The Awakening in Pantanoburg
It had already been a week since he had woken up in the fortress of Pantanoburg, as the place seemed to be called. His name was Aethel Kaltessiera, apparently the son of a nobleman from a small frontier barony, or at least, that was what he had managed to understand from what people said, not so much to him, but about him.
Albert leaned his hand against the wall so as not to lose his balance, afraid of falling if he did not hold on to something. He looked through the small vertical slit in the hard stone of his room, at the highest point of the squat fortress. Below, two floors down, he could see people walking through the muddy streets. Winter rain had begun, but it was not yet cold enough to snow, which made Pantanoburg one of the most miserable places he could imagine. Dirty, muddy and smelling of waste, that frontier outpost was a hell on earth compared to any place Albert had lived in his past life. And mind you, in this life he was the son of someone important, not merely a wheelchair-bound physics teacher.
A knock sounded at the door, which immediately opened without him having authorized entry. A wrinkled, grey-haired man came in holding a fired-clay lamp burning fish oil. Albert noticed that the object gave off an unpleasant odor. He suspected the smell did not come only from the oil, but from other fuels previously burned in the same vessel.
The man was middle-aged, about fifty-one years old, as he had told him while instructing him. His name was Bernadorio. Albert had managed to learn a good part of the numerals that week, and the man had been made responsible both for his health and for teaching him to speak and study.
And he was a decent teacher.
"Hello, young master. How are you feeling today?"
Albert recognized the phrase that Bernadorio repeated daily and understood its meaning, even though the words still sounded foreign and strange to him.
He watched the healer place the lamp on the crude wooden table used for their studies. The old man let out a sigh, his hand at his side. He walked hunched over, and Albert noticed that it was, most likely, an old injury that had healed badly.
"Well, Professor Bernadorio. My head does not hurt at all. I feel an anticipatory joy to study with you today," recited Albert, choosing his words with care, calling to mind the structure of the language and the vocabulary he had learned up to that point.
"Eager. You are eager to study. We do not use words that way, remember? They join together to form concepts..."
Bernadorio pulled out one of the chairs, pointing for Albert, or rather Aethel, to sit in the other.
Albert knew that. He had already grasped the logic of that language, which he had discovered was called Common Vulteric. In truth, he was fairly certain that the term Bernadorio used was closer to "Poor Vulteric," or "Vulteric of the poor," in the sense of being the tongue of the common man, but he preferred to correct it mentally to "common," so as not to risk offending anyone.
Even so, he had no difficulty with the language. In reality, he found it genuinely fascinating. It was a structural mixture that seemed like a latinised German. This was fortunate, since German had been his mother tongue in his previous life, though he had mastered several others, including the Latin variants. Vulteric possessed the freedom of word order typical of the Latin languages, but with the agglutination of meaning characteristic of the Germanic ones. For him, understanding that strange tongue was a pleasure that distracted him from his inexplicable situation.
For someone who had spent his previous life unable to move his body from the neck down, using his brain was one of the few leisure options available. He looked at his own hands and feet, which now moved, albeit clumsily. He left the window slit and went to sit beside the professor, walking with difficulty and supporting himself on the wall and the table, under Bernadorio's watchful gaze.
He pulled the heavy chair out carefully, applying force with his feet in a conscious and slow manner so as not to fall backward. When he managed to sit down, a smile escaped from the corner of his mouth. Bernadorio observed everything attentively, mentally noting the young master's progress with genuine concern.
The healer remembered the moment Beleran had burst into the fortress shouting, carrying Aethel soaking wet and convulsing. The boy's mother, who had been sewing near the hearth, had fainted at the sight of her son in that state. Bernadorio had done what he could.
By luck, the child had expelled the water from his lungs and begun breathing again. But upon waking, the young master did not know his own name, had lost the ability to speak, and moved his body in a bizarre fashion, like a newborn foal. Baron Ferrante, Aethel's father, had been devastated. Bernadorio had feared the boy would suffer permanent damage from lack of oxygen to the brain and would never become a whole man.
And yet, life had surprised him. The young master now seemed more lucid than ever. His mind appeared sharper even than the old man's own. Within days, he already understood nearly everything, and his only barrier was pronunciation or words not yet memorized.
"You cannot think through your every movement, young master. You must let them happen naturally. Let the body's memory work for you. It is better to fall and learn with the body than to think through everything, not fall, but not learn either. Stop thinking and let your body feel."
Having said that, the old man, his old injury notwithstanding, planted his feet against Aethel's chair and shoved it out from under him.
Albert, focused on how to close his fingers around the parchment, felt his vision spin. He fell with a dull thud onto the green-furred rug. To Bernadorio's frustration, the young master showed no defensive reaction whatsoever. He fell rigid, maintaining the seated position, now parallel to the floor.
Albert cursed under his breath as his shoulder absorbed the fall on the soft rug, something made of a material he had no equivalent for on Earth, green-furred and large enough to have come from something bigger than a bear. After registering what had happened, he relaxed his body and prepared to climb back onto the chair. He knew the healer was right, but after seven decades of immobility on Earth, he simply had no reflexes. Even so, he would keep trying. Secretly, he had already been practicing, walking in circles around the rug while doing complex calculations in his head to distract his mind and force his body to move on instinct. Soon, he hoped, walking would feel natural, like riding a bicycle, which was also something he intended to learn in this new life.
"Bernadorio!"
An irritated woman's voice echoed through the half-open wooden door, which immediately flew open with a bang.
A woman entered in a hurry, her brow furrowed in clear disapproval. She rushed toward Aethel who, as he tried to get up, was enveloped in a protective embrace. She felt his head for injuries and examined the shoulder that had taken the impact of the fall, an impact honestly near nonexistent, given that the boy was light and the rug extremely soft.
"Good morning, Milady. I see that my request for you to refrain from attending your son's sessions has not been honored," said Bernadorio, unperturbed by the presence of the baron's wife. Rather than facing her, he was organizing the parchments on the table to begin the lesson.
"Well, I remember perfectly well that it is I who decides where I go and remain in my own house, healer..." the noblewoman retorted, squeezing Aethel's cheeks affectionately.
Albert's heart grew heavy the instant he saw her again. And he knew, with a certainty that hurt, that this woman was his mother. She had been a constant presence that week, an unhappy one for him, because he had already learned in practice that it did not matter how much he mulled the matter over during the nights. When the emotions of the drowned boy came, his degree in psychology and all his mental fortitude were worth nothing.
Without any difficulty, she lifted the heavy crude wooden chair and guided her son to sit down again.
"Without a doubt, Milady. But your excessive worry may hinder his recovery. I have in mind only the mission the baron entrusted me with. My duty is to ensure that the young master recovers in the best way and as quickly as possible, and your presence is not helping..." declared Bernadorio firmly, but without harshness, carefully even. His eyes swept over Aethel as though expecting something to happen.
He knew how much Ulfiana had suffered. That woman, a one-circle knight, powerful in body and mind forged in battle, now wore deep, heavy shadows under her eyes. Her skin, once a healthy white, looked pale and sickly.
"And how is his progress coming along?" Ulfiana asked, probably for the hundredth time that week. Her voice trembled slightly, seeking a confirmation that would settle her fears, which Bernadorio promptly provided.
"Very well, Milady. Very well indeed. I believe the young master will have no lasting damage whatsoever. He seems even more lucid and sharp-minded. Perhaps the fright has steered him away from running through the mud with the peasants and awakened his interest in matters of the mind. He himself asked me for the barony's account book to read."
Bernadorio gave an encouraging pat on Aethel's shoulder, who murmured something unintelligible. With his other hand, the healer opened the heavy ledger for the year in front of the child, under the mother's attentive and worried gaze. The tome contained all the expenditures and income of the domain, duly recorded by Bernadorio, who had taken on that function by virtue of the scarcity of literate and capable people in that place they called the end of the world, Pantanoburg.
But Aethel, or Albert, was mute as feelings of longing and dread began to flood him. He stared at the account book so as not to have to meet the worried eyes of the woman behind him. The sensation was vivid, as though it had been branded into his very soul. With his logical mind, he understood that this was likely because the trauma had been so profound for the child who had drowned that, upon returning to the body, little Aethel's brain had kept it as a scar.
He tried to focus on the numbers, but the image of Ulfiana embracing him amid the darkness and cold of the Kaltflut, and the longing he had felt in that moment when he knew he was going to die and would never see his mother again, made him feel the water around him once more. The confusion of not knowing which way was up or down, the sensation of forces holding him and pushing him from side to side beneath the freezing current... He felt his throat close and his lungs go icy again.
He tried with all his strength to focus on the figures, which now scrambled as his vision went blurry. Water ran from his eyes and sobs of terror and grief escaped him involuntarily. He felt an immense longing, an absurd longing for the woman who was right there behind him, alive. And he was alive. He would only need to turn around and embrace her tightly. The pain of never seeing again someone he could touch right now was such that the tears finally ran freely, and the sobs mingled with the mucus.
Ulfiana embraced her son from behind the chair. The boy sobbed and trembled uncontrollably. Bernadorio looked away from the scene, his heart heavy at the sight of the real terror in Aethel's eyes. He focused on the table in front of him, pulling the account tome toward him with his right arm, removing it from before the boy so that the tears would not destroy his meticulous work.
"My boy, my boy... My love, my Aethel, please, my boy... Everything is all right..."
Ulfiana embraced him and spoke the phrases like a chant, her affectionate voice soft in her son's ear, trying to make the terror pass.
She felt terrible too. Aethel was surprisingly well most of the time, but whenever he saw her, he cried and fell into a state of shock. She missed her little boy terribly. She had even begun to think that perhaps it would be better not to see him, to spare him, but her mother's heart tightened at the thought. She did not know how long it would take to pass, or whether he would never want to see her again. She held on to the hope that if she persisted and made him face the suffering to its limit, he would finally improve and go back to being what he had been before. The smiling child who jumped around her as she sewed in the hall, hugging her legs and pressing loving little kisses and the warmth of his rosy cheeks against her.
Her heart felt as though it had been tied to Vulticume itself, the highest mountain in the world, and cast into the cursed Kaltflut, which had done her son such harm. Seeing that it was no use, that it would not stop and that she was being nothing but selfish in making her gift of life suffer, she let go of the boy, in tears. Perhaps for the twentieth time that week, Ulfiana kissed Aethel's hair and left the room. Now it was she who was sobbing through the cold stone corridors of the fortress of Pantanoburg.
And as Ulfiana's sobs grew more distant and time passed slowly, Aethel's panic diminished. His breathing returned to its rhythm, his rational mind reasserting itself over that state of deep emotion imposed by the boy who had drowned. Albert was thinking clearly again. The sensation was still terrible, but it subsided to manageable levels. He recalled the studies he had done in his past life with survivors of the Second World War, people with marks so deep they seemed incurable. At times, they were indeed incurable, but some people improved. He believed that, despite how terrible it was, little Aethel's experience could be healed, or rather, his experience, in this case. Perhaps stopping the dissociation between body and mind would be a good place to start. Healing not Albert, an old man who died in an asylum bed, but Aethel, the child who drowned.
In part, he was failing to do that because he felt like a usurper. He did not understand why God would give an old man like him, who had lived everything there was to live despite his disability, a second chance, rather than simply giving that chance to Aethel, the rightful owner of the body he now inhabited. He, who had always wanted children and never could have them, felt revulsion at the idea of stealing a child's life, even though, deep down, he knew he had stolen nothing. That his situation was so inexplicable it lay beyond guilt and the will of men.
When he looked at Ulfiana and Ferrante, he felt a heavy guilt, because who was here was not their son. Their son had drowned in a muddy river. But at the same time, it was their son. Every time he looked at Ulfiana, before falling into mental chaos, he felt a deep maternal love that mingled with his own feelings for his mother as Albert, the woman who had cared for him his entire life despite having been abandoned by her husband, the father Albert had never known.
And Ferrante, he could feel it. Aethel harbored a deep respect and love for his father, probably what Albert himself had wished to be for the children he never had. If he had inherited Aethel's emotions, what was he to do? Ignore them completely and begin a life without being an impostor? Part of him felt that the least he could do was give the parents the happiness of seeing their son well, honoring the legacy of the flesh he now inhabited.
Yet the other part was his selfish side. He knew that Albert's ego would not let him go so easily. He had been, until he died of old age, Albert: the teacher, the bodily incapable who tamed the mind, and that too was a kind of achievement. The people he had loved could not simply disappear. The woman who had loved him even as he sat motionless in a chair his entire life, spending it giving him love and companionship, dying far too soon to accompany him in the victories they had dreamed of together... That memory of his beloved wife, the only woman in his entire life, and the identity of who he had been, could not be thrown away as though they had never existed. If he gave up on himself, he would be giving up on her, and that he could not do.
"Boy... boy... Aethel."
His name being called brought him back to the reality around him, as though he were being pulled from a deep reverie. He blinked his red, swollen eyes and saw Bernadorio calling to him with a gentleness that was uncommon for the old man.
Aethel, moving mechanically and already breathing regularly and calmly, wiped the table with the sleeves of his shirt. The gesture earned him a disapproving look from Bernadorio, but it did the job of leaving the surface clean before him. He then awkwardly pulled the heavy tome toward him and opened it.
He was pleasantly surprised by the healer's organization. The entries were clear and followed an efficient logic. He read each page carefully, learning from the master, asking the meaning of words he still did not know and clearing up doubts methodically. He asked for explanations about the nature of the expenditures recorded in the ledger and received lessons on the reason behind each expense and, more importantly, the figures. It was, in fact, an effective way of getting to know this world, besides practicing writing and the local numerals.
As the hours passed, the two of them finally brought the study session to a close. Midday had arrived and Bernadorio had other tasks to fulfill. Although Ferrante ensured that the healer-manager had as much time as possible for his son's recovery, the reality of the barony was that there were no spare hands, much less ones of Bernadorio's caliber, and he was needed in the daily affairs.
"And you must eat well. I will leave the book here. I trust you to take care of it."
The old man stood up and walked hunched to the door. He looked at Aethel with the sternness of an exacting teacher, while the boy also made his clumsy way toward the bed.
"That way you can study it further, since it interests you so much. Just do not eat anything with the volume nearby, one thing at a time," Bernadorio added as he left the room.
His place was immediately taken by a maidservant, who entered carrying a wooden tray with a deep silver plate from which steamed what appeared to be a stew.
"Young master, I brought your lunch..."
The maid bit her lip, looking around. She was young, slender, with brown hair and flushed cheeks. She made sure there was no one nearby in the corridor before continuing.
"Do you need help eating, young master? I can help," she whispered.
Camélia was her name. She had been brought to serve in the fortress, a considerably better position than the vast majority available in Pantanoburg, especially for a woman. She considered herself lucky to have been chosen by the mistress for that work.
Lord Ferrante's grumpy healer had categorically warned her that no one was to help the young master with his cutlery. But she could not bring herself to obey. She had seen Aethel trying to reach his food in those days, failing miserably in the process, and she could find no room in her heart to deny him help. Besides, she was sure he was improving and would soon be eating normally again. There was no need to put him through that humiliation, he was a child after all.
Aethel gave a sincere smile to the young woman before him, who was nearly eighteen, considerably older than he.
"Thank you, Camélia. I will eat on my own. I have been getting rather good at it lately. You can leave the stew on the table, please, just be careful with the books," he replied with kindness.
The maid nodded. She honestly thought the whole commotion had been an exaggeration. There were people in the town saying that the household heir would be simple-minded for the rest of his life, but she had watched him go from mute and confused to someone who spoke, and spoke better than she and all those bumpkins from the village, if she was being honest. No one believed her when she told them. Some even asked whether Lord Ferrante was paying her to lie about the boy's condition. Master Ferrante had indeed paid the staff a little extra to say exactly that, but the truth was that it would not even have been necessary. The young master really was better, merely slightly... uncoordinated.
"If you need anything else, you can call, young master. Just ring the bell until someone comes," Camélia reminded him, pointing to the object beside the bed and gesturing with her hand, mimicking the motion.
Made of what appeared to be brass, the instrument served its purpose well enough, but Aethel had not used it a single time, which perhaps explained why the girl tried to teach him through mime every time she brought his food. Deciding it would be better to dispel the notion that he no longer understood how things worked, Aethel picked up the object and rang it in front of Camélia. The sharp sound echoed through the room, and he promptly returned it to the bedside table, somewhat abruptly.
She felt her eyes go slightly misty watching Aethel ring the bell. She had "taught" the young master to use the bell again. Little Aethel really would be all right, she was sure of it, even if he was speaking in a more formal and correct manner than expected of an eleven-year-old child. Satisfied, she gave a polite curtsy and left the room.
Aethel, meanwhile, made his way back to the table, sitting down before the stew and beginning to eat it in spoonfuls that filled him with satisfaction. Not merely for the act of eating itself, but because being capable of using his own arms and hands to hold that spoon and feed himself without needing anyone's help, doing it when he wished and by his own will alone, made him genuinely happy.
The food that week in Pantanoburg had taught him that he should have given more value to the spices available on Earth in the time he had spent there. The meal was not bad, it was rustic, in truth. The meat was of unknown origin, though he suspected it was game, and from a creature he had not yet come across in his previous life. Most likely something belonging to a monster or marsh animal that existed only in this world. Bernadorio had told him details that were hard to believe, sounding like a medieval man describing an elephant as though it were a dragon. He had his suspicions that that was not quite what was going on, but the green-furred rug he trod on every day lent plausibility to the healer's tales.
Even so, they were serving him tubers and fresh vegetables every day, which he had come to understand that week was something truly luxurious, not necessarily consumed by the lord himself on a daily basis. In the first few days, he had already had a vague sense that the barony's financial situation could not be among the finest, and seeing the account book had confirmed it. Mainly after the detailed explanations in the lessons just now, he confirmed that his calculations were correct: they were paying, per sack of grain, more than fifteen times the normal value.
That was, for him, still a mystery. What he could infer was that the barony, in that wretched swamp, certainly could not sustain the local population and must be very dependent on imports and supplies, a true frontier economy. But even so, that alone did not explain the absurd prices, unless the neighboring territories were engaged in some kind of sabotage against his father.
He still lacked information about the politics of this place. Honestly, he was not sure whether, as an eleven-year-old Aethel, he should get too involved, appear too interested, or show that he knew too much. After all, he was not yet certain that the chance of ending up on a pyre, being exorcised of demons, was zero. He already knew that his parents loved him, of course, and his tutor was clearly an enlightened man, which had put him at ease to learn from him. But even so, he remained somewhat reticent around other people, since at times love and enlightenment meant nothing in the face of a sufficiently deep-rooted idea. For now, he would be careful.
Finishing the stew with relish, he felt the cool air coming through the vertical slit in the stone across from the writing desk, identical to the opening through which he had looked earlier, before the old man had come in for the day's lessons. The air was cold and clean, as though it came straight from the untouched forests and wild mountains in the distance. But shortly after, the smell of a medieval city came with it, and he silently cursed the window.
They were narrow windows, little more than slits in the wall, closed by a simple wooden shutter, now open, laying bare the city below. If that could even be called a city. To him, it was one of the most miserable places he had ever seen, worse than the slums where he had lived with his mother in childhood, far worse.
He closed the shutter to spare himself the smell and, with pleasure, stretched his entire body like a cat, feeling the young musculature contract in an agreeable way, if still somewhat disordered.
Perhaps, he chewed the idea carefully, the least I can do is make this place less miserable to live in.