The Fire and the Fog (12 page)

Every move he made to unstick his hand hurt
like nothing else he had ever felt, hurt more than his burning
face, but he had to get free. He had to get out of his room, and to
his parents. They could help him; they would know what to do. If he
couldn’t get his hand free, he couldn’t get to them, and they
wouldn’t be able to make things right.

He pulled and picked slowly at his bed sheets
for a time, wincing, and sometimes letting out small cries of
anguish as he slowly unpeeled the covers that were slick with blood
and stuck to his hand. Every fiber of sheet that he unstuck sent a
new wave of agony shooting up and down his arm. He had to unravel
it slowly, fold by aching fold, to keep from screaming or fainting
from the pain.

He was doing it though. Fold by blood-slicked
fold came away from his hand; he was making progress. He felt he
was almost untangled from the mess of blankets when two small bits
of bloody flesh fell out from a fold, and rolled down the covers to
lie beside him, taunting his reeling mind.

He stared at his severed fingertips, trying
to understand what was happening, and his head began to twirl like
a dry leaf in a whirlwind. He didn’t notice that his right hand was
free, just that two of his fingers were sitting there in front of
him, not at all where they should have been.

‘Why are my fingers here’ he thought as his
head cocked to the side in confusion, and swam dizzily. ‘Why aren’t
these on my hand?’ As his vision slowly faded again, Gel tried to
reach for the fingers at his side with his good hand.

‘Have to’

‘Have to put them back’

‘To put them back’

‘Have to’

***

The next time Gel woke the fire and pain in
his face and arm had not lessened, but some clarity, some faculty
to think, had returned. He knew he could do nothing for his face as
he opened his left eye and looked at his white ceiling, panting
heavily. Whatever mess was hiding under the mass of semi-congealed
blood that covered his right eye, he couldn’t fix it in bed. He
ignored the tiny voice in the back of his head that told him he
couldn’t do anything about it out of bed either. Sitting up and
throwing off the covers with his left hand, he knew he had to do
something for his right hand, and its missing fingers. He had been
saved the first time by his covers; he must have wrapped himself in
them somehow as he thrashed in pain, staunching the blood. He swung
his legs to the floor, testing them unsteadily as he tried to
rise.

The feeling of the soles of his feet on the
smooth wooden floor felt too normal, too natural, when compared
with the chaos around him. His first few steps were hesitant,
unsteady, a slow shuffle made possible only by pushing on his knee
with his hand to keep himself upright, but they were still steps.
Slow and hesitant and careful, but at least he was moving.

With some difficulty, Gel tore a sleeve from
the shirt he had discarded the night before, and wrapped it
carefully around his injured hand as he lurched unsteadily towards
the door of his room. He hadn’t even tried to clothe himself, and
trying and falling would have slowed him down too much; he didn’t
care if he walked out in his undergarments. He had to find his
parents.

Taking the stairs took time. His eyes were
fixed on the steps as he tried to guide his unsteady legs down
safely, and his left arm was wrapped tightly around the banister
for support. He held his right to his stomach to lessen its
movement: every motion it made hurt. The steps seemed much steeper,
and there seemed to be more of them than he ever remembered; each
one sent slivers of fire shooting up his right arm, forcing him to
grimace and grit his teeth. The journey down them was arduous,
painful. But then, right then everything was.

Gel took a slow, relieved breath as he
reached the bottom of the steps, breathing deeply from the effort
of his success, and looked up towards the front door.

The door had been heavy, solid. When Gel was
younger, he used to have problems pushing it open, or closed. The
old wooden door had stood as long as the thick stone of the rest of
the house, and had always seemed like it would last as long as the
rest of the house.

Now it stood split open. A good part of the
door around the latch had been broken through and lay on the ground
in a pile of splinters. The rest of the door hung at an angle,
creaking occasionally as its weight fell on the one good hinge left
at the bottom of the door.

The rest of the house looked the same. It
looked as if a whirlwind had torn through the place, destroying
everything. There were plates and dishes and vases smashed to bits
on the floor. As Gel looked into the kitchen he could see that the
kitchen table, where he had eaten almost every meal of his young
life, lay overturned, one of its legs gone.

In short, the house was destroyed. Sure, the
heavy stone walls and roof stood, but every other fixture of the
house had been torn asunder. It was chaos; pure destruction,
furious and wanton. It was scary.

His parents though, were nowhere to be seen.
He had been sure his father would help him. Would comfort him, make
the memories of the bearded man go away, make the world right
again. His mother would hold him in her arms, and stroke his hair,
and his troubles and pains would melt away.

But his fingers and his face, these weren’t
the scratches one gets falling from a tree. His parents couldn’t
hug his wounds away, even if they were there. And they weren’t.

Gel wanted to cry; felt like he would retch.
The feelings of sadness and sickness clashed and fought with each
other, and he didn’t know whether the tears or the vomit would come
first. Why was this happening to him. No-one ever got hurt in the
stories his mother would tell. People weren’t supposed to get hurt,
especially not him.

He stumbled slowly, as if drunk, out of the
house, passing through the shattered remains of the door. He knelt
in the front yard, his one good eye blinded as sadness beat
sickness and the tears welled in his eye. His body was choked by
sobs, his left hand balled in the grass in front of him. They were
gone. Somehow they were gone. He needed them, and he couldn’t find
them. They were supposed to be permanent, there for him forever,
but his parents were gone. Right then he didn’t notice the pain of
his hand, or his head; he somehow didn’t feel the rivers of fire
that shot through his arm each time he brought his right hand
pounding against the ground in fear and anger, in sorrow and
pain.

Time passed. Anger and frustration, sickness
and sadness, slowly gave way to a mute acceptance, and a weariness.
His body still heaved with bitten back sobs, but they were less
frequent. The tears had stopped; their last vestiges blinked out to
clear his vision, the dampness of their passing still evident on
his cheeks.

The low hill of the Mayor’s manor offered Gel
a view of the village when he finally looked up from the ground,
his fingers tightening on the grass as he pushed himself up to his
knees. Fires still burned, and smoke rose thickly into the sky, and
even from a distance he could see the bodies of the dead in the
streets. It was strange. In stories, when something bad happened,
the skies would be dark and swirling with clouds, thunder and rain
would fall from the heavens like leaves from a tree. But the sky
above the smoking village was a light blue, clear, and the sun was
slowly rising towards its zenith, bright and brilliant, lighting
the wispy clouds and floating birds over what would have been a
beautiful day.

Then again, in the stories, no good people
died. He stared out over the smoke and the fire and thought
nothing.

Eventually, Gel started to walk. He wandered
the village aimlessly for a time, unable to think. Everywhere he
walked, he saw destruction, and fire. And death. There were not
many bodies, and those that lay in the streets Gel’s eyes skipped
over, trying not to recognize them, and failing. He spotted the
body of Del, the baker, lying against the doorframe of the bakery,
his eyes wide in surprise and his hands limp near one of the two
ragged red circles in his dusty white apron.

There were more of course. Dozens of bodies
in the streets, that Gel could see. But he didn’t count them. It
seemed like everyone he knew. But then, he knew everyone in the
village. Every dead body was someone he knew on sight, if not by
name. His eyes and mind skipped over anyone he did not see, anyone
who might have escaped, just as they missed the few signs of
struggle.

Through it all, through the death and
destruction that he saw, through the evidence of violence that
tortured his eyes, what disturbed Gel the most were those people
that looked like they had simply gone to sleep. There were not
many, but he found Daeny, one of the Thatcher’s older daughters,
lying on her side in a ball outside her house, her eyes closed. She
looked like he could shake her, and she would wake up. But she
wouldn’t. She was dead; they all were. She was marred only by a
purplish bruise on the side of her plump face, but even that looked
like it could have come from a bad fall.

Many of the houses were still
smouldering
, many others still burning, as he walked
the dead streets. Only the stone buildings, the Mayor’s house and
the church, had escaped the destruction lent by fire.

Gel went to the church in his absent
wandering, wondering if maybe the Fulhar had locked the heavy,
metal banded wooden door, if he had possibly survived. The door was
broken open, slashed and hacked at and through, so similar to how
his own door had been broken open. The inside of the church had
been ransacked; many of the holy symbols of Ragn were missing. But
the Fulhar was nowhere to be found. Gel wondered absently where in
the village his body lay. No-one had escaped; no-one could
have.

***

He stumbled through the broken streets for a
while, occasionally stopping and staring, eyes unseeing, at
something in front of him, some person or place he remembered, but
eventually Gel went in search of Sheane and Mae. He hoped and
prayed, but knew what he would find. But he had to face it; he had
faced everything else.

The garden around their house had been
trampled. The front window was smashed, and the walls around the
window were blackened and charred, but Gel was still able to make
it in the front door and upstairs, ignoring the sisters’ dead
parents as he passed. Their fathers head had rolled into a corner,
and their mother lay in a bloody heap, her dress ragged and
torn.

Still, he made it inside, and up the stairs
to the girls’ room. The door to their room looked like it had been
kicked in, much like his had, but he barely saw anything. His mind
seemed to be wrapped in a haze of fog. The girls’ room was as
destroyed, as the rest of the house. The bed had escaped somehow,
the covers still neatly made. It looked like it could be slept in
anytime. It stood in sharp contrast to the broken odds and ends
that scattered the rest of the room.

But the girls weren’t there. His parents were
gone, his friends were gone. Gel was alone.

Gel walked, and his body shook with laughter
and tears as he left the twins house. He knew what he had to do
now, he thought as he left the house, his eyes and mind ignoring
the carnage around him.

He stopped laughing as he walked down the
familiar cobblestone streets, now patched in places with blood.
Somehow he stopped feeling. He barely noticed as he walked past
Lady Vaen, sitting on the front steps of her house, her head
leaning against the wooden doorframe. Her eyes stared straight
ahead, and her hands were pressed against her stomach in what had
been a vain attempt to keep its contents inside, but Gel didn’t
care. All that concerned him now was inside her house. Somehow her
house had escaped the worst of the destruction and fire, and Gel
would have thanked Ragn if he had cared enough to. True, much of
Lady Vaen’s fancy art, her sculptures and paintings and vases, were
either gone or broken, but as Gel searched her house, he found what
he needed. It was in the music room, which made sense, hidden under
a painting of a pretty lady in a rose hat sitting in a boat on a
lake that had fallen from the wall.

The lute case itself was slightly battered,
it had a dent and scratch or two from when the painting had fallen
on it, but when he flipped open the latches and looked inside, the
instrument inside was pristine, and beautiful. Gel had always loved
his old lute, he had cherished it for years, with its worn frets
and top, and much replaced tuning pegs, but Lady Vaen’s was a
masterpiece, with more than two hundred years of storied owners,
and it was his now. He laughed wryly again at the thought. It had
to be his. There was no-one else left to take it.

Gel left Lady Vaen’s house and walked down
the cobblestone street, the lute case clutched tight to his chest
as he left the village to burn behind him.

***

Gel sat when he reached the old Oak, and he
was happy it still stood. What with everything else in his life
that had been destroyed, he was glad to have one place that
remained free of blood and death and smoke and fire.

Horse tracks were left all throughout the
plains around the city, and even Gel’s untrained eye could tell
there were many. Gel noticed, but he didn’t care. He didn’t care
about revenge, or justice, or anything really. It did not matter
who had destroyed his village, if they had ridden in on horses. Gel
wouldn’t even have cared if they had flown in on dragons. As he
opened the lute case and lay it on the ground beside the old Oak
tree, he knew he had only one thing left to do.

His hastily bandaged right hand and missing
fingers gave him some pause, they still hurt, but he unwrapped them
anyway. The blood had scabbed over the stumps of his fingers, and
he could see that he was missing half of his fourth finger, and all
of his fifth. It was a small thing to be missing, to cause so much
pain, he thought, but he could play without them. He picked with
his right hand, and he could pick almost as swiftly with three
fingers as with five. Gel was absently glad that he had not lost
fingers on his left hand; he didn’t think he would have had time to
relearn the lute.