“Shit!” Marius threw himself off the track just as the cart began to climb towards his position. His headlong dive took him into the nearby brush. He landed face first in a stickleprick bush.
“Fuck!” He careened backwards, pulling stickers from his face and hands and flinging them away. His heel struck an exposed root and he tumbled back onto the track and across it in a mess of flailing arms and legs. His head struck the massive rock on the other side and he pitched forward, landing face first on the sandy track. He lay that way for perhaps half a minute, waiting for his eyes to catch up with the rest of him, then rolled over, expelling a spray of spit and sand into the air, and found himself staring into the barely-interested face of an underfed, aged mule. Marius scrambled out from under the animal’s gaze and stood, eyes darting to either side of the track in the search for the best escape route. When no sound was forthcoming from the mule he stopped panicking and let his gaze settle on the driver of the cart the beast was pulling.
Marius was no great judge of age, but something that old should either be buried or a tree. Marius had once spent a torturous month impersonating the chief eunuch to the Caliphate of Taran’s second best harem, in a fruitless attempt to discover the location of the Caliphate’s second best buried treasure. In Taran they bred a special type of dog whose face, if it could be described as such, was nothing more than a mass of folds and wrinkles. The more wrinkles the dog possessed, the more highly it was prized. Marius had seen dogs that resembled mobile scrotums, pressed to the bosoms of cooing concubines as if the most precious possession on Earth, while his own scrotum sat alone, underappreciated and never once held to the bosom of anybody. But even the most scrotal of puppies would retreat to the nearest concubine’s cleavage in defeat when faced with the almost supernatural collection of wrinkles that stared at Marius now. The driver of the cart looked like a relief map of the Broken Lands after a major land battle had taken place. He crouched in his seat like a blind man’s drawing of a spider, a straw hat that looked like it might be hereditary crammed onto his head; arms and legs like knotted string poking out of a vague assemblage of clothing as if they’d been leant against them and forgotten. He stared at Marius, and Marius had the uneasy feeling that the old man had died of fright, and someone had better tell him before he forgot and drove off. He slowly raised a hand, and bent his fingers in a wave.
“Hello,” he said, praying the old man wouldn’t spook and drive over him. He was in luck. After an extended pause, in which Marius could imagine his single word searching across the wrinkled phizog in an attempt to distinguish his ear from the rest of him, the old man leant over to a lamp that hung from a pole at the side of the cart. He tilted it so the light swung directly into Marius’ face. Marius smiled, and waved again.
It is entirely possible that the descendants of the old cart driver still tell stories of the night he met Marius. Blinded as he was by the sudden flash of light, Marius didn’t see him leave the cart, but he did feel the breeze as he passed, moving across him at an angle towards the bushes at the track’s edge.
“Hey, watch out for the stickle…” But it was too late. The old man cleaved the stickleprick bush without stopping, stick arms waving like a pair of spindly black machetes, cutting a path through the bushes at a pace that would have impressed a charging elephant. Marius watched him disappear into the gloom of the forest. Within moments the man was out of sight, but the sound of breaking vegetation continued for several minutes. Marius listened to the crashes of destruction fade into the distance, then turned back to the mule. They stared at each other. Marius’ gaze slipped down to the sand at his feet. No footprints spoiled the ground between the cart and the forest.
“Well,” he said. “What do you make of that?”
The mule snorted, although whether in agreement or disdain, Marius couldn’t tell. As there seemed no chance of consensus, he glanced back down the track, then down the path the old man had taken, then back at the mule.
“Can’t leave you here, I guess,” he said. He climbed onto the cart and twitched the reins. “I doubt I need to rest my legs, either, but let’s not take the chance, hey?” He pulled on the reins, and slowly, with great reluctance, the mule wheeled about and began to pull the cart back down the track. Marius leaned back, and glanced at the seat beside him.
“Hey, what do you know?” he said, “The old chap left his hat behind.” He placed it on his head, twitched the reins once more for emphasis, and let his new pet figure out the rest for itself.
For the first time since his travails had begun, Marius relaxed. The mule plodded onwards like a surly automaton, one step after another without a single change of pace or demeanour, the rise and fall of its haunches hypnotic in the gently swaying light of the lantern. Marius quickly fell into the rhythm of the journey, letting his body swing along with the back-and-forth motion of the cart. Now he understood the old man’s posture – faced with the endless tiny adjustments necessary to maintain balance, his body quickly admitted defeat and slumped into the shape of least resistance. Without the presence of another person to remind him, Marius quickly forgot about the stickers poking into his face. It was only when he reached up to adjust his hat, to stop the incessant rain falling into his eyes, that he brushed against them and remembered to pull them out. He stared at the first of them, and frowned. He had felt nothing as he pulled it out, not even the slight tug as it loosed its hold upon his skin. Yet he remembered the pain of falling into the bush, and how much his head had rung in the moments after he struck the rock. Gerd had been adamant that the dead were beyond such mortal sensations, but Marius was not so removed from humanity that he could dismiss the things he had so recently felt. Something was not right. Some vital information was missing, some essential truth had been mislaid, or neglected. Marius had seen his reflection. It was not that of a living man. And yet he did not feel dead, which begged the question: was he alone in this, or was this deadening of skin and soul simply something that the dead were persuaded into believing, because nobody had the strength of purpose or character to deny the common belief? Or was it Gerd who did not feel things simply because he was Gerd? And if so… Marius stared at the prickle as if he might find the truth written upon it, like the foreign conjurers in the markets who claimed to write your name on a grain of rice. As if you’d even be able to read it if they did, Marius snorted, and flicked the prickle out of the cart. No, something was not right. Perhaps a few more hours of pondering while the mule strode gently onwards would reveal the missing link. What the heck, it was as good a plan as any.
The mule, unaware of how good the plan was, chose that moment to stop. Marius blinked, then did so again when he saw the shaft of an arrow sticking out of the beast’s neck. He stared stupidly at it for a moment, long enough for something to whizz out of the nearby brushes and thud into his chest. Marius rocked back in his seat, staring down at a matching shaft that now protruded from his torso.