Welcome to Gaia! ::

word count: 3300
06/08

It was raining on the Garde.

The nightingale, while she had not yet laid eyes on it, could be heard sounding somewhat forlorn from somewhere near the ruined gatehouse, answered at times by some of its fellows off in the distant trees. But as she worked her way further into the maze of tunnels beneath the bailey - attempting to consult Viatrix's map as she went, but without a great deal of success due to her own poor sense of direction - the sound grew distant, swallowed up first by the rain and then by silence.

She had no particular goals, save for getting some idea of where the most work would be needed. She had arrived with the pleasant idea of taking a day off from the labor of exploring and clearing the place - perhaps only doing as much as required to find the boat and see if it was seaworthy - and found her plans for leisure thwarted by the dismal skies.

The weather seemed to dampen even Gouvernail's already-dour spirits, rendering him not just quiet but nearly silent. It had been a storm, of course, on that day that must have overturned all his ideas of what his existence now was, but there was no cursed lightning, now, to let him reach out a hand and touch reality. Or perhaps this was all projection on her part, and he was only impatient that the rain kept him from seeing her progress with the whip.

If it was that, then it was for the best that she was spared. She had not yet found a way to practice that had suited her ideas of privacy, and had therefore made no progress at all besides watching and attempting to internalize more Youtube videos - and very little of that. But he did not ask, and she was spared from answering, whatever his suspicions might have been.

She paused at the mouth of a door that led downwards again, unblocked and unbarred, the air that rose up from beneath feeling cool and dry. She passed the beam of her flashlight around the stone, and found it - as so much of the Garde was - richly ornamented. The murals here seemed largely intact, and she paused to muse over them.

"Kind of ominous," she said, without expecting a reply and therefore without disappointment when she received none. The light lingered as if with a will of its own on the particularly vivid panel, where a lady in a red gown reclined - dead or unconscious - on a cushioned couch beneath a spreading canopy of fruiting trees, her eyes covered by a veil whose flaking, gilded paint glinted in the beam. To one side of her and separated by an ornately wrought frame, a knight, incongruously in his chain mail and with the Tristram knot of the Garde worked on his tunic, rested on a piled-high bed before a window where snow fell thickly.

The theme continued when, after a pause, she continued her steady creep downwards, and realized that she was viewing some sort of story, unfolding backwards: designed to be understood by someone walking up the stairs from below. A man - a servant, she surmised, from his simple dress - bound the lady's eyes in the golden blindfold, and further down a maid removed her from her opulent gown and put her into the simple scarlet one. And further still, she gazed from a tall window across a vast sea, whose fantastical creatures and stylized waves comprised most of the rest of the walk, and at the other side of which the knight, in green and brown, lifted his eyes from the opposite shore, towards the lady who lay across the ocean.

She paused before him, finding herself unconsciously searching for a resemblance between him and Gouvernail - moved, perhaps, by the similarity of their clothing. But whoever the model for that figure had been, it had not been Gouvernail: the knight in the painting, with his hair long and golden, looked more than anything like a male version of herself. It was a coincidence, of course, but it was an unpleasant one, and she turned away from it, swinging the light around the chamber she had just entered: small, with a wider door across from where she stood, devoid of any item save for a central pillar so wide that she could not have put her arms around it. This was adorned with figures that, as she approached, proved to be skeletal beneath their festive clothing, and she paused.

She was not afraid of these kinds of things in general. She had, as she'd drily told Encke and Viatrix, after all been a former goth. It was not the morbidity of the figures or even the oppressive, drafty, dry darkness that prickled the skin on her arms. It was the sudden instinct that she must have drawn near that crypt, which Gouvernail had long ago mentioned and which she had avoided out of a strange sense that to approach it with a dead man at her side would be both cruel and unbearable.

She turned, thinking that perhaps she would simply return the way she had come. But Gouvernail stood, almost invisible in the darkness, on the last step which she had just descended. The scene of the knight gazing over the sea was outlined behind his ghostly form: a painted figure turning with longing towards the unseen lady halfway up the staircase.

The former Garde looked at her with an air of suspended expectation, his hand pressed to his side in that habitual gesture, looking for a sword that was not there and never had been in this guise. He did not move, to give her space to return up the stairs - as he always did, as if she could not have simply walked through him if she wished - nor did he speak. He only looked at her, patiently watchful.

"I think I should turn around," she said, despising herself for how timid it sounded.

"Why?" he said flatly.

She did not answer immediately, hesitating, bouncing the flashlight in her fingers until the flashing on the walls made her feel sick. "I just do," she said at last.

"Are you afraid, Lady?" he asked, with a touch of coldness, and she bristled, even though in truth she knew that she was - not of the dark, nor of crypts, but of something that she could not name, and which churned her stomach not infrequently, now, when she was in his company.

"No," she said. She hated lying. She hated lying to herself most of all. But she lied, now, out of a feeling that if she did not, she would somehow suffocate under a sudden and unavoidable truth. "I just don't know what good it's gonna do me."

"What good does any of it do you?" The question was defiant, quick - snapped out with that sudden temper of his. She was, again, not immediately able to answer. He had said that he did not hate her, and he had promised not to lie to her. But she had often suspected since he said it that he was lying to himself, and despised her as much as he ever had.

"Fine," she said at last, feeling her stomach turn again. "But stay behind here."

It was the spark to touch the explosive tinder she had felt in that last question. "Again and again," he spat. "This need to shield my -"

"No," she said, lifting her voice to interrupt him and jolting like a startled baby animal when it echoed back at her from the stone. "Not to shield you. To shield me. I can't deal with it," she said, forcing the confession out. She did not need to say what "it" was, as both of them already knew: to stand in front of a sacrosanct home for corpses, with a ghost at her side whom she could not help and whose thoughts she would not be brave enough to ask for. He might be prepared to look on the reminder of his own suspended mortality. But she could not look on it while he stood there in silence next to her.

It was his turn, then, to be long silent. But he spoke at last, through gritted teeth. "I will stay, then, Lady," he said, with that little dip of his head that he always had when he was bending to a request she had made. "As you wish it."

So she went beyond him, into the wide dark doorway which curved downwards still into air still cooler and drier, and she left him behind in the blackness, and found herself - as she knew she would - in the crypts at last.

She had expected, vaguely, something much grander: had in some abstract way imagined a vault for as many bodies as a busy castle could afford over several lifetimes. But the room was small, and it was neither opulent nor grand, and there were no narrow little shelves such as she had seen in books. Instead, heavy boxes of stone fanned out around a central dais: coffins, most of them closed with heavy lids on which rested an inch of ancient dust.

Some were open, however, and towards one of these she stepped, trying to move boldly, although she suddenly quailed for reasons she could not name. Back home - or even above ground, in the dreary rain noise - she would have asserted with confidence her willingness to look at some mouldering old corpse. But she had to fight, now, to step up onto the platform and peek into the first open box.

It was empty, and she exhaled, stirring up a cloud of dust that left her coughing. The second, too, was empty, and she had just begun to relax at the idea that all of them might be empty - and she had many excuses for why she would not open the others - when her approach to the third showed her almost immediately that it was not empty at all. Her flashlight caught on scarlet fabric, dusty and sunken into the ribs of a figure that was not rotted, but mummified by the crypt air. A sheet of heavy green velvet concealed her face, worked in the Earth rune. Long hair, its color indistinguishable but perhaps, she thought, once very dark, was arranged in intact braids at the lady's sides, and her arms were crossed over those sunken ribs, like dry twigs inside sleeves opulently embroidered with a motif that, she realized as she leaned nearer, was comprised of the ring of the Earth rune entwined with the Garde's own Tristram knot.

She backed away, forcing herself to turn to the next open coffin. The darkness at her back suddenly felt oppressive, populated with contemptuous eyes, as she leaned over the edge of the box already knowing, somehow, what she would see within.

She had once wondered what it was that Gouvernail had looked like, when he was not the Garde - wondered what he wore and what he carried besides the sword that he was constantly and instinctively reaching for. She at least knew, now, what he had been buried with. She stood mute and numb, her blood rushing in her ears, and looked down at the Earth rune draped over his face, the rust-red fabric thick and heavy enough to conceal the contours of what she knew must be little better than a skull beneath; the hair, like the other's, was too gone to time to have any distinct color remaining, but she recognized the choppy, careless sweep of it off of his temples, the cut done as if hastily by someone with more concern for convenience than beauty. A golden circlet wound around his brow, clinging to the sliver of exposed, shriveled, greyish skin above the veil - almost a crown - and other glints of gold and gem caught the beam of her flashlight as she rested it gingerly on the edge of the coffin to free her hands.

She leaned over the coffin, feeling almost as if she watched herself doing so from somewhere above her own head: watched herself reaching out to touch the rusted remnants of a sword at his side, where he always moved as if to rest his hand on it; reaching out to touch the heavy golden chain strung across his sunken ribs. He had always carried himself with a sort of aloof superiority; he had described himself as the son of a rich man. But to see him draped in gold gave it a truth that the abstract mention never had. He had always struck her as a soldier; at rest, even with his sword at his side, he was more of a prince.

With ginger caution she touched the crumbling, flaking leather gloves, which were folded over his chest, and she passed her fingers over the gilded embossing on the backs of his hands: seagulls, she realized numbly. He had haunted this place for a thousand years - and what that haunting had been like for him she had never had the courage to ask - and he had listened to the dying of the seagulls, and then a thousand years of silence where their raucous cries had once been, and all the while he wandered a castle that had once been his and where, now, his own body shriveled up in this cold crypt beneath his phantom feet.

Without realizing what she did - still seeming to observe herself with detached fascination from some other place - she slipped her fingers beneath his, feeling the weight of rings inside those gloves, and rested her thumb gently on the shape of the seagull, passing it back and forth: an instinctive gesture, such as one might use when holding the hand of a grieving friend.

Dreamlike, she closed her hand gently, but not gently enough. With a sick sound, the ancient, dry-rotted leather gave way beneath her touch. She felt for an instant, her stomach lurching, the papery skin beneath, stretched with fragile tightness over the bones of a hand that now had so often reached uselessly for her own, and for a single hysterical moment she almost expected the corpse, now, to lift her fingers to its horrible lips. But she stumbled back, snatching back the flashlight, the beam of which landed in the next - and final - open coffin. It was not empty. It contained within it, neatly laid out as if in waiting and without any dust at all to mar it, a sheet of pale, steel blue velvet: a veil worked with an Earth rune.

A horrible realization seized her, and she immediately vomited onto the dais floor. Some awful instinct told her to remain silent: to stifle her retching, to even attempt to crouch to minimize the sounds of the splash, lest Gouvernail in the next room hear her through the oppressive silence. She leaned with her hand on the edge of one of the coffins, trying frantically to catch her breath, scrubbing her mouth on her sleeves and succumbing to a second round of unproductive retching before she could right herself again.

Part of her wanted to reach into that last box, remove that horrible veil, and tear it in half. But she could not. She could not make herself look at it again. Instead she heaved herself up to lean on the box that was Gouvernail's, right next to it, and her trembling light caught on yet more gold, along with the glint of some gem set in it: a ring, loose on the desiccated finger, exposed when her fumbling backwards had torn away half that rotted glove. She paused, trying to gulp in air as silently as she could, and then - moved by some defiant instinct that she could not name - she reached out and snatched it from his hand.

She assumed the shape of the Garde - let him wonder why if he wanted; perhaps he would think that she had wanted the extra strength to move those heavy stone lids; perhaps he might even think that she had been afraid. The truth was that she wanted to hide the vomit on her sleeves, and she wanted to thrust the ring, as she now did, into subspace, with some sort of frantic paranoia as if she might be accused of some theft at any moment. The irrational and impulsive act somehow seemed to calm her and to thrust her back into her own body; the floating dreamlike feeling popped like a bubble and she fell still.

She hated to lie. But this one was necessary, and so it was with complete calmness - with a composure of expression that was even serene and queenly - that she returned to the antechamber. As she stepped into it she noticed, at the base of that broad pillar, a glimmer of light in a crack near the floor - so slight as to have been drowned out, before, by her flashlight. With a sick sense of certainty that she did not want to know what that light was, she swept past it to where Gouvernail still stood on the lowest stair and where, as expected, he stepped out of her way in a useless gesture of politeness.

She said nothing as she moved past him, back up the stairs, past the knight gazing at his lady, past her preparations for bed, past their sleeping in their golden masks. But she stopped at the head of the stairs, arrested by what she had not noticed before, and which her beam of light now rested on.

The conclusion of the mural's story was spread before her at the wall opposite the stairs. The golden-haired knight and his red-clad lady, now divested of their masks, clasped one another in their arms beneath a fantastical night time sky: neither orchards nor snow were now spread above them, but gilded stars and multiple crescent moons.

She stood for some time looking at it in silence, fighting back the last scraps of nausea still clinging to her, and for the first time that day Gouvernail volunteered a comment.

"United in dreaming of one another. I was told, when I took on the Garde, that to sleep soundly and dream pleasantly was the reward of those who did the duty of the Garde well."

"Sweet dreams for those with a clear conscience," she suggested, with a touch of cynicism. It felt good to be cynical; she closed her mind around it with relief.

"I suppose so, yes."

"I always sleep well," she told him as she turned away from the mural and headed back towards the surface.

"So you have told me," he said.

"And you?"

"I do not sleep, Lady," he said, and she inwardly flinched. But she had made a promise.

"Before."

He was quiet. "No," he said. "I suppose I did not do the duty of the Garde well, as I rarely slept soundly." That almost-empty box yawned somewhere beneath them, next to the one where Gouvernail, even in death, still slept so restlessly that his ghost still wandered above it.

"I don't think that was a very nice thing for them to tell you. Maybe you did the duty of the Garde perfectly fine, and couldn't sleep because you've got a stick up your a** and won't let yourself have anything nice."

He startled, but said nothing. The silence was maintained as the sound of the rain again became audible, followed by the fitful nightingale. The half-submerged rooms were, as always, miraculously dry - by magic or simply expert engineering - and they emerged into her makeshift bedroom. She had arranged a dogsitter, planning on spending the night once more, but to think of sleep and dreams while she rested in a room above that open coffin was an unbearable proposition. So she let him pretend, as always, to take her hand; she pretended that the blood did not run from her face and leave her cold as she looked at his ghostly fingers and imagined them clad in rings and gilded gloves.

That night, in her own bed amidst the noise of Destiny City traffic and Petitcru's gentle snoring, she did not sleep soundly at all, and her dreams tumbled one over another in nauseating chaos, half-remembered when she awakened, and forgotten entirely by the time she left her bed.