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FACE (continued)
DISCLAIMER: Claymore & its characters belong to Norihiro Yagi & his affiliates.
Part Two - BLACK
6.
The road leads down into the last valley before the ruins of Pieta. Here, it narrows till it passes onto higher grounds. Woods flank the road like walls along a corridor. Here, for the first time during the journey, does Raki know that they are being watched.
Isley didn't train me for nothing, he thinks, his hand flirting with the temptation to draw his weapon. But he's stopped by something else: that both Isley and Priscilla know too, and both choose not to do anything about it.
At the crest of the valley he sees two men. They wait in the middle of the road. Too obvious. Raki thinks they're either looking for trouble or looking for someone. Yet Isley keeps walking, closing the distance, as if both men were permanent fixtures in the landscape.
"Isley?"
He hears him sigh. Then he turns to Priscilla, addressing her like how one would talk to a very small child:
"I want you to wait here while I talk to these gentlemen. Understand?"
Raki waits to be asked forward. But he sees Isley turn to him and say: "Why don't you replenish our food and water?"
7.
"Who do you think they are?" Priscilla asks him, when he returns.
He had taken their water pouches – leather-skinned and hardly drunk anyway – down to the nearest stream. He emptied everything, refilled them, dumped the bits of food he hadn't already thrown away. He had left Priscilla there, waiting at the foot of the rise while Isley met at the summit. He wasn't sure what he was expecting when he had returned.
Against the backdrop of cloud and sky, Raki watches sunlight illustrate out their features. They could pass as farmers. Perhaps even bandits. But he knows: no human would ever approach Isley with such military restraint, with their eyes directed at his. He eyes their lack of weapons, the way they loosen their muscles, the polished frowns on their faces when they pause for Isley to respond to them. He knows: they answer only to Isley. He thinks they are the remnants of Isley's old marauding army.
"His former men."
He sees Priscilla frown.
"They're anxious," she declares.
"I can see that too."
"No. All three of them."
He sees her with her eyes closed, one hand out, palm up. A single lock of hair has fallen across her face. It flows absently across her lips.
"Can you hear what they're talking about?" he asks, pressing.
"He's giving orders."
For a strangled moment, Raki sees one of the men's eyes warp beyond Isley's frame and connect with his own. The man's expression hardens, and he can see the animal-like edge to the narrow eyes and the slit sides of his mouth. He can almost imagine the Awakened form of this man. The man appears to bark in protest at something Isley says, before softening with a dog-like obedience.
"He's talking about us," Priscilla announces.
Raki feels his frame tighten. He isn't sure about so many things, and this isn't something he wishes to add to his list of worries. He eyes the clouds, splitting light, behind the men. Again, like during their conversation in the tavern days ago, he feels the muscles in his legs clench. He drills a fist into his jutting kneecap. It disappears.
Then he sees Isley hand over the papers to the two men.
On the dusty trail, a thundercloud rapidly approaching from the south, Raki thinks he finally understands. He thinks he knows his – their situation. He looks at Priscilla who, to his surprise, nods. He turns his back on Isley's meeting, and says:
"I think that the time has come for us to make a choice."
8.
As he expects, Isley doesn't tell him what he talked about in detail. He simply says they were old friends, who had arranged to meet long before. When Raki tries to get more out, he adds:
"Old warriors-in-arms," Isley gathers his directions. "They asked about you and Priscilla. But I told them if they spoke another word about you, I would've not let them leave here alive."
Isley smiles, and Raki finds the soreness in his muscles develop into a beating, lingering pain. He sneaks a hand down to massage the flat plateau behind his knees again. He knows this is the kind of phantom pain that has been with him for years. The leftover strain from all the training with Isley, from having his human frame pushed to its limits.
But he knows better: his pain will be nothing compared to what he'll feel when he reaches Pieta. And he knows too that Isley, who has begun to walk away, is always – somehow – the centre of this discomfort.
9.
Raki thinks Pieta looks different in summer. The road leading to the desolate city splits off from the main route, sloping down into yet another valley swamped by shell-green grass as far as his eyes can see. At the highest point before hitting the slope, he can finally see it: the grey smudge of a town sprawled below, cuddled in the elbow of a meandering stream like a horizontal cut on the landscape.
They stop so he can eat. Raki eats, Isley takes a swig of water, Priscilla stares. There's no snow, no blizzard. There's no blasting, coughing wind. Instead, Raki finds the air strangely still. Storm clouds loiter above the town, but they are blurred across the sky by the time they reach the bottom of the valley. In their place, hangs the shallowness of a sea-blue sky, laced with clouds and the watery yolk of the sun. Raki has never seen the north so beautiful before.
But as they near the ruins, he feels that familiar atmosphere again. It's the absence of movement, the stillness of the surroundings, with nothing but the destroyed town. The sense that something terrible happened here all those years ago.
They pass through the front gate, its stone columns smothered by weeds. Moss blossoms on the buildings, like colourful wounds on their stone bodies. The afternoon sun plays with Raki's eyes, casting floating shadows under the empty husks of all the ruined buildings. To him, the spreading black along the edges of the blasted and potholed street looks suspiciously like blood.
Priscilla falls back. Raki sees her eyes closed again. The air is filled with the scent of fresh grass, stagnant water and something else. He knows it's the sense of decay.
He walks towards the monument waiting behind the next cluster of buildings. Isley glances around, and begins to speak:
"People say that the Organization had never lost so many warriors before in one place," he says. "And nobody had seen so many Awakened Beings dead among them."
"You'll know it better than most."
Raki sees Isley smile, too politely. "Have you discovered something I don't know?"
"You probably knew exactly how many Awakened Beings were here on that night."
"Ah. And how would you know that?"
When he doesn't answer, Isley softens, his smile melting away.
"Raki, you mind telling me what you think you know?"
Raki looks to the taller man. He makes an elaborate shrug, and says:
"Nothing you already don't know."
10.
At the first sight of the memorial, Raki feels something spreading over his chest. Something – nostalgia, perhaps. Or dread. Or grief.
He remembers the last time he was here: winter, a storm and their cloaks waving to each other across the cold square. He remembers seeing the blades for the first time and how, listening to Isley's opinion, he had poured his tears over the swords. He could only be separated by Isley's insistence that he'd freeze to death if he didn't move.
That was years ago, Raki thinks. Now, as he breaks into the square, he sees the blades, like tombstones, distributed haphazardly on a carpet of quivering pasture. He wades through the knee-high grass. Flowers, blood-red poppies like open sores, seize his trousers as he brushes past them. The blades have turned dull-coloured. Some have been overwhelmed by vines.
And roughly at the centre of the scattered blades lies a heap of stones. He remembers building it. Now, years on, he plucks a rock from the grass and lays it on the summit his makeshift monument.
He goes to the farthest blade. It is tilted and rusty, lying in a yellow blush of sunlight. There, he kneels. He rights the blade with some effort. He images the warrior who last held it. He rests his head on the vertical steel. He closes his eyes. He pictures Clare.
Her face, chewed away from his memory, fails to appear.
Behind, in mumbled tones, he hears Isley talking to Priscilla. He can't hear the words exactly, but he can make out the strain in his voice. Instead, he listens to Priscilla's footsteps, departing.
Raki hears her say to Isley: "I wish you would stop treating me like a little girl."
Then, he knows – feels – Isley approaching him. The two of them are alone on this deserted square of land, accompanied by an audience of unused swords.
Isley's voice hits him like a smack of thunder:
"So you knew."
Raki sees the open plain through the stripped-down walls and cratered buildings. The shadows of clouds stamp shapes on the land. Green smears the hills beyond them. He can hear wind slicing through the fingers and splinters of stone left from the nearest building. He touches the large blade. He makes no attempt to stand.
"I think I've said this before," Raki says. "But she saved me."
"Uh huh."
"And after all these years I can even remember how she looks like."
"Time does that."
"So she could be buried here. I won't even know."
"What's her name again?"
"Clare."
"I don't remember."
"You were here, weren't you?"
He hears Isley walk closer, and turns to face him. Like that short interval at the tavern, like the first time he disarmed him, Isley doesn't look him in the face. His fringe shrouds his eyes. He stands with shoulders squared.
"But back to the question," says Isley. "Why don't you tell me what you know?"
"I think I know enough."
"Really?"
"Pieta. The massacre. The warriors who died."
"That's a bit vague."
Raki explains: "You ordered your army to wipe out the town. And you're still giving orders because of a new creature the Organization has come up with."
"Ah that's – so you know about the Eaters."
"You can't carry a piece of paper for two days without reading it."
"Then you probably should know what's next."
He doesn't. But when he sees Isley draw the blade and lean on it like a walking stick, he thinks he might.
"I think it's time to complete your training," Isley tells him.
Raki takes a deep breath.
"A human travelling with two Awakened Beings, isn't going to survive when the Eaters tracks us down."
"Your point?"
"Getting there," Isley swings the blade. It is massive, almost bigger than a Claymore. But he sees how it lands with a smack in Isley's other hand. He repeats it, flinging the blade in blurry arc. A blatant display of strength. "My men thought I'd gone crazy. Wanted to know what a human was doing with the White Silver King."
"That's what they called you?"
"It was a nice title."
"Why not tell them you're not fighting anymore?" Raki answers back. "Why not tell them you're with us? Not with them?"
Isley slaps the blade into his palm. The sound breaks off from the surrounding buildings. Raki notices: his eyelids curl behind his bangs, and he turns very still, as if he's deep in thought.
But he speaks: "I told them when we meet next, the human will be one of them."
Raki understands. The blade, Priscilla's dismissal, Pieta. Isley's investment in his training. Everything.
"What if I refuse?"
"I don't want to do this by force."
"What? Cut me up?"
"I've done this before," Isley says. Finally, he brushes his hair away, and Raki sees those eyes, full of intent. "It hurts less than the real thing."
Raki sighs. He knows this could be it. He knows that, from now, every move would be a wrong move. He wants to plead, to run close the distance and embrace this man, his brother, who is bound by his own actions to hopeless cause. But he doesn't. Instead, he turns, faces the Claymore's sword.
He kneels. He prays. He's only prayed once before, for Clare. So he repeats that prayer now.
In the middle of it, Isley's voice:
"I just realized something."
Raki continues to pray, rushing to end with Clare's name on his lips.
"You've known all this while?"
Raki nods.
"That's a lot of time. To plan. To tell Priscilla."
Raki gives Isley another nod.
When he gets to his feet, he sees Isley's face, no longer confident. The sword, however, still remains firmly in his hands.
"So are you going to ambush me with something?" Isley asks. He looks around. "Like one of your self-learnt moves?"
"You took a drink before we arrived at Pieta."
"Go on."
Raki takes the pouch from his side. He feels its lightness. When he lifts it up with his left hand, Isley seems to understand. For effect, he draws his dagger with other hand.
"Where do you think all the pills went into?"
For a second, Isley's face hangs suspended in surprise. But he breaks into a smile. It makes Raki more uneasy than he already is.
"Very smart of you."
Raki shrugs.
"You forgot I'm the better swordsman."
Then, a voice: "You forgot about me."
Priscilla strides into their midst, and then things happen very fast. Isley moves his sword-arm. She stops it. Raki sees Isley's instinctive reaction: he tries to protect himself with his other arm. It cuts through the air, chopping. But before it connects with Priscilla's face, he's on the ground. Priscilla flexes the arm under her. It snaps. It twists outward at an obtuse angle.
"Wait!"
Both pause. But Isley struggles to stand. Raki sees Priscilla apply pressure. He lets out a painful shout. It's the first time he sees him in agony.
"Priscilla! Stop!" Raki finds himself saying.
"Let him stand."
She looks up at him. Unsure, but she still obeys anyway. Raki helps Isley stand, but holds the dagger close.
"You planned this," Isley pants.
"Yes." He aims the blade at Isley, who's clutching his broken arm, struggling. Raki hesitates. He's reviews the sight of this man before him. This man: Isley. Not just any man, but the man who taught him to hold a sword properly.
But Raki says what he's been wanting to say all this time: "Show me she isn't buried here."
Isley stops. He looks at the Claymore's swords, his gaze flying back and forth through them.
"I think your obsession with that warrior has made you crazy –"
Raki puts the dagger in the centre of his forehead, and orders:
"Dig them all out. And show me."
11.
Raki measures their shadows. As the sun drags itself across the entire length of sky above Pieta, their shadows get pulled towards it. They merge with those from the ruins, pooling in a mass of dark colour along straight fragments of stone and debris. At one point of the day, Raki turns to find the sun at its brightest, an orange flower made luminous by the hills crowding around its descending form.
Isley has exposed the seventeen shallow graves beneath the blades. His face is mucked with soil, his arms bloodied with dirt. Raki examines them. Nothing. Years of winter storms and summer humidity have eroded the warriors' symbols at the hilts. The skulls that stare back at him mouth at some inner pain he can't interpret.
"Recognize anyone?" Isley says, goading.
Raki presses hard on the hilt of the sword he took from Isley. He thinks: there's nothing to prove that she's here. There's nothing to prove she isn't
Raki walks up to Isley. He makes sure the blade is pointed at the taller man's neck. He knows there's no possibility of a good answer, but he asks anyway.
"You don't remember anyone named Clare?"
"Can we stop playing games?" he says. Then whispers: "Listen Raki, put down the sword and let's talk. I know what you're thinking. But you don't want to be alone with a monster –"
Priscilla: "What's he saying?"
"You think just a few years of swordsmanship is good enough when she awakens?" he says. Raki endures this, till Isley moves closer, his butcher shop breath filling the narrow space between them. "And she will awaken – it's just a matter of time –"
"Raki, I don't think you should listen to what he's saying."
In Isley's face he tries to pry free any memory, any hint of Clare's face. He tries to see the ridge of her forehead, the sloping hair, the way sweat perches like a mustache on the upper reaches of her lips – he sees the shaky way she swings her large sword, the rustling of many muscles when she jumps. He can't stop thinking. And he knows it.
"She's alive," he says. Isley's face breaks out in exasperation. "I'm going to find her."
"Good. Now let's –"
He holds up a hand to stop Isley from talking, then points at the nearest grave, where the bones of a dead warrior look like a curled fingers of an open palm.
Isley appears to understand. But, he raises his hands, and says: "Raki, I trained you –"
"I know."
"I taught you everything you need to know."
He nods.
"You can't do this! Leaving me for a monster –"
He lands the first blow lands on Isley's temple, so fast that he hears the wind of his retracting fist. As his former friend and mentor stumbles, he thrusts up the flat of the blade at him. Isley shouts, but the blow muffles it. Isley crumples, his legs bend and he crashes into the open grave. The last Raki sees of the white silver king is a folded man clutching the side of his face, his long hair speckled with bloodstains.
12.
"Raki, are you all right?"
Evening falls. All he wants is to get out of here, to exit the valley with its ruins, graves and wounded man he's left in one of the graves. He walks to where his memory triggers a route, skirting the stream, climbing the slopes till the wind comes at him, gusts punching into his face. As the orange remnants of sunset drip away from the horizon, he continues walking, darkness coating him like a blanket.
He hears Priscilla walking behind. Her footsteps fall like whispers. He's grateful for the space she gives him. But soon, whether he likes it or not, he will have to face her, face the truth of who she is, and his own frailty in the face of greater things.
He gropes in the dark. His feet strike rocks and bounders, and the huge sword he took from Isley catches the weedy arms of plants more than once. Ahead, he stares down an intense darkness, so black he imagines fires, colours, spaces on it. Somewhere beyond it, he knows, is the Central lands, his home, the trails he's familiar with, and everything he's hoping for,
"Raki?" Priscilla again. "Where are we going?"
In the thick nothingness, he tries – again – to reassemble that face once for all. He sees the ripped knuckles of a closed fist. Then an inverted tick of blood trailing downwards from a busted lip. Hair brushing shoulders, its ends sharp, as if hacked by a machete. The sound of breathing, drenching from the very bottom of lungs –
His own. Filling the space around him and Priscilla. In the absence of a face, the darkness swallows, and pulls him forward. He wants to tell Priscilla, this where we're going. Forward.
He takes steps after step, closes his eyes. And before he knows it, he can't tell the difference at all.
.
.
END
NOTES: This is one of those stories that took a lot of energy to write. I had to imagine every bad thing & grudge about my closest friends to write the dialogue between Raki and Isley in this chapter. Another crazy example of how fiction and real life impact & inspire each other.
My only regret is that I didn't use Priscilla a lot as a character in this story. It became a bit too much about Raki & Isley, with Priscilla becoming the saintly third-character.
Even though the number of reviews tell reviews a different story, I'm just glad to post this, to contribute to an already flagging fandom. But do leave a review so I know whether or not my writing's just plain nonsense or something you'd actually read.
And thank you for reading this.
10.10.2011