This is an excerpt from The Elavale, my fantasy novel.
Wil
“The Age of Unconsciousness was a beautiful first step in Goa’s bright future. A necessary ignition that would restart the flames of human inspiration. Despite the absence of flexion, I would contend that the Tetral’s hands were indeed always present throughout this period of godless strife. Make no mistake, the Tetral have always had the power to refine us—from the lowliest of scrap to the most precious of gems.”
From The Abridged History of Goa, Vol. 1, by
D’geris Luvenar Ecquellio Maunstrade, His Presence of Illumination
916L, the Month of Solus, Age of Consciousness
The rain pellets mixed with the blood from Wil’s face, chilling his hot, throbbing skin. He spun in the mud, his full beard and long hair clogged with dark muck. A plump woman with an exposed midriff, and a lithe man with a hand of half-missing fingers provoked their teenaged son; the boy kicked Wil in the ribs. The family wore black linen masks with cut-out eye holes, soaked to become slick imprints of disfigurement.
Wil grabbed the boy’s leg on the next incoming swing and threw him aside. The man with the disfigured hand tackled Wil. Struggling and spinning, they kicked and grasped at each other. The man pinned Wil face-first, kneeling on his back.
“Feed ‘im slime!” the woman shouted. “Feed ‘im filthy, icky slop!”
“Tell the boy to get up,” the man said, breath short.
“Get up, wily boy! Get up, belan-meat!”
The boy got to his feet, then charged, screaming in a cracked voice of rage.
The mud flew. Wil coughed on nose blood and spat sludge. The slippery floor gave none an upper hand, but it was still two against one, and Wil took too many blows to the body and face. He was pinned, the boy striking his side, the man kneeling on his arm. He blinked through soaked hair and dirty water, blew mud from his mouth, and saw the glint of his trowel. In one powerful move, he reached with his free hand, grabbed the trowel, and drove it backward into the man. Blood flashed in the cruddy afternoon light as he pulled the tool back. The man recoiled and stood up, holding his shoulder, crimson seeping through stubby, clipped fingers. Wil swung the small spade at the boy, missing, but scaring the boy away.
“I’ll cut your boy!” Wil yelled, his own adult voice cracking. “Get out of here! Go on!”
The man spat. “Take the barrow, woman. Boy, come.”
The ambushers took Wil’s trundle of freshly picked dustroot and wheeled it down the ditch into the forest. Wil lay on his side, trowel extended, abdomen screaming against his age’s compromises. When they were out of eyeshot, he dropped in a heap of exhaustion, letting the rain pelt his body.
Thinking of the crop field, his heart left his body. He yelled to the sky in defeat, wanting nothing more than to grab the trowel and charge after them. But when he lifted his torso again, the pain crackled up his back and he dropped again. He opened his eyes, panting, a chunk of his soul taken with the root. A swath that meant no bread, no dairy, and no produce for his family.
Where did they come from?
The encounter had dashed his hopes that he had found peace in a remote, quiet village. He hadn’t recognized their voices. How many people was the Magnus letting in now? The old fat fool. Scarier than anything else was his wife’s reaction. She’d try to console him, try to explain it off, but in the end, he knew there would be some amount of disappointment he could never rectify.
Stop thinking like that. Evie’s not like that.
After a while, when the blood from mouth wounds threatened to choke him, he leaned over and spat a dark glob. He looked at the trowel on the ground, remembering things he’d done to vagrants before. Before Tesh, before Evie.
Evie . . .
He grabbed the trowel and slammed it into the mud, bowing his head and sighing. He couldn’t pursue them in this rage. He shouldn’t. But if he allowed them to leave uncontested, would they come again? Would others come? His forty-seven-ell-old body ached as he stood. No, if he was to do anything further, he needed his brother, Hess.
He closed his eyes, trying to imagine opening his door and Evie’s reaction. He could feel his entire body drooping, but began the slow walk back to his house.
He hadn’t fought like this in ells.
A day after his ninth birthday, Hess had slapped him on the cheek for trying to take the last klumpa, their favorite fruit. In a spin of screeches, they fought until their father emerged and carried both boys into the house for punishment. A nine-ell-old squabble over sweet nectar. Though he’d taken punches with four times the amount of weight since then, somehow that memory had always trumped them.
Wil staggered up the mismatched path of embedded boards back to his porch. The palm of a hill cupped his home, standing at the base of a grassy knoll. Three quill-like buckus trees stood atop the knoll, their foliage rubbery coils that formed a green cylindrical mass. Through their trunks came Tesh’s ubiquitous silvery haze, which, when combined with the rainfall, brought an ancient gloom to the dark green countryside. The brush and groundcover throughout the village kicked up the scent of mint and sage, reminding Wil that while his life was fragile and broken, nature went on unobstructed, perhaps even jovially.
He stopped before his front door and braced himself on a porch strut, dripping and disoriented. Evie had built their house with nothing but the forests around them and her collection of woodworking tools. It was a small two-story with intricate designs engraved around doors and windows. She’d created a “family seal” comprising a mallet and grains, and carved it into the front door. They attached her shop to the side of the house, soaked sawdust creating a path from its door and scattered shims below the windows. Workbenches and dull saw blades adorned the cut grass, boards and hewn trunks leaning against the shop. Little figurines lined the home’s patio and windowsills, half-painted, marbled, unfinished. The torrent of rain inundated everything.
When he opened the front door, an aroma of aparra seeds and glush puffs hit him, laced with horrible dread. He gingerly removed his muddy boots and flung his garments to the floor in their entryway. He entered the small kitchen, standing under the threshold in his loose undershorts, sopping hair, thick hairy chest against pale skin, and a blood-smeared, muddy face.
Evie sat at their table for two, in a cramped but neatly organized kitchen made primarily of stained wood. Behind her, a pot was bubbling over a dustroot burner. She looked up from her book and laughed. Then she noticed the blood.
“Wil!” she exclaimed, jumping up, angling carefully to protect her protruding stomach.
“Ambushed,” he said in his gruff voice, letting her examine his face.
“Ambushed?” she asked incredulously.
“A family. Three of them. They took a quarter of our dustroot.”
He looked down, as her eyes pained him. So, she took his face in her hands and refocused him.
Crow’s feet grew off her pale blue eyes. She wore her black hair in a bun, joined by little streaks of gray. She grabbed him and pulled him into a hug. Despite getting slimed by his muddy face, beard, and hair, she held his icy body, and they stood listening to the rain batter the roof.
She led him upstairs to their bathroom, lit a fire under the bathtub as it began filling, and began cleaning his face to dress his wounds. He sat on a kitchen chair in front of the vanity as Evie swiveled around him, constantly catching her pregnant belly, dabbing at scratches with a cloth wet from a bottle of old pesky, wiping mud, and rinsing detritus in the sink. After the tub filled, it was quiet except for the creaking of Evie’s movements and the occasional squelch of a wrung cloth.
Wil watched himself in the mirror, trying to take Evie’s silence as one of compassion. His brown hair was almost the same color as the mud being wiped away, as if Evie wasn’t able to rinse every stain—
Don’t be dramatic.
His blue eyes met hers, and they kissed.
“Do you know who—”
“No,” he said.
“It makes little sense,” she said. “Here? In Tesh?”
“I’ll find them.”
“And do what?”
“Have a little faith in your husband. I’ll bring Hess.”
“At least tell the guard.”
“What’s Tiffo going to do? Laugh?”
Evie groaned. “This is the consequence of your pointless feud. Tiffo’s not the only member of the guard.” She cupped his cheeks and looked at him. “Wil.”
He sighed, touching a cut on his lip, wincing. “I’ve got to secure what we already have. Put it under lock before the caravans arrive. Then we can deal with them.”
Evie finished dabbing at a spot and leaned quietly against the counter.
“I’m sorry,” Wil whispered, hands clasped at his knees, jaw strained.
She looked at him for a moment. “Don’t say that. How’d we get here?”
The tension released, and he looked at her.
“How’d we build this place?” she clarified.
“Well, you built it.”
“Wil,” she said, kneeling and placing a hand on his thigh. “We’ve been through so much to get here. A barrow of dustroot? Why’s that going to stop us now?” She smoothed his beard with a hand. “I believe in this family. We’re just getting started.”
He gave her a flat smile and took her hand, squeezing. His voice was stilted. “Thank you.” He took a beat, feeling the smoothness of the top of her hand with his thumb, drinking in her aura like medicine. He stood, almost losing his towel. “I believe in this family, too. But I also believe in food on our table. Dust to power our lights. Luvens to pay our debts.”
Evie shrugged. “If it comes to it, we can just live with your parents.”
“True,” Wil said, feeling some of his old energies return. “They will be dead soon; the house will be ours.”
“Wil!”
He flung off his towel before stepping into the tub.
***
The rain had receded, leaving a sun-dried mud field. The silver haze inhaled and exhaled throughout the countryside, little wisps and bigger clouds that smelled like chalk when one immersed themselves in their mist. Evie had always said rain healed wounds. Wil rotated his shoulder and stretched his neck. He wished rain could fix debt, too.
He walked outside, mug of tea in hand, and winced at his bruises. Evie was still asleep. The quiet of the morning allowed him to think and self-deprecate without distraction. Before dawn, every morning. Only this time, he was looking at three quarters crop instead of four. Their dustroot engine churned away on the side of their home, giving energy to their lamps. Maybe they could live without it for a while. It wouldn’t matter all that much, to be true; they used maybe one or two roots in six months.
But none of that would end up being a concern if he could secure the lost root.
What are you going to do when you find them? If you find them?
He worried Hess might be a little too engaged, as he was like to do, especially when it involved injustice.
He sipped his tea, a mint shrub and culis root blend Evie had perfected. One of the many perks of being married to an apothecary’s daughter. The warmth blossomed down his throat and into his stomach. Three days it had rained. Unusual for Tesh in the late cithtos season; the chilly rain would usually come for only an ura or so, then let up for a few days. By the time the relys season arrived, rain wouldn’t show itself until the next cithtos. Visitors had often scratched their heads at Tesh’s green lushness. But those who lived here remained convinced it was the undercurrents that gave life to the country. Long wells, aquifers, and sluices created by an ancient people, big chasms filled with groundwater, an unlimited supply pulsing upward like heart-pumped blood.
Squeaking grass heralded Hess’s arrival. Wil’s younger brother was a tall, lean man with a clean-shaven face and short blonde hair swept back. He was wearing tan linens and a leather tunic, its green paint faded. Hess’ hazel eyes were buried under an emotive, mischievous brow. His lip had a familiar scar on the right corner, a little white streak rising upward—Wil’s doing, with a stick he’d thrown when they were young and playing “war.”
Hess was looking out over the crop field as he made his way to the house . . . a sheathed sword in hand.
“I guess this wasn’t some ploy to get my free labor after all,” Hess said, smiling at Wil as he approached.
“Sadly, no,” Wil said, finishing his tea and setting the mug on the windowsill, next to a rough-hewn figurine. He folded his arms as the brothers examined the crops. “You planning on using that?” He nodded to Hess’s sword.
“If I have to,” Hess said, leaning the blade against the house. He saw Wil’s stoic face and shook his head. “I won’t cut down a teenager.”
“It wasn’t just a teenager.”
“Well, we’re not going in there unprotected.”
“It’s Tesh,” Wil said, giving Hess an older brother kind of look. Violence was unheard of here. “Besides, I already cut one of them.”
Hess furrowed his brow, then checked in Wil’s mug.
“With a trowel,” Wil added.
“There’s the missing bit,” Hess chuckled, tipping back the mug to get the dregs.
“Do you want some?” Wil asked.
“I might have skipped breakfast.”
“Come. Let’s eat before we gather it all up.”
After filling their bellies with horkbeast sausage grounds, pickled ghis weed, and toast, the brothers set out to harvesting the rest of Wil’s field. Wil worked fast and “violent” as Hess called it, curt movements and a lowered brow. He said little during their ura together.
“You know we could go find them and you could take out your anger on the people who actually did this,” Hess said, stretching his back.
Wil yanked a root with extra force, then caught his breath, staring into the dirt. “I don’t feel guilty pulling out roots.”
Hess watched his brother. “You can talk to me. If you want. I know how you get when you’re thinking about stuff.”
“Let’s finish this row.”
Hess waited for a moment before grabbing his collection sack and kneeling down again.
Wil scooped and pulled on the barked root, then twisted, ripped, and tapped the product to remove excess dirt. His hands looked like tree stumps, caked in dark brown soil. He stopped and looked up at Hess, now busily working. Truth was, if the vagrants made off with his root for good, the profits from his remaining crop wouldn’t be enough to cover all the season’s debts. That was certain. It could buy some time for Evie to finish a few of her projects, and he’d help where he could. But maybe . . . maybe this was a sign that they were to move. To become yet another villager to leave Tesh in search of an Aferitian destiny. Wil thought of the Aferitian auditor coming to the farm in a few weeks to collect a chunk of payment. Some little man, all alone in Wil’s domain. Wil could convince him. He’d have to.
How the scholars had found out such a disfigured, diminutive root could have such power was beyond him. A barrowful could power all of Tesh’s lamps and burners for three months. He sometimes wished the scholars were farther along in discovering a wider range of uses for it, especially now that he was a farmer, but figured maybe the simplicity was best. At least his field was a speck compared to those of the root barons in the Middledom.
Come afternoon, their shirts were soaked, and Evie had run out of opper juice.
“I swear we’ve picked thousands,” Hess said, dragging a bag full of roots toward Wil’s shed.
“If only,” Wil said, helping his brother heft the bag inside.
Once the sack sat neatly on top of another, Hess put his back to the shed and got some breaths out. “Did they really take that much? I’m sure I can put something together to help out. Mom and Dad, too.”
Wil clapped a hand on Hess’ shoulder as he trudged back to the field. “We’ll be okay. But thank you.”
“You’d think helping provide services for the country would be a little less expensive.”
“These farmlands are precious to Aferitia, especially here at the end of the fertile land. They don’t want to be under the barons’ short little thumbs.”
Hess cackled. “Typical of Aferitia to lose their tight grip once resources get involved. We should’ve settled in the Middledom. Maz Mallotte, The Carenthen. That place will become its own province if ol’ Gerry isn’t careful. Why didn’t we become barons?”
“I’m guessing it’s not very baron-like to lose a quarter of your crop to a teenager and his parents.”
They joked and prattled until the sun started its slow descent and the silver mist threatened all sides of the farm. The brothers wheeled the last barrow of the season’s yield toward the shed, placed the sacks on their piles, and shut the door. Wil ensured the lock was secure and vowed to sleep outside the two nights before the caravans came to town. They rounded the shed and leaned over the field’s fence, admiring their work. Beyond the field, the forest loomed tall and wide.
“So they went in there?” Hess said, nodding.
“Mm. Took the ditch path. Back ‘round that way.”
Hess put his back to the fence, leaning, giving Wil a familiar look of raised eyebrows.
“No,” Wil said. “Tomorrow.”
“By tomorrow they could cross the Switches and be halfway to Sorenbeach by now.”
“If these people are lazy enough to steal someone else’s work, they won’t travel all the way to Sorenbeach to sell. They mean to sell it here or in Gode Valley. I guarantee it.”
“Then let’s get them! Here and now!”
Wil remembered Evie’s urges to inform the Tesh guard of the theft, but he wasn’t in the mood to listen to Tiffo make Wil grovel for help. He looked at Hess, the forest, then his home, digging his boot into the soft dirt. He pointed a finger into his brother’s face. “Don’t get carried away.”
Hess guffawed, rushing to collect his sword. “Don’t forget your trowel!”
Wil grumbled.
Together, they walked down the ditch, curved around the field, and approached the forest wall. They passed through a plume of white haze, getting a nose full of chalk. Wil waved the mist away as they emerged into the dense green of the forest. Tesh forests were apparently older than Aferitia, almost suffocating with moist, thick air and canopy cover. The ground squished underneath their feet, a mixture of fallen needles from the tall spiral tree limbs above and the minty brush. Spirals derived their name from the ribbing that wound up their trunks like small, harmless auger blades, and produced hanging vines that intertwined to become enormous fluttering sheets.