Chapter Four : Fire-water Dreams

Edmund was running, running, his legs tangling with each other in unfamiliar ways. His body was running with sweat, blurring his vision and stinging his eyes, matting his fur. His breath panted over his lolling tongue, the taste of blood in his mouth where he had bitten it.

He was running through snow, through Turkish Delight, with chains on his paws. His exhaustion was complete, yet he could not stop running, even though his limbs were mired and his mind reeling.

A heavy crash of something on his shoulders, his right screaming at him. His vision smeared like wet oils or watercolors in the rain. He tumbled in an insane kaleidescope of color, or did the world tumble around him? His vision dimmed to gray and then flared again, the taste of blood and Turkish Delight in his mouth giving way to vinegar and bile. His shoulder squirmed as something tickled inside it, pulsing with the beat of his own laboring heart.

A wolf's face above him, something holding him down. Blocky jaws chomped and ravened amid a blocky muzzle, floating in a sea of heavy silver. Dislocated and distanced from their movements, the teeth puppeted a dreadful parody of memories.

“Lie still, Son of Adam, fortunate favorite of the Queen – or else not so fortunate.”

The wolf's face stretched and pulsed, smearing to deranged snow, and he was running again, his veins full of fire. The Queen, the Queen, what did the Queen want with him?

She was running alongside him now, a tall figure in a red dress with a blade-crimson crown sharp as razors dipped in blood. “You must run far faster if you want to get anywhere, King Edmund,” she said, short and sharp and accusing, “Really! You'll never achieve anything at this pace! Faster! Faster! Further up and further in!”

His paws were a blur before him, the slimy agony of his shoulder gnawing at him, his throat parched and scorched by the taste of acid rising from laboring guts. The Queen, the Queen, who was the Queen? Long live the Queen, far away, over the sea, in her palace in the city, far from him, staying where she did as bombs rained down.

His world exploded in gouts of powdered snow, reverse avalanches that shattered into hailstorms of broken glass. “Get away from that window!” howled a female voice, and then he was being dragged down stairs, glass clattering in his hand. The grip on his shoulder was molten iron, the face of the Queen icy and harsh and cold. “Off with his head! Off with his head!” The Queen's executioner raised his axe, the blade crawling like maggots, his brother's butcher-blue eyes glinting in his head.

The bite of the blade into his shoulder was rapid, battering him and pulsing with the beat of his heart. His heart spasmed and trip hammered. The Queen's wand stabbed into his chest, again and again. His veins wrapped writhing around it and were drawn out in a long tangle of bloody strands. Warmth dripped onto his chest, sticky and coagulating.

“My poor child, how cold you look,” said the Queen, her mantle wrapping around him. Warmth spread over him, hot warmth, making the red rise to his cheeks. He wanted to speak, to say it was too much, but his mouth was full of a tongue that was not his own and his teeth did not fit. He pawed weakly at his face, pulling soft, squishy matter from his jaw. It was quickly cooling, gritty and vile under his fingers. Granular like snow.

The sled was moving now, with a roaring swish that was quite wrong over the snow, the crack of the whip too rapid, the tip of the thong hitting him in the shoulder each time. There was no time here, the clocks were melting and dripping off the table, foaming into the snow into chalices and silver boxes tied with green silk ribbons. His mouth and nose were full of the flowery scent of celandines as his paws raced, the tin cans he'd tied to his tail clattering behind him. A girl there – chocolate eyes and butter-yellow hair, tasty and toothsome – asking him questions he did not want to answer, saying things about the Queen. The Queen. “Off with his head!” she snapped.

He jumped for the girl with the hair like a lion's mane and the golden-brown eyes. The house of cards clattered around him as he knocked her to the floor, and then they were up and marching around him, little weapons shouldered. The Queen's soldiers and his were fighting, his little tin armies clattering, Maddie leading them valiantly. The soldier turned to him, his equine half twitching, his human half gleaming with chips and scratches, his voice tinny.

“Orders, Sire?” asked Kyllaros. All around him, the cards and the tin soldiers took up the refrain. “Orders! Orders! Orders!”Order, Order! The gavel banged on his shoulder, too fast, a trip-hammer. He tried to shove the periwig out of his eyes, trying to see what he was supposed to pass judgment on. Edmund the Just. Just what? “Just not fast enough!” hissed the Red Queen, “Faster! Faster! Further up and further in!”

“Orders! Just do what you're told!” came the parade-ground bellow. Lucy's voice sang in his ear, maddening and shattering. “The Lantern Waste is falling down, falling down, falling down. Narnia is falling down, my fair lady! Build it up with cards and tin, cards and tin, cards and tin! Run faster or you'll never win, my fair lady!”

The howl of wolves outside of wherever inside was. The presence of them now with him. “Lessons learned do not a King made,” said one. “You're not as bad as Father,” said another. “Ding, dong! The Witch is dead!” sang the puppies. “I wish you had a heart,” said Maddie with Susan's voice. The lion looked at him.

But the Lion didn't ask for courage, or say anything to censure or condone Edmund. He reached forward with his tongue, and laved Edmund's face with it, sponging delirium and agony from him.

Edmund Pevensie writhed on the floor of the cave, his lips and chin smeared with vomit, his neck wound running with pus and crawling with maggots, and his eyes widely dilated. His nose and mouth bubbled with mucus and spew, his hands pawing feebly, hooked into arthritic claws. With a snarl, Lorren and Hatawatha shoved Carrack aside, his wife growling with genuine anger into his lowered face. Lorren hooked her claws into Edmund's lower jaw, hauling his chomping mouth open. She pushed her muzzle into his face, scooping vomit from his throat with her tongue and spitting it away. With a great heave, Edmund drew an agonized breath.

“What did you do?” howled Hatawatha in Carrack's face. The puppies were howling, excited by one of their first hunting trips and now distressed by the delirious human. Lorren licked her teeth, snarling as she recognized the taste.

“Fire-water,” she growled, “he gave him fire-water.” She bent her head to look into Edmund's spinning pupils, watching as he gasped and flailed at nothing, murmuring things she could not hear and certainly could not recognize.

Hatawatha was incensed. “You gave him what?” she howled. “You idiot! You've seen what it did to my father!” Carrack raised his head and hackles and snarled back at her, no longer cowering.

“Your father can't handle it, he's broken and practically an omega – you've said as much yourself!” Carrack gestured at the thrashing Edmund with his blunt nose. “It dulls the pain, and it is a sacred drink!”

“You know nothing about it!” howled the she-wolf, causing the pups to whine and whimper and slink to hide behind their father who was standing close to his wife, seeing if she needed any help in tending to the sick human. “It must be administered by the theurges if it is to be sacred, otherwise it's just one more poison for dogs to dull their senses with!”

“It causes visions!” Carrack snarled. Lorren snorted with derision, moving swiftly to her precious collection of dried herbs, collected roots and gathered berries.

“It causes hallucinations, Carrack! It's poisonous! You drop the sap into the river and the fish float up dead!” She carefully gathered a few leaves and strips of bark in her mouth and began to methodically chew them.

Carrack was no so easily dissuaded. “It'll make a wolf of him – no wolf of the Western Wild is allowed to run with the packs until he's wandered in the spirit realm,” he said stolidly, but he was backing down, his tail and hindquarters drooping. Hatawatha cuffed him, her amber beads rattling.

“You're a fool – you know nothing about it!” She battered him again, her claws gouging shallow scratches in his fur. He whimpered and lowered his head, protecting his nose with his paws – more a gesture of submission than genuine defense. “I married you and came out here to get away from that alpha-male rubbish! He's not a wolf, he's a Son of Adam. He's not like us!” Lorren was forcing the chewed medicine into Edmund's mouth, massaging his throat to make him swallow. She turned to Carrack as his spasms subsided.

“He's sick – that wound is infected,” she snapped. “And don't give me any rubbish about visions and ghost worlds – that stuff just makes you ill, and then a bunch of stupid, uncivilized Western Wilders get together and convince themselves they've had visions from the spirit world.” She ignored Hatawatha's remonstrations and protests. “You've all spent too much time howling at the moon and listening to tales not fit for suckling puppies – Aslan and Tash and the Great Wolf and all the rest.” She licked and nibbled at Edmund's neck, sucking out the pus and scraping the wound clean. “When are any of you going to get weaned?”

Not a one of them answered, and, even if they had, Edmund could not have heard them – for he had sunk into a deep slumber that looked – to the wolves at least – as if it were peaceful and dreamless.

But it was not – Edmund was standing on rough grass with a chill wind blowing across and through a few stunted trees and white-wooded bushes heavy with mourning-purple berries. In front of him, the mountains rose in great forested steps upwards, cold and clean and clear, joined by a few twinkling silver chains of tumbling cataracts. He thought he felt a presence behind him and span around, but there was nothing to see – save the reversal of what lay before him. He was in the mountains, with them rising before him and falling behind him. For a second, he looked beyond those mountains, out over a country he recognized and out to a star gleaming on the seashore. It looked almost close enough to reach out and grab, certainly close enough to reach in a few steps. But the presence behind him that he could not see and the determination in his own heart made him very deliberately turn his back on that and turn the face the rising mountains again.

Beyond them, behind them and a long way away, there were higher ranges that looked almost black, and then peaceful mountains that were snowy white, all heaped up together. Something in him longed to stride beyond the harsh green mountains and walk through those black peaks into the unknown whiteness beyond, but the presence behind him assured him that it was not yet time. He looked down at the scene in front of him.

There were stumps of trees arranged in a circle, stumps that had been shattered by blows or felled by lightning or even succumbed to disease. Each was carved with pictograms, ones which he recognized, and carved with claws – rudely and roughly into the bark as if by creatures that lacked the manual dexterity for greater precision. Before each stump a wolf sat – silent and immobile as if carved from stone. There was a stillness to the space, a stillness that did not invite intrusion.

He would have welcomed the presence telling him to move forward, or to turn back – but what he did not welcome was his own curiosity impelling him to walk forward. Or perhaps not curiosity, perhaps something better and greater than did in fact come from the presence that had always been behind him, even when he had rejected and neglected it.

He crossed the line of the circle the stumps marked, and suddenly the air was filled with howls and growls and snarls, wolves snapping and biting at each other, a whirling maelstrom of teeth and claws and fur. The noise rose like a cacophony, discordant howls gating against the others in a terrible echoing tumult. The wolves buffeted and battered him as they fought, knocking him to the ground unheeding.

A shadow fell over the sun, and it grew even colder. The wind began to pick up, slicing through his armor and cloak, a few flakes of snow beginning to gather and fall onto his eyelashes and the fur of the wolves. The presence behind him impelled him to action, and although he did not want to he struggled his way through the mass of fighting wolves to the center of the circle, where an almost-blue wolf sat next to a great carven stump, itself conspicuously naked and unclaimed.

It was definitely getting colder now, and the shadow hanging over the sun was resolving itself into a parade of weird spikes, the silhouette of a crown or castle. Edmund was struggling to get onto the empty stump, but no matter how hard he tried, he kept slipping and sliding off it. He could not even begin to clamber on there, and as he struggled the task took on an importance which seemed disproportionate. He knew that if he could just climb onto that throne he would be able to destroy the shadow and then everything would be fine.

Did he just call it a throne? He already had a throne.

And then he realized that his crown was not on his head here, and that his royal sword lay snapped under the roiling waves of Caldron Pool, and that here he was just one more wolf among hundreds.

I'm no wolf, he said to himself, but the presence behind him growled and the one in his heart growled back – but quite a different growl this. And then he realized that the only way he would get onto that throne would be if all the wolves helped him, and that the only way they would all survive would be if he was on there.

He didn't want it to be that way, because he could see of no way of managing it. He heard himself howling and crying, “We have to work together, together! As a pack, in Aslan's name! A pack!” The wolves did not seem to hear him, although it might have been that some of them fought the others in order to defend him. But that was not exactly what he had had in mind. He was frantic now, the edges of his world beginning to blur and darken, the very frame of his body flexing and changing as the vision became too much.

He did not know if he was standing on the throne when the multiple-spiked shadow of the Witch crashed down on him in the form of the great ravening wolf that had wounded him, sending spasms of pain shooting through his shoulder and throwing him into dreamless unconsciousness. His last memory was of a ringing crash as if ice or amber fell around him, the prickles of pain from frostbite or sharp needles piercing his flesh . . . or perhaps the sensations were of something destroyed rising around him, and the prickles merely the tingle of joyful anticipation?

A/n : Okay, future chapters won't be so weird! The (very slight) reference to Maddie the tin soldier is to the “character” of the same name in A. Amelia' Black's The Way Things Are.