Goldenmark

by Jean Lowe Carlson

  Fenton’s speech came to an end. Elohl sat, digesting all that had been said. As if summoned, Ghrenna’s cerulean eyes came, rising up like the dust that blew across his boots in the whispering night. She was there, breathing all around him. Moving in his heart and skin, slipping into his body, waking every part of him. Without pain or any kind of searing sensation, only a beautiful wash of warmth this time, the Goldenmarks began to glow softly on Elohl’s chest and down to his forearms and hands. Like curls of ocean sunlight, they flickered and moved under his skin – tender and calm, but strong.

  As if they needed his love to truly come alive.

  Without a word, Elohl unbuckled his crimson Red Valor jerkin and shed it to the bench. His shirt went next, pulled off over his head and cast to the pitted wood, then his leather bracers. Taking long, slow breaths, he focused on that feeling. Of Ghrenna and their connection. As he did, the Marks flared brighter. Not to bind, and not because he was in dire straights trying to unite bitter enemies or stop a conflict, but because Ghrenna’s love moved around him and through him like the curls of the nightwind – raising his own powerful love in return.

  Elohl felt her respond, sitting in meditation thousands of leagues away under the mountains. Ghrenna turned, came to his arms, molded to his body. As they breathed together in a space that had no distance and no time, feeling each other’s hearts and the bliss of their togetherness, the Goldenmarks surged, bright.

  People stopped their activities all along the nearby Way. Through half-lidded eyes, Elohl saw them staring at him through the fire-studded darkness, not just seeing his Goldenmarks light, but feeling them brighten with a powerful, timeless love. A Valenghian soldier dropped a saddle from his shoulder and sank to his knees, his astounded face bathed in that pure etheric light. A Cennetian cook-girl gripped her filthy apron, tears blinking from her startled copper eyes to be cast in that radiant glow. A Praoughian tinker dropped his basket of wares to the dust, his round face made even rounder by the o of his mouth as he watched curls of bright love flow through the darkness.

  Elohl saw them, felt them, as his peaceful love and gentle bliss with Ghrenna reached out in every direction; sighing through every mind, easing into every heart. As a crowd gathered in that strong white-blue luminescence, Elohl realized that he felt love for them – all of them. Not because they were infatuated or impressed by him, but simply because he was touching their hearts. Something about the power of the Goldenmarks opened men up; allowed their hearts to be seen and felt. Allowed Elohl’s own heart to touch theirs and commune in this powerful, peaceful feeling. It was gentle, beautiful, blissful – warm and wild in the panicked night.

  Elohl’s lips fell open. He took steady breaths, feeling this vast love that moved like an oceanic sea in every direction as the Goldenmarks surged, casting the entire camp nearby in a godly, incredible light. Far away, he felt Ghrenna smile, her sigh lovely as a midnight wind.

  Elohl. It happens tonight. We are ready to bring you into your full power as Rennkavi. And now I know that you are ready, too. Come to me, when you feel the power rise to its peak. Come to me – and become who you were meant to be.

  Her blessed vision faded from Elohl’s mind and she slipped away. But the sensation of love that had triggered Elohl’s Goldenmarks was not gone. The Marks breathed through Elohl’s skin, sending waves of heat and chill through his body as they gave a blissful light to the thickening crowd. Men and women watched him, hushed and reverent, in a ready way that Elohl could feel. As if he could reach inside them, he knew their hearts as well as his own, and could feel the loves and longings of each and every person bathed in that wyrric oneness.

  As if he had become their hearts, and they his.

  Taking out the Valenghian High General’s pin that Merkhenos had given him, Elohl ran his thumb over its silver vine, gleaming by the strong light of his Goldenmarks. It was smooth and dotted with tiny flowers under his roughened skin. Glancing at his hands with their luminous ink, twisting and curling like true sunlight now without any underwater constraint, Elohl turned them over. Staring at his old self-inflicted scars upon his inner wrists, he allowed himself to feel all these men and women. How tired they were; how bone-weary. How much they just wanted to go home to their families, their children and loved ones.

  How much they longed for all the same things Elohl did – as much as the first day he’d come to the High Brigade, and through to this very moment.

  “Ever led a war before?” Elohl spoke to Fenton at last.

  “In my time,” Fenton’s demeanor was calm, a kind of awe upon his features as a liquid golden fire burned in his eyes. “Eight hundred years ago, it was all war, Elohl. I led men and they died. I led them again, and still they died – all because we didn’t have a Rennkavi. Don’t let that be our fate. Be our hero, our leader. The man you were born to be. The man that King Hahled Ferrian marked you for all those months ago.”

  “Lhaurent is Goldenmarked also.” Elohl slid his thumb over the silver pin again, feeling as if he touched eels in all that smoothness. “He has the same power I do.”

  “No, he doesn’t.” Fenton’s smile was kind in the night. “He doesn’t have a quarter of the strength you possess, Elohl. Because he doesn’t have this.” Reaching out, Fenton set his palm to Elohl’s heart and the Goldenmarks flared beneath it. Elohl felt a bolstering strength surge through him, as if Fenton had actually pressed some of his own mighty wyrria right through Elohl’s heart. Taking a deep breath, Elohl shivered, feeling something inside him rise, strong with coils and scales and talons in the night.

  “Unite these men around us,” Fenton breathed softly, “before Lhaurent has a chance to take them away. Peace comes at a price, Elohl; all men pay that price in war. But the only way to find true peace is to allow yourself to become what you need to be. To marshal this army and lead them – as you were born to.”

  With a last deep breath, Elohl rose. Fenton’s palm slipped away, and Elohl turned, taking up his crimson jerkin from the bench. He slung it on sans shirt, leaving the Goldenmarks open for all to see. Setting the Valenghian High General’s silver pin to his collar upon the left, he squared his shoulders. Eyes were upon him, watchful in the night. Not just Merkhenos’ captains and personal guard, but this entire region of the camp. The Way was choked with tired faces illuminated by Elohl’s Marks and in the burgeoning crimson of the oncoming storm – faces of men who had seen too much war.

  But they had strength, and so did he. They would stand and face Lhaurent’s army with courage this night, no matter what they could or couldn’t do. As Elohl stepped forward into their midst, he felt something rise in his heart, an expansion of understanding. And as he reached out to clasp the arm of the stunned Ghirano before him, Elohl felt a smile lift his face.

  A true smile. A smile that knew suffering and hardship. A smile that knew peace and plenty. A smile that knew love and rage, hate and mercy, as he clasped Ghirano’s arm. And Elohl’s deepest love flared his Goldenmarks through the night, expanding them tenfold like the coils of some ancient creature unfurling to embrace the world.

  Because he knew, that all their hearts held the same love.

  “Gottio!” Ghirano breathed, his eyes enormous, bathed in that light.

  “I’m no god,” Elohl murmured, “just a man. Spread the word, Ghirano. For how you feel tonight is how we all can feel if we unite and finish this. I’m tired of war. Aren’t you? Isn’t it time this was over?”

  Copper eyes shining, Ghirano nodded. He let Elohl’s wrist go then sank to one knee, setting a fist to his heart in a strong Cennetian salute. All through the nearby Way, men and women sighed to their knees in the luminous darkness. But it wasn’t what Elohl wanted. Resolutely, he knelt, helping Ghirano back to this feet, clasping the man by the shoulders and giving him a shake of camaraderie.

  “Don’t worship me – fight with me. Help us unify tonight, so we can end this with minimal bloodshed. Put any differences you have with the other nationalities aside, and we ca
n win a lasting peace for all our lands. Are you with me?”

  “Rennkavi,” Ghirano breathed. He swallowed, then gave a curt nod. “Rennkavi!” He shouted, to be heard over the midnight wind and blowing silt.

  In that moment, Elohl lifted up his voice also, his strong baritone rebounding off the Monoliths as his blazing wyrria lit the night.

  “Tonight, we become one!” Elohl thundered. “Though we shall see battle, do not see the man across the field as your enemy. See how your enemy may become your brother! For are we not all brothers and sisters of the same heart? I feel the same loves and losses in you that you feel in me. These Marks I bear do nothing but make plain that which is right in front of us – that men are made to live and love in peace and companionship. Join me! For I fight this night against a tyrant, because sometimes killing a rabid beast is a mercy. Just as we feel mercy when we stare into our lover’s eyes, so we will be mercy when we stare into the eyes of our enemy. We will drive straight to his heart, and bring his slaves over to our love. That is what we are – we are all Rennkavi! And none may sunder us with their hate!”

  A rousing roar went up through the red night. Hundreds of men, thousands. A rhythmic clapping came nearby, as Ghirano and his Cennetian guardsman started a song, beating a complex rhythm upon a water barrel. Something in it called to Elohl, moving his veins and spearing his mind. He felt Fenton rise to it, too, the man’s lightning suddenly prickling around them in flashes that slit the gathering night. It was an old song, an ancient song. A song that had been created to move power when that power had been young. It wasn’t in Cennetian, or any language Elohl knew. That song seemed wyrric, full of bright chirps and sliding syllables – like birds of hope soared to the midnight sky, and Elohl’s hope surged with it.

  Borne upward upon the tide of a thousand soldiers and more feeling the pulse of that song, Elohl’s Goldenmarks spread wide, flaring out through the burgeoning night. Each curl of script unfurled like massive coils though the air, their etheric light touching every person there. Each sigil upon his skin dug in like enormous talons, piercing into every heart. Even the oxen lowed in the sylvan darkness, the horses whickering, moving toward him with a peaceful, steady gait.

  In that moment, Elohl felt the Dragon within him unfurl. He was no longer the Wolf, alone and lost in the darkness. He was both Wolf and Dragon; and as he set his coils around the world and his talons into every heart, he knew the true power of the Goldenmarks.

  He could unite them all, without enslaving them.

  And he would – with love.

  CHAPTER 43 – KHOUREN

  Khouren was pacing. Their allied army had halted for the evening meal, in a swath of rolling hills a few days south of Vennet. The evening was on fire with golden light as Khouren’s boots crunched in the sandy soil, hills of grass waving around him. He moved like a stalking specter, kicking at a spiral seashell in the dirt. The Thalanout Plain had been an inland sea long ago. Carven out by glaciers, swallowed by saltwater, then raised up with treacherous bogs upon either side, it retained a prehistoric feel – as if behemoths still roamed its waving grasslands.

  A mound raised nearby, made from thousands of ancient corpses piled high under the withering sun. Thigh-bones taller than a man, claws as long as Khouren’s femur; gargantuan skulls with tusks and spikes in ridges along their spines. Skeletons of animals so old their bones had petrified. Beasts damned to destruction, then piled by some long-lost people to rot upon the plains until their bones were bleached into stone.

  The Hills of the Damned were avoided by caravans and armies, superstition rife about it. Only the bravest snuck into this dead zone to plunder ivory and sell it for atrocious sums, or powder it into costly aphrodisiacs. Gazing upon an enormous mound ten man-heights tall, Khouren’s spirits fell, feeling like they were cursed. Ihbram had ridden his keshar-cat back early this morning, giving a scouting report that had darkened every heart. The slave army with the captured Elsthemi that they sought out of Ligenia had already rendezvoused with the main Menderian host.

  Ihbram estimated Lhaurent’s army at nearly seventy thousand now, from his spying upon a hilltop. It was a force the allies could never hope to breach, even though they had gained Delennia’s Red Valor cavalry and a significant portion of the Menderian host from the Battle of the Vault and General den’Albehout’s decision to join Arlen. The allies numbers were nearly ten thousand fighters now, but it could not compare to the annihilating presence of Lhaurent’s mustering. Even worse – Lhaurent’s forces were already marching to war. Ihbram had raced his cat back so hard it had frothed at the mouth and collapsed when he arrived to tell them that battle was imminent upon the Aphellian Way.

  The allies had halted their column today after Ihbram’s report, two days’ ride from the Menderian encampment. An afternoon of wretched discussion passed, full of bad options and worse. All non-fighting personnel had been left behind at the Vault – including injured Menderian soldiers, or those who had lost all heart for battle. But Khouren knew they’d been the smart ones, to relinquish their place in the coming mess.

  “Khouren?” Eleshen’s step was light and Khouren startled. With more gravitas than she’d had before, she stood tall as she approached – the bearing of a true warrior, which was what she was now. Khouren reached out and wound her into his arms. Breathing softly, he buried his nose in her long sable braid.

  “Are you all right?”

  “This place is cursed.” Khouren’s mood was dark under the lowering sun. A specter rode him, telling him that marching against Lhaurent’s army was death. “If we ride out to free the Elsthemi slaves, we’ll be crushed.”

  “I know.” Eleshen murmured, pulling back slightly. “Everyone’s still discussing it, but —”

  “What’s there to discuss?” Khouren spoke, certainty filling him like sand siphoning into a bottle. “Even a midnight raid upon a force like that would annihilate us. Aeon, everything’s all wrong—!”

  “Shh,” Eleshen set a hand to his chest. “What’s gotten into you?”

  “Death. Can’t you feel it?” Khouren gazed around, shivering in the brisk wind.

  “It’s just the bones,” Eleshen soothed. “Everyone knows this place is haunted.”

  Khouren breathed out slowly, trying to ignore the creeping fear that prickled over his skin and failing. At last, his gaze returned to Eleshen. “What are the commanders discussing? Are we to attack?”

  Eleshen fiddled with her long sable braid, turning to gaze back from where she’d come, facing into the brisk evening wind. “Merra is hot to advance. Arlen is advising caution, Delennia and den’Albehout with him – to watch and gather intelligence. Ihbram’s vastly worried over the Kreth-Hakir he saw. He counted more than thirty of them among the tents of the main host.”

  “We’ll be annihilated.” Khouren closed his eyes as certainty filled him.

  “Delennia’s advising we circle through the northern Bog and give support to the main Valenghian force, rather than charge or raid Lhaurent’s army. She’s counseling Merra to abandon the enslaved Elsthemi. Ihbram thinks he can get us to Valenghia faster, through these barrows here in the Hills of the Damned. Apparently, some of them acted as portal-ways long ago, into some dead city just inside the Heathren Bog near the Valenghian fortifications.”

  But Khouren knew those passages through the barrows. Even though Ihbram counseled it as a wise move, he didn’t agree. Things lived inside those humped mounds of bones; things that were just as voracious today as they had been when Khouren and Ihbram had traveled this way over three hundred years back. It was part of why he trembled, standing upon the low hill, watching the piles of bones in the settling evening.

  This place was for the dead, far more than the bowels of Roushenn had ever been.

  Suddenly, Khouren heard a roar that sounded like the Elsthemi High General. Like live lightning, Merra came storming up over a hill from the commander’s parlay. With a snarl, she drove the long blade of her polearm into the sandy soil. Her br
eath heaving, she sank to her knees. And then down to her butt, ripping up the tall grass in fistfuls.

  Eleshen moved forward as if to console Merra, but Khouren gripped her arm with a shake of his head. A mournful yowl wafted on the wind, and Merra’s great white cat ambled up over the hill, bumping her blocky head into Merra’s back. With a hard sigh, Merra stroked the cat’s tufted ears. The big creature sank to its belly and curled around Merra like the world’s laziest couch, its tail-tip flicking with the gusting of the wind as it reached around to lick at the place where arrows had been removed from its haunch at the Vault.

  Ihbram came over the rise next. He glanced at Merra, then headed in Khouren and Eleshen’s direction. Stopping, he curried his fingers through his trimmed russet beard, then itched it. “Well, we’re no closer to solving this fuckwad than we were hours ago. Any way you slice this meat it’s rotten.”

  “You want to take us through the barrows?” Khouren glanced at Ihbram.

  Ihbram caught his glance, sober, then shrugged his shoulders. “Delennia has a solid force upon the Way, though they’re outnumbered a good two-to-one by Lhaurent’s army. Elohl’s there, and Fentleith. Far more power than we have now. If we can’t get through a wight-barrow to the northern Bog... I’d have to say we’re minced meat if we attack the Menderians directly.”

  “What’s Arlen going to do?” Eleshen glanced at General Merra again, who now leaned back against her cat with her arms crossed and eyes closed.

  “Not much he can do,” Ihbram sighed. “He promised to aid General Alramir, but not at the cost of all of us. I think the barrow-passage is the most strategic plan. The Alrashemni are for it. So are Delennia, Purloch, and the rest. Arlen is trying to be magnanimous, but you can see it all over his face that he agrees with us. But he fears that if we leave, Merra will—” Ihbram rubbed a hand over his red braids, flicking away a light sweat from his brow.