Drakon Omnibus

by C. A. Caskabel

  “So, more important?”

  “We need the Craftsmen. They are the only difference between us and those animals. They are not as important as the…Reghen—but close.”

  We traveled for two moons northeast passing a few of our own outposts. It was the first and last careless period of the campaign; the spring meadows in bloom and the evening wind rustling through the wheat stalks. The othertriber villages appeared when the summer heat became unbearable. They looked the same as our settlements in the camp, the sides of the tents built with circular wooden frames, stakes, and branches tied together. The poles were propped up along a vertical round mesh from one side so that they could be tied high above in the center to create a ceiling with a smoke hole. The tents were covered with thick felt, rarely with hides, to block out the cold and wind. Cauldrons bubbled outside the tents, and the horses were few, outnumbered by mules and donkeys.

  That was where the similarities with Sirol ended and the differences began. They were small camps, mainly farm villages. Twenty tents. Thirty. Ten. Too many sheep and goats. Too many for them. Not for us. We left a few behind, enough for them to survive—if they could survive hunger.

  “Herders, farmers, a few hunters,” the Reghen told me. “We will not shed blood here.”

  The biggest difference was the people. Short and weak—they all would have perished in the Sieve on the first night. The nomads we met on the way were leaving their winter pastures in the south and were heading north to find fresh meadows for the summer. The farmers stayed south to reap the barley and the wheat. We would need all of it. Each farmer crouched next to his one woman and their two or three children, frightened.

  “I thought they’d run away,” I said.

  “They’ve seen us before. Do you know how many Hunters the Tribe has, Da-Ren?”

  “About as many as Blades, I guess.”

  “Yes, way too many. There’s not too much to hunt in the Iron Valley.”

  “What does this have to do with anything?” I asked.

  “The Hunters come up here every spring. Not much to hunt in early spring, so they come to gather all the supplies we need from here. This is the other camp of our Tribe, the one you never see,” said the Reghen. “For many summers now, when the Forest stopped us and we settled in Sirol, these peasants provided for us. Horses, sheep, hides, wheat, barley, millet, milk, women—almost everything comes from here. We have many outposts scattered here, thousands more men.”

  I always knew that what we had in Sirol was not enough, but I had never seen the northeast, that vast space of earth and people who kept us alive.

  “And what do they take?”

  “They are part of the Tribe. They give us life. No one harms them. Neither othertribers nor us. Life for life.”

  Fair.

  We didn’t ravage them. Neither the Blades nor the Archers had any glory to gain from these poor peasants. The Reghen were in charge of everything that had to be gathered, and the Chiefs simply stepped aside and followed orders. The Archers trained on their horses to ease the boredom and fought over which women to mount.

  “This time, though, it’s different,” the Reghen said. “We’ll take more than ever before.” The Truths came clear. “In every village, gather all the strong men and load all supplies onto the carts. And take most of the animals, not all.”

  We chained and enslaved, but the heads of the peasants stayed in place. Malan’s messengers made it clear that this was our land and these were our people.

  “They are othertribers, but they are slaves who feed us,” the Reghen told me.

  “I have never seen such weak men in my life,” I said to Leke.

  “They cry when we take the sheep, the wheat,” Noki said.

  “Well, what do you expect? They’re scared. When winter comes hard from the north, there will be nothing to save them.”

  “The Archers take even the tents from the herders, anything that can be carried.”

  “They cry even when we take their young men with us,” I said.

  “Not my boy, my little boy,” Noki squealed, mimicking the mothers.

  “I don’t understand this shit. Their little boys have beards on their chins. Why do they still live with them?” I asked. “These shepherds will march with us on the campaign. We left Sani and our comrades back at Sirol, and these lucky dogs are coming with us. They should be on their knees blessing us.”

  I asked the Reghen about that because it made an impression on me. If they were loyal and part of the Tribe, why didn’t they want a Story?

  “When the Guides brought us, twelve-wintered boys to the Sieve, no one cried,” I said. No one who made it out of the Sieve alive, that is.

  “These ones here have families. A sweet poison that renders you powerless with fear every night. They have submitted to protect their families. Fear, family, poison—that’s their only Story,” said the Reghen.

  In the middle of summer, the first small cities appeared, hidden behind wooden walls about the height of two men. A few were surrounded by shallow moats, some not even that.

  “Are those logs they’ve piled up over there supposed to be a wall? Do they have them for the winds?” I asked.

  “They have them to keep looters away, not our warriors. They are useful,” said the Reghen.

  “They are wooden and short,” I said. “Were we carrying the siege towers for these walls?”

  The walls weren’t put to the fire, and there was no siege. Their gates opened wide to welcome us. None of them dared to resist. The forty thousand of the Tribe had become a giant snake that swallowed everything it met along the way, and no wooden wall could stop it.

  We were greeted by our own garrisons, who were stationed in these cities to keep order, and by the local chiefs who collected the supplies and the best women from their folk and gave them to us in return for being allowed to retain their titles and power. When we entered these small cities of the northeastern plains, the locals hailed us as gods descending from the sky and redeemers of the future, and by the time we left, they were looking forward to starvation and sleeping next to the old and ugly women we left behind.

  “These cities had wronged and dishonored our ancestors. Generations before,” the Reghen told me.

  The Legends and the Stories came alive and became Truths the more we dived into the East. The younger generations paid for the sins of their ancestors.

  “Why are they such cowards? Don’t they have warriors?” I asked.

  “They don’t have a Sieve.”

  Our hordes looted, gathered, swallowed, and bloated.

  The fourth moon away from Sirol came, and our course turned fully east. We left behind the cities that rested on the great rivers and the fertile lands. We were getting farther into the arid steppe of our ancestors. In the steppe, a man with a dream, a young man searching for his Story, will go slowly but inevitably mad.

  The steppe engulfed us from all sides, even from the second day. The Trackers told me that the vast flatlands continued like this forever and that we were just at the outmost edge of the steppe. My mind stopped there, wrapped within the golden sheet of nothingness that erased thought, dream, and memory. I didn’t have a battle to look forward, I didn’t have the Sieve, there was no threat or adventure, and nothing to help me pass the days and nights. The only view to fill my mind was an endless yellowish fabric, the plateau of the steppe that never ended, no matter how hard the eye tried. Once in a while, a forgotten autumn cloud would mark the edge of the sky—nothing else. The yellowish sheet became brown, gray, purple, and bluish white, changing color to the light of the sun and the moon, but it remained otherwise flat and endless, emptier than the morning sky. It spread out like despair, a land that had been made only for our horses to gallop fast.

  There was no Forest, not even a memory of it. During the first moons, back in the peasant valleys, Zeria’s amulet danced upon my chest whenever the wind sang through the wheat fields. But when we entered the steppe, the wheat disappeared, and
only the howling wind remained. Like the Forest, Zeria’s face slowly vanished.

  We rode hard during daylight, slept the cold night in the open under heavy cloaks, woke the next morning, and the scene in front of us was always the same—a treeless flat expanse covered with dry grass. Riding, walking, screaming seemed acts without purpose in this boundless plain. Hills appeared far away to the north, looking like blue-gray tongues jutting from the mouths of giant beasts. They shimmered playfully in the scorching heat, but never came closer.

  Every time the Trackers saw any marmots hopping about or standing upright in the golden grass, they would motion for us to turn right—as if the plump animals were signs that we had wandered too far to the north. The Hunters soon wiped them out, a little for their meat, mostly for their fur. A rumor had spread that Malan had asked for a winter coat made of marmot fur, and from that moment on, every Chief wanted one as well.

  Only when we arrived at the next river did we believe that we had actually moved forward and were not just riding around in circles. Triumphant cheers greeted the Trackers every time they brought back news that we had reached a river. There were times when every swollen autumn river was another snake that had come out to stop Enaka’s chosen Tribe, days when we didn’t move at all. Snakes of water, servants of Darhul, fought a bloodless battle against the snakes of warriors, servants of Enaka. In midautumn, the season of the Goddess ended, and the weather roughened.

  “At best, we can make a hundred times a thousand feet every day. The horses could go much faster, but not the oxen and the carts,” I said.

  “We can’t abandon the oxen or the supplies,” said the old Reghen.

  “This rotten weather has changed fast and is slowing us down.”

  “We can’t change the weather either.”

  The weather was always bad. The sweltering heat was already in the past, replaced by the chilling nights and the dull, heavy rains. I was sick of the tents. The round ones were too bulky to carry and needed too much time to set up and take down. The smaller ones that were good for sleep and nothing else we used more and more, sheltering with two or three other men, and much more rarely with a woman. If it wasn’t raining and if I didn’t have a woman, I took the felt covers, wrapped them around me, and slept under the wide canopy of stars. The more I got used to it, the more I didn’t care to go into the tent if it wasn’t necessary.

  The Sun was the only god on this journey. It colored clouds, lakes, water, and earth in a thousand shades and made every day threatening or magical. Malan wasn’t riding in front anymore; he had put the Sun in charge.

  “The land of our ancestors—that’s where the glorious Sun, the son of the Goddess, is leading us,” the Reghen and the Witches would say whenever men became restless. These Stories were shiny and impenetrable armor, protecting them from the boiling anger of the men. Despite all the promises, they had led us into a desert of hunger and desolation.

  “Our ancestors came through this land to give birth to you. Do not fail them.” This was the burden they laid on us. “If you hold faith, you will see the faces of their spirits, guiding you in the day and guarding you at night.”

  The truth was that I could see them. Soon, I could hear them too, whispering to me at night:

  We died and rotted trying to escape from this same steppe. Breathe the white dust, it is our skulls and bones; our bodies are one with the dry earth.

  The dead rose every morning to speak to me, to travel with the wind in the opposite direction, toward the west, where they longed to reach, in vain. Their bones awoke from the soil, swirled like small, bone daggers, and fell with vengeance onto our faces, into our eyes, and deep into our skin.

  “Where are you going, warriors of the Tribe?” they asked.

  “On the greatest campaign.”

  “We will come too. You will take us.”

  They weren’t asking. They were demanding. They got inside our ears, between our teeth, and under our eyelids, and rode with us. The storm-washed skeletons of our forefathers clung to us like sticky dust.

  The monotony of our journey cloaked everything and grew thicker with each wintry morning. The enemies, whoever they were, hid. We hadn’t reached them yet, so the men looked for other enemies and found them among themselves. The brawls, over women and food, were getting more frequent, and the Archers always got the best cuts, leaving the scraps for the rest. The slaves got hardly anything even though, together with the Craftsmen, they were the only ones of us who were of any use.

  Once every moon or so, the horde stopped at the banks of a river. We had plenty of men, and we became helpers of the Craftsmen and woodcutters, but there was never enough wood. The Craftsmen made bridges as long as a thousand feet and thirty feet wide and thrust into the shallow mud of the river giant stakes, pounding them hard with stones that they raised and lowered with pulleys.

  “Da-Ren, take care that no Craftsman is killed, and you go help them in whatever they want,” Malan had said to me at the last council of summer.

  The First Craftsman next to him, nodded with a serious face.

  “I haven’t trained my men to carry wood,” I said to Malan.

  He leaned back on the wood-carved throne, as if he were bored of my words.

  “Not much training needed for that. The work will do them good,” the Reghen answered me.

  Malan’s fingers fluttered a few times through the stuffy air of the tent, ordering me away. He did not ever raise his eyes to meet mine.

  All the Stories we heard as children were about brave warriors. But it was these men who hadn’t lived in even one Story: the Reghen, who scribed, counted and ordered, and the Craftsmen, who built the bridges, the double-curved bows, and the siege machines. Those would determine the fate of this campaign. Without them, we stood no chance.

  “This is not a campaign for heroes; what Malan promised me,” I said to the Reghen.

  “What did you expect?”

  “To fight the fierce warriors, to face the Buried Deadwalkers and the othertriber demons up close. To settle who’s best.”

  “A campaign of heroes—”

  “Why are you laughing? Isn’t this our Legend, your Reghen’s Legend?”

  “You will face their warriors soon,” the Reghen said. “All these tribes we conquer have their own heroes too. We will make them heroes, and they’ll call them so when we kill them,” he answered me.

  “This is not our Story. It isn’t the Story of the First Reghen,” I answered.

  “Oh, but it is. What are heroes for you, Da-Ren?”

  “Heroes live for battle. They wield the blade, ride the stallion, and shoot the bow.”

  “Those who rot defeated in the battlefields have blades too. You will meet their doomed heroes. Their offspring will become your slaves and praise their dead fathers’ heroism. The First Reghen sacrificed themselves, but not foolishly. They did it to bring victory to the Tribe. At the right moment.”

  The black cricket crawled out of the grass and to the edge of my boot and chirped repeatedly in agreement. The crickets of the steppe chirped whenever rain was coming or when we were approaching a river. These were the trails our ancestors passed long ago to reach the Iron Valley. The cricket had seen all of this before and hopped away.

  The heroes who sacrificed themselves like the first three Reghen of the Tribe. The old Reghen would continue to drill that Story into my head throughout the campaign. It was not by chance that this Reghen had come to shepherd me and keep me on Enaka’s path. They had sent him. He was preparing me. To become a hero. He readied me for the pyre.

  “We need heroes, but we need catapults and siege towers, even more,” said the Reghen.

  “What are you telling me? The one-carved heroes are now the same with the four-carved Craftsmen?” I asked.

  “The same? No, not the same. Heroes die. The Craftsmen, you better keep ‘em alive.”

  XLIX.

  A Magic Dust That Steals my Mind

  Twenty-First Spring. Firstblader />
  All men die. Despite the Reghen’s wishes, a few of the Craftsmen died in the icy winter that came, the first of my life away from Sirol. I spent those moons trying to stay warm inside my tent, proud that I didn’t lose a single Blade to the cold, and wishing for some crazygrass to wipe my mind clean. I mixed the dry powdered milk with the snow and rubbed the cups with my squirrel fur until it melted.

  Spring came as we headed south for the second half of our journey. The lands commanded by our garrisons and walked upon by our ancestors were long behind us now. We left the steppe to our north and headed south, having bypassed the whole east and northern coast of the Black Sea. Before us lay the distant lands of the Southeastern Empire, its northeasterly border. We were cut off by tall, snow-covered mountains, and we were forced to keep close to the shores of vast lakes, some of which were bigger than the entire Sirol valley. These were more like seas with angry waves, and brackish water so salty that not even our horses could drink.

  The horses were the only ones that never betrayed us. They were short but strong-limbed, the best for crossing these harsh terrains, perfect for climbing and enduring, swimming and jumping. They were born from the same curse as their riders. They were the opposite of the quick-trotting, elegant, tall horses we saw later in the Southeastern Empire. We took all the animals from the villages we passed along the way. Many of them were small and useless for battle, but they mated with ours and would give birth to stronger breeds, the Reghen said. I finally found a gray stallion that could honor and continue O’Ren’s name. He nickered and beat his hooves all the time, restless, and stuck his snout into my tent whenever I was late coming out for the day.

  We moved south fast, away from the salt lakes, and reached arid lands devoid of all life. The only thing that moved there was gray mud boiling in craters. The craters slowly spewed out rivers of mud that stank like the scum of Darhul and spilled over the hills like his nine gray tongues. The earth dried and cracked from end to end and made it impossible for our horses to cross.