'Is that… shit drying on your boots? Is this how you grace my kingdom? With shit caked over your legs? Is this how your kind show respect?”
I was lost for words, but the tall man, scratching the nits from his greasy beard, was not. 'By the look of you it appears you're staying… for now at least. Just don't you touch any bloody thing… Come along!'
Vision growing misty, I could still make out the man trotting away on four legs — horse legs. He was the half man, half horse from the seal upstairs: Bludgeon — a Centaur — a King — the one I had come to see.
9. The Trials of King Bludgeon
Those first days in the mountain I never once saw the centaur. I did pass out at the foot of those spiralling stairs, waking here — a cramped room with no natural light. What light there was came from a torch dancing color off the walls. My bed was a thin cloth over stone, and my only exit was a locked, and sturdy wooden door with not a peep or creep heard behind it. This was my cave — my cell.
I watched that bronze doorknob for what felt like an age. Waiting and waiting for it to turn — to open — but it never did. Somehow, I had the craziest idea, a profound sense that I was not to open the door, but to wait for it to be opened. All would be lost if I turned that door handle, a rule so vague in its creation, yet so clear in my mind. Do not open the door! Do not open the door!
At one point, I shivered on that meagre bed for twenty straight hours, weak from blood-loss, hunger and thirst; assaulted by violent visions and screams dipping in and out of the room and my imagination. At times these visions became all too real, living apparitions sharing space with me. I heard Kathy calling for her dad, saw her hand reach down from a realm far from mine. Missy also came and went, her cartoon face unwholesomely smirking whilst reminding me of some of the more pathetic details of my life — the people I'd lied to and hurt; how many porno magazines I'd jerked off too.
At one stage, I fought back the old wizard Scarfell as he pressed his foot into my chest. It may have been a hallucination — it was — but the illusion was still real enough to make me pass out. Kat was here too, his decimated body crumbling to pieces in the corner. There, he would meditate for hours under a pool of his own curdled blood, face skinless, exposed brain and two bulbous, unblinking eyes.
'Get out of here!' I cried. 'Get the fuck out! Get out!'
I couldn't tell you how many days I endured this torture, but with my strip of cloth soaked in sweat and tears, piss and shit, and a head drowning in delirium, enough was enough. That rule sent alarm bells ringing in my skull as I crawled toward the door — Do not open the door! Do not! Do not!
My legs could barely support my weight when I stood. Reaching a trembling hand for the bronze handle, I did not have the strength to turn it, but I didn't have to — the door was flung open like a shuttle hatch blown out to space, and there, filling the frame, the centaur stood.
'Ninety seven hours, forty three minutes and twenty six seconds!' he exclaimed, cheerfully. 'Tell me, have you been incarcerated before boy? Spent time in a cage have you then? I suspect as much. Bloody scientist sends a prisoner to my home! A convict and rapist knowing my bloody luck!'
His haggard face, reasonably satisfied, lowered level with my own. 'You're not going to rape me in my sleep? Are you boy? Well?'
'What, what is this?' I asked, voice shrivelled.
'Training of course! First and foremost, discipline is what I demand, pisser — discipline! If I tell you to stay in that room, then you bloody well stay in that room! Discipline is the key! You are off to a sufficient start, I will say that. Anything under fifty hours and I would have thrown your legs down the Mountainside and sent your torso down to collect them. I've done it before.'
'You've been here the — entire time?' I asked, overwhelmed.
'Yes.'
'But I could have died!'
'Drooping balls!' he tittered. 'You're already dead pisser! Now you are a speck! Discipline, understand? Well, answer me speck!'
'I…I understand.'
'Good. Come along then!'
The centaur moved from the door and down a suffocating corridor to the right. I followed, but found it impossible to keep up as Bludgeon smoked off into distant darkness. I attempted to run but my body wouldn't allow it; even at a snails pace my arms snagged off the jagged walls. This was a dismal place, aptly stinking of wet stable and built up piles of horse manure.
The smells and bleakness didn't matter though, the most important thing was that I was out and free of that room. My mind continued to play tricks however, trying to convince me that I was imagining this; another delusion, and how the truth would see me still wasting away on that bed cloth.
'Speck!' yelled the impatient centaur. 'Come along, come along I say!'
I picked up a hobbling pace and groaned toward a growing shine. I felt a mincing in my left foot and figured I had broken bones and others elsewhere when falling down those stairs; thankfully, an eye opening change of scenery took the pain from my mind. The cave seemed to explode in height and width, stubbing out all feelings of claustrophobia. Magnificent geode crystals, many thousands of years old, hung like sculpted fingers down from the ceiling, and their reflecting light was accompanied by numerous torches around the walls, causing the entire room to twinkle and glisten like fireflies. A dozen other corridors and passageways were dotted between those torches, a maze of burrows inside the Macros.
'Wow,' I said, gawking.
The crystals above directed their glassy fingers to a luxurious dinner table, varnished and proud at the centre of the room with a lonely chair at one end.
'Sit,' said Bludgeon, appearing from a corridor, his woolly body bulging with biceps and shaggy hanging hair. He was an impressive and intimidating figure.
I took the seat whilst Bludgeon, grasping two steaming bowls, remained at the furthest end of the table, kicking back his hoofs and twitching his wary eyeball. Then, with a flick of the wrist and scraping of wood, he slid one bowl from his end of the table to mine; and like the best barman in the world, the bowl came to a perfect stop under my chin.
'Eat speck! Eat!'
It was some kind of broth, and boiling hot when going down my throat. Although mouth watering, the taste was stomach churning, leaving my tongue with a coat of cigarette butts that I knew would sit there for days. I didn't care. I drank the liquid and gorged the cuts of flesh and vegetables left at the bottom. I recalled now how ravenously Kat stuffed himself at Madam B's table, and how amusing I found his lack of manners. No longer.
Once finished, I heard another slide of wood and watched as Bludgeon's bowl of uneaten broth come to a halt before my empty one. I glanced up to find him no longer at the table, or even in the room.
***
Two weeks gone, I still had only glimpses of Bludgeon, and discovered most of his cave to be restricted by locked doors or cramped dead ends. I would hear him call and curse my name from the dinner table, but when I arrived in his glittering hall he would be gone, and my meal for the day would be waiting to be eaten. Tasteless meat and dirty water for the most part, but I was at least getting my strength back.
The sound of flowing streams inside the rock was a constant irritation, like an endless static. Worse was that feeling of being observed all of the time; and despite seeing nothing in the dark, I always felt the eternal eye of King Bludgeon. I was the yo-yo, and his finger was wrapped tightly around my string.
During my explorations, I came across one cleanly carved, wider than usual corridor, and then remembered I had been here before. That corridor ended at a set of spiralling steps, twisting upward in the hundreds to a tiny torch blowing in the breeze. How could I have forgotten so soon? The seal — the birds — the trap — the samurai.
'Kat?' I yelled up, with an echo. 'Can you hear me Kat? It's Fox!'
No response. I grabbed the railing of the staircase when — 'Going somewhere boy?'
Bludgeon stood where I first saw him, with a starry light blaring over his hunched shoulder.
