The Mermaid's Tale Page 4

  “Vampires will need more ground troops to hold next time,” the grizzled Arukh said, mirroring my thoughts. The scarred flaps where his nose should have been snorted, “can’t run a stampede everywhere.”

  Next time? The balance of power in the City was shifting. Who knew how far or how hard?

  A band of Dwarves came around the wall. They stopped, staring at us.

  “What’s this?” their leader said. He was middle aged and dressed in better armour than his fellows. I could see the glint of plate and mail. “We missed a blood drinker?”

  The others wore goblin armour, weavings of fresh twigs and branches, covered with clay and fire hardened, rude and rough to the eye.

  Goblin armour was heavy but very cheap. It seldom lasted out a battle, and might only protect against two or three good blows. But then again, if you were so poor a warrior as to take two or three good blows in a battle, odds were you wouldn’t last the battle, no matter what the armour.

  Their armour was cracked and broken. They looked tired and bloody, their clothing and weapons cheap and ill sorted. Outkingdom dwarves, I guessed, here seeking Totem membership.

  The Vampire, surveying the battlefield, gave the Dwarf a cursory glance.

  “We contemplate the flavour of evening,” she said coldly.

  “Oh,” said the Dwarf, “is that what it is called? Hiding among the filth?”

  “There is no hiding from the self,” the Vampire replied, “and nothing else worth hiding from. Here I stand; it is as sufficient a place as any other.”

  “Ah,” said the Dwarf, “perhaps you could stand over here, so that we can add a Traditional scalp to our pickings.”

  “As it is your desire,” the Vampire answered, “it is incumbent upon you to follow it. My place is satisfactory to my wishes. I have no urge to move.”

  “Well enough then,” the Dwarf said. Turning to his band, he ordered, “kill them all.”

  We held our weapons tight, crouching and waiting. Only the Vampire seemed unconcerned.

  “No,” one of the Dwarves said. He had the flattened accent of an outkingdom Dwarf; by the sound of it, probably from somewhere near the Goblin quarter.

  The lead Dwarf turned glowering.

  “What?”

  “No,” said the Dwarf. “What? Do we look stupid? That’s a Traditional Vampire. There’s a Troll. Those are Orc. There’s Hobgoblins and Kobolds there. They’re dangerous. Any of them is dangerous, and there’s a flock of them standing there.”

  “Are you disobeying an order?” the leader asked dangerously.

  Behind them, the other Dwarves shifted nervously.

  The challenger stepped back a little, looking for support from his comrades. He didn’t seem to find it.

  “I’m asking you to consider your order,” the other Dwarf said nervously, “we’ve just been through a battle. They’re fresh.”

  “You wanted to join Snow Leopard totem.”

  “Totem don’t mean nothing if you’re dead,” the other Dwarf replied, holding to a little scrap of defiance. Something that no Kingdom Dwarf would ever think.

  I watched the others. They weren’t itching for a fight, I could tell. But they wouldn’t commit to defiance. Eventually, he’d bully them into it, because it was easier to scream and die than to say no. They would die, the strength was on our side.

  The leader stared at the challenger. He was physically larger, and in better condition. His bronze armour was still pristine, the other Dwarf’s Goblin armour was shattered in a dozen places. A quick fight, I decided. Not a good outcome.

  “You will always be outkingdom,” the leader snarled.

  The other Dwarf shrugged eloquently. He’d picked his spot, now he was making his peace with death.

  The leader looked over the others, trying to gauge their willingness to attack. He didn’t seem to like what he saw.

  “Fine,” the leader said, “we’ll hold them here and send for a clan party”

  No, I thought. Not good.

  I took a lance from a surprised Hobgoblin, and stepped forward, crouching submissively, holding the lance straight up, base against the ground.

  “Honoured Sirs,” I grunted, “excuse me.”

  The lead dwarf turned to face me.

  “What?”

  I drove the blunt end of the lance into his face. His eyes bulged. There were a series of cracks as his teeth shattered from his mouth and his jaw broke, his head arched back and his neck snapped.

  I’d pulled the lance away and stepped back, squatting, grinding the now bloody base of the lance into the packed earth beneath my feet.

  The Dwarves had backed up, holding weapons at ready, as if waiting for a charge.

  Nothing happened.

  “I guess you’re the leader now,” I said finally, to the Dwarf who’d challenged the leader. “Honoured Sir.”

  He looked from me back to the body, and then to the band behind me.

  “Battle’s over,” I said. “You won. We didn’t fight. We don’t fight now. We just want to go. Nobody has to die. You win, we go away. You show strong, we retreat. Not come back.”

  He looked back at his band, chewing his lip nervously.

  I stared at the dead Dwarf between us.

  “Nice armour,” I said.

  He glanced at his leader’s corpse.

  “Yes.”

  “Very expensive.”

  “Yes.”

  “Too bad a corpse wears it.”

  That seemed to decide it, for him.

  He took two steps and kicked the body, theatrically, for his troops. The corpse rolled.

  He spat on it.

  “Kingdom bastards,” he said loudly for his troops, “call us out to die, while they sit safe with the totems.”

  This one had gone out to die with the rest of them, but it wasn’t the time to mention it.

  He looked at the assembled Dwarves. There were other Dwarves and Human riders beyond them, moving back and forth. No one was paying attention.

  “Battle’s over,” he said, “we take our rewards.”

  There was a mumble of agreement.

  He turned to us.

  “You there,” he addressed my band, “this is our place. Go away, or we’ll kill you too.”

  I bowed submissively and grinned.

  “Honoured Sir,” I answered.

  “I had a dream,” the Vampire announced. “I dreamt that I squatted, and dropped a large piece of shit. And then it began to speak to me.”

  “This was your dream?” I asked.

  “Well, there was more to it,” she said, “and there was subtext and symbolism, metaphor and layer of meaning. It merits annotation. You wouldn’t understand, of course. But this thing I speak of, this was the part that pertains to you.”

  “Arrah,” I said sourly. It was comparing me to the excrement of its dream, that was plain. “So what did it say to you?”

  “It castigated me for creating it and then refusing to acknowledge it. I pointed out that it maintained its existence regardless of my wishes or attentions.”

  “It challenged me for my responsibility to it as creators owe to their creations. It posed interesting questions. What did it owe me, for giving it life? If this was not a welcome gift it enjoyed, what did I owe it for the injury of life? That we now both existed separately, was there a relationship between us? Should there even be one?”

  “What did you conclude,” I asked, “you and your shit?”

  I was almost interested.

  “There were many aspects,” said the Vampire, “but one was that as the process of its existence had provided me with relief, I owed it a boon. It’s creation had served my interests, if not its own, redress was needed.”

  This was her indirect way of telling me that she felt some sense of obligati
on for the fact that I’d saved her life back there, whether I’d wanted to or not.

  “I want to find a horse,” I said. “I want to find a place I have seen from the water.”

  She stared at me.

  “From water?”

  “I travelled there by water. Now I want to go there by horse.”

  She nodded.

  “You journey by halves, from land and sea. I like the metaphor. I will find you horses and accompany you.”

  She began to whistle, a keening high trill that went on and on. Eventually, a group of four horses appeared, a stallion and three mares. Watching Goblins murmured with awe at the Traditional’s ability to call horses from nothingness.

  I watched her caressing the stallion, noting their familiarity with one another. She moved among the mares, finally choosing one, she gestured to me to mount up.

  We rode out. I tried to keep the river in sight, though it made poor riding. Too much brush and scrub, too uneven the ground, to ride quickly.

  “You aren’t City Rughk,” the Vampire said. “You ride as if from the plains.”

  I shrugged.

  “The plains,” she said again, “but a long time ago. Perhaps you rode with the herds, perhaps born there.”

  “You are not southern,” she probed, “speech is wrong.”

  “North,” I replied uncomfortably.

  She nodded.

  “Up along the border forests,” she said. “Rughk are made there when we meet the Goblin folk. The herds go out, the Rughk are born, the herds come back next year, and the year after. The Rughk are left behind sooner or later. No Rughk can stay with the herds. They live, some of them. Solitary and mad.”

  “Arukh live as best they can.”

  “There is a little bit of Troll speech in your accent.”

  “Is there?”

  “You were a trapper in the northern border forest. You grew up near a Troll. You learned from the Troll.”

  “Dead Troll.”

  “Did you kill it?” she asked.

  I hesitated.

  “I kill Trolls,” I said finally, defiantly.

  Except I hadn’t, not really. I remembered highfooting through the snow, wet with the cold, gasping, lungs burning, my trap failed and now they where hunting me, closing in to kill me and all I could do was flee, pulling myself through the deep snow as their long strides brought them to me. And then the sound of the ice breaking...

  “I have it that Rughk destroy everything they touch,” she said, snapping my attention back to her.

  “Arrah,” I replied, “this is true.

  “Why does this matter?” I asked, irritated by her near prescience. She was too clever, she read too much. I would have to get away from her.

  “You know big killers. Tigers and Bears and Trolls. You don’t know about wolves on the plain.”

  I was stunned. All this, just to tell me I didn’t know about wolves?

  I hated vampires, I decided again.

  “I have seen wolves,” I grunted.

  We rode in silence for a while.

  “Why?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Why did you come here?”

  “Can’t you tell, I thought your dreams told you everything,” I sneered.

  “I have asked,” she said simply.

  I grunted. We rode along in silence again.

  She waited.

  “There was a Troll,” I said suddenly. “Sometimes I raided his traps, when my own weren’t enough. Sometimes he hunted me. He didn’t hunt very well. Or maybe he didn’t try very hard. He died.”

  The Vampire waited.

  “I killed him,” I said. Saying that, it made my chest tighten. As if it was true.

  She looked at me.

  “I did not kill him,” I admitted. “He just died. Things die. Everything dies.”

  “New Trolls moved into the traplines. They wrecked my traps, burned my shelters, hunted me hard. They would have caught me, sooner or later.”

  I had tried so hard to kill them, so very hard, and it had ended with that desperate flight through the snow, death at my back, and that moment where I felt the ice cracking beneath my feet and knowing I was going to die. I bit my lip, I would not speak of it further.

  “Aah,” said the Vampire, as if she had read more than my words.

  I refused to speak again.

  No new pearls of wisdom came from her.

  We found the place, I marked its location by the carrion crows and the second body. From horseback, it had the look of a secluded mud bay, quiet and out of the way of both travellers by land and sea. A good place to dump bodies.

  From the vantage point of the horse, I scanned the bay, looking for signs of other bodies. Nothing fresh enough to warrant investigation.

  There was no trail for the second body. Too much time had passed. There was a trail from Mira’s body’s location. I followed it, leading my horse.

  The Vampire followed on horseback.

  “Bad country for horses,” the Vampire said, looking around.

  “Arrah?” I looked up at her.

  “Browsing country, trees and bushes. Not grazing country. Footing’s treacherous for horses. This is a place for jumpers, like deer and elk, not horses.”

  I looked around. It wasn’t too different from what I’d known on the trapline. Then again, there hadn’t been many horses in the traplines. Just deer and elk as she’d said.

  “Good horse country,” the Vampire pointed, “way over that direction.”

  Was she urging us to head over there? I ignored her.

  Poor horse country just meant that whoever had dropped the bodies had wanted to wander off the beaten path.

  I followed the horse trail as best I could, until it was joined by first another, then several other horses, as I knew it would.

  The trail was lost. I got back on the horse and followed the path made by many horses.

  The Vampire stared at me expectantly.

  I sighed.

  “Tell me about wolves,” I said finally. It was there, she was waiting in that damned Vampire way, their allusion and metaphor, always talking about one thing and saying something else. I despised their maddening indirection.

  The Vampire brightened, grinning, her two delicate fangs shining.

  “I will tell you how wolves kill,” she said.

  “With tooth and claw,” I told her.

  She ignored me.

  “You are from the forest lands, and so you learn the ways of great killers. Trolls, Tigers. Hide. Stalk. Ambush. The killing blow.”

  “Arrah.”

  “Wolves are different. On the plains, there is no place to hide, to stalk. Instead of the hunt, there is the chase. Where the tiger is the one, because a great one can hide where the many cannot, the wolf is many, because the small many can chase, where the great one will fail.”

  “Wolves aren’t small,” I said. I had seen wolves as big as Hobgoblins.

  “By the eyes of those they kill, the wolves are small indeed.”

  I grunted.

  “The wolf, it is not strong enough for the killing stroke. The way they kill is as the way they chase. It is long and drawn out. It is many bites, first to stop, then to bring down. They bite and they bite and they bite, tearing away pieces, drawing blood and slicing the muscles, pulling out the guts.

  “I have seen wolves take half a day, killing a cow. I have seen wolves eat their full, and still the cow clung to life, slow to die.

  “What is this word the Goblins have... butcher. Wolves, they are butchers. Slow and sloppy killers, torturers of many cuts, but killers still.”

  “What?” I said, shocked.

  Mira’s body was still large in my mind. Butchery. Torture of many cuts. How did she know these things? Did s
he know? Why was she saying this to me?

  “Why do you tell me this?” I asked. “What do you mean by this?”

  She only grinned.

  “I have fulfilled the obligation of my dream.”

  Her horse galloped away.

  I pursued but my horse soon tired. She’d vanished.

  The horse slowed to a walk, returning on its own to the grass fields that marked the entrance to Vampire Kingdoms.

  Vampires, the Traditional Vampires that rode and drank from the beasts as they swept back and forth over the plains year after year, believed all existence was a dream of many dreamers, a labyrinth of hidden meanings and symbols that they existed in both waking and sleeping.

  It made them damned irritating to talk to.

  I made my way back to the Lodge, pulling my great knife, a bronze blade about two feet long, as I approached it. The building’s massive bulk sat imposing before me, the high roof blotting out a piece of the sky.

  The great doors stood open, tall enough for Trolls to walk through, a dark cavern yawned within. From its mouth came the heavy rhythmic sound of a drum beating.

  Just outside the doors, three Arukh were cutting up the body of another. They snarled at me as I approached. I growled low, holding the knife to them. There wasn’t enough left of the dead Arukh to guess who he was or how he’d died, not that it mattered to anyone but the victim and his killers, and not very much to them. Soon they would go back to bickering over the choicest cuts and who would break the bones and suck the marrow.

  I passed through the doorway, staying to the centre, snarling right and left as I did so. There was no one laying in wait. I paused, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness within. Down the centre of the long hall, a few dung fires burned, the smoke curling high and rising out through the roof shutters.

  Arukh of all sorts roamed back and forth in the lodge, gambling, arguing, eating. Some sat by the cubholes that lined the sides of the lodge. A few pairs of hostile eyes fixed upon me. I strode forward, brandishing the knife, growling at whoevers’ eyes met mine. One by one, they looked away.

  At the other end of the lodge, the heavy drum beat, and Trolls stirred the stew pots. I made my way down, snarling as I went, weaving back and forth.