Mulgara Page 4

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  My name is Seasmil Oleugsby. Most would say I am a large man. I’d concur; made from the heavy lifting, but not solely due to all the bodies. When I am lifting, my hair is tied in a ponytail; black hair, though like the many scars on my skin, it wasn’t always that way.

  I was named after my great-grandfather, who led a charge on a camp of cannibal pirates off the coast of Suela. His name grew to legendary status, despite a rather gruesome end. He and his company were roasted alive in suits of hardened clay. Apparently there is a holiday in that idol-worshipping land that still mimics all of this. A ragged sailor once told how the women rub their clitorises on the face of the still-screaming meal to be. I often wondered if my ancestor had suffered this intriguing punishment, and if he had felt a final delight before the world went dark. It was a neglected portrait that hung from a wall during my youth that told me from him I’d inherited the Oleugsby menace: flat forehead, deep-set eyes, and a square jaw.

  I was born and raised in Nilghorde; in the Templeton District to be exact, designated for the martial servicemen and their families. We were on an edge of the city, where the farthest line of homes faced a great forest. Templeton was a sturdy square, once cut from the forest and sown on the Nilghorde quilt. Inside our heavily patrolled borders sat the steep-roofed stone houses surrounded by all you’d expect to see in the farmlands.

  And I do mean heavily patrolled. Despite it being a district in Nilghorde, there was little crime. Most of the watchmen and the Metropolitan Ward lived there. They hadn’t busted heads all over this land to allow swarms of riffraff to spill into their own domiciles. But in the earlier days, when the Conqueror was waging war and the future-wardsmen were his soldiers, Templeton was a place where fathers were gone most of the year, leaving children to be raised by elder siblings or their promiscuous mothers.

  I was an only child, but that was just fine by me. From the beginning, I’d always fallen deep into the joys of solitude and imaginary friends. These playmates inhabited holes in trees and pawed the floor under my bed. By the time I was catching up to the height of my mother, I had shed any interest in sports or games played out in the streets.

  That, though, wasn’t from being alone too much—as Mother quibbled at times. I’d discovered the world of science. I begged Mother for an alchemy set. After much whining and mutinies at the dinner table, she caved and brought me a little wooden box. It wasn’t just filled with mineral pouches, corked vials, and tiny cutting tools—it bore wonder. In my hands were the keys to the doors of the natural world.

  The little box became my obsession. The few friends who still lingered about stopped knocking on our door. Mother’s pleas to go outside and play eventually stopped too. Far less gratifying, imaginary friends turned to dust. One by one, faint screams, audible to my ears alone, and then there were only shadows. I particularly remember the elf in the old elm on the edge of Templeton Park. He sat crouching in the canopy, silent as always. His stare haunted me for a long time. Disapproving of me leaving the mists of fairyland for pragmatism was certainly understandable. But it also couldn’t be stopped.

  I eventually focused on the visceral endeavors and varied my experiments greatly, from futile attempts at tracking stars to more enjoyable branches dealing with the inner workings of anything I could either trap, scavenge, or lure with meat.

  II: Into Cellars

  Seasmil,” I often have to tell myself. “If you are going to go into the backstory, be sure not to leave out the most important stuff.” For backstory is merely useful for jutting us forward into that great, mysterious yonder. And I should know this, being I’ve spent more nights falling through book’s pages than your average paid scholar. With this bit in mind, telling my tale would be a wide chasm from thorough if I failed to tell of my father, in his entirety, as is best known to me.

  No, not some Ordrid—though you may have anticipated such a revelation due to, among other things, my habits and choice of work.

  No, my father was Augnor Oleugsby, a cavalryman in the notorious regiment Swift Saber. The SS was a highly deployed unit under the Conqueror himself, and subsequently, I don’t have any recollection of my father in the house amid my earliest years. Despite his absence, we did not struggle. Charges and pillages accumulated, bringing back chest upon chest of jewels and coin.

  My father was a beast of a man, a stone golem with legs like unhewn trees, and a neck like an oxen in the farmlands where Mother had come out of.

  The first memory I can muster was of him telling Mother a spirited story. With the smell of the saddle still lingering, he recounted riding through the farmlands of Serabandantilith and mowing the villagers down like grass. I didn’t hear the whole tale, and time has a way of inflating and deflating the sanctity of memory, but I do remember a comparison of some people to the height of our kitchen cupboard. I was eye level with the cupboard myself back then and tried to make sense of how men were so small in other lands. As was her nature, or at least her developed one, Mother listened half-heartedly, trying multiple times in vain to clue Father in that I was listening, and do so without infuriating him.

  Whether Father was riding the famed memory of his grand-father, or was an exemplary soldier, or a combination of the two, I do not know, but he’d embarked on a career in which he was being groomed for a lofty and prestigious rank. Chief Horseman perhaps, or maybe a lower seat in the Office of Scepters when his ruthlessness left the saber and moved to an inkwell. All I know is, wherever he was slotted to go came to a sudden and unmovable halt when I was about ten.

  We never really knew where he was or when he’d be returning. There were the wives meetings, where the senior crone married to some military relic long overdue for retirement would disseminate the latest news through scroll and lecture. Mother hated those. In one of her more humorous moments, she reenacted how catty they all were and how without delay the meetings would degrade to drunk clucking hens gossiping over which watchmen was the most endowed and notes on his availability.

  So, it’s no surprise to me now that one fateful winter, when Father was supposed to be on the forefront of some vague campaign, he was attending to the wife of a field grade commander in his SS.

  We found out weeks after. Father had returned home a wretch, reluctantly telling Mother that he was done deploying due to “some arbitrary insubordination.” For all the stolen gold in the Thunder Bustle, I couldn’t fathom why Mother didn’t tear the house apart and leave him emasculated after he had fallen asleep. She took it on the chin and seemed to recover back to her dismal role as housewife to the once-great warrior. You would have barely noticed anything at all, save the additional silence at the table and the lines in her face that had deepened. But hindsight is an unchained dragon, cruel but liberated. I know now why Mother remained in that house in Templeton.

  Despite a heated debate among his superiors, Father was allowed to retain a paying position. As a man it occurred to me maybe it was his greatest detractors who gleefully fought for this altered retention. Demoted to a stable master for one of the SS garrisons, our once healthy stock of horses were sold off, their mountain of feed abandoned to mottle with the fungi that I examined and the vermin that I caught.

  Most of the time, Father would bring his work home with him—we certainly had the room in the stables. Mother once whispered he was too embarrassed to be seen in his billet by his former brethren.

  One of the few reasons he wasn’t pulled apart by a departing pair of Saber warhorses was he’d saved the life of an esteemed officer. At the time Father’s infidelities were being exposed, this officer had climbed to the seat of Vice Chief Horseman and had enough clout to muffle the baying of the scorned husband. Although the Vice Chief’s influence spared my father, the same could not be said for his loose-ring-bearing mistress, whose corpse dangled on the Tower of the Waning Moon for a season of crows and maggots.

  This Vice Chief’s generosity bore our family other gifts too. Soon after the SS returned from the deployment where Father had saved his life, he came to our home one evening for a dinner. And not any ordinary dinner. Mother had banged around in the kitchen almost as frantic as she did over her wardrobe, ending it stuffed in a dress never to be seen again, and in front of a meal so large my boyish brain anticipated the Conqueror’s entire army.

  He was a noble-looker, the type whose gray feathered hair and blue eyes made you wonder why he’d ever signed on to shit next to men with blade wounds stitched by other lugs; squatting over the same trench, dug by men for whose wounds there was no fixing. He left us with a chest that chunked when it hit the floor, and he sang Father’s praises until the night drew me weary. Right before he departed, he brought me from his carriage a baby lamb, black as midnight. My best guesses were it was either some custom of warrior etiquette—a gesture of giving life to the seed of the man who saved his—or a grand display of appreciation for Mother’s cooking.

  Though I was informed of every glorious detail, it was still hard not to wonder if Father had really dashed into that ambush to save him not for duty or for that brotherly love soldier-types love to go on about, but rather to quench a bloodlust. Truth is, that Vice Chief knew my father in a way I never did. I would be false to not say that a lifetime ago I wished to see this man, to sit on his knee and partake in his celebrations, to wear his giant helmet and be tossed in the air. Bruises simply meant I received something different.

  My experiments on our neighbor’s cat brought a particular salvo, and the manner in which I returned the feline only heated the beating. Around that time, stable work lost a lot of its demand. To fill the gap, Father took an avid interest in denouncing my hopes and daily endeavors. That damn cat was all it took. The alchemy
kit was pried from my hands, only to be shoved against my chest a moment later. I wept without restraint when I was ordered to break all the vials. Afterward I assumed the usual stance and held firewood above my head until my shoulders screamed. Somewhere in this memory I recited the piece of martial jingle I’d recite a thousand times: the SS creed. As an adult my mind has shunted all but two stanzas:

  One rider, ten riders, or riders score

  Through pain, through cold, through plain, through moor

  I don’t think he ever planned for me to be a warrior, and if he did, he surely changed his mind after his demotion. “Bunch of damn beggars in armor,” he’d say. “Lousy mob whores praising the cowardly; worshipped those that pass out bread instead of the blade.”

  This, of course, worked to my benefit. The rank and file could march off our land’s tallest cliff for all I cared. Like most children in Templeton, I enjoyed a comprehensive education, poring over sonnets and rattling an abacus with a series of tutors—maybe even more so, since no son of Augnor would wear armor in peacetime. My favorite subject was unsurprisingly biology, and it may have been boyish defiance, but Father’s classic soldier’s disdain for the arts and academia only strengthened my resolve to not only be a man of science but a medical doctor. So what if my tastes were a little unorthodox from the start?

  With funding procured from Mother’s undergarments drawer, which had been procured from Father’s last heavy chest, I built an upgraded version of my laboratory—this time in the cobweb-infested cellar of our most vacated and dilapidated barn. Once I was sure the ogre who stalked my waking life was unaware of operational headquarters, I continued to explore the governing of all life-forms that I could drag through the candlelight.

  Around the time when hair began to sprout in new places, I snuck out one night and penetrated deep into the city. I scurried through alleys. At the risk of abduction or worse, I finally found what I was searching for outside the back of a noisy brothel. It was soft, pink, and barely dead. I brought it home and down into the cellar. It was the first of its kind, but surely not the last.

  III: Seasmil and Somyellia

  Leading minds say all this gods talk is nonsense,” my old tutor used to say. “Tubes and muck are we.”

  One of many in a long line of educators that ran screaming from our home, this tutor had been a student himself. The Institute of Human Sciences, Rehleia’s premier medical school, was placed on a Nilghorde hill like some jaded royalty. More than just eliminative materialism, I learned from this scholar that the Institute did all sorts of fascinating studies in its grand halls. The true tome of treasure came the day he brought me an old course book of his. I hid it deep in the cellar, behind a skull of a large dog and several jars of entrails from woodland fauna. The findings within the book were a stream of wonder. And soon a river.

  I have been accused of being a callous man, solitary and apathetic to the plight of others, but I can say that if that is so, that I wasn’t always. This tutor had been warned by Father, backed against a wall in our den, random sharp object to his neck, not to encourage my peculiarness and stick to the curriculum. When a distant neighbor called upon our door to ask if we’d seen her dog, not only did I receive a staunch one, but the best teacher I ever had collected his last payment with the helpful removal of his front row of teeth.

  Mother pleaded my innocence, even drumming up the courage to compare unfounded accusations made by the SS at Father’s expense. In truth, part of that neighbor’s pet hid my begifted course book. My guilt in that matter served no purpose to surface.

  Now it must be understood, this lamb placed in my arms by the Vice Chief was also slotted for the operating table. I wanted to see if it could survive with a transfusion of my own blood. The experiment of course presented itself while I was reading one of the studies. The Institute had run a lengthy trial, placing vats of murderer blood from the Municipal Dungeon into orphans’ arms. Most of the orphans died before transfusion, but a few strong specimens survived. The damn rainwater ruined the last several pages, but I imagined the spectacular transformation of these test subjects in their cages: street children screaming through the bars with eyes of predation, walking among the caged viewing areas while pumping the blood of cutthroats. I didn’t have the resources needed for full replication, but a lamb wasn’t bad.

  I’d spent a week or so tactfully letting my blood, being sure to avoid the constant threat of discovery and cataclysmic reaction from my parents. Then the “Day of the Lamb,” as I’d come to call it, finally arrived. Enough blood was stored, and Father was heavily asleep from a full day of the stable.

  I laugh now at the ruthless ambition. Although cursedly naïve at the time, as we all must be, I am proud of who I was at such a young age. The story was already concocted: wolves stole the lamb. And I was going to use the blood I drained from it to make room for my own and paint a believable scene of carnage.

  Down in the cellar, to optimize my sight, I placed candles in the shape of a triangle. In this triangle’s center was a low table that I laid the lamb on. I tied down a front leg, but when I reached for the other, chaos erupted.

  We fought like pit fighters. A mad chase around the table sent the transfusion gear into every nook and cranny. My jar became a half-congealed explosion. He stayed me with a rear kick to the jaw and when the lights went away I felt pure nausea.

  At the end of it, we were covered in sappy blood, both panting. My heart beat harder at the thought that Father may have heard. Equally, I imagine, the lamb was terrified of some determined lad, with rope in hand at the opposite end of an unpleasant cellar.

  It was then I looked into those black-jeweled eyes. Maybe I was being melodramatic then, and maybe I am a bit still, but this thing had the courage to fight off his attacker—like a drunken banshee—whereas I took my beatings without recourse. I’d killed hundreds of rats, snakes, cats, and dogs who put up less of a fight. It is hard for someone who dwells in the company of people and song to understand, but I felt a closeness with this creature that was beyond that of normal explanation. Up until then I hadn’t named him, but right then he became Celly. A childish, campy, spondee of a name, sure, but it signified the cellar, where I met my best friend and where, I still believe, two spirits connected.

  We emerged out onto the floor of the barn. Gigantic horses glared with an oppressive over-watch. We washed at the well, and I returned him to his corral. Sneaking back inside I breathed a sigh of relief, hearing snores that would humble a bear.

  After that night, Celly and I were inseparable. He followed me on my long walks through the shores of the wood-line, where I showed him all the snares and pitfalls that I used to capture wide-eyed shriekers. I’d sneak him in the house sometimes, and he would sleep next to me in bed. His smell, long-lasting, I remedied with heavy incense and constantly cracked windows. He and I both grew in stature, and we spent many a summer night sitting on the floor of the cellar, one reading to the other.

  —

  A night in the late spring I heard strange noises from our kitchen. It was a faint rustling, followed by a sound that reminded me of the cracking of firewood. And after that nothing more.

  At the time, a banishment to my bedroom for some shortcoming prohibited me from investigating any further. The next morning I awoke to Father screaming. That was nothing particularly unusual, except this time there rang a unique desperation. I ran out to see him on his knees, back toward me. He held Mother, dead as dead could be. The rope hung without motion, tied to a rafter where our kitchen met the den.

  The thought of her watching over me in some a state of…unbeing the prior night sparked the hair on my arms.

  Her face showed the full effects, and her neck I could not bear.

  I must have let out a small yelp, because there was a moment where Father turned to me. He had the look of a painting made by a decadent and angry artist. He hadn’t cried, or at least I hadn’t heard him, but his eyes were red, and not the usual shade.