Chapter 1217: Naught but ash(1)
The trumpet let out a sudden, violent blare, the brassy note slicing through the crisp air of early november like a butcher’s cleaver. The sound rolled across the plain, where a great expanse of emerald green stretched until the horizon swallowed the world. Beneath the morning sun, the grass still clung to the dew left by an early rain,its dampness turning the road ahead into a treacherous slurry of mud.
"Must you really play that thing now?" Basil asked, his palm clamped firmly over his left ear. He spoke doing his best to not let his irritation of a man forced to endure one of the many peculiarities that defined the creature at his right.
"I like being announced, dear lad. It sets the stage." Merelao muttered. He was busy scratching the line of his jaw, his fingers feeling the skin where he had just been shaven clean; there wasn’t so much as a nick, a pimple, or a phantom scratch on that smooth face.
"Some would say there is a distinct benefit in not making a ruckus while moving through a war-torn province," Basil countered.
"Thieves stalk silently. Do I look like a common cut-purse to you?"
"You are many things, my lord," Basil answered, his tone heavy with a bitterness at the moment that he made no effort to hide. "But a thief? No. You are far too loud and eye-catching to go unnoticed. Even the blind would find you by the smell".
Basil watched the flamboyant man.
Even in a field of thousands, where a thousand blades hungered for his throat, the man refused to be subtle. He had been told that the Mad Bull held a red cape in the mud, the horned helmet pointing defiantly at the sky, the trumpet clamoring every time he felt the world wasn’t looking at him closely enough.
It was a cosmic injustice: Basil’s own father had been scarred by the toil of duty, yet this glory-hound, this man-seeking-star, had walked through a dozen slaughters without a single scar to show for it.
Where was the right in that?
Merelao simply laughed, unaware or perhaps not to the boy’s thoughts, the sound bright and effortless. He was a social animal who only truly existed when he was being watched, oozing a vitality that felt like an orange being pressed hard against a wall. How queer it was, Basil mused, that the man only seemed to truly come alive when death circled them like a murder of crows.
Basil looked up. The black birds were soaring again. Until yesterday, they had been cawing like a band of spoiled, angry children, furious that their banquet of meat had been cut short by the massive pyres the prince had ordered. It was a waste of wood to burn the enemy, but his father would risk no plague being birthed from a field of death.
He looked behind as he wondered whetever what his father was meaning for them to do was truly wise.
Still what was he to do?
Grandfather, Xanthios, Asag,Rykio and Jarza had all tried to persuade him, hell even Edric had thought it a bad idea. As for who spoke in the plan’s favour?It was only his father and the Kakunian. And even that wasn’t for any strategic acumen, he half suspected Merelao was here for the fucking banter.
For a whole day the tent was in uproar, as for now?The air was silent all silent save for Merelao’s blabbering, which Basil found much harder to endure than the crows. The man was a loghorroic paddle.
"Men of our station have a duty to be noticed," Merelao said, his voice carrying the smooth, practiced resonance of a chapel bell. He adjusted his silken mantle, looking every bit the prince he desired to be, but yet was not. "If we are to shepherd the masses, the flock must never lose sight of the crook. We are the Star by which they steer. We must shine."
"Of course," Basil replied. He kept his response to a dull nod, fearing that any more movement would cause his skull to crack open.
"Which necessitates, naturally, that we remain most presentable at all hours," Merelao continued, his gestures fluid and effortless. "I myself am shaven with the rarest oils pressed from the green-wood trees of Maldonta. The essence of roses is sent to me from the High Patron’s city; it is splashed against my skin to ward off the common stenches of the world. Speaking of which... perhaps I ought to share a bottle with you? You look as though you’ve been sleeping in a stable."
So that was where he was going uh?I stink?
"I am in no need of such kindness," Basil muttered.
Merelao leaned in closer, invading Basil’s personal space without qualms. He drew a long, delicate sniff of the air near Basil’s collar.
"Oh," he said, his expression wilting into one of profound disappointment. "Lilies and saffron. This is truly wasted on you, my friend. You would probably use it as a common aftershave and think yourself sophisticated."
I don’t even yet shave?
Does he just want to make conversation?With a boy?
Basil pulled back, squinting through his eyes "You are eerily good at that. I didn’t expect you to be so attentive to a man’s scent."
"You would be surprised by the secrets a man yields if you simply force yourself to watch, and to breathe," Merelao replied, his eyes sparkling with a keen intelligence.
"Is that so? Like what?"
"Well, for a start, your silhouette has shifted a tiny bit. There is a certain... ruggedness to you today that was absent before."
"Like?"
"Well, specifically, that small bush currently making ground on your jaw and chin," the Kakunian pointed out, gesturing with a finger.
Basil’s hand flew to his face, his fingers grazing a rough, prickly texture he had craved for years. "Wait. Bush? I’m growing a beard?"
"I suppose you are finally of age," Merelao teased. "Did you truly not notice the grass taking root on your face?"
"I haven’t had the chance to look in a mirror in a long time," Basil grumbled, feeling the coarse hair. "When you’re hiding in the woods, the least of your concerns is whether your hair is styled to courtly standards."
"Well, that isn’t even the most striking change I’ve observed."
"Yeah? Speak for yourself," Basil said, a small spark of pride cutting through his headache. "I’ve always wanted a beard."
The man’s eyes went on him as if wondering whetever that ought to be called as such before sighing as his gaze drifted downward, settling on the beast beneath Basil’s saddle. "The more pressing change, it seems to me, is that you have seen fit to change your steed."
Basil went rigid just for a moment. He took a long look at Merelao
"I... I had to change horses. A matter of unfortunate necessity."
Merelao sighed, a sound like silk tearing. "A pity. A tragedy, even. That earlier beast was a creature of immaculate breeding. Your father, when he hosted me , seemed so consumed by pride for those stables that he once offered me samples from his finest lines. And they indeed were fine. What brought that change’’
Basil misliked being interrogated, but the man had, in a fashion, saved his father’s life. The least he could do was swallow his pride and refrain from looking quite so dismissive.
"An unfortunate business," Basil said, trying to keep his tone even despite the hammering in his temples and chest. "A viper sprang from the high grass and spooked the beast. The horse bolted in a blind terror. We never saw him again. Perhaps the venom took him and he’s rotting in a thicket, or the wolves that seem so loose in this land had their fill of him."
"A viper? Truly?" Merelao asked, his eyebrows arched in a mocking peak.
"Indeed.Why?"
"It is nearly winter," Merelao said, his voice dripping with a patronizing pity. "I don’t know if they taught you this in the forest, but snakes have a tedious habit of vanishing when the air turns chilly. They don’t much care for the frost. Now isn’t that quite queer?"
More than queer, it was just a lie.
Basil felt a flush of heat crawl up his neck. It was a mercy his father hadn’t been the one to hear the tale; the old man would have smelled the lie before Basil had even finished the sentence.
Or did he already know?
"If you are going to lie " Merelao sighed, "at least have the courtesy and good sense to make your facts straight. It spares us both the boredom of a clumsy deception."
Basil let out a long, weary sigh. "Fine. There aren’t many excuses a man can use when he trots into camp without his prized stallion. How did you even know about the vipers?"
"Must you really ask?" Merelao tilted his head. The fine-boned mare beneath him snorted, a sharp, wet sound as if the animal shared its rider’s haughty mood.
Basil had forgotten. Merelao bore the mark of the serpent in more ways than one. "How was it, by the way? It isn’t often a man, let alone a child, survives the bite of such a thing."
"Most men would have the grace to refrain from asking," Merelao replied, though the sharpness of the rebuke was softened by his usual melodic lilt.
"Is the Valorous Bull so reserved about his past?"
That seemed to sting. The grace in Merelao’s posture faltered for a heartbeat, replaced by a sudden, rigid tension.
"Never!’’ he spat though he indeed talked. Perhaps he just wished to be pushed a bit more ’’I was but a boy of nine if you must know," Merelao said, his eyes fixing on the horizon as if watching a ghost. "Youthful and quite blissfully ignorant of how the world had just shattered around me. Until I was eight, I lived with my uncle and my cousin, both of whom are currently exhausting themselves trying to kill me. I didn’t have the sense to realize that back then and thought we were just family."
He shifted in his saddle, his fingers tightening on the reins.
"I was training with Varo. I was a miserable swordsman, if truth be told. My cousin Latio was a far better blade then. I was busy taking blow after blow from a blunted tourney sword, my head ringing, when I felt a small sting. A needle’s prick, as if I’d been careless with a dagger."
Merelao’s jaw clenched, the muscles working beneath his skin. "I looked down to see the most colorful snake I had ever beheld, casually slithering between my legs like a ribbon of silk. A heartbeat later, the world was nothing but Varo’s panicked shouting and the frantic clatter of armor. But through it all, I heard the hiss. Especially that hiss.’’
He swallowed.And the horse beaneth him snorted.
"I was bedridden for a week," Merelao continued, his voice losing its melodic lilt, turning thin and brittle as dry parchment. "I drifted in the gray spaces, slipping in and out of a fever that felt like liquid fire in my veins. Burning and boiling and yet not killing me. Never that.
I remember praying. Not for recovery, but for the Long Sleep. I begged the Weaver to be done with the game and cut that fucking thread of mine..."
He reached up, his fingers ghosting near the edge of his jaw, a reflexive twitch Basil had noticed.
"The nightmares were the worst of it," Merelao whispered. " I was in a pit. I could feel them, thousands of them, curling up over my lips, their scales cold and dry like dead leaves. They would strike me, over and over, on the chin, the cheeks, the eyelids. And the sound... a choir of a thousand hisses, a sea of slithering that never stopped. I would wake up screaming, only to find the room silent and my skin burning.Sometimes my eyes would open to the sight of Varo crying, blaming himself for my eventual death.He is a good man.The best."
He went quiet for a moment, his knuckles white as he gripped the pommel of his saddle, as if that sight was more haunting than the bite and the fever.
For the first time, Basil believed he saw the true man beneath. The "Valorous Bull" looked, for a fleeting second, like the frightened nine-year-old he had once been.
"I survived, obviously," Merelao said, forcing a sharp, brittle laugh that didn’t reach his eyes. He straightened his mantle, desperately trying to pull the mask of the graceful prince back over his face.
"When the fever finally broke and I was truly awake, the healers told me the truth. That serpent was no local viper. It was a creature that only breathes in the deep sands of Azania, a thousand leagues across the sea. It was a gift, you see.
A gift sent from a distance, possessing a venom so potent it usually stops a man’s heart before he can even shout. And my dearest uncle is the one to thank for that. My own blood. My own family, reaching across an ocean to kill a child.And I will thank him for it. Indeed I will."
He looked at Basil then, his eyes searching the younger man’s face as if he were seeing the ghost of the boy he used to be. Basil tried to reconcile this broken honesty with the flamboyant, eccentric peacock he had known, the man who claimed war was his muse and lived for a thousand hollow pleasures.
"For a long time, I asked what sin I must have committed to merit such a thing," Merelao continued, his voice thick with a curdled sort of grief. "What excuse could there be for the butchery of a child? Was I perhaps too kind? Too curious? Too full of a joy that made them feel small?I remember when I used to make hat of hays and gifted one to my uncle and cousin.
Too long I have searched for the fault in myself until I realized the rot wasn’t in me. It was in them. Their laws, their cruelty, their bottomless desires.
They sent a child to his death, for what? A throne? A title? I didn’t want it then. I truly didn’t. I loved them. The simple love of the simplest child coming from the stupid heart of a boy that though family is....that.... just family."
He looked away, his jaw tight. "Where was the justice in it? Where is the love in dealing death to your own kin and then, when the grave fails to take him, spreading ugly rumors to finish what your attempt could not? The curse of that day follows me, twelve years too late remembering what that family truly was at the marrow. I still dream of that pit of slithering grass, engulfing me, chocking me, holding me down, their body cold as grass until I become one with them. Sometimes they get so ugly that I..."
He stopped abruptly, catching the way Basil was staring at him.
He spoke no more after that.
He didn’t finish the sentence, though the meaning was clear enough , and instead rode in a silence so heavy it felt like a shroud, staring straight ahead at a road only he could see.
