The Fire and the Fog (34 page)

Erris found herself burying her face, and her
tears, in his shoulder; found herself crying as he awkwardly patted
her back, and tried to make soothing sounds.

As awkward as it was, it did somehow seem to
help.

***

Dan’r stalked through the fog, furious. That
anyone would attack a family. That anyone would try to…

He was disgusted. Words couldn’t explain.

He didn’t care how long it took. He would
find them all. Erris’ family; the soldiers; he would find them all.
And he would do whatever had to be done.

He started on the left side of the road. The
first soldier, the one Erris had called the leader was there, just
out of sight of the wagon, his fingers clawing through the hard
dirt, his eyes empty, his face afraid. Dan’r pulled a large hammer
from his cloak with one hand, and then he started on the soldier.
This one deserved it most, so Dan’r took time to break him. He
started with his fingers.

***

It took him time to find the next group, but
the underbrush was heavily disturbed; he had a clear path to
follow. He could see no more than ten feet on each side, but it was
enough.

The first soldier he came across was on the
ground. He had tripped over a root, trying to escape the Fog. One
of his arms was up, his face and eyes bared in fear.

Dan’r took the soldiers’ sword from him,
impaled him through the stomach. Strangely he felt nothing but
curiosity as he did so; small tendrils of Fog tried to leak through
the wound in the man’s abdomen, rather than blood.

Dan’r left the sword in him, moved on.

Four others were close by. Three had
blundered into the Fog unaware. A fourth had tried to climb a
tree.

Dan’r dealt with them all.

***

After Erris recovered slightly; after she and
Gel separated, eyes cast aside in embarrassment, after they each
sat against an opposite wall of the wagon, looking at anything but
each other, they started to wait.

They weren’t sure how long, but Dan’r seemed
gone for a long time. They waited, and waited. And then they
started to talk. Erris asked Gel where he’d gotten the scars, and
he told her, telling her all about the painful night, and about his
village.

And then they talked about themselves. About
Gel’s life in the village; about Erris’ life on the farm. They just
talked.

***

It took him longer to find the children Erris
had spoken of, but he moved in a slow, sweeping grid, and found
them eventually. The boy lay on the ground by a tree. He might have
been asleep, but for the large purple bruise on the side of his
face.

The girl was held tight in the soldiers’
hand, one hand reached back to strike.

Dan’r took this soldiers’ sword as well,
stabbed it under his armpit, left it.

By Erris’ count, he had three more to
find.

***

He had to light his second torch just before
he found one of Erris’ sisters. She had fallen, her face a rictus
of pain as she held tightly onto her ankle, two soldiers standing
over her laughing. They had been distracted, one with the butt of
his rifle in the girls midsection.

Dan’r broke their knees and left them.

***

He had to pull the last soldier off the girl.
He took his time with that one. Left him nailed to a tree.

***

When Dan’r finally came back and started to
haul himself into the wagon bench, Erris and Gel stopped talking,
clamming up tight. But their glances stopped being quite as
awkward. Somehow, over misery and loss, they had bonded.

‘I’ve dealt with them,’ Dan’r said as he
climbed up into the wagon again, slumping down in his seat, and
motioning for Marmot to start moving.

‘What do you…,’ Erris started, but Dan’r
interrupted almost immediately.

‘When we’re done, when we stop the Fog, it’ll
disappear. And everything that’s in it right now will come back.
It’ll be let go. If I did nothing, then…then everything here would
go back exactly as it was. I couldn’t leave them like that. When
the fog’s gone, your family will be safe.’

Erris said nothing for a moment, processing
what he’d said, before hurrying and throwing her arms around him,
and kissing him lightly on the check.

‘Thank you,’ she said, and she meant it.

When Gel started up his music again, it
seemed a little more cheerful to everyone.

***

They travelled for days, their whole world
closed in a bubble, twenty meters long, ten meters wide. They ate
and slept in the grey bubble, used the wagon for occasional privacy
when necessary. Gel played, Erris read, and Dan’r made sure their
torch supply was always adequate. They travelled through towns,
villages, and even a city, but they kept to the road, rarely seeing
anything to their side. Dan’r would sometimes jump off the wagon,
head into the fog with a single lit torch, but never for long.

On the second day of travel, Erris started to
read out ideas from the books she read, though Gel and Dan’r rarely
gave much comment.

By the third day, they started to get on each
others nerves. With no new material other than the shifting grey
expanse all around them, Gel’s music was beginning to grow stale,
beginning to repeat, and he took longer and longer breaks between
playing. Dan’r was touchy, and exhausted, and would react with
anger to the slightest prodding. And Erris…Erris was fine. She had
her books, and light to read them by, and her family would be
alright.

On the fourth day, they passed through
Vhindyar, the Regian capital, the light from their torches close
enough to the houses on the side of the smaller thoroughfares to
throw the sharp, solid construction, built to withstand a constant
salt spray from the ocean, into sharp contrast. Here, they caught
their first glimpses of people, seemingly frozen in time, gaping
out windows or reaching for doors where the Fog rolled over them in
the streets.

‘Why don’t they come back when the light from
the torches touches them?’ Gel asked at one street corner, where a
red-robed priest stood, his arms held wide. He seemed to be
welcoming the Fog that had swept over him. He must have been sure
in his faith, sure that his God would protect him.

‘It gets inside them, I think,’ Dan’r said,
barely glancing at the figure as they rode past, Marmots hooves
echoing endlessly off the houses to either side. ‘The light can
take the fog off them, but not out of them, so they stay
stuck.’

That revelation gave the statues, frozen in
time and given wavering shadows by the flickering light of the
torches, a new, unsettling light. Gel and Erris wondered if the
frozen people might still be aware, still be able to see them as
they rode past slowly through the deserted streets. Dan’r ignored
it all and spent most of his time brooding silently.

On the fifth day, they reached the ocean.

III

The ocean had called to them for hours as
they followed the road, their only net of safety in an otherwise
grey, hostile world. They heard the waves crash against rocks
somewhere below them, the ebb and flow of the surf the first
outside sound they had heard since entering the fog. It was
something different, something that wasn’t the ever-present creaks
and moans of the wagon. The sound the waves made…it seemed
glorious. Even Dan’r, dismal for days, came slightly out of his
depression. He straightened out of his seat slightly, his face
taking on a stern, yet hopefully determined, glint.

They followed a long, slow, winding road down
the side of the cliffs. At some points, off to their right, the
light of their torches would show a drop, would show the ground
falling away into…nothing. It was unsettling, knowing you could
fall, not knowing how long you might fall for.

Before long, they entered a small fishing
village. The thatch-roofed houses and muddy roads echoed the chorus
of water lapping against docks and the foreboding silence of the
place. Its people were frozen in time as they went about their
daily tasks. They must have assumed the Fog was just that, fog.

Dan’r stopped the wagon when Marmot’s hooves
started to clatter against the wooden dock. The light from the
torches barely made it over the sides of the dock; the waters on
either side remained hidden in the fog.

‘Wait here,’ he said, lighting one of their
few remaining spare torches and pushing himself off the wagon,
‘I’ll find us a boat.’

The fog swallowed him soon after, quickly
filling the hole made by his torch, and it wasn’t long before even
the muffled creaks of his footfalls against the ancient dock were
smothered.

Erris and Gel sat, waiting, as they had many
times in the days previous.

‘What’s going to happen to Marmot?’ Erris
asked, realizing for the first time that it was unlikely they could
bring the horse with them on the ship.

Gel looked at the horse thoughtfully, his
young mind working. ‘Well…if we leave him here, then he’ll get
covered by the Fog,’ Gel said, frowning, ‘but…he’ll be fine as soon
as we stop it right?’

‘But he’ll be alone, in a strange place. And
who knows what the villagers here will do to him. Maybe they’ll
steal him, or sell him…’

‘It’ll be fine,’ Gel answered quickly, ‘We’ll
stop the fog, and then come right back, and we’ll save Marmot
before anyone can take him.’

Any further conversation was cut off as
Dan’r’s muffled footsteps emerged from the fog, followed soon after
by the man himself.

‘I found a ship,’ he said, grabbing his bag
of art supplies and another lit torch from the wagon, ‘Grab what
you can and follow me.’

Gel grabbed his lute, Erris her bag full of
books, and both took a lit torch in either hand as they stepped off
the wagon, and followed Dan’r closely.

‘Wait,’ Erris said, stopping as they passed
Marmot. She stepped up to Marmot, nuzzling him with her
forehead.

‘You be good, silly horse,’ she said, closing
her eyes as the horse licked her, ‘you be good and don’t be afraid.
I’ll be back soon, and then we’ll go back to the farm, with mother,
and and…’

‘Let’s go, girl,’ she heard Dan’r call from
behind.

With one last nudge at Marmot’s forehead, she
turned, wiped away a tear with her shoulder, and nodded. Marmot
disappeared silently behind them as the trio stepped into the fog,
and walked along the creaking dock.

‘Here.’ Dan’r stopped and waved one torch
over the side of the dock, illuminating a portion of the boat.
‘We’ll have to be careful getting in.’

Dan’r lowered himself slowly into the boat,
then held onto the dock to steady it as Gel and Erris lowered
themselves in. It was a good seven meters long, and two wide, with
a sail furled up in the center, and oars stashed on either
side.

For the next half hour, they busied
themselves setting up the ship. Dan’r made more torches, littering
the bottom of the boat with them, while Gel and Erris found ways to
secure them to the boat, by wedging them between planks in the
hull, or tying them down.

It took ten torches to light the boat, five
on either side, equally spaced out, and when they were all set,
Dan’r sat heavily in the center of the boat, leaning his head
against the mast.

‘You two, sit at the back. I need to rest.
You have to row.’ Dan’r said, closing his eyes.

‘When do I get to play?’ Gel asked, annoyed
at being relegated to rowing.

‘What direction do we go?’ Erris asked,
concerned about setting off into the fog with no heading.

‘Just start,’ Dan’r said, not looking up,
‘I’ll take over soon.’

Gel and Erris looked at each other, then Gel
shrugged, moving slowly, unsteadily to the back of the boat, taking
out one of the oars and putting it in its lock.

Erris sighed, and joined him.

And then they set off. It took a while to get
used to rowing, and they made little headway, but they eventually
got the hang of it. Rowing in unison, they even managed to talk
quietly to each other, as Dan’r slept against the mast nearby.

***

When Dan’r did finally wake, he had Gel and
Erris put up the oars, and quickly set about unfurling the sail on
the boat’s single mast.

Then he sat, and beckoned Gel closer.

‘It’s your turn now, boy,’ he said, barely
noticing Gel’s frown at being called boy again. ‘You need to play,
and your music needs to do two things. One, you need to calm the
ocean, keep the swells small enough for this boat to cross safely.
Two, we need wind to fill that sail, and in case you hadn’t
noticed, there is none right now. You need to make us some wind,
and it needs to push us…’ Dan’r paused, pulling out a small
circular compass from his cloak, ‘…that way,’ he finished, pointing
off to the right of the boat.

‘I…I don’t know if I can do that,’ Gel said,
suddenly afraid.

Dan’r looked at him, his eyes wide, almost
feral. ‘If you don’t, we die,’ he said with frightening finality,
picking up Gel’s lute from the side of the boat and handing it to
him.

***

Gel was scared as he took the lute from
Dan’r. The old man had changed, recently. Ever since they entered
the fog he’d seemed…angry, impatient. Dan’r was already turning,
working with the mast and sail, angling it to catch the wind that
didn’t yet exist.

Gel moved back to the seat he had shared with
Erris while rowing, walking crouched to not rock the boat. When he
did sit beside her, he hunched himself over dejectedly, stared at
the lute, moved the stumps of his missing fingers back and forth
strangely, remembering he was broken for the first time in
days.