The Golden Fool
Chapter 9: Roads Without Gods

Chapter 9: Roads Without Gods

He savored the line. "I never know if the next horror will come from the mountains or the sea," he replied, and found that, for the first time in a while, he was not lying.

Othra ducked under the table and came up with a brittle sheath of parchment, the corners curled and the surface stippled with scars from a dozen hands before his.

She smoothed it flat with both palms and pointed to the cluster of ink-dark shapes along the edge.

"If you’re going anywhere, you’ll want to know the world you’re walking into." Her finger traced the rough bounds.

"We’re here, north of the split river, in the woods of Outer Groth. Most of the land east is marsh, then hardens to scrub. There’s the old keep on the ridge, but it’s been empty since the last cull."

Apollo leaned over the map, watching as her callused finger hopped from border to border.

The shapes were less cartography than conjecture, every town marked with a symbol that looked like a scab or a wound. "Who rules here?" he asked.

"No one you’d care to meet," Othra replied.

"The coast belongs to the Sable Duke, though his grip doesn’t reach this far inland. The river’s held by the Temple Guard, fanatics, mostly. West is the old empire, what’s left of it. They say the city of Glassmar is still standing, but I wouldn’t trust the news. South, it’s the republics, each smaller and meaner than the last. If you keep going, you’ll hit the salt cities, though by then, you’ll be dead or rich, maybe both."

He took it in, following the jagged lines as if they were the score of a forgotten song. "And the mountains?"

She grunted. "The Cloudspines. Beyond that, nothing but stories." She eyed him, and for a moment he could see the shape of the person she might have been without the long siege of grief and necessity. "You’re not planning to stay off the roads, are you?"

He shook his head. "I have to move. East, then south."

"Good," she said, rolling up the map and shoving it into his hands. "You stay here, you’ll be dead before the month turns."

He tucked it under his arm, unsure if the gift was a kindness or a veiled command. Othra reached for the jug, refilled her own cup, and regarded him with the weary magnanimity of an old god taking confession.

"There’s places out there worse than here," she said.

"You see a village by a black creek, keep walking. If you catch the smell of roasted copper, turn around. And never, never eat the bread if it’s still warm." She looked up, and he realized she was perfectly serious.

He nodded, thinking how every world, every civilization, had its own subtle rules of survival; mortal or divine, the only real wisdom was knowing when to run.

She pushed a small parcel across the table and a walking stick. "Dried meat, strip of cheese, and the last of the white root. Use it only if you’re dying for real."

She hesitated, then added, "You owe me a favor. Not the kind you pay back with coin."

He took the bundle, the map, and the bitter understanding that Othra had decided his future with the same blunt force she’d used on his wounds.

She poured another cup of her sour cider and knocked it back, then turned away, busying herself with some new, necessary task.

He left her there, shoulders hunched, already unreachable.

The road east was less a road than a series of betrayals strung together by ruts and deadfall. He walked it with the slow, calculated indifference of an invalid, every step measured out of spite for the world that wanted him crawling.

The morning’s drizzle clung to his hair, soaked the old tunic, chilled the sweat at his collarbones, but Apollo pressed forward, refusing to cede even a degree to the weather or his own body’s revolt.

He kept to the forest margins, where the new growth bled into the ghosts of old burns, and the only witnesses were the stunted pines and mourning doves.

The map was no help, distances shrank and expanded according to the logic of a dying civilization, and half the landmarks had already been swallowed by regrowth or rot.

He trusted nothing but the sun’s slow rise behind the clouds and the memory of how the world ought to be stitched together.

By noon, he was already on the far side of the next valley. Looking back, the village had vanished, erased by the folds of ground and the slow, forgiving haze.

A relief, but also a wound: for all its cruelties and squalor, the village had offered him a place, a function, even if only to be blamed and then exiled.

’Onward,’ he told himself, though his legs begged otherwise.

The woods thickened, and the terrain grew unpredictable, quagmires disguised as meadows, sudden swells of granite, the black twist of bramble ready to snag and draw blood.

Once, when he paused to piss against a birch, he glimpsed a pair of eyes in the understory, yellow, flattened by the gloom.

Predator or scavenger, it trailed him for half an hour, never daring closer, then peeled off when the trees gave way to a long, stony ridge.

He ate on the move, tearing strips of Othra’s jerky with teeth still sore from the night’s beatings.

The cheese was pungent, almost offensive, it left his tongue numb, which he counted as a mercy.

For hours, there was only the rhythm of walking, the ache in his side, and the inexorable sense that something was following.

He pushed the suspicion aside. Paranoia, he told himself, was the birthright of every exile.

By twilight, the woods ended abruptly at the edge of a vast, churned plain. Once, Apollo guessed, it had been farmland, terraced rows of stubble and shale, punctuated by the withered skeletons of windmills.

Now, it was a sea of mud and wind, the only movement a murder of crows pecking at a patch of dark, unnameable spoil.

He skirted the field, following the line of an old stone wall.

A quarter of a league along the crumbling wall, he heard a voice. At first, Apollo mistook it for the wind, high and tuneless, a child’s hum carried over the barren rows, but as he rounded a tangle of half-dead hawthorn, he found the singer, a girl, no more than fifteen, perched on a toppled grindstone.

Her hair was the color of frostbitten wheat, scraped back with a leather thong, and her face was so pale it seemed almost luminous in the dusk.

She wore breeches hitched high and a patched vest that might once have belonged to a much larger brother.

Her feet were bare, scabbed and splayed against the freezing earth as if daring it to break her.

She did not look up when he approached, but her humming stopped, replaced by the slow, surgical picking of a scab on her elbow.

A basket rested at her side, half-filled with scavenged roots and something that looked like a withered gourd.

"Not much for travelers, this way," she said, still not meeting his eye.

Her accent was local but softened, no hint of the swamp drawl, more the clipped lilt of someone who read aloud, if only to herself. "The town’s the other direction."

"I’m not headed to town," Apollo replied, unsure whether to keep moving or risk the strangeness of conversation. "Just passing through."

This earned him a sidelong glance. Her eyes were a muddy green, flecked with gold where the sun caught them.

"Nobody passes through. Pasture’s all brined. If you’re not after the villages, you’re after the field. And no one but idiots and thieves comes for the field."

"What’s special about it?"

She snorted and spat, a glistening arc landing on the rocks. "Nothing. That’s the problem. Used to be barley. Then it was wheat. Now, it’s nothing."

She looked at him squarely now, as if daring him to say what all the rest did. "Father says the ground’s cursed. He won’t let us plant, but he won’t sell it off, either. Says it’s a matter of blood and principle."

Apollo followed her gaze to the open land: a long, pocked patch of earth that seemed to drink more light than it reflected.

No birds circled overhead, and not even the crows were bold enough to hop the wall. He felt the tingle of old power there, a resonance in the soles of his feet. Not divine, but not wholly human, either.

"You live close by?" he asked, keeping his hands visible and his voice low.

The girl nodded, chin jutting toward a distant stand of black willows where an old farmhouse sagged like a drunk at the end of a bender.

"That’s ours. If you’re looking for work or food, there’s neither, unless you count the rats." She flexed her toes, as if to demonstrate her ease with hunger. "Name’s Vela."

"Apollo," he said, which, stripped of its godly freight, sounded almost plausible.

Vela considered this, then shrugged. "You can come in, if you want. Just don’t mind my father. He’s mean even when sober."

Something in the way she said this, bored, but not quite hopeless, made Apollo wonder how long she’d been warning off strangers, and how many had listened.

He shook his head. "I won’t trouble you," he said.

The words surprised even him, he’d been ready to accept any fraying thread of hospitality, if only to escape the ache in his bones.

But there was a clarity to the girl’s posture, a warning not just of threat but of kinship, the pride of those who had nothing left to lose, and so would kill to keep it.

He recognized the pose. He had lived it once, in finer clothes and under better names.

She seemed to sense his withdrawal and, with a flick of her heel, sent a stone arcing into the field. "Suit yourself," she said, but did not get up.

The silence between them stretched, thin as the light.

Apollo turned to go, then looked back, unable to resist a question. "What happened to the crops?"

Vela picked at the gourd’s rind with a small knife, more for the motion than any hope of a meal. "Some say blight. Others say the river changed. Last year, a man from the city came with a barrow full of powders and told us to sprinkle them at dusk. Next morning, the dogs were dead and the barley was blacker than my father’s teeth."

She gestured at the field, its furrows glistening with brine. "It’s not coming back. That’s what I think."

He recognized, then, the underlying signature, faint, but unmistakable, like the tail of a comet in a cloudy dusk.

The stench of another power, one that had moved through here before him, wound itself into the dead furrows and the ragged lines of her wrists.

It was not Olympian. It was older, or perhaps just hungrier, it had left a thumbprint in the dirt that would outlast the bones of the families who farmed it.

Apollo almost offered to look at the field, to test the soil with the old rites, but stopped himself.

The knowledge would only confirm what Vela already knew, and would frame him, again, as the bearer of bad news.

Instead, he met her eyes, and for the first time, she did not look away.

"You have a gift for land," he said. "You see it clearer than most."

She snorted, but the edge of her mouth softened. "Tell that to my father."

He gave a slight bow, the gesture ingrained, shorn of its regal bearing but not of dignity. "You will outlast the curse," he said, and the statement was both prophecy and apology.

She watched him go, and, as he rounded the next bend, he felt the gaze on his back, not hopeful, not angry, just waiting.

The way all children watched the old gods, long after the gods had stopped watching them.