Of Birds of Balm II

The voice persisted, with a brief cough, ‘you are the brother of Pureus II,’ he explained. There was a fine lace of worry within his words. Rekamé curled his limbs into some twisted embryo.

‘I cannot say what has happened to you, though it is understandable that you may flee home with such embarrassment.’

Rekamé did not understand. He had been shot by these men and made to bleed. A prisoner of their cruelty; all he wanted was to sketch a pool. He needed that blood.

‘Son, can you not at least give me something?’

Then he knew. Of course, that was the voice of his father. He unfurled himself, to open for embrace. Dear father.

The man fell back in swift evasion. ‘I don’t know if you’re still capable of speech. I don’t know what’s happened to you, but we must get you to civilisation before nightfall. To your brother’s treaters. They’ll know more than me,’ old Harkés said.

Rekamé did not understand. Harkés’ retinue did not either, but they followed their duties all the same, bundling the abomination into some lesser palanquin wherein he was strapped. They marched in unison, at the beats of some heaving song that labourers might sing to pretend their life is joyous; and it made the nobleman angry, for fury compounded, wherein he bellowed wails that prompted rustling animals to leave and the singing only to swell.

Their brown leathers became stained the colour of wrath by his screeching, as toxifying phlegm was sprayed from the edges of his crying lips. The retainers did not know what to do, nor did Harkés, who simply watched his spare son with a lamenting horror.

The advance continued until a set of horses appeared through the green rush on a twisting mountain path. Rekamé had not realised how high up that plateau of the great forest was. Though thinking on it now, with enough concentration devoted that his shrieks subsided, he could not remember how at all he arrived at the forest originally.

Those horses were lean and strong, but all whinnying with a disturbed caution as the party approached. They seemed as fearful of the organic alloy of a man as the party had. But Rekamé could only see his own injury and his own flesh; his eyes were dull to what those around him saw.

As the whistling troop loaded his palanquin onto a wagon, the attached horse kicked up, calling in horsetongue to be relieved of the duties of living rather than carry the cart of that being. All the same, no one spoke back to it. Not even the comfort of whoa.

The party began to trot down the mountain pass, to one side the reaching roots of the edge of the great forest. Long brown vines reached through solid stone, fracturing it, and making it most dangerous. To the other, a high wall that told of the steepness of the cliffs they were riding upon.

Rekamé was silent with them, gazing at the inky mixture of thin honey-shades of orange, yellow, and pink-red. Aeris was moving to sleep, wherein the twin moons of Areus the resplendent and Illeus the illustrious would rise to occupy her throne of the sky. Never before, save a glance through a window, had Rekamé of the Right-Hand seen the night. For the night was the territory of the Left-Hand, and it was his duty as a child of the sun to watch the world by day, just as his brother and all the Left-Handers would watch the world of night.

And yet Harkés had left the safety of sleep to search for his son by day. Sinistral to even his own breed, it seemed to Rekamé. Shattering tradition and livelihood so that his person could assume control of both day and night, perhaps? A Third Path that they spoke of? Or of both hands? The last one to claim both paths was Chaparralion itself.

In the earliest mention of Sourcing, during time before Epochs, Primordial Time, wherein a man of the Right-Hand is said to have merged, or in some sources assimilated, a woman of the Left-Hand. Their union created the first mortal being capable of both paths of Sourcing, though this forced the entity into insomnia and degraded its sanity, to the point that their speech was unrecognisable and their behaviour alien. Many sources say that over time the being grew horns and fur like a goat and sprouted the dragonwings of a nychterithrope, a were-bat, with a serpentine tail before self-imposed exile in a great forest that was named for it: Chaparralion.

It was unlikely old Harkés would want that. He was too prideful to risk losing hair for horns. Nevertheless, it was odd for any man to be present on the other side of the day in the Land of Pearls.

Creatures did it, and some odd peoples did too – like the Esthebian peoples of Balm, whose daughter Niebian was the Queen of Pearls, or the Birds of Balm, whose living feathers were said to fall a glowing greyscale by nightfall, from the writhing entanglement of livelihood that populated their coat by day.

The Sentinels, however, were the best example. Though Aeris’ glory of golden light often blocked their view to the mortal realm, they could sometimes be seen, glancing down on Aeyn. They were the stars in the sky, and the subjects of the moons and suns that were given a seat with them through great reverence and trial. Yet he rarely saw them radiate as they did of the evening.

The folk of far-flung lands, beyond the continent of Iniryen, though still bound to the seas of Aeyn, would see the Sentinels whenever they pleased; for though they could not Source, and though they were still bound to mortality, theirs was a freedom not available to either path. Not a Third Path, per se, but another road entirely. ‘Do the Birds of Balm still fly the skies of those separate roads?’ Rekamé mumbled to the cruel tranquillity of dusk.

A thump of stone on wooden wheel rocked Rekamé again, scoring his back ever more. They were taking him to healers, Harkés had said, but yet none had bandaged the slits in his arm, so spitefully filled with the volcanic shards of crystal shadow. The same sweeping shadow that took hold like a sea of onyx above him.

He held that forearm up to the sea of onyx, where the Sentinels were surfacing to swim, and Illeus’ head was peering beyond the remaining blues, like vivid sapphire berries, that Aeris had left to dissolve amongst that on-swelling onyx. The light of the two moons, and the eyes of the Sentinels swam through his wounds-still-wet. Each grain of obsidian that was wedged amongst his soft flesh, less raw in the light of night, but no less agonising, glinted like the teeth of that beautiful smile that stole away one’s ponderings. Stole them to give back, in their place, a pure serenity.

The colour of space was not dissimilar to the flavour of the Chalice. ‘The Chalice,’ Rekamé thought in his excitement, ‘I gave it away – there’s no need to fear any more pain. Harkés and Pureus won’t hunt me like this should I only tell my truth.’

‘Father,’ he finally spoke.

Harkés called a defiant whistle, halting every step in instant time. ‘My son, Rekamé, you can still… this is a miracle. And of course it is under the watchful eyes of the twins of night! Are you hungry?’ Harkés spat, leaning over the gross form of that hybrid that still told to be his son, with the wrinkled features of a man-soon-dead.

Rekamé squinted. He was hungry, truthfully, but the swift to tell satiated him more than bread or honey could. ‘I lost the Chalice. Gave it away, when I was in the great forest. It was an odd experience, the whole thing honestly, but–’

‘Chalice?’ Harkés interjected, ‘and what Chalice is this?’ There was a forceful inquisition in his tone. Rekamé knew this tone. For all its harsh products, it was never built on mutual understanding.

‘Sava’s Cup,’ Rekamé honestly replied. A woman in the retinue choked on her tongue in laughter. Two of the men followed suit. Then the entire affinity was in a choir of bellowing amusement. They were silenced with the snap of lord Araxes’ fingers.

‘You… lost a mythical object? And with such triumph it sounds a burden to carry the very object of gods’ desires. Why would you speak in such victory to claim such a bold lie at your own blood? There is not a lie bolder…’

‘I woke up, yesterday at dawn, it was in my hands. It told me–’

‘You woke up with the Chalice of Erudition in your hands and you ran away. So when, along the way, did you become such a freakish creature? Before you lied and fled to leave your mother anxious, or afterwards when you just “gave away” the… Is this a twisted scheme to oust your brother or me? Will you now tell me you drank from it and know secrets enviable by beings beyond our plane?’ Harkés was loud-of-voice now. This was a furious shouting.

‘I–’ Rekamé was not given a breath to speak.

‘You are always lying. You are always purchasing expensive things and pretending you’re some pious man. You are a failure, Rekamé, and now that you bear the scars of a beast, you claim to have held a myth in your hands only to “give it away”? It is so ridiculous I’m inclined to believe you. In fact, what was it that you were given in return?’ Harkés was no longer at odds to silence the hysterics of his retinue. He let them laugh, and they laugh they did, howling like wolves or the leonounds that stalked those mountains.

‘My sight.’

Old Harkés himself screwed his face. The very essence of the marriage of interrogatory fury and euphoric hilarity were upon his twisted cheeks, thinning lips, and white-wispy brows. ‘Your sight? So now you were blind? How is it that you became blind? I… My own…’ He cut himself off to cachinnate with his convulsing troop. A tear even shed as he did, and did he laugh indeed – for minutes. Rekamé could do little more than lay back and witness humility materialised.

‘I was blind because I tried to Source… And I burnt my retinae in Aeris’ light,’ Rekamé explained, realising as he did just how ridiculous every word of his was. But he had the moment of speech now, ‘what is this anyway? You shot me to bleed and have not bandaged me. You call me a monster and a liar, yet I am the victim? And now claim that I seek to usurp my on brother? Harkés…’

His father slapped the raw of his cheek. All laughing fell away. A slit of crimson opened where it was most tight on his high under his eye, to only add to the aching that was now present in most places. ‘Don’t call me anything less than father. Or lord. You will not take me on a first name, especially not with the rest of what’s come from that mouth.’ No longer did the onyx sea seem so appealing nor the Sentinels ever-present friends; they were now the jury, and the twin judges that sat higher still were far from Rekamé’s comfort.

 ‘I am the victim, Rekamé. You mother is the victim. You are a destructive waste; a scar upon our name, and yours is to be my burden before death. I can teach your brother to seize a country, yet I cannot teach you pleasantries to your rescuer, much less a magnate far beyond what you deserve to sit in presence of. Especially beyond court.’ Harkés coughed, ‘and that is the end of this conversation. You will go to be healed, and you will apologise to your mother. Enough with this talk of legend before I tell your brother and he sends knockers to your door asking to whom you “gave it away”. They are convincing enough that you’d admit then, at least, to your lies.’

Thus, the conversation did end, and the column began again to move. Now branded a liar, the spit that the nearest horseman gave him would be without his father’s punishment. Nor the guffawing. Nor the comments.