rummaging amongst the detritus, pulling out earthenware jars and sniffing the contents. One by one she dropped a pinch of their contents into the mixture on her palm. Marius slowly cupped his ruined genitals in his hand.
“Why now?” he silently asked the Gods. “All this time with no sensation at all, and you decide now is a good time to give it all back? What have I ever done to
The crone crossed the room to squat in front of him. Her free hand grabbed his jaw. Marius lacked the strength to resist. She raised his head and wiped a finger across his wet cheek, transferring the tears of his pain into the goo.
“Good.” She clapped her hands together, crushing the contents into a thick globe, kneading it in her palms until it became a round, muddy parcel no bigger than a sheep turd. Once she was finished she placed it in her mouth, and swallowed.
“Well?” Marius managed to croak.
“Wait.”
She folded back into her blanket. It wrapped around her as if of its own volition. Within seconds she was once again the anonymous lump he had first seen. Marius knelt before her, uncertain, unwilling to move lest it should break whatever spell she had commenced. The ache in his balls intensified, and he swallowed, trying to keep down the sourness that threatened to fill his mouth. One dose of the old woman’s special kind of love had been enough. He had no desire to repeat the dose.
The old woman remained still. Marius turned his head slowly, waiting for some sign to emerge from the gloom. An itch began between his shoulder blades. He ignored it. I am dead, he told himself. The dead don’t itch.
The dead don’t come either, a voice answered. He ignored that, too.
After an eternity of waiting, the witch raised her head. Marius opened his mouth to speak, then stopped, and simply stared. The old woman was looking through him, and her brow wrinkled in response to sights he could not hope to see. Her eyes had changed colour, he realised with a burst of fear. Where the outsides of her eyes had been a dully milky yellow, borne of years of malnutrition, now they flashed more intensely than the flowers adorning the island hills, and her irises had brightened, moving from dull brown to iridescent red. When she spoke, her voice was deep, and resonant. No longer the whisper of an ancient crone, it filled the hut with the lilt of the young island men who lay on the hillside above the beach each day, taunting the Scorbish sailors as they loaded the boats.
“Death,” she said. “A wave of the dead, never ending. They are angry, and you stand at their head. And never peace, never to know the rest that does not end. Never to embrace that which you hold most dear.”
“But…” Despite his uncertainty, Marius leaned forward, willing the crone to talk. “My family? My… my mother?” A thought struck him, and he was shocked at the pain it brought with it. “What about Keth?”
“You shall not see them again. And what you will become… it will be a mercy for them. Their memories will be of a man. You are dead to them, as you are to us all.”
“But…”
“No more.” She shook her head. Her eyes cleared, brown and white bleeding into the iridescent colours. Within seconds they viewed Marius with normal light, and terror.
“I have seen the devil,” she breathed, and he was scared more by the way she shrank away from him than by anything he had experienced since he ascended the path to the hovel. “I have seen the ruin of the world.” She extended a shaking finger towards the hole through which he had entered. “Leave. Leave me be.”
Marius leaned forward, trying to pin her eyes with his own. She slid away, scuttling back into the darkness and raising her hands to cover her face.
“What?” he cried. “What was it? Please, what will I do? What did you see?” He reached out a hand towards her, but she screamed a little girl’s scream and batted him away with outstretched claws. He fell back, clutching at where she had caught his wrist. Blood seeped between his fingers, turning sticky beneath his touch as it reached the air. Marius stared down at it. There should not be a flow, could not be.
For a moment he almost screamed as well.
Then he lurched to his feet and stumbled backwards towards the entrance. Eyes still fixed upon the screaming witch he leaned down, and reached to where he had placed his neatly folded clothes. His fingers closed on air. Marius swept his hand across the floor, but all his despairing fingertips met was dirt. He tore his eyes from the crone and looked down. Nothing. He slung his gaze further, slapping the floor in disbelief. His clothes were gone: his cape; his breeches; his jerkin; the multitude of coins he had hidden amongst them; everything
“Where are they?” He turned back to her, but the old woman had disappeared as completely as his clothes. Marius leaped across the hut. Then he saw it – a flap, half the size of a normal door, tucked behind a mound of mouldering cow hides. Marius dove over the hides, sliding face first through the open door and onto the rough ground beyond. He scrambled to his feet, and looked about him.
The hillside was empty. No matter which way he turned, only the copse of trees surrounded him. No evidence of human passage greeted his sight. Marius stepped back, and surveyed the witch’s hovel. Well, he thought; that explained the magical transformation. From this side, he could see it was just a normal village hut, built onto the rear of a tree of massive girth. The sheer weight of scrub surrounding the tree’s base hid it from casual view, but from this side, it was clear. Strangely, Marius found it a comfort – another instance of “magic” that turned out to be nothing more than sleight of hand and need for money. All of a sudden, free of the oppressive atmosphere inside and the heady mixture of lust and fear, he could slot the old woman into his pantheon of con artists. The normal world reasserted itself around him. He re-entered the hut, and gathered the uppermost cow hide around him like a blanket. Apparently, curing was a skill that had not yet made it to the Dog Crap Archipelago. He, swiped a cloud of nipping fleas from his face, and fought his way round to the front of the tree. Then, methodically, and with great care, he kicked the hovel’s camouflaging until it was no more than broken twigs underfoot, exposing the hole cut into the hut’s wall. With any luck, it would rain before the old bitch could repair the damage.
His task accomplished, Marius strode with as much dignity as he could manage back down the hillside and into the village. No villagers lingered outside as he passed. No smiles greeted him, waiting for a reaction from the foreign visitor. Marius frowned. He had heard about this sort of island’s funeral ceremonies. They went on for ages, each new round of gorging followed by another, the feast broken only by pauses to drink whatever noxious alcoholic brew the islanders had managed to ferment from their fruit. Women would dance between courses, men would fight; there would be some sort of manhood ritual involving beds of coal and people’s feet. If you were lucky enough to find yourself on the right sort of island, the chances of bedding a nubile, intoxicated virgin girl got higher with every course you survived. At the very least, these things tended to rumble on for three or four days, until everyone was either too sick, too tired, or too shocked at finding themselves married to a teenage girl whose name they could barely remember to continue. The village should be a repository for drunks, asleep in whatever corner they crawled to before consciousness deserted them. The sounds of coupling should echo from within huts. The words of filthy sailor songs about the King, the Lord of The Stool and a randomly agreed upon number of foreign princesses ought to ring out. There should be impromptu wrestling matches. Weird, foreign islander chants should weave through the night. Drinking, carousing, vomiting, fucking, fighting and eating – where was it all? Not a sound greeted Marius. There was only the wind blowing against the thatches of the huts as he passed. The village was silent, deserted. Something was very, very wrong.
Marius wound his way towards the long cane tables. They stood empty, the platters of fruit and meat tipped over and lying forgotten on the sand. In the space between them, the King’s funeral pyre had burnt down to a mound of glowing coals. Marius stared at it, spotting blackened and shrivelled bones amongst the embers. No chance of shanghaiing a monarch there. He grimaced, and looked beyond the fire to the water’s edge.
The natives stood along the shoreline, staring out into the wide ocean. Marius gazed along the rows of immobile strangers. Where were the sailors? He couldn’t see a single one amongst the multitude – no Captain Bomthe, no Master Spone, not even young Figgis stood amid the press of bodies. Marius took one involuntary step forward, then another. At the rear of the crowd, a child glanced his way and then shouted. As one, the natives followed the child’s pointing arm. Marius stopped, ready to turn on his heel and run as best he could towards the forest. Perhaps, if he were lucky, he could live out the rest of his days as a cow, hidden amongst the roaming herds. But the villagers made no move towards him. They simply stared, emotionless, as he approached step by hesitant step.
The crowd was slightly thicker just down the beach from where he stood. Now it parted, and in the flickering
