by Rab Foster
in Issue 120, January 2022
Even while he struggled against the drug’s effects, Drayak Shathsprey saw the irony in his predicament. Everything he’d encountered since coming onto the Mynchmoor had seemed an affront to him with its grey, dreich joylessness: the landscapes, weather, people, houses, food. The sweet-tasting wine served this evening was the first thing in days that’d kindled a glow of pleasure in him. Yet for some nefarious reason, they’d put a potion in the wine to knock him out.
He struggled to his feet, withstood a swirl of dizziness, grabbed the table edge, and heaved the whole thing up and onto its side. Plates, knives, goblets, jugs clattered onto the flagstoned floor. The people on the table’s far side who’d been watching him dumbly – not dumbly, he realised now, they’d been watching with evil intent – sprang back. The air seemed to darken around him, though it was dark already with a greasy smoke reeking of burnt turnip. His hands became maddeningly clumsy, but he managed to unsheathe and wave his sword.
He spat at them: “Bastards!”
The Mynchmoor was bowl-shaped. It had high, rugged ground around its edges and a depression in its middle where the land was slightly more sheltered and fertile. Crossing the edge-land had been dreary enough, following a track with mist ahead and banks of brown heather, clumps of withered ferns, and remnants of tumbledown stone dykes on either side. The only living things he encountered were shepherds, and flocks of ragged, scrawny sheep, and big, barbarous sheepdogs that looked more likely to tear out the sheep’s throats than guide them according to their masters’ instructions.
Drayak kept glancing back while he made his way along the track, expecting the mist to show three silhouettes, of men on horseback. Few bounty hunters would think of searching for him in a place as desolate as the Mynchmoor. But Carnsbay was an exceptional bounty hunter.
Most nights, accommodation was in the rudimentary shelters used by the shepherds while they were outside with their flocks. One night, though, he found a shepherd’s cottage where for a few coins he was allowed to sleep in a back room on a heap of sheep-fleeces. Illuminating the room was a lantern, a hollowed-out turnip with a candle inside. The candlelight glimmered through a mouth and eyeholes that’d been cut in its purply hide. The carved turnip-face looked vaguely feminine and black feathers garlanded it, representing hair.
“Vordecca,” the shepherd’s wife explained as she showed him to his quarters. She raised a hand to her face in some religious gesture and gave the lantern a bow.
As he neared the Mynchmoor’s centre, the ground descended. Sheep still grazed on parts of the slopes, but there were cultivated fields too. The only crops in the fields were turnips, their purple orbs seeming to peer like bruised, cowering faces between the soil and the plumes of their leaves. These fields increased the further down he went, but the mist thickened too. Consequently, the landscape here seemed even more nondescript than the edge-lands.
He saw figures standing amid the turnips and mist, arms stretched wide as if they were boasting about the sizes of fish they’d caught. And because scarecrows were present, he wasn’t surprised to hear crows. They cawed in distant choruses. A few times, he heard flapping and saw black flecks rise from the turnips, through the mist, in straggling spirals.
Earlier this evening he’d arrived at the farmhouse. First, he’d thought it was derelict. Its once-whitewashed walls were pocked and scabbed with lichen and seams of moss filled the lines between its stones. But then he noticed smoke issuing from its chimneys, almost indistinguishable from the mist, and knew he’d have to ask someone’s permission to stay there tonight.
A gnarled old woman had welcomed him. So had half-a-dozen younger men, all with burly frames, lumpen features, and weather-beaten complexions, presumably the old woman’s sons. Now, backing away from his hosts, threatening them with his sword, Drayak supposed they’d been too generous with their hospitality when he arrived on their threshold, and he’d been foolish to be duped by their eager voices and ingratiating manners.
The very biggest of the sons moved towards him. Drayak slashed at him, only to have his sword-hilt fly out of his stiff, numb fingers. Simultaneously, his heels caught on the edge of sheep-fleece serving as a rug and he tripped and reeled back. He crashed against a wall. On a shelf nearby was one of the turnip-lanterns that lit the chamber. Like the lantern in the shepherds’ cottage, the face of the local deity, Vordecca, was carved onto it and crows’ feathers adorned it as hair.
The son came at him again. Drayak seized the lantern and slammed it into his face. The turnip-shell fragmented on impact and his assailant howled and staggered back amid whirling black feathers. Drayak hoped the candle flame had burnt his face.
Then he lurched forward, wanting to follow this up with a punch. “To hell with you,” he shouted. Trying to think of some insults this degenerate would understand, he added, “Inbred turnip-brain! Rancid sheep-buggerer!”
Drayak swung his punch, but the potion had destroyed his coordination and his fist flew nowhere near the man’s head. Unbalanced by the useless punch, he swayed and toppled onto the flagstones.
And remembered nothing more.
*
Until…
He opened his eyes and found himself facing a curtain of mist. Its hem trailed over a slope tufted with clumps of ragged turnip leaves. The mist glowed weakly, which suggested the sun had recently risen and it was the morning after his misadventure with the wine.
Numerous parts of his body, his wrists, elbows, and shoulders, thighs, knees and ankles, waist and chest, felt an uncomfortable tightness. At those places, ropes fastened him to what seemed like two lengths of wood arranged in a cross behind him, his legs and torso pinioned to the vertical length, his arms stretched along the horizontal one. The cross was so tall his feet hung a yard off the ground.
Remembering the scarecrows he’d seen yesterday, Drayak realised he’d become one himself.
He wasn’t alone in the field. The old woman and her six sons from the farmhouse stood among the furrows in front of him. When he saw Drayak was conscious, the old woman intoned, “Vordecca!” She raised her hand over her face and made the same gesture that the shepherd’s wife had made a few nights ago. Her sons repeated the intonation and gesture. Then all seven bowed.
Drayak tried yelling abuse at them but discovered a ball of cloth had been wedged into his mouth. Ignoring his grunts, the woman and her sons turned and walked off along the furrows, careful not to dislodge any turnips growing on the ridges between them.
He strained against the ropes but soon accepted he wasn’t going to free himself. Meanwhile, a breeze started blowing downhill and the mist started drifting. A putrid stench reached him and he turned his head and looked up the slope. The mist had parted there and revealed another scarecrow… No, he realised, it was somebody else bound to a cross. Strands of black-rotted flesh dangled from the person’s arms and torso, indicating that considerable time had passed since he or she became a corpse.
While he wondered what’d torn the corpse’s flesh loose like that, he heard flurrying wings and rasping cries and a murder of crows alighted on the ground before him.
They lurked among the turnips and stared at him from the dark beads of their eyes, past the hooked blades of their beaks. For an absurd moment, Drayak attempted to perform the duties of a scarecrow and frighten them away. He jerked the only part of him that was mobile, his head, from side to side and tried making intimidating noises behind the cloth in his mouth.
The crows observed this display nonchalantly. Then they extended their wings and rose into the air, though only briefly. When they landed again, it was on Drayak’s arms, shoulders, and head. A dozen sets of talons dug through his tunic-sleeves and hair. Worse, the sounds they made had changed. No longer did they emit hoarse caws. They spoke with human voices, feminine ones.
“He’s funny!”
“Trying to scare me. Me!”
“The irony!”
Though they came from different crows, the voices sounded the same.
The situation became even more disturbing. The nearest ones Drayak could see, perched on his shoulders, had lost their crows’ heads. Now miniature human heads sprouted from the dark-grey plumage of their breasts and napes. The head was identical on each crow, that of a woman with straggling black hair.
Recalling the face carved on the turnip-lanterns, Drayak thought to himself: “Vordecca!”
He didn’t say this, only thought it, but the creature on his right shoulder answered as if it’d read his mind. “So, you know me, pretty one.”
Drayak said, or thought: “‘Me’? Not ‘us’? You’re a single being, not a flock of different ones?”
“I’m Vordecca, Witch-Queen of the Mynchmoor. The peasants here are my subjects, my tenants. Once, I lived among them as a human, imposing my laws upon them, claiming my rents from them. But I grew old. I had to use subterfuge to escape the fate that comes inevitably to humans. I fashioned these creatures with my magic and put my soul in them, different parts of my soul in each one.”
“Which part are you?”
“The most important. The cunning part.”
A creature on his left shoulder added, “And I’m the cruel part. Oh, pretty one, how I’d love to hear your shrieks while I tear your eyes out!”
“It would be good to meet the charming part,” thought Drayak sourly. “Though probably that part never existed.”
“Listen,” said the cunning part, “my tenants offered you as a sacrifice today. For me to feed on, both your flesh and your psychic essence, so I can continue to live and defy death.” The miniature woman’s head opened its mouth and revealed needle-like teeth. “But I’m going to offer you a deal. Three men are approaching, and I’d rather feast on three than on one.”
“Three men? But what can I do?”
Another of the creatures flapped out of the mist. “They’re passing now,” it called, “on the road at the bottom of the field.”
With a dexterity that a real crow wouldn’t have possessed, the cunning part raised a claw, inserted it into Drayak’s mouth, and dragged out the cloth. “Scream, pretty one. Attract their attention.”
Drayak’s mouth ached after having the cloth stuck in it. He croaked, “I don’t understand – ”
The cruel part sighed and dropped off his left shoulder. It descended to his crotch, used its claws to grab onto the cloth covering his upper thighs, bent forward, and bit with its needle teeth into the area between those thighs.
Drayak complied with their wishes. He screamed.
Then he must have fainted for a minute because, the next thing he knew, three more men stood before him. They wore doublets, leather jerkins, and cloaks and had various small weapons like daggers, flails, and cudgels strapped to their torsos. He knew two of them, Hazlan and Skeer, by reputation only. But Carnsbay, the short, squat figure standing directly under his cross, he was only too familiar with.
Carnsbay peered upwards and said, “It’s a good job we stopped to investigate.” The shaven, battle-scarred dome of his head was reflected behind in the blade of a massive axe that he carried in a holster on his back. “This is unexpected, I must say.”
Drayak realised the ropes had loosened. The only firm one now was the rope holding him by the chest. However, he kept his arms stretched along the horizontal length of wood. Behind him, he heard scuffing sounds. The creatures must be hiding at the back of the cross, their claws unfastening the ropes. To distract the bounty hunters from the sounds, he started talking.
“What are you going to do with me?” he demanded.
“Well, we’d prefer to kill you,” Carnsbay explained, “and bring just your head back to Lord Balen. But by the time we returned, your head might be rancid and maggoty and not look like you anymore. So, to avoid any identification problems, we’ll have to bring you back alive. Might chop off your feet, though, to stop you trying to escape – ”
However, it was Carnsbay’s feet that suffered then. The final rope, securing Drayak’s chest, gave way and he dropped from the cross. He landed right in front of Carnsbay, one of his heels came down on Carnsbay’s right foot and bones cracked inside it. While Carnsbay hollered in pain, the momentum from the fall sent Drayak lurching past him and into Skeer. He ducked and his shoulder ploughed into Skeer’s stomach. The second bounty hunter was knocked flat and, careering onwards, Drayak ran over the top of him.
Drayak kept going. With drunken movements, he tripped from furrow to furrow and through the rows of turnips growing on the ridges. He heard Hazlan yelling close behind him. If only, he thought, I had a weapon –
It occurred to him there were weapons, all around him. He halted, seized a clump of leaves, and wrenched a turnip out of its ridge. Then he turned and swung the turnip at Hazlan, who was only a yard away. It caught his pursuer on the head and sent him stumbling and then crashing face-down across the ridges and furrows. The sword he was carrying flew from his hand and disappeared amid a tangle of turnip leaves. Drayak pounced on top of Hazlan. He drove down a knee against the back of his head and jammed his face into the soil.
Drayak glanced back and saw Skeer approaching with his sword drawn. He scrabbled in the nearby leaves, trying to locate the sword Hazlan had lost. Under him, Hazlan struggled frantically, unable to breathe with his nose and mouth buried in the earth.
He still hadn’t found the sword when Skeer reached him. Suddenly he remembered that Hazlan had other weapons on him, and he yanked aside Hazlan’s cloak and snatched free the only weapon that wasn’t trapped between his body and the ground. This was a curved dagger contained in a sheath at his hip. Immediately after, screaming with exertion, Drayak heaved himself up and rammed the blade as far as it’d go into Skeer’s belly.
Skeer coughed, expelled a dribble of blood down his chin, and reeled back. He took both weapons with him, the sword in his hand and Hazlan’s dagger in his belly, which Drayak hadn’t managed to pull out again. Skeer collapsed among the turnip leaves. Drayak dropped back onto Hazlan and continued pressing his head into the dirt. Meanwhile, Carnsbay came limping towards him, gripping the shaft of the huge axe that’d previously been holstered on his back.
By the time Hazlan stopped struggling and became still, Carnsbay was almost upon him. Drayak didn’t have time to turn Hazlan’s body over and search it for more weapons. Instead, he scrambled onto his feet and started moving again. When he’d fallen off the cross he’d been powered by a crazed, desperate energy, but now that energy was spent. He was enfeebled by the lingering effects of the drugged wine and by the pains the ropes had left in his joints. He staggered across the field, hearing Carnsbay curse and insult him while he hobbled after him: “You bastard! You pup! You’ll get what’s coming to you!”
Finally, ahead, a figure appeared in the mist. Drayak unthinkingly blundered towards it. It wasn’t until he’d almost reached the figure that he smelt decay and recognised this as another of the sacrificial scarecrows. Unable to check himself, he crashed into it. The cross toppled and Drayak fell onto the corpse that was roped against it. His hands sank through its rotting chest. A hundred flies swarmed past his face.
Carnsbay loomed over him, the axe raised. “I don’t care if your head’s putrid mush when I return to Lord Balen and I get no bounty!” he raged. “I’m cutting it off now!”
Something that was crow-like but not a crow swooped down and clawed at Carnsbay’s face. He dropped the axe and used his hands to swat the creature away. Once it’d retreated, he grasped downwards and tried to retrieve the axe handle –
Drayak sprang and intercepted him. In his hand was a length of rib bone that he’d prised from the corpse’s chest. He thrust the bone into the side of Carnsbay’s neck.
Carnsbay fell longways into a furrow, where he writhed and gurgled while blood pumped out of him. Several of the creatures descended from the mist, little mouths open in anticipation, and alighted on him. While they fed, Carnsbay’s convulsions grew weaker and finally ceased.
Stinking of soil and rot, desperate to be gone, Drayak rose from the collapsed scarecrow and started making his way down the slope. He presumed the road was in that direction and, somewhere along it, the bounty hunters had tethered their horses. But then something made him pause and turn back. He noticed one of the creatures watching him from the leaves on a nearby ridge.
“Well done, pretty one,” it said. Though in its voice and appearance it was indistinguishable from the others, he sensed this was the cunning part.
“There were three of them,” he said. “They could easily have overcome me and taken me away. Then you wouldn’t have had one, let alone three, to feed on.”
“I had faith in you,” the cunning part replied. “Humans can’t see the auras around them, but I can. And your aura is dark. As death.”
“That’s not a compliment.”
The creature smiled, showing its needle teeth. “From me it is.”
©January 2022, Rab Foster
Rab Foster was brought up on a hill farm in the Borders region of Scotland but he now works as an educational consultant. His fiction has appeared the anthology Swords and Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume I, as well as in Aphelion, Blood Moon Rising, Legend, Schlock! Webzine,Sorcerous Signals and previously Swords & Sorcery.