It was raining.
It had always rained in Lundra.
Chroniclers, distracted by the steady drip of untraceable leaks, would be heard throughout the annals of time, crying out in lament as another drenched manuscript lay ruined and in the need of redrafting. Water in the inkwell, again; damp settling into the air and turning important paper into collected mâché. The ever-falling rain had ruined all too many attempts at record keeping and the history of the island nation was traditionally passed on through story and though song rather than with the accuracy of a textbook alone. But despite all logic and contrary to reason, Lundra loved nothing more than reading.
With a dizzying amount of printing presses, the books of Lundra fluttered out across the world and now could be found sold as far as Versale.
It was an island enwrapped by words. Popular for cheap kindling, the weather bureau steadfastly printed their weekly forecasts; Paper-backed novels would be read, re-read and then lovingly stuck back together so that a friend may read them too.
It was a dreary place. Grey clouds blanketed the sky and led the rain to fall in a multitude of layers. There was drizzle; sleet; cats; dogs; lake-like formations of rain that all pummelled down in varying cascades, washing across the land unhalting, and drenching the already sodden earth to the point of run-off. The ground was wet, the forecast was wet, the chances of a picnic were historically miniscule in the lonely nation of Lundra.
Corinne lay face down in a bog; it wasn’t an entirely unpleasant experience.
Yes, the potential of another breath of air was just about as likely as the smell of peat washing from her hair. But, with her nose firmly entrenched in the miasma of bog water, the smell of peat was the single welcome fragrance that she was currently having to process.
There were worse places to be face down. She had read about the endless Sandseas of Yansir that boiled and baked with a dryness that was rumoured to melt even the shadows; there were the six types of needle-grass* hiding in the summer lawns of the gardeners of Versale; there were inescapable winds that tore through Western Gara, howling under twice sealed doorframes and pulling nails from things that would really be missed if allowed to be torn free.
All things considered; Corinne was quite happy to be lying face down in a bog. It was quiet, the rhythmic drumming rain pattered against the back of her head and felt vaguely consoling in a way that, for the first time in three days, had given her a chance to breath.
She needed to breathe; sure, she would eventually have to breathe-in regardless of the peat-mass the surrounded her, but in the dim dark embrace of the bog, the tired police officer wondered if she could just float here for a few moments longer.
Crime was only a mild nuisance in Lundra. Inclement weather was a handy deterrent against the dark figures that enjoyed lurking in an alley’s shadow and finding a thug who would muck about with wet cobblestones for a thug’s living-wage was as likely as finding a pot of dust at the bottom of a lake. But, despite this, and despite all efforts of the clouds above, the vile would always find a way to be vile and anything expensive would eventually find a way to become stolen.
Lundra, by its nature, was excellent for plotting: candle-dim taverns with private nooks for whispered conversations; ominous stone circles, set aglow by the runic light of a cult who had found a half-decent alchemist. But even with all the bountiful opportunities for negative planning, there was never any use for serious crime in Lundra. Why plan a heist when it was easier to let the bank keep the hassle of getting water out of a vault? Why overthrow the government when it was warmer to sit in a tavern? More often than not, crime in Lundra boiled down to either a spectacularly incompetent doomsday cult, or some drunk farmer who had let the natural progression of things change his opinions on what can be struck with an axe.
Policing in Lundra was all legwork, Corinne had decided. It was running, it was talking, it was talking while running in an effort to avoid the paperwork. In fact, Corrine had often felt that her time as a police officer was just spent waiting for someone run, and then having the cardio enough to be able to chase them down.
Light.
Light returned in a muted sound of sloshing water as moss and thicket were dragged upward along with Corinne’s head. The world was mud. Her eyebrows felt overburdened as an anvil of bog-matter sloughed away from her brow. A sneeze resembling ten-dozen mudlarks sent a patter down from her nose towards the still settling waterline.
People in Carrick-Joyce paid for this. A merchant with clean palms bought six cuts of poor-quality peat from Corinne’s brother last spring and had said that it was purifying for the skin.
Spitting a hack of sediment back into the water, Corinne dowerly wondered if the same would be true for her hair, teeth and toenails.
Pulling herself backward, the waterlogged officer looked upon the world with dead eyes and floundered against the mud of the embankment with a harangued kind of exhaustion.
‘Do you feel that holding on was a mistake, Corri?’
Her partner, Lawdry’s, poetic warble had taken on an unusually harsh note to Corinne, everything was harsh at the moment. Smiling tersely at her fellow officer, she gave a punitive gesture and then began to extract a quagmire of mud from her last pair of comfortable boots.
Lundra knew the rain like a policeman knew their boots.
With a well walked familiarity, the country had been studiously recording its weather patterns since before written history and had discovered it more accurate to forecast the amount of rain rather the duration. And so, Lundrians had given up on the idea of outdoor pastimes, preferring indoor games such as cribbage, or dead-rat push.
There were outliers, of course. The trawlers, who dragged gaff hooks across the marsh in hopes of snagging a lost treasure; the marathon runners who walked as if they were lighter than air and ran across the surface of snagging marsh and bog as if it was but mostly dry concrete.
‘The rain’ll do you good.’ Corrine’s father had often intoned–the man was a firm believer in the learning through repetition and would bore his idioms into conversations to the point of nauseum. ‘Thanks to the clouds, you could swing a stick no end and it’ll always point to a patch of good peat, my girl.’
He was a simple man, but Corinne did believe his words. The land was Lundra, its people were Lundrian. There was a goodness here, sometimes buried just below the waterline
Conjuring a small ember of fire into her palm, Corrine held the flame close to her chest and began to feel a warmth bleed into the brackish water that still dripped from her saturated uniform. A tendril of steam rebelled against the spitting rain Corrine watched her diminutive flame sputter meekly**. She was tired, the flame faltered.
‘Thanks for all the help,’ she said, spitting mud and exhaustion onto the floor with the grace someone who had just been dragged through a bog by a marsh horse, any politeness she had was buried somewhere by the first meter of her sludge filled journey.
The ground felt heavier in Lundra. Constant rain had made regular travelling hard and anything that lessened the dangers of the open country were considered precious. A good marsh horse was valued as much as a sturdy umbrella in Lundra.***
‘Did they get away.’ she asked, not truly caring if the horses had turned loose or not. There were more important things in the world for Corinne at the moment. Blankets, hot whiskey, fighting anyone who stood in the way of either.
‘Looks like it,’ Lawdry yawned, his enthusiasm hollow from sheer lack of sleep, ‘we’ll need a shovel to find our two friends, but the horses did manage get away. They’ll not wander too far though, I’ll let Peter know that they’re grand and we’ll call it a day…when we get back, that is.’
Lawdry was barely standing, he had been trekking through unwelcoming countryside for the last three days and was fairly certain that the rain had given him a concussion. Corinne, his superior officer, was determined enough to burn down the haystack while looking for a pin and had managed to track down two thieves who were pretending to be horse traders. She leapt–she always leapt–into their fleeing wagon and fought black and blue until the horses grew tired of the scuffle and ran headlong into a bog in an effort to get away.
Looking around the open field for anything resembling a shelter, the young officer wondered how many more wet cigarettes away he was from leaving the police force in a huff.
Corinne didn’t particularly like the police force either. It was a means to and end that meant that she occasionally was able to enjoy a fist fight while on horseback. She had loved fighting while growing up and her five brothers would still find themselves shuddering whenever they heard a knuckle crack. By twenty Corrine had worn more black eyes than she had worn socks and now, at forty, the joy of a good tussle was still to lose its lustre.
She owned a bookshop too, well, lived in one anyway. With long shifts and dedication to sleeping when not on patrol, Corinne had found little time to open the doors of her shop in recent years, and the “sorry, we’re closed” sign that hung her window had become so dust covered that it was barely legible.
It was a curious store. Nestled between a tavern and candle shop, the diminutive frontage of “Sandulk used books” was so seldom customed that many had assumed it to be abandoned. Inside, it was crowded. Shelves and tables were strewn with ageing hardbacks and the fragrance of paper was nearly visible when inspected by candlelight. There were nooks, a wooden staircase had been precariously converted into piles of non-fiction, pokey rooms were stuffed with bursting shelves much larger than their doors in a mystery akin to ships and bottles.        Â
Sitting in the mud, Corinne couldn’t help but think of her bookshop. There was a sadness in not being there, an absence of place that a person feels when all too far from their home. Looking at Lawdry for a long moment, Corinne wondered if he would be ok without her.
‘I’m retiring,’ she said without really thinking, ‘enough with mud, I just want to be dry for once.’
‘Dry then?’ Lawdry replied without paying attention to the unceremonious retirement. ‘But what would you want a thing like dry for? Dry is for deserts. Nah, you’re one warm drink away from being yourself again. Come now, let’s find a road.’
Helping his friend from the embankment, Lawdry shook off his dry-coat and dropped it over Corinne’s shoulders. The misting rain had slackened, the night was cold, but bearably so.
With limp and stumble the two officers saw the road rise and the ember of a tavern beyond.
There was music in the air, a safety away from the inevitable storm.
Corinne and Lawdry descended into the comfort of a hearth-lit porter and revelled in three pints that fell towards a sleep so welcome and complete.
The walk home was a still a long and winding trail, but surely it was a quiet one…
Surely.
—
*Botany is considered an often-dangerous study in Versale, and the experience of its practitioners is likened to that of a person who goes bungee jumping despite knowing that they’ve forgotten the rope.
In the game of life, there are some hobbies that reach a plateau of consequence when compared to others.
**Lundrians, a curious race, were born the innate ability to kindle flame by a matter of embers. While handy when the matches were misplaced, it was difficult for a Lundrian to deny allusions of a devilish ancestry and the more sheltered villages of the world would become quite upset when seeing this without the presence of a stake, preferably one already on fire.
***Born for tough work, a marsh horse could stride across the wet earth unimpeded and would jump into bogs more readily than most fish. It was said that two Lundrian horses could move a city if the mood struck, and many were fearful of a day when it would.
J. McCray
2023
Sunday Short Stories 