3.9 - May They Laugh at Their Passions

     Iker patted the multitude of pockets in his township jacket looking for his flute. It was the trademark attire of someone who chose, or more likely was required, to carry their entire life with them. Iker was somewhere between the two. In theory, he could live anywhere, but he wasn’t interested in living anywhere, he wanted to be here. Zaedon, the city spread as thin as oil floating on top of water. If his first two days here were any indication, this place was like no other. It would be terribly dull without music, though. 

“Excuse me, captain, have you seen a flute around anywhere?” he asked the guard stationed on the small wooden platform surrounded by planted pikes facing outward. Iker was sure that just yesterday the platform had been a bit higher off the ground, but then again, the marsh had a way of claiming everything in time. The man turned and glared at him. 

“Be on your way civilian, I’m on watch,” he said, as he shifted the scimitar strapped to his belt. He was a man not much older than Iker, perhaps in his mid-thirties. Life had not served him well. His eyes were sunken in, and his teeth were yellowed and cramped. He anxiously folded the thin strands of hair left on his head over one another. His cloth robe was patched with thick leather squares both in an attempt at thicker protection, and also to keep the ragged thing together.

“Ahh, yes of course. So sorry to interrupt,” Iker said. He paused for a moment. “But I do sincerely miss that flute, and I was hoping that in all of your watching you may have seen something.” 

The guard pushed open the makeshift door of the platform-a half door barely reaching the guard’s belt-and stepped down into the mud in front of Iker. 

“Don’t you know we’re at war, bard?” he said. His breath was pungent and thick, smelling of days old bread and goat’s milk. “I don’t have time to look around for your little toy.”

“Well of course. If you don’t have the time to brush your teeth, surely you wouldn’t have the time to scour the land for a humble flute. Not a toy, by the way. A flute. But I will forgive this minor transgression in exchange for the answer to two simple questions, my dear captain of the endless watch.” Iker said, taking a few pointed steps backward away from the guard. “Who is it that employed you to keep your most honorable watch, and who is it exactly that you are protecting us meager civilians from?” 

The guard huffed but turned his head away from Iker as he did it, clearly taking the comment on his breath to heart.

“You know as well as I do. The Sarken Empire, in concert with the Oswelda Republic! They could strike at any moment, and from any direction. We must stay eternally vigilant.” he puffed out his chest and stood a bit taller. As tall as the hump in his back would allow. 

“Yes, and I commend your diligence to the cause, my king protector,” Iker said, giving the guard a slight bow. “But tell me, how are you to know if someone from this Sarken Empire or perhaps a companion of theirs from the Oswelda Republic were to encroach upon these most vulnerable and destitute lands? What signs do they bear? What behavior betrays their allegiances?” 

The guard waved a hand dismissively but seemed to be at a loss. 

“That...well it’s obvious to a trained eye,” he said. “They just have a look about them. A menacing glow.” 

Iker assumed a straight-backed and decorous stance himself, holding his hands behind his back and high stepping his way to a slime-covered rock upon which he perched like a great bird of prey. 

“Of course that brings us back to my first of two questions which you so effortlessly sidestepped in your decrying of these dangerous nations that lurk in our shadows even now,” Iker said, raising a finger in the air. “Who has trained your sharp eyes to spot such vile...villains?” 

An inexcusable slip of the wits. This dismal ambiance was beginning to addle his senses, and yet at the same time, it was far too fascinating to abandon. Like watching a rat eat its young. Luckily, this guard was too dim to notice Iker briefly stumbling on his words. 

“You new around here or something?” he said, his face twisting in disbelief. “Brigadier General Muhra calls the shots. Taught me everything I know!” 

He sharply turned and pointed to a leather patch on the shoulder of his robe. Stitched into the leather was a sigil, a circle broken on one side with three staggered lines that join in the center. 

“You have been so gracious to a sheepish music maker such as myself,” Iker said, still atop the slime-covered rock. “I will pester you no further with my inanities. Allow me to reward such service.” 

He reached into one of his many pockets and pulled out a round silver coin, the size of a baby’s fist. Bowing low with his feet held close together on the rock to maintain his balance, he proffered up the coin to the man. He was unsure of the wages being offered to someone of this man’s rank, but an educated guess led him to believe that this coin was roughly two weeks worth. His head was down, staring at the mud around his rock island, waiting for the guard to eagerly take the coin from his hand. He waited. Then, assuming the guard wasn’t paying attention, tilted his head up. The guard was giving him his undivided attention, in fact. His sunken eyes were looping from the coin to Iker and back again. 

“I cannot accept that,” he said, quieter than anything he had said yet. “I am trying to protect you, not rob you of your fortune. I can see that you aren’t well off. None of us are, I suppose. Keep your coin, bard. And don’t go waving it around like that, you’ll end up face down in the bog somewhere.” 

Well. Iker hadn’t expected that. The man might be simple, but he wasn’t void of humanity. The coin was mostly meant as a peace offering for his insistent ribbing, but now, by way of the guard’s refusal, Iker found himself along the low road, peering up at the man he had been so sure was beneath him. Well, this was an embarrassing start to the day. Iker quickly dropped down from his slime coated throne and tucked the coin back in one of his pockets. 

“What is your name?” he asked. 

The guard bristled at first, surely at the directness and lack of fanciful rhetoric. 

“Kuhlka,” he said. “And yours?” 

“I am Iker. Thank you for putting up with me Kuhlka.”

Iker nodded and turned to leave, but Kuhlka loudly cleared his throat. 

“I’ll keep an eye out for your flute, but you really shouldn’t interrupt people while they’re working.” 

Iker smiled at the guard. 

“I would appreciate it. I, likewise, will keep an eye out for a toothbrush and perhaps some soap for you my good man.” Kuhlka’s face became bright red as he shouted at Iker and moved back onto the platform, slamming the door behind him and shaking the wooden pikes stuck to it. One good turn did not a perfect man make, and in all fairness, he could use a bit of cleaning. Besides, people would begin to talk if Iker was suddenly sweet on everyone he met. His reputation as a quick-witted double talker would be ruined, and that was his stock-in-trade. At least it was elsewhere. 

Zaedon was proving to be quite a unique challenge. There were no city walls or clear delineations of regions. Wards and neighborhoods were discussed at length, but with no apparent understanding of their location, and with no unifying information. The swampland it was built upon was miles wide and deep, covered with structures and hastily strung together barricades. Building to building and tent to tent, the people were fiercely resistant to change and consumed by an oppressive loyalty the likes of which Iker had never seen before, primarily due to the aforementioned lack of geographical awareness. One woman in the farthest northern corner of Zaedon could sing the praises of her community, and the brutal war it was entrenched in, and a man in the southern tip of Zaedon could claim the same community as his own. It was as if pieces of the city were swallowed whole by the swamp, and regurgitated elsewhere perfectly intact. Iker seemed to be the only one who noticed. For everyone else, the world was as it should be. 

He continued to retrace his steps from the day previous, hoping to stumble upon his flute. The structures around him, simple single-room homes spread out so as not to put too much weight on the soft ground, thinned and gave way to mismatched tents set upon thatched platforms. He remembered this area from yesterday. They called it The Portcullis. It was where the destitute prayed for the safe return of their heroes, as they ventured out to war. Positioned in the center of the area was a rickety and crooked wooden archway, one side partially sunken into the mud. Most of the tents in the area were open, each with a prostrated figure sticking half of their body out and bowing towards the center pathway of the area. Waving and demonstrating for them all was a group of soldiers dressed in brand new sellsword leathers, each one armed with a jagged silver spear, yet to be marred by blood. Iker continued forward towards them, preparing his own weapon; the silver tongue some benevolent God had gifted him with. Before he could reach them, however, one of the prostrated figures grabbed him by the sleeve and pulled him into their tent along the side of the path. 

“Get down you fool, can’t you see there’s a ceremony happening?” she said. Iker found himself nose to hook nose with a woman in her sixties, covered in yellowing lichen and a moth-eaten robe. The tent smelled of sweat, unwashed skin, and the mud that squeezed through the thatched floor. After she pulled him through, she immediately prostrated herself in the entrance once more, mumbling prayers to honor the soldiers outside. Iker slumped back on his heels and glanced around the tent. A stained bedroll lay in one corner, the edges frayed and mud-soaked. In the opposite corner was a small tree stump being used as a table, with a bucket of animal remains next to it. A knife with a large chunk missing from the blade and a scratched wooden handle was stabbed into the stump, and bits of what looked to be raw chicken meat were half sliced next to it. 

“Are you going to cook that?” Iker asked, poking the woman in the side. She ignored him. He looked past her through the tent flaps and saw the heroes nearing the archway. The one leading them, a young man with crimson red hair, waved one last time for the crowd, then shouted something unintelligible and charged forward, quickly followed by the rest of his companions. 

“Of course I’m going to cook it!” the woman said as she slinked back into her tent, clearly used to moving on her hands and knees as the tent was barely five feet at its highest point. With muddied hands, she ripped the knife from the stump and resumed her butchering. 

“You can leave now. They’re off,” she said, with her back to Iker. 

“Who were they?” Iker asked. “They seemed rather important.” 

“Heroes,” the woman said without turning. “On their way to the frontlines. Fighting for us.” 

Iker shifted his body from a kneeling position to a seated one, folding one leg over the other and sticking them through the tent flaps. She didn’t seem to be the most welcoming woman, but she wasn’t immediately resistant to questioning which was the most that Iker could hope for from Zaedonians. 

“Honorable men to the last,” he said. “I am new to the complexities of Zaedon, so forgive the ignorance of this question, but where might the frontline be? I would very much like to avoid it.” 

The woman began shoveling sliced bits of chicken meat into a large pocket of her robe. 

“How should I know?” she said, as she pulled another chunk of meat from the bucket, this one unidentifiable to Iker. “I am here, and here is where I stay.” 

She paused, and held the meat up to her face, then immediately pulled back and growled to herself. She lifted up the bottom of her tent and tossed the meat outside. 

“Of course, a pious elder such as yourself should never be faced with the violence of war,” Iker said. Information may come in slim portions from this old hag. “In general, what direction do they seem to be heading, most of the time?”

She howled a high pitched, single note laugh. 

“Pious elder?” she said, turning to him. “I’m younger than you are!” 

Surely that couldn’t be true. Her skin was weathered and stretched as thin as butterfly wings. Her hair was a dense maze of knots, each grayer than the last. Spots of stubble grew along her chin, and the sides of her cheeks. 

“Of course you are milady!” Iker said, recovering quickly from yet another gaffe. “I simply meant to imply the knowledge of age, but not the age itself. You are the spitting image of a lovely princess I once had the pleasure of courting.” 

The woman looked at Iker, then very emphatically spat on the floor. She laughed, that same single note laugh, then kicked his feet out of the way as she crawled out of the tent, dragging her pocket of raw chicken along the floor. Iker was beginning to like this woman. There was an irreverence to her that he found comforting in its familiarity. He scrambled out of the tent to follow her. She continued to crawl in the mud for a moment, then slowly stood up, still bent over from the pressure and strain on her back. She hobbled towards a hanging fire pit not far from her tent. Iker had seen them all over Zaedon. A wooden structure with legs spread in a semi-circle pattern supported a beam that reached at an angle upward. Attached to the beam was a chain, and hanging from the chain, secured at all four corners, was a stone slab with a small fire set atop it. The woman stepped over to it and began slapping down bits of chicken on a smaller flat stone, just outside of the fire. There was no pot or pan to speak of. A man on the other side of the fire glared with one eye closed at the woman, but continued to cook his meal without comment. 

“I will leave you to your meal, milady, but one last question,” Iker said, joining her around the fire. “Have you seen a small blue flute recently? It would have been within the last day or two.” 

She kept her eyes on the chicken, and Iker noticed her hand gripping something in her pocket. The shape of it seemed to be the knife she had used to cut the meat. He glanced about and caught quite a few hungry faces peering out from tent flaps and from behind fallen trees along the periphery. 

“Ain’t seen a flute,” she said. Iker waited a moment for a follow-up, but none came, so he bowed and made to leave the woman. 

“Check with Hogle, he likes collecting things,” she said, just as he turned away. 

“Thank you kindly,” Iker said. “Where might I find this Hogle?” 

She laughed to herself and pointed through the archway the heroes had marched through. 

“He’ll be off that way,” she said, flipping one of the pieces of chicken. 

“Thank you again, Poultry Princess of the Portcullis,” Iker said. He winked at her and choked down the barrage of wisecracks that threatened to burst from his mouth. They tasted terribly astringent. It wasn’t so much that he was afraid to poke at those beneath him, in fact, he very much enjoyed it, but most Zaedonians were simply too far down to reach. The sense of accomplishment he felt when dismantling another with a fusillade of expertly crafted gibes was all but diminished if the target of his wrath had already been beaten down by life to the degree that these people were. This woman had lived three lifetimes before most lived half of one, there was no fun to be had at her expense. She winked back at him, pulled her knife from her pocket, and stabbed a piece of chicken, then popped it into her mouth. He was sure it was still partially raw, but that was her business. 

He skirted the archway, afraid of incurring the fury of the pious who were still bowed and praying for the safe return of the heroes. The land ahead bubbled up in marshy hillocks, with pockets of dank water reaching up to Iker’s knees at times. The inhabitants were few and far between, out here, but not gone entirely. A group of boys sat on a stilted platform over a black pond, dangling shoddy fishing rods down into the water. One of them watched Iker pass by. His mouth hung open on one side, and he had a filthy cloth tied over his left eye. They were twig thin, all of them, and draped in what were very clearly stolen clothes.

Iker continued over the next hillock and came upon two men, locked together. One wore ripped cloth pants and a black jacket, and the other wore a leather tunic beneath a brown jacket and pants too covered in mud to identify. They were grunting and shouting, arms clasped together, each one noticeably injured. A third man was standing on the hillock opposite of Iker, arms folded, looking down on the brawl. He reached behind him and picked up two cudgels, then tossed them down to the combatants. They simultaneously broke from their grapple and took up the weapons, then without hesitation, began bludgeoning each other with them. The man on the hillock yelled out in joy, then noticing Iker, pointed at him. 

“Come to watch my spartoi, have you?” he yelled over the noise of two men killing each other. “They fight for my gift of peace. Soon we will be free of this forced violence. Enjoy the show, traveler!” 

“What a gracious ruler you must be, to allow them this opportunity,” Iker called back. “If only the entire world was ruled by your delicate touch, war would be extinct, as each man would be too busy killing their brother in the mud to do much of anything else.” 

“Do not question my decrees, simple man. You know not of my power,” the man shouted, a little louder as one of the combatants cracked a bone in the arm of his opponent. 

“You have the power of a dung beetle, my liege,” Iker shouted, as he eyed an easy escape from the hillock, into a winding path between two more. “Capable of pushing your weight in shit multiplied tenfold.” 

The man roared, but Iker was already gone, through the swamp, ducking under weeping willows and trouncing through brown streams of thick water. Eventually, he worked his way into a clearing of mostly flatland, dotted with dying trees and shrubs. In the center of the clearing were a pile of bodies in fresh mercenary leathers, holding slightly bloodier silver spears than when Iker had seen them before, marching off to victory. The heroes barely made it a mile, it seems. A few more bodies were piled up from a different regiment, but clearly they had been the more prepared of the two parties. A man with a large rucksack was scrambling over the pile like a spider, prying pieces of armor loose and tossing them away, digging through pockets frantically, shoveling things away into his pack. He caught sight of Iker and howled out, but continued his work. 

“These are mine! Here first! Already claimed them!” he said, his voice warbling as if he had a bubble in his throat. “Find your own!” 

“Hogle, I presume?” Iker asked.  

He froze in place, on all fours, hands, and feet on the torso of some poor dead soldier whose eyes and mouth were hanging open in protest from the grave. 

“Who said?” he barked. “Who sent you? I don’t have it. I didn’t take it. Leave me be.” 

Iker let out a sigh of relief. You could always count on a thief or a looter to be the same no matter where you were. Even in Zaedon, a place he couldn’t make heads or tails of. For all of their trickery or backstabbing, they were the most reliable types around. 

“I, unfortunately, didn’t ask her name, but she was in one of the tents by The Portcullis,” Iker said. “Quite a spirited woman, with a taste for chicken.” 

Hogle yipped with excitement and plopped down, straddling the soldier’s body. His long hair was pulled into four distinct and decidedly uneven bunches, providing a clear view of his face. With a bloody hand, he pulled at the few strands of a beard that spiraled downward from his chubby face. 

“Tallow sent you?” he said, practically overcome with eagerness. “What did she say? She say anything about me? She talk about me? How’d she look?” 

“As devastating as ever, I’m sure,” Iker said. “She told me to find you I need only look for one as stunning as she, with a personality to match.” 

“Yeeeehhhh!” he yelled, holding on to the vest of the soldier and kicking his feet out in front of him in delight. “I knew it! I always knew she had eyes for me!”

Iker came closer to the pile and retched at the smell, but held it in. He made an effort not to look at the bodies, but something on one of them caught his eye. It was a soldier he didn’t recognize, one of the ones the heroes had clashed with. Stitched onto the shoulder of his leather was an emblem, a circle broken on one side with three staggered lines, meeting in the middle. The same emblem Kuhlka bore. Hogle’s revelry continued, and Iker saw a similar symbol on the armor of one of the heroes. A complete circle, with an arrow in the center. He squinted one eye and put his thumb up, creating a break in the circle, and continuing the lines of the arrow outward. 

“What else? What else did she say?” Hogle said, addressing Iker directly. Suddenly, Iker had a sharp and distinct desire to leave Zaedon and never return. There was no mystery to be found here. It was nothing more than a swamp of lunatics creating their own pockets of reality as they went along, and every second he spent here was another second closer to becoming the next Hogle, scrambling over corpses looking for shiny buttons. 

“My dear man, have you happened across a blue flute by any chance?” he said, ignoring the questions of the thief. “I would very much like to have it back.” 

All of the joviality of Hogle vanished, and he tightened his grip on the vest of the soldier. 

“I found that fair and square. It’s mine now,” he said. 

Iker had no time or interest in dueling this man. Unbelievable, what a day in Zaedon could do to a man. He reached into his pocket and took out the coin he had offered to Kuhlka. Hogle nearly fell off of his throne of death at the sight of it. 

“Give me the flute, and this is yours,” Iker said. 

Quicker than he had seen any human move before, Hogle slid down off of the pile and shrugged his rucksack into the mud, flipped open a pocket, and pulled out Iker’s blue flute. He held it out all the while eyeing the coin and licking his lips. Iker extended both hands, the coin in one and his other an open palm to receive his instrument. Hogle tensed for a moment, and then in one fluid motion put the flute down in Iker’s palm and gripped the coin tight. Iker let go, and as quick as he could, left the clearing. He stood on a hillock and breathed deep and hard, clearing his lungs of the dead air. With the inside of his shirt, he cleaned his flute as best he could, then gently blew into it. The sound was clear and clean and perfectly as it should be. He would need it that way, to get out of Zaedon with his mind intact.