The Everlands Chronicles: The Truth

by A. J. Bell

  Sir Richard gathered some of his men and told them my plan. They all understood to obey my command, the orders of a squire. Most of them were from Stoneburg or the nearby villages, so they knew me well and thus didn’t questioned Richard’s orders.

  While Sir Richard’s men got ready, I spoke to the men that had been imprisoned. All the ones that wanted to fight with us were set free. The few remaining in chains were the ones that had been forcing the villagers to fight, and would be questioned by Sir Richard.

  I wrote a note for Ghad, because he needed to know what had happened to his brother in case I didn’t return to Greenville in time for Chad’s burial. I also wrote a short note for my parents that was only meant to be delivered if I were to never return.

  “You’re wounded. We need to take care of you before you depart,” said Sir Richard.

  “Most of this blood is Chad’s. I was lucky enough to get away with only a minor cut on my head and a few scratches. My wound has stopped bleeding, so I will just wash the blood off and we’ll be on our way.”

  Sir Richard hugged me, which felt strange, yet welcomed. “Be very careful. If you see you cannot take them down, leave! We’ll go back with more men – together. Don’t be stupid, lad. Think of your mother before you do anything crazy.”

  I nodded, then I went down by the stream and washed my face off. Red water dripped through my fingers and faded into the current of the unending Loveless River.

  “The men are ready, John,” said a soldier. They were ready, but was I ready to take more men to their doom? If we got caught, it would be the end of many of my father’s and Sir Richard’s friends. So many familiar faces marching to aid those who were so helpless.

  “We won’t be stopping until we’re close to the village. Be on your guard at all times. Ride on!” I ordered, taking the lead of the company and stealing one more glance at Sir Richard’s worried countenance.

  We traveled all the way to Pokan Village at full speed, taking no breaks. Although we arrived at night, there was no way we could have missed the village, even from a long distance. The village was on fire – the houses, the people, and the animals. It was all ablaze!

  The men from Pokan, whose families had turned to ashes, wept together. I mourned with them and shared their anger and frustrations. I felt their pain. Deep inside of me, I wept too. I wouldn’t crumble in front of them like the woman I was. I had to show strength I didn’t know I had. John couldn’t show Elle’s weakness. “Search for survivors,” I commanded, without hope. Sure enough, the men came back empty-handed after a couple of hours. I wanted to give them more time to mourn their losses, but if I did, we might be too late to help the other villages.

  “I don’t know the way to Gaelac or Tishan,” I told the men, “but enough lives have been wasted, and enough blood has been spilt tonight. Show me the way so that you and I might still try to help them. If you had a chance to spare this suffering for someone else, would you not do it? Would you allow other men to lose their wives and children because you have lost yours? This might be selfish of me to ask you, but ride out with me. Help me defeat those who have taken the most precious things that once were yours. Fight with me!”

  I wish I could say that the crowd rallied behind me after my speech, but their response was more solemn than that. The unanimous decision to continue the fight was based on the grief that these men shared. With their help, we were now stronger in numbers, burdened by loss but fueled by anger.

  Preparations were made for us to set out in the morning, and we rested for the night, although I was certain that I was not the only one who couldn’t sleep. But we needed to. We needed this time for both us and our horses to rest, drink, and eat plenty – to give us all strength for the journey.

  At early dawn, I went to a small stream near the outskirts of Pokan where we had camped to get a refill for my canteen. The water was nice and cool but couldn’t really be enjoyed. The smell of the massacre ruled the air, so that even uphill, I still perceived the smell of burnt flesh – impossible to forget.

  I soaked a small bandana I had in my pocket in the water and rubbed it on my face to cool me down. As I was leaning close to the stream, for an instant, I thought I saw something in the water. Then, a few seconds later, I saw the image again. But it wasn’t in the water. It was above me, in a tree branch – a pair of brown eyes staring intently at my sword, lying on the ground beside me.

  I continued to clean my neck with the bandana but also followed the reflection in the water as the silhouette moved closer to me. He jumped down from the tree and grabbed the hilt of Heaven, but I stepped on the blade and pulled him up by the hair. I was ready to strike, but my heart shattered when I saw he was just a boy, eleven-years-old at the most. I let go of him and he ran away, as fast as a deer sprinting through the woods. I followed him, trying to keep up, but he could squeeze his small agile frame through many places mine wouldn’t fit, forcing me to find alternative routes.

  Finally, I caught up with him by launching myself forward and grabbing his legs first, then I crawled until I was literally on top of him, and my weight was keeping him down. He tried to fight and push me off, but I had wrestled with greased pigs before and came out a champion, so there was no way a young boy would get loose from my grasp, no matter how hard he tried.

  “John, where are you?” I heard the men calling out for me.

  “Over here,” I yelled.

  In a few minutes, they had found us – me still on top of the boy and him still struggling to free himself. One of the men stepped forward and pushed me roughly aside. I hit my back on a rock, which hurt as if my back had been slashed open. I said nothing. I bit my tongue when I saw that the man who had pushed me was embracing his young son, tears streaming down his cheeks.

  The boy told his father that one of the women had pretended to join the enemy ranks in order to get some children out of the village without raising suspicion, and she had taken them deep into the woods into a small cave. She had gone back the previous night. When she didn’t return promptly, he decided to go out and find her. By so doing, he witnessed what had happened to the village.

  He said the Gypsies had taken some of the women with them, had locked the rest up in a couple of huts along with the remaining children, and then torched them. He was able to free the prisoners in one of the huts, but he couldn’t help the others. Sadly, his mother was not among the women he freed.

  “Take us to the others – the ones you freed,” I said.

  Things changed. The men had thought everything was lost, and they wanted to fight. Now, there was hope that some in their families might have survived. Would they still be willing to risk life or limb to protect others who may not be so lucky?

  We arrived at the little cave where a handful of the men had someone there waiting for them – a wife, a child, sometimes both. Unfortunately, too many of them had no one there.

  I was surprised to hear that the men who had found their loved ones alive would still leave with the rest of us, as long as we left behind some supplies to help their families until they returned safely to them. These men were true heroes; they had lost all and then gained it back within a few hours. Still, they were willingly going to help others keep all they had, if we arrived on time.

  We rode to Gaelac through the woods instead of taking the road. The route was shorter through the mountains. Gaelac, about one hundred miles west from Pokan, was a small trading village that kept peace with everyone. I was worried that they might be the ones that would suffer the worst loss since their men usually didn’t get into fights at all. I doubted they even knew how to wield a sword. Their trade was wool, so they had many sheep to look after, but possessed scarcely anything else. That was the place where the ‘beasts’ that attacked Pokan were heading.

  That’s where we’ll hunt them down.

  Gaelac was widely known for a two hundred foot wide gorge a few miles before the town. This drop-off was the reason many travelers stayed away from this area – Sir Ri
chard among them, since he hated heights so much. It was at the edge of the gorge that a line of men captured by the enemy were on their knees, with their backs to the huge emptiness. Women pleaded with the executioners to forgive their husbands. Regardless of their pleas, the bows of the enemy were fixed on the men and ready to release their fatal arrows.

  The archers of our company readied their weapons while the rest of us, with our swords, crept behind the prisoners across from the ones by the gorge. When we cut them loose, unintentionally, one of the prisoners gave us away by stepping on a small twig, breaking it in half. The noise wasn’t any louder than the sounds of the weeping women; yet, it still called the attention of the perpetrators, who quickly changed their aim from them to us. Luckily, our archers released their arrows first, taking most of them down – not killing them, but hurting them enough that they wouldn’t be able to attack again.

  The taking of Gaelac was easier than we had expected. Since we outnumbered the perpetrators, they really had no other choice but to die or surrender. They chose the latter.

  We spoke to the leader of the village, a widow named Sicah, who had lost her husband when the attacks began. Sicah’s husband was the first one to oppose the uprising against the King, so they killed him on the spot.

  “Where are the rest of the men?” I asked.

  “And where are the women that were taken by them?” one of the villagers from Pokan asked.

  “And children?” another one asked.

  I had missed the fact that a few of the men with me were also looking for their loved ones taken as prisoners from the attack on Pokan. They didn’t miss the fact that their loved ones weren’t among us.

  “Are there any other prisoners besides the ones that were bound here?” I asked, fearing the worst. Sicah’s answer confirmed my fears.

  “They came with prisoners, but they took them away again. Most of them were women and young girls, along with the men from our village that they are forcing to fight. The attackers took their families as prisoners to keep them in control, but they departed two days ago to Tishan. From there, I heard them say they were going all the way to Surien. The men you brought down along the gorge stayed to guard us.”

  “Two days ago? By the time we get there, it is going to be too late,” said one soldier.

  “No! No! It would only be too late if we waste our time!” I replied. “Tishan is closer to The Gardenhills than it is to the Everlands. When we’re near Tishan, we’ll send word to Sir Dorian, whose soldiers are keeping watch on our borders there. They can come to our aid on that end, and those cowards will never expect it.” I turned to face the men. “You have endured much, too much, in such a short time, but now, our brethren of Tishan and Surien need our help. We must send word to Abilene of what has happened here and in Pokan, and of what’s to come in Tishan and Surien. Those of you willing to ride to aid our brethren, gather your supplies and meet me here in two hours. No one will be judged if you decide to stay. Whether it’s many riders that follow me or none, I’ll still go and help the other villages.”

  Chapter 16

  A two-day journey on horseback waited for us to descend the mountain, and then another day once we reached the road to Tishan.

  Our assailants had one more day on the trail before they swept through Tishan with their wave of destruction. I stared at the gorge as I waited for the men to assemble. The huge emptiness of it gave me an idea. I wasn’t sure it was an excellent idea but felt it was worth trying.

  “If we can cross the gorge, we might actually be ahead of them.” The men looked at me as if I had gone mad, but I had been called crazy before; we were about to find out if I truly was. “The village of Tishan is behind those canyons in front of us, less than a half day, if we can avoid going through the ups and the downs of the mountains. I’m not good with the bow, so I need someone to help me,” I said to a very perplexed group of men. “I need the best archer we have.” The man who stepped forward was a new addition to our company from Gaelac named Masde.

  “Let me see your arrows.” He gave me one, and I examined the steel-coated end of it. “What things can you pierce with them?”

  “They can go through a bear skull without any problem,” Masde assured me.

  “And how is your aim, Master Masde?”

  “Never a miss, Sir,” he reassured me.

  I pointed towards a tree right across the gorge whose roots were hanging into the gorge. His eyes followed my arm. “I want you to send this arrow straight through its core. Can you do that?”

  He nodded. Obviously liking the challenge, he fired the first arrow, and it barely missed the tree, landing on the ground.

  “Never a miss?” I asked him.

  “Never!” Masde said with determination. He tried again, and this time, it hit the tree. He looked at me, so proud of his work, but his face turned pale when he saw me tying an arrow to the end of my rope – reading my thoughts.

  “Do it again,” I said, “straight through the core. My life will depend on your accuracy.” I handed him the arrow. He started to sweat heavily at the realization of what I was asking him to do, but then he fired, and the arrow found the heart of the tree and did not budge, even though I had three men pull on it as hard as they could. “Wait until I’m on the other side, then shoot a few more arrows in the other trees nearby. Once I have the ropes securely tied on the other end, go ahead and secure them on this end. Then you may begin to slide on them across the gorge, one at a time. Keeping your knees bent will help you when you land,” I instructed. I tied the other end of the first rope on the biggest tree that Gaelac’s edge of the gorge had. “Like I said, you aren’t obligated to follow me, especially if I fall into the abyss,” I joked, but some of them continued to stare blankly at me. I took off my leather belt, crossed it on top of the rope, wrapped my hands tightly around it, took a deep breath, and jumped.

  My heart rate rose as I glided over the gorge. It was less than thirty seconds before I reached the tree, and its roots that were hanging into the gorge helped me on my landing. I then tied the first rope around the tree several times until it was secure. Next, Masde shot five more arrows that I also secured around the other trees and waited for the men, but no one crossed. They were too afraid to even try.

  I lowered my head in disappointment, turned around, and started to walk away towards Tishan. Moments later, an arrow passed by my foot and landed on the ground. I looked back and saw Masde beginning to slide across the gorge, with a few others following him.

  Not everybody crossed the gorge, but I had a party of at least thirty-five men, which was so much better than me alone. Once they all had crossed the gorge, we started to run towards Tishan, staying away from the main roads, just in case any of our enemies might be hiding there. The people of Tishan were relieved to see us, and they immediately attacked the men who were guarding them. When these perpetrators became our prisoners, we made sure they were well bound and their mouths silenced before we positioned ourselves inside the huts. It was actually good fortune that we didn’t bring the horses with us.

  We let the intruders walk all the way into the main square of the village with their prisoners behind them. Their leader called out to the men in the village to surrender.

  “Citizens of Tishan, the time has come. Join our cause and bring down the unrighteous ruling of King Tobias over the Everlands. No more oppression, no more…”

  I had enough. I walked out of my hiding place, sword in hand. Their leader froze in mid-sentence.

  “Citizens of Pokan, Gaelac, and Tishan, your King doesn’t forsake you. He doesn’t forget about you; neither does he go from village to village plundering and killing at will, like these assassins do. It’s time to raise your swords, clubs, and anything you find near at hand and use them to win your freedom back. We are here to fight in the name of the King. Fight with us. Fight for your freedom!” I said.

  “Shut him up!” one of the intruders said. Two other men came walking menacingly towards me. I just
chuckled and waited. After those two, two more approached me, and then two more until I was surrounded. I gave the sign to my soldiers, and then we charged against them.

  The battle had begun. Some of the prisoners, although still bound, kicked and fought to free themselves from their oppressors. Once again, it wasn’t that hard for us to defeat them. We thought they would have strength in their numbers, but it turned out that there weren’t that many of them. They had sent the majority of their men and a great amount of the prisoners to Surien before they even arrived at Tishan.

  We sent Masde to deliver a message to the Everlanders at the Gardenhills border to ask them to help the people of Surien. After days of almost no rest, no food, and no peace, my body was giving way to fatigue, but my spirit wanted to continue to fight. I knew that I was asking too much for my men to follow me to Surien, but regardless of how exhausted we were, we had to ride there as fast as the wind itself if we wanted to have a chance to aid its people, and so we did.

  We stopped only as we needed to – taking short naps here and there, grabbing a quick bite of bread and some fresh water to drink while on the road. The three-day journey took longer than we wanted it to. Even though we grabbed horses in Tishan and gained more men, the hardship of the long journey was taking its toll on all of us. Surien’s greatest hope rested on Masde’s shoulders. I just prayed he had reached Sir Dorian’s encampment in time.

  We watched the battle from the top of Hope’s Hill, whose name perfectly fit our cause. The name of Hope’s Hill was given to it because, a while back, when the village of Surien was established, they were hit hard with a deathly fever produced by snake bites. When searching for a way to cure its inhabitants, Surien, their leader, found at the top of a hill a plant with small berries that brought their fever down and saved them. He called them ‘Ghost Berries’ and he named the place where he found them Hope’s Hill.