Fierce Gods

by Col Buchanan

  All Nico had to do was sit tight and wait. His father would come for him.

  At least the storm had blown itself out. Though even with the glow of sunlight on his face it was cold sitting there bound and unable to properly move. The other captives in the wagon huddled against each other for warmth, seven women in varying degrees of sullen misery. They were young mostly, the daughters of farmers and shepherds and foresters by the looks of their hardy clothes and calloused hands, no doubt captured along the Chilos in surprise raids.

  To Nico’s eyes the Khosian women looked bizarre sitting in their everyday winter clothing secured by heavy chains of iron. It was as strange a sight as when he had first seen slaves on the reaver island of Cheem; people shackled like strongboxes, like prized possessions that had to be stopped from running away with themselves.

  The scent of the women’s animal fear wafted all around him, as strong in his nostrils as his own stale sweat. They were obviously still in shock at their present enslavement. Yet their heads lifted even as Nico’s did, scenting the sea upon a sudden oncoming breeze.

  The land ahead was tilting downwards now as the hills dropped towards the plains around Bar-Khos. Suddenly they could all see it before them in the far distance, down there in the haze: the besieged city standing on the southern coast of the island, the plains before it darkly covered in imperial forces and a thousand smoking camp fires.

  The sea lying beyond the city was like a slate flecked with chalk. Across it thrust the striking feature of the Lansway, spanned by the walls of the Shield and reaching out towards a smudged impression of the southern continent. But it was eastwards that Nico’s eyes turned in eagerness – east past the marshy delta of the Chilos towards home, their homestead and wild farm not far from the foothills of the High Tell.

  Nico inclined his head, hearing thunder rising on the breeze. It was the heavy guns of the siege blasting away at each other, and they dragged his attention back to the city, back to the vast imperial encampment they were headed for.

  Another day’s slow travel and they would be there.

  ‘Hey, pretty boy!’

  Alongside him, one of the cloaked mercenaries reached out from his saddle to grab a handful of Nico’s hair, and yanked his head back violently. Nico stared fiercely at the man’s leering face, appalled by the meaty stench of his breath.

  ‘Maybe we have some fun with you tonight, heh? Maybe we give old Lolaff some dross in his wine to put him out, and we sample the wares before we reach the city, starting with you. What do you say to that, hey, boy?’

  Indeed, considered Nico – what to say to that? But he was reprieved just then by the fat leader of the group, Lolaff, who bellowed out from the back of his own zel.

  ‘Jern, keep those hands to yourself there!’

  Reluctantly the guard released his grip, hissing through his teeth as he dropped back.

  ‘Pay him no heed,’ insisted the girl by his side. But foreboding descended in a smothering gloom nonetheless. His leather bindings were really starting to hurt. His belly grumbled with hunger. His bladder badly needed to empty itself. And there seemed no way of escaping this imprisonment.

  ‘You have a name?’

  ‘Nico.’

  ‘Call me Kes.’

  The others watched with forlorn eyes. Their suffering was a palpable presence in the back of the wagon, a pall of misery that could not be ignored, not even by these cold-eyed men or their leader, Lolaff. Yet somehow they acted as though it was nothing to them; men long inured to the pain of others.

  Nico recalled again what he had gone through at the hands of the Mannians back in imperial Q’os. The horrors of these people, these fanatical conquerors, now unleashed here in his homeland.

  This living existence was a frightening thing when you saw how truly dire it could get for a person. Kidnapped from your home and forced into bondage like some beast of burden. Born as an innocent child into a family of brutal violence and fear. Burning to death on top of a pyre while you struggled for your next breath of agony. A loved one suddenly dropping dead by your side, like his dog Boon; the fabric of life you shared together gone in a heartbeat, nothing left but impressions in the grass.

  The Mannians liked to say that what didn’t kill you only made you stronger. But that was childish bravado, he knew now.

  Even if you survived the worst that could ever happen to a person, you were likely never the same again. For always you would remain aware of the thin crust of ground upon which your life was really built, and how an abyss lurked just below the surface, waiting to swallow you whole through accident or design. Take a wrong step – or do nothing at all – and suddenly you could be plunging into a nightmare situation too horrible to ever contemplate in your normal days. Yet here it was, happening to you now in all its ferociousness, as real as life ever gets.

  Too real.

  Waiting, deep down every moment of the rest of your life, for the next terrible thing to happen.

  But these tragedies seldom happen, said an inner voice not at all like his own. It sounded just like Ash, his old Rōshun master. Be glad of that. Be glad these things are so rare in life.

  With the wagon jerking him from side to side, Nico recalled what his father had said a few nights earlier, about remembering the joy of past days together, he and his family playing in the rice fields with the rainbow fish.

  Nico breathed in and out like Ash had once taught him, slowly and with attention, breathing all the way into his belly and out again until the dread started to drain from his body. He sought out something good in his mind to reflect upon, and straight away the pretty face of Serèse popped into his head, the hot-headed daughter of Baracha: Serèse smiling at him on a rooftop garden with invisible sparks playing between them . . .

  He blinked and saw the pretty features of the girl by his side instead, biting her lip in tension.

  Remember your joy, he wanted to say to her.

  But what good would that do the young woman when some bastard was forcing himself upon her? What good would it do Nico either, for that matter?

  *

  Gasps sounded from some of the group. Chains chinked as women lifted hands to their mouths to cover the awful putrid stench in the air.

  Nico looked up to see that they were trundling past another burnt-out village on the road. This one appeared to be decorated with the corpses of villagers hanging from trees; men, women and children twisting slowly by their necks.

  He stared as hard as the others, people learning a lesson never to be forgotten. What the Mannians did not claim for themselves, they killed.

  Imperial soldiers still lounged around the scene of their crime in their cloaks and armour. It looked like they were garrisoned in what few structures remained intact in the village, and a gang of them watched the wagons rolling past with their cargoes of women, hands on the hilts of their swords as though judging whether it was worth taking on the guards. A few called out to the captives, but the women wisely kept their heads down.

  On the outskirts of the village a drystone cottage stood alone and partially in ruins. A child was crying within. It was an infant, by the sounds of its wails catching at him like hooks of need, and when his peers heard the sounds too they cursed or prayed aloud in agitation. From the foremost wagon a woman screamed out and tried to launch herself over the side, only to be knocked back by the harsh blows of a guard’s baton.

  ‘She thinks it’s hers,’ rasped the grim woman at the back. ‘Poor fool lost her young one when they took her. Every time she sees a child, she goes into a fit.’

  ‘You lousy bastards,’ snarled the girl next to him, loud enough for all to hear. ‘A curse on every one of you miserable rotten bastards!’

  Nico tore his gaze away from the passing ruin, and stared off in the opposite direction instead where things were less raw and monstrous, wishing he could block his ears too. He wanted freedom from his captivity more than ever before, and he peered at the trees on the slopes and clenched his fists hard
until he felt the fingernails digging into his flesh, trying to waken from a dream.

  Still there was no sign of Cole, and he cursed his father’s name like a litany.

  Downwards they trundled towards Bar-Khos, with the sound of the child’s hungry wails fading only slowly behind them, and even then, long after, lingering in their ears.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Nico

  That night, after making camp in the lee of a darkly forested slope, an argument broke out between the slaver guards and their plump leader, Lolaff, concerning the conditions of their employment.

  It sounded like they were complaining about their pay, but the more they argued the more it became obvious to Nico – and no doubt to the other captives too, shackled and bound against the young trees surrounding the fire – that the real issue concerned them instead. With Bar-Khos and the imperial encampment so close now, the guards wanted their way with the women while they still could. So tonight they complained that their pay was inadequate and that they should be compensated by sampling the wares, and threatened to desert Lolaff if he refused.

  But Lolaff had obviously been involved in this business of human trafficking for a long time. Like a jovial but stern older brother, he scorned and cajoled the men in equal measure while he held his ground, thrusting his great belly out with the confidence of a man who holds the purse strings, and all the answers to their complaints.

  He did not want his goods spoiled before they had even arrived at the front, he told the men. If they touched the women, he would have them arrested by the first soldiers he could find, and their hazard pay, waiting back in the capital, would be reneged.

  As a final warning to the guards, Lolaff made a show of holding up a necklace that he wore, and Nico was appalled to see that it was a Rōshun seal of protection, a tiny leathery thing that inflated and deflated as it breathed. Lolaff was showing them that they could not simply kill him and have their way. If they did, they would have a Rōshun vendetta down on their heads.

  While they argued some more in frustration, one of the women started calling out to the dark woods. It was the broken mother who had cried out for the child they had passed in the roadside ruin.

  ‘Shut up!’ snarled a guard, rounding on her with his baton.

  ‘But I can hear her!’ she shouted, lunging against her chains with her hands outstretched towards the dark trees. ‘I can hear her crying!’

  Every guard grew still as they peered out at the darkness. The woman was right. There was a child crying up there on the wooded slope.

  Uneasily the guards trod to the edge of the firelight and stared up the hill.

  ‘What’s a babe doing out here in the middle of the night?’ the man Lolaff asked aloud, plucking at the hairs of his beard.

  ‘Couldn’t be the same one we passed on the road, could it?’ replied a guard over his shoulder.

  ‘Well if it is, it’s not wandering about up there on its own.’

  Suddenly a dog barked from the crest of the hill, and then another – a whole wild pack of them growling and yelping. The camp dogs went into a frenzy and dashed off into the trees barking their challenges, vanishing in the blackness.

  Once more the infant’s wail rang out from the slope, though this time further to the right of the camp.

  ‘Jern,’ muttered Lolaff from the side of his mouth. ‘Send a few of your men out. Find whoever it is that’s up there.’

  With their argument forgotten for the moment, two unhappy guards were sent out to scout the slope, scampering into the tree line with their swords drawn. The rest remained below, hands on the hilts of their weapons, silently waiting; men who had lived through strange nights before in hostile territories.

  Yelps of pain rose up from the first of the dogfights on the hill. Dogs snarled and growled in combat. Off to the right a thud sounded from somewhere up in the trees, exactly like the sound of an armoured body crumpling to the ground. Then there was another thud.

  The men shifted uneasily.

  ‘Get some torches,’ snapped the guard sergeant Jern, not moving from the edge of the firelight. In a rush the men snatched up burning sticks from the fire then fanned out towards the woods, their swords drawn now too, naked steel reflecting the flames.

  Fat Lolaff edged back closer towards the centre. The man was nervously dabbing his lips with his tongue. Nico sucked at his own dry lips, a delicate intuition shaping itself on the crest of his thoughts.

  Above them, above the ridge of the hill and the scrapping dogs, the stars were shining in all their brilliant insignificance, while the slope below remained a dark mystery, a forest of unknowns. Firelight struck the bare branches of the nearest trees, and then there was only a velvet blackness, into which some of the guards were stepping boldly with their torches.

  For a moment the captives were forgotten about entirely, every guard’s back turned towards them. Just as well too, for Nico almost leapt from his skin when someone tapped his shoulder from behind, and a panted voice whispered in his ear, ‘Son!’

  It was his father, hunkered down in the shadow of the tree trunk Nico was bound to, cutting through his leather bindings with a knife.

  ‘You took your bloody time!’

  ‘Hush, lad, you want them to hear us? Now where’s your mother at? Point her out to me.’

  ‘I would if she was here.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said she isn’t here. I was mistaken.’

  ‘Aiieeee.’

  Even as Cole cut through his leg bindings, Nico was amazed to see an infant child strapped to his father’s chest by a sling of clothing, its tiny head poking out. Cole had to work one-handed with the knife, because the little finger of his other hand was held in the child’s mewling mouth to keep it soothed.

  ‘Hurry up, will you? You’re taking all day!’

  ‘Here,’ snapped Cole, ‘give him your pinky to bite on. He’s hungry and teething.’

  With the women on either side of them shifting in their chains for a better look, Nico held the tip of his little finger between the child’s sharp gums while his father finished freeing him. But as soon as he did so the child bit down hard.

  ‘Ow!’

  From the fireside, Lolaff the slaver turned to look over his shoulder in their direction. The Mannian squinted, but he seemed to see only Nico sitting in the shadows beneath the tree, for he spat on the ground then turned back again, calling out to the men on the slope in enquiry.

  Gasping in relief at his sudden freedom, Nico struggled to his feet then followed his father around the clearing, rubbing the sores on his wrists.

  In the shadows Cole bent down next to one of the captives – the distraught woman who had lost her child. ‘Do you still have milk?’

  ‘Yes!’

  She sobbed and clamped a hand to her mouth as he handed the babe to her, then cradled the little moving bundle in her shaking grasp.

  In moments Cole had cut the woman free too so she was able to stand, then he led her away from the camp.

  ‘Come on,’ growled his father, looking back to the fire and the guards. ‘We need to go.’

  ‘What about the others?’

  ‘We’ve no time, Nico. They’ll spot us any moment here!’

  ‘Wait, we can’t leave these women like this!’

  ‘Nico!’

  ‘Give me a blade. Your machete there.’

  ‘I’ll give you nothing, boy. You can’t damn well save the whole world. Now come on.’

  Nico growled and turned on his heels, heading back into the firelight.

  Now he was free, a silent fury possessed him. All the hours spent in captivity and the shocks before that – the slave market of Tume, and the poor girl shivering naked on the block . . .

  Rage dispelled every doubt and fear, and as he passed between the captive women, Nico picked up a rock from the ground, barely breaking his stride, and with a whip of his arm shot it right at the back of Lolaff’s head.

  There was a crack and then Lola
ff spilled over onto the fire. The slaver howled and rolled his bulk clear of the flames but they followed him, pursued him, dancing across his cloak and his hair so that he wailed in panic and scrambled on all-fours to be free from them. His nearest guards turned about in shock.

  After him ran Nico, stooping to grab up an oval rock from the circle around the fire. The stone was so hot that it seared the skin of his hand, but that only made him hurl it all the harder at a guard dashing into his path. The guard went down with a dent in his helm, and Nico stooped once more to snatch up the fellow’s fallen shortsword, just in time to fend off the blow of another guard’s blade, so brutal it almost knocked him off his feet.

  But then his father was there by his side, cursing Nico aloud, and he dropped the guard with a thrust of a blade so that Nico was able to bound past him.

  What are you doing? asked a frantic part of his mind even as he ran after Lolaff with the shortsword in his hand, following his burning form as he wailed and scampered into the trees.

  Nico stayed right behind him, weaving through the trail of oily smoke. On the run he stabbed at a guard swinging his torch around, feeling the awful ease of the blade slipping through the man’s leather armour and deep into his flesh. He kept on running, stronger and more agile than he had ever been in his life. It was as though all that Rōshun training he’d once struggled through was flowing through him again, but through a better conduit than before, a better body, so that the heft of the sword in his grip was as familiar as the weight of his hands, and he knew in every instant what to do with it.

  ‘Nico!’ roared his father in anger from behind, but he was beyond listening by then.

  For those savage moments amongst the trees, Nico cut down every movement that confronted him, using the burning Lolaff as bait for the surrounding guards’ attention, and as a moving human torch to show him where to strike and when.

  He lost all sense of time, all sense of himself, in fact. It was only when Lolaff lay before him as a still and smouldering heap on the slope of the hill that Nico came back to himself at last, and then he realized there were no more guards around him. In the sudden darkness, absent now of torches, he heard zels snorting as they were spurred from the camp: the surviving guards fleeing as Cole shouted after them to come back for more.