Note: This occurs in the same fanon as my other Suikoden fiction, most notably on the tails of The Spindle. I'm not sure if reading the others is required, but it certainly makes things clearer.

Also, many thanks to K'Arthur for betaing!

Karayan 493

a brief foray into Genso Suikoden III

by Mithrigil Galtirglin

---

Two important people were dead. Important people call for unprecedented courtesy, even if they never ask for it themselves.

There were four gravediggers in the temple. Unlike most of their kind, these men had permission. If one were to see them from the highest point in the chamber, they would seem as small and insignificant as two of them actually were. Alongside the great statues, four stories high and brandishing swords as wide as bedrolls, these men muttered and grunted, uprooting the plaster floors. Beside them, within the reach of their tools, the Goddess slept under her pale blue shroud, atop the flight of stairs that made her pedestal. She was as small as they were, but didn't look it.

It was quite dark, even with the massive double-doors open. There was to be no fire kindled in this room, ever, for any reason. Such was the will of the True Water Rune. There were no windows, no torches, not even the minute embers of incense. Most of the structures in the room had never cast a shadow for more than a minute. The only light came from beyond the doors and the rune-lanterns that the gravediggers had been allowed to bring in, one to each man, and all of these spare lights were now gathered around their workstation, siphoning off the tiles to be removed. It had been difficult work, and would remain difficult work until they finished it. Their eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness long ago--very long ago, in some cases--but something kept them from going about their work with their usual confidence. Perhaps they were afraid.

The chisel cracked through the tile, and everything in the temple rang. The sound was like a belligerent teenager, defensive and stubborn as it leapt from statue to statue and wall to wall until it was everywhere, then rattled out the door. Every noise had echoed that way but the gravediggers' own hushed voices.

The tallest of the gravediggers also appeared to be the eldest--his beard was streaked with grey--but he was kneeling, handling the hammer and the chisel. The three men under him picked at the tiles beneath the Goddess' pedestal with their own tools, lifting the plaster to reveal earth like any other. The second-eldest-looking carried the last few of the tiles to where the other stones were stacked, trying his best not to let any dirt or roots loose on the erstwhile-sacred floor. The two apparent youngest, their work done for now, rested on their picks and wiped their brows. The youngest-looking one, fair-haired and long-fingered, sighed and smiled rather jauntily, which visibly unsettled his partner, even in the semidarkness.

"That should do it," the bearded one said, rising and looking over the patch they had unearthed. It was disturbing and profanely out of place, a near-perfect rectangle of dirt at the feet of the Goddess' white marble pedestal, four stories under the most blessed roof in all of Zexen. The patch was wide and long enough for the two coffins that waited not ten feet behind the men, polished ivory and glowing the way ice does in a chilled glass. One coffin was gilt and labeled with gold, the other silver, but they were otherwise the same.

The tile-carrier set the slabs down on top of their pile--they would be replaced by a different crew--and made certain that they would not fall. "Took us long enough," he muttered, raising his hands to brush the dirt off of them but stopping short when he recalled where he was. He turned and walked back to the swathe of dirt and shook his hands off there instead, beside the blonde one. "Heh. Now all we have to do is dig it."

"One grave?" The darker pick-man asked.

"One grave for the two of them," the tile-carrier said. "Feet first, back-to-back."

"It's supposed to be eight deep," the bearded one added, following the tile-carrier's example and shaking the dirt off his hands over the patch. "Won't take long with all four of us."

The pick-man glanced back at the coffins with tight lips. "Right."

"Did they plan this?" The tile-carrier asked the bearded one, 'they' meaning the bigwigs and 'this' meaning a dual burial, a ceremony, and permission for four laymen to spend more time in the Goddess' chamber than any living man had ever been allowed.

The bearded one understood the question. "I think so. I don't think anyone banked on them dying so close together, though," he added with a longer and more stable glance at the coffins than his subordinate had managed. The only thing that spooked him in this place was the Goddess. Unfortunately, she filled the room the same way loud noises did.

"Eerie, no?" the blonde asked. His eyebrows were rather long and thin, like his smile.

The tile-carrier nodded. His hair was almost completely shaven, but what he did have showed a preternaturally receding hairline, and the rune-lanterns made the wrinkles in his forehead very pronounced and deep. "Damned right. First the Goddess and Saint Salome, now these guys..."

"You sure the deaths were natural?" the bearded one whispered, still looking at the coffins. His expression was almost disbelieving, behind his spectacles, and he wrinkled his nose.

"They are," the pick-man tacked on quickly. He didn't want to believe otherwise.

"They're old," the tile-carrier said. "Old things are supposed to die. And then we're supposed to bury them." He looked over at the blonde, who was still smiling and leaning on his pick, staring at the Goddess' shrouded pedestal as if he could see through it. The irreverence of what he had just said made itself clear to the tile-carrier at that moment, and hit everyone else a second after. The Goddess, after all, had been younger than these dead, important men.

Old smells filled the bearded man's nose. He moaned to himself, "Gaah, I want to get out of here," adjusting his glasses and holding his forehead. He remembered the way the old castle had smelled, more than fifty years ago now, and the stables where these important men had talked, three feet over his head. He wondered if they'd ever noticed. He remembered waving them off before the battle his best friend had been told he wasn't allowed to fight in. He could smell holding that friend back. It was like glory, but fermented. He needed a drink.

"Don't blame you," the pick-man said. How he'd heard, the bearded man wasn't sure.

Someone chuckled, and the sound was like the tile-chipping, and filled the room. The tile-carrier and pick-man actually started at the noise, until they noted whose throat it came from. "Scared of the sacred?" the blonde asked, turning his smiling and narrow-eyed face from the Goddess' pedestal at last.

The pick-man stammered out an unconvincing laugh, but the balding tile-carrier glared down at the blonde man. "First rule of digging other people's graves, kid; you don't put off the people who cared about the stiff."

"I like to think our Goddess wouldn't be offended by your being afraid of her champions," the blonde man offered, lifting his pick and gesturing with it. A little dirt scattered over the tiles at his feet. Only the other pick-man noticed. "Flattered, maybe," the blonde continued. "And I'm older than I look."

"Sure," the tile-carrier snapped. The blonde man, to his eyes, looked barely twenty-five, less if he didn't have those crows-feet around his eyes. Anyone under thirty was a "kid." This one seemed to be good at digging, and so did the other pick-man, but they both still registered as "kid."

"And I'm not scared," the bearded man said, at least partly truthful. He closed his eyes as he turned back to the others, both to avoid looking at the Goddess and to concentrate on his memories.

The blonde man laughed again, and it rang, but this time only the pick-carrier reacted to the echo. "Of the Knights, at least," the blonde man said. He set his pick down and leaned on it again, crossing his ankles with a toe to the ground, like a farmer surveying his fields. In the blue light, his eyes all but disappeared.

The tile-carrier was not amused. "Cheeky bastard."

When the bearded one laughed, it didn't echo as the blonde's did. "Just for that, I am getting out of here," he said, with a slightly forced smile at the blonde.

"Sure, sure," he pish-poshed, maintaining the smile but shifting his weight on the pick.

"Dig it yourself if you're so brave, kid," the bearded one added. It was easier to smile as he got deeper into the potential joke, but the look of the new kid was rather unsettling to focus on. The bearded one ended up catching a view of one of the mighty statues out of the corner of his eye. He remembered the smell of her armor-polish.

"I told you I'm older than I look," the blonde said. He stopped technically smiling, but his cheeks and eyebrows were still raised and his eyes were still barely visible for how he squinted. For a moment, to the bearded man and the tile-carrier, the blonde did look older than he had before, but both men dismissed it as a trick of the light.

"Lovely," the tile-carrier said. "So be a big boy and stay here while the rest of us go get drunk."

The smile returned in full-force, tight-lipped and dimple-cheeked, like a classroom troublemaker who had scored a high mark on an important test. "You got it, boss," he almost chimed--it filled the chamber--and clapped his gloved palms together over the pick's hilt.

The tile-carrier noticed for the first time that the blonde had been wearing gloves all along. No one respectable in Zexen wore gloves anymore, not since decades ago. "You're serious?"

"Go ahead, take a break," he waved once with a dismissive left hand and only half of a sneer. "I've dug holes before." Only one eyebrow lowered, and half of his face kept up the tight-lipped smile.

"I was kidding," the bearded one said.

"Don't kid a kidder. Just go." Again, the blonde tried to wave the others away, this time going so far as to elbow in the general direction of his fellow pick-man. "Just watch, tomorrow morning there'll be a hole here so perfect that our dead friends will jump out of their coffins just to see it!" He concluded, and reached down to his hip for his canteen. In a swift motion he uncorked it and tilted back a deep swig, then licked his lips in a blink, like either a snake or a cat.

After a moment, the pick-man managed another medicine-laugh. "Maybe he's already drunk," he offered, his eyes on the canteen. It was still uncorked, and whatever was in it seemed too dark to be water, but it was hard for the pick-man to tell in this light.

"Heh, of course I'm not drunk!" he half-sighed, waving his arms defensively with the canteen still sloshing in his left hand and the pick falling to the floor out of his right. One end landed in the dirt, and the metal one clattered on the tile and kicked up another clattering through the room, not quite loud enough to wake the dead. With a sheepish expression and even more squinted eyes, the blonde quickly picked up the pick and shooed the others away.

After the bearded man got out a final smell of appraisal and turned toward the light and the open doors, the others listened. They gathered up as many tools as they could, a bit hesitantly, but left the blonde all they figured he would need. The tile-carrier and the bearded man supposed they would just have a few drinks and leave the new kid here an hour or two, scare him up good, and he'd be better to work with in the future. Only the pick-man was set on actually packing up and going.

"Eight deep, Elliot?" the blonde asked, surely, as if he didn't need to confirmation at all.

"Eight," the bearded one confirmed automatically. He realized a few steps later that he'd never told the new recruit his name, and a step after that that the blonde had probably just heard someone else use it. Something smelt wrong, but then again, a lot felt wrong about this situation to Elliot. He wanted to leave, and left.

"Have a good time!" the blonde man called, and the echo followed the gravediggers out the door. That done, with a smile--his teeth peeked out this time, he couldn't help it--the blonde set to work.

The buckets and bins clanked together when he set them up on the tiles surrounding the patch of dirt, on the first of several tarps that had been brought along to keep the floor clean. His movements were deft and serious despite his jaunty smile and the tune he was whistling to himself as he set up, plainly secular and almost bawdy even without its lyrics. Perhaps it was the slur of the air and tone against his canines, but his whistling had a brassier, more resonant tone than most.

Four stories under the most blessed roof in Zexen, the blonde man whistled and chipped at the dark red earth. Here and there, at breaks in his tune, he traded the pick for a shovel and spooned the holy ground into the containers on the tarp, not especially carefully, but competently. He had not been lying, of course, when he'd told the men he'd dug holes before. Very little dirt escaped onto the tarp. He whistled, and smiled at the giant statues and portraits, sharing memories with their living counterparts, all of whom he'd known. There was a night sky painted on the ceiling, lost in the darkness over his head, but he found his own star through the blackness overhead and smirked at it anyway. And here and there, when he was changing tools, he would send his tight-eyed, tight-lipped grin at the Goddess and straighten his shoulders, the way he'd always felt he needed to around her.

"Oh, no no no, I'm not drunk," he told her, behind her shroud. "Just a little high."

Imagining her pale eyes widening and lips parting slightly, he amended, "On life, on life, I assure you!" He leaned the shovel against the wall of the hole and leaned over it, crossing his arms on the ledge of tiles. The hole was five feet deep by now, and the blonde stood in it up to his chin. "I'd share, but you wouldn't like it, especially not when you wake up. If, if, sorry," he corrected. "Maybe during, but not if you wake up."

Before he picked up the shovel again, he took another swig from his canteen. As deep in the hole as he was, the darkness of the liquid on his upper lips could have been an illusion. "It's the same old Karayan four-ninety-three as ever," he told the Goddess over the edge of the hole. "I came into a lot of that, fresh from the source. It's not very refined," he admitted. "Never was. I literally extracted and bottled it myself over the course of a few weeks. Nothing special after that, no infusions, no, not even boiling."

He fiddled with the canteen's cork, and backed away from the edge of the hole a little. Some dirt and roots dribbled down the front of his clothing and his scarf, but he didn't seem to care. "I keep the bottles in my wife's cellar, mostly, and a few in my boss' palace," he continued, but without the familiarity he'd had before, and he kept his eyes on his task and not the holy sleeping place of the Goddess. "The missus likes it. Drinks it more than I do. But then, she's used to it." He chuckled, and managed to look her way again as he retrieved his pick. "It was my first time trying to store anything like that. The bottles don't like it. They say so. They ask me to open them and put them out of their misery. It burns, they say. It would. So sometimes I do," he finished, ramming the pick into the earth, hunched over it like a war-hero with a flag.

He found himself in a rhythm, especially since he couldn't bring himself to whistle any more. He picked at the edges of the hole, flattening them steadily, his smile faded, as if he were trying to crank energy or will into himself. He swept the dirt up in buckets and set them aside, perched on the tarp and tiles over his head--for the hole had somehow gotten deep enough to cover him in his shoulder-steeling work.

He stopped with the pick raised over his head. "I say this to you now because tonight, I have the courage, and tomorrow I might not." Before he could bring it down, he looked up at what little he could see of the Goddess' place through the depth and the darkness, and donned his tight-lipped smirk again. "Like I said, high on life, high on life." He winked at her, then piqued his long, thin eyebrows over his squinting eyes.

"I always knew I was crazy," he said, and swung the pick down into the dirt with a fierce exhale. "Then again, people kept telling me that truly crazy people don't recognize their own insanity," he amended, prying the tool loose and raising it again. "Maybe they just haven't had as much time to mull over it as I have. Or maybe their awakenings haven't been as rude."

The rhythm of heft and swing took him back, and each beat thundered out of the hole and up to the constellated ceiling. It didn't give the statues any pause, but bounced off their marble swords, gold-gilt praises and hollow eyes, from one stone face to another in stilted conversation. The sounds argued and clattered and raced out the doors, and the blonde man, in his pit, laughed at them. His laugh chased the rhythm past the dead men in their coffins, and they were not amused.

"You know, certain swords shout at me," he told the Goddess. "I try to ignore them. The trouble is, without them I end up killing people very slowly. I wonder if it would be better, every time, if I just listened instead of pretending to be stable."

He sighed, and set the pick down against the hole's earthen wall. "No, no, it doesn't work. Especially since the slower things aren't helping me.

"I'm starting to like it," he said, unstrapping and uncorking the canteen again. He could no longer see the Goddess' slab and shroud from how deep he was in the pit, so he raised the canteen in her direction, in almost a toast, before drinking out of it. "I mean, the Karayan four-ninety-three."

When he licked the residue off his lips again--as quickly and suspiciously as before--he licked his smile away as well. Since he couldn't say this to her face, or even to her pedestal and shroud, he gave the words he meant for the Goddess to the shovel. The words came out in a sigh, and didn't leave the sanctity of the hole in the temple's floor. "It's still a punishment, yes, but it's more like when my wife punishes me, or berates me...a ritual," he decided. "A ritual that stopped meaning what it used to mean a long time ago."

He swept a mound of loosened dirt into the nearest bucket. The rhythm returned, and drowned out his confession. "She likes punishing me. It makes her feel personal. Human, I think. Sometimes, she feels remorse when she punishes me. I'm starting to understand that--I don't feel as much remorse as I used to. It's more 'Hey, Hugo's blood probably goes well with curry.'" He sighed and shook his blond bangs out of his eyes, dripping a little with a deep red sweat. "Man, I miss curry sometimes."

At that, he knelt, and lifted the filled bucket over his head to the floor. He needed to strain a bit--soon, he would be in too deep to climb out.

"I think I told you, somewhere in there. I'm not sure," he said, and it came out fading to a whisper. He left his fingertips resting on the cold tile above him, reaching past them toward the Goddess' sleeping place, as if he could actually make it there. "So now it won't matter that I might not have the courage again tomorrow. I'll regret it when I wake up. I always do. It means that if you wake up someday, I'll have to kill you. Most of me won't want to do that."

He closed his eyes, and pressed his cheek to the hole's wall. A thin, twiggy root dug into his lip, and he bit it in half and spat it out. It was dead. "I'm scared," he said, "but you knew that already. No, no, not scared enough to do it right here, right now. Not that paranoid, yet. Or that courageous." The dirt stuck to the traces of red sweat on his face, and he stepped back, breathed, and wiped his face with his scarf. When he left the soiled cloth down, he'd somehow wiped the smirk back onto his face and the darkness back around his eyes.

"But what is courage, really, in my position?" he asked, looking up at her star on the ceiling, since he could no longer see her shroud from eight feet under. "Probably letting you live, letting the truth about who I keep in my wife's basement out..." He trailed off, and asked the hole's walls and the gravediggers' tools, "Courage is acting in spite of fear, not because of it, right?" The dirt declined to answer.

"If I'm scared that you'll let this out, 'courage' is trusting you not to. Not killing you first. Right?" The sleeping Goddess also declined to answer.

He appraised the hole around him, certain by now that it was eight feet deep, with smooth walls fit for the deceased Knights to stare at for eternity. "Or maybe it's just putting stock in the fact that you'll never wake up, will you?" he asked the other occupants of the room, and a few others of the lamentably dead who were out of hearing range already.

They answered. It just didn't echo the same way his voice did.

His work done, Nash gathered up the pick, shovel, and buckets, and slid them out of the hole. By now, he had to jump in order to do so, and some of the dirt from the bucket spilled off the tarp and onto the clean tiles. He laughed to himself, realizing how deep he was in, and dug his toes and heels into the earth underfoot. After a moment, he closed his eyes and let his arms hang at his sides. He concentrated, and breathed, and with his breath the wind around him strengthened and set his scarf rustling. The dirty cloth wrapped around his face and seemed to consume him, leaving only darkness wherever it touched his skin until its light flapping grew loud and leathery, bouncing off the walls of the pit. The wind whipped the scarf into the shape of a bat until it was undeniably real, and the bat fluttered out of the hole, whistling and thundering through the sacred room with an echo before and after it.

He could see the statues frowning at him through the darkness, ten times relatively larger. They admonished him from under their false stars and blackened ceiling, wincing at the noise and the intrusion where the light from the rune-lanterns reached. He flew around the columns and shrouds of this eternal bedchamber, where one soul slept and at least four were dead. He wanted to laugh, and the laugh sounded as a screech from his tiny throat, and soon every corner of the holy room was thrumming with that screech. He saw, in his memories alone, glares from living and dead eyes, and laughed or screeched in their remembered faces. Only then did Nash alight on the edge of a bucket full of dirt, and will himself to appear human again.

Out of the pit, he worked quickly. The room was still echoing with the bat's laughter as he spread a clean tarp over the soon-to-be double grave, and he rolled the tools that belonged to him into a neat bundle to strap to his back. The buckets of dirt and the pile of tiles he left as they were, but shrouded them the same way the Goddess was blanketed. He left the other three lanterns at their points around the hole, to hold the tarp in place. He knelt, to adjust that final lantern, and found himself staring up at the Goddess' slab and shroud instead.

Nash whispered. It did not echo. "...I feel blessed, Lady Chris, so very fortunate, that you've been deemed docile by my boss." He scoffed at the next thoughts that crossed his mind, but voiced them anyway, quickly and almost ashamed. "I can't imagine I'd have the stomach for a cellar full of White Hero. Not even if I stretched out drinking you over five hundred years. That's how long the Karayan four-ninety-three will last, at the rate the missus and I are going, you know."

He rose, and wiped his gloves off on the front of his slacks. "Well, looks like my courage is just about to run out!" he said, then looked over his shoulder at the doors. The light didn't warm his cheeks, but when he looked back over the shadows at the Goddess' shroud, he was smiling like a rowdy schoolboy again. "I'll just give you a kiss to spite the missus--I know for damn sure I'm not your prince--and be on my way," he decided, already stalking up the steps of her pedestal to where she slept. "Sleep well!" he laughed, and pulled the curtains aside without even a touch of hesitation.

She was beautiful to him. Perhaps not as beautiful as she had once been, raked by wind and defensive emotion in the glowing woods of Alma Kinan, or stubborn and wrathful driving her sword past Sarah's petticoats and into her thigh, but the True Water Rune had preserved what it could of Lady Chris' perfection. She was more living than the statues that kept her company, but not very much, and Nash could only feel the breaths escaping her lips when he leant over to kiss them.

He closed his eyes. He had not intended to close his eyes. Perhaps it was rage or warmth or sheer insanity, or just the last vestiges of courage coursing through his dead veins in place of the blood in his canteen, but no reason occurred to him to back away. He tried to keep his mouth closed, he really did, and he meant to keep his incisors still, but the first command fell on irreverent lips and the second would soon follow.

In his mind, several pairs of eyes glared at him; pale ones, red ones, gold, brown, blue, everyone who had a better idea of what he was doing than he. Nash stopped on his own time and opened his eyes, to a perfect view of the ivory coffins at the foot of the pedestal, ready to be buried.

"My, my," he half-sang with a smile, "I'm a bit out of line." Carefully, he straightened his back and pulled the shroud back over the Goddess' body and face, noticing that she had a bit more color to her cheeks. Perhaps she was angry with him. Women tended to be angry when he kissed them. His eyes small but somehow bright, he stalked down the steps of the pedestal and sank to a regal kneel.

"I extend my humblest apologies, good sirs," Nash said to the coffins. He then rose and backed away to pick up his tools and lantern and, whistling, headed for the doors.

The tune was the same as before, subtle and country and open, but it died down as Nash came closer and closer to the lighted hallway. He remembered something, and hissed out the last few notes of the refrain before turning back to the Knights in their caskets.

"Don't tell my wife," he added, vestiges of concern creeping into his voice and the crows-feet around his eyes. "She'll dig you up and do horrible things to you." He shook his head and sighed. "She does that."

He shrugged, as if the outcomes didn't mean all that much. That done, he adjusted the pick, the shovel, the lantern, and the pack on his shoulder, turned one last time, and closed the double doors on the two corpses and the sleeping Goddess, one door at a time. The shadows wavered left, then right, then disappeared altogether, and the little remaining light trickled through the sheet spread on the floor, into the cavern where the coffins would be ensconced tomorrow morning.

When Elliot and the balding man came back for their lanterns, they figured that the new kid had simply fled the scene. They were surprised to find an immaculately dug grave under a clean white tarp, but the blonde man had left a trail of dirty footprints, up and down the stairs of the Goddess' pedestal and out the double doors, and the tiles had to be mopped. The balding man spent a good ten minutes complaining about today's youth, making them all out to be cowards or prodigals or both, leeching off their betters.

Elliot had to agree, especially considering that in his day, he'd been proud to fight--well, assist--beside some of the best young men the world had to offer. He looked apologetically at Sir Borus and Sir Percival in their ivory coffins, and wrinkled his nose. "No offense," he said, driving the damp mop over the holy floor.