Rainwillow Crossing (part 2 of 4)

Rainwillow Crossing had gotten off easy.

There was no real other way of looking at it--unless you take survival as just another curse, just a longer, harder death. But things were not so hard. Nowhere near as hard as what they'd been--what they were still being--in most of the rest of the world.

It was the height that had done the most to save his village. Yondel remembered it from his own life's memory: some seventy or more years ago--a child of ten or eleven.

The nightmare had begun with bad weather. It hadn't seemed very much out of the ordinary, storms came early in the spring, they were laced with ice and smothered the mountainside in darkness, they lashed it with bladed rain and howling winds, driving anyone with sense to seek shelter behind their walls. If these storms were worse than usual, it was only a turning of luck, maybe next year’s would be gentle by comparison.

Thunder had come. Lightning that brightened the world momentarily out of existence. And then it had come down harder and faster, flashing and rumbling four or five times within a minute, shaking the earth. And the earth, in answer, vomiting up great grey clouds--air-burning, crop-burning clouds, mists that stripped men's skin, that poisoned trees and grasses, birds, sheep. That crept into houses to poison children.

And then the plagues--weeks later, laying families low in an hour, leaving households of corpses sometimes by morning, while a light-robbing veil hung soupily over the world.

He remembered those days, he'd lived them in fear, staring through a crack in the wall at the swirling, clotted air, thinking he'd never see the sun again, waiting for the plague to find him as he knew it had found his neighbours. Houses burned. Huddled villagers stood outside to watch them, breathing damaged air through shirt collars and blankets. The sky would sometimes still rumble, still crack with sudden ferocity, though no more rain fell, and the sun was long gone.

The clouds sunk. They flowed off down through the valleys and passes, settling into the lowlands. The sun, when it returned, had come back changed, no longer yellow, clearly wounded, and sitting a sky that bore its own scars.

Yondel the child, young boy, had known: childhood was over for him, this change would mark before and after for every still-living soul.

#

One in ten. That was what he thought. How many souls were still living? Maybe much less than that, especially lower down. He might not have been living today if he'd been born a coastal fisher's boy. But with living came its own problems. Eminlae, walking a little bit behind him, her hair ragged over her face: there was such a problem.

When they were over the ridge and likely clear of any following villagers, he stopped and asked her how she was.

What could she say? She shook her head, face down.

Yondel reached and lifted her chin. “It's only superficial. Cuts and scrapes. It isn't so bad.”

“It doesn't matter though, does it?”

“Ah, we'll see about that.”

She shook her head miserably. She'd every reason to.

“Come,” he said, still helplessly turning this over and over in his head.

She looked at the holes in the slopes beyond his cottage, at the collection behind the back wall. She fiddled with her hands as she walked, and then stopped, coming to his doorway.

“What is it?”

She finally looked up. “Have you brought me here to kill me?”

#

She might well ask.

Seventy years ago: the curse came on its victims much faster. It wasn't called anything yet, it wasn't known about, not even imagined. He'd been with his father when he'd seen the two men, at one moment chatting beside the well, the next doubled over and choking, fighting for the breath, fighting to whimper their pain through constricted throats. Dark patches rose up on their skin, veins flowed dark, eyes clouded iron-grey, claws grew out of their fingers as their heads and mouths and teeth swelled. These weren't men anymore--though their names had been Hedrik and Ongbert, though Hedrik had used to ruffle Yondel's hair when he came to the cottage buying eggs, though Ongbert had once taught Yondel how to take a rabbit with a well-placed stone. These were monsters, and they came at them, father and son, salivating and bloodthirsty.

There had been others around. Shocked, simple, farm-folk.

Yondel's father had yelled: “Kill them!”

His own neighbours.

But hadn't it been the right thing to do? Another villager--a woman named Songbith--was transforming not twelve yards away. Yondel's father had been carrying a flail that day for the threshing. Now he wielded it the way a knight would, striking poor Ongbert hard in the face, ruining his already ruined mouth and nose, spilling black blood, striking again at the side of his head, striking more times as his neighbour fell--lashing spasmodically with new claws.

Then Hedrik. Then Songbith. All putting up a fight.

And he remembered the girl. Anjesha--just a few years older than he was. Or she had been. Now she was something else--curved and big-shouldered, black-patched, howling. Charging him.

“Kill her too, boy.”

Anjesha--her hair still blond on top of her distorted head.

“Boy! Yon!”

His knife in the girl without his really knowing at first how it got there. But the memory had come back over the months, had etched itself perfectly onto his ready brain. He could picture his own hand, holding the knife, leaning as he stabbed with it, twisting, seeing corrupted blood come gushing out, lumpy with clots and vital organs. He'd stabbed all the way to the hilt.

He went to sleep too often with that image playing through his mind.

#

So Eminlae might well enough ask: have you brought me here to kill me?

He said, “No.”

“But you always...”

He had before. His father had been one of the ones to most vociferously argue that it must be done. These Cursed were too dangerous not to put a blade in. And transformations often came in a cluster--as if one triggered others--a contagion or a chain reaction. Break the link. That was what his father had said. Other men had listened. Some had come to regret it. Others had mourned their kin, and complained that they might have been saved--what if the curse had receded as quickly as it had come? Poor Anjesha: alive after all? “Mighty quick there, Jorgan Hacksaddle, to go about killing your friends.” And the family had retreated over time to their further fields, to a cottage that had once been occupied only to mind the summer grazing.

And so Eminlae had asked: have you brought me here to kill me?

Yondel tried to reassure her. “I'd have left you there if I wanted that.”

“I thought... maybe to spare them...”

To spare them the deed? How generous of me? But that was one charity few men were ever thanked for.

“I won't hurt you.” He didn't really know what he should be saying.

“Then what?”

“Come inside. There's soup on the fire.”

#

It turned into a night where snow came. Yondel stoked the fire high, he added rabbit and skidgeon to the pot, along with some more spelt, a cup of good Hosenvray wine. He breathed in the scent as he stirred.

“Let me,” she said cautiously.

“I'm accustomed to managing these tasks.”

“I should... all the same... let me help.”

It kept her busy, it stilled her shaking hands a bit. Yondel saw that she still ate well, soaking the full bowl with hard bread, taking a second when he offered it. He wondered if it was her or the transformation accounting for her appetite. He didn't really know her that well--his semi-isolation to blame for that.

“I'm glad of your company,” he said out loud.

“You shouldn't be. I might tear your head off.”

“Oh, not yet.”

He cleaned and sealed her cuts while she knelt in front of the fire. As the rain got louder, he went to a chest for his old lute, started strumming up a tune, began a song, and was pleased to hear her join in.

Eventually she said “You sing like a woman.”

“Oh?”

“You know the words. So many of them.”

“I suppose I do.”

“It's true what they say about you then? That you remember?”

He lay down his instrument. “It's true. I remember what I'm told. Not with the clarity of a True-Seer, worse than most women, better than other men. I can't immerse myself in the memory, I can't be there, but I can call up the details--from my lifetime, from my ancestors.”

“My grandmother was a True-Seer.”

“I'm sorry.”

“She was strong. She'd cry in other people's pain, even if it was centuries old. And she forgot about us more often than not. She was losing her mind, of course. She didn't know then from now.”

“Memory can be its own curse, I suppose.”

“Hers was.” She dropped her head into her lap. “Mine's going to be worse.”

True. And he'd no bright ideas what to do about it. He managed, rather lamely, to tell her that sleep would help her, it would calm her mind, and there was plenty of time to decide what to do when the sun rose. Useless platitudes, but he slept more easily than he thought he would, more tired by the day's events than he'd guessed.

 

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work.