By Ron Leighton
Copyright © 2011
In the damp, dark cottage three doors from Gergenon’s lone brothel, Nathaiu struggled with the black-haired woman under him, desperate to get what he wanted. Her frantic exhales were visible in the faint light of the hearth, like the fear in her gray eyes. Did she not understand his need? As he gained control of her flailing limbs, and she settled a little, as if out of a fatalistic acceptance, he gripped her harder and pressed closer. He saw one eye fix on him and she trembled as she turned her face away, to escape in some small way, it seemed.
****
A week and a day before, a bone-chilling March wind blew across Artago plain, lifting a swirl of dry snow. Nathaiu wandered along Gergenon’s main street. Counting stones and jumping over a stinking drain, he made his way to the early market by the temple of Orotar, the Sun God. He narrowed his blue eyes against the sunbeams slanting over the former border-fort’s jagged old walls, which ran parallel to the street. In the shadow of the temple tower, his dazzled eyes found relief, and the market. Looking for a cheap chicken – one his aged Aunt Enselyta could cook with a little thyme, basil, and salt, if he could get it – he made his way through the murmuring throng.
Nathaiu’s stomach growled as he stopped in front of a chicken-seller and looked at the man’s baskets of half-starved birds.
Its thin cockscomb slumped lazily to the side and its pale red wattle wiggling, one chicken tilted its head and gawked at him with one eye.
“Three coppers?” Nathaiu said, glaring at the thick-bellied chicken-seller and shaking his head. “For these things?! It’s robbery! Why don’t you just sit by the graveyard and poke widows for their offering-coins? Give up the chicken-selling?”
“Raise up your own chickens, if you don’t like it,” the chicken-seller said with a twisted sneer on his lips.
Disgusted, but mostly dispirited, Nathaiu walked away.
Passing out of the temple tower’s shadow, he shaded his eyes from the bright sun again. Ignoring one chicken-seller and the next, he came to the salt-seller’s decrepit booth. Only, instead of the salt-seller, he found an old man in a fur hat peddling incense.
Nathaiu crossed his arms over his thin chest. Now where’s that salt-seller got to? he wondered with irritation, his eyes stuck on the stranger.
The man certainly looked curious. A foreigner, Nathaiu guessed. An outlander to all the seven countries. He had seen a fur cap like that only one other time – on a bear-tamer with a stump for a hand. He had decided then not to think much of a one-handed bear-tamer with a strange accent and hat.
Still, this man, this incense-peddler, wore the long, thin gray scarf of the blessed priests of Orotar. That counted for something. Not even the most foolish vagabond would risk arrest mere footsteps from the temple if he had not been granted the right to the distinction.
Nathaiu waved away the sweet-smelling smoke that curled under his nose and scrubbed at his unkempt, dirty-blonde hair. He watched as the incense-peddler harangued a huddle of pilgrims. Through the haze, Nathaiu made out the man’s empty black eyes, so different from the smile hiding under the man’s drooping mustache. A bit unnerved, Nathaiu turned to go.
But the sudden mention of an incense to send the dead on in peace to Orotar stopped him cold. He turned back and found the man staring at him through the crowd.
The peddler held up a tray of little brown cakes. “Do departed dear ones linger in sadness?” he asked.
Nathaiu’s heart shook. He nodded his head. The peddler waved an invitation to move closer. “Uh…My mother and father, they died of a fever one after the other during Winterfest ‘fore last.”
Solemnity on his face, the man leaned towards Nathaiu and spoke through his flapping mustache. “And they linger now despite most anxious prayers?”
Nathaiu swallowed hard and nodded.
Tears formed in his eyes and against his wishes trickled slowly down his cheek. He brushed them away with the back of a hand. Not a day had passed since his parents died that he had not thought of them, not a day that he had not sensed their troubled spirits. For this reason, he lit a lamp and said a prayer to Orotar every morning just after sunrise, and then one before he climbed into his sagging, creaking cot at night.
“I ask with humility, Shining One,” he would whisper, hands clasped tight as he knelt in front of the small household shrine tucked beside the hearth.
Let not the clinging earth and its devils have them
Let your light lead them away from darkness
Let your love bring them out of sadness
I beg you…
His mind tinged with doubt, Nathaiu blinked away his thought and asked the stranger, “Who are you?”
The incense-peddler gave a weary look and waved his hand. “I am called Thuveoro, Smokemaster.” He shrugged and smiled. “I come with Shining One’s work in mind. How shall I call you?”
Nathaiu couldn’t place the man’s unusual accent. The Smokemaster might come from the east, the north or the south, but Nathaiu couldn’t say which.
One of the pilgrim women followed the conversation, her meek, freckled face turning silently from the peddler back to Nathaiu.
Nathaiu answered with some reluctance. “Call me Nathaiu.”
“Friend of gods?” Thuveoro said, lifting his thick brows. “It is good name, good name. Your father and mother loved you dearly.”
Nathaiu scrubbed his thin, rough hands together against the cold and shrugged. “Nearly as much as I loved them, I guess.”
“Hmm, well… Do you know what delay happy departure of loved ones for Great Father?”
Nathaiu’s mind wandered and he found himself in the presence of his memories. He swallowed hard again. “No,” he answered. Blinking to focus his eyes, he added, a hint of desperation in his voice, “But I seek to know.”
Thuveoro’s coal-black eyes did not move, though a slight grin peeked again from under his gray mustache. “Is sad secret,” the man said, “but I gladly tell.”
I must seem a weepy, superstitious old woman, Nathaiu thought, casting a quick glance at some of the pilgrims. But he didn’t care. The pilgrim woman looked at him with wide eyes, and then blinked. He felt no shame for his tears and curiosity, or at least not much.
He looked back at Thuveoro.
…
(Go to ‘A Cheerful Smoke for the Dead’ at Smashwords.com to get the rest of the story!)