The Age of Heroes

by Scott J Robinson

Rawk got himself partially upright and lurched away. Nobody would see if he ran, nobody would know. His mind rebelled against the thought anyway. They might not see, but he would know. And, as with the wolf, he knew that running was useless. He wouldn’t get far. He wouldn’t have gotten far even before being kicked.

  In the corner he turned to fight. The troll was on him almost before he was ready. He slid the first swing of the mace past his shoulder. Barely. He stepped around the next and darted forward. But the troll’s strength was amazing. It stopped the huge weapon with seemingly no effort and reversed the swing. Rawk managed to keep his head as he stumbled away.

  Flowers tripped him up. A sharp rock jarred his knee when he fell. He almost called out. Noises behind him made him turn his fall into a not-very-effective roll and he landed on his back. He batted away another attack and knew it was a mistake before he’d even finished. He started to roll again as Kult shattered. The troll’s mace thudded into the ground beside his head. He spat dirt. Flowers rained down around him a second later. He scrambled away, fingers in the dirt, trying to pull himself forward quicker. Quicker. Quicker. Never quick enough.

  All he could hear was the thundering of his heart. He could smell flowers. He didn’t know what they were called but they looked a bit like pennylace.

  He tried to concentrate, to keep his mind on more important matters, to think. He kept moving, up to his elbows and knees in the unknown flowers.

  The troll must have been getting sick of the game for it followed close behind.

  Rawk crawled and limped and scrambled, looking over his shoulder, breathing in the stench of the flowers.

  He stumbled, slipped, was drawing in the smell, face in the dirt. As he tried to get back up, his hands touched something. His fingers closed and he recognized the perfect, comfortable feel of his new dwarven staff. He tripped again, rolled. On his back, he saw the troll over him, mace swinging before it was even within range.

  Rawk brought the staff up out of the pool of flowers, spun the pointed end around. The troll was caught by surprise. It tried to stop its charge, but Rawk lunged forward and the staff sank into the creature’s eye.

  But the mace kept coming, momentum swinging it around. Rawk winced and waited for the blow, unable to do anything about it. Soil flew again and that contact with the ground was all that saved him. The blow deflected, slowed. A spike tore through the flesh on his arm. The troll landed on top of him and almost crushed his leg. It might have broken it anyway.

  Rawk screamed out in pain. He only did it once though, so he was quite pleased with himself, in his moments of lucidness.

  He woke some time later. He didn’t know how long.

  “I’m starting to make a habit of this.” He gritted his teeth against the pain. He was a lot further from help this time.

  Rawk looked at his arm first. The mace’s spike was still there, impaling the flesh, but not as bad as he’d imagined. He didn’t want to remove it because that would increase the bleeding but he really didn’t have any choice. Taking a deep breath, he grabbed the handle of the mace and carefully, slowly, pushed it away from him so the spike slid out of his arm. It hurt. He gritted his teeth against the pain, closing his eyes for a moment while he got control of his breathing. He sat up with a groan of pain and saw blood streaming down his arm. At least it seemed to be. A healer might have had a different word for it. Trickling? Dribbling? And his feet were shouting complaints. He chose to ignore them, as best he could. One problem at a time.

  Rawk tore strips off his shirt. He wadded up the first to block the wound. The second he used as a bandage, awkwardly wrapping it around his arm and tying it off. It wasn’t very tight, but it would have to do.

  He tried to calm his thundering heart.

  Next task. The troll was still on his legs. It wasn’t going to be easy to move. Rawk gave the problem some thought. Anything to keep his mind off the pain. Anything to stop him wondering how long he had left to live. Anything to stop him from looking around to see if the troll had any friends.

  The dwarf staff had come free and was laying close by, still in one piece. Rawk took it up and slid it underneath the troll’s corpse.

  I’m about to find out how strong this really is, he thought. Once it was all the way through, he got the tip onto the ground and started to lever the troll away from his legs. The creature shifted a little bit. Then a bit more. Finally, Rawk raised the staff just enough to slide the troll down to the ground. He worked his way out from under an arm and breathed a sigh of relief. His arm hurt, his leg hurt and his stomach and ribs still ached. At least it was his left arm again. And he didn’t think any of them were life threatening, now that he had a moment to think.

  He looked around to see if the troll had any friends.

  There was someone there, though Rawk couldn’t see who.

  Rawk took a guess and waved. “Hello, Deaner,” he said. He would look silly if he was wrong, but that couldn’t be helped.

  The Captain of Hawk Squad came out from behind a tree five yards from the one he was looking at. Close enough.

  “Rawk? Is that you?”

  “Who else would it be?”

  “Well...”

  “I could do with a hand here, you know.”

  “What happened?” The Captain came closer. “We could hear noises but couldn’t work out what the hell...” He stepped up onto the low wall and came to a stop, staring at the troll. “You killed another one?”

  “I would’ve let you do it if you’d arrived a bit sooner.” Rawk took a deep breath. “Could I borrow your healer for a few minutes?”

  -O-

  Rawk almost fell out of the wagon as he tried to climb out over the side.

  Deaner hadn’t been happy to just leave him standing by the side of the road, just a few yards from the wall. But Rawk had insisted. Hawk Squad could not help but draw attention and if anyone recognized the limping, bruised man with them that would have been the end of it. So he had thanked them and started slowly down the street. That seemed like days ago but could not have been more than and hour. He didn’t know how far he’d walked before someone had taken pity on him and offered him a ride. It was a dwarf, but he’d accepted anyway. That seemed like days ago too.

  Rawk gathered his thoughts, it wasn’t easy, and looked up at the driver. “Thank you,” he croaked.

  The dwarf grunted, then shook the reins to get the horses moving again. Rawk pulled his hood further down over his face.

  “Are you all right?” someone asked.

  He nodded and waved them on. “I’m fine. Just a little under the weather.” He wasn’t dying. Probably. Just very sore all over and just about as tired as he had ever been in his life.

  “Are you sure?”

  He waved again and leaned against the wall, cradling his arm and favoring his foot. He noticed, through his haze of pain, more Words of Wisdom, painted on the side of the building across the other side of the road. The darkness will always end, but if morning is too far away, light a torch.

  Rawk tried to work out what that meant. Did it mean anything at all? Thinking about it made his head hurt so he pushed himself upright and staggered the final steps of his journey, down the hill towards Sylvia’s door. It was fifty yards, with half a dozen stairs, and almost beyond him. He stumbled in through the door, wincing as the bell rang above his head. Sylvia was talking to a customer in the front room so Rawk straightened up as best he could and made his way to the stool by the counter. He sat down heavily and tried to arrange himself so he didn’t look like he was about to die. Then he waited and tried not to die.

  Breathing helped. The dry crisp air of the room was probably filled with all types of medicine, kicked up as Sylvia mixed the concoctions. He was probably being cured of a dozen things he didn’t even know he had.

  Finally, the old lady handed over a couple of copper coins, took a small jar from Sylvia, and made her way out onto the street.

  Rawk slumped onto the counter as soon as the door closed
.

  “What has happened?” Sylvia rushed over and stopped him from falling any further. “Come with me.” She supported him as she led the way towards the door to the back of the shop.

  “Thank you.”

  “What have you been doing?”

  Rawk didn’t answer until he had climbed up onto a high timber bed and laid down with a grateful sigh.

  “The same as usual,” he said. “Saving the city and all that.”

  “Really? Have you ever actually saved the city before?”

  Rawk tried to think as he pushed his cloak away from his arm. “No. I don’t think so. There were those rats...”

  Sylvia started to laugh, but cut off when she saw the blood on his arm. “This certainly wasn’t done by a rat.”

  “Another troll.”

  “Another troll?” She hurried over to a shelf. She searched for a moment before finding a powder and mixing it with water from a jug on a table.

  Rawk tried a smile but it didn’t feel right.

  “Here, drink this. All of it.”

  As Sylvia rushed off again, getting bandages and a needle, Rawk drank. It tasted horrible, which was to be expected.

  “Are there more? Where are they coming from?” Sylvia started working on his arm. Rawk tried not to watch what she was doing.

  “Are you one of Thacker’s spies?”

  Sylvia attempted a smile then. “I will certainly let him know.”

  “Well, let him know that they look like trolls, but I don’t know for sure.”

  “Dwarves know a bit about trolls. If Thacker or one of his scholars could—”

  “Wait, Thacker’s a dwarf?”

  “Of course. What did you think?”

  “Well, I thought he was human, obviously.”

  Sylvia shook her head. “There are nearly three times as many dwarves living on the South side of the river as there are humans. And there are more elves than humans as well. Do you think we would follow a human?” Sylvia sighed. “This wound it not good, Rawk. Half an inch to the side and I would have been amputating.”

  “We?”

  “Pardon?”

  “You said ‘we’. As in, ‘we elves’.”

  “Everyone thinks elves and dwarves are some type of mortal enemy from centuries ago—which isn’t true, we just never understood each other—but nobody can understand humans.”

  “We elves? You’re an elf?”

  Sylvia stopped working at Rawk’s arm and looked at him. For a moment she smiled, as if at some grand joke, but then seemed to realize that he really didn’t know. She laughed. “All these years and you didn’t know?”

  “If I’d known...”

  “You wouldn’t have come to me for help? Or you would have tried harder to kill me previously? Or perhaps you wouldn’t have lowered yourself to battle me at all. Are you less of a man because you couldn’t defeat an elf?”

  Rawk’s face reddened. He started to sit up, but Sylvia pushed him back down. He was so weak he couldn’t fight her.

  “How ever did you survive all these years, Rawk? You walk around in a daze, seeing the world as you want it to be.”

  “If I saw the world as I wanted it to be there wouldn’t be any elves or dwarves at all.”

  She fetched an ointment down from a shelf and came back to the bed, shaking her head. “You think humans are better than the other races, when really we come from the same people.”

  Rawk spluttered. “We do not.”

  “I am not a full elf, Rawk. My mother was an elf. My father was a human, a logger from a little village a few days north of Fadanel.”

  “You’re still an elf.”

  She sighed. “I’m not trying to get into your good books by claiming to be a human. ‘We elves’, remember? What I’m saying is that humans and elves, and dwarves, can all interbreed. There are no abnormalities with the offspring. We are the same people.”

  “We are not.”

  “We cannot breed with Nokins. We can breed with Galangs but the offspring are always mules. Humans and elves are the same breed. The fermi and the Katans divided some time ago, before recorded history, but humans, elves and dwarves divided even before that.”

  “Dwarves are hardly more than animals. They—”

  “Grow up, Rawk. Think for once in your life instead of spitting forth the same tired lines that Heroes have been spitting for thousands of years.”

  “They stink worse than a pen full of dead pigs.”

  “They smell, so they are animals?”

  “They don’t smell. They stink.”

  “Where do you see these dwarves? The stinky ones?”

  “All through the city.”

  “North of the river?”

  “Of course. I never come south.”

  “And what are the dwarves doing? The ones north of the river?”

  “Working on the sewers. Cleaning the streets. Building things. They stank up the Hero’s Rest for more than a month.”

  “So they’re working?”

  “Yes.”

  “These men are doing hard physical work, often for twelve hour shifts, and you are complaining that they smell?”

  “Well...”

  “Have you seen them at home? After work?”

  “Of course. Not at home, but when they aren’t working.”

  “When they are walking home from work?”

  “Are you done yet?”

  She tied off a bandage with a violent tug. “I don’t know, am I?”

  “The troll kicked me in the stomach and ribs and then landed on me.”

  “Are you sure you want an elf looking at that?” Sylvia sighed and went back to work. She probed his stomach with long, strong fingers. Rawk tried not to move. “Nothing is broken. There is no serious damage that I can see.”

  “Oh. All right then. It hurts like hell.”

  “Live with it. Anything else?”

  “Fine.” He tried to think of anything else. Maybe... “There’s something wrong with my knee, too.”

  Sylvia sighed and knelt on the floor. She poked and prodded around the joint, moving the leg backwards and forwards.

  “I think you need to find another healer, Rawk. I refuse to help a man who seems intent on getting himself killed.”

  Rawk grunted. “I think you don’t really understand what choices I do and don’t have, Silver Lark.”

  “What, Weaver is forcing you?”

  He shook his head. “I’m a Hero; I have to do Heroic things. That means I can’t sit around in a tavern while Hawk Squad run around the forest hunting trolls. I won’t get any respect for that.”

  “Respect from whom, Rawk? Those people who fawn over you? They are the same ones that cheer at a public flogging. Maybe you should give some thought to who you are trying to impress.” She paused in her ministrations and looked up. “The troll did this to you?”

  Rawk cleared his throat. “When it fell on me.”

  She didn’t say anything, but gave him a look that clearly said what she thought of that. She collected a jar from a shelf and set it down on a bench. “Rub that on every morning.”

  Rawk didn’t say anything. He started to push himself upright.

  “Don’t be stupid. You’ll be staying here for a while so I can keep an eye on you.”

  “I can’t...”

  What he couldn’t do was sit up. He slumped back down. “How long do I have to stay?”

  “We’ll see.”

  Wensday

  Rawk started to roll over and almost fell off the bed. He looked around at the medicines and drugs and scrolls. There were noises from out the front of the shop as Sylvia served a customer. She came through the door a few minutes later, pushing her long hair away from her face and hooking it behind an ear.

  “I wasn’t sure if you were going to wake up.”

  “I didn’t know I needed to.” He groaned as he pushed himself into a sitting position. He could see that her ear was a little bit pointy, now that he looked.

 
; “Once the medicine took effect it didn’t take long.”

  “I thought you might have used magic.”

  “We had that conversation before.”

  “Well, I can hope.”

  “You can, but it won’t help.”

  “How long was I asleep?”

  “Almost an entire day.”

  Rawk felt like he could sleep for another day. He watched as Sylvia did a quick check of the dressing on his arm. There didn’t appear to be any blood.

  “Do you have any of the tea remaining?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, here’s some more anyway. Pack this new wound tonight as well. You opened the other one up again, by the way. You need to rest the arm.”

  “I was resting it. I was using the other arm.”

  “Grow up, Rawk. Now get out of my shop before I need to bring someone out here. And don’t forget the cream for your knee.”

  Rawk got himself upright and shrugged awkwardly into his cloak. Out the front, the doorbell clanged as somebody entered the shop.

  “You’d better go out the back,” Sylvia said.

  “Right.” He grabbed his belongings without looking and crossed to the door at the back of the room as quickly as he could.

  “And Rawk...”

  He stopped with his hand on the door handle. “Yes?”

  “Send Travis around with my money later. Fifty ithel, and I’m doing you a favor.”

  Rawk sneered. “Right.”

  Out in the alley he tried to get himself organized. He went to sheath Kult but noticed that there wasn’t much more than a stub of the blade left. He remembered something about that. “Path.” He’d had the sword for a long time. Since almost the beginning. He’d taken it from a Merindoc prince killed by a band of brigands outside Jilk. Rawk hadn’t been paid to protect him, but he felt guilty about the death and the sword both. In the alley, a long tired lifetime away from Jilt, he rammed the stub into its sheath and swung his pack over his shoulder. His arm ached all over and Rawk didn’t know if he’d be able to fight another troll even if he wanted to.

  The first thing he had to do, before he went off looking for more trolls, was visit Weaver. Ramaner was going to shout at him as it was. Why didn’t you come to us yesterday? Rawk sighed and started limping down the hill, trying to avoid crowds so he wouldn’t get jostled.