by Craig Zerf
‘So?’ Urged Jarvis.
‘Uncle Robert has been charged with sedition. Stealing weapons from the Fair-Folk. They’re readying the gallows. Jarvis, they’re going to hang Robert at sunrise.’
‘They can’t do that.’
‘They can. And they will. There’s no way that we can stop them.’
Jarvis stood up and strapped on his sword.
‘What you doing?’ Asked Benny.
‘I’m going to speak to father. He was right. Now, somehow, we need to save uncle Robert and then get the hell out of here.’
The two friends ran down the main street towards the bay where they found Jarvis’s father, mending his fishing nest.
Jarvis blurted out the story and waited for his father’s reaction.
He threw his net down and snorted in disgust. ‘Shit. That bloody younger brother of mine. Always knew he would end up over his head. Dammit. Come on, boys.’
Jacob Baker started walking back home and the two young men followed.
‘What are we going to do, pa?’ Asked Jarvis as they got home.
Jacob didn’t answer. He simply went to the hallway cupboard and pulled out two double-barreled shotguns. He loaded them with buckshot and then opened a drawer in the cupboard. Inside the drawer was a glass jar filled with copper pennies. He poured a handful of pennies into each shotgun barrel and then, tearing four strips of a shoe polish rag, he pushed wadding down each barrel to prevent the coins falling out.
Then he smiled. But it was a mere grim facsimile of humor. A death’s head grin as opposed to an expression of happiness.
‘Ha,’ he said. ‘Let’s see those bastard pig-men try to stand up against a barrel load of his majesties coin of the realm. So, when do they reckon that they’re going to string up my little brother?’
‘Sunrise tomorrow, mister Baker,’ answered Benny.
‘Right. Jarvis, I want you to go and find your sister, Doris. I’m going to take one of the horses, you take the other three. Pack everything that you can. Food, medical supplies, knives, the pistol next to my bed. Make sure you take an extra pair of boots. Then the both of you head north, away from these Fair-Folk bastards. This village is not going to be healthy for any of the Baker family after tomorrow.’
‘But, dad,’ argued Jarvis. ‘How am I going to help you rescue uncle Robert?’
Jacob smiled again. This time it was genuine. ‘Son, how many pig-men and goblins are stationed here?’
Jarvis shrugged. ‘Not sure, dad. A thousand. Maybe two thousand.’
‘And how many will be watching the murder of my brother?’
‘All of them, I suppose.’
‘Exactly. Look, son, ever since your mother passed we haven’t got on so well. But I tried my best. I did what I thought was right.’
‘And you were right, dad. I know that now. So, let’s save uncle Robert and then get out of here.’
Jacob put his arm around his son. ‘My boy, I’m sorry. But I’m not going to save Robert, there’s simply no way that we could. I’m going to die with him. And at least make a few of these pig-men pay for the privilege of murdering my baby brother. Jarvis, my time here has passed. I no longer care or even have the will to continue. Every day I ache for your mother’s company. I love you and Doris with all my heart but you have to let me go. It’s all that I ask to go out in a blaze of glory.’ Jacob laughed. ‘It’ll be fun. Also, it will give you a head start.’
Silent tears ran down Jarvis’s face.
The father and son hugged one last time and then Jacob left, concealing his shotguns under his long, fishermen’s coat.
Jarvis and Doris left Pennance later that evening, slipping out under the cover of darkness. But they did not go alone. With them was Gerry, his brother, and his parents. Each had their own horse.
They headed north.
***
Jacob sat atop his horse that stood on the small hill overlooking the Orc encampment. He was watching his final sunrise. And, as if it knew, and did not want to disappoint, it breached the horizon in a burst of deep lavender. Then the streaks of purple turned slowly to pink and then gold as the massive orb floated upwards. The eternal aurora borealis lights flickered their green wash across the heavens in a perfect counterpoint. A new day had been birthed.
Below him the entire Pennance battle battalion was arrayed outside of the stockade. Massed ranks of alien creatures.
Alongside them stood a group of the village noteworthies, perhaps twenty or so. Councilman Blamey, father Donovan and doctor Brennan amongst them.
In the small clearing in front of the crowd stood a plain wooden gallows. There was no trapdoor or hanging drop as the structure had been built at ground level. It was a simple L shape from which a rope hung. The rope would be placed around Robert’s neck and he would be hauled up and held until he choked to death.
A goblin started a slow beat on a skin drum and the compound gates opened to reveal the prisoner, flanked by two Orcs. They walked slowly through the massed ranks until they reached the gallows.
Jacob leant forward and patted his mare on the neck.
‘Come on, girl,’ he whispered. ‘Let’ go make some noise.’
He kicked her flanks and she leapt into a gallop.
The ranks of Orcs and goblins glanced up at the sound of the thundering hooves to see a single man bearing down on them. His head was thrown back and he was whooping a battle cry.
Robert saw him coming and he shouted back. An incoherent cry of both pride and disbelief.
Jacob spurred his horse across the front of the crowd, urging every bit of speed out of it. But before he got half way there, the goblin archers had started to unleash their arrows.
Jacob flicked back his long coat and drew one of his shotguns. He aimed and fired back at the goblins, discharging both barrels at once. The combination of buckshot and copper pennies swathed through them, like a claymore mine, tearing off limbs and hammering half-inch holes through their alien torsos.
A group of Orcs jumped in front of the fisherman. He dropped his empty shotgun, drew the next and fired. Again the discharge wreaked havoc and devastation.
An arrow struck the horse in the neck and it went down. Jacob sprang from its back as it did and ran the last few feet to his brother. He pulled his knife out and slashed the ropes from his hands.
The sun grew dark as over five hundred goblin archers unleashed their cloth yard arrows at once. The air was filled with the sound of fluting death as the arrows reached their zenith and plunged down towards the two brothers.
They put their arms around each other and smiled.
***
Later that day, when the orcs went to collect the stolen arms from Roberts’s barn they were no longer there. Instead there was but a simple note written on a scrap of brown paper.
“There will be blood for blood!”
Chapter 17
His full name was Cornelius Montgomery Thaddeus Parkinson. It was a long name. His friends, when they had still been alive, had called him Tad. Some said because it was a shortening of Thaddeus. Others because it was short for Tadpole.
It wasn’t easy living up to such a long name. Especially when you had Achondroplasia or, as many referred to it as, dwarfism. Tad stood four foot five and weighed in at 140 pounds. And that was all muscle and bone.
Thaddeus had been born to a mother, who was a full time housewife and a father who was a teacher at the local elementary school. They had been good and kind parents and Tad’s affliction was never treated as such. Both parents gave him full rein to whatever he wanted to do and supported him fully. He qualified from Edinburgh University, at the age of 25, with an honors degree in astronomy.
By this stage he had also become a minor celebrity as Britain’s only dwarfish bodybuilder. Ever wary of obesity problems that many achnondroplasts suffered from, Tad had become a fanatical exerciser and weight lifter. The bodybuilding side of it was merely a byproduct of his four-hour a day training regime.
It
was after he had graduated that he had his first real argument with his parents. At the age of twenty-five with a respected degree behind his name, Cornelius Montgomery Thaddeus Parkinson (Tad), decided to join Burnaby’s traveling circus as a strongman act.
Tad certainly knew that he was being deliberately obtuse and otherwise. But he had his reasons and they were his own. At the same time that he joined Burnaby’s he took up knife throwing. As with everything that he did he became superb. Probably the best in the United Kingdom, if not the world.
Sometimes people still made jokes about dwarf throwing or they asked him where his axe was or they called him Gimli. But they seldom did it more than once. And that wasn’t because he always resorted to violence. In fact he often turned the clumsy humor back on people gaining both their respect and their friendship.
For the last three weeks, however, he had taken to talking to himself. This was because, out of the forty people that had worked in the traveling circus, he was the only one still living. And he was lonely.
The pulse had hit while they were on the road and, after it had become obvious that the cars and trucks were not going to miraculously all start to work again, they had pushed them off the road into an adjacent field, forming them into a round laager or encampment.
A stream ran across the bottom of the clearing and, amongst them all, they had sufficient food for about a week.
Unfortunately, mister Burnaby was a class 1 diabetic and his insulin ran out at about the same time as the food. He went into a diabetic coma that evening and never came around.
From then on the lifestyle at the lager became a comedy of errors. Whilst grieving her husband’s death, Mrs. Burnaby had a heart attack and died. Faced with a double funeral, they decided to dig a single large grave fairly far away from the encampment. Zorba, the male half of the Flying Greek Trapeze Artists, slipped while digging the grave and cut his leg quite badly. Without antibiotics the wound became infected and turned gangrenous within hours.
Later sepsis set in and Zorba died an agonizing death in the small hours of that morning. Adelpha couldn’t take the death of her beloved husband and slashed her wrists necessitating another double funeral.
They dug the second grave next to the first.
Then Dorcas Pugsley, the bearded fat lady, collected a basket of mushrooms and made a mushroom stew for all. Fortunately she guzzled most of it down herself leaving only enough for six of the road crew to snack on.
By midday next all seven had died in the throes of unimaginable pain.
It took two days to dig a big enough grave for all of them.
At the end of the second week one of the five clowns found an ancient unopened can of pickled fish under the floorboards of their caravan and the resultant battle for it caused the immediate death of three of them. The two victors shared the fish.
Within twelve hours they started to suffer from blurred vision, dry mouth and muscle weakness. 72 hours later they had died of botulism poisoning.
No one bothered to bury them. They simply dragged them off into the forest and left them there.
Tad went hunting for small game and, using his prodigious knife throwing abilities, he managed to kill a couple of pigeons. However, to his shame, he told no one and simply cooked and ate them himself before he returned to the camp. He kept up this subterfuge for another ten days, by which time the remaining 23 members of the circus were almost dead from starvation. Tad knew that, even if he hunted all day, he could never find enough food for all, so he simply kept his deeds secret. But the rest were now aware that, somehow, Tad was getting food.
That evening when Tad reappeared from his days hunting they attacked him en masse, determined to find out where his food supply was. It was a pathetic and unbelievably depressing show of strength as the score of emaciated, starving, sickly people attempted to physically best the well-fed, healthy circus strongman.
More than half of them died from straightforward exertion as their floundering hearts simply gave up beating due to lack of sustenance. With deep sadness and massive remorse, Tad had to kill the rest in order to live on.
And so he had. The only survivor of the world’s blackest farce.
Since then he had taken to talking to himself, hanging tenuously onto his last threads of sanity in a world gone absolutely and completely mad.
He glanced up at the horizon and saw a small group of three horses and riders silhouetted against the lowering sun. He quickly donned his leather jerkin, a custom made waistcoat with enough small pockets to hold a dozen razor sharp throwing knives. Then he slipped on his leg sheaths, one on each thigh. Each of these held a single larger, heavyweight-throwing knife. Finally, he slid one of his steel tomahawks into a loop on his belt. Then he climbed up onto the roof of one of the trucks that made up the laager and he waited.
The group ambled up towards him and stopped a few feet away.
A large man with a small girl riding in front of him raised his hand in greeting.
‘Nathaniel Hogan,’ he said. ‘Master sergeant, United States Marine Corps. This is Milly, these two lovelies are Adalyn and Janeka and this be Gramma Higgins.’
Tad nodded his acknowledgement. ‘I be Tad, astrologer, circus strongman, knife thrower, survivor and dwarf. I have no one to introduce on account of all of them being dead. I think that I may be insane…but that remains to be proven in any sort of empirical way. At present it is simply a working theory. Welcome to my laager.’
The party dismounted and led their horses in between two trucks and into the protection of the laager.
‘So, how long have you been here, Tad?’ Asked Nathaniel.
‘A while. Since the solar storm. There were many more of us. It’s a long story and I have no desire to speak of it. At times I am no longer even sure if it all happened. In fact, I am no longer sure if this is all real or simply some manner of delusion. Regardless,’ he continued. ‘It is the structure in which I am being forced to operate so, until further proof, I shall continue to assume that it is a reality of some sort.’
The marine smiled. ‘Tad, you are one weird dude.’
Tad nodded. ‘Perhaps. Perhaps not. Who knows.’
‘Do you have any food?’ Enquired Nathaniel.
‘No. But I can get food. I hunt well.’
‘Well, then,’ said the marine. ‘Why don’t we let the ladies start up a good fire while you and I go and hunt us up a mess of something.’
Tad nodded. ‘Let’s go. Better done than said.’ He climbed down from the truck roof and he and Nathaniel headed away from the laager and towards the nearby forest.
They walked without talking for a while. Nathaniel was impressed at the way that Tad moved. His footsteps made no sound, he kept to the shadows and his gaze constantly swept the surrounds.
Then Tad held his hand up and put a finger to his lips. He pointed.
Nathaniel stared for a few seconds before his eyes translated the scene in front of him. And when it did, it was immediately apparent.
Standing in the dappled shade, cropping the grass, was a small Muntjac deer, maybe forty feet away.
The strongman pulled a heavy knife from his leg sheath, cocked his arm and released. The blade whipped through the air and struck the deer directly behind its law bone, instantly severing both its jugular vein and carotid artery. The deer shivered once and then dropped dead.
The two men gutted and dressed it where it had fallen. Then Nathaniel cut down a sturdy pole of wood, spitted the deer on it and carried it over his shoulder as the headed back to the camp.
Back at the laager, as the sun went down, Nathaniel constructed two tripods from sturdy sticks lashed together with strips of bark, then he put one each side of the fire and lay the spitted deer over it.
Meanwhile Gramma had put on a pot of wild carrots and the girls had searched the trucks. Adalyn and Janeka had found two cajon drums. Basic wooden boxes with a sound hole and a snare. One sat on them like a stool and played by beating the front of the box with an open
hand.
While the deer sizzled away on the spit the two girls beat out a rhythm. They started simple and soft, almost jazzy, and then segued into a more primal beat. Jamaican Obeah underpinned by the savage cadence of North Africa. Mysterious and demanding.
Gramma joined in, chanting on every second beat. ‘Hey-ah! Hey-ah! Hey-ah!’
Tad and Milly started to clap a counter rhythm, jagged and syncopated.
Nathaniel felt shivers run up and down his spine. Sweat poured down his back as he felt the spirit of the ancient music fill his soul. He tried to stop it but it demanded his attention. Insisting on him. His hair stood on end and power flowed into him. He felt like he was going to explode. His skin felt taut as a drum skin. Tiny flickers of blue fire sparkled all over his body. And the beat went on.
He stood up, threw his arms wide and howled at the heavens. Massive bolts of lightning leapt from his fingers and crashed against the sky. The sound of thunder rolled across the land and the smell of ozone filled the air.
The lightning formed a ball of iridescent blue fire that hovered for a while and then went crashing into the nearby forest, shattering trees and causing a vast swathe of fiery destruction.
The Forever Man fell to the floor and lay still. As still as death. His clothes were smoldering and his face was a pale as a full moon.
Once again, the night became still.
And far away an owl hooted as it searched for its mate.
Chapter 18
Nathaniel’s consciousness came rushing back. A tidal wave of senses assailed him and he almost passed out again.
He glanced quickly around. He was seated on a horse on top of a small hill.
On his left stood another horse. Mounted on it, a man dressed in a grubby white tunic and robe. A druid. On his right, another four horses and a man holding a long brass horn. They were all dressed in great kilts, the tartan weave wrapped around their torsos as well as their hips. On each of their backs was a sheathed double-handed broadsword, in a shoulder scabbard. Hanging from each saddle, a large wooden quiver that held six heavy throwing spears.