by R J Hanson
“Very well,” Silas said as he walked over to the desk and took up the chart of Rogash’s trait notes. “That makes sense.”
“It does?” A’Ilys asked.
“Just a moment,” Silas said without looking up from the chart on Rogash’s desk. “You haven’t specified what the mothers were eating during these pregnancies.”
“So?” was the extent of Rogash’s response.
“So, the developing body and brain of the infant are dramatically impacted by the diet of the mother,” Silas said. “Several years ago, perhaps more than one hundred, a merchant who traded out of Modins noticed among the wives of ship’s captains that traveled to sea with them a significant increase in survivability, birth weight, and speed of development. You see, his success as a businessman was attributed to his remarkable ability to record and analyze mathematical details. The anomaly of the childbirths bothered him enough that he spent a few years studying the phenomena. He eventually deduced, and the results have since been reproduced, that it was the change in diet of the mothers that had such profound improvements in the infants.”
“You read a book about this?” A’Ilys asked.
“It is intriguing,” Dru said.
Rogash stood quietly and was paying very close attention.
“He determined that the only factors that changed were the diets. Temperature, exposure to sunlight, exposure to sea salt, weather conditions, presence or absence of the father; all were ruled out. However, he knew that spirits and ale were forbidden aboard seagoing vessels, and the foodstuffs packed for the ship’s crews were typically uniform; salted fish and beef, dried fruits and vegetables, and only water or coffee to drink. Therefore, he conducted a study among several young women who were pregnant in the city. He kept them sequestered and fed them only the sort of rations they would find aboard a ship. His experiment bore out his hypothesis and confirmed it was the change in what they had to eat. Now, having said all that, have the females you’ve experimented with had access to ale or strong spirits?”
“Quite a lot,” Rogash said. “They don’t much care for the process, as you might imagine. So, they do tend to drink quite a lot.”
“And you’ve seen a number of defects that cannot be accounted for otherwise?” Silas asked. “Defects that were not passed down from a father or mother?”
“Yes,” Rogash said.
“Excellent,” Silas said, maintaining his excitement. “We must…”
He stopped midsentence at Dru’s upraised finger. Silas closed his mouth and took a step back so that he was no longer standing in between Dru and Rogash.
“You have dwarven slaves here that mine and smith for you,” Dru stated more than asked. “If my Lord of Chaos assists you with this project, will you agree to an arrangement to sell your smithing wares through our channels in Moras?”
“Absolutely,” Rogash said.
“And if my Lord of Chaos assists you, you agree that we, he and I, have a stake in Clan Jet Hammer, and standing to call on you for aid and protection?” Dru asked.
“Yes,” Rogash said after a reflective pause.
Silas didn’t understand precisely what was taking place, but he did understand that Dru was apparently asking for a significant commitment. A commitment Rogash agreed to only after serious consideration.
Chapter VI
The Wilderness Provides
They held each other until the heat from the fire had dried what remained of Dunewell’s pants and driven the chill from their bodies.
“We should sleep,” Dunewell said. “Just a few hours. The fire will burn down by noon. That will still leave us a few hours of daylight after the climb to find some kind of shelter.”
They were still holding each other, and Belyska turned her face up to his and kissed him.
“The wilderness will provide,” she said.
She sank back to the sand near the fire and pulled him down to her. They kissed again.
“Our oaths?” Dunewell said.
“There are no oaths here,” Belyska said. “No oaths, no kingdoms, no churches, no wars, no laws, but what is between us. We will be back in the world of oaths soon enough.”
They awoke a few hours later, still holding one another.
Belyska rolled in the sand to face him, and he saw tears standing in her eyes.
“Ask me to abandon it all, and I will,” Dunewell said. “I will forsake every oath.”
“Could you ask that of me?” Belyska asked.
“I…,” he began, and then let the lie fall from his throat. “No, I couldn’t.”
She smiled as tears rolled freely from her eyes and over her blushing cheeks.
“Nor could I ask it of you,” she said. “Kiss me one last time and then let us return to a world we must serve.”
He did. Her lips, swelled and warm from crying and wet and salty from her tears, touched his soul. It was the last time Dunewell would ever kiss a woman he loved. It was the last time Belyska would kiss a man. It was a kiss that held the passion of the coming decades of loneliness and parched longing that they both must face.
Then Dunewell removed his pants, or what was left of them, and began stuffing them into the bag he’d made of his right pant leg. Belyska, without a spoken word, understood intuitively and pulled off her shirt and pants as well. They packed the clothing into the makeshift bag and tied it well at both ends. Then Dunewell drank deeply from the river, refreshing his own thirst and Whitburn’s soul.
Dunewell pulled the harness over his shoulders and double-checked the knots on Belyska’s. He sighed and looked to her. She gave him a curt, decisive nod, and he leapt to the ledge of the ceiling. The freezing spray of the river stole away any heat they thought they had stored up. It chilled them to the bone in seconds.
Belyska, despite having an understanding of the Lord of Order ritual and what it imbued, marveled at Dunewell’s display of physical strength and agility. He carried their combined weight holding no more than an inch or two of stony ledge washed by icy waters. They were twenty feet from their cave when she realized she’d been holding her breath.
Belyska marked the location of their cave with an eye practiced at marking a trail, thinking she would return from time to time to remember the love she’d found there. She never would.
If Dunewell had only himself to worry about, this climb would have been much faster. However, he couldn’t take the slightest chance of a fall. He didn’t understand much about children but knew that some had been lost from trauma or significant stress. He knew that some brothel owners in Lavon and Degra engaged in the deplorable practice of striking a pregnant tavern girl in the stomach to kill her unplanned child. The mere thought ignited Dunewell’s ire and his nausea. He pushed those thoughts from his mind, and he inched his way along. He relaxed his mind and allowed himself all the time in the world. One foot or twenty, one hour or days; none of that mattered. What mattered was continual progress and the safety of Belyska and her child. It couldn’t be their child. It probably couldn’t even be her child. He felt her hands on his shoulders and could smell her hair as her head pressed against his neck. Discipline, the kind forged by the Silver Helms and honed in the battles of Tarborat, shut his mind off to such thoughts and sensations.
Whitburn hardened his skin, and the stony clefts could not cut or mar his toes or fingertips. Whitburn poured strength into his arms and legs. Whitburn imbued his hands and feet with the agility of a mountain goat. Dunewell climbed.
After an age, Dunewell eased them down to the grassy surface of the river’s edge on the north side of the plateau. They were in a small forest of oak and pine, which gave them some shelter from the biting north wind.
Dunewell pulled their clothes from his pack and handed Belyska her shirt and pants without looking up from the ground. Then he turned and pulled on his own pants, or what was left of them. The dry clothes were an immediate relief, but they would need a fire, and soon.
Without a word, Belyska began gathering wood while Dunew
ell used the sharp edge of a chunk of flint to scrape bark into fine strips of tinder. His hands trembled with the chill. Whitburn could perform many incredible feats through Dunewell, but protection from the elements was not among them.
Dunewell struck the flint against the steel of his rider’s pike, throwing short-lived sparks into the tinder. Finally, blessings from Bolvii, a spark took hold, and the feeble smoke of a fledgling fire trailed up through the gathered kindling. Dunewell placed several more handfuls of kindling atop it and then moved off to the edge of the Whynne to drink deeply from its flowing waters. That need satisfied, he returned to the fire where Belyska was feeding larger sticks into it. They each took a smoked fish from the pack and ate in silence next to their small fire in the shelter of an ancient pine tree.
The sun sank with unusual speed in the western sky, throwing a brief rainbow into the freezing spray from the Whynne. They both watched the rainbow from opposite sides of the fire and experienced the brief beauty offered to them with the appreciation only those of a life of sacrifice could know. When the sun vanished behind the mountains to the west, Dunewell rose to gather another armload of wood. When he returned to the fire, several long minutes later, he saw that Belyska was already asleep on her side of the fire. He also saw that tears had smudged the ash and dirt on her cheeks.
He sat down opposite her, facing out from the fire. He resolved to keep the first watch. Some hours later, he heard her stir. She sat up and stretched. By the stars, Dunewell judged it to be almost exactly midnight. It seemed they both possessed the honed inner sense of time that was the mark of any soldier who’d spent much time in the field. Without a word, he handed her the rider’s pike, returned to his side of the fire, and stretched out on the ground. Sleep took him quickly.
When he awoke the next morning, he was struck with panic. She was gone. Dunewell wanted to leap to his feet and begin searching for her immediately. However, he’d been trained better than to give in to emotion and panic, although he felt far too much of both. Slowly he took in his surroundings, listening and smelling as much as he was seeing. He caught her scent on the wind and knew that she was north of him and not far away.
Dunewell rose quietly, took up one of the flint rocks, and stalked through the forest. He walked only a few yards from their camp when he saw her crouched in the brush, rider’s pike at the ready. She was watching a wolf, the wolf, the same wolf; it had to be. It was the same wolf he’d seen on the other side of the river. The large hunter laid two rabbits down in a glade several yards away, seemed to lock eyes with Belyska, and then moved off into the shadows of the forest.
“As I said,” Belyska said without turning around. “The wilderness will provide.”
Her words were clipped, and her tone direct. They were back in the world of wars, churches, and oaths.
Dunewell returned to the fire and fed a few more sticks to the flames. He ate the last of his smoked fish and then began chipping the flint. He worked at that most of the morning while Belyska used the rider’s pike as best she could to skin and gut the rabbits. She passed the skins to Dunewell, who used the flint to scrape the fat and flesh from the hide. Belyska then broke two green limbs from a nearby tree and spitted both rabbits over the small fire.
By that evening, they had made a serviceable bow, seven arrows, a crude axe with a flint head, and Dunewell had fashioned his rider’s pike to a stout limb, creating another makeshift spear.
The next morning, they ate the rabbits, drank from the river’s edge, and filled the bag made from Dunewell’s leather pantleg with water. They needed to find a large animal. One that could provide enough hide to make crude boots and perhaps even enough for a cape or tunic. That meant a bear or an elk.
Belyska followed the wolf’s tracks north for almost two hours before she found bear sign, scratch marks on the trees almost fourteen feet off the ground. They needed to be heading east, but they needed meat and hides more.
“An arrow won’t take a bear that large, no matter how well-aimed,” Belyska said hoisting the bow and small supply of arrows. “Your spear might, but the blow would have to be precise, and that would put you well within arm’s reach of the creature.”
“Bears can smell food from a great distance, can they not?” Dunewell asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Many leagues. Are you thinking of baiting it?”
“I am,” he responded. “Let’s find a good tree, one that you could climb up enough to be out of his reach and sturdy enough that he couldn’t push down. You perch in it with the bow. I’ll go back to the river and see if I can spear another fish or two for bait.”
“I suppose you’re going to spear the bear while I hide in a tree?”
“That’s the idea.”
“Have you any doubt I am just as skilled a warrior as yourself?” Belyska asked.
“I have no doubt about which one of us is pregnant.”
There it was. In the open. Dunewell worked to hold back his anger. Belyska opened her mouth for a reply she knew would cut him to the bone. She caught that reply with her teeth and turned her back to him.
“She can’t be mine either,” Belyska finally managed to say in response to what she knew Dunewell must be thinking. “You have my word she will be cared for, though.”
Several quiet moments slid by while they both chewed away hard words and hurtful jabs. Finally, maturity and an acceptance of what could not be changed settled over both of them.
“That large pine to the northeast,” Dunewell said, pointing and not looking around at her. “That one will work. I’ll meet you there when I have the fish.”
He walked toward the river struck with how suddenly a man’s life, and his heart, could change. Belyska had said she. A daughter then.
He reached the edge of the Whynne, knelt, and wept. He let himself cry for five minutes. When those minutes of self-indulgence had passed, he choked back his tears and cleared his thoughts. He would not grieve about this again.
It took him several tries, but he finally speared three fish. He took a leather thong, cut from the rabbit hides, and tied the fish together, leaving a small loop on one end. When he reached the pine tree, he found Belyska resting on a limb almost twenty feet up. With one great leap, Dunewell jumped to the limb below her, not quite sixteen feet from the ground. He held the limb in one hand and looped the three fish on it with the other. Having no knife, and his rider’s pike affixed to the spear left on the ground, Dunewell bit into the bellies of the fish to open them up and scent the air.
Dunewell dropped to the ground, spit the taste of raw fish guts from his mouth, and moved off another forty feet from the bait. There he dug a shallow pit with his hands. He rubbed the smell of the fish from his hands and mouth with the moist dirt from the pit, hoping to disguise the smell. Then he laid down in the hollow and pulled pine needles and leaves over him, completely covering himself and leaving only a small gap to watch the bait.
Dunewell could hear the bear approaching. The sound of its heavy paws on the dead grass and leaves was unmistakable… and coming from behind him.
He looked up to Belyska, who was signaling for him to hold his position. Dunewell let his muscles go slack at the same time holding in his breath. The bear was close now, and he could hear the large beast testing the air with its nose. Dunewell closed his eyes and reached out with his other senses, Whitburn’s senses.
The bear, a great black of at least twenty feet in height, was less than ten yards from him. The wily bear was master of this corner of the forest for a reason; he could smell a trap.
The bear’s roar shook Dunewell with its awesome power. Then he heard the bear’s claws striking the ground and felt the vibrations in the ground of its great charge. Dunewell rolled from his hiding place just as a huge paw tore through the ground where he had been. In one fluid motion, Dunewell rolled up to his feet, reversed his direction, and plunged the spear deep into the bear’s side. As he did so, an arrow struck it in the neck.
The bear rose up on h
is back legs, breaking the spear off in the process. Belyska continued to pelt it with arrows, but the great bear paid her no mind. His focus was on the man who had laid the trap.
Dunewell circled wide, hoping to put a tree between himself and the bear. Had he known what sort of speed the bear was capable of, Dunewell could have easily evaded him. However, he did not.
The bear leapt forward with a grace and swiftness of action belied by his girth. One heavy paw struck Dunewell and knocked him several feet into the air and sent him crashing into a nearby pine. The blow would have killed any normal man.
Yet, Dunewell was not only man, he was much much more. He crashed into a tree, almost six inches in width, and broke the tree with his ribcage. The air was slapped from his lungs, leaving Dunewell sprawled upon the ground. The tree was bludgeoned in two and toppled with the force of Dunewell’s collision.
Belyska began to scramble down from her tree, but to what end. What could she do to the great beast other than provide it another target? A single target that could easily result in two deaths.
Dunewell crawled away from the bear as it rose again to its hind legs and let go another of its mighty roars. Dunewell, still weak from the Muerso wound and his struggle since, fought his way to his knees.
Belyska dropped to the ground and loosed two more arrows. Yet, the master of these woods would not be drawn away from the man that laid the trap.
The great bear charged again. Dunewell reached for the crude axe that had been shoved in his pants. As his hand reached for it, his eyes found it. It was on the ground several yards away near the tree he’d torn down with his back and ribs. Dunewell, even with the weakened protections Whitburn could offer, was done for. The bear was going to kill him.
As the bear’s maw approached, its head was suddenly engulfed in a whirling mass of gray fur and biting teeth. The wolf, the same one that had been on the other side of the Whynne and that had brought them the rabbits, latched upon the bear’s neck and clawed away at its eyes and chest.
Dunewell, using a nearby tree to help him stand, finally made it to his feet. The wolf’s action had given him a brief pardon. As he rose, the bear slapped and clawed at the wolf violently. The bear’s claws, each several inches long and razor-sharp, tore through the wolf’s belly in a great gouge. The bear hurled the mortally wounded wolf far to the side and glared at Dunewell with its one remaining eye, blood dripping from dozens of new wounds, and one gory eye socket.