Work Text:
About a stone-cast from the wall
A sluice with blacken'd waters slept,
And o'er it many, round and small,
The cluster'd marish-mosses crept.
Hard by a poplar shook alway,
All silver-green with gnarled bark:
For leagues no other tree did mark
The level waste, the rounding gray.
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Mariana”
***
The river hills of Isvaroë had cradled him as a child like his own mother’s arms. Now, under a sky sometimes the hue of lead and sometimes an exhausted, pale blue, Maia felt exposed on all sides like a small, hunted creature. A pathetic little grey hare as he had heard Setheris once describe him, surrounded not by hunters but by the land itself. The empty, flat stretch of reeds and still, murky water lay over grey-brown mud like dirty glass over a tarnished mirror, dragging itself on in every direction toward fringes of trees toward the east and south, and to the north, the foothills of the distant steppe. Here there was no shelter from the sky, only shallow blankness the likes of which Maia had never imagined in his most desolate dreams. In the first week as he lay in his bed, back to the bubbled and warped panes of the window, he could not even bear to turn his face toward the weak spring sunlight, let alone look on the place he had been brought to.
He was never encouraged to explore the Edonara, and for the first year he could have counted the times he set foot past the walls of Edonomee on one hand, preferring to observe it at a distance when he could bear to at all. Strange birds, dull-feathered and small, built nests in the eaves near his window. Trickles of water advanced and retreated, scribing unsteady trails in the silty mud. Tall stalks with lumpen brown heads grew near the edges of pools, rustling with breezes heavy with the scent of decaying plants. Once, gazing from his room following some confinement by Setheris, he watched as Haru drove forward with his pitchfork to pin the head of a snake colored black and a dull amber hue. With a child’s detachment he observed Haru crush the head under his boot, vaguely remembering the gardener’s description to him the prior week of dangerous, insignificant beasts and how they ought to be dealt with.
Snow fell, creating the treacherous semblance of paths over clustered mosses and grasses matted under their own dying weight. Snow melted, inundating the outlying grounds with mud that caused the courtyard’s flagstones to squelch with every footstep and sharp-edged weeds to sprout in the stone cracks near the unused stables. At times sun broke through the clouds, illuminating the world around him in hues of gold and lead, and Maia would pause in his reading or meditation to look on the place that had received him—a land free of malice but also of compunction, uncaring what lived or died within its expanse.
The Edonara was still too open, laid bare under the gaze of distant crags and sky, but in it there were places for small creatures to hide, eking out existences that little could be said for save their being existences at all. Beyond the courtyard, through the crumbled portion of the wall beside the rear stable gate, stands of the brown-headed cattail reeds stood higher than Maia’s head, their slender stalks a welcoming hideaway through which he might slip unnoticed. Despite Setheris’s occasional stares across the flat, glooming wastes, whether to catch him in some wrongdoing or simply longing for what he had left behind Maia could not say, such shelter allowed him escape from that harsh gaze. Among the rushes he might have been any of the creatures unseen by the distant observer, or nothing at all. There he might sit back on his heels examining clutches of eggs the size and opacity of fingernails in which small creatures he could not name writhed and pulsed with burgeoning life, or observe the more living creatures—skittish frogs, dragonflies as long as his arm, on one occasion a snake that ribboned over his boot and was gone before he might have deemed it either dangerous or insignificant. Once, near dusk, he had begun back toward the manor in anticipation of Setheris’s late return from business in Calestho when before him flashed a heron’s steely grey plumage, a silvery fish of the sort that lived in some of the deeper pools thrashing briefly in its beak in the late orange-gold sunlight. The bird regarded Maia with a wary contempt that evoked something of his guardian in its yellow eye before stepping away through a stand of sharp sedge grass into the Edonara.
He knew the names of almost nothing, and procuring them from the servants resulted in single-word answers and hasty retreats, or in rebukes from Setheris for wasting his time. In one literally moldering section of the library he found among shelves of legal precedents and carefully filed periodicals a slender volume entitled A Huntsman’s Guide to the Thu-Evresar Marshes, apparently a relic of Edonomee’s days as a functional hunting lodge. The book dealt mainly in techniques for tracking and killing things with parties of men and dogs, but the woodcut illustrations and the lexicon of creatures that might be killed for such sport caught his attention and thence allowed him to add marsh grouse, Evreseise roe, and the elusive catoblepas to his vocabulary of cattail, sedge and heron. On days when he felt particularly bold he smuggled the book out of the house under his jacket, comparing black ink with living feathers or bark and so committing them to memory in the absence of any other teacher save those who had trod these same lands long before his time.
Elves as well as beasts frequented the swamps, mainly the occasional courier making his way along the circuitous and badly-kept road from Khalno to Aveio. At times trappers approached the lodge—poachers, Setheris sneered, wretched criminals; I will box thine ears if thou speak’st to them—to trade braces of waterfowl or small fish or even flayed snakes to flat-eared, narrow-eyed Kevo who nonetheless refused to turn up her nose at ways to supplement the meager food budget. None of them even attempted speaking to Maia, usually starting back at his sudden and incongruous appearance or ignoring him completely. On one occasion, a ragged man who seemed to be Haru’s kinsman appeared outside the groundskeeper’s quarters one night with a flask of wine procured from the more arable eastern reaches and the promise of tales. Half of the tales Maia hardly understood, but the tales of the marshes caught his fancy even as they terrified him: Wild cats, cousins to the nazhcreis of the steppe, who stole from trapping lines and savaged those who sought to protect their quarries. Flight into trackless wastes from Thu-Evresada men and the subsequent nights hidden in thick stands of reeds open to the elements and praying to the gods for concealment. Stranger creatures even than the elusive catoblepas: four-armed, story-tall lizards, man-faced lions, restless spirits of the drowned and incautious dead that roamed the forested fringes of the Edonara waylaying and absconding with those less fortunate than Haru and his kin. Crouched outside the cottage the night long, Maia listened until the exchange of stories became an exchange of snores and he had no choice but to creep back across the grounds and up the stairs to his bedroom on the second story.
His unstifleably wide yawns the following day earned him a split lip where one of Setheris’s rings caught him across the face, but the notes of the conversation that he managed to compile from memory in the margins of his single workbook were enough, that day, for him to weather the pain. In following days he began to collect odd scraps of paper, newspaper byleaves and grocer’s bills and letters deemed by Setheris too unimportant for anything but kindling. Onto the emptiest of their expanses went these stories and more, kept from the eyes of those around him in a secluded corner of Edonomee’s Othasmeire where no one save him ever went. The neatly-bound pages, entitled Reflections upon the Thu-Evresar Marshes, Written by the Archduke Maia Drazhar in the Years of His Relegation Thence, allowed him to dream of the world beyond, the great publishing houses of Cetho or Ashedro which might, one day, give his hobgoblin’s scribblings a second glance. These compilations took him farther and farther into the marshes, for charcoal rubbings of certain plant leaves, for notes on the nesting habits of egrets, for poor attempts at diagrams of the algae that bloomed startlingly green and delicate in stagnant pools. Some expeditions left him in possession of breathtaking white water lilies, or with sights of obscure birds to cross-reference in the Huntsman's Guide. Others led to hours of sifting through mounds of dead cattails which revealed nothing more than midges and murky water. Still, wonder for the most part outweighed frustration and disappointment until, in the pursuit of a species of swallow which seemed to winter there from the steppe, one long expedition near his twelfth birthday led him into a pool deeper than it looked, whence he emerged covered in leeches and half-drowned from a dive he had taken from a buried tangle of weeds. The damp chill left him with a rattling cough and a fever that took near two weeks to abate, exacerbated by a catch in his breathing from where Setheris had struck him for returning in ruined, muddied clothing. In the chapel… my things… bring them, please? he had begged Pelchara, Kevo and Setheris in turn, but nothing appeared in his room. By the time his weakened legs would bear him to the Othasmeire he found the papers clammy and mildewed beyond reading with the permeating damp of winter. His heart, too taxed by illness to even properly break, felt leaden in his chest as he turned his back on the small niche, never to avail himself of its space again.
He might have re-embarked on his scholarly work had he not begun to grow past the point that the cattails’ shelter no longer hid him from the fly-speckled windows of the lodge, prompting regular interrogations from Setheris regarding his doings. Afraid of Setheris’s inevitable condemnation of such a laughable undertaking, afraid that this small diversion too would be denied him (particularly with its allowance of escape from under his guardian’s thumb) Maia argued for the benefits of exercise, citing the lack of horses or anything else more befitting one of his class. Setheris’s scorn that the uncouth hobgoblin would choose to befoul himself with the muds and miasmas of such a place was token at best and he did not forbid Maia anything. And so Maia walked, surrounded by the far-off booming of bitterns and the smell of still water and plant rot. Since his early days, the odor that had at first felt like to choke him he now barely recognized save for changes in its particulars: the precise, sharp edge that presaged snow, the loamish, bloomy scent of spring, the odd, mineral tang carried from the foothills by the northern winds. Where rock met water, eons of dripping marsh had hollowed caves in the mountainsides where strange creatures were said to dwell and where the southern steppe barbarians had once conducted rituals to their strange gods before Edrevenivar the Conquerer had driven them back from Aveio. At times Maia wished he might one day see those caves, to explore their alien depths or (in darker moods) to sink into the stone far from his mother’s beloved stars never to return. There he would be shielded more surely than by the marshes which no longer left him feeling an insignificance on an empty flat stretch but which felt teeming and alive some days and as bleak and empty as his own life on others.
In his eighteenth year, a breeding pair of cranes nested in an expanse just visible through the window of Maia’s room. From the writing desk where he perused the library’s dwindling number of books he had not yet read and occasionally prayed on nights when Cstheio Caireizhasan’s realm was not obscured by unwholesome mists he came to know them near as well as he knew the rest of the household. The two went about their days in a seemingly constant dance, bowing and weaving toward each other as they twined dead reeds into a nest, as they faced the swamp’s caprices, as they stalked through the shallows in pursuit of frogs and small fish. Is this what thou’rt reduced to? Staring at birds like an imbecile for the rest of thy days? he mused. Still, it was not without a spark of joy that he observed as the patience of each alternately still and dancing bird produced three orange-brown chicks that scurried about the waterlogged mats of horsetails and sedges with a vivacity that both belied and complimented their surroundings. He had thought to name them Vana, Vanis and Vanet for the wondertale, though his complete inability to tell them apart as they grew quickly put an end to such fancy. A Huntsman’s Guide to the Thu-Evresar Marshes spoke of fledging at seventy days of age, which seemed to hold true as the scrambling gait and shrill cries that carried through his window’s open casement slowly became a more stately adolescent silence, as clumping amber down gave way to untidy protrusions of feathers that stuck out from them at odd angles.
Following these seventy days, Maia braced himself for the stripling cranes to simply vanish in a flurry of new-fledged grey and pearlescent white. In practice, however, the departure was as slow as the original process had been sudden. The chicks’ heads began to clear the tops of the reed beds and suddenly they were running along the flat stretches, over quagmire and solid earth alike, before rising into the sky with a flurry of stick legs and wings that caused something to flutter in Maia’s throat like the beat of those same wings. For some months it was a rare day that he did not see one floundering its way into the sky, but gradually their appearances became more and more infrequent until one final one made its last appearance, a dark shape against a clouded sky in late autumn. From the corner of the bedchamber that the season had already begun to sweep with draughts and ice over with frost, Maia could only watch its wind-born progress south toward Barizhan and beyond. Something in the sight was enough to penetrate the resignation that had become a part of him as surely as the land itself, sending a pang of soaring longing through his heart as painful as it was buoyant. In time the bird vanished into the clouds, leaving only Maia’s own desire to fall up and up into the sky in its wake, the marsh stretching futiley below him as oblivion claimed him, caught between the stars and the mud.