The Mercenary's Lament

When Heron built his home, he did so as he’d always dreamed - as close to the edge of man’s world as he could reach. The Wastes were known for one thing - the further south one ventured, the quieter the cries of animals, and the duller the greens of fruitful trees. Down here, the dunes were unforgiving and caked with the dust of powdered bones. 

At the lowermost point of the Wastes, the sands gave way to an ashen swathe of soil and gravel. Here, Heron found stones just strong enough to form stable walls. The trees, bereft as they were of fruit or leaves, provided ample wood for him to construct a set of humble furniture pieces.

Through this, he kept a string of a hundred and eight terracotta-coloured beads wrapped around his wrist because as long as he held them close, he found that he could ignore the dull aches in his shoulder, his ribs, and his knees. Aches from bones broken past, flesh torn and scorched in a dozen different ways.

And so, there was his home, a solitary patch of life alone on the vast scape of the Wastes, where the wind’s song was unending and inhuman things writhed across the sands, always watching but never approaching.

*

It was half a day’s walk to the nearest road, a merchant’s lane that ran to the north. Rarely did anyone come far enough to reach the Wastes but when they did, they were travelling peddlers and rogues, brave enough to root around the deserted fields for any half-buried trinkets that may fetch a small price in the cities to the north.

Heron spent his days tending to the upkeep of his home during the scant hours of daylight. The Sun resented her duty to light the land, and she would only bathe the Wastes in warmth for a sliver of the time she gave the rest of the world before she fled back beneath the horizon. 

Heron found those hours were best spent grinding wood shavings into dust, and making parchment. He’d never learned how to write, but he had time enough to create his own script and write great tomes for no-one but himself. The cacophony of people did not reach him here, and he was content.

The true reason he was alone laid to the south. Perhaps a hundred paces away, the land collapsed into a sheer canyon that stretched out as far as the voice could be carried. And beyond this, a cluster of gargantuan mountains, behemoths of blue stone and icy crests. The Sunken Peaks were named so as only the upper half of the mountains rose above the land. To reach the base, one would have to travel down into the gorges and valleys beneath, where no light could reach.

This was not done though. The Sunken Peaks were known for the stories told of the wraiths and skin-wearing Othermen that resided deep within. Some said the ghosts of all things that died in solitude were drawn to the Peaks, and they would dwell within the mists, their hollow voices keening out in the night.

*

Heron wasn’t afraid of anyone brave enough to journey through the Wastes in an attempt to rob his home. He had little value for the things within his cottage, save for the beads and the cow he'd traded for on his journey south.

He remembered the bewildered looks he had received from his fellows when they had stumbled upon a well-concealed horde of treasures in the ruins of the last Sakra Temple. Heron had taken nothing for himself but the string of beads around the neck of a statue. 

All those monks were grifters anyway, some beads aren't working miracles for anyone. Can’t be worth much, look at them - already chipped in so many places!

The wind tells me they’ll bring me fortune.

The fortune is here you dimwit! What are the odds the Silverprince will bid us raze another town and leave anything of value behind?

From the day he carried them, Heron found that he had no trouble finding at least one hot meal a day. Other days, he would even find people looking to him with unusual favour, with desire. How often would he jostle someone unintentionally, only for his apologetic murmurs to be rewarded with coins, fruits, or even the cloak off of one’s back?

He knew it was the beads on his wrist that kept the acres around his home untouched by the inhabitants of the Sunken Peaks. He could see them sometimes, when he went to close the shutters at night and their forms were skittering along the dunes, dancing under the moon.

*

Heron didn’t venture out towards the merchant’s lane often but on this day, he had an itch for wine, some of which was typically carried by the merchants and their horse-drawn carriages. None of the sellers were particularly amiable, at least not to Heron, but they stuck to their schedule of passing the lane once the day after every third full moon. 

The Sun was at her highest as Heron reached the lane. And for whatever reason, the merchants did not show. Upon approach of the road, Heron found the earth to have been recently disturbed, by human footsteps and the wheels of greatly burdened carts.

He had missed them, and he would have to make do with the paltry batch of pears he had been able to grow in the little pen adjacent to his cottage. Heron had never been one for cider, but drink was drink.

It was only as he turned that he saw the small figure looming in the distance. His first instinct would have been to return home with haste but in this moment, something stayed his feet. The figure was not moving swiftly or steadily, and as it got closer, Heron could make out the undone braids blowing in the wind and the bundle she was clutching to her chest.

How easily you could tolerate the stench of bodies piled upon each other, how swiftly you stepped over the limp forms of those that could yet be saved.

He needed to turn back and disappear before he was seen.

Will you do one decent thing before you slink back into the nothingness?

Heron began to move, and after a short half-run, he reached her. She was shockingly gaunt, mottled skin clinging to a skeleton. And the bundle she held was in fact, an infant. 

The Mother did not respond when he greeted her, nor when he asked who she was and where she hailed from. Her eyes were a pair of clouded pearls, unfocused to the shape of the world. It was as if her spirit had already passed but the body had forgotten to die. She ambled forwards for a few more paces before her knees buckled and she collapsed.

*

Heron wondered what had driven him to such a bizarre act of gallantry, to carry her and the child all the way back to his home. She had not woken once and now, she was asleep in front of the hearth. The infant had not been so restful. Small as he was, he cried loud enough to rouse an army, and he did not quiet until Heron fed him a mixture of milk stewed with old bread. The infant looked to be half a year old but with the lack of nourishment in mind, he could have been twice that.

*

When she finally roused the next day, the Mother studied the room before her eyes landed on the infant. With surprising speed, she leaped up, snatched the child into her arms, and recoiled to the other end of the room, her eyes wide with terror.

She would not speak, nor would she leave the corner. Twice, the infant soiled himself, and both times the Mother wiped him clean with the cloak he had placed over her while she slept. Eventually, Heron placed a large pot of water over the fire and once steam began to rise, he left it in the centre of the room next to a small rag, and a plate with bread and fruit.

“I’ll be outside until morning.” 

*

It remained this way for several days. Every morning, Heron would come in to find her praying in the corner, prostrated with her head towards the wall. The infant would wake shortly after and though his mother would not speak, it seemed she finally accepted that Heron was not an immediate danger. She allowed him to provide food, milk and water.

A good wash had banished the grime from her skin, revealing a pattern of circular scars on her face. Three dotted rings, cut in concentric circles around the left eye. One for each decade survived without succumbing to sickness or madness.

“You’re from the Zezuru tribe,” Heron whispered, and for the first time, she looked at him with something other than caution, and her features relaxed.

*

The infant recovered quickly and within a matter of days, he showed no signs of ever having been near death. While his mother shrunk back whenever Heron approached, her son would repeatedly call out in the nonsense noise of a child, laughing with his only two teeth on display. Twice, the Mother had to stop him from crawling towards Heron, his brow furled with curiosity.

*

“How do you survive out here?”

When she finally spoke, the Mother’s voice was laboured and hoarse. Heron was seated by the window, darning a hole in one of his breeches. 

It wasn’t the daily doldrums of life she was wondering about. How was he living, breathing and healthy so far out in the Wastes, and so close to the Sunken Peaks? The truth was that the isolation and the unyielding land were far preferable to the theatre of civilisation, the exhausting repetition of smiles and nods and arbitrary exchanges tossed back and forth for fear of being looked at as an outsider.

He told her he liked the smell of the air and she bothered him about it no more. 

By now, the infant was able to take tottering little steps whenever one of them took him by the hand. The Mother would not tell him her name and in fairness, she seemed sharp enough to know that ‘Heron’ was a mere moniker, and his birth name had been discarded some time ago. But did she know that he took that name from a bird found only in his homeland, a black-feathered hunter that would encircle its wings into a canopy above shallow waters to devise a false sense of shelter for fish before plucking at its unsuspecting prey?

He began to wish he had called himself something gentle but then, gentleness was a luxury for better men.

“He isn’t old enough yet,” the Mother had said in regard to the infant. “Names are sacred to us. They are not given to children until we are certain they will survive.”

Heron wondered if she had already chosen a name for him in her heart and if she whispered it to him when there were no prying ears. Often, he would have to stop himself from dreaming up a name that he could bestow upon the child, if the decision was his.

*

“You’re one of the Silverprince’s men,” she muttered one day, as she milked the heifer. The Mother worked quickly, for the Sun was already dwindling.

Heron froze. The infant was waddling in circles to the left of him, waving a twig in one of his hands. “How did you know?” Heron said.

“There is something unnatural about this place. You have little plots of grass and wheat growing by your home but even that should not be possible in the Wastes. And why do you remain undisturbed by the Othermen?”

Heron said nothing. The Mother finished her work but did not turn to look at him. “Only the men of the Silverprince are known to have successfully pillaged most of the temples and towns around the sacred cities,” she said. “And only a Blood Rosary can keep a man alive in a place like this.”

“I am no man of the Silverprince,” Heron stood, and for the first time in years, he felt the iron of conviction in his gut. “His men took everything we had, if I had not joined him, I would never-”

“Please,” she said. “What lies behind you does not matter to me, I am only speaking as I see.” She faced him with a hardened gaze. “My son will reach his speaking age soon. We must reach the last free Zezuru settlement in the north before this, or I will never be permitted to name him.” Her voice cracked with the last few words.

“I can escort you back to the merchant’s lane,” Heron said. “They will-”

“No!” the Mother said. “You can come with us to the settlement.”

Heron’s breath caught in his throat like the pit of a peach, swallowed in panic.

“Our Chieftain has plenty things of value to offer, he can even-”

“I will not,” said Heron, and he resumed his work with the logs.

“Please!” she said. “The merchants already abandoned us once, my son will not survive with only me to protect him!”

The boy pawed at Heron’s breeches, picking at the sawdust settled in the fabric. He had a way of fascinating himself with small things, anything he could squeeze between his little fingers. 

Will you do one decent thing?

The boy had a fixation with the beads, to the point that Heron was forced to leave them atop the hearth until the child was asleep and he could covet them no longer.

“I will not,” Heron said with finality. The Mother regarded him, her features taut. She lifted her child under one arm, the pail of milk in the other hand, and retired indoors just as the last light of the Sun disappeared.

*

He spent the night sitting with his back against the rear of the house. The Sunken Peaks carved vicious lines against the sky, like they were the fangs in the mouth of a colossal beast that was large as the world itself. The longer Heron stared into the Peaks, the more attuned he was to their preternatural emanation, their contrast to everything built by the hands of men.

This was what he had chosen. After giving so much of his life and his body to the whims of noblemen, he no longer had to answer to anyone but himself and it was good.

If only the Mother had starved to death before he had found them. Let the vultures and hyenas have chewed the both of them to the bone, so Heron may have remained undisturbed.

It was only the arrogance of someone who came from organised people that could drive someone to make such demands of him. It was astounding that he had allowed her to intrude on his home for so long. Had she truly been as destitute as she seemed? Or had she fainted at his feet with practiced frailty, just so she could be carried to his home? Had she been laughing to herself as she dangled her child in front of him and toyed with what sympathies he had left?

She wanted a noble figure at her side, some buffoon willing to play at knighthood, at protector so she could fool others into believing she was the beleaguered saint in a story of endless suffering. This was the tapestry she was weaving for herself so her role would be an easy one to assume, and she wouldn’t have to pretend to know who she was the way the rest of them did.

These are the things Heron muttered to himself as he drifted in and out of sleep, startling himself every so often with sudden wakefulness.

And far off, the shadows that slithered from the Sunken Peaks were creeping a little bit closer than usual, their pale silver eyes piercing the darkness.

*

They were gone by the morning. Heron felt their absence immediately when he crossed the threshold of his home. The corner she had retreated to for days was pale on the walls and the floor, kept free of dust by the repeated motions of someone cowering at first, then praying, then sitting comfortably with legs crossed, child asleep against the thigh.

And there was something amiss in his house. The mortar that had bound every stone in each wall was now dry and brittle. Parts of it crumbled like aged bread when Heron ran his fingers along it. The wooden beams that supported the house were splintering all over, and creaking with the push and pull of the wind.

The roof that he had thatched so exquisitely was splitting into parts, rays from the fickle Sun slipping through and mingling with the dust in the air.

And the beads were gone.

There was a man under the surface of Heron’s skin, a man who had given twenty years of his life to the Silverprince, who had spent days and nights coated in blood, bile and beer. A man who was now bellowing that he needed to chase after the Mother, put an end to her and her child as he should have done to begin with, and take back his treasure.

But rage as he might, that man had long since shrunken to a fragment of his former self, and his bellows faded as Heron sat in front of the embers in the hearth, watching the coals glow softly.

Today the wind was as sonorous as ever, and the foundations of the house shook with its vigour.

The denizens of the Sunken Peaks would be coming for him, but this was Heron’s dwelling. Though the days would be a little darker from now, he was just as much at home in the nothingness as they were.