by Josh Howard
in Issue 51, August 2024
Symond rose from where he had been sitting cross-legged on Pak’s shell as they entered the ruins. He spread his feet for balance and shielded his eyes with one hand, even though the few remaining columns occasionally blocked the mid-morning sun. Pak’s clawed feet beat out a steady thump-thump-thump-thump. Now and then the turtle scraped over half-buried masonry, and Symond used the staff in his other hand to steady himself. He peered down shadowed roadways, their cobbles shrinking squares of gray in the encroaching grass.
Four blunted spikes were embedded in Pak’s shell, two on each side of the turtle’s spine-ridge. Each spike was topped with a leather cap and a couple of lengths of rope were coiled around them.
From where he stood swaying with the rhythm of Pak’s gait, Symond could see furrows in the earth where others had dragged blocks and chunks out of the ruins. The remaining stones all looked either too small or too large. Father and Mother had sent him to bring back a piece that could go in the new cellar. He saw himself having to admit to Father that he couldn’t find what they needed. Symond sang a few bars of a lilting melody to Pak. When he stopped singing, he continued to hum half to himself, missing most of the notes.
The turtle carried him past a fallen wall with pictures carved into it. To Symond they looked like birds with snakes’ tails and a woman with her teats showing. It was hard to tear his eyes away from either. But he did so, imagining Father walking along, guiding Pak.
He could steer Pak with a few taps, and he directed the beast to the right, down a wide thoroughfare, then right again, into the old city’s heart.
Their path began sloping gradually downhill. Here there were more pieces of about the size Symond needed, but they tended to rest under larger rubble, and he wasn’t sure he could squeeze his ten-year-old frame between the gaps to secure the ropes.
He was just getting ready to turn Pak around when he saw it. A relieved smile spread across his face. There in the shadow of two portions of wall was the stone he needed. It was round and uncracked and its rim was still a good five inches above the earth. He could have it trussed in minutes and make up for the time he lost looking.
Symond slid down the side of Pak’s shell and jogged toward the stone. “This way, boy,” he called cheerfully, and the plodding thumps sounded from behind him as he took a better look at his prize. It was darker than the surrounding masonry and undecorated, except for a few barely-visible whorls around the edge that might have been figures, or writing. A shallow depression about the size of his fist lay dead center.
He looked up into the glassy orbs of Pak’s eyes. “A piece of luck, eh?” he grinned. The turtle stared. Bright yellow flecks stood out against the greenish brown scales of his head, with its beak that never opened unless Pak meant business. Symond liked the way Pak’s eyes were ever alert, not dull like a cow’s, even though they never betrayed even a cow’s emotion, much less a dog’s. Pak was incredibly useful around a farm. His reptile stench was too strong for delicate noses, true, but Symond had been used to it since he got big enough for Father to trust him around the turtle a couple of years ago.
A little nudging and tapping got Pak turned around so that Symond could loosen the ropes. He took another appraising look at the round stone, seeing his planned rig in his mind’s eye, then got to work. He threw one end of rope over the top. The other rope went across it at a diagonal. Symond ran to the other side and dragged the loose ends under the rock and threw them over again. Sometimes he climbed over the surface, looking like a small spider wrapping up an oversized beetle. He came close to making a mistake once or twice, but Father’s voice in his mind corrected him. At times like that he winced slightly and hummed louder for a moment.
His job finished, Symond stood back with his hands on his hips. The lines were secure, but with enough slack in them not to catch up the turtle’s legs or bang against his shell as they made progress. He would walk behind and watch for snags.
Turning to get Pak started, he noticed the same woman from before carved into the wall looming over his stone. At least, he guessed it was the same woman. This carving was even more weathered, but he recognized her by her breasts, he thought with a giggle. Where her face should have been was indistinguishable from plain wall.
“Home, boy,” he told Pak, and the turtle heaved his shell up from where he had been resting.
He didn’t get far. The slack went out of the ropes and Pak’s progress stopped. Symond scowled at the ropes, then the stone, then the turtle’s shell. Except for a bare inch or two, the dark rock hadn’t stirred. Pak had pulled bigger loads for them than this before. “Rest, Pak,” Symond called. As the ropes slackened, Symond circled to the other side. There was nothing wrong with his rigging. “Home, Pak!”
The same thing happened. Symond scratched his head and an empty feeling began to form in his stomach. What was he doing wrong?
He crouched to look under the stone and lost his balance. He barely noticed the impact as his rump hit the earth.
There were hands.
The stone wasn’t the top of a buried column; Pak’s last effort had loosened a few more inches of dirt. A central plug with an upturned edge lay under it, and grasping the edge were dozens of pale gray hands, their nails cracked and their bones flexing beneath the skin. That was what quickened Symond’s breath and filled his stomach with ice—the hands were alive. As Pak relaxed and pulled again, the hands shifted and renewed their grip. They reminded Symond of the young clinging to a wolf spider’s back.
He made an animal noise and scrambled to his feet. He was knocking the staff wildly against Pak’s shell before he knew what he was doing, and he caught himself before he started swinging it like a weapon. “Home, boy! Now!”
As far as Symond knew, Father had never disciplined Pak, but there was no danger of the turtle mistaking his meaning. The stumpy legs strained while Symond stared wide-eyed at the stone. He was grateful not to be able to see the hands. He still hadn’t caught his breath, he realized. Pak’s claws were digging rents in the earth now, but the stone hadn’t moved.
On feet he could barely feel, Symond approached the stone and made himself crouch for another look. The hands were still there. They showed no signs of weakening. What were they? Who were they? Symond thought of Father and kicked out without thinking. He felt a leathery impact beneath his shoe, but the dirty nails raked out so quickly he felt the breeze on his ankle as he just managed to pull back in time. The hands didn’t budge. He jabbed at them with the staff and nearly got it yanked from his grip.
There were no pairs, Symond realized. The hands were a crazy mix of rights and lefts. Pak had dug up so much earth he was flinging it in Symond’s face. A wild idea hit him of getting the turtle to dig up the rock. But what would they find once they started digging? A faint sob escaped his lips.
“Rest, boy,” he croaked. Pak would eventually tire, and they were getting nowhere like this.
Symond gripped the sides of his head, getting his breath under control and trying to think. He should go back, he knew. But he could see Father’s face as he told the story. Once the man had beaten him for leaving a gate open and made him eat dinner on the doorstep. But later he had lied to get out of trouble and Father had looked at the ground, his mouth hanging open, not saying a word. He hadn’t touched Symond…or spoken to him…or looked at him, for a month. The memory of that tension between them, taut as a coiled snake, actually dulled Symond’s fear of the hands. Especially since he had a grim but clear vision of himself leading Father back here: They would look under the stone and there would be no hands, no signs of disturbed soil, nothing at all. He would look into Father’s face and…
He cursed, using a word even Mother would beat him for. Tears started at the corners of his eyes, but he wiped them away furiously. A scraping sound made him look up.
It moved nothing like an inchworm, Symond decided. An inchworm wouldn’t need that many limbs. But it was big, and it was coming around the wall, and it was headed his way. It was no animal. A beast of any sort wouldn’t move that clumsily. The thing wrenched the front of its elongated body up, sending a ripple down its length. It slither-humped toward him, regarding him with an eyeless face that only resembled a human skull the way the markings on some moths’ backs resembled eyes. A sound like a labored intake of breath came out of it. And on each side of the thing’s body were arms and hands without number. But the wrists were limp, the hands useless, the arms spindly and gray and starving.
Symond screamed and backed away with the staff raised in a sheer warding-off gesture, no hope of attack. He made to climb on the stone, but this time the hands beneath it weren’t busy. They lashed at him, and he risked turning his back on the worm-thing to jump. That gained him a couple of feet, but the skull that wasn’t a skull appeared and the vestigial limbs began awkwardly flopping around the edge he had just left. The dying breath of the thing accused him.
He rolled off the other side and landed sprawling. Hands came for him but only managed to get the staff. To his horror, he found he couldn’t let go of it, even when they touched his whitened fingers. A face popped around the stone behind him, and Symond released the staff, sprinting around the side of Pak’s shell. He didn’t take off through the ruins, figuring the creature would be on him in no time. He only circled around, thinking to get anything—Pak, the stone, the wall—between him and that writhing mass.
He tripped over his own feet. Stars erupted as his chin met the ground, but he flipped and pedaled backward on his heels and palms. The thing was completing a ripple less than six feet away. It raised itself for the final squirm that would put him within its grasp.
And just as if he were feeding at a trough, Pak’s head shot out and his beak caught the creature square in its midpoint. Its writhing took on a new burst of speed. The hands flailed helplessly at the air. Pak held its gray length with no apparent urgency, his staring eyes as blank as ever. Symond laughed with relief. The thing’s struggles slowed, and Pak loosened his jaws just enough to bring them down again in another snap. A shock went through the creature and the limbs went slack all at once. But the skull-head lifted as the last ragged breath escaped it, and Symond looked directly into the gray spots of its eyes. They held and pulled him in.
He saw the city as it once had been. Laughing groups of people passed without looking at him. Towers connected by arches of black and crimson shaded the street, whose paving stones met as neatly as scales. The walls gleamed with the bare-breasted woman and her strange winged attendants in sharp relief, though he still couldn’t make out her face.
Despite the laughter, not everyone was happy, Symond saw. A few people—dressed no differently than the others—were struggling as they were dragged toward the dark stone. The people holding the strugglers’ arms smiled and chattered away as if they were sharing some joke with a friend. Men and women in white robes flanked the stone. The women held knives. And each group of people held their “friend” bent over the rock as a robed man yanked the person’s hair back and a woman drew her knife calmly across the bare throat.
Symond stared at the blood dripping onto the ground a few feet from his face. The drops froze in the air and grew until they filled his vision. He saw flames blazing against a night sky as people ran pell-mell down the streets. Strangers on horses with painted flanks rode through them, hacking with axes left and right. It became a gray morning, and he saw the strangers dragging what looked like bolts of cloth, household goods, and lumps of wood to a pile to be set ablaze. He saw the streets deserted. Wild deer roamed through the city. Disused buildings crumbled.
And like a faint echo on the edge of his awareness, he heard a woman’s keening cry, equal parts despair and rage. There were no people of any sort visible—the ruins looked little different than they had when he rode in on Pak that morning. But Symond knew who it was. It was she, the woman on the wall. She whose people had built the city named after her, whose people had dragged their own one by one to her altar stones, who had traded their own blood and lives for the prosperity that was once the envy of the world. Her city was a shambles, her name forgotten. The remnants of her domain were being dragged away bit by bit to serve the humble needs of the farmers who had settled the area after the horse-riding despoilers had passed into history. Only a solitary altar stone remained, with her sickly guardians to protect it while she watched impotently from beyond. And one guardian had been felled by nothing more than a peasant’s farm-beast.
Symond felt her anger but knew it could not harm him. The woman had no power but in the hands still holding the stone to the earth. Her fury only served to remind him of Father. He could not tell Father what had happened. The man would never stop hating him. He was supposed to get a stone for the cellar…
“I’m yours!” he shouted. The woman’s rage faded slightly, tinged with curiosity. “I’ll worship you!” Symond told her. “I’ll never tell anyone. Just let loose the stone!”
He waited. Then, in the space of an eye-blink, he was back on the ground with Pak standing nearby. The turtle had bitten the worm-thing into chunks. It looked like half the creature had already traveled down Pak’s gullet. Symond shivered, but he noticed that the woman’s wail was gone. He thought he heard what sounded like a dusty chuckle from somewhere far away, but it could have been the wind.
He stood and shakily walked back to where the stone lay. He peeked under it from ten feet away and saw that the hands had vanished. Where they had been was only a patch of disturbed dirt like an old pig-wallow in the forest. Symond let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. He retrieved his staff.
Pak had eaten his fill. Symond tapped his shell and got out, “Home, boy,” in a voice barely above a whisper. The turtle heard him, though, and started forward yet again. This time the stone pulled free as if it weighed nothing. Symond stared open-mouthed as Pak dragged his burden purposefully down the cobbled street. It took a moment for Symond to remember himself enough to feel relieved, then he trotted after the turtle.
From outside time and its swirling materials, in a twilight realm shunned by those of her own race, circled by avian shapes with coiling serpents’ tails, a female figure watched the tiny man-child trudging along behind his loyal beast. He was better than nothing, she decided. Far better. He was not without will, but not endowed with too much of it, either. He would keep his word. He would be too afraid not to. And who knew…if his devotion was strong enough, she might be able to supply a few things he might want when he got bigger. For free at first, of course. Yes, this man-child would do nicely.
To start over, all she would need was one good pair of hands.
The turtle followed his instinctive path toward what the boy called “home.” Pak’s mind was too simple to understand the full import of the weighted thing bouncing along behind him. But his race was a long-lived one, and its memory longer still. He was not given to shows of emotion even if his face could register them, but as he pulled the woman’s altar stone toward its new resting place, some might have said he looked close to tears.
©August 2024, Josh Howard
Josh Howard’s work has appeared in Dream Fantasy International and previously in Swords & Sorcery Magazine.
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