Pilgrimage, a suikoden fanfic

Pilgrimage

a brief foray into Genso Suikoden III

spun expressly for elregrs, with holiday wishes

from Mithrigil Galtirglin

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Be still the drums! Be empty the flute!

Be silent.

I release the spirits of the wind, the whispers of our elders. They bend the grain with their council, still fires with their wisdom, caress the waves and make them grow. May they speak through me! May their words breathe life from our offering-fire and take beast-form, human-form. May we bend to the spirits as the grain to the wind!

"May we bend to the spirits as the grain to the wind!"

"Let the tale be sung!" the Shaman cried at the top of his voice, breaking and snapping as a child's would. He thrust his arms into the air and faced the star-painted heavens, his fine bracelets glowing in the firelight and the cold kiss of the dying half-moon. His chest heaved beneath the player's-robes he wore, grey as the canvas of a cave's wall, blank as the plains as seen by the stars. Vines of pale smoke rose before him, carrying the blood-warming smell of honey and the hunt as the beehive crackled in the thrall of the ritual fire. The last of the still-living bees burned into fireflies, and fell shivering to the grass, croaking like far-away frogs. Spices and gathered leaves poured out of the shaman's hands as the wind took him, and these fell to the flames, flickering and dying like honorable quarry.

He breathed deeply. His shoulders, hale and broad as a warrior's, lowered with his beckoning arms. Behind the falling, ashen leaves his eyes, half-slit and pale in his sun-darkened face, fluttered as if at the touch of a lover. His lips parted, his fingers brushed past them, and he held his spice-spattered fingers on the neck of his grey tunic.

"I am an old woman," he said, "a very old woman." His voice, clear and halting, made it true. He was in the thrall of the wind and no longer himself. "I walk with three legs. I sleep before sunset. I have buried my children. I drink the salten water of the dead."

"And I will have my way," Luce demanded, her staunch form like a fortress before the eyes of the elders, all of whom were younger than she.

The most senior of the elders turned his eyes from the woman to the sun that shone behind her, setting red and deep in the plains. The weather, too, was of the setting sort; it was the dry end of a short summer, leaving steaks of a wounded tan in the fields, too noisy for the beasts to hide in. Winter would come before the prey grew lazy, and kill the crops while the seeds were still hard and thin. It would be another year of rationing and sneers from the Harmonian patrols and their figurative cage. "We cannot spare you a hunter."

Luce spat. "I need no hunter. I need no guard." Hunched over her carved cane and wrapped in her shawl, Luce was still an imposing and warm figure, flat-faced and stern-mouthed but not hardened. Her hair had been chalk-white for a decade and fell heavily to her shoulders, thinning as it went. Her face was a quake of earthen wrinkles and sank into her thick neck, and the hands dismissing the council were gnarled like a lizard's tail. "Who would hinder an old woman who means no harm?"

"There are dragons."

"I will go by the roads."

"Dragons prey on the roads."

"Not since the Ironheads and Harmonians patrol them."

"You should not go alone."

"I will not go alone," she said, loudest yet, as if she was speaking to rowdy children. "But I will not take a hunter for a guard."

A chill breeze rustled the grass and the coarse clothes of Luce and the elders, carrying with it the smell of the young men returning to the village. The scent of raw meat and river-mud filled the air and Luce looked turned around to face the newcomers. Behind her, the elders rose from where they sat, a few brushing some loose straw and kindling off their laps. "They will not help you," someone said.

Someone else agreed. "The Ironheads did not come to our aid when Harmonia took Chief Hugo from us."

"They stood by like shadows," the most senior said. "They will not welcome you."

Luce listened and smelled more than watched--her eyes were beginning to fail her--as the hunting party returned. They laughed and boasted and championed their kills to each other and to those who guarded the village, ignoring the Harmonian patrols as if the helmeted blue-and-white men had grown roots and lost their tongues. The Karayan youths cleaned their blades with a pestilence of scrapes and footsteps, most of them too young to know life without the blue-clothed Harmonians fencing the village in, all of them too young to have known the horrors that had taken Luce's sons from her.

"I go to forgive," she whispered, her venerable voice carried gingerly by the wind to the ears of her clansmen. "If they turn me away, the fault is not my own."

Who will you take? the shadows whispered in songlike unison.

The drum beat thrice. Hunched over a cane that had been provided for him, the Shaman said, "I will take Girro," in the old woman's voice. He breathed her words out hoarsely through the smoke that pooled in front of him. The bonfire cast long, sparkling shadows on the wall behind him, silhouettes of his audience wrought into those of elders by the spirits. "He speaks with the spirits," the Shaman said, holding a hand through the spice-heavy smoke and beckoning someone forward.

Slowly, a young man in the audience rose, brushing the dry grass from his wide-legged pants. He was not dressed as a player, but would be one if the Shaman told him to be, and stepped forward to take a deep drink of the cool grey smoke. Embers and sparking insect-wings pooled around his sandaled feet. His shadow joined the others on the wall behind the Shaman, and the eyes in the blackness glimmered like his own.

"I will go with you," the young man whispered, taking the Shaman's hand through the ambitious tongues of fire. "Though I am not sure of what help I will be."

The Shaman laughed the old woman's warm laugh, and leaned on his cane, pulling a phantom shawl around his shoulders. "It has been a long time since I walked the stone roads of the Ironheads," he said. "And you have never been. You will remind me of the way, and I will show you their terrors and their wonders."

Their terrors and their wonders! the very ground seemed to whisper, on the heels of the drums and flutes now rising like the smoke. A swarm of bees, their wings aflame, poured out of the fire with a noise like sickness, and tore through the air around the Shaman and the young man as they stepped into place behind the wind-whipped bonfire. Star-like embers drifted to the floor around them, and the shaman raised his prop-cane in that hand that did not hold the youth's.

Then take Girro, the shadows of the elders called through the cackling of the dying bees, and may he bear you back to us, your errand done.

Every flute and drum rang twice--first a deep stab, and then its echo. One by one, the erratic, burning bees fell to the grass, extinguishing themselves, the grass merely parting for them. Perhaps they had never burned at all.

With their solemn faces turned moonward, the Shaman and the young man said, on one tone, "And together they left the village, and they traveled to the towns of stone."

"The old woman knew," the Shaman said alone, "that to find who she sought, she would first have to go to the City on the Bridge. And with Girro at her side, the old woman left the village behind. For days they walked across the plains," he continued, and the young man styling himself Girro joined him, a pale tenor echo of the Shaman's voice, "and the travelers grew numerous with each sunrise."

The young man stared through the smoke, into the face of a girl who had her ardent eyes locked to his in wonder. "And to each passerby who asked the purpose of their journey," he said, "the old woman would say:"

"I go to forgive," the Shaman whispered, like dust on the wind.

I go to forgive, the spirits echoed.

"That's a pretty story," the Zexen guard farthest to the left spat, glaring. "But I'm going to need more information."

Girro breathed, and set his shoulders, wondering what had come of the truce of his fathers after all. "As I have told every of your kind until this point, I am Girro of Karaya. The woman I am guarding is Luce, one of our eldest. She was one of the guardians of the Flame Champion Hugo from before the war, during the war, and until his disappearance. And she wishes nothing more than to meet with one of your chiefs."

The guard--who, like all the other guards, wore a black armband on his weapon arm over his setting-sun colored tunic and armor--sighed. "You'll have to be more specific."

Luce gestured for Girro to stand aside, which he did, nodding obediently. The squat woman was barely chest-high to the guard, and easily the smallest of the Grasslanders waiting in line. In addition to the Zexen soldiers in orange, there was a regiment of Harmonians in blue, leaning against the wall and chatting amicably as the more colorful travelers stood shuffling in the queue. Girro saw their angry faces targeting him and Luce, for occupying the guard's attention for so long.

"If the Silver Maiden is in this city, tell me," the old woman said, her words powerful but strangely tired. "If not, then let us pass, and we will move on."

One of the guards farther down the line began to draw his sword. Girro was unarmed but for his staff and Shield-Rune, and a shiver of fear ran through him. He found he'd taken Luce by the shoulders, cowering, alerting her--

"She is not here," someone behind them called.

Girro's head darted around to look over his shoulder at who had spoken--it was the eldest and most decorated of the Harmonians, with short, messy hair like a boy's, though it was streaked with grey. Though he wore the Harmonian blue, he was, upon a closer glance, in an entirely different cut of uniform, with wide legs that fanned like fish-fins and made him look rather like a pair of shears when he walked. "...LeBuquean," Girro guessed, in a whisper even he could barely hear.

The might-be-Harmonian ignored Girro completely and went straight to Luce. He wore goggles in repose around his throat, and his eyes were rather warm. When he was close enough for Girro to actually see the man's face, within the middle-yeared cheeks there was a harsh spray of pock-marks and dry streaks, like in the moss highest on the cliffs. "She was taken away a few days ago," he told the old woman gently in her ear, whose shoulders Girro still protectively held.

She had not turned to face him, nor did she now, but Girro turned from the man and the guards to watch her smile. "The Spirits keep you, Franz," she said, as the man in blue passed them both by, and crossed the line of Zexen guards as if they were merely a bend in the hallway.

Do you mean to speak for them, Harmonian? the spirits asked, and the fire cackled madly with their words.

"I will take them as far as the Castle by the Lake," the girl who had been called to portray the mantor-rider said, her face still bowed into the thick, olfactorous smoke. "And I can vouch for their hearts. They will bring no harm to her."

The shadows behind them nodded--once they had been a circle of elders, now they were a line of guards. And with a wave of the Shaman's staff into the bonfire before him, the shadows parted, leaving only indiscriminate wisps of grey on the canvas behind the players, now three. In the fire, the last of the beehive was crumbling into ash, and the sparks pooled about the hem of the Shaman's robes.

"The mantor-rider had found favor within Harmonia after many years of struggle," the Shaman said, casting the old woman's voice aside with the smoke before his spit-slick lips. "And the Ironheads could not disrespect him. And no more was said of the old woman's errand between any of the three travelers--"

"--because Girro was wary--" the young man said.

"--the old woman spoke none of it--" the Shaman said.

"--and the mantor-rider would only say that the Silver Maiden had been 'taken away'," the girl finished, her voice a shock clearer and higher now that she was only speaking for the LeBuquean, not as him. "With his strange beast, he protected the old woman and Girro on their way to the Castle by the Lake, and had grown strong enough to frighten the Blue Dragons of the northern plains."

Silence followed this statement as, behind the trio of standing players, the shadows began to gather again. The Shaman was stirring the fire with the tail of his prop-staff; old wood died, and stronger wood topped over, and the flames rose higher. He let a trail of spices out of his sleeve and the orange flames flickered to a blood-red, warm and sumptuous and low-burning. On the wall, the shadows stretched into towers, broken and curling like ancient trees.

The girl and the Shaman joined hands, with the fire between them and cradled in the ring their clasped hands formed. They mirrored the towers--the young man, as Girro, stood off to the side, out of the path of the swirling ashes--and the Shaman and girl chanted in unison. "They talked of people and places Girro did not know. There was a sadness to them, a kind of desperation, and Girro could tell that they were not friends such as he had among his clansmen."

"But they were older now," the young man standing in for Girro whispered past the fire to the watchers. "And they clung to each other with talons for words, to the withering vines of their past."

"How is your Iku?" Luce asked, as Girro rubbed a dark, strengthening oil into her leathery ankles.

The sun was beginning to set earlier, and the shadows grew longer with each passing rest. Girro almost did not notice that they were stopping after shorter distances each day, when the old woman's joints began to creak. She sat now with her back against a tree as Girro saw to her, and she stared over at the old LeBuquean, seeing to his mount. Girro recalled something about it being the grandchild of the one the LeBuquean had ridden during the Second Fire Bringer war, but did not really care. The beast's spirit was not terribly congenial, though its intelligence could not be disputed.

Franz looked up, and the short noise he made before speaking was distant and almost surprised. "She is well," he said, running a glove through his short, greying hair and smiling warmly over the bridge of his goggles, resting on his neck. "We have an inn outside the Valley. She runs it with our daughter, and our son-in-law."

"I am glad to hear it," the old woman said, leaning back into the tree and staring up at the turning leaves with pale, glassy eyes. Girro glanced up from her swollen joints at where the old woman sought through the light-veined leaves, and wondered how little she saw.

The mantor made a humming noise that sounded like at least four gryphons in shallow pain. Franz stroked its wings, making elaborate clicking noises with his tongue until the beast stilled. "I don't much like my son-in-law, but Cora is happy with him, and that is all I can ask for," he said when he was done.

"Yes," Luce whispered, her throat creaking. "Are there grandchildren?"

"Perhaps, soon," Franz said, not terribly enthused.

"They will be Harmonian."

"Yes."

"That is what you wanted."

"Yes."

Girro shook more oil into his palm and listened for what the old folk were not saying. The mantor, strangely purring now, drowned them out.

"Franz."

"Yes?"

"When the Harmonians took Chief Hugo from us..." the old woman began to say, stretching her wrinkled neck heavenward to see beyond the browning leaves. The words forgot themselves.

When his mount was quiet again, Franz answered, hanging his head like a child in the face of reprimand. "I helped them," he admitted in a clear statement, stronger-voiced than he'd intended for it to be. "They granted me citizenship. And Iku and Cora."

"And Le Buque?" Luce asked, still straining.

Franz did not have to answer.

Girro's shoulders were as tense and stubborn as Luce's ankles under his palms, but the woman's voice was clear and free like falling water. "I forgive you," she said, and slumped restfully against the tree.

The girl who had been speaking for the mantor-rider stepped aside, and knelt, reaching for what one of the elders offered her. The hollow, dry gourd-for-bowl was almost as wide as her chest, but the liquid in it was surprisingly light, and she accepted it gingerly. The pale substance was flecked with dry leaves and chips of spice, drifting aimlessly in it as the liquid rippled. Carefully, she stepped through the smoke to the edge of the fire, the wide bowl held chest-high.

I forgive you, the spirits whispered, again.

She tilted the bowl and let it pour on the fire. Where it touched the flames, they exploded into fists of a sickly green. The dead scraps of leaves flickered white, then grey, and died.

"He left them at the Castle gates," the Shaman said.

"Oh, welcome! Welcome to Budehuc!" the egg-yolk haired woman was shouting, running on a clear beeline for Luce and Girro. She spoke very fast, and very loudly, especially for someone running at that speed, and Girro was taken aback.

The woman could have been anywhere between thirty and fifty years old. Her face was wrinkled with joyful lines and her bony shoulders and sagging breasts bounced heavily as she ran. She trailed a long orange skirt behind her, its hem and her thick boots caked with mud and fallen leaves like a child's. She wore a bright green jacket and a checkered scarf and a grin as wide as her sparkling eyes, blue as the castle moat.

"Cecile," Luce almost sang, breathless, extending her hands to the strange woman. Her own eyes were beginning to sparkle as well, but with tears. Girro held her upper arm and shoulder tighter, feeling the old woman begin to shiver under her layers of shawl. Before Girro knew it the blond woman was in their space, taking Luce's outstretched hands and shaking them fervently, clasped between her own. Cecile's hands were callused and ruddy, more creased than wrinkled, pink-palmed and raw. She had never been a mother, Girro could tell.

"--Luce! Oh gosh. Oh goodness! It's been so long! You walked all this way? You must be freezing! Come on! And so tired! Thomas, Thomas, come quick! It's Luce! You remember Luce!"

The sheer speed at which this woman was existing made Girro's ears ache. He was thankful that the blonde woman hadn't done something foolish like drag Luce behind her, because that no doubt would have snapped off the old woman's arm. Almost as suddenly as she had sprung out of the castle gates the woman was tearing back through them, orange skirts bouncing, still calling out at the top of her whistle-high voice.

Girro held Luce's upper arms tightly and looked sidelong at her dripping eyes. "She was a girl when last I saw her," the old woman whispered, quavering against the young man's chest. "Barely older than my Lulu."

"The spirits say that she is not a mother," Girro said.

"She is the mother of this castle," the old woman replied. "Every stone is as her child." That said, she leaned on her staff, and Girro supported her through the polished gates, swinging gently in the autumn breeze.

Tendrils of the ill green flames still wound through their stronger orange cousins in the bonfire at the Shaman's feet. He held his staff before him, eyes closed somberly, elbows lowered into the tumbling grey robes, nudged by the smoke and meager wind. Beside him, the young man-as-Girro held a hand on the Shaman's shoulder, at an arm's length, sweating under his dark pulls of hair.

"The Castle on the Lake welcomed them," they said together.

"As did its chief," the man assuming the voice of that shade proclaimed in turn, rising from the gathering and stepping gingerly toward the playing space. He was older than the Shaman, but beginning to be outclassed by the youthful hunters that he still guided on their rounds. He had spoken this story before, and smiled at the Shaman as he crossed before the shadows and the fire, tossing a fistful of seeds into the flames and listening to them crackle. "He was eager for news of their clan, and of all those in the Grasslands, for he was of the sort that could not abide the suffering of others." The man reached out a hand to the Shaman's other shoulder, and lowered his voice to be more in tune with the man he played. "He loved all save himself."

"Goodness me," the frail and soft-looking man wheezed. "I had no idea things had worsened so..."

The first thing Girro had noticed about the castle-master was that his shirt-cuffs were never going to be white again. Perhaps they had been, once, if his collar and the buttons were any indication, but the sleeves were spattered with wine and ink and dirt and streaks of grass. He had been gardening when the egg-yolk haired woman had first told him that Luce was here, and since then Girro had never seen him with his hands still. They were as weathered as his wife's, but from spades and mortars and quills, not spears. Other than the business of his hands, though, he was a good deal stiller than Cecile. He also looked to be the age the spirits said he was; his hair was lush but as grey as the stones in the fountain they were sitting at, and he wore crooked spectacles, teetering on the bridge of his fleshy, boyish nose.

"It is only our diginty that suffers, Thomas," Luce said, trailing her gnarled hand through the fountain-water absently. The water was clean but for the fallen leaves that gathered on its surface, brown and gold and dead.

"I feel so awful," Thomas sighed, wringing his hands and glancing uneasily over his shoulder at the setting sun. "I mean, I did all I could until..."

"Until?" the old woman prodded.

The castle-master's reflection in the fountain-pool contorted into a grimace of self-loathing. "Budehuc...we are a center of free trade, but in order to remain so we had to accommodate all who needed to make use of the land. You can see now, we're as much Zexen and Harmonian as Grasslands. There's a Toran quarter, a block of folk from the Island Federation. The Free Knights of Kamaro have set up a base here. We have jewelers from Tinto. We have an ambassador from Goya. We've even got merchants from across the ocean, in Marlintine..."

Girro watched the specter of the castle-master's face in the water bob up and down, widen, flatten, thin, and want to cry for the state of the world. He was so genuine, so pitiable, and so full of love that Girro himself could not conjure up the slightest trace of dread at what the man was about to say.

"We could not endanger this land," Thomas whispered. "It is bigger than us."

Luce stopped trailing her dark, veined hand through the water's surface. She raised her head and stared at the sky. "I understand."

"We offered Hugo sanctuary. During the war. He...he refused it."

"That is like him."

"But we...we did the same for the Harmonians. When Hugo beat them back, a few weeks before the end. The Bishop came here with his men to regroup and we let them." The words came out in a whisper, like a man respecting the dead at his feet, not years in the past. "To have done otherwise would have set the world at war."

Girro turned to Luce, her shoulders stooped as she eased her creaking bones to sit more comfortably. "I forgive you," the old woman said to the castle-master, and brushed aside a wet leaf that had stuck to the hem of her shawl.

The man styling himself as the castle-master had an easier time carrying the gourd than the girl who had stood for the mantor-rider. He held it confidently to his chest, the translucent contents almost stable, reflecting the resplendent stars overhead. He stood over the fire, calm and broad, and the shadows behind him thickened with smoke.

I forgive you, the spirits whispered, and the player poured out the contents of the gourd. They cascaded to the fire, and the sparks and embers blasted skyward in bursts of a vibrant pink, the color of fevered cheeks and callused feet and mending wounds. The man retreated into the smoke, and from the smoke back to the gathered audience, by way of the shadows.

Behind the other players, the wall of shadows stretched and darkened, and the flickers of light settled into pairs of calculating eyes. The wind kicked up and swirled, carrying the hollow tones of the flutes and sharp pangs of the drums straight to the Shaman's ears. He waved his arms and the staff, rending the smoke before him, and sank back toward the wall, away from the firelight and into the darkness.

"They left the Castle by the Lake," he and the young man said together, "and walked through the forest roads until they reached the City by the Sea. The old woman swallowed the pain in her legs, though the journey took twice what it had used to. The paths were paths she knew, but they ended at a place she no longer recognized. In her years away from the City by the Sea, it had aged, as she had. It had suffered, as she had, and learned, as she had."

With a wave of his hand, the Shaman silenced the flutes and drums. "And like her, the city was in mourning."

The gravediggers had not yet buried Salome. His sarcophagus was set to the side of the dark temple, in a ring of velvet ropes on gold posts, under dozens of rich shrouds, all in the Zexen orange and gold. Luce and Girro had been told not to disturb the corpse, and had all intentions of obeying. And after all, Luce's errand was not with the dead man.

The old woman collapsed, wailing, at the foot of the stone temple's central pedestal. The statue was not entirely built yet, but the stairs had been completed and polished to an admonishing white. They led to a long table, silver-threaded, in a pool of pale light from the Rune-lanterns that surrounded it, atop which the woman lay under a delicate white cloth. Her pale hair spilled over the edge of the table, longer than her recumbent form. She barely breathed, and everything about her glowed through the shroud's thick filter like a river beginning to freeze.

Lady Chris was merely asleep, but Luce's crying did not wake her. Girro held the old woman to his chest, feeling each heaving sob through her spine and listening to the temple spirits echo her cries. The spirits, already drenched and dripping, wept for their mistress, and told Girro everything he needed to know.

She has become their Goddess, the spirits said. History has forgiven her.

"But I am not history," the Shaman said in the old woman's voice.

She is history, the shadows on the wall croaked. She is as Fate. She governs the spirits of Water in her slumber. So that history may hold her to its breast, it has forgiven her.

"But I am not history. I am an old woman."

When a force so great as history as absolved her, what does the will of one old woman matter?

A single drum rapped once above the others, and silenced everything. Even the burning twigs ceased to snap, though the fire still filled the hollows of the Shaman's face and ringed his shadow on the wall, bent double with assumed age.

"Until this one old woman forgives her," the Shaman shouted, "she will not forgive herself. And this one old woman will not have her sleep eternally without having been forgiven. I am a very old woman," he said, and the spirits filled the voice with their ephemeral tears. "I walk on three legs. I sleep before sunset. I have buried my children. I drink the salten water of the dead--"

"--And you will have your way," the boy who stood for Girro whispered. His shadow stretched out its arms, but the boy was still, hanging his head as smoke-itching tears dripped down his dark cheeks. When they fell into the fire, they smelled like cooling glass.

"The temple walls and unfinished statues carried a voice to Girro," someone said from within the gathering. "It belonged to the dead man in the corner, who guarded the sleeping woman with what power still filled his quiet heart." The speaker did not rise, and no one turned to look at her, for the fire had embraced her voice and writhed to throw it onto everyone's ears in painful snaps, and the voice ceased to be her own. "The dead man told Girro that he would step aside, and allow the old woman's spirit to speak its piece. He told Girro not to worry. He told Girro that he wished nothing more than for the untroubled sleep of the woman on the pedestal, and he told Girro that his duties as the old woman's guide were over."

"And Girro believed him," the young man said in his own voice, and backed into the shadows.

Luce's last sob caught in her chest, and she was still. Girro held her for an hour after she was dead, in the darkness of the Ironheads' strange temple. The spirits had taken up her weeping like the blood of a fish, speared while still in its home river. They guided the woman's unspoken words on the last legs of their pilgrimage.

"I forgive you," the Shaman said, and doused the fire.

He ended up leaving her body in the temple, draped over the very steps she had died on. The Ironheads had laws about what was to be done with all who died within their walled cities, and Girro did not protest. He walked through the city like a ghost, and stared at the sparkling sea, glowing black in the sunset as far as his eyes could see. He had never seen such a terror--a field of water unfit to drink, by plant or beast or man alike. It was a cage built of tears, and it tempted Girro's ears with foul secrets.

The City was easy to leave, and his journey to the village quicker, now he was walking alone. He brought news of Luce's death to their people, and spared no part of the telling, but knew that the way he had seen the tale was not the only way it had been lived.

He called for flutes and drums, and a fire.

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