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The End of the Trail

  © 2015 Louis Rakovich

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  About the Author

  Louis Rakovich writes sometimes-fantastical literary fiction. His short stories have appeared in numerous publications, including Bartleby Snopes, Criminal Element and The Fiction Desk. He grew up in Jerusalem, Israel, and currently spends his time between NYC and Tel Aviv, while working on his first novel – a psychological thriller.

  He's inspired by authors such as Truman Capote, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Edgar Poe, and filmmakers such as David Lynch and Andrei Tarkovsky. In his free time he enjoys cinema, curious objects and strange places.

  You can find more fiction by him at www.louisrakovich.com.

  The End of the Trail

  by Louis Rakovich

  I.

  As I lie here I think they were right about one thing and wrong about another. She's beautiful, that part is true. She's the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. This fact means more than it appears to at first glance, for while the women where I come from are harsh and overworked, worn from the salt and the cold wind, they're not the ones I think of when I say this. In picture books, and in the fancies they've conjured up, I've seen those ebony and ivory girls with mouths like burning wounds. And on fever nights brought on by the winter cold, they walked around me, as real as human flesh and blood. So I am not a layman when I say, “She's the most beautiful woman I've ever seen.” But she's not a witch.

  Where I come from people live off salt. Giant white boulders hug the cliffs, and long ago we've carved steps in them, each in his own domain. They go down to the salt flats. My grandfather, who had only one foot, made his stairs not like the rest of them, not a straight, steep line, but a winding white path. Decades later they were my stairs. I've carved out everything around them and sold the glimmering white chunks to the fishermen. I've drilled half my salt flat. And so had my grandfather, and so had his son – for the night tide lifts the sea halfway up to the brims of the cliffs, and every twenty years the boulders and the flats are renewed.

  Each month we'd sand the stairs and brush the old doornail that marked the level of the sea at night. We'd start at dawn and be on our way back by five, with enough daylight left to get home. As children, we were all taught the same thing – if ever you find yourself on the stairs when night falls, feel your way up to the doornail and sit there till morning. A candle or a lantern wouldn't be much help in that darkness, unless it's to keep warm. Even then, you'd freeze. But you wouldn't slip and drown, and in the morning they'd put you in a bath of warm water and cover your ears with bags of warm salt, and sometimes you'd wake up.

  Some woke up without a finger or a hand, and some, like my grandfather, without a foot. All the same they'd teach their children never to climb higher than the doornail at night – it was better to fall asleep to death and have your body buried by your family, than to drown in freezing water.

  Some, like my two younger brothers and years later my older one, didn't wake up. They buried them on the old hill by the king's fort, wrapped in sealskin to stay warm in death. My older brother told me once, that our parents had buried two bodiless skins filled with salt and weeds. The fishermen from the neighboring towns had been catching just enough to feed themselves, and there were no fish left to salt. Unlike those fishermen, our family couldn't eat its produce. Salt had to be exchanged or turned to gold. And that was why, my brother said then, our parents gave us the last of the fish and ate the dead children.

  Ten years later a pine fell under the weight of the snow and took a quarter of the hill with it. Eight graves, three of them my brothers', were left exposed. When I came there the loosely sewn sealskins were whistling in the winter wind. It's true there was a dearth around the time the twins died, but as I cut the skins open, all I found were one large skeleton and two little ones.

  The people where I come from love their rumors.

  *

  A year is three months of mild summer and nine months of uncompromising winter. In the last week of summer the married women go to meet the traveling grocer by the old hill. They buy flour, spices, potatoes and beets. Over the next two weeks they rotate, spending each day in a different woman's home, stocking up for winter. They push together all the tables in the house, and they sit until midnight, making little pockets of dough filled with spicy potato paste and minutely diced vegetables. These aren't enough to keep a family going all winter, but they're good help if the fishermen's luck goes sour.

  The year before my wife died they came to our house on a Thursday. They used to look forward to her turn, because I was richer than them and had my own salt flat that didn't belong to the king. So before they came I went down to the salt flat and killed a sea lion who was sitting, gold and shimmering, on one of the boulders. It took me four hours to slide the golden giant up the steps. If I hadn't noticed him I'd have served them fish.

  As they cut the vegetables and flattened the dough, they'd talk. The usual, earthly talk would wither down fast, and then they'd move on, excited, to the rumors our town loved so much.

  I bore them no real grudge. They were hardworking, they raised children on barren cold land, they buried their dead with dignity. But when I listened to their gossip and their ugly tales, I hated them, and my wife with them. I rarely stayed past dinner. I'd leave them in peace and go to the room where my desk stood, and I'd read until they fell asleep in their chairs.

  There was only one kind of story I wanted to hear, and I admit that when they told it I would become one of them, a wide eyed fool. It was the kind brought to us by the king's servants. Their stories were wild like the tales we told as children on sleepless nights, and tenfold more frightening than the one about my parents the cannibals. But I hoped that there might be a shred of sense in them, some echo of a tangible truth. I didn't care for anything the gossipers had to say about the town and its people, but I did want to quench a nagging curiosity and find out what had happened to the king.

  ***

  II.

  I never deciphered the stories. Instead I found out one day in the dead of winter, a few years after my wife's death. A man came to my house. He was tall and thin, and reminded me of a spider in his hairy black coat. He reached into a pocket sewn onto his belly and took out a flask. He sipped, inhaled deeply – covering his mouth with one gloved hand, for the air was cold – and sipped again. Then he said he wished to take me up to the fort.

  The day was dark and overcast, and only when we got to the old hill did I see that his coat wasn't made of hair but of thinly sliced sealskin, covering him from top to bottom like feathers. He looked back at me and smiled.

  “They said if you refused to come, to tell you that you'll get to see the old salt king. Maybe I could wait for you on your way out, sir, and you'd tell me what you saw? I won't tell no one else if you don't want me to.”

  “You're not from around here, are you?” I asked.

  “No, sir,” he said. “Came here ten years ago from beyond the fort on the other side. They looked at the mark from the branding iron on my back and said I could stay. Said, you can cut down a tree and build yourself a house. Let me stay on account of my speaking and reading no worse than they.”

>   “People here don't call him the salt king.”

  “Right,” he smiled. “Don't know any better, do they?”

  His hood was lined with fur, the black strands dancing around his face. His eyes were black too, with irises like little tunnels, and bloodshot from the cold. We walked among the gravestones. Three generations of my family were buried there. I hadn't been there in two years. The pines above us bent out of shape and a large clump of snow fell onto the man's head. He pulled back his hood to clean out a frozen twig that had made its way inside. When he began ruffling his dirt colored hair I noticed that he was missing an ear.

  “Frostbite?” I asked.

  “No, not frostbite, sir. Not at all.”

  We got to the top of the hill and turned right, making our way down along the fort's ancient, moss-speckled wall. We walked for two more hours before we reached the gate. It had rusted a little since the last time I'd been there, twelve years earlier. The man approached it and stood on his toes, struggling to grasp a thick door knocker that hung from the mouth of a metal fish. Finally he took hold of it and knocked on the gate. A slot opened and a muffled voice reached us through the wind.

  “Who's there?”

  My companion took a deep breath, and shouted at the top of his lungs, “An invasion. Who do you think it is, you ape? Open up!”

  The gate opened slowly. As it did, the thin man nudged me with his elbow.

  “You've probably never seen what an ape is, have you, sir?”

  “I have in pictures.”

  That seemed to puzzle him. “What pictures?”

  “Pictures in books.”

  He thought it over. “You're a proper lord, then, I suppose. Is there any more like you down there?”

  “Not anymore.”

  The gate was now open wide enough to let one person in. The thin man stepped inside and I followed.

  A very large man stood on the other side. Wrapped as he was in a thick layer of fur, two people couldn't close their arms around him if they tried. He shut the gate behind us. The wind stopped blowing. The thin man took off his hood and ruffled his hair again.

  “You know, about that frostbite,” he said, “don't rule it out just yet. Might still get acquainted with that bit of life, I just might. My feet are frozen solid.” He burst into loud laughter, and settling down, continued, “It's cold. Let's go.”

  A pine grove spread over the margins of the fort. Beyond this layer of tall, snow-covered green, loomed the castle – a dark, rugged construction, even older than the stones of the fort wall. We bypassed the guard and entered a shed with a roof of black thatch. A fire burned in the corner and a fat man with a braided gray beard snored in a chair. The thin man opened a basement door and revealed a flight of stairs. I thought of my only other visit to the king's castle twelve years earlier. I didn't like remembering him the way he used to be, a loud and kind man with a mane like a black lion's – the most beautiful man I've ever seen.

  I followed the thin man into the tunnel.

  *

  There was a time, long ago, when once a year – at the fair – the king would talk to me. The foreign lords who lived on the foothills would buzz around him, smiling, flattering, and for a short while he'd ignore them for my sake. He would ask about the salt, the stairs, the recent deaths in town. But sooner or later he would always return to the company of the foreign lords, and I'd go on to enjoy the food and the drink alone.

  When it became clear that there wouldn't be another fair, and that the king had retreated to his castle for good, the foreign lords took their belongings and went back to their family estates. That was nine years ago – four years before my wife died, and three years after I had seen the king's castle for the first time, on the day of his wedding.

  They said the little queen was eleven when he married her, but I saw her from afar and couldn't make out her face through the veil. They said he waited four years to consummate the marriage, but while she grew he succumbed to a disfiguring disease. And so, on the long delayed wedding night, he was already the strange, bent figure that would appear on the tower balcony from time to time but never go down to the foothills.

  If what they said is true, then his first night with his wife took place around the time he disappeared, for in the past eight years we hadn't seen him once. For three years I kept going to the old hill on the day that had once been the day of the fair, but he never showed up.

  Only the little queen and the doctor were allowed to see him. Some servants said he was dead and they were keeping his corpse in her rooms, but those were senseless rumors. The king had no heirs, there wasn't anyone from whom she needed to hide the death. Others said they'd seen him, through holes in the wall late at night – a squeaking, crawling thing on four legs. I now know those were rumors too.

  *

  I don't know how long we walked in the tunnel. It twisted and curled so many times I lost sense of our whereabouts, and imagined we were walking in endless, convulsing circles. Finally we reached a flight of stairs going up to the ceiling. A door opened above us.

  A guard led us down a dark corridor with people's faces carved into the walls, and up another steep staircase. We went through a creaking door and found ourselves in a bright room swaying with heat. The guard went out the way he came.

  “Her Majesty is coming,” the thin man said.

  My stomach hardened as I heard two pairs of feet approaching the room. The queen entered. The guard waited outside the door.

  She was young. Not a girl, but a very young woman, with skin undamaged by the wind and long hair the color of bronze. Below her eyes were the dark crescents typical of shut-ins. Her features were delicate but well defined, and her eyebrows thick and bright like the wings of a bronze bird. She greeted me by name and bowed her head. I opened my mouth but the thin man said, “Your Majesty,” and went to stand by her side.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  He bent down and whispered in her ear. She nodded and ordered him out of the room. Once he closed the door, I said, “Your Majesty,” and she bowed her head again.

  She sat down in a large armchair that faced the fireplace. I sat opposite of her. My chair's shadow fell on her face.

  “You can take your coat off”, she said, “but you'll have to put it back on if you want to see my husband.” She waited, and then she put her hands on her cloth-covered knees. She said, “You want to know why I called you here.”

  ***

  III.

  “You must already know that my husband is sick. A doctor has been trying to cure him the past ten years, and now the doctor is dead and my husband’s no better. Each day is worse than the last. The king will be dead within a month unless a thing is done – one of two things – and that’s why I called you here.”

  She swallowed, her throat making a loud and wet sound as it clenched. “The doctor lied to us. He knew of the two people who could save my husband, and he didn’t say a word. He kept concocting his ointments and his herb soups. Too afraid he’d lose his job. When we took him in, with the rest of the runaway slaves back when my husband first got sick, he was a dirty, ugly old man. Blind in one eye and limping like a dog. He said to us, don’t send me away, I’m a doctor. I’m not saying he wasn’t. But we were stupid, I was stupid, and I thought that if he could cure dry gangrene and clear infection away, he could heal my husband.

  “When he died a week ago I went to his room, to find his useless recipes. I saw his journal lying on his desk, the same old journal he came here with. You already know what I found inside. There are two people who can help the king, and he knew where each of them is. And now I know too.”

  She stood up and slid a few loose strands of hair behind her ear. “Wait here,” she said, “and I’ll go and see about bringing you some food. You’re hungry.”

  *

  The large wooden clock above the fire said I was alone in that sickeningly hot room for a half hour. I was thinking that I couldn’t have known the two people who might save
the king, for the only people I knew were salt drillers, fishermen and petty merchants. The queen came back, carrying in her hands, like a maid, a platter of meat and fish and a steaming glass of golden drink. She set it down on the chest that stood between the chairs. “Eat,” she said.

  I bit into a piece of seal flipper and the queen continued.

  “Have you ever been to the forest?”

  I shook my head. “Only been as far as the old hill.”

  “Could you get there if you wanted?”

  “I could, up the path that goes on the rocks and then through the marshes. My father’s done it.”

  “And all the way through the forest? You’re a strong man, could you kill an animal or a person that got in your way?”

  “I could.”

  The queen forced a smile. “If you bring me what I need I’ll give you anything you want. You can come live with us in the castle, like a real lord. You’ll never lack a thing. You can bring anything or anyone with you. A wife, children, a mistress. Anyone.”

  “No, I don’t have anyone.”

  She frowned, as though with those five words I had bored her immeasurably. “You can find a woman here. Women. You won’t lack a thing, I promise you. You’ll still own your land. And I heard you like books. This is the king’s castle, we have so many. We can give you rooms right by the library. You’ll live like the truest of lords.”

  The heat pumped behind me. I felt as though I was sitting in on a feverish dream.

  “But why me?”

  “There’s no one else,” she said. “Our guards are strong men, but fat and slow. Our servants are weak. Our lords haven’t been out of the fort in generations, and the foreign lords have all gone back to their homes. And then there are your people. They’re strong and they’re quick and used to the cold, but they’re peasants, with peasant brains. So there’s only you. My husband told me about you.”

  Something small hurt in me as I realized that I wasn’t proud of being what I was; that I would give up hard work and my salt flat for a warm room and books with pictures and a wife who wouldn’t die young. And I said, “I’ll find them. Who are they?”