So, Crippled God. Fallen One. If I could kill you with my bare hands, I would. If I could kill every priest, and every god, and all those others stalking the streets with stones in their hands, I would. For the whores and all you took from them. And for the children .
He rose, shouldering his pack, his useless weapons, his useless armour, and faced the others, seeing that they too were ready, and when Tarr gestured they fell in one by one.
One more night. In the name of innocence .
Bottle’s joints were on fire. Swollen and red, they made every step agony. Since when was a story enough to keep someone alive? No matter how heartbreaking, no matter how tragic. No matter how incensed the listener might become. The world lacked such simplicity. He’d never believed in speeches, was ever suspicious of that power to incite. Dreams could be voiced, desires could be uttered and then whispered back with fervour, but in the end most people eventually turned away and the crowd dispersed, and it was back home and getting on with living.
For all the boldness of believers on the front line, when the fires ebbed and no one was looking, it was time again to hide away. But maybe we need that. Our little hole to climb down into. For some respite, where all the clamouring voices in your head can just die away. For blessed silence .
And the ones who never get to that, who are so consumed they can find nowhere to hide, no place to rest, see what happens to them – see the fever in their eyes. They have made their lives torture, they have made the voice of their spirit one long, unbroken howl .
Fevered, aye. He was that, and more. ‘ We’re the walking dead .’ Fiddler’s words, or someone’s, anyway. Maybe Cuttle. No matter. The walking dead didn’t feel pain like this. The walking dead didn’t carry on their backs a thousand questions – questions with no answers.
His grandmother was now hobbling beside him. She didn’t belong on this trail, in this desert, but there she was. And maybe she wasn’t his grandmother at all, just some other wax witch twisting reeds in her arthritic hands, making dolls for the children in the village ahead. Gifts.
Charms. I remember you giving them away. Toys, you said, head bobbing. Free toys! And they all ran up to you, laughing .
But you wove protections into those dolls. Blessings, wards against illness. Nothing powerful, nothing to stop, say, a flash flood or an avalanche. But the father that lashed out with his fists. The uncle who slipped under the blankets in the dead of night. Those ones paid for what they did .
And the cuts that healed. The fevers that went away .
So, Grandmother, I’ll walk this last walk. In your memory. Make me a doll, for this pain .
And take this child by the hand. And tell him again, how they will pay for what they did .
For years, before her nails were worn down to bloody shreds by all that she clawed at, Smiles had carried a dream, carried it around like a pearl inside a battered shell. Of a day in the future when she was a mother, and she’d given birth to twins. Two girls, squalling and hissing the way girls do. Playing on the beach under her watchful eye.
And then, in a dark, desolate season – with the skies grey and the seas swollen – the older ones would come to her. ‘ The fish are gone ,’ they’d say. ‘ The spirits must be appeased. Choose one, Mother, and make of her the gift of our people, our gift to the thirsty waters .’ And she would walk away, calling her daughters back to the hut.
They were lowborn. The whole family. Her husband and the father of the twins was gone, maybe dead. It was all down to her. One child to be blessed, the other cursed. Yet arguments could be made as to who was which. She knew all about that.
A night of bitter winds, of fires doused by spray. And Smiles would set out, knives in hand. And she would kill every one of those elders – in all their hunger, in all their needs now that they were too old to fish, now that the only authority they still possessed came with their threats and warnings about angry, vengeful spirits. Aye, she would show them a vengeful, angry spirit, and the gifts it would make to the hungry sea would appease a thousand spirits of the deep.
Those kinds of dreams were honey on the tongue, heady with the juices of pleasure and satisfaction. She suspected such dreams hid in the hearts of everyone. Desires for justice, for redress, for a settling of the scales. And of course, that sour undercurrent of knowledge, that none of it was possible, that so much would rise in opposition, in self-preservation even, to crush that dream, its frail bones, its pattering heart – even that could not take away the sweet delight, the precious hope.
Wells for the coin, league-stones for the wreaths, barrows for the widdershins dance – the world was filled with magical places awaiting wishes. And empires raised lotteries, opened games, sought to lift high heroes among the common folk – and everyone rushes up with their dreams. But stop. Look back. Gods, look around! If all we seek is an escape, what does that say about the world we live in? That village, that city, that life?