Empire of the East

by Fred Saberhagen

  Gone. All of them gone.

  After a period of sitting, he became aware with a slight start that a man was standing near him in the yellow-gray dust of the road. There were sandaled feet and a pair of buskined ankles, and masculine calves with lean muscle and sparse wiry black hair. At first Rolf could think only that the man must be a soldier, and Rolf wondered if he might get out his knife and strike before the soldier killed him—he had thrust the kitchen knife awkwardly under the rope that was his belt, with his shirt closed over it for concealment.

  But when Rolf raised his eyes he saw that the man was no soldier. He appeared to be unarmed, and looked not at all dangerous.

  “Is there—something wrong?” The man’s voice was precise, and gently accented, one of the few voices Rolf had ever heard that spoke in its tones of far places and strange peoples. The speaker’s mild eyes blinked down at Rolf, from a face too woebegone in expression and too ordinary in most of its features for the hawk nose to give it pride.

  The man was no peasant. Though his clothes were not the finery of an important person, they were better than Rolf’s. He was dusty with long walking, and he had a pack on his back. His simple knee-length cloak was half open, and from under it one lean, dark-haired arm extended in a rotating, questioning gesture.

  “There is something much wrong, hey?”

  Finding an answer for that question was an insurmountable problem at the moment. Rolf soon gave up the effort. He gave up on everything.

  The next thing he was clearly aware of was the mouth of a water bottle being applied to his own mouth. If his mind had forgotten thirst his body had not, and for a few moments he swallowed ravenously. Then in reaction he nearly vomited. Good clean water choked him and stung his nose, but it stayed down at last. The drink shocked him, revived him, lifted him another notch toward rational function. He found himself standing, leaning on the man. He pulled away and looked at him.

  The man was a little taller than Rolf, not quite as dark. His face seemed leaner than his body, and somehow finer, as if he had trained his face to show only a part of a great and unrelenting worry—“ascetic” was not a word or concept that Rolf had at his command.

  “Oh, my. Something very much wrong?” The mild eyes blinked rapidly a time or two, and the lean face essayed a tentative smile, as if hoping to be contradicted, to hear that things might prove not so terrible after all. But the smile faded quickly. The stubby-fingered hands recapped the water bottle and reslung it under the cloak, then came up to clasp themselves as if beseeching to be allowed to know the worst.

  It took Rolf a little time, but he stammered out the essentials of his story. Before the telling was finished, he and the man were walking along together on the road, now going away from the highway and the Castle, heading back in the direction from which Rolf had come. Rolf noticed this distantly, without feeling that it mattered in the least which way he walked. The shadows of the trees were lengthening now, and all the winding road was cool and gray.

  “Ah. Oh. Terrible, terrible!” the man kept murmuring as he listened. He had ceased to wring his hands, and walked with them clasped behind his back. Now and then he hoisted and shifted his pack, as if the weight of it was still unfamiliar after all his travels. During the pauses in Rolf’s story the man asked his name, and told him that his own name was Mewick. And when Rolf ran out of speech the man Mewick kept talking to him, asking idle-sounding questions about the road and the weather, questions that kept Rolf from withdrawing again into a daze. Also Mewick related how he was walking along the coast of the great sea from north to south offering for sale the finest collection of magical implements, amulets and charms to be found on the open market anywhere. Mewick smiled sadly as he made this claim, like a man who did not expect to be believed.

  “Have you there—” Rolf’s voice choked, so he was forced to start over, but then the words came out strong. “Have you there in your pack anything that can be used to track men down and kill them?”

  On hearing this question the peddler only looked more gloomy than ever, and at first gave no answer. As he walked he kept turning his head to shoot glances of apparent concern at Rolf.

  “Killing and more killing,” the peddler said at last, shaking his head in disgust. “No, no, I carry no such things in my pack. No—but today is not your day for being lectured. No, no, how can I talk to you now?”

  They came to a branch in the road, where the right-hand fork led to the clearing where Rolf’s home had been. Rolf stopped suddenly. “I must go back,” he said with an effort. “I must see to it that my parents are buried.”

  Wordlessly, Mewick went with him. Nothing had changed in the clearing except for the lengthening of the shadows. What had to be done did not take the two of them long, digging with shovel and hoe in the soft earth of what had been the garden. When the two graves had been filled and mounded over, Rolf gestured at the pack which Mewick had laid aside, and asked, “Have you anything there that…? I would put some spell of protection on the graves. I could pay you for it later. Sometime.”

  Frowning bitterly, Mewick shook his head. “No. No matter what I said before, I have nothing here that is worth the giving. Except some food,” he added, brightening just slightly. “And that is for the living, not the dead. Could you eat now?”

  Rolf could not. He looked around the clearing, for the last time, as he thought. Lisa had not answered to his renewed calling of her name.

  Mewick was slowly getting into the harness of his pack again, seemingly hesitant about just what to say or do next. “Then walk with me,” he offered at last. “Tonight I think I know a place to stay. Not many kilometers. A good place to rest.”

  The sun would soon be setting. “What place?” Rolf asked, though he did not feel any real concern for where he was going to spend the night.

  Mewick stood considering the lay of the land, as if he could see for a distance through the woods. He looked to the south and asked a couple of questions about the roads that skirted the swamps in that direction. “It will be shorter, I think, if we do not go around by road,” he said at last.

  Rolf had no will now to debate or even to think. Mewick had helped him. Through Mewick he was maintaining some hold on life and reason, and he would go along with Mewick. Rolf said, “Yes, we can go cross-country if you like, and come out on the road near the swamp.”

  True to this prediction, they emerged from the scrub forest to strike the south-going coastal road, just as the sun was redly vanishing behind a low cloudbank on the sea-horizon. From the point where they struck the road it ran almost perfectly straight south for about a kilometer over the level land ahead of them, and then curved inland to the left to avoid the beginning of the swamps.

  The woods having been left behind, there were open fields stretching on either side of the road, all unplowed and untended. In two places Rolf saw houses standing deserted and half-ruined in their abandoned gardens. He kept walking on beside Mewick, feeling himself beyond tiredness, feeling floating and unreal. He could generate no surprise when Mewick stopped in the road and turned to him, slipping the pack from his own back and holding it out to Rolf.

  “Here, you carry for a little while, hey? Not heavy. You be an apprentice magic-salesman. Just for now, hey?”

  “All right.” Indifferently he took the pack and slipped it on. Gee-gaws and trash, his father had said, speaking of the things that the smooth-talking magic vendors peddled from farm to farm.

  “What is this, hey?” Mewick asked sharply. He had spotted the outline of the handle of the little kitchen knife, made visible now by the pack straps tautening the shirt around Rolf’s waist. Before Rolf could make the effort of answering, Mewick had pulled the knife out, exclaimed in disgust, and pitched it far away into the tall roadside weeds. “No good, no! Very much against the law here in the Broken Country, to carry a weapon concealed.”

  “The Castle law.” The words came in a dead voice through a closed jaw.

  “Yes. If Castle soldiers se
e you have a knife—ha!” Apparently anxious to defend his action in throwing away Rolf’s property, Mewick seemed to be making an effort to scowl fiercely. But he was not very good at it.

  Rolf stood with shoulders slumped, staring blankly ahead of him. “It doesn’t matter. What could I do with a little knife? Maybe kill one. I have to find a way to kill many of them. Many.”

  “Killing!” Mewick made a disgusted sound. He motioned with his head and they walked on. It was the last of day, just before the beginning of dusk. Mewick mumbled in his throat, as if rehearsing arguments. Like a man forgetful, lost in thought, he lengthened his strides until he was a couple of paces ahead of Rolf.

  Rolf heard the trotting hooves at a distance on the road behind him and turned, one hand feeling at his waist for the knife that was no longer there. Three soldiers were approaching at leisurely mounted speed, short black lances pointed up at the deepening clearness of the sky. Rolf’s hands moved indecisively to the pack straps; in another moment he might have shucked them from his shoulders and darted from the road in search of cover. But Mewick’s hand had taken a solid grip on the back of Rolf’s shirt, a grip that held until Rolf relaxed. The barren fields bordering the road here afforded next to no cover anyway, which no doubt explained why just three soldiers came trotting the road so boldly on the verge of twilight.

  The troopers all wore uniforms of some black cloth and bronze helmets, and had small round shields of bronze hanging loosely on their saddles. One of them was half-armored as well, wearing greaves and a cuirass of a color that dully approximated that of his helm. He rode the largest steed and was probably, Rolf thought, a sergeant. These days the Castle-men rarely appeared on duty wearing any insignia of rank.

  “Where to, peddler?” the sergeant demanded in a grating voice; he reined in his animal as he caught up with Mewick and Rolf. He was a stocky man whose movements were slow and heavy as he got down from the saddle—he seemed to be dismounting only because of a wish to rest and stretch. The two troopers with him sat their mounts one on each side of the road, looking relaxed but calmly alert, their eyes more on the tufts of tall grass around them and the marsh ahead than on the two unarmed walkers they had overtaken. Rolf understood after a moment that the soldiers must be taking him for Mewick’s servant or bound boy, since he had been walking two paces behind, carrying the load, and he was poorly dressed.

  But that thought and others were only on the surface of Rolf’s mind, passing quickly and without reflection. All he could really think of now was that these soldiers might be the ones. These very three.

  Mewick had begun to speak at once, bowing before the dismounted sergeant, explaining how he was hiking on his humble but important business through the Broken Lands from north to south, being welcomed by the valiant soldiers everywhere, because they knew he had most potent charms and amulets for sale, at prices most exceedingly reasonable, sir.

  The sergeant had planted himself standing in the middle of the road, and was now rotating his head as if to ease the muscles of his neck. “Take a look in that pack,” he ordered, speaking over his shoulder.

  One of the troopers swung down from his saddle and approached Rolf, while the other remained mounted, continuing to scan the countryside. The two dismounted had left their lances in boots fixed to their saddles, but each wore a short sword as well.

  The soldier who came to Rolf was young himself, he could have had a little sister of his own somewhere in the East. He did not see Rolf at all except as an object, a burden-carrier upon which a pack was hung. Rolf moved his shoulders to let the pack slide free and the soldier took it from him. At some time when the men of the Broken Lands still worked in the ways of peace, someone had filled and strengthened the road at this low place; under his bare feet Rolf could feel fist-sized rocks amid the sand and clay.

  The sergeant was standing leaning his dull gaze on Mewick as if trying to bore through him with it; the soldier took the pack there and dumped it on the ground between them, a cascade of gimcrackery on the damp earth. There fell out rings and bracelets and necklaces, tumbling and bouncing with love-charms of anonymous plaited hair, with amulets of carven wood and bone. Most of the objects were scribbled or shallowly inscribed with unreadable markings, meaningless signs meant to impress the credulous.

  The sergeant idly stirred the mess with his toe while Mewick, blinking and hand-wringing, waited silently before him.

  The young soldier stuck his own foot into the scattered pile and teased out a muddied love-charm, which he then bent to pick up. With his fingers he cleaned mud from the knot of long hair, and then held it up, looking at it thoughtfully. “Why is it,” he asked of no one in particular, “we never catch a young girl out here?”

  At that moment the mounted man had his head turned away, looking back over his shoulder. Rolf, without an instant’s foreknowledge of what he was going to do, moving in a madness that was like calm, bent down and picked from the roadbed a rock of killing size, and threw it with all his strength at the head of the young dismounted soldier.

  The young man was very quick, and managed somehow to twist himself out of the way of the missile. It flashed in a grazing blur past the astonishment of his fishwide eyes and mouth. With a sensation of deep but calm regret at having missed, Rolf bent to pick up another stone. Without time for surprise, he saw from the corner of his eye that the stocky sergeant was slumping folded to the ground, and that Mewick’s arm was drawn back, about to hurl a small bright thing at the man who was still mounted.

  The young soldier who had dodged Rolf’s first rock had drawn his short sword now, and was charging at Rolf. Rolf had another rock ready to throw, and the tactics he employed with it came from children’s play-battles with clods of mud. A faked throw first, a motion of the arm to make the adversary duck and doge, then the real throw at the instant of the foe’s straightening up. This way Rolf could not get full power behind it, but still the rock stopped the soldier, crunching into the lower part of his face. The soldier paused in his attack for just a moment, standing as if in thought, one hand raised toward his bloodied jaw, the other still holding out his short sword. And in that instant Mewick was on him from the side. A looping kick came in an unlikely-looking horizontal blur to smash into the soldier’s unprotected groin; and as he doubled, helmet falling free, Mewick’s elbow descended at close range upon his neck, with what seemed the impact of an ax.

  Two riderless beasts plunged and reared in the little road, and now there were three of them as the last of the troopers finally dismounted, in a delayed slumping fall, clutching at a short knife-handle fastened redly to his throat. In another moment the three freed animals were galloping back along the road to the northeast, in the direction from which they had come.

  Rolf was aware of the sudden strident calling of a reptile in alarm, high overhead. Still he could do nothing but stand watching stupidly while Mewick, his short cloak flying, hopped back and forth across the road, cutting one throat after another with the practiced careful motions of a skillful butcher. The last of the three soldiers to die was the one who had been first to fall, the stocky sergeant; he seemed to have been ripped from groin to navel in the first moment of the fight.

  Rolf watched Mewick’s knife make its last necessary stroke, be wiped clean on the sergeant’s sleeve, and then vanish back into some concealed sheath under Mewick’s cloak. His mind beginning to function again, Rolf looked about him, noted how one black lance lay useless and unblooded at the side of the road, then bent at last to pick up the young soldier’s short sword.

  With this weapon in his grip Rolf followed Mewick at a run, going south along the road, and then off the road on its western side, pounding across a weed-grown fallow field toward the nearest arm of swamp. Twilight was gathering, and the reptile’s cries grew fainter.

  Even as he and Mewick ran splashing into the first puddles of the bog, Rolf could hear distant hooves and shouts behind them.

  The Castle-men made no long pursuit—not at night, not int
o the swamps. Still the fugitives’ way had been anything but easy. Now at midnight, wading through hip-deep water, sliding and staggering amid strange phosphorescent growths, more than half asleep on his feet, ready to fall but for the support of Mewick’s arm, Rolf became suddenly aware of an enormous winged shape that drifted over him as silent as a dream. It was certainly no reptile but it was far bigger than any bird that he had ever seen. He thought it questioned him with words in a soft hooting sibilance, and that Mewick whispered something in reply. A moment later as the creature flew behind and above him, Rolf could see its rounded and enormous eyes by their reflection of some sharp new little light.

  Yes, on the land ahead there was a tiny tongue of fire. And now the ground rose to become solid underfoot. The winged questioner had vanished into the night, but now from near the fire there stepped forward a huge blond man, surely some warrior chieftain, to speak familiarly with Mewick, to look at Rolf and offer him a greeting.

  There was a shelter here, a camp. At last Rolf was able to sit down, to let go. A woman’s voice was asking him if he wanted food….

  III

  The Free Folk

  Yes, my parents are dead and under the earth—so Rolf told himself in the instant after awakening, before he had so much as opened his eyes to see where he was lying. My mother and father are dead and gone. And my sister—if Lisa is not dead, why she may wish she were.

  Having reassured himself that he was capable of coping with these thoughts, Rolf did open his eyes. He found himself looking up through the small chinks in the slant of a lean-to shelter, an arm’s reach above his face. The higher side of the low shelter was braced upon some slender living tree trunks, and it seemed to have been made mainly by the weaving together of living branches with their leaves. The interstitial chinks of sky were pure with bright sunlight; the day was well advanced.