by John Gwynne
Something’s not right. Drem frowned. The hound’s dun coat appeared much darker, the snow around it serving to intensify the difference in colour: white, unbroken snow almost glowing, the hound dark as night.
Olin reined in his horse, Drem did the same, both of the animals shying and dancing away as the two men slipped from their saddles. Fritha followed and Drem held a hand up, warning her to stay back. Fritha scowled and ignored him.
Closer, Olin and Drem instinctively fanned out, Drem’s hand resting on the hilt of his knife, his da slipping a short axe from his belt. Drem saw a splattering across the snow, droplets of blood about the hound, a string of rubies. He scanned the trees around them, widespread, the snow crisp and unbroken.
Nothing and no one hiding close by.
‘Surl,’ Fritha said, both command and question.
The hound wined, lifting its head from the trunk, seeming as if even that movement took the greatest effort.
Drem stared at the hound’s torso, trying to work out what was wrong. He could see the shape of its shoulder, the line of its back, but the colour was wrong, and it looked as if it had been draped with a cloak. A dark and red-veined cloak, the colour of burned charcoal from the forge. Then its body shifted, a ripple from neck to tail and the coal-black shape detached itself from the hound, rising, coalescing into a creature with red eyes set in a bloated, flat-muzzled head and long, needlelike fangs that dripped blood. A tremor pulsed through its body, vellum-like wings undulating, stretching out, twice as wide as the hound, now, snapping taut, a leathery rustle as the creature moved.
‘BAT!’ Olin yelled, throwing himself to the ground as the bat launched itself at him. It was bigger than a war shield, a high-pitched screeching like grating bones issuing from its mouth, talons raking at Olin’s back, his horse behind rearing and screaming, lashing out with hooves. The bat veered away, a shadow in flight, bearing back down upon Olin, who was turning, hampered by the deep snow. The bat landed on his chest, hurling him flat on his back, those long fangs darting down, towards Olin’s neck.
Drem flung himself at the creature, a blind rage filling him at the thought of it hurting his da and part-bellow, part-shriek burst from his throat as he slammed into the giant bat, hurling it from Olin, Drem rolling with it in a fountain of snow, wings tangling with his arms, a foul stench of rot and decay mingled with the sickly-sweet tang of fresh blood. Drem came to a halt on his back, grabbed at the bat’s wings as fangs snapped a handspan from his face, a wave of putrescence washing over him, making him gag. He tried to grab the beast by the throat, but its wings were beating a whirlwind in his face. A sharp claw on the spine of a wing slashed his arm, cutting through hide and thick wool to open the flesh beneath, a burning pain and blood-splatter across his face.
Seax on my belt. But he couldn’t spare a hand to reach it, tried to roll the creature into the snow but the weight of its body, the jerk and thrust of its muscular neck made it impossible to do anything but hold it, and he wasn’t doing that very well.
Fritha appeared above him, swinging a branch at the bat, crunching into its body. With a crack the branch splintered and Fritha grabbed a wing, heaving on it, but the blood-frenzied bat ignored her, jaws snapping closer and closer to Drem’s throat.
Another line of raking fire as the wing-talon gouged into his arm again, and then the bat’s head lurched forwards, fangs sinking into Drem’s shoulder.
He screamed, loud and echoing, new strength fuelling his body, and he ripped the bat from his flesh, blood trailing a crimson arc, the creature frenzied, jaws gnashing, red-lipped, and then, abruptly, its head exploded, blood and bone and rancid skin raining down upon Drem, in his eyes, his mouth, up his nose.
He coughed and spluttered, hurled the bat corpse away, its wings still twitching, wiped clots of blood and bone from his eyes and saw his da standing over him, framed by snow in the canopy above.
Drem rolled onto his side and vomited bile onto the snow, where it steamed in the frost-filled air. A hand under his arm and he was standing, his da checking him over.
‘Just my shoulder,’ Drem said, shivering at the thought of those long fangs in his flesh. Strangely, it wasn’t hurting, even under his da’s probing fingers it felt numb, just a faint echo of what he expected.
‘Can’t feel it,’ he mumbled.
‘That’s the bat’s saliva,’ his da muttered. ‘It numbs, like willow bark or skullcap. They usually attack prey that’s sleeping, can drain you dry without you feeling a thing.’
‘Is it dangerous?’ Drem asked, panic stirring that the numbness would spread, stop his heart and lungs from beating, or that he might die of some infectious disease.
‘Let’s get you home, clean it out properly.’
‘Aye,’ Drem agreed enthusiastically.
Fritha was sitting with her hound; the animal was still breathing, its head on her lap.
‘Will he live?’ Fritha asked, a tear rolling down her cheek.
‘Depends how long that thing had been feeding on him,’ Olin said, crouching and stroking the hound’s neck. ‘Get him home, clean his wound, feed him up.’ Olin shrugged. Then he looked past Fritha, eyes fixing on something beyond the hound. He stood, walked slowly forwards, examining the ground.
‘Get the ponies,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘We’ll see if we can get that hound up across one of their backs.’
Drem turned to find the ponies but had only taken a few steps before he felt a hand upon his arm. It was Fritha.
‘Thank you,’ she said. He opened his mouth to say something but she leaned forwards and kissed him on the cheek, a gentle brush of lips on skin, a hint of honey on her breath. Compared to the cloying stench of blood that was hovering around his face it was like a whisper of heaven.
‘Let’s get those ponies,’ she said and walked on, leaving him standing there, the beginnings of a smile twitching his lips.
Neither of the ponies had gone far; Drem’s was standing and stripping bark from a tree trunk, Olin’s remaining almost exactly where it had been to begin with.
‘What’s that?’ Fritha said, pointing at a dark object in the snow.
It was the new-forged sword, lying upon the snow, the tang, cross-guard and a handspan of the black blade poking from its sheepskin wrapping.
‘Nothing,’ Drem muttered, stooping and scooping it up, hastily pulling the sheepskin up over the tang.
‘Drem,’ his da shouted, voice muted in the snow-wreathed woods. There was a tone to it that set his skin tingling.
Drem ran, left the ponies, sword gripped tightly under his arm, the crunch of Fritha’s feet behind him. They didn’t have to go far. The smell hit Drem before he saw.
‘Think I’ve found what brought that hound into the woods,’ Olin said, standing and staring as Drem and Fritha stopped either side of him.
‘Asroth below,’ Fritha breathed.
Before them was a scene of carnage. The ground was stamped and churned, snow and blood mixed to a bloody sludge. Drem saw huge paw-prints amongst the pink mire. Lumps of meat were scattered all about the area. It took Drem a few moments to recognize them as body parts. A hand, half a leg, a shoulder and arm, flesh tattered and torn. A torso and head, the body almost eviscerated, guts strewn about like so much old rope.
‘No,’ Drem whispered, because the head staring lifelessly into nowhere had belonged to someone he knew, someone his da called friend.
It was Calder the smith.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
BLEDA
Bleda walked out through the open gates of Drassil. There were a dozen paces of near-darkness as he made his way through the arched tunnel beneath the battlements and gate-tower, and then he was stepping out into the last rays of daylight, the sun a pale glow above the trees of Forn. Before him spread the field of the dead, a road cutting a line through the cairns that filled the plain. Bleda took a deep breath and marched on.
He’d looked down upon these same cairns from the tops of the battlements many times, knew th
at they sheltered the fallen from that day that the world changed. The day the Kadoshim and Ben-Elim had broken free from the Otherworld and become flesh.
But those same cairns had looked different when viewed from so high above, like pebbles cast upon a cloth of green fabric. Now, though, they rose to either side of Bleda, tall as him, some taller, looming, filling his world, pressing in upon him.
So many dead! Has there ever been such a battle, with so many killed?
They were covered with moss and lichen, earth filling the gaps between stones, grass and weeds growing, snails and slugs and other things scuttling between the slabs of stone. The wind sighed through them, sounding like a thousand voices, whispering.
And what would the dead tell me, of that dread Day of Wrath? Deeds of valour, of courage and honour. Of murder and slaughter?
For a moment he remembered another battle, figures on the ground like ants, the Ben-Elim swooping down upon them, screams drifting up to a young boy on a hillside. He shook his head, scattering the memories like flies, returned to the cairns and their whispers of the Battle of Drassil.
Bleda had heard the tale many times, of how the Ben-Elim’s allies were hard pressed and overwhelmed on the plain by the greater numbers of the Kadoshim’s forces. Led by the black-hearted King Nathair, if Bleda remembered right. A man who rode to battle upon the back of a draig, a fearsome beast that was all but extinct in the Banished Lands now. The Kadoshim had been the first through the portal from the Otherworld, and so had filled the skies, diving down upon the beleaguered allies of the Ben-Elim, a warband from the western realm of Ardan, wherever that was. All Bleda remembered about them was that they were led by a beautiful queen, fair as the sun.
Edana.
The Kadoshim had fallen upon them like a plague, spreading their slaughter. But the Ben-Elim had been close behind, throwing themselves through the portal from the Otherworld, risking all, as Jibril frequently told Bleda and Jin in their lessons, in a desperate bid to save the good people of the Banished Lands. Asroth had been defeated, frozen, the Kadoshim routed, their allies slain or scattered, and so had begun the Age of Lore. The Protectorate of the Ben-Elim.
The reign of the Ben-Elim, whatever they like to call it.
Bleda glanced up at the sky, pale and open now as he moved beyond the reach of the great tree’s canopy, and imagined the Kadoshim and Ben-Elim up above, blotting out the sun, swooping and spiralling in aerial combat. He could almost hear the echo of their battle-cries, their death screams, the explosions of turf as they crashed to the earth in ruin.
It must have been a sight to see.
And then he was through the cairns, the first trees of Forn growing tall either side of the road, thickening as he walked on. The world changed about him in just a few steps, becoming a place of twilight and shadow, of scratching branch, shifting light and rustling leaf. Birds called and insects chittered, wood creaking.
A forest is louder than I ever would have imagined!
He’d rarely set foot outside Drassil. He was allowed to: there were no restrictions upon him as a ward of the Ben-Elim. He was treated as an honoured guest rather than a prisoner, even if Jin said otherwise, so he was at liberty to walk out onto the plains around Drassil, or even into the forest, though he was hesitant to do so. He did not want to do anything that would make the Ben-Elim doubt him, or bring shame on his Clan. Bleda knew that the cords around him were not thick rope or heavy iron. They were bonds of duty and honour and threat, and they bound him more tightly than anything fashioned by man. He knew if he tried to leave, to escape, to flee back to his kin, that he would be responsible for breaking the peace between the Sirak and the Ben-Elim. He would not do something that would shame his kin, or bring the wrath of the Ben-Elim down upon them.
‘You must be strong,’ his mother had said to him all those years ago. And he had tried to be, every single moment from that day to this one.
Some days that is harder than others, he thought, lifting a hand to his throbbing face. One eye was still closed from his beating, and he could still taste blood. And he was walking with a limp, a pain in his hip. He knew it could have been worse.
Would have been worse, if not for Riv.
He knew her name. A lot of people lived within the walls of Drassil, many thousands, but after five years you tended to know most of the people around you. Especially the ones that spent time on the weapons-field, which he frequented most. He often went there just to watch others train when he was not being taught, or listen to Jin mock them, and he had noticed that Riv seemed to spend more time there than the others. Certainly more than her training regime required her to be there.
She confused him; she was clearly skilled with many weapons.
Though not the bow!
A warrior dedicated to her craft, and brave. But so weak, as well. She had literally no cold-face, didn’t even try, and her control over her emotions was obviously just as brittle.
I should be grateful of that weakness today, as she saved me from a worse beating. Maybe even my life.
There had been a long, terrifying moment today when he’d thought that they were going to kill him, as he had fallen to the ground from a dozen blows and felt their boots slamming into him, the weight of them pressing down upon him, suffocating.
And then she had been there: Riv, snarling and spitting like a wolven in a sack.
‘Tonight, in the forest beyond the field of cairns,’ she had said to him, and so here he was, though he was not quite sure why he’d come. Inquisitiveness, yes, and there had been something in her eyes and voice that suggested this was important, somehow.
What does she want with me?
‘Over here,’ a voice said in the darkness.
Bleda stopped and stared, saw a shadow detach itself from the trunk of a giant oak. It waved an arm at him.
He left the road, skidding down a gentle incline as Riv stepped out into a beam of light. It caught her fair hair, highlighting threads of gold.
‘I thought you wouldn’t come,’ she said, a vulnerability on her face, in her eyes. Her nose was swollen and red, dried blood crusting one nostril. A reminder that she had paid a price for helping him on the weapons-field earlier that day.
‘Why would I not?’ he asked, frowning. He owed her a debt of thanks.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ she shrugged. ‘Here.’
She swung a bag from her back and offered it to him. It was leather, of the kind the White-Wings used to pack their kit in when marching off on a campaign. The shape inside pushed against the leather.
‘What?’ Bleda said, fighting a frown from his forehead.
‘Just take it,’ Riv said, shaking it at him.
He did, hesitantly, then opened the drawstring and peered inside. It was hard to see, the shadows of the forest dense and heavy, light shifting about them as branches swayed high above.
‘Take it out, then,’ Riv said impatiently.
Even her voice betrays her emotions!
Bleda glanced up, saw her studying him with a deep intensity.
He reached his hand into the bag, felt something smooth, a curve. His stomach lurched as within a heartbeat his confusion turned to shock and joy, for he knew in an instant what it was.
A Sirak bow.
He drew it out of the leather bag slowly, disbelievingly, and held it before him in his hands.
Not just a Sirak bow. My bow.
And in his mind he was back in Arcona, nine years old, sitting in an open-fronted ger and watching his brother shape this same bow with a feeling in his belly close to worship.
‘Hand me the sharkskin rasp, little brother,’ Altan had said to him. ‘Now the sinew’s dry we need to take these rough edges off. Otherwise it can feel like a fistful of thorns, which won’t help when you’re aiming at a Cheren arse-wipe, eh?’
Altan had laughed and shown him how to rasp the sinew that had been glued to the bow’s back, using sharkskin they’d traded from merchants come up all the long way from Tarbesh, far,
far in the hot south. Another world, Bleda had thought back then, his whole existence consisting of Arcona and the Sea of Grass.
He’d loved his brother so deeply, the sudden rush of this memory so vivid and clear in his mind’s eye, that he thought for a moment he could smell his brother’s sweat. It was like a punch in his gut. A groan escaped his lips and his vision blurred, tears filling his eyes.
‘Are you all right?’ Riv asked him.
Bleda blinked, swayed in and out of tree-cast shadows.
‘I . . .’ he said. ‘My bow. How?’
‘I saw it in the dirt, that day in Arcona. Just picked it up, I don’t know why. I should have given it to you a long time ago, I don’t know why I didn’t. I just . . .’ She looked at him strangely, then shrugged and dropped her head. ‘I’m sorry.’
And looking at her, hearing her words, Bleda felt almost overwhelmed by another rush of emotions. Anger, that his bow had been so close, all these years, this physical, touchable link to his brother, to his home, when all else he had was fragile memory, faint and transient as morning mist. But the other emotion surging through him was joy. It was almost like having his brother back, ghost-like memories wreathed about and through this bow like the sturgeon glue they had used to bind it. Joy at seeing his bow, touching it, a feeling of wholeness that he had lacked for so long he hadn’t realized it was gone. Until now.
Staring at Riv, these two emotions warred within him, back and forth, rage and joy, joy and rage.
Joy won.
‘My thanks,’ he whispered, and allowed himself the ghost of a smile as he looked upon the bow in his hands, his fingertips moving from the worn, leather-bound grip to the smooth, recurved lines of its limbs, horn on the belly, sinew on the back, all washed in countless coats of lacquer, the last flick of the bone ears where the gut string was attached.
‘I’ve tried to care for it,’ Riv mumbled, and Bleda could see that she had. He gave a little tug to the gut string, felt the dryness of it, knew it would fray and snap with much more pressure.