Chapter 4
Stewing over the dirty word used to describe his Wogol, Brine was only half-aware of his surroundings. He could see a hazy yellow shape shuffling to the north and he could hear the shape calling to him from over its shoulder, but he was too preoccupied with his thoughts to comprehend the meaning of the words.
He continued on like this for a few paces, plodding along with his mind in the clouds and his heart in the gutter, and eventually his eyes passed over the horizon to the north and he realized the yellow shape had moved to the banks of the Leresh and was facing the quagmire within.
He stopped next to his canary-clad teacher and looked to the north, letting his impaired eyes wander along the strip of land separating the stalks and the riverbed. The land there was as straight as a ruler and he could see for nearly a quarter of a league at least…but there were no Lathians to be found.
That’s odd, he thought, and returned his gaze to the yellow form of his teacher, then the trail of boot-churned mud at his feet. The trail turned right and led back into the river bed.
Brine felt an icicle of fear stab him through the heart. He looked again to the corridor of soil north of him, long and straight and rolling forever, then down at the Leresh, then out at the thirty-one brawny figures stomping a channel through its center.
Admittedly, his eyesight was not the greatest, and many of the visual details were lost to him without the use of his monocle, but he could still see the lay of the land and it was just as flat on this side of the river as it was on the other, and he was pretty sure this side of the Leresh led to the same Harriun Wilderness in the north, same Forn River beyond that.
So why, he thought numbly, in his blessed and righteous name, he added with respect, are we wading through two-and-half hands of soupy river mud?
From the middle of his belly, the fire-voice said, Oh, I think you know the answer to that one, Rugs.
With his busted eyes fixed on two Lathian guides, Brine shook his head.
Sure you do, Ruggy, the fire-voice cooed. They’re setting you up for the next go. Third time’s the charm, right?
Brine’s head was still shaking mildly, but even as it shook he could feel the dread moving into every corner of his body, leaving it crusty and hard, like a scab. His toes felt stiff, his neck ached, his lungs labored to breathe. It was almost like the dried muck on his robes had infiltrated to his insides.
What’s the matter, Rugs? Don’t you want to be charmed?
Rather than answer this, Brine took another look at the identical river banks and thought, They are setting me up. It’s the only thing that fits. I caught those last two before they could do anything and now they’re crossing over again to have another go at me.
There you go, Ruggy, the fire-voice said. Knew you’d figure it out.
You bet I figured it out!—But let me tell you something: It’s not happening a third time! Oh, no! Not a third time! The first speckle-gummed heathen that comes anywhere near me is going to get a glow hand to the face!
Brine knew the glow-spell produced a limited amount of light and absolutely no heat, but he also knew that the Lathian mercenaries did not know this. If he were lucky, the sight of a glowing hand thrust at their nose would have them running for the hills.
He grabbed his right hand and massaged the palm with the thumb of his left hand. As far as the spell was concerned, this served no practical purpose. The smooth pressure of the thumb merely cleared his head of distressing thoughts and made practicing the incantation that much easier. He rubbed a moment more, then kicked off his sandals and bent to pick them up.
“Sandals, Godfry,” he said, reminding his teacher to remove his footwear. He slid a hand through the straps of his own footwear and resuming his palm-rub, thinking of the first time they’d crossed the river and Brine had spent several long moments digging the old man’s sandals from the mire.
Beside him, Godfry didn’t move.
“Sandals,” Brine said again, giving the old man a look and finding him squinting across the riverbed, his mouth agape and his lips aquiver. “Godfry?”
Shielding his eyes from the sun, the old man said, “Is that old Bal out there?”
Without looking up, Brine said, “What about those sandals, Godfry?”
“That is old Bal!”
Wincing at the excitement in Godfry’s voice, Brine turned his gaze to the Leresh and quickly spied the stooped advisor. It was not a difficult task, not with the man’s pronounced hunch, his proximity to Sladge and, on this occasion at least, the fact he was stopped halfway across the riverbed.
Shielding his eyes for a better look, Brine saw the whole troop had stopped, every mouth-breathing one of them.
Are they waiting on me to catch up? he wondered. Is that it? I let them get ahead and they lollygag until I draw near?
“That’s ole Bal out there!” Godfry said again, shaking with excitement as he shuffled forward and made to step into the mire.
Never taking his eyes from the gathered throng in the riverbed, Brine grabbed his companion by the shoulder and said, without an ounce of feeling in his voice, “Your sandals.”
“Are we going to see him?” his teacher asked, turning sharply to face him. “Are we?”
Brine watched as the mob of Lathian bodies parted around a coffin-shaped object lying in their midst. He could see the bent outline of Balthus as he inspected the dark slab, prodding it with his cane, giving it a poke here, a stab there, turning to Sladge and making comment. They appeared to be interested in the ends of the coffin-like object.
“Yes,” Brine said, still squinting at the thing in the riverbed, his mind a buzz with activity.
“Old Bal,” Godfry said, sounding as giddy as a young boy.
Brine squatted on his hunches and began prying the sandals from Godfry’s feet, doing so by touch alone as he kept his eyes on the blurry scene in the middle of the Leresh. He couldn’t see much, but he knew the thing in the mud was no sarcophagus, not unless it was used to house the body of a titan, and not unless it had been constructed of a shiny black wood of which Brine had never heard.
And why the ends? he wondered, scooping up the hem of Godfry’s canary robes and shoving a wad under the old man’s arm. What makes the ends so special? he thought, handing Godfry his sandals without looking at him.
“Okay,” he said aloud, hoisting up his own robes and practically dragging the old man down the bank. “Here we go.”
Like the earlier banks they had crossed, this one had hardened in the hot summer sun and become something like clay, affording Brine and his bearded cargo ample support and traction as they descended. It was not until they had reached the flatter sections of the river (those sections where the water had lingered longest and the fish-stinking mud was still cold and soft and something like paste) that the difficulty began.
Brine, miraculously enough, managed to hold his own with the mess, grimacing here and groaning there, but ultimately finding the strength to raise and lower his legs. Godfry, on the other hand, had no end of trouble with the passage, even with Brine’s aching fingers sunk within his sleeve and even with Brine’s staining back leaning into the strides.
For the most part, Brine kept his head down and his eyes clenched shut, trudging along towards the curious object in the river and listening only to those sounds loud enough to rise above the rasping of his lungs, one such sound being the stampede of sucking bootfalls as the Lathians began stomping their way to the eastern banks.
Hearing this, Brine was almost grateful for his incredible dearth of speed. If nothing else, it gave Balthus and his crew the time they needed to vacate the area before Brine arrived. This way, the disciple could inspect the dark slab without fear of bumping into any of the hunchback’s burly retinue.
He struggled on until he was standing within an arm’s length of the artifact then stood himself erect and actually stepped back from the object, knocking into Godfry. The old man groaned from the contact, but d
id not go down, and thankfully he was too winded to ask questions. Brine would not have given answers.
With his eyes bulging, the disciple saw that the mysterious object was much larger than he’d first surmised. It was as long as four or five grown men and as big around as the sewer canals beneath the city. In fact, had the thing been hollow—instead of packed full with…well, whatever it was packed full with—he could have squatted down and waddled straight through it.
But it wasn’t hollow…and it wasn’t wood, either.
Brine’s first thought was that pillar-like object had been poured from hot, bubbling tar. It was a ridiculous notion, to be sure (a perfectly formed cylinder of pitch resting there in the riverbed?), but that was exactly what he saw taking up space beside him.
It was the reflection of the sun in the object’s greasy black skin that finally snapped his mind back to reality. With the sweat running down his forehead and with his robes sticking to his back and armpits, the thing before him couldn’t be the viscous substance it resembled, not in this heat, not without deliquescing from a pillar into a puddle.
But if it’s not tar…
“Godfry?” he called, speaking in the nervous tones of one straddling a sleeping beast. “Godfry, do you know what this is?”
Brine felt whiskers on his shoulder and a boney frame against his side. Then, after a bit more crinkling beard noises, he heard the old man say, “Ah.”
“Ah, what?”
“It’s a bole,” Godfry said. “Harriun bole, I’d say.”
Brine winced at the H-word and turned to the north. He didn’t want to take his eyes from the creepy thing before him, but he couldn’t help but look north, couldn’t help but see if anything else was floating down the river of sludge on this hot and sweltering day.
“This thing…,” he asked, pointing a finger to the north, “…came from up there?”
“Mm-hmm.”
Brine made an ugly face. “And you…you say it’s a bole?”
“Mm-hmm.”
Brine rolled the word bole around his head and wondered if this wasn’t another bizarre side effect of the old man’s senility, wondered as well if the old man was even looking at the thing before them, the thing with the glassy black skin and the complete lack of leaves and branches.
“I’ve never seen a bole like this,” he said, slopping around to the nearest end of the trunk and laying eyes on the area that had so fascinated the Lathians. “Most trees I know of have, uh…,” the words died away as he surveyed yet another contradiction.
Instead of being encased in a semi-rigid layer of protective bark, this meaty abomination appeared to have been wrapped in something like frog’s skin—black frog’s skin. Flaps of the stuff were hanging jagged and loose on this end, the edges having been mangled by something crude and pointed, like a pickaxe.
Brine moved his astonished gaze from the edges to the interior, and received another jolt. While most trees tended to be filled with concentric rings of splintery wood, this thing was filled with something like the dark meat in a chicken leg, something soft and wet and tan.
From beside him, he heard Godfry humming curiously and hoped, secretly, that his childhood mentor had finally realized the error of his way and was ready to own up to his misclassification. When he turned to face him, however, he found the old man staring not at the dark flesh of the bole, but at the throng of burly mercenaries climbing the eastern banks.
Brine listened to him hmming again, then watched as he cocked his head to one side and mutter, “Is that Bal?”
Motioning to the strange specimen before them, and trying to keep the old man on track, Brine said, “Godfry, if this is a Harriun bole—from out of the Harriun—” he gave an emphatic tilt of the head, “how did it get down here?”
“It is him!” Godfry announced, plucking his stick from the mire and taking a step towards the bank. “Old Bal’s over there.”
“That’s great,” Brine groaned, not bothering to look, “but did you see the ends of this thing?” He leaned closer to the tattered skin. “It looks like something cut into it, something like a—” mining pick was the word he was going to say, but before he could say it his teacher went slurping away from him.
“Hey—Hey!” Brine broke from the bole and hurried after his teacher. He still had a myriad of questions about the bole—and about life in general within the confines of the Harriun—but for now he needed to get hold of his teacher. If he couldn’t manage that, he’d be scraping muck off the two of them.
“Hey, what’s the hurry?” he asked, stomping next to the old man and taking hold of his yellow sleeve.
“That’s ole Bal!” Godfry exclaimed, staring at the eastern banks and sounding young with excitement. “Ole Bal, way out here…”
Imagine that, Brine thought sarcastically, turning his attention to the eastern bank. He could make out the hazy outline of bodies scrambling into the bean plots, his ruined eyes picking out the brown of their sleeveless shirts and the black of their boot-cut pants. He managed to locate the Sladge in front—a head taller than the rest—and Balthus close behind.
Glaring at the hunched adviser, and remembering the strange incident in the king’s anteroom—those sleepy gray eyes racing across the room—Brine said, “Are you two close?”
Godfry nodded with pride. “Oh my, yes,” he said, speaking with the warm tones of a doting grandfather. “I’ve known ole Bal forever.”
“Wow,” Brine said, feeling he needed to say something, but unsure what that something should be. “That’s a…that’s a really long time.”
It occurred to Brine that Balthus was the most recent appointee to the king’s council and that Godfry couldn’t have known the man for more than ten ages, but instead of mention this and risk sending his teacher into a fit, he said, “So what’s he like?”
“Balthus?” Godfry said, looking momentarily to the messy riverbed. “Well, he’s a very shrewd card player, I can tell you that. Not much of a reader, but a masterful card player.”
“Card player, huh,” Brine said, sounding as glum as he looked. “What else?”
Godfry looked down, massive brows stooped towards his nose. For a moment, it didn’t look as though he’d be able to come up with another adjective—as though card-player was it—but then, just as Brine was ready to give up on the matter, the old man’s face lifted and he said, “Oh, and he’s a very static man, that Bal.”
Positive he hadn’t heard correctly, Brine leaned close and said, “Was that statics?”
“Yes, yes, very static,” Godfry explained. “I can remember on one occasion, I had just come in from the gardens for a council meeting, just finished up a good book on growing Cheshian wild flowers, I believe, or maybe not, I can’t recall. But the gardens were very bright that day, as you know, and the council room not so much. Not that it excuses me, of course, but I don’t believe the lanterns had been lit yet, and my eyes…well, you know how my eyes are. So in I went, sunblind and groping, looking for my chair, no idea where anything was and I…well, I ended up sitting on ole Bal.”
Brine looked ill. He didn’t like looking at the hunched Lathian, let alone touching him—Glory forbid sitting on him. The very idea made his skin crawl, especially when he could have made the very same faux pas.
He thought back to that first night in the castle, the way Balthus sat perfectly still in the corner and panned his head from person to person. He imagined himself shuffling to the far corner of the room in search of a place to rest his weary legs, a place to escape his gnawing dread, imagined himself spying the chair in his periphery and backing himself into it by feel alone, the press of bony legs against his thighs, the point of a beardless chin against—
Brine felt an immense force strike him in the side and his whole world lurched sideways. There was a moment of weightless confusion followed by the cold, wet sensation of a mud oozing around his body. The cold, wet sensation did not ooze for long.
Brine had his h
ead up before he knew what hit him, looking around with the one eye that hadn’t been caked with mud. It hurt to do this—his back and neck aching from the sudden jolt he’d just suffered—but he continued his search.
For one thing, the pain in his spine was nothing compared to the anguish of his lower lip (which he’d bitten through on impact and was now filling his mouth with the taste of copper), but for another, he knew the culprit he sought could not have traveled far.
And he hadn’t.
After only a moment of disoriented searching, Brine spied what he was looking for: the outline of a man stomping away from him through the soupy landscape, heavy pack strapped to his shoulders, head craned back to reveal a scruffy, vine-speckled grin.
Tol’ yeh we’d get yeh, Boy-o, the grin screamed. Tol’ yeh we’d get yeh.
The Lathian mercenary turned to face his companions on the bank and Brine let his gaze fall to the mud.
From above him, he heard Godfry ask, in a kind and wonderfully innocent voice, “Fall down, did you?”
Brine rose up on his arms, his body making a juicy slurping noise as it came free of the muck, and he glared at the old man. On the cheek that hadn’t succumbed to a layer of mud, he felt a flush rising to the surface, and in the part of his mind that wasn’t blind with fury, he heard a whole army of nasty comments dancing and screaming and begging to be set free.
But since nasty wasn’t the way of the Amian, he turned a deaf ear to these comments and tried very hard to focus on the fact that it was not Godfry he was angry with. It was the pack of mouth-breathing infidels standing on the eastern banks, the ones he could hear chuckling and snorting and slapping each other on the backs.
“I must have,” Brine said, leaning into the weight of his pack and standing to his feet. “I suppose I must.” He dragged a hand down the left side of his face and flung the residue at the ground, casting a sideways glance at the riverbank. “I’ll have to be more careful next time.”
Godfry hummed thoughtfully and said, “Or perhaps you need help?” He began to nod in agreement with himself. “Yes, yes, perhaps a little assistance, just while crossing the messier parts of the river.” He looked down at his feet, seemed to remember himself, and said, “I’m not sure I’m strong enough, but…,” he looked around, searching for a solution, and spied the Lathians on the embankment, “…but perhaps those fellows over there could help?”
Brine’s head was shaking before the old man ever finished. “No.”
Godfry’s head came around. “No?”
“No,” Brine repeated, still shaking his head. “Let’s not bother them.”
“Bother them, you say?” Godfry’s caterpillar brows were crawling down the stoop of his forehead. “Why, I can’t see the bother,” he reasoned. “They’re big enough to carry us both.” He turned to the burly men in the distance. “You men, there! You fellows! Would you mind lending us—”
Brine had his head up in an instant, startled gaze pivoting between the old man and the riverbank as he said, “It’s fine. Godfry, really, it’s fine.” He stepped between his teacher and the Lathians. “I’m fine,” he said, fixing the old man with a look, then faking a grin. “I just need to watch my step, that’s all.”
Godfry stared at him, his ancient eyes probing the expression on his student’s face, his pupils dancing all over.
Brine thought, Here it is. Here’s where it happens. Where he finally realizes what we’re up against and he finally notices the flush on my cheeks, the strain in my eyes, the nervous energy crackling my voice…
“If you say so,” Godfry muttered, giving him a nod.
Brine felt the hope flow out of him. He grabbed his former teacher and went stomping towards the bank.