by David Waid
in Issue 83, December 2018
What was to become the most intemperate and inglorious debauch in the history of Nuboe commenced as any other festival might, swathed in tradition and observance of the country’s old forms.
Rowan Stilko disembarked from his blossom-festooned chariot to the accompaniment of the crowd’s full-throated cheers. On an elevated platform, bobbing elders gathered in crimson and orange with gold brocade and formal collars that reached above their ears. Rowan remained smiling as unfamiliar dignitaries recited florid speeches and, with grand hand sweeps and trailing sleeves, gestured to him for easy applause.
The crowd understood that he was a hero and would soon—assuredly—be dead, which lent the moment a bittersweet tang. And yet his blond hair reflected autumn’s sunlight with such an unexpected blaze that many quivered in anticipation of the days ahead.
Only once did he make the mistake of looking up toward nature’s frowning colossus, the stone peak known far and wide as Pilar’s Tears. His chest grew tight, his breathing shallow, and his fingers whitened where they gripped the balustrade.
Looking over the jubilant crowd he thought of his mother, so recently deceased, and winced. He thought back to the day, not four weeks past, when her cough had become a continuous, body-wracking affliction, causing her to spit red foam in the dirt by her pallet.
On that day, his mother had looked at him and bitterly cursed the peak. “When I die,” she said, “you will be the only one of our family left. Promise . . . promise you won’t go.”
“Of course not, Mother. I promise.”
But the door had opened then, and bright sunshine spilled into the room. Lorillar, their neighbor from the hovel next door stood smiling on the lintel. Wide eyes fixed on Rowan, she said, “A delegation from the City of Tenuris is coming to see you!” With one hand fluttering against her chest, she pointed east.
Rowan stood and wiped his hands on his trouser legs. His mother looked at him, cursed again, and turned back to face the gray, smudged wall.
That day had been overcast, and people gathered outside the house in the dusty, uneven street to stare at the lacquered palanquin making its way toward Rowan, carried by two muscular slaves. From its golden seal, Rowan recognized the conveyance of the Marl of Tenuris, lord of House Bluddwell, chief of the city’s guild houses, and a man as old as mist. This meant the two richly appointed men who walked on either side of him were the Marl’s surviving sons, Prukan and Tash. It was said they were always near the Marl, listening quietly to every breath he took, looking for an advantage, one over the other. Last came four soldiers wearing the Marl’s livery of black and gold.
As the entourage drew even with Rowan, there came a sharp rap from inside the sedan chair, and the slaves stopped, setting it down. The door slid back, and Rowan glimpsed the old man’s hunched figure in profile. Tenuris’s Marl sat atop what looked like a cushioned platter, his back so stooped with age that his shoulders bent over his knees and his chin thrust forward like the mandible of a tittlefish. The slaves withdrew the Marl on his platter, turned, and bore him smoothly to Rowan.
The old man’s shaking hand brought the Eblis from his lap, a slender willow wand with an iron rendering of a finger affixed to the end. The finger wavered in Rowan’s face for a moment and then fell, pointing at the ground.
“Please sit,” said the tallest of the sons, a hawk-nosed man with thin shoulders and sparse hair. “My father would like to speak with you.”
Rowan sat cross-legged in the dirt as two of the soldiers rushed forward with embroidered campstools for the brothers. Legs dropped down from the Marl’s platter, and he was set before Rowan like a tea service.
The Marl lacked teeth and most of his hair, but he had great white, tufted brows and skin as brown and wrinkled as an old potato. For a time there was silence. The Marl sucked his lips in and pushed them out in a rhythm as monotonous and unvaried as the drip of a water clock. The crowd had grown thick with curious onlookers, but glares from the soldiers and the keen shine of their drawn blades held all at a distance.
At last, the old man gave an extremely long, shuddering groan. Prukan leaned toward his father, nodded as if this were intelligible speech, and turned back to Rowan.
“My name is Prukan, and this is my brother Tash,” said the taller of the Marl’s sons. “My father gives you greetings. He says your family name is justly famous. So many of your clan have braved the great peak and the nimbus of their glory hovers about you.”
The old man, who had not taken his squinting eyes from Rowan during this speech, moaned once more. He wheezed and smacked his lips, gestured feebly with one knobby finger.
Again Prukan nodded.
“My father would like to build a festival around what we would call The Last Climb of the Stilkos . . .”
Tash, from the other side of his father, coughed quietly. “Or the Fête of Tenuris,” he said. “Please remember, brother, there remains some disagreement regarding which name holds sway.”
Without taking his eyes from Rowan, the old Marl thunked the metal tip of his Eblis twice against the dirt, and Tash fell silent. Prukan smiled and cleared his throat.
“Such a festival would be the biggest in our city’s history,” he said. “With it, we will surpass the attendance of Antástalon’s Purple Epicuria and Spring Idle. We will crush the upstart village of Prosperpine that has seen three recent drowning deaths and attracts visitors through its cynical, rapacious, and utterly false claims to be haunted by a vengeful ghost.”
Prukan straightened his robe and looked at the dwelling, his face carefully neutral. His gaze swung back to meet Rowan’s. “What, you might ask, would be the benefit to you?” Rowan said nothing, yet Prukan held up a hand.
“No, do not demur. You are right to ask this question.”
The Marl’s son began to tick off points on his fingers. “First, we are prepared to present you, upon signing of the contract, fifty freshly minted gold imperials with which you can outfit for the climb and settle whatever debts you may have.
“Second, for the two weeks of festival preceding your assault upon the Tears, you will be celebrated like a king; drinking, eating, and otherwise debauching as you like.”
“And at no cost to yourself,” ventured Tash.
Prukan scowled at the interruption, and both brothers glanced sidelong at the Marl. The Eblis hung limp in the old man’s hand, the iron digit resting in the dirt. Prukan frowned.
“Third,” he said. “The crowning consideration. For your cooperation, we propose an historic allowance that will forever recognize your family and your unique circumstance. Breaking with ancient tradition, we will inscribe your name at a size half again as large as any other on the immortal wall. Imagine, please, your name cut in stone with pilgrims running their fingers reverently across the letters.”
“That is,” Tash added, “if there is any need for memorial at all. It is bandied among the common folk that you of all climbers have the prowess to conquer our famous cliff.”
Tash sat back and silence descended. The Marl and his sons let it swell, waiting for Rowan to speak, confident in their position.
Those who competed in trade with the Marl were well aware that he never assayed the field unless victory had already been won. Indeed, many a man had spotted his own ruin in the swaying approach of the Marl’s sedan. Some, no doubt, would have read his presence at the Stilko household as a presage of events more certain than the Infallible Crooning of the Banjan Oracle. With scant facts, they might have deduced that the Marl understood Rowan would come into a family inheritance made chiefly of debt to the moneylender and regional gambling lord, Gadaa of Ys. The sharpest would perhaps have ventured further, noting that the Stilko brothers’ appetites for food, drink and women had been at least a proximate cause of that debt. Finally, they might have foreseen that the Marl had weighed Rowan’s response like the contents of a purse, anticipating that the young man’s blood, the sap from an obsessive family tree, would leap at the unprecedented honor that could be his in memoriam.
The crowd of onlookers—who had been quiet—now went utterly still. On the rooftop across the street, a blue and white prayer flag snapped in the wind. Rowan looked over his shoulder at the ramshackle edifice that served as his home. The doorway stood open, framing darkness.
When he turned back around, his eyes went from the Marl to the Marl’s sons. His gaze swept the silent crowd of onlookers. The faces there were pinched, expectant. A sharp flash of reflected sunlight drew Rowan’s attention to a cloaked and cowled figure standing in a weathered doorway. The stranger’s leather cloak bore the silver coin badge of the gambling lord’s enforcers. Rowan swallowed and with great difficulty tore his eyes away.
“Umm . . . yes . . . well . . .” Rowan focused his gaze on the Marl. “I would be honored.”
His sick mother’s groan issued from the dark opening in the house behind him, but it was lost in the swelling cheer of the crowd.
Given the certain history of the cliffs (and despite Tash’s suggestion to the contrary), no wagers were placed that Rowan would succeed. The only betting centered on how far above the stony base he would reach before plummeting to his death. As it happened, Rowan’s lantern-jawed features and chiseled vigor made him popular, so a few sentimental bettors had him setting a new record. The oldsters, however, spoke to each other in hunched circles, smiled their gummy smiles, and bet low.
For nearly a fortnight, people watched Rowan and his moods closely, trying to gain an insight and advantage in their wagers. Every meal he ate was commented on, every drink a subject of study. Some postulated that his trysts and prodigious appetite were products of a hardy soul, and the betting for his relative success rose accordingly. Others commented on the fact that he spent not a moment in consideration of strategy or in preparation for the physical ordeal, and it was the betting for his failure that grew.
Rowan, meanwhile, spent his days in carefree pursuits with whatever people he chanced upon in the streets, taverns, and at public games. The city was overflowing, and the festival saw no shortage of colorful folk. But after the first week, he began to favor certain individuals repeatedly until they were inseparable and became jealously labeled Rowan’s Ring. Two in particular, observers noted, could drink as long and hard as Rowan and remain standing. One of these was Fortescue, an obese giant of a man, whose silence would occasionally be broken with crude, outlandish statements. The other, Elgen, a waspish former schoolmaster who, it was said, had abandoned his pupils to attend the festival and admire the last jaunty candle-flicker of the Stilkos as their line guttered into extinction.
Early one morning, Rowan and his Ring sat in the common room of the Cliff Shadow Inn. The room was filled with erstwhile merrymakers sleeping or passed out in their seats, some even stretched among the stinking rushes on the floor. All of these folk, the most die-hard of carousers, had traveled from far and wide to be by the legendary figure of Rowan, and by him they would remain to the utmost stubborn limits of human endurance.
The round tabletop before Rowan alternated in spots between the stickiness of spilled beer and the slick, cold grease of a bird served up hours earlier. Bones, olive pits, plates, nutshells, and overturned flagons littered the wood, along with bits of soaked bread, cheese rind, and a townsman named Peor Reedman whose head had set all the crockery rattling as it hit the table.
Two stoop-shouldered serving women threaded their way among the sleeping revelers, muttering sullen curses and clearing what they could. As long as Rowan remained, the owner had declared, so too would the barmaids. The innkeeper could ill afford to offend the guest whose presence made the difference between mere festival success and reputation building of an epic nature.
Rowan slowly swung his nodding head, looking from under dark blond eyebrows and past strands of light hair that had come loose from his braid. He surveyed the room until he had the minstrel in his sights, the one whose music had seemed so odious as the night began. In retrospect, it had not been half so bad.
“Wake him,” said Rowan. “I want more music.”
One of the women raised her eyes to the ceiling and let out a long breath. She shuffled over and gave the man in motley a shove that toppled him from the chair.
Fortescue snorted at the sight. He sat to Rowan’s left, working the spaces between his teeth with an ivory toothpick. His bulk was such that his sides sloughed over the arms of the chair. Even at this hour, his sharp eyes spotted a morsel of chicken that he picked up and placed in his wet, pink mouth.
“Ho, minstrel,” Rowan called. “Play me Calk’s Last Wish.”
Elgen opened one eye. “By the gods, man, not that again!”
“What do you know of music, schoolmarm?”
“I know that any mawkish tune played seven times by a talentless pennywhistle—no offense, my good minstrel—is like a dung offering to the gods.”
“Given that I may be dead in two days, the subject of ‘last wishes’ is more than academic. We are therefore beyond your realm of bookish expertise.”
Elgen placed his head on the table by Peor’s as Rowan turned to Fortescue. “Big man. What is it you would ask for? What is it you want most in all the world?”
Fortescue picked at a cheese rind and pushed tiny prizes into his mouth. He looked up long enough to nod toward a woman who had passed out in a chair, her head resting against the back. Copper tresses flowed like a red river over the carved wood, hanging almost to the floor in a curling mass. Fortescue said, “I’d like to wrap her hair around my balls,” and returned his attention to the rind.
The schoolmaster gingerly lifted his skull from where it had been resting on the table, a piece of nutshell embedded in his forehead. He squinted and searched the room.
“There,” said Rowan, indicating the young woman.
Elgen stared. He pushed out his lower lip judiciously and nodded. “Oft thought, but ne’er so well expressed,” he said. Gently, carefully, he lowered his head back to the table.
The groggy minstrel ran his fingers over the strings of his instrument, a panrellote on which the third and seventh strings were missing, though he seemed not to notice. He launched into his chanson, with its extraordinarily long rounds, and Elgen groaned into the table wood. Rowan swung his hands in sloppy flourishes as though directing notes. By the end, the minstrel had caught his second wind and without preamble rolled into Three Tulips on a Trireme. For his third musical screed, the man slowed things down with the tragic and anticipatory Climb of Rowan that had been so popular in the early days of the festival. By the third stave, Rowan wept openly.
“A beautiful song. I almost think . . . almost . . . no, no, I’m going to go through with the thing,” he said. After that, the innkeeper quickly bustled the minstrel away, but some change had already touched Rowan.
The next day was the last before the festival’s hero would attempt the cliffs. He slept late in the arms of a merchant’s young wife, but there his adherence to routine ended. Where he had been known to stretch luxuriously in the afternoon light of an open window, today he did not. He sat on the edge of his bed, staring at the floor. When the woman ran her nails across his back, Rowan resisted the call. Without a word, he dressed and left the chamber. Downstairs, he walked past the crowds in the common room and out into the street, ignoring the good-natured calls, the smell of roasted lamb and savory pies.
The townsfolk sensed the change immediately. A raucous scraping of chairs ensued as people hastened after him, climbing over tables, their own meals forgotten. Even those of the most marginally poetic nature could sense that the soul of the festival had shifted, moving from simple and lighthearted to a complicated, pensive melancholy. A kind of magic infused that moment and, almost without spoken word, the shift in mood rippled out from the Cliff Shadow Inn, through the city and to its very edges where tents stood erect in fields of wild columbine.
Blue ribbons of sweet smoke rose from the hookah’s bowl of resinous yaryeh. Its priceless stimulant had worked miracles once again. The slave girl backed away on her knees, wet eyes blinking. Her lip paint was smeared, and her hair disheveled, yet the Marl paid no heed. His eyes closed as the dangerous hammering of his heart began to slow, and he smiled. As the girl had found, he was a doer and not simply one to whom things were done. He slapped the willow wand against the moist, hanging skin of his emaciated thigh and turned to thoughts of the future.
The success of this festival was everything to House Bluddwell. Together, the revenues and prestige it could bring would secure the Eblis in the possession of his house for another generation. Keep it from that grasping bitch, Averneen, or from Malstrom, toad of the Brewers’ Guild.
This festival was his last great work, its proceeds his legacy. He had even outwitted Time, his most canny rival. When the Stilko matriarch’s quibbles had threatened to delay the festival another year, it had been a small matter to have her poisoned. The Marl was, after all, a doer and not a man to whom things were done.
Rowan saw the weeping cliffs rising up over the rooftops, and for the first time, they stopped him in his tracks. Although the appointed time of his great climb was not until the next day, he walked toward them. A large, hushed gathering had followed him from the inn. The path to the base of the cliffs was a mile through scrub and stunted trees, but they continued to follow, and the only sound in that eerie landscape was the swish and tramp of footsteps.
When Rowan arrived, he craned his head back. Bits of cloud moved across the sky, and the cliffs seemed to lean forward. From so close, there was no telling how tall they were. He went and stood for a time before the chiseled memorial. Kneeling, he touched certain of the newer Stilko names and a sigh ran through the crowd.
Rowan rose, glanced up the cliff one last time and walked back toward Tenuris, the crowd parting for him. He retraced his steps past silent townsfolk with hungry, searching eyes and gay festival clothes.
That final night, Rowan remained alone in his chamber, forgoing the women who loitered in the common room, hoping in vain to be his fabled last love. His many observers didn’t know what to make of this change in disposition and were divided as to its cause and impact. They wondered, without the slightest trace of irony, whether he was suicidal. Mightn’t he do something wild and rash? Strike out in violence? Run away in the night?
This last was a real concern for the Marl, who possessed a duly signed contract. He waved his Eblis in indecision, eventually ordering that a perimeter of guards be set both in and outside of the hostel where the champion slumbered.
Rowan slept fitfully and for only a brief while. When he woke, the city was quiet, peaceful, and moonlight washed its buildings. Below the window, a cat picked its careful path along a garden wall, and Rowan remembered the trip he’d made to the Tears earlier that day. He had not expected to be so strangely affected, seeing the names of his father and brothers at the foot of the implacable rock.
One of his earliest memories was of Father telling Rowan and his brothers, with the seriousness only a drunk can muster, that the Tears of Pilar were like a vampire, a malignancy sucking life from the Stilkos. “Other families might have their banshees,” he’d said, “but we have the cliffs.”
After his trip to the Tears of Pilar with the crowd of people on his heels, Rowan knew the truth of that. And he knew the people of Tenuris had come to partake in the feeding. As he’d walked back past their silent ranks, Rowan felt the gaze of festival-goers plucking and pinching at his skin as a farmer might pinch the fat of an Oakentide slaughter-hog, tsking in concern, but secretly pleased.
Closing the curtains of his room, Rowan lit a taper. There was a bookcase in one corner of the chamber. He’d been told that if he firmly pressed the spine of the volume titled, “Maurer’s Guide to Dancing Roof Demons” the shelves would swing back. And indeed they did.
He’d also been told that a lantern would be waiting for him on the steps of a slender stair heading beneath the cellar to an arched passage of mortared stone. It was.
The stone passage would lead to a dirt tunnel where tree roots hung from the ceiling like an old man’s hair. The tunnel to an exit in a clearing where there waited a saddled horse.
And the horse was there.
In the early morning darkness, Rowan checked the horse’s saddle straps and patted its neck. Then he found a nice tree at the edge of the clearing against which he could lean his back and await his contact. Soon, however, he slept.
Rowan dreamt well: of climbing Pilar’s Tears and beating it, cresting its summit. In the dream, his fingers were raw, and his muscles trembled, but euphoria and courage pulsed in his veins. He stood on the great peak and looked out in one direction over the patchwork quilt of autumnal farm fields. In the other direction lay the sea, stretching away beyond Lyksele Bay and into the blue distance.
He woke to the sharp prick of a stiletto at his throat. Familiar hints of vanilla and sandalwood lingered in the air. When he started to move, the blade pressed closer and a soft voice whispered in his ear. “Move and you die.”
“Who . . . ?”
“The one who holds your debt.”
“Gadaa?”
“Foolish of you to sleep when so many would pay good coin for your hide. Fatigue perhaps from coupling with everything in Tenuris that walks upright?”
“Is the great crime lord jealous?”
“Ugh. You’re a sot. You’d soon’ve been a skin-toned sack of jelly, if not for the smuggling routes of my safe house.”
Gadaa pulled the stiletto away and stepped around the tree. The gambling lord was revealed, with long black hair, dark eyes and freckled cheeks. She threw her cloak back. Leather pants went into thigh-high boots. Her black linen shirt was bound beneath wide leather bands on her forearms while a silver locket hung from a chain around her neck. She extended her hand and helped Rowan to his feet.
“Jealousy it is, then,” said Rowan.
“Fah! My passion runs more to the dramatic. While you were dipping your poniard in the city’s slatterns, I raped the ancient guilds of Tenuris.”
“Odd, considering you were one of its guild masters.”
“I dislike predictability.”
“Predictability . . . ?”
“That and I discovered my lieutenant had secured the support of the Marl to replace me on council.”
“Replace . . . ?”
“Kill me, you idiot.”
“Aren’t you worried about retribution?”
“Not at all,” she said. “By now, the fidgety guildmasters will be discovering your absence. Word will spread quickly and people will clamor for the return of their wagers. Finding me gone as well, the masters will make the long walk to the basement of the counting house, their hearts a-patter.”
“Yes, well, things appear to be proceeding ahead of pace.” Rowan nodded toward the horizon where dawn light showed a black plume of smoke stretching out on the wind.
The corners of Gadaa’s mouth ticked up. “Even faster than I’d hoped.”
Screams of pain and shouts of triumph came from the solarium adjoining the Marl’s bedchamber. There could also be heard the splintering of wood, the shattering of delicate porcelain. The Marl pictured Tenuris’s rabble boiling through his home like ants, and his fists clenched. Lurid firelight and the smell of burning buildings came through the high windows behind him. The Marl’s stomach churned and twisted in a spasm of white-hot pain. Each swollen heartbeat fell heavy against his ribs. A teakwood box lay open beside him and what little yaryeh he hadn’t shoveled into his mouth had spilled into the bedding.
Someone tried the handles of the double doors, but they had been locked. The slaves had done it. Not to help, curse them, but to keep their master from being rescued. Moments later, the slick wood’s shine danced as the door took a blow. Another hammer stroke fell and a crack formed on one of the panels.
The yaryeh was killing him, of course, and it hurt. Yet the effect of the stimulant made him feel impossibly strong, too. He unfolded his thin legs and lowered them over the side of the bed to the cold marble floor. When they entered, the rabble would find the proud master of House Bluddwell waiting for them, not some mewling invalid. As long as he clutched the bed’s corner post and let it sustain most of his weight, it was almost as though he could stand.
When the door burst inwards, the ravening mob paused, dumbfounded. The Marl stood naked beside the canopied bed, one hand outstretched, clutching the Eblis, an accusatory, iron finger. A woman screamed, pointing to the purple-black engorgement below his waist, and the mob drew back. The Marl, a tottering husk, wheezed and seemed to laugh.
“I . . . am not . . . man to whom . . . things . . . are done.”
His lips split in a terrifying grin, then his eyes rolled back in his head and he swayed. Bright blood erupted from his mouth, drenching his front. The crowd retreated several steps as the Marl tipped forward, landing against the floor with a wet slap.
Gadaa whistled up the still-dark forest path. A wagon rattled into sight and at the reins was Elgen. Hitched to the rear was a chestnut stallion with a tooled leather saddle and scarlet trim.
“I’m impressed, Gadaa. Such a large wagon for our earnings?”
“Hardly. Fortescue is passed out in the back and he takes up two thirds of the space.”
“Oh.”
Rowan moved close and put his arms around the woman. “It was a good plan, wasn’t it?” he said.
“A fine plan.”
“We’ve always worked well together. Why don’t you stay with us? With you at my side, our merry band could be the scourge of a land far, far away.”
“It comes back to predictability, I’m afraid. Someday I would end up killing you.”
Rowan pulled her tight against him. He bent his head until his mouth was inches from hers. “What is to keep me from trussing you up and making off with all the coin?”
“I suspect,” said Elgen, from his perch on the wagon, “that it would be the stiletto she has pointed at your kidney.”
“Idle curiosity,” Rowan said. “You understand.”
“Of course,” she replied, stepping back, “In any case, my share of the profit is both larger and elsewhere. To paraphrase a wise man, ‘Trust, but indemnify.’” She walked past Elgen to the stallion, Rowan admiring her hip-heavy swagger from behind.
As Gadaa swung up onto the horse’s back, she said, “Elgen, make sure you and Fortescue get a fair share of the swag.” She looked pointedly at Rowan. “You two are the only reason I brought it.” Laughing, she wheeled the stallion around. In a flash, she galloped back up the forest path Elgen had arrived on.
The natural sounds of the awakening wood had just resumed when the wagon rocked from side to side and the horses were forced to take a steadying step forward. A grunt resounded in the little clearing, and Fortescue’s melon-shaped head appeared above the wagon’s side panels.
“By the sweat-soaked ass crack of Beoldun,” he said. “I’m starving. Please tell me we have more than these uncomfortable kegs of money to live on.”
Rowan pursed his lips, eyes still fixed on the forest path. “You know,” he said to Elgen. “There is something in the fact that she could gut me like a trout that arouses me.”
The schoolmaster followed his gaze and nodded. “The ways of the heart are indeed mysterious.”
©December 2018, David Waid
David Waid is the author of the IPPY silver medal winning novel The Conjurers. This is his first published short story.