Chapter 1: The End

                                                  I.

Gardyn was the best basket weaver in the village- no trivial accomplishment considering the small but feisty Endrian village was itself called Baskets. She arrived eight years ago, by a difficult and circuitous route. Raised as an orphan, and in turn sheltering other orphans, she learned her skills under expert tutelage in the great city Kahijo. A poor woman, she was suffering simultaneously from several misfortunes. The latest at that time being a mixed blessing: Her drunkard, vicious husband had at last abandoned her, taking all their worldly possessions that he could cram into the baskets her own toiling hands had made.

 He did leave one oblong basket, however, which cradled their son and only child, little Onyss. Discarded, dishonored and destitute, Gardyn was forced to leave her home and her friends in search of a livelihood. Shunned and overwhelmed by the austere and ostracizing apathy of the larger towns, she eventually, after many privations, arrived in a place where her great talents were not only an economic boon but a sacred art form. Here in Baskets, by the dexterity of her spirits and her fingers, she made a comfortable living; well-respected by the community.

 And this respectability was enhanced by the whirlwind windfall of a hasty and passionate matrimony with the son of a prominent citizen. Tursus was a handsome and vigorous gallant who handled her gently and kindly in all the ways that had been denied to her in her previous nuptials. Treated with the reverence of a town treasure, Gardyn was left to weave her baskets on her porch, across from the bucolic civic center, where her husband and his father worked and strived daily for compromises conducive to the public well-being and private happiness, hers not the least.

Sitting up well-passed dusk, Gardyn sat with a lantern on her small porch with the various articles of her craft spread at her feet, in her lap, and on a small table. Several animals had been reported missing earlier that day, including several dogs and cats, a few goats and pigs, and a cow. Tursus hastily packed, in one of her baskets, a small meal to take to the emergency town meeting that had been called to discuss the important and urgent business of getting on with life after the relatively harmless occurrences. “You men raise a fuss over the smallest things,” chided Gardyn from her stool. “Imagine, calling a meeting over a couple goats.”

Tursus dismissed her with a grimace, “If a fenwolf howls, the council must talk about it.”

Gardyn was preparing her parting remarks when she was overcome with the befuddlement and surprise of a fish, plucked from the stream by the absconding talons of a raptor, as she watched her husband’s head struck open from behind in a misty spray of blood and chalky skull fragments.

When his body sank down, how much more did the powers of her mind flop about like that writhing fish, slipping the claws of its abductor, plunging to the ground, to suffocate upon that dusty element it has no instruments to comprehend; such was her state to discover that her husband’s destroyer was none other than her beloved son Onyss.

Gardyn falls to her knees and meets the blood spreading across the floor. Hardly aware of what she was doing, she begins scooping and patting the contents into her husband’s open skull, as if she could put the pieces back together. As if she could weave a basket for the soul to revitalize the eyes that rolled in his sockets. “It is alright. It is alright. I think- I think it is going to be alright.” She mumbles franticly. She could put him back together and it would exonerate her son. That was the thing to do, put him back together and they would still be a family. “What have you done?” she whimpers, glancing up at Onyss. “Fetch the doctor! I think it will be alright… oh, what have you done?”

“What have I done?” said the strange, strained voice of her son. He grabs his mother and raises her to her feet. She struggles weakly. From the increased height, she could survey the damage and see more and more plainly that it was irreparable. “What have I done?” repeats Onyss.

Gardyn’s big watery eyes look at him hopefully. She takes his refrain as a dawning remorse. If he was sorry, if he was really sorry, he could go to Southern Court and accept the discipline of the Judicator. She stretches to touch his face, forgetting her hands are dripping with blood.

He seizes her wrists and for the first time looks into her face, “What have I done? I have set us free! Oh, mother, do you not see? Now we are free. You do not need any man but I.” he shook her sharply, trying to jolt the horror from her face.  “Am I… a murderer? Is this patricide…?” he stumbled over his words. He was trying to recall an argument that had at one time made perfect sense, but now he quarreled with the details. “No, no, it was self-defense! We are prisoners of the false law that he and his kind represent. Destroy the false law, you see, and how shall I be a criminal? The true criminal,” he pointed at Tursus, “created the false law to forgive and excuse him. But there are higher laws that can never be cheated. What need of guilt, remorse, punishment or forgiveness when everything proceeds according to natural law? The elders and their families must be eliminated- but I have saved you. I have set us free. Come away with me now.” spoken more as an order than a request.

Gardyn resists. She tugs at his grip but looses her traction in the viscous gore coating the porch floor. “How could you? How could you?! What have you done?”

He does not let her fall but drags her from the porch. “What have I done?” he growls.

Gardyn dug her heels into the soft grass, continually staring back at her husband’s body. But when Onyss stops, she at last spreads the width of her gaze and surveys the village. Shouts emanate from every direction. A black smoke rises behind the hall. Bright fires glean from the roof tops and through the open doors. Silhouettes are running haphazard through the streets. The village elders were being dragged by husky dark men out of the hall, by their scalps and by their feet; by their belts and by their teeth.

“Where are you taking this woman?” demanded an approaching stranger. He was lean with broad, naked shoulders and a wolf-skull crest.

“I am taking her with me.” said Onyss. His tone was defiant but clearly intimidated by the older, bigger man.

“We are collecting the women over there.” he pointed to the school yard.

When Gardyn looked, she saw the girls and the women of Baskets being corralled in that direction. She recognized Salka and Britta, her friends; and Tryna and Adlin, little girls in their nightgowns. Men stripped to the skin, painted or tattooed, wearing bizarre bestial masks were striking at them with switches. Others were carrying women young and old over their shoulders or dragging them by their prized tresses and curls amid wailing protest.

“No, no.” said Onyss. “I have set her free. She is to be one of us.”

The wolfheaded man slapped Onyss athwart the cheek. The blow turned his head and he released his hold on Gardyn’s wrists. There she might have attempted an escape but did not have the presence of mind to do anymore than sob in the grass. “We do what we want.” said the stranger, “But take only what we need. What purpose will she serve?” the stranger raised his hand to strike again but was forestalled by a slender rod. It was not the physical resistance that stayed his powerful arm- but a spiritual authority.

“That is enough, Mr. Gladly.” The slim cane belonged to an old man who seemed to take great interest in vignettes such as this. “We are the men of the future. We are the people of the future. You must always think about the future, Mr. Gladly.” said the frail newcomer. “As the squirrels make stores for the winter, as the birds return in spring, we must be ever conscious of the climate.” He touched the crown of Gardyn’s sinking head. “I have given the boy my permission to save his mother, though I disapprove of his protracted sentimentality. We will need artisans. We will need people who, when this lamentable conflict is at last overcome, can show us the way of peace.”

“What conflict?!” screamed Gardyn, her voice cracking and breaking across all three of their weird faces.

With a wave of his skeletal hand, the old ghost commanded the two men across the lawn. They drag Gardyn between them.

She could only depend on the weight of her body to resist them, and what was that to the vigorous youths? The village elders, all men, were lined-up on their knees. Their heads were bowed, fearing even to glance to the side, lest they be beaten yet again. Flames were leaping from the great doors of the hall behind them, brightening the night with leaping oranges and grumbling reds. A dense smoke blackened the watchful moon, casting a tempestuous duel of light and shadow over the gathering.

The elders were watched by more wolfhead guards, menacing them with their clubs and whips. They dropped Gardyn in the dirt at their feet. The spindly ghoul marched back and forth like a reviewing general, tapping the cane in his hand. “For those of you who do not know, my name is Thresh Pin. This village of yours will be destroyed. For those of you who do not know, we are not conquerors. We are not occupiers.” He lifted the face of Gardyn’s father-in-law with the tip of his wand, “We are but hurriers of the Natural Law. Your industry and your commerce are meaningless. You fill up your days building petty trifles, and bickering over petty trifles.” His cane hissed towards the burning Hall. “Do you know, the Tajlyns would often hide their most valuable possessions within works of exquisite art, because they understood, even if the location of their secrets were discovered, how few would willingly destroy their ornaments of precious metal and rare gems. But to reach that which is truly valuable… you must smash through the artifice! You must discard all that dazzles!” With a sweep of his hand, the killing commenced afresh. The elders were bashed and beaten, scarcely struggling. Gardyn was terrified by the commotion and brutality. Never had she witnessed anything so senseless and wanton. She writhed on the ground, though none touched her. Thresh knelt down with deliberate and careful gestures to pat her hair. She shrieked shrilly but a firm panic crushed her into a shuttering, precarious calm.

“Sssshhhh.” whispered Thresh, “Dear woman, this untidiness is but prelude to bliss. Think thusly: Was the pain not great when your devoted son was born? Cried you not so? Was there not blood?” Her countenance was distended into an unnatural grin as she stared at the grizzly faces. “Your son has been to the End of this world. And come back. He has descended into the abyss. And come back. He has tasted the memories of ages past. And come back. And he has seen the true, hideous, corrupting and deceiving character of so-called justice- of false law. Weep not, dear woman. As the steam rises from exposed entrails, so we escape these fleeting moments of anxiety and fear.” Thresh paused as if considering saying more but was thoroughly distracted and enraptured by the tumbling agony of the dying elders.

But not even the quasi-religious rhetoric of the ghoulman could account for what happened next. A great thunder was heard, not overhead, but along the horizon. A moment passed in silence, then the very ground, and everything that stood upon it, began to tremble and shift. The burning buildings, already weakened, collapsed into themselves, tossing up scarves of flame and belching smoke. The wolfheaded men threatened to scatter but were held in slightly greater terror by the calm disapproval of Thresh. At last, unable to keep their balance, they sprawled in the grass beside the dead elders. By virtue of his rod, Thresh remained standing as the ground quaked beneath him. His mind rushes to interpret what was happening. “Master!” cries Gladly, “What does it mean? What is this?”

In a moment, the event was passed and all was quiet save the pops and groans of many fires. Thresh Pin smiles, “There is only one explanation: The End.”

                                                 II.

Not drowsy or disoriented, but tired. One hand instinctively seizes a slender dagger, ever close by. Her body aches from lying tense and rigid. The smell of rot and mice and rotten mice remind Dex she is lying on the attic floor. She cannot see well in the dark but she hears slumber all around. Her straw pillow had shifted to a more restive head nearby. If only dreams could be traded so easily.

Her senses aroused by a recent nightmare, Dex feels the closeness of her confines and meditates an escape. Though accustomed to similar sleeping arrangements, she longs for fresh air and a little more space. She tries to remember the layout of the small garret. The ladder down was on her left; but how many bodies lay in her path? Wasn’t there a second ladder leading to the roof? Yes, she was sure of it.

Dex pushes back her discontented hair. Using the pin-like dagger, she bundles the superabundance of wavy locks to the top of her head. By doing so, she clears the way to remove from each of her ears a small wad of beeswax.

This was her usual manner of sleeping. It was an oft wrongly appreciated fact that she was forced at times to spend the night apart from the group, because the combined breathing, coughing, murmuring, snorting and snoring was a gross distraction to her rest. The beeswax in her ears was an uncomfortable and undependable remedy, but she seldom had any other recourse.

Now she could tell by their sounds that only two sleepers blocked her path to the ladder leading down. Preferring solid ground to the questionable stability of the roof, she resolved to make a play for the descent. And yet, something stopped her.

At last unimpeded, her ears were gulping up all the ambient noises. Among these sounds is a faint… drumming. ‘Drumming’ being the first word the sound suggested to Dex, although she was not satisfied with the classification. Perhaps some early-risen servant was poking out of a window or balcony to vengefully beat the trodden, dusty rug of his master- what else could it be? Since childhood, as far back as she could remember (which incidentally wasn’t very far), she had been a collector of sounds. This, however, she could not properly identify. She turned towards the roof.

Dex was a slender and short girl, but in the dark of the attic, she stoops low to avoid collision with any mischievous rafters. Using her ears as guide, she tiptoes across the floor, cringing at each creak her movements coerce from the decaying boards and loosening nails. At last, she reaches the upwards ladder. Moonlight, like fresh snow, glows on each rung. She climbs up and lifts the covering. The moon shines in a favorable direction and its lonely face, uncommonly close, draws Dex towards it. The sound is clearer now, but only so much as to be sure it is not drumming.

As she raises herself up, a blazing black shadow blasts her. A choleric croaking claws at her ear canals. Barely able to restrain her fluttering heart, she realizes it was only a governor crow that had been perched atop the hatch. “What are you doing up here?” she hisses, tempted to throw something at him; until her own self-consciousness supplied the retreating crow with the retort: ‘What are you doing up here?’

And the strange sound grew louder.

Dex lifts herself all the way out of the opening. Her coarse nightshirt was more or less adequate in the misty summer night, but stepping onto the roof, she regretted not putting on her boots, as the scratchy thatching pricked her bare feet.

The moon was close, but isolated in the sky. By its light, she could survey the terrain for miles. The timber-stone village bellow her is dormant. The burgeoning hills are blanketed in gently waving cereal grains. The old windmill groans nostalgically in the tender breeze. The night is calm, passive, serene. Even the old farm cottage beneath her feet was sturdy and still. There was no sign of activity or danger. The big crow, coming at her so close after a nightmare, had given her a start, but in the span of a few calming breaths, is forgotten. That is, until Dex realizes the sound that had drawn her upwards had drawn nearer.

It’s like a rhythmic rushing of wind through consecutive trees, approaching from behind. There was a hideous scream over her shoulder and she cringed. A bird. Not a crow this time. Then another, sizzling past the opposite side. She turns, instinctively crouching. A versicolored cloud engulfs the evening sky. Countless birds beating the air together storm overhead, too many types to recognize. Layers of day and night birds on the wing side by side. They shriek out, shrill and anxious. Feather and talon graze Dex’s hair, pressing her down by degrees. Thousands. A violent blowing of tormented air swirls round her. Their distinctive cries clash and sear, all comingled in a hellish, agonizing din.

As quickly as they appeared, they seem to vanish into the night air. As the last screech recedes in the distance, Dex peels her fingers from her face. Red welts rose on her arms and legs from the coarse thatch, but her body ignored the discomfort as she crouched firmly against the roof. What did this mean? She asked herself, whipping her head around. The conglomeration of birds clogging-up the air was terrifying enough, but she could not doubt that they were compelled by a terror of their own. What was driving them?

As lost feathers of varying hues and forms lazily drift down and the fury of the birds fades, Dex becomes uncomfortably aware of an ever-stranger noise. This noise had been there all along, she concluded, masked beneath the swirling and drumming of the birds. It was steadier and deeper, deeper than anything she had heard before. It is not even a sound, she thought, as her heart swells painfully. It is not a sound. It is something she can feel inside, but it is not a sound. That clutching noise, which was not a noise, penetrates Dex’s body and she shudders. A word occurs to her. Though lacking in descriptiveness, it was startling in its aptness: something bad is coming.

Her limbs shiver and balk, but she forces them into action. She flings herself at the hatch and barely touches a rung before hitting the floor. She had no idea what to do, except that she had to wake-up Silas. Though a young man, Silas Salokin is patriarch of the company. She stumbles over Inrik and nearly steps on Shillam before laying hold of him. He is instantly awake when she touches his arm, “what?” he murmured.

“Something bad is coming.” she is very close. Her pale lips quiver and her wide brown eyes peer-out at him amidst a mass of tangled black hair.

Silas rubbed his eyes, “Dex?”

“You hear me?”

“Was it your nightmare again?”

Dex was startled by his patronizing indulgence. Perceiving this, Silas sat up in earnest, “I’m sorry I said that. I know you’re cautious, not an alarmist.” He rubbed sleep from his eyes, “something real must have upset you.”

“Something bad.” she corrected.

Silas got up. Besides the disruptions she had caused in reaching him, everything seemed in order. “What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

As an experienced traveler, Silas is well aware that calm and quiet rarely equate safety. “Did you hear something?”

“Yes. I-I mean, I don’t know. …Something.”

Silas’s voice sank skeptically, “Something?”

She nods emphatically.

 “Alright, what do you want me to do?”

 “Something!”

Other sleepers are stirring: “And now what?” grumbles Shillam.

“What’s going on?” groans Inkrik.

“Dex had another nightmare…”

A dozen or more irritated occupants poured humiliation onto her. “It wasn’t a dream. I saw… birds.”

“Birds? In here?”

“What? No! On the roof…  a lot of birds.”

“…Why were you on the roof?

Dex stretched out her arms, “A lot of birds. Something frightened them. It wasn’t a dream!”

Then even to their mediocre ears comes a report of distant dogs and the ringing of the bell tower. An eerie calm settles, heavy as incubi, on the waking crowd. For Dex, the unnoise was rising, piercing; it blots out all other sound. She covers her ears, squeezing her head till it throbs. Screaming, shattering ice sickles and relentless machines of grinding wheels burst and drown inside her head. The entire cottage begins to shake. Decades of dust shower from the rafters. Shelves of old cookware quiver and dance. The attic floor wriggles under their feet like a raft at sea. Dex shrinks down. Silas reaches for her as she falls and draws her into his arms. The world shudders.

                                                III.

         Dex was standing morose among shattered crockery in the dusty rays of morning sun, already dressed for the road in her faded jerkin and tattered skirt that exposed her leather leggings and high, heavy boots.

“It was merely a groundquake.” says Silas politely as he approaches.

Dex laughed sorrowfully- which is an odd sort of sound to anyone, “Little damage was done to us or the cottage… but, the word ‘merely’ seems meager accompaniment to ‘groundquake’.”

Silas nodded, “As an actor, I am above petty jealousy or grudges; I didn’t even mind when the last bed was given to the executioner’s understudy. I maintain that the good people of our company are the true captains of public exhibition.”

This time it was Dex who looked at him with patronizing indulgence. His pallid blue eyes and perpetually shaven chin gave him an appearance just arrear of his actual age. He had been leading this band of vagabonds for a long time, though he could not be much older than herself. They might even be the same age. Yet, contrasting with Dex’s relentless taciturnity, Silas had a humorous equanimity that overthrew everyone he met.

“Hear me out,” he said, “It may represent a low point in the already dubious and disrespectful career of stage performing, that traveling entertainers such as ourselves should be reduced to hiring lodging at some ancient farm cottage, even though its molding plaster is already bursting with sleepers.”

“It would have been the ditch if I hadn’t stopped you from bludgeoning the host with our Royal License to Perform.”

“And you were right to do so,” said Silas, “I mean, to protect the document rather than the old cheesemaker’s head. An actor’s greatest, though by no means complete, protection is in the written permission of our dear sovereign.”

“I’m beginning to wonder if it’s really worth the trouble. Any sort of lodging can look appealing on the fringe of a tiresome journey.”

 “Yes, for all that, it is still my contention that a true actor should refrain from speaking until he has polished the forthcoming line.”

Dex began to retreat into her hair, “…What line?”

“I know the event affected you more than the others. True, they are a salty bunch: clever, experienced, resourceful- and this is especially true of myself; but I understand that your peculiar, that is, acute hearing amplified the incident.”

They were silent for a few breaths then Dex spoke lowly, “for the others, they scarcely had time to feel fear before the rumbling was over. Maybe it’s better to be surprised, than to sense something coming which can’t be averted, placated or …escaped.

“And when you put it like that, it does seem absurd to say, ‘merely a groundquake’.”

Together they watch through the window as a distant rider goes dustily down a narrow path; not hurrying but not looking back. Horse and man alike are faded and ragged, aging, ungroomed. Dex sighed, “I don’t blame him for deserting this village.”

Silas nodded readily, “I have been everywhere there is to be, and I can tell you that in the broad expanse of the Jo’Xen Empire there are many wondrous and charming localities, many stately towns. The surrounding countryside boasts more than a hundred prosperous villages- most with baileys, markets, squares.” He put his arm around her shoulders and waved his hand as if unfolding a tapestry, “This, however, is none of that. Only a series of huts and houses with ill-repaired thatched roofs; and front doors so low that you have to stoop if you wish to enter. At least, I would have to stoop- you would probably walk straight in. And there, on the periphery of it all, the scattered remains of collapsed arches littering the ground like disarticulated bones on either side of dirt roads that go nowhere.”

Dex turned from the window, “Empires are composed primarily of dirt roads. It reminds me of how I got here, to the Empire, I mean.”

“Does it?” said Silas, taken aback by her sudden frankness. “You’ve never told me.”

She shrugged, as if compelled to apologize for boring him, “It was nine, maybe ten years ago. I was a small girl then, orphaned and dislocated. I came with a thousand others: refugees, criminals, peddlers, pilgrims and pickpockets.”

“No wonder we get along so well.”

“The army sent us here from the front. There were dozens of orphans, like me, in the care of two or three nurses; themselves in the care of a quartermaster unseen. The head nurse used to say, ‘A thousand variations of the same story: too old, too young, too poor, too troublesome, too selfish, too proud, too holy, too unwholesome- no use to anyone. We are marching from the frayed reaches of the Empire back to the big cities, to be dispersed among the crowds, destined for demeaning labor.”

“Well, that was certain to cheer you up, wasn’t it?”

“The old widow looked down right at me and she said, ‘Is it better than the alternative? Only time will tell.’.”

Silas thrust his thumbs under his belt; he felt he had a keener attunement to melancholy when his thumbs were occupied, “I have been your friend for three years and I know you are not fragile or callow. Although the disturbance last night was slight and brief, one cannot take it lightly when the foundation of all things trembles.”

Next Chapter: index