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A small, non-human figure holds a carved toad in her hands. Behind her, superimposed on a hunter's moon, are the eyes of a gigantic toad-creature.

Of Mist and Marshlight

- an autumn story

Of Mist and Marshlight is the autumn story of the four Shymeyric tales and features the elfen Caeci Wolfsong, a character that I return to a lot in both my writing and artwork. The elfen were created over the course of several years in the 1970s, both as another race of characters in the Dungeons and Dragons games that I played a lot at the time, and later, in my writing, as a useful way of exploring humanity through the eyes of a non-human character. Caeci, estranged from her people for the majority of her life, is very non-human, both physically and in her way of thinking and looking at the world. But she is forced by circumstance to live as human in a human world. This makes her, for me at least, a fascinating character, as outsiders often are. This extract is the first part of the story..

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"When stones hide toads and corpse-lights flare
And even night-things hush and bide within their dens,
Then, traveller, shun the sucking ground, and 'ware
Of mist and marshlight creeping throught the fens..."
[Old Fenland Adage]

Autumn mist muffled the distant cry of a wolf from the Werewoods far away in the distance as the small, shaggy grey pony trotted out of the rain-curtains and came to a halt, his hooves silent on the spongy moss of the Fenway. His coat, spangled with droplets of the heavy fog that coiled around his legs, shone with an eerie radience in the phosphorescence that glimmered over the rise ahead, and the eyes of his almost invisible rider, reflecting that wan light, glowed through the dusk like twin points of emerald witchfire.

The rider was hunched in the saddle, hooded against the rain and wrapped in a thick cloak of brindled fur, the oiled leather lining outermost against the chill dampness of the season. A small travelling lantern was slung from the pony's saddle horn, its light flickering along the curve of the rider's cheekbone to illuminate dark hair straggled from the wet, and gleaming off the traces of old gilt on the pommel of the sword that was slung, wrapped in oiled silk, across the rider's shoulders. Both pony and rider looked equally miserable, faded, as if the constant dampness had leached all colour from them, leaving only a monochrome grey traced against the paler grey of the fog. The one person to witness their emergence, a solitary frog-fisherman returning from the fens in his coracle, made the sign of the demon-horns and spat between his fingers to ward off evil, half believing the achromatic figures to be way-ghosts, revenants, materialising from the gathering dark; then, noting the size of the rider, he marvelled that a child should be abroad at such a time on such a night. He raised a hand as the rider turned a white smudge of a face towards him, then blinked in surprise as fog and pony shimmered and merged into a blurred ambiguity of drizzled shadow. The fisherman, squatting in his small boat, alone and afraid, shivered in superstitious dread as he peered into the sudden emptiness and paddled on, the slow, soft splash of his oar and the bumping of jars and nets against his oilskins creating a small island of reality amidst the fog that surrounded him on all sides with terrors.

Caeci loosed the gathered shadows with which she had wrapped herself, slipped from the pony's back and rubbed his nose with a woollen-gloved hand. He whickered softly. Caeci nodded.

"I know, tariel," she said. "You felt it too."

Beneath the hood of her cloak her ears twitched forward, focussing, and she wrinkled her nose as a soft splashing came from the direction of the light ahead. Accompanying it was an almost imperceptible smell, so faint that human nostrils would never have caught its nauseous trace, a smell of putrefaction, as if a grave had gaped for a moment and then closed. Caeci shivered. Something, some emanation, had come from ahead, raising the hair all down her spine as if a cold wind had run spectral fingers over her. It was not the fisherman's presence that had disturbed her, even though she had concealed herself from his perceptions; her shadow-wrapping was a reflex, force of habit more than anything else - humans were often a danger to her kind. No, this - whatever it was - did not feel like anything human; the danger-sense that she carried locked into the deep unconscious recesses of her mind had flared so suddenly into her chilled half-doze that her heart had lurched and hammered as if a gaping hole had yawned, trap-like, beneath her feet. Even now her senses crawled with alarm-response, and the pony was shuddering next to her, his eyes rolling whitely.

She stared into the nacreous dark as the hitherto safe reality of her surroundings twisted into might-be under the crushing implication of whatever prowled behind the phosphorescent mists, and unseen shaped lurked and coiled around her, peripheral. Cautiously, she reached out with her mind, deep-sending, putting interrogative thought-tendrils out into the stillness beyond the ridge. She wondered briefly if the lurker might be only the empathetic image of some piece of human work, mundane and ordinary to them but still disturbing the earth enough to create the feeling of wrongness that still shook her. Nothing stirred. She allowed herself to relax a fraction. Perhaps, after all, it was nothing more than human leavings.

Then, in a moment of flesh-crawling realisation, that small comfort was denied her.

Something moved, shadow-like, in the dim dream-shapes of her perception, something very old and very hungry, coiling away from her featherlight mind-touch like a dark tentacle shunning the light, horridly alive where no life should be.

Shuddering from the brief obscenity of that contact, Caeci climbed back into the saddle, the creak of wet leather a comforting commonplace, and drew her sword, the iron ringing softly as it cleared the scabbard. Rain gleamed on its slick, dark surface like oil. Muttering a charm under her breath, she urged the pony onwards towards the flickering light.

As they came to the top of the rise she reigned in the pony and stared intently through a rift in the fog at the unpleasant vista that lay ahead, her eyes darkening as their slit-pupils expanded to their fullest extent to pierce the murky darkness.

In front of her were two weathered blocks of granite with the remains of rough carvings just visible on them. between the two blocks, wreathed in mist and the clinging tendrils of climbing plants, was a single finger of stone some ten feet high. Blotted with lichen and mossy padding, it emerged from the ground like a fungus, and the earth around it was peculiarly cracked and stained. The pillar was unshaped, but on its base, beneath the moulds that clothed it, were more pictographs and symbols similar to the ones on the granite blocks - strange symbols and figures, blunted by time and the weather but still horribly suggestive in their alien delineaments. Caeci moved closer, raising her lantern to light the menhir's carvings. The faint illumination showed a crude picture of a toad-like creature, squatting and somehow leaning forward as if to leap from its two-dimensional prison. It leered out of the stone, its fanged mouth open in a monstrously benign grin. The wavering light of the lantern gave it a horrid semblance of life as it made shadows jump and dance in the toad-thing's eye-sockets. Caeci shuddered and lowered the light. Her elfen prescience was screaming hidden danger, but all around her was stillness.

Beyond the stone, as far as the eye could see, a vast marsh extended, the unhealthy greens of stunted reeds and sedges partly hidden by the writhing mists and illuminated by the unwholesome shining of the phosphorescence. Bowed down by the heavy air, willows loomed like spectres through the layered mists, and the white, skull-like fruiting heads of cotton-grass bobbed and waved at the swamp's edge. A compound smell of bog-asphodel and methane stink came from the marsh and every now and then there came a flabby belch as a huge bubble of gas rose and burst in the mud. Faint dots of brighter light wandered aimlessly through the miasma as the mindless but dangerous will o' the wisps danced over the bogs. Caeci set her jaw and growled under her breath. She for one would not be taken in by their lures; to follow the cheery lights of the creatures was certain death in far smaller and less sinister marshes than this one.

She listened attentively for the peculiar splashing sound that she had heard before, but there was no sound other than the sporadic 'plop' of bursting bubbles and the constant wail of the sluggish wind as it blew through the pale rushes on the outskirts of the marsh. Caeci's eyes widened and she flung back the hood of her cloak, ears rotating forward as they sought for other sounds. That was what was missing. There were none of the usual marsh-noises here, no croaking of frogs, no hoarse cries from water birds as they ransacked the muddy water for worms and insects. The silence was redolent with menace, the glimmering darkness seeming to wait in unholy anticipation.

Caeci swore, sheathed her sword, and pulled the throat-flap of her travelling cloak closer as the seeping water found another point of entry. She glared about her as if daring the mists to reveal there secret, but there was unease in her stance. After all, this was the month the humans called 'October' and the elfen called 'Saihaynet', a time of ghosts and twilight, dreams and hauntings. Brother Sun had relinquished the world to winter's overlord, Draken, the life-severer, and the Darkling hordes, and darkness held dominion.

Caeci drew her brows together as she stared out over the swamps, scowling. She and the pony were already tired from the long ride north from the port of draffe along the difficult trail that crossed the Swordhilt, the chain of mountains that bisected this part of the country from east to west. Riding the last part of the treacherous, rocky track throughout the day to arrive here at the end of the evening had taken more out of her than she cared to admit. To stop, eat and sleep was essential before continuing her way forward to Hubbe, the great fortress-town that was the capital of Tuth Arkadayne. At her back, grim and grey, were the mountains she had just crossed, the peak of the Mappenmounde at their centre looming high and dark still through the fog. She could not afford the time it would take to find a way around the swamps. She had already lingered too long and exhaustion was slinking through the dark at her heels. Caeci stretched and flexed her spine, flushing fatigue from weary muscles. Murmuring encouragement to the pony, whose laid-back ears and widened nostrils still betrayed his nervousness, she drew the damp fur of her travelling cloak around her and they moved down away from the ridge, away from the ominous silence of the marsh, and trotted further along the Fenway, past more of the strangely-carved standing stones, towards the village of Marish Thorp and the promise of rest.

As Caeci rounded the last corner and the lights of Marish Thorp came into view the rain eased off for the first time that day. The pony's hooves clip-clopped on the harder ground of the beaten track that ran down the centre of the village, the quiet sound ringing eerily in isolation. Somewhere away in the darkness the marsh made its presence felt as the harsh babbling of a hunting marsh-gibberer, and a thin shriek as its prey voiced its last agonies, disturbed the hush. Caeci shivered.

On her left, as she rode into the village, a dark, still lake glimmered. The smell of rank vegetation came from it. Hulking over their small artificial islands, two crannógs loomed beyond the nearer shore, small windows shedding a pale light over the black water. Briefly a voice was raised in anger, the words indistinguishable at this distance. Caeci wondered what family drama was being played out behind the timber walls. Along the track, set slightly back from the road itself, were the small wooden buildings of Marish Thorp itself, the reed thatches glistening with rain. At the far end of the village were two larger buildings built of drystone, and beyond them, where the Sumpwash river cut across the trail and the ferry-house squatted by the shore, were huddled several hovels of turf and moss, their frontages sloping down to the river. Upturned coracles leaned against their sides. The buildings seemed to grow from the ground like unhealthy plants, and the soft light shining through their doorways and from behind their shutters only threw their lifelessness into horrid relief, like the pallid, unhealthy glow of a long-dead corpse.

Marish Thorp seemed hardly big enough to warrant a tavern - the Fenway being but rarely travelled - but tavern there was, a somewhat larger building with a stables propped drunkenly against the wall next to it. A sign above the small doorway announced that it was called 'The Trail's End' although, Caeci reflected grimly, it was hardly likely that any traveller would stop at Marish Thorp by preference. She dismounted and led the pony into the dark stable. There was no-one to see to the needs of the animal, and the interior of the stalls had the musty smell of long disuse. Caeci rubbed the pony down and unsaddled him. Then, leaving him contentedly munching the last of the oats from her saddlebags, she made for the tavern, her knees trembling from the tiredness that had at last caught up with her. A blast of heat washed over her as she pushed open the door and stepped inside.

The room was small and made smaller by the clouds of harsh tobacco smoke that hung in skeins below the roof, thickening the air. Caeci's nose wrinkled in distaste at the acrid smell, which overlaid the other smells of the room without masking them - the stink of sour sweat and sourer beer, stale wine, and the all-pervading damp. The floor, sticky with spillage, was strewn with reeds. The only illumination came from several rushlights that hung at intervals along the walls, a feeble light that served only to make the shadows of the room deeper still. There were few customers, and all were ranged along the walls, seated in long settles, the tables in front of them heavily marked with stain-rings. A fire in the centre of the room added even more texture to the atmosphere despite the hole in the roof immediately above it. Water from the sodden roof blew through the hole at intervals producing curses from all the occupants of the room, frog-fishers mostly in leather kilts and coarse wool stockings, their heads bent over a complicated game played with three different colours of pebbles and sticks of different lengths. In the far corner sat a solitary dark figure, his face shadowed, staring moodily into the fire. Caeci's gaze lingered on him a moment. He, unlike the others, was an unknown quantity; like the lurker in the marsh, unknown and therefore dangerous.

Caeci shook the dampness from her mane. The sudden movement drew the drinkers' attention towards her, and a heavy silence rippled outwards from where she stood. Face after face registered surprise, fear, unease, suspicion. Caeci sighed, inwardly. These others were all too well-known, all too predictable, but no less dangerous in their ignorance and superstition. Alreday, her head was aching as her empathetic senses picked up the incipient hostility around her. She cursed herself for her own stupidity. If she had been less tired she would have anticipated this reaction, would have thought to have shifted into a human approximation that, in this dim light, would have cloaked her own appearance. Too late now, however. She noted the dark man staring at her, just as intently as the others. She sighed and moved further into the room, her sodden cloak steaming in the heat.

She was given a wide berth as she crossed to an empty settle and, shrugging off her cloak and depositing her pack on the oaken seat, warmed herself at the fire, trying to control her shivering. There, she became even more the focus of the assembled eyes as the feeble firelight limned her in greater detail. There were more muttered imprecations from the shadowed corners of the room, and one or two of the older men and women bit their thumbs at her. Somebody, somewhere, said 'Demonspawn'.

Warmed by the fire, Caeci turned to the tap-room where the serving-man was standing, slack-mouthed with amazement.

A mug of mulled ale, please," she said. "And food - meat for preference - just hot and lots of it." Her voice was husky, and surprisingly low. The boy gulped and disappeared into the back room. "And a room for the night please," she added after his retreating back. She returned to her pack and, unslinging her sword, sat down on the settle, yawning hugely. This caused another gasp to whisper round the room as her carnivore dentition was fully revealed, the pointed incisors and long upper and lower canines gleaming wickedly. Caeci settled back aginst the hard support of the seat-back and let her eyelids droop. Sitting in the settle, her feet dangling above the floor, and with her eyes closed and their reflective, lambent glow shut away, she looked like some strange, changeling child, half-animal. Slowly, the conversations resumed around the room, but now there was only one topic of that conversation, and the sidelong glances that went with the furtive mutterings were all directed at the small figure by the fire.

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