Merry Christmas everyone! I hope, despite all of *gestures vaguely around* this, you have had a wonderful time.
During lockdown, like many I’ve been regressing pretty hard into my teenage self, reading story after story of schlock-y fantasy and science fiction pulp, a perfect accompaniment to the return of episodic lowbrow pulp television of the sort found in The Witcher and The Mandalorian, a modern day Xena Warrior Princess though never quite courageous enough to fully throw itself back into the glorious world of “monster of the week” and cheesy melodrama. Given all that, I suppose it was inevitable that I’d try my hand at creating my own character and so, I have!
So, to my readers, I would like to introduce you to Darot Sonmargot, an perennially broke and weather-beaten vet in a world of dense jungles, chaotic magic, tough working class gnomes and backstabbing politics. James Herriot for fans of The Witcher.
This coming four part adventure with him is an early test of the character, and if you do keep reading I am sure he’ll change an awful lot over the coming months. Tone-wise, I’ve tried quite hard to create a pastiche of the kinds of magazines and journals that publish these sorts of stories and I think at some level I have succeeded.
Anyway, without further ado, please read on for part 1.
The Pit and the Forest (Part 1/4)
They called it a Rinkrin. It had a bloated grey chest that was undulating slowly with each burbling breath.. Six spindly legs protruded from a pallid, stocky torso. Each one tapered into a heavy paw, tipped with jagged claws. A pinched face hung from its thick back, which tapered into a long inquisitive snout. Each side of the skull was ringed with four heavy-lidded eyes which, right now, were closed.
It was asleep.
I had a hand up its arse.
There are times in your life, where you really look back and take stock of things.
My name is Darot. Darot Sonmargot if you must know and yes, I was not given my patronym. No, I will not talk about it. On the days that this tale unfolds I was at a dig-site where I’d heard of un an unpleasant veterinary job that needed some attention. As to why I took the job, why does anybody do anything? I was broke and, worse than that, in debt and indentured (such was the way of things at that time) and the offer of money from the ‘seer was enough that I could clear all of it with enough change to set myself up with lodgings.
The Rinrkin’s bowels rippled and a gas reminiscent of eggs left in the sun paired with notes of curdled milk bubbled from its sphincter. The noxious fumes enveloped my trapped forearm before squeezing their way out in a short, sharp pop. A pretty priestess who had smiled at me over dinner wrinkled her nose in disgust and disappeared from the viewing platform. I forced myself to think about the shanty I might rent in Kest to see out the winter, if I survived the next couple of days.
I must have been quite the picture. Me, down there, sunburned and heaving in my heavy overalls and my knees being stripped of their skin by the rough sand. The monster burbled and snorted in its sleep. On the banks of the pit, four minders, who as far as I could see were there to monitor me as much as the rinkrin, shuffled from their positions on a casting star.
The rinkrin’s belly rose and one of its eyelids fluttered. One handler gulped and, squirming on the top of the casting star, intoned the sleeping catechism even louder. I really hoped they knew what they were doingm because if the spell broke even for a second, the Rinkrin could pull a man into pieces like wet dough and snaffle the chunks of him down its long snout. Or so I had been told.
“Don’t you dare,” I murmured. Apparently, it hadn’t eaten a thing since it arrived and I did not plan on me being its first meal.
“Anything?”
A drooping, brightly cockaded hat appeared at the edge of the pit. Lister. Chief of staff to whichever absentee scholar was running the dig. He peered over the edge nervously. His many chinned head wobbled under the weight of his ostentatious headgear.
“Well,” my fingers, tightly ensconced in the fleshy cocoon of its anus had found the abnormality, “There is something.”
“So are we feeding it right? Keeping it right?” Lister wittered, “It’s very expensive you know. The cost of import alone, the shipping, paying the monastics and the labour disputes, well, I told you over dinner-”
He had of course. Bloated with pride and wine he’d gossiped away exactly what he had done to get the animal over, how many feathers he’d dusted and strings he’d pulled.
“The gnomes are going to go spare,” he’d giggled, “Imagine them all, trying to riot for pay with this thing on guard.” He belched with satisfaction, “I just need you to get it eating meat Sonmargot. Do you think you can?”
“Of course,” I’d said. What would you have done? I’m well aware that I was doing nothing for solidarity with my fellow labourers by helping them fix a vicious looking strike-breaker, but I had no intention of being indentured for any longer than I needed to be.
I began to withdraw my hand, slowly. The Rinkrin’s warm breath caught a little in the throat and its snout snuffled sharply. The keepers shuffled again.
“Stand,” I muttered, “Fucking. Still.”
My hand slipped from its gruesome prison. I gagged immediately and only the rinkrin’s sudden violent stirring stopped me from retching out loud and distracting the handlers who, to their credit had all realised that if one of them moved they all would die. I took a step back, testing the sand with my feet.
“Did you find anything?” Lister called.
I ignored him. The job was not done yet. I didn’t keep my eyes off the animal. It was stirring again now, stretching its lengthy limbs. I could see the tips of its claws begin to unfurl.
“Everybody,” I said slowly, “Don’t panic. I want you to take a single step back. Keep your feet sure.”
They shuffled to the tips of the casting star. The rinkrin let out a low burble and the flaps at the end of its snout shuddered ominously, but nothing more.
Whining and screeching far too loudly the gates of its enclosure began to winch open. They were less than twenty paces away, hardly any distance at all but more than enough that any of us could trip over if were careless. The trouble with a casting star is, effective as it is in keeping an animal asleep, you don’t get long before it stops being effective. As intimate as I’d just been with the animal neither I, nor anybody else, really had any proper idea about its core anatomy and how quickly it’d break out of torpor. We also didn’t know whether drugs would make it sicker, or how to effectively hog-tie it so that it couldn’t damage anything. For all that short popinjay Lister’s boasting, they’d manage to secure a rare and dangerous beast to and somehow forgotten the aftercare manual.
Getting to that gate were some of the longest few seconds of my life. Each step felt as if I were reaching the peak of a hill only to round a rock and find yet more hill to go. In reality I moved as quickly as I could and with as much care as possible. Every one of the handlers had a mother after all. Not that it made much difference. I swung myself under the heavy iron rungs of the gate and waited for the others to step away from their casting star. The dust that had twinkled and swirled above the rinkrin began to fall like golden snow and they jogged up the slope towards the gate. They were flushed with sweat as if they’d been doing gnome-toil in the shadeless cruelty of the rice paddies. Their breathing was ragged and they were exhausted, which is why what happened next was not surprise. They had nearly reached the gate when one, a tall boy with a sprig of curled hair who couldn’t have been more than thirteen stumbled. A small cloud of dust and dirt was thrown up in the boy’s wake, barely enough to rustle the sand the boy was scrabbling in, but it was enough.
One moment he was on his knees, dusting his hands and gathering his ridiculous long purple casting robes. The next, he was flying. He flew not with the grace and deliberation of a bird taking wing of course, but like a bag of rocks hurled from a trebuchet, rattling and rolling and shrieking all the way. A jagged trumpeting assaulted my ear and the sand of pit gathered itself together before expelling itself in angry waves. The boy landed with a wet crunch right at the edge of the iron gates and flopped to the floor. Directly where his left knee should have been a babbling bloodied brook trailed its way back down into the pit.
I don’t know and will never know what made me move like that. I have never been a proper athlete. I’ve spent most of my life on my feet and that confers a certain lanky ropiness, but I have never been any kind of gymnast. I doubt that how I moved was beautiful. What I do know is that I was stood behind the iron gate and then I was back in the pit, yanking the boy back towards safety. The tendons of my forearms strained under the weight of him and his dangling arms nearly tripped me.
“Don’t shut the gate,” I yelled.
At the opposite side of the pit, directly below the viewing platform, the rinkrin crouched low on its spindly legs. Its long head whipped side to side and its six eyes rolled blearily. Its snout sniffled and snaffled hungrily about it. The remaining handlers had backed up to the gate and from their vantage point they rolled the jug of casting dust down the sandy verge towards the beast. It bumped once on a stony outcrop, bounced and shattered throwing up a rolling cloud of the glistening dust which listed into the bowl of the pit where the creature was stretching and testing its limbs. It hooted again with a long, keening sound like a scratchy trumpet. It is strange what you pick out in situations like these, but over all the screeching and yelling and hooting, I could actually hear Lister prattling about the amphora, “No, no no! The expense! Cannot be justified…”
Then the rinkrin found the poor boy’s leg. It lay, pathetically in the dust, just by the roving trunk and when the creature found it, it began to run its trunk cautiously over it. Unfortunately, it was at the exact moment that the rinkrin decided that it might as well enjoy the forlorn limb as a snack that the boy slumped into me chose to woke up. The leg disappeared up the long snout as if it was sucked through a straw and the rinkrins six eyes span madly.
“My leg,” the boy moaned, nearly breaking entirely free my grip, “My leg.”
I grabbed him from the under both armpits and gave him a frantic pull, causing him to scream in pain. The resistance of his shocked body nearly tore the muscles of my back apart.
“Shut up,” I snapped uselessly “It’ll hear.”
It did hear. Of course it heard. And behind me what I heard was the frantic stumbling and crashing of people pulling at the crank to loose the great metal gate and leave us in the pit together.
“Don’t you dare!” I leaned down, knees bent and wrapped my arms fully round the heaving, cursing torso. Warm blood drenched my fingers, slicking my grip but I held on tight and yanked him back. The boy shrieked again. We were a step away but the rinkrin and the gate were moving too. Its long trunk swung and whirled and it trumpeted hungrily. I pulled again at the shaking boy, dragging him just in front of the gate which screeched as its ropes came loose. I turned just in time to catch an apologetic, but terrified minder slashing at the ropes that held the pulley mechanism that controlled it with a long knife.
The rinkrin ploughed towards us. Its limbs juddered and wobbled. Its snout swirled the dust and, with a single final bound it launched itself across the remaining pit. I grasped the boy and pulled one final time but it was no good. In my vision was nothing but six whirling eyes, two unfurled claws so sharp they could impale a horse and the long grey snout. Its breath was sickly warm and it reared back to strike.
Then I was through. The gate slamming in front of me with the beast on the other side. My back seared with pain and I was sat, paces from the blackened iron of the gate in the dust heaving and choking. The boy’s whole body was shaking, and he vomited onto my lap. Not that I cared. A dozen uniformed gnomes were pulling him away but I couldn’t stop staring through the gap in the iron where the whirling eyes of the creature and its probing snout curiously examined the gate.
I had not seen those eyes up close before. They moved constantly but for the smallest moment, I would swear in front of the moon that they all fixed themselves directly onto mine. My stomach lurched and bile squeezed up my oesophagus. Sunspots filled my eyes. The rinkrin’s breathing was slow. My lungs seemed to match it. It was almost soothing. I could feel the saliva sloshing in my mouth and the calmness of my fingertips settling into the dirt. Was that music? Or was it breath? I couldn’t tell. I tried to match the tune, humming to the low drone of the instruments and, if only for a moment the creature seemed to be doing the same. Then, rough hands curled round me the moment crumbled. The beast trumpeted again, though the sound of it wavered as it settled in the pit once more to rest. Its breathing was as laboured as mine. Hands were holding onto my arms, firmly guiding me away from the pit and into bright, sunlit corridors. My chin was titled back and water poured into my mouth which made me gag as much as I instinctively gulped to swallow as much as I could.
“Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” I heard myself confirm to the concerned handler, “Yes I can.”
I shook my head to try and clear my head. One of the handlers, a tall woman of around forty with raven hair and a tough, thin face was holding a cup. I could see drops of blood along the corridor from where the boy had been taken ahead of me.
“Do you need anything?”
“I need to sit down.”
“Fair enough, I’ll get you somewhere, but Lister will want to see you and I can only hold him off so long.”
“Yes, I know.” My voice was ragged.
“He’ll want to know what happened,” she said. She shivered. “Moon, I don’t know what happened. It was right on top of you. I don’t really know how you managed to get the other side of the gate. Everything happened so fast.”
“What do you mean -”
“I mean, you were a good few paces from the gate when we cut the rope,” she said. She shook her head, “But you can’t have been. Fuck. You wouldn’t have got through. Just what it looked like to me. You were a few paces away and by the moon it looked like you were gone. We cut the rope, sorry about that by the way - only way you could have got through is if it pushed you-”
I smiled weakly. “We were all panicking.”
“Yes,” she said, “We were. I can feel my heart pounding still. I’m surprised you’re conscious, brush with death like that. Poor Berrick.” She shook her head.
“Just be glad we’re all still here,” I said, “Moon alone knows what they’re thinking importing these things. But I’ll still be coming back. I have a job to do.”
She smiled and shook her head, “You must be desperate.”
I shrugged and pointed to the indenture marks tattooed into my wrist.
“Shit,” she said, “Some really will do anything to get out of a bit of work.”
She wasn’t wrong. And worse, she’d been right for the entire conversation. I could only hope that, in the confusion nobody else had noticed that the beast, despite having us at its mercy had suddenly decided, against all of its basest instincts that it should, without any provocation or signal, shove us through a falling iron gate to safety before it closed. I hoped that nobody had noticed, because if they had noticed, and had drawn the same conclusion that I had of this behaviour then frankly, I would have been better off if the rinkrin had just torn me to pieces there and then.