Cloudfyre Falling - a dark fairy tale (25 page)

‘
If I recall it correctly,’
Gargaron said, ‘the metal man I met in Autumn stated that Hawkmoth
resides upon a place called Barren Hill, a spot conspicuous by some
landmark known as the Dead Man. Barren Hill lies beyond Thoonsk and
the Murdered Sea both. It be a safe bet that this were the sea it
were referring to.’

Thus they began their
crossing.

3

Grimah stomped out across sand,
and patches of crumbled and cracked salt crust that were dirty
white but pinkish in places. Weeds that grew here were spindly and
wilted and some shrubs lay entirely encrusted in salt. In the
distance as they pressed on they spotted more wrecks of ancient
lake trawlers, old wooden ships that leaned this way and that in
their sandy, weed strewn graves. Much closer were the sun bleached
and dormant skeletons of enormous lake monsters: snapping turtles;
marine vipers; tusked water horse, some whose empty skulls dwarfed
even that of Gargaron himself.

There were also islands. Tall
rounded toadstool humps of land that arose up out of the old lake
bed. Some of these islands still possessed the remains of long
deserted fishing settlements, crumbling shacks with rooves long
eaten away by unbridled winds, and some, particularly where the bed
of the lake proved far shallower, still bore crumbling wooden
jetties jutting out across what would once have been waters teeming
with fish and shrimp; nowadays they spanned naught but barren rock
and sand and empty shells from long dead crab and
cockle.

It were upon one of these such
islands that Gargaron and Melai set up night camp as the suns began
to set.

4

Gargaron set a fire alight having
gathered up kindling of salt crusted twigs and leaves, before
laying on heavier, thicker chunks of deadfall. He did not mind that
Melai sat back from the flickering, crackling flames. But as the
flames took to the fuel and engulfed it he thought it odd that she
looked so fearful.

‘
What be your concern?’ he asked
her as he sat down, pulling both his great sword and the hilt of
Hor’s hammer close beside him. (If there were bandits about they
would have nothing off him without a fight.) ‘The fire does not
seek you.’

‘
Fire be the mortal enemy of
Mother Thoonsk,’ she told him, ‘thus it remains my
enemy.’

Gargaron shrugged. ‘Aye, but in a
way it is everyone’s enemy. It bears no loyalty to any save, I
hear, the devils. Yet, for eons, folk have learnt to control it,
and bend it to their will.’

‘
Still, I do not understand why
you would invite such a soulless demon here.’

He frowned. ‘Why, for warmth. And
if I had hunted some beast for dinner then fire shall have cooked
it. Also, it be a social mechanism, a means for folk around which
to socialise.’

She laughed. ‘Now I know you
fib.’

He smiled, more at her laughter.
‘I fib not. A central fire will bring folk together at night, or
during winter months. Banquets, special ceremonies, rituals. All
may be had around a fire.’

‘
Strange customs then.’

‘
You do not utilise fire, I
gather,’ he said. ‘How then would you keep warm during cold nights
in your Thoonsk? And do you have no need to cook?’

‘
Much warmth and social communion
and spiritual sustenance comes from our joining with our willow
home trees. And have you not observed? I eat no thing that is dead
or has been slain. I eat only of living plants as Mother Thoonsk
has offered.’

5

The moons lit the lake bed, and
the lake bed seemed to glow in a dreamy kind of elf-light. The
night proved cool but the fire kept their little space on the
island warm long beyond the witching hour. Melai though refused its
warmth. She slept away from it, beyond the huge hump that were
Grimah. And had her back turned to the giant for she could not
stand to look upon his Nightface whose large eyes seemed constantly
to watch her.

She slept fitfully and dreamless
and the night to her were empty and silent. All her life she had
slept within in her home tree at Willowgarde. At night she would
sprout root and reconnect with it, and until dawn, while she
slumbered, she would hear the protective voice of it conversing
with other trees, would hear their secrets passing back and forth
across Thoonsk; she would also hear the owls and the howler bugs
and the tooting frogs and the hunting turtles snapping and
splashing. An entire cacophony of sound had filled her woodland
during its wee hours. That first night away from Thoonsk, on that
little island, she had never felt so alone, so exposed, so
isolated, and when her limbs sprouted root they had nothing with
which to connect. She wept alone under the moonlight while the
giant and his steed slumbered without trouble.

6

The following day they came across
first a stone fort situated on yet another island. It looked but
the ruins of a castle, ancient and salt layered. And to pass by it
closely were to see tortured remains of folk preserved by salt
within.

Later, at midday, when the warm
wind off the lake bed threw sand grit and dead crystalline insects
at them, they passed by an island situated to their north where
Gargaron slowed his steed at the sight of a peculiar spectacle; one
Melai had never set eye upon before. She watched Gargaron pull out
his spy glass and put the object in view.

To her it looked like a huge pile
of skulls. She asked what it were.

‘
A Creep Mound,’ he told
her.

‘
Creep Mound? I have naught heard
of such things.’

The absence of a ghost raven
guarding the mound intrigued Gargaron. Though did not surprise him.
It were most likely dead. ‘It be an object we would do well to
steer clear of. For it marks the region of some terrible
illness.’

‘
Illness?’

‘
Aye.’

‘
Could it be to blame for all the
death we have seen?’

Gargaron shrugged. ‘Anything be
likely.’ It occurred to him then that the entire realm these days
it seemed like a Creep Mound. The dead piled up daily around
them.

7

An hour later they arrived at the
remains of an old ocean trawler. They had spied it from a distance,
and like the castle, it had remained a conspicuous lump on the
horizon until, the closer they drew to it, it had taken on a more
defined shape.

Unlike the castle however it were
not encrusted in salt. Suggesting that perhaps it had sailed these
parts long after the castle had been abandoned.

Gargaron pulled Grimah to a halt,
studying the vessel where it lay bogged in the weedy sand, its
starboard hull tilted groundward.

‘
This ship be cursed,’ Melai
murmured. ‘Do you not feel it? Why do you stop?’

‘
There may be resources to
pilfer.’

A lively breeze whined at them
through the ship’s wooden hull.

‘
I would rather we press on and
leave it to its ghosts.’

Gargaron felt her consternation.
And sensed something further. But not from Melai. An odour. Some
smell wafting from the bowels of the ship. And when he saw a face
watching them through one of the portholes he tightened his grip on
his reins.

It came out at them then. One
first. Then another, and another. Three cursed and crusted folk,
with little flesh left on their skulls, chests, arms, legs; clad
only in tattered robes and leather boots. Their rancid briny stench
wafted at Gargaron on the breeze, and Grimah whined and fought
against the pull of the reins.

‘
Take us from
here!
’ Melai screeched.

Gargaron finally set Grimah into a
gallop as the skeleton folk rushed at them, bones clicking, jaws
chattering and snapping shut. One wielded a mace, the other two
were equipped with swords.

They chased Grimah most of that
day. Whilst they were not fast across ground, they were persistent,
and chased and chased, until one by one… they fell into the hard
packed salt. And did not rise again.

By late afternoon the distant
horizon began to spike up with some far off line of mountains,
snowcapped and jagged. But any notions that this dead-sea
wilderness stretched all the way to their foothills were soon
interrupted by a vast shore line forest, and soon Gargaron and
Melai and Grimah had left the ghosts of Claraville behind them and
were roaming through grassy green hills.

1

NEAR end of day they crested a
rise and saw northways’n’east the land dipping down into a shallow
vale, to what looked to be a running brook, and beyond that lay a
tall tree covered hill poking into sky like the hump of some great
sleeping beast.

Gargaron pulled Grimah to a halt
and both he and Melai stared wide-eyed at the scene before them.
There were a cottage they saw upon that hill, nestled amidst the
trees, and an enormous statue, (the Dead Man, Gargaron guessed)
towering into the sky perched at hill’s flattened summit. But the
most heartening and intriguing aspect were the wandering livestock:
goat and deer. And the presence of birds flitting from tree to
tree. And the sounds of bugs twittering, cheeping,
whistling.

Gargaron recalled
the words of the mekanik. “
We must
traverse beyond Thoonsk, and cross the Murdered Sea… Not until
Melus and Gohor again hang directly over our heads shall we reach
Barrow Hill upon which the Dead Man sits and watches all. There, in
his cottage, Mastaer Hawkmoth resides.
”

So, we are here
at last,
Gargaron thought. ‘Do you see
this?’ he asked. ‘Do you hear it, Melai?’

‘
Aye,’ the wood’s nymph replied.
‘Does life flourish here?’

‘
I have no idea,’ Gargaron said.
‘We can only hope.’

2

Gargaron took Grimah down grassy
slopes toward waters of the brook. Something of a canoe listed
peacefully upon water’s surface, strands of black algae clinging to
its sides like witch’s hair.

Red crabs wandered the stony
shore. But hundreds of them also lay face down, or belly up; some
of them with legs still kicking pointlessly at the air. A murder of
ravens skipped through the stones, pecking remorselessly at the
dead. But they too had a number who had succumbed and lay, with
their feather’s sodden, rotting at water’s edge, tugged at gently
to and fro by the current.

The sight were a dent in
Gargaron’s hopes—perhaps this Hawkmoth had not found a way to
counter the blight after all.

He had a mind to
shoo the ravens,
to
flip
over the toppled crabs for their own
salvation. But he knew better now. What had stricken the rest of
his realm had begun to stricken these water dwellers. Pond skaters
and frogs and fishes and salamanders all. None spared. All dying or
dead. And as Gargaron and Melai drew closer the stench of rot came
to them, thick and pungent and cloying.

Melai clapped a hand over her
face, Gargaron coughed and spat. Grimah snorted nervously and for a
time put in a fight, refusing to step near these fetid
waters.

Gargaron urged
Grimah on with a gentle heel-jab to his ribs, and a determined
‘
Yar!
’ Grimah
reared up on his hind legs, squealing. Melai screeched and her
wings beat in a reflexive response.

Gargaron made to push Grimah
forward when at last he spied the object of his steed’s
consternation. And it made Gargaron haul his mount to a standstill
quick smart.

A water hag watched them. She lay
very still. Half submerged, her face and one shoulder free of the
rippling brook. Her sodden hair hung in straggled clumps, her lips
had withered, her brown teeth grew with green moss and yellow rot,
her sunken eyes held a bleak opaqueness, yet appeared to glow with
a faint magical green witch light. A hole in her neck, ragged flaps
of skin doing almost nothing to hide it, swarmed with black beetles
that nibbled at the lips of flesh and when she realised she had
been spotted she appeared to grin.

‘
Back up, I warn you,’ Melai
commanded Gargaron, who had not moved since laying eye on the hag;
he had rarely seen one such as she, and were fascinated. ‘Back up,’
Melai urged again.

As Gargaron took heed the hag attempted to
move.

‘
She comes for
us!
’ Melai hissed.

Though all the hag succeeded in
doing were lolling over. As if whatever life left to her, were
swiftly waning. She continued to watch them though, most of her
face now claimed by the brook, her stringy hair caught on the flow,
the beetles in her neck drowning. The witch light in her monstrous
eyes fading like sunlight beyond a storm.

Gargaron pulled Grimah back up
grassy slopes. Steadied him. Settled him. ‘Be fine, Grimah,’ he
spoke soothingly into his ear. ‘Be calm now.’

3

They traipsed across vale,
tracking the course of the brook, hoping to find a fairer waypoint
to traverse. They located one further down where the belly of the
brook shallowed upon a bed of smooth stones.