A Strange and Bitter Crop

[catch]

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.


The first body could be found, though it's owner would take some doing to identify. Here was humanity, stripped and bare of all it's trappings, a sad and lonely shell of flesh that once contained vibrancy, and life. The conspirators were too suspicious, raised to well, to make a hanging upon a lonely road. It swayed in a tree, far enough so that it was beyond the ring of light thrown by the entrance-gate, but close enough that it could be seen as soon as the sun rose. They had made their statement, and they had enacted their justice, and now, the body could be burned, once it's warning was heeded.

The face was too swollen and beaten to be immediately identified, but the broken and twisted hands that had been bound behind the back were lily-soft, unused to labor. It took only a brief headcount to come to know that this was Rollo Lombard, who had changed so quickly, who had lept at the chance of power that the Civil Constabulary had given him, power to enforce his Lady's will. He had wielded that cane with just as much cruelty as the others, laughing over a job well done while the poor and unfortunate bled out on the streets. His body had been ravaged, beaten, torn by hands blinded by revenge, by tears. Some who had received his beatings had not lived, and such savagery upon the body spoke volumes of the motives of those that did this. The man had suffered, horribly suffered, before he had been hanged.

Because they knew what Justice would not be done. The cries and excuses were already trickling in, of mind-magic, involuntary, that they had not meant to do these things, and how can they be punished, how could they be blamed -

They knew what the answer would be, for those who were rich, or made rich, by Rhaena's will.

It was only the first.

[catch]

The second body would leave no question that it was done by the same man, woman, group of people who had done the first. It hung, in the same manner, from the largest oak-tree on the path into town, a tree who's branches, in the spring-time, provided a bit of shade for sharpsters to wile the steady traffic in and out of Myrken, for beggars to beg, for farmers who could not afford stall-space to sell their wares within sight of the gates. Now it had become this, a tree that bore dripping and twisting fruit, a shower of flame as the multicolor leaves abandoned the grim branches, hurling themselves away as if in horror of what their host had become.

It is naked, the corpse, and this time, it is that of a woman. Tortured, but not in the way a man would usually torture a woman. The physical torments went not deeper that the skin, a brutal beating, like the first; a body mutilated, like the first, and finally hung by the neck until she died.

Probing would find that she was a Foundation woman, a stern lady who became more and more obsessed with beauty, with perfection. Her efforts in them had led to a permanent inking of arching brows, rogue applied to cheeks and lips, with needles men use to carve crudeness into their skin. She had been a great beauty, in her day - and still was - but her soul was pure ice. And all of her suitors had seen what was within, and they went with less-beautiful, less-rich, but warmer girls. And though her fortunes were modestly rich, no man could reach past the coldness of her heart.

She grew older, more bitter, watching her beauty fade into something no-less beautiful, but suffering it alone. The closest she came to happiness was this, the Lady's time; her mind did not need to be taken. She poured out her knowledge, her woes, about Miss So-and-So and her patched dress, not because money was tight, but because she was frugal, and here a beggar may be found. She whispered into the Civil Constable's ears, and through them, gained revenge on her suitors, gained revenge on a world that told her prettiness was not everything. To the last, even as the Lady lay dead, she was querulous, demanding the Civils do something about the riff-raff pouring through the streets, about ale-stinking Constables and jumped-up Militia that were little more than crusty farmers, that this was illegal, that she would be writing to Razasan -

Those that she had revenged herself upon now had their own brand of vengance. For hers was the latest body to hang on the fire-crowned oak.

[catch]

With the once-Vice Governor, they had failed. They had passed precious food into Constable hands, and they had waited until those Constables had left their posts. But minutes early. Enough time to take her, take her out with hands bagged and gloves so that she could not tough. That is what had caused Fringee's boy to go mad, one of the men said, his throat a low and animal growl. Had reached out and touched him, for nothing worse than horse-teeth and mud on his knees. Now the boy did nothing but rock, day after day, once-bright eyes inarticulate and dumb. The failure had been bitter. There had been a man in her room, and she had been alerted, some body or furniture blocking the way, and they could not linger, for Constables cost much to buy, and two more were, already, on their way.

The failure had been bitter. Almost crushing. These were not evil men or women, after all. They were hungry. They were desperate. The Constables, the Marshall, had taken back their streets. But they had not taken that final step. For the rest of Fall, these people labored, breaking their backs and cracking their hands for what potatoes, turnips, beans, peas, or wheat could be gotten. They labored for their broken families, their children that remained, while the summer of decadence, of dismissal, of blood, still burned in their hearts.

The ground was frosted. The scanty harvest was gathered.

Who goes unpunished?

______________________________________

A madman's interest only holds so long before he tires of shivering in the bushes. Once more, Myrken would awaken to strange fruit. Once more, a naked man hung from the oak, it's skeletal fingers reached to the sky, beseeching, begging for a drop of warmth. His body had long frozen in the night, his features marred by the water that had encased it, the frozen rivulets and lakes where it gathered in the creases of him. A sculpture of ice, and his name was Harmon, and he owned the Gifted Steer - once the Gutted Steer, a tavern. His prices were good, for not only did he brew his own bitters and darks, but he imported, too. That is what had first attracted the Taken, and when they complained of his sign, he had amicably changed it, painting over the hanging, entrailed beast with a goofy-eyed cattle that sat, upright, in a child's school seat. He had kept his beers, but as more customers came to him, he was - as any good businessman - willing to change. He brought in teas, and a little cook who knew the art of sandwiches and cakes, and he gathered the shillings and dollars into his rough hands.

Rhaena had made him a rich man. And for nothing more than this, the Beast of Vengeance had struck him. They had been frustrated, thwarted of prey, and they took a more innocent man to slake their bloodlusts.

[Rance]

She looked on with several others. They all stopped and said nothing. Silence was easy.

They all looked at the hanging man. He was stripped of his clothes, and the places where seams and hems had torn against his resistant flesh were bruised and blue. When there was a gust of wind, the hemp from which he dangled creaked like an old door. His ankles knocked together like two rocks. His fingertips -- it looked like he'd been clenching whole apples when his heart stopped, for his fingers were bent into talons -- pointed toward the ground along with his toes and even the lazy skin of his lifeless penis, all praising dirt. But his chin, his chin--

His chin was bent up, angled toward the Myrken sky, the skin twisted like old leather by the rope lashed desperately around his throat.

Gloria Wynsee forgot she was holding something in her hands. She never even remembered what it was. It splattered to the slush.

"He's got to be gotten down," said one fellow, his voice a whisper, afraid to offend.

"Pits with him," said a woman whose shoulder pushed too closely into Gloria's own. "Let the prick hang. Just let him blow in the wind for a bit."

"He's should be buried," another one said. "We're not animals. We're not beasts."

The seamstress' knees felt unreliable. Watery. She squatted down in the slush, drew in a breath, touched her gloved fingers to the soil, afraid she was going to teeter. That man was dead; that man was dead and the heels of his feet and the tips of his toes were purple, purple, purple where all the blood had pooled, filling his legs like a bottle. In Jernoah the sun would broil him, cook him, burn him until the gasses and waste in his guts burst--

She burst, too, vomiting a flag of color on the shoes of another man who'd come to gawk at the discovery. Sour fluid soiled her bonnet-edge, a slat having caught a brunt of the expulsion.

She stumbled out of the crowd, never apologizing, forgetting what it was she had come to purchase in Myrkentown in the first place.

[Rance]

She came back that night, staring at the long shadow of the gnarled old oak against the white glow of the Crawl Moon. Tennant had escorted her here; he had forgotten everything, but amid his durable dissonance, he was a statue of the familiar and the comforting. "I want to chop wood," she had told him.

The body still dangled, a man without a name whose skin had started to go tight and stony against the winter chill. A cloudy icicle dangled from a swollen toe, not a thing of water, but of fluids that had frozen as they seeped like wax from between the wrinkles of his heels. In the vacuous winter, he had no stink; he was leather, inanimate and sculpted, swaying back and forth at every insistent wind.

Under the stars, the seamstress hoisted Mister Catch's ornamental wood-cutting ax. She wrapped her sweat-blackened hands around its handle, set her heels, twisted her hips, and swung with diligence at the rough bark. Each chop sent an echo of pain through her palms and into her elbows; every hack bit a line out of the ancient treeskin, spraying splinters and shards of bark alike--

She did no true damage. It would take a greater man a number of months to do anything more than disturb that grand, deep-rooted splendor.

Thump.

Ninenty-three, ninenty-four times an hour.

Thump.

Tennant could have left, could have vanished -- all that mattered was the tree.

Thump.

She put the tree between her and the dangling corpse. With every strike against the oak's rigid spine, he jerked, flinched, an illusion of life rattling in an otherwise cold slab of meat.

Thump.

Inside her mind, Jernoah was a gleaming beacon, a wonderful pride, a bountiful and delectable void of reason. Women and men could not be hanged in the desert. When Sunwake dawned and bathed Myrkentown in orange, she looked away from the corpse and imagined, for only a few moments, that she was home.

[Tolleson]

It was a massive and gnarled spider, the shadow that bled from the tree, cast because of that moon. The light of it was no different, but here it somehow seemed blue, piercing, and cold. The sight was more the cause of his shiver than the chill in the night air.

She would cut with or without his words and for a time he said nothing. He let her do as she said, chop at the petrified tree. It was hours then, the rhythm of her chopping putting him into a sort of trance. There were things Solena had told him, after all he had been at her home when suddenly others woke, forgetting mere hours. The gaps hadn’t been apparent, not at first, he had been asked to do something. Something with Solena, this explained why he was here. Something with the Underdark, and this explained why he needn’t come back to work. She told him what she knew, which of course, was now all that he knew. A story neglecting Gloria and Catch, and all the details of some horn, or betrayal, that said nothing of a lake or dances. It was simply a matter of a beard, a lakeside confrontation, and several months being content to grow herbs, brew tonics, and live with a family that was not truly his own. But then there was Genny, hadn’t he been worried, wasn’t there something just there, a fleeting impression but a shadow at the ede of his mind. But she was all right, no one spoke of her in whispered tones with worry or malice. The details of it all, the compare, the contrast of events cycled through his mind.

Near dawn he finally rose, a stone come to life in her pause, as if by stopping she had woken him. Though in truth, his eyes followed every swing, alert and aware. “I know better than to tell you this is no work for a lady, but it is conspicuous work to do by day.”

His words were raspy, gentle but cracking as if his voice had been frozen for much longer than the span of one evening. Two or three steps and he was beside her, lying his hand over one of hers and peeling back her fingers to slip free the ax.

“You should rest, lovely Gloria.”

[Rance]

No work for a lady.

"What matters," she said, her breath heaving in her chest, her shoulders clinched as if they were pressured by some unseen harness, "if I'm lady or fellow? What work can be done by those with something occupying the space between their legs that -- that I could not try?"

The head of the ax thumped against the ground. The Sun gleamed, fresh and welcoming, casting the shadow of a hanging body in a long slash across the ground beyond the tree. Sweat crawled in tapering stains from the arches beneath her arms to the threadbare waistband of her dress. Her neck was smeared with wood-dust and tar, and when she turned to look at him, her stare was wet, old tears frozen like little droplets of ice on the lumps of her cheeks.

"You flatter me. You've always such compliments. You've always been a patient and caring friend. But -- but I've no breasts of worth; I've a man's chin and a mongrel's eyes. I snore when I sleep, I wipe my nose and my fingers on -- on my clothes. You speak too freely of lovely.

"A man is hanging. It's -- it's no place for lovely."

But however resistant her words were to his comforts and praises, her fingers peeled away from the ax like pliable tips of clay. Her aching, swollen shoulders loosened at his proximity -- how many times had she chopped, how many blazes had she scoured into the bark with the blunted maul? -- and when his hand touched hers, she did not stiffen, but instead teetered, swayed, and crushed her cheek against his chest. She crumbled against him, tried to hide against his lapel. For all her peculiarities and the visible struggle that sometimes raged between girl and woman, she cared for him the way one might an idol perched on a stool; she admired him, trusted him, found solace and warmth in his scent of orange and spice--

"Why the rope," she asked. "Why not the sword, or a knife? Why the rope. Why hanging?"

She did not protest when he accompanied her home. The girl held onto him.

And later, when exhaustion consumed her, when she dreamed about the ten hovering toes and the wrinkled stretching-marks lashed into the naked victim's skin, she never knew that he'd returned.

What was conspicuous work to do by day for her was anything but for a man like Tennant.