How to Be a Human - Chapter 1
So, in 2019 I wrote How to Be a Human, and in 2020 I followed it with How to Talk to Shadows. There's a third story, How to Heal a Severed Soul, which I began work on in 2020 and ground to a halt, not because I didn't know where the story was going, but because it was so close to my own mental problems that I couldn't cope with writing any more of it. It still hasn't let go of my imagination, and I still want to complete it, but at the moment I've got other projects on.
Anyway, the purpose of this blog post is to include the first chapter of How to Be a Human, and to ask you: would you like me to post the rest of this on my blog? Or would you prefer to read it on Archive Of Our Own?
Gardas
wasn’t sure why his trial wasn’t taking place in the Walled City. For the past two weeks, he had been held
prisoner in what looked as though it had been a cowshed, with a
magic-restraining collar around his neck so that he couldn’t use his powers,
and his hands and feet shackled to prevent any more mundane means of
escape. Not that Gardas had fancied his
chances of escape anyway. Quite apart
from the large troll guards stationed outside – not the local trolls of the
Downs, who were mostly pale, sickly creatures, but craggy-featured grey trolls
from the hills to the west – he had been too ill most of the time even to
try. Whenever he tried to remember what
had happened, he had felt dizzy and confused, and sometimes even fainted. Gardas hated being ill. It reminded him of the pranks that Azalar,
his master, had used to play on him when they were boys.
Azalar’s
cousin Auric had come in to visit Gardas every day of his imprisonment, to
bring him food and to reassure him not to worry. Not about the past that he couldn’t remember
(‘It wasn’t your fault. You weren’t
yourself,’), not about his upcoming trial (‘It’s all right; I’ll take care of
you,’) and not about the dizzy spells (‘It might be some sort of hex Azalar put
on you, or it might just be you making yourself sick with fretting. Just concentrate on getting through today,
and I’ll take you to a healer as soon as we get a chance,’). This made a lot of things not to think about. Gardas had spent most of his time seeing how
many sit-ups and touch-toes he could do.
He
supposed Auric must be his master now, since apparently Azalar was now
dead. Gardas was vaguely, guiltily aware
that he seemed to have caused Azalar’s death, though he couldn’t remember the
details. At any rate, Auric didn’t think
that anyone would be sorry about Azalar’s death as such – certainly, Auric
himself didn’t seem to miss his cousin – but, nonetheless, there were horrible
executions reserved for slaves who killed their masters.
Then
again, was he still a slave? Azalar’s parents had bought him when he was
eleven, on the understanding that they would pay for his schooling up until the
age of eighteen, after which he would pay them back by working for them or
Azalar up to the age of twenty-five. If
he had shown enough promise for them to decide to send him to university up to
the age of twenty-one, they might have gone on owning him until he was
thirty-one, but Gardas couldn’t imagine them caring to do that. Auric might have, if it had been up to him,
but he and Azalar would have been only twenty, perhaps at university themselves
or just starting their careers, by the time Gardas finished school.
But
now, somehow, Auric, whom Gardas remembered as a young man of eighteen, was
thirty-two, with a full, red-gold beard to counterpoint his light gold hair. And Gardas himself, who had already been as
tall as Azalar and rather taller than Auric when he was sixteen and they were
eighteen, now towered over Auric like a mountain troll. He was thirty, apparently, and his body
looked lean and sinewy from what he could see of it. Disappointingly, he still had a sprinkling of
pimples (mostly on his back and buttocks, where he couldn’t reach to squeeze
them), and his hair seemed to be already thinning, but Gardas had never worried
much about his appearance.
At
any rate, this morning Auric arrived earlier than usual, with clean clothes, a
bucket of water, a towel, and a comb, to help Gardas get ready for his
trial. He began by persuading the duty
troll to give him the keys to Gardas’s shackles, after which the troll locked
them in together before Auric undid the heavy iron cuffs. Next, Auric bathed the sore patches around
Gardas’s wrists and ankles, anointed them with soothing ointment, and bandaged
them. ‘Not that putting the manacles
back on is going to do you any good,’ he said apologetically. ‘If you get off, I can heal you properly
later, but it might help if the inquisitor and the jury feel a bit sorry for
you. In the meantime, do you want to
wash yourself, or would it help if I did it?
It’s not a good idea getting your dressings wet, after all.’
Gardas
wasn’t sure if complaining was going to get him into trouble, but he looked
dubiously at the swirls of blood in the water.
Auric cast a purifying spell, followed by a warming spell. Gardas stretched, wincing as the blood flowed
into stiff muscles, then peeled off the grubby clothes that he had been wearing
for the past two weeks, and briskly began rubbing himself down with the damp
flannel. It could have been worse, he
knew. At least the manacles had allowed
him enough freedom of his hands to pull down his trousers when he needed to use
the slop-bucket, and enough use of his legs to walk over to it. All the same, while Gardas was not a
fastidious man, going for two weeks without a change of underpants was
something he hadn’t had to endure since before Azalar’s parents had bought him,
and it was good to feel fresh and clean again.
When
he had finished, he rubbed himself dry, dressed in a clean set of patched old
clothes which covered even less of his long limbs than the previous ones had,
and ran a comb through his hair. The
hair seemed to fall out in large clumps, as if he had aged much more than the
fourteen years everyone said, though it was still black. Finally, he let Auric lock the manacles back
in place. They wouldn’t fit over his
bandaged wrists and ankles, and clenched uncomfortably tightly round his
forearms and calves. Auric hadn’t
brought him any boots, and Gardas didn’t bother asking for them. After all, Auric didn’t have to visit his cousin’s murderer at all, let alone give him the
chance to wash and change his clothes.
Auric
knocked on the door to let the guard-troll know it was safe to let them
out. Outside stood a skinny, dark-haired
boy of perhaps ten – no, Gardas realised, at least twelve or thirteen, but
short for his age – who glared at Gardas with undisguised hatred. He had one arm in a sling, and wore the
scorched remains of a school robe. ‘Do I
really have to testify in his defence?’
he asked Auric. ‘Just because he…’
‘Enough,’
said Auric. ‘You’ll have time to tell
the whole story – the parts that
reflect well on Gardas, and the parts that don’t – in due course. But the court needs to hear Gardas’s own
account first.’
‘I
thought you said he couldn’t remember anything?’
‘That’s
right. Well, let’s go – and thank you
for keeping him safe, sir,’ Auric added to the troll, who made no reply.
Auric
led the way, with his left hand supporting Gardas’s right elbow as if he were
escorting a friend rather than dragging a criminal slave to stand trial for his
life. Gardas didn’t know much about
farms, having spent his early childhood in the shanty town that stood outside
the City proper, but he realised that the stone building he had been kept in
had once been part of a bigger complex of buildings – more animal stalls? – in the
midst of the ruins of other buildings – barns full of crops? The farmhouse itself? Both the buildings and what might once have
been fields were now blackened ruins.
Gardas had been expecting the countryside to be full of nettles and
brambles. As Auric gently levitated him
a foot or so above the ground, to spare his bare feet over a pile of broken
glass and sharp stones – and the charred remains of what looked like human
bones – he thought that nettles might have been preferable.
Somehow,
someone had managed to bring the Seat of Judgement from the Walled City to set
it up in an open-air court which nestled in a hollow between the Downs. He supposed the location made it easier for
the crowds sitting on the charred slopes of the hills to hear what was going
on.
Gardas
realised that he recognised the place.
He and Beatrice and Azalar and Auric had been here only last year – or
rather, back when he was sixteen. These
were the Holy Hills, with their carvings of a dragon, a griffin, a unicorn, and
a werewolf. Azalar, who was frightened
of heights, had stayed down on the plains below, but he had allowed Gardas to
go with Beatrice and Auric to scrambled around on the steep grassy slopes,
casting cleansing spells to blast invading weeds off the white chalk
surface. It had been a beautiful sunny
day, full of the sound of skylarks’ song and Beatrice’s laughter. It was one of the best days of his life. And now, there were only four blackened
scorch marks to show where the carvings had been. Who had worked all this destruction? How was it even possible to blacken chalk? And why?
A
white-bearded wizard, evidently an inquisitor, motioned to Gardas to sit down
on the Seat of Judgement. The stone
chair clamped him in place – not sprouting tendrils as enchanted wood might
have done, but simply ensuring that his hands and feet were suddenly encased in
hollows in the stone (tight hollows, which pressed painfully on his sore wrists
and ankles) and that there were stone bars across his waist and neck.
‘Gardas,’
began the inquisitor (not Slave Gardas or Wizard Gardas, or Azalar’s Gardas or
Auric’s Gardas, or anything that might give him a clue to his current status),
‘you are charged with a campaign of war crimes and intimidation taking place
over the past fourteen years, including multiple counts of mass murder of both
wizards and commoners, multiple counts of destruction of property, one count of
grievous bodily harm to a child, and one count of destroying a wizard’s
magic. How do you plead?’
‘I
can’t remember,’ said Gardas. ‘I’m
sorry, sir.’
‘You
can’t remember, and yet you feel sorry?’ sneered the inquisitor. Gardas had an uncomfortable feeling that he
had met this inquisitor before – maybe been on trial in front of this inquisitor
– though he couldn’t remember when or why.
He wanted to snap, ‘I meant I’m sorry I can’t answer your questions, you
pompous git!’ but he couldn’t manage to get the words out. He often couldn’t say much, especially in
front of his betters, which included practically everyone.
He
noticed that the inquisitor’s robes were nearly as old and shabby as the
second-hand shirt and trousers that Auric had found somewhere for Gardas. In fact, even though they were presumably in
their best clothes for an important occasion, nearly everyone was dressed in
rags. People Gardas recognised and knew
were wizards, including some of his old teachers, wore a random mixture of
wizards’ robes and commoners’ trousers or dresses – and it wasn’t just the
female wizards wearing dresses, which implied that some of the men would have liked to be still in robes, but no
longer possessed them. Had he caused
such widespread devastation that people no longer had sheep to shear or fields
to grow flax in?
When
they’d come out here before, there had been sheep grazing on the hills, and the
fields had been a patchwork of sky-blue flax flowers, silver-blue-green unripe
wheat, blossoming bean-plants, and grass waiting to turn into hay, with
hedgerows between them, and even a few small patches of woodland. They were mostly beeches, Beatrice had said,
and had told him the legend of how beeches had come into existence thousands of
years ago, when a young witch had fallen so much in love with the sun that she
had turned herself into a tree in a misguided attempt to win his love, and how
her human suitor had begged her not to leave him behind, so she had turned him
into a boar who could eat the seeds at her feet. Auric had said, ‘That’s really sad,’ and
Gardas, who hadn’t wanted to admit how much the story moved him, had snorted,
‘That’s stupid! When she loved a good
man who loved her and wanted to marry her, why would she choose the sun, who couldn’t marry her?’ Azalar had hexed him with a tongue-sticking
spell for being disrespectful, but Beatrice had nodded seriously, and said,
‘Yes, it was a stupid decision to make.
But lots of people have the problem of loving someone who can’t love
them in that way, and can’t accept the friendship that their beloved could give
them, or go on to find out who is the right person for them to marry.’
Now,
everything was a blackened ruin, without even the beginnings of weeds thrusting
through. It looked almost as though it
had been attacked by a dragon. Gardas
remembered a lesson on dragons once: how Black dragons were among the most
dangerous variety, although they were smaller than blues, because their fire
was so destructive; Blue dragons’ fire could burn and injure, but Black
dragons’ fire could devastate land so that it was permanently cursed, or
inflict injuries that could not be healed either by natural means, or by any
human magic. Only the healing fire of a
silvery Grey dragon, larger than any variety save the Golds, could undo a Black
dragon’s curse. Perhaps Paul had been
injured by a dragon? It would explain
why no healer had restored him to normal.
‘Gardas! Are you paying attention?’ snapped the inquisitor.
‘Sorry,
sir,’ said Gardas again.
‘As
I was saying, before I or anyone else questions you any further, you need to
drink this truth potion. I must remind
the court that the defendant’s testimony will not necessarily give the true
facts of what actually happened, but will reveal the truth as it appears to
him. I must also remind everyone that
those under the influence of a truth potion are easily distracted, and so it is
important that nobody else calls out, or questions the defendant without my
permission. Now, Gardas, are you ready?’
‘Yes,
sir,’ Gardas managed, in a strangled grunt.
A younger, female wizard lifted the cup of bitter potion to Gardas’s
lips (he had known it would taste bitter, so had he been interrogated like this
before?).
As
Gardas drank, he began to realise that there was nothing really to worry
about. After all, they were all his
friends here, even if some of them were friends he’d never met. He grinned, his tongue lolling like a dog’s,
as he got ready to tell his tale.
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