“The Spaniard” is a serialized novella.
Synopsis:
A lone gaucho traverses a barren landscape in a 1930s era alternate world, chasing a shade that took what he loved most from him. Joining him is the mysterious Gunslinger, a woman he has met only in dreams, and a trickster spirit, who may or may not have an agenda of his own.
«Previous — Table of Contents — Next Episode»
This week’s episode:
After facing his demons, the Spaniard must clean up the mess left behind.
Sweat beaded his brow as a tight, hot knot smoldered under his sternum. It burned as it clenched harder, concentrating all of his frustration and worry into a hard ball. His fingers itched to sink under the skin, push away the bone, reach inside and toss it away. Black coiling tendrils had wound themselves into the fissures and bronchioles of his lungs, clinging on desperately to his ribs as it was rent away, curling and writhing.
The Spaniard could not do this, wish as he did that he could. Instead, he lay shivering beside the Gunfighter. All the blankets and spare clothes they had brought were barely enough to keep the chill of the night off them. He felt her suddenly jolt, fidgeting as she pressed closer, as though that could somehow diminish the cold penetrating through their skin and sinking deeper into the bone.
It would be a long night.
It had been late afternoon when they had stumbled on the city, bathed in a warm light that should have been a welcome sight after burning daylight to get through the tunnels. If he hadn’t been so hesitant—
There was little use in beating himself up. Thankfully, Zalmon’s people, by all appearances from the section of caverns they’d explored, had not made headway here; they’d been relatively safe to explore and pick their way through. And what wonders! He doubted anyone back in his father’s dwellings, or the larger town, had ever seen carved caverns as marvelous as what he’d encountered. Or bioluminescent mushrooms and lichens. Guided lights that circled and swirled around while pressing through the darkness.
But the cold sweat and anxiety still hollowing out his chest was not a longing ache for the safety of hidden tunnels, though it was, the longer he held the Gunfighter, slowly dissipating. The memory of his wife, his foreman, and the others swinging naked from the crossbeam of the barn kept playing before his eyes, a moving picture reel in the darkened theater of his mind. He saw them, whether he kept his eyes open or pressed them shut.
Against him, the Gunfighter shifted, her head resting on his chest and laying relatively comfortably on his bicep. The ghosts are not real, he thought, but she is.
It had been some time since either had washed or showered, and the smell of her, her smell, was strong at the root of her hair. He focused on it, a warm, slightly sweet scent that almost reminded him of ponies. He couldn’t say why exactly; her hair wasn’t coarse like horse-hair, and her smell was different than Imelda’s. Her’s had been spicier, earthier somehow, perhaps all the work on the ranch had permeated into the deepest layers of skin and had become her. The Spaniard forced himself to breathe it in and out, feel the coarse weave of her vest and the softness of her cotton shirt—
Internally he recoiled. They burned, eyes rolled back, tongues lolling—
“Are you alright?”
Her whisper was soft.
The image of their faces, frozen and dead, a mask of pain. He wondered if they’d been hung one by one, or all at once, to suffer en masse.
“I…”
“You haven’t been the same since you touched the sigil.”
He met her with silence.
“Julian, Julian…” Insistent, then a softer plea.
“Answer me.”
There was a sudden urge. He had to stand, and so he pulled away from her and used the rock to steady himself upward, leaving her to lay there, looking up at him with confusion.
He supported himself on his forearm, resting his forehead painfully on a piece jutting out at eye level.
“I…I keep seeing their faces. I can’t go down there and face him. … All I can see is their faces.”
“Who’s faces?”
“…my wife’s…the foreman and his …family. Rilkey and Bill, Quentin and Tomás…I…”
The Spaniard sank to his knees, stone biting through the fabric into the soft skin.
The flood of images bloomed before his eyes, as the words tumbled out like a turgid waterfall onto the cavern floor, burbling and flowing in a stream that he struggled to comprehend. Distantly, he felt her touch his back and hold him, as he relayed every thought and detail.
It took some time, though time during a long night seems to stretch in a limitless way, to speak it all aloud.
In the speaking, it was alive, and it was true. It could no longer be avoided, or hidden in depths, tucked into lead boxes on recessed shelves, locked far away from consciousness. It had boiled up, like an unholy curse rising through the heated depths of hell, striking and testing at the corners of his mind, for weeks and months, licking at him, teasing like a snake tongue darting into the cracks. He had gone back over it, again and again—it had and had not been his fault.
He’d had to go away to sell the livestock. They had needed the money.
But if he’d been there, he could have stopped it. He could have fought.
He could have saved Imelda, their son … he couldn’t say his name.
Saying his name…saying all of it, aloud, it made it real.
It was real.
It had happened.
And it was his fault.
He could have prevented it—
Could he?
The Spaniard’s mind reeled, grappling and struggling over the waves of dread and grief and —
He wanted to kill. He wanted to rend and tear that smiling, sneering bastard to shreds. Watch his eyes bulge and his tongue loll as Julian’s fingers clenched tightly around his neck, hearing each bone and vertebrate crunch in his hands, to see the face go red, then purple—
He wanted to rage at the sky and rend his clothes, the air and the fabric and the cave and every ounce of creation a suffocating blanket against the reality that his wife and his only son, barely a toddler, were dead.
“They’re dead,” he whispered hoarsely. It was the first time he’d ever said it, the whole truth, together.
Imelda’s body lay in the ground, along with the others, decaying and returning to the earth, cold and fetid. Her beautiful face charred and her hair burnt and singed a blacker black than kohl.
To speak it aloud was to make it true, and real.
He could not outrun the memories any longer, as he could not outrun himself. Bitterly, hot trails running across cold cheeks, he wept.
Once he had purged it, all of it, though he suspected there was still more buried within himself than he wanted to face, he slumped against the wall silently, tears crawling down his dusty face. The Gunfighter leaned against him, her small fingers, softer and more delicate, intertwined with his. They fell asleep together like that, resting in the quiet dark of the cavern, a sliver of dark sky punctuated with a thousand thousand stars, winking at them from above their view of the night.
A cool light pierced through the gloom of the cave as the Spaniard heard rustling wings. Sharp aches and pangs rang out through his back and his neck, every muscle complaining as he slowly roused from sleep to look around. A small wren, the color of sand and stone, chirped and hopped at the mouth of the tunnel, tilting its head with curiosity, seemingly surprised to see humans in this remote spot. It did a little half turn on its feet, shuffled its feathers, then flew off and above, out of sight.
So there is still some kind of life here, apart from Zalmon and his foot soldiers, he thought.
The Gunfighter had slumped against him, head resting in his lap. Gently he lifted her head, placing the rumpled blanket beneath it, as he extricated himself to stand.
He went to survey Magora again, seeing no sign of movement in the early-morning light. As the sun had set the night before, they’d seen the watchfires go on, torches and flashlights blinking as whatever people there were had come out of their hiding spots and begun the evening’s work. He crouched, eyes unseeing as he sifted through his thoughts.
He could not explain, exactly, what had happened to him the day before—not with touching the sigil, being possessed by such desire, anger, and vengeance as he had experienced. It was as though he had been in a dream for all these many months, drifting and lifeless as he had traveled from town to village, a tumbling mess of memories barely held together by his skin and clothes. They had remained behind the dyke, threatening to break loose all this time, when he could no longer pretend that they didn’t taunt him with the threat of overwhelming suffocation.
The heaviness in his chest drew him deeper into reverie.
He had had to go away. It was part of the rhythms of ranch life—raising and preparing their small flock of sheep, as well as the cattle, for droving the stock route northeast.
It was not his fault. He’d had a job to do, one he’d done many times in his youth and in his marriage. Imelda had been both capable and left in capable hands willing to defend the homestead. It was as clear a truth as anything, and yet he, as he stared at the red packed dirt of the outcropping outside of the tunnel mouth, he could not yet shake the feeling that he was to blame.
That if he had only stayed…
Would he have been slaughtered too?
It was impossible to say. They had likely been dragged from their beds in the night, otherwise, the dogs would have warned them, and likely, the dogs had been killed first.
What he had not seen, and had refused to grapple with till the shade in the bar had said so, was that the body of his son, among so many, had been missing. It had been too great a grief, losing her, losing all of them, men, wives, and children, laughter and memories and the sweat of many years between them all, clearing and building that land. The idea that his son, Gaetano, might still be alive, had been too great to consider in the face of everything.
To have it all consumed in a scorching blaze, leaving behind only skeletal carbon as proof of its existence, had been more than he’d been able to take.
And so he had left, half-crazed, half-starved.
It was a strange way he had taken to get to this point. He was an empty husk staring down at a tomb.
Behind him, the Gunfighter began to stir, and after a few minutes, joined him in squatting on the ledge.
“Any lookers?”
“No. Seems they roll up shop as soon as the sun appears.”
The Gunfighter fidgeted with a few pebbles, turning them over in her hands.
“We goin’ in guns blazin’?”
“Not quite.” Stretching out his hand, the Spaniard traced a path with his finger that wound through the city.
“My guess is, Zalmon is aware that we’re coming. We may not have as much of the element of surprise, but, since no one is out here in the daytime, we may be able to sneak through.” He paused and took a breath. “When I touched the sigil yesterday, I … I saw him, Zalmon, and I … I get the sense that he saw me. But it was like … it was like the city showed me a way through that would help us get there, undetected.”
“The city showed you?”
“It sounds crazy—”
Peering at him, she gave him a look.
“Everything that we’ve done is the textbook definition here.”
He chuckled and nodded.
“Our most exposed spot is going to be coming down from the opening to the path right there; we’ll be unable to hide for cover. Until we get to that formation down below, we’ll be exposed.” Some fifty feet down, a swooping crest of rock rose in front of the cliff face, obscuring the wall and the path that hugged it. If he looked down, he could see the path wriggle down toward the bottom, splitting off here and there into another network of cave entrances. Whomever the Sinaqua had been, they’d either been busy excavating, or they’d used the natural features of this place to their best advantage. Below in the valley, the river glinted and shimmered like a silver-scaled snake, blinding to the eyes. The memory of the path he’d seen came back to him, a knowledge he didn’t know how to explain. If he stood, he could trace the steps nearly blind all the way to the throne room that Zalmon occupied.
“Well,” she said pensively, “if he knows we’re coming, what’s to say that we’re not walking into a trap—that he didn’t plant the way you saw, or worse, once he saw it, he also knows?” There was a tremble of fear in her voice. “So we make it down. And then?”
“The path should take us down through the valley and circumvent direct roads, giving us the ability to slip in. From there, there’s a set of passageways that should take us into the heart of the Ziggurat and bypass meeting his forces, until we’re in the vicinity of the throne room.”
“And the city told you all of this?”
“…Not in so many words as in…memories, I suppose.”
She was silent a long moment; he could see her chewing and weighing the plan. Slowly she stood, still watching the city and the glittering river that ran through it.
“I don’t like this. We can’t be sure it’s not some kind of trap to lure you down there. But past this point, hell, well back to the horses, and I’m doing this blind. None of this is on my radar for how to navigate us there. And I feel…useless? Helpless?”
Her gold hair fluttered a little in the slight breeze. A frown settled on her face as she said, sighing, “Better gather up our things and get a move on.”
The Spaniard watched as she turned away and began cleaning up, then looked down upon Magora.
“Yeah. Better get a move on.” He stood, and went to help her pack what little they’d brought.
«Previous — Table of Contents — Next Episode»
Want more? Consider a free subscription to keep up with the next installment or Buy me a Coffee as a show of support.
Rachael Varca is a writer of more than fifteen years experience. She writes at Inking Out Loud, a collection of essays, poems, short stories, and home of the serialized novel, The Spaniard. To see which books she’s working on for Commonplace Thoughts, visit her at Bookshop.org.