Surface Tells

When Mattius came to me that summer evening, he should never have been able to make the trek. A testament to what strength can be found in desperation.

My home sat far from the rest; isolated by trees, and not one creek but two.

A shrieking bleat drew me from my kitchens and to the gardens.

I had come out ready to face what I assumed would be a snake startling my goats, but it had been a man. On his knees, and head was thrown back, panting as though he wished to pull the clouds from the sky above.

This stranger had stumbled upon my house where it was carved into the hillside.

I noticed his eyes next, while he watched me walk from my home to where he knelt. The fatigue in them held confusion, to be sure. His amber-colored eyes were brimmed with red, their movements lethargic like sap in the chill weather.

I could not make out his lissome features at the time I found him among my tomatoes and rosemary. His hair clung to his neck and face, and his cheeks hollowed.

Blood, vomit, and sweat had dried to his skin, making the dirt stick to him like pollen over honey.

He held one arm tied against his body with a strip of his own tunic. Hurt from a stumble on his plight, no doubt. The flow of death that had spilled from his mouth must have tumbled out hours before he arrived at my home if the flakes dried over his skin and clothes were any indication.

Through his intoxicated breaths, he used the unbound arm to reach into a small bag tied at his waist. He grabbed for something, then held his palm out to me. Berries, unperturbed in his dirty palm.

“Please?”

His voice was a susurrous sound, echoed by the wind combing through the garden around us.

A stranger to this area would not know that the red tinge of those berries was prophetic of the blood spewed after eating them.

He was wise enough, even then, to carry the berries with him. Some distant part of his tortured mind thought to keep the very seeds of death with him so he might show another what damned him.

Moments thereafter passed in a blur of will and desperation.

I washed and soothed him. I gave him herbs to make him wretch. I fed him food to fill the void inside. I forced all my will into him, silently pleading for him to wake back up. I cleansed his body and spoke words to cleanse his mind.

Finally, finally, the fever broke, and he wretched the essence of it over the side of the bed and into the nearest handmade jar. A stout thing with handles and a lid, intended for salves and oils yet to be made.

Out of his mouth came an inky thing. So dark and potent, it absorbed the bedside candlelight; the flame flew toward the jar and vanished in a small puff of smoke as if hitting the water.

I jumped back from him. He was too exhausted to see any of it, and how I flew away from his bedside when it came forth.

Peering inside the jar, the dark ball sat undisturbed. I lidded the jar and set it just under the bed. Once it was out of sight I was able to banish what had to be a trick of the mind from my thoughts.

Mattius slept hard in my cottage, he had left death’s grasp.

His arm had been hurt but not broken. Rest would heal it. After the purging of the blackness, Mattius grew rosy and serene. The young man now had golden-brown curls and the cut of his face was one a sculptor created with unabashed admiration. His eyes shimmered like a sun’s beam over fresh honey.

That is when he had given me his name.

Only when Mattius left four days later, did I remember the jar under the bed. I found it when I had gone to strip the blankets for a wash in the creek.

The small salve jar had changed, it was simply no more.

Mattius’s likeness and name were etched on the front in black ink that matched the bile he had left inside. Upon the jar’s face, was an image of a man atop a cliffed shore, an army on the seas behind him. The banner in his hand matched that of the ships behind him.

Such a prophecy could not be discarded, and I made a place for the jar of evil on my shelves.

Months later, news reached the town across the two creeks that a young general had liberated the islands to the south. Mattius The Thrice Blessed they had called him. Blessed by the sea and the sky and the land; how else could the man have taken the islands with no casualties to his side, and such resounding force if not for such blessings?

Since Mattius, my jar collection grew with every healing encounter; I now held a hearty reputation as a town healer, for my salves and meals could mend any need.

An infant girl who was red with fever and screaming all her days, ridded her evil in the form of a small black object, much the same as Mattius had. The jar depicted a woman surrounded by dozens of children and a farm beyond.

A husband and wife could not produce a live child, and the black ink of their jar showed two children seated at a table brimming with food.

For years I collected jars from ailments of the flesh, mind, heart, and otherwise. I had built a second hut to hold the jars, for I could not stand to sleep near the vile purges, regardless of the images of their happiness on the outside.

Hundreds and hundreds of lives were mended. None ever thanked me nor asked my name, nor how this came to be. But I liked it that way.

Decades after Mattius, and the first jar, he came back to me. He crested the hill that led to my garden with six armed men.

He chastised me for taking the fallibility of life from his citizens, claiming that those who do not fear death are not easily governed. The six marched me into my house before they went to the hut in the back.

When the six men went to the back hut, I could hear the pottery hitting the ground. In great fell swoops, they must have emptied the shelves. Mattius stayed with me as they did.

“Please?”

I pleaded again and again, even as his men filled the air with a cloud of pungent smoke. An oddly sweet, sickening stench of burning evil.

Thus was the first of my deaths.

When the men left, I went to the ashen ruins. I sifted through the ash and stone until I found what would have been the center of the room. Heaving the small stone tiles off the floor, I found the only remaining jar.

He had not recognized me, I realize now. Else he might have thought to seek a jar of his own. I remembered him though. I remembered all the people who sought my help, something Mattius could not equally claim.

Mattius still painted on its face and his navy beyond him. I grabbed a fistful of the purging herbs from my apron pocket and chewed them through the bitter taste. My tears collected on my lips and their salt cut the bitterness.

I wretched over the ash piles of my small hut. A white ball came forth, among the muck. I picked up the white mass. It was only the size of an olive. I rolled it between my fingers before lifting the lid on Mattius’s jar and adding mine to his.

As I set the lid back atop, a wave of storm clouds came through. In a sheet of rain and wind, the ashes were cleansed away, and I was left soaking in my clothes with the jar in hand.

All of the black orbs of evil I had collected had been set free from their ceramic prisons. The fire would not have burnt them, I had tried in decades past. But the orbs were gone. Only Mattius and I remained now.

I numbly went over the two rivers.

The city was aflame. The stench of rotting bodies had filled the streets. Wails clouded the air.

Every ailment I had captured returned to its originator, or a substitute host, as decades had changed the populace.

Broken lovers and hollowed parents found me crying over the children’s forms. “Evil Woman,” they called me, still not knowing my name, but Pandora’s I was given.

Thus was my second death.

----

My death occurred in two parts.

The first was the loss of the life I had known; my garden, my animals, my house, and my reputation. All with the declaration that I was evil.

The second death was of my body.

Together as blackness and light, Mattius and I watch the wax and wane of greed and selflessness over this world. The mingling of those pieces of our souls merged us into omniscient damnation together, and still, he does not know my name.