Hugh Cook - The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

Floating on his back, Guest was slewed around by the sun, cartwheeled by the hallucinatory daylight, overawed by skies of a blue so wide it was beyond his imagination.

Was this life?

It seemed it was.

But -

What a world! And what a life!

The banks of the river were a wasteland of the torn and tattered, a wasteland of mulched houses and slewed shacks, of canted temples and drowned corpses, of groaning cattle and struggling pigs half-drowned in pits of morass. Finding his strength, or what was left of it, Guest struck out for the nearest shore, and hauled himself up onto the bog of undry land, there to grapple with the oppressive physicality of cold slime and stinking slush.

He was unslaked, unfed, and overwashed, and his father was missing, was nowhere to be seen, so what should he be doing first?

As Guest was still wondering, a body came floating downstream, face upturned to the sun, and he realized it was his father, and realized the man was dead.

Nijidith River: a flux of filth which flows out from Stench Caves and down to Lake Kak, that singularly unpristine body of water on the shores of which stands the city of Obooloo, capital of the Izdimir Empire.

Guest Gulkan dragged his father from the river. It was him!

It was him! Guest smoothed his hand over the steep slope of his father's forehead, feeling beneath his fingers the corrugations of the deep ridges gouged in the bone of that forehead, ridges which ran from hairline to eyebrows. He was too devastated to weep.

As Guest sat there on the banks of the Nijidith river, kneeling beside his father's corpse, that corpse opened its eyes.

"Wah!" said Guest, taking very much by surprise.

"So you too are dead," said Lord Onosh. Guest thought about it a moment, then declared that, in his considered opinion, neither of them was dead, as unlikely as that might seem.

"I think you wrong," said Lord Onosh. "I thing the pair of us certainly dead, for where could this be if it is not in hell?"

Now the Witchlord was being perfectly reasonable when he delivered himself of this opinion, for in all truth the landscape in which the two Yarglat barbarians were marooned did look very much like one of the uncouth outlands of hell. Guest conceded as much.

"Yet," said Guest, "I believe us to be alive."

"Then all I can say," said his father, "is that it would be much more convenient if we were dead."

To this gloomy sentiment, Guest voiced no opposition. For survival was sheer depression in such a brutalized landscape, and all the Weaponmaster really wanted to do was to collapse. He was ragged with lack of sleep, his throat was sore, his belly was griping, and he was so severely bruised that to move was to inflict upon himself a savagery of suffering.

Yet, being disciplined in the necessities of war, both Witchlord and Weaponmaster did get themselves moving, and shambled along the riverbank, heading downstream until they saw what looked to be a surviving hut atop an unwashed knoll.

"The hut," said Guest, pointing it out.

"Huhn," grunted his father.

And no debate more complicated than that, the two bent their footsteps toward the hut, where they found a peasant family engaged in taking a meal.

There were eight or nine peasants – it was hard to count them exactly, since three or four of the smallest were sitting under an outside table at the feet of their elders – and one of these was a young woman who was breastfeeding a piglet. This scene of indulgence reminded Guest of another young woman – perhaps the very same one – whom he had seen performing a similar action while he was on his way to the Stench Caves.

"Hello," said Guest, trying to smile, and doing his best to look more like a man and less like a zombie.

He was greeted with blank incomprehension.

"Speak you the Galish Trading Tongue?" said Guest, voicing the question in that language.

The same mute, uncomprehending stares were echoed back to him by way of reply.

"Toxteth?" said Guest. "Galsh Ebrek. Wen Endex. Understand?"

In educated company, the names of places often rouse a response where other vocabulary fails, but none of these peasants was geographer enough to have heard of any place so foreign as Wen Endex.

"Never mind," said Lord Onosh. "We don't have to talk to them. We can take what we want."

"Can we?" said Guest, casting hungry eyes on the chickens which were grucking around under upturned baskets of loose-woven cane. "We have no swords, and I for one am in no mood for war."

"Never mind," said Lord Onosh.

Then the Witchlord took off his boot, pulled the cornucopia from his foot, and wrung out the cornucopia as best he could. None of the peasants reacted to the sight of this device, so Guest presumed they did not realize its import.

Having thus readied the cornucopia, Lord Onosh reached out and took a handful of soy beans from a cast iron bowl which sat in the middle of the peasants' table. None of the peasants made any move to stop him, for he was bigger and brawnier than they were.

Indeed, from the paralysed steadfastness of their silence, Guest deduced that they thought both Witchlord and Weaponmaster to be ghouls or demons, and not creatures to be challenged or otherwise trifled with.

Having seized a handful of soy beans, Lord Onosh let them fall into the cornucopia, then upended the thing.

A dribble of soy beans spilt from the cornucopia's crumpled green cone. Then, with a rustling hiss, a cascade of beans slewed forth, piling up around the Witchlord's feet. Suddenly, Lord Onosh began to laugh. Despite his fatigue, his hunger, his unappeased thirst, he was enraptured by the sheer childish pleasure of working a miracle. Such was his engrossment in this task that he walked right round the hut, spilling out a track of soy beans.

"Enough!" said Guest.

At which his father brought the cornucopia to the vertical.

It made a terminal grockling sound as it swallowed anything that was left inside it, then was silent. Empty.

At all this, the peasants sat and stared, for these shenanigans were totally beyond their experience, and they had no repertoire of reaction which was adequate to the occasion. Then a full-grown pig came porking up the slope to the hut, and began to trough its way through the spilt soy beans, eating with a sanguine confidence which persuaded the peasants to follow suit.

As the peasants started in on the soy beans – tentatively at first, as if fearing that what was undenied to a pig might yet be denied to them – Witchlord and Weaponmaster seated themselves at the table and helped themselves to long and greedy draughts of potable water. As if realizing that their guests might be human beings, and humans beings sorely beset by adversity, the oldest of the female peasants – a venerable materfamilias with a face seamed like a gray mudswamp in a time of drought – began to fuss around them. Before she was through, a pair of straw sandals had been procured for Guest's sore feet, and the food on the table had been supplemented by a bowl of boiled potatoes and a plate of raw mushrooms.

Comforted by this attention, both Witchlord and Weaponmaster began to start to feel human again. They ate prodigiously, downing handfuls of soy beans. Working away at the munchiness of those beans, Guest found they brought back memories of Dalar ken Halvar, where he had often eaten the same provender.

The peasants relaxed, chattering away to each other in their own language. Listening to these gray-skinned Janjuladoola people talking in the Janjuladoola tongue, the two Yarglat barbarians were painfully reminded of the fact that they were marooned on a foreign continent where they spoke not a word of the dominant language, and where they were unlikely to run into more than an occasional smattering of people who spoke their own native Eparget.