if trying to wear them down to match the flatness of the plain below.
"It's none of your business, that's what it is," the old woman snapped.
"You'll kill yourself, dragging yourself up here in the sun."
"And you'll kill me if I stay below."
"We agreed-"
"You decided and made everyone else do as you said."
The younger woman frowned. Her thick, black brows drew themselves flat and a line almost as dark deepened between them. She continued to follow the older woman, taking easy steps where the older woman slipped and struggled, banging her knees on the rocks. "We agreed," she began again, "that the Signs pointed this way. Hard times are coming, food and water will dwindle and there won't be enough to see us through. The Signs pointed to you and the others, those whose time is already drawing to a close."
"I've got years left in me," the older woman said, stopping to take a breath, having been forced almost to crawl across the rock in her exhaustion.
"There are children who have their lives still before them, yet to do all the things you have already done. You've had your share. They are the future, you are the past."
"I'm the now!" the old woman twisted around to better shout at her pursuer, her face running with sweat and her lips cracked, "All of us are the now! Times will get hard, sure, but they aren't yet. When they come around you can kill me then but I'm not dying when our food stores are bulging with plenty. And why me? Why not a child who doesn't even know what they'll miss?"
"You're worn beyond use. Your legs can barely carry you."
"They still get me where I want to go, just as they are now." The woman turned away and continued her climbing.
"Your fingers are too twisted to spin thread or weave cloth." The younger woman persisted, relentlessly following.
"I can stir a pot, hold a knife, use a hoe to til my garden."
"You offer us nothing."
"Why should I?"
The old woman had reached the top of the rocks. She stood, hunched and fragile, the wind tearing at the hem of her dress and ends of her scarf. She rounded on the younger woman and shouted again, "Why should I? I want to live! I want to eat sweet things and watch the young ones dance while I keep time on the little drum my husband made for me when I grew too old to dance myself. I want to live until my sons come home again and bring me gifts and stories. I want them to see me wear the silk scarf they sent me and know as they've thought of me I've thought of them. I have fewer years but they're mine and I want every one of them. You have no right to take them."
The younger woman did not speak immediately. She let the wind take away the last traces of the old woman's words until there was space for her own. Shoulders straight, her face dark and impassive, she said, "It has been decided."
The old woman pressed her lips together, her face pinched with exhaustion, pain, and sorrow. She straightened her body as much as her twisted bones would allow and looked into the younger woman's eyes with a steady gaze. "I defy your Signs."
The younger woman was unmoved. "It does not matter."
"I wish ill on them, that they might twist and lose their form."
"They will not."
"I wish ill on them, that what they warn of becomes truth and they are hollow and useless because they cannot change your fate."
"If our fate is decided then it is decided that we will live and thrive."
"You will suffer and regret! You need my life to pave your path of good fortune and I deny you it. With what little worth is left in me I wish your fate twisted."
"You cannot harm us."
"But I can harm you."
The cold certainty of the old woman, her body trembling with emotion but her words firm as the rocks beneath their feet, made the younger woman take a step back. Power laced the old woman's words, power that the younger woman had not know she could call upon.
"Yes," the old woman said, her voice rising, "You cruel, inhuman thing. I wish your fate twisted, that you match in your body what you are in your heart, I wish suffering without reason and without end."
"Your wish is incomplete," the younger woman said, once again standing firm and impassive, drawing strength from her own power, the power that she used to hold herself above all other people and to direct their fates as she decided, "It cannot be without end."
"True, true. If your suffering is to end then you must be as useless as me, with nothing to offer, no worth, and your must be loved in spite of it. Only then will I be satisfied."
The younger woman had no time to speak words to counter this curse, for the older woman rushed across the top of the rocks with speed and nimbleness that defied her years. It was the last of her years, exchanged for this last burst of strength and to power the curse. The years that should have threaded into the path shown by the Signs and being denied them the path would twist.
For a moment the ragged little bundle that was the old woman, her head scarf shimmering as the wind rippled through it, was caught up by the wind and held for the briefest moments above the rocks, above the younger woman, above all the land that the eye could see.
The dust thrown up by the horses' steady plod filled the air around them completely in a blinding yellow-white, eye stinging cloud. When Caliban was set down he almost thought the ground would be nothing but a mass of shifting, scratching dust and not the iron-hard surface that his feet actually landed on. The impact from the short distance from horseback to the ground slammed through his knees and hips and he crumpled, the pain too overwhelming for him to catch himself or even gasp.
"Sorry," the man riding the horse said, his truly apologetic tone muffled but not hidden by the cloth wrapped around the lower half of his face. Caliban wished the man had cursed at him instead. Harsh scorn, a mocking vulgarity, or even a punch or a kick would have let Caliban give voice to equal hate, equal ugliness. The escort party, one to carry Caliban, two to guard any attempt of Caliban to flee, had been nothing but polite and a little apologetic the whole ride out from town. More than once over the past few days someone was saying, "Let's be civilized about this," or "This doesn't have to be ugly," and any hint of anger or resistance from Caliban was met with uncomfortable disapproval, as if to a child that was being willfully difficult.
Now, in that civilized way, the escort was dropping Caliban in the open plain and allowed him no water, nothing to cover his head, not even his walking stick. He wondered where it was, the stick that he had let dry for two years before shaping it into a serviceable tool and into it carved patterns that pleased him. Flowers, this time he had carved flowers and painted them with what colors he could concoct from the plants from his garden or foraged on the edges of town where dust hadn't yet wiped out all the plants.
"Well, then," said one of the escort, pulling the reins of their horse to turn its head back toward town, and given a respectful tip of his dust-powdered hat to Caliban's crumpled form in the dust. "You have our thanks." By the time Caliban got himself sitting up the three horses and riders were smudges in the dust and the rising wind whipped away any sound of hooves or bridles or any possible last words addressed to Caliban. The ground was hot through Caliban's clothing and dust scoured cruel, feverish rawness in his mouth and eyes and yet in the pit of his stomach was lump of cold like frozen metal. Until he was dropped from the back of the horse he hadn't let himself believe that this was being done to him.
"The railway might not come through after all, you see. They're looking at towns further away, where it's still green and people will settle and do business. If we just got some rain . . ."
Many different people had explained it to Caliban, that if the beast wasn't placated the rain wouldn't fall, and it was the collective failing of the town for having neglected it for two generations and they had to make up for it now, they all had to do their part. Caliban was of the opinion that the allotment of responsibility was not evenly distributed.
It had been another hot, dry day, the day they decided. He had spent the morning tending his little garden, dragging water from the well in the rusty bucket he had taken possession of when it was discarded by its previous owners, trickling water under the leaves of his small crop of food and the wildflowers he'd managed to get to take root around the one room shed he lived in. After resting and letting the pain in his legs ease a little he had been preparing to gather his tools and head nearer the center of town so he could sit and keep an eye on the children for the busy parents while he whittled on tools or toys. Most days he'd tell stories, sometimes teach the children letters and writing or the little of mathematics that he knew. The parents repaid him with leftover food, old clothing, shards of colored glass, bits of metal, and sometimes even rocks with strange spiraled creatures fossilized in them that they found on the plain. But that day a group of people came to him and calmly explained that since his legs were lame and he contributed nothing of real value to the town he would have to die.
Spitting out dust, Caliban looked toward the town. The dust covered it like a veil and he could not pick out a single building or landmark. If he went back, if he could walk that far, would they just put him back on a horse and return him to this spot? Pulling his shirt collar over his mouth and nose, he turned to look in the opposite direction. Mercy Rock jutted out of the ground, sharp black lines cut clearly in the restless movements of the dust-filled wind. Some people said there was a spring there, that had poured clean water into the base of the rock since the time when the plain was green with living plants and the wind blew clean too, no dust to choke the throat and scratch the eyes.
Mercy Rock was also the lair of the beast.
Twice the height of a grown man at the shoulder, the beast was scaled like a lizard, they said, those who claimed to have seen it. Some said it was big enough to snap up a horse, rider and all, with his bird-like beak and make of it no more than a mouthful. One the rare nights the wind died it was said you could hear it's call, a strange, grieving cry that sounded nearly human. It cried when it was hungry, the stories went, and calmed the wind so it would not interfere with its hunt. When it was fed it would sleep and when it slept it would rain. There was little to eat on the plain now, so the beast must be hungry and discontent and since it was discontent the rain would not fall. Older stories, told by grandparents who heard them from their grandparents, said the beast flew on leather wings like a bat's and the beating of its wings was what stirred up the winds and raised the dust, and that if you went out on the plain you could see it flying, a shadow is the hazed sky. Few had claimed to see if fly in this generation, so perhaps it was at the mercy of the wind and not its source.
Just the last year, though, a traveler who had risked crossing the plain to speed her journey, had come out of the billowing dust with new stories of an oasis at Mercy Rock, just like the old stories. Clear water, cold to the touch, and tender green plants clinging to the edges of it.
"Didn't stay long," the traveler said, accepting another drink from the townspeople that had gathered at the end of the day to hear what news she might bring, "There was a hole in the side of the rocks, where two slabs of rock leaned on each other to make a triangle, and I could hear something moving in it. Something that wasn't just the wind in the rocks. Scratching and dragging." The traveler shook her head, "I caught my breath, refilled my water and made for here. Yes, scratching and dragging and . . . a sound like a beast sighing, like how a dog does, only it was deep, like something bigger. A great deal bigger."
So, there was possibly a monster at Mercy Rock but definitely water. And Mercy Rock was where the townspeople wanted Caliban to end up anyway, in the gut of a monster. Pushing himself to his feet, testing how his weight felt on his aching knees, he turned his face to Mercy Rock, and started walking.
The formation of rocks was the highest point near the village. It jutted up in the middle of a flat plain with mounds of low-lying plants laying over the ground in ripples of emerald velvet. Beneath the shade of the rocks the plants thinned away into a pale sand hollow that was filled cool water from a spring trickling beneath the rocks. At the top of the rocks the sun and wind had scoured them bare and at the height of the day heat rose off it like an oven and the touch of it burned.
The old woman scaling the rocks had wrapped her hands in cloth, twisted and frayed fabric over twisted fingers, in order to protect herself from the worst of the heat. Her dress was plain and well-worn but around her head and shoulders she had wrapped a scarf woven in a delicate pattern of red flowers on a turquoise background and the fabric caught the sun in a silken shimmer.
"This is pointless." A second woman, younger than the first, stood tall and straight a little ways behind the first. Her dress was of fine, colorful cloth that was woven with intricate patterns and decorated with embroidery and beads. The ends of the scarf around her head had beads tied into the fringe and they clicked and glittered in the wind that endlessly blew over the rocks as if trying to wear them down to match the flatness of the plain below.
"It's none of your business, that's what it is," the old woman snapped.
"You'll kill yourself, dragging yourself up here in the sun."
"And you'll kill me if I stay below."
"We agreed-"
"You decided and made everyone else do as you said."
The younger woman frowned. Her thick, black brows drew themselves flat and a line almost as dark deepened between them. She continued to follow the older woman, taking easy steps where the older woman slipped and struggled, banging her knees on the rocks. "We agreed," she began again, "that the Signs pointed this way. Hard times are coming, food and water will dwindle and there won't be enough to see us through. The Signs pointed to you and the others, those whose time is already drawing to a close."
"I've got years left in me," the older woman said, stopping to take a breath, having been forced almost to crawl across the rock in her exhaustion.
"There are children who have their lives still before them, yet to do all the things you have already done. You've had your share. They are the future, you are the past."
"I'm the now!" the old woman twisted around to better shout at her pursuer, her face running with sweat and her lips cracked, "All of us are the now! Times will get hard, sure, but they aren't yet. When they come around you can kill me then but I'm not dying when our food stores are bulging with plenty. And why me? Why not a child who doesn't even know what they'll miss?"
"You're worn beyond use. Your legs can barely carry you."
"They still get me where I want to go, just as they are now." The woman turned away and continued her climbing.
"Your fingers are too twisted to spin thread or weave cloth." The younger woman persisted, relentlessly following.
"I can stir a pot, hold a knife, use a hoe to til my garden."
"You offer us nothing."
"Why should I?"
The old woman had reached the top of the rocks. She stood, hunched and fragile, the wind tearing at the hem of her dress and ends of her scarf. She rounded on the younger woman and shouted again, "Why should I? I want to live! I want to eat sweet things and watch the young ones dance while I keep time on the little drum my husband made for me when I grew too old to dance myself. I want to live until my sons come home again and bring me gifts and stories. I want them to see me wear the silk scarf they sent me and know as they've thought of me I've thought of them. I have fewer years but they're mine and I want every one of them. You have no right to take them."
The younger woman did not speak immediately. She let the wind take away the last traces of the old woman's words until there was space for her own. Shoulders straight, her face dark and impassive, she said, "It has been decided."
The old woman pressed her lips together, her face pinched with exhaustion, pain, and sorrow. She straightened her body as much as her twisted bones would allow and looked into the younger woman's eyes with a steady gaze. "I defy your Signs."
The younger woman was unmoved. "It does not matter."
"I wish ill on them, that they might twist and lose their form."
"They will not."
"I wish ill on them, that what they warn of becomes truth and they are hollow and useless because they cannot change your fate."
"If our fate is decided then it is decided that we will live and thrive."
"You will suffer and regret! You need my life to pave your path of good fortune and I deny you it. With what little worth is left in me I wish your fate twisted."
"You cannot harm us."
"But I can harm you."
The cold certainty of the old woman, her body trembling with emotion but her words firm as the rocks beneath their feet, made the younger woman take a step back. Power laced the old woman's words, power that the younger woman had not know she could call upon.
"Yes," the old woman said, her voice rising, "You cruel, inhuman thing. I wish your fate twisted, that you match in your body what you are in your heart, I wish suffering without reason and without end."
"Your wish is incomplete," the younger woman said, once again standing firm and impassive, drawing strength from her own power, the power that she used to hold herself above all other people and to direct their fates as she decided, "It cannot be without end."
"True, true. If your suffering is to end then you must be as useless as me, with nothing to offer, no worth, and your must be loved in spite of it. Only then will I be satisfied."
The younger woman had no time to speak words to counter this curse, for the older woman rushed across the top of the rocks with speed and nimbleness that defied her years. It was the last of her years, exchanged for this last burst of strength and to power the curse. The years that should have threaded into the path shown by the Signs and being denied them the path would twist.
For a moment the ragged little bundle that was the old woman, her head scarf shimmering as the wind rippled through it, was caught up by the wind and held for the briefest moments above the rocks, above the younger woman, above all the land that the eye could see.
@klarioncall I read your post. not exactly what you were saying, but along the same lines.
The area around the ruined castle was typically in a gloom cast by the close growth of trees and bushes and looking into the forest from the unshadowed fields made the gloom even deeper by contrast, colorless grays overlaid by black shadows and the mists that lay softly over the fields and gently faded with the sunrise lingered longer under the trees, in wisps around the castle, and in a smooth blanket over the bog.
Sitting on a branch above the ruins, blue-clad feet kicking idly, Dawn observed the view from the inside of the forest, appreciating how formless the gray and black were actually brown and green in countless different shades and there were purples in the veins of new leaves and in flowers that couldn't be seen looking in from the fields, but from here they were rich and gentle among the thorns and jagged edged leaves.
For the past few weeks Marianne had been making nearly daily visits to the Dark Forest and today Dawn had finally been able to tag along and get to see how the reconstruction of the castle was going. After everything that happened over that one very busy night things had been busy. They were still busy, truly. Roland was arrested. Sunny nearly was too. All the people who had been love-dusted were gathered up and the fairies and the goblins launched a joint investigation and everyone was discussing diplomacy, damages, restitution, and generally arguing about everything. Dawn got asked a lot of questions by a lot of people and each one of those people seemed to ask her the same questions that the last had asked and nobody seemed to be writing down Dawn's answers and saving her the trouble of having to repeat herself.
In the middle of all the fuss Marianne and Bog somehow managed to disappear together at every opportunity with the excuse of diplomacy. Dawn found that unlikely, unless they were planning a marriage alliance to unite the two kingdoms. Which, while it seemed to be the eventual conclusion, was definitely not the couple's immediate intention. It left Dawn feeling lonely, perhaps even lonelier than she had felt when Marianne was supposed to marry Roland. That had somehow seemed to fit the pattern of their lives. A fairy princess marrying a dashing fairy knight, lovely and unexceptional and inevitable. Roland had been everything lover should be, everything Dawn had been taught to expect a lover should be.
Now Marianne had picked The Bog King, who was everything a lover shouldn't be and was yet somehow perfect. For Marianne, anyway. It was nothing like the love Dawn had been familiar with, it didn't fit at all into her idea of her own future lover. It had all been a picture of sugar-spun sweetness laid out in sweet strands of charming smiles, the giddy thrill of flirtation, of loving in a way that was deeper and truer than loving her father, her sister, her friends. Now that brittle sugar-spun sweetness had been smashed into sticky splinters as thoroughly as Bog's castle had crumbled into the bog.
Bog and Marianne weren't just lovers, they were friends. They certainly flirted, though they might deny it, but they also talked to each other about things like friends would. Dawn thought of all her short-lived crushes and couldn't imagine talking to them about anything that really mattered, not like she could talk to Sunny, or how she used to be able to talk to Marianne. That had gotten better, though. Something in Marianne, some hurt, had started to heal. It had been a hurt Dawn couldn't understand and in her lack of understanding she had pretended it wasn't there at all. Now that Dawn could see it she felt awful and couldn't find a way to apologize. She'd wanted to ask Sunny for advice but there hadn't been a chance. Mostly because things were so very busy and a little because Dawn was now aware that Sunny had his own hurt that she had never noticed but should have noticed.
Below Dawn, around the ruined castle, the goblins swarmed like ants, hefting and sorting pieces of rubble to uncover the foundation. From the bits and pieces of discussion that drifted up to Dawn's perch she understood that the foundation itself was unstable and they would have to rebuild it entirely before they could even think of starting on putting up walls. Bog was crouched up a splinter of rubble that stuck up from the ground at an angle, his spiky elbows on his spiky knees, wings held alert while he listened to a group of goblins and fairies waving pieces of paper with blueprints and diagrams on.
"Nobody seems to want to agree on anything today."
Marianne dropped herself on the branch next to Dawn with enough force to set the leaves swaying. She sat down, crossed her legs and rested her elbows on her knees in an unconscious imitation of Bog. They also currently shared a very fed-up look. "Everyone has a different idea of where to put the new castle, how to build it, what to build it out of, how big it should be . . . and of course Dad's people want to start arguing about the cost before we even settle on a plan. Seeing how it was Roland who caused it while officially acting for our side I think our people need to shut up about it."
"Who's right?" Dawn asked, "who's got the best plan? Fairies or goblins?"
"All of them. None of them. It depends. A lot of fairy-style architecture won't work here, but they don't want to hear that. It's always worked for us so why wouldn't it work here?"
Marianne rolled her eyes. Dawn giggled. Marianne smiled at her. It was her old smile. How she had smiled before Roland broke her heart and she'd built a wall around herself to keep anyone else from doing the same.
"Aren't you bored up here by yourself?" Marianne asked, "You didn't bring Sunny with you?"
Dawn's heart squeezed. The question poked at the snarl of confusion in her heart that she had been trying to put aside for a little while. There wasn't any real reason for Sunny not to be there. Dawn knew he was free today and any other time in her life she would have asked him to come and have an adventure together. "No," Dawn said, unable to squeeze out an excuse to Marianne.
"Are you still made at him?" Marianne asked, "Because if you want me to I can always drop him into the bog and let him get out on his own. I thought you made up, though?"
Dawn shook her head. "We did make up. I just can't-I can't be what he wants."
Marianne sat up straight and tilted her head. "He loves you but you don't love him."
"I do love him!" Dawn said fiercely, her eyes hot and a lump rising up in her throat, "I love him so much! He's my best friend and he's always been there and I don't want him to go away but I don't love him like that and I'm going to lose him!"
Marianne silently held her arms out and Dawn immediately threw herself into her sister's hug. Marianne had always given tight, crushing hugs and now that sword-fighting had harden the muscles in her arms and shoulders it was like steel wires wrapping around her.
"I don't love Sunny!" Dawn said, fighting back tears that would send her into wordless, useless sobbing, "I don't love Arin or Benjamin or Charles or anybody! I'm never going to have anything like you and Bog have because even when somebody loves me I don't love them!"
"Hey, hey," Marianne murmured and patted Dawn's back in the way of a person who doesn't know what to say to someone crying. It made Dawn's tears leak faster and her throat tighter. Marianne had used to know what to say when Dawn cried. Once upon a time her big sister had all the answers and the world had been so easy and safe. Now the world was opening out in front of Dawn and it was huge and empty and she was going to be all alone in it and nobody could help her.
"It doesn't have to be Sunny," Marianne said uncertainly, "You can wait for as long as you need to, you don't have to be in love right now. Bog and I-"
"I don't want what you and Bog have!" The words escaped so suddenly and violently that Dawn lost all control and convulsed with sobs, scared of the truth she had admitted. She didn't want to love anyone and so no one would ever love her. The love potion had made her fall in love with Bog and for awhile she felt everything she was supposed to, everything she had wanted to feel. Then it was gone and she was empty because she hadn't actually wanted it at all.
For a long time she sobbed into Marianne's shoulder while her sister continued to pat her back without speaking.
"You love me, right?" Marianna asked after the sobbing started to ease off.
"Mmhm!" Dawn said vehemently into Marianne's now very damp shoulder.
"And Dad and Sunny and, well, Bog, too, right? In a not . . . not a sugarpie honeybunch sort of way?"
A giggle slipped through Dawn's tears. "Yeah, not like that."
"And we all love you too."
"But Sunny-"
"I know, I know. But he did love you as a friend enough to be afraid of losing that. Anyway, his feelings are his problem, not yours.
"If I can't love anybody-"
"Hey. What's the antidote for the love potion?"
"Real love?" Dawn offered, pulling away a little to rub the tears off her cheeks.
"And what broke the potion's spell on you?"
"But-"
"It broke because you really and truly love Sunny even if you're not in love with him. That's real love. It didn't have to be--to be the right kind of love. It just had to be real."
Dawn just sniffed, her face feeling swollen and sticky. She felt stupid and miserable and almost certain that Marianne was just saying things to make her little sister stop crying. But . . .
"Do you really think so?"
Marianne grabbed Dawn's shoulders and looked her in the swollen eyes, "I do. I love you, Dad loves you, and you love us. Even Bog loves you, you're so irresistibly lovable."
"Bog's just nice," Dawn said, still not convinced.
Marianne snorted. "Not the first word that comes to most people's mind when they meet him. In fact, he'd resent the accusation. But if you need me to I'll drag him up here and say for himself that he loves you. In front of witnesses and everything."
For a little bit Dawn was overcome with giggles. Marianne put her arm around her shoulders and tapped the sides of their heads together. "I kind of felt unlovable for awhile," Marianne said, "I thought I failed, I guess, for loving Roland. I sort of felt that I couldn't count on anyone to love me back. But you were always there. If I'd never met Bog or anybody else I'd still have you."
A little spot of warmth touched Dawn's heart. Her head hurt, she wanted a drink of water and a nap, and the world was big and frightening but right here, next to her sister, she was safe for a little while. "Thanks." she sniffled.
"You're welcome." Marianne gave her shoulders a squeeze. "Wanna head home?"
Dawn looked doubtfully down at where Bog was kicking a goblin, blueprints and all, into the water. She looked back at Marianne, "Don't you guys have plans?"
Marianne shrugged. "Something more important came up."
For some reason that answer made Dawn burst into tears all over again.
#Oh this is the nicest thing that’s ever happened to me in fandom#Thank you this is wonderful#i really like the Dawn characterization here#my girl#strange magic 2015#I like ButterflyBog being a revelation#because if she doesn’t want even That#there’s no way she wants it at all#Definitely not when she felt it under the love spell and it was so Foreign
(via @klarioncall)
sorry to drag your tags into the main post but I just wanted to say thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it! and also talk a little about Dawn and Sunny.
I started writing for the Strange Magic fandom right when the movie was first released and it was really the first time I wrote serious, coherent stories. I was very anxious and eager to please and tried a lot of the time to write things I thought the fandom wanted.
I liked Sunny and Dawn (potionless, if we want the ship name) and I liked writing about them but did have trouble reconciling with Sunny being ultimately rewarded for his actions and getting the girl, and in general disliked the trope of the best friend secretly in love and 'earns' the girl. I heard about the discarded ending where Dawn turns Sunny down but never felt brave enough to use it in my fics. Even though *I* myself have never been in love or wanted to be in love and the idea appealed to me.
So now many years later it's refreshing for me to sit down and write about Dawn realizing she doesn't want romantic love and being told that it's fine not to want that.
@klarioncall I read your post. not exactly what you were saying, but along the same lines.
The area around the ruined castle was typically in a gloom cast by the close growth of trees and bushes and looking into the forest from the unshadowed fields made the gloom even deeper by contrast, colorless grays overlaid by black shadows and the mists that lay softly over the fields and gently faded with the sunrise lingered longer under the trees, in wisps around the castle, and in a smooth blanket over the bog.
Sitting on a branch above the ruins, blue-clad feet kicking idly, Dawn observed the view from the inside of the forest, appreciating how formless the gray and black were actually brown and green in countless different shades and there were purples in the veins of new leaves and in flowers that couldn't be seen looking in from the fields, but from here they were rich and gentle among the thorns and jagged edged leaves.
For the past few weeks Marianne had been making nearly daily visits to the Dark Forest and today Dawn had finally been able to tag along and get to see how the reconstruction of the castle was going. After everything that happened over that one very busy night things had been busy. They were still busy, truly. Roland was arrested. Sunny nearly was too. All the people who had been love-dusted were gathered up and the fairies and the goblins launched a joint investigation and everyone was discussing diplomacy, damages, restitution, and generally arguing about everything. Dawn got asked a lot of questions by a lot of people and each one of those people seemed to ask her the same questions that the last had asked and nobody seemed to be writing down Dawn's answers and saving her the trouble of having to repeat herself.
In the middle of all the fuss Marianne and Bog somehow managed to disappear together at every opportunity with the excuse of diplomacy. Dawn found that unlikely, unless they were planning a marriage alliance to unite the two kingdoms. Which, while it seemed to be the eventual conclusion, was definitely not the couple's immediate intention. It left Dawn feeling lonely, perhaps even lonelier than she had felt when Marianne was supposed to marry Roland. That had somehow seemed to fit the pattern of their lives. A fairy princess marrying a dashing fairy knight, lovely and unexceptional and inevitable. Roland had been everything lover should be, everything Dawn had been taught to expect a lover should be.
Now Marianne had picked The Bog King, who was everything a lover shouldn't be and was yet somehow perfect. For Marianne, anyway. It was nothing like the love Dawn had been familiar with, it didn't fit at all into her idea of her own future lover. It had all been a picture of sugar-spun sweetness laid out in sweet strands of charming smiles, the giddy thrill of flirtation, of loving in a way that was deeper and truer than loving her father, her sister, her friends. Now that brittle sugar-spun sweetness had been smashed into sticky splinters as thoroughly as Bog's castle had crumbled into the bog.
Bog and Marianne weren't just lovers, they were friends. They certainly flirted, though they might deny it, but they also talked to each other about things like friends would. Dawn thought of all her short-lived crushes and couldn't imagine talking to them about anything that really mattered, not like she could talk to Sunny, or how she used to be able to talk to Marianne. That had gotten better, though. Something in Marianne, some hurt, had started to heal. It had been a hurt Dawn couldn't understand and in her lack of understanding she had pretended it wasn't there at all. Now that Dawn could see it she felt awful and couldn't find a way to apologize. She'd wanted to ask Sunny for advice but there hadn't been a chance. Mostly because things were so very busy and a little because Dawn was now aware that Sunny had his own hurt that she had never noticed but should have noticed.
Below Dawn, around the ruined castle, the goblins swarmed like ants, hefting and sorting pieces of rubble to uncover the foundation. From the bits and pieces of discussion that drifted up to Dawn's perch she understood that the foundation itself was unstable and they would have to rebuild it entirely before they could even think of starting on putting up walls. Bog was crouched up a splinter of rubble that stuck up from the ground at an angle, his spiky elbows on his spiky knees, wings held alert while he listened to a group of goblins and fairies waving pieces of paper with blueprints and diagrams on.
"Nobody seems to want to agree on anything today."
Marianne dropped herself on the branch next to Dawn with enough force to set the leaves swaying. She sat down, crossed her legs and rested her elbows on her knees in an unconscious imitation of Bog. They also currently shared a very fed-up look. "Everyone has a different idea of where to put the new castle, how to build it, what to build it out of, how big it should be . . . and of course Dad's people want to start arguing about the cost before we even settle on a plan. Seeing how it was Roland who caused it while officially acting for our side I think our people need to shut up about it."
"Who's right?" Dawn asked, "who's got the best plan? Fairies or goblins?"
"All of them. None of them. It depends. A lot of fairy-style architecture won't work here, but they don't want to hear that. It's always worked for us so why wouldn't it work here?"
Marianne rolled her eyes. Dawn giggled. Marianne smiled at her. It was her old smile. How she had smiled before Roland broke her heart and she'd built a wall around herself to keep anyone else from doing the same.
"Aren't you bored up here by yourself?" Marianne asked, "You didn't bring Sunny with you?"
Dawn's heart squeezed. The question poked at the snarl of confusion in her heart that she had been trying to put aside for a little while. There wasn't any real reason for Sunny not to be there. Dawn knew he was free today and any other time in her life she would have asked him to come and have an adventure together. "No," Dawn said, unable to squeeze out an excuse to Marianne.
"Are you still made at him?" Marianne asked, "Because if you want me to I can always drop him into the bog and let him get out on his own. I thought you made up, though?"
Dawn shook her head. "We did make up. I just can't-I can't be what he wants."
Marianne sat up straight and tilted her head. "He loves you but you don't love him."
"I do love him!" Dawn said fiercely, her eyes hot and a lump rising up in her throat, "I love him so much! He's my best friend and he's always been there and I don't want him to go away but I don't love him like that and I'm going to lose him!"
Marianne silently held her arms out and Dawn immediately threw herself into her sister's hug. Marianne had always given tight, crushing hugs and now that sword-fighting had harden the muscles in her arms and shoulders it was like steel wires wrapping around her.
"I don't love Sunny!" Dawn said, fighting back tears that would send her into wordless, useless sobbing, "I don't love Arin or Benjamin or Charles or anybody! I'm never going to have anything like you and Bog have because even when somebody loves me I don't love them!"
"Hey, hey," Marianne murmured and patted Dawn's back in the way of a person who doesn't know what to say to someone crying. It made Dawn's tears leak faster and her throat tighter. Marianne had used to know what to say when Dawn cried. Once upon a time her big sister had all the answers and the world had been so easy and safe. Now the world was opening out in front of Dawn and it was huge and empty and she was going to be all alone in it and nobody could help her.
"It doesn't have to be Sunny," Marianne said uncertainly, "You can wait for as long as you need to, you don't have to be in love right now. Bog and I-"
"I don't want what you and Bog have!" The words escaped so suddenly and violently that Dawn lost all control and convulsed with sobs, scared of the truth she had admitted. She didn't want to love anyone and so no one would ever love her. The love potion had made her fall in love with Bog and for awhile she felt everything she was supposed to, everything she had wanted to feel. Then it was gone and she was empty because she hadn't actually wanted it at all.
For a long time she sobbed into Marianne's shoulder while her sister continued to pat her back without speaking.
"You love me, right?" Marianna asked after the sobbing started to ease off.
"Mmhm!" Dawn said vehemently into Marianne's now very damp shoulder.
"And Dad and Sunny and, well, Bog, too, right? In a not . . . not a sugarpie honeybunch sort of way?"
A giggle slipped through Dawn's tears. "Yeah, not like that."
"And we all love you too."
"But Sunny-"
"I know, I know. But he did love you as a friend enough to be afraid of losing that. Anyway, his feelings are his problem, not yours.
"If I can't love anybody-"
"Hey. What's the antidote for the love potion?"
"Real love?" Dawn offered, pulling away a little to rub the tears off her cheeks.
"And what broke the potion's spell on you?"
"But-"
"It broke because you really and truly love Sunny even if you're not in love with him. That's real love. It didn't have to be--to be the right kind of love. It just had to be real."
Dawn just sniffed, her face feeling swollen and sticky. She felt stupid and miserable and almost certain that Marianne was just saying things to make her little sister stop crying. But . . .
"Do you really think so?"
Marianne grabbed Dawn's shoulders and looked her in the swollen eyes, "I do. I love you, Dad loves you, and you love us. Even Bog loves you, you're so irresistibly lovable."
"Bog's just nice," Dawn said, still not convinced.
Marianne snorted. "Not the first word that comes to most people's mind when they meet him. In fact, he'd resent the accusation. But if you need me to I'll drag him up here and say for himself that he loves you. In front of witnesses and everything."
For a little bit Dawn was overcome with giggles. Marianne put her arm around her shoulders and tapped the sides of their heads together. "I kind of felt unlovable for awhile," Marianne said, "I thought I failed, I guess, for loving Roland. I sort of felt that I couldn't count on anyone to love me back. But you were always there. If I'd never met Bog or anybody else I'd still have you."
A little spot of warmth touched Dawn's heart. Her head hurt, she wanted a drink of water and a nap, and the world was big and frightening but right here, next to her sister, she was safe for a little while. "Thanks." she sniffled.
"You're welcome." Marianne gave her shoulders a squeeze. "Wanna head home?"
Dawn looked doubtfully down at where Bog was kicking a goblin, blueprints and all, into the water. She looked back at Marianne, "Don't you guys have plans?"
Marianne shrugged. "Something more important came up."
For some reason that answer made Dawn burst into tears all over again.
Marthat hadn't been to any of her classes for a week. She'd spent the time in a gray fetid haze in a nest of twisted blankets that worried around her in lumpy snakes that did nothing to give her comfort and yet were never important enough to untangle. Food wrappers and other trash piled up around her and she watched it all heap up knowing she needed to contain and remove them but her mind was as twisted and lumpy as her bedding and there seemed to be no way to wiggle free and set herself in motion.
At one in the morning something in the gray, twisted, smothering haze shifted and she was finally in motion again, not knowing how she'd started and doubting that she had ever been incapacitated at all but rather making a deliberate choice to stagnate. She showered, she emailed her professors to make her excuses, ask for homework, inquire about extending deadlines. When six am trundled into view she left the apartment and headed to campus, her hair dry and scalp itching because her limited range of caring hadn't extended to using conditioner.
Her first class of the day wasn't until nine. She walked the empty campus, telling herself she would use the time to work on her laptop, but knowing she would fret the time away doing nothing and hating herself for it every second of the way. The sun was painting a beautiful sunrise with clouds like torn shreds of cotton hanging on to the deeper purple of night while all around them it was pink and orange and yellow. Marthat looked at it but couldn't see it. Around her was the silence of a city, in which the distant sound of cars, the endless hum of the buildings' air conditioning units, the song of birds that Marthat never learned the names of, didn't count as noise.
Marthat had no hopes or expectations. The task of facing teachers and classmates and explaining where she'd been laid over her like a weighted blanket and the more she thought and the more she tried to plan her excuses the more tired she became from fighting the weight of it. She had a persistent awareness that while she might have showered she had not done laundry and her sweats--barely a step up from pajamas--were on at least their third wear. As for her socks, she tried not to think about it. She could feel lines around her mouth and between her eyes were deeply folded and all the muscles of her face pulled tight. She probably looked sick. She hoped she looked sick and that everyone would assume she was sick and not ask what was really wrong.
The sort set of stairs tucked between planters filled with half-dead flowers and grass was empty. Which was good. A relief. No one to see her, no one to bother her. For two minutes, maybe three, Marthat stood in place, too weighed down to walk the half a dozen steps to the stairs and sit down.
"Marthat?"
A surge of energy spiked through her sludgy muscles, releasing her from the paralysis. Muscle memory was not yet restored and she turned, having to place her feet consciously with each step, tottering when the gears and levers that worked her body stuck in place or gave too easily to her yanking. Completing her turn, Marthat saw a short, slight person in dull colored pants and a hoodie with the sunrise tracing their outline in yellow. They lifted a hand, their fingers and palm black against the colors of the morning sky.
"I missed you!" they said, "I was hoping I'd run into you soon."
There was no inflection of inquiry in the greeting and it's absence gave Marthat's heart a sharp squeeze. She knew, somehow, that all the excuses she'd had washing around inside her brain were not necessary here. The bright, purely pleased smile being directed at her told her something she always found hard to believe. They were glad to see her, happy that she was simply there and demanded nothing more from her than that.
"I. Yeah." Marthat found her voice was as unwieldy as her limbs. Thoughts moved sluggishly but even so they were too fast for her lips and tongue to give them form. She swallowed and coughed. "I missed you too."
Growing up Michel Victor simply did not have the vocabulary to describe the workings and sensations of mind-reading and had to painstakingly cobble together elements of description from the five known senses to craft a rudimentary and unsatisfactory representation to give to people who insisted he satisfy their curiosity but refused to listen for longer than a minute.
Victor had often described the moment in someone's mind when they heard a joke as drawers in file cabinets being opened and dozens and hundreds of files being skimmed through in an instant before a pop of light connected a certain number of files when the punchline hit. There followed a giddy flickering and overlaying of concepts and images. A chuckle was brief, the files discarded and the mind wandering into new trains of thoughts. Hearty laughter got the mind stuck on the small little circle of files and went round and round.
The moment a problem was solved, or any significant connection was made was surprisingly similar. The pop of light connecting the different, previously unrelated files, the surge of pleasure rocketing around, bouncing off of everything else, knocking more files into the mix, making more connections, bringing more joy.
Right now he could hear the process happening in the mind of someone who had looked into the fridge and discovered they happened to have all the ingredients to make their favorite sandwich.
"Oh, like a light bulb moment!" was often what people would say in response to Victor's fumbling attempt at explaining.
Most of the time it was easier to agree with them. If Victor knew they cared to listen he would persist. The idea of a simple switch of off to on did not encompass the brain's endless search for patterns, how it craved them, seized them, fabricated them if it had to. The clicking into place of puzzle pieces that you hadn't known were puzzle pieces, the rush of ideas coming together and transfiguring from routine searching into a moment of joy or satisfaction. There were never enough words. There were never the right words.
He was translating from a language that he was the sole speaker of. There weren't many mind-readers. At least, not many that made themselves known. Victor had met a handful of them in professional settings and had found it hard to be around them. There was a sort of feedback caused by being near each other, the echo of his thoughts repeating in their mind, like trying to hold a conversation when everything you say is repeated back, fouling up the next thing you were trying to say or think. He'd heard stories about people who had trained to overcome this and used as instantaneous relays on missions but if they did exist he'd never met any of them and never been offered that sort of role. Perhaps it was due to his lack of commitment. He was only in the military at all because it was insanely hard to find steady work when you legally had to disclose your status as a registered mind-reader to prospective employers. Sure, there were anti-discrimination laws, but when had those ever stopped anyone?
Going to attempt to write something every day to exercise my creative muscles. Let's see how long I can keep it up and if it helps me write my stories.
Growing up Michel Victor simply did not have the vocabulary to describe the workings and sensations of mind-reading and had to painstakingly cobble together elements of description from the five known senses to craft a rudimentary and unsatisfactory representation to give to people who insisted he satisfy their curiosity but refused to listen for longer than a minute.
Victor had often described the moment in someone's mind when they heard a joke as drawers in file cabinets being opened and dozens and hundreds of files being skimmed through in an instant before a pop of light connected a certain number of files when the punchline hit. There followed a giddy flickering and overlaying of concepts and images. A chuckle was brief, the files discarded and the mind wandering into new trains of thoughts. Hearty laughter got the mind stuck on the small little circle of files and went round and round.
The moment a problem was solved, or any significant connection was made was surprisingly similar. The pop of light connecting the different, previously unrelated files, the surge of pleasure rocketing around, bouncing off of everything else, knocking more files into the mix, making more connections, bringing more joy.
Right now he could hear the process happening in the mind of someone who had looked into the fridge and discovered they happened to have all the ingredients to make their favorite sandwich.
Fantasy Guide to Royal Households and How they Work
When I say Households, I mean the entourage that follows around the royal family. The household went everywhere with them to care for their needs from the people who would empty their chamber pots to their noble companions. Most royal households are basically the same as noble ones, only on grander scale. Every royal had a household and an entourage as well as every noble at court.
Palace Personnel ~ The Commons
The commons were an intregal part of every household. They made up perhaps 80% of the work force. Royal courts were often on the road and never spent more than a few months at every palace. The court was constantly moving. Some positions were not permanent, meaning certain servants did not travel with the court because they were employed at the palace only. They would be paid by the Monarch's paymaster.
Scullion: The scullion was a relatively easy position to fill so they were often changed as the court went from palace to palace. They would be responsible for scrubbing and cleaning the servants quarters and the kitchens. They would scrub floors with lye, scour pots with sand, sweep put the fireplace and clean up after the other servants. They were the first to rise in a castle and tasked to light all the fires in the kitchens. Scullions would just be employed to the palace and serve a multitude of chambers
Laundress: The laundress was responsible for the cleaning of anything made of fabric in the household. Since they are handling unmentionables, they knew what happened behind closed bedchamber doors. They knew when the King visited the Queen or hadn't, they knew when marriages were consummated or not and they knew when the Queen and royal women were not pregnant. They often sold secrets to pad their pockets. Laundresses might be permanent staff but sometimes not.
Minstrels: The minstrel was a commoner hired to play an instrument or sing for the entertainment of the royal. A royal might staff a few at a time but they would always have one on hand. The minstrel would likely come with their masters as they travelled. The minstrel might serve the main royal household but a royal might retain their own.
Cook: The cook was one of the most important servants in the household. They would have the task of overseeing the running of the kitchens and keeping supplies in order. They would likely be on call at all times. Henry VIII's cook was often woken in the night because his royal master wanted a midnight snack. The cook was a valued member of the household and would have been highly sought after if they were a very skilled cook. They would have travelled with the joint. Cooks were apart of the greater royal household but often royals retained private cooks for their own use.
Maidservant: The maidservant cleans the castle. She would sweep the floors, scrub them, empty the chamberpots, get rid of the ashes from the fire and ready the fire for later. She would make up the bed or strip it for the laundresses. She would wash anything that needed washing including furniture and ornaments. She was likely not a travelling servant and would be strictly employed at a single palace.
Jester: The jester was the hired entertainer. Working under the master of revels, the jester had the daunting task of making the monarch and their family laugh. They would tell jokes, tell stories, cause havoc in the court for laughs and lighten the mood. The most successful jester of all time was Will Somers, jester to Henry VIII. Will broke bad news to the infamously bad tempered monarch and got away with things that would have sent others to the block. Will survived most of Henry's reign, his head intact. Jesters would be apart of the main household though each royal might have one of their own.
Positions within the Royal Household ~ Noble
Nobility were always welcomed at court. They eat at court, slept at court and were cared for by the monarch. Some nobles had to sing for their supper and most were hired as royal servants. They weren't exactly scrubbing floors and would be paid handsomely with land that would generate wealth for them
The Steward/Seneschal: This person was the head of the royal's staff. They would have the task of running the lands and servants their master or mistress. The steward served as a backup and assistant in all the tasks even representing their master or mistress when they were unavailable. Would be a high ranking noble. Each royal household would have them.
Treasurer of the Household: The treasurer was the accountant and pay master. They would be in charge of ensuring debts were settled, wages were paid and the household was running within the budget. This was a coveted position because it gave the treasurer insight into the financial situations of the royals. Such info was wroth its weight in gold. Each royal would have one.
Usher: The Gentleman Usher would be in charge of escorting guests into the royal chambers and into the royal presence. They would act as a go between their royal master/mistress and the guest often going back and forth with messages. It was just as coveted as the position of chamberlain but with less responsibilities.
Master of Horse: The Master of Horse was in charge of seeing to the horses of their master. They would oversee the grooms or the stableboy/hands who were employed at the stables to actually care for the horses. The master of horse would ensure that the stables were in order and the horses were up to parr in order to bear royalty across the kingdom. Each royal would have one but there would a main one who acted as overseer.
Master of the Wardrobe/Mistress of the Robes: These are the nobility who are employed to look after the clothes of the royal they serve. This would mainly involve a managerial position, overseeing the inventory of the royal wardrobe (a warehouse like building that housed the clothing) and placing orders for new clothes. It was a tidy job that rarely involved getting the hands dirty. Each royal would have one.
Chamberlain/Valet: The chamberlain is employed to look after the Lord's bedchamber. This was the most sought out position as they effectively were the gateway into the royal presence. Their main task was making sure their boss was comfortable and happy. Could be a well born commoner or a noble. Each royal would have one.
The Page: All royal households had pages. They would be a young noble boy about seven years old sent to their royal master. He would be in charge of tidying up after the lord, carrying messages to other servants and occupants of the castle and serving him at meals. Unlike others on the list, the page would not be paid. His experience was his payment as he would learn the running of a court and how to be courtier. Each royal would have one.
Squires: Squires were like pages though they only served the men. They would accompany their royal master to battle, look after his armour and mail, ensure that his lord's horse was saddled, caring for their master's weapons. The squire would always be a young nobleman on the cusp of becoming a knight.
Governess: The governess is a noblewoman woman employed to oversee the Monarch's children's household. She would be the first teacher a royal child would have and would oversee the nursemaids who would have care of the physical person of the child. She would be appointed when the child was four or five. Notable governesses include Katherine Swynford (wife of John of Gaunt and mother to the Beaufort line), Margaret Pole (wife of Tudor Loyal Sir Richard Pole, sister of the last York heir Edward of Warwick, daughter of George Duke of Clarence and niece to King Edward VI and Richard III), Kat Ashley, Margaret Bryan, Madame de Maintenon and Baroness Lehzen. Most unmarried Princesses retained their governesses while Princes generally outgrew their governesses after they were breeched.
Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber: They were the male companions of a King or Prince, sort of like ladies in waiting but manly. They would accompany the King or Prince everywhere they would go and shared duties with Groom of the Stool (royal toilet paper dispenser) and the Chief Gentleman of the Chamber (overseeing the staff and maintaining the chamber). They would help their master get ready, serve him at the table and organize hunting and games to keep him entertained. Gentlemen and companions where often chosen for their connections as well as their master's own opinion. Henry VIII's gentlemen included: Sir William Compton (ward of Henry VII and heir to rich lands), Sir Henry Norris (the grandson of William Norris who fought with Henry's father at Stroke and a relation to the Yorkists Lovells), Sir Anthony Denny (son of Sir Edmund Denny Baron of the Exchequer) Sir Michael Stanhope (brother in law to Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset), Charles Brandon (ward of Henry VII and son of Tudor Loyalists)
Ladies in Waiting and Maids in Waiting or Maids of Honour: These are the female attendants to the Queen or Princess. Ladies in Waiting were married while the Maids were unmarried. They would have to attend their mistress wherever she went, help her get ready, keep her chambers in order, write letters for the Queen and maintaining her honour. They were chosen for their connections. Using Katherine of Aragon as an example, her Ladies in Waiting included: Maria de Salinas (daughter of Juan Sancriz de Salinas secretary to Isabella, Princess of Portugal and a Spanish courtier in the service to Katherine's parents, wife of Baron Willoughby de Ersby), Elizabeth Howard (the daughter of Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk, sister to Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk and wife to Thomas Boleyn, ambassador to France), Anne Hastings (daughter of William Hastings, 1st Baron Hastings, wife to George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury and Lord Steward.), Agnes Tilney (wife to Thomas Howard, Earl of and 2nd Duke of Norfolk.), Elizabeth Scrope (wife of John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, a loyal Tudor lord), Margaret Scrope (wife of Sir Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk cousin to the King), Anne Stafford (sister of the Duke of Buckingham, married Sir George Hastings, Earl of Huntington and daughter of Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham (cousin to the King) and Lady Katherine Woodville (sister of King Henry VIII's grandmother and his great aunt by her marriage), Elizabeth Stafford (sister to Anne Stafford wife Robert Radcliffe, Lord Fitzwalter and Earl of Sussex around). Their connections are what got them their places and you can see why they were chosen.
Accommodation
Accommodation can be a difficult thing to sort both as a writer and a steward. You might have a palace of 200+ bedchambers in which you must house a staff of 500-/+, a varying amount of nobles, the royal family (of a varying amount) and their own households. When assigning rooms it is best to think of a Russian nesting doll. Start from the inside and work your way to the outside.
The best rooms go to the monarch, their consort and their children/siblings/parent(s). These chambers would include the bedroom, a drawing room/ common area, a privy, a closet (a small chamber that can be used for prayer or work). They would be furnished with the best cloth, the best candles and whatever furniture brought by the resident since most royal courts travelled from palace to palace. They will also have chambers for their personal servants such as ladies in waiting and grooms.
The second best set of rooms would go to the highest ranking nobles/people in the court. These rooms would be less fancy and a little smaller. These would be given to from titled nobility descending from those of Ducal rank (Dukes/Duchesses) or even members of the council such as Thomas Cromwell in Tudor times.
The next set would be considerably smaller, perhaps minus a closet or a drawing room. Given to lower nobility.
The next level of chambers would be smaller perhaps only the bedroom and a common area given to minor nobles.
The last set of rooms would be small and only hold enough room for a bedroom. Servants would have to sleep on the ground on pallets beside their masters.
Any other guests at court would have to stay at off-site locations around the palace in the city. Some nobles at houses around major palaces just in case they arrived late or were kicked out of court.
I've been down a rabbit hole of Desi fashion (I have literally spent daaaaays browsing Pernia's Pop Up Shop) and honestly that shit is fascinating.
I can't possibly cover all of it in a single day. But I will point out that Google Art is starting to put some items from textile & art museums in India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan online, which is tremendous.
"Ethnic" dress is SERIOUSLY under-documented in Western museums. Instead of being presented as something as contemporary and complex as western fashion, it's all lumped together as a curiosity and not something that changes and adapts as society moves.
Obviously these museums in India have a very different approach, but there's not much of their collections online. Even with Google Art, the pictures there are small, and you can't zoom in on the complex details the way you can on say The Met website.
Hopefully this is just the first step in things changing for the better. There should be a lot more of it online.
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