The Torc

FION (3)

Fion had frequently seen Jalin in the streets of Tanasthe. He wondered what it would be like to have enough money, to have a full belly, warm clothes and a nice soft bed to sleep in instead of the tombstones of the necropolis on the north-facing edge of the temple. Although he didn't admit it to himself—he didn't actually say it, at any rate—he thought Jalin was gorgeous. His admiration and desire warred with resentment. Fion was rich, titled, and handsome, while he, Fion, was a thief and a whore, and would never amount to much or achieve anything. He used to daydream about what it would be like to live in the palace, to perhaps even be—oh that it could be so!—Jalin's friend. Sometimes he would allow himself to imagine being his lover. He used to follow Jalin around Tanasthe at a safe distance, just to watch him, to admire the shiny black hair, the mauve-blue eyes, the lithe slim body and muscular arms and shoulders (a product of the sword-practice and martial exercise expected of a warrior). More than anything, though, he wanted to emulate the lofty expression, the confident demeanor, the cool arrogance.

When Fion had the chance, when he was with a client who could afford a bed in an inn, he would take a good look at himself in whatever mirror was available. He would look at his curly chestnut hair, his grey-green eyes, and his olive skin. He would hold his head this way and that, to inspect his neck or chin. Yet he had no illusions. He might be good enough for worn-out old farmers from the countryside, or sailors desperate after weeks at sea, but he wasn't beautiful in the way Jalin was. And he didn't think things would get any better. He had seen how the poor aged faster than the rich, worn out by a life of toil and privation. He slept rough, unless he was with a client who had hired a room for a whole night, and then he had to pay for it with more sex in the morning. Once, after he'd been with a sailor who had fallen asleep, he'd been admiring himself in the mirror. He'd been startled when he'd heard from the bed. “Vain little creature, aren't you? Don't worry, my pretty, you are as lovely a boy as I've seen in a hundred ports. Now, come back to bed.” For a moment, Fion had been comforted. Yet he'd still had to go back to the bed to endure bad breath and rough sex. There was no escape. And he knew without doubt—for had he not seen it himself?—that Jalin was more beautiful than he was. And Jalin didn’t even need to be handsome. He didn’t even need to earn his own living. It wasn’t fair.

Fion's mother had been a soldier in the Kharthian army, and had met his father when they'd been on a campaign with the imperial army against brigands in the mountainous wilds between Elfhame and the empire. His father had charmed his mother—though the details had changed every time his mother had told him—at a pub, or on some far-away village square, or on the march home. She hadn't known she was pregnant until she'd been back in Tanasthe. Jalin had as many dreams about his father as he had about Jalin. Sometimes he would lie half asleep in the sun somewhere, his head filled with romantic nonsense. He used to daydream that his father had come to Kharthion, looking for Klara, whom he still loved. But he asked around, and was told that she was dead. As his father was leaving the room, his shoulders slumped, his interlocutor casually added that Klara had had a son, Fion, and that he could be found at such and such inn. Fion never let the thought spoil his daydream, that a father might not wish his son to be a whore and a thief, hanging round bars and sleeping wherever he could find a bed. He imagined his father saying, as he found him, how sorry he was that he hadn't known, sweeping Fion off to a life of luxury and ease in a castle or manor on the edge of the elf kingdom. Every time an elf turned up in Tanasthe, Fion would inspect him, looking for similarities with his own face and expression, trying to find out his name, quizzing him about whether he’d known Klara.

He knew in his heart that the dreams wouldn't come true. Reality was that he would go on the way he had before, surviving on scraps, whoring, dealing dakh, thieving. He didn't in fact make much cash from dakh, because he was inclined to use too much of the drug himself. Daydreams weren't always very sustaining. Alcohol and dakh, when he could afford them, worked better. They produced more convincing illusions. When he was desperate, he would pick pockets. But only when he was desperate, for the penalty for theft was hanging. No one much cared about the trade in flesh or drugs, and the two often went together.

All the same, on a warm summer's day, Fion didn't think his life too bad. But the ache inside him to belong somewhere, to matter to someone, wasn't assuaged by his sex or his drugs or his dreams, or even by his little terrier, Giant, which he loved more than anything. Sometimes, on a cold winter's night, he would cuddle close to Giant, trying to keep him and himself warm, and wonder bitterly whether things would ever improve. The Weavers weave the tapestry of life as they will, he knew, and his thread was in there next to all the others. What would happen, would happen. Apart from Giant, he had no friends. He was too intelligent, he knew, and that made him uncomfortable to be with, because he could see to the heart of things, and into the hearts of people. What he saw there depressed him. Because of his obsession with his father, everybody knew his was elf-kindred, and that didn't do him any good either.

His coin was running low, and he'd just decided to see if there was a new ship in the harbor with a crew of sex-starved cashed-up sailors when he saw the funeral procession make it way across the square from the palace towards Aliya's temple. Of course he'd heard all about the death of the Duchess—who hadn't in all the island?—and he'd heard the rumors too; that the Duke had killed her; that she'd killed herself; that it was a plot by the Duke of Vestia to expand his influence; that the Duke of Kharthion had a new lyubon. The gossip swirled. There hadn't been so much excitement since the visit by a Fnerxer pirate ship ten years before, pursued right into Tanasthe bay by a squadron of the Imperial fleet. He watched the procession idly, bored. The gongs and flutes were mournful, but the buzz in the crowd was excited rather than grieving. The body of the Duchess was borne on a long bier pulled by four pure white horses. Fion wondered how much the Duke had paid the High Priestess to use them. Solemnly, just behind the bier, walked the household, lead by the Duke and his heir, with the Duke's younger brother and what Fion assumed must be cousins just behind. They wore white robes bound with pale blue ribbons, as is proper, for these symbolize the clouds and happy blue sky of the Havens, where the Great Spirit takes our souls when we die, and enfolds us in Her blessed wings. Fion automatically made the sign of Aliya, and then said a silent prayer for the Duchess, remembering that she too had been half-elven. She should have lived decades, maybe centuries longer. With a wry grimace, he acknowledged that he himself was also unlikely to live nearly so long. One night, a drunk client would knife him, or he would be caught thieving and be hanged by this very Duke's inquisitors, and half-elf or no, he would live no longer than all the poor who surrounded him, their eyes eager for a sight of aristo grief.

The bier moved to the huge cremation platform in front of the temple. The High Priestess and her priestesses and acolytes were there. It was after all a state funeral. The speeches were long and tedious. Throughout it all, Jalin stood next to his father, his face stone, his eyes blank coins of grief, and only when the flames took, the pitch-soaked pine logs ignited, and the coffin itself took flame with a whoosh did he weep. The Duke let him cry for a minute or two, then turned to him and said sternly yet with a surprising gentleness and affection in his voice, “Your grief is unmanly.” Or at least, that's what Fion thought he said, because he couldn't hear over the cries of the populace and the clashing of spears of ducal guard and the great clang of the gongs. Fion was divided between pity for and envy of Jalin. If it had been him, and it had been his mother lying there, he would have wept too. As indeed he had, when he had seen her body burnt after she'd died of the red cough that winter when it rained so much and the crops failed and his soldier mother, no longer of use to the Duchy of Kharthion, had been permitted to starve herself into an ague that killed her within a few days and left her son an orphan. Fion understood how Jalin felt, and the sharp aside of his father seemed to needlessly worsen the pain. Fion might have had no father, but he had at least been permitted to grieve, and the Temple priestesses had given him oat and honey cakes as funeral gifts, and for a few days he hadn't been hungry. Yet he could tell from the way the Duke spoke that he loved his son, and he envied Fion with all his heart.

The ducal family watched as the fire died down, all through the day into the late summer evening, and long before the bones had cooled enough to be broken, Fion had gotten bored and gone down to the docks. There he found a sailor who'd been willing to buy him dinner and dakh and a bed for the night.

The next night he hadn't been so lucky with clients and in the end had had been reduced to begging a stale pie from the man who sold pastries on the corner opposite the temple. Grumpy and tired, the old man had made him pay a dolve-denar, which was half the normal price. All the same, Fion hadn’t wanted to pay anything, but he was glad that he hadn’t had to sleep with him, and it was worth a dolve-denar to avoid that. It was a warm night, the air still with summer dust, the air as warm and caressing as a lover’s breath on your cheek. Fion stretched out on a half-buried gravestone. It prompted the thought for the first time that the Kharthians hadn't always cremated their dead. He supposed that they had taken to cremation when the city had grown with prosperity and trade. There was no room now for bodies.

In the Ducal mausoleum there were just urns behind the locked grille, each decked with a white and blue ribbon. The ribbons on the oldest of the urns, which Fion could just see in the far corner of the tomb, had faded to a sad yellow, and hung in tattered strips, but the seventeenth Duchess's gold urn shone, and the ribbon round it glittered. Cynically, Fion wondered whether spirits in the Havens also thinned and faded as they were forgotten by their friends and family still left in the world. He realized with a pang that he couldn't remember his mother's face, that the only detail left was that her eyes had been a warm hazel. All at once, he wished fervently that he still had some of the dakh the sailor had so willingly shared with him the night before.

At that moment, Jalin came into the necropolis, a solitary figure, unaccompanied by bravos. At first Fion assumed it was a mourner from the common people, not an aristo, since the rich never went anywhere without protection, come to mourn a friend or a relative, as they often did towards twilight, when the world remembers, when the doors between this world and the otherworld stand ajar. Intrigued, he crept closer.

Jalin sat down in front of the family mausoleum and hugged his knees. Fion could hear him crying. He moved a little closer, and he could hear, through the sobs, words being spoken, without being able to make out what they were. He squatted down and tried to shuffle closer as quietly as he could, but he scraped the ground and Jalin leapt to his feet.

“Who's there?” Without pause, a sharp dagger had appeared in Jalin's hand.

“I mean you no harm.” Fion stood up carefully, keeping his arms well away from his sides.

“Who are you?”

“I am Fion ys Letraion.” He might never have met his father but he was proud of his father's name. His mother had mentioned it often, sometimes with love and sometimes indifference.

“What do you want here?”

“I live here.”

“Here?”

“We don't all have houses, with warm beds.”

Jalin looked down, momentarily abashed. “You know who I am?” It wasn’t really a question.

Fion just nodded. “I'm sorry about your mum.”

It was Jalin's turn to nod.

“My mum’s dead, too.” There was a silence. “Well, I'll leave you,” said Fion at last. He seldom begged. It was much less humiliating to whore. At least he gave something back. And somehow he didn't want to humble himself before this shining beauty. Let him pretend that he was a man who could keep himself, even if his bed was a tombstone, his food scraps, and his metier sex for sale.

“What happened?” Jalin didn’t seem to want him to go.

Fion leaned against on a lintel on the side of the tomb. “She got sick. The red cough.”

Jalin made a face. “Horrible way to go.”

“No way is good.” He wasn't aware of the longing that had infused his tone. Jalin shot him a quick glance from his violet eyes, now dark in the fading light from the western sky.

“And your dad?”

“He was an elf.” Fion said nothing further and that told Jalin much.

“I'm a quarter elvish. My mother was elf-kindred.” When he said 'mother' his voice broke for a moment.

“Yeah.” Fion scratched his head. “We sort of don't belong anywhere. Not elvish, not men.”

“I'm glad my mother was elf-kindred. It's given me... power.”

“What sort of power?”

“I'm a wizard.” But even as he said this, Jalin felt a fraud. What did he know, really, of wizardry? He had no teacher but books—his father would not allow it—and even the books weren't by actual wizards, merely by people discussing what wizards were and what they did. He felt even more of a hypocrite when Fion nodded solemnly, impressed. “What trade do you have?” he asked. He hadn't meant to embarrass Fion, and was sorry when he saw him color and turn away.

“This and that.”

Jalin realized that he had no idea at all of how the common people lived. He had no idea of people's trades, how they made their living, how they coped with poverty and hard work. It had not seemed important before, but, now, face to face with someone he could see and feel for, his ignorance looked callow and selfish. But he didn't want to push Fion. “Oh,” he said.

Fion wondered whether Jalin had guessed what he did. He didn't show any signs of leaping up, and there was no tension in his face that indicated his disgust or disdain. If he becomes my friend, he thought, I will give it up. I'll get a trade, maybe work for the pastry maker. Yet he knew in his heart that he would never submit to another's will, and that apprentices earned nothing. Their wages were the skills they learned, which would one day allow themselves to earn a living. He needed money to live on. Other apprentices stayed with their parents or other relatives. Where would he stay? And he would have no money for dakh. Daydream he might, but in the end truth bitter or otherwise always had the last word. He felt a quick rush of sourness, but with the facility brought by long practice, concealed it and bit back the recriminations he felt like making.

Feeling a tingle on his back, as if someone were watching him, he turned to look. Resting on the edge of the mausoleum, looking down with peculiarly malevolent expressions were four leathery black creatures—winged demons, their eyes like glowing coals in the deepening dark, their shapes a black stain against the greyer stone. Fion started back in fright and horror, and Jalin turned to see what had disturbed him. Giving a cry of fear and disgust, he leapt up, and without another word, ran out of the necropolis into the gathering dusk and disappeared. With languid flaps, three of the four creatures took off after the fleeing Marquis. The fourth eyed Fion, and gave what was manifestly a cackle of delight, and then said, quite clearly and contemptuously, though afterwards Fion wasn’t sure whether it had actually spoken, “He is ours, whore. Interfere not, lest you pay dearly.”

Fion wasn't sure whether they were phantoms in a dream. They certainly seemed real. It seemed all too real, horribly, unbearably real. Sweating and terrified, he ran out of the cemetery into the square. When his heart had stopped beating and his terror had abated somewhat, he bought himself some dakh. He took out his pipe and filled it. He lit a lucifer and set it to the tamped contents of the pipe and drew the sweet acrid smoke deep into his lungs. He was instantly filled with contentment. The vulture-like demons were forgotten. He relaxed into a pleasant stupor. As usual, he felt his desire rise, and a wish for sex, with someone he loved and cared for or even with anybody merely willing, grew in him. Jalin came into his mind, and he wondered what it would be like to got to bed with him, and make love slowly but passionately and then wake up next to him in the morning. He was thus agreeably engaged when his shoulder was roughly shaken and the dream shattered.

“Where've ya been?” It was Yakon.

“Around.”

Fion hated and feared Yakon. He was a huge ex-military Yarsfelder, his blond hair tied back in a long pigtail halfway down his back, his biceps so big Fion would have struggled to put two hands around one, his shoulders and back the massive size and strength of a man who hefted lumber as his trade. But he had another employment too. He was a pimp and a rising criminal. Fion could have joined one of the houses in Tanasthe, but he preferred to work on his own. Until Yakon found him, anyway. Yakon had seen him on the beat outside The Duke, an inn between Tanasthe's main square and the harbor. He had been all sweetness until Fion was alone with him in a room in the inn. Fion's first inkling that something might be wrong was when Yakon locked the door and put the key in his pocket. But at first he hadn't done anything out of the ordinary. He'd even kissed Fion, gently and carefully. But he was rough during sex and towards the end, as he was climaxing, he took Fion's throat and squeezed it, and when Fion choked out a plea to be let loose, he had backhanded him twice across his face, drawing blood. Afterwards, as if nothing untoward had happened he said in a conversational tone, “You're good. I like you. You need protection. You know, sometimes your clients might get a bit rough with you.” And he'd smiled blandly, while his green eyes glinted. Protection turned out to involve half of Fion's takings. Fion was much too afraid of him to argue, but he was very careful not to let Yakon know what he really earned, keeping as much of his money as possible behind a loose stone in a very dark corner of the crypt underneath the temple. If Yakon found him, whatever he had on him would disappear into Yakon's meaty palms, and if it was too little, he would make his displeasure plain. Sometimes that meant Fion couldn't work. Yakon's displeasure often took a sexual turn.

Yakon took Fion's arm in his huge hand, and dragged him down the road into The Duke’s Torc, yet another inn, where the inn shingle was a picture of the magical torc that gave the Dukes and Duchesses of Kharthion their authority to rule the island duchy. It was widely believed on the street that Yakon owned the inn, and certainly it was now a tavern which the wary avoided. He marched Fion up the rickety stairs, ignoring Fion's cries of pain as his elbows and ankles were bashed against the treads and the stair railing. Their progress upstairs was studiously ignored by the patrons of the inn, after one or two quick looks. No one was going to stand up to Yakon, especially not for some half-elf street whore. Particularly here, in the hostelry he owned.

Yakon threw him onto the pallet in the room so hard he slid a footlength or two and hit his head against the wall. “I've told you before, bitch, that I expect a little respect.” He picked up Fion and threw him against the wall again. A piece of plaster broke off the lath filler and fell to the floor. Luckily it was Fion's back which took most of the force of the throw, not his head. Even so, it was ringing. He got onto his knees and knelt for a moment to gather his strength. His head was still woozy from the dakh. He had no money to give Yakon. He hadn't had a client all day, and what money he'd had in his purse had gone on the dakh.

“Give me your money.”

Fion just shook his head. He didn't mean that he wouldn't give Yakon any money, just that he had none with him right then. He was about to speak to explain this when Yakon lifted him off the floor by his hair and flung him to the ground. Yakon's powerful hands seized his throat and started to squeeze. His eyes were filled with a demented fury. Fion was certain he was going to die, and suddenly he understood that he urgently wanted to live. He twisted underneath the larger man, trying to reach the dagger he kept in his boots, the only valuables he possessed, a present from a rich merchant from Cappor who had taken a fancy to him a couple of years ago. His instincts were to fight in silence, to save his breath, but he wasn't able to stop himself pleading for his life. “Please, Yakon, stop, please, let me go, Yaki, I'll give you money, I promise.” But all the while, as if of its own accord, his hand was frantically searching for his knife. His vision was just starting to go completely black when his hand grasped the hilt. He drew it out of his boot. With the last spark of his consciousness, he thrust it deep into the Yarsfelder's back. It glanced off a rib. Yakon roared with anger and pain and reared back. His hands left Fion's neck. Fion writhed and flexed again, desperate, trying to get out from under the huge body of the other man. But he couldn't. So he pushed the dagger up into Yakon's gut and twisted, not intending to kill. So he told himself afterwards. Yet he knew that some part of his soul had intended Yakon’s death. Only afterwards did he come to see that he had changed himself with this deed, with this intent, and that he would never be the same again.

Yakon gave a great grunt, the groan of an ox, and fell to one side. Fion thrust again, up into the heart, as one of his clients had once explained to him how to do, and then again, fear and anger and loathing making him mad.

When it was done, he fell back onto the pallet, panting, his eyes closed but visions that he knew he would never forget running again and again across the inside of his eyelids. For a few minutes, no more, he blacked out. When he came to, he was lying on one side of the pallet. There was blood all over his smock, and down one leg of his leggings. Yakon was lying completely still, on the floor, in a pool of blood. Fion scrambled to his feet and tested the door. Yakon had locked it. Good. Then he realized that there was so much blood that if there was any gap between the floorboards, the patrons in the public room below would soon know what had happened here. For a moment, he considered with some grim amusement that they might think it was his blood. But either way, they would certainly in the end come to find out what had happened. As these thoughts rose in his mind, he heard the tramp of footsteps, and the creak of floorboards along the corridor, and still dizzy and sick, but now filled with a mortal terror, he threw open the casement and slipped out through the window onto the roof of the stables below.

<<Chapter 2

Chapter 4>>

© 2009 Nigel Puerasch. All rights reserved.
Romantic m2m novels and short stories