Black River

by Peter Fugazzotto

  Vincius scanned the field as well. "Not too industrious a people. A field unplowed."

  "They won't touch it."

  "A few oxen and a plow and all those white stones could be removed before the planting season."

  "Not stones," said Harad.

  Vincius squinted at the field. "What then?"

  "You haven't heard of Tryr?" asked Patch.

  One of the Dhurman soldiers, a veteran who was always sneaking a drink from the jugs in the back of the wagon, answered. "Tryr. I was here. Hehe. Boy, you need to know the history of the North if you are going to muddy your feet. Otherwise might find yourself swallowed up in a bottomless bog."

  Vincius sighed and fluttered his long elegant fingers at the man. "So educate me then. I haven't brought you here for companionship."

  The Dhurman sneered. "You should be asking the Northmen. They're the ones you should ask about Tryr."

  "Enough with the drama. Spit it out, man."

  "Fine, if the hound dogs refuse to tell their side of it, I'll tell mine. When I came here, there was no Dhurman fort, and the field you see was filled with the tents and lean-tos of the gathered clans of the savage Northmen. Their Warlock King had united them, bribed, cajoled, bullied them into doing what no one else had ever been able to do before – gather the warring clans together long enough to stand against Dhurma. I crouched on those far hills, a scout, looking down on horror at the massed army. We were but a legion, led by an inexperienced general, who the whisperers suggested was sent to Tryr to fail. What easier way to rid the Republic of a charismatic upstart?

  "I reported back to my captain and was led to the general himself, now the Emperor. I knew him when he was one of us. Maybe not knew him. But back then he was no son of the gods, just a scrub like the rest of us. When I reported on the Northern encampment, he laughed at me. There was none of the panic that you would expect from a legion outnumbered four to one, none of the panic you would expect from someone of such little experience. Favius just laughed."

  The wagon crept down the rutted road towards the fort. Above the portico, Harad could see movement, the awakening of the guard. Tryr did not welcome visitors even to this day.

  "And what of all of this?" asked Vincius.

  "This is where we turned the tide on the Northmen." The Dhurman soldier laughed. "But we never would have done it without the treachery of Shield and his Hounds."

  "Was not treachery," said Harad. "The treachery was long before that."

  "They did what we could not. A handful of savage Northmen doing what a full Dhurman legion could never have done, walking into the heart of the camp, embracing their own Warlock King, their great uniter, and sliding cold steel between his ribs."

  "That is all we did," said Harad, exasperated at the way that the Dhurman told the story. "We had a blood debt that had to be claimed. The heavens would not rest until we did. We were not responsible for what followed. Our hands are clean of that."

  Patch mumbled beneath his breath and turned his horse from the wagon and the conversation.

  The Dhurman laughed. "I was one of those eagles that descended. Lambs to the slaughter. Even before we reached those fields of death, they had turned on themselves, back to their bickering and warring, ground muddied with clan blood. And that's what that field is, a testament to their own savagery and stupidity, and that's why it's never been cleared of the skulls and bones after all these years, a reminder to the Northmen that their people are too weak to be anything but slaves beneath our boots."

  Harad stared at that field of death, at the thousands of skulls that lay like stones on the land, wondering whether what the Dhurman soldier said was true. It did not matter any more. Too much time had passed.

  The Dhurman laughed and laughed.

  But in the dark of the coming night his laughter would no more foul the air of the North. The soldier had spoken words that would leave him for the crows. This Harad knew.

  STRONGMAN

  SPEAR SPYRCHYLDE WAITED in the mists.

  Behind him the pale ghosts of torches painted the outline of Cullan town and the fort. Before him, the Black River slapped the rickety dock beneath his feet and sighed its passage to the west, opposite the faint glow of the rising sun in the east.

  "You said he would come," said Spear, the man who once led the Hounds alongside Shield Scyldmund.

  "He will," answered Cruhund.

  Spear pulled his cloak about his shoulders and buried his hands in his armpits. He would have rather been in the warm tangle of furs and skins with Yriel. He had been dreaming of the old clan gathered about the bonfire at the village by the lake when Cruhund's deep voice had broken his sleep. Yriel's fingers had draped over his bare skin as he rose.

  Now the two men huddled in the mists on the banks of the Black River waiting for the man that Spear would hurt.

  A black shape separated from the water, then weathered planks emerged, and a thick twined rope was hurled out of the mists into Cruhund's hands.

  "Quietly and quickly, Cruhund. Get your man to move the furs," came a voice from the silhouette suddenly standing in the boat.

  Cruhund dragged the boat scraping into the dock and hitched the rope to one of the slick moss green piles.

  "Here, here, take these," the boatman said, his voice sharp towards Spear. The man, corpulent, the boat shifting dangerously beneath his feet, barked again at Spear.

  The man was a trader, a Northerner who had come from the vast wilds to the east, boat heavy with the furs of otters and minks, the symbols of status to line the edges of cloaks for the daughters, wives and mistresses of the senators and merchants in the city of Vas Dhurma.

  The fat trader himself remained a clansman, wool cloak and trousers, braided red beard, the scars of the trials of youth and the battles with the world worn proudly on forearms and cheek.

  The man froze in the boat when the thinning of the mists allowed him to see who stood before him.

  Spear knew he was recognized: his shaven head, his towering form, the Dhurman leathers taken from the bodies of the men who had fallen to his blade, and the rune-carved spear in his hand all gave him away.

  "Off the boat."

  The man hesitated, dropped the furs heavily at his feet, and then timed his small jump across the gap. The dock protested under his weight. "The currents carried me fast. Otherwise, I would have been here at daylight."

  "The others wait in the reeds."

  The trader turned his lower lip in his teeth. "Spear, you know I wouldn't avoid you. I've always given you your share."

  Spear nodded to his Northern companion at his side, a man bigger than himself, also mongrelized with the stolen armors and weapons of their Dhurman conquerors. "Cruhund says otherwise."

  "It's not true."

  "You're saying Cruhund lies?"

  The trader's meaty hands drifted towards his belt, the large knife with the worn leather handle. "He took furs. He is complicit. I am not the one you should be watching."

  Spear knew the man was not lying. He too had been watching his second. Cruhund coveted what Spear had taken, the small corner of the trading town. Spear had seen it in the way that Cruhund whispered to the others in the crew in the mead hall, the way he always laughed at Urbidis's crude jokes when Spear was delivering their weekly bribe to the commander of the Dhurman fortress, and especially in the way Cruhund ogled Yriel, Spear's woman.

  One day blood between these two Northmen would be spilled.

  But not this morning.

  This morning was about reaffirming his control of the docks.

  "This is not about Cruhund," Spear told the fat man. "This is about me, and respect for me."

  The sun thinned the mists. The far side of the wide river revealed itself. The boats of the others were dark forms on the still darker water. They were watching and waiting to see what the strongman would do. Spear knew this. He knew what was expected of him and what he needed to do to hold on to the life he had built through some spilled blood but mor
e through whispered fear.

  If he faltered, it would all fall apart. They would sneak their goods in up or down river. Cruhund would conspire. Urbidis would push Spear away. He would never earn enough to buy Dhurman citizenship for himself. Everything would be lost.

  The fat trader leaned in, his breath thick with the sour bite of pickled fish. "Maybe I made a mistake. But it was for greed not disrespect. And your man encouraged it."

  Cruhund snorted.

  The trader continued, his voice thrown to reach the shadows of the other boatmen holding position in the river. "By the blood of clansmen, I swear to you Spear Spyrchylde that this will never happen again."

  "You have already given me grave injury."

  Despite the cold, beads of sweat formed on the fat man's brow. "Then a quarter of what I have in my boat is yours."

  The chill morning air made Spear's teeth hurt. Geese arrowed west towards the Whale Road and unforgiving sea.

  "Half then," said the trader, his voice reduced to a whisper. "Anything else and I will be destroyed. My trade will be lost."

  Spear wanted to return to the warmth of the furs and Yriel. He wished that Cruhund's coarse voice had never pulled him from his sleep.

  "Really?" asked the trader. "No room to bargain. You truly want to punish me? For such a minor transgression? For something everyone else does behind your back while you prance around in the throw away clothes of dead Dhurmans pretending you are something you will never be?"

  The knife lashed out sooner than expected. Spear leapt back, the hiss of the blade as close as the whisper of a lover. The dock shook with the fat man's steps but Cruhund kicked out with a foot and the man tumbled to the ground.

  Spear moved quickly and pinned the man down with the butt of his weapon, the hard wooden shaft pressing into the soft of the trader's throat.

  "You're just a thug," the fat man spit. "No honor any more. The days of old are dead. The North is dead because of traitors like you. Dead."

  Cruhund kicked him hard in the ribs.

  Spear turned his weapon over so that the iron head of the spear, one he had lifted from a Dhurman soldier he had tracked down and tortured near two decades ago, deformed the fat man's belly, creating a hollow with the increasing pressure.

  "I'll give it all to you," the fat man pleaded. "Riches, that's all you want any way. Take it. Take it all."

  "I want more than that," said Spear. He lunged forward driving the spearhead through the flabby flesh, beneath the ribs and to the man's heart.

  Behind him the water of the river lapped against the piles of the dock, hissed over the gravel shore. The dark boats bobbed, waiting even though dawn had lightened the sky.

  "Dump him in the river," said Spear.

  "And his furs and boat?" asked Cruhund. The Northman's teeth were yellow, jagged as if shaped from tearing meat from bones.

  "Set the boat adrift."

  "But..."

  "Set the boat adrift and bring the furs, all of them, to the mead hall tonight. We'll split it among my men."

  Cruhund pursed his lips to prevent words from spilling out of his mouth. He bent to the body, fingers pilfering pockets, searching the corpse for hidden purses.

  "Anything you find, we divide among us," said Spear.

  Cruhund sneered. "You think I'm trying to take it for myself?"

  Spear left the waters and turned back to Cullan town. Small stones crunched beneath his feet. Ahead the morning market was waking, the steam rising from the iron pots, the baskets filled with mosses and dried fish, the thick pale roots piled on blankets, and the slinking dogs edging closer to the untended.

  The sun was above the eastern horizon but the mists remained resolute. He wished for a day that the sun would burn through and he would be warmed to the bones. But when would that ever occur?

  He nodded to the vendors, grabbed small loaves of bread without paying, and skirted the puddles and mud. He doubted the furs would still be warm. He doubted Yriel would be waiting for him.

  But he hurried home anyway, hopeful for something that he knew did not wait for him, and behind him, the market dogs harried him, nipping at his heels, waiting for their moment to grab the food right out of his hands.

  ROAD

  VINCIUS HAD NEVER been so cold in his life. The wind that tore across the road bit the skin at the back of his neck and his hands, which held the reins for the oxen, felt as if they would be perpetually frozen into claws. He doubted he could unfurl them right away. The cold from the cart driver's seat seeped through the fabric of his cloak and tunic as if the planks were made of ice rather than wood. It chilled him right to his core. He wanted to order one of the four remaining Dhurman soldiers to change places with him so he could instead huddle in the back of the cart, wrapped in cloaks and furs and burlap sacks, pressed against the others, sheltered behind the thin boards.

  But the Apprentice Chronicler refused to show the others that the cold was bothering him.

  Especially the Northmen.

  He knew they already saw him as weak. Anything he complained about would further diminish him in their eyes. Weak men were not followed.

  Even though they rode at a distance from him, he felt their eyes on him as if waiting for him to show a sign of weakness.

  Vincius vowed he would prove himself on this mission to Cullan and the North. He would ferret out the caches of magic and destroy them. The name of Vincius of Xichil would be known in the long chronicles of the Grand Collegium, and hard men would follow him by virtue of his strength.

  He lifted one curled hand from the leather reins and blew his breath into the hollow, but the warmth dissipated the moment it made contact with his skin and the cold rushed back.

  The band of men – the Northmen buffeted on their horses, the Dhurmans cowering in the bed of the cart – pushed along a ridge where the wind bent the rich green grass to the ground, two muddy ruts cutting the road for them. Overhead, another coming storm had darkened the Northern sky, swirls of black twisting through the piled slate clouds.

  They were far from Empire.

  The oxen struggled with the muck and uneven ground. Several times during the day, the wheels of their cart had become stuck and it took near all of their muscles and a stream of compounding curses to get it rolling again. The days of cobbled roads and Dhurman route markers were long gone. In fact, they had not seen any sign of a true permanent Dhurman presence in almost two weeks. Where there were outposts, they were of a Northern construct – built of the local wood and mud rather than of stone and plaster – suggesting to Vincius that they had existed long before Dhurma brought her armies north.

  A dozen quail lifted out of the brush and he followed them across the dark sky as the wind jostled them in their flight. On other side of the road, the land sloped down, carpeted green and peppered with large craggy stones. In the distance, he could just make out a herd of cattle. The land was expansive, so different from crowded Dhurma, so different from his home of Xichil where houses clung to hillsides, where vineyards climbed the volcano, where men pulled boats across the warm sand to the gently lapping waves of the sea.

  Here it was as if man were an afterthought. The land resisted plow and axe. Anything that a farmer earned was hard gained. The land in Xichil was difficult to control but generations of farmers had learned how to eke out an existence in the warm land, piece by piece in the volcanic soil. In Xichil, the gods let them flourish through hard labor; here the gods simply did not care.

  Over these weeks of travel and especially with their arrival in the North, Vincius better understood the taciturn Northmen, warriors shaped by the harsh climate around them. The North also underscored how soft the Dhurmans were.

  The past night in Tryr while he was buried in his blankets, shivering before sleep overcame him, he realized how differently the story of the Empire would have been written if the Warlock King had not been killed in that field of skulls.

  After some time, Harad, the giant, red-bearded Northman, let his horse dr
ift within an easy distance of the cart and Vincius flagged him over.

  "Another storm, you think?" Vincius asked.

  The other shrugged and smiled. "Why not?"

  "That book? In your shoulder bag?"

  "I'm bringing it North."

  "Obviously. But you can read?"

  The smile disappeared in the beard.

  Vincius continued. "None of the others appear to be able to read and few enough Dhurmans, so my question is one of interest rather than disparagement."

  Harad bent far forward on his horse and plucked a long blade of grass brushing the horse's shoulder. "Spent six months in Hopht in a pit before Shield was able to bribe the guards. In there, I protected an old man from the gangs. He taught me to read as payment."

  "So you bring a book of the south North?"

  "Plenty of swords beyond the Black River."

  A strong gust of wind forced Vincius into the folds of his cloak. The huddled men behind him, most asleep, shifted position, trying to find shelter from the wind.

  "One less," said Vincius nodding back to the Dhurmans dozing in the wagon bed behind him. One of the Dhurman soldiers had gone missing.

  The missing man was the Dhurman veteran who the night before had been so eager to talk of the history of Tryr and the complicity of the Hounds in the death of the Warlock King.

  Harad readjusted the long piece of grass between his lips.

  "You said he stayed up with a jug," said Vincius. "The one who left."

  "Might've said that."

  "Other than you Northmen," Vincius said leaning forward in his seat and lowering his voice, "I seem to have drawn the beggar's lot."

  "Like I said he woke me at night with his moving around. Saw him gathering his gear. Wasn't my business if he wanted to leave."

  "Left just like that. As far as we've come."

  "Like I said," Harad added, "a coward waiting for the right moment to desert."

  "Doesn't seem right."

  "A coward."

  "He had told me how grateful he was. Has a family back in Dhurma. Desperately needed the money for them."