And so he and his thirty men rode out, in search of the dregs of a rebellion that had already failed.
They found the bull in a vale of wispy yellow grass, treeless and open. It was folded down, as if it had settled there to sleep. There was an evening light on it, stretching its shadow out over the ground. Its blood had put a deeper darkness on to the grass around the stump of its neck. It had blackened there, and dried to a crust.
Yulan stood by the bull’s severed head. A huge and heavy thing, with horns almost as long as his forearm. It lay tilted slightly to one side. The eyes were gone, and most of the tongue. The carrion birds that had claimed them soared overhead, waiting for these intruders who had disturbed their feasting to depart. Yulan flicked a hand to ward the swarming flies away from his face.
“What do you see?” he called out to Hamdan, kneeling a dozen paces away.
“There were maybe fifty of them,” the archer said thoughtfully. “Perhaps a dozen mounted. They all moved off northward after they killed the bull. Not hurrying.”
Yulan wiped his fingers over his brow, smearing away sweat and the dust of a long ride.
“Bring your bow boys in, then,” he said. “I think we can call this done.”
Hamdan straightened and whistled, the piercing note lancing out across the wide valley. His men, dotted across the whole expanse, searching like him for footsign, turned as one and began trotting back.
“No point in chasing them once they’ve killed the bull,” Yulan muttered to himself as he leaned down and took hold of one of the horns.
He lifted the bull’s head, permitting himself a fleeting grimace at the great bony weight of it, and carried it back towards the horses. So it was, and had always been, with the Sorentines: they made a bull the totem of their war, and when they judged that war done – won, lost or simply no longer of interest – they killed the beast and went back to their homes.
Yulan rested the head across his horse’s shoulders.
“Perhaps the sight of this will persuade Callotec that we’re finished,” he said to Rudran.
“Perhaps,” the big man said gruffly. “You seen that yet?”
He twisted about in his saddle, pointing back the way they had come. Back towards Towers’ Shadow. Yulan looked, realising as he did so that all of Rudran’s men were already faced that way, staring at the horizon.
A thin column of pale smoke was rising into the sky, far away. Going straight up.
“That stupid thrice-bastard,” murmured Yulan, feeling a knot clenching in his chest. Knowing, in his deepest bones, that he had become part of something terrible. “How long’s that been there?”
“Just started,” Rudran grunted. “But we’re a long ride away.”
The Free came down upon Towers’ Shadow from the north, riding horses all but spent. They came in the first of the day, with the morning’s cold, sharp light on their flanks and the angry yellow glare of flames before them.
Half of Towers’ Shadow was already gone, sent into black ruin by the fires. A few cottages were still alight, pouring out smoke that churned and swirled above the village. The Hommetic army was scattered all across the fields surrounding the village. Not arrayed as warriors might be for battle, but strewn like a disorderly crowd observing a contest or fight. They stood in small groups, some cheering or laughing, others simply watching in silence. They stood amongst bodies, some of them.
There were old men, dead, at the edge of the village. They must have come out to defend their homes. Old men with pitchforks and crude spears and skinning knives against Callotec and his army. Women had died too, Yulan saw as he rode into the village. His nose burned with the stench of smoke and ash and death, and it sickened him as it never had before. It made him feel weak. He had the bull’s severed head sitting before him on his horse’s shoulders; one hand on the reins, one hand resting on the bull’s brow, between the horns. His fingers were pressing ever harder against the skull, he realised. As if they wanted to gouge their way through the bone.
He looked into the face of a Massatan woman slumped against the blackened stub of a roof timber. She looked just like his mother’s sister. There were arrows in her chest, and stomach, and mouth. He slowed his horse to a walk, feeling it trembling from exhaustion beneath him. Thought that perhaps he too trembled, for other reasons. He could hear the crackle of flame, and the dull excitement of the warriors around the village, and people crying, people wailing. And the yipping of dogs, those accursed hounds of Callotec’s. They were here somewhere amongst the houses, but he could not see them.
The headwoman’s body was in the centre of the village, stretched out on the ground. She must have been dragged from her sickbed. She had been trampled by horses. Her corpse, ignored as it lay there, was misshapen. Crushed. Yulan could see the imprint of hoofs on the bandages her whip-wounds had been bound in. He could see the shape of hoofs in the hollows and dents punched into her back, her skull.
Callotec was standing close by, with a dozen or more of his guard. He was surveying the wreckage of Towers’ Shadow, with a crude smile upon his face. He turned this way and that, spun about, and then saw Yulan coming.
“I found them, those little thieves,” Callotec shouted. “Do you know what they did with the three dogs they stole from me?”
Yulan knew. He had known from the moment he heard of the theft. But he said nothing. He let his horse drift slowly closer to Callotec.
“They butchered them,” Callotec spat. “And ate them. Hounds bred over generations by my family to be the finest hunters in the land. Hounds worth more than this entire village. They ate them.”
“They are starving,” Yulan said dully, though he knew it would do no good.
“Starving?” screeched Callotec. “Then I’ve rid them of some mouths to feed, have I not? I’ve saved them from their hunger.”
“You have done enough.”
“And who are you to tell me so?”
“I am Captain of the Free,” Yulan cried, and he flung the great bull’s head down at Callotec’s feet. Then he leaned down, stretching as close as he could to this cousin to a king, this butcher who dressed like a lord. “And in their name I say you have done enough here. That head tells you this war is over. You should listen to its message, and I’ll open your ears to it if you make me. You might have five hundred men at your back, but I have the Free and I’ll gladly test the two in the balance if that’s what you want.”
He was aware of Rudran and Hamdan and all the rest spreading out beside and behind him. They formed a line. He heard blades unsheathing, arrows slipping from quivers. He saw Callotec’s eyes flicker from side to side. A gust of hot wind sent a curl of smoke writhing down around the bull’s horns. The hunting hounds were snarling and yelping, somewhere not far away. Demented, to Yulan’s ear; just like their master and his blood-maddened host.
“Which side of the scale do you think is the weightier, king’s cousin?” Yulan said. “Thirty of the Free, or five hundred of your dogs? Which side do you think has more men on it who truly know how to kill, and how to die with honour if need be?”
Callotec gave a snorting, strangled laugh, and backed up a few quick steps. His guards thickened about him. Yulan curled his lip in contempt.
“The Free have never been party to this kind of madness,” he spat at Callotec. “You’d not have done it had we been here. You’d do well to remember that, now that we are.”
Callotec’s glare was as laden with hatred and fury as any Yulan had ever met. There was nothing behind those eyes but pride and utter indifference to the sentiment or fate of others, he suspected. The man was worthless, and thought himself precisely the opposite.
“Oh, I yield, great Captain, if that’s what you want to hear,” Callotec cried at last, with an exaggerated flourish of his arms. “Does that make you feel like a fell and terrible warlord? It should not. I remain a royal cousin, and you just a brown-skinned savage like these peasants here. It’s done. I’m done here.”
He to
ok a few steps forward and kicked the bull’s head with the toe of a fine polished boot.
“We can go home,” he snapped. “No one welcomes that prospect more than I.”
An eruption of growling and snapping made Yulan turn. A writhing knot of Callotec’s hunting dogs had spilled out from between two houses that had survived the flames. They were fighting, all of them trying to fasten teeth on to a thick, pale stick.
“Get your dogs out of the village,” hissed Yulan.
But even as he spoke, his vision was tightening upon the object over which the dogs fought. The sounds of the moment – the crackle of fire, the voices of anguish or glee, even the deep-throated snarling of the dogs themselves – fell away from him, and for an instant he was entirely alone, cut off from everything save the sight of that child’s arm. It had been torn off at the elbow, leaving a stub of bone and trailing tendon and muscle. Along the length of the forearm, the skin was shredded, hanging in tatters. Some of the fingers were gone.
Slowly, heavily, Yulan turned towards Callotec.
The King’s cousin bared his teeth, taking steps backwards into the protection of his swordsmen. He held his arms out, spread his palms.
“What?” he said. “It seemed a fitting kind of justice. Dogs must eat too. Half a dozen Massatan brats made for a fine —”
Yulan stabbed his heels into his horse’s flanks, and the animal surged forward. He set his hand on the hilt of his sword. But then his horse was twisting and veering to the side, as Rudran lunged in and pulled the reins from his grasp.
“Not the moment,” the lancer hissed to his captain.
Yulan blinked, barely understanding what was being said to him.
“Us dying’ll not mend anything, no matter how many of them we take with us,” Rudran insisted, staring deep into Yulan’s eyes. “There’ll be another day for the mending.”
Yulan breathed, felt the smoke in his chest. He hung his head, and let his sword slip back into its scabbard.
The Free did not travel the same road as Callotec’s men away from Towers’ Shadow. Yulan did not trust himself, or Callotec, or anyone, to keep even a hateful semblance of peace. So as the Hommetic army crawled back along the Old Threetower Road – a derelict highway, but the only route even half fit for their wagons – Yulan led the Free up and away over rough ground and older, fainter trails.
He stopped his horse on a rise in the rolling hills, the last from which they could see Towers’ Shadow, and looked back to the dark, crippled village in the distance. The others rode on in dour silence, save Hamdan, who waited.
“I brought him here,” said Yulan quietly, to himself as much as to the archer. “He made me his herald.”
He knew, even then, that this was a guilt, and a shame, he would never shed. His bitter anger might fade. The knowledge that this, his first endeavour as leader of the Free, had brought no honour to their name, and fallen far short of what Merkent would have wanted, might be accommodated. Might even make him a better captain, if he could learn from it. But there would never be anything, no future deed or glory, that would undo or answer his utter failure of the people of Towers’ Shadow. His own people. He could have guessed what might happen – not its detail, but its shape – if he had allowed himself. For that, there would be no forgiveness. Not from his own heart.
One night in the wilds, still days from their destination, he cut the hair from his head. He shaved his scalp, leaving only a single long horse-tail that he bound up into a topknot. No one asked him why. He was grim and silent through all that journey, and something in his mood made everyone fearful to approach him. So no one asked him, and no one knew, why he left his black hair on the ground by the remains of a campfire, far from anywhere. No one knew except Hamdan, and he did not need to ask. He was Massatan too. He recognised and understood the trappings of penitence.
Yulan saw Callotec only once more after Towers’ Shadow. He would have made it never if he could, but the creature cornered him in a gilded passageway of Crex’s palace. There were great bay windows looking out over the lake, where bones were said to lie thick beneath the waves. Callotec was lurking in one of those bays. Lurking in ambush, Yulan realised, and could not help but reach instinctively for his sword as Callotec stepped out in front of him. But the noble’s only weapon was a venomous tongue, not a blade.
“So you came not just to take the King’s gold, but to whisper your bile into his ear, did you?” Callotec said.
“I took only one third the gold we were promised,” Yulan said through clenched teeth, “and would have taken none, if I could have done it without punishing my men for a failure that was all mine.”
“But you thought to punish me, didn’t you?”
Callotec jabbed a finger at Yulan’s chest as he spoke. It would have been easy enough to catch it and break it backward. But all Yulan wanted was to be gone, and to banish this man from his sight for ever.
“Crex mocked me, and called me Dog-Lord, and told me I’m to command a Kingshouse out on the Narbonan shore,” Callotec snarled.
“I’m sure you’ll thrive there.”
“It’s exile, and you know it. You have cost me my standing, my… everything.”
“I have?” Yulan had to fight the anger rising within him. “No. The King asked me what I had seen, and I told him. That is all, sire.”
“And he takes the word of a sell-sword over that of his own family. He lets your malice persuade him to injustice, to my dishonour.”
“He takes the word of the Captain of the Free. And he hardly needed persuading, truth be told. He did not seem overly surprised that the man he sent to quell a rebellion came close to starting another one. Angry, but not surprised. I think it pleased him, sire, to be given the chance to rid himself of you, your cruelty and your worthless indolence.”
The barbs, the acid, Yulan put into his voice were unwise but the fury roiling inside, against himself as much as Callotec, would admit of no restraint. He was tired, and feeling Merkent’s loss as keenly as if it had happened yesterday, so he goaded the man.
The blush that coloured Callotec’s face, and the quiver in his lips, told him that his contempt had found its mark. He was surprised, though, at how quickly Callotec mastered himself. How sharply his eyes narrowed and gleamed with fell malice. He spat at Yulan’s feet.
“Enjoy your moment, sell-sword. You’ve done nothing, and changed nothing. I’ll tell you a secret… no, not a secret. A promise. Tides ebb and flow, but they do not change the nature of the sea. I am of royal blood, and nothing you can do will alter that. The tide will bring me back, and lift me up again.” Callotec leaned close to whisper, and though Yulan longed to back away, he did not. “When it does, know this: I’ll see you on a gibbet like the peasant you are, and I’ll go back to Towers’ Shadow and finish what I started. I’ll go hunting with a hundred dogs next time, not just thirty, and they’ll be the best fed hounds in all the land by the time I’m done. I’ll see every man, woman and child in that cesspit dead, and burn every shack I left standing, and I’ll plough the offal and bones into the ground with the ashes. And I’ll take greater pleasure than you can imagine in doing it.”
“You won’t do any of that, Callotec,” Yulan said coldly.
He brushed past, and walked slowly and steadily away. His footsteps echoed from the flagstone floor and the bare, hard walls.
“You think not?” Callotec called after him, almost shrieking. “I don’t make promises lightly.”
Yulan stopped. His anger, Callotec’s madness, the smothering weight of those few days at Towers’ Shadow; it was all like cloying mud at his ankles, trying to pull him back. Refusing, utterly, to let him go. He turned around. Walked back to stand close to the Dog-Lord and stare into his glittering, mad eyes.
“Nor do I,” Yulan said. “And yes, I think you will never do any of those things, because I will not permit it.”
He walked on, out into the streets, where the stench was of manure and dirt and workshops, and sweeter by fa
r than that of the palace.
Yulan did not look at those around the fire. He did not want them to see anything in his face, or eyes, that would sway the choice they made. Because he knew them as well as he knew anyone in the world, he knew – or at the least suspected – what each one of them would say, and why. He wished it were otherwise, but he could not make it so by will alone.
Hamdan spoke first, of course.
“Well, I’ll be going along. Cannot think of anything I’d rather be doing with my last days with the Free, and that’s the purest truth you ever heard on my lips.”
He said it lightly, as if Yulan had proposed that they go gathering apples in an orchard. The ire was in him, though. Yulan knew that better than any of them. He had never doubted Hamdan’s response to this. Even if it had not been Callotec, and Towers’ Shadow, Hamdan would have said the same thing. Yulan suspected they would never be parted, the two of them; and if they were, it would likely not be by Hamdan’s choice.
The other one whose response he had been certain of was Akrana.
“I too,” she duly said.
Because she did not want the Free to end, Yulan knew.
He looked at the archers, one by one, and one by one they nodded. Hamdan had taught them their trade, led them for years. Their loyalty to him was unquestioned. This too Yulan had known would be as it was. Which left Wren, and Kerig, and there Yulan’s certainty failed. These two had more to lose, more to seek elsewhere, than the rest. They had been ready to walk away from the Free with the least regret, for they could imagine a future for themselves with a clarity, and a joy, that Yulan envied almost beyond words.
Wren smiled at him. She absently set a hand on her husband’s arm. Glanced at his sleeping face.
The Free Page 6