A F T E R   T H E   W A R

Vale of Blood Roses

There is a smell in the air as he throws stones at the skull ravens, and he has smelled it before, and recurring nightmares come back at him like yet more of those vicious birds, pecking and probing and doing their utmost to undo his mind.  Jakk Young pauses with one stone remaining in his hand and three ravens in the tree.  The odds excite him.  The creatures watch him with their soulless eyes, and soon they will call back their brethren he has scared off. 
            He sniffs, throws the stone and watches the final three birds fly away.  Even then it feels as though they are laughing at him.  He sniffs again, taking slow, measured breaths.  He turns around slowly, scanning the woods for any sign of movement.  But there is nothing, and he is alone.  The smell has vanished now – if it was ever there at all – and those briefly recalled nightmares are beyond his grasp once more.  But the memories, though faded and sometimes so remote that they feel like the recollections of others, are always there.
            Jakk gathers his backpack, bow and the ground squirrel he shot earlier and starts for home.  The woods have come alive again now that he has seen away the skull ravens, and the canopy sings with the busy, complex concert of Pengulfin Woods’ wildlife.  Wood sparks grind their legs to scratch out their mating calls.  Song birds try to outdo each other in range, volume and beauty.  Ochre tree frogs groan and growl, lizards whisper their way across rough bark and crown ants whistle softly as they expel venom into the guts of their unfortunate prey.  Noises he knows and is familiar with, and they make Jakk feel at home.  He knows the geography of this part of the forest so well that he could walk this final mile with his eyes closed.  The noises and smells make shapes, locating tree and path, rock and stream.  He has been here for fifteen years, yet it is only recently that he started to understand the language of the land.
            A hundred steps further on, he knows that something is wrong.
            That smell, he thinks.  It came back like the ghost of a memory, not smelled but remembered; caked dust, blood-roses trampled underfoot, death in waiting.  He knows it is bad, but his memories are in turmoil, fighting and rolling with nightmares so that he is not quite sure which are which.  The idea that he could have lost so many bad memories is, in a way, worse than being able to remember them all.  They stalk him, unknown and hidden away.  Even after so long, he knows that dangers you can see and understand are much less terrible than horrors you cannot.
            He is suddenly eager to reach home.  He enjoys hunting in the woods, welcomes time on his own away from Bindy and their child Romana, but now he wishes nothing more than to be with them again.  The frogs’ calls are mocking, the wood sparks do not bode well.  And as he crests the small rise to the east of their homestead in a clearing in the woods, and that smell from the past is real once again, he sees that one of his nightmares is about to make itself known.

 

His daughter Romana stands at the entrance to their humble home, one hand holding the door half-open behind her, the other pressed to her mouth as if to hold in a cry.  It’s not like Romana to be so quiet, and Jakk knows that she is shocked, upset or afraid.  Perhaps all three. 
            Bindy is a dozen steps from the timber building, kneeling beside a shape splayed on the ground.  The shape is a man.  Jakk’s wife seems frozen above him, one hand outstretched but unable to touch whoever it is.
            That’s where the smell is coming from, Jakk thinks.  That shape.  That person. Blood roses rotting, and he must have come here to return my nightmares to me.
            Bindy looks back at the building.  “Roma, bring water, quickly.”
            “Mother …?”
            “Water, Roma.  And see if you can find the horn.  We need your father here.”
            For a few beats Jakk feels like an intruder, viewing a scene he was never meant to see.  They don’t know I’m here, he thinks, and for a few beats more he remains motionless and silent, watching his wife’s naturally caring soul fighting and debating what to do, how to touch.
            What must she be seeing?  That stink is bad, and it would be amazing if the person is not already dead.
            “No need for the horn,” he says at last.  The relief on Bindy’s face is a comfort, but also a warning.
“Jakk, thank the Black!  He stumbled in, collapsed, and I think he might be—”
“Don’t touch,” Jakk says.  He hurries down the gentle slope, keeping to the path they have worn here over the years.  He knows the route so well that he does not need to look, and that way he can examine the man sprawled on the ground before his wife.
Dead, Bindy wants to say.  I think he might be dead.  But Romana is still watching from the doorway and listening to her parents’ conversation.  A growing girl, death is becoming something of a preoccupation.  The fact that Jakk refuses to talk about it perhaps makes it worse, but he has seen too much death to be able to discuss it with his daughter.  Every question she asks dredges up bad memories.
And Old Parkgan doesn’t help, wandering through the forest and telling anyone who will listen that the Cataclysmic War has marked the end.  Borrowed time, he says.  We’re all inhaling the land’s final breath. 
            As if to prove everyone wrong, the prone man groans.
            “Roma, hurry with that—”
            He shouts, sits up and reaches for Bindy.  She falls back and kicks out, knocking his hand aside and scurrying backwards on hands and feet.
            “Bindy!”  Jakk drops the dead ground squirrel and bow and runs, pulling his knife as he does so.  It whispers against the leather scabbard, and his blood is suddenly on fire.
            “Jakk!” the man says when he looks around.  “Jakk Young!”
            Jakk pauses a dozen steps away, hand still clasping the knife’s handle.  The man has dark skin. No hair, a bulky body that may have once been strong.  To begin with Jakk does not know him, because he has changed so much.  But he can smell him.  And he can see the blossoming blood roses on the man’s stomach, spread in a splash as though planted there with a flourish.  “No,” Jakk says.  “I don’t know you.”
            The man laughs.  It sounds mad.  “But you know these, Jakk?”  He runs his hand across the tops of the stubby flowers, and fleshy petals kiss at his fingertips.  “And you know you can’t forget what we did, can’t just shut it away!”
            “Roma, that water, now,” Jakk says.  She disappears inside and closes the door behind her.
            “It’s come,” the man says.
            “What’s come?”
            “Revenge … like we always knew it would.”  The man raises himself on both arms, stretching forward as if to take a bite from the air.  “Jakk, I only just got away!  They’ve already got Rufiere and Leeza, and I only just …”  He touches the blooming things across his stomach again, and below them Jakk can now see a deep, ugly cut. Things protrude from there, and they look like coiled grey guts.  “But I didn’t get away for long.  I cut one, it bled, and now …”
            Jakk feels cold.  Revenge, the man said.  And those nightmares are circling, coalescing, and Jakk can hear them mocking him from where he thought he had buried them away.  “Stay away from my family,” he says quietly.
            “You have to get away!”
            “Stay down.  Don’t get up.”  He walks backwards to where he dropped the bow, picks it up and strings an arrow.  He does not take his eyes from the sick man, not for an instant.  That would be dangerous.
            “Jakk?” Bindy says.  “Who is he?  What’s wrong with him?”
            “Haven’t you told her anything?” the man asks.  He laughs but there’s little humour there, only disbelief.  “Nothing at all?”
            Jakk sights along the arrow.  Shut up, he thinks, shut up, shut up, please give me any excuse and I’ll make you shut up.
            “Ventgoria,” the man says.  “Jakk and I fought the Soyaran from the Poison Forests.”
            “Jakk fought the Krotes in the Cataclysmic War,” Bindy says, but she’s looking at Jakk now more than the man. 
            Jakk stares back.  He blinks slowly.  I’ll tell you soon, he tries to convey.  I lied, and I’ll tell you soon.  But not right now.
            “It’s come for us,” the man says again.  “The heart and mind.”  He spits out a mouthful of blood.
            Jakk breathes in deeply and wonders when his turn will come.