Episode 6: Where is He?

 

“Well? Where is he?”

Peitho and I are standing over the corpse of an ugly pony. The corpses of a marvelous war horse and an evidently less-than-estimable western noble are arranged nearby – as though they both just fell over dead, rider-in-saddle and beast.

I am staring down from very nearly the exact spot— The same spot where Pepin watched as he slew 2001 men, at least one pony, and at least one horse.

S – Is this what the Rapture will look like? Like God just reached his hand down and took the souls right out of His Children's bodies?

I can feel it, something... I want to say cracking – but it isn't a cracking. It's a high-tension wire stretched just to the point before it snaps. It's a tightness of breath. A constriction even in the sound of my heart pounding in my ears. It's the smells of ozone and of sulfur – and of lifeless nothing. Like even the grass and the air have died, not yet to show signs.

S – Is the air the same, though it flows in wind like water?

R – Is the water in a river the same?

But more than anything it's a yawning pit in my stomach. A wrongness about which only the oldest animal parts of my brain know. And their inarticulate screaming.

“Robert—“

In something like a panic, my body activating every single flight or fight response at its disposal, I wheel around on Peitho. She holds up her hands; her eyebrows likewise, her shoulders sinking back. She assumes a defensive posture.

“Peitho, I—“

“You scared me, Robert. Your eyes....”

I close them. I can only imagine what I look like.

“You didn't hear me, did you?”

Trying to clear my mind, to control myself or at the very least to ignore this place, I look at her again. “No. What did you say?”

“Pepin. Where is he?” Peitho's voice is sharp, impatient. Strained. I hear the tension in her, too.

R - She feels whatever it is about this place, too.

S – Well, she should, right? She should know what it is we're feeling.

I – Should she?

“I don't know.”

“Have you already forgotten that you—“

“Fuck you, Peitho.” I spit. If she expects me to try to get back into his— “How am I supposed to know?”

“You're the—“

“And you said you didn't need me if I could get you to where he was.”

Had she said that? Or had I imagined it? I'm not sure. And it doesn't matter. I'm not actually backing out, I'm—

“This is why you were hired, philalitheia. Earn your gold.” Peitho actually does spit saliva at my feet.

“This. This is why I was hired.” I roll my eyes performatively and move away from her, like a different vantage of the goddamned pony is going to change anything.

Frowning at the ground, trying to think of something to say that isn't going to get us arguing again. I look down at the pony. “He would have fallen, right? With the horse.”

“You think he was sitting on it?” Then, before I can, she says, “Right. That's what – do you really think it happened exactly the way you saw?”

“I think that that doesn't matter right now. I think that...” I'm looking at the pony. It's lying on its side, like a tipped cow. But it's not sleeping. “He probably got trapped under it, yeah?” I look up at Peitho. She shrugs. “He would have had a while to look around and decide where to go, under there. To think of his next move.”

My eyes drift toward the horizon, at the right angle he would have been facing under the horse.

And that's when I see the barn on yonder hill.

“Over there,” I say and point.

“Don't be an ass,” Peitho says, then traces with her eyes the line from my finger to the barn. “Oh. I see. Yes. I imagine you are right. Should we, then?”

I look to the sky. Just after noon. “The sun is only setting from here.”

“Indeed.”

That is the last thing either of us says as we make our way to the distant hill. Suddenly, as we are closing to within one hundred yards of the barn, Peitho stops me by the arm. I roll my eyes around to hers.

“Do you remember how I told you that working magick means knowing when to use it?”

I can't seem to blink. “Whatever happened to that?”

Peitho stares into my eyes for a long, meaningful moment. “If ever there were a time that you were going to will an outcome into being—“ She pauses. Her face is a mask of determination – but I do sense a quiver in her lip, see her swallow a lump in her throat – do I not know that same fear in her eyes? “Awen, now is that time.”

Dumbly, choked up myself, I nod.

Peitho breathes through her nose, closes her eyes. Her nostrils flare. And when I can see the emeralds of her gaze again, she is different. Harder. The angles and planes of her face subtly changed. Flatter. Sharper.

And her eyes seem so much bigger.

“You take the front, I'll take the back.”

She looks at the barn, and I ask:

“That's the plan?” I don't like that I sound a little hysterical.

“Yes. Count to five, then rush the door. Maybe one of us gets to him before he can kill us both.”

S – That's the plan, isn't it? That's the only plan there could be.

I nod. My jaw is clenched too tightly to attempt speech.

And why, now, of all times, can I not think of al'Shamshir; can I not think of the Library – can I not do any of the things I should have been doing lo the last week besides obliterating myself in Peitho – when I need them most?

“You ready?”

I find some enthusiasm for this nod.

“May the Mother guide us,” Peitho intones. Then, when I look to begin the march to certain doom, she says, “You're supposed to say, 'And may She bring us home.'”

I peer back at her, incredulous. “How am I supposed to know that?”

“That's what you're supposed to say right now. And may She bring us home.”

I sense the cut in her repetition.

“Is that where we're going?”

“That's what you're supposed to say, Robert! That's what I want you, a man, to say to me, a woman whom you have professed to love. Right now. That's what I want you to say. Say it to me, Robert. Tell me, 'And may She bring us home.'”

She's practically seething. I say it as much to prevent her going into a seizure as anything.

S - Jeez.

“Thank you. Now – let's get this Rod and die trying.”

She starts without me.

“Don't you mean or?”

S – Goddamnit. Not this again.

I jog a pace to catch up with her once more.

And then we're silent.

I had given next to no thought about the barn all the way here. But now that we're less than 100 yards away.... It's one of those rectangular jobs with doors on either narrow end. The yard and the land surrounding are empty. It's eerie. Uncanny. Peitho either doesn't notice, or doesn't seem to. I, however, can't not feel the wrongness about this place.

It's like the air, the very grass beneath our feet, are holding their collective breaths. We don't even know for sure that Pepin is in there.

S – What if he's hidden the Rod somewhere?

S – That would be funny.

S – But, wait. Why would he do that?

S – To leverage it for his life.

S – Does he know I'm coming?

S – Not me. Someone else will come for him eventually.

S – Metus.

S – Then why hide in the—

I stop at the nearest corner of the barn. The wood, when I put my hand on the structre – an act done as much to hold my weight as I watch Peitho round the barn as to convince myself this is all really happening— The wood feels like it knows what I'm going to find on its other side and wants me not to do what I'm about to do.

Run! it whispers. Save yourself. You don't have to die here.

I feel stupid. Two people do not have a building surrounded. What are we thinking? Are we going to burn him out? I don't know about Peitho, but I'm not going to. We don't even know for sure he's in there. And besides, I think Peitho wants his blood on her hands. Actually, not figuratively.

I wish I could trust her.

That's the last thing I think before she disappears around the corner. I only happen to notice it. The last thing I see is that Peitho is barefoot. How had I never noticed before?

I close my eyes. Instead of counting to five, I try to imagine what is going to happen when I open that door. Instead of that, I think:

He's going to give himself and the Rod up to me.

And then I'm moving.

I dash over to the doors. Without thinking about how we are as good as dead, I pull the door open just enough to dart inside.

The barn is dark. And cool. And everything I think a barn is meant to be – besides inhabited with animals. For a second, my suspicions are confirmed: the farmers evacuated – obviously. And then I see the other end of the barn.

I can't know whether it was Peitho who did it, but both doors on her end are wide open, providing what light there is. And Peitho is nowhere to be seen. Unless....

I thought I saw something dart, too low and too fast to be Peitho, into the shadows over there. I must have imagined it. I must have.

“You....”

I hear the voice before I see the speaker.

I turn to it, slowly, like knowing that the killer has been behind you all along and isn't going to make it any less fatal if you don't turn around to face them.

In a stall in the middle of the barn, on the side to my right, I see him. I see his eyes, their beady, black reflections in the greater shadows of his hiding place. It is not the fact of him which freezes me. It is the horrid recognition in those eyes – Pepin's eyes – which sort of turns my mind upside down, like a particularly uncanny vertigo – like looking in a mirror and seeing someone else's face looking back at you.

And not only because the chorus of my thoughts harmonized with his word with that same upside-down, inside-out tonality; and I know my eyes must reflect something of his same horror. But for a deeper reason – a reason I will not know for many years to come.

Peitho moves in the shadows, now to my left. She is subtle, but I see her. My hand shoots out – a calming palm to Pepin like I might if he were a badger, or a boar, or a snake. But it is for Peitho.

“You,” I agree, moving toward Pepin. Trying to position myself so I can see more than his outline and the broken black bosse of his eyes.

“I know you.” and I see him. The emaciated little man of my dreams and Visions cowers, half obscured in straw and entirely covered in filth. He leans toward me, now, on his palms, climbing onto his knees. It is as though there were a cloud or a sort of fog covering his face, darkening his eyes. As he peers at me, that fog lifts, and a brightness returns to his gaze.

“I saw you. In the Rod. She showed me you when I begged her for sleep. Dreams of you – chasing me – going to punish me for what I will do – what I am doing – what I have done.”

Pepin's voice is just as erratic and insane as his eyes. His face twitching as he seems to flit from one time to another, apparently unsure which when he is in - which when he would prefer to be in.

“She said you were going to take the Rod.”

His eyes shoot to it only an instant before mine do. I cannot overstate how tense that instant is.

Today, we, you, modern humans think you comprehend the fear of death at the speed of thought. I've seen your action movies – your superheroes. If the Rod of Asclepius were a gun, you might think you know the fear I feel. If it were a gun that shot lightsabers, maybe. But you would maintain in your mind the truth and the hope and the trope that even firearms aren't instantly and unerringly fatal in stories will remain true, here. You might think that I, like John Wick, could get out of this alive.

I knew better.

When I realize that he is looking for the Rod, I know full well what he is capable of with it – and that neither Peitho nor I can do anything about it. There is no time to question whether it is possible. I have seen that it is possible. And I have a split-second to decide what to do.

My eyes follow his, to the Rod, half buried in the straw at his side.

We both freeze. Staring.

I at him, him at the Rod. I can only imagine what thoughts are behind his broken eyes.

“Pepin, no?” His name from my lips jerks his attention to me.

There is a dirty-glass sheen to his eyes. Like a cataract – but of the lens between the eye and the soul. It clears for just a moment.

“Pepin the Great, right?” I ask.

“No,” he says. His voice sounds like a wail, like a choked sob. He speaks a northern Italian dialect that will morph into something like Austrian in a few centuries. “Not great. Pepin the Fool. Pepin the Coward. Pepin the Weak.”

“What happened here, Pepin?” I try to keep my voice concerned. “What happened down there?”

“They're all dead. All dead. They saw. I showed them.” He looks down at the Rod again. I don't take my eye off him, but I can feel it, now – the Rod, if that's what the tingling in my skin, like standing too close to an unstable electromagnetic generator, lifting the hairs of my arms and neck from my flesh is.

I dart a look with my eyes alone to my left. Peitho is nearly invisible, waiting in the shadows, nearby. I shake my head at her.

Pepin is staring at me.

“But you know. You have seen.”

I take a step toward him, crouching slightly. I make no move nor glance toward the Rod. There's no way of knowing how quickly he could grab it up; but I'm two paces too far away to stop him, whatever that would mean. I know it. So I'm not going to try. Not even thinking about it.

“I see you. Yes. Talk to me. Tell me what happened. Help me understand.”

“I— I—“ Pepin chokes, but he doesn't break his stare, doesn't for a moment even flinch his gaze from mine. Something happens in him. Something he has maybe been wanting to happen his entire life – someone has seen him. Someone wants to understand him.

I kneel, moving closer to him. As though he were a cat and not a man, and I had a treat, I extend my hand to him. “Start at the beginning. Who are you, Pepin? Why do I see you in my dreams?”

“I....” he blinks, looks away from me. His eyes search the floor of the barn, and he's a completely different person. It's as though whatever that cataract was, it cleared up, and here he is, Pepin as he was before whatever disease made him what I knew. Dirty and disheveled, but human in all meaninglfully obvious ways. And sane.

Dangerously so.

“I'm no one. I— I thought.... My grandmother always told me.... I thought— She told me that my father's father, that she got with child from a king. She named my father after him, and me after my father. King Pepin of Italy. That's what she said. That's what he believed. But he— My father was no good.”

Pepin's eyes are far away when he says this. His voice dreamy. As though he had forgotten these things. As though only one thing had been on his mind for so long it had consumed everything else.

“I believed it. They told me that I would be a prince if he were alive. Not just the worthless son of the good-for-nothing son of a whore. My father.... My father was a drinker. I know he tried to kill me more'n a few times.” His laugh is weak. Which of us is he trying to reassure? “Used to say I was weak. That in the old times I'd'a been left out to die as a babe. But seein as how my mother— He said I was foolish. That I had dreams in my head weren't possible could be real. That the world didn't care about people like me, an' I shouldn't care about it. Burn it all to the ground, he used to say. Kill em all. Kill em all.... Too cowardly for princely blood, he said. And he'd hit me. Said it would make me strong. Stronger, at any rate. Couldn't make a chicken into a bull, now, could I? And Gramma—

“Gramma. All she talked about til... til she died was Venice. She should be the Queen of Italy if not for Venice.”

“Venice is where Pepin of Italy—“ I offer.

“Died. Yeah. Not even slain in battle. He died from an illness, besieging their walls. As cowardly and dishonorable a death as a Pepin deserves, huh? She said it was sorcery. She said they worked some kinda spell on him. The Venetians – the Lombards, to get their revenge on Charlemagne.”

S – Interesting....

“And you hated Venice for it. For your life. For your family.”

He's looking at something in his lap, I realize. He's standing. I see the Rod in his hands, as his waist is suddenly at my eye-level. When did he pick it up? I hadn't seen him move for it.

I – You hadn't exactly been looking, had you?

R – Too busy thinking about—

And now he's pointing it at me.

I rock back on my heels, my eyes climbing the snake, his arm, to his face. There is no threat in his eyes. But they are fractured once again. There is, however, more anger in them than one sane soul can contain. It trembles his hand, shakes his voice, froths his cracked lips.

“But she was a liar, and he was just a drunk. And you are here to take from me what is mine.”

I'm holding my hands at my shoulders and trying to tell myself the tingling of my skin is just nerves – just fear, excitement. But I already know what it is I feel – it's the killing magick of the Rod, waiting to sever for me what was cataracted for him.

“Why don't you put that down, Pepin? Huh?”

“No!” He clutches it to his chest – that familiar pose I have lived so many times – and I try not to breathe a sigh of relief. “You don't know what it is. You can't have it. It should be destroyed. You can't destroy it! It's too powerful! She will know. She will stop you.” His eyes are shooting all around the stall, as though calculating a thousand possibilities I can only guess at. His voice shifts from talking to himself to screaming, to almost whispering lamentingly. Then they lock onto me. “You don't understand. You can't!”

“Yet,” I insist, rising slowly to my full height – and wondering immediately whether that is a good idea: Pepin can't be an inch over five feet. At over six myself, I tower, describable only as menacingly above him. Add the weight difference of nearly one hundred pounds, and if the Rod were not what it is, taking it from him would be even more disgraceful a display than taking candy from a baby.

Pepin frowns. Tilts his head like he hears a voice I can't. “You want to keep me talking. You think then I'll give it to you. Or the Lamia will take it from me.”

Is Wadjet talking to him right now?

“What Lamia?” I ask Pepin. “What monster?”

He laughs, a derisive thing completely at odds with his appearance. “What monster? The monster I took this from.” He waves the Rod around flippantly.

S – What is happening? What have I done?

He can't be talking about Peitho. But then he looks past me, into the shadows near where I'd last seen her. He has to be bluffing.

“Tell me what happened to your family, Pepin.”

“I killed them.” Pepin straightens his spine, holding his head almost regally above his concave chest. “I killed them both in their sleep. With my knife.” The Rod is in his left hand. The right is too tremulous. He tries to hide it behind his back.

“Why?” I ask. “Why not just leave?”

“Just leave? Where was I to go? But that isn't why. You know why.”

His eyes darken. His whole face does, as though the barn were somehow dimmed for the scene.

“No,” I breathe. “I don't. Please – please tell me.”

“The dreams.” Pepin breathes the word, and it chills me deeper than to the bone.

“The dreams?” I manage through a throat which has gone dusty. “Tell me about the dreams.”

“You've never had the dreams? The dreams that feel so real? Like you're another person, in another life? Or like you're you, but in a different version of this life? Like over there, as bad as it might be, it's better than being here? Like when you go to sleep you can't tell the difference in which you is the real you? You've never had dreams like that?”

He looks at me, regards me, like he might spit at my feet. But he does not give me time to answer. He must see it in my eyes. He must know why I have worked so hard for so long to end the dreams.

“It makes you feel like you're insane. But it wasn't those dreams. It was the other dreams. The dreams with the man in the robe. A black robe. Tall. With a black hole where the face should be. Blacker than the blackest black could ever be in its worst nightmares. His voice was filled with an indescribable power. He made me afraid. But he called me Pepin the Great. He promised me....”

For a moment, I think Pepin is going to make me prod him. Then he doesn't.

“He said that he was an Angel of God. He said that God chooses his kings in this world, and I was to be tested. God wanted to make me a king. But I had to kill my father and my grandmother, he said. Do that, and God would give me everything I wanted. I didn't believe at first. I thought I was, you know – mad? So when he came to me again, I made him prove himself to me. He said that I would wake in the middle of the night and that my knife would be beneath my pillow. When I found it, I would know what to do.

“And it was. I didn't put it there. Was he in my room? Was it magick? I don't know. It didn't matter. I didn't think about it. I knew what to do. If he could do that, what else could he do? Could he put the knife in my heart, if I said no? And who were my father and my grandmother to me? They would kill me just to do it, with no reward on offer.”

Pepin falls silent. His eyes drop to his trembling right hand, and I don't think he believes what he has said any more than I do.

“But it felt good.” His hand closes in a fist, and there is strength to it. No tremble, either. A single tear streaks the grime of his face. “It felt right. To end it. The cycle. You know? The sins of the father shall be passed unto the son until the seventh generation. Let it end with the third.

“He came, the next morning, as he said he would: with the first light of dawn. And he took me someplace. We.... It was the strangest thing. I can't explain it. We walked out the door of my home, the bodies of my father and gramma cooling in their bed – and into the hall of some noble. I never learned where. And he never told me – the noble never introduced himself. But they told me – they told me to find this.” Pepin holds up the Rod, reverently, as though he knows full-well what it is and isn't the kind of person who would use it to steal thousands of lives for next to no purpose.

“They said to find it for them and they would make me a king.”

Pepin's mouth twists hatefully.

“But they lied.

“I was nothing to them. My power, what I'd gained – what I'd done – it meant nothing to them. My father was no son of Pepin of Italy. My blood is not Carolingian. I was a weapon. Disposable. And I—“

Pepin's face opens up like the full truth of what he has done is fully realized in his mind for the first time. He flings away the Rod like its serpent has just come alive. He's screaming with a horror from the depths of his soul. And I am transfixed by the Rod's arc to the ground at my feet.

“Don't hurt me,” he whimpers, sobbing freely now.

“I don't want to hurt you, Pepin,” I whisper, looking at him.

“I know.” He sucks a wad of runny wet snot back into his head. “But she does.”

Before I can think to wonder, aloud or otherwise who she is, Peitho suddenly appears in my vision. Darting for Pepin.

But it's not me who stops her from doing what she planned. I shout her name. Almost more like a no, really. That was my contribution. Impotence, thy name is not Robert Longshore.

No. It was someone else.