One Night in Magadan
an excerpt

“So you’re in this bar,” this guy said to me, “and you’re hanging out with some of your buddies, and this merchant comes up to you with a business proposal. What do you do? You’d at least give it a listen, right?”

Oh my gods, I thought to myself. Why do the drunks always want to start babbling to the musician? I thought that’s what bartenders were for.

“My buddies and I are mercs,” the idiot went on, “so we’re always on the lookout for a little action, so we think ‘what the hell.’”

This was about mid-day, on the benches just outside a tavern on the middle part of Blazon Street. I couldn’t tell you which one. I didn’t have a gig lined up but I was a little broke, so I sat down with my lute, set out my tip jar, and started plucking. I made sure I was just on the edge of the tavern's property so I could get out of paying commission. A few people were listening at first, but just my luck this drunk mercenary decided to sit down next to me, tell me his life fucking story, and drive away any paying audience I might have had.

“I mean, all we were doing was waiting around, killing time until we could make some real money, so we said why not?”

Magadan had been overrun with out-of-work mercenaries for about a month, and this loser was a pretty sorry-looking example. He had an old breastplate, greaves, and those metal guards on his arms that I can’t ever remember what they’re called. He smelled like shit and beer, his right eye was swollen shut, and his boots were clearly two different sizes. By law his sword was bound into its sheath with a leather strap, and it looked like someone had made sure the knot was extra-tight. At first I assumed he was already dressed up for the night’s victory celebration, but from the smell I decided that was probably the only outfit this guy had at all.

“So he tells us about these monks who ripped him off.”

“Uh-hunh.” I nodded, feigning interest. Maybe that’s my problem – I don’t show enough contempt. Of course, snotty musicians don’t live very long – they either starve from lack of gigs or they get their asses kicked.

“Something about how they didn’t pay up what they owed for a shipment of robes or herbs or something. I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention. Anyway, they owed this guy a lot of money, and he needed some help collecting it. So he says, ‘I need some guys to raid their temple.’”

I hit a really bad note at that point in the idiot’s story. “He wanted you to go on a raid. In the Theotrium.” I was incredulous that this guy wasn’t decorating a gibbet.

“What’s that?” he asked. Maybe they did hang him, I thought, but it only killed his brain.

“Y’know, that big area downtown with the temples of all the gods? The heavily-defended temples that are usually packed with church-goers all day?”

“Oh, no,” he chuckled, blowing a little beer out his nose. “No, not there. This place was up in the country, about a day’s ride east of town.”

I nodded, and tried to get back into the bridge of “Merry Jill’s Jig.” I was trying to concentrate on a new trick I do with an arpeggio in the transition between two of the chords, but I’d got off track listening to this asshole.

“He says they probably didn’t have enough cash on hand to pay what they owed, but we could go in and take it out in whatever else they had. Y’know, all that gold shit they have in temples hanging around.”

“Uh hunh.” I couldn’t believe this, which may be why it stuck in my mind. What kind of moron would go raid a monastery, of all places, and then talk about it to some random minstrel he just met at lunch. He hadn’t even really met me, for gods’ sake! It’s not like I’d actually introduced myself or told him my name. He’d just sat down and started running his goddamn mouth.

“So we front him a little security money, and we take off for this place.”

I stopped playing entirely. “Wait. You gave the merchant money? First? Before you went on the raid?”

“Well, yeah.” He stared me in the eye with an expression just like a drunken scholar who once tried to explain Magadan’s trade relations to me after a whole bottle of port. “He had a fence lined up to pay for the goods we brought back, but he needed some cash on hand to bribe the right people and keep the whole thing hushed up.”

“Cash he needed… from you.”

“Yeah. Like I said, the monks hadn’t paid him off.”

“So you give this guy your money and ride out of town.” I started paying a little more attention. I knew where this story was going, but I wanted to find out exactly how stupid this guy was.

“Right. We get out there around dusk and stake the place out. The place actually looked like a little fort. Can you believe it? A monastery built like a fort. We could see right away why the guy had hired us. It was well-built, though, so we knew these monks had to be swimming in loot.”

“What kind of temple was this exactly?”

“I don’t know. I can’t keep track of all these gods and goddesses.”

“What?” I was having a hard time believing he wasn’t putting me on. “They’re the fucking gods. What do you mean you have a hard time ‘keeping track of them’?”

“Hey kid, we only need one god where I come from,” he said, making this weird little sign in the air over his forehead. So that was it – he was a Judan, probably from Adelphia. I let it go – monotheists confuse me more than atheists, and the last thing I wanted to do was start a theological debate with a mercenary who’d probably taken a few too many blows to the head.

“So how’d you break in?” I asked, getting him back on track. I gave up trying to play anything, and I was just hoping to get his story over with so I could get back to work.

“Well, there’s always the trick where you pretend to be visiting monks, but we forgot to bring any robes along, see, so we went with the old ‘We’ve got a sick man here, can you please help us’ routine. I was the sick man. We made this little stretcher out of a couple of cloaks and they put me on it. They even put mud all over my face and arms and legs, see.”

“Because sick people have mud on them,” I added matter-of-factly. I don’t think he even heard me.

“The monks open the doors, and the guys rush ‘em. I clobber the guy at the door and stay back to guard the entrance.”

“Right...”

“Well we get inside, and in the main hallway, where you’d think they’d have a lot of their pretty religious shit on display? They’ve got nothin’.”

“Nothing.” That made sense. A lot of the Orders forego worldly wealth. I doubt an idiot mercenary from Adelphia would know that, though: I hear the Patriarch of Juda is the richest man in their country.

“Nothin’,” he goes on. “Just these two big statues and the end of the hall, and a bunch of little fire… bowl… things…”

“Braziers,” I prod him.

“Yeah, but nothing to steal. Nothing at all.”

“The two statues. Was it Menel and Calesta?”

“Who?”

“Guy with a sword, chick with a spear?”

“Hey, yeah! That was them!”

“God of valor, goddess of strength?”

“Uhh… Well, I guess.”

“The War Gods?”

“Hunh. That’s… That’s funny.”

“What is?”

“Well, we go in there to fight a bunch of monks, and all of a sudden a whole a whole platoon of soldiers comes out of nowhere and rushes us! I mean, what the hell?”

I was aching to do the math for him: war gods plus temple built like a fort plus bungling mercenary attack equals righteous ass-kicking, but now the guy was just ranting at empty space.

“You just try to help a guy out, make a little money, go on a harmless raid on a bunch of no-good pagans, and what to you get for it?”

“Beat up and run off?” It was no good. I could have probably snuck away and not have him notice, except I’d have had to crawl over him to do it.

“I tell ya, I busted out of there like nobody’s business. When my buddies get back, we’re going to go find that merchant and tell him next time he sends someone on a mission, he needs to give them a little more intelligence!”

“Oh, I think he got your intelligence about right,” I muttered. “How much money did you give him exactly?”

“Well, he had to bribe a lot of people…”

“Uh huh.”

“I tell ya, you can’t trust anyone in this stinkin’ town.”

That was it. I couldn’t take it any more. Drunken rambling was one thing, but I wasn’t going to listen to anyone, especially someone as shit-headed as this numbskull, talk bad about my city. It would be bad for my business, and I’d have to move on at least three blocks before I started my next show, but there was one sure thing I could do to make this asshole go away.

I sang.

It worked. (It helped that I pulled the A and C chords way the hell out of tune before I started.) The drunk listened for a minute, looked into his beer as if it had suddenly turned sour, grunted something I couldn’t hear over my own warbling, and stumbled away. Everyone else within earshot had already left.

And that, my friends, is my only memory of my last day in Magadan. I couldn’t tell you when I woke up, or whether I was hung over. I couldn’t tell you what I had for breakfast. I couldn’t tell you if it was sunny or cloudy. I’d like to remember it as one of those days where the wind comes in from the north and showers the city with the smell of cherry blossoms. It’s just as likely that it was one of those days where the tide hit just right to back the river into the sewers and drown us all in the smell of brine. Truth is, I don't remember. One stupid conversation with a drunk mercenary is all I have to offer for the last day in the city of my birth.

My name is Aust. I play the lute, the pipes, or the drums, for whatever you will, wherever you will. I tell tales and I write poetry. I do not sing. This is the story of my last night in Magadan. This is the story of the end of my world.