Beggar's Utopia -- Chapter Five

The links to the others are in my signature and ^ up there. =)

Eoghan and the story are both in need of a new name--just read it however you want. Call him Queen Cesspit for all I care. And this is about 1000 words longer than the previous part, so feel free to skip nitpicks. Thanks in advance!

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Chapter Five

The body rested upon the ground like wood, firmly stuck, and gradually melting into a chalk statue. Logan sat on the chair, shivering, eyes filled with a bubble of water in which the body’s stone sprawl trembled in a mess. His throat was dry, soar from the glugging sobs.

Were it to be enlightened with victory, an evil smile would have stolen his face, but he had no intention to let it. There were moments such, yet equally rare, as now, that conjured a waking anticipation to fear, fear that knew no mercy against the wicked tone to his spirit. Too many voices spoke to him within the sea of sighs, all cursing, and dancing around the corpse and broken bottle with joy, taunting.

He wanted to speak, throw his hands forward and awake the laying man. He had not even learnt his name. Not that it mattered—all gone, now. Had the man a family, friends? Or then perhaps his character had leant towards some distinguished creed in which Logan was simply there to clean his shoes, flinging a coin to him when suitably fulfilled. A million memories. A billion thoughts. All in ruin with thanks to Logan’s moment of drunkenness.

He despised alcohol.

Any use in trying to decipher his thoughts into voice was frivolous. A few fleeting glances in which he confessed to murder would suffice, he decided. Words that could not be heard were empty, useless, and might as well have been never speculated. What he had once been… that man on the streets. A dignified beggar, if ever one were possible, might once have been a fair, embraced title. But in league of some petty hours, in a poor man’s paradise, the voice kills someone. Days in which his dreams were plausible only in dreams were gone. His dream was fortune, and it made a murderer of him.

This world did not belong to him.

Logan threw his hands over his face and squealed in an ascent of agony until tears were washing the blood from him. The screeches burnt his throat, and it felt good. The throes in the throngs in his tired head numbed the senses away with cloud and mist, dipping them in the colours’ shade.

Preferring to see his valour in something other than humility, Logan stood, and stepped right over the body. Borne upon his guilt was an oppression, oppression that deemed itself so desperate for forgiveness. The more he let it slip away, or the more he veiled it underneath all the hatred and profound mists that dominated in a world where it was the right thing to do, just because everyone else did it. The past happened and one day the future will, but the present required him to push the body away and forget, ignoring the guilt.

And that, he did.

It was not him. He was like the unplaced man, ready to swallow someone else’s morals. But, it was not him. Deep down, he knew; he might freeze his skin into a white-washed silence, but inside there might be a heart, and it raged with heat and flame.

And, whenever he should yearn its passing—

White tears rolled down his face, and he gave the sky his surrender.

‘No!’ he screamed, ‘My sword was always clean—now, forsaken!’ And he withered like the withered man, roared like the lonely heartache until there was no sound, no sight, nothing.

Heartbeats were meant to be quiet, salvaged from the dead and then clung to for as long as possible—

They pounded on the door. The wood shook and threw a volley of tremors at Logan, who stood, struck. Guards, or demons or souls of the raised dead—they had come to finish him or draw him to the world—

And they wrung yet more rhythms. Cracking noises billowed dust high up as he raised his hand. Shards of mirror gleamed at him, and he grabbed some his fingers, bony, and trembling violently. Spearing into his flesh they found blood and pulled it out, stabbing the flesh. More pain. More flavour on his tongue.

The door opened.

‘Come with me. The body will not be found. Leave everything behind you. Come with me.’

Light shone from behind the man and wrung his eyes. Too dazed once again to disagree, he simply shook. There passed a moment or two in which he lingered on the threshold, unsteady, unsure, not entirely ready to leave his new habitat. And enter the world. He had found a home – boring as it may – but a home.

With the force of a few words he renounced the walls, took the regret and gave the dead man a home—he could have it. And he rose to the call of the pale guest.

How funny, he thought: he had two visitors in a single day. The most he had ever had.

He did not look back at the house. Aesthetics would have contradicted him; whether the grim obscurity of a wooden shack, or a palace had returned the fleeting glance, he knew that there would have been no point. He decided; time to move on.

Obeying, Logan dismissed a notion in which he would protest or question, in a trance that kept him walking forward, breathing in smoke from a nearby chimney. The man turned a corner at the end of a path, and walked continually ahead.

There were no houses for a few miles, which he walked silently but briskly. Endless stretches of greens and browns, both of which sedated by grey, reserved the only signs of life. The path they followed was a track, barely visible, and upon it, a few birds chimed with the unease of the low sun. The songs they sang were tired and the clouds were grey in the frail ice. Logan saw not a single silhouette, but he heard them, calling to one another.

Along one side of the path, a few houses began to accumulate. They leaned across like deluded sentinels, uneven in height, but dull, and decrepit. Its tenants skulked behind windows, dense with filth, denoted to be the poorest class – as testimony to their rugged appearance – with such precarious walls that they apparently trembled as the two men walked by. All they could afford were a set of squalid, featureless face to show receipt for their fear, of a somewhat apprehension, retiring like frightful animals as the two men passed along their road.

The man walked with military procession, stabbing his limbs into the ground in perfect sequences. Logan, for the first time, began to consider possible explanations for his unsaid questions, which troubled his mind. It became commonplace for him to fear himself—he had left, left without thinking, just like his following without thought. His mind was beyond him, far in the distance behind the path, behind the sunrise where all the answers rested.

Behind the sunrise.

Logan smiled; he was chasing them.

#

For a while, the only sound to be heard whistled faintly against the trees. The whispers of the wind. Logan felt the fatigue in his legs creeping up and infecting his spirit. All around him, dreadful figures of monsters for trees bulked, until the atmosphere was little more than a shadow. Their branches swept down like clawing fingers, groping with horribly long boughs, leading Logan into a black passage where light was seldom found, and the uninviting darkness soothed the entire area.

Should a tiger’s lair be discovered by a deer, who suspects she has come across a haven, the tiger will bound upon it and indulge in fine cuisine. The deer is eradicated, and all its memories, its life and future die, in exchange for preserving the tiger for a few more days. However, if the tiger enters another’s territory, he will be cautious, and prepare himself to fight with the orange lightning on its back if danger approaches, because at that point, he is fighting for the lives of all the animals he has devoured, not just himself. But there is more—if a similar confrontation challenges a cub, he will stand still and hope that the other animal shows mercy. If it does, the cub will do as the other bids. He will commit himself under a nebulous fear and show gratitude for compassion—after all, he is lost; a cub does not wander aimlessly into the wilderness by itself unless need abides.

The latter, Logan decided, made him a cub.

‘Excuse me?’

The shaking in the voice startled him, and he realised it was he who had spoken. The man stopped marching, for Logan was still and the crunching had stopped.

He needed some sort of clarity—his eyes were blinded by the blackness, and the twigs and brambles below were silent. Nothing moved.

‘Your voice, it…’ Soft and inquisitive. ‘Yes?’ Composed like steel.

‘Why am I to follow you? Did you come to arrest me?’

The body in the sitting room with the broken bottle.

‘What?’ inquired the voice, apparently in its tense curiosity again.

‘I know that I’m a murderer; you know it too. And you came for my lifeless corpse. You came to take it away.’

Under a weak ray of sunlight, Logan managed to make out a figure, addressed by the haze.

‘Very true.’

Logan shivered.

‘But I am no murderer; you will not die by my hands. And that body is of no significance to me—slaves are, and always will be, dispensable. So put it out of your mind before it is cut from your neck.’

So bland, so lifeless, so thick with ice.

‘And some friends of yours sent me for your very heart. Wanting to see you.’

Logan stared at him.

Silence for a moment.

‘What?’ he asked. ‘They want to see me?

‘You do not know what friends I mean.’

‘Because I have so many friends...’

Sarcasm. Bitter.

‘I… did they say “friend”, literally, just like that?’

‘Well, if you do not trust they would you name you so then it could be anyone.’

‘Just tell me. Who sent you? I need a name.’

What he had said did not surprise Logan—nor did he care. Something about today made the sun a little greyer and his eyelids heavier. But the tone was unbelievably monotonous, as if the words had been built into him.

‘I had no desire to kill anyone. Please, understand that.’

‘Forget it.’

‘But… it wasn’t just him.'

‘You killed more?’

‘I’m talking about his life, those he knew; memoirs that are now just chips of rotting flesh.’

‘People die.’

Logan felt the emptiness in him turn around, incomprehensibly.

‘The family he might have kissed, friends he grew up with!’

‘And they will live. If one is not dead, one is alive. If your brain still functions and orders about your body and you can find blood pumping from your heart then consider yourself conscious to reality.’

Logan’s eyes were dreary, but he painted the scope with his functioning brain and pumping heart. Within the man, he saw little faith that they might share something fair. But then, what did the man see in him? Was Logan a mere pilgrim of his aged renegades? But, he was betraying his own mental doctrines; there was just hatred coming from him; no one understood him. No more love, or care, as once he might have preached. Everything felt odd, as if he should be gone, as if his every footstep fell into the mud and was then washed away by the rain.

Slaves.

‘Do you know who I am?’

The crunching on the earth commenced again, fading into the sunlight, now sprouting a silhouette.

Logan hurried again, ignorant to the trembling muscles in his legs. ‘Please, is there anything? Anything you can tell me?’

Flaming embers spat down from the sky, hitting him in the face as light cascaded around, revealing a magnificent plain, in which trees disappeared, and grass spread far and wide beneath his feet, leading to a stretched hill.

The man stood not far away, and for the first time, Logan grasped the empty painting that was his face, a visage, pouring a line of light from the glint in his eyes. Like a watchman, his feet bore him into the earth, swaying only against the cool breeze.

‘Do you know who you are, Logan?’

Considering, he supposed not. That is after all, why he had asked.

‘You…’ Logan bit onto his lips until cracks appeared and salt-licked him blood. ‘You said that you didn’t know me.’

The features upon the man’s face mellowed into something unfitting, unnatural, breaking the concrete that formed his skin. It was, perhaps, a smile, the faintest shred of emotion.

‘A name is just a word. I cannot imagine you would care much for that, though.’

A name is just a word.

‘Well, if you play so lightly with names, what’s yours?’

‘Eoghan.’

Logan slipped back, and hit the back of a tree with a thud. Leaning his back against a tree, he placed both hands across his eyes and closed them. ‘I… don’t know what I’m doing.’

‘We do not have time. It will be explained in the City.’

‘I don’t care for the ridicule you’re putting me through—just… just… I’ve always been trying to say that. That at the end of the path there’ll be some gold, or answers or I don’t even know!’

Logan’s legs scrambled back together.

‘Who are you?’ he cried. A second of rupturing blood grabbed hold of his hands, and launched them at Eoghan. They punched into his heart or the dip in his chest, thumping, flinging all kinds from the wheel of rage at him. ‘What’s in there?’

Eoghan spluttered, and fell down into the earth.

Logan pulled his hands back and looked at them. They were so tender and bruised already. In a shrill echo, now growing, cackles whistled between the winds. Howling. The shrunk ball of Eoghan would shake as he lay on the floor, twisting in the mud, shivering like an ill child.

Breath was stubborn. There was not enough in the air. Logan’s chest expanded and wrinkled together in wild patterns. He flung a hand across his heart and tried to steady himself, but some sort of thicket – bramble, weed – caught his foot. And he collapsed.

‘Who are you?’ the voice came, mocking from the dirt, and then faltering into a flavour of lifeless words. ‘You are afflicted with madness! Yes!’

Logan sobbed, tears sinking down his lips, onto his skin, like crust, as the mud grabbed onto the last of his cloak. ‘Can you just tell me? Where are we—what’s…?’ He leant back, so very tired. ‘I woke in such a place, and just after a few hours, it was as if fate had supplanted me with no way to sustain it. And I destroyed it.’

‘I am lying in the mud!’ A few coughs spluttered from Eoghan’s mouth, like a muddy child. ‘Like a filthy… beggar! A beggar!’

‘It’s the past. It’s done!’

‘Like your friends, companions, eh? Are they “the past”; are they “old dirt”?’ the swine mocked.

Logan remembered… they stirred a faint dream in his chest. But it was true. He had been with them once, for his own selfish accord. Burning them for warmth, he lived from them. ‘How do you know about them? How do you know about me?’

‘Oh, we all know about you! The rich man from the south—you gave so many wonderful speeches! Or you did, a time ago. Very passionate. You money-hugger.’

Logan looked beyond the crooked words, searing deep into him, and in a flash of a blink, felt his heart race like the canter in a horse.

Why was I there? He saw the perfection on his skin, the reclusion, the gold as bricks. There was no denying it anymore. That’s why I was there.

Had he the energy, sparks might have erupted and where the anger licked his knuckles, the animal on the floor would have tasted it smash into him. But he was tired. He needed to sleep. He had betrayed himself, he had betrayed his company.

He could barely muster himself to an appropriate composure. Sleep he could not. It was then that he caught the first glimpse of day, lingering among the curtain clouds. Where he looked, he saw the faces of countless warriors, all dressed in golden ribbons. He saw a million children laughing behind every crease in the wrinkly blue, or maybe sobbing—their innocent eyes sparkled with any possible emotion. To think that there were other people looking up at the sky just like he. Notably, they may well have been thinking the same thing, except under a different allusion. Poor or rich, or both—they were human.

Maybe his family were too sat beneath the sky. Family. It seemed right to call them that, as right as the sky’s blue. They had, after all, been there for him like any kin he had ever known. He refused to be the lonely one. He had to find them, at any horizon, under any weather, no matter how many eons away.

It was his house. The one he was in.

Little doubt was there in his mind—he knew it. Beyond the innocent perception one may derive from him, the beggar, the exile, was a murderer of such pompous design that a soul tagged a price.

Despite any sword he may have borne between his fingers, blood, he had never spewed. If only he had broken the confession a little earlier, and then, he may never have left those men at all. He might even have saved a few, or devoted those remaining to a life in a bucolic haven. One with walls and safe acres, where no soul may safely cross bearing weapons—a gift from him. At the furthest sunset.

He had never wanted to kill. Years were spent wallowing in the grief of the city. But he left, not being able to accept the passing of his home. Logan was right. They were wrong. They disagreed. They fought. He fled.

But guilt was the simplicity in a belief that he could have done better, that he might have taken an impossibly distant castle by himself, and that power mustered in him as a choice, to do better. Was there? Could he have refused to go—killed his conflicting conscience?

It was all a false illusion—he under the mercy of the past.

But, it would not have mattered. The entirety of the story imposed on its own simplicity, though bound upon the most sentimental segment of his mind.

Playing things as such should be left from him, he decided, since what had happened before was done.

Thoughts like that would only harm him. He shifted a little more in the mud, enjoying its long-missed scent. Even now, he occupied the most obtrusive piece of land for as far as the distance returned to him, and he was still nothing, like the tiniest spec of dust beneath a house.

The ground was cracked. Water fed itself in between the islands of mud, drifting through like a lonely boat venturing to unfound islands. He sat, and glared far away into the distance. It wanted him not to cross; the barrier stood as a long hill, stifling, the guardsman stretched before the forest’s edge. Craning his eyes to both the left and right, he saw the same, endless winding trees clumping with earth, forging a solid blockade, like a million soldiers except they only stood and did not move, under visible obligation to be difficult.

The City meant nothing to him. He needed to know.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Away!’

Whatever.

Logan reapplied himself with the chapped vigour and rose. There was nowhere else for him to go; thereof he trudged across the strewn body and helped the man up. Offering a bland submission, Eoghan stood.

‘I was told to take you to the city. I do not know why but you can hope to guess. But you are going to the city.’

They would not be there; his companions would be in the wilderness. He hoped. He did not want them to be there. But, if they were… he was no better. He had betrayed himself before anyone else could do it for him.

‘Where is it?’

Eoghan raised his hand and wavered towards the hill, where the rising sun rested and painted the grass gold. A sunrise still? The sun was suspended upon the highest pinnacle but near. Perhaps he would meet them on route. Because, if he did not know where his goal lay, there were a million paths to reach it.

‘What city?’

‘It has no name. It has no use for one. It is the City.’

Logan nodded, mumbled faintly some meaningless apology, and looked into the sky.

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Stuff:

So, ye. I wrote this. A couple of things:

Eoghan is kind of meant to be a little robotic, but with oppressed emotions, if you see what I mean? Does that work for you?

How's the story going? Are you liking it? Interested? Too dull? Too fast/short?