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FACE
A Claymore Short Story
DISCLAIMER: Claymore & its characters belong to Norihiro Yagi & his affiliates.
RATING: T
For Fatehah. Whose face I struggle to remember.
"I look inside myself and see my heart is black."
- Paint It Black, The Rolling Stones
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PART ONE - White
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1.
He reaches town in the evening, goes into the tavern like they agreed. There, he finds Isley seated at a table with his sword on the table and a harlot named Ailsa on his arm.
Outside, he sees the sun taking cover behind the bulky shoulders of mountains. As the town prepares for night, residents barricade their gates. Young boys usher their animals inside. Several stragglers retire to the tavern. He had slipped past everyone, the night watchmen taking their positions behind him.
Briefly stunned by sour pressing stench of so many people in such an enclosed space, he takes a seat opposite his good friend. The harlot joins him. She isn't from this town, but says the men here are bigger, give better and can last longer.
"Really?" he asks.
"Look at you." She laughs. A hand plunges below as if to pluck something from his crouch. But he's faster. So she settles for tracing circles around his abdomen. Her other hand fetches a flagon from the table. She nods to Isley. "And your friend here has the strength of a hundred horses!"
"Closer to the truth than you think," Isley says.
But he hasn't been gone for three days to return to cheap talk. Gently brushing Ailsa aside, he produces from his cloak a pouch and several shredded pieces of paper.
Isley reads the intent in his face, and says: "Ailsa dear, why don't you get our good friend Raki something to eat."
Dismissed, she stalks away, pressing a finger to his chest. Raki thinks she has a small face and too-sharp nails. Now, with Isley all to himself, he talks.
"Is Priscilla well?"
"What do you think?" Isley reclines, like a giant feline, his eyes glowing through parted bangs. "She's in the room, away from all this filth."
He smoothens out the pouch. He fingers them, extracting a handful of Yoki-suppressant pills, as if they were gold coins.
"That's quite a haul."
"As you've taught me, go for the handlers. But I prefer theft to murder."
Isley grins. "I didn't teach you to be a common thief. Remember that."
"And these orders," Raki points to the papers. "There's something there I don't understand –"
When Isley reads them, his eyes flicker with concern. He almost speaks. But Ailsa returns. Her idea of something to eat is a boiled leg of some unfortunate mammal and yet another flagon of mead. She holds them as she straddles Raki's left leg. She curls her hands behind his head. He finds Isley's brooding face replaced by her bosom.
As he peers behind her, he sees Isley makes his leave. He takes the pouch and the papers. Raki thinks he is going to give Priscilla a dose of yoki-suppressant tonight. Just in case, he mouths to him – and he disappears into the black belly of the tavern.
"Now, where were we?" Ailsa goes.
Warmth blooms into his thighs. She touches his nose with hers, planting her arms astride his shoulders. But facing this girl with hay-coloured hair, Raki is forced to think of someone else. He remembers staring face to face with her too, the forest around them, a grove of trees like a protective shield. He tries to remember.
Instead, he looks beyond her, to the window, to the darkness he has just escaped from, to the orange sunset leaking from behind the trees. He tries to summon the memory of that someone else to reassure himself he still remembers her. But just then, the night drowns out all the last remains of day.
2.
Isley and Priscilla stay in an adjacent room, so all through the night Raki has Ailsa to himself. But he sends her away when, after several rounds, she insists on showing him the many other ways men from town pleasure her.
He locks the door after her and stretches out on the bed. It feels much more comfortable with just him on it. He still can taste her tongue on his lips, a barley-flavoured tang of old mead, and sheets are encrusted with hours of their accumulated sweat. But he lets his mind revert back to the grove of trees on that crumbling hillside. He can recall the clicking of rocks under his feet, a carpet of granite fragments leading away from where somebody, someone familiar had turned away from him. He remembers everything about that moment – even how thinking of it now in the empty hole of his room makes his heart ascend – everything. But the face of the person there.
He sleeps in, until Isley politely knocks on the door. He tells him that Ailsa's gone and it's morning and they have to go.
"You saw her leave?"
"Eh you sent her away."
"So you saw her leave?" Raki says.
In the single sword of sunlight slicing in through the brown-edged curtains he sees Isley's eyes narrow. But when he blinks and gets up, the frown is gone.
"I need a bath first," he says, throwing out his soiled shirt "Why don't you go and prepare breakfast first?"
Isley shrugs. "You and your baths."
He soaks in the soapy water just because he wants to feel clean, to flush away all the last two days' of travelling from his body. He picks the shards of gravel clean from between his toes, the coal black grit from under his fingernails. As he eases into the white soapwort lather, he feels the fatigue ease from his shoulders. Then he thinks of the next journey, across wild country, to wherever Isley will lead them.
And where are they going next, anyway?
Drying his hair, a young girl waits patiently on his bed. The sunlight makes her shoulder-length hair the colour of roasted chestnuts.
"Did you drown? Did you meet some monster underneath the water?" she asks.
Raki takes her into his arms, and kisses her forehead. Her mouth edges into a smile. He feels her shoulder blades, as sharp as daggers, against his chest, and the way she always presses her palms around his right hand when he returns. He listens to her breathing. When he breaks the embrace, he sizes her up. As usual, she always looks thinner.
"Please don't ask me if I've taken the pills," she says, and strolls out the door. He can hear her voice trailing from the depths of the tavern rooms: "We're waiting to feed you."
Feeling cleansed, he follows Priscilla down to the deserted hall. Isley sits alone at a table, away from the bars of sunlight punching through windows at every angle. He sees exhausted or sleeping patrons slump over tables, like corpses, with mead bleeding from their overturned flagons. Outside the half-open door, Raki doesn't hear the town stirring to life.
Raki sits, and Isley gestures to a steaming bowl of brown porridge and chamomile tea. "Eat something. We have a long way to go."
"Where are we going?"
"North."
"It's a bit early to take cover in the mountains."
"We're not going there."
"How far north?"
Isley crosses and uncrosses his legs, strokes the braids on Priscilla's hair. "We're heading towards Pieta."
Raki stops. He looks to Isley, noticing the smirk, noticing his eyes examining him. He knows that was deliberate, to see how he would react. He even sees Priscilla turned towards him, looking at him directly.
"You remember Pieta?"
"It's been years but I can remember."
"You'll get a chance to pay your respects."
Raki feels his legs grow tense, the muscles just above his thighs twitching, as if he can still feel the girl from last night sitting on them. He thinks of the shattered buildings, kneeling in half-melted snow. He thinks of the three of them walking amongst the ruins. But most of all, he thinks of the warriors' swords, perched in the ground, like a flock of desolate birds on a lonely landscape. He tries to recall the symbols on the swords.
"I told you before, she isn't there."
"Of course not," Isley says.
"Isley." Priscilla begins. "Don't."
"Let him dream on," he waves a hand, pulls his cloak tight. "Dreams are good."
He ignores Isley. Instead, he plays with the thought of returning to Pieta, to the graveyard where he stubbornly believes she isn't buried. He never liked the place. But he knows the story of Pieta like everyone else, how the retelling of its last days have acquired the status of hushed whispering and quiet respect, the kind of stories people tell in taverns. After all, Raki reasons, Isley probably had something to do with it.
As he sips his tea, he finds that the chamomile has a heavy, rusty taste invading its sweetness. He moves his hands to his mouth, then sees the crescent of blood on the lip of cup. Instinctively he returns to his mouth, only to realise he isn't bleeding.
He looks to Priscilla, who herself takes a sip of the tea, then to Isley. Behind his mentor, he sees the hollow insides of the tavern, in its reddish shadow, protected from the glare of morning light.
"Isley, where is everyone?" Raki asks.
When he receives no reply, he makes a move to get up and check on the men he had previously thought knocked out from the night of heavy drinking. But something in Isley's face, again the narrowing of his eyes, discourages him.
Raki tries again. "Isley, what did you do last night?"
Isley shrugs.
3.
Raki helps Priscilla with her cloak. It's getting too big for her. He folds the top around her shoulders, drapes the hood till all he can see is arching bridge of her nose.
"Did Isley try to feed you?" Raki asks, keeping his voice low.
She shakes her head, wriggling her hand up to her forehead to adjust the hood.
He lets his hand linger on her a moment longer than usual. But she smiles and touches his hand, her fingers so small they feel like an infant's curling around his thumb. He wants to imagine that this is who Priscilla is: her memory nothing but their travels, her vulnerability something he can take the effort to protect, her quiet thoughtfulness the essence of her character.
But he knows better.
He keeps the yoki-suppressant pills in the pouch fastened to his belt, opposite to his dagger, the only weapon he carries while on long journeys. Isley carries the sword. After all, with Isley around, he knows there isn't much need for armament.
He fastens his own cloak, pulling tight the stray ends around his arms and adjusting the keffiyeh around his neck. In his room, he leaves behind his old clothes. A habit, he believes, which helps him move forward. He empties the water in his bath, checks the room to see has not left anything behind.
He exits the tavern latest. Before departing, he goes to where he and Isley sat the night before and empties enough silver to pay for their stay. He arranges them into a neat pile. To pay for something – at least it's honest, he thinks. At least it reminds him he is still, after all, human.
4.
They walk through the deserted town. A town like this, Raki thinks, should be chaos in the morning: women screaming at other women, boys fetching animals, people getting about their work. But everything's just like the night before. Windows screech on their hinges. Wind sings through unlocked doors. The gate leading out of the village, where surely there should've been night watchmen, dangles ajar like a loose tooth. Rectangles of fresh earth dot the ground leading out of the town.
Raki knows that people have a habit of disappearing in Isley's presence.
Still, he follows, as they head north along a well-taken road. On both sides of the road, fields show early signs of the summer, their honey-coloured barley crop flickering in the sun as far as the eye can see. Petals on flowers flash at him like pink tongues. Above, a cloudless sky allows him to see into the green mist of hills and more hills.
He expects the trip to take at least five days. He tries to second-guess what Isley will do in the meantime. He knows Isley's unusual travelling habits: his preference to stopover in towns rather than by the roadside during evening, his non-avoidance of warrior patrols, and his almost-magnetic fondness for the north.
"Isley, why are we going north this time?" he asks, speaking to Isley's back.
He looks vertically upwards, as Raki has seen him do many times, as if he'd just asked a question too simple to explain. So Raki clarifies it.
"I mean, why are you bringing us pass Pieta?"
"You're not excited?"
"That's beside the point."
"To put it simply," Isley says. "I'm meeting some old friends in the north."
"Why now?"
Then Priscilla adds in: "Are they Awakened Beings?"
At this, Isley doesn't stop or flinch. He continues walking, staring straight ahead at the twisting road through the hills and plains. He doesn't answer the question either. Raki tries to catch Priscilla's eye, because she's right.
The questions build up in Raki's head as they settle into a self-imposed silence. To ease himself from doubting his mentor and friend too much, his hands stray to the dagger at his right. He grasps its sheath, thinks about the questions and jogs forward to match pace with Isley.
"You're not going to tell us anything, aren't you?" he asks.
If Isley has become weary with his questioning, Raki thinks he's hiding it well. Because he sees him pull his face into that trademark grin and say, with a patient finality: "You'll see."
But Raki counters: "You really saw her leave the tavern this morning?"
He finds himself satisfied that it is Isley who is now confused. "Who?"
"Ailsa."
"Who's - ?" Then Isley grins again. "Ah. You mean, the harlot."
"Priscilla doesn't need to hear that language."
"Did I see her leave, you say?"
Isley takes to staring straight ahead again. Raki dislikes this. It reminds him of their early days training together, when he would be sparring with Isley and nothing he did could make him blink an eyelid. He dislikes this because he knows it's Isley's way of saying, what you're doing doesn't matter to me.
"Which direction did she go?" Raki asks. "Well? You didn't do anything to her, right?"
"Nothing you already don't know," he says, and Isley runs his tongue over his lips.
5.
As Raki expects, Isley plans, travels and knows the terrain in a way that he can only admire. They reach towns before sunset every day, without fail. They sleep with a roof over their head every night. Even though he consumes hardly anything, Raki knows he will be up with him for breakfast before their next day's trip. When they run into the Organization's warriors at some of their stopovers, Raki doesn't need to say anything, because Isley himself calmly ignores their presence.
Being in towns means Isley does not practice, and Raki takes the hint, so he does not do any sparring either. Instead, for the first time in a while, Raki spends the short period before turning in talking to people at the taverns and inns, being around humans who worry about human things like their harvests and their wives. It closes memories he'd rather forget from previous months, when the only fellow humans he talked with were harlots Isley hired.
But, returning to his bed at a quiet inn one night, Priscilla says: "It must be nice to remember things."
It's been six days on the road, and outside Raki sees nothing but mountains, the defences of the northern lands. They look to him like the outline of a giant's shoulders in the dark. Priscilla sits by the open window, her hood finally pulled back, the wind tugging at stray strands of hair.
"Not all the time."
"But you remember the things that count," she tries. "Like your Clare."
She's very lucid today, he thinks. He catches sight of the crushed yoki-suppressants, their powdery black residue which she takes with water at Isley's insistence. Then he pauses: it's only the second time she's mentioned Clare.
"You remember."
"Would you like me to tell you what you said?" she says. "Would you like me to help you remember?"
He isn't sure about this. He sees Priscilla's glazed-over eyes, her dredging deep into her own memory to resurrect something he said years ago isn't the kind of conversation he likes before he goes to bed. But before he can say no, Priscilla is already talking.
He sits, plants his head against the wall. Years on and roles are reversed, he thinks, because it's as if Priscilla's telling him the story, and he's listening, trying to recall something.
As Priscilla speaks, the details begin to emerge from the dark. A figure seated across the licking flames of a fire, glowing as if haloed. Fragments of Hogweed flowers clinging to a pair of speckled, and a hand reaching down to brush them away. A hand, knuckles showing, white, like a claw, pushing the side of his face towards a face –
Years and days with too many other women have bleached that face from his memory. Instead, he finds it replaced with an airy whiteness, like a blizzard. And while Priscilla continues talking, he can't go any further. When he looks past her, the missing images get edged with black: mountains, hills, the deep valleys surrounding Pieta, where everything – Clare, his old stories, perhaps hope – ends.
When there's nothing for him to do but close his eyes to sleep, to douse that empty white with darkness.
NOTES:
Part Two will be uploaded in a couple of days after I do a bit of tweaking. This story will deal with a bit more dialogue.
Question: after reading this chapter, what impressions do you have of Raki, Isley & Priscilla? Do they meet with what you understand in canon?
Thanks for reading (and answering the question, if you did). I'll help me plan later stories.
Edit: 25 Sep 2011