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dunmerofskyrim · 7 years ago

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When Simra woke in darkness, the world was touch and taste, and the drip and the drip and the drip that took up the whole of his hearing. The sour parch of his mouth and the overgrown ache of his head, like a fluid weight behind his darkblind eyes. The grazed gritty sting of his hands and the uncovered cold of his body. But what he noted first was the cuffs.

They were heavy on his wrists: chafing where once there’d been bracelets, bangles, beads, and leaden silence where their whisper and jangle had been. A quiet that rung out through him, into him, like swallowing a shard of ice and feeling it slip down. He fumbled with his fingers at them. Thick iron, rough to the touch, grooved and scratched. Manacles, but they weren’t chained together. Another purpose then. And Simra reckoned he already knew, but he tried all the same.

He tried to cast a light. Cupped hands near his face and metal murmuring cold close to his painful jaw, the stinging side of his cheek. He tried again and his hands were shaking, making the manacles rub. The magic wouldn’t come, when all but all his life it had come whenever he called. No light. And the dark bore down on him after that with all the weight of water.

A trapped fox frenzy then. Blind hands scrabbling useless, finding walls, floor, senseless signals from nerve to shrilling nerve.

The taste of blood in his mouth, and after, the gristly give of his cheek as he chewed through it. Starch sweet and dry on his tongue and trickling down his throat. Spit thick and white-tasting as ricewater — the paper film that forms on top of ricewater left out in the cold. Voices in the silence and pictures thrown up on the walls of what he couldn’t see. Memories like insects under his skin.

Rice broth. Drink up, it’s good for you. – Broth? This is barely tea, Case. Water you’ve boiled something in isn’t broth, specially not when the thing you’ve boiled’s just rice. – And thrown like a shadowplay on the inside of Simra’s eyelids, Caselif pouted and said: Fuck you too, sweetbones and lemme learn you something. Here in Ebonheart, ain’t no such thing as ‘just rice’.

An ache on his scalp and temples, like a setting scab that’d take hours of work and warm water to loose up. Then a hand searching into the roots of his hair. Tight, something tight round his wrist. Whatever you want. Whatever it is you want. – To mark you. You understand that, don’t you? Marking? A savage like you. – Writhe and grind in his ribs as he tried to struggle again. – It’s important. How else will people know you for what you are? – No, please no. Just one? Just two? Just don’t — just don’t…

He screamed maybe. Hard to say when he stopped, but after a time there was only his heartbeat, drumming inside his skull.

A light came above him, sweet as rescue. The first grey sky before dawn, dim but blinding for all it was better than nothing. It anchored him. Slow, slow as he slowed his breathing, and came back to himself.

The grey light flushed pink. Simra stared up, slouched and sitting below, watching as it changed. Bars appeared across the sky when the light was bright enough to show them: an iron grate gone halfway to rust at the mouth of a tunnel. A cell then. He’d suspected it, but knowing something he already knew was better than knowing nothing.

It was damp, smelling of sea and starting to sound of it. Light leaked down the walls, painting shadows where before there’d been only dark. They were hacked into the rock, or else bored down by the work of water long ago. A moment of fear at that. If the water dug this pit, what if it came again when the tide was high enough? Drowned him? But that would be a sentence more than a cell. He tried to hope otherwise.

Gold light glinted on scars in the walls. Chiselmarks. The place was built then, not grown. Still, it seemed better suited to be a well than a room. A narrow-necked tunnel dug into darkness, with Simra, wet stone, and rancid straw crammed into its bottom like lees at the end of a bottle. Might’ve been appropriate – a kind of poet’s justice – if it was the bottle that had landed him down here, but it was the mariner. Broad shoulders; bellowing voice that had gone so quick from calls and coaxing to threats. Not drink but the dumb rut-greed of men. That was the cause; what about the crime?

Grinding limbs and stiffened joints, Simra made to stand. Good to find he had room at least to straighten. He measured the sides of his cell out in paces – three by four and fourteen about – and pieced together what he could. It was a memory skill he turned to: something Kishewyr had tried to teach him, by the shores of lake Amaya. Something like a spell without magic, leaving just an exercise to bend your brain through. Walk through your memory like it’s a place; follow its roadways and find it full of rooms. It had never taken with Simra. He got impatient trying to better what was already good. But he tried it now all the same.

He remembered the yurt pitched on the black sand beach by the rice paddies, just beyond the tideline. Moor-ropes moaning in the wind off the ocean and him grumbling about it too as he wrapped his mantle round himself and led the two guar townwards.

He remembered setting to sell them. Ask with cornerclubs and bed-and-board places for travellers, anywhere with a stable attached. Tammunei had said, Find someone who’ll ride them. And in the end when he sold them to a ricefarmer as draftbeasts, pullers of ploughs, that had seemed close enough to the mark. As close as he’d get, anycase. – Can they wade? – Friend, they can swim. I’ve seen these two ford rivers in Winter with packs and riders. How else d’you think my companions and I got this far off the Plains? – And that’s where you got them, is it? Won’t have no Ashlanders come wanting them back, will I? – Simra laughed and didn’t answer. What good was a weak joke if not to cover something over, after all? A frailty, a weakness, a fear. Twenty-eight drams for the two of them when they were worth at least twenty each. He wondered if he’d’ve got better with a butcher, but that’d be one more lie than he wanted to tell Tammunei.

He remembered the cornerclub after. Sign of the Weeping Eye. Sawdust and sand on the floor to better clear spills and spews. Murky greyglass jar behind the counter where some glowing insect flew spirals and dashed against the walls of its prison. The clubkeep spoke to the jar, gloating over it like an old and broken rival. And going by the cinder-seeming dust gathered in the jarbottom, perhaps it was, or had been.

He’d asked for a drink and then asked for the date. Easy to lose track on the road. – Evening Star, stranger. Eighth day. – And that called for another drink. If not on your Signing Day then when?

So now, Simra thought, stopping to lean against the wall and stare up at the grate-scarred sky. First morning of your twenty-fourth year, and here you are spending it in a holding cell. “Now isn’t that a thing?” he said. “Now isn’t that a fucking blight of a thing…”

But he remembered the mariner by the fire. Nothing much after that, but the daylight had reached deep enough into the well to show him his hands. Broken and scab-stiff skin at his knuckles; the heels of his palms scuffed raw. In his unwashed face, he could feel one eye swollen half shut. His throat was bruised tight, hurting when he tried to swallow, and a few sharper stripes of pain scored the side of his neck. Fingernail scratches.

The mariner must’ve come off worse. If not, Simra reckoned, their places would be switched.

“He’d be down here, and you’d be up there, beat up but let free.” His voice was thick. Chewed cheek; a split lip that split back open as his mouth moved. “The victim…”

If this was the way things had played he was glad of it. Blind drunk he might’ve been last night, but that didn’t stop him seeing when someone deserved a kicking. Fucker. Bay like a dog from the side of the street at anyone not cowed away from walking it, will you? And when they don’t take the maggoty bait that you’ve laid – when they spit on it; spit on you – then what? Talk like you’ll take it by force? Like it’s your fucking right…

The anger had come back by then. Nothing but shadows for memories of what he’d done – but hadn’t that always been the way with drinking?; and weren’t there times when it had been a mercy? – but this creeping shadow of the anger he felt was hard and cold and clear.

He’d tried to swallow it before, for Caselif’s sake. Nights in Suran when he’d be out and come back in the morning, hands still showing on his skin, the colour of spilt wine. That was after the truth came out. The days when things were starting to break, so they tried harder than ever to make them work; smiled and laughed and held each other tighter and hotter than ever like sharing more lies might fix what the truth had done. – It’s simple, Sim. Pays better is all. Some of these pious types, they just like to pretend. Like if they’re taking it, it ain’t about anything but what they’re taking. Power, not… – Fuck that. Fuck them. – They pay better to go away feeling clean? Fuck it, let ‘em. – I swear, Case, if you just give me names… – And take half the rice out our bowls? Sweetness, it’s just pretend. – And those bruises. They’re pretend too? – Nothing I can’t handle. – And it’s just for now, right? – It’s just for now… – …Stronger than I could ever hope, d’you know that? – Pshaw…

He’d really tried. Made a show of caving in, eyes closed and head hung and an almost-sweet sigh on his lips. After all, hadn’t he said it wouldn’t be a problem? Not with him; not between them. Who was he to judge? Everyone sells something. That wasn’t the problem, but rather what these men would want to buy. Simra held onto the rage of it, keeping it close and well-stoked and ready, telling himself it would be there the minute one of those bastards crossed a line. It was important. How else besides anger could he make sure he differed? Hate them or join them, that was the way Soraya had taught him. Lessons he couldn’t shake; wouldn’t want to shake off.

But that was long ago. Today, it blazed down with time, and the sky overhead grew brighter, and the air in the cell grew cold. No jacket, no mantle, no scarf and no boots; just footwraps, shirts and trousers, the seat of them damp from sitting. Simra shivered and waited, seething that they’d taken what they had from him. Why was it always the blighted jacket? Bracelets, bags, rings off his fingers now too, but the jacket was always first to go.

His breath smoked the air. Water shimmered down the black throat of his cell, and he stared, dreading and daring it to turn from a trickle to a torrent and drown him. But the worst it did before stopping was worsen the cold. Force him onto his feet from where he’d slumped in the wet half-rotten straw. And by then standing hurt. He was hungry, but didn’t reckon he could eat if he tried. Thirsty above all else.

Noon came. Or what he thought must have been noon. A sky bright and colourless as steel, enough that he could feel the light on him, a tease of warmth in all this stiff salt-smelling cold. A shadow passed over the cellmouth. Blocked his sun.

“That answers that question then,” Simra said, voice thick as sand.

“Eh?”

“Safe to assume I didn’t kill the fucker. Not if you’re here already.” Simra leaned back against the driest wall of his cell. Worked his shoulders and the pinnings of his back until he felt their stiffness soften. “If it was murder, you’d’ve let me rot a while. Am I right?”

The shadowshape at the mouth of his cell didn’t say a thing. Simra squinted up, trying to make of them what he could. A shapelessness to them, like layers of coat and cloak — cosy, he’d bet, warm-wrapped for a Winter morning, the bastard. Bill-peaked helmet maybe, shade for the eyes. Who else wears a helmet in town but watch or guards? But that was where his reckoning ended.

“So?” said Simra. “Tell me what I’m charged with.” In secret he was glad they’d come when they had and no sooner. Easier now to mask up, give off a bored fingernail-studying calm. If they’d seen him earlier, bloodying his hands against the walls…

“Nothing that’s all that. Just breaking the peace. Davon’s Watch sees its share of brawls on the docks. Usually they sort themselves out…”

“So what’d I do to earn a bed for the night, hm? Woke some light sleepers? Curdled some curds with my choice language?”

“Some shouting, yeah, way I heard it told.”

“You weren’t there, then?”

“Three gods, no, I just got on duty.”

“What else d’you hear?”

“What?” The voice went smug. “You weren’t there either?”

“Right you are! This is all a big fucking misunderstanding. And these?” Simra gestured at his bruised face. Grimaced through blood-tasting teeth. “I got these falling down this big fucking hole this morning, so if you’d just let me back up…”

A tutting sound from above. Two figures now – same helmet – and still less light breaking down into this pit. Where the first voice was round and slow, the second was nasal, sneering:

“There was the matter of some property got damaged too. A shopfront stoved in. A jar of oil broken and poured across the street. Pot-traps smashed. One pavestone pulled up. Blood to be cleared… And a ship captain who kicked up some dust, being down three crewman and not able to sail this morning — threw off the whole itinerary, y’understand.”

A twitch played down Simra’s back. A weight unsettled in his empty belly. “Three?” he said, sounding finer than he felt now.

“One half-drowned when he fell in the harbour – or was he pushed?; yeah, pushed sounds more like it—”

“Kicked’s what I heard.”

“Right.”

“Fucker couldn’t swim?”

“Right. Another dazed and with a broken jaw. That was you and your cobblestone; don’t know why you couldn’t just punch with your fist like civil people. Either way, no condition to sail, y’understand. And then there’s the matter of the third…”

“The big one. Way I heard it, he’s come off the worst. Missing an ear’s what I heard.”

“Missing more than that…” The second voice snorted. A ratty little laugh.

“Good,” said Simra. “I’ve done worse to people deserving less.”

“Now. Now now. The cause of your quarrel’s between the quarrellers.” That same tutting, a sneer sounding all through it. Simra could see why someone like that would join a townwatch. “Our concern’s with seeing justice gets done. Understand?”

A sourness rose like bile up Simra’s gorge. “So — a fine? Sitting me here to stew doesn’t fix windows or pay off plaintiffs, does it?”

“Confiscation of property, as related to the crime.”

Fuck you, fuck you, scratch your stones on a thorntree and catch greencraze you sanctimonious fucking insect, Simra thought. “Related to the crime?” he said.

“Right. Equipment of a violent bent, y’understand.”

“Jacket, cloak, and jewelery?” Simra hissed.

“Armour,” the nasal voice corrected. “A sword and quite a number of knives. And the matter of certain items of unconfirmed enchantment…”

The Nords of some petty Skyrim townlaw would never look past the sword and blades. They’d pat you down for knives and koshes and knuckles but never suppose enchantments lay on every little thing, or shackle a prisoner’s magic as well as their wrists. This was the cost of civilisation. You expect more from people, you suspect more too.

“And what about the matter of getting them back and being on my way?” Simra said through gritted teeth.

“A simple cost, paid to the township, for every item you want returned. All very reasonable, y’understand.”

“Suppose you’ll charge me bed and board too…”

They laughed. “And for rearranging your face for you!” At that, they laughed harder.

Laugh. They might well. They weren’t the ones being robbed.

#TES #Morrowind #Dunmer #Simra Hishkari #SH Forth and Back #SH New Canon #Caselif Moathryon

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