Old School

[smokingboot]

I can't think; despite the cricket and the mellow company of my dear larians I feel a bit rough, a bit headachey and depressed for no reason. It's a gentle day, but this story has been waiting for me to shape it. It is done, but it is not a nice story.

Last February I wrote a piece which I now realise is a parallel to this one; both are about twins of a kind. The other is on just_writing because it is older, better I think, and I need to let go of it. I will sort out the deeply dodgy bits of this one later. Right now, it goes here so it doesn't sit in my head. I hide it behind a cut for courtesy's sake.



OLD SCHOOL

I had thought about his death so long, I was not prepared for it when it came, despite the fact that it happened exactly as I had predicted to myself in the silent hours. There is a way to sort such matters. You had to bake a little man out of a certain kind of dough. You could crack an egg in it, but the only other moisture had to come from your tears. If you could cry enough tears to make the dough workable, you had been hurt beyond bearing, and vengeance would be yours. Once you had made the little man, you had to find a photograph of your enemy, cut out the face and pin it on the body, or if you had something he had given you, you could break it and mix it in with the dough. When it was baked, you could put it in the fridge, and he would first burn with rage and then freeze with impotence until he could do nothing; Or you could tear it apart and feed it to the birds of the air, and he would fall apart too, and be devoured by the world, or from within himself.

In all this, you had to pay a price, but if you had given the tears, it was already agreed you had paid a bounty in sorrow. And if you were innocent, you had little more to give.

Of course, I baked the little man, I wrote his name in script and cut it up and put it in the dough. I didn’t need an egg for moisture, my tears were more than enough. I had cried enough to dampen the dough for a dozen little men. Those who bake will know how hard that is, how much one has to cry.

Then, after a while, it began, and I knew he had three chances before he died. Then he died and I was not ready.

And he lay in his coffin. I had not wanted to attend – it was hypocrisy, he believed in nothing – and I was relieved he was going to enter the earth, for the earth is a great wall between the living and the dead, and I knew that he would never follow me, never torment me more.

Not that he could do so anyway; there are roads between the living and the dead, and he never learnt them. All his strength was bright, spoken, talking power; put a coin on his mouth and he would speak no more. It was right that he should join the shades of Hades, but I did not want him to drink of Lethe; I did not want him to forget me, or what he had done, or who had sent him there.

Do not fear the haunting of those gone. Only the righteous can hurt you, those you harm who have not earned it; this is old school teaching and you only learn it in the dark season.

And you will know that season before anyone else. But you will not fall pray to it, unless you are weak; unless you use what you have for harm born out of vanity. But he who threatens your life, your mind, your heart with a killing blow, that one is a natural target for the teeth of the old sow, the moonraptor. Never forget it. Hatred is a child of darkness and light, but so is love. They are twins. Beware of killing your twin.

So, he lay among the lilies and the helpless tears, beautifully exaggerated for his love of bombast, his need for pageant. I was invited at the last minute, and I wanted to make sure he was dead. I walked up to the coffin and wondered who had paid, for surely he had no money of his own. And I saw the old woman, once his lover (and a fine shambles she made of that!) blowing her nose and crying. She had paid for all this velvet nonsense but not alone, no, she kept too tight a hold on her purse strings for that. So I looked again, and there was the man whose needs took him into schoolyards, and there was the man who winced and covered his face when I came near, and there was the bloated carcass still moving on legs like slabs of green cheese; and their faces were blank and lost without him.

And they were watching me watching him. Now here is a thing, you must not cry if you see the body. One tear, one tear of pity can undo the whole business, unless your prey be already on the river, and he was not, for they were barbarians and had placed no coins on his eyes, no coin on his mouth. Even if he found the ferryman, he could not pay him. And then I did not know what to do; for if I did not help he would stay this side of the river and bother me perhaps, but it was important that I give him nothing, nothing to link us ever again, in all the lives in all the worlds. It must be as though he hadn’t existed, as though we had never known each other. He could be born on a planet like ours but only circling a far distant star; and I would never feel his presence anymore.

But he could go nowhere without the coins, and I was the only one who knew he needed them. The ferryman would not take him, and he, for all his talking, knew none of the old roads. He could seek out the Judges of the Mask, for he had many faces and they might understand him, but that way lies along another river, too well known, and even he has better sense than to lurk near the lair of Brother-Killer. He could seek a bridge of light, but the ways of air are closed to him, for it was the children of air who ate the little man, and whatever track he takes must begin under the earth. He could go the mountain way, but between the Wind-Walker and the great net waiting at the sea cliffs, he would be hunted and eaten before the flowers on his grave wilted. There was nowhere for him to go, nothing for him to be. Words on a gravestone would fade. No-one would remember. Even I would not remember.

Less harsh would be Hades, I thought, even if eventually they make him drink Lethe and he will forget; still, I only have a right to so much. And he cannot get there unless he has the coins. These fools, for all their dribbling and weeping consider only the pretty colours of him, the loss to themselves, the swelling grey tide turning their sandcastles to mud. They do not think of what happens to him next.

He cannot get there without the coins. If I give him the coins, I reach my hand out to him and a link is made. No. If they love him so well, let them guard him in death as in life. But they cannot, for they are just puppets and the strings above their heads are cut.

Just as that thought entered my head, the lisping man came up to me. Of them all, he was the only one who dared approach, and he did that reluctantly, for though my hair is white and I am small of frame, I stand taller than they. I cannot explain it better than that.

‘There’s something wrong…’ He said, ‘I can tell by the way you’re looking at …’ He stifled a sob and then released his tears, blubbering, hoping for my arms, some kindness in my voice, something. I looked at his face, and felt the mask’s weight on mine, impassive and heavy. Would now be the time to tell him how the beloved waved him aside as tedious, how he bored his idol? Was this the time to tell any of them? It was certainly the time to speak of the coins, and the one way to get him to the river. I thought it over.

No. He had earned tears and words and lilies. He had not earned one coin, let alone three from me. No river, no bridge, no light, no Lethe, only the earth and stones, only silence and unbreachable walls. And yet.

At length I spoke. I gave them help of the old-school kind.

‘It is wrong for him to have a gravestone,’ I said. ‘Plant a tree where he lies.’

The man shook his head. ‘He would want to be remembered,’ he said. ‘He would rather have a stone than a tree.’

I shrugged. ‘You asked, I’m telling you. Do as you will,’ and I turned away. But this one was always weak-willed and somewhat afraid of me, and I knew he would say yes.

They buried him nameless, and bought a yew sapling, just as I told them; had their love reached their pockets they would have bought an older tree and sent him home faster.

There is a reason yew trees grow in graveyards. Their sap is red as blood, and their bark is dark as skin and their berries are poison; the ancient ancestors whose bones make up the soil of the land loved such trees, for they grow hollow over time. Those hollows are doors to the land of the dead, far safer than the roads, the rivers, the mountains, the sea. But they are slow and before they can do this, they must grow for a thousand years. A thousand years and he can go home, if he can remember where it is. A thousand years and peace enough for me.

I sometimes visit it, to smell the rich poison of the past in root and leaf, but the bark stays resolutely solid. Then I leave it, and feel with every step, his feet pushing against the soles of mine, reflected on the other side, walking every step I walk. Each time I go out, he presses harder. I know better than to stare too long in puddles and there are no mirrors in my house. Sometimes one forgets important things.

The earth is not impenetrable and unmoving. It dissolves every second, every minute, through seeds and worms, roots and caves, mines and wells and tunnels, until there comes a time when it is as pliant as dough, as thin as a little pastry man. I feel his toes scrabbling against my own, nails scratching mine. A thousand years is nothing in the dance of the earth, in the malice and pity of the twin. There are no unbreachable walls.

That’s a lesson I missed in the Old School.



Copyright and intellectual property of Debbie Gallagher 2005 all rights reserved, not public domain etc etc etc...