Evening the Ninth — The Deathless Thing in the Reeds and the Coming of the Small Deaths

Hear now — no, sit. The bench holds. It has held worse than you.

I know that look. You came in from the salt-road with your throat full of dust and you thought there'd be no telling tonight, that Hjalti's cup was dry and his tongue with it. Wrong on the first count. Landlord! The Zamorian's paying — he doesn't know it yet, but the gods write the debt before the man does.

You there, with the empty cup. Two nights past I gave you the anvil of dead kings, and the green brood that boiled out of that citadel like maggots from a split hound. Don't ask me to tell it twice. A song told twice is a woman kissed twice by the same drunk — it loses something both times.

This is what came after. The marsh.

Draw close.

There is a country south of the good stone where the world forgets to be solid. The ground there is neither earth nor water but the argument between them, and it breathes. Step, and it sighs under your boot. Step again, and something under the sigh moves away from you. The air hangs wet as a fever-rag over the mouth, and every breath you draw tastes faintly of an old cook-pot nobody scoured — sweet, green, and gone over.

The Cimmerian went in.

Understand me: a man born to grey hills and clean cold hates that country the way a hawk hates a cellar. There is no horizon in a marsh. There is only the next reed. And he walked into it with the cross-scars showing white through the grime on his back, and reeds closed behind him like a mouth.

He found the cave-mouth by the smell.

Now. There was a thing that kept that cave, and it was called the Executioner, and I will tell you why the name stuck.

It stood as tall as a doorframe and it was not a man. Scales the colour of a drowned frog, wet-looking even in dry air, running black along the ridge of the spine. A snout like a war-boat's prow. Eyes set on the sides of the skull — flat, gold, lidless, the eyes of a thing that has never once wondered whether it was right. In its fists a blade wide enough to bar a gate, and the edge of it dull, because it had never needed an edge. It did not need to cut. It needed only to fall.

Reptile-folk of the marsh, we call them, when we speak of them at all. Older than Stygia. Older than the trick of writing. They were doing this before there was anyone to tell it.

And the first blow the Cimmerian landed — a good blow, a killing blow, the kind that ends an argument between two men forever — went into the thing's ribs and came out again, and the wound sealed like water closing over a dropped stone.

He stood there a moment. I know he did. Every man does. The body knows before the head catches up: the arms go heavy, the mouth goes dry, and the belly drops a hand's width. This does not die.

Crom gives a man strength. Crom does not give him a way out. That is the whole of the Cimmerian creed and it is a cold thing to be handed at the bottom of a marsh with a doorframe walking at you.

So he did the only thing left, which is the thing his people are for. He kept swinging.

He cut it and it healed, and he cut the same place again before the healing finished, and again, faster than the flesh could think — the way you split green wood: not one great stroke but the same stroke, over and over, in the same wet groove, until the fibre gives up its argument. The wide dull blade came down and took a slab of hide off his shoulder. He gave the shoulder. He took the ribs. It came down again and rang off the cave wall and stone-chips opened his cheek to the bone. He gave the cheek. He took the ribs.

You cannot outlive a deathless thing.

You can, if you are stubborn past all reason, out-hurry it.

When it finally went down it went down slow, like a wall deciding. And the marsh made no sound at all — no bird, no frog, nothing — because in a place where the ground breathes, everything had stopped to watch. He knelt in the muck beside it, blowing like a bellows, blood running off his chin into the water in strings, and he waited to see whether it would get up.

It did not get up.

He waited a while longer anyway. That is the part I like.

But hear me, because this is the night's true meat, and the fools always miss it.

That cave was not empty.

Deeper in, past the smell, in the wet dark where the Executioner kept what it kept, there were three living things with rope on them.

A priest of Set — Hyrkanian, hollow-eyed, the marks of his god inked down his forearms and half worn away by damp. A Zamorian, thin as a lockpick, with an archer's ruined fingers and an archer's flat stare. And a third called Sully, of that company men name the Black Hand, and Sully had been down there long enough that the light off the cave-mouth made him turn his face away.

The Cimmerian had worn rope. Not metaphor, boy — worn it, with the sores to show where. There is a certain way a man looks at a knot when he has been on the wrong end of one. He does not untie it. He never untles it. He cuts it, and he cuts it too hard, and the blade bites the post behind.

So he cut them loose. Three strokes, no words, and the ends of the cord dropped in the water and were carried off somewhere to rot.

And then — and mark this, because it is the whole difference between a man and a driver of men — he turned his back on them and walked out toward the light.

Turned his back. On a Set-priest. On a Zamorian who kills at forty paces. On a man of the Black Hand.

They could have taken him in that corridor. They stood there in the dark rubbing their wrists, and the water dripped, and each of them did the sum every freed thing does: the road behind, or the back of that neck.

They chose the road.

They came out into the green light behind him, one and then the second and then Sully last, blinking, and none of them ever said a word about it that I have heard. Some debts don't get spoken. They get walked.

Now I'll tell you a small thing, and I tell it because sagas that are all thunder put men to sleep faster than lullabies.

Going down into that country he had passed a gazelle.

A hooved brown nothing with wet eyes, standing in the shallows, chewing. It looked up at him — this man crusted head to heel in the dried black of three fights, dragging a sword through the water — and it did not run. It simply looked. Then it went back to chewing, having judged him, correctly, as somebody else's problem.

He let it live. There is no saga in a gazelle.

And there were spiders in the reeds — grey ones, the size of a splayed hand, hanging in webs strung with dew, and when he came through them they went across his shoulders and his neck and into his hair, and a man who has just fought a deathless lizard will still, I promise you, do a stupid little dance in a marsh over a spider on his neck. I have seen it in better men than him.

And there were the other ones. The dry ones.

They came up out of the wet ground where no bone should keep — men who had been dead so long the mud had nothing left to take — and one of them had held on to a bow. Think on that. Everything gone: the eyes, the tongue, the name, the woman who said the name, the whole of whatever he was. And still the hands remembered the draw.

The arrow came out of the dark and went past the Cimmerian's ear with a sound like a wasp with a grudge.

He broke them. Bone gives easier than scale — that's the one mercy in it, and it comes with a lesson: the thing that has been dead longest is usually the easiest to kill twice.

Two nights and three, then, and the fire in this telling burns lower.

He went back. That is the part that makes my throat ache, and I have a good throat.

He went back into the marsh a second day, and a third, for the same cave and the same dark and the same rope. Because there had been more of them down there than he could carry out at once — and a man who leaves one behind sleeps badly for the rest of his life, and he had already learned that lesson in a place he does not speak of.

Second day: the priest and Sully. Third day: Sully again, and don't ask me how a man ends up bound twice in three days — ask Sully, he's alive somewhere, buy him a drink, he'll lie to you beautifully. Some men are born with a talent for the wrong room.

Between the walking he did the small work. Cut reed and root, dug what the mud would give, boiled and bound and set an edge back on iron with a wet stone, sitting cross-legged in a ring of freed men who did not yet know what to call him. Three things made with his hands in those days that were not weapons. That is not a small thing. Any butcher can take a life apart. It takes a different sort of patience to sit in the stink with your hands full of cord and make something that holds.

The blade was black to the hilt and would not come clean. He stopped trying. Some rust is just history.

On the fourth day he came up out of the wet country onto the sand, and the sand had its own opinions.

A scorpion, big as a hunting dog, came sideways out of a rock-shadow with its tail cocked over its back like a question nobody wants answered. Then the cobra — hood spread wide as a serving-plate, swaying, doing that slow rocking dance that is not a dance at all but arithmetic, the thing measuring the distance to your ankle. And then a desert snake, brown on brown, which is the worst kind, because you do not see the desert snake. You see the place the desert snake just was.

Small deaths, all of them. No song in any one. But I will tell you something for nothing, and it is worth more than the ale: it is never the deathless lizard that gets a man. It is the brown rope in the brown sand at the end of a long day, when the shoulder is stiff and the eye is tired and the mind has already gone on ahead to the next well.

He killed them all and walked on and did not think about it again.

I think about it. That's why he's the Cimmerian and I'm the one with the cup.

So there he stands tonight, wherever he stands. A dead thing in a marsh that will not get up. Three men behind him who chose the road when they could have chosen his neck, and behind them a growing tail of others from evenings you've already had out of me. The scars on his back have company now, on the shoulder and the cheek, and the cheek one will pull his face crooked when he grins, which — Crom help us — he has begun to do.

He does not sing about it. His people don't. Crom keeps no hall of songs, and a Cimmerian who boasts is a Cimmerian who has run out of enemies.

That's what I'm for. A cup, a fire, and a room too tired to leave.

But here's the thing that keeps me awake, and I'll leave it in your ear like a splinter so you come back:

Those bones in the marsh had bows.

Someone armed them. Somebody, somewhere back before the writing, put a weapon in a dead man's hand and taught the hand to hold it — and the hand is still holding.

The Cimmerian has been going deeper each time. There is a bottom to that country.

Something down there has been arming the dead for a very long while, and it has not stopped, and it does not yet know his name.

Nor do you, half of you. Come back and I'll sell it to you.

Landlord — the Zamorian's paying.