A Sterkarm Kiss

by Susan Price

  “Sterkarms!” a woman screamed in her face, and shoved her away.

  Mistress Crosar heard a male yell, a roar of wordless anger. She saw figures move in the smoke. She ran for the tower herself. An axe chopped into her back, knocking her flat in the mud and smoldering, fallen thatch. The axe chopped at her head. Then the man trod on her as he ran on to the tower.

  The yard of the tower was crowded with storehouses, stables, kennels, smithies, dairies—all of them thatched and most of them with wooden upper stories. Many of them were now well ablaze, and most were somewhere on fire. The glaring, shifting light reflected off the thick smoke, which filled the alleys, stinking and clogging the lungs. Burning thatch fell and whole walls threatened to come down. The heat was intense.

  “Out!” Patterson yelled, and made shooing signals at his men.

  The Sterkarms were still hunting through the alleys, yelling and whooping hunting calls, mad to kill and utterly blind to danger.

  The Elves made their way back to the gatehouse and ruined gate. Fire made them turn back twice, seeking another way through the alleys. The roar of burning and the heat was constant, and Patterson was sure that he’d left it too late and trapped his men as well as himself. But they found the gatehouse and emerged thankfully on the hillside, where it was relatively free of smoke, and cool, and open. The men he’d left on watch were waiting, with Gareth.

  Patterson laid down his gun, and while removing his helmet and wiping his dirty, sweating face, he stood in front of Gareth, looking at the kid’s anxious face. He said, “Fuck me. Wind ’em up and let ’em go.”

  “What?” Gareth said. He kept glancing from Patterson to the smoke and flames rising above the tower walls. He was trying to keep himself from asking if that should be happening.

  “Your pals. They’re still in there.”

  “Mad buggers,” Atwood said without admiration.

  “Place is burning down around their ears,” Patterson said, “but they don’t want to miss anybody out.”

  “Women and bloody kids,” another man said.

  Burnett laughed. “Equal fucking opportunities.”

  Yes, but they’re not real people, Gareth found himself thinking. They’re history-book people, not real people. It’s only like turning a page in a history book—“Brackenhill Tower was taken by assault.”

  A woman’s yell rose above the noise of the fire—not the operatic scream of a film’s soundtrack but the choked, astonished yell of a woman whose voice only reached that pitch and volume because of a terror and desperation that Gareth had never felt in his life—but an impression of it thrilled along his nerves at the sound. All the men looked around and froze at that yell—then realized that there was nothing they could do, and relaxed.

  “Happy days,” Patterson said.

  The Sterkarms came ducking out of the gatehouse, coughing, gasping, spitting, and ran over to them. Not all of them were there, and as they came nearer, the faces under the helmets were so streaked with blood, sweat, and dirt that they were impossible to recognize. And they were carrying heads. Human heads were dangling from their hands by the hair. They slowed to a walk near the Elves, and they were laughing. They threw the heads down on the hard ground. Thump, they went.

  Gareth looked away as soon as he realized what the things were, but then he looked back again, fascinated. He’d never seen a head, cut off, before. He had to know the worst. They looked surprisingly normal. Just heads, but ending at the neck. He felt himself turning cold, shudders running through his flesh. These had been people, alive, full of their own concerns … If this could be done to them, it could be done to him.

  Someone slapped his shoulder and made him jerk with shock. It was Patterson, yelling at him. “What?”

  “What’s he saying?”

  The man beside Patterson was Per Sterkarm—Gareth could see that, now he’d wrenched off his helmet. His fair hair stuck up in sweat-fixed spikes. Per pointed back toward the tower and said something urgently. Gareth tried to concentrate, with his eyes straying again toward the heads lying on the ground. One was a woman’s head. A woman …

  “What’s he bloody say?”

  “Ahh … he wants you to put a shell—or a rocket, or whatever they are—through the roof of the tower,” Gareth said.

  “There’s only women and kids in there,” Burnett said. “We ain’t doing that, Skip. Are we?”

  Per pointed to the burning tower. “That be a beacon fire. Every Grannam who sees it will light beacons, and they’ll come here with as many men as they can raise. And more will come after. Can you kill them all? Even with your Elf-Cannon, can you kill them all?” He paused, to let Gareth translate, but paced up and down and didn’t let Gareth finish before adding, “If we leave tower, they’ll use it again—use it against us. Put a bomb through its roof. Do it now!”

  Gareth stumbled over the words. He found them turning to dry, clogging earth in his mouth, almost impossible to form or spit out. Never before had his words been directly responsible for killing. But by the time his voice dried altogether, he’d translated enough.

  In silence Patterson stooped, took a rocket from the box at his feet, and loaded it into his launcher.

  “Skipper—” Burnett said.

  “See that?” Patterson nodded toward the heads lying on the ground. “You think we’ve got nothing to do with that?” He knelt, raising the launcher to his shoulder.

  “We’re just doing their dirty work,” Burnett said.

  Another man, Ledbury, took out a rocket and loaded it. “We’re being paid to do their dirty work.” He loaded and knelt.

  Everyone stuck their fingers in their ears and watched as first one rocket, then a second, went arcing up. Mouths agape, they watched the trails of smoke, watched them curve down. The first hit the tower’s tiled roof near one corner, at the edge—the second struck an eye blink later, more centrally. The explosions came to them as one blast, blowing high dust, tiles, splintered wood. They watched the dust cloud expand, lose its shape, drift. The Sterkarms cheered. They linked arms, danced, and cheered.

  The tower itself was burning now. Gareth looked at it, feeling half stunned as he thought of how those rockets, having pierced the tiled roof, would have blown through the wooden floor beneath and fallen into the hall, probably crowded with women and children. He didn’t want to think any further than that, but his mind ran on anyway, showing him pictures of metal shards slicing flesh open, of wooden splinters shot through soft bodies, of bones shattering, veins spilling blood, arms and legs parting company with bodies … Was anyone in the tower still alive?

  “Away! Away!” The Sterkarms had gathered up the heads, and they were running away from the tower, back to the moor where they’d left the rest of the horses, and they were whooping and laughing. Gareth hurried after them, afraid of being left behind, but he was thinking, with misery, of all the way they had to travel back—all those hills, and all those streams and bogs. He could feel all his muscles aching and twanging as he ran. And this is what I think of, he thought, when I’ve just seen people butchered—I think of my own aches and pains. But then, he was amazed that he could still think at all.

  18

  16th Side: The Elves’ Offer

  “You’ll no touch me,” Andrea said. “You’re no locking me up anywhere—you’re no!”

  “I’ll no leave you to run round,” Isobel said. “There be no telling what you might do.”

  The two big men—elderly, but still big men—edged farther into the room. There were also several women—big, strapping border lasses.

  “I am no working for Grannams,” Andrea said, and stepped sharply back, raising her hands, as the men and women moved closer. “I am an Elf! I am a friend of Elf-Windsor! If you lock me up—if you touch a hair of my head—you’ll answer for it to Elven!” That made them halt. Andrea looked at Isobel. “If you insult me, there’ll be
no more white pills. No more favor from Elven.”

  Isobel set her hands on her hips, stuck out her lower lip, and snorted down her nose. “Then you stay here, Mistress Elf! You shall no go to my kitchens, nor about my storerooms. Here! With a guard.”

  Isobel was always one to keep her word. So Andrea was sitting in one of the armed chairs by the fireplace in the tower’s topmost, private room—and remembering how she’d been imprisoned there before. Per had been away fighting then too—but that time he’d been waylaying Elves, not Grannams. Had that been a different Per, or not?

  It was hard to think about it without confusion. Would her Per have slit the throat of a helpless girl?

  No. He wouldn’t. He just wouldn’t. He’d fought, yes, and probably killed, in defense of his land, but he hadn’t killed women and children. He’d had courage and a kind of honor …

  Don’t romanticize, Andrea. It’s all circumstance. Don’t we all change, and sometimes drastically, when our circumstances change?

  Better stop philosophizing, she thought, and hope that this Per comes back alive, and that he’s enough in lust with you, at least, to save you from Isobel … or that Windsor turns up soon and has enough fellow feeling for another Elf to get you out of here …

  When they’d first left the ruined and burning Brackenhill Tower, Per’s spirits had been soaring with all the exultation of winning and still living. And he’d had his revenge, more than paid the blood debt, and won fame—he was the Sterkarm who’d attacked and destroyed the Brackenhill Tower.

  The others had been in good spirits too, and their long way home had been lightened by memories of the Brackenhill Tower, shattered and burning. “Dost mind how tower went up? Kaboom! The way he ran! Nobody’s ever mined a tower afore.”

  They’d taken, as always, a different way home from the one they’d come by, threading their way through the hills, and they’d run into a party of Grannams, maybe one of those coming to see why the tower burned. Instead of riding to meet them, or running from them, or trying to outmaneuver them, they’d simply sent the Elves forward. The Grannams, unsuspecting, had come onto the fight. The Elves had ripped them into pieces without even getting near them. The Sterkarms had laughed and cheered, and ridden over what was left of the bodies, lancing them.

  Now, hours later, the hilarity, for Per, had cooled and congealed. He rode glumly, head down. In his mind, again and again, he saw his father’s grave in the little graveyard by the roofless chapel. A grave so new, the earth was still bare, ungreened. The glee, the easing of grief that battle and vengeance had brought, were gone, and the chill left behind was deeper, bleaker. At his saddlebow, by his knee, hung the head of Richie Grannam’s sister—it had seemed a fitting revenge when he’d hung it there and would satisfy those at home. The killing of his father, father’s brother, and cousin had needed a response so fierce … but his father was still dead.

  He was too tired to feel it strongly, but it came back to him with renewed certainty that every Grannam had to die to pay this debt. Every Grannam man, and every woman, so no more would be bred. Every Grannam child and baby, so no more would reach an age to kill Sterkarms. And everyone who allied themselves to the vermin. It meant a long, weary time of riding ahead, and he was very tired. Head nodding as he rode, he thought of bed: a warm bed … and that led him, inevitably, to think of women. It would be very good to lie in bed with a soft, warm woman, and then, after he’d slept, to play with her. The Elf-May came to mind. A very bonny woman. He wondered if she’d still be at the tower.

  Gareth had never been more tired—he was almost too exhausted to think. Sooner or later, he kept telling himself, they had to come in sight of the Bedesdale Tower, and then it would be over. Or nearly over. When the tower did come into view, he felt a spurt of pure joy—and then realized that it was still miles away. And felt like crying.

  An age later, a weary age of trudging on legs that could hardly feel the ground, one of the riders drew his pistol and fired it in the air, with a blast that made Gareth’s flesh leap on his bones. He clutched at his heart in shock. Ahead of him, all the men hollered, waved, and bawled, eager to let the waiting women know what heroes were returning to them. No response came from the tower. The Grannams were roused and riding, so the women stayed behind the walls, until the riders came so close they could recognize them.

  Faced with climbing the steep path to the tower, Gareth sat down on the ground. He’d walked so far and climbed so many slopes; he’d fallen and slipped back, and had to cover the same ground again; he’d scrambled over rocks and jumped or splashed through streams. Now his feet were hot and throbbing. He couldn’t climb that hill. He didn’t care if the Grannams got him. His muscles were too sore to lift his heavy feet for another step.

  He was yards behind the last footman, so there was no one to laugh at him. He hung his head down between his knees and luxuriated in not moving.

  Maybe he dozed. He was startled by the clop of a hoof close by him and jerked up his head, his heart thumping, half expecting to see a murderous Grannam swinging an axe. Instead he saw the big man with the odd name, Sweet Milk, leading his horse. Unsmiling—he didn’t smile much—he held out his hand. Gareth gave him his hand and was hoisted to his feet with one strong pull. Sweet Milk held his horse’s head and, with a nod, indicated that Gareth should mount the horse.

  “I can no,” Gareth said. He knew that his aching legs would never lever him up that high.

  Per came out from behind Sweet Milk. Gareth was surprised to see him. To his even greater surprise, Per crouched down and cupped his hands, offering him a boost onto the horse’s back. How could he refuse? Though doubtful of actually landing on the horse’s back, Gareth took hold of the saddlebow, set his foot in Per’s hands, felt himself catapulted into the air, and somehow did land neatly astride the horse. The saddle was hard as stone, and full of uncomfortable ridges. As Gareth settled onto it and tried to put his feet in the stirrups, he saw something furry or hairy hanging by his knee. With a feeling as if icy water was being filtered through him, he realized that it was a head. He shrank back from it—it felt as if the flesh was creeping along his bones to get away from it. Sweet Milk noticed, and while Per tightened the horse’s girth and adjusted the stirrup leathers, Sweet Milk quickly unlashed the head. Gareth thought he carried it by its hair, in his hand. He could hardly believe this or grasp that the man carrying the head was being kind, but at least the thing wasn’t near him anymore.

  “Thanks shall you have,” he said to both Per and Sweet Milk, in a voice that shook. They barely glanced at him, both seeming tired and depressed. Sweet Milk led the horse Gareth rode, and Per came behind, leading his own horse. They didn’t seem to find climbing the hill difficult, but then they’d ridden part of the way to Grannam country and most of the way back. That also meant the horse he was riding was too tired to give him any trouble, for which he was deeply grateful.

  When, after a long, slow climb, they reached the gatehouse of the tower, they found Isobel waiting, on tiptoe, craning her neck as she looked for Per. With cries of gladness, she retreated before them, through the dark, dank, muddy tunnel of the gatehouse, where the horse’s hooves rang out and echoed, into the courtyard. Women were hugging men, horses were being led away with a clattering of hooves, children were dancing and whooping, dogs were running about, jumping up and barking, chickens were fluttering and clucking, and all was a flurry of noise and movement. Per’s horse was taken from him and led away, and Isobel threw her arms around him, crying out, “I be gladdened to have thee back! Oh, I be glad!”

  Sweet Milk helped Gareth down from the horse and was then enveloped by a couple of young women. Gareth, aching in every muscle, stood amid the jostling. No young women bothered Gareth. He felt very lonely, and longed for somewhere to lie down and stretch out.

  Through the laughter and babble rose thin, screeching wails that seemed to scrape down Gareth’s backbone. Some women were
keening. Two men had been lost in the fire, and not even their bodies brought back. The glad chatter hushed gradually, as more and more people turned to comforting the bereaved.

  “We killed a sight more of them!” someone said, and one man was holding up a human head before an audience of impressed, appalled, and delighted children.

  “There be hot water,” Isobel was shouting. “There be food! Oh God, but we be gladdened to see you all back!”

  Everyone headed for the tower and the hall. Gareth dragged himself up the stone stairs, one step at a time, driven on by the promise of food. Yes, he longed to lie down, but it would be good for his belly to have something to occupy itself with while he slept. In the hall, long trestle tables had been set up, and at one end water steamed in wooden tubs. The men stripped off their shirts and washed away sweat, dirt, and blood, while the women handed them towels or even dried them.

  At the other end of the table were set out plates of flatbread and butter, cheese, cold meat, cold porridge, and dried fish—a feast. Even before they were dried off, the men wandered down to that end of the table and started eating. Gareth found himself sitting on the hard stone floor amid the straw—it was better than standing—and relishing great mouthfuls of hard flatbread with butter and cold mutton. A woman handed him a cup of ale, and he took a big swig. It was thick, like thin porridge, and rather sweet, but with more alcoholic punch than its taste and appearance led you to expect. It was “festival ale,” the first brew, a special treat for returning heroes,

  “We blew down tower!” someone near him was saying.

  “Burned it!”

  Feet rustled in the straw, disturbing the scent of dried herbs. The peat smoke had a sharp, throat-catching reek. A big dog sloped past him, smelling rankly of smoke and its own dirty coat.

  “Not a Brackenhill Grannam left alive!”

  It would be many days—maybe weeks or months—before the account was worked up into a coherent story.

  “Mammy,” Per said, “I’ll gan up stairs and sleep.”