Horn of the River God: Book I of The Song of Agmar

by Frances Mason

  “As often as I can,” he agreed. He sighed then, and extended his hand. “But for you I would make my body ache even if you offered no release. I’m your slave.” He twiddled his fingers, inviting her to take his hand.

  She folded her arms, pushing her perfect young breasts up. His body responded instantly, his cock hardening. The whore who had bit his balls now grabbed his cock and gently bit the knob, before running her tongue down his shaft’s quickly growing length. He grabbed her by the hair and lifted her face away. She pouted.

  “You see what I renounce for love of you?”

  “In hopes I’ll satisfy you where she can’t.”

  The whore protested, “I can satisfy any man.”

  The nun raised an eyebrow, a mocking smile playing lightly across her lips. “Only the goddess can satisfy the deepest longings.”

  “Show me,” he implored.

  “You’re not ready.” She moved toward the door.

  Oliver sprang out of the bed and bounded to the door, blocking her path.

  She looked at him with the eyes of a frightened child, and instinctively he moved out of her path. She stepped past and turned back to smile at him. “Perhaps you are learning.”

  “I’m ready to learn,” he said.

  “You have so much to learn.” She turned to descend the stairs.

  “You wouldn’t create trouble for me with Amery, would you?” he asked in a pleading tone.

  “Now why would I do that?” she said, turning back to face him.

  “I wouldn’t give you cause. Not if I knew what was cause.”

  “No, I believe you.”

  “So, what do you want?”

  “Is it so unclear?”

  He hesitated, then shrugged. “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t have to. Not with this.” She pressed a fingertip against his forehead, and at the touch he gasped. A feeling suffused his body that he could not describe, but which might have been a combination of every bodily pleasure he had ever experienced. He felt he was going to come. He thought, she’s not even touching my cock. He staggered and reached out and grabbed the edge of a tapestry to prevent himself falling over. Then she withdrew her fingertip from his forehead and placed her open palm against his chest. His heart stopped, or beat more quickly, he could not tell which, his thoughts were in such confusion. He heard her voice then, saying, “Here you must listen and hear the truth,” but the voice seemed to come from the rhythm of his own heart, mingling with those of another. He felt the pulse in the hand against his chest, and his own heart steadied to the rhythm of hers, until they beat in unison. Then he was looking into her eyes, and saw her arm by her side, and wondered whether it had all been an illusion.

  “Will I see you again?” he asked as she turned back to the stairs.

  She looked back over her shoulder. “Can you doubt it?” Then she was gone.

  Chapter 37: Jasper: Vrong Veld

  As Jasper reached the narrow streets of the inner city he thought of Hwe Li. His heart beat faster. He was amazed that still, after so many years, she still cast such a spell on him. It was normal, of course, for an abbess of Love to take a knight commander of the Crimson Monks as a lover. The god and goddess were husband and wife, though the myths said they were rarely faithful to each other. The nuns always worked to improve the standing of the monks, and the monks provided protection for the nuns and priestesses when it was needed. This was all unremarkable. But for one woman to enchant Jasper for so many years? In his youth he had had many lovers, so many that he had forgotten most of their faces and names. He knew there was magic in the way she affected him, but he did not feel anger toward her because of that. For him it only made her more appealing. She was, like Love herself, a force of nature, and his own nature, quick to anger but quicker to calculate clearly in the heat of battle, hot in passion, but not ungentle, was bound to her more surely than chains could accomplish.

  He was drawn from his reverie as he was hailed from behind. A servant in the duke’s livery ran up, out of the shadows, panting and calling his name breathlessly. The servant proffered a sealed scroll. “Her Grace sends an important message, Sir.” Jasper could not turn his palfrey in the narrow street, so shifted in his saddle onto his left thigh and leaned back to take the scroll. Something struck him as wrong, then he noticed the bloodstain on the livery and that the man’s body was turned to hide his other arm behind his body. At that moment the man dropped the scroll and caught him by his sword arm. A glint of steel revealed the dagger in the servant’s other hand. “Nethra’s blessing,” he hissed as the knife slashed up toward Jasper’s heart.

  Jasper’s mind raced, and the knife seemed to move so slowly that it was easy for him to avoid the thrust. He heard the footsteps from in front and knew without looking that other assassins lay ahead. Then he saw several more emerging from doorways behind the false servant. They wore the black cassock of the Dark Monks. But to be a monk of the god of death in this city was to court your own death, Jasper thought. Even in the capital the Dark Monks knew better than to invade the territory of the Crimson Monks. This was suicide, and while the Monks of Death were known to accept death to bring off high value assassinations, to do so in the power base of the Monks of War risked all their brethren across the kingdom, and even the very hierarchy of their temples and monasteries.

  While all these thoughts sped through Jasper’s head his free hand drew his own dagger, a long thin knife for piercing the visor slit of unhorsed knights. But he realised as it came free of its sheath that without flipping one leg over the saddle he could not extend his free arm effectively, and with his foot firmly in the stirrup he would not risk a potentially deadly entanglement if he could not quickly get it free. As well as which he would be butcher’s meat if he dismounted with the assassins closing in from all sides. Instead of trying to release his sword arm, he grasped the assassin’s wrist in turn and yanked with all his might, slamming the assassin into his palfrey’s rear. The assassin bounced back, letting slip Jasper’s wrist as Jasper released his. The palfrey, unsettled by the impact lashed out with a vicious kick of both rear hooves. The assassin was thrown with great force back into the oncoming group of assassins, the white of a shattered rib bone protruding from the stolen livery, his face blank with unconsciousness or death.

  The others indifferently shoved him aside and moved forward slowly, even cautiously, glinting long knives in their hands, faces hidden beneath their dark cowls. Jasper wondered why they did not carry crossbows, and turning forward saw that the same was true of the others in that direction also. To ambush him here with crossbows would have given him no chance of survival. Perhaps the reputation of the Dark Monks was more legend than truth, but it did not make sense for them to be so incompetent as this. Those in front did not even draw knives, almost inviting him to charge.

  Perhaps that’s what they want, he thought, and it’s good strategy to frustrates an enemy’s wishes. But he could not turn his horse here, and she would not charge into thrusting knives anyway, even if she had been armoured with barding. She was not a warhorse. She was a palfrey in the safe streets of his home town. But there was a chance she would do what was needed; this was not a terrifying battlefield. There was no din of weapons striking, no screams of a hundred men dying to spook her. He knew there was a broadening of the street just around a turn beyond the assassins in front of him. There another street joined it, merging to form a single wider way. His palfrey nickered and twitched her ears. He whispered reassurance in her ear, patting her neck soothingly, then spurred her forward. At first she was reluctant to charge the men, then she either saw the slight parting in their ranks, or sensed the men closing behind. She galloped forward, knocking the assassins aside, into the walls.

  Jasper did not waste time reaching for his sword, which would have been less effective in this narrow space than in the open anyway. He stabbed and slashed with his dagger at the faces and necks of those who had not been pushed aside by the palfrey’s flanks.
The dagger found more than one mark. One assassin he caught full in the face, the blade serving its purpose well, slicing through nose cartilage, bone and brain, killing him before he could register the shock of his injury and scream. The assassin fell without a sound under the palfrey’s hooves. Another screamed and grasped his neck as blood gouted through the fingers he pressed against the flow. Another stumbled back grasping his eyes, slashed from side to side. If he survived he would never see again. Strangely, while they now drew their daggers, none tried to thrust at him, at least as far as he could see. Then Jasper was through them, and galloping up to the turn, low over his saddle bow in case absent crossbows were belatedly produced, knife at the ready in case a further ambush awaited beyond the turn. But as he emerged into the widening street he only saw ordinary townspeople.

  A leprous beggar extended his bowl. Jasper examined him carefully, unsure whether it was a disguise. He observed with equal suspiciousness the wives gossiping outside the baker’s shop, and the shopkeepers haggling with customers and the hammering blacksmith and his apparent apprentice, and others. But their faces were familiar, and he recalled having given alms to that beggar the last time he had been in the city. He looked behind to see if he was being followed. He felt a strong urge to turn around and charge back down the narrow part of the street, slaughtering as many of the assassins as he could, but his tactical mind overrode his rage. He would send out a contingent of fully accoutred Crimson Monks when he reached the Quarter of Blood, though he guessed the assassins would have disappeared by then.

  Many things struck him as wrong in what had just happened. This attack was unprecedented. Was Augustyn so powerful with the Brotherhood of Death that they would risk their order’s very existence? And if it was they who targeted him, would they send such incompetent fools? However exaggerated the Dark Monks’ reputation might be, surely trained assassins would not be so useless as this. The place of ambush had been perfectly chosen; in that at least they had not been inept. He had been taken off guard, and his movement confined. Admittedly they had been lucky in finding him distracted, pondering the mysteries of love, complacent in his home city, heartland of the Crimson Monks, uncharacteristically unaware of his surroundings. But he always said to the novices that half of success in war is dumb luck, and that was not entirely a lie to make proud young warriors wary of the too quick charge. There had been many of the assassins too, hemming him in. He was armed but unarmoured and his mount was no warhorse. Yet despite all the odds being against him he had escaped without a scratch. If ever his dictum about luck had been proven true it was now. And yet…as exceptional as his soldiery was, as good as his luck had often been, the assassins’ failure did not seem plausible to him.

  Jasper examined himself. Then he saw the cut across the forearm of his tunic sleeve. He poked a finger through it, and drawing it out saw a smudge of red. He rolled back the sleeve. There was a cut along the inside of his forearm. He was not sure whether it had been inflicted by the false servant or one of the others. It was more a knick than a cut, about half an inch long, and only a little blood oozed slowly out.

  Riding toward the Quarter of Blood, as the excitement of battle faded, he felt nauseous. His vision clouded at the edges, and his head ached, and the sea seemed to roar in his ears. By the time he reached sight of the order’s quarter he had slumped over the neck of his palfrey. She trotted on, returning to her home stable. As he rode through the gate he saw eyes staring at him from the darkness, and yet he had thought it was still day. He could not think clearly, or remember a thought moments after it passed through his brain. A groom shouted something, which combined with the sound of shod hooves on cobbles, the groom’s voice was galloping and hooves spoke in strange tongues between cobblestone shaped teeth. A threatening sea of faces surged about him. He looked down and saw the sun beneath them, and both sea and sun jolted at short intervals. He was hanging from the palfrey, his foot caught in a stirrup, his head bumping on cobbles, which bit his scalp. A face with eyes of creamy jade that slanted gently down at the edges. A small mouth above them pulsed like a tiny heart, opening and closing, breath bleeding invisibly out. Raven black hair flowed up from the sky to the ground. Arms, disconnected from the rest of a body, pushed him toward the sky. Hwe Li’s screams for help were as distant and cosmic as the adulteries of the gods, and other voices shouted softly amidst the din of the roaring sea.

  “Poison,” he croaked, but he could not be sure they could hear him, or even that he had thought what he thought he had said.

  Several pages and grooms rushed and lifted him, untangling his foot from the stirrup, lowering him to the ground beside the horse trough next to the stable doors.

  “Dark Monks!” he muttered to a groom, “Dark Monks! Find them.”

  The boy’s face was puzzled. Perhaps the boy had not heard. Perhaps Jasper had not made sense. He tried to speak again, but his mouth felt as though it had been filled with dusty molasses, and his tongue stuck to his palate, and his words slurred into nonsense, though whether in his head or on his lips he did not know. The smell of hay and horse manure was in the air. More voices shouted and more faces surged about him. He was sure one of them was Hwe Li, but her presence, usually so pleasurable, now only seemed to make him sick. He vomited, then dry retched, but he knew the poison was in his blood not his stomach. Hwe Li was covered with the former contents of his stomach, but she had not flinched or drawn away. For the first time in the years he had known her he saw her cry. He reached out to touch her face, fascinated by this miracle. She was the abbess of the local convent of the goddess of love, a power in these parts and the kingdom itself from eastern to western sea, but the contents of his gut had made her cry. He wondered what had been in his gut, but even in his delirious state knew that thought made no sense. His veins ran with cold fire. Then the thought was gone and forgotten. He felt the moisture on his hand. He was too weak, and his hand fell away, but she caught it and held it against her cheek.

  The order’s apothecary, Abelard, and his apprentice, the lanky novice Pierre, were shoving all the rest aside. Even Hwe Li was taken aside by Pierre. Abelard examined Jasper, large eyes made larger behind thick lenses suspended by a bent piece of silver wire on his long nose, which was crooked from having being broken and poorly set many years ago. Deep wrinkles at his eyes’ edges deepened, as those on his brow multiplied with his frown. He was a Crimson Monk too, and had been a great warrior in his youth, but time had grizzled him; a long grey beard hung down to his broad chest, and when he walked he limped with many old battle wounds.

  Abelard checked Jasper’s pulse, placed his fingers on the knight commander’s lids and forced them wide open, examining carefully the whites of his eyes. Finally he examined the vomit. Jasper was not able to sit up, and had difficulty lifting his hand, but with his fingers he crawled his hand across his body and tried to point to the arm which had been cut. “Poison…blade,” he tried to say, but could barely whisper. The apothecary, not understanding at first, shouted a question at the surging sea of faces. Marcos’s face floated forward. He kneeled and leaned close to Jasper, his ear next to the knight commander’s mouth. “Cut,” Jasper mouthed, with barely a breath. Marcos sat up and said something to Abelard, which Jasper could not make out through the roaring in his ears. Abelard shook his head and pointed to the vomit. Marcos argued vehemently with the apothecary for a moment, then grabbed Jasper’s arm, rolling back the tunic. He could find nothing. Again he and the apothecary argued, then he reached for the other arm, and rolled up the tunic sleeve. Triumphantly, he pointed and gesticulated. The apothecary examined the cut. He snapped an order at Pierre, who ran off.

  Faces drifted in and out of Jasper’s vision. Hwe Li struggled against Abelard; but that veteran of many battles was still a strong man, despite his age and injuries, and all her rage broke futilely against his bulk, until Marcos motioned that he should release her. She threw herself on Jasper and tore at his clothes, slapped his face, and screamed at him, “Don’t you d
are die you bastard, don’t you dare. You’ll not escape me that way. I’ll fight through the halls of the dead to find you. You won’t escape me there. Even Death submits to the goddess.” She beat his chest. Marcos gently lifted her and held her away as Pierre returned. She flailed against Marcos at first, but he did not only hold her with force, shouting at her, “For the life of him you love, let them work.” Her rage subsided then but not her anguish. She wept so intensely that her whole body shook. She watched Abelard work, the faint glimmer of hope in her eyes continually washed away by her flooding tears.

  Pierre had brought a wooden tray, so large he had to carry it with leather straps about his neck. He carefully set it down on the horse trough, beside his master and knight commander. On it were many phials, some of green or red or blue or clear glass, and many other colours; some of white or pink quarts veined with glittering gold or jet black, or carved from marble or sandstone; some of ceramic; and one even seemingly fashioned from a single great sapphire. Beside the phials was a collection of tiny ceramic bowls with lids, distinguished by subtle shades in the colour of their baked clay, and the numbers of their regular polygonal edges. Abelard took one of the phials and unstoppered it, inverted it with his fingertip on its opening, then touched his fingertip against the cut. He watched the result carefully, then took another phial. From this one he dripped a viscous cream-white liquid onto the cut. Jasper felt intense pain, shooting from his forearm to his shoulder, from his shoulder to his head, and he roared as the pain descended through his whole body, though a moment before he could not have whispered a complaint.

  Hwe Li screamed, “You’re killing him,” and struggled more against Marcos, but Abelard merely nodded to himself with a satisfied expression and muttered, “That’s the one.”

  He took several phials and a small mortar and pestle, and placed them beside him on a slate stone by the horse trough, lifted the lids of half a dozen bowls in turn, taking careful measures of dried herbs from each with tiny silver spatulas, and combining them in the mortar. Then he poured or dripped from each of the phials onto the herbs, some reacting with each other to fizz and bubble or send up tenuous threads of foul smelling smoke or weird coloured vapour. Finally Abelard ground the whole mixture with the pestle. Then he motioned to one of the grooms and pointed to the gourd of watered down wine that hung at his waist. The groom handed him the gourd. With its contents Abelard diluted the mixture, then carefully stirred it for consistency.