Chapter Twenty-Five: 702 O.V. The hills above Cahahouli Bay – The Filpots Caravan
Balthier snapped awake, bouncing free of the web of forcibly induced memory so abruptly it actually hurt. Rousing disjointedly Balthier realised belatedly that in fact the pain he was experiencing was due to the fact that he seemed to have fallen sideways upon the floor of his cage and that something hard and pointy was jabbing into his ribs.
Fumbling blearily for the offending object with clumsy fingers Balthier found himself holding the Landis Phoenix statuette under the pale and lack lustre moon.
'Well I'll be blowed….' He croaked more bemused than anything else, 'How did this get here?'
Hadn't Hamish had the statuette last? Balthier was almost certain the bastard pirate had taken it with him when he left his cabin aboard the Antarii to make the acquaintance of the two Filpots; hmm, how very….odd…that it should turn up here with him, inside a cage.
Rising to a sitting position was not easy but Balthier managed it in the end and as he did so he finally realised that the constant, dizzying rocking sensation he was currently experiencing was actually not a side effect of the drugs he had been dosed with but instead due to the slightly more concerning fact that the Filpot's caravan was on the move.
Startled Balthier grabbed the bars of his cage and watched as trees and bushes, dark painted grey-green under the moon, flitted past. The Chocobo pulled caravan and trailer cart was trundling at good pace down the hill, which coincidentally meant they were travelling away from any spot Balthier's possible rescuers might go to find him.
'Why does nothing ever go as planned?'
Frustration masked dawning panic as Balthier's left hand curled absently around the Landis Phoenix. He had no idea how the strange object came to be here, and frankly that was the least of his worries at the present time. Still the statuette had proved a useful bludgeoning tool in the past: perhaps if needs must, he could use it against the Filpots?
A tingle of static burst forth from the statuette and coursed through his palm to dance up his arm. Balthier jerked his hand away, instinctively trying to release the light hold he had on the object. It seemed then that time rippled, like a stone breaking the surface of a still pond, and there was a sound like a clean linen sheets being flapped in the air.
Balthier let out a highly undignified yelp of surprise as inexplicably he found himself thudding face and chest first onto the stony ground of the hill road. The impact was still coursing painfully through his body as he began to roll, limbs akimbo, down the hill.
The Filpots caravan was drawn up sharply as Herriman heard the shout of surprise and looked around to see their gentry quarry fly off the back of the cart, somehow free of his cage, and bounce heavily along the roadside.
'Bloody blue blazes,' Herriman leapt from the slowing caravan, grabbing up his military issue sabre as he did so. He hurried back up the hill the scant few feet to where the Bunansa brat was staggering to his feet. Behind him Bea worked on drawing the excitable Chocobo to a complete stop.
Brains all jumbled in the cage of his skull, Balthier stumbled upright, chest aching from a nasty impact with unforgiving grainy stone and chin oozing blood from a nasty cut received at the same time all the wind had been knocked clear out of his lungs. He heard the male Filpot shout and moved into a defensive crouch before his brain had caught up with what was happening.
The Filpot male made a clumsy lunge for him with the arm not holding his sword. Balthier nimbly skipped a step to the side and made a snatch for the man's sword. He was parried away as Herriman Filpot proved that he was indeed, once a man of the Archadian army. Balthier instinctively swung the arm holding the Phoenix in a wide sweeping arc to keep Herriman and his sword away.
A bird screamed directly above his head, and it sounded like an eagle lurching down in a dive straight for him. Balthier ducked instinctively and therefore, when Beatrice's blow dart sliced through the air, it sailed straight over his head and lodged half an inch deep in the side of Herriman's cheek.
'Harry!'
Beatrice let out a screech to make any hunting bird proud as her rather surprised husband pulled the dart from his cheek. For a second the man stared at it in shock and then promptly dropped like a stone to his knees, eyes already glassy from the drugs.
Balthier was not about to look a gift Chocobo in the mouth; he made another, this time successful, snatch for Herriman's sword and dropped to his knees behind the larger, older man who swayed where he knelt fighting the effects of Beatrice's nasty narcotics concoction.
'Do not move,' Balthier ordered the furiously advancing Beatrice. He pressed the edge of Herriman's sword against the man's throat while using the bulk of the man's body as a convenient shield.
'You will not kill him – you can't,' Beatrice seemed genuinely dismayed by her husband's predicament. She remained rooted to the spot across the roadside, her blow dart gun in her hand hanging limply at her side.
'I can and I might,' Balthier argued back, though in truth Balthier had no desire to kill Herriman or Beatrice. He had never killed anyone and had no desire to break that trend now.
'Let us come to terms, madam,' Balthier said briskly well aware of the fact that Herriman's weight was becoming increasingly burdensome as the man somnambulantly fell against him. Balthier would never be the largest or the strongest man there was, but at eighteen he had yet to acquire the breadth of shoulder and corded muscle to his arms that would allow the man he would grow into to at least stand against those stronger than he. Disturbingly a fine tremor of exertion and adrenaline made his sword arm shake visibly.
Upon seeing this evident weakness Beatrice made her move. Faster than Balthier could credit, she had the blow dart gun to her lips once more and had sent a dart winging its way toward the meat of the sword arm Balthier had braced across Herriman's upper chest.
'Bollocks!'
Balthier tried to tear his arm away without accidentally decapitating the male Filpot but even he, in that long and transcendental moment before impact, knew that there was no way he would be fast enough.
The dart shot through the air aimed with perfect precision for his forearm. Balthier could do nothing but wait for the sharp sting of impact. From everywhere and nowhere an eagle screamed. Balthier jumped half out of his skin but then could only gape with the same incomprehension Beatrice had upon her own face at what happened next.
The dart hung suspended in mid-air; its flight arrested before it could find a home in the flesh of Balthier's arm. Balthier had never seen anything of its like before; not even the telekinesis technik favoured by Judge Zecht could match this.
Heart thundering in his ears he reached out shaking fingers towards the dart and tapped the stem. It was solid, it was real, yet it did not even bob upon the air.
'Son of a Bangaa's….'
Balthier did not have time to finish his somewhat uncouth oath as before his amazed regard the dart quivered in thin air now turned solid and binding, twitched upwards so the point was facing skyward, and then flipped back upon itself. Once again there was a screech of an eagle and in open defiance of the laws of physics and common sense the dart reversed course and shot through the air headed directly for the female Filpot.
Beatrice Filpot was too surprised to do more than squeak in confused terror as the dart struck deep and grinding into the side of her neck. She fell much harder than her husband into the dust of the road side.
'Well I'll be a moogle's uncle.'
For a minute or so Balthier allowed himself the indulgence of complete, slack jawed shock and then he staggered, rubber-legged, to his feet and tottered over to where Beatrice lay in a disordered pile of petticoats. He stared down a little foolishly at the woman who was staring furiously back up at him as her own horrid poison raced through her veins.
'What manner of fiend are you boy, to command laws beyond science?' her voice was slurred but he heard the fear and aversion clear enough.
Balthier opened his mouth to speak and found he had not a word to say. His jaw worked, his teeth clicked together, but words failed to form.
'Well……hmmm,' He breathed out through his teeth as he snapped his jaws closed.
Dazedly he wandered a little ways from the female Filpot towards the caravan. He entered the caravan and lit one of the oil light lamps. The inside of the Filpot's little wheeled dwelling smelled of linseed oil and lard; a strange combination. Across the small table top that extended from the wall there was a contract emblazoned with the Bunansa seal and the miniature portrait of Baby Ffamran and his father.
Still clutching the Phoenix loosely in his fist Balthier reached with his free hand for the portrait and shoved it into the pocket of his tattered trousers impulsively, refusing to think over long on what he was doing or why. Taking a breath he lifted the contract in his hand and forced himself to read what was written.
I Cidolfus Demen Bunansa Esq. PhD. M.A. accord the above named individuals with the commission of retrieving my son and heir, Ffamran Mid Bunansa, from where so ever he is currently to be found and returning him forthwith to my care. In the event that it is not possible to find my living heir, I commission the aforementioned individuals so named in this contract with delivering unto me proof concrete and incontrovertible of my son and heir's demise.
For a long moment Balthier simply let his eyes rove over the carefully scribed text, one, twice; thrice. Almost distractedly he wondered whom his father or the Filpots had employed to scribe this contract, for he knew well that his father's hand was never this neat. The signature and the green wax seal were authentic though. Balthier swung the Phoenix absently in the one hand as he dropped the contract back down onto the table, deep in thought.
'Incontrovertible proof of demise, hmm?' Balthier murmured to no one in particular.
Suddenly inspired Balthier deposited the Phoenix on the table top upon the crisp parchment of the contract and withdrew his small dagger from his hip sheath (accustomed to the use of firearms he had clear forgotten he was even carrying a knife when confronted with the Filpots). Fastidiously checking the dagger blade for any grains of dirt or other impurities he rolled up the sleeve of his right arm and ran the tip of the dagger smoothly up the length of the vein, opening a shallow cut from wrist to elbow. He squeezed the edges of the cut until thick globules of ruby blood welled up and spilled down the sides of his arm.
Letting his blood dribble down his arm he hacked away his right sleeve from below the elbow and daubed the dirty white cloth in his own blood. Then, for added effect, he slathered the sides of his dagger in the trails of blood until the blade was covered. Balthier then bundled the naked blade up inside the ragged blood soaked cuff of his shirt and dumped the macabre collection on the table top.
'Now I need but paper and a stylus.'
Casting his eyes around the cramped surroundings his flitting gaze eventually alighted upon what he was looking for. The sharp point of the fountain pen stung the cut on his arm as he daubed the tip in his blood and scratched out a simple note beginning with the date:
On this day, in the year 702 O.V. the pirate Balthier did murder one Ffamran Mid Bunansa, heir of Cildofus Demen of the same family. Leave off your search old man, for your son is gone, ne'er to return to you.
Liberally splotched with spatters of blood and inked in the same, the scrap of paper and its terse message, alongside the blood stained cloth, would hopefully prove enough to dissuade his father from further attempts to find him.
With a satisfied sigh (and to think he had not even needed to be rescued – all he had needed was the timely intervention of a useful mantle ornament!) Balthier put his back into the task of dragging the insensate (and twitching in the throes of nightmares) Filpots into their caravan.
Exhausted from his labours Balthier almost forgot to pick up the Phoenix from the Filpots' table. Remembering only in at the last minute he thoughtlessly reached for said ornament with his blood dripping right hand.
Alas it is so often the little things, the oversights of the moment, that later prove the most damning.
Thus it was with Balthier, as distractedly he took up the Phoenix in hands coated with his own spilled blood and in so doing coated the statuette with that self-same nectar of life. He did not feel the tingle fission of magick that was invoked by this one thoughtless act, and it would be years before he would know the consequences of it.
Blood spilled demands blood spilled again. The Phoenix drank deep upon the blood of one whose spirit would soar free and she did like the taste.
707 O.V: The Moors of Mara: Landis
Fran had had many years of wandering with which to witness a wide gamut of Hume behaviours; so much so that she had become something of a connoisseur of such. She has seen war and destitution; she has seen joy and triumph written large upon the faces of humes both strange and dear to her. From her partner, that most dear of humes, she has been treated to such nuances of emotion as she could ever wish to see. He is a creature of his wits and passions; ever changing like the turning tides and the rolling seasons of the year.
She cannot predict him and in thus does she derive such pleasure from him; he is the questions that the Wood would not permit her to ask.
Yet for all that, the vagaries of hume nature he has displayed over last days past, however, she would sooner have done without.
'Balthier this madness cannot persist; we must make for Landia wherein Larsa and Hamish both, await the return of the Phoenix.'
Pushing open the door to his cabin, Fran stepped into the stale air and damp of the room. The scent of hume desperation and unwashed flesh tickling her nostrils.
She walks over the clothing and book strewn floor towards the lump under the piled rough wool blankets on the bunk bolted to the far wall. The usual impeccable order Balthier kept his belongings in was now lacking. A storm of frustration has left the room in utter disorder. White linen shirts flung hither and thither, spare belt pouches emptied of their contents and left discarded across the floor. There are dog-eared books left open to the air, annotated with almost illegible notations, filling every available space. Indentations and puckered impact marks denote the numerous failed attempts that Balthier has made to smash the Phoenix statue to pieces upon the steel walls of his cabin.
She can hear his breathing as she approaches, though he makes no attempt to acknowledge her presence.
Repressing a trickle of annoyance that did not trouble her outer stoicism, Fran pulled away the carapace of sweat soaked blankets from the shivering lump upon the bunk. Balthier does not react; his eyes screwed closed and his features pinched and drawn under a thick coating of week old beard stubble. Clutched against his chest the Landis Phoenix's sharp beak prods into his breastbone.
The rank stench of hume distress almost caused Fran to step away. Balthier shivered, bereft of his protective coating of woollen blanket. He has closed in on himself, a butterfly returning to a tight and dark self-imposed chrysalis, these last few days. It pains Fran to see that the consummate performer can no longer maintain his act.
The leading man is undone, and left exposed to cruel truth.
Crouching down beside the bunk upon a clear space on the floor Fran breathed in shallowly through her mouth as she pulled Balthier around so that he was forced to face her. His eyes remain closed but, despite this, she knows that he has not slept in days. Fran cups his ragged chin, tilting his face up as he tries to duck his head defensively towards his collarbone.
'How now pirate, is this not poor show?' she murmurs softly as one would to a child.
Balthier shudders; she still maintains the hope that he can hear her, somewhere above the eagle's screaming, but make him respond she cannot. He is mewed up to his malady and the Phoenix he either refuses to be parted from, or is unable now to let go of.
Fran is not sure which it is; that Balthier would ever give his will to another Fran does not believe could ever come to pass, but that he might be seduced into a temporary pact with a being so well able to grant his heart's desires, and thusly find himself ensnared, that is a possibility she cannot completely disregard.
Her partner is a creature of his passions and passions can corrupt; she knows him to be a man who does not always use due caution in his dealings, and instead favours any dealings that will grant him the freedom to fly as he will.
Much as one might pet a child or a kept Dreamhare Fran scraped the long fingernails of her hand through the mussed and sweaty clumps of Balthier's disordered hair. She murmurs Vieran words of comfort to her ailing partner; if she cannot rouse him to life and vigour once again perhaps she can soothe him to sleep?
Yet she fears he is already beyond her reach, for she hears the eagle screaming once again.
Her partner's decline was swift, after escaping Eraldo's cold grip.
At first Fran could detect only an abstracted anxiety, a more than usual sharpness to his words and actions, as he coerced the hume Aeneas to go to Balfonheim and leave them be. What hope Balthier had of this commission Fran to this day remains unsure; she senses that there is a twisted link between the two humes, one that had moved Balthier to suspicious consideration of Aeneas' needs.
Still Fran had argued with Balthier that sending a man who was at best antipathetic towards him, to Balfonheim wherein Rikken and Elza (those who had set the bounty upon his head and stirred the pirates to murderous intent to begin with) dwelt was not wise. Balthier had turned to look at her with eyes more tired than jaded and said simply:
'If Aeneas is there gaining instruction on where to stick the knife he is thusly not here performing the act.'
'You add fuel to the fires of your downfall,' Fran had rejoined and Balthier, pale and trembling, had not smiled. Instead he had winced and closed his eyes before saying in strained voice:
'Do you hear that eagle screaming?'
Vaan and Penelo to Dalmasca had been swiftly dispatched by Halim Ondore, once retrieved from Lumineres Demesne. In truth Fran suspected that the two young Humes would sooner have returned to she and Balthier than their home. Nevertheless the Queen had a want to see them alive (and no doubt wanted an accounting of just what Balthier was up to) and therefore the children had little choice but to obey.
'Good,' Balthier had said when she had brought him the news that the children were safely back where they belonged, 'Better they are well shot of all this.'
'You push away all available allies, Balthier. Do you court your own destruction?' she had queried, watching as her partner's fingers ran with nervous preoccupation over the stone and metal plumage of the Landis Phoenix.
'I do away with all available cannon fodder and hostages in the making, Fran.' Balthier had answered with ne'er a smirk in evidence; eyes glassy and blank staring. It was then, when the eagle had called, that Fran too had heard her triumphant screech ringing in her ears, and seen said triumph clearly in the flinching of her partner's muscles, and hunching of his shoulders into cowed stoop.
What had become of the hume Anna Zargabaath, after her rescue from Dorstonis, Fran was not certain, but she suspected strongly that the woman would return.
'She'd be wise to stay well clear,' Balthier had said when Fran raised the possibility that the lady would return, 'But I suspect you are right Fran: I am not so lucky as to escape the debts owing to that lady, and she seemed of a mind to collect with interest.'
That night the eagle's screams had granted no respite to either Fran or Balthier. To Fran's ears it was the cawing of carrion feeders picking over corpses. What the eagle's cries portended to Balthier Fran was almost glad not to know.
Nevertheless, once divested of unnecessary and uninvited guests, Fran had been unsurprised when Balthier had set a heading for Landis and thrown himself immediately into researching the myth of the Phoenix.
'Why for not simply return the Landis Phoenix to the Landis? Of Landis' forging was this vessel wrought; in the knowledge of men of Landis perhaps lies the answer to our freedom from it.'
She had argued as Balthier submerged himself in the history and folklore of the ancient republic by day, and they were both driven to sleepless hours of misery by night.
Balthier had looked up at her when she had thus spoken, face pale as a waxen moon, and eyes deep sunk in wells of shadow within his skull.
'I can't,' he had stated without his usual eloquence, 'Gods be damned Fran, do you not think I would toss this bloody thing in the nearest blacksmith forge and be done, if I could?'
Fran had studied him for a moment then. She heard well, and knew well, what the Phoenix offered him; a sky unbound and granted onto him: his to master evermore. She thought on the dissatisfaction, the restless ill-humour that had so vexed her partner since Bahamut's fall and Lemures' trials. He grew bored of his life, Fran knew this, and sought a new horizon to conquer.
The shooting star running out of sky to blaze across; she had always known he would burn out early.
Without a word more she had left him on that day; left him with the Phoenix clutched tight to his breast, poring over dusty tomes. That night her ears rang with the glorying screams of the Phoenix.
Evermore it was the same for a week passed and seven days more.
Fran heard it every time the eagle screamed in Balthier's ears. She saw how swiftly his ears became deaf to all else. She saw the fight he fought without a word spoken; a fight with that which owned his soul. She knew him lost before he did but found that there was little she could do. At night under dominion of the eagle's cries Fran and Balthier languished, and the rising of the sun offered naught in solace.
Her suggestions to entreaties became and he, struggling in a battle already lost, could not hear her.
'Can you hear that noise, Fran?'
He would ask her as he paced the close spaces of the Strahl, unwashed, unshaven, tearing at one soiled cuff or holding aloft before his bleary eyes a book whose words offered no solutions.
'Can you hear the eagle screaming?'
Fran would answer, that yes, she heard it well. She would tell him that if he would truly be free of the grip the Phoenix had upon him he must release his grip upon the Phoenix in turn. Like two combatants locked in deadly physical combat they had choke hold upon the other; neither could gain the upper hand and neither could be free of the other.
He did not listen; she feared he had already lost the ability to hear her counsel.
'If you will not return the Landis Phoenix to Landis then to the Lord Larsa release your grip on her,' she had tried one last time to reason with him, when it was clear beyond day that she and he together were ensnared by the power of She who owned the skies.
'To he who is now Gabranth, who is of Landis born, give up the Phoenix.'
She had come close to pleading, 'This power, Balthier, is not one that you can conquer: too much your soul is wedded already to that which she would snare you with. This honey trap is one that you can only fall to.'
Balthier had stopped in his endless pacing then and he had blinked confusedly about the place, as if only then becoming aware of his surroundings. He had turned his head and looked right through her.
'Fran?' she had heard him call as the eagle screeched within his ears and hers, 'Fran are you here? Fran where are you? I cannot hear you.'
Viera are creatures not born to grief or joy, yet in Balthier's company Fran has come to know much of the latter. Perhaps it was only mete therefore that she must taste of the bitter fruit of the former now.
It was with grieving heart, indeed, that she had watched on that day, not long passed, as Balthier had chased through the corridors and cabins of the Strahl calling her name, and cursing the Phoenix still clutched in death grip within his hand, for taking her from him.
Fran had followed, knowing that the Phoenix's triumphant screams of victory deafened them both to the cries of the other, as Balthier had flung himself to his knees upon the grated floor of the engine room and tried to smash the Phoenix into twists of metal and masonry, pulverising the bones of his own fingers to bloody pulp as he did so.
'Give her back,' she had just heard his own furious cries above the screeching Phoenix, 'Damn you, not her: you cannot take her from me.'
In the end Fran had had no recourse to action save to cast a spell of immobilisation upon him. She had dragged him back to his cabin and cast enchantments of white magick upon his brutalised hand; knowing all the while that the Phoenix had done what he had once claimed could ne'er been done:
The Phoenix had come between Fran and he and their partnership stood now shattered as the Phoenix statue refused to be.
Thus now, knowing that the Phoenix is ascendant in her triumph over she and Balthier both, Fran brushes her fingertips over the twitching cheek of her favoured hume in benediction and farewell.
She cannot break him from the Phoenix's hold. Alas she fears that no one can. How do you free the shooting star from the sky he was born to roam? To do so would be to destroy all that he is, and render him ashes on the winds. She cannot do this and thus she must depart; her own survival depends upon it, for she knows the sky to be a jealous and capricious mistress.
To the dark and closed Wood, Viera go. The Phoenix squawks in her ears causing Fran much pain, Empty creature; you are old Viera, a tired remnant, lost to your purpose, outcast to your kin. A shackle binding him to soil and muck: be gone and live or stay and die.
She to Hamish of Landis will go, some remedy must be sought for this ill-starred union of sky and pirate, but it is with grieving heart that she rises from his bed side and leaves him. Leaves this hume she has no will to be parted from.
The eagle's screaming and the whipping gale causes Fran's ears to bleed but she walks unbowed from the Strahl's mooring place in the highlands of Landis. She is chased and harried, taunted and goaded, by the winds over the moorlands and the birds in the sky all the way. It matters not, for her soul no further hurt can take.
Allow me to extend an invitation to you, dear Fran, and offer you the chance to share in mine own ambitions. You could be, perhaps, the first ever Viera sky pirate.
His words to her upon first acquaintance, to her ears do return, soothing the ache of the Phoenix's cruelty. Inevitably to the pledge he had made with most flippant manner her mind then retreats:
I think that you are in need of a diversion to speed along your time, Fran, while you are sundered from your Viera wood. It would be my honour and privilege to provide you with such diversions.
A pledge and promise made almost in jest but upheld with greater diligence than he applied on ought else. She had made no rejoining promises to him, yet her leaving now a betrayal does feel.
She must leave him, Fran knows this, for she fears what should happen if she remained in competition with the sky. She fears not that he would disregard his pledge for the ultimate freedom the Phoenix offers; that would be his choice and she would never hold him back. No, instead Fran fears what would come of it if the pirate should choose the Viera over the sky and lose his wings forever.
What should happen should the shooting star fall?
The Phoenix had once asked her, when first her presence she did announce to Fran. At the time Fran had offered no answer but an answer she has all the same:
Should the shooting star fall, then down would fall Fran as well.
Better by far that he continue to fly, she thinks, and fly alone upon the skies.
Fran's ears twitch, the eagle still screams, and the night upon the moors of Mara, is a very dark one indeed.