🪔 Lundra: The Falling Rain – Part 5

It was no weather for travel.
Lundra, by its rainy nature, knew little of travelling. It was a gormless thing, a nagging part of the day that people did their best to avoid. Some would ignore travel as it happened to them. Tinctures of rum and lavender to help sleep hold throughout the burden, Boxes, reenforced with iron, to be nailed shut so that a person could sit quietly and wouldn’t have to hear or see any of the ordeal.   
Mould would get into the tea, the road would flood and become a bend in a river. The land was, by a process, counter intuitive for holidaymaking, and most Lundrians would choose to spend their time indoors, dreaming of a life without rain.
Adventurous Lundrians, both underprepared and overpacked, would stride into the wilderness of their country with misplaced zeal, flinging themselves at moss-slick shale mountains and diving into churning seas. They would return battered and beaten, but they would return. They would join their friends in candlelit taverns, and they would swap stories of their travel, bearing smiles of having conquered nature—or having merely survived nature, as it may better be put.  

The world beyond the tavern’s window became opaque as rain fell heavily against the glass. It was a cold rain, a downpour of hurling fall with fragments ice in the heart of every droplet. Corrine watched the rain and couldn’t help but feel an old shiver of another drenched day out on patrol.
Rain had more meaning to a Lundrian than the word could convey. The nation had lived with the rain since the inception of their language and had found that the single word “raining” was as useful as describing the sky as being airy. There was driving rain, rain that drizzled about in two minds between fog and mist. There was flooding rain, lake shifting deluge rain, rain that didn’t quite ruin a picnic. The people of Lundra had found the time to describe every type of falling water in their first thousand years, and after that poetry on the subject no longer seemed to be as interesting as it once had been.
Despite the cold, there was something mediative about walking in a rain such as this for Corrine, the drumming upon the cobbles, the familiar drip from the cloth of her overcoat, it was a peaceful kind of drone that no number of two-a.m. finishes had managed to beleaguer.
The coats were part of the Sandulk police uniform, but more importantly they warm. Well-oiled brown sailcloth, stitched over a cosy tartan inlay that was as comfortable as it was waterproof. Corrine pulled her weathered coat across her shoulders and drew a knot of flame into her palm just to watch it burn for a moment. Her wrist ached from the effort.
Things had become harder this year. No longer feeling the familiar strength of her past, Corrine had noticed that each morning was more and more of a toll. She noticed that there never seemed enough time to lay still, it was always just rush and ruin, deal later with the ache.  

‘Shall we go for a walk then?’ Lawdry laughed, as he sat down and dropped two pints of porter upon the table. The glasses were heavy and clean, the porter inside darker than Rathney iron. Corrine looked at the beer and thought of it to be more welcoming than a woollen blanket in winter.
The young officer noticed his partner snuffing out a fire in her palm and pushed the table’s candle over towards her.  
‘It’s bad luck to draw a flame at the table unless it’s for making light.’ He paused, taking a draft of his beer, and expecting a reply. None came
‘What’s wrong Corrine? You’ve been frowning enough at that window that I’d think you’d been married to it. Did you not sleep well?’
Lawdry had an honest way of asking a question that Corrine had often wished that she could find the knack for. He cared for people. Not just offhandedly but with his entire heart.

‘No, Finn.’ She replied, hoping for another moment of silence.

‘Is it cracked then?’

‘No.’

‘Scuffed?’

‘Enough with the window, Finn! By Dormir, you’re a wet pair of socks. Look, I’m tired from three days too north a travel and I just want to sit without mud in my boots for a while.’ Corrine moved her pint across the table and stared at the streak of water that was left behind. It resembled a fragile kind of comet, a light way up above the cloud-line.
‘I’m tired, but yes, I slept well. Are you well?’ Corrine turned the questioning around towards her partner with an officer’s grace. She had been doing this for too long.

‘I think so. I do feel as though I’ve fallen into a well and been hit with a wet stick of thistle, but that will pass.’ Lawdry scratched at his hair and dislodged a stubborn clump of mud that his scrubbing had missed. ‘So long as Lenith stays lucky, I won’t be volunteering to go trawling again. Anyway, do we have a plan of getting home, then? I’m not sure that seven-or-so pints will make the horses come back by themselves.’
The rain fell more heavily now, it was the kind of rain where puddles welled to the surface and life itself looked for a shelter.

‘I’m going to drink this pint,’ said Corrine flatly, ‘then I might go for a walk. I might leave my badge on this table, and I might go for a walk.’
Staring into the darkness of the porter, age seemed to dwindle Corrine somewhat, she felt small, tired.
‘I’ve retired, Finn.’

‘Retired?’ a pause, a lump being swallowed, ‘You’re dying then? Oh, gods Corri, don’t tell me that you’re dying!’
A wetness began to well behind Lawdry’s eyes, the gentle-hearted officer dropped his shoulders with a forlorn beaten slouch and appeared to be one moment from collapsing into a pile of unwoven thread. He struck the table with his palm and began to recite a sonnet to Lenith so that ill luck may pass.  

‘I’m not dying and quit your daft wailing.’ Corrine said, shouting over Lawdry’s moans, ‘I’ve retired, ok. Everyone retires. Take your dead man back to Sandulk and see if he’ll replace me. See if he’ll replace Lionel, they can be friends.’ wanting to add something along the lines of a decomposing man at least achieving something as he sat on his arse, Corrine paused and remembered that Lawdry still liked the armoury steward. He saw too much good in the world, too much honesty in people.
Finn Lawdry had joined the Sandulk police force as a lad and four years later he was still as innocent as a spring morning. Corrine remembered his first shift. The disconsolate face of a boy who had just had his wallet stolen. The abuse of good nature that believed in a pickpocket feeling remorse and then bringing the thing back eventually. Lawdry was a great detective, but he was also a very average police officer.

‘Why would you retire then?’ he said, ‘You love policing. You’d not get to fight anyone if you retire.’
Sipping at his porter, Lawdry caught some of the beer’s foam on the beginnings of a moustache and Corrine remembered a time when he looked to have barely grown eyebrows.

‘It’s time. I want to open my shop, properly this time. I don’t want to carry a dead man back to Sandulk and then get caught up in finding out why a horse thief was carrying a seeing stone.’
Finding the argument distracting enough to be relaxing, Corrine leant back into the well carved wooden booth, the fragrance of peat wisping about the tavern. Everything was calm here, simple, but well thought out. For the first time she wondered if Gara would be worth visiting one day.
The light of the afternoon began to hang lowly.     

Regardless of the weather, it was a three-day horse ride back to Sandulk, and both of their horses were away, galloping somewhere freely upon the other side of the river. That’s a trouble with a marsh horse, Finn mused as a fiddle player stroked a droning melody across his strings and the tavern fell into contemplative silence, all they want to do is gallop. All a marsh horse wants to do is dance across the land and it would only be the ocean that would stop them. He’d always loved horses, they were honest.

‘You’ll be staying another night then?’  
A figure that appeared to be built of stone and beard appeared by the table of the two crestfallen officers. The barman, Markov Woodturner, was at first glance every bit as Garran as a snow peaked mountainside but spoke Lundrian with an all-soaked fluency. His family, now running between tables and serving both food and drink, looked a picture of happiness, the joy of a mountain beer hall intermixed with the hospitality of a cosy Lundrian tavern.
The music was flowing now, a farmer had found a drum and second fiddle player strung a lagging melody behind the first. There was push, a stirring urge to talk and to stamp along to the beat. The trouble of the day no longer seemed to matter as more patrons folded into the tavern and more and more sound was layered onto the din. A cheer took up as a red nosed woman flicked open a case and withdrew an accordion. A lad, drunk for the first time in his life, felt emboldened to take the hand of his quiet love and revelled in the mockery of dance that youth was so often inhibited by.
The tavern was full. Life, in this moment, was full.
Corrine smiled and thought of her book shop. It was so close to not just being a thing of dreams.

~

Alice Cuttler was angry.

From her first breath, Alice had hated the world. There were too many people, too many voices. Fools that spoke inane nothings; fools that wasted Dormir’s time by continuing their own survival. Alice just wanted everything to be quiet. But it was always talk, all the people did were talk. Even here, even in this muddy field, they all talked.

Blake was dead. The only one quiet enough to silence the voices was dead and now Alice had to hear them all again. The Policewoman had been lucky, she had frightened the horses more than she won the fight. She leapt in a bundle of punches and kicks, she surprised Alice and Blake, and they fell into the icky water.  
Alice stabbed at the ground in idle thought. The policewoman was a good fighter, brash but keen. She had dodged two stabs that many would have missed, she had punched Alice in the eye and had broken her nose. No one had broken Alice’s nose before.
‘Grey lady. Grey lady, oh friend that we’ve found.’
Grinning a broken toothed smile, the wiry thief snapped her knife at the hilt upon the ground and smiled at the handle as she drew its spectre into the earth once more. Once, twice, Alice drove her bleeding hands into the stony moss, again and again she punched at the earth until the voices were drowned out by a red line of static.
‘Grey lady. We’ll find you. In the ground we will find you.’  

The worms pulled their way to the surface.      

—

J. McCray
2023