Hamdan was unperturbed by either sound or smell. He looked around, apparently curious, as they passed through the field of the dead.
“Quite the fight,” he mused. “Two or three days ago. Shame nobody told them the war was all but done. Crex’s Armsmen on the losing side, I should say. It’s not Callotec’s boys, more’s the pity. Wrong badges.”
He glanced across to Drann, and gave a dry smile at the sight of him with his hand clasped across his face.
“Does it smell bad?” the archer asked. “My nose stopped paying much heed to certain scents a long time ago, sad to say.”
He leaned down as his horse stepped over a corpse, and tugged a broken spear out of the body. He regarded its point, and then sniffed and sent it spinning away into the grass.
Disturbed by the arrival of the spear, a great lizard – a good deal longer than Drann was tall – went lumbering away from one of the bodies, its massive tail scything back and forth. Drann grimaced. Of all the carrion beasts that haunted armies, the lizards were the ones he found the most repellent. Creel’s warriors had told frightful tales of what happened to those left injured on a battlefield, unable to defend themselves, when the lizards found them.
Drann was suddenly struck by the strangeness of it all, as his horse picked its way carefully around dead men. Lives and memories that were gone like floating seed heads on the wind; just meat now for the lizards and crows and foxes. There would be people somewhere – perhaps hundreds of them – who did not yet know that their father, husband, son was dead on this hill. Maybe they would never know when and where they died.
“What was his name?” he asked Hamdan quietly. “Creel’s last contract-holder who got killed?”
Hamdan regarded the sky with wide-open eyes, pinning his lower lip with his teeth for a moment. He closed one eye. Then snapped it open again, shook his head and returned his gaze to the road before them.
“No. Can’t remember.”
“Really? Did you not speak to him?”
“Not overmuch. Didn’t take to him. He was an older fellow, short on good humour as far as I could tell.”
“You do know my name, don’t you?”
Hamdan frowned at him. Bit at that lower lip again. The frown deepened as his memory delivered nothing to his tongue. Then he shrugged. Drann’s spirits fell abruptly and unexpectedly, as if tripped by a half-buried stone in his chest.
Hamdan laughed.
“Ha. What a fine face, like a scolded pup. Drann, son. Your name’s Drann. You’re going to be the butt of every jest if you don’t learn to dress your hopes in a mask now and again.”
The archer’s mirth tricked Drann into overconfidence. He let himself think that because Hamdan had told him about the Weaponsmith, there might be more stories to be mined from those rocks.
“What is it about Towers’ Shadow?” he asked lightly. “What’s this Callotec to Yulan?”
And that was what finally got Hamdan to stop talking.
The cart track dipped down to ford a narrow, rock-strewn river. On the other side, beyond a fringe of trees and bushes, the ground rose towards the town of Curmen. The modest buildings of pale, almost yellowish stone were starkly silhouetted by the low sunlight at their back. As the horses came to the water’s edge, a sandpiper went jinking and darting away up the valley like an erratic, low-flighted arrowhead.
Hamdan drew to a halt and allowed his mount to dip its head and drink from the chuckling river. Drann looked questioningly at him. The archer was watching the opposite bank intently.
“Might be a little problem,” he murmured.
“What is it?” Drann asked, but Hamdan was already swinging out of the saddle.
“Sit tight. Hold these reins for me, would you? Folk tend to find a man on a horse a bit more worrying than a man not.”
Drann was alarmed to find himself thus responsible for two horses, but both animals were placid. Entirely insensitive, it seemed, to the tension in the air.
Hamdan stepped forward into the river. The water foamed and spluttered about his ankles. He walked slowly, in a rut generations of cartwheels had ground into the riverbed, both hands raised above his head. Drann saw that he held in one the little leather coin pouch Yulan had given him.
“Not meaning any harm,” Hamdan called out to the bushes on the far side of the channel. Still advancing, feet feeling the way carefully, keeping his eyes fixed on the riverbank. “Just looking to put a little coin in someone’s hand.”
The screech of a buzzard overhead snatched Drann’s gaze upwards for a moment. He saw the bird circling high, a dark quill-stroke against the sky. When he looked back down, everything had changed.
Men were coming out from amongst the bushes, right there at the point where the track climbed out of the river. Four of them. Three men and a boy, in fact. Everything about them was instantly familiar to Drann. He had never set eyes upon any one of them before, but he knew them.
Rough and rugged clothing that had softened over years of use. Faces dried by sun and wind, worn and blunted by labour, shaped by the lives they had lived. Spears – simple, wooden – meant not for killing men, but for leaning on when you had walked half the day, and for fending off wolf or cat or bear. Farmers and shepherds in other words, like those Drann had lived amongst all his life.
Only the boy, who was perhaps twelve or so by Drann’s guess, had not yet been weathered by the world. And only he carried not a spear but a sling, hanging loosely at his side with a rounded stone cupped in its fold.
“Good day to all,” Hamdan said cheerily as he walked on through the river. But he twisted his head over one shoulder and hissed back at Drann: “If that lad with the sling starts winding up, fall off your horse. He’s not going to miss you sitting up there like a sack of corn.”
Drann blinked, feeling suddenly heavy and fixed upon the animal’s back. Feeling, in fact, much like a sack of corn.
“Don’t come no closer,” one of the townsfolk rasped at Hamdan, who kept smiling but ignored the instruction.
“After nothing but trade and a bit of talk, you have my word,” the archer insisted. “In sore need of both, come to that, so we’ll pay well.”
“Nothing to sell you. Last few months, your kind’s emptied our stores for us, stolen half our flocks. Trampled every field. Burned our barns. Killed our people. So you stop where you are!”
That last was shouted, the man’s voice peaking and straining. Hamdan did stop. A couple of paces from the men, still ankle-deep in the river. Lips still locked into a determined smile.
“So you’ve had enough, then,” he nodded. “Taken up spears. I’d do much the same in your place, no doubt. But I’m not here to take anything, only buy. And I really would like to talk to —”
“Nothing to sell, nothing to say,” the leader of the townsfolk cried, and himself took a step closer to Hamdan, coming down to the water’s edge. His spear was levelled now. Its point trembled, etching on the air the powerful emotions its wielder struggled to contain.
For a moment, there was no sound but the gurgling of the river and the sifting of trailing willow boughs by the gentle breeze. Hamdan was a statue, arms outstretched in submission. It did nothing to dim the spearman’s ire.
“You brave bastards with your armies and your swords. You’ve ruined us. My children are hungry. You think I’ll sell you what food I have left?”
To Drann, he looked to be on the brink of tears. Drann had seen his own father weep once, after the King’s tax-takers found the barley he had hidden away. Not when they made him bleed in punishment for his crime, but afterwards, when they had carted that secret store away, and left him with only the prospect of a hungry family. Drann suspected there were few things worse for a loving son than to see his father weeping. He wondered, fleetingly, whether that youth with the sling was son to this near-broken man.
“I understand,” Hamdan was saying, still with a light, almost merry tone. Drann was not sure he did understand. Perhaps he did not see quite what D
rann saw.
“If you’ll let me explain who we are,” the archer continued, “you might —”
The farmer jabbed with the spear. Even Drann could tell it was a half-hearted, clumsy gesture. Hamdan leaned aside, but the spear point did not quite reach him in any case.
“Oh, now. Don’t be doing that,” Hamdan said sternly. “Really. Don’t be doing that.”
The farmer gathered himself and took a step nearer. His teeth were bared, in fear and fury alike.
“Hamdan…” Drann said, urgent but too quiet.
Again the spear darted out. What happened then was too fast for Drann to quite understand, until it was already done. Three men and a boy, all armed, against one man with only his hands, and with his feet in water; and it was finished before Drann had taken four breaths.
Hamdan seized the shaft of the spear as it came towards him and pulled sharply. The farmer took a staggering step forward. Hamdan planted a boot firmly into the man’s crotch. In the same movement, his free arm flicked out, his fingers opened and the bag of coins darted from his hand straight to the boy slinger’s face. It hit him on the bridge of his nose, his efforts to avoid it merely planting him on his backside, sliding him a little way down the riverbank.
As the first spearman was falling, Hamdan was already surging up out of the water, spray pluming about his legs. The other two men he faced were moving, but too slowly, without decision. Hamdan knocked one down with a blur-fast pair of strikes to the centre of his chest. The second managed to turn, and even begin to run, but Hamdan tripped him and pulled the spear from his hands and cast it aside.
When Hamdan turned to face the boy, Drann wanted to cry out, to tell him to stop. But there was no need. Hamdan seized the boy’s collar with one hand, his sling with the other, and growled into his face: “Stay still.” The boy obeyed.
The three men were all on the ground, in varying states of distress. One by one, with pointed detachment, Hamdan broke their spears across his knee. He wiped his hands on the breast of his jerkin and turned to Drann.
“It was good advice. The falling off your horse bit. You should have taken it.”
Drann nodded.
“Don’t look so miserable, son,” Hamdan said. “People who can’t fight shouldn’t start fights. Might be a useful lesson they’ve learned today. Now, go fetch the rest of them, would you? Think you can do that without coming unshipped? Quick as you like. I’ve got wet feet.”
9
The Clamour, That Permanence
It was only as he rode into the tiny, shabby town of Curmen that Drann realised he had been looking forward to arriving there. Arriving anywhere, in fact, in the company of the Free. He had, without actually thinking about it, been hoping that people would see him riding amongst them and think him one of their number. Look upon him with the same awe that he had assumed must greet Yulan and the rest wherever they went. He only realised all of this because the reality of the experience so completely dashed those unconsidered hopes.
The Free were greeted not with adulation or awe, but with grim silence, suspicious eyes. It made Drann uneasy. None of the others seemed at all concerned by it. He could only guess that the scene had been repeated so many times, in so many places, that it no longer troubled them. Perhaps – a darker thought this, more discomfiting – they no longer comprehended it, or whence it came.
“Where are you going?” asked a tall, long-limbed man who walked alongside Yulan’s horse.
The chief man of Curmen. Not one of those who had challenged Hamdan at the ford. Those three, and the boy, had been released as soon as Drann brought Yulan and the rest to the river. Yulan had given them the pouch of coins before they disappeared. He told them it was in payment for the spears Hamdan had broken, though it was ten times what such simple weapons could be worth.
A well-meant gesture, Drann did not doubt. But you could not mend crippled pride with unasked-for coins; that was salt, not salve, to the wound.
“We’ll bed down in Ordeller’s lodging house,” Yulan told the town’s headman without looking at him. “Stable our horses there. We all of us need a good night’s rest.”
The man cast an uneasy glance at the Clamour’s wagon, grinding its way up the unevenly cobbled street with Hestin sitting, as ever, still and silent at the reins in her cloak of green leaves.
“That too?”
“That too,” Yulan confirmed, staring straight ahead. “Best spread the word that your people should keep away from the stables tonight. We’ll set a guard. Pay the stabling fee to you as well as Ordeller tomorrow, if there’s no trouble.”
Curmen was a sorry old town, bedraggled but clearly come from better times, like a little lord whose lands and wealth had been frittered away through drink or coin games. It had a wall of sorts still about it, gappy and robbed of most of its good stone. The buildings were solid enough, made from the same rock as the surrounding hills, but worn and tired.
Drann knew vaguely that Threetower had once been a trading place and busy border crossing when the Hommetic Kingdom and the Empire of Orphans had briefly attempted a sort of peace. It had not lasted long. The road from here to there had no doubt lost its traffic, and dragged Curmen down into decrepitude with it. Now, somewhere out in the gathering darkness, the last of the Hommetics fled along that same road, seeking refuge and perhaps an avenging army in the very empire his ancestors had for so long resisted.
The lodging house to which Yulan led their little column embodied the town’s reduced circumstances. The tall building had finer windows, a finer roof of slate tiles, than those that surrounded it; one or two of those windows were cracked, several of the tiles loose and all of them stained and pitted. The adjoining barn was big enough to accommodate more travellers’ horses than the place must ever see now.
While Hamdan and his archers saw to the stabling of the Free’s mounts, and the hiding away with them of the Clamour and its wagon, Yulan led Drann and the others inside. Ordeller awaited them there, and she was a sight to behold.
Tall and prodigiously broad, she had a jowly face as softly full as an overbrimming water skin. Everything about her was eye-catching – from the garish red skirt to the many-coloured ribbons tied through her hair – but none of it could hold Drann’s attention when set against her companion: a large black-haired ape that sat on one of the tables.
It was a beast unlike anything he had ever seen. He had heard of them, of course. Strange creatures, near-men some called them, that hailed from the forests far to the south, beyond the Massatan sands, beyond everything. He could not guess how one might have arrived here.
Its face was uncannily human, its eyes in particular. Its fur was grizzled, just as an old man’s might be. Greying about its cheeks, its temples, and across its shoulders. Those liquid, intelligent eyes were a touch rheumy.
The creature sat there, loose and comfortable, upon the table and chewed at an apple. Once, it met Drann’s fascinated stare, and returned it for the briefest of moments before losing interest and looking away.
“The brown boy and his crew,” Ordeller cried with a capacious grin, offering Yulan a slightly mocking curtsey. “The honour’ll make me dizzy. Catch me if I fall, Captain; catch me do.”
“Feed us first,” Yulan said. “If you’re going to faint away, do it after.”
Ordeller had always been one of Yulan’s favourites. Just as people had overpraised his own wit, down the years, many missed the depth of Ordeller’s. She hid it well, of course. That was a part of her gift and her usefulness. People thought her just a mildly strange, solitary woman letting a lodging house rot away beneath her feet. Even if she was truly just that, Yulan suspected he would have liked her. But she was a good deal more.
She sat with them about the largest table, though she did not share in the bread and stew she had set out. There was no one else. No other eaters or drinkers or weary travellers. Ordeller had closed up and barred the doors for now. Until the talk was done.
“You’ve come for a pi
glet, got yourself a boar to fight instead,” she said ruefully. “One with big gutting tusks, at that.”
“Meaning?”
“Few dozen of the King’s men passed by, right enough, just a couple of days back. Killed two shepherd boys and four of their flock, the whore-bastards. That’d be this Callotec, I guess. Thing is, another couple of hundred folk arrived over the hills from the south. Joined up with them. They’re all camped not three hours west along the old road, in the broken lands.”
Yulan’s heart sank. A twist in the weave. He had brought the Free to fight a handful, and found hundreds instead.
“You’re sure?” he asked, knowing the answer.
“Sure as sure. What you pay me for, isn’t it? My thinking parts’ve not turned to shit since last we met. It’s been a time, but not that much. I’ve had one or two brave lads take a look. Keep an eye. Three hundred or more, no doubting it.”
“That’s a shame,” murmured Wren, almost wistfully.
“That it is,” Yulan grunted, glancing at her then turning back to Ordeller. “The Kingshouse at Towers’ Shadow still ungarrisoned?”
“Far as I know,” Ordeller nodded.
“No more friends for Callotec between here and the border, at least,” Yulan mused. “Nothing to stop him, either.”
“You can catch him easy enough,” Ordeller said. “When the trading stopped up at Threetower, the road looked more like an invitation for the Empire’s army than a tit to be sucked at, so the Hommetics had parts of it torn up, dug up, ploughed. It’s a slow old way to go, these days. Well, you know that, I suppose. Like as not, that’s why these King’s folk chose it; none’d think to seek them this way. They’ve got wagons and all sorts with them, so they’ll not be out of sight for days yet.”
The Free Page 9