How do you think you know anything about me, sir?” I growled…
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“Mi name’s Ellis.” Been a cottar here for I don reckon how long. Longer than ye’ been alive and some. I seen more commanders come an go from ‘ere than I can number on all mi fingers an toes. I’se here when Baldwin and his people past through goin out east.”
My father. The meagre room we were in, already small, seemed to press in and squeeze the air out of me. I could feel blood pounding in my temples. After all these years, to hear his name spoken aloud. By an old man who had materialized out of the dark and asked to speak with me. What is happening?
“Sir, I have just been at table with the fort commandant and my own superiors. There are none in this outpost who were present when the embassy…when my father came through here. I heard from his own mouth that everyone serving then was rotated out.” I said. Had I heard the commandant truly? Had I perhaps misunderstood his words in my drunkeness?
“Almost everyone were changed out. Everyone ‘cept me. But none takes notice of one such as I. I’m no imperial. Just like you aint neither.” he said.
“I AM an imperial citizen.” I said forcefully, furious that even in this ruin they called a ‘fort’ at the edge of the damned world my origins were still being called into question by anyone who chose to do so. I stood up and walked over to the great thick wooden door and began heaving it open.
“Be at peace, sirrah. I meant no offense. Please stay.” and those last two words the old man spoke in such a sad and wretched voice that I turned around and glared at him.
“I have given up my life to be here, been on the road with those vile men for months on end. I will not have my loyalties called into question, old man!” I snapped.
“Peace, sirrah please! No need for a cholor so late at night. I just meant ye wasn’t born to the Empire. Ye’ come from without. We’re at the ass end of it here as is. ‘Tis no slur to be an outsider here. I meant no offense.”
“How do you think you know anything about me, sir?” I growled.
“Well for one, them imperials have that funny way o’ talkin, never speakin straight, always trying to game each other to get somethin’ they want. That way of talkin’ didnt come natural to yer father, and it dont come natural to you. I’m just a bondsman, but I know’d a knavish heart when I meet one, and yours aint that. Us common folk can’t afford to be so slippery, can we? Now quit lettin the heat out and have a seat an I tell ye’ about yer father.” he said. Baldwin. What does he know of Baldin? I starred out into the wet darkness of the bailey.
It took the use of both my hands and putting my entire weight into it to pull the great door shut again. The old man had done this with one arm earlier. I continued standing.
“Now what’s ‘is about not having enough food for you folk? Who told you that?” he asked.
“Those are the words of the garrison commander himself, it caused some unpleasantness between our people and his at dinner tonight. We can’t bring twenty five men and horses into the wastes and expect them to survive from eating moss.” I said, trying to imitate the Polemarch’s authoritative tone.
“Eatin’ moss! Horeshite. Ye’ must have been drunk at table, we ‘ave months of spare food in the larder. We always ‘ave more than we can use, ‘ardly anyone ever comes out ‘ere.” he said, puzzled.
“Our leader threatened to take what we need by force from your supplies.” I said, thinking back on the knife the Polemarch had jabbed into the banquet table, the flash in his eyes that, even in my booze addled memory, had seemed to carry an evil promise.
“Your man… threatened the commandant?” Ellis said. I starred at him for a while, for only on hearing him say it out loud did I realize how mad the whole thing had been. The Polemarch had threatened him. What did it mean? I wondered as Ellis got up and refilled his cup with more of the green stuff. He looked out of a small thatched window into the dark.
“Why on earth would ‘e do that?” Ellis asked, and he seememd to be asking of the walls of his house as much as of me.
“It was a most… unpleasant dinner,” I said.
“But why?” he asked once more.
“Our mission has a charter from the empire guaranteeing supplies and–”
“Not you lot, sirrah. I meant why would our commandant not just offer you lads what y’ need?” He snapped at me without turning around.
“Perhaps you can tell me, sir”
“Strange goings on about here of late. He did the same thing with the first group of ‘em” he muttered.
“The first group of who? Do you mean Bald…the embassy?” I asked, my anger shading into confusion.
“No lad. The first rescue mission that come through lookin for em I meant.’” he said.
“Wh…who came through looking for the embassy to the east?” I asked slowly.
“They sent a rescue mission through here to go out after ‘em, must have been twelve, no… thirteen months ago, I reckon? Nice group o’ lads. Nicer than your lot, by the sound of it.” he grumbled.
“Firstly, your commander refused us the food he had already been instructed to deliver. Secondly, there was no…we are the only rescue mission that has been sent to find the embassy.” I said. Baldwin. Damn him, I came here to ask him about Baldwin, his words writhe about from thing to thing like an eel.
Ellis shrugged, a strange gesture to see on one so old. “I mended the shoes of a couple of their ‘orses miself’ fore they set out, sirrah. They crossed the river and headed due east” he said, waving his hand in the direction of the motte, the river and the wastes beyond.
“There was no other rescue mission.” I repeated.
“They needed extra supplies too, and I gathered up what their quartermaster ask’d for. I even give em a box o’ salted fish I was savin’ for a special occasion. Figured they’d have more need of it than us here. Night a’fore they left, the commandant comes to me and tells me to put it all of it back in the larder. Says they was just goin to forage off of the land. Eat birds and moss and such. Bloody nonsense! But it’s not mi place to argue with the commandant so I put it all back. They was only allowed some extra oats for their horses, and naught else. Shame they didn’t take the salt fish at least. Would ‘ave been a balm for them for disappearing into thin air out there, just like yer father and them other folk before ‘em” he said.
Ellis was old, and unlettered, but the way he spoke about these many goings on, though he rambled, was not in the fashion of a dotard whose head had gone to mush. He remembered too many things too clearly, though it seemed out of joint in his telling.
“ Wait. Where…where did this other rescue mission come from?” I asked him.
“From out west o’ course, just like you lot did. About… ten men I think they were? They had some big bit o parchment covered in seals, showed it to the commander and asked for his ‘elp.” he said.
“It’s not…not possible. Ours is the first, the only rescue mission” I said slowly. I was trying to gain some purchase of reason amidst all of this, but this talk of a previous rescue pricked at something in me. We were the only ones who had ever been sent out from the capitol. Our charter said as much, I have read it myself. Baldwin and the others had been gone for over three years now. Yet why had it taken so long to organize a rescue mission? Three years with nothing, no word sent back, no messages, no sign of anything. Three years while the empire just…sat on its hands. Perhaps they had done something? Had they sent a mission before ours?
“If…if they had dispatched some group already to try and rescue the embassy, why would they not have told anyone?”
“Ye are a lad of the cities, aint you? Booksmart. But none too wise. What’s worse? Losin’ a group o men? Or losin’ a group o men an then losing the group o men you send out ter find the first bunch o men, hmm?” he said and whatever mirth had been in his face was gone now.
I thought back to when I had petitioned the Margrave at the court to join the expedition. When I’d mentioned I was Baldwin’s son…the whole court had taken up whispering and murmuring. Had I misunderstood why? Was the shadow of the embassy’s failure perhaps larger than I realized? I am being led astray somehow. Baldwin. How did he come to meet Baldwin? I needed to stay focused on Baldwin.
“Please sir. You mentioned you met my father. What…what did he look like?” I asked. Though we were in a small thatched hovel, my mind reeled as though I was standing in the middle of a street in the capital on market day, the sounds of wagons and horses and passerby drowning out my own inner thoughts. Ellis’s face screwed up and deflated in concentration and his desiccated fingers curled up into his palms like atrophied claws on the table in front of me. As though the memory he was looking for required him to pull all the vital humors from elsewhere within his body. I took another sip of the liquid and realized that it had returned me to sobriety. How did I come to be in this little hovel? I wondered.
His eyes, I couldn’t tell their color, flashed wide open at last. “He were tall and thin, dun-haired, an missin the last bit o’ the ring finger on his left hand. That true up with ‘im?” he asked as he leaned towards the fire and rubbed his leathery hands for warmth. His face was drawn, as though recalling this took some special vitality from him.
I sat back in the chair. It was Baldwin he spoke of. Two men with the same appearance and the same missing digit on the same hand could simply not have passed through this jerkwater place. In the capital, or even some of the larger cities, mistaking one person for another was common. There were scores of men there who looked something like him… until you noticed the missing digit. And here, at the edge of the world, where only a tiny handful of men come when they are assigned some dolorous task…the odds were nil.
He does know my father.
“At… at dinner…” I stammered “they said all the garrison who were here when the embassy passed through had been switched out, after they realized…” I trailed off.
“In their heads sirrah, all the persons was switched out. Imperials don’t rate an old cottar like me for nothin’ Half the commanders I worked for never even bothered to learn mi name…why just last the other week….”
Ellis was, in his telling, the sole true resident of Fort Vaid. Something like a caretaker. It was he who patched the holes on the keep with peat each rainy season. He who sharpened and re-set the stakes of the bailey walls when they inevitably wore down from the elements and needed tending. He who had bred and raised the fowl we had eaten for dinner that very night.
In every village our caravan had passed through as we’d made our way out towards the frontiers, each one, I’d observed, had a man or two like Ellis about. A commoner of no account, from nowhere in particular. A man who does the vulgar tasks that are beneath the lowest imperial drudge. The sort who disappears from others’ regard most of the time. One rated so lowly that none even care what he sees and hears.
Baldwin, Ellis told me, had approached him one night when the embassy had passed through Vaid, and asked him to repair a wheel on his carriage. My father had struck up a conversation with him, which no person of any imperial status had ever done before, other than to yell orders at him.
“Yer father was well dressed and carried himself proud. But he were also the first man to ever ask mi opinion on anything that I can recall. And not to amuse himself mind, but to really want to know it” he said. That was Baldwin. In the dogana I had often seen him chattering away with even the lowest of the stevedores, as though men with bent backs and callused hands were his closest companions.
“What did he ask?” I asked.
“He wanted to know what I thought of the savages, seeing as I’de spent so much time out in these parts” he said.
“What did you tell him?” I asked. I was like an awe struck child in the midst of a bed story who can only keep asking ‘and then?’ Each word Ellis now said was like fresh air breathed into my mouth. Something I long thought submerged and hopeless was coming back to me, one gasp at a time. Could it be that Baldwin lived? Not in some hopeful fancy, but truthfully? Could it be that I might see and speak to him once more? I could hear my own breathing grow ragged in the small cottage.
“I told him the truth sirrah” Ellis continued. “The savages was ‘ere long before this fort. They was here before the empire itself, most like. They got no eye for money or power or such.” and here Ellis lowered his voice so low that I had to lean over the table towards him to hear properly. “The savages don’t care nothin for power or schemes. They belong to the old gods, which they still follow, an which they guard. Jealously.” he whispered as his eyes bored into mine.
“The savages are no concern of ours. We aren’t imperial proselytizers come to convert heathens” I said, thinking suddenly of the priceless aspergillium I found under the imperial chappel and which was secured safely in the supply carriage.
“we just want to–”
“Rescue yer pa, sirrah, I knowd why yer ‘ere, and good on you for wanting to save him. A boy should want to look after his pa. But answer me this: if ye was a savage, how would it look when ye learn there’s imperial soldiers tramping through your home to help with this so-called ‘rescue’ hmmm?” He asked as he took another drink of the green stuff.
“What concern is it of theirs? They can have their hovels and their dungpies for all we care” I said. The old gods. I hadn’t thought of them for so long now. Not since back in Grell across the sea…
“Men in fine clothes passing through to try and make their silver out east is a fools errand, and I told yer father as much. The savages knowd and respect them that’s on pilgrimages, even if it’s only to worship the gods o’ silver an rubies. I told yer father him and his people should have safe conduct, more or less. Sometimes they even trade with imperials if there’s something they fancy.” and here he indicated the cups full of the wondrous green elixir we drank. Traded it for a handful of corn, had he said? strange. He continued.
“But soldiers with swords and spears and what all aint exactly ‘ere to buy and sell, is they? That commander and his lads yer followin is bound to raise their ‘ackles.” he said, hocking a great gob of spit into the hovels fireplace.
“What could legions of savages have to fear from a few soldiers eating beans in their midst?” I asked.
This man might have consorted with Baldwin, and he seemed to have a prodigious memory, but that was the only thing to mark about him, I reminded myself. Ellis was still only a provincial. I doubt he had ever set foot inside anything as large as a proper town. I had met enough uncouth sailor folk in the Dogana to know: unlettered men like this always think they possess some secret insight into the workings of the world that their betters do not.
“I don’t mean that lot o troops that’s with you now, but all the ones comin’ in behind ‘em. The savages aint goin to think its only yer little band. And they’ll reckon the ones who come after yours won’t be on ‘missions o’ mercy’ when they arrive with whole platoons for seigin their villages” he said. Ellis had spoken hope into my heart, the first I had felt in many months about Baldwin’s fate. But now his rambling was taking us into some sad, suspicious musing of his; dark imaginings from a darkened mind.
“Please sir, these are… ideas out of some fancy. The eastern frontier hasn’t moved in eons. The truces have been honored for as long as any record will show. This is it.” I said, pointing down at the floor of his cottage, and the ground below it, slowly being licked to death by the river at the end of the world. We literally sat within the fort that demarked the settled limit of the empire. Don’t drown me in your ramblings now, old man.
Ellis smiled his wizened old face at me again and shook his head. “Yer a clever lad, I’ll grant you that sirrah, but that’s all just bunk for folks back in the cities. What use are treaties and agreements when legions of men with iron swords and pikes show up, eh?” he asked. I had no response to that. Ellis continued,
“Baldwin told me he had a lad, was raised out past some great ocean in the west, beyond the empire. I might be a simple man, but I’ve seen the commandant’s maps, I know’d the shape o’ the world. It’s different out where your from, where yer people is from. The old gods might have gone to ground in the empire, but you was raised ‘round the old faith” he said, leaning in close so that his face was almost next to my ear. “Just as I was.” he whispered.
He pulled back and reached deep into his swaddling cloak and dug out a thin chain with something dangling from it. A necklace. He pulled it over his head, kissed the dangling thing, which glinted faintly in the fire light, and held it out to me. I grasped it and moved over to the little fire to see it better.
It was a trifle. A length of burnished copper wire. The kind you might find at any blacksmith’s forge. It was wrapped over and over about itself, and bent into a shape I recalled now but dimly. The last time I had seen such a thing was…it must have been twenty years ago… when I was a boy in Grell, across the sea. A memory flickered through my mind. A night when the sky itself had been blood red. My mother had been chanting something, an old prayer, I think. What had she been praying for?
Ellis suddenly let out a great round of coughs, and hacked up a long chain of phlegm which he spit with expert precision into the fire as I looked at the odd shape. He was bent over somewhat in his chair, a faint wheezing coming from him at each breath.
“I’ve worn mi self out with all this chatter. Best ye’ be off ter bed. I’m no more use tonight.” he said. I got up and left then and I could not recall what our parting words had been for the sight of the copper recalled something in me, some shard of my childhood that appeared to me at times always dimly. I chased it down in my head as my feet made their own way back to the outyard where the supply wagon was and I got into my tent and laid down to sleep as my mind’s feet still wandered about in my head, seeking an old recollection, long-foreclosed. It was…something I had learned…in school…was it?
Alister’s journey continues here
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