The Goat

This is a story my friend Jade and I co-wrote a while ago. I started writing something today, but I just got home from a trip and I'm tired, and that story will take longer than I want to stay up for. So yeah, here's this.

I am loath to part with the body and spirit of my beloved grandfather. Tragically, I am forced to choose between him and my dear, dear husband. You see, my grandfather is the spirit of a man trapped in the body of a goat. When he was a young lad, my grandfather was apprenticed to a great Shaman. It was a great honor, for the Shaman was the most powerful within a month’s travelling by foot, or even by ox-cart, or at least so my grandfather has told me. My grandfather, Olaf [Oo-lahf], studied hard and gained must of his master’s knowledge. He loved the life set out for him. However, as he grew into a young man, he began to love something else even more—a beautiful young woman of his village, Ingelill. He asked for her hand in marriage, and when she agreed, asked the Shaman for his blessing.

But the Shaman refused, saying that he would be a fool to give up the power he could have for a woman. As much as it pained him to defy his master, Olaf loved Ingelill, and they were married. For a short time they lived in marital bliss, and a son was born to them.

Soon after their son’s birth, the Shaman found their happy little home. In his fury, he turned Olaf into a goat. Ingelill begged him to restore her husband, but to no avail, and the Shaman left without a word.

But the situation was not as dire as it first seemed. Olaf retained his powers of speech, and the family lived happily for many years. Olaf gave his small son goatty back rides and watched as he grew into a man. Eventually, his son found a wife of his own, and they soon had a young daughter.

But then, tragedy struck. Olaf’s son’s beautiful bride was struck by lightning, and passed away. In his grief, her husband stopped eating, and he too was soon lost forever from this world. Their daughter, or rather, I, was raised by Olaf and Ingelill. Despite his… unusual form, I have always loved Olaf as a father.

Eventually, I met and fell in love with an American man. Olaf disapproved, as my soon-to-be husband had no knowledge of our language or culture, and though he had initially had nothing against the man, he thought he was unworthy of me and was corrupting me away from my family. But I loved and still love my dear Bob, and we eloped.

When my grandfather heard, he was furious. He ran around the house bleating in rage, until he suddenly keeled over.

My grandmother was distraught. She could not bear to part with him, so she brought him to a taxidermist. As an apprentice Shaman, my grandfather had learned enough that his spirit was able to remain with him. My grandmother kept him by her side for the rest of her life.

Tragically, she too soon passed away. My grandfather was passed on to me. I brought him into my home and made a place for him next to the umbrella stand. I was happy to have the only remaining member of my family, the grandfather I had loved so much, with me again. Although my grandfather had become quieter since his death, his mere presence was a comfort.

But soon, odd things began to happen. First, my husband’s clothes began to disintegrate. Then, the writing in his important books and papers would disappear. At first, we didn’t understand what was happening. But when I spoke of my worries to my grandfather, a familiar chuckle emerged from his now-silent throat. I realized that he was causing the disturbances.

If it had only been these small nuisances, I could have tolerated it—after all, he is my family. But one day, my husband felt an odd pull in the night. He was dragged from his bed. The next morning I found him unconscious at the base of the stairs with a broken leg and a fractured wrist. He gave me an ultimatum: my grandfather goes, or he does.

It will be my grandfather that goes. I hope to find him a loving family who will respect him as the great man he is. He is a kind, friendly man, and is unlikely to cause harm to any but the man he considers to have stolen me away. I mean to list him for sale on ebay.

Deal

The night was dark, so dark I could not even see the blade at my throat, but I wasn’t afraid. “Do you mean to kill me?” I inquired.

“Only if you refuse to tell me where it is,” my attacker answered in a gruff voice.

I smiled sweetly, though he couldn’t see it, and answered, “Sorry, Vak, but you’re going to need to offer more than that.”

“You don’t seem to understand me, Rakayl,” he sounded frustrated. “I’m offering you your life. If you tell me, I’ll go away and leave you be. If not, I’ll slit your throat.”

“You seem to be under the impression that you have the upper hand here. You don’t. I have something you want, but you don’t have anything I want. You’re going to have to raise the price.”

“Your life!”

“Like I said, you don’t have anything I want.”

He finally got it. He sheathed his dagger, and for a moment I thought he was about to leave, but he didn’t. We sat silently in the dark, until he finally muttered something and all the candles in the room flared up. For the first time in years, I saw his face, and he saw mine.

He hadn’t changed much, if at all. Same voice, same face, same beard, same twinkling eyes, same attitude. I knew I’d changed, been aged by years of toil and misery and hopelessness. And I’d meant it, that my life meant nothing to me. Back then, sure, I was a daredevil, took stupid risks that could get me killed, but I’d loved being alive.

I looked away to avoid seeing pity in his eyes. He knew what I’d been once, and to see me reduced to this…. I still had my pride, and one other thing as well.

“Fine,” he gave in. “What do you want?”

“Nothing you can give me.”

“Then why shouldn’t I just kill you and be done with it?”

“I won’t be able to tell you anything once I’m dead.”

“And you’re not telling me anything alive. Why shouldn’t I just kill you and save myself the bother of trying to talk it out of you?”

I shrugged. “No reason.”

He was growing irritated. “Damn it, isn’t there anything I can do to get you to tell me?”

“Like I said, there’s nothing you have that I want.”

“What do you want?”

“Freedom.”

He smiled. “So if I get you out of here, you’ll tell me?”

“No.” He started to glare at me, but I continued, “If you get me out of here, and take me with you, as a partner, then I’ll tell you.”

“I’ve no problem agreeing with that… but are you sure you’re still up to it?”

In a flash, I grabbed his knife from his side and had it at his throat. That was enough of a reply, so I said nothing.

“Fine, fine,” he said, holding up his hands. “I take back the question. We have a deal?”

I tucked the dagger into my waistband, and we shook on it. “My knife wasn’t part of the deal,” he complained.

“No, it wasn’t,” I agreed, but did not return it. “So do you have a plan? Because I assure you, I haven’t stayed here for four years because I like the scenery.”

“You know me, I play things by ear. So should we trick our way out, or fight our way out?”

I’d forgotten that. My style had been to plan everything out to the last detail beforehand, with a multitude of backup plans for everything that could possibly go wrong. Vak had tended to come up with mad ideas and, with no planning whatsoever, act on them, improvising whenever anything went wrong. But it worked for him. After all, I’d been caught, convicted, and sold into slavery, and he was free.

I thought about his question, and grinned. “Fight our way out, of course. If you think you’re up to it.”

“It would help if you gave me my dagger back.”

I smirked. “I guess you do have more need of it.” I offered it to him.

“I don’t need a bit of metal to fight with any more than you do,” he protested, so I put it away.

I had nothing to take with me and no reason to linger, so we left. He’d already picked the locks to get into the room, so we crept out into the darkness.

“Steal a pair of horses?” Vak suggested.

“Just two?” I led the way to the stables. They were guarded, but the guards, not really expecting any trouble, weren’t as alert as they should have been. I was on the first guard before he even noticed us, and by then it was too late; I left him bleeding out into the dust. He’d had time to let out part of a scream, but it didn’t matter. The only one around to hear was the corpse of the other guard, who Vak had dealt with while I was killing the first one. We saddled the two best horses, and quickly released all the others—a distraction, sure, but I mainly did it out of spite. The loss of a few horses, and even a few guards, was hardly enough revenge, but it’s better than nothing.

We dispatched the two guards at the gate as easily as their fellows, but the magic was more difficult. That was how I was caught the last time I tried to escape. I’d thought I’d neutralized it, and started to climb over, and realized it was stronger than I’d thought when I was stuck to the gate for the rest of the night, until the next round of guards came and caught me.

But Vak was with me this time, and as loath as I am to admit it, he knew more magic than I did. So after a rather tense half hour of sitting on my horse in the cold, watching Vak mutter to himself, we were through, and all we had to do was stay out of sight.

“Where to now?” Vak asked me.

“A ship would be best. You up for a spot of piracy?” He was, of course, and if the small craft we took couldn’t exactly be called a ship, it was quite capable of taking us to Port Endra, in Majardea.

“So is that where it is, then?” Vak finally asked me, on the second day of our voyage. “Majardea, or nearby?”

“Well, it was. But it’s too late now. Did you really think they wouldn’t have gotten that out of me a long time ago?”

He stared at me. I put my hand on the dagger, in case he tried anything, but after a while he just laughed. “I should have known. So what happened to it?”

“Well, that bastard wasn’t about to go off on a quest for it, so I guess he must have sold the information or something. A while back I heard some hero went after it, and she found it, but…. I’m not exactly clear on the details, but I heard them complaining about what a waste that was, because I guess she fed it to a goat. Good riddance, in my opinion, you know what I thought about it.”

Vak shook his head. “A goat. The most powerful artifact known to man, and she fed it to a goat.” He looked at me accusingly. “You owe me.”

“I know.” But I didn’t much care.

A Sacrifice

You’re never so alone as when you’re in a crowd of people who hate you, except when you’re in a crowd of people who don’t know you exist. And that is the position I found myself in on that fateful day. It was summer, hot and bright, a beautiful blue sky above and throngs of happy people all around me. Their pleasant smiles and cheerful laughter opened an emptiness in my heart.

My loneliness was so intense that I was almost glad when Liana and the others showed up. Almost, but not quite. Loneliness is awful, but pain and humiliation can be worse.

It went exactly as I expected, exactly as it always did whenever I see them now. They used to be… well, we were never friends, but we were all cordial to each other. I guess now they feel they need to make it very clear that they hate me as much or more than anyone else, so they won’t be tarred with the same brush. Not that that excuses them.

They started off making fun of me, then moved on to vicious accusations, and finally started hitting me, knocking me down, kicking me, spitting on me. Tears ran down my face, and I screamed out in pain.

“HEY!” a female voice yelled out, and they stopped, probably more in surprise than anything. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Leave her be and run off before I call the guards!”

“Like they’d care about that piece of trash,” Liana muttered, but they slunk off.

The woman who’d chased them away helped me to my feet. “Are you alright?” she asked.

I nodded. “It hadn’t gotten too serious yet. Thank you.”

“I’m glad I could help. I’m Crisabella.”

“I’m Aniya.”

“Ohh,” she said in sudden understanding as the friendliness left her face, and she hurried away.

“I did the right thing!” I called after her, but she didn’t look back, and no one else looked my way.

That’s when you’re the very most alone—when you’re in a crowd of people who don’t know you exist, but if they did, they’d hate you.

It wasn’t always this way. Back when, I was… not famous, but well-known, well-liked. It was an honor to be chosen to go on the quest. I’d have been a hero if I’d succeeded. And I did succeed. Then, I ruined it all by doing the right thing.

Not that I regret it. Not really. Not that part, anyway. I regret finding the damn thing. I regret agreeing to go in the first place—agreeing, I would have killed to go. Sometimes I regret being born. But I don’t regret what I did.

What happens in stories, what’s supposed to happen, is that a hero goes on a quest, succeeds, brings back the fruits of their victories, the kingdom is restored to health and prosperity, and they all live happily ever after. What happened in real life is that I went on the quest, I succeeded in finding the Talisman, I brought it back, and I destroyed it. We got attacked from two sides and the kingdom barely survived the war, the crops failed, the economy collapsed, there’s been political dissent and the crime rate has gone up. It’s all my fault, of course.

I will freely admit that had I delivered the Talisman to the king as I had been expected to, as I had originally intended, none of that would have happened. We would have lived in peace and prosperity, or in prosperity, anyway, for surely if he’d had something that made his kingdom undefeatable, he’d take advantage of it. And it would have taken advantage of him, and of everyone around. It would have sucked up happiness and hope and replaced it with greed and malice. I held it in my palm for only a few moments, but it was enough. I know its nature as surely as I know anything, and it was pure evil.

It wasn’t hard to destroy. I smashed it between two rocks and it shattered into a million pieces. I fed the pieces to a goat. Goats will eat anything. I will note that the goat suffered no ill effects. Evil has no hold over goats.

It’s rather a miracle that I wasn’t executed. I don’t know why I wasn’t. I once heard it said of the king that he was a good king, as kings go, meaning he usually had some kind of reason before torturing people to death. But I’d given him plenty of reason, and never even been arrested. Maybe he figured a lynch mob would’ve done his job for him by this point.

But the most recent attempt at vigilante justice hadn’t done me any serious harm, thanks to my regretful rescuer, so I went home, moped around for a while, and eventually went to bed. I fell asleep crying, “I did the right thing,” over and over into my pillow.

I was awakened by a pounding on my door. I shot up in terror. Was it Liana and her gang, come to finish what they’d started? Or the king’s men, with a warrant for my execution? Did it much matter?’

I decided it was better to get it over with, whatever it was, so I went to open the door.

It was no one I had expected, no one I knew. A tall woman in a dark green cloak was standing at my door. “I’m quite sorry for the noise,” she said when I opened it. “You didn’t wake up when I first knocked, and it would have been rude of me to come in uninvited.”

“I keep my door locked, anyway.” I was still to half-asleep to make intelligent conversation.

“There’s that too,” she said with a smile that made me think the only reason she hadn’t come inside, locked door or no, was politeness.

“Anyway, you managed to wake me, you might as well come inside.” I belatedly realized how rude I sounded- I had been jolted from my sleep in the middle of the night. “Would you like some tea?” I offered as I locked the door behind us.

“If you’re having some. You could use it, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

I nodded. As I began brewing the tea, I explained, “I thought you had to be either guards with a warrant for my arrest or a mob with torches and pitchforks.”

“I’m very sorry.” I could tell she meant it. “My name is Malexandra. Do you know of me?”

I did, everyone did. Lady Malexandra was some kind of sorceress, and had a sort of school or something just outside of the city. Her politics were anarchistic, but the king mostly left her alone, as had his father and grandfather before him—it was debated whether she was immortal, I remembered, as the woman standing before me didn’t look more than thirty-five. She was, now that I think of it, the one who’d made the comment about the king not torturing people to death without a reason.

“Yes. And you know who I am, I assume?”

“Of course. I don’t wake complete strangers in the middle of the night for no reason.”

I waited until the tea was done, and we were each sitting on my sofa with a mug of it, before asking, “So why are you here?”

She took a sip of tea before answering. “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. I came across the information that the king has ordered your arrest for treason.”

I shouldn’t have been shocked, and guess I wasn’t, but there’s a difference between worrying that you’ll be killed and knowing that you’re to be tortured to death, and her words hit me harder than the fists of the morning’s attackers. “When?” I managed to ask.

She looked at me sympathetically, but her voice was matter-of-fact. “Perhaps an hour ago. You should have a few more hours before they come for you.”

“I have a few hours before I’m arrested, and we’re sitting here drinking tea?” I asked, but my voice held no emotion, and I found I really didn’t care. It all seemed so far away, the king’s guards and Malexandra and my hand holding the mug of tea.

“Aniya,” Malexandra’s voice was stern. “Listen to me. I understand this is very difficult, but you can’t go into shock right now.”

“Why not? I haven’t anything better to do for the remainder of my life.” But I knew she was right, and took a sip of tea and tried to force my mind back into place.

“Nonsense, you need to go pack whatever’s important to you.”

“I don’t have anywhere to go.”

She gave me a look that said to stop being stupid. “You’re coming back with me.”

“I am?” For nearly a year, nobody would speak a civil word to me, and now I was being offered a place to stay. “Why are you recuing me?”

“Because you need it, for one thing, and I dislike executions.” As I got up to pack my things, she added, “And because you did the right thing, destroying the Talisman. Someone as brave as that should get at least a few breaks.”

I spun to look at her. “So you don’t hate me for it?”

“Gods no. Could you imagine the king, or anyone, with that much power?”

“Yes.”

“Right. Well, you’ll fit right in at my place.”

And I did.