Tincture of Wormwood

An extract

Four on horseback rode along the beach by the light of the burning city. Their galloping hurled splinters of shell and bone, which glittered in small green sparks; the hour was approaching midnight, but the sea glowed as if with sunset. The four rode in single file: the king followed at a respectful distance by the prince, who was followed at a similar distance by the general and the priest yug-Mungor. Behind the priest, dragged by a rope twice the length of the gap between the king and his son, stumbled a bloody-mouthed wretch with the rags of a rich ceremonial cloak wrapped uncertainly around his sagging loins. Every so often yug-Mungor would spur the horse and then reign it in, causing the overfed wretch to scrape along on his belly like a heretic's ragged remains through a pious main street.

Aside from the minor damage from his run along the beach, the only mutilation thus far practised on the prisoner was the removal of his front incisors, upper and lower, by King Choyug's personal barber. Eleven heads, similarly privileged before being sawn from the bodies that had carried them, were mounted on the pikes of eleven common soldiers in the king's guard. The guard had remained at the city gate while the king, the prince, the general and the priest rode out to Wormbone Reef.

When joined to their bodies, the eleven heads had formed the city's chief governing council; the wretch at the end of the rope, as minister for works and heritage, had received royal clemency thanks to his knowledge of the city and its environs. General yug-Smorod had argued that some trouble might be saved by sparing others besides; Prince Chogrob had urged that the entire city be razed, its entire government destroyed and its entire population removed or eliminated, as the king himself had sworn on the day the twelve councillors had first refused his terms.

For his own part, yug-Mungor was inclined to agree with the prince: whatever might occur along the way to its fulfilment, a vow was a vow. Certainly, an unwise promise made in haste might be better broken than kept; but King Choyug's promise, wise or otherwise, had been made in the presence of the true god, whose ways were notoriously whimsical, and whose prophets from earliest times had praised the virtues of unwisdom. Using his quiet authority as royal confessor, yug-Mungor had done all he could to persuade the king that Dantiscor, outpost of heretics and traitors, must be expunged from existence, save only the accepted quota of mutilated survivors who would be spared to wander the world and advertise, by the stumps of their fingers and the gaps in their teeth, the inexorable mercy of the world's creator.

Unfortunately Choyug the Conqueror, having delayed until late middle age before taking up holy war, could never completely rid himself of worldly concerns. As a commander, he had to keep order among his troops; as a politician, he had to avoid battles that only a whimsical god could win; as a monarch, he had to avoid making too many powerful enemies; and as a father he had to leave his heir a more prosperous kingdom than he himself had inherited.

The priest stabbed the horse's sides with his spurs, then reined back so abruptly that the animal's indignation almost jerked him from the saddle. Even the most whimsical gods have their little consistencies, yug-Mungor reminded himself; for example such minor rigidities as the laws of momentum and inertia. Over the sighing of the blood-flamed sea, he thought he could hear the prisoner struggling up and stumbling onward, and coughing white splinters from his chastised mouth.

Only a little further on, the general's horse had come to a sudden stop, and yug-Mungor duly halted before the distance between them could close too far. As the king's confessor in a time of holy war, he was by ancient right entitled to ride at the side of his sovereign, the better to receive the king's confessions and to deliver all necessary admonishments; but yug-Mungor had made it his policy never to insist on worldly rights, and his presence was for the king to demand. He raised himself in the stirrups, trying to see past the general's squat silhouette; then yug-Smorod twisted in the saddle and beckoned him forward.

Bowing his head, the priest approached at a respectful pace and stopped just short of drawing level. Ahead of them the beach curved away behind the pale, crumbling cliffs atop which the city glowed; and it was before this bend that the king and his son had also halted, apparently to stand and stare.

It could only be the Reef, yug-Mungor thought. Held in superstitious awe by the citizens of Dantiscor, and in superstitious dread by the rabble for miles around, Wormbone Reef had remained unseen through generations of taboo. Ordinances ancient as the city itself forbade that the Reef be visible from any window or turret; the city walls overlooking the Reef held no watch-towers, and only the Reef's reputation and the treachery of waves and cliffs protected Dantiscor from naval attack. Indeed, King Choyug's original plans for subduing the city had provided for just such an assault; but the strenuous objections of his commanders, backed by testimony from reliable spies and the well-attested chronicles of a dozen previous failures, had persuaded him that the precedents were not encouraging. Hence the great siege which had cost so much time and inconvenience; which had lost the king his favourite son and many important allies; and which had brought to everyone involved, from the royal commanders to the lowliest camp-followers, an inexhaustible ration of rumour about the powers and perils of the Reef.

For something forbidden to look upon, it was remarkably easy to hear about. Not only the chronicles in the king's library, but the villages in the surrounding country and the travellers passing through, were full to overflowing with rumours and portents. The chronicles preserved several amusing legends with scholarly condescension, while cushioning with condemnatory verbiage their hints of those less harmless. Among the more innocuous, in several versions, was the story that the Reef constituted the remains of a great sea-monster, slain by one of the city's numerous mythical founders, who had forbidden his people any sight of the carcass in case they should ascribe the victory to him rather than to divine providence. Among the more harmful, in splintered hints, was the idea that the Reef constituted a living shell in which the city's future destroyer slept, and from which the light of illicit gazes would one night bring him forth.

In the villages nearest Dantiscor, people said that the Reef was the forefinger of a buried giant, which wagged back and forth over the centuries to scold the world's impious rapidity. In villages further away, people said that the Reef was a living worm, the fount and source of every other worm in the world, and susceptible to persuasion and propitiation through inflicting on its humbler offspring various ritual torments. Among traders travelling the routes between Dantiscor and Garsilor it was known that the Reef was made of sea-foam left behind by the tide, which had accumulated over thousands of years and would continue to accumulate until the sea dissolved it again; among traders travelling the routes between Dantiscor and Pelbon it was known that the Reef was made of fish-bones, fashioned by ancient tribes into a shrine from which their spirits haunted the sea.

All this fable and foolishness, and any number of variants and elaborations, yug-Mungor and the other priests and monks in the king's retinue had transcribed and collated for the royal librarians; and yug-Mungor himself was intermittently at work upon a compendium for the attention of the bishop, with whom rested the ultimate decision as to what was innocent fairy-tale and what was criminal blasphemy. In the process of compilation yug-Mungor had found that not only did the legends differ as to the Reef's nature, composition, origin and purpose; they could not even agree on its appearance. According to some it was shaped like a finger, according to others like a worm; the sea-foam stories said it resembled a dune made of lace, while the fish-bone stories said it looked like a thousand white nets piled together. Now that the king and his son were apparently in sight of the Reef, yug-Mungor trusted the anticlimax was profound.

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