The Bats of Elvidner

by Danielle L. Parker

parts 2-3

Last View is neither village nor town; it clings to the flank of the Dunkel Mountains like winter lichen does to rock, without green or hope of springtime. The man on the eight-legged steed found in the first pearl of dawn six or seven leprous and hopeless habitations of piled rocks and banked dirt, huddled as densely as nits. A brown half-frozen stream of sewage and wash water meandered between them, crusted with a rainbow film of grease. A large gaunt rat, feasting upon the ordure, turned to glare at him for an instant without fear in its red eyes and then humped swiftly into a crevice.

The rider, drawing rein, took the leather hat from his head and allowed the bitter breeze to ruffle his bared brow. Behind him stooped the trail he had labored up through the night, falling in multiple breathless cloud-hazed switches to the distant valley floor. But his eyes, which were twin strange glitters of silver under his lids, seemed alert in spite of his hours in the saddle.

After his brief rest, he lifted his hat to his head again and drew a long spear from its sling near his knee. With its iron-wrapped butt he knocked on the door of the nearest hovel: once, twice, three times, the metal striking each time with a peculiar authority in the still air.

“Eric Cut-Lip!” he called in a bass boom. “I, Elian Tellen, command you! Come forth!”

There was no reply, but now the silence seemed to quiver with a voiceless agitation. The rider, waiting with iron patience, heard a rat-like scurrying within; at last the patchwork boards that formed the door cracked open a finger’s width, and the curls of an untamed red beard and one pale rapidly blinking eye could be seen around the edge.

“I am sick!” its owner protested in a trembling voice. “Go away!”

“Presently,” said his visitor. “You must answer my questions first. Two nights ago, perhaps three, the Silent Ones passed through this town, did they not?”

The eye fled. There was a rusty scraping sound as Eric Cut-Lip tried to force shut the patchwork door, but Elian Tellen had already inserted the end of the spear into its gap, and the door did not budge.

“It was the night before last,” gabbled his reluctant respondent. “At midnight, when the first moon was high, we heard them... oh, a great, great caravan of Evil Ones, with many prey! We were afraid! Oh, do not make me speak of them! I am sick!” And within could be heard panting and cries as Eric Cut-Lip struggled once more to shut the door. But the door did not move.

The visitor pressed his lips slightly beneath the shadow of his leather hat. “And was there a dark-haired youth among them, twelve or thirteen years perhaps, tall for his age, and dressed better than the common kind?”

“Many, many prey,” wept the red-bearded man in response. “Men and women and children; oh, the poor, poor babes! Go away and do not affright me, lord!”

“I go,” replied his interrogator as he withdrew his spear. His face now was stern and set. “You may tell those who inquire that fifteen souls from the little town on Wandering Creek, and one more besides, were taken. I go to save those I can, but there will be few alive even now.”

“The poor, poor children!” wailed the voice from within. “Oh, I am sick!”

Elian Tellen slung his spear in its sling at his knee and slapped the reins upon the neck of his centipede-legged steed. With a blur of its segmented limbs the beast leapt Last View’s wandering slime and thundered past the last hut; boom went its feet, in a swiftly rolling drumbeat. The trail above was sparse and steep, and only its own footprints now gouged the new-fallen snow. Ahead the orb of the sun shone low and weak in Elvidner’s ash-lilac dawn, and its rays gilded the frozen peaks it rested upon with a false rose.

part 3

There had been sixteen in the cart, sixteen humans with limbs woven like knitted yarn, without room to breathe, to piss, or to wail. There was plenty of room in the swaying wooden conveyance now, but no one was celebrating. Now there were only four. Only four, and all of them shivering and trembling in the frigid high-altitude air.

Only Siglind Stick-Arm, the bony child of the village washerwoman, still whispered monotonous prayers from inside the cover of her tangled hair. “Lords of White Star, save us from the Evil Ones; Maura, red mother of birthing, protect us now...”

The red-haired pig farmer Hagar Huge-Fist, sitting sideways in the front of the cart, spat through the wooden lattice door. The spittle fell short of the smoothly working haunches of the double-yoked dray bats in front. “Ain’t no lord of White Star listening to ye now, girl.”

There was no real rancor in his voice, but Loeske Light-Eyes, the village elder, spoke up in mild protest. “Let the child pray, Hagar. It can’t hurt.”

“Can’t help, neither.”

They fell silent. The boy, his dark head cocked in an attitude of intense listening, beat his knuckles softly against the wooden side.

The old man watched him with rheumy pale-eyed speculation. “Talking again, are they?”

The boy nodded.

“I’ll go next, then,” the old man said. “There’s not much blood in me, but maybe it’ll be enough, for a while. I’m old. Doesn’t matter much to me when I go, now.”

Siglind Stick-Arm fell suddenly silent and pushed her face into the shelter of her upraised knees, covering her head with her spindly arms. But the boy closed his eyes and turned his head, like a blind man seeking sound. He shook his head sharply: no.

“Witch-boy,” breathed the farmer, and signed avert with furtive fingers.

“The boy can hear them talk, and we can’t. That’s our only hope right now, pig man.” The old man hitched himself laboriously upright, pressing his wrinkled face against the rear lattice. The cart was open on each end, where the tightly woven branches formed doors now secured with coarse rope. The wooden sides curved over their heads in a crude low arch. “One of them in sight — one of the warriors. It’s coming.”

A breathless silence fell. Then the boy, hesitant at first, then more loudly, began to rap against the side of the cart in a variable, stop-and-start rhythm.

“Keep the boy alive as long as you can,” the old man said. “Do that for me, Hagar. He can hear them. You can’t understand how important that is. Ain’t never been one of us that could hear them talk, before. Dogs can — we know that. But humans haven’t been able to, before. You’ll have to give them the girl next. There’s no help for it.”

A shadow fell over them from behind; a bitter-iron odor threaded their urine-fouled air. The boy stopped his rapping. The humans, immobile, looked upon the source of the shadow with terror-dry eyes.

The face was larger than a man’s, sunk low between sharp, jutting shoulders. Its shoulders were the tips of its leathery wings. It leaned upon the elbows of those wide, scissored wings as it hopped-walked upon the ground. The pupil-less eyes were large and glassy black; its nose a hideously complex structure of folds and tubes and fluctuating holes. Its mouth was pinched small and sunken like a toothless elder’s; the flexible sucking tube that formed its eating apparatus hidden, for now. It could not chew, nor could it bite. But it did not need to bite or to chew.

“Promise me, Hagar!” the old man rasped. “Get the boy away, if you can. It’ll have to be soon. We’ve been descending for at least an hour now.”

“Aye,” the farmer replied hoarsely. “I’ll do what I can, Light-Eyes.”

Suddenly the boy tapped, almost hesitantly, upon the wooden side of the cart. There was a pause; then he tapped again, and again, and at last, a flurry of desperately fast knocks in a complex rhythm.

Then the knocking fell silent.

And at last the shadow withdrew, and the cold bright sunlight slanted inside their wooden cave once more.

The old man wiped his gray-stubbled face with trembling fingers.

“It heard you,” he whispered. “By the lords of White Star, boy, it knows you can hear it.”

The boy nodded. A flash of white split his face suddenly: a smile.

“It was testing you, sure enough. What’s your name, son?”

“He don’t seem able to talk none.” The pig farmer snorted. “Ain’t said one word the whole time. Ain’t even cried.”

The boy frowned. His fingers found his mouth, and felt out its shape dourly.

The old man nodded encouragingly. “Go on, boy. What’s your name?”

The boy’s fingers fell away. He spelled out something on the palm of his hand. The old man leaned to look. The boy spelled letters over and over, more urgently each time, and at last seized the old man’s hand to spell out the same shapes.

“B,” Loeske muttered, squinting. “That’s a B... R... Bram. That your name, boy? Bram?”

The boy nodded. He let the old man’s hand drop. Then he twisted his head to listen to the silence, and began, once more, to knock softly against wood.

“We got a witch-boy that don’t talk, and bloodsuckers that don’t listen,” the pig farmer said. “How’s that going to help us?”

The old man scratched his stubbled chin in satisfaction. “One of them listened. Maybe that’s a start.”

The cart tilted steeply. Its occupants slid forward in a helpless tangle. The swinging bucket of half-frozen water hung above broke free from its hook and crashed down, drenching them in icy liquid.

“Maura help us!” the farmer screamed. “What’s happening?”

Loeske felt about in the sudden absence of light. The cart was tilted too steeply to pull himself upright. The little girl wailed. The old man put his arm around her thin, trembling shoulders for comfort — his own, perhaps. He could hear the labored, panic-stuttering gasps of his companions in the close inky dark, but he could no longer glimpse even the whites of their eyes.

“This is it,” he croaked. “We’re going down. Lichtlos... we’re going down into the heart of the world. Pray, farmer, if you know any god who might listen. It can’t hurt.”

To be continued...