The Golden Bridge of Nevesus
by D. G. Ironside
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
By the gods, I had suffered the bottle on the night of the star fall. Through a murk, I witnessed that stark eve, the streak of light, a pillar of fire diving from the black. Things seldom plummet from the heavens. My hazed view, gripping a rare reality, stared up from a tub of fantastically warm water open to the cool spring air. My head was reclined right then, having just loved myself with delicate determination, eyes up, lids fluttering. Within that blink of shameful bliss, I saw white-yellow fire crack the sky. I admit, my moments of isolation and intimacy did not commonly receive such fanfare.
After a brief respite, I’d gotten dressed in a robe and slippers and staggered, steaming, down to the bar. I then told my tale unabashed to whoever would listen, omitting only one mid-size detail. I learned the shining star was a wonder that few had witnessed, but then, via my whispers, it became the thing absolutely every drunkard was yammering about; inebriation adores the tallest tales. Yet I was not chasing relief from boredom as much as renewed purpose. Then as forever, liquor did not avail reinvention, only the mirror of discomfort, mouth instead of mind.
Days later, Jadus told me the star had fallen on a line straight to our lonely spire that loomed in the east. The grand flash he’d seen, too, an illumination to halo the mountain. The impact had revealed that Mount Tiltas was more than a vast chunk of rock; it was a reinvigorated volcano. What did I know of spewing lava and white-hot rocks? Not much if you didn’t count my love life. But since that night, Tiltas spewed out grey cinders in a plume.
“It was, perchance, rock broken from a moon,” Jadus speculated, tapping the table. I looked him over. My erstwhile lover was in a terrible state of repair since his ill-conceived resurrection last year, his spirit whole but his body in tatters. Elders at the Temple of Insight had restored him at my behest, but nowhere as good as new. Foremost, he was putrid to the nose, reeking of expired egg. Of late, his joints would make odd sounds, unoiled creaks with every step. What’s more, small pieces fell off him randomly, wayward chunks. For the moment, he was mostly together, only a section of his nose missing, a not insignificant part of the tip.
“Here,” I said, handing the bit back to him from where it skittered on the floor. He plugged it back in place with a wee rub to make it stick. Right then, I wished that my own nose was broken.
“We have three moons,” I said, stifling my breath. “A star is not a star falling to our earth if it is only an offcut of them.”
Jadus beckoned our serving boy closer. The staff at The Edible Curmudgeon were a handsome group, the current lad no exception. The boy reminded me of myself: younger, supple, less encumbered. Oh, that time and chance could be friends, I thought, with a smudge of guilt.
“Worry not about the stars and moons but what Gregor would have me do,” Jadus croaked out in his trademark rasp. It was then he ordered a sweet fizzy beer, foam for a top.
“Float iced milk in the mug, please,” Jadus added, wanting cream with his sugar. That sweet thought reached my tongue as well. Maybe it would help my fat skull or my suffering inhalations.
“Make it two,” I waved. The yummy lad scampered off. “You think Gregor the Covetous will want something from you?”
Jadus carefully massaged several of his knuckles, fingers and thumbs at odd angles.
“Of course, he would and will. He should be here any second.” No sooner did those words hit my ears than did Gregor the Opportune strode in, massive boots thumping the floor. He smelled as precious as ever, half parts leather and musk-ox, yet somehow alluring compared to my old lover. With typical command, Gregor stood near.
“Hey boss,” Jadus managed.
“Chief,” I nodded. Technically he wasn’t my chief anymore. I had been relieved of that, in wake of the hard deal he and I had carved to make Jadus alive again. Yet for all that I was free, I was foolishly flirting with my previous prison of obligation, sitting where I was. Gregor moved a chair to join us, his dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, his wide beard springy, longish, fuzzy. All three hundred pounds of him sighed deep.
“My two lovely freebooters,” he said, sitting back. The chair groaned to accept him. My guess was that he got a lot of that.
“Stars and whatever, lads,” Gregor said. “Though truly, Kalvus, you were so intoxicated two nights ago that I figured you would still be dry, hard as an old fig after days in the sun.”
“Yet I remember the climax of light,” I offered, sucking the inside of my cheek.
“No matter your memory, I want it.”
Jadus cleared his throat, nearly dislodging teeth, some perpetually loose.
“Sorry. What is it you want?” I asked.
“The fallen star, dum-dum,” Gregor said.
“Moonrocks fallen on the side of a volcano?” I questioned, incredulous. Whatever Gregor wanted it did not seem likely, even possible. A fairy tale. The dream of a child.
“It was a burning star,” Gregor said, rubbing out gunk from his deep-set eyes. “Past legend says that rare metals plummet as miniature suns from the sky. I want whatever remains. You are my tomb raiders. Go raid.” He made it sound like all we had to do was stand up.
Right then our sugar-beer floats arrived. Gregor the Impertinent snatched them uninvited, one in each hand, and he drank them, akin to chugging mead in a pub race, one after the other. Foam and iced milk rimmed his unwashed mouth.
“Good stuff,” he said, wiping his beard with his sleeve. “Now, I’ve made things ready. There are a pair of hardy steeds outside. Go fetch me the heavens.” He ordered two more sugar-beers, only for himself. Then he belched huge, the sour mist of his insides a spritz over everything.
“You make a bold assumption, bringing two horses,” I said.
Gregor smiled, his big yellow teeth showing in an upturned crack.
“The bare slopes of Mount Tiltas cannot be ventured alone, Kalvus,” he said. “We all know that. We know also that your man here needs you to keep him safe and warm, little spoon that he is.”
Jadus should have been outraged yet gave but a throttled sound. I bit my lower lip and sighed through my nose, wondering how much booze it would take to inspire me to climb a mountain, the last of my loyalty blowing in the breeze.
* * *
I did not recall explicitly agreeing to renew my labours for Gregor the Insistent, even if I was again riding one of his palfreys cross-country. Perhaps it was that Jadus could never do anything as a single. He needed a companion for safety, if nothing else. What was more, Gregor the Capricious had always been reckless with our lives, nefarious, reticent with helpful information. More awful things, too, I was sure I’d forgotten. Such atrocious trends were much of why Jadus had died sixteen months ago, a victim of poor planning and withheld facts.
To repair that awful happenstance and restore my lover, I had sworn to be a drudge to numbers and figures at the Temple of Pholtarch, my obligation for the ritual of raising. Since then, Jadus and I endured our beautiful love being ruptured and riven, from a debutante making an entrance, to an old crone fallen down the stairs.
Of course, Jadus stank for his partial return to life, but he also walked as an animated scarecrow. His flesh was stained like the summer flu, markers of rot all over. To be fair, he was still kind, generous and caring, and we had tried to overcome, but I had discovered about six times that getting cozy with him was like making love to a side of slaughtered meat.
“Shank of lamb?” Jadus asked me. We were camped in one of the caves outside Bardelve, on the road along the coast. It was raining, the air so wet you could drink a breath. Beyond the cavemouth it fell in sheets.
“Thank you, my sweet man,” I said, taking a bit. There was nothing wrong with courtesy, even between obsolete lovers, and of course, uncured loins would never last on the road.
Jadus pulled forth a map, the environs of Mount Tiltas traced with charcoal.
“Here, on the southwestern face,” Jadus said. I saw a symbol upon the page I did not recognize.
“What’s that, there?” I pointed.
“The ruins of a tower.”
“A tower? On the side of a volcano?” I asked. “What about the molten rock? Or is this why the tower is a ruin?”
“You and I didn’t know Tiltas was a volcano until two nights ago. Perhaps the Dread-Cadge of Oolibah never knew at all.”
“Dread-Cadge? What for the love of zombies is a Dread-Cadge?”
Jadus studied the map. Blinking costed him eyelashes and eyebrows, so he had none. In the flicker of our cookfire, he appeared quite eerie. He reinforced the lines of the map with his own marker, a ghoulish cartographer of a sort.
“This was a cult dedicated to the jitters,” he told me. I shook my head in disbelief.
“They would invoke a trance-like state where they soaked in fear of their own godlet, suffused with despair. Evidently, many of them wasted away, so lengthy were these anxious raptures,” Jadus explained.
“These beggars were the architects of a huge and ancient tower? Guys who shat their pants and atrophied for long baths in dismay?”
“No,” Jadus replied, “just the most recent inhabitants. The structure itself is archaic, and history doesn’t record its original purpose. But from high on those ruins, we should be able to see where the moonrock fell, the star, whatever it was. Plus, there is a timeworn track across the rising stone. It may allow for horses.”
I nodded and jabbed, “Should we plan to meet Dread-Cadge and join them in a catalepsy?”
“Shut up and suck on your lamb bone,” Jadus said.
I did. I then stared at Jadus when he fell asleep. I tended the embers and hated myself. I smelled only the smoke in the cave and felt guilty for relief. What was love if it couldn’t transcend a stench? I thought. Cannot love overcome decay?
For a year and a third I had pondered calculus, percentages, and accruals at the Cathedral of Pholtarch. Excruciating mathematics, lugging around endless burdensome volumes, slaving all my days to integers. All such toil for Jadus, but then, ultimately for what? My ex had new breath from his resurrection but, in this moldered incarnation, he would never be free. Gregor’s axe of debt was perched to cut his noxious neck for one thing and, for another, we could never seek relief for Jadus’ poor state beyond proximate means. Somehow, Jadus had to be made whole, new and, above all, fresh.
I concluded that to have another true chance together, we must be unfettered. I wasn’t sure of the method, but we would have our liberty or damnation in the attempt. I cracked open one of my flasks of whiskey to help me think. As the fire came to ash and the heat diffused to nothing, I heard the rain just beyond. That deluge was me. I was an inebriated idiot, soaked in devotion.
As I pulled my blanket up to my chin, my mind ambled to something completely unrelated, perhaps only to let me rest. I recalled a ribald tale about a taxidermist drinking at a pub, winning bets for identifying skins of animals blindfolded, then going home to fondle his wife in a stupor. The punchline escaped me. Something about a skunk and a hatchet. My last thoughts before sleep were always outrageous.
* * *
Copyright © 2019 by D. G. Ironside
