The Fire and the Fog (22 page)

They failed.

II

Everything was on fire. Why was there so
much fire. And why did everything hurt so? There was screaming, and
fire, and he couldn’t find anyone. They were screaming for him, he
could hear them. He could hear his mother calling his name. Was
she? Was anyone? There was just so much pain it was hard to think
stra…

Gel sat up with a start, a light blanket
falling slowly into his lap as he reached out a clammy, shaking,
four-fingered hand to the cold stone wall beside him. It was a
dream. He was at home, he was safe, and…

Four fingers.

He pulled his left hand, his only real hand,
to his forehead as he started to sob. As tears began to fall.

Well why shouldn’t they? He was broken, and
he was alone, and everyone he loved was dead. Why shouldn’t he
cry?

‘Because crying won’t help you’ the voice of
reason in his head said. It was that calm voice, reasoning, his own
mind’s way of thinking to itself, and its message was simple.

‘Get up, Gel. You have to get up.’

Gel threw off the covers and stood shakily as
the voice of reason spoke, his left hand going to the wall for
support, for leverage.

The stone wall was cool against his sweating
palm. Blessedly cool. He put his right hand, his half-hand, up
against the cool stone wall as well, partially for support, but
mostly to soothe the fire that was all his right hand could
feel.

Gel stood there a while, both hands against
the wall, head bowed, chest rising and falling in ragged breaths as
the voice continued talking. As long as it was only in his head, he
wasn’t talking to himself.

‘Get up, Gel. Get up and smell the ashes.
Someone did this to you.’ The voice continued in his head, angry as
Gel knew he should be. ‘Get up and find them. Find whoever took
your life from you. Find them and destroy them. Make them pay.’

And the voice in his head was right. Somehow
he would do just that. He had given up, earlier. Thought that all
he could do still for his family was play them out, until he played
himself out too. But no, there was something more. Somehow he would
make them pay. They deserved it. His family, his friends, and
whoever had done this, they all deserved it. They deserved
vengeance, revenge, and there was no-one but Gel who could bring it
for them.

The other side of his head wondered if he
might be wrong, though. What could he do? He was young, weak, poor.
Alone.

But, he was standing now. And the fire in his
hand burned less; the cool church stone had at least soothed that
one ill. His voice of reason had gotten him this far, hadn’t it?
What could it hurt to continue listening to it? He had nothing
else.

‘I know what I have to do, now’ Gel thought
to himself as he turned, looking slowly about the room, as he took
in shattered and upturned pews, large hard wooden constructs carved
generations ago, that had always seemed as eternal as the stone of
the church. ‘I have to find them,’ he thought, his eyes passing
quickly over several canvas bags, their outlines showing they were
filled with something, ‘Find them and make them pay,’ he thought.
His eyes narrowed in confusion at the sight of an easel, paints and
canvas set up in the middle of the cleared area; widened in
surprise as they found, and stopped on, a man curled against the
wall opposite Gel. The man appeared to be asleep; at least his eyes
were closed.

Gel didn’t know who the man was, but he would
start with him. He would find a knife, or a sword, and start
getting his revenge right then and there. He would kill the man
against the wall. He had to. He was part of it. He had to be.

Looking quickly through the scattered bags on
the church floor though, Gel only found food, paints, scattered
brushes, a few small bottles of liquid. Nothing he could use
against the man, nothing that would give him the advantage he would
need. The man was bigger, stronger. Gel wouldn’t last. He wasn’t
running away, he told himself, he was surviving to deal with the
man later, when he was stronger. The rationalization helped.

So instead, Gel grabbed one of the canvas
bags full of food and left. He left the church he woke up in, left
the house he grew up in, left the only place he had ever lived,
left it all behind, and started along the cobblestone road out of
the city.

He looked back once, before he left the
village entirely. Looked back at the square stone villa atop the
low hill at the center of town; back at the only home he had known.
From the distance, he could almost pretend he couldn’t see the door
on its hinges, could almost pretend he couldn’t remember the inside
of the house, that he couldn’t remember the destruction that
greeted him when he woke. Part of him remembered the last time he
had left the city, remembered that lovely day spent with Mae,
kissing under the Tree. But he shook his head, banished those
thoughts. They were gone, they would never happen again.

He started to put distance between himself
and the village, but the distance wasn’t enough. His eyes couldn’t
ignore the destruction, and his mind couldn’t stop seeing it. It
got worse every time he thought of it, imagining the fire, blood
and destruction. It layered itself steadily over his image of the
town, a dark filter of fire and smoke, getting heavier with every
pass.

Gel’s mood was dark, darker than it had been
before he went to play under the Oak tree. He could no longer
pretend that his house was okay, just as he couldn’t pretend that
the village behind him was now nothing but a charred and broken
husk, a torn and shredded shadow of a painting that once was. He
could pretend, could grieve, no longer. It was time to act.

And so he left it all behind. He left the
destruction and the terror, the death and pain, he left his life
behind and headed out, alone, onto the open plain that surrounded
Oortain’s Copse.

Part of him wondered why the rest of the
world should seem so beautiful, so pristine. A clear blue sky;
birds and sun were in the air. Green-gold fields surrounded him.
Why should the world seem so perfect when his village behind him
crumbled slowly to ashes.

But most of him ignored that. Ignored the
sky, the birds, the sun, everything but the canvas bag held tightly
in his hand, dragging jerkily along the dirt road underneath him,
and the thought of how he would make them pay.

III

Dan’r woke slowly; the sort of crawling
return to consciousness that ekes out of a quiet, dreamless sleep;
where the first moment of wakefulness is indistinguishable from the
last fragile grasps of unconsciousness.

Even after waking, he lay still, curled
against the wall, unable to be sure if he had woken or was just
stuck in a calm, silent dream. Either way, he knew that moving
would spoil it.

Eventually though, Dan’r rose from his calm
lethargy. Just as every dream must eventually end in wakefulness,
so too must every moment of halcyon, where all seems right with the
world.

On this morning, light and quiet, Dan’r’s
calm was broken when he realized the boy was gone. Gone sometime in
the night or the morning, in the few unguarded hours Dan’r had
slept. There was no way of knowing when the boy had disappeared, no
way of knowing when.

Just days out of his drunken stupor; just
days into trying to do right by the world again, and Dan’r was
already failing. He cursed himself for not grabbing wine when he
was ransacking the rest of the village. He could use a good
drink.

‘He’s not ready yet.’ Dan’r thought angrily
as he looked over the scattering of supplies strewn about the
church. He looked down at his hands, pale but steady in the morning
light, ‘I’m not ready yet.’

He hadn’t been ready to move yet. There was
food in the town, supplies, but he hadn’t collected enough. And
he’d spent his days painting nothing; landscapes. Vague memories of
scenes he recalled from his drunken haze. Nothing he could use. He
was losing valuable time already, not leaving after the boy
immediately, but he couldn’t leave yet.

So he sat at the easel he had found, threw
aside the canvas that he had been working on. He had been painting
the tree he had found the boy under, its dark and verdant leaves
already painted, surrounded by a light outline of grass. He had
been about to start the shading, had been about to start putting in
the small details of feeling and colour that would make the
painting seem more alive, more emotive.

Instead, the painting landed on the floor of
the church, the still wet oils sticking quickly to the cold stone,
and Dan’r began to sketch on sheets of parchment. Days ago, in his
delirium, he had thrown away his cloak; it was the first thing he
redrew, and then he quickly sketched out the pieces that would fill
the pockets of the cloak. Not all of them, he didn’t have time for
them all, but the important ones. Water, food; the essentials.

***

His Art finished, Dan’r began to sort through
the supplies scattered among the broken pews. Much of the food he
had scavenged on that first day in the village was gone. At least
the boy had thought to bring supplies when he ran. The remaining
food went into a bag with what art supplies Dan’r could fit: the
brush and paints he had found; those would be hard to replace;
charcoal, and some inks, scraps of parchment of varying sizes. The
canvas and easel would have to be left behind. As glorious as it
was to paint on real canvas again, it would only slow him down.

No. For now what Dan’r needed would have to
fit in the one bag, and into the pockets of his cloak, newly made
and stocked with scraps of parchment. Days ago, it had been a
weighty burden. Now its presence, its weight, was comfortable.

Four hours after discovering the boy gone,
Dan’r was on the move. He circled the outskirts of the village
first, his back stooped, his eyes and hands intent on the ground
beneath him. It would be faster to see if the boy had left the
village, before searching house by house.

He found what he was looking for. On the
eastern edge of the village, where the cobblestones turned to the
dirt highway that ran throughout Rognia: recent footprints; small
ones. The boy had gone East.

Dan’r stood and knuckled his back slowly,
cloak billowing lightly in the wind around him.

‘What I wouldn’t give for a goddamned horse’
he muttered to himself, already wincing at the tight knots
hardening in his back. Still, there were some things he could not
make.

***

‘I hate walking!’ Gel yelled at no-one. The
sun beating down on him, the blue sky above and the golden fields
that grew on both sides of the road ignored him, just as they had
each time he had yelled out before. ‘Hate it!’ The few birds in the
sky ignored him too.

He saw a clump of dirt on the road ahead,
somehow held together in a vaguely spherical form. He wanted to
kick it, just as he wanted a weapon of some sort to swing at the
unoffending grain to either side of him. The last clump of dirt he
kicked had broken apart. Unbalanced, he’d fallen, and lain dejected
on the ground. It had taken him a good five minutes, and more
energy than he thought he had left, to force himself to stand
again.

‘I hate you!’ Gel yelled at the dirt as he
walked slowly past it. The dirt ignored him, just as the rest of
the world had. Yelling was just making him thirsty.

He missed water already. He had two loaves of
bread in the canvas bag, now covered in dust and dirt from being
dragged along behind him for hours, and a lump of cheese. He’d
already eaten the two apples, and wished there had been more. He
should have brought water.

Being thirsty, not knowing how to pack, made
him think of Sheane and Mae. What he wouldn’t give for an afternoon
with them under the shade of the old tree, with a picnic basket and
a lute and not another care in the world.

Vengeance wasn’t fair.

***

It didn’t take Dan’r long to find the boy.
He’d had much less of a head start than Dan’r expected, and he
seemed to be stopping frequently to hate the world. Dan’r knew from
years of first hand experience how much that could lengthen the
pace of a journey.

What took time was skirting around the boy,
staying close enough to keep an eye on him, but far enough to not
be seen. Dan’r left the dirt path, made his way through the fields
on the left of the road, wading through the tall grass as if it
were water. The land was flat, and Dan’r could make out sheep
grazing in the distance, but he wasn’t worried that the boy would
spot him. The boy was too angry to pay attention to the world
around him. Anger clouded the boy’s eyes as alcohol had clouded
Dan’r’s for years. Meeting him now wouldn’t help.

Dan’r reached his hands into his cloak, his
fingers touched parchment. He pulled out a water skein, uncorked
it, and drank deeply. It wasn’t cold, but still it was water. The
boy would need some eventually. He’d have to stay close enough to
be there when he did.

‘Wish I had a hat though’, Dan’r thought to
himself. Then he smiled. The boy had probably stopped to hate the
world again. He had time. He lowered himself slowly to sit
cross-legged in the middle of the dirt road, and reached his way
into the bag at his side. Pulling out a large sheet of parchment
and some charcoal, Dan’r started to hum, a vague idea of a plan
forming as his hand moved the charcoal across the page in short,
measured, controlled bursts, the scratching sounds coming from the
parchment music to his ears.