Perhaps I did not understand the gravity of my departure just then. It felt like escape to me. Like liberation, perhaps, from I know not what.
* * * * *
It was evening by the time I arrived at the next village --which, truly, was a city by comparison: huge buildings rising up three, four stories tall. Walls of exquisite granite and polished stone. Roads as wide as rivers where people steadily milled about here and there and children flit to and fro like little fish navigating the current. When I came upon it, I found my spirits lifted by how grand and new and so very different it all was from that humble mountain town whence I had come. Here those little sprites would not skip along behind me in twos and threes as I walked the lanes of the marketplace. Here they would not flash too-wide smiles and greet me at every street corner like I was some pet come to grace them with my presence. Here they would not have me sit at their dinner tables out of some peculiar desperation to play host for their local enigma.
I felt my posture straightening as I approached. Hungry and parched as I was, I was ready to take on this new experience. What new habits and quirks would define this collection of people? How would they joke? How would they barter? How would they greet the sun and moon and their fellow man from one day to the next? How would they mourn? How would they celebrate? How--
Silence swept down the road like a tsunami tide. I froze mid-step as first one, then three, then seven, nine pairs of eyes swung my way and stared. All sounds of city life sucked away, and the ground seemed to sink several feet without them.
I stared back at them.
Their expressions were flat, stony, confused, with not a smile among them. I hadn’t realized how strange that would feel, that glaring lack of recognition. As silence rushed one way, a separate mass of question marks surged toward me, the masked stranger. The enigma. Something unpleasant stirred deep in my stomach.
Under the sheer weight of their gazes, I found myself taking a step back. Slowly, I lifted my hands, palms forward: a placating gesture if ever there was one. I stared out at them.
They stared back at me.
It feels silly to say that I single-handedly fixed into place an entire road of people by the mere power of my presence, but there I was. There were they. And I did not know what to do. During all the time leading up to my arrival at that city, I had anticipated the newness with a childish eagerness. I had trotted along, skipped over rocks, and even jogged for a bit, because I did not want to delay. When I passed someone on the road, I waved to them with every ounce of geniality that a mere wave could afford, and then turned to study them in passing as if they might betray hints of what was to come.
Then arms began to curl around the shoulders of children, drawing them to either side of the road. Wordlessly, the river parted before me. Somewhere off to the left, a cluster disappeared through a doorway and a lock clicked into place behind them. Their faces appeared in the window a moment later. From off to the right, a man with muscles made to snap trees by the trunk and a height that put storm clouds to shame stepped forward. His eyes were the color of spring leaves backlit by the sun.
I stepped forward to greet him. One arm came to rest diagonal across my chest, but with the other I pushed my hand forward to fan my fingers and wave. A greeting --such a simple gesture-- is the most basic form of communicating peaceful intent. How one man chooses to greet another can reveal everything about his intentions --the subtle tilt of voice or hand, the glance, the posture and breathing. For me, I gave the same wave I gave to a familiar face passing by in the market: shoulders relaxed, head slanted affably to one side, an automatic smile parting my lips beneath the fabric of my mask. It was the kind of wave that made me think of floppy-eared puppies.
And he grabbed it. He marched straight up to me, snatched my hand out of the air, and squeezed it until I felt tremors quake up my arm and down my back. It hurt a sharp and jagged kind of pain as if all the joints in my hand had spontaneously dislocated and pulled the tendons taut. He wasn’t attempting to take the glove off --I had no fear of that. If anything, he seemed to be attempting to permanently fuse the glove to my hand. I tilted my head at it. Not quite what I had come to expect from handshakes.
He tugged me forward a step and squinted at me with those bright green eyes. “Who are you?”
My one hand held captive, I unfurled the other. I pressed it to my chest, gave him two dainty pats on the shoulder, and then gave him a second chance: I offered the hand in the space between us, for a handshake.
He looked down at it. He looked up at me. His jaw shifted two increments to the right, and his grip on my hand tightened until I could feel his muscles straining against my bones. “Who,” he said, “are you?”
The pain of his grip had a peculiar effect in that there was a distinct gap in my mental processing when I could remember nothing beyond that sensation of my hand being gradually crushed. It took some effort to swim up from that static emptiness, and I realized that the first name that arose from that blank space was my pet-name. Jester.
I felt my shoulders go rigid. A spark of alarm lanced from the depths of my stomach out to my limbs and, barely able to register anything past that, I tried twice to yank my hand free, hiked up my elbow and twisted. His hand was steel, his fingers were teeth digging into my skin, digging through it. I pressed my heels to the ground and, using all of my weight as the fulcrum, tried to pull. I leaned back until another hand caught my shoulder. A presence at my back. At my side. There was a whole group of them arcing around me.
“Tie his arms. Bring him to the lockhouse.”
My feet scrabbled at the ground, but they had me by the shoulders. They yanked my arms around behind my back and roped them together tight enough that I could count the bones in my wrists by sensation alone. Why they did not think then and there to tear off my mask was beyond me, but I found my breath hitching with dread as rough hands tugged me downstream, down the road, away from the tranquil forest.
* * * * *
I sat on a bench with my hands over my face. My wrists were still roped together, but a feat of flexibility had brought them to a position where I could lean my elbows on my knees and thereby support my head. Through sheer forgetfulness, I’m sure, they had not yet taken off my mask. One might argue that should be the first priority to strike their minds. After all, the sole question the leaf-eyed man had asked me had sought to discern my identity. But in their haste to disarm me, the simplest means of procuring an answer had eluded them. In their haste to throw the villain in jail, they had forgotten to take his knife.
They had, in fact, forgotten to take my knife, not that I had any intention of using it. It remained clipped to my belt with several other pouches of bits and bobs I had collected prior to leaving the mountains. All they had taken was my meager sack of provisions. And my freedom.
The situation should have been alarming, but the panic had drained from my system by then and left me feeling sluggish and resigned. Dread was still a presence that pricked at the insides of my stomach every few moments, but I was not so desperate as to overlook the fact that I couldn’t chew myself free even if I tried. So I waited.
I listened to voices down the hall, watched the light stop at the bars of my cell to leave gashes of shadow across the floor. They had left a glass of water and a slice of toast and cheese on a napkin for me, but I didn’t touch them. Studied them, sure. The bread was stale and beginning to turn a miserable shade of grey, but the cheese was fresh and soft at the edges. The water was pure and placid in a chalice made for a child. I grimaced at it.
“Not hungry, huh?”
Looking up, I realized that I had retreated so far into reverie as to forget that I was on watch. I slowly lowered my hands to my knees, tried to cup the fingers of one hand over the other as best as I could with my wrists roped together. A glance at the food, and I shook my head. A lie.
The man towered over me as I sat. He stood with a hand resting against the bars of my cell, fingers curled as if he needed to shade his eyes to make me out in the dim lighting. I imagined that my silhouette in that cell must have looked like some devilish imp crouched and waiting for a squeaky hinge to set me free. I could still make out the spring green of his irises.
“Sorry about rough-handling you there,” he said. “I know you haven’t done anywhat wrong. Yet.”
He paused as if to give me a chance to reply, so I tilted my head at him. With my wrists fastened, there was only so much I could do.
He cleared his throat uncertainly. The big brawny storm clouds of before rapidly wilted in the perceived awkwardness of my silence. “So, uh. Do...you...talk?”
I glanced down at my hands, and for a brief, peculiar moment, I wondered whether, if Hunter had come along with me, I would still be in this situation. I dislodged the thought with the same movement with which I answered his question: a quick shake of the head.
His lips twitched downward. Silence, while awkward, must also be suspicious. But he still clung to some vestige of hope, pushing the grimness from his face as he stepped back from the bars. “Hang on. I’ll getcha something to write on.”
I did not move in the time between his departure and his return. When he gestured me to the bars, I rose and let him remove the bindings from my wrists. Blood rushed back into my hands, making them sting and tingle fiercely enough that I had to take a moment to shake them out and rub at them.
Then he offered me the paper.
I took it.
He offered me the pen.
I took it.
Then he let a smile tilt his lips to one side and asked, “So what’s your name?”
I stared at him for a long moment. I let the pen settle between my thumb and forefinger and adjusted my tingling fingers around the pad of paper. His eyes were so hopeful, so kind, but when he saw that I was hesitating, that optimism began to fade at the edges. I wondered what he would do to me if I didn’t oblige. Did he know?
I looked down at the pad of paper, propped it up against the bars, and scribbled over it with a series of quick --and altogether unnecessary-- flourishes. When I had finished, I ripped the page from the pad, held up a secretive finger in front of my mask, and offered the drawing out to him.
I felt that I had improved at drawing the outline of my mask, but he was not impressed. He took it, stared at it, knit his eyebrows, and finally looked up to give me a baffled look to defeat all other baffled looks. And disappointed, like a puppy realizing it has been tricked out of a treat. His huge shoulders sagged.
“You know, I’d like to let you go, but you know with the war on I can’t just let masked strangers wander the streets.”
I nodded. It was reasonable enough, after all. I tucked the pen and paper into a pouch on my belt, took three steps back, and sat back down on the bench. It wasn’t so much that I was committing myself to an eternity in that cell, but I figured that, at some point during my stay there, I would cross the line from stranger to familiar and they would let me on my way. That was how it worked in the mountain village after all. What pet name would the jailors assign me here?
Leaf-eyes frowned through the darkness at me. His fingers curled around the slip of paper with my drawing. I watched expressions shifting over his face like different clouds passing over the sun. First there was confusion --there was always confusion. Then a flash of panic, anger, and then a break into a shaky laugh. As he laughed and shook his head and drew a hand down his face, he shook that drawing at me.
“You’re strange,” he told me. “I’ll give you that. If you’re not going to talk, how about you take off that mask and let me get a good look at ya? They say y’can read a man’s intentions in his eyes.”
No sooner had the words left his mouth than I was clamping one hand over the top of my head and shaking a finger at him. Then my hands settled lightly on the bench to either side of me like birds coming to rest. As much as I wanted to be free of that cell, I willed myself to be patient. After all, I had nowhere else to be. I would be free eventually, and so I just had to wait.
The man frowned. “The policy’s that I can’t force you t’take off any kind of clothing, you understand.” I had not understood, but I felt my shoulders relaxing from the knowledge. My spine curved until I could settle back against the wall, making myself comfortable. Leaf-eyes grimaced and continued, “I’m going to have to keep you here until you can explain yourself or at least take that mask off. Understand? You’re not exactly painting a picture of innocence here.”
I nodded once, twice, and flit my fingers at the air. It was time to make myself comfortable in the cell, and it would be easier to do without him staring me down with confused disapproval. How curious that he flinched from the gesture.
Trying to save face, he heaved out a sigh and rapped his knuckles against the bars of the cell. The storm clouds he was trying to summon were more like rain clouds. “Fine. You’ll have to eat at some point.” And he turned and walked away with a haste that hoped I hadn’t seen that I had gotten to him.
I watched him leave, and then looked up at the ceiling, breathing out a sigh of my own. I would have to eat eventually, but not straight away. If I kept my lungs deflated, I couldn’t feel the hunger pangs quite so much. It would be okay. This here was something new from before --a new chapter, if you will.
Let the game begin.
Comments (1)
See all