Gregor The Cripple

None came.

Mildred woke before the sun rose, so they set out with far too little sleep between them. She kept looking at Gregor, and he didn’t know why.

They embarked, trotting slowly north up a steep grade which eventually levelled to head down again less steeply. Instead of continuing down north, they followed the road as it turned to head west along the top of the ridge.

“Is it bad to kill people?” Mildred quietly asked, mostly to herself, half-sure and tentative. She knew instantly that her question lacked nuance, and that circumstance and intention mattered heavily in this matter. Perhaps not to Gregor, but certainly in general. She felt embarrassed and foolish for having asked, and more than a little sheltered for having such concerns in the first place. And, given her company, she wasn’t expecting a particularly nuanced answer.

Firstly, she considered, Gregor was piercingly intelligent, and secondly, he was a seasoned savage.

To need to confront death and its creation with a virgin mind was a privilege of the sheltered few. Thus, to ask someone like him such a question must paint her as quite the child, but she needed to talk about it.

There is a certain catharsis that can only come from uncomfortable conversation, and explaining your position to others was often the best way to come to understand it for yourself. Hopefully.

“Am I bad for doing it?”

“Do you think killing is bad?” Came the unexpected response.

“Well…” She began, halting as she realised that she didn’t quite know what to say.

Most people simply took the position that ‘yes, killing is bad’ without ever really developing a concrete reason as to why that is the case. They never really thought about it, because they knew that they were obviously correct and it would be insane and monstrous to think otherwise.

She was the same, being a mostly normal person (in her opinion) who had never had reason to develop an unreasonable sense of self, like Gregor did during his apprenticeship to Kaius.

In her mind, that there was no rational person who would call killing good, and for her, for most of her life, it had been very firmly the exact opposite of good. Murder was clearly evil, and she was very comfortable holding that opinion.

But now that she had left her sheltered life and weathered the abuse of others with evil intentions, she could see the situational reasonableness of killing. And for the first time, she felt the value of the fuzzy distinction between killing and murder. The world now made much less sense, and her own mind was an uncomfortable place.

Still though, she could not see killing as a good thing.

“…I don’t know. It should be bad, I think.”

They encountered then a switchback zigzagging up a very steep hill which might have been mistaken for some diminutive variety of mountain if it were removed from the context of the much larger masses of rock blotting the horizon around it.

“Then it is bad. Bad is an individual thing, uniquely belonging to the mind that assigns it. If you decided that it was good, then it would be good.” The tip of his hat bobbed slightly with the steps of his horse, and the rat atop the brim slept peacefully with the motion.

At that moment, Gregor didn’t look mad or savage, and he sounded almost reasonable.

The eminence they had come upon rose up close enough to vertical that it was more like a cliff than a hill, and the switchback was like a case of shelves that leaned against it.

“Most people don’t think like that.”

He shrugged. “Most people are stupid.”

Mildred couldn’t decide if the wizard’s perspective was entirely devoid of nuance, or was so dense with meaning as to merely appear blunt... Well, probably not.

Gregor’s position was paradoxical in the way that it insisted in the objective nature of subjective morality, and Mildred felt that she didn’t really understand what he meant.

He was also an insane man. That was important to consider.

They started up the switchback, which, though less steep than their previous ascent, forced them to spend far more time treading far more ground, only to cover what was really a very small distance.

Back and forth they went, zigging and zagging higher and higher. As they made their way skyward, Mildred was tortured by her own mind’s ability to recall things it had previously experienced. This power, called ‘memory’, was the source of the great bulk of mankind’s torments, and it told her that Gregor’s words made a crooked sort of sense, which was a very cruel thing for a mind to do.

She tried to put the problem out of notice, but there was very little to replace it.

Going forward, would all her acts and intentions and wants and opinions be coloured by the fact that she had killed someone?

Her unthinking actions had served as the transformative process that turned a ‘him’ into an ‘it’. Would she forevermore exist as an agent of that change? She had done it reflexively – would she need to keep that in constant consideration? Could she trust herself not to do it again?

And why did it bother her so much? Plenty of people had killed before, and there were plenty of good reasons to do it – there were easy cases to be made for the defence of the self and the defence of others, and she could even apply them to her own situation.

Mildred knew this, but she couldn’t stop fretting. It made her feel silly and naive, and that made everything worse. Were these concerns born from the selfish desire to feel moral?

She couldn’t help but feel that they were, and she hated it.

Mildred’s head was a mess.

“Gregor. Distract me.” She commanded, shifting the burden of her distress to his reliable shoulders. He hadn’t failed her yet, and she really hoped that he wouldn’t start soon. Thus began another lecture on the wonders of the future.

***

A rumble rippled through the hills, like waves in a bay. It was the kind of deep sonorous sound that carried far, particularly here, with all the deep valleys and high walls of stone for it to bounce between.

The pair had passed over and around the many great ripples of earth that made the knees of a mountain, and presently they were in a shallow valley that probably once held a small river. There was a tunnel here, cut into a deep recess in the face of a cliff, and stretching out of this tunnel were twin strips of metal that went off to disappear behind rolls of tree-crusted earth in the distance.

These were train tracks, and the rumble was fast-approaching.

Mildred was supremely puzzled at the discovery, then very giddy as she made the connection, almost forgetting her troubles.

She absently abandoned her horse to Gregor, then stalked toward the tracks in a way that somehow straddled the line of commonality between feline and avian predators. If the tracks were alive, their primordial self-pissing reflexes would have triggered in an instinctual attempt to ward off this predation.

However, even in the case of that impossible eventuality, Mildred would likely not have been deterred.

She crouched beside the tracks. They were beaten old things, sitting on a flat bed of gravel and secured to ratty planks with spikes that were close to death by rust, with the tops of the tracks polished to a dull shine. She touched them and felt a faint vibration, then, pressing her ear to one, her head rattled with the hundredfold deep thrum that echoed through the mountains.

Observing from behind with distinctly male interest, Gregor tried to work out just why he found Mildred’s particular qualities so fascinating.

She was odd, though certainly not in the ways that he was odd. Mildred was toned and tall, long of neck and short of hair. She was physically abnormal; unconventionally beautiful. Generally, women were not like Mildred, and he suspected that many women would dislike her for this reason, being that she was attractive in ways that they could not be.

She possessed an uncanny grace and strength, and carried herself accordingly. When she walked down the street, Gregor suspected that she would never need to swerve or avoid people – they would take the initiative. She might not ever realise it, but with the way she looked and moved, pedestrians would know to make way. She was different and unfamiliar, and difference carries the spectre of threat. The unknown is not to be trusted, after all.

Furthermore, she was intelligent, which suggests capability. Gregor judged that her cleverness and understanding of mechanism would be intimidating to the stupid many who were only just smart enough to realise their inferiority. Men would be uncomfortable and women would be put-out by the comparisons that they would inevitably make between themselves and her.

Many would be off-put by Mildred’s presence, because people, being social animals, had ways of recognising their betters by instinct.

A spark burned behind her eyes. People could tell that she was clever when she looked at them – they knew that she was observing rather than just seeing. They felt it, and their primitive animal parts panicked, like a fawn freezing when it feels the hungry eyes in the treeline. She would have that effect.

Much about her was animal, and she lacked that element of domestication which dwells in the features of most people and serves as a subtle hint to the primal mind that an individual is congenial and safe to approach. Gregor probably lacked it too; hackles raised in his presence. They both felt sharp to the sensibilities of normal people.

Difference is threat. Intelligence is capability. Unfamiliarity is unpredictability. And people are hard-wired to see the world through the lens of dichotomy. Us and them, friend and foe, good and bad, known and unknown; always with themselves ultimately being on the good side of the equation, which thus made the other bad by contrast. People were mean in simple ways, Gregor had found.

All of this worked together to give the impression of danger. She was a potential threat, as judged by the instincts of man. Perhaps that was it. Perhaps Gregor’s goat only got going when given great danger, being that danger was all that could excite him.

Evenfuthermore, however, was the fact that she liked to wear tight trousers.

“Are they big?”

“Hmm?” Gregor vocalised. Perhaps she was clairvoyant.

“The trains.” Mildred was standing right at the side of the tracks, practically on top of them. The tunnel was loud with trainsound.

“Come back here, quickly.” Said Gregor, approaching to a sensible distance for trainwatching. He would need to kill a train if she got hurt, and he didn’t yet know how to do that.

It came a short while later, bursting through the mouth of the tunnel with the horrible screech of brakes as it prepared to take a corner around the next hill. The locomotive vanished in an instant, but the coal cars it pulled continued to whoosh by for an eternity, then suddenly they stopped, and the eternity felt short. The pair watched the caboose shrink and vanish.

Mildred had a silly little smile, and she seemed happy for the moment.

***

That happiness followed them to the banks of some nameless river, where it vanished upon finding that the bridge had burnt down.

Or rather, it had been burnt down

It wasn’t uncommon for a bridge in the middle of uncivilised nowhere to collapse, but it would be highly unusual for such a bridge to burn. There was no way to know for certain, but that didn’t stop Gregor being sure that this was arson, and that the bridge had been burnt to slow them.

Mildred’s recollection was seven decades out of date, but it placed another bridge further upstream. With extreme luck, they might find that someone had maintained it. If not, rivers shrink with proximity to the source, so they would inevitably find somewhere to cross if they followed it.