Kraken Defender

It was night. The doomed man railed imprecations before the fusillade sounded and the powder flared like a cannonade so close that I feared the excoriation of my retinas. I dropped to my knees as phosphenes danced before me like they would out on the bay when I was a child walking the shingled coast just before the gloaming of the evening. This place was the anodyne of my spirit, an illimitable expanse of sky and water that bequeathed the susurration of largesse. I would find frangible shells out on the littoral and imagine them talismans of a mage, whose power I had inherited. I would skirt across the waves on a scend of lambent energy until I came to the wounded kraken that many sailors spun yarns over. Wicked harpoons sporting weathered patinas still protruded from multitudes of yawning chancres along its massive body that still spawned mutinous combers in its harried wake. I would rise up in my fiery puissance and rebuke the injuries. The harpoons would fall into the sea and the suppurations would cease as the healed kraken would turn and pledge its life to me in fealty and service.

But here, fifteen years after affecting that make-believe salvation, I had finally caught up with my true-to-life kraken, only to lose him to this night of conflagration. A wave of kinesthesia washed over me and I came back to myself, feeling the raw dirt on my cheek and palms. I had fallen prone, but now I propped myself up to crawl swiftly to Thorn; dragging my leg irons along. I could have walked – well hobbled – but that seemed too extravagant just then, and I hoped to preserve an inconspicuous ambit. Thorn had fallen on a mound of scree before the menhir of Mhoolghassen, like a piece of detritus from that ancient stone; a fallen warrior, unwelcome to his own cenotaph. When I reached him, his face was a flickering chiaroscuro in the torchlight, and I shuddered with sudden formication. Quickly, I stripped off my cloak in an effort to relieve the dreadful sensation as well as my inchoate nausea.

Taking a small, granitic cruse from one of the pockets, I removed the cork and tried to confirm the contents in the crepuscular light. This water was precious, a gift slipped secretly to me from a sympathizer earlier that day. And overcome with the risk I was engaging in, I first took two selfish gulps down my parched throat before dipping my thumb and forefinger into the cruse. I touched his face then; drawing the cool, evanescent liquid in the sign for the ablution of the dead. It seemed that even the soughing of the trees hushed in a caesura of silence before resuming their mournful threnody. I feared my tears would spill over his intransigent visage in a cataract of emotion, so I laid my incarnadine cloak over his body like cerements and turned away.

I was re-corking my stone flagon when I was finally descried by one of our captors: Jave of Halen-tarn. His brow knurled in puzzlement before giving way to irrefragable hauteur. I cut my tongue on the arête of my teeth and wished I could instantly deliquesce into the ground as an innominate substance, ephemeral as the dew. His hand shot out to wrest the vessel and I flinched, expecting to be struck. Instead, he backed away two paces and squatted to scoop up a fistful of dust. His eyes were like the obdurate reflection of his uncompassionate heart, and I attended him as my cynosure of doom. He released the dirt from his fist into the vessel, creating a miasma of dust that could have signified the promise of my own life at that moment. He shook the bottle and smiled inimically. I shuddered in the night air, wearing only a light cymar after shedding my cloak on Thorn.

Instead of approaching, Jave turned toward sallow Yhimma, laying only a few paces away. She was stricken with ague – whether from sepsis or exposure, we knew not – and her febrile body longed for some benignant succor. Jave’s shadow fell across her like an adumbrating depredation, and she looked for me with bilious eyes casting glints of nacre in the torchlight.

In nascent horror, I realized his intention. He meant my spoilt water as a mocking febrifuge and would force it down Yhimma’s throat to wrest from her what last feeble resistance she had…and to turn Bhur against me. Bhur sat shackled in a demesne of ineluctable futility and spat sibilants that scored me like indictful execrations. I had taken the risk to approach Thorn. I had gulped from that flagon which I could have shared with Yhimma, lending its blessing and strength. And I had allowed my indiscreetness to ensnare me, wasting what precious and temporary freedom of unbound hands I had. What would transpire now were reckoned scions of my own fault and weakness. I did not need to consult Bhur’s umbrage to apprehend his preterite judgment of me.

Like a clangor, Yhimma’s plaint brought me out of my self-loathing reverie. I was done with my self-imposed reticence. I was also done with uttering foul blandishments to assuage our captors’ strange, circadian rhythms of violence. I lurched erect and shouted, “No! Leave her be!”

Jave ignored me and squatted over Yhimma. Still shouting, I rushed forward, trying to keep my feet. But I fell near a brazier, bedizened with glowing coals. By this time, the others had glanced up from their ale and strewn viands to muse over my antics. But I did not so much as pause before sweeping up the brazier and coming again to my feet in one motion; upturning a clay amphora in the process. The spilth on the rocks had the color of blood, but I ignored it as I ignored the heat from the pan burning away my skin like ruined scoria in a smelting pot of silver.

Jave turned then, with a long dirk in his right hand as if he were just expecting me succumb to his well-laid trap. His smile was unnaturally easy, as though we were sparing with jerrids on the open verdure of the Tournament grounds. “You whoring dray mare,” he husked. “I’ll play you like a sackbut trebled into oblivion!”

For an instant, I froze; gelid with white pain coursing from the fire pan. But I was already resigned to this bitter asperity. Like a motley oriflamme in a staged tableau, I held my fellow captives transfixed by sheer stupidity or courage: the conclave of time would judge. Then I thrust the fire pan with all my strength at Jave; heedless of his proximity to Yhimma.

His glaive rose up to deflect the brazier – which it unceremoniously accomplished – but the flaming contents were irredeemably upset. Like the removal of coigns from an unmortared arch, the orange coals tumbled beyond their bourne to fall about Jave’s head. Sparks flared into his face and one coal lodged itself into his tunic. Ere the coal was finally displaced, he sang and danced a mad paean while the other men roared with raucous derision.