Rusted Memory: A Wanderer's Tale Read online

THE WANDERER’S TALE

  RUSTED MEMORY

  Jennifer Melzer

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogue therein are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  THE WANDERER’S TALE: RUSTED MEMORY

  Copyright © 2014 Jennifer Melzer

  All rights reserved.

  By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this book. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, compiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced to any information storage and retrieval system, in any form of by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express permission of Jennifer Melzer.

  Cover Design by Dragon’s Gold

  ONE

  Illavia

  The masters of this world all say that every great story is composed of the same three elements: a beginning, a middle and an ending.

  Of course they are, in fact, correct, but most stories are so much more than those simplest of elements.

  Stories are people. The lives and moments in need of remembering. These tales are time and essence, blood and tears, life and death and so much more.

  My own story has a beginning. The middle stretches on forever and there is no end in sight.

  Call me memory catcher, storyteller, skald, bard. The Great Wanderer. Most who’ve heard me tell my tales simply call me Morovio.

  Because none who’ve had the pleasure to hear me sing my memories of this world ever forget that name.

  Morovio.

  In their minds they know it cannot possibly be the same man who told stories to their grandfathers, and the grandfathers of those grandfathers long before they were a spark of thought in the mind of the gods who made us all.

  Morovio.

  Joyous on their lips when they raise their cups to me in celebration.

  Morovio.

  It is the first thing they remember when they wake the morning after a particularly drunken endeavor during which I dazzled and bewitched with one of my tales, the details of my face fading from memory. Lingering on their lips, the curse that is my name. Morovio… Would that I could change it. The All-Creator knows I’ve tried, while casting my prayers to the wind and begging Him to help me, but it seems the cursed hold no favor with the gods, not even the great father of them all.

  It was so long ago that name first became my own. Another lifetime so distant even I can barely remember it. I was a simple farm boy then, the ninth and hungriest son of my father. I don’t remember what my father called me anymore, only that my life truly began when he apprenticed me, his only son, to a traveling bard after a night of drink and song at the local tavern. I barely remember my mother’s tears, the trembling of her lips and the keening of her agony as the old man wrenched me from her clutches.

  His name was Morovio too, but that’s a story for another time.

  On the subject of my own naming, it took place far longer ago than it should have, another life, nay, another age, as I’ve written in these pages oh so many times.

  I’ve watched dynasties fall, empires rise from the ashes of despair as races merge or wink entirely out of existence to be remembered only in my tales. I’ve watched people I loved wilt and wither like flowers against the cruel hush of time and felt the longing of my own innumerable losses so often that sometimes I am convinced those losses are all that remain of the man I once was.

  I was a man, once, and I suppose in some small part I still am. The remnants of that man lie buried deep within me; he stares back at me through bloodshot, weary eyes each time I catch my own reflection in the glass. Eyes that remind me of my mother, though these days they are rarely filled with tears, as hers so often were when I knew her. That woman, my mother, so long gone from this world that I am all that remains of her memory. My hair does not dull in its sheen; it does not lose its color with age. In fact, it is still the same dark shade of chestnut; it still curls and waves as it grows to length. And though the lips beneath my nose remain the same, they are more likened to a sneer than a smile because those eyes of mine, so like my mothers, have seen too many things that can never be unseen.

  And tonight the grief of the things I have seen is far too much for the soul of a single man to bear. The memories prompted me to drink, as they all too often do, and this young woman who lies sprawled before me looks so much like a dream I once had I am overwhelmed with drunken grief.

  Illavia.

  Tonight it is her I remember.

  Sweet, beautiful Illavia with eyes like a clear, star-smattered summer’s night and lips as lush and sweet as the ripest nectarine you’ve ever tasted.

  Illavia.

  My first love, perhaps the only love I’ve ever known, for when she left this world she stole the greatest parts of me—heart, soul, essence—and took them with her to the grave…

  “You know you move your lips when you write?”

  She sounds nothing like her, my fair Illavia, and that alone is cause enough for me to lose affection. Illavia had a voice like the whispering wind through a spring rain, hushed and beautiful, inspiring and sweet as a humble goddess lowering herself from on high to bless me with her company.

  This one… I fear she could not charm the beard from a goat with her lilting lisp, unsteady pitch and imbalanced tone. Worse is that she lacks the cleverness and polish of a well-spoken lady, and when her lips quiver and part, all I am able to focus on is the gap between her teeth.

  “Did you hear me?”

  Curse her interruptions!

  I lift my gaze from the lamp-lit parchment and see again why I chose her.

  Lips together now, gap-toothed grin hidden, she smiles with more gentleness and her eyes light up in the warm glow of the lantern. It shines within the darkness of their blue like a flickering field of fireflies.

  Just the way Illavia’s eyes once did.

  And as the lamplight flickers, I am reminded of the stars I once saw in her eyes and I want to write another song about her.

  “What are you writing?” she asks, drawing her leg from the loosened sheets and laying it atop the coverlet as if to entice me back into her arms. “Have you written about me?”

  “But of course,” I lie, as nothing could be further from the truth. Though I suppose it was, in some small way, she who inspired the quill that now leaps across these pages.

  Her, with eyes like Illavia, whom I lost so long ago.

  “I have written page upon page on the very color and beauty of your eyes.”

  Eyes to light the world, and it was for this very reason I chose to take her to my bed.

  Because I could lie beside her in the half-dark grey of coming dawn, staring into those eyes and remembering the only time my life made any sense. Illavia.

  “Sing to me then,” she coos, drawing the length of her leg upward, the pale skin glowing gold in the lamp’s golden light. “Sing songs about the color of my eyes.”

  I grin and lay my quill atop the parchment, turning a coy smile over my shoulder at her.

  “Have I not already sung enough for one night?”

  I rise from the desk in the corner of the room and take careful steps across the boards. They groan beneath my careful feet, echoing through the quiet tavern like the yawn of an old ghost.

  “I’ve sung for my supper and I’ve sung for my bed,” I remind her. “I’ve sung for the gold that will see me from this land and I’ve sung the sweetest words to entice you into my arms.”

  “But you did not
sing for me.” She pouts a little when she says this, reminding me once more of a love I should have long ago forgotten. “Not for only me.”

  “But of course I did.”

  I draw back the coverlet, exposing her full nakedness to the damp chill of the night. The air caresses her in such a way, the cool blankets whispering across her skin and enticing the soft rise of her nipples.

  “Every note I sang this night, I sang for you and only you.”

  One knee touches the mattress, the old straw beneath the sheets crinkling as I sink into its depths and lower my weight into the bed. I lay my cheek against her thigh and turn a fiery gaze upward.

  The damp musk of her sex fills me, the lingering sweetness of perfume on her skin and when I turn my lips downward to brush across the top of her thigh, I feel the gooseflesh rise to meet my tender kisses before I taste the salt-tang of sweat upon my tongue.

  “I want you…” I begin in the breathiest and most enticing of whispers. The rush of my desirous exhale hushes across her skin and she shivers beneath its caress. “To sing…” I dart my tongue out and trace the quivering muscle of her inner-thigh, one hand moving inward to rest atop her other leg. “For me,” I finish with a forward lunge, my shoulders burrowing between her parting thighs.

  Her giggle is followed by the drawn out moan of pleasure from deep within her chest…

  And that is how I make them sing. My reward for the gift I’ve been given—though at times I am still convinced ‘tis a curse more than a gift—is the parting of thighs, sweet whispers and breathy sighs.

  And tonight, as she sings to the tune of my caresses the same way they all do, I close my eyes and dream she is someone else, someone whose memory is worthy of the burden it places upon my shoulders as I walk the world lifetime after lifetime after lifetime trying to forget.

  Tomorrow I will forget this woman in my bed. Her name is already fading from mind, and come dawn I’ll wash her scent from my skin until all that remains inside me is the haunted eyes of something left behind so long ago I should not remember it at all.

  Illavia.

  From now until the day this wretched curse is broken there will always be Illavia.

  Only Illavia, and it is the sound of her sighs that carry me away.

  TWO

  To Women