Col Buchanan - Stands a Shadow

Vanichios did not look at him as he left.

Ash shivered beneath the blankets, his eyes swimming with phantoms of colour. He had long ago drawn the curtains over the window of the bedroom, yet still the moonlight leaking in around the edges was too much for his closed eyes, so that he kept his head covered while he coughed and sputtered in his fever, and felt as though the whole bed was spinning.

In his mind, the distant gunshots were only the sounds of maize husks popping on a fire. He was half dreaming of the drinking house of his home village of Asa, the room hot with the fire burning in the hearth, the black pot above it tended by Teeki as the warming maize clattered within it and filled the smoky room with its aroma.

He was sitting alone in a corner, eyeing his step-uncle across the room with a growing sense of hatred.

Ash had been sitting there all evening, getting quietly drunk like the old regulars at the bar, mulling over the rice wine that was their nightly respite from the world. His own burdens had refused to lighten, though. Even now, he did not wish to return home to his young wife and child, and all the responsibilities that they represented.

They had lost another of their breeding dogs to the shaking disease that morning. Ash had no idea how they were going to find the money to replace it, nor even how they were going to repay the debts they already owed.

The more he drank, the more he thought of running away and leaving it all behind him. This was hardly the life he’d imagined for himself, not when he’d been growing up as a youth on his family farm, watching his mother and father work themselves into the ground trying to meet their own rising debts and taxation. Ash had dreamed of striking out on his own when was old enough, of earning his way as a soldier, a sailor, anything but this.

And then he’d fallen in love, of all things, and had married, and settled down… so that in the blink of an eye, it seemed, here he was, trying to drink away his burdens like his father before him.

Ash stared at his step-uncle across the room, brooding. Lokai was headsman for a dozen villages within the outer ranges of the Shale Mountains, a tax-collector in regal clothing, appointed by an official of the overlord Kengi-Nan. He doubled as the local moneylender too, lending back to the villagers his own skim of their taxes at extortionate rates.

A useful man to have in the family, Ash would have thought. Yet his step-uncle was obsessed with increasing his wealth, and with the power over others that it gave him. When it came to money, he seemed little impressed by ties of blood.

Lokai was enjoying himself tonight. In the midst of the banter with his henchmen, he deigned to acknowledge Ash’s piercing glare. The man stared back, with a pipe in the corner of his mouth, his head tilted back just enough to look down his nose. Even from here, through the smoky atmosphere of the room, his eyes seemed to be laughing at him.

Ash had no idea why he suddenly snapped just then. A drunken intuition perhaps. A sense that in those mocking eyes lay knowledge that warranted such a reaction from him, even if he was ignorant of what it might be.

Ash saw the man’s eyes widen as Ash lurched to his feet, stumbled drunkenly across the room towards Lokai.

He slurred words he did not fully understand himself, while his step-uncle struggled to rise and his henchmen around him did the same.

A table scattered. Lokai rolled to the floor with it, the drinks spilling everywhere, a flash of blood on the man’s face.

Ash’s knuckles stung as he roared over his sprawling form.

Men grabbed him from behind. He surged against them until he was spent of breath and grew still in their arms. He stood there heaving for air as he glared down at the man.

‘You think yourself something special?’ his step-uncle demanded from the floor, holding a hand to his bloody nose. ‘You think because you have my pretty niece as your wife, because you married your way into a better family than your own, it makes you someone?’ And he slapped off the helping hands of his henchman as he staggered unsteadily to his feet. ‘You’re nothing but a fool,’ he snapped. ‘And your own wife makes you the greatest fool of all!’

Silence in the room. The words so incongruous to Ash that it took several moments for them to sink in.

‘What are saying?’ came his thick voice.

The man was in full flow by then. ‘What do you think I’m saying? When you needed money, the year you were wed, to buy your damned dogs. You think I loaned you those coins freely? I had my way with her by way of a down payment.’ He paused then, to look about at the other men standing there gaping. ‘Aye, I did that, and there isn’t a damned thing any of you dare say about it.’

He drew a breath to say more.

Ash realized that the tin mug he had been drinking from was still clutched in his left hand, the contents gone from it. He lunged forwards without warning, breaking free of the men’s grasps as he swung the mug with all his might, a black rage upon him.

When they dragged Ash to his feet, his step-uncle was lying on the floor with his face caved in like a bowl. Blood was bubbling from a hole at the very bottom of it. The man’s left foot kicked a beat against the planks of the floor, and then he gasped and died as they all stood there watching.

He’s murdered the headsman, someone muttered.

Ash fled into the darkness of the night.

He looked up, found himself staring at a harsh square of moonlight.

It was the bedroom window, with the thin curtains hanging over it.

A figure sat silhouetted in the chair, picking at the wood of one of its arms.

‘Che?’

The figure leaned forward in the chair. Ash heard the wood creak.

‘It must have been hard, hearing that news about your son.’

Nico.

A strange thrill filled Ash’s stomach, like the fear of falling. He found that he couldn’t speak.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Nico. ‘I don’t mean to pry.’

Ash rested his back against the headrest, feeling how the pillow was wet where his face had been lying.

The memory faded slowly in his mind, though he could still smell the popping maize in his nostrils.

‘Not as hard as losing him,’ he rasped, and blood pumped in his throat.

‘You miss him.’

‘I think of Lin every day. As I think of you.’

‘What do you think about?’

‘You, or my son?’

‘Your son.’

‘ Ach,’ Ash said in frustration.

He felt the urge for a drink, recalled he had already finished the wine he’d found in the kitchen.

‘I think of his eyes, like his mother’s. I think of how he gave his spare tackbread to his friends in the leanest days on the trail. I think of him chasing the girls before he even knew what he was chasing them for. I think-’ and he stopped himself there, on the brink of something reckless.

‘I think of his death,’ he said in a whisper.

Ash saw it then, as though he was there in the Sea of Wind and Grasses. He saw the dust of the tindergrass engulfing the clash of battle. The Heavy Wing of General Shin emerging from behind the lines of the Shining Way, betraying them all for a fortune in diamonds. A rider bearing down on his son, felling the boy with a single stroke. Hooves trampling over his body as though he was nothing but a discarded sack of clothing.

‘What is it?’ said Nico in the silence.

Ash clutched the sheet he lay upon in his fists, needing something to cling to.

‘You wish to hide things from me, even now?’

No, Ash thought. I wish to hide them only from myself.

He looked at the shadowy form of his apprentice across the room.

‘I did not love him,’ came his cracking voice. ‘For a time, at least, I thought I did not love him as my son.’