The Apprentice, Chapter 8

Origin stories

Find the other chapters here.

I like an origin story with a little bit to it. A lot of place names are pretty dull. I come from a place called Sligo, Sligeach in Irish. It means “shelly place.” And, yep, it is. No mystery there. And maybe Pitch Springs got its name from the unnatural depth of the river at the location of the town or maybe the colour of the earth was so dark below the river that it made the waters seem black. But, actually, there’s a far more interesting tale behind it…

Chapter 8: The Story of the Naming of Pitch Springs

Pitch Springs had not always been named such. In fact there is a story attached to its renaming which has fascinated me since I first heard it. Many now say that the tale is nothing more than a bucket of bull’s manure but I am certain there are nuggets in it, even still, of truth or half-truth at least. I will relate here the Story of the Naming of Pitch Springs

Many years ago, in the village of Brightwash the mayor, a man of great girth and booming voice named Moltotzi, decided to build a series of mills along the riverside in and around the town. This would be of great benefit to the people of Brightwash and provide much-needed employment for several of the younger men who had been born too late to inherit any land and too stupid to study something worthwhile. The mills were really very popular. The town became famous for the fine bread flour it produced. Brightwash began to prosper and so did Mayor Moltotzi. He was hailed as a miracle-worker. The young men who found jobs at the mills soon found themselves prosperous enough to take wives and build houses of their own. Before long, nature took its course and lots of little would-be mill-workers came into the world. The village grew and Moltotzi said it was time they changed the name. Brightwash became Milltown and felt just a little bit darker.

Now, the folk of Milltown had always lived on the banks of the sparkling River Giarri so stories of the river’s odder inhabitants had been passed down for generations. Occasionally, a farmer making a delivery in the early gloom of morning or a sot wending his way home in the late black of night might report ed that they had seen one of them lurking or leaping in the middle of the deep river, sylkies; beasts that could take human form. While immersed in the river’s silvery mirror waters they appeared as nothing more than otters, remarkable only in their exceptional size but on the occasions when they left the river they were transformed into short, dark-haired men and women with deep black eyes. It was said that they survived on the bounty of the river itself: its fish and weeds and the plants of the river banks; so they did not interfere with the doings of the people of the town. Well, except in one very serious respect: supposedly they kidnapped young children. It was said that they did not procreate in the same way that people and animals did, you see, due to the fact that they were a magical species which were left over from the ancient times of the Fomorin Empire. So, to make more little sylkies they had no choice but to draw from the population of humans in their area.

The people of the town did not, at first, realise what was occurring. Their children simply disappeared from their beds. It was thought to be the evil work of some wicked man but there was never any evidence of that found at the homes of the disappeared. One father, one of the newly married mill workers named Davus was not willing to let his two year old son, Krish, go the same way as the dozen others taken from his neighbours. He determined to stand watch all night every night, if necessary, to find out who was responsible for these outrageous abductions, and to kill them. Darkened by night and partially hidden behind a curtain in their bedroom, he sat as Krish slumbered in his cot. His wife, Yolanna, slept in the bed next to the cot. He fought off sleep all night with a concoction prepared by the wise woman of the town (I often wonder if Aggie was this old.) The first night passed by without exceptional incident as did the second but on the third, Davus was sitting there behind his curtain, clutching the spade he intended as a weapon, when the silhouette of a darkened, naked woman slipped, soundlessly through the window, even as he watched. He did not act immediately, but paused to determine the intentions of the intruder. The little, hairy woman skulked to the edge of the cot, looked in, reached down. He burst from his place of hiding, thrusting the point of the spade like a spearhead at the neck of the kidnapper. A sylkie is not a defenceless creature, however, and is swift as an adder when attacked. This one sidestepped Davus’ effort and screaming like a cat, flipped out of the still open window. The whole house was awake now, Yolanna and Krish crying in startled horror. Davus vaulted through the window and made chase, raising a hue and cry as he went: “Awake, awake now!” He shouted, “Enemies here! Enemies! Up Milltown, Up! Up!” He whooped and hollered all the way to the river until half the town had come out of their houses and onto the streets. It was enough to cause the would-be kidnapper to be trapped. the sylkie, only strides from the safety of her river home found a wall of Milltowners blocking her path. The surrounding enemies made her crouch into a defensive position and watch as Davus came on, spade twirling in his hands as he did.

“Stop!” Cried the woman, in a gurgling bark. She held her hands out to Davus who smacked one of them with the flat of his spinning spade. She yelped and squealed in pain and stuck two of her bruised fingers in her mouth. “Where are our children?” asked Davus. “No children in the river! Just pups!” she garbled, fingers still mouth-bound. Davus’ spade spun and whirled about and then it stretched from his hands and struck her in the right knee. The sylkie woman went down and wailed terribly. “Where are our children, monster?” Shouted her tormentor now. “No children in river…just…pups,” she managed, whining and shaking all the while. Davus did not accept her answer. Had he not seen her attempt to take the child from his cot under his very nose? Had she not confessed by simply being? As if someone else had decided to voice his own thoughts, a shout came from the crowd, “You’re a sylkie, you can’t be trusted! That’s what you do! You take children and spirit ‘em away under the water. You have my Mikel! You have him down there!” The Sylkie fell to her knees as if struck again and growled, “No! We have pups. Not want your children. Not for the river, not for us, for the mayor!” Davus paused, his interest piqued. He had long been suspicious of the mayor and his ever-growing palace with its ever heightening walls in the centre of old town. He thought him a venal and greedy glutton but he could not imagine that he would have something to do with the disappearance of all those children, eleven in all now. “The mayor?” he asked, using the spade to support him as he knelt down beside the bruised and pathetic sylkie, “what about the mayor? Tell me n-”

“What’s all this, here!” The voice was unmistakable. The mayor had won elections based entirely on the strength, depth and timbre of his voice. Many claimed it had persuasive powers. Some said they had been hypnotised by the merest greeting from the man. Davus felt the reverberations of the mayor’s famous vocal cords in his own breastbone. He turned, and there the man was, dressed as if for the hunt, enormous red jacket over cream waistcoat, leather jodhpurs. He held a crossbow: Mayor Moltotzi. The mayor parted the crowd like so many chickens and came through to stand beside Davus. “Your Honour, I caught this sylkie trying to take my child, Krish. I chased her out and woke up the town.” “Yes, yes, good man…” “Davus, Mayor, it’s Davus.” “Yes, yes, I know that. Now, let’s just have a look. Well, she is a beastly looking whelp and no mistake. Still, how do you know she’s one of these river-dwellers? Hmm?” The mayor was questioning Davus but his reply came from the crowd of townspeople which had expanded till almost everyone was there, “She tried to take his lad! She’s a demon!” There was a rowdy chorus of agreement from the rest of the assemblage. “Indeed? A demon, well th-” “No!” interrupted the injured woman on the ground and attempted to crawl away. “It was you, you, you. Monster! Monster! You, monster mayor! You made us, you!”
A stone flew from the back of the crowd, hitting the sylkie woman square in the nose and knocking her back to the ground; another came from closer to the front and in no time the crowd was a mob and the stones flew freely. Davus ducked and covered his head with the blade of his spade and crawled away from what had just become a lynching. creeping away, wanting nothing to do with it, he hid and watched from the trees at the riverside until it was over and the town had gone home. Then he emerged and slumped to the spot where lay, not a woman, but the carcass of a large river otter, bleeding and battered almost beyond recognition. “What had she meant about the mayor?” he muttered to himself and then picked up the sylkie and brought her to the river.

A month passed; the abductions had stopped. The people of the town had forgotten all about the events of that night by the river. Well, everyone except Davus and his wife at least and Yolanna only because she had stayed where she was to look out for young Krish. He began to wonder if folk had been right about the mayor and the power in his voice. Everyone had turned so quickly. By the time they had started beating the poor woman they had sounded more like a pack of hyenas than the pleasant townsfolk he knew, no more words just howls and grunts and screams. And now…now the event may as well not have happened. He did not bring it up. He had been suspicious of the mayor since then and he was worried that there were agents amongst the Milltowners now. Making up his mind to go to the river and ask the sylkies what happened, and why, Davus made his excuses to his wife and went that very night.

It was just before midnight when he reached the riverside and he was reminded, uncomfortably of the night of the stoning. There was the stain still on the paving stones of the path to the jetty; there was the tree he had hidden behind; his shame hurried him along. He stood at the edge of the jetty and called, “Sylkie, sylkie, sylkie-o.” Over and over. He had brought an offering, of course, salted sardines. It had cost him a full day’s wages but he thought a sea fish would be a delicacy to river dwellers. The bells in the clock tower rang twice while he called and waited and introduced his bucket of fish to the river’s slow-flowing waters. His patience eventually bore fruit; a head bobbed out in the centre of the river. He had not seen it emerge and did not know how long it had been there by the time he finally spotted it but once he did, there was no mistaking it. Sleek, wet, shining dark, with moon-mirror eyes, the giant otter yawned, casually revealing the set of long glinting teeth in a jaw that he had heard could shatter the leg of a full grown man. He hesitated, but of course it was already too late. They would not let him turn around now. There were more heads bobbing out there, perhaps a dozen of them; one of them changed, becoming the head of a beardless youth. “Come in. Leave your clothing. Bring the fish.” He undressed clumsily and then, holding onto his bucket, jumped in. “Let the bucket go,” said the young sylkie man. Doing as he was told he watched the heads all submerge and then felt their wakes swirling about him below the surface. As they gathered and played with their food. He took a breath and dived. He could discern their dark bodies blur in dance about him; claws swiped at his face and missed by a whiskers’ breadth; a sideswipe almost surprised the air out of his lungs and then he was hoisted uncomfortably with little paw-hands in his oxters and dragged swifter than any man has ever swum in water. His eyes were forced closed by the pressure of the water on them and he kept his arms and legs as straight as he could so they didn’t catch on anything. They swam him for far too long.

Lungs burning and underarms aching he emerged finally from the water. His surrogate swimmers chucked him unceremoniously out of the water and onto the riverbank. Coughs wracked his chest and head for a few minutes and he spat up river weed and tiddlers. When he looked up there was a scrubbing brush-bearded man before him, dressed only in filthy torn britches and a sackcloth shirt.
“What?” Dared this sylkie wise man. “I was there…” “Where?” The man’s face betrayed a deep impatience. “When your woman died, I was there. I was one of them,” confession felt good, “I caught her.” The strike came too fast for Davus to see but he screamed when it came. Blood ran freely down his face from the four long slices made by the sylkie’s claws. Hand to face, he pushed on it to try and stop the bleeding. When he looked back at the man, it was as though he had never moved. “I deserve worse,” he said. “Did you come for worse? For punishment? We could do that but it would do our kind no good. It would make our lives much more difficult. No. Why did you come?” said the elder. “I came to ask you about Mayor Moltotzi. Your woman said the children were for him, not for you.” Davus’ voice was thick with his own blood, he spat some out and looked at the man again. He said nothing. “You don’t steal children to make them into sylkies, do you? You don’t kidnap them so you can have your own young. Am I wrong? You know what people think of you. I can see to it that they learn the truth. Just help me discover it!” The old sylkie hawked and spat a black gob into the mud. “The mayor is an evil thing. Not a man. Not him. Looks like it but so do I, eh? No, not a man. It’s name is Mulloch. It is here to feed. It eats usually sheeps and goats and rabbits and birds but once every month it wants a little one. ‘Give us human ones,’ it says, ‘and I’ll let you keep your pups.” Davus was aghast. “He knew, didn’t he, that we would all blame the sylkies for this? We are all so sure that sylkies take our wee ones for their own that we wouldn’t even think of another culprit. That’s what I believed but I needed proof as well…and then I found your woman in my house that night. The Mayor was able to use that discovery to deflect the blame onto you and your people.” The sylkie elder nodded curtly. “We will be leaving here. We have lived here in this river for many birthings but the mills hurt the water and they hurt our pups. Three have been sucked into them and killed already. They are too young to know the dangers and we want our children to roam free in their own homes. But I do not want to go until I know that Mulloch is no more.” The elder held out his long nailed hand to Davus and Davus held out his. They shook and and agreed. “That bastard will die. I will make certain of it.”

Davus was not a warrior; he was not an assassin; he had no magical powers, but he had a desire for true justice and the will to achieve it. His adversary was the most powerful man in the town and extremely popular with the citizens of Milltown. Also, he lived in a fortress. But, he had his weaknesses. He had a passion for the hunt and spent much of his time tracking and shooting game with his hounds. A retinue always accompanied him on these hunts since he could not be expected to fetch the kill or cook his own food while out. Also, he needed a squire, a stablehand and even a coachman if the hunt was to happen far from the town. Davus knew this about the Monstrous Mayor, as he began to think of him, because he had a friend who worked as a beater in this retinue, a friend he could replace. He would have to bide his time, though, and formulate his plan, not to mention waiting for his face to heal. Injuries like that never healed fully of course and he was scarred forever afterwards. His wife told him it added character and he earned the nickname, Scar.

Came the fateful day of the hunt. Davus replaced his friend in the role of beater and he joined the hunt at the gates of the mayoral palace in the centre of town. He never even entered; he didn’t have to. Out came Moltotzi astride a huge dray horse, the biggest in the region, it was said. Davus kept his head low and sat astride his own plain pony, trying to stay out of sight. They were to go, that day, to the nearby Hills of Heather where the mayor would hunt grouse with his specially made crossbow. It was not a long ride to this place, just an hour from the town but it was very different: colder, wilder and wetter. There was a mist blanketing the hills when they arrived, poor weather for hunting. The mayor managed to bag just one grouse all morning. Davus he knew it was a sign and he knew an opportunity like this one would not come again. They stopped for lunch near the top of a long-dropping waterfall, the very source of the Giarri on which Milltown stood. The company camped near enough to the water for the cook to fetch it but not close enough to allow its noise to overwhelm conversation. As the other servants busied themselves around the fire, Davus snuck off and planted something near the mayor, just close enough for him to see it from the corner of his eye, a feather. It was one of enormous length and had been part of a fan, once gifted to Yolanna by her mother. “What’s this?” said Moltotzi when he spotted the feather and, grabbing his crossbow, went to get a closer look. He picked it up and marvelled that it might have been dropped by a bird he had never before shot. He looked around for the beast only to discover, that’s right, another feather and another and another until the trail of them had wound him a zigzag as far as the waterfall. He stood there at the cliff, looking around dumbly for the bird he had come for, crossbow cocked and raised. But there was no bird, there was only Scar. “For the children,” whispered Davus as he crept up behind the bulk of the monster. He calculated for a just a moment and then ran at the broad red-coated back of the mayor. He managed to stop himself from going over too, only by clutching the hardy heather on the edge of the cliff. Davus watched him disappear into the mist and heard his unearthly scream all the way to the bottom. No-one else did. The little retinue returned to the town after hours of searching the hills, assuming the mayor had wandered off in the mist and fallen over the cliff side. They were partly right. When they returned to the town they entered the mayor’s palace to see if he had somehow made his way back there. They searched it high and low and found no sign of him. What they did find shocked the whole town, well almost the whole town, Davus and Yolanna were not surprised when a secret dungeon was uncovered. It was littered with the bones of children and the truth was revealed to Milltown. Of course it was not called Milltown for much longer. Once the party had returned from the hills the waters of the bright Giarri had turned unaccountably dun and then dark and then black and they have stayed that way to this very day. Black as pitch is what they were. It was not the residents’ idea to rename the town again. No-one knew exactly who started it, in fact, but that’s when Milltown became Pitch Springs.