Qatal withholds his mercy

Qatal’s hands slapped over his face as soon as he stepped into the room – even before he understood what had horrified him. His terror of his sadistic master was so primal as to be a reflex, and he hid his unmasked face as he might have snatched his hand out of a fire.

His first conscious thought was that Dantalion had returned sooner than he had promised. It was exactly the sort of feint that one expected of him, and Qatal cursed himself for having let himself be caught in carelessness again.

His second thought, as he inhaled his own blustery breath trapped behind his fingers, was that one of the shivering kittens he had just rescued had thanked him by pissing on his hand. He was coming to hate cats more than he hated any living thing – even more than men.

He heard Eithne call his name just as he vanished, but he did not think his servitude to her trumped the duty of a centurion to appear in his mask at all times. Nor did his dignity permit him to return until he had stopped at a nearby stream to wash his hands.

His dignity was therefore doubly outraged when he returned to the room and found that the odor had remained behind.

“What is that stink?” he hissed through the slits in his mask. “Is that cat pissing in here now? I won’t stand for it!”

He pounded his fist into the flat of his palm, imagining fondly that the vile creature’s little skull lay upon it.

To his shock, Eithne leapt at him and knocked his arms aside to plant herself between them and poke his chest with her small, stabbing finger.

“That cat does not misbehave in the manner you are suggesting!” she hissed in a fair imitation of himself. “And nobody asked you what you can stand! I called you here to serve me, and you shall serve!”

Little Eithne! Who called him “good sir” and begged his pardon and offered to cook him breakfast if she summoned him early! Who braided her hair into pigtails and wore her best dress to receive him! Hissing at him! In her nightgown!

He lifted his head so high he could only spy her sideways through the slit of one eye. It was enough to see her chin begin to tremble out of control. She took a babyish snorting breath as she tried not to sob.

He understood then that she was afraid – and not of him.

“How may this lowly worm be of service?” he grumbled.

“First you shall take off that mask,” she ordered. “And then I want – ”

“I can’t take off this mask!” he hissed. He pointed his stubby finger at the bed. “If he sees me without it!”

He started as he realized that he was surely well aware of everything said and done in the room, for all his feigned sleep.

Eithne folded her hands demurely together. “I shall tell him I ordered you to take it off.”

“Then he’ll punish you!”

“He won’t punish me for that. I shall tell him it frightens me.”

Qatal was so dumbfounded by her innocence that he nearly laughed for lack of appropriate reaction. Still, he tipped up the mask and unhooked it from behind his horns.

“He may not punish you, because you didn’t know,” he muttered.

And, he thought, because his sadistic master would not risk cutting short his own pleasure by inflicting on her the sort of fatal punishment he preferred.

“But he’ll punish me by and by,” he added grimly.

And this time not merely by making him chaperon to a cat.

“I shall tell him not to,” Eithne murmured. “I shall tell him you’re my friend.”

Qatal grimaced and nearly laughed again before the chill of his drying sweat reminded him that his expressions were no longer hidden by the mask. Fortunately Eithne had already turned shyly away.

“Now,” she announced with her customary softness, “I would like you to hold him for me while I change the sheets.”

Qatal choked, “Hold – him!”

He muscled past her to stare at the body on the bed.

That was the stink, he realized: it was the reek of a body breaking down. Now that he stopped to listen he could hear the rasping breath. Now that he looked he could see how deeply sunken were the eyes, how blue the lips, how dry the teeth. His master was not merely feigning sleep but feigning a slow death.

It was inconceivable, though Qatal’s eyes and nose and ears told him it was true. It was still more difficult to believe than this pregnancy story, for his master might have possessed a thousand tricks to bring that about. Above all else Qatal simply could not believe Dantalion’s own towering dignity would permit him to piss himself.

For a moment he thought it more likely that he truly was mortal, truly was dying. But such was his lord’s diabolical perversity, Qatal concluded it was some cruel game that surpassed his own merely demonic imagination. Perhaps Dantalion intended to make Eithne watch him die so that he could rise up and rape her as a corpse.

“Please?” Eithne prompted.

Then Qatal remembered what she had asked him. Strangely the idea did not even disgust him as it ought. His own dignity was slumped somewhere out of sight. He only felt an odd heaviness in his chest and arms, a numbness.

“I cannot lift him myself,” Eithne said primly, “else I would not have summoned you.”

“Just leave him lie, lady,” Qatal sighed. “Call me again in a few hours and I’ll take his body out and bury it for you.”

If Dantalion would feign death faithfully enough to lie still, he told himself, he would take the body far. He would bury it beneath the biggest stone he could lift. It would not make a difference to Eithne, for Dantalion would surely rise again though Mount Ararat lay upon him and the Ark upon it, but it would make a difference to him.

“He is not dying!” Eithne snapped.

Qatal snorted in awkward impatience. Her innocence was crushing.

“Look at him, lady. His lips are all blue, and he can’t hardly breathe. I don’t know much about balling yarn, but I know a few things about dying men, and that man’s dying.”

She screeched, “He is not dying!” and snatched at his arm in an attempt to turn him around. Her strength was nothing to his, and she managed only to snag her fingernails in his skin, perhaps even breaking a few of them as she scratched him open.

Qatal grit his teeth and snorted deeply, locking his arms straight at his side and clenching fistfuls of his own fur to stop himself from whirling around and ripping off her head. He could hear her snuffling behind him, twisting and gasping and making weak mews as she nursed her injured hand and tried not to cry.

The scratches on his arm began to burn, and he was suddenly reminded of the fresh and the fading criss-​​crosses he wore across his palms from the savage struggles of ungrateful kittens.

They only scratched and hissed because they were frightened, Eithne had told him. Eithne had rinsed his wounds with cool water and dressed his hands. Eithne had thanked him for the sake of the kittens, and of their poor little mothers.

Qatal decided it would be easier to do as she asked than to argue with her.

“Fine, I’ll hold him,” he grumbled.

He grabbed a corner of the blanket and whipped it away – and then he knew he was doomed.

He had seen his dark and mighty lord pale and wingless and weak as a grub: a skinny boy, scarcely twenty years old, wasted and wheezing, steel-​​gray in places and blotchy pink in places, and covered in an oozing rash. He had seen his lord’s belly slightly bloated like a toddler’s from buildup of fluid, and below it, on his sparsely furred groin, he had seen his great lord’s little limp worm of a penis lying in a small puddle of dark urine that had trickled down to soak the sheets.

Eithne stepped up and tossed a towel gently over it while Qatal still stared.

“I shall bathe him after you leave,” she said. Her voice was soft, but it was no whimper. “I’m simply needing you to lift him so I may be changing the sheets beneath him.”

Qatal mumbed, “Understood.”

“You may be bringing me fresh straw in the morning,” she told him as he sat the body up, “but I don’t like to be moving him too often…”

Qatal straightened the flopping limbs and lifted. The man was even lighter than he appeared, as though he had already lost the weight of the parts of him that were dead. His torso was feverishly hot, but his legs were already cold.

“It’s almost morning,” Qatal muttered.

Eithne had already begun to lean over the bed, but for an instant she straightened and sighed and let her shoulders sag in weary relief.

Qatal had some inkling then of the night she had just endured. Perhaps that was what Dantalion planned to do to her: make her love him, and then hideously die – a sort of rape of the heart. This refinement of torture seemed very like his lord.

“Perhaps when the sun comes out,” she said as she pulled back the sheets. “So it will be nice and dry.”

Somehow Qatal could not tell her it looked like snow.

She stripped and remade the bed with brisk tenderness, as though it were not merely Dantalion’s bed she handled but his body. Qatal had watched her work the same way when she had bandaged his hands. He was not acquainted with this manner of touching: the rapt care, the gentle but reassuring firmness, the last caressing stroke to smooth the sheets or the gauze. He still could not understand.

Finally she folded a towel and laid it in the middle of the bed, where Dantalion’s hips would lie.

“There,” she sighed. “Be laying him down here now.”

Qatal laid him down. He tried to make his movements gentle, to help him comprehend her gentleness, but this only made him awkward. Dantalion’s body flopped onto the bed like a fish into the bottom of a boat.

Qatal sucked in his breath and waited for his lord to rise up and strike him savagely down. Instead Eithne slipped past him to blot the damp belly a last time with the towel and then pull the blankets over the helpless nudity and tuck them in.

“There now, lad,” she said tenderly. “That will be feeling a bit better.”

“I don’t think he feels anything any more, lady,” Qatal grumbled.

“He will when he wakes up.”

“He won’t never wake up, lady.”

This time she did not hiss or shriek at him. “Qatal,” she corrected softly, “now I command you to stop saying that.”

“Then I won’t, but that won’t change anything.”

“It distresses me, and I do not like it. And he is not dying: he is simply so very tired from riding from Dunfermline to Lothere in two days without stopping to sleep or eat.”

Qatal shook his head wearily. Dantalion could have flown that distance in an hour or two, and he did not need to eat at all, but he did not suppose Dantalion wanted Eithne to know it.

“And he’s getting better,” she prattled on. “He’s sleeping more quietly now, and he’s stopped coughing.”

“Lady,” Qatal sighed, “when they stop coughing, that’s when they’re done for. When you stop coughing, you start drowning. His lungs are filling up with water – you can hear it when he breathes!”

She squeaked, “No!”

“Aye! Now, I’m just trying to help you out here. You need to stop hoping and stop wasting your effort on that – that body there. You need to be…”

He pawed dumbly at the air with his big hands, like a drowning man. Gentle words came no more easily to him than gentle gestures.

“…taking care of your babies or something. Or whatever,” he huffed.

“His babies!” she whimpered. She was breaking down: past fear, past anger, and into despair.

Qatal snorted and sighed again. “Just think about them as your babies. His part’s already done.”

He lifted his head slightly, proud to have stumbled upon this tidy bit of logic. Women, unfortunately, he was learning were illogical beasts.

“But I want them to know him,” she pleaded softly, as though Qatal himself had the power to decide. “I want them to know his face. I want them to know his smile… his – ” She hiccuped, but she did not quite sob. “His teasing smile I’m loving so…”

Dantalion’s teasing smile! Did mice ever grow nostalgic over the teasing smile of the cat? Perhaps they did – before it snapped shut over their little necks.

“You won’t be seeing that smile again,” Qatal said grimly.

To him the idea seemed a reprieve, like the timely death of the cat, but Eithne broke down and sobbed.

She spun away from him as though he had slapped her, and her rumpled hair lifted in its own breeze and fluttered down over her shoulder like a shawl. She tried to catch her snuffling sobs in her hands, but he heard her lisping shattered phrases between them: words like “Cian” and “sweet” and “your smile” reached his ears.

Qatal lifted his head, trying to feel the disgust he knew he ought to feel. Through the slits between her fingers he could see the trickling candles, melting away like the body on the bed, but in her palms she seemed to catch and cup their pure amber light. Her hands sparkled, and he saw that she was also catching tears.

He put out an awkward hand and touched no more than the hair that lay over her shoulder, but she spun back up the length of his arm and curled up against his breast like a grateful kitten.

Qatal held his breath, but he could not stop his heart from pounding. He felt a numbness in his arm and chest. Was this gentleness?

At any moment he knew his savage lord would sit up and strike him down for daring to ease the torment of his favorite victim. Or perhaps this too was part of his plan: perhaps he meant to make her befriend him, so that he could torture her by slowly torturing her friend. Death, Dantalion had always lamented, was least painful for the one who endured it.

For a moment Qatal had his mind made up to slay her. He could make it almost painless: his fingers clamped just so around her throat, and she would black out in seconds. He would send her to the one place where Dantalion could never follow. He would bury her beneath the biggest stone.

Then he let his hand fall. He was a demon, and even his first inklings of gentleness and mercy could not trump his selfishness. He had lost everything but his mask and this girl. With this girl he did not even need his mask. He would miss her too much if she died.

“Well,” he grumbled, “I suppose we could turn him over onto his side.”

“W-​​w-​​would that help?” she blubbered.

Qatal snorted. “It might help him breathe if the water’s not collecting in the same place.”

She sniffled and looked up at him hopefully.

“It might help him live a little longer. If that’s what you want,” he shrugged. “It might not be merciful but then what do I know about mercy?” he muttered to himself.

“Long enough for him to get better?” she asked.

“I don’t think he’ll ever get better, lady, but if he still feels anything he might be more comfortable till he dies.”

He saw the hope fading out of her eyes. Hope was a strange light that made tears sparkle both when it flared up and when it died.

“You can’t do anything once the lungs start filling up with water,” he explained. “It’s like drowning on the inside. You can take a man out of the water, but you can’t take the water out of a man.”

Eithne sniffed and swallowed deeply. Her tears sparkled in her dark eyes.

She whispered, “I know someone who can.”