As the fifteenth body slumped before him, headless, Peregot Root wiped his forehead clean of sweat and his blade clean of blood and said, thoughtfully: “I think we’ll build the church here.”
Despite his reputation for silence, Captain Gruvus had a most expressive and almost over-chatty face. For instance, one bushy eyebrow raised towards his commander – across a room filled with corpses, soot, and distant screaming – spoke whole volumes.
“The plateau is defensible enough,” continued Peregot blithely, “at least with modern armament and defenders of merit rather than primitives. I saw a well on our way here, so there is drinkable water – as long as none of the men have dumped corpses in it yet, which I will now ask you to have them not do – and this limestone seems beautiful and workable enough for construction. And of course it sends a message, to put such a thing where this…shrine once was.” He nodded, agreeing with himself. “Yes, I think we’ll build the church here. Tell the others. I’ll catch up. It won’t take long.”
It didn’t take long, but longer than Peregot would have liked. All that was left were the two shrine-tenders, an ancient woman and a young boy. He spoke to them both but the old woman ignored his words – looked through him as if he wasn’t there, staring dead-eyed at the sad little altar whose contents they’d already smashed flat – and the boy wouldn’t stop crying.
Frustrated, he slapped the woman. No response. He killed the boy. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t flinch right to the last, even when he pulled the blade loose, like her body had seized up all over long before his weapon met it. And her eyes never left the altar.
“Tear that down and toss it over the cliffs,” he told the men when he was done cleaning his sword again. And they did so, though it strained their backs. It was solid rock, and heavy too – ancient granite, by the looks of it, fit to be a mountain’s heart and marrow. A long way from home on this limestone plateau. The time and effort to move it here and seat it must have been terrible.
Scree scrabbled around the bases of the stones as they slid over the edge, reluctant to be gone. They hung in the air, floating for a possible but highly unusual second. Then they fell, and if they made a sound it was lost in the background noise of the sack’s conclusion.
***
The last of the village was burned clean by the day’s end. The first stones were cut for the church by the eve of the day after. Smooth and strong and clean limestone. Clean, but decorated.
“It has shells in it,” said Gruvus bluntly.
“Yes,” said Peregot, hand resting on the stone (and the shells) thoughtfully. “It does.” He moved a finger, followed the spiral and curve of long-emptied carapace like he was testing the sharpened edge of his blade. “Keep it in,” he decided, “the patterns are pleasing to the eye. And they are God’s creatures too, or were. Let the stone speak of where this church was built, eh?”
So it did. And so it was. The bodies were burnt or shoveled over the side of the cliffs to feed God’s more-alive, less-picky creatures; the foundations for the new were plotted atop the ashes of the old; the well was expanded and clad in limestone (ah, the water was sweet and clear); and when the first settlers came to Peregrottan, they saw their home by the white church upon the hill against the sun before they even saw the hill itself, rising above the horizon.
“God is here,” said Peregot, as they held their welcoming feast in its hall. After more than a decade of fire and death his face was at last covered with the wrappings of a priest; his hands were shaved clean and painted with the appropriate decals, his sword had been buried under the new altar, wrapped three times around with flowers. He would now live here. He would one day be buried here. “God is home.”
They slept late into the next morning, new herdsman and new-come herd alike laid low by bounty. And if they woke with uncertain dreams clinging to their heels, well, that was the price of overindulgence, wasn’t it?
***
The settlers were hardy, diligent folk, who had not come to this land to drink and run riot.
The soldiers were hard, strong folk who had already gotten their drinking and riot out of their systems some time earlier.
Their days were spent with hard, good, God-serving labour. Their nights were early to bed. Their mornings were early and productive.
Their dreams were troubling. Their dreams were continuing to be troubling. Mostly in that they were becoming clearer.
“It’s the legs,” Peregot told Gravus one hot afternoon as they sat in the shade, damp with good, honest, sun-earned sweat and the dirt of the earth they’d torn. It kept his mind so very far away from the memories of what he was talking about. “They’re very insistent on that. There are many legs. Sometimes floating in the water, sometimes scratching in the mud. But they remember all the legs. That, and the sea.”
Gravus grunted around his waterskin.
“The rest is inconstant. Being hunted – consumed, even. Hunting, eating. Devouring algae. Legs and the sea and being a small creature in a vast space.”
“Why,” said Gravus, a trickle of liquid seeping into his beard, “are you telling me this? I get them too. We all do.”
“God protects,” said Peregot without thinking.
Gravus didn’t even raise his eyebrow.
“But there is nothing here to be protected from,” Peregot amended. “Just bad dreams. Bad dreams that mean nothing.”
There was a scream from the well, and a splash. They were running before the first echoes arrived. A settler lay shaking besides it, already surrounded by her kin, water pooling around her from a fallen bucket and washing away the blood seeping from her freshly-scraped hands and knees.
“In the water!” she said. “It was swimming! And it saw me!”
Peregot looked, and looked poorly. He ought to have strode up to the crowd peering into the well and calmed them, issued instruction as to what ought to be done, taken control as he’d done in hundreds of battles. Instead he rushed to the rim as quickly as all the others, made space with force rather than words, and for this he was rewarded with a distant splash and an indistinct ripple, and the gleam of (shadowed-out, choked by their peering bodies) light on wet carapace.
Peregot’s fingers clenched on the limestone wall, touching smoothness and something else. A swirling shell, just under his palm. Legless in death. In life, he saw it in his dreams.
He forced a smile. “A fish, nothing more.”
By the afternoon’s end two more had seen it, squirming at the wooden slats of the bucket with a dozen limbs that left no marks. By the next morning the first water-carriers were making the long trek down-and-up hill to the river, walking by the well with averted eyes.
That Restday, Peregot forced the same smile to his anxious herd and spoke different words. He spoke of idleness bringing fancy, and fancy bringing doubt, and doubt bringing evil, and how that evil might perpetuate falsehoods. He spoke of the redeeming power of hard work inspired not by fear of the world, but by service to God. He spoke of the necessity to solve communal problems by admitting communal weakness, and of their responsibility to admit this and work as one to better all.
He never said that removing the stone shells would make the dreams stop, or the thing in the well leave. He never said that at all. But the way he didn’t say it brought great fire and energy and speed to the chisels that were distributed amongst the people of Peregrottan, and when the sun set on a most unrestful Restday it did so on a people covered in rock dust and calmed of mind and heart.
Come the morning, Peregot lifted his holy book and found beneath it a great horned shell jutting from his altar’s smooth-cut surface, face-forwards, empty mouth open wide.
He had seen and done many terrible (but very necessary and Godly) things in his life. He did not scream. But he DID drop the book.
***
As the trail to the river was ground into existence by feet, so too were the walls of Peregrottan’s houses eaten away by chisels, fresh-faced stone turned centuries-dissolute in days as families spent their evenings chipping away fresh eyesores from their homes. There – over the mantle, the long segmented one. Had it been there last night? Surely not, they’d checked it all the day before last (or the day before that). It had been there last NIGHT though, hadn’t it? Had she dreamed it? Had he? No, last night they had both had soft flabby bodies encased in hard cones like a ram’s horns, this was from the night before last, when they had hidden in muck beyond light and been plucked loose by hard-bristled claws. Hadn’t they? What else had happened?
Their days were long and full of falling stone; their nights were endless and subsumed by mud and water. Peregot began to hold daily meetings, then took to house calls, then at last simply walked the village in endless loops, calling out to any who made eye contact.
“The well is clear!” he reminded them. “Nothing in it but a figment! It has been blessed with book and glove and word!”
They nodded back to him, unless they were carrying water. Everyone was carrying water now; the days were scorching, the river was far. Even Gravus would not meet his gaze, but that was because he could not find him. How many days had it been since he’d seen Gravus?
So, bereft of his herd, Peregot returned to the church to pray, or at least to think, or not think. And as he opened his book upon the altar –
(which he never lifted from it now, because he wasn’t sure what would be left if he chiselled away the frozen stone scream that lay underneath it, or what might happen if he did)
– he heard a groan, pained and long.
He was distracted, which is why it took him a moment to compare it to his vast mental library of the sounds of pain made by living things and decide it was none of them. That was long enough for the floor to fall apart underneath him, sending priest, book, altar, and all below. And as he fell, he smelled dried flowers, and heard the ringing sound of his own sword sliding away.
***
Peregot landed.
On what, it was difficult to say. He could not see to look, and he must not move, because he was absolutely certain, in a way that he’d never been before, that he was being observed by something greater than himself.
Something under his palm moved, something horned of shell and foul of mouth. It tested his finger for edibility. He did not move.
It was below him too, farther than the thing at his flesh. It had been there, but they had prodded it and poked it and chiselled at the tombs of its own herd, its own herdsmen, and ah. What had lain in the stone under the rocks he had thrown away?
Why, all the bodies of God’s creatures. But oh, oh, oh no. Peregot had never questioned which God.
He was still being watched. It was impossible not to be. The eyes observing him were simple stony lenses; they could not blink. They saw him. They saw through him. They saw through him and his mask and his book and up into his church and saw past that into God’s home and they saw God in Heaven and Peregot finally understood why a mouse would freeze before a cat. Because it knows if it moves, it dies, and above all else, above anything else, above everything else, life demands its own existence, and oh no, oh god, oh god, oh
Like a mayfly above a river, there was a splash, and a tug, and it all went under.
***
Captain Gravus and his six deserters slipped into the port-town of Murgbrussan as unnoticed as they’d planned, but for all the wrong reasons. Mobs roamed the streets, fire spread across roofs, shouts filled the air.
“The priest went mad,” the fisherman they hired explained between breathes, setting sails and swearing each time the wind wobbled. “Stopped talking mid-sentence, eyes rolled back. Fell down and choked like a retching dog in the street. They brought him home, and the door came off the church – fell apart in their hands. Their feet sunk through the floorboards. The windows broke in the breeze, and the ceiling was coming apart when they left. Like it was made of damp sand on the beach.” He shook his head. “Bad times, a bad land, a bad omen. Until we get that place consecrated again, I’m leaving for home, and good luck to all the sorry bastards staying behind.” His face contorted for a moment. “Beg pardon, but can I ask you for a prayer for them aforesaid sorry bastards? Not a typical fee, but… none come to mind right now.”
Gravus’s expressive brows furrowed. Then twisted. Then raised. And, as his six fellow soldiers stuttered and halted in their own attempts, he reached beneath his shirt and pulled loose the small holy book that lived above his heart and flipped through its sweat-dyed pages.
Each and every one was perfectly blank.
Licked clean.