Myth Makers
Beneath his cloak was a body weary and secluded. A chest bearing marks of old skirmishes in distinct pattern and a musculature that had been forged within heavy steel armor and ornamental weaponry of every caliber heaved on his back, in his hands. He walked without it. In his mind virtually naked, bereft of the second skin he could scarcely remember the last time he went without. How long had it been? Years, had to be. Maybe since he was a boy; the last time he remembered being a child, before he was abducted by heavenly forces and transfigured into the paragon of bravery he was now. But today he was not that man, no. Today he was no one. It was raining. There were people lining the streets. Some standing, some sitting on downed wheelbarrows. Some with drink, some munching inside their beards on soggy soda bread. This is what people do? He could feel their lethargy, their oppression. Even the clouds turned downtrodden away from them. There was a light up ahead and an open door and a flocking of them toward it.
Inside they were congregated in round tables. It was loud, raucously so. Filled with shouts of inebriation and exaggerated temperaments beside. He searched for a place to sit, the hood of his cloak still shadowing his visage and dark mane of hair. Not that there was much point to it. Very few here would be able to identify him by face alone, certainly not while their perception was hazed and influenced. But it was a comfort to him so he left it on as he squeezed himself through ravines of commonfolk to a table and chair that had not yet been poached by a rabid opportunist. He sat, he waited. A strange tranquility amid the cacophony of slurred speech. His marksmen's eyes and honed eardrums picking apart individual links from the membranous chain of bodies. The stink of unwashed sweat and beer and hot breath. A full-bellied man near the front got a little too generous with another's woman and fists were thrown. It was ugly, one-sided, unfair. He could've set them straight without breaking composure, he knew. Could take this whole place on if it came to that. Call fire into his hands and invoke the power suffused in him that he barely understood, that even then he could sense quavering through his bloodstream like a threaded filament. But he was not here for that. He was tired of it. For this night he was there to sit, to watch, and to listen.
What they had spoken of first were their own tall tales. Stories about the fish they had caught and the game they had hauled back from the wilderness that grew in their size and jeopardy every time they were recounted. Gradually they moved from their own exploits to larger communal yarns spun so often and so lionized that they themselves had taken on a quality of personhood. Each a separate myth told to fit its own hero, each having to his own life only a shade of adjacency. The ones that he could say had actually happened were bent and inflated to something bordering upon parody or propaganda. It was flattery, or so he thought it should be. But he felt no pride in it. Not for this false idolatry, these epithets of grandeur. The Bright Slayer. The Sword of the Sun. Was there no escape from the legend that followed him, from himself? He sunk in his chair and the peace he'd harbored inside the cloak turned to stonewalled forfeit. But there was something else that came into the chorus of orators. Laughter. Jokes freely made at the expense of the Great Champion. Chinks in his sacrosanct breastplate proving he was not greater than irony, not so high above their peasantry that he could not be pulled down as some human facsimile among them. He began to laugh in spite of himself. To spite himself, as it were. And there was a kinship he felt that he'd never known before. The chance finally to view his own iconography and mock its pretense, its absurdity from their level. Their level. Without thinking he rose from his chair and approached the men by the bar. He reached out his arm and began to shout aloud for them, but he stopped. The enunciation of his beckon trembling on his tongue and silenced. To reach out would be to give himself up. The end of their fun, and of his. He couldn't do that. Wasn't the hero's way. So he departed the tavern instead. Back into the night's rain, anonymous and satisfied, toward the high castle from where he'd come down.
Inside they were congregated in round tables. It was loud, raucously so. Filled with shouts of inebriation and exaggerated temperaments beside. He searched for a place to sit, the hood of his cloak still shadowing his visage and dark mane of hair. Not that there was much point to it. Very few here would be able to identify him by face alone, certainly not while their perception was hazed and influenced. But it was a comfort to him so he left it on as he squeezed himself through ravines of commonfolk to a table and chair that had not yet been poached by a rabid opportunist. He sat, he waited. A strange tranquility amid the cacophony of slurred speech. His marksmen's eyes and honed eardrums picking apart individual links from the membranous chain of bodies. The stink of unwashed sweat and beer and hot breath. A full-bellied man near the front got a little too generous with another's woman and fists were thrown. It was ugly, one-sided, unfair. He could've set them straight without breaking composure, he knew. Could take this whole place on if it came to that. Call fire into his hands and invoke the power suffused in him that he barely understood, that even then he could sense quavering through his bloodstream like a threaded filament. But he was not here for that. He was tired of it. For this night he was there to sit, to watch, and to listen.
What they had spoken of first were their own tall tales. Stories about the fish they had caught and the game they had hauled back from the wilderness that grew in their size and jeopardy every time they were recounted. Gradually they moved from their own exploits to larger communal yarns spun so often and so lionized that they themselves had taken on a quality of personhood. Each a separate myth told to fit its own hero, each having to his own life only a shade of adjacency. The ones that he could say had actually happened were bent and inflated to something bordering upon parody or propaganda. It was flattery, or so he thought it should be. But he felt no pride in it. Not for this false idolatry, these epithets of grandeur. The Bright Slayer. The Sword of the Sun. Was there no escape from the legend that followed him, from himself? He sunk in his chair and the peace he'd harbored inside the cloak turned to stonewalled forfeit. But there was something else that came into the chorus of orators. Laughter. Jokes freely made at the expense of the Great Champion. Chinks in his sacrosanct breastplate proving he was not greater than irony, not so high above their peasantry that he could not be pulled down as some human facsimile among them. He began to laugh in spite of himself. To spite himself, as it were. And there was a kinship he felt that he'd never known before. The chance finally to view his own iconography and mock its pretense, its absurdity from their level. Their level. Without thinking he rose from his chair and approached the men by the bar. He reached out his arm and began to shout aloud for them, but he stopped. The enunciation of his beckon trembling on his tongue and silenced. To reach out would be to give himself up. The end of their fun, and of his. He couldn't do that. Wasn't the hero's way. So he departed the tavern instead. Back into the night's rain, anonymous and satisfied, toward the high castle from where he'd come down.
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