The Golden Fool
Chapter 8: A Song For The Dead

Chapter 8: A Song For The Dead

For an instant, Apollo thought the child had died in the interim. But Othra barked out, "She sleeps!" and the sound cut through the mob like a thrown axe.

The mother lunged to the cradle, hands frantic as she searched the child’s chest for movement.

When she saw the rise and fall, the faint, healthy flush eking its way into the baby’s cheeks, she gave a low, incredulous sob.

The hush that followed was thick as pitch, broken only by the slow realization rippling outward, the child had survived.

For a moment, the crowd hovered at the pivot between relief and suspicion, then suspicion asserted itself, as it always did among the desperate.

"Healing root," someone hissed, a woman with a bent nose and a baby bundled in her own arms. Her voice carried wild, bright accusation.

"She used the willow and the feverroot on the babe. That was meant for all of us."

A murmur caught and multiplied, hands tightening on stones, faces collapsing into the familiar grimace of those cheated by fate.

Another man, shoulders hunched with the violence of his years, spat into the mud.

"You hoard it for your favorites. My brother’s child is burning, but you said there was none to spare."

He glared at Othra, then at Apollo, and Apollo understood in that instant the old, old logic of sacrifice.

Othra straightened, jaw squared and mouth set like a blade. "If I hadn’t, she’d be dead already. There will be more feverroot, once the foragers return."

"Or none," said the bent-nosed woman. "And then what? Another child gone, while you keep yours breathing."

The air thickened, the crowd drawing closer, gathering itself for either surge or collapse. Apollo saw how the villagers orbited Othra, a churning of hate and need, the centripetal force of exile looming at the edge.

He knew from countless plagues how quick a mob could turn, how little it cared who bled so long as something did.

He stepped in front of Othra, his arms loose but ready.

"You need her more than you know," he said, voice pitched to carry.

"Kill her and you have nothing but worms and prayer, and I promise you the worms will not answer."

A stone arced from the crowd, striking the door frame with a thunk. Another followed, grazing Apollo’s shoulder.

The pain was minor, but the symbolism was not lost on him. ’First the god, then the healer,’ he thought, ’and after that, only the grave.’

Yvant shoved his way to the front, spear horizontal, keeping the crowd at bay.

"Enough," he roared, the word as sudden as thunder.

"We are not animals. Othra saved your children and your kin, all these years. You blame her now because you’re afraid. But you owe her your lives, every one of you."

For a moment, it seemed the mob might turn on him, too. Then the baby in the cradle gave a soft, mewling cry, and the crowd stilled.

Even the bent-nosed woman fell silent, rocking her own child as if uncertain whether it would be the next to burn.

Othra’s chest heaved once, and she staggered, a tremor passing from her knees to the top of her scalp.

The night shouldered in, the flicker of torches painting the crowd’s faces in grotesque relief, predator, scavenger, the doomed and the soon-to-be.

The silence hung so long it threatened to birth a new, terrible outcome, until a young man in a torn jerkin, eyes rimmed with the red of fresh grief, surged forward with a pitchfork raised like a banner.

Yvant was turned half to the crowd, his voice still raised in argument when the pitchfork caught him in the side.

A wet, audible pop, and the shaft drove straight through, the lower prong tangling in his ribs. The force of it threw him against Othra, who tried to break his fall but only succeeded in staggering backward, herself pinioned by his dead weight.

For a single, impossible moment, the only sound was the hiss of torch fire.

Then the crowd, freed from its momentary paralysis, erupted. The woman with the bent nose shrieked, unsure if she was fleeing or attacking.

Another man, younger still, tore the spear from Yvant’s memoryless hands, wielding it at Apollo with the desperate, incompetent violence of a cornered animal.

Apollo ducked the first swing, reaching instinctively for the old power that had taught men to fight and win.

Nothing answered.

The spear clipped his ear, warm blood sluicing down his neck, and in the next instant Othra was on the ground, Yvant’s body splayed across hers, his face already slackening into the mask of the beloved dead.

The villagers pressed in, a maelstrom of hunger and old, unreasoning terror. Someone seized Apollo by the hair, another by the arm, and suddenly he was dragged to his knees, boots digging deep furrows in the mud.

A foot pressed between his shoulder blades, pinning him, while a babble of voices debated whether to cut his throat or simply bury him alive in the midden.

He waited for the knife, for the club, for the stone, waited with the bleak calm of one who has seen this scene rendered in every epoch, every civilization, the ending always the same.

But as the debate mounted, so too did the discord: some shouted for clemency, others for proof, a few to let the godless murderer go and save their wrath for the next, more deserving target.

Above the melee, Othra’s voice rose, a banshee’s wail, cracked by grief and rage. "You fools! Don’t you see? The fever is in you!"

She clawed at the mob, her hands spattered with Yvant’s blood, her eyes wild as the moon.

"You think killing him will save you? He’s no more to blame than the wind or the worms."

Her words fell on the crowd like a curse.

There was a faltering, then a shudder, for a second, they saw themselves, not as a righteous fury, but as the dying animals they were, muddied, scared, and already marked for death by some invader too small for even Olympus to see.

The foot eased from Apollo’s back. The hands that had gripped his hair and arms fell away, uncertain and clammy.

Apollo rolled onto his side, coughing up the taste of blood and mud, and blinked through the haze to where Yvant’s body sprawled, haloed by the torchlight and the ruin of Othra’s grief.

He dragged himself toward the fallen man. The movement was neither grand nor dignified, it was the crawl of the condemned toward a relic or a grave.

The villagers recoiled as he passed, clearing a path as if afraid his shadow could infect them.

When he reached Yvant, Apollo paused, kneeling in the muck beside the corpse, the spear still shuddering in its wound.

The music that lived inside him, the old, golden song, had been a source of power, of arrogance, of command over life and death.

Here, now, it was a splintered, shivering thing. He pressed two fingers to Yvant’s throat, found the absence, then closed the man’s eyes with a thumb and a gentleness no one had ever accused him of possessing.

He could have said nothing. It was not his place, not anymore. But the silence in the clearing clamored for meaning, for ritual, for the illusion of order.

Apollo bowed his head and began to sing.

The song was ancient, one of the first, forged in the blue dark before men understood the difference between lullaby and lament.

It was a hymn to the setting sun, a promise that even godlight could be lost and yet return, battered and changed.

The language was older than the stones, the timbre rough as sea glass. It vibrated in Apollo’s ruined chest, rebounding from his cracked ribs and the fever-damp lungs, filling the clearing with a sound both beautiful and broken.

Othra’s keening quieted, the villagers petrified by the strangeness of it. Even those who had moments ago shrieked for blood now listened, transfixed, as if the song might explain what had just happened, or at least soften its edges.

He watched as the feverroot woman knelt in the mud, tears streaming openly down her face.

The mother of the revived baby cradled her child as if it might vanish at any moment. One by one, the villagers lowered their weapons, their faces slackening from masks of vengeance to the blank, naked stare of the newly-bereaved.

Apollo sang Yvant’s name into the hush, once, twice, then a third time, until the syllables lost their shape and became an offering to whatever hungered for the dead in this place.

It was not a prayer, it was not even forgiveness. It was simply the act of remembering, of refusing to let a life slip past the ledger without song.

When it ended, the hush was complete. No one moved. Othra stood, blood-caked and trembling, her eyes locked on Apollo’s as if daring him to betray the moment with a word.

He did not. Some debts, even for the gods, were meant to remain uncollected.

The morning came like an apology, soft, gray, and wet enough to rinse the worst of the night from the village’s collective skin.

They buried Yvant at the lip of the forest, beneath the roots of a yew that had survived the old burnings.

Othra presided, her hands washed clean, her hair bound up in a knot that made her look even more severe than usual.

The villagers came in waves, some alone, some by the handful, bringing small, strange offerings.

A scrap of blue cloth, a whittled charm, a few with nothing but open palms and the slow, deliberate lowering of the head.

Apollo was there, but apart, standing a dozen paces off, watching as if through the scrim of a vanished world.

Liska found him as the crowd drifted away. She wore a tunic several sizes too large, belted with a strip of dyed gut, and her eyes were red but dry.

"You sang," she said, as if it explained everything.

He nodded. "It’s what I do."

She mulled this over, then shrugged. "Mama says you’re leaving. She says you have to."

"She’s right." He watched as Othra finished tamping the earth. The woman’s shoulders slumped, as if the act of burial drained even the memory of strength from her body. "It’s better that way. For everyone."

Liska wrinkled her nose, unconvinced. "You could stay. The fever’s gone. People are scared, but... it’s not all bad." She paused, then added, "If you want, I’ll show you the place in the woods where the mushrooms grow. The red ones. They taste like rain, if you cook them first."

He almost laughed at the offer, so earnest it hurt. "Thank you," he said. "But I have to be somewhere else."

He left her at the graveside, walking back through the waking village, where the violence of the night before had burnt out and left only the silt of regret.

Even the dogs, fighters and scavengers all, gave him a berth.

He found Othra in her hut, scrubbing dried blood from the table. She didn’t look up. "I suppose you’ll want your cloak back," she said, voice flat and without expectation.

He let the silence answer for him. She finished the scrubbing, set the rag aside, then poured two cups from a battered jug that smelled of apples and something faintly medicinal.

"The road east is flooded last I heard," she said, passing him the cup.

"But you could skirt the hills, keep to the forest until you hit the old king’s road. There’s a market town, Marrowgate, three days if you walk without dying. Four, if you die a little on the way."

He sipped, and the liquid bit his tongue, then warmed his chest. "What’s in Marrowgate?"

"Everything and nothing. People who don’t ask questions. Enough faces you can lose your own in." Othra’s gaze was hard, but behind it, something unwound, just a fraction. "They have a watchtower. You might like it."

"Why would I?"

Othra shrugged, as if the effort of explaining was beneath her. "People like you always want to see what’s coming."

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