Bless This Meal 1 of 2

Without warning the ground seemed to open beneath Daric and he was falling, the world quickly receding above him as he was swallowed by the underworld. Something smashed into his face and he heard his nose as it crumpled against his skull like a balled-up wad of parchment. Lightning flashed behind his eyes at a second impact and part of his forehead went numb.

He blinked, peering into darkness. His chin was warm and wet. Had he fallen into a pool of water? Thunder rushed in behind the lightning and the numbness on his face faded as a deep pain in his head demanded to be acknowledged. With a groan he rolled over and closed his eyes again, returning to a deeper blackness and not, to his surprise, the gas-lit streets of Dark Water. He grabbed his head with both hands and tried to hold back the pain that poured from his brow and into his mind. His hands met the warm and wet surface of his skin. It was then he had several revelations. The first was that he was covered in sweat. He could feel it covering his whole body like a grimy shell and his hair felt like a thing attached, in a most irritating fashion, to his scalp. As he lay there on his back he could feel clumps of hair, like spikes of long grass, lying across his face. The second revelation was that he had grown a landmark on his face as least as prominent as any in Frostmount yet it was no mountain. Rather it was a volcano, and his hands were already growing sticky with its spewings.

He began to wonder how long he had been lying here on the chilly, wooden floor. Although the coolness of the floor was comforting in the smothering humidity, his lower back and his knees were beginning to throb with a dull ache where the floor was pushing his bones upwards with its patient but dogged stubbornness. Daric considered he may have been laying here for quite some time. He cracked one eye open and peered hesitantly through the triangle formed by the heels of his hands against his face as if he were a child again, peering through the keyhole. He felt the same here, unsure yet whether Mother had taken her bottle to bed and if it was safe to crane toe through the family room.

He could see more this time, the distant memory of the room’s darkness turned out to be somewhat exaggerated. Rough wooden beams, dried and cracked with age, writhed and made faces at him in familiar, flickering candlelight. Daric was immediately seized by the stomach-clenching panic of someone who doesn’t know where he is and quickly he rolled onto his knees and looked around.

That quick glance told him where he was and memory came flooding back. It didn’t come back alone either. Thunder seemed to roll through his head again, without the lightning to warn him, this time. He stopped turning his head and moaned when the room kept spinning, its speed increased like a Fortuna Wheel released by its dealer, but there would be no winners today, thank you for playing, better luck next time. A new wave of warmth spread across his face and he knew he was bleeding heavily.

When he could open his eyes again he saw the culprit on the floor. He had seen the innkeeper’s infant son playing with the cylindrical fishing weights by the room’s stone hearth earlier in the evening while his father dashed manically around the inn’s common room, keeping drinks filled and carousing with the fishers as they celebrated. The stone weight, easily the width of a bottle of summer ale, was resting against the leg of one of the heavy wooden tables that filled the room, its eyehook peering at him with wide-eyed innocence as if it had not tried, and nearly succeeded, in killing him. As if he couldn’t see its escape trail through the sawdust that sprinkled the floor. He was leaving a trail as well. Puffy, red clumps and sawdust resting in little mounds and a streaked red trail marked the path to the hand that was bracing him up from the floor.

The room was empty. A breeze, heavy and sluggish with the stick air that it could not quite shake free of, wafted through the open windows and the candles in the room to sputtered and danced, the light they threw twisted and whipped wildly against the tables they rested on. The light bounced oddly through the glass tank on the bar. For a moment Daric recalled the innkeeper charging people two coppers for the thrill of taking one of the field mice he kept in a small wire cage, now throwing its shadowy grid against the wall, and tossing it to the territorial guardfish in the tank so they could watch the snaggle-toothed fish thrash the intruders into bloody chunks as they swam for the tank’s sides. The innkeeper’s greasy-looking jowls would shake as he laughed heartily and yelled, “Fish food!” Each mouse was reduced to ragged giblets that floated lazily to the bottom of the tank after a few moments. Daric had seen the pink foot of a mouse resting on its toes against the tank’s sandy bottom, its leg extending upwards into a stump of bone. A mouse foot standing in the tank, without the rest of the mouse. That had made him a bit queasy and so he had taken the rest of his drinks at a table. Every so often he would hear “Fish food!” ring out over the excited hubbub of the room and he would make a point to look in the other direction. Then, Daric supposed, he had either run out of mice or customers willing to pay to murder them and the announcements stopped.

He couldn’t see the guardfish now but for a moment he saw or imagined the silhouette of mice moving in their cage, no doubt searching for a way to escape the grisly fate of their fellows. A dark thought about ghost mice whisked through his mind.

The breeze lifted stiffly, for a moment it seemed it would escape it bonds but, like the mice, it was consigned to its captivity. When it guttered out it took several of the candle flames with it but room didn’t get much darker. The liquid silver light of the Mother, full and pregnant with her two daughters soon to be born, poured into the window. The only sounds were the crackling of the hearth fire and, more distant, the crashing of the waves on the nearby shore. The storm that had beaten in Daric’s head was nowhere in evidence.

Although the room’s spinning had abated, Daric’s confusion had not. How had he ended up here?

He recalled coming into town, of course. He had spotted it ahead on the south road just as he had begun looking for a likely place to camp. With the Mother glowing brightly in the sea of stars above his head he thought it unlikely he would have to worry about rain tonight but sometimes, this close to the ocean, you could get surprised. When he had seen the glow of the town growing in the night sky before him he had pushed on, wanting the feel of a straw mat beneath him.

It had been a longer ride than he had thought. Daric and his horse both were ready to fall out from exhaustion by the time they reached the small fishing village. Lightfoot was not living up to his name. He had been forced to buy the grey horse, old and fat and obviously well-ridden, at an exorbant price several days before in King’s Bridge when his own mount had developed some sort of sickness that caused mucous to run out of every hole in the horses’ head before killing it. His old saddle, with much of the strap long since rotted off, was ill-fit to “Lightfoot’s” soft paunch and he had dared not ask the stable master, with the gleam in his eye seen only in that of merchants who have desperate customers, how much to repair the leather. So now the horse snorted and stomped with every step forward, and several times he had turned to bite at the new master that had treated him so shabbily, mostly by making him walk.

They had followed the sound of excited voices to the town’s beachfront where it seemed every villager in town had gathered in the surf where they were splashing and laughing. Every moment or so some of them, often the women but a few men as well, would dance a short dance in the waves then return to their splashing. It took only minutes for Daric to learn what was behind this jubilant display when he hailed a laughing young man rushing to the water with a wicker basket. Daric could see now the baskets, and various other containers that most of the villagers carried.

The town and its fishers had not had the best year, it seemed. It was story well known in these times. The haul had been small, the purses light and the old folk suspicious. Sickness killing the fish before they could be caught, they said. Bastard poachers from the next dominion stealing all the fish, they said. Crazy old man Arton, doing black magic in his shack in the woods and turning all the fish into servants of the devils, they said.

Tonight was the Mother’s Festival, to celebrate the fullness of her fertility in the evenings before her two daughters joined her side in the night sky. The villagers, not daring to snub the expectations of one of the Great Spirits, had raised the Dawnpole in the reeds of the village square, a symbol of fertility itself and signifying the Mother’s lover whom she met at the start and end of every night. Silver ribbons ran from the tip of the pole to all of the home and businesses surrounding the square. It signified the fertility, the bounty, of that union flowing over the village. They had done these things, the villagers, yet there had been no joy or anticipation in it, only the resignation of a tired duty to perform.

Yet the Mother must have sensed their simple faith and piety, so the young man, his eyes watery with ale, assured Daric and perhaps himself. She had showered them with blessing this night for as her swollen belly rose in the sky, there was a great cry of excitement from the beach where the last, desperate fishers of the day were finally dragging their simple wooden craft ashore.

Dancing thickly among the shallows and, indeed, even throwing themselves up upon the firm, wet sand of the beach, were thousands and thousands of silverfish, the Mother’s own messengers to the Deep Spirits. Every one of the villagers, save those who had already filled their coffers or exhausted themselves filling their neighbor’s, was in the surf with baskets, with pails, with wheelbarrows, nets and widespread aprons joyfully and laughingly collecting the bounty that had been bestowed upon them.

Daric had wondered aloud, more to himself than to the fevered young man, at such strange behavior from fish. The young man had frowned at him, seeing he obviously hadn’t been listening, and began explaining again, most unnecessarily, how the silverfish were the Mother’s messengers. Proof for any man to see, that the Mother was rewarding them. From his seat on Lightfoot’s back, Daric could see far more than silverfish lying on the beach. Various sea-creatures of various sizes were scatted across the sand as well as a small tribe of sea turtles who calmly made their way inland among the rush. There also seemed to be a great many crabs, mostly ignored among the larger sea creatures and the cavorting villagers. Some few had stopped to pick gingerly at the beached fish with their oversized claws, pinching off tiny chunks of white meat that disappeared into their quivering mouths. Most were moving towards the spiky dune grasses that grew thick past the point of the high tide. There were some villagers collecting a wider variety of meat but most were focused on the brilliantly sparkling silverfish that proved them to be the wonderful people that they had always known they were.

Daric saw this and he saw the fervor in the young man’s shining eyes and decided to simply let the issue rest at that. He was thinking that the full moon often drove both man and beast to strange acts and he had seen such looks as that the young man turned towards him before. They were often best left to lie unchallenged. Instead he had asked for directions to lodgings and the young man waved an arm absently inland, Daric already forgotten since he didn’t seem properly awed by the spiritual giants he had the good fortune to meet.

He spotted the long, low structure of the inn, its porch seemingly fashioned of driftwood slung together by way of various ropes and tie-offs. It squatted past the Dawnpole and a small fire where several old women gathered around a large cookpot, cleaning fish and laughing as they tossed the long bony remains into a pile. Daric thought this village would likely raise quite a smell along with the sun.

Daric would have sworn Lightfoot sighed as he slid off the horse’s back. His cracked, leather boots sank into the soft sand. After tying the horse’s reins, Daric quickly peeled off his leather gloves and picked at his woolen stockings. They were far too heavy for this heat but they were also the best and only clothing he possessed and so he patiently dug them out of the crack of his backside. A full day in the saddle, in the liquid heat, had entrenched them firmly into his nether regions. A pair of women, fishwives by their stained dresses and coarse manner, laughed loudly at him as he awkwardly mounted the single step to the inn’s door with two fingers and a thumb firmly ensconced between the cheeks of his arse.

Finally he achieved a sort of relief from his stockings, which were still so stiff with sweat they felt more rigid than any armor he had ever worn. He pushed through the beaded curtains that separated the inn’s common room from the square. They were strung with hundreds of tiny conch shells.

Even with nearly every villager cavorting in the waves, the room was still crowded. Men and women alike danced to the hollow yet cheerful tune a leathery old man near the hearth blew from a pair of reed pipes. Others cheered and jeered alternately at the dancers from the many tables as they banged their pewter steins along to the tune or reached out to pinch a tender portion of a passing reveler. Above all this Daric heard someone yell “Fish food!” and turned to see several men crowding around the large bowl of water at the bar. One of them, an obese man was wearing an apron, marking him as the innkeeper. His huge cheeks shone with sweat over the red blotches marking those who enjoyed the bottle a bit too much. A chubby young boy was standing at the man’s leg, crying as he watched them making ‘fish food’. The fat man would carry his bulk, surprisingly quickly, back and forth from the bar, filling his customer’s cups as fast as they could empty them.

Daric walked over to buy an ale and secure a room. Between mouse executions the innkeeper peered at him suspiciously and began telling him that getting a bed would be difficult seeing as how many villagers would not want to trek out to their homes after tonight’s late work, and likely, even later revels. He was interrupted by the barmaid, a heavy girl with a slightly upturned nose and slightly downturned lips. “Now see here, Uncle,” she punctuated each phrase by absently pointing the mouth of an empty ale bottle in his direction, “No one but the Markels has paid for a room yet and you know it. We’ll not turn this tired young man away because of someone who might want to stay.”

The uncle started to mutter something uncharitable than laughed and turned back to his tank as another drunken fisher lifted a mouse to dangle by its tail over the water, now tinged with pink by his brothers’ deaths on this sacred night of blessing. “Fish food!” Daric quickly paid the young girl for his bed and retreated from the room’s more grisly entertainment.

He had eaten a bowl of the silverfish stew that flowed as bountifully as the ale and he watched the young boy who had retreated from the men to play near the hearth. The tow-head boy rolled the fishing weights that would later try to murder Daric back and forth between his outstretched legs. He had to be the innkeeper’s son. Still thick with baby fat and already cheeks that seemed too large for his face he looked to be a smaller, albeit more healthy, image of his father. Daric idly wondered where his mother was and thought she was probably one of the women he had seen cooking the stew out front.

Then he had watched the barmaid for a time. She had healthy hips and a heavy bosom and smiled with long-earned patience at the drunken good nature of the fishers at the bar except when she frowned as her uncle shouted his singular, clarion call. That endeared her a bit to Daric and he considered trying to get her in bed. In the city she would have been considered obese much like her uncle, but in this part of the country she would be thought of as curvaceous women, rich and full as the Mother herself. The small pout her mouth formed at each instance of her uncle’s cruelty made her look quite kissable and Daric felt the faintest stirrings in his lap but ignored it. He knew he was far too tired to try and turn some charm her way and far, far too tired to wait up until her duties at the bar would be finished this night.

With a resigned sigh he downed his last swallow of ale and made his way to the cramped, but comfortable room he had rented. He was pleased to see that the bed had a wool mattress that, although ragged, was every bit as soft as it looked. He had gone quickly to sleep, despite the noise of the jubilant villagers. At least that was what he had thought.

If that was the case then how had he ended up on the common room floor? Setting the malfeasance of the fishing weights aside why wasn’t he in his bed? His head throbbed as if the villagers were pounding a tune into it with their steins while he tried hard to think.

He remembered Dark Water again, his hometown, and walking through the streets at night. He had been on his way…somewhere. Green eyes. He shook his head slightly at the image that filled his mind of a brilliant green eye, and then he regretted it as the room threatened to go for another spin (try your luck again) and he felt a fresh flow of blood run down his face. His thoughts were confused and disjointed. A concern bubbled to the surface of his mind that he may have lost a great deal of blood and so he slowly found his feet and began looking for something to try and staunch the flow.

Two tables over he spotted a bar cloth aglow in a shaft of moonlight. It was sitting among a small gathering of cups. He made his way over to it, leaning on the tables, not entirely sure of his feet yet. He pressed the cloth firmly against the wound on his brow and a low moan escaped his lips. He suspected that he would wear this mark for some time. Perhaps he would answer folk’s curious looks with the claim he had earned it in battle. With a fishing weight. One that very nearly kill him. His small chuckle filled the thick silence of the night for a moment startling him and he stopped quickly.

Looking down into the ale in its cups he tried to see how badly he was cut. The drink rested at different levels in each vessel but all were nearly full. Daric thought it odd that at a table full of drunks not one person had drained their cup before leaving the table. He looked around the large room again seeing it as if the first time in the competing silver and orange lights of the full moon against the many candles and the hearth fire.

A strange sensation crawled through Daric’s body and his felt the gooseflesh on his arms prickle up. His mind seemed to sharpen against the pain in his skull and he thought again of a brilliant green eye gazing at him. Inviting him?

The fire and the candles bothered him. Had the innkeeper really gone to bed along with the celebrants and left the fire and all these candles burning in this room full of sawdust and wood? Innkeepers who make those kinds of mistakes don’t tend to have inns to keep for very long. The unpleasant man had been well into his cups when Daric watched him tending to his ‘fish food.’ He supposed that it was possible the man might forget such a critical thing but his niece, she of the healthy hips and heavy bosom, would not have. For a moment Daric lingered on the memory of her. For some reason she stirred up the memory of the first girl he had ever wanted as a young man. He wasn’t sure why he thought of her. Her name had been Carolita and she had looked nothing like this woman but the brief flirtation with that memory comforted him a small bit for no reason that he could see.

Nothing else he could seemed out of place and yet everything looked as if the fishers had quit their festivities all at once, right in the midst of them. He walked to the sea-shell curtain and looked out towards the square. The cookfire still burned high and silverfish stew boiled over the lips of the cauldrons as if the fish involved were intent on escaping back to the sea. There was a slight hissing each time the frothy mass reached a limb out to touch the hot coals beneath it. He couldn’t see the beach past the light of the fire.

Nothing else moved. Daric realized that he was breathing now in short, quick breaths. He could feel his mind, already indignant from the pain it was trying to work through, recoil from the sudden feeling of emptiness and isolation.

This was almost immediately relieved with a crashing like a wave of its own. Into the edge of the cookfire’s light walked a man. From his appearance, his stockings wrinkled with dried sea water and his skin beaten and weathered, he was obviously one of the villagers. He had come from the area behind the inn and was walking towards the beach. He either hadn’t noticed Daric or wasn’t interested in him and he kept his gaze ahead of him as he walked past the fire. Daric could see him only for a moment more until he was swallowed by the darkness and the blinding flames of the fire.

Maybe that’s where the rest of the villagers went. Perhaps something else had washed up and they had gone to see. That commotion could have been what had stirred him from his bed. It didn’t sound right to Daric, he knew how exhausted he had been when he laid down with his stomach filled by hot food and warm ale. Besides he had been doing something…again something flittered at the edge of his memory and though he tried to nail it down it flitted just out of reach again. Although he wanted nothing more than to return to his bed, especially with the pain in his head which was even now moving into his neck and shoulders, he decided he would get no rest until he had taken a look.

Daric returned to his room and donned his boots. He lashed his scabbard to his belt and snatched up the satchel that held everything else he owned. Hard experience and long habit kept him from ever moving too far from his possessions. He took a strip of leather from his satchel and, with a growl, tied the bar-cloth against his brow as tight as he could get it without passing out.

He was nearly to the strands of sea-shells once again when a sudden noise behind him caused him to spin around, hand clumsily grasping past the pommel of his sword, heart adding its own pounding tempo to the drum-beat in his head.

He relaxed slightly when he saw the innkeeper’s son crawling with pudgy knees around an open door. The door opened on a hallway that presumably went to the rooms where he and his father, and maybe mother, lived. Daris saw another door sitting ajar behind the child. The boy, his eyes sleepy, crawled across the sawdust floor towards the square. He didn’t pay Daric any mind, no doubt long adjusted to strangers in the inn. Daric thought his a bit old to be crawling. Hadn’t he seen the boy waddling his way between the bar and the hearth earlier that night? He briefly considered sending the boy back to bed but decided it was the lad’s home, he knew his limits better than Daric, who knew them not at all. So he turned his back on the child and walked outside where Lightfoot seemed to watch from from the corner of his dark, liquid eye, perhaps making sure Daric wasn’t planning on exasperating him further this night. Daric gave the horse a wide berth, remembering those snapping teeth, and continued past the fire.

For a moment he was blinded as his eyes adjusted and then, in the light of the swollen Mother, he began to see the villagers. As he turned his head he saw a crowd standing in the surf, some only to their knees or calves, but many others in chest-deep water or deeper. As his eyes continued to adjust to the refreshed darkness, with the fire lost over the crest of the beach’s high tide line, he saw more people. Than more. The cold whiff of terror he had felt earlier returned and he saw that scores and scores of people were standing in the water, staring out at the ocean. It was the entire village. It had to be. The ones not already in the surf were walking slowly in that direction. They didn’t turn their head and they didn’t make a sound. The silence was only broken by the crashing of the waves and the occasional, distant hiss of the escaping fish stew. But no laugh, no cry, no word split the night air. Silence. It seemed comforting, inviting even. Why, is was just like a walk through the streets of Dark Water at night! Peaceful and quiet. And when he got there Carolita would be waiting there for him, comforting. Inviting. She had been hadn’t she? The full moon playing across her dark skin and glistening off her midnight-hour hair, her brilliant green eyes glittered up at him as he sank into her…

A cool breeze blew from the ocean and across Daric’s face and he realized the night was cooler out here. This ludicrously mudane thought snapped his perceptions back to working order and he realized he had been standing there with his mouth hanging open.

He had been thinking about walking down the beach and into that surf. A shiver went through him that had nothing to do with the breeze. It had seemed like all he had wanted had been waiting for him down there. He had been thinking of Carolita and, with a start, he realized he had been dreaming about Carolita before he found himself bleeding on the floor of the inn.

They had been children, but her a few years older than him. He remembered, with a clarity he had not possessed in years, walking silently through his sleeping hometown of Dark Water Landing. The excitement in his chest that left him breathless came back to him as well as the falling-over-the-edge-but-not-quite-yet rush of anticipation he had felt. Carolita was waiting for him. She had known, of course, about his crush on her and had always smiled gently at him whenever the heat in his face had caused him to lose his words as he spoke to her. A whisper in his ear one night had led him out to the old Heart Tree late at night and there, under another bright moon, she had let him take her in his clumsy way.

Again the memory of the green eye rose in his mind but that wasn’t right, was it? Carolita’s eyes had been as dark as her hair. Hadn’t they? Why would he dream that detail wrong? Why he would he dream of Carolita and that night at all? He had been but a child, at least, until Carolita had made him a man.

Daric looked again at the villagers, standing as motionless as the waves would allow them. They still stared outwards towards the ocean and although their eyes were blank, their expressions were not. Their expressions were beautific. It was as if they were looking at all the glories of the world and it showed in a lift of the lips here, a bottom lip bitten there. A tear trickled from the blank eyes to the wide smiles of many.

As Daric watched another man, a stooped elder with his remaining wisp of ghost-like hair blowing in the breezes, made his slow and painful way towards the water. Daric found his feet moving as well, not towards the ocean, but towards the old man. The sand slipped and stuck beneath his boots which each step and Daric found himself breaking into a bow-legged strut, filled with an urgency to keep the man from entering the water.

“Respected One,” he called the man by the traditional title given to elders in the northern cities, “Don’t go down there. It’s…” He trailed off. He had been going to say “not safe” but he had no way of knowing. It certainly did feel “not safe”. In either event the old man paid him no heed at all and continued on his way, struggling through the loose sand. Daric closed on him and reached out to get a grip on the man’s arm. The moment his fingers closed around the edge of the elder’s tunic the man jerked his arm away, snatching the cloth from him. Daric hadn’t been expecting that. Their silence and far away gaze had made him think of them as passive, but it was clear they felt strongly about reaching the water.

He watched the old man’s scrawny feet carry him several steps away and then moved after him again, intending to physically pull the man back.

A child’s screech split the night air and made the hair on Daric’s neck stand on end. He immediately thought of the innkeeper’s boy and whirled back towards the village. His legs pumped vigorously, churning up sand in his wake as he ran back towards the tavern. He felt his blood turn to ice in his veins at the horror before him.