[story] ashes
Mar. 30th, 2007 11:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ib_archiveauthor: lit (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
phoenikoi)
email: benten@gmail.com
The letter that arrived was written in a delicate but firm hand and held only one line. It was not signed.
"Mother?" Iserno asked as the letter dropped into Leander's lap. "Is it bad news?"
"Your father," Leander said distantly. "He was helping in the fight against the raiders."
Iserno lost all colour in her face, her eyes like huge bruises. "Is he all right?"
"He's dead." As she spoke, a huge sob rose and choked in her throat, preventing any more attempts at speech. Leander leaned her forehead against a fist, feeling a chill take hold of her body. At length, she realised she was repeating her husband's name, Hugo, Hugo as if it were a spell to draw him back to her side, whole and healthy.
There were hands in her hair, like flames against the ice that had replaced the blood and muscle under her skin. Iserno clung to Leander's knees, the warmth of her tears spreading through her mother's skirts.
When reason returned, Leander ordered the servants to make ready for a trip.
"What are you doing, mother?" Iserno asked, still pale.
"There are some things I must do."
"But - you've never left this house! Mother, you can't be thinking, at your age-"
"My girl, do you imagine that I've lived here all my life?" Leander pulled her open-mouthed daughter into a brief embrace, closing her eyes as Iserno remained stiff against her. "I'm sorry."
"You can't go out to the borderlands without an escort at least," Iserno said, her voice carefully bleached of emotion.
"I know how to take care of myself," Leander said. "I did live there for the better part of my life, before your father decided we should move here with you."
Iserno pulled back, looking down at her mother's face, a frown wrinkling her forehead as if uncertain of this new, hard side. Leander smoothed out the creased skin with her fingertips, wondering when her daughter had become so tall. Iserno allowed it, blinking a little, her mouth softening to a little girl's tremble. There were no further protests.
On the road, Leander's bones felt brittle, and the cold ache in her chest refused to subside. She had changed into a shabby dress and thrown a cloak over it, marvelling that she could still fit into her old clothes. Iserno had pressed a charm packet on her, tying it around her mother's neck in a healer's knot to strengthen the spells. Leander was grateful to it for taking away the small discomforts of riding, protecting her from her own fragility.
Goblin speech came back to her slowly, though she now spoke the border dialect in a halting city accent. The towns she passed through asking for information of her husband were still suspicious of an outsider, but willing enough to talk to one who knew their language. Mention of her own hometown thawed their indifference, replacing wary politeness with concern for one of their own returned. They were happy to share news and gossip, and started her on a trail that ended in a mixed town close to the edge of the borderlands, almost to the foot of the mountains denoting the start of exile country.
She spoke with the old goblin women seated outside their houses as they bent over their work, feeling through baskets of dirt for tiny pebbles like beads of clear glass. Leander recognised the rocks as a common bonding agent for most spells. It was found in the black earth scattered around a mountain inhabited by dragons, and the town children were likely sent to bring baskets down every day so the old women's skilled fingers could pick them out from worthless stones and sell them to witches.
"I'm looking for a man," Leander said, "a warrior carrying a sword with a boar's head on its hilt. His name is Hugo Styborne, and he was last known to be fighting off the raiders across the border."
The goblin woman's eyes were small and creased, squinting up at her visitor. "Why do you look for this man?"
"He is," she hesitated, "my husband."
"Does he give you trouble?"
"I was sent word of his death."
The goblin woman sorted through her stones for a few long moments, then set the basket aside. "Come inside and talk with me."
The house was minimally furnished with a low table and mats placed over the dirt floor. The goblin woman seated her guest and took the opposite side of the table. They looked at one another in silence at length, before the goblin woman said, "You talk like one of us, but you sound like a citybred girl."
Leander smiled to be called a girl, but merely said, "Hugo thought it was better for me there, after we had our daughter."
The goblin woman settled in her seat, nodding as her guest's voice took on a storyteller's cadence. Leander's pain was momentarily blunted by memory as she searched for words to share her story.
It had all begun with a fire in her town. The houses were light wooden structures as fragile as hollow eggshells, easily destroyed and rebuilt. It was the stone cellars underneath those buildings that offered safety during a raid and thus were built to last. The fire had been set by a gang of young thugs, new to their occupation of theft and wanton destruction. They cowered with the rest of the townsfolk at the consequences of their careless handiwork. The heat and flames barred the people from the safety of their cellars, contributing to the panic of parents calling for their children and the younger ones crying or screaming in the smoke.
No one noticed the dusty traveller charging through the confusion and tackling the leader of the gang, cracking his skull against the stony ground. His followers fled, their nerve broken.
The fire died out once there was nothing left to burn, and grim-faced survivors picked through the ruins to salvage what they could and tend to their wounded. The newcomer stood among them, seeming to shine in his new city clothes, travel-strained though they were. He looked uncertain, standing aside as the older humans and goblins worked to restore order and pacify children.
He accosted Leander as she passed him, asking, "What happened here?"
She lifted her eyebrows at him, and the stranger went an abrupt shade of red.
"A raid," she answered and turned away.
He trailed after her, the sword strapped to his back clanking occasionally, ducking his head when she stopped to glare. Finally, she ordered him to be useful and join in the salvage efforts. He obeyed with a meekness that surprised her, but it made her think better of him. The easy smile that came to his face as they worked drew a curl of shyness in her stomach.
Later, he told her that he was a hero, and that his name was Hugo Styborne. He seemed to be waiting for her to recognise the name and was dispirited when she confessed ignorance and asked what a hero was. His explanations seemed inordinately full of monsters and the glorious deaths of various ancestors.
"Not much call for that sort here," she remarked, but drew maps in the dirt to show him the easiest way into the goblin heartlands, where the raiders came from. He listened intently, trying his best to put on a serious face, to seem older and wiser than he actually was. Leander rather hoped he wouldn't die and follow too soon in his ancestors' footsteps.
The next day, he rode away in the direction of her pointing arm, towards the lands of the warlike goblin tribes and their ancient grudges played out in constant battles, unlike their peaceable trading cousins living in human lands. Several months later, Leander put the stranger out of her mind as either dead or best consigned to a distant, unreachable dream.
As one of the older girls, she was now allowed to take watch. She liked the grassy hills close to the town, spending hours combing through a yellow meadow for tiny flowers, though they were little more than weeds. On the other side of town, closer to the mountains, the other lookout waved whenever they crossed each other's field of vision. They signalled danger by running back to the town and shouting warnings, but all seemed well.
Leander's musings were disrupted as a stranger crashed through her meadow on a horse the colour of a thundercloud, whooping like a savage. The man was slung low on the side of his mount, an arm outstretched to snatch her up. She threw herself flat and rolled clear as he passed, then back to her feet with a stone in her hand. Her aim was true, and the rider fell off as his indignant horse reared straight up and raked the sky with its hooves.
Turning to flee and warn the town, she paused as the rider swore in an unfamiliar tongue. After a moment, she recognised the foreign city accent and took a hard look at her attacker. Hugo looked up at her with a smile that was more a grimace. He had grown out of his boyish features, and there were new scars on his arms. But his clear, laughing eyes retained their youth.
"I'm sorry if I scared you," he said.
She kicked him sharply in the side, then fell against him raging at the sheer idiocy he continued to display in her presence. He was startled, then uncomfortably pleased. Breathlessly, they broke apart and he blurted, "I kept thinking - as I was coming back - I wasn't sure if I wanted to ask you to marry me."
She kicked him again, hard, and he fended her off, laughing, before drawing her down against his side.
"Stay and find out," she told him.
They were married the next year. Hugo adored his new wife and liked nothing better than to laze around watching her work or else let her bully him into helping. But a fever of restlessness soon settled on him. He smiled less, instead striding around the house like a caged animal.
"I know what kind of man I married," Leander said, touching the tense muscles in his back. "A hero doesn't sit at home. He goes out to be an idiot, and comes back to be slightly less of an idiot."
"An idiot, am I?" He lifted her up bodily, laughing at her as she folded her arms and looked deeply unimpressed.
Before leaving, he would kiss her, slow and careful, his hands around her face as if trying to catch a memory. Sometimes he whispered apologies into her hands, bringing them up to his mouth, or leaned his chin on the top of her head.
"Will you come running out to meet me when I come back?" he asked.
"Don't be ridiculous," she said, but pressed the palm of her hand to his cheek.
Hugo met his daughter for the first time as a wide-eyed baby eight months old and inexplicably wailing. Disheveled and cross, Leander tugged him down by an ear and pressed a kiss to his mouth. "This is Iserno," she said. "Your spawn."
"Why is she crying?" he asked, looking overwhelmed.
"I've been trying to find out," she said. Lifting the baby out of her cot, she tucked her in her father's arms and adjusted his grip. "Here, take her. Maybe she'll be quiet for you."
Hugo stared at her in wide-eyed panic over the baby's head. Iserno looked startled for a moment, staring up at her father's face, then burst into tears. Leander leaned against the doorframe and laughed helplessly as Hugo yelped and begged to be rescued from the squirming bundle.
"It might be better if you went to stay with my mother. She could help you with Iserno," he said to her later as they curled up together in the bed. Hastily, he added, "The city might suit you. There are - shops and things."
She narrowed her eyes. "Are you saying I'm not capable of living on my own?"
"No! But with a child - it's different now."
"How?" she challenged.
"At least bring her to meet her grandmother," he said with her face against her neck, coaxing the set of her shoulders to ease.
She sighed, looking to the back of the house as Iserno announced the end of her nap with a howl. "Very well."
Hugo's mother insisted on them getting married a second time by a city priest with all the family crowded around to witness, although there was an awkward moment when it was revealed that Leander was an orphan. Immediately after, she embraced her daughter-in-law and said, "Now it is properly done."
Leander exhaled deeply, returning herself to the present. The goblin's home faded back into her vision, the familiar construction of its rough, wooden walls reminding her of her house before moving to the city manor. "My mother-in-law was a good woman. She died not long ago."
"You had many good years," the goblin woman said as Leander stopped speaking. She touched her human companion's hand. "Her son - your husband - sounds like a fine man."
"He was," Leander agreed softly.
The goblin woman called a few boys to help Leander in her task of recovering her husband's remains. She wanted Leander to stay with her as the boys went out to search, but Leander refused. There were rituals to be done to prevent the rising of the unquiet dead, and one as strong as Hugo would make a terrible monster. She knew, too, that witches often stole the bones of fallen warriors as ingredients for dark spells and sent crows to mark the sounds of battle. As his wife, the responsibility fell to her and no other.
They went to the killing grounds, as the desolate battleground was called, the scorched land dividing the two territories like a line scratched into the earth.
"We must be careful and stay quiet," the boys said. "If we hear battle or any strange noise, we must leave and come back some other time. If there are raiders, they won't be too interested in us, but it’s better to be safe."
Leander kept her eyes shaded against the late evening sun as the boys moved around her, a steady ache filling the hollow under her eyelids. Their quiet voices blended in a rough mutter like kittens just learning to growl. Then, one of them waved her over as his companions clustered in a loose circle around him.
"Here," he said and pointed.
She looked down, silent for a time, then said in a wavering voice, "Stupid, stubborn old man."
As if sensing the end of her quest, a wave of fatigue swept through her, and she was grateful as one of the goblin boys held steady onto her elbow.
"We're helping you," he said kindly, and all three nodded.
"Thank you," she said, and allowed herself to be led away.
They wreathed the dead with flowers before putting them to the torch and kept vigil until the flames starved and flickered out. The goblin woman gave Leander a small silver vase to store Hugo's ashes, waving away her weak protests. She placed it in a sack and went outside, where two boys were playing at swords using stout sticks.
"Die, monster scum!" one shouted, slashing at his opponent.
"Think you're such a hero," the other boy taunted.
The false swords clacked and slid against each other. "I'm going to be the greatest hero that ever lived."
He looked a little like Hugo, fair-haired and awkward as he had been as in his youth. Leander walked up to the boy and slapped him across the head.
"Find a better dream," she told him. "One you'll have no regrets in chasing."
The boys stared at her in sullen confusion, watching as she walked down the road with her head held high. They could not see the tears that flowed unchecked down her face, or how closely she held her burden to her heart.
end
phoenikoi)email: benten@gmail.com
The letter that arrived was written in a delicate but firm hand and held only one line. It was not signed.
"Mother?" Iserno asked as the letter dropped into Leander's lap. "Is it bad news?"
"Your father," Leander said distantly. "He was helping in the fight against the raiders."
Iserno lost all colour in her face, her eyes like huge bruises. "Is he all right?"
"He's dead." As she spoke, a huge sob rose and choked in her throat, preventing any more attempts at speech. Leander leaned her forehead against a fist, feeling a chill take hold of her body. At length, she realised she was repeating her husband's name, Hugo, Hugo as if it were a spell to draw him back to her side, whole and healthy.
There were hands in her hair, like flames against the ice that had replaced the blood and muscle under her skin. Iserno clung to Leander's knees, the warmth of her tears spreading through her mother's skirts.
When reason returned, Leander ordered the servants to make ready for a trip.
"What are you doing, mother?" Iserno asked, still pale.
"There are some things I must do."
"But - you've never left this house! Mother, you can't be thinking, at your age-"
"My girl, do you imagine that I've lived here all my life?" Leander pulled her open-mouthed daughter into a brief embrace, closing her eyes as Iserno remained stiff against her. "I'm sorry."
"You can't go out to the borderlands without an escort at least," Iserno said, her voice carefully bleached of emotion.
"I know how to take care of myself," Leander said. "I did live there for the better part of my life, before your father decided we should move here with you."
Iserno pulled back, looking down at her mother's face, a frown wrinkling her forehead as if uncertain of this new, hard side. Leander smoothed out the creased skin with her fingertips, wondering when her daughter had become so tall. Iserno allowed it, blinking a little, her mouth softening to a little girl's tremble. There were no further protests.
On the road, Leander's bones felt brittle, and the cold ache in her chest refused to subside. She had changed into a shabby dress and thrown a cloak over it, marvelling that she could still fit into her old clothes. Iserno had pressed a charm packet on her, tying it around her mother's neck in a healer's knot to strengthen the spells. Leander was grateful to it for taking away the small discomforts of riding, protecting her from her own fragility.
Goblin speech came back to her slowly, though she now spoke the border dialect in a halting city accent. The towns she passed through asking for information of her husband were still suspicious of an outsider, but willing enough to talk to one who knew their language. Mention of her own hometown thawed their indifference, replacing wary politeness with concern for one of their own returned. They were happy to share news and gossip, and started her on a trail that ended in a mixed town close to the edge of the borderlands, almost to the foot of the mountains denoting the start of exile country.
She spoke with the old goblin women seated outside their houses as they bent over their work, feeling through baskets of dirt for tiny pebbles like beads of clear glass. Leander recognised the rocks as a common bonding agent for most spells. It was found in the black earth scattered around a mountain inhabited by dragons, and the town children were likely sent to bring baskets down every day so the old women's skilled fingers could pick them out from worthless stones and sell them to witches.
"I'm looking for a man," Leander said, "a warrior carrying a sword with a boar's head on its hilt. His name is Hugo Styborne, and he was last known to be fighting off the raiders across the border."
The goblin woman's eyes were small and creased, squinting up at her visitor. "Why do you look for this man?"
"He is," she hesitated, "my husband."
"Does he give you trouble?"
"I was sent word of his death."
The goblin woman sorted through her stones for a few long moments, then set the basket aside. "Come inside and talk with me."
The house was minimally furnished with a low table and mats placed over the dirt floor. The goblin woman seated her guest and took the opposite side of the table. They looked at one another in silence at length, before the goblin woman said, "You talk like one of us, but you sound like a citybred girl."
Leander smiled to be called a girl, but merely said, "Hugo thought it was better for me there, after we had our daughter."
The goblin woman settled in her seat, nodding as her guest's voice took on a storyteller's cadence. Leander's pain was momentarily blunted by memory as she searched for words to share her story.
It had all begun with a fire in her town. The houses were light wooden structures as fragile as hollow eggshells, easily destroyed and rebuilt. It was the stone cellars underneath those buildings that offered safety during a raid and thus were built to last. The fire had been set by a gang of young thugs, new to their occupation of theft and wanton destruction. They cowered with the rest of the townsfolk at the consequences of their careless handiwork. The heat and flames barred the people from the safety of their cellars, contributing to the panic of parents calling for their children and the younger ones crying or screaming in the smoke.
No one noticed the dusty traveller charging through the confusion and tackling the leader of the gang, cracking his skull against the stony ground. His followers fled, their nerve broken.
The fire died out once there was nothing left to burn, and grim-faced survivors picked through the ruins to salvage what they could and tend to their wounded. The newcomer stood among them, seeming to shine in his new city clothes, travel-strained though they were. He looked uncertain, standing aside as the older humans and goblins worked to restore order and pacify children.
He accosted Leander as she passed him, asking, "What happened here?"
She lifted her eyebrows at him, and the stranger went an abrupt shade of red.
"A raid," she answered and turned away.
He trailed after her, the sword strapped to his back clanking occasionally, ducking his head when she stopped to glare. Finally, she ordered him to be useful and join in the salvage efforts. He obeyed with a meekness that surprised her, but it made her think better of him. The easy smile that came to his face as they worked drew a curl of shyness in her stomach.
Later, he told her that he was a hero, and that his name was Hugo Styborne. He seemed to be waiting for her to recognise the name and was dispirited when she confessed ignorance and asked what a hero was. His explanations seemed inordinately full of monsters and the glorious deaths of various ancestors.
"Not much call for that sort here," she remarked, but drew maps in the dirt to show him the easiest way into the goblin heartlands, where the raiders came from. He listened intently, trying his best to put on a serious face, to seem older and wiser than he actually was. Leander rather hoped he wouldn't die and follow too soon in his ancestors' footsteps.
The next day, he rode away in the direction of her pointing arm, towards the lands of the warlike goblin tribes and their ancient grudges played out in constant battles, unlike their peaceable trading cousins living in human lands. Several months later, Leander put the stranger out of her mind as either dead or best consigned to a distant, unreachable dream.
As one of the older girls, she was now allowed to take watch. She liked the grassy hills close to the town, spending hours combing through a yellow meadow for tiny flowers, though they were little more than weeds. On the other side of town, closer to the mountains, the other lookout waved whenever they crossed each other's field of vision. They signalled danger by running back to the town and shouting warnings, but all seemed well.
Leander's musings were disrupted as a stranger crashed through her meadow on a horse the colour of a thundercloud, whooping like a savage. The man was slung low on the side of his mount, an arm outstretched to snatch her up. She threw herself flat and rolled clear as he passed, then back to her feet with a stone in her hand. Her aim was true, and the rider fell off as his indignant horse reared straight up and raked the sky with its hooves.
Turning to flee and warn the town, she paused as the rider swore in an unfamiliar tongue. After a moment, she recognised the foreign city accent and took a hard look at her attacker. Hugo looked up at her with a smile that was more a grimace. He had grown out of his boyish features, and there were new scars on his arms. But his clear, laughing eyes retained their youth.
"I'm sorry if I scared you," he said.
She kicked him sharply in the side, then fell against him raging at the sheer idiocy he continued to display in her presence. He was startled, then uncomfortably pleased. Breathlessly, they broke apart and he blurted, "I kept thinking - as I was coming back - I wasn't sure if I wanted to ask you to marry me."
She kicked him again, hard, and he fended her off, laughing, before drawing her down against his side.
"Stay and find out," she told him.
They were married the next year. Hugo adored his new wife and liked nothing better than to laze around watching her work or else let her bully him into helping. But a fever of restlessness soon settled on him. He smiled less, instead striding around the house like a caged animal.
"I know what kind of man I married," Leander said, touching the tense muscles in his back. "A hero doesn't sit at home. He goes out to be an idiot, and comes back to be slightly less of an idiot."
"An idiot, am I?" He lifted her up bodily, laughing at her as she folded her arms and looked deeply unimpressed.
Before leaving, he would kiss her, slow and careful, his hands around her face as if trying to catch a memory. Sometimes he whispered apologies into her hands, bringing them up to his mouth, or leaned his chin on the top of her head.
"Will you come running out to meet me when I come back?" he asked.
"Don't be ridiculous," she said, but pressed the palm of her hand to his cheek.
Hugo met his daughter for the first time as a wide-eyed baby eight months old and inexplicably wailing. Disheveled and cross, Leander tugged him down by an ear and pressed a kiss to his mouth. "This is Iserno," she said. "Your spawn."
"Why is she crying?" he asked, looking overwhelmed.
"I've been trying to find out," she said. Lifting the baby out of her cot, she tucked her in her father's arms and adjusted his grip. "Here, take her. Maybe she'll be quiet for you."
Hugo stared at her in wide-eyed panic over the baby's head. Iserno looked startled for a moment, staring up at her father's face, then burst into tears. Leander leaned against the doorframe and laughed helplessly as Hugo yelped and begged to be rescued from the squirming bundle.
"It might be better if you went to stay with my mother. She could help you with Iserno," he said to her later as they curled up together in the bed. Hastily, he added, "The city might suit you. There are - shops and things."
She narrowed her eyes. "Are you saying I'm not capable of living on my own?"
"No! But with a child - it's different now."
"How?" she challenged.
"At least bring her to meet her grandmother," he said with her face against her neck, coaxing the set of her shoulders to ease.
She sighed, looking to the back of the house as Iserno announced the end of her nap with a howl. "Very well."
Hugo's mother insisted on them getting married a second time by a city priest with all the family crowded around to witness, although there was an awkward moment when it was revealed that Leander was an orphan. Immediately after, she embraced her daughter-in-law and said, "Now it is properly done."
Leander exhaled deeply, returning herself to the present. The goblin's home faded back into her vision, the familiar construction of its rough, wooden walls reminding her of her house before moving to the city manor. "My mother-in-law was a good woman. She died not long ago."
"You had many good years," the goblin woman said as Leander stopped speaking. She touched her human companion's hand. "Her son - your husband - sounds like a fine man."
"He was," Leander agreed softly.
The goblin woman called a few boys to help Leander in her task of recovering her husband's remains. She wanted Leander to stay with her as the boys went out to search, but Leander refused. There were rituals to be done to prevent the rising of the unquiet dead, and one as strong as Hugo would make a terrible monster. She knew, too, that witches often stole the bones of fallen warriors as ingredients for dark spells and sent crows to mark the sounds of battle. As his wife, the responsibility fell to her and no other.
They went to the killing grounds, as the desolate battleground was called, the scorched land dividing the two territories like a line scratched into the earth.
"We must be careful and stay quiet," the boys said. "If we hear battle or any strange noise, we must leave and come back some other time. If there are raiders, they won't be too interested in us, but it’s better to be safe."
Leander kept her eyes shaded against the late evening sun as the boys moved around her, a steady ache filling the hollow under her eyelids. Their quiet voices blended in a rough mutter like kittens just learning to growl. Then, one of them waved her over as his companions clustered in a loose circle around him.
"Here," he said and pointed.
She looked down, silent for a time, then said in a wavering voice, "Stupid, stubborn old man."
As if sensing the end of her quest, a wave of fatigue swept through her, and she was grateful as one of the goblin boys held steady onto her elbow.
"We're helping you," he said kindly, and all three nodded.
"Thank you," she said, and allowed herself to be led away.
They wreathed the dead with flowers before putting them to the torch and kept vigil until the flames starved and flickered out. The goblin woman gave Leander a small silver vase to store Hugo's ashes, waving away her weak protests. She placed it in a sack and went outside, where two boys were playing at swords using stout sticks.
"Die, monster scum!" one shouted, slashing at his opponent.
"Think you're such a hero," the other boy taunted.
The false swords clacked and slid against each other. "I'm going to be the greatest hero that ever lived."
He looked a little like Hugo, fair-haired and awkward as he had been as in his youth. Leander walked up to the boy and slapped him across the head.
"Find a better dream," she told him. "One you'll have no regrets in chasing."
The boys stared at her in sullen confusion, watching as she walked down the road with her head held high. They could not see the tears that flowed unchecked down her face, or how closely she held her burden to her heart.
end
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Date: 2007-04-01 10:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-03 04:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-03 03:16 pm (UTC)I love that line. How sincere and powerful.