Those Final Memories

I’ve forgotten some of how I lost them, but other things I will never forget.

I remember how it began: the sky darkening around the northern bank of Ocather’s bay. Snowflakes falling gently on reed-thatched roofs. That energy in the air. People, Umghul kinsmen, screaming and weeping and panicking as they stampede from our mud hut village toward the shoreline until their feet churn the main road into a sucking mire. I remember how the carts clogged the passages between the shacks and slums, but people only clambered over the top of them like insects. A bargemen, a non-Umghul, stood on the roof of a shack by the bay and screamed uselessly for order. An old man sat at the threshold of his hut, begging someone to help carry him. “The Ganthians will kill me! The Ganthians will kill me!” he cried over and over. I wonder if anybody stopped to help him. I wish to the Creator I could have.

Mother fastened her hand around my wrist and dragged me down the street. Tears made streaks down her dirty face. My foot sunk into the mud, and when Mother jerked me free I lost my woven shoe, but she didn’t hear me tell her so, or didn’t care. Father carried my little sister and a sack of belongings, and my older brother carried another bag. I was only a child, but I could tell we weren’t coming back. My mind latched onto the good iron cooking pot we’d left above the fire pit in our hut, but Father and Mother didn’t seem to care. “Come on, Nial, pick up your feet!” Mother kept yelling at me, screaming at me, begging me. I tried to tell her my leg got stuck in the muddy street again, but she wouldn’t listen. The wind whistled again and bit at my bare arms.

The bargeman looked down at his associate one more time, then cupped his hands around his mouth. “Last call!” he shouted. “Last call!”

Father dropped his bag and picked me up. “We have to go faster!” he yelled above the cacophony of the crowd. He too had tears running down his face. I’d never seen him cry before.

Ahead of us, close enough to fire an arrow but separated by a writhing crowd of bodies, floated the last barge heading upstream. The rest of them were fast disappearing to the east up the Tharam River, propelled by hundreds of tiny oars dipping synchronously into the water. Rearing from a tower of stone at the middle of the bay – nearly a mile from shore – stood the city of Ocather, gleaming in the last crimson rays of the departing sun. A single bridge spanned the bay from the city to our Northern Bank, and I could see the fires licking up the rotten wood. They’d locked the city gates and burned the bridge to keep the Umghur – us – from taking refuge within the walls. I wondered if we were going to die.

“Last call!” the bargeman yelled again.

We ran. Everyone ran. Belongings fell. We passed sacks of gold, silks, swords, children… Father knocked someone down, then leaped over someone else. I saw someone draw a sword. Many screamed. Snowflakes fell gently on reed-thatched roofs.

“Don’t stop running!” Father screamed. “Don’t stop running!” I think he was talking to himself.

A bell rang on the barge. I saw it drifting from the dock and out into the brackish water. People fell into the bay, turning the water’s edge white with their thrashing.

Father hit the shore, still carrying me and Sister, and lot his balance. The coldness struck me, enveloped me, and I went fully under. Salt went up into my head and the bay pressed against my ears.

Something yanked me from the water, dragging me by heavy clothes. I burst up and fell onto a hard wood surface like a lungfish tossed on a chopping board. Sister cried nearby as Mother comforted her. The wind whistled over us and prickled my wet skin like needles.

I looked out at the shoreline: my home, the Northern Bank, with rows of huts; the throng at the water’s edge; the souls drowning in the intervening waters between us and them; the deck beneath me packed with Umghul refugees, like me.

We made it onto the barge.

I screamed.

Father pulled himself on board with water dripping off his beard. “Verna!” he cried, “Verna!”

“I’m here!” Mother yelled from nearby.

My sister stood beside me, crying. I grabbed her hand to prevent her getting lost. I had to tell Mother I’d lost my shoe. She would be upset, but she had to know. She’d paid good coin for them.

“Fares!” cried someone, a non-Umghul by his accent. He pushed through the crowd toward Father. “You must pay fares to ride!”

My sister and I moved to Father’s side as he searched his pockets. “We don’t have money,” Mother said.

The bargeman shook his head and whistled to two large men near the front.

“We have money!” Father said quickly. “We can pay you when we reach Larensk!” But the bargemen didn’t respond and the big men moved closer. Sister began crying again.

“Here,” Big Brother stepped forward and handed the bargeman a sack of coins.

“Where did you get that?” Mother lit. Skerris wasn’t supposed to keep money to himself. That was the rule. Father didn’t object though.

The bargeman pushed one finger into the wet bag, shifting coins inside and muttering numbers to himself. He shook his head again. “This is only enough for three.”

Skerris bristled. “It is enough, you liar!”

“Fares increased an hour ago. Two of you will have to leave.” He made a gesture to his enforcers who were now only a few steps away.

“Please,” Father cried, “for the love of the Creator!”

“The Creator will protect you, I’m sure,” the bargeman said in resignation. “There’s not enough room.”

I looked at the shore vanishing behind us, then at the gleaming city. Both looked too far to swim.

“You can’t do this,” Mother wept, already beginning to shiver uncontrollably.

“What if only I go?” Father asked.

“No!” I screamed.

The bargeman held up two fingers.

“I’ll pay for them,” said a passenger sitting nearby. He made his way over to us. “I have the coin.” Old and toothless – a true Umghul, as Father would say. He even wore the bracelet of bones around his wrist which clinked and danced as he proffered the fare.

The bargemen snatched the coins and counted them slowly in his palm. He nodded. “Yes. This covers one more fare.”

“You’re lying!” Mother shrieked, but Father grabbed her by the waist, kissed her, and jumped overboard.

“Da!” I screamed and leaped after him.

Water surrounded me again. The light turned from dark teal to gray as I descended. My arms and legs flailed. I tried to remember what Undle Rore had taught me about swimming, but my clothes billowed around me and the river pulled me with its gelid hand. Cold. Airless. Lightless.

Something grabbed my arm and yanked me upward. My head broke above the water and the wind stung my cheeks like needles, but my lungs filled with frigid air. An arm slipped across my chest and held me fast.

“Nial! Damn you, Nial! What have you done?!”

Father’s voice. I didn’t reply. I was with him. That was all that mattered.

The barge floats away in the distance. I hear the slap of water against us, my father’s labored breaths moving in and out as we limp to shore, the crackle of fire on the bridge, my mother screaming.

The silt squeezed between my toes as we finally touched shore. By now the sun was gone, but snowflakes continued to fall. The wind bit my skin in a thousand places.

Father tore at the reeds and stuffed them down my shirt, scratching my skin. “Damn it, Nial, what have you done, boy? What have you done?”

Now I felt ashamed. I dropped my head. “I’m sorry, Da.”

“You should have stayed with your ma where you’d be safe. I could have made it to Larensk in less than three days travelling on my own. With you it will take longer. Why did you jump, Nial? Why didn’t you stay with your ma?”

I looked out between the reeds and across the bay. The highest towers of Ocather somehow still caught the last shards of warm light passing over the edge of the world. I knew the Cromish nobles hated us, but I’d always thought the city would defend the Bank if we were invaded. Now Ganth’s ships hurtled toward Ocather, and nobody in creation would help the Umghul.

I opened my mouth and told the truth: “I’m sorry, Da. I didn’t want to leave you.”

He stopped stuffing my shirt and stared at me. Though the light was failing, I could see his eyes were red and full of fear. I wanted him to be brave for us, needed him to say we would be alright. Instead he sat down and wept, and cradled me to his chest. I felt the heat of his body against mine, and, in that frozen moment, I truly believed we would survive.

The sound of drowning Umghul carries across the wind. The sun sets, and Ocather becomes a dark silhouette against the cold and cloudy sky. Snowflakes continue to fall into the night.

We walked inland where the berse grains grow until Father stopped and declared we would rest for the night. “Shouldn’t we start a fire?” I asked because I was cold.

“No,” Father responded, “not tonight.”

He woke me early before dawn. The cold infested my arms and legs until my whole body ached. Snow dusted everything in sight.

We walked all day that day, our path paralleling the Tharam River, and nothing happened. No travelers, no barges, no food. Once, I saw a barn owl swoop and snatch a rat from between the stalks, but that only reminded me how hungry I’d become, and how Father plodded on without word or explanation. Sometimes I asked for him to stop and rest, but he only told me to keep walking. “We have to catch up with Ma and the others. We can rest once we reach Larensk.”

We trudged on. The road wound on and on, the berse grew taller and taller as we walked until it swayed taller than Father. I became miserably cold, especially my one naked foot. Then sun set, but still we didn’t stop.

“Da,” I finally said, exhausted and frustrated, “I’m tired. I can’t walk anymore.”

Father turned and looked at me, his face shrouded in darkness. He stood that way for what seemed like forever as the wind grew stronger and rustled the berse. “Alright, Nial,” he finally said.

That night, we encountered the wraiths.

Their song carried across the berse plains, moving in the breeze, inhabiting the blackness. Their pale light moved between the seven-foot stalks and played across our rapt and tortured faces. They say the wraith’s song is irresistible to an Umghul, that they are lured to their doom as moths to a flame. Even at such a young age, I felt my soul reach out, felt Father quaver as he held me tightly against his chest, even as the pale lights passed a mere dozen feet from us. My mouth opened to speak, to say something to these revenants, but Father muzzled me with his hand.

“Don’t speak,” he hissed into my ear. “For the love of the Creator, please don’t speak!” His warm tears testified to his struggle.

I remember the stories the elders would tell around cookfires after the guards’ patrols ended and most of us had fallen asleep. Haunting fables of how the Tharam turned to poison a thousand years ago, and how the wraiths were once maidens sacrificed by their fathers to old gods to save our people. Those dead maidens now drifted aimlessly across the endless berse plains, looking for the fathers who killed them. Some might not believe me, but I have heard their laments with my own ears, and felt their cold light upon my skin. I pray every one of them finds rest, and I pray their fathers are never forgiven. Not until the Tharam runs dry, and a thousand years more.

Father woke me early again. I complained of fatigue and stiff limbs, but he paid no heed, keeping silent as he did when burdened by worries. I would later come to wonder if he slept at all for our entire journey.

We resumed our trek. A warm breeze drifted in from the ocean, and collided with the river to produce a thick fog lit yellow from the rising sun. Only my bare foot felt cold now, but I was thoroughly famished. Father picked some berse seeds off the stalks and gave them to me as we walked. At first I hesitated, as the berse belonged to the nobles in Ocather and Hoglen and harvesting them was forbidden us by law. But Father insisted, so I took them, and immediately felt youthful frisson at defying the monarchy. The seeds turned out a bitter, unsatisfying respite, but thwarted my hunger enough to leave be grateful. “Suck on them,” Father suggested, demonstrating by packing a few seeds into his gum. “They last longer that way.” I giggled, for his filled cheeks made him look like a squirrel.

“Da,” I asked, “what will we do when we reach Larensk?”

“Find Ma and the others.”

“But what after that?”

“Find a place to live.”

“Will you be a tailor again?”

“Most likely.”

“But where will you get a new loom?”

“I might have to borrow one for a while. We—”

Father stopped. A saddled horse with no rider stood not thirty paces ahead, obscured by the dense fog.

“That’s far enough,” a soldier with a Cromish accent shouted. He and another approached us with pikes raised.

Father shoved me behind him and put his hands up. “We mean no trouble, sirs. We’re only passing through.”

“And passing along intelligence, I wonder,” the second one said. His uniformed red doublet gleamed in the spare sunlight. “They’re probably spies.” Someone further back in the fog called out, and the second soldier answered. It became clear from the density of voices and presence of equipment that we had stumbled into a small Cromish checkpoint.

“Please!” Father begged, taking steps backward that drove me closer to the edge of the road. “We mean no trouble! We’re from Ocather, and we’re heading to Larensk!”

“Stop moving!” the second soldier yelled. “Where are you going?”

“Please!” Father said again, this time with a hand on my shoulder, willing me to disappear into the grains. I couldn’t leave him. I batted his hand away and made a sob.

“There’s a child with him. Don’t let the child go either. You, stop moving!” Somewhere in the distance, I thought I could hear hoofbeats. Or perhaps it was my own heart.

“Please! Take me, but not my boy!”

“I said stop moving! Not another step! That child’s coming with us too!”

“Please sirs, no! Please let us go!”

I heard the mechanized double-tick of a pistol being cocked. My breath left my lungs.

“Stop!”

Hoofbeats again, truly there this time. Many of them, and nearby, and growing closer. I looked behind us and saw the massive riders materializing out of the gloom.

“It’s an attack…” the first soldier gasped far too late. “We’re under attack! Cavalry! Cavalry!”

Father shoved me wholly into the shadow of the berse moments before the cavalry thundered down the road and through the open space where we’d stood. The sounds of pistols cracking and blades clashing and the scent of gunpowder and ferrous blood filled the air. “Da!” I screamed, running straight back to the road then stopping dead and leaping backwards again as a horseman erupted from the berse stalks just in front of me. I narrowly avoiding the strike of the beast's back hooves, then ran back to the road where the melee had crescendoed into a bloodbath of dying infantrymen and horsemen slicing through their ranks.

I coughed and rubbed my eyes from the sulfuric clouds of gun smoke and looked out upon the carnage. But a few seconds into the battle, and already so many bodies. Still more soldiers fighting or fleeing. Horsemen darting in and out. Loam tossed skyward from their stampede. And Father nowhere to be seen.

I don’t know whether I screamed or cried or kept silent, but I remember running, skirting away from the cavalry, checking each body for Father. Some I found already dead. Some lingered around death's threshold, still choking on their own blood. Some were wholly uninjured and merely whimpering. Most were Big Brother’s age. When I rolled one over, he grabbed me by my clothes and began shaking me. "Forgive me!" he shouted in his throes, "Forgive me!"

"I forgive you!" I shouted back reflexively, for I didn't know what to say. He looked into my eyes as if seeing me for the first time and relaxed his grip momentarily, so I wrenched myself away and continued my search.

The battle raged on as I scurried from one doomed face to another like a caterpillar inching desperately through a mighty hurricane. I don’t know what I was thinking – I don’t know that I was thinking at all – but the one lucid thought I clung to was that I had to find Father. I had to. I had to.

Someone grabbed me and tackled me to the ground, and that was when I truly did scream and bit the hand of my attacker, but it was Father, and he lay upon me and shouted in my ear to remain still until I finally heard him and obeyed.

We lay there for what seemed hours. Until every Cromish soldier had fallen or fled. Until every Ganthian horsemen was sated with their butchery. Until the sundry noises of wind whispering against the berse stalks prevailed over the sounds of the dying. Then we got up and ran.

When we finally stopped, we collapsed on the edge of the Tharam and drank greedily from the small pools at its edge.

I look out across the meandering waters. Images of bloodied faces and screaming horses still swim in my imagination. When I turn back to say something to Father, he’s fallen asleep from exhaustion. I move next to him and fall asleep too.

When we woke it was nearly morning again– we'd slept all day and through most of the night. The pale lights emerged again to sing their chants into the frozen night, but did not approach us. I believe they fed on the wounded left at yesterday's skirmish.

In the morning, Father led me on a different path, apart from the road. He said he needed to visit an old friend, and wore a resolute expression I’d seen when he came to an important decision. We walked straight into the plains, Father cutting a path between the stalks as I followed as closely behind as I could. Whatever his objective, I could not fathom. We'd lived our whole lives on the Northern Bank... what friend could he possibly know out here?

After some time walking seemingly aimlessly away from the Tharam, we stumbled onto a cowpath lined with fresh patties and still infested with flies. Father seemed pleased. The path took us deeper and deeper, and stalks grew higher and higher. When the wind blew and the tops of the stalks bent over us, the cowpath went almost completely dark. I’d heard of berse growing so tall, but never seen it.

After many hours, we came to a gnarled wooden stump by the path, topped with a cow skull and leis of tiny purple flowers. Father smiled and told me we were getting closer, setting a faster pace than before. My bare foot felt colder and colder.

We arrived at a hole nearly as wide as I was tall running at an angle into the ground at the center of a small clearing. An almost imperceptible trickle of smoke tumbled out the opening in the ground, and I could smell burning tallow. Father stopped me from entering the clearing, but bent down to me and trenchantly whispered instructions: “We are going to meet some people, and we might be here for some time. I need you to trust me. You mustn’t say a word. You hear me? Not a single word the entire time we are here. Next, we are going to walk out into this clearing with our hands apart like this. Just like this. Do it with me, raise your arms... good. Only when they see we are unarmed will they come out.”

We did so, just as he said. And just as he said, three shirtless men emerged from the berse stalks to surround us, each brandishing a bow and leveling a nocked arrow at Father. I grew afraid until Father began speaking to them in the Umghur tongue, a language I’d been taught but never retained. Father said something about a long journey, about Umghur, and about soldiers.

The bowmen lowered their aim, and one responded to father in the guttural language. I’d never heard Umghur spoken fluently by anyone so young, for the Cromish nobles had outlawed the language before I was born. I felt deeply confused, but nobody seemed bothered by my reticence, so I kept silent. Father spoke to them at length, telling them his name, and something about wraiths, I think. They even laughed at a few things he said, and one of them approached and tousled my hair and spoke nicely to me, though I don’t know what he said. Eventually they invited us into the hole. Father helped lower me down, then crawled in after me.

Only one torch lit the underground, spilling light across the dingy dwelling. Father left to confer with a man in another deeper cavity separated by cowskin, entrusting me to the care of a big man who I later learned was named Harrim. While there, Father only spoke to me in Umghur, but gave me a grave look and squeezed my shoulder, so I obeyed.

It took some time to adjust to the darkness, but when I did I saw many chests bearing Cromish insignia, and a whole corner of the hole packed with tunics, doublets, and armor just like those the doomed soldiers had worn yesterday. Harrim sat in the opposite corner humming a vaguely familiar tune from my childhood lullabies and working the knots out of a cowskin with calloused hands.

Father reemerged, this time followed by a much older man with metal rings piercing his cheeks, eyebrows, lips, ears, and forehead. The older man laughed as Father said something, then slapped eyes on me and grew serious. He approached and scrutinized me, stooping to initiate some sort of inspection. He pulled at my ears, inspected my tongue, and even pinched my calf. I might have cried if not for Father’s hand on my shoulder. I’d grown up being told to avoid Umghur with rings on their faces. They say every piercing stood for a man that man had killed, and having such a piercing was punishable by death. I looked at Father again, and his expression told me everything was alright.

We stay in the hole for the night, the warmest night we’ve had since leaving the Northern Bank. The wraiths still chant their cursed hymns, but they remained outside, and I can hear Father’s soft snoring against my back.

The next morning, my limbs felt sorer than ever, but Harrim gave me a strip of leather to chew on. The old man gave Father a supply bag, and one of the young bowmen guided us back to the road, taking us on unseen routes to avoid the soldiers’ checkpoints. Father’s spirits lifted high, and though the sky remained overcast, he fed me small strips of jerky.

It took us most of the day, but finally I saw the plumes of smoke rising into the sky above the grain. “There it is, Da!” I shouted. “There’s Larensk!” Father smiled.

As we approached, we met more and more Umghur refugees. Most were haggard and wet, and some stared with obvious interest at Father’s satchel. He hid it under his shirt and took my hand, telling me to put away my strip of leather. The Tharam River appeared again, and I could see the first sets of Larensk’s docks along the banks. We had made it. We had made it.

“Da, how will we find Ma?”

We checked each dock, and even found where many of the barges had made land, but none from Ocather’s Northern Bank. “This is the Southern Bank,” a bargeman barked impatiently at us, “the Northern is further down!”

We walked on, passing increasingly despondent and desperate refugees. Anxiety welled within me at each set of docks.

“Bargeman,” Father asked, “where is the last barge to leave the Northern Bank?”

The bargeman looked away. “One tipped on the way here,” he said in irritation.

“What?! Where? Where?!”

“Just south of here, about a mile. We received word it tipped but an hour ago.”

Father danced on his feet for a moment, pulling at his hair.

“Da?...”

“Nial,” Father turned to me aggressively, “Nial, listen to me: I need you to stay right here. You hear me? Right here.”

“But Da…”

“No, Nial. I need you to stay this time. I’ll be right back, you hear?”

“But Da…”

“Right. Back.”

“No! You can’t go without me!”

“Nial, please, I have to go get Ma and the others. Please.”

He began to move off but I grabbed his hem.

“Nial, please! Please stay!” He pointed to the bargeman. “See this man? Stay right by him. Promise me you’ll stay right by him!”

I looked at the man, then back at Father.

“Promise!”

“I promise!” I said, and began to cry.

“Good,” Father said. He grabbed my shoulders and wiped a smudgy tear off my cheek with his thumb. “I will be back.”

I looked down.

“Nial! I will be back! I promise!”

I looked into his eyes, and saw his were wet too. I hesitantly nodded.

He planted a kiss on my forehead. “I love you son.”

I nodded, unable to reply through the tears.

“I will be back. I promise.”

I nodded.

He leaves, disappearing into the crowd of refugees, headed back the direction we came. I remember what he looked like leaving me. It's the last memory I have of him.