Svarog: Chapter One, Part One

By Jaz McDougall

Counting his two surviving arrows, Torg hushed his breathing and cursed his luck. The temple in ruins, the battle won, and still he fought for his life in the dungeons beneath.
Still, he'd done his duty, won his honour, and if he could survive to enjoy it, his freedom. Were it not for his quivering knees, the crumbling stone ledge beneath, and the unhinged bent of the slavering enemies below, Torg would be happily counting his blessings: Two arrows, two foes, and beyond them, the way out. The fires, the beach, the longships, the sea, and then home to Ranheim, and hopefully not so much as a dark cloud along the way.
Staring down at these two, Torg recalled their savage brothers and sisters on the beach landing that morning. Bloody, desperate fighters they were, pitching every filed tooth and ragged nail against the Ranr steel. To a warrior in full dress, only a little more dangerous than any other rabble. For Torg, in light armour, having lost his knife in somebody's eye, tired after a long night's wait and a day's sleek assassination, he knew his life depended on using his last two arrows wisely. Failing that, he'd have to hope they choked on his still-warm bones.
He drew the first arrow. Nocked it. Pulled it taught, held it steady. Reared the eager arrow, lined up with the exposed neck. Just as he began to relax his grip on the bowstring, he glimpsed the belt of throwing knives strapped to the exposed thighs of the cultists. For a moment he teetered on the brink of action, the eager vision of fleeing shafts straining at his nervous system.
With an errant twitch, his hand let go, the arrow fired, and his heart lurched with the error. He cursed aloud. The arrow stuck the older, stockier cultist through his bicep. A grunt hefted from his slack jaw as he craned his neck to inspect the sharp splintering in his arm.
The other didn't puzzle over the red shaft protruding from his fellow. He spun instead, slaver hanging on the lower edge of his wooden mask, and cast his eyes about the ceiling of the chamber. Torg's only hope lay in sending another to him before the other got up. Perhaps lightning would strike them, he urged in flippant prayer.
Just then, Torg's ledge gave way, and he leapt at the wounded fiend, hoping to arm himself with a filched knife. As Torg leapt, the standing one threw his blade at the ceiling with killing force, and it didn't come down again. Torg landed roughly, but on one foot, at least, the other knee grazing badly.
His sights fell on the pierced cultist. He leapt from his haunches, knocking him to the ground in a whorl of teeth and knees and nails. His right fist smashed the throat; the other went to the thigh belt, the knife grip, and he pulled it free, raised it high, stabbed it down.
From nowhere, pain soaked into his shoulder; the Ranr's gold hair dusted suddenly with scarlet. He rolled over the fallen one, pawing at the standing cultist, but it was too late; a blade stuck into his side, missing ribs, puncturing something that felt hot and sent nausea to work in his belly. Something vital.
The cultist was calm, and paced beyond the field of Torg's vision. He gripped the hilt in his side. Through the knife's blade, he felt the gentle pressure of his fingers like a storm of glass in his stomach. He closed his eyes, pulled it free. It didn't hurt.
His head felt light. His heart felt slow. With white encroaching on his vision, he stood gingerly and backed into a corner, blades held wide.
The cultist, grinning mask hiding his true smirk, stood slowly now, without urgency. He had been eating his wounded friend. Summoning his will, giddy with endorphins and pride, Torg kicked dust at them, and charged, throwing both knives.
His legs gave way. His vision quaked all the way to the ground. The fall was long, like falling from horseback at a gallop. He knew a red pool was escaping him now, fleeing in every direction, every drop a second, a minute, a year. The pain had long since been replaced by sweet nausea and bitter defeat. His vision blacked for a second, and when he came to, his head had lurched over. Hot blood and coarse sand had covered his face.
He looked to the heavy exit door, which blew open, the six-inch hinges rattling in the stone, three inch oak shuddering.
"What a foul wind," He said, or may have said, or thought he said.
He blacked out again.
Here is the wind to take me home, he thought. My Valkyr. Surely I have fought bravely enough. Surely the gods will not mistake my skulking mission for cowardice.
Then, with a flash of white, she was there; chilling in her beauty, hair white as snow, and yet younger than he, in body. Her armour gleamed in the sun, uplifting poetry after his final dirge. Blue tattoo marking her left cheek, a scar across her right. She bent to him, and took his hand, said something.
Blackness. Fire. A ring opening, fire in the black, a ring of burning pitch, igniting and expanding. In the centre was blue, and white; fish, mermaids, warm orange lights, purple boats, a man talking on a cell phone, a hall of warriors, warriors drinking and singing...

"Wake up."
The Valkyr was back, except now her armour didn't gleam. Now Torg saw the grime on her neck, the blood on her armour, the dryness of her thin lips.
Torg lay propped in the corner where he had fell, and a flaming brand lay glaring beside him.
"I burnt your wound." She gestured to the lump in the sand. "A kidney. Can you walk?"
"I... I don't know. Where are the other two, the natives?"
She let him glance around the room. Both lay straight and flat in their own pools of blood, arranged with arms crossed on their chests, unmasked, a coin on each eye. Their faces were hideously mutilated, noses and ears and cheeks all carved to putrescence.
"You aren't hurt?"
"No," She breathed, distractedly.
He looked again at the younger cultist. Where the hands crossed at the heart, there seemed to be a gash there. Besides his own, it was the only wound on the body. One strike.
"You're her, aren't you? Aeron. The Thane's Champion."
"Yes. I'm honoured you know me." She held out her hand. "You're one of the scouts. Torg."
"Aye! Mead of my bones, the honour is mine!"
"You're free, then. Your Jarl is dead, and you fought well in the temple. Not one of their chieftains saw the sun rise."
"Ah," He began, fearful now that his moment of glory would be tarnished by truth. "Well, one did. He was ready for me, and fled."
Aeron looked him up and down, and then reached to his pack straps and hauled him to his feet. Her strength surprised him; his legs didn't touch the ground till she put them there. He should have expected as much, from one so tall, with a shadow so long. She spoke.
"He shall not see the moon, then."

To be continued...

©2009 Jaz McDougall

Diurnal

By Jaz McDougall

On the corner, by the roundabout at the edge of town, sat a fuel station. The lights and sounds of it never went out, and someone always stood there in the window, even at night.

Across from the fuel station, a long, low factory squinted at the daylight, and slept at night. Inside, the great long machines seemed like one snaking train track, and a thousand empty jars sat backed up in them when nobody worked there. Green metal and moonlight slow-danced in the cooling footsteps of the workers.

The last building at the end of town wasn't very big, but a dozen or so empty coaches nested in the parking lot, so it looked big. The staff kept it very clean, and wore their uniforms with a stifled pride, affecting hunched, casual strides against the icy wind, when they weren't suppressing boyish glee behind the wheels of their leviathans. Only a few of them worked through the night.

The factory workers waited at the bus stop, mostly Polish people glad that this land would never be as cold as Poland, even as it drew on to Winter. Still, they shivered, and waited for buses and taxis and carpools, and smoked and laughed with cramped, smirking faces and shaved heads. Their jolly ambience didn't mirror the typical British congregation in the slightest, not in Reyes' experience.

Reyes worked nights in the fuel station. In the fuel station, it was cold, and the old place stank of the rotting toilet and the filthy mop, and Reyes didn't much care. He used to; his swaying feet wanted to walk the floor and scoop the dust-pan and stock the shelves, but as the days began to shrink around him, as winter uncoiled its mandibles and started to gnaw at him, he grew to hate working nights.

Pallid Reyes sat on the stool and dangled his legs and waited for the Polish workers to shuffle home and the bus drivers to buy cigarettes and swagger away. He stopped the security tape, which had almost run out, and pressed rewind. He got the second tape out, the one that would record until he did the same thing the following night. He wrote up both things in the log, and he did everything with a sigh and a pout. He had five minutes, roughly, until it rewound fully and he'd to put in the new tape. A larger gap than five minutes wasn't allowed, and his manager would be angry if he found out.

Reyes hit a red button by the microphone console, which locked the door. He took both keys for both cash registers. He locked the office, the staff room. He was now locked into the staff area.

His heart beat violently; he felt like he could laugh or cry like a madman. Reyes knew that what he was planning was illegal, and very unwise. He took a deep breath, and allowed the roving laser of his concentration to dissipate, to let go of stock and logs and filthy tools and empty bleach jugs and cash balances that were off by a penny, and text messages from his boss and from his boss and comments from the other staff and - Reyes couldn't relax under this weight, couldn't take it any more; he had to get out. He felt trapped, and gaunt, and filled with night and starved of sun.

He went to the fire door, and threw it open, and looked up. The sky was dark and inviting, but a glare from the simmering town outshone all but the brightest star, and he hated that about working here at night. His hands shook and his breath rattled. Did he really mean to go through with this, now? He'd never done it since his accident with the police in Pittsburgh, and the small puncture-scar above his hip stung to remind him of the dangers. But, he frowned, and thought thoughts no more complicated than this: life is too short.

A familiar strength roared, and he felt the small of his back prickling, all the way from his neck to his ankles now, and now the soles of his feet tickled and a joy welled in his chest. His hair ruffled once, then again, uncontrollably. A wind swept from the fields to the north-west and danced around him, trailing little fingers across his face and neck and back.

The smile in his belly spread to his lips and down again to his lungs, which laughed, a laugh that shook his sides, and he curled up into a ball, lost to gravity, hung in the night like a bizarre lamp, framed in the back doorway of the open fire exit of the squat gas station. He giggled, and hugged himself, and smelled the brick around him and the water on the ground and the rain in the air.

Somewhere, hundreds of miles from him across the arc of the Earth, he smelled the dawn. He longed to swirl his fingers in the glow, and with that yearning, he flew.

Wind roaring, Reyes didn't feel cold in the slightest; he laughed and shouted down on the tottering party-goers, and spread his arms and legs like Peter Pan, and thrust out his arms like Superman, and sat in the air like the Buddha, and went east...

Soon, Reyes had accelerated, left his town behind, and the sky had brightened. He went far. He went high. At this height, the atmosphere began to resemble a cracked robin egg, wreathing half the world in blue and white wisps. The other half, his half, was clear, and it yielded to the secret purple, the cold blue and glaring white, the imperious green of the distant heavens. Reyes flew for the blue fog.

On the horizon, an ocean of black. The land knit together into a patchwork quilt, and stark light cast every structure, every plant, every crag and every blossom as a black and azure graffiti, jagged teeth of night incising from the green and golden surf.

On the horizon, a purple gloom, as the Mountains pawed at his ankles, and the wind kissed his cheeks, and the clouds filled his clothes.

On the horizon, a murmur of red, as the land gave over to sea, and the little ships threw out little lights, and the little people in the port staggered back to little homes. Then there came land, smothering the heaving, swelling breast of the world with dowdy green and grey in the cold light. Here, the riches of the world were shored up – the achievements and discoveries, fineries and luxuries of a red-faced little race – in buildings the colour of porridge. The land, the glorious cityscapes and countrysides of humankind, persisted for a moment in Reyes' speeding vision.

On the horizon, the Pacific.

On the horizon, red clouds.

On the horizon, a shaft of gold, a sparkle of green, a dapple of red, and then, and then, and then the sun burst over the edge, and lit the million candles of the ocean, and the white succumbed to a spray of colour from every corner of his retina.

Reyes flew and flew, and let the sun fill his eyes and his heart, and felt the relief uncoil the fingers about his soul, build in him, nourish and nurture him.

A boy lost in the shaking tumult of the trade winds, somersaulting with rolling eyes and a shivering heart. Crying, laughing, falling, and flying, Reyes found himself a moment or two later, drifting in the pristine purgatory of a thick cloud bank. Despite his lapsing focus and ephemeral bliss, Reyes was still going very fast. As his eyeballs lolled in their sockets, his thoughts squirming with the sensation of self-propelled flight, the Sun vanished behind him, behind the Earth again.

The shadows lengthened. The Atlantic dwarfed him, and he began to dwindle in it, sinking in body and mind, until he'd found his little island, his little Kingdom, his little shortbread tin country, his whisky-soaked county, his town, and his fuel station. He landed softly. He trudged heavily across the gravel behind the forecourt. He scuffed sluggishly across the cracked tiles. He unlocked the staff area and the tills. He changed the tape. He pressed record. He hit the red button, and unlocked the shop, and waited for customers, and the Sun.

©2009 Jaz McDougall