“You shall not see them again. And what you will become… it will be a mercy for them. Their memories will be of a man. You are dead to them, as you are to us all.”
“But…”
“No more.” She shook her head. Her eyes cleared, brown and white bleeding into the iridescent colours. Within seconds they viewed Marius with normal light, and terror.
“I have seen the devil,” she breathed, and he was scared more by the way she shrank away from him than by anything he had experienced since he ascended the path to the hovel. “I have seen the ruin of the world.” She extended a shaking finger towards the hole through which he had entered. “Leave. Leave me be.”
Marius leaned forward, trying to pin her eyes with his own. She slid away, scuttling back into the darkness and raising her hands to cover her face.
“What?” he cried. “What was it? Please, what will I do? What did you see?” He reached out a hand towards her, but she screamed a little girl’s scream and batted him away with outstretched claws. He fell back, clutching at where she had caught his wrist. Blood seeped between his fingers, turning sticky beneath his touch as it reached the air. Marius stared down at it. There should not be a flow, could not be.
For a moment he almost screamed as well.
Then he lurched to his feet and stumbled backwards towards the entrance. Eyes still fixed upon the screaming witch he leaned down, and reached to where he had placed his neatly folded clothes. His fingers closed on air. Marius swept his hand across the floor, but all his despairing fingertips met was dirt. He tore his eyes from the crone and looked down. Nothing. He slung his gaze further, slapping the floor in disbelief. His clothes were gone: his cape; his breeches; his jerkin; the multitude of coins he had hidden amongst them; everything gone, as if they had never been, stranding him naked in this hole in the ground with a terrified old woman.
“Where are they?” He turned back to her, but the old woman had disappeared as completely as his clothes. Marius leaped across the hut. Then he saw it – a flap, half the size of a normal door, tucked behind a mound of mouldering cow hides. Marius dove over the hides, sliding face first through the open door and onto the rough ground beyond. He scrambled to his feet, and looked about him.
The hillside was empty. No matter which way he turned, only the copse of trees surrounded him. No evidence of human passage greeted his sight. Marius stepped back, and surveyed the witch’s hovel. Well, he thought; that explained the magical transformation. From this side, he could see it was just a normal village hut, built onto the rear of a tree of massive girth. The sheer weight of scrub surrounding the tree’s base hid it from casual view, but from this side, it was clear. Strangely, Marius found it a comfort – another instance of “magic” that turned out to be nothing more than sleight of hand and need for money. All of a sudden, free of the oppressive atmosphere inside and the heady mixture of lust and fear, he could slot the old woman into his pantheon of con artists. The normal world reasserted itself around him. He re-entered the hut, and gathered the uppermost cow hide around him like a blanket. Apparently, curing was a skill that had not yet made it to the Dog Crap Archipelago. He, swiped a cloud of nipping fleas from his face, and fought his way round to the front of the tree. Then, methodically, and with great care, he kicked the hovel’s camouflaging until it was no more than broken twigs underfoot, exposing the hole cut into the hut’s wall. With any luck, it would rain before the old bitch could repair the damage.
His task accomplished, Marius strode with as much dignity as he could manage back down the hillside and into the village. No villagers lingered outside as he passed. No smiles greeted him, waiting for a reaction from the foreign visitor. Marius frowned. He had heard about this sort of island’s funeral ceremonies. They went on for ages, each new round of gorging followed by another, the feast broken only by pauses to drink whatever noxious alcoholic brew the islanders had managed to ferment from their fruit. Women would dance between courses, men would fight; there would be some sort of manhood ritual involving beds of coal and people’s feet. If you were lucky enough to find yourself on the right sort of island, the chances of bedding a nubile, intoxicated virgin girl got higher with every course you survived. At the very least, these things tended to rumble on for three or four days, until everyone was either too sick, too tired, or too shocked at finding themselves married to a teenage girl whose name they could barely remember to continue. The village should be a repository for drunks, asleep in whatever corner they crawled to before consciousness deserted them. The sounds of coupling should echo from within huts. The words of filthy sailor songs about the King, the Lord of The Stool and a randomly agreed upon number of foreign princesses ought to ring out. There should be impromptu wrestling matches. Weird, foreign islander chants should weave through the night. Drinking, carousing, vomiting, fucking, fighting and eating – where was it all? Not a sound greeted Marius. There was only the wind blowing against the thatches of the huts as he passed. The village was silent, deserted. Something was very, very wrong.
Marius wound his way towards the long cane tables. They stood empty, the platters of fruit and meat tipped over and lying forgotten on the sand. In the space between them, the King’s funeral pyre had burnt down to a mound of glowing coals. Marius stared at it, spotting blackened and shrivelled bones amongst the embers. No chance of shanghaiing a monarch there. He grimaced, and looked beyond the fire to the water’s edge.
The natives stood along the shoreline, staring out into the wide ocean. Marius gazed along the rows of immobile strangers. Where were the sailors? He couldn’t see a single one amongst the multitude – no Captain Bomthe, no Master Spone, not even young Figgis stood amid the press of bodies. Marius took one involuntary step forward, then another. At the rear of the crowd, a child glanced his way and then shouted. As one, the natives followed the child’s pointing arm. Marius stopped, ready to turn on his heel and run as best he could towards the forest. Perhaps, if he were lucky, he could live out the rest of his days as a cow, hidden amongst the roaming herds. But the villagers made no move towards him. They simply stared, emotionless, as he approached step by hesitant step.
The crowd was slightly thicker just down the beach from where he stood. Now it parted, and in the flickering fire light, Marius could make out the new king, surrounded by those who would spend the first days of his reign jockeying for the key advisory positions within what passed for his court. They were standing over a dark lump on the sand. The islanders stared impassively at Marius, then, as one, turned towards it. Marius drew up to the outer edge of the crowd, and glanced down at the child who had raised the alarm. The child stared back at him, no fear on his face at the sight of Marius’ dead features. Marius raised his face towards the king. He stood, as expressionless as those around him, his feet planted firmly at either side of the lump’s apex. Marius glanced down at it, and sighed.
“Oh, crap.”
The witch lay face down, one arm emerging from her filthy robes. Two small rings glinted in her open palm, directly between the King’s legs. Her face, what Marius could see of it above the line of the sand, was contorted in terror, her one visible eye wide open and staring. Something small and wet lay next to her mouth. In a certain light, if one were thinking of it in the right way, it might have been mistaken for the end of someone’s tongue. Marius tore his gaze away from her face, and found the King staring directly at him.