III

Time seemed to lose all rigidity in that moment. A fraction of a second became elastic and yawned ahead of me. I stepped outside myself  and suddenly lost all feeling of weight. I had ceased to be matter. I wondered when I would next take a breath.  

And then, between the count of one second to the next, I recalled a story.

A story that had never left my side nor my thoughts whilst I slept. A story that was an ice cold sabre through my heart. One of the last told to me by my mother before she got sick and disease rotted the tongue from her head. 

Back when I would still be permitted to see her face.

Before she was taken from the palace to the convent.

I must have been young, then. I cannot recall her face even now, nor her scent. Her true scent. When I think of my mother I think of the yellow veil and the overwhelming odour of lithemus. I think of darkened halls and vaulted ceilings that the waning light from the thin apertures didn’t reach. I think of the fingers of shadow knitting overhead like a canopy of dead branches. The air is thick with ragged breathing. She was alone at the apex, as befitting a queen, and yet there was no escaping the sound of the terminally ill below. Nor was there hiding from the clatter of hoof and the roll of the wheel of the cart. The desiccated herbs hanging from the frame of her bed, the smell of the ointments, none of it was enough at night, when I dutifully sat by her bedside. The smell of the burning dead would drift through the open window like a dread phantom and writhe across my skin. Upon my return to the palace I would insist the clothes that I had worn be taken and burned themselves, such was the smell and how it affected me. 

I attempted to be the dutiful son. To show I was not like my brothers.

I knew my place. 

Yet in the end she was no longer my mother. 

She was a monster. 

I digress. 

Before her degeneration I would be teased about how pale I must be, to wander like a babe in her shadow. To fear the setting of the sun. To fear the rising of the sun. Yet she told me to pay no heed. That her love and my love were an immortal chain that would never be broken. That the envious and pathetic mockery would affect our love in the same way the death of a swallow affected the forest. Every night I would be allowed to pay visit to her chamber. I would be lead there by her page - a wizened and gnarled root of a man that I knew as Campion. He had been my mother’s most trusted attendant, and also her doom. It was Campion who had defied the word and in doing so brought the plague to my mother’s bedside. It was Campion who had succumbed before any other in the kingdom, but he had by then sewn the seeds of a terrible harvest. 

Campion had little time for me, yet showed no outright hostility, and for that, I considered him benign. Once I had even caught the shadow of a smile on him, but he always seemed prone to good humour around my mother. She had that effect on even the most downbeat, pathetic and lost. 

Perhaps that was why my affinity with her was what it was. Was I pathetic also? I believe so. I was then as I am now. 

She would weave her tapestry and a tale would spring from her lips, me her captive audience, spellbound from the first word til the last. She told me stories of lost and forgotten kingdoms that had risen and fallen in lands far from our own. Stories of the creation of the world and of the gods. Stories of creatures that lived and died deep within the earth, of creatures that would soar through skies that were caught in the maelstrom of creation. 

And I would love her for it all the more. 

One evening, with not a cloud in the dark sky visible through the large glass aperture behind her, she told me a different story. She seemed hesitant to start, instead bidding me to sit closer by her on the small lambswool throw she had draped across a series of pillows that had been removed from her bed and placed before her. At first I wasn’t sure, for it was never my place to be in such close proximity to her or to go against the rules of my station, but she beckoned me with such a sad, sweet smile on her face that I could not refuse her. Campion had been sent from her chamber moments before and it was just my mother and I and the aurora that blazed across the northern sky. 

She weaved in silence as the colour danced an impossible distance beyond her. Far beneath it I could see the braziers lit across the top of the wall - we knew them as the blazing teeth of the night. Between the wall and my mother’s window was my world. Was the world. A short expanse of grand architecture and dwellings that towered up towards us and away towards the wall. The dwellings were as grand as the cathedrals and monuments, as the treasuries and halls of justice. We did not want for anything, and we revelled in our own importance. 

And why not. This was no self-delusion. We were the immortal flame. 

We are the immortal flame. 

She began eventually, after such time had passed that I became convinced that she had forgotten I was there. She spoke quietly and hesitantly. So very much unlike her. Her tales always began with a warm smile and a confident voice. She would begin with such confidence because she knew the worth in what she was about to tell me, what words she was about to spin. 

This time was different. 

In recollection I should have known she was already sick, or getting sick. I could head Campion beyond the heavy door of her chamber. Coughing. My mother’s skin was waxen in the candlelight, her eyes almost unnaturally bright. 

Had she known then? 

Was this why she had chosen that particular story?

The events that would transpire hence, all those years later, those that set in turn wheels of motion that brought me to this clearing, would indicate that she knew full well the importance and ramifications of the story that she was about to tell. There was it seemed good reason for her to be so very hesitant in the telling of it. It was this story that would then cause me to awaken in the dead of night for the rest of my childhood and pre-adult years screaming and crying into the dark. The night after she had finished the telling and sent me to bed, I soiled my bedclothes. This was a story unlike all others, and I do not forget it even now. 

It was presented before my eyes now, as I watched my body, rigid with shock. It played out like one of Grammar’s zoetropes. He would show me one right after…he did what he did. It was my reward for being good. 

For being quiet. 

Until I wasn’t. 

This story unfolded and I relived it again, with the lack of my mother’s soothing tongue. I left the clearing and I was up in that unfamiliar sky, all around me the vibrancy of terror and death. The vividly of arterial blood and the death mist of the terminally wounded. I saw the fragments from her story that I had tried to forget. Only fragments - the surface of an iceberg that scraped the bowels of the ocean. I saw that cat, blind with a serrated spine of impossible teeth over the arc of it’s back. It’s belly was distended as it drunkenly mewed it’s way towards me through the stars. My body was far below, yet it wasn’t frozen. I could feel the echo of my heart beat once and reverberate slowly like the birth of a whale. I only played at being stricken, and I could feel that blade at my throat even from where I now soared. 

I was sprawled on wolf skin before the hearth in the great hall. I was held down by unseen hands and the cat slurred and staggered it’s way towards me. The noises it made were sickening, it’s lower jaw hanging limply from it’s aberration of a head. My hand did as it always did in the surface of my nightmare, and went out to soothe the beast, despite the rest of my body recoiling in disgust away from it. 

So close now, I could almost touch it. It’s eyeless, misshapen head. 

Then it stopped, as it would stop, and it lolled on to it’s side, it’s engorged bowels rupturing, the stench imagined but foul. I begin to gag. Something crawled from inside it, it too mewling along with it’s mother. This should have been the cry of a new life, yet it was the strangled rattle of death. The newborn was dying as it’s mother. Yet I reached for her still, my hand finally resting on that matted skull that yielded under my touch. I retched again. And again.

I was falling now, falling towards where my body sat. 

Was this my gift? Or was it my curse?

The cat was from the story. That’s all I remembered. I could recall nothing more. I didn’t wish to dive beneath the surface of the ocean. I didn’t wish to see the rest of that iceberg.  

I was still gripping the cat’s foul head, yet that was all I held. It’s body was still above me, in the ether. I had simply wrenched it’s still mewling skull from it. I tried to let go yet inadvertently crushed it, something bursting from within, snaking along my arm with supernatural speed. I tried to shake it off. To release it, but it was on my shoulder, my neck, my jaw.

My mouth. 

In my throat. 

It felt like a finger. Thick and foul tasting. 

I retched again. 

And again.

Then hot bile foamed from my throat and down my chest, my vision blurred and swimming. I no longer felt the blade at my throat, the shock of it had done enough to stop me consuming what was in my hand. I looked down, where I thought I had the head of the abomination in my grip. Nothing but a handful of blueish ooze where I had crushed the berries.

Something large was dumped before me and my vision cleared at the last. 

He wiped one large finger on his jacket, the one he had forced down my throat to force the gag reflex. His knife was already sheathed. He looked down, brought my attention to the pile of dead birds he had dropped at my feet. Their eyes were white and maggoty, blue froth around their beaks. Bodies bloated with corruption. They stank. 

“Bad berries,” the ranger said. 

It was all I could do to nod. 

Bad berries.