The Legend of El Shashi
Copyright © 2014 Marc Secchia
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What is life but a slow dance of falling petals?
P’dáronï of Armittal,
Time Was, Time Is
El Shashi. What a name!
Whisper it reverently, friend. Hurl it as a weapon. Let it fester between vindictive curses, or let it be your benison. Q
uash an unruly child? Assuredly–and in a breath enrage or elate any audience. But be warned. Though it once convulsed entire cities in celebration, this name has spawned more quarrels than there are fleas in fifty Fiefdoms. Time was, joy and laughter attended El Shashi’s deeds. Now the sum of its sorrows would swell the very oceans.
Is it not given that one name should birth a hundred more, their syllables worn as river-stones, shaped and reshaped by the ebbing and flowing of the gantuls of
humankind? And such a salcat’s basket I concede: names fanciful and foolish, beautiful and bland; names miraculous in power, and names that creep from some nameless hole but to shrivel and cower from the light. Here, epithets rub shoulders with proverbs. Here, runes lie graven upon the walls of palaces and upon tombstones. Should a man own such a wealth of titles, what a dreary burden that might prove.
El Shashi,
author of a thousand legends, named among the Gods! Yet was he not man? And named as a man? Ay, time’s shroud has veiled this truth. Like the ever-shifting mists of foul Ariabak, throne-city of Ulim Godslayer, the truth of El Shashi is felt but not found, heard but oft misunderstood; retold, but twisted in the telling.
Incline an ear to a
n ulule for a makh or more and she will doubtless spin a yarn of a life stranger than most, which made El Shashi the best-loved man in the Umarik Fiefdoms, and yet the most reviled. Is the common ukal not a coin of two sides? One for valour; the other forever stamped with villainy.
Love him or loathe him, one cannot
–one
must
not–be indifferent.
* * * *
I contend that a name’s truth is both strength and curse, a deceitful vessel wallowing in the gulf betwixt utterance and understanding. Names bear a weary weight. They are a travel-worn, battered baggage that litter life like signposts to places best forgotten.
Ah, to forget but for one makh that which was! In Dusky Fahric, the tongue of scholars and poets, his name means ‘wonder-worker’. If only the legend were so inoffensive
–hiding as a stagesmith’s mask a clutch of the greatest tragedies in Umarik history. I marvel that these very symbols I scribe do not groan and cry out as a woman in the throes of labour, or from the quim slump insensate upon the scrolleaf in inky blots of remorse.
I mark this advisedly, for at my great age, the desire to peer back across the serried valleys of memory is both a distraction and a too-frequent pastime. Should I digress it is, in the words of the peerless poetess Phari al’Mahi kin Saymik, ‘for the grey weariness of bone and marrow that mists my ailing flesh’.
At last, I have resolved to die.
I have named both time and manner of my death.
Should this knowledge mark me uncommon? So be it. What man may escape such a treacherous mire of myth and mystery? Even the grave is denied sway over my life. Ay, and many a secret stowed in the depths of my being should best perish with me.
A taper gutters. My hand begins to tremble as the quim scratches my life’s last act in spiderlike lithlin runes across an unfurled scrolleaf. The past rises before me
as a spectre wrenched untimely from the grave, wailing its paean to desolate skies. Mata–She ignores my every petition. Echoes of ancient aches plague my thighs and calves. And through the annals of our time, as through my quoph, the many names of El Shashi reverberate like the booming cough of a great Qur’lik message drum–Soulstealer, Kin-Reaper, the Burning One, the Whisperer, the Running Man, Stormtide over Gethamadi, Benok Holyhand, Scourge of the Westland, the Plague-Rider, and, worst of all, Bringer of the Wurm.
All these names and more have I earned. For I and he are one.
I am El Shashi.
* * * *
If it be counted vanity to chronicle one’s deeds and days, then let vanity be my watchword. How many long makh did I not chew the fat, before committing to quim this account? Tales abound! Legends survive to multiply with a tenacity shared only by the common cockroach. My life has become a hewehat field trampled by the scholarly horde. Against their doom be held what lies remain cased in rune and leaf.
I despise falsehoods. For as persons what we perceive, what we recollect, and what we convey in word and writ, are necessarily filtered through the apparatus of the seven senses. Far better to sup from the source, than to set store upon the third-hand ren
ditions of fools and charlatans.
Ay. But I grow churlish with age, truly told. Let them low a
nd bray as jatha in the traces. I cast not a brass terl upon their shrine.
Perhaps I feared the searing of truth. Why slash open old wounds to no good end? How I longed to set the record aright, to pare clean the embellishments and fabrications of a thousand ulules over a lifetime spanning eleven gantuls
–nay, closer to twelve, on my honour.
You gasp? Be assured, Benethar, of my candour before Mata and before all men.
Last Glimday, no less, I dandled the first descendant of my twelfth gantul upon my knee. And a fine infant he was too, hale and squalling to the skies. Even amongst the Eldrik, mark my words, the pinnacle of my great anna is revered.
Again, is it self-serving to seek to shock, to instruct the ignorant, or to dispel long-cherished myths? Or rather to disappoint, stripping to the banal
bone events others have costumed in the finest robes of vivid imagination? I fear that I simply cannot have grown up in every one of the hundreds of Umarite villages that claim to have nurtured the great, the wondrous, the astounding El Shashi, whoever or whatever they imagine him to be. And I am neither a royal Hassutl, nor an Eldrik Sorcerer, nor Mata in bodily form. I am not even a royal bastard. There! I have ruined the claims of no less than eleven Lines which to my knowledge profess this worthless distinction.
Nay, though my conceit is ample and amply demonstrated from quim to scrolleaf, it is scant motivation. Nor do I seek to spread blame, thereby diminishing my own, or to assert some mistaken superiority. My reasons are deeply personal. Soul-scouring.
Sweet Mata, break these shackles!
How
I thirst for my catharsis, a final purging of bitterness, or my quoph will never know its final rest. Did I not promise a full record to my loved ones? Granted, I intend the truth of El Shashi to resound beyond the Fiefdoms. But how can I even begin to portray the mines of sorrow into which I will delve, and the agony of tearing from memory’s darkest caverns, such offences as would make the very bedrock take voice and scream? Myriad voices, myriad accusations and regrets that scourge my dreams and attend each waking makh …
Grief is a companion
closer than any shadow.
Heading this catalogue of misdeeds is one that has plagued me longer and deeper than any other
–my betrayal of the man who was both friend and father to me. I have never forgotten that act of filthy cowardice. Nor have I been allowed to forget. I have paid for it season upon season for anna thrice a mortal lifetime, and more. Though it cost torment as unto my last breath, Benethar, I must lay this matter to rest.
Thus by rune and by quim, shall I recount the names of El Shashi.
I shall lay open a vein and splurge my lifeblood upon the scrolleaf, revealing his curse, and his salvation.
In all these matters the Wurm is foundation, heart, and end.
Being an account of his youthful folly, of how El Shashi came into his powers, and of the augmentation of the Wurm.
For reasons you will understand, friend,
certain references, names, and places have been changed to protect those concerned from the avengers.
: Rubiny
2
nd
Levantday of Youngsun, Anna Nox 1353
Breathing deep of the sathic-scented air, I owned it an excellent morn. I sensed a gentle promise of Springtide’s warmth and clear skies in Suthauk’s golden eye, but without the scorching brunt of Doublesun beating upon one’s brow like the insistent clanging of a blacksmith’s hammer. Once Belion rose, later in the season, the white sun would scorch the world into tans and browns. Woe betide the unprepared farmer. His crop would shrivel and die.
As the hindmost jatha hitched to my cart lowed dolefully, I stretched out to tap it with my master-prod. The beast lurched forward, making the rear axle groan as a tree grinds against its neighbour on a stormy night
–this despite the application of half a pot of grease and last eventide’s filthy labour. I champed my jaw. A breakdown out here could cost me dear. When I reached home–my friend Janos the Armourer’s forge was none too busy, this season–I must have the axle seen to.
Warily,
I negotiated the soaring fromite massifs that flanked the crest of Hadla’s Pass, named after a famous ulule said to have perished here one tempestuous Alldark week.
Squeak.
No old-timer deep in his cups could have whined more insistently than that axle. The echoes played tricks with my hearing. But this morn hinted at nought of darkness and death. The early sunshine struck golden notes upon the trail’s rocks and bushes as though the very skies had reached down to play melodies to delight the eye. A white-crested yaluk warbled genially midst the rocks nearby. ‘All’s well with the world,’ I imagined him singing. A worm-laden belly makes any bird sing the sweeter!
So the world appeared to me.
At length the rocky cleft drew open, allowing my eyes to roam afar from my eagle’s perch upon the very rim of the Yuthiyan Mountains. Far, far below my feet, tiny patchwork farmlands nestled into the mountainous folds as if a litter of puppies jostled for the teat. Smoke from a clutch of cooking fires trailed lazily into the vaulting heavens. Red kites swirled as specks upon unseen thermals. And the road yonder described a brown ribbon dallying between the wheaten fields before vanishing without a trace amongst the dark green crowns of an immense ulinbarb and lyrithbark forest lovingly miscalled Hadla’s Skirts by the locals. A barrier so snarled and intertwined as to be well-nigh impenetrable. Just one road had been hacked through it by the painstaking labour of Roymere’s luckless convicts, braving the heat and cobras by day, and the grey timber wolves and marauding jerlak by night. How many anna; how many lives had it cost? Even bandits refused to operate within its bounds, preferring life without to death within.
Vast Roymere. Not a gentle mistress. This was frontier country, wild and beautiful
, a land of trackless forests and jagged, deeply-scored ravines, above which soared peaks studded with mauve fromite deposits–as Janos oft opined, the kind of land a man could fall in love with. Or mark his favourite proverb, ‘A land to shape a man, rather than man to shape the land.’
As the cart rumbled on, I recalled a recent conversation. “I find it passing strange, Arlak,” Janos
had noted, “that the gently bovine jatha has a close cousin, the belligerent jerlak, that so actively and with distinct intelligence hates all things human.”
I paused brushing down
my jatha, hitched to the staypole between us, and snorted so forcefully it hurt my nostrils. “Huh!”
“After all,”
he pressed, with sly intent, “jerlak have been known to band together to destroy an entire village. The reason jatha are not harnessed side-by-side, young master, is that they will fight and turn into jerlak. Did you tie the traces aright?”
I dropped the currycomb as though burned, while stealing a quick glance at the staypole. Just to confirm
… Janos doubled up cackling like a lyom. I burned.
Ah, that brand of humour I loved so well. A wiry ferret of a man, Janos. He had dark hair he wore unfashionably l
ong, but neatly tied back, and flint-grey eyes that sparked like a cheerful bonfire when he waxed passionate on a subject. Learned and erudite as any ulule, what he did not know of the world bore no mention. And his stories! He could talk the very water out of a well. Quite why he chose backwoods Roymere for his dwelling I had never puzzled out, no matter how persistently the questions simmered in my mind and how delicately I tried to approach the subject.
Thus I measured the sturdy backs of my three dun jatha in their linear traces, and considered the sweep of their double horns, as wide as a man spreading his arms, and felt my guts squirm as though I had swallowed a live shadworm. My knuckles clenched white upon the carved bone trace-handles. Curse him! Right now, Janos was probably chortling in that scraggly wisp of facial hair he
called a goatee. If there is some other way to arrange beasts of burden, I know it not. And he was right. Harness jatha in tandem and they will fight to the death, for reasons no one has ever explained to my satisfaction. Yoke the same pair nose to tail, or turn them out to pasture together, and they become as docile and stupid as hunks of rockwood.
How came this to be,
I reflected idly? A question to stump the wisest ulule. A question to provoke a yammarik to righteous wrath.
In the back of my cart I had stacked some of Janos’ curved Lykki short swords and enamelled broadshields, bound for the regional market at Elaki Fountain, where I hoped with luck for profitable trade. Perhaps I should flog this load on the cheap. Teach Janos to play his mind-games! I slapped my knee and
chortled heartily, before it popped into my mind what repayment he might exact at our next lesson. This sopped up my mirth quicker than a fresh-baked roundel sweetbread tossed into the gravy-bowl.
Janos was teaching me the blade
–an unusual occupation for a farmer’s son, I’ll warrant, but it was my choice and I who first sought him out. I have no love of farming. I planned to enlist. For that, one needs skills. It was three anna before I understood the true quality of Janos’ swordsmanship. I hurled the accusation in his face one Rushday after dinner, ‘You’re holding back! You’re deliberately letting me win!’ ‘Keeps the fires burning, my son,’ came his dry riposte. I slammed the door and stormed home as if I were a mountain squall rushing off to dash its fury against a nearby peak.
Ay, from that day on, Janos changed his teaching methods. He thrashed me daily until
a strange plague of bruises multiplied upon my person. Now, I recall to my shame, that the pain and fear of his instruction motivated me more excellently than ever before. I became an able student–after I finished cursing him. Many a morning at lyom’s-crow I could barely rise from my bed for the aching tenderness of my body. I hobbled about like an old-timer and tended my bruises with a paste of rimmerwort and lurdik-flower.
But Janos had been there for me when it counted most.
It was on this very road, I mark–not an arrow’s flight beyond Ry-Breen Crossing where the third and deepest ford sluices ravenously across the cold underpin and a ferry must perforce run during the Rains–that my foster-parents were murdered, these nine anna past, in the anna of my majority. Roymere law holds majority to be one’s fourteenth birthingday, whereas it is sixteen in most other Fiefdoms. They were returning on their regular trading route when their cart broke down. So they chose to camp out that night rather than hike the league or so to the nearest village, as would any sensible trader. Although Roymere is by and large a peaceful demesne, their cargo was valuable.
This I learned, or later pieced together, from those who chanced upon the bodies.
What is certain is that a Faloxxian raiding party–part of a tribe in later anna wiped out to the last child by a Roymerian militia force–fell upon them during the makh of darkness as slaghounds to the slaughter. What hope, a Matabound pair against fifty wild barbarians? For though plunder aplenty lay hid in the carts, those who know the Faloxx ken their fondness for raw flesh, stripped slowly and–the word burns my tongue as acid–skilfully, from the living victim and shared out about a bonfire to feasting, merriment, and amorous cavorting in the shadows.
My spittle plopped in
a clod of mud beside the rust-red track. Why should the fates overtake my beloved family, but spare me? When would I travel this road again without pain’s dagger pinned through my heart? The last time I had seen them alive, was the day they left for that ill-fated trip. They ordered me to stay and look after the farm. I spurned them, sulking, while they said a loving farewell. Had I but known it would be the last …
My eyes strained for
a sight of the broad fields of lime-green hewehat grain that lined the Ry-Breen River, often visible from this height on a clear day. Today my gaze seemed blurred and unreliable.
“Trader! I say, trader!”
“What in Mata’s name …”
“Are you deaf, boy? Bound to block the pass till
eventide?”
I felt my cheeks colour. I knew this man from the marketplace, by sight, if not by name. I muttered, “Peace, you old sot!”
“What say you?” His jowls bulged into ripe turnips. “You’re Arlak, I mark? Sorlak’s whelp?”
Had I not been disturbed in my dark thoughts, my
ire might not have peaked so. It stopped my throat like a well-corked skein of Gurbian red.
The other sniffed, “Out of my way, then, you uncouth tropik-hopik!”
My arms guided the cart upon the verge. The carter pulled alongside and looked askance at me. He sighed, and added in troubled tones, “Young Arlak, I believe in every man’s fair chance. Therefore, by my grephe I declare: on this journey you will reap nought but sorrow. Turn back, and set out another day.” He must have seen my expression darken, for he added quickly, “Peace to you.”
“Peace to you,” I muttered to his back, more disturbed than annoyed. He
hurried on as though Ulim’s howling Hunt were snapping at his heels.
Truly told, this grephe is no fable. The power of the sixth sense is common to all persons, to a greater or lesser degree. Its stirring might be felt in the recognition of eyes meeting across a busy marketplace, or in the inklin
g that one is being watched, an affinity for certain arts, a gift of healing, or even in the ability to discern truth from falsehood. Some individuals hone the grephe to an astonishing skill. A strong sense of grephe is basic to the respected trades of fortune telling, hunting, athocaries, quatyls, spying, and the like.
Words of grephe are neither lightly spoken, nor lightly received.
So I chewed and stewed upon his grephe all that afternoon, tromping my way from a cheerful mood into the slough-pit of despair. Would that I could have dismissed it out of hand! “Surly brat,” I berated myself. “You wronged a man an honest grephe-offering.” I tossed the jatha their head and thundered down to the plain, wrapped in a storm-cloud of my own making, embittered and consumed by thoughts of my empty present and misfortunate past.
But once down
into the foothills that would lead me shortly into Hadla’s Skirts, my mind drifted on to other matters.
Janos had giv
en me a new jerkin that very morn. I fingered the supple leather, worked with subtle patterns of swords crossed in battle, eagles soaring, a charging tygar, and other symbols of power, and owned it an excellent gift. Far too fine for a farmer’s son. It put me in mind of Rubiny o’Telmak. Ah, Rubiny! A maiden as beauteous as she was heartless, as coveted as she was aloof, as sweet of body as she was cruel of disposition! Janos had vowed she would look kindly upon me should I wear the garment. My loud chuckle startled the jatha. I stilled them with a firm slap of the traces. Truly told, it is customary for young men of my age and station to invite a girl to the harvest dances on the Doublesun cahooday, a regional festival of considerable note, when the twin suns bear down with their utmost brilliance and the stifling makh of darkness is mercilessly brief. Rubiny had turned me down flat four anna running. She did not sashay out with another, though there were suitors aplenty. She simply did not want me. So she claimed–why else spurn my invitations? And a man has his pride!
Let me be swift to advise: Rubiny
was the very incarnation of quathly desire. Lissom of leg, full of bosom, bright of eye, flame-red of hair, she was nought but a deer gliding amidst common hogs. She had owned me heart, hand, and hearth, since I first beheld her one Youngsun morn bearing a basket of brown-speckled eggs fresh from the lyomhouse at Telmak Lodge.
But where before I might have mooned over her beauty for a makh or more, this day my heart was consumed with a helpless, blind fury that knew no stanching, a bleeding anger as raw as fresh-crushed bitterwort. I could not avoid meeting Rubiny at the inn. Her lip would curl. She would revel in my stuttering importunities, my brash and graceless tongue, my country drawl,
and my dusty half-boots. She would ready whip-words of rejection to lash from her lips. With her smile, she would flay me bone-deep.
My doubled
-up fists struck puffs of dust from my thighs. I should rather die. Better still, I should shun her company, drink myself into oblivion, and then … enough!
Half a makh before sunset, right on schedule, I heaved the cart to a standstill in the forecourt of Telmak Lodge and alighted cockerel-stiff to the dark, freshly-swept flagstones. My lead jatha lowed like a lovesick Hakooi minstrel sawing at
a five-stringed lummericoot, hoof-weary and hungry besides. A drudge regarded me toothlessly from his indolent throne upon a bale of thorrick beside the wide-flung stable doors–soaking up the day’s last warmth, I suspected, until his master returned with kicks and curses to chivvy him along.