Blood Of The Wizard (Book 1) (39 page)

Dhal watched in astonishment as it began to fill.  She had seen bathhouses built over hot springs.  But this… this was miraculous.  Even the stone floor was warm.

“A bath?”

“Yus,” Talent said matter-of-factly.  She pulled a blanket from a stone nook then walked to the entrance and draped it on a series of clothespins.

“Yus, you will feel better.  Take them off.”

Dhal flushed, a bit manic.  Then she shook her head at her own modesty.  But of course, she told herself.  This lady was a handmaiden.  She pulled her blanket around her shoulders and bent down and unbound her shoes.  She slid them off to the side and pulled her undergarments down under her dress.

“Doon get in, though.  Not yet.”

Dhal nodded.  She unbound the leather straps of her dress and pulled it down over her shoulders.  When her breasts were unclothed, she heard a rapping noise under their feet.

Talent knocked back on a copper tube, then grabbed her gently, spinning her around to face her.  She took her wrist and led her to the edge where she pulled Dhal’s arms out to the side.  She lifted Dhal’s left breast and found a bit of rawness had developed underneath.  She pulled up her right breast and again found that there was a bit of rash developing.  Talent gave a small noise and pulled Dhal’s dress up over her head.  She pulled aside the last of the undergarments and asked Dahl to turn back around.  Fully nude, Dhal nodded.  She felt the blood rushing into her cheeks, but she soon checked her own modesty again.  This woman, after all, was a trained handmaiden.  She swallowed and grinned at herself, but the embarrassed feeling only worsened as Talent grabbed a fistful of her hair and pulled it over one shoulder, pulling down on the lobe of her ear and looking in it.

“Mmm, ya,” Talent said quietly.

“What?  What is it?”

“Ah te normill.  Bit ah the windburn in te ears, ya.”

“Oh.”

“Been in it over a week, ya.”

“Say again.”

“Te wash… te ocean, ya?”

Dhal nodded and stepped to the edge of the bath.  Already, the warmth was astonishing.  Talent tested it with a bare foot, swirling her toes it.  Then she banged on the gutter with a pair of loud knocks.

Dhal huddled, sitting down.  Then Talent scrubbed, still laughing.  Dhal was bent, but leaning backward now, trying to stand against the force of her strokes as she worked scented whale fat into her hair, into the muscles on her back and under her arms.  She rubbed her neck tenderly.  Then she plopped the scented fat into Dhal’s palm, making a motion for to scrub her front while Talent put a copper pitcher in arm’s reach and worked on her ears.  It was a long affair, all said, and it left Dhal’s skin steaming and red—but clean.

When Talent departed, Dhal scrubbed herself a bit more.  She rinsed out her hair once more and leaned back.  There was small glass window on the other side of the tub.

The reflection that stared back seemed so thin and small.

When she looked out, it was grandeur that stared back.  The inescapable enormity of it.  Beyond the sprawling village and harbor, the ocean was not as wide as the sky, but it was somehow bigger, more certain and cruel, and at the back of her skull came an unpleasant warm shiver.  She stretched, rubbing herself more fully with of the smaller towels, which was laden with the scented fat.  The immutable fact, she mused, was that no one could escape this man, nor the land he chose to inhabit.  She was his.  There was no choice but to hold on to whatever that meant.

Naked and wet, but finally clean, she allowed herself to cry.

Chapter 83

__________

Cullfor and Bunn emerged onto a wooded trail, which wound like a worn ribbon through large oaks.  Afternoon seemed to drip by as they walked, and all the while random questions began to surface in his mind, like how was he going to feed Bunn?  Then the sensation of more sinister, and increasingly larger questions incubated for moment:  How the hell was he going to keep her alive in all this? 

At a place where the muddy, wooded path ventured to edges of a bayside farmstead, he paused. 

He fisted his chin. 

He looked beyond the rolling fields to a pair of thatched roofs.  He turned to her, the sun bleaching a thick webbing of cloud in the western sky.  He could smell the assuring smell of scythed grass and a thin trace of woodsmoke.

How far would he have to go before the worded influence of the monk would have no bite?  She rubbed his arm and took enough of a kiss from him that Cullfor smiled.  The gravity of his thoughts thinned, and for a moment, everything around him felt like home.  He looked around, and he thought:  That a land is foreign or familiar, this is decided by its women.

He took a gulp of air and looked back at her.

She had her hands folded around his dirk.  She had stolen it from his boot and was slowly sharpening it on a stone.  She looked up at him thoughtfully. 

Then she returned her gaze to her work.

“My sweetness, I can care well enough for me,” she said.  “You can keep your heart on those you mean to save.”

__________

Together they snuck through the farm, tracing its edges as if the humble homes housed some malevolent watcher.  They traveled for slow, cautious hours up a dry and north-winding creek until they found an undercut section of the creek’s bank where, aching as darkness descended, he built a shaky and short-lived fire.

While the stars emerged, Bunn gathered stones and logs, stacking them in a clumsy wall to ward off the wind.  She piled more for a primitive shelter.  By full night, the crude accommodations did their work.  The fire stayed lit.  And he began feeling something very close to relaxed.  As they settled in for a nap, he thought about the bizarre animals at the bay.  He felt her rubbing his arm again, and he gave all his thoughts to that instead.

The feeling of her hand on his wrist simmered, creating a nice mix of energy and calm in his heart.  Even as the shuffle of night animals whispered around them, breath came deep and easy.  Lying next to her, he rolled to face her and knocked down their wall.

Stirring snorts of laughter rose from both.

He kissed her cold forehead and he slept well.

__________

In his brief dreams, he was faced with the question of what separates a man from a beast.  An answer came to him from his dead uncle, the old dog mumbling loudly that the difference was simply the ability turn a strange phrase, though for the life of him he knew not from whence, when, or where the ability came.

His dreaming face grinned, laughably aghast at why it should wonder such a thing.

__________

Just before morning, Cullfor woke with a raw cold piercing his joints.  He had a rattle in his chest, and while he lay nestled in the grotto he barked a thin cough, studying Bunn’s slumber.  Her snoring nostrils flared.  When she groaned, grabbing for him, he got up and went outside of their primitive shelter to relief himself.

The cold was surprising.  He made quick work of a pee and walked back staring back at the crude, broken wall.  How had it kept them so warm?

As he laced his trousers back, he ducked inside, just as the noise of thin sleet erupted like tine beads of glass rolling down a tin roof.  In the dim tumult, he noticed that his leg no longer hurt, so he pulled the trousers down again and unbound the dark wet dressing.  The arrow-hole was full and purple.  It had shrunk to a little flower around the wound, like a small purple octopus.

He lay back down, and he thought about the first time he saw an octopus.

__________

He is on a smallish windswept island.  It is nearing sunset, and the dusk of his first year of training with Dirty Gig, the halfling witch.  He has already learned to write and to read.  He has enjoyed it immensely, but now his small teeth are bared in anguish.

Something has gone wrong...

And now he is squeezing an octopus.

For all his youth and inexperience with anything scholarly, he has learned too quickly.  Without enough frustration.  There has been no real growth, Dirty Gig tells him.  And he senses the truth in her even if he doesn’t understand it.  There is no envy in her voice.  No meanness.   But, buried like crops that have been planted to late in the season, there has been this sense that his training is at a standstill.

And now, without knowing precisely why, he has sequestered himself.

In this, he has started thinking he may have been duped.  It had been the means all along, his hungry mind tells him.  He realizes it now.  Dirty Gig wants him out of the way so that she can practice her craft with being told by the Halfling-King to train him.  Out here on this bleak island, he is at the mercy of that miserable old woman.  Flirty, dirty old Gig.  The horny old bitch.  For twenty days, her henchmen have not come with the grains for his beer and bread.  So in his remarkable animal-hunger he is beyond the human recoil of the octopus’s grip.  Yet it has taken the summons of something foreign and repulsive in himself to seize it from the tidal pool.  Ripping and sloshing onto the heat of the black sands, there is no pity.  No fear.  Only the notion that he has devolved, somehow, and it is an open question as to what this new thing will not eat.  Cullfor hunkers.  He does not know what he is holding.  For a savage moment, he sneers as he holds it aloft.  Surf crashes without cease behind him.  Ahead, all around, uncomfortable trade winds shake an endless blanket of grass.  There is a notion, sudden and wicked:  That eye.  There is a quality there.  Is it evil?  No.  This thing is not evil.  But nonetheless it is as if the creature has strayed from the frozen caverns of hell to be purposely caught.  As if by virtue of this, hell-colored waves ripple away from its head.  Again the wind brutalizes him for a moment.  Like no place known to him, the wind does not retreat from the sea here.  It rushes to it.  Out from the temped green grass to blast away the cool.  When it relents, it is replaced by the bake of the sun.

He licks white lips and struggles to think.

“Oh little beast,” he whispers, the thin and creased bur of his voice lost to a break in the surf behind him.  “Let’s hope you don’t taste as hideous as you look.”

That improbable eye blinks.  Otherwise, its stare is unrelenting and as certain as an afterlife.  It has more gravity than it should.  Something in his Cullfor’s sturdy young nature is failing under the gaze.  He finds it strangely necessary to seize the gasping beak before it might answer.

He needs this to be done.

The preadolescent wizard seeks a smashing rock.  His search is too frantic, too long for comfort.  It must be a suitable stone.  It must have a jagged tip.  Death-writhing might sadden him in this pitiful mind.

He bends, an action made easier with a shrunken waist and the thinning remnants of his robes.  Then he freezes.

Instants erupt quickly:  The octopus warps.  Curls around his thumb.  Blackens.  It bites.  Or stings.  He is never certain.  Only that it is an utter and choking pain.

He swallows his shock, tosses the beast back into the tidal pool.

“Oh, precious balls of the old gods.”

Cullfor grabs the base of his thumb.  He has thought things over, and over.  He has built a fire to combat the sting of night things and his immutable fear of the dark itself.  But he has not anticipated being attacked by such a thing.

“Hoo, the pain.”

There is a thick wet ribbon of red, snaking from a little X-shaped hole.  Soon it is curling down his wrist to the sea.  There is a faint feeling.  Surges of light.  The feeling passes.

As something in his tonsured head rises sharply, his soul seems to soar for an instant.  He looks around with the vaguely hopeful sensation of lift.  Everything is wonderful and terrible both.

Just as drastically, his mood dips.

“Damn beast.  What have you done?”

Still holding the base of his thumb, he plunges his hands in the water.  He shakes off the blood and stands.

Suddenly his body is awash in cold.  But the wound throbs of heat and itch, and there is that giddy feeling again.  Cullfor laughs, gazing around into a mounting fog.  It is a fog he knows does not exist because the wind still shakes the grass under a blue sky.  The ocean seems tilted.  Night comes with unusual speed.  He clenches his jaws and shakes his head, and he bumbles up the rocky beach to his fire as the flame whips and gasps for its life.  He plops down with an odd sensation.  His blood feels syrupy.  His chest hurts.  He peers up, eyes watering.  Stray sparks winnow aloft in clusters, vanishing as they fly toward the starry sea.

His morale crashes again.  This time without a bottom to catch it.  Weeping, he thinks about the witch called Dirty Gig.  He thinks about the two of them at the table, quietly eating breakfast cakes.  One of her breasts is out of her sleeping gown, but it is the cakes that hold him rapt. Their buttery crisp edges.  The lusciously soggy middle.  Greasy sausages.  The bleary sun, rising to the chimes out in Dirty Gig’s large walnut tree.  She is humming a ridiculous song. 

A dog, a woman,

and a walnut tree. 

The better you beat them,

the better they be…

So tie me up,

and I’m bound to thank ye

lift my gown

and proceed to spank me…

He smiles to think of it now, just as he had smiled long after they set down their wooden spoons and he lifted back up.  He had thought it was a hint, the song, for when she reached over to gather his plate, he seized her.  He pinned head to the table with a wall of the unseen verve.  When she offered no protest, he lifted her gown, exposing what was a surprisingly smooth, full backside.  She merely turned her head and looked back at him, not angrily, not even terribly surprised, but more as if merely curios at his next move. 

He smiled.  “You’re a terrible trainer.”

“Aye, true enough, boy.  What will ye do about it then?”

He looked at the spoon in his hand, looked at her bare buttocks, paddled her.

Hard.

Perhaps too hard.  It is hard to say.  For nearly an hour, she did little by way of reaction except to close her eyes, whimper and writhe slightly.  When they were done, she said nothing and did little but rise afterward without so much as a nod and get back to her chores.

It was never talked about.  Never repeated.

All he knows is that not too long after, he is squeezing more blood from the octopus wound.  There is a fleeting suspicion that life is holiday, or a journey for a pious life he had led prior to this one, and in his delirium he tells himself a promise:  One day he will get back.  He will get a spoon.  He will know that breakfast-time joy of life again.

The wind, which had been blowing for twenty-seven days, ceases.  With a branch and a thin sheet of dry bark, he writes the promise to the beach itself, and the world wriggles and seems to swallow some of his pain.

But he does not let all of the pain go.

Something deep inside him needs to feel it.

And Cullfor while suspects God offers all men such wisdom, he thanks Him for this quiet place to accept it.

__________

Cozy in his grotto, Cullfor managed what felt like another hour of sleep before he woke, smiling, but with a strange taste in his mouth like rotten dairy or octopus slime.

He hawrked and rubbed his eyes.

He reclined once more beside her, nestling against her, feeling her cold nose, her sweaty hair, and for the first time in years, he offered up a prayer of thanks.