Heraclix and Pomp: A Novel of the Fabricated and the Fey (27 page)

He heard the boy unlatch the box and watched as the lid lifted. Cold air cascaded into what Heraclix could now see was a coffin. Al’ghul’s face slipped into view against a background of stars. The moon cast its light from somewhere off to the side, giving the boy a malformed glow that rendered him hideous in the night.

“He’s breathing,” the boy said.

“Merely a formality,” Mehmet called out from somewhere below. “Breathing isn’t as important when you’re halfway between life and death.”

“No, I suppose not,” the boy mumbled while looking into Heraclix’s unblinking eyes.

“You’ve done well, my giant friend,” Al’ghul said softly. “I have what I want now. Fuskana is mine. She is bound to me. I had hoped, but never really believed, that a girl such as her, a girl so beautiful, so pure, could be mine. I’m sorry it had to come to this. But thank you.”

Then, turning his face toward the direction from which Mehmet’s voice had sounded, the boy asked, “Will he be okay in there?”

“Yes—for our purposes, at least. He might be a little cold, a little uncomfortable. He might even suffer a panic attack, being unable to move, but what is that to us?”

Heraclix hadn’t felt, up to that point, panic. Now, though, he had to suppress the anxiety that began to swell up from his gut into his chest, throat, and head. He tried to speak aloud to himself, but whatever power gripped his body also held his tongue. Not that having a voice would help him. Judging from the lack of noise, they were in some remote location away from civilization. All he could hear were Al’ghul, Mehmet, the horses and . . . someone else. Another pair of feet, he thought, slowly shuffling around the wagon. When the wagon door below him opened, then shut with Al’ghul in plain sight and Mehmet’s droning voice distant, he was sure of it. There was another person, a silent person, moving slowly, with them. Could it be Fuskana, brokenhearted by the departure of her beloved Kaleel? There was no good way to tell.

Al’ghul shut the lid. Heraclix thought he heard a whisper of weeping beneath his coffin, then a hush fell over all.

A crack of thunder (or was it an explosion?), sounded without warning. The source was so close that Heraclix could hear the sizzling of electricity as the bolt disintegrated.

“Don’t be frightened,” Al’ghul’s muffled voice rose up through the bottom of Heraclix’s coffin. “I will protect you. I love you, you know.”

There was no response as the rain began pouring down in a torrent.

Heraclix soon found that his coffin wasn’t watertight. There was definitely a leak at the seams. He could do nothing to stop the water as it trickled in, taking refuge from the thunder that crashed outside. This continued for what seemed like a long time. Then, thankfully—though painfully—the rain drops stopped plopping into his box, freezing into icicles instead. He thought he could hear wind-whipped snow spattering against the side of his coffin. The thunder slowed, but continued for hours.

On what must have been the next morning, grunts of effort preceded the rocking of his coffin and the crack and tinkle of shattering ice.

Al’ghul’s breath came out in steamy vapors as he spoke.

“There he is, Fuskana. Do you remember? The giant who rescued us.”

Over the boy’s shoulder the beautiful young Fuskana’s face appeared. But it was devoid of the cheerfulness she had earlier shown. Her mouth was flat, neither smiling nor frowning. And her eyes were vacant, like the eyes of one who was raised during the trauma of war, eyes that have seen too much—vacant.

She looked down at Heraclix, but her expression remained unchanged.

Al’ghul put his hand on the girl’s shoulder, and she moved with him, like a puppet under the puppet master’s hand.

“Come,” he said with disappointment. “Get back into the wagon. You’ll be warmer in there.”

The lid closed, trapping a tiny cloud of the boy’s breath. It disappeared in the darkness before diffusing across Heraclix’s face. It was the only warmth he would feel for days.

A shot rang out near the wagons. The echo that reverberated through the air indicated that they must be in some sort of canyon or up against a range of mountains.

The wagon stopped, but the sound of hoofbeats didn’t. Someone was approaching.
Many someones
, Heraclix thought Pomp might say if she was here. He couldn’t tell how many, not even when their horses slowed to a trot, surrounding the wagon.

“Stand and deliver!” came a shout in a thick Russian accent.

“Again?” shouted Al’ghul.

“Again,
da
! Only this time there will be no saving you.”

Heraclix thought that this might be true.

“We still owe you for what you did to poor Yuri. Or, rather, you still owe us!”

A collective shout erupted from the robbers.

“Take the girl,” the lead Cossack said.

Hoofs stuttered, and bridles clanked as the Russians moved to obey their orders.

Mehmet began chanting in Arabic.

Heraclix wondered if the old man was saying his last prayers before going to meet Allah in paradise.

Al’ghul taunted the Russians. “Any closer, and I’ll cut the tongues out of your mouths.”

The robbers laughed.

Fuskana screamed.

A general “huh?” rippled through the ranks of the Cossacks, followed by more specific shouts:

“Ah! What is that? It stings my bones!”

“My skin . . . it’s . . . it’s falling off!”

“What is happening to me?”

The voices rose into a crescendo of shouts and screams followed by a lone voice, that of a man aged well beyond the dusk of life, that trailed off as the wagon moved on: “Can’t see. Can’t see. What has happened to my eyes? I am blind. No. No! I have no eyes! I can’t see! Where are the rest of you? Someone please help me . . .”

The voice soon faded to silence behind them.

“H-how did you do that?” Al’ghul asked.

Mehmet answered. “In order to fully understand death, one must clearly understand the transitions between states of decay in mortality. Death is merely unfettered decay. All I did was speed up the process. You’ve never heard of a decrepit highwayman, have you?”

“No. No sir.”

“And you never will.”

“But why didn’t you do that to them the first time they attacked us?” Al’ghul asked.

“These things come at a price, my boy. One doesn’t go about altering one bit of the universal laws without paying for the
balance, with interest, in another. Besides, your brother and the giant, as our newly-old friends have inferred, were doing just fine without me.”

“But my brother died!” Al’ghul said.

“Careful boy,” Mehmet warned in a low voice. “There’s still a bit of balance owed to me. You are the beneficiary of some of my investment. Perhaps Fuskana there . . . perhaps she would prefer my company to yours?”

Al’ghul said nothing more . . .

. . . until the increase of bustling sounds and voices indicated that they had reached a major city, though Heraclix had no way of knowing where they were or how long they had been traveling. He tried to piece his situation together by catching snippets of conversation, but the words melted into an incomprehensible babble. All he knew was that most of the voices were speaking Turkish, with a smattering of Magyar and Serb.

Al’ghul spoke only enough to receive his orders from Mehmet, and the other responded in kind.

“How far?” the boy asked.

“Just past the gate. Park the horses there.”

“How long?”

“About an hour. See that the horses are fed and watered.”

“And what of us?”

“You’ll be fine. I’ll bring some bread when I return.”

The air seeping into the seams of the coffin reeked of spices he hadn’t smelt since . . . since a time he couldn’t remember, though the odor was familiar and warm, comforting for reasons he couldn’t fathom. His mind went reeling, searching for a window into these teases of memory that he couldn’t quite resolve, like mirages in the heat of the desert—yet another analogy that he somehow understood, but knew not how. Frustration rose up in his chest, neck, and the wide space between his eyes, but was held still by the immobilization of his body, the urge to scream silenced behind his paralytic tongue. Blood, or whatever it was that coursed through his veins, flushed through his temples, the noise like the sound of rushing waters heard from afar.

Only when he calmed himself, more or less resigned to his situation, did he hear something other than his own physiological manifestations of anger.

“Kaleel?” A woman’s voice. Fuskana.

“No, not Kaleel. Kaleel is gone now. Probably for good,” Al’ghul replied.

“But . . . why?”

“That doesn’t matter right now. What matters is that you are free to go, and you need to go now, while Mehmet is away.”

“Mehmet . . . can’t remember . . .”

“Don’t try. Mehmet is a bad man, a selfish man, a sorcerer. You need to go now, Fuskana, before he returns.”

“Where?” she asked. Heraclix wondered if the girl would ever be able to make a decision by or for herself.

“Go north to Sofia. Here is a bag full of
Kuruş
coins. This will buy your passage and hold you over until you can find your family again.

“And you?” she said with more concern than Heraclix felt the boy deserved.

“I will take care of myself . . . and the giant.”

“I . . . remember . . . the giant, I think.”

“There is much that you won’t remember. Allah is merciful to take some memories away. Now go!”

“But I can’t . . .”

“Go!” the boy yelled loud enough that she jumped in her seat. She then got out of it.

The girl’s crying fell away as the boy’s rose above.

Two thumps and a loud crack sounded on the side of the coffin, at the seam, followed by the rush of air into the compartment.

Tears streamed from Al’ghul’s eyes, falling onto Heraclix’s chest before freezing.

“You would be right to kill me,” the boy said to the immobile golem. “And you may. I deserve it. Better to die at your hands, though, than to suffer at the hands of a madman, or cause Fuskana to suffer further under his enchantments.”

He paused, wiping tears from his cheeks before continuing the monologue. “You see, I had Fuskana. But she was not mine. I didn’t earn her. I thought she would love me, if I could have all of her
attentions. Only now I know that one cannot fall in love when one is forced into it. I am a fool. Kaleel is now likely dead, or soon will be. I cannot fix either of those things now. But I can, and have, set Fuskana free. And now I shall free you. Do what you will. I have betrayed you and deserve whatever you see fit to inflict upon me.”

The boy reached down and touched Heraclix’s forehead, scrubbing at the skin, as if to remove a mark.

“Once I clean the sigils from your head, you will be free. You will be momentarily disoriented, but balance will come to you shortly.”

Al’ghul continued to rub Heraclix’s forehead, becoming more frantic as time wasted away.

Then something inside Heraclix snapped. He drew in a sharp breath, his back heaving from the influx of cold air into his lungs and the instantaneous restoration of sensation to his body. He blinked, breathing heavily, flexed his fingers and rotated his ankles. He drew his knees up and a wave of nausea swept over him as the world spun uncontrollably around him.

“That should be it,” Al’ghul said, putting a hand underneath the golem’s shoulder. “I can’t lift you. You’re going to have to sit up. Mehmet will be back soon. And if we’re not gone, the consequences will be bad, not just for me, but for both of us. Come, get up.”

Heraclix hadn’t felt so weak since his rebirth in Mowler’s apartment. The sensations were much the same, though Al’ghul’s explanation of the situation at least provided a context to what was happening.

He rolled onto his side and pushed himself up. The coffin lid fell clumsily on him until Al’ghul strained with both arms to lift it up off of him.

Heraclix lifted a leg over the edge and rolled out of the coffin onto the wagon’s footrest. He felt vitality come to him, not to its full strength, but enough to get down from the wagon. Al’ghul jumped down beside him.