The Apprentice, Chapter 11

Crabby

Maryk has seen better days. He has found himself living in the woods in a leaky old shack and subsisting on conjured fruit. For three years. He’s bored of it, and what’s more, he’s clearly not looking after himself. He needs a good meal, maybe one of those tasty crabs that live in the fens? And someone to look after him. That’d be nice too, wouldn’t it?

Chapter 11: Fen-crabs and Little Toes

Years passed. I grew up, not very much actually but nonetheless, I became a young man. By the time I was fifteen years old I possessed the face of a man far older, grey and white and blue in splotches as well. I spent most of my time in amongst the trees of Creakwood, the colour of which matched my own quite well. “I could blend in here like a twig-bug if I went around these woods in the nip,” I often said to myself, “never even need Invisible.” Sometimes I went out into the Crabfen, if for no other reason than to catch myself a couple of the eponymous crabs for dinner when I tired of fruit and berries. Sometimes I visited the old quarry not so very far from my old world to gather chalk for my homemade blackboard since I had no paper. I never saw anyone else. People did not go to the places I went. This satisfied me. That was the purpose of my new life. I could do no-one any harm out in these forgotten places, these abandoned houses and weathered graveyards. Well, no-one other than myself, of course.

For instance, came the day I lost my other little toe. The Crabfen had called me out again. My diet of water-fruit, grubs and occasional squirrel had begun to take its toll on my mood as it always did. “Oh! Water-fruit, so nourishing, oh, water-fruit, so dull, oh water-fruit, so boring, I want to smash my skull,” was a verse I penned all on my own and could often be heard to sing sitting under the glowing leaves of the water-fruit bush, in between tired chomps of unwelcome fruit. I had tried a number of other spells, which I thought might produce food of different varieties. They resulted in the creation of a number of poisonous toadstools (I spent two days over a pit behind my cabin after trying those,) the skeletal remains of a chicken unsuitable even to make stock, and a leather purse which has, admittedly, come in handy for the collection of berries and grubs. I came to the conclusion that the Fomori Emperor who wrote the book or, at least, had it written for him, had no need for spells to feed him; he had slaves for that. The water-fruit spell was, no doubt, no more than a novelty.

The weather was the type reserved for the days when your emotions are felt so strongly that they must surely be affecting it with their deep, bog-misery and their thunderous angers. Unsuitable for crab hunting in the fens, as the day may have been, I could not have put it off ‘till another one without, as the song suggested, smashing my skull. Rain fell, not in drops so much as in waves, drowning the fens. I could see not ten paces in front of me and the sheer weight of my conjured, sodden, cotton clothing weighed my emaciated body down so much that I considered simply doffing them. Of course the bitterness of the wind across the open bog might have done for me so I decided to keep them on. I performed the Umbrella spell to stave off a small fraction of the torrents. So, I squelched my way on through the Crabfen, determined to find a crustacean or two for my supper. “Crab, crab, crabbie, crabbie, crab crab,” I would call, counter to the effect that I wished it to achieve. “Where are you, my tasty little beauties,” I used to sing, thinking that it might entice them into my supper sack. It didn’t, not that day. I did encounter one but it avoided the sack.
It felt like days that I had been creeping and hunting and calling and singing for crabs. My boots, a hardy pair of conjured crocodile skin ones, went up to my knees and I was sure they were more than up to the task of crab hunting. On any other day, they would have been. But on this hellish, rain-soaked nightmare of a day the bog attempted to suck me down into it with each step. It did not get me, it almost did. It had me and it lost me.

A step in the wrong spot was all it took. I knew the fen quite well, I thought, but it transformed on that day. the whole thing was a trap and I was the prey. One step, as I said, was almost my undoing. The boot went thigh-deep into a patch of ground I had stood upon many times to seek out my own prey. I struggled and wiggled and pulled at my own leg and finally dislodged myself, leaving the boot there, in a grave of its own construction. My bare foot came out at speed and I fell back into the bog. Dirty, brown water crept into every opening and crevice both in myself and my clothing; my crab sack was gone; I spluttered and coughed up a lungful of bog in an attempt to right myself and that’s when I felt it; a slice, a thin, hard pressure and a crunch. I felt the warmth of the blood rolling down my foot and calf as they stuck up in the air like birch saplings. I spat and gurgled into a scream. “Bastard! Bastard, clawing, tearing, toe-clipper! Bastard!” I got my hand to my face to free eyes, mouth and nose completely of mud and bog water. I took a deep breath to shout some further obscenities at the little aquatic bastard that had shorn me of my last remaining little toe when I looked up. I used the breath for another scream instead.

Straight out of a fireside story had she come, and there she stood before me. I had no doubt about her identity. The Fae-Mother stood tall and spindly like a trellis supporting her clothes, most of which did, in fact, resemble plants. Stuck in the bog as I was I could not even guess at her true height but it was certainly taller than the tallest man I had ever met. The face she showed me was grey and swathed in shadows thrown by the leaf-like hood she used to keep the rain off. It seemed to do just that and better, I might add, than my Umbrella cantrip did. Her arms hung limply at her sides, hands twig-fingered and pendulous by her knees even when standing unbent. Her wrists, neck and ankles were adorned in layered circlets of black and bronze. The very surface of the fen is where she walked, disturbing neither bog pool nor grass blade. Feet spotless, she stepped and glided.

“You are in some distress, old man. Would you like some help? Perhaps I could assist you with your wound…” The voice which vibrated from her reminded me greatly of a lark’s song and a bear’s roar.

“I am no old man!” I said, foolishly indignant as the blood poured freely from the stump of my former little toe and wallowed in a bog more foul than the famed dung pits of Arampour, “I’m a fifteen year old young man!”

“Maybe it has been too long since I have seen a human, your kind have changed if all young men look as you do.” This time the sound on the air which formed these words was the blowing of a summer breeze and the the rumble and crack of a rockslide. I looked her in the eye as she spoke and I saw her in there. Eyes so old are not to be found anywhere else in the world. Her grey and shimmering green orbs looked back into my own eyes. “I can explain later about my looks; I would be more than happy to, Fae-Mother. Right now, I would like to graciously accept your offer of aid. I am in dire need.” Being polite was difficult. It had not been necessary for more than three years. I don’t care if I am spoken to politely when I am my only conversation partner.

She reached down with her long fingers and I grasped them. They were so long and slender that I almost feared to grip too tight but then, as I did, I could feel the fingers like thin iron rods pull me easily to my feet. Once upright, I found myself atop the grass like my saviour was. “Please follow me, old young man, and I will attend to your foot.” I limped along behind the Fae-Mother all the way to the edge of the Creakwood. Below a particularly wide-canopied weeping-willow bordering the bog and the wood we were totally protected from the elements. In fact, once the tree’s curtain of leaves had closed behind us I could hear neither wind nor rain and the light which filtered through from outside was that of a hazy summer’s day. The ground beneath us was firm and dry and I gratefully threw myself upon it before removing my shirt to expose my ribs and sagging-skinned belly. It was surprisingly warm also.

My saviour, the Fae-Mother, took my newly deformed foot in her iron grip and looked at it. She removed my other boot and compared the foot to the injured one. “It seems you are careless with your toes,” she said. In this place her voice reminded me of the whisper of tree leaves in a light wind and the echo one discovers in the boles of hollowed out trees.

“I have often been unlucky,” I said. She penetrated my soul with those timeless eyes of hers and spoke again, “Unlucky? I think you would say there is more than mere misfortune involved in the story of your short life’s troubles. You are a boy who resembles a man of advanced years as your race reckons such things; you have lost two toes; you are nothing short of emaciated and you live by yourself in the Creakwood where no people come any longer. It would take one person many more years to accrue that degree of bad luck.” Those eyes kept me pinned and I answered her because I had no choice.

“My name is Maryk Sharpetzi. I am accursed for the murder of my mother and twice accursed for the murder of my first mistress and thrice accursed for the murder of my own sister. My mistress, Old Aggie, cursed me to look the way I do but everything else that has happened in my life has been as a direct result of the curses I gained at birth when I killed my mother and three years ago when my sister died by my hand.” She continued to simply hold my foot in her hand. I started to worry that it was incredibly filthy (a young boy without a mother or governess to tell him when to do it can easily fail to wash himself regularly.) I wriggled it a little but she simply held on firmly. “Yes, that makes sense. Curses, of course I can see them rising off of your shoulders and head like fumes and smoke, two black, one red. It was not such a bad thing to kill Old Aggie, I think. She was a lying, devious, selfish, murderous human as so many of you are. It was not the act that cursed you in that case, it seems, but the woman herself. The other deaths and several other acts of lesser evil have become a part of your soul. They are terrible things to live with, curses such as those you labour under, and you have suffered greatly for them.”

Laying my foot back on the ground, she continued to speak while I looked in wonder at the wound. The flow of blood was totally stemmed, the stump seemed cauterised (I remember still the dreadful searing of the hot poker used to seal the stump of the toe on the other foot) and I felt no pain.) “But I think I know some things about curses that you do not. I would like you to find me again when you need to know more about this. Now, you need to go back to your shack and rest. You must be exhausted. Here, you may want one of these to help you recuperate.” She reached around behind her and drew out a sack, my sack. Inside, wriggling and snapping, was a brace of fen-crabs. She placed the sack on the ground before me and I grabbed it before my supper could escape.
“Thank y-” I looked up and the Fae-Mother was gone.

Perhaps I should explain a little about the Fae-Mother.

And you’ll get to read all about her in Chapter 12 in a few days, dear reader!