Songs of the Dying Earth

Filling your head with stories of wild adventure and heroic deeds is a tempting way to pass the time when you live in a place as boring as the tiny charmless village of Ratgrad, but as Evillo the Uncunning is about to learn, trying to duplicate those adventures can get you into more trouble than you’re really prepared to handle…

Evillo the Uncunning

Tanith Lee

1: Above Derna

Some way up behind the steep forested canyon wherethrough flows the slender River Derna, lies a depressing landscape dotted with small villages. One evening, a male child of less than two years was found wandering in the vicinity. Smothered by the dim red dying of the light, among tall clumps of spite-grass and blackly spreading thorn-willow, the infant might easily have gone unnoticed. But it is possible his gleaming golden hair may have been mistaken for something valuable in the metallic way.

The fellow who did so, by name Swind, having learned his error, still carried the infant to the adjacent village of Ratgrad.

“Ho, Swind: Could you not have left that thing where it was? Where is your charity? No doubt some passing hungry gib or ghoul would have welcomed it.”

“Tush,” said Swind sullenly, dumping the crying boy in the dirt. “In the era of sun’s death, life is ever valuable and must be preserved — so that it may also be punished for the insolence of persisting.”

Accordingly Swind and his wife, Slannt, were given the child to raise, which they did following the village tradition. They starved the boy and rained constant blows upon him, these actions ornamented by witty verbal abuse in the village mode. Despite such care, he grew to the age of eighteen. He was well-made and handsome, with a tawny skin, large dark eyes, and his hair still golden under the filth Slannt and others diligently rubbed in it.

His given name was Blurkel. But by the time of his seventh year, he thought nevertheless that he had recalled his real name, which was, he believed, Evillo. Nothing else could he remember of his former life.

Ratgrad was married to another local village, the equally charmless Plodge. Once every month, the denizens of both villages would meet on a bare rock, known either as Ratplod or Plodrat Spike. There they would sit about a large fire and drink fermented erb berries, next singing various unharmonious songs, and telling stories of the most uninspiring kind.

Fell the day of the festival.

To the Spike trooped all Ratgrad, Evillo perforce going with them.

The celebration proceeded as it always did, becoming more loathesome by the minute. By the hour that the old sun began to crawl to its lair in the west, the Spike and its surrounding shrubland rang to uncouth carroling and eructations.

Evillo, to escape the attentions of certain unpalatable village maidens, had climbed up a tall lone daobado that spread its bronzy limbs behind the rock. From here, suddenly he beheld a solitary figure walking towards the Spike. Evillo stared with all the power of his dark eyes, thinking perhaps that he imagined what he saw; visitors were infrequent thereabouts. But curiously, as a sunfall red as an over-aged wine of Tanvilkat obscured the scene, the figure grew ever more apparent. It had the shape of a man, but was closely robed and hooded.

Something thundered in Evillo’s ears: his heart.

Just then, the village look-out, who was that evening the master-hacker Fawp, also noted an arrival and let out a yowl.

Startled silence beset the revellers. Many jumped drunkenly to their feet, and every eye fixed upon the grey-cloaked stranger.

“Stay,’” bellowed Fawp, who had drawn his cleaver. “Proclaim your type and intention.”

“Also be aware,” added Glak, the carcass-heaver, “while we slay enemies instanter, friends who visit us are required to present a gift.”

The mysterious figure had drawn near and now spoke in a low and sonorous tone.

“I am neither enemy nor friend. But I will present a gift.”

Stupid greed overcame the stupid bravado of the villagers. They pressed forward and now clustered about the stranger as he entered the sphere of firelight.

Up in the tree, Evillo watched, half waiting for some magic sloughing of disguise, revealing the man to be a frit or other fiend. But the hooded figure did not metamorph into anything else. He came to the fireside and rested himself on a large flat stone. And precisely then, through the mesh of the hood which concealed his face, Evillo fancied that he glimpsed two human eyes that glowed with a mental ability far beyond the average. For a moment, they met his own, and then passed on.

“Be seated,” said the stranger to the villagers, and such was his authority that each of them at once obeyed. “The gift I offer is modest, but you shall have it. Know then, I am Canja Veck the Fabler. He who is compelled, by a nameless but omnipotent force, to travel the dying earth, and there to recount its stories to any that will hear.”