Oskalt (2)

Roughly a fortnight since the day we reached Pirberk and walked into the Talios church. Whether you’d call it long or short, that stretch of time had been the finest of Pormel’s life.

— Grrrrrk.

Pormel gave a wide yawn, and its feelings came through to me in fragments. It had no wish to leave a place that treated it so lavishly.

…An odd feeling, this.

And yet one word from me would have it up on its feet at once. Its will, its feelings, its thoughts do not enter into the matter. Only the fact that I gave the order.

That was what it meant to hold dominion over a thing. I silence every will that thing possesses and pour my own in.

Am I truly fit to receive that unconditional love?

Too many idle thoughts.

Since taking up the pursuit of the Lucseon church again, I had felt for myself how the emotions that had worn thin in me were coming back in all their old variety. A few years ago I would not have registered such trifles at all.

“Brother.”

A voice came through the dreary patter of the rain. Drick was walking toward me.

“Going off like this. Feels a shame, somehow.”
“Isn’t a parting a sudden thing by its very nature?”

He had come running straight from swinging a sword in the drill yard. I had said there was no need to tell him, and Camilla had gone and passed him word of it anyway.

“Well. That’s like you, brother.”

Drick gave a light laugh. He was in everyday dress with the Talios church’s emblem worked into it, and in a bare fortnight the look had come to sit quite naturally on him.

“I won’t be able to watch your trial.”
“It’s all right. Nothing to make a fuss of.”
“I’ve had a word with the branch head. Failing the trial won’t get you thrown out.”
“If they threw me out I’d miss the lamb ribs here, I’ll grant you that. But I’ve no intention of failing in the first place.”

In the cold rain Pormel gave a low cry. I stroked it under the jaw and pulled the saddle and reins tight. Drick watched, and something troubled came into his face.

“Brother.”
“What is it?”
“Thank you.”

A face that might have been laughing or crying.

“You said you’d let me live another life. That you’d cut the unhappiness off. Thank you for saying that to me then.”

“…I thought you’d be thanking me for bringing you here.”

“Of course I’m thankful for that too. I’m living happily on the strength of it. But here’s the thing. Living it out, I came to see. I was happy before ever I got here. From the moment you said those words to me, brother, I was already living another life.”

Somehow I thought that ambiguous face of his came nearer to a smile than to anything else.

“You and Kalen gave me a second life, brother. The back alleys were where I survived as a human being, but where I got to live as a person was at your side.”

Just as I exert influence over Pormel’s will, Drick had come under mine. Nothing so visible as the authority of dominion was at work in it, and yet he had plainly been shaped by me, and was becoming, little by little, a different man.

“Thank you. Brother, I wanted to get this said. Thank you for changing my life.”

To change someone’s life.

To shake someone’s fate wholly out of its course.

It means that by exactly that much my own fate is shaken too.

“Is that so.”

I have changed. I grieve, I take joy, and I long for what is gone. Can I declare that Drick had no hand in that change?

“In that case I ought to say thank you as well.”

For entrusting your fate to mine. For leaning on me, and for letting me lean on you. For that, I was thankful.

Drick only stood there, saying nothing. I did not bring out the rest of it.

A little more time passed, and at last Kalen came running up with the baggage all gathered, a fold of his clothes held over his head.

“Sir knight! Take this.”
“What’s this?”
“The church gave it, so you wouldn’t get rained on.”

Kalen was holding a heavy robe. No emblem of the church anywhere on it.

“No need.”

Instead of taking the robe I pulled up the cape I already had about me. It had been made to keep the rain off in the first place, and it was waterproofed accordingly.

Kalen grumbled and lashed the spare robe in among the baggage. He was wearing one himself.

“So now all that’s left is to go?”
“You’re ready?”
“I’m done, sure. Aren’t you taking anything of your own, sir knight?”
“That’s right.”

I had come empty-handed, so it stood to reason I would leave empty-handed. I climbed into Pormel’s saddle and reached down a hand to pull Kalen up after me.

“Did you make your farewells?”
“Briefly, yes. Drick seemed awfully sorry to see us go.”

Kalen’s particular knack for getting on with people had made him quite close to Drick. Mostly it was Kalen pushing in and Drick pushing him off, but today, at least, it seemed the two of them had talked a good while. Privately, Drick may well have been counting the rain a mercy.

It hid the few tears that had got away from him, after all.

“Hold on tight.”
“Yes.”

This time Kalen did not answer back with a question of his own. He only settled in behind the saddle and gripped me hard around the waist.

Pormel.

At my call Pormel rose from where it lay. In the cold, settled air its hot breath steamed white.

Let’s get out of this city.

Pormel kicked off the ground. A heavy sound rang through the whole of me, and a sharp wind-driven rain beat at my helm. It cleared the outer bailey wall in a single bound, landed on a rooftop, and ran on from there.

The whole of Pirberk, wrapped in mist off the water, swept past over my shoulder like wind. Only a huge beast broke the stillness, cutting across the grey city. Anyone who saw it would have screamed and run for the guard corps, but there was no chance of their coming after us.

At the city wall Pormel hurled itself toward the gate. Pirberk’s gates, shut fast until now, stood wide open as of today, making a show of their grandeur once again.

“Whoaaa—!”

The guards shouted something, but Pormel did not stop. In a single rush we were past them, past men who could never have found the nerve to stand in the way.

— SKRAAAAAK!

A fortnight had gone by without a proper run. Perhaps it was the pleasure of grassland underfoot after so long. Pormel let out a roar big enough to set the air trembling, and it sounded as though it were asking me where we were to go.

Northeast. Toward the cold.

Erbern. Oskalt.

To the closing act of a long story.

“Sir knight, look over there.”

All at once Kalen threw out a hand. Where his finger pointed, an enormous cloud lay across the horizon.

“Doesn’t it look just like a mountain?”
“A very tall mountain, that.”
“I’ve never in my life seen a cloud so low and so big.”

Green grassland, and a sky bluer still, and a white cloud snagged on the horizon that divides them.

The way it stood there, as though the light wind were nothing to it, lodged itself in my sight.

“Doesn’t it feel like a dream?”
“What does?”
“All of it. The grassland and the cloud so sharp and clear, the smell of grass on the cool air, Pormel with its red eyes shining.”

A gentle breeze came up. The wind swept low across the grassland and set it rippling like silk.

“I’ve never in my life experienced anything like this.”

Kalen closed his eyes and opened them again, as though he were singing. He looked to be packing the unreal sight into his head as full as it would go.

“The empire’s west is famous for its fine weather. Weren’t you a westerner yourself?”
“Scenery like this I’ve seen plenty of, sure. But this is a first.”

Pormel gave a small cry from where it lay, and Kalen’s words came layered over the top of it.

“This sort of soft, welling-up feeling I can’t put a name to, I mean.”

A soft, welling-up feeling.

I looked at the rippling grassland, at the cloud standing as high as a mountain, and at Kalen with his face flushed. Somehow I felt I understood what he meant.

“Is that so.”
“I’m glad. That I came with you, sir knight.”
“Time we were moving again.”

Failing to allow for a companion’s stamina is a chronic complaint among the deathless. Two days of running straight through and we were brought up short after all. Pormel’s strength gave out and it sank down where it stood, while Kalen, who had eaten and slept in the saddle, was in rather better case.

Love that asks nothing in return, that at a single command will not stop until it drops.

There was no helping the heaviness it put on me.

We set off again from the open field. Pormel ran at a pace neither fast nor slow, and a moderate wind worked its way in through the gaps of my helm. We crossed the plain and forded a small river, went over the hills and ran a vast plateau.

By the time the blue of the sky had drained slowly away and gone over to purple.

Only then did we come to the mouth of a forest.

“Primeval forest, is it.”
“The trees are absolutely enormous.”
“Several hundred years old at the least.”

Kalen fumbled something out of his coat, a map of the surrounding country he had got from the church.

“It says if we turn right here we strike a road. Do you want to go that way?”

Four days since we left Pirberk, one of them a rest day, so three days of running straight through. Given Pormel’s speed, which no horse could match, that put us halfway.

“A road is more likely to catch other people’s eyes. And the road itself looks to go the long way round the primeval forest besides. Cut through this forest and we should be there within a day.”
“Won’t Pormel’s bulk hold us up?”
“The old trees of a primeval forest are all one species. Which means this is ground where only this tree can live. With no variety among them, the inside of the forest won’t be so dense.”

We settled on cutting across the primeval forest. With every hour pressing, every option open to us had to be weighed. I scratched the back of one of Pormel’s spines, and it began slowly to move its legs.

“…It’s bleak in here.”

The purple left behind after dusk had gone met the gloom of the primeval forest, and the two together drew a dismal air out of the place. Kalen shivered and pulled his robe straight.

“It is certainly a bit strange. We’ll camp here tonight.”

The old trees deeper in were all one species, just as at the mouth of the forest, and the gaps between them ran as wide as the trunks themselves, so we were never troubled by Pormel getting stuck. We settled in under a tree thicker across than Pormel itself, spread out the blankets, and had just set about getting a campfire going with flint and steel.

“Sir knight. There’s something, though.”
“What is it?”

Kalen set down the flint in his hand and turned his head, sweeping his eyes around us.

“Isn’t it dark, somehow?”
“The sun’s gone down, hasn’t it.”
“No, what I mean is, isn’t it too dark even allowing for that. For it to go this pitch-black there ought to be another hour or two to run yet.”

Kalen was right. Deep in the primeval forest the light was poor indeed, and I had been putting it down to the high, huge foliage of the old trees and thinking nothing more of it.

“The weather’s turned cold, it seems.”
“No, well… I am getting the fire lit now, mind.”

Taking my words entirely the wrong way, Kalen struck flint and steel together over a heap of fallen leaves. Click, click, and small sparks jumped. Like a black dot on white paper, they were the one thing in that black forest with any color to it.

More and more sparks came as Kalen’s hand worked its steady rhythm, and just as one of them fell into the heap of leaves.

“Wait!”
“Sorry?”

— FWOOSH.

At the same instant as my shout, a bright red light bloomed. A light red to the point of ill omen, and bright with it.

“What’s the matter?”
“…”

It may be groundless worry. But the situation in front of me fit far too neatly with a certain past to be written off as coincidence.

With the days when I rode Plibentorinus I.

From somewhere came the cry of an animal. No. A sound nearer to a monster than to an animal.

“Kalen.”
“Yes?”

“Put out the fire.”

A monster that tears the living apart and eats them. A ghoul, that is.

“Right now.”