PULL ME UNDER - Side B - Fear of the Dark - Nineteen
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(Author’s note: this marks the half-way point in the story, so for those new to the book feel free to check out the TOC link above, where I also have background info, the blurb, pronunciation notes, etc!)
Side B - Fear of the Dark
Nineteen
At the castle, the horse was well cared for—as far as Tanner could tell, being fairly ignorant of horses, real horses. A mare, she had space to run and good shelter from the weather, shared with some other animals he was unfamiliar with, none but the mare paid him any mind—but when she took little morsels from his open palm and shook out her mane in excitement, nothing mattered. Every visit to the castle brought him to the menagerie so he could give her a pat and feel her breath, look into her eyes and each visit gave an indescribable pang in his heart. What happened to your rider? Did you wander here by yourself?
No one had found the keys to open Meired’s little storage room, and no attempts at lock-picking succeeded. Tanner itched to get back in there, just to feel the things in his hand, weigh them, read all the names inside the wallets.
He was getting much better with the bow, though his peers had learned to shoot as children, and as he visited Antoll’s ashes he joked with the unresponsive urn that he was finally able to hit something, if he concentrated real hard. He missed Antoll being there to teach him, and told the urn that too, before heading back outside the castle walls.
Aching bones, muscles hating every move they made, yet he was still upright. It was deep winter and even in the jarring cold they trained, and trained, and trained. The city didn’t get much in the way of snow, but the wind in the open was enough to kill a man unprepared.
To watch Ddun and his retinue walk through the streets amazed Tanner with a swell of awe, to see crowds part and men bow low. Rudda and Borga nearest Ddun, the rest of no consequence to Tanner, but they all carried themselves like a flock of godkings—Ddun always had, even while being as humble as he was, it was so effortless, and envy shared space with awe. Commanding respect just by posture alone, there was no question in Tanner’s mind that Ddun was the right man for the job. He had always walked like that, oozing that presence from his pores. Everyone respected him, if they had to say “no,” it was done with tact and politeness.
Tanner had once wondered, would they be like that with him, if he fought like them, if he walked and talked like them? They didn’t. Though he had been offered a place in Ddun’s retinue, he declined it. It didn’t feel right. He would stay a loyal soldier. He wasn’t sure if he saw sadness cross Ddun’s eyes when he said so, but that’s how it went. Eventually he relented to Ddun’s request that he be a riding teacher, the young boys admiring Tanner’s distinct style and knack for break-neck speeds, and he enjoyed it. One accomplishment to stick in his cap.
There hadn’t yet been a chance to teach them how to play hockey, but that would come.
He passed the whorehouse full of pubic lice ran by an insane Stenya who refused to pick up sticks, past the smoke and grease of the food stalls and the racket of the blacksmith quarter, the stench of the tannery, all built fresh with passionate urban renewal initiatives powered by slave labour, and it was glorious. Every smell, every pollutant in the air and on the streets, every merchant trying to con him, it renewed him like the fresh white tarpaulin over the semi-permanent tents. Now that he was done with his errand of passing scrolled messages around, he sought a gift. Lauren’s birthday was in January, and so Tanner was likely very late. With a different moon and sky and year, precision didn’t matter, he figured, and being so busy… He missed his sister.
Peiransi bookbinders made official documents, but he had given the apprentice some extra coins for her trouble to get his commission done, a nice leather-bound book for Lauren to fill with sketches, a bottle of iron gall ink. She’d use it. It was the most expensive thing he had ever bought in his time there.
He returned to his bed in one of the many soldier’s tents, nodded a greeting to the other men relaxing away from the chill. From under his bedroll he pulled out the iridescent swath of silk he had found, a blue sheen at one angle and green on another, to wrap the book, and stored it carefully with his other few belongings. He tied his mask to his belt and pulled the tall red felt-lined boots off his feet. Then he reclined on his bed and pushed his shearling cap down over his eyes to nap.
A man with a burning stink of alcohol on his breath shook Tanner awake, a surprise that sent sparks from his chest out his limbs as the cap fell from his face. In a squat next to his bedding, a big motherfucker, and Tanner reached for his knife without a second thought before a hand reached out from under the cloak and pressed his wrist down. He recognized that big mitt. “Borga?”
“You’ve got to come with me,” Borga whispered, and passed Tanner a skin of wine.
Tanner nodded, a confused knot on his brow, took the skin and indulged. “What’s wrong?”
“You’ll see.”
Borga led Tanner through the meandering trails between tents and training grounds, a swirl of dread tensing Tanner’s shoulders as they went along. He was brought to Ddun’s tent, decorated at the entrance with their banner and countless colourful buntings and chimes hanging and flitting in the breeze, glittery sounds sprinkling the air of the thoroughfare leading them to the door. Ddun was shouting inside, and Borga opened without requesting audience first.
No one was in there to shout at.
“Tanner!” Ddun yelled as he noticed their entrance. “You’re the perfect man to help me.” He wasn’t drunk, and that alarmed Tanner more than if he had’ve been.
“How can I help you, General?”
“Shut up with that. I hate it.” Once Ddun stomped over to them at the door, Tanner saw the dark circles under Ddun’s eyes, the pallid skin. Was he sick? “You need to take me out of here.”
“Sir?”
Ddun punched him with a solid right hook, knocking him backwards into Borga’s chest with stars flashing in his eyes and his body involuntarily limp. Borga held him up like a scarecrow.
“Don’t be an idiot around me again, listen to me. Stand up.”
Borga stood Tanner upright, the floor threatening to slip out from under his feet, but he nodded, stretching his jaw. Ddun had snapped, there were frayed synapses in his skull. Tanner stayed silent.
“Borga.”
The big man Tanner had relied on for support gave a quick bow and backed out of the tent, leaving Tanner to Ddun’s insane mercy.
So he started laughing. “The fuck?”
“Thank you, I needed that moronic laugh. Tanner, I can’t sleep. Every time I sleep I have the same dream. It means something.”
“What’s the dream?”
“I’m lost in a dark room, no walls, I’m not sure it’s a room, I know I’m lost but there’s no way through. Just blackness, yet I can see. I first had the dream after the fight with Felik, nothing for a long time, until recently, I have it every night. It means something. But I’m stuck in here reading dispatches! Like this one,” he stomped to an ornate desk, the same wood and cherry-red lacquer as the carved map that now hung from an iron stand nearby. “They’re cutting trees in sacred forests, like the one you appeared in. Meired would have no care at all, it has to be her. A Grandfather would never allow it to be desecrated. Are those spirits angry, and they’re making me go mad? Are they asking for help? Is it Lauren? Maybe it’s Meired herself.”
“What if it’s just a dream?”
“Was your vision just a vision, when you saw Lauren at the lake?”
Tanner had nothing to rebuke with.
“I have to get out of here.”
“Do you want me to be frank?”
“Yes.”
“How the hell am I supposed to smuggle you out of here? Dress you like a woman?”
Ddun sat with a thump in the chair at the desk and covered his face to laugh, a quiet giggle with shoulders shaking as proof. “Gods, I’ve missed you.”
“So where are we going?”
“You tell me. I just want out of here. I need you to steal me.”
“We could take a trip to see the sacred forests, see with our own eyes what’s happening. No banners.”
Ddun pet his beard, contemplative and frowning. “It’ll be cold. A long ride.”
Tanner shrugged.
***
It was like skipping school, calling in sick to work, that sense of general mischief heated his blood and planted a permanent grin on his face, hidden by the cloak Borga loaned while sleeping off his drink. The pressure of everything was getting to all of the westland boys, it seemed, and Tanner was doubly glad to have declined a high-ranking position.
All his jingling coins and beads were bundled up and tucked into his waistband, wary of the thin crust of ice that might give his position away in the dark. Mindful of any snowdrifts over the sand, keeping low and snaking past the backs of tents and diving into ink-black shadows to make his way to the General’s tent, where the bastard was probably pacing and mouthing obscenities at nothing, as Borga had admitted Ddun was wont to do lately.
Ddun, the man Tanner admired for his confidence to be so distraught, it had to be more than a bad dream. The stress needed release, Borga had said, he couldn’t bring himself to fuck anyone other than his woman back home, and the backed-up cum was making him crazy—that was Borga’s drunken theory at least. Tanner told the prick he was going to wind up yellow and bloated if he didn’t stop guzzling every drop of liquor in the Dvarri innerlands, and they both laughed at each other and parted ways.
Ddun kept the AK in his tent, with part of one magazine left, and Tanner was eager to hold it again. Before he could, he had to get in the place, and there was the small matter of the guards posted at the door. Ddun’s tent was practically fortified, enough wood to make a skeleton on the inside, latticework of only inches between slats, a door that could swing and latch, no meager flap and ties. That also meant Tanner couldn’t just hike up the skirt of the thing like a pervert and go underneath.
He picked up a good sized rock and tossed it with a roll to the foot of the guard, see if he could be enticed from the spot. Tanner found it hard to believe the man wouldn’t move for such an obvious ploy, only to hear Ddun’s mumbling inside the tent go quiet.
“Your watch is done, get your asshole back to your tent or I’ll strangle you.”
Ah, Ddun, a man of eloquence. So much for Tanner’s stealth tactics—not too bad for the lack of planning. His shoulders relaxed as he waited for the guard to shuffle off—with hesitation as if confused if he should obey the orders or not, but obey he did. Tanner went to the door of the tent and gave it a shake, the latch held until Ddun appeared, dressed for the weather in a coarse deep green cloak like Tanner’s, both of them looking like unadorned Christmas trees, and Ddun, knowing exactly what Tanner was hoping for, forced the rifle into Tanner’s ribcage, perfectly wordless. Tanner gripped it with a toothy smile and they both ran for the horses, hopped up and bolted, without considering if they should leave a note.
Horses didn’t run as fast in the cold, which was one reason why spring was considered the start of the raiding season, but they rode on anyhow, howling with cracking, exuberant triumph to be far from the city outskirts. They were nomads, being stuck in that place for so many months was unnatural, and the two of them were like birds out of their cage—Ddun happened to be a very important bird, but they didn’t let that fact sour their mood just yet.
Ddun and Tanner hunted their way through the landscape, their journey slowed by their need for sustenance, but it wasn’t so much about the destination. Ddun began sleeping better immediately, twelve hours solid the first night. Slowly the colour returned to his cheeks and his eyes lost the shadows beneath them, and Tanner delighted in making him laugh with his stories that were mostly made up about loose women, just as his grandpa had done with him when he was younger—when he told the actually very true story about the river spirits, Ddun just about died.
“I bet you believe us now, don’t you?”
“I sure as fuck do.”
“Yet you questioned my dream.”
“Old habit.”
“Do you know why Rudda is so superstitious?” Ddun asked through a mouthful of rabbit leg.
If Tanner’s experience had made him appreciate the spirits of the land and water, he couldn’t imagine what Rudda’s cult-like devotion to them could have been inspired by. “Please tell me, oh my god.”
“I can’t tell you, he refuses to tell me, the prick. I was hoping you knew.”
A crystal broke between Tanner’s ears as he laughed, to think of the magic that everyone here took for granted, that Lauren and himself had only just seen in little scraps, like dropped puzzle pieces that didn’t fit with anything they knew. “Why is this place so fucking real? Spirits aren’t real where we come from. Magic… just isn’t.” He didn’t know where inside him the words came from, but he wasn’t laughing anymore. The chunk of rabbit had stopped half way to his mouth and it hung there, he stared. It might turn to sand.
Maybe that’s why the guy wound up offing himself after fifteen years of trying to make sense of everything. He thought he was caught in a dream that didn’t end, only to find others like him to talk to, and it just scrambled his head like a fork in a bowl of eggs. The finality of knowing he wasn’t ever going to wake up, that fifteen years really had passed, he wasn’t lying in a hospital bed having comatose hallucinations.
“I could ask the same about you both.” Ddun watched Tanner from under his brow, a stillness that locked Tanner in place. Ddun was right. Tanner couldn’t imagine it from their perspective, either. Ddun was the first to return to eating, and Tanner forced himself to bite and chew. “There might be something in those scrolls and tomes Meired collected.”
“I’d love to get into that room. But I thought no one could open the door?” Tanner sucked rabbit juice off his thumb. “Lauren might, if she ever stepped foot in that castle again.”
“I lie awake wondering what happened to her there, you know. As if I didn’t have my own dreams keeping me from sleep. I haven’t had the time to do anything but plan for war.” There was a hitch in Ddun’s voice that made Tanner sympathize with him. They both missed Lauren.
“Have you dreamt that again, since we’ve been out here?”
“No. My head has been very clear, actually. It’s the open horizon, I think.”
“Maybe it isn’t. Rudda and Borga have both been upset, too. Borga’s going to drink himself to death.”
“I don’t want to go back.”
“You gotta.”
“South first.”
***
Tanner lost track of the days, but the landscape was changing. The brushland was thicker, the trees less stunted. He thought back to the strange blue-tinged forest, those trees grew so tall in a land where people were using dried dung for fuel in winter because the trees weren’t plentiful enough. Most of their lumber they traded for. Yet those trees were enormous, so tall they blotted out the sky, and no one touched them. If that was the sort of forest that Meired was pruning, it was no wonder at all why Ddun and the others would be so incensed at her actions, so much so the Stenya were considered not much more than a tick on their ass in comparison to the threat in the south, now.
They came to a Dvarri camp, no one recognised them and they were given pleasant hospitality, as any travellers would be given. A cozy family unit, all sharing one big tent. They were given some lambs-head soup and asked the family if they heard anything about Kisku, the sacred wood. The father, a thick grey moustache wet from soup, shook his head. “No one is going to the city. We’re poorer for it, but I won’t take my family near it.”
“Why not?” Ddun asked, a slight lean forward in interest. Tanner knew to pay attention, and kept his eyes off the women for the first time in his life.
“You can’t see the horizon. It’s a dreadful omen.”
Ddun’s fingers fidgeted at his knee, nails flicked. Tanner swallowed, sweat on his palms, watching as Ddun’s jaw opened and shut as he tried to form the correct question. “What do you mean, can you describe this omen?”
The father gestured his hands over his head in an arch. “The sky is thick, like this, over the city, and we dared not approach it for the sight of it put me ill at ease. It’s no firesmoke. You get this… twist in your spleen to look on it, and if you can dare to look long enough, you can see the creatures that flow like fish in water, in and out, I had no name for them, so we’ve chosen to go back north instead, lend our humble holdings to the cause there.”
“An honourable cause it is, and your family will be compensated well,” Ddun said. “When was the strange vision first seen?”
“I know that not. Ones we’ve spoken with, who were there at the start of autumn, there was a sickness that fell over the city and they fled to avoid plague. I heard a rumour…” at this the man stopped, rubbed his face. “I know this seems absurd, but I heard a rumour it might be the Crown. Did you plan on venturing there?”
The Dvarri crown? The one that was cursed? Tanner didn’t get a chance to ask before Ddun answered the question.
“No. We’re heading back to Kaddusk, we can’t travel together I’m afraid, but you have our thanks for your hospitality. What’s your clan name?”
“Yamnoyuk.”
“I give you my word, your name will be noted.”