Farlander

He rubbed his face to wake himself fully, then hunkered back against the wall.

He needed to get out of this place. He could barely breathe, in this airless, roiling stench. The blackness pressed down on him like a blanket of heavy velvet. He felt trapped, knowing that till morning he could not simply stand up and walk outside of his own volition, not even to see the sky, feel the fresh air upon his face. A memory that was more a recollection of sharp emotion came to him then: that time he had found the snare while walking in the hills overlooking their cottage – the tightened loop of wire holding the severed limb of a wild dog, flesh still hanging in shreds from the leg bone that had been chewed clean through.

A sound of shuffling feet in the darkness: someone approaching again. Nico tensed, ready to lash out.

I will tear off your flesh with my teeth, he thought, if you do not back away from me.

'Relax,' came a voice. 'I'm a friend.'

A man sat down next to him, the sound of his hands fumbling within his clothing.

A flame ignited in the darkness, at first too bright to look at. Nico squinted with a palm shielding his face. For a moment the flame sizzled and curled, as the blackened end of a cigarillo burned and glowed red. Then the man blew out the match, plunging them into a darkness even deeper than before.

'You know, I've been lying awake all night trying to figure how I recognize your face.' The red tip of the cigarillo smeared through the air and crackled into renewed brightness as the man inhaled, lighting up the extremities of his face while casting its hollows into shadow.

'Your father,' he said, exhaling. 'I used to know your father.'

Nico blinked, his eyes still swimming with spots of colour.

'Of course you did,' he said, sarcastically.

'Don't call me a liar, boy. You're his spitting image. Your father was married to a redhead by the name of Reese. A fine-looking woman, if I recall.'

Nico let his hand drop from his face, sheathing his anger for the moment. 'Yes, my mother,' Nico agreed. 'You truly knew him, then?'

'As well as any man. I fought with him under the walls for two years.'

'You were a Special?'

'Surely. Though it seems a lifetime ago now, thank the Fool. I make a living now, a small one, playing rash. Rest of the time, when I can't repay my debts, I'm obliged to linger here.' The man rubbed a hand across the stubble of his chin. 'And what of you? What brings you to this condition?'

Nico had no wish to get into the whole sorry affair. 'My healer said it would be good for my lungs, so I come down here from time to time.'

'Your father had wit, too,' the voice replied without the merest hint of humour. 'It was the one thing I liked about him.'

There was an edge to his voice as he said this. Nico heard it, and waited for him to say more. The tobacco smoke curled about his face for a moment, the scent pleasant here in this foul place. It reminded him of nights sitting around a campfire in some park or empty building, with Lena and the others he had come to know while without home or shelter, Nico cracking jokes and watching the bottles of cheap wine and the tarweed roll-ups pass freely between them, their laughter raw, while the warm circle of light held at bay the hard day that was inevitably to come.

'We didn't see eye-to-eye on occasion,' the man continued in his sour drawl. 'He accused me once of cheating at rash. Though he couldn't leave it be at that, of course. Had to go and catch me out in front of the whole squad. Cost me a lot of money, did your father. I got the man back, though.'

A cough followed that might equally have been dry laughter.

'To be honest with you I wasn't hardly surprised when he lit out on us, and deserted like he did. The last time I saw those scared eyes of his, I knew what he was thinking. Clear as day I saw it.'

Nico's jaw clenched tight. His nostrils flared. He took a breath and said, coolly, 'My father was no coward.'

Again that cough. 'I don't mean anything by it. Everyone's a coward when it comes down to it, save for the crazy ones. Some are just more scared than others, is all I'm saying.'

Nico's breathing was now loud enough to be heard above the snoring of the other men.

'Easy now, it's only talk, and talk's not worth a damn. Here, have a draw.'

Nico ignored the burning end of the cigarillo held before his face.

He thought of his father instead: a tall, straight-backed figure in his memory, long-haired and kind of eyes, and his words softly spoken. The same man laughing wildly, with a pitcher of ale in his hand, while grabbing his mother by the waist to dance with her, or snatching up his jitar to pluck them some poorly composed song. A hike the two of them had made together in the lonely hills. A sunny Foolsday when he had taken Nico to some beach so that he himself could gaze out to sea while Nico played down by the shore line.

Nico had been ten when his father enlisted with the Specials. The enemy was pushing harder than ever before, it was explained. Every day some new Mannian tunnel was encountered, or the Mannians themselves broke through into the underground works of the defenders. The Specials were taking heavy losses, and they needed volunteers.

For a month at a time his father would go off to the city and fight beneath the walls of the Shield, then come home a slightly different man. With every return he seemed quieter, and less handsome in appearance.

On one visit home he had lost a whole ear, so that only an orifice remained on that side of his head. Yet Reese still embraced him and whispered soft words in his damaged ear loud enough for Nico to overhear, telling his father how relieved she was to see him still alive. Another time, his father arrived at the door with a bandage wrapped all around his head. When he took it off some days later, it looked as though his remaining ear had been chewed by a dog. Over time his eyebrows faded to nothing. His long hair became stubble. Scars criss-crossed his scalp, face and lips. He began to hunch his once broad shoulders as though he was permanently cold.

Nico's mother would try to hide her horror at these changes in the man that she loved, but often some unguarded expression would betray her.

When his father had finally returned for his first prolonged leave of absence from the Shield, Nico barely recognized the man who eyed his son as though looking at a stranger, and sat by himself out in the rain, and never smiled, and seldom spoke, and drank heavily. An atmosphere developed inside the cottage. His father would shout over the smallest of annoyances, till Nico grew tense and ever-expectant of trouble.

He took to going outside more with Boon, the two of them wandering the forest and the land around their cottage. When the weather was bad, Nico would stay in his room, with the door shut, and recount in his mind the stories that he knew, or recall The Tales of the Fish he had seen in his visits to the city, thus passing the time in idle fantasy.

One night, his father drank himself into a rage so consuming that he attacked Nico's mother, dragging her around the room by the hair while Nico yelled and begged for him to stop. He struck out at Nico and knocked him to the floor. Then, just as suddenly, stopped, blinking down at his son's shocked expression, before he stumbled out into the night.

Returning the next morning, his father packed his personal things and left, while Nico and his mother still slept huddled together in his small bed. Nico felt as though his world had given way beneath his feet. His mother had cried for a long time after that.

Nico now clenched his fists in the close darkness of the cell, and sighed. 'He had his reasons for leaving,' he said to the unseen man.