Episode 5: Twin Peaks

 

Have you ever felt a sourceless cold pass through your body?

That's what it felt like. Sort of.

It was more like a wave of force, of the emotion Shock, passed through us. Like there had been some kind of explosion, some deed so terrible that its happening created some sort of outwardly expanding sphere of influence – and what I felt was the shockwave.

I stand there with my mouth hanging open, my heart racing, breath shallow.

“What was that?” I hear myself say when I find the same look on Peitho's face.

Her mouth slowly closes, her throat working in vain to swallow – to speak what she knows.

R – You know what that was. You've felt it before.

I – That was Pepin.

“He used the Rod.” I'm stunned. I know it's true, and yet I cannot believe the words coming out of my mouth.

Peitho appears not to have known. Hearing me say this is, evidently, enough for her to regain her composure.

“Robert. We cannot run from this. Not now. We may never have been able to.” If I am wondering whether she has read my mind, her eyes are saying she will never tell.

“Peitho—“

“It's there, right?”

I follow her wrist with my eyes, down her hand, her finger, to what she's pointing at. I am prepared to tell her yes no matter what I find. That is, until I'm looking at the pair of peaks the road continues toward. The same mountains I saw in my ND Vision – only from a different angle.

“Yes,” I breathe.

“And what we just felt....”

I look at her. “I can only assume that is as I have seen as well.” Peitho's face falls – but only fractionally. I notice it only because I'm smug and arrogant and foolish and looking. I also see the fear that shadows her eyes with doubt.

S – What have I done?

I – You have done the work of her enemies for her.

R – You have weakened her heart when we needed her at her strongest. She was our only chance of getting out of these mountains alive.

I – You have doomed you both.

Peitho looks back down our distant road, and I am surprised that Ted isn't out here already. Gods know he wanted to bust my balls every other morning.

And there he is, pulling up beside Peitho, now. My reality doesn't so much slow as I'm observing all this happen as it does... strobe. Like I had become a slide projector. Clicking from one moment to the next, with nothing between. And now she's getting in – and she gives me an ugly look before she disappears inside. And then the street is empty except for me and the carriage.

“You comin, son?”

I blink, and Ted is looking down at me.

“Let's go.” He waves, but there's no smile on his face. I don't know what Ted knows, and for that matter, I don't know anything about him besides that he has a granddaughter whom he loves very much.

R – It wouldn't exactly be fair if he died doing your duty up there and you didn't, don't you think?

“Yeah,” I sigh. “I'm coming.”

The next hour is among the most brutal, most exquisitely uncomfortable hours of my life to that point. We were, all of us – even the horses – completely silent. The only sounds those of the lumbering carriage and the occasional horseshoe pinging off a paving stone. 

I am staring out the window, watching those mountains slowly rotate.

I can't say whether Ted and the horses felt the shockwave. But I can say that the quiet, the sense of elephantine fear cramped into what room there is in the carriage, is hellish.

What were we going to do?

The question hangs like the Sword of Damoclese over the silence, like a scream held back only by total paralysis. The nothing of the play actor about to be made dead by the bear anyway.

Neither of us actually asks it, though.

How could we stop him? Stop him from killing us?

I'd had some vague, half-baked notions of sneaking up on him tonight in his tent, in the camp. But that made even less sense than trying to imagine what we were going to find now. There wasn't even going to be a battle. I was always going to fail. I really was doomed the moment I first got in this carriage with Peitho.

Doomed to fail.

I look at Peitho. She's not even staring out the right window. A white-hot knife of spite is forged in my belly, and I think to plant it in her back. I hate her. I am sure of that. She is everything I am trying not to be – a liar, a deceiver— And then she looks at me. She must have felt my glare.

Her eyes are so big and so white and so afraid.

My anger, my hate and my resentment fade. It's not her fault. None of this is her fault. She is just playing the part she was taught to play.

Yal – What if you taught her another part to play? What if you kept playing together?

This thought catches me like the perfect riposte in an argument. It's so obvious. It's been right there in front of me the whole time: the solution to this thing I'm in.

I blink, turn my head from Peitho to muse out the window... and see it. The peaks. The implication of a valley between.

I'm on my feet.

“Robert?”

It's them. I've been here. I've—

I open the door and walk out of the carriage.

Ted does not know I am going to do this, and does not slow down. I do not know that I am I doing this, and do not prepare for the complicated physics problem which is landing safely.

I land, all right. Safely, too, for what it's worth. But no one should mimick my arrival in a safe but hurting jumble of limbs on the roadside.

“Robert!”

I hear Peitho, but I do not heed her.

My attention, my very being, is laser-focused on those peaks.

I've been here before.

I climb to my feet.

“Robert! Ted, Rob—!”

My eyes fly to the sky. Straight up.

I almost expect to see myself flying up there. I feel like I'm in free fall.

I jerk – because a hand has grabbed my shoulder. My eyes shoot down to Peitho's. “What?” I notice that we are no longer in the carriage. “How...?”

“Is that the spot?” Peitho's face is hard, angry, and maybe a little concerned. Then she's spreading her lips in a terse there-there. Not sympathetic, but she's identified why I'm acting strangely.

I look back to the spot. “Yeah.

She nods, her brow stern. Her eyes gleam like exposed alien steel. Turning back to Ted, who waits for us some few yards away on his carriage, she calls, “Thank you, Tedoro. This is as far as we will join you. But, please, friend, I must encourage you to continue the journey to its end. For your safety.”

Teodoro looks at us for a long, silent moment. I can't see his face well enough to tell what he's thinking. But he's an old man – they're wily enough to be inscrutable when they want to be. Then he nods, checks the carriage door is closed, and gets his donkeys moving. He doesn't spare a look back. Good for him.

I wish I could go with him.

“Now he's safe, we'd better get going,” Peitho says at my side. She takes a step forward, then looks back at me as though she is going to ask what the hold-up is. “Did you bring a kit?”

I don't answer. She knows I didn't. What, did I forget my backpack of extra food and a bedroll in the carriage? Though I can't be so sure she hasn't got one hidden wherever the Statuette and gods know what else.

“The sun is only going to be out for so long.”

She gives me that arched eyebrow and I want both to punch her in the chest and kiss her right on the mouth, all at once. I sigh.

“I don't want to do this, Peitho.”

“What are you saying?”

 I'm not looking at her face anymore. In fact, I'm looking down the path toward the death which brought me here.

“I'm saying that I don't want to do this.”

I meet Peitho's eyes. She is crestfallen, her features forming the silent question: Are you really going to make me do this all alone? With her mouth, she asks, “You're going to come this far to give up now?”

S – We sound like children. I'm sorry, Peitho – I imagine myself saying to her – but this isn't a harmless hole in the ground – and I didn't have to do that, either!

But that would be meaningless. Instead, after loo long of watching her eyes watch mine, I ask:

“What does it matter? Huh? Let him have it. What's the worst that could happen?”

Peitho breaks my stare, turns – even takes a step – toward the valley I know is nestled between those peaks. Her hair blows in the wind behind her, just as majestic as had she planned it. With the mountains as her backdrop, she looks proud, defiant – free. And I wonder whether what I am feeling isn't what their men felt for great people such as Alexander the Great – or Helen of Troy.

“I don't know what the worst thing is that could happen,” she starts. “What I do know is that the Rod of Wadjet is mine. Pepin the Great stole it from me. And I am going to kill him for it.” Peitho looks over her shoulder at me, her body, her face, languid. As calm and confident as any predator in its home, she is in no way joking. I'm sure of it.

“You can either come along or not. But I am going to do my duty.”

“And what is that duty?” I ask, but Peitho is already turned back to our final destination. “What is that duty?” I repeat. In answer, she starts walking down the slope. “Peitho! What is that duty! What is it? Whom is it to?”

I shout, but she isn't listening. Am I really going to ask to no response until she's out of earshot before I get the hint?

I hang my head. And start jogging.

I catch up with Peitho before too long.

“Well?” I ask eventually. She looks at me, arches an eyebrow. I sigh. “What is that duty?”

“You're just going to have to follow along to find out, aren't you?”

S – This was really not the best time for you to switch masks on me, Peitho....

“I guess so. Is this— Peitho, is this really how you want to play this? Trust is—“

“Trust!” she kind of laughs, bitterly. “Trust. You're going to tell me about trust.”

S – Why does she have to be like this? Why are we fighting?

“Do you really want me not to trust you?”

Peitho shoots me an ugly look, then freezes. I stop in place beside her.

We have rounded the mountain so that the valley of my visions is before us. But it is no Vision had in an altered state, nor any description in a journal which roots us both to the spot like a Hedge Mage's Warding spell.

It is the titanic serpent of the dead winding along the floor of the valley.

Men. Some two thousand of them.

Just dropped dead.

“Come on.” Peitho's face is ashen.

I don't respond. I do follow.

The terrain of this part of the trek is easier, treeless, the slope gentler. Almost like the peaks agreed that this would make a great spot to fight battles. I can almost imagine Hannibal Barca bringing his elephants through this same spot. But I don't have to imagine what that battle would have looked like: Minus the giant beasts, I'm looking at the After image right now. If only the trek there were so easy.

We both, Peitho and I, know that Pepin and the Rod are not among the men who will lie here, forgotten by time, until even the minerals of their bones are reclaimed by the Mother. If Pepin is anywhere, he and the Rod were last on that hill over there – on the other side of the stream – and this line of corpses – from us.

So we just walk.

For my part, I'm trying not to feel an intense, crushing guilt. How can it be my fault these men are dead?

You knew. You knew and you did nothing.

I didn't know, though.

You did. This is your fault. You could have stopped it. You should have stopped it.

I don't even know this voice, ugly and hateful. Wadjet? Could she be so cruel?

And not to think about how this valley feels wrong.

There's a smell. Like ozone and sulfur. But not a smell at all – more like a feeling in my nose hairs. Something happened here.

Something unnatural.

We reach the corpses.

And Peitho falls to her knees in the soft, silty bed of the stream. I can see the anguish on her face – but of course I can only guess at what she is feeling.

My eyes scan the battlefield. It feels like learning you're the only person to survive the Second Coming and Rapture. Like learning I'd overslept and missed the end of the world. So many of the dead men before us are just dead. Like they decided to lay down among the mortally wounded and go to sleep. It's uncanny. It feels unreal.

Peitho lets out a keening wail. She's doing something in the water than involves splashing and wide, swinging arcs of her arms – and I try to ignore her. I try to tell myself it's to be respectful, but really it's so I don't get irritated with the irrationality – and let it show on my face where she will see it.

There are a remarkable number of wounded dead. A remarkable amount of blood pooled in the mud and shallow water.

And nearly all of them are those who fought with their backs to Pepin.

“They were going to lose this battle,” I hear myself say. “What sort of an army did they send for him?”

Peitho stops wailing. I hear her splash through the bloody stream to my side.

“Look at his.” I point to Pepin's army. “Their dead – there are so many wounded with arrows and other injuries – and so few injured on the other side....”

“It looks like they may have only learned which end of their swords were for killing this morning,” Peitho observes, her voice filled with a bitter pity. I look at her. She is soaking wet and rivulets of blood run from her hair and down her face.

S – What in the fuck did she do that for?

R – Don't react. Don't say anything.

“Right. But why?”

“They were not expected to actually fight,” Peitho says as though this is the obvious and only answer. It probably is.

I squint at her. “What do you know?”

“Only what you saw. This was not meant to happen this way.”

Peitho is looking at the hill Pepin did this from. I am too, now.

“Pepin was supposed to do this. But not to his men.”

“He really showed them.” I meant to say this ironically – and then remember that this was the very threat, the very promise Pepin had repeated over and over in his broken mind. Did Peitho know that?

The look she's giving me suggests that she does – and that she thinks I'm being perverse.

“This was a token force. These men were innocents. Victims.”

“Peitho?” What are you thinking?

“Someone knew he could do this. That the Rod was capable of something like this. They set him to it.”

“We knew that, though," I point out.

“Of course we knew that!” Peitho wheels around on me, shouting. She fumes. “What we don't know is who or to what end.”

“Now you care.”

“Caring does not mean pissing and moaning when we can do nothing. It does not mean imagining all the worst-possible scenarios. Caring is doing.” Peitho starts walking toward the distant hill.

“And what are we going to do?” I ask, following after. Shouting, when she doesn't answer. “What are we going to do?”

Peitho doesn't even look at me.

“I am going to start by killing Pepin the Great.”

“And then? … And then?”

“And then everyone else who gets in my way.”

I don't say anything more until we've climbed to the top of the hill.