A Man Of His Word

..4..

HAPPENING UPON AN OLD EL ARBORAN marshland scoot was as much a miracle to Greon Reacches as blundering into an Imperial Navy Strike Fighter docked in the middle of the swamp with its pilot grinning from the cockpit window, giving him the thumbs up.

Greon sank to his knees and could have wept. Reverently he brushed his hands over the thin, bone-dry wood. He righted the primitive vessel and inspected its long, flat hull for fractures or perforations. It may have been old, the wood extremely worn down through time, but it was serviceable enough for his needs.

He offered a quick prayer of thanks to the Emperor of Mankind for shining just a little light on him today. Not that there was much of it left. The sky was turning a deep, coal red as Verdantis Minor drifted into the shadow of its mainworld.

It did not take long to rediscover all the old tricks from childhood. He found the sweet spot at the end of the scoot as close to the huff as he could get. There he could plant his feet firmly and not topple over the side. He had cast his boots off without knowing it. As a kid he had never worn shoes, even as a young adult, until he had joined the Imperial Guard. He had forgotten how pleasurable such an experience could be. Punting down the bayou without a care, like he was twelve again. He pushed down the punt-pole, only needing to use a third of its generous length, urging the scoot across the marshlands with small shunts and tweaks, mobilizing his centre of gravity with the primitive vessel so that it became an extension of himself. He was getting back his 'swamp toes' as the locals called it. He pushed against the graceless current. When he came to a bend in the canal he would take the inside for economy of motion. It may not have been as safe or as fast as a motor launch but it was a damn sight better than wading neck deep through the dangerous, pestiferous swamp.

Greon felt a smile warming his face. He was on a scoot again and headed home.

His good cheer lasted three hours.

Ironfig loomed up from the mists and the flooded forests. The sunset was burning lower and lower as the agri-moon of Verdantis Minor was slowly passed over by its mainworld. Inevitably it would lose the race and Verdantis Major would steal all its light, as it had done for billions of years, making ruddy afternoons like this one drag out long into the evening. But as Greon's eyes pierced through the crimson gloom, the real fears that had been locked away, the ones that had plagued him as long as he had been with the Guard, hit him hard in the chest.

Ironfig Hold had sunken into the bayou like an aged ebony skeleton of shattered wood and rotted boards. A desolate ghost town of platforms. Stilts bent sickeningly beneath collapsed tar-coated, clinker-built habs. Broken rope bridges that once gave avenue between the dwellings now trailed in the watery boulevards like giant weeds. The devastation was complete. The spectacle was incomparable to the memories of his childhood, so he felt only a cold and distant shock at the discovery.

A few dwellings still stood amongst the sad ruin. Old Kassdan's mudhop market, along with what must have been Lubryte's Cantina, though the signs were no longer up and all the merchandise long pilfered or sunken deep into the marsh water.

Usually when you entered a mudhold like Ironfig you were welcomed with the earnest racket of laughter and cussing, the thump and strum of tumble-strings and a fiddleneck, the clapping of hands, the rich aroma of simmering jamba stews and boiling sweet tea. There would be people everywhere locked in a hullabaloo of intermingling, sweaty congress.

Now, in the bleeding light and shadows, there was nothing but the eerie silence and the smell of burnt wood, dried up weed and rotten fish.

Greon poled the scoot along the channel that ran down the middle of the hold. Morvey's Boulevard he remembered it as, but all the signs had collapsed or rotted away. He was about to give up the whole thing as a complete waste of time and money, cursing himself for being an over sentimental fool, when he noticed a flash of white amongst the ruin.

It was a young woman in a simple, white dress. She stood out in pale contrast to the dying light of day and the burnt-out frames poking up around her. Contradictory realities fighting for the same world. Like a lost ghost. And though she was plainly dressed she was almost fey in the ruddy glow, holding onto a large basket of apple-beets in her frail arms. The fading dusk light glinted in her glossy, black hair.

Greon pushed the scoot to the side of the boulevard and put a foot atop the boardwalk to keep the vessel in place.

'Excuse me, ma'am?' he called out, remembering his Southern Delta manners. 'Are you from around this way?'

The woman jumped at the sound of his voice, her eyes flashed. She had the sharp, tawny features of all El Arborans. Beautiful but shrewd angles in cheekbone and chin. She looked down at him with one hand against her brow, the other balancing the basket of apple-beets on her hip.

'Does it look like I'm from elsewheres', stranger?' she called in a voice that struck him as odd, while at the same time drilling deep within him until it extracted a soft rarefied vein of memory.

Greon's heart did a flip. He almost toppled back into the bayou there and then. As soon as he regained his composure and his balance he clambered up onto the boardwalk, the punt-pole drumming onto the boards as he raced toward her.

'Mericca-Ann? Is that you?'

Mericca Ann Reacchus's face plummeted from bright and terrified to an incredulous pale. Her mouth opened wordlessly and all the apple-beets thumped and tumbled across the boardwalk.

'Gree?' she whispered. Her eyes wild with disbelief. 'What you doin' here? I thought you'd gone and got yourself killed out beyond the Belt!'

Greon Reacchus hugged his sister about as fiercely as a man of his strength could without breaking her back, not caring if she could breathe or not. She let him hug her too. The reunited siblings stood that way for a long time. Tears in their eyes, stupefied grins on their faces.

'Emperor's Mercy,' Greon cried in disbelief. 'I never thought I'd see you again!'

He held her outstretched in his arms, gazing down at his little sister who had grown into a tall, young woman. She was strange to him. Long and bony, poorly fed perhaps, yet she still had that same nub of a nose, those same tiny ears like their mother's.

'Are you well, Merri?' he asked. 'It's so good to see you! Alive and - grown up! When I found the village like this I feared the worst.'

She swiped tears from her russet cheeks. She looked down at the boardwalk, at the strewn apple-beets. 'I'm sorry, Gree. It's such a shock. It's been so long, I never thought you'd come back. Not when they took you away like that.'

'I made a promise, Merrica Ann. Remember? I'm here, just like I said I would.'

She sniffed and shook her head, waving one hand at her face as if to dry the tears away, or to shake the shock from her trembling fingers. 'Oh dear me, we weren't expecting any visitors today.'

'We?'

'Rolly and I. Oh my, it's been so long, Gree. I got myself married. Rollam Grellis is his name. He's from all the way over in Whistle Stilt. We got hitched 'bout five years ago. We got two little ones.' she glanced around then, looking up and down the shattered boardwalk. 'They'll be runnin' round here somewheres, makin' more trouble for themselves than not. My word, Gree, it's been such a tragic long time.'

'Twelve years, three months, and-' Greon stopped. It certainly had been a long time. Just seeing a face as familiar as Mericca Ann's made all the words catch in his throat. And although she seemed a little troubled by his arrival, which he could not blame her for, he had not anticipated the happiness and excitement he felt to finally look upon a living member of his family.

They talked for a long while there atop the boardwalk as the red light faded and faded, until the night was lit by the sharp, pale arc cast off from the edge of the mainworld. Greon told his sister of his exploits in the Imperial Guard, how he had survived two minor battles, the monotony of guard duty, the worlds he had visited, how this was the first time the Departmento Munitorum had assigned his company special leave since he had been conscripted. An entire two weeks! In the same subsector! Only the Emperor's Will could have made it so. He told her how he had never stopped thinking about her and always wondered how she was doing.

Mericca Ann dried her tears as she told him of Ironfig. How it had slowly lost all its trade over the years and that no one really ever came down this way anymore. It was getting too dangerous too, what with the Black Spawn and all the racitors, and the other bad things that came around. Now it was just her, Rollam and the kids. She told him their parents old hab was still standing, but only just, and demanded he come back for supper and stay for the night.

'That sounds a whole lot better than sleeping out here,' he told her, unable to stop himself from grinning. 'You cook now?'

She slapped his arm and led him back to the old family home in the silvery blue light of the mainworld. But as they walked arm in arm Greon realised there was something odd about Mericca Ann. Something that troubled him. Something other than the years lost between them, or how she seemed so thin and malnourished.

That feeling escalated to a darkly unsettling aspect when Merrica Ann introduced him to her husband.