Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles)

by Brady, Robert

  There’s something about riding a huge horse which is entirely different from normal ones. A horse is a powerful animal – a stallion especially. Riding him, you learn to move with him, to be one with him – sometimes, I think we’ve given up something of our humanity when we left horses for cars. Even while I still dwelled on my encounter with War, on the pain, on the fear of being here, not knowing what I had to do next, not knowing what would become of me, I found release in that ongoing ride, that powerful animal surging across the plain beneath me.

  For a while, I thought to myself that, with him on my side, I had a good chance of accomplishing whatever it was I had to do.

  The shore had turned more toward the west and I could see some sort of change coming up, either a river flowing from it or just a bend in the shoreline.

  As we approached, he finally slowed to a walk. Now I saw a river mouth flowing south from the lake and that the ground had become hilly. I also saw a little scrub grass that the horse would likely want. The sun had fallen past the apex; we must have been running for four hours or more. It amazed me – I couldn’t guess how far we had come. With such animals for their mass-transit, the civilization here would advance strangely. Commerce could develop more quickly than industrialization and countries become more far-reaching as distances could be traveled more quickly. The stallion was lathered now and would likely need a rest. I wondered if I could make a bridle from my shirt for him when he slowed to a stop.

  “Kak dila?” I heard, and saw no one speaking.

  “Huh, what?” I asked.

  A tiny man in steel sleeves and shoulder pads, carrying a huge mace, stepped out from in front of the panting stallion. He had steel-gray hair down past his shoulders, including a beard tucked in his belt, and a pointed steel cap. He looked at me curiously, then at the stallion, and then at the sword in my hand. His bushy black eyebrows pulled down over his eyes as he pointed at it. “Kak etot, Sentalskovich? Lo vista ot sevadstni Voinu!”

  I shook my head and the horse shied a little. If he took off again I would seem like I was running away. I wanted to talk to this man and I doubted that he waited here alone. I didn’t want to find out that a stand of archers had me targeted from over some nearby ridge.

  At the mention of Voinu, however, a buzzing had started in my ears. I shook my head and he said, “Nye etot ot Voinu? Kak etot, toshe?”

  Again, the word Voinu brought the buzzing, and I felt a smaller version of that violation that I had experienced when my new God had looked into my mind. I felt something behind my ears go snap, and then nothing. I reeled on the back of the horse and almost steadied myself with my sword hand before I remembered how sharp the weapon was and used the other.

  “I – I don’t understand you,” I said, and in my own ears the language that I spoke sounded strange.

  “Ah, an Eldadorian, then?” the little man said. “Fine, then, Man – who are you, Eldadorovitch, and is that truly a Sword of War you are carrying? It isn’t every day that someone rides a stallion from the Wild Horse Plains south into the lands of the Simple People.”

  This, I guessed right then, had been my first taste of this foreign culture. Already I didn’t like it.

  Chapter Three

  The Simple People

  The little man looked up at me, a tight smile buried in his beard, eyebrows twitching. I knew I should dismount but I didn’t want the horse to bolt. I thought about his question and looked at the sword in my hand.

  “Aren’t all swords for war?” I asked him.

  He grimaced and gave a short nod. “Mmm, very philosophical, Man,” he agreed. “And what great Lord are you, that you dress in rags and yet don’t dismount to greet me properly in my own nation?”

  Well, that didn’t take long. Randy, if there is money in pissing people off, you’ll be a millionaire, I thought. At the last moment I remembered my God’s advice however, and resolved not to identify myself.

  “My name is Ran – um, that is, Rancor,” I told him. That was the best I could think of on the spur of the moment, considering that the word had to start with “Ran.” Actually it suited me most of the time anyway. My voice sounded different to me now, although I couldn’t tell why.

  “I just caught this horse this morning and I have nothing to tie him up with,” I admitted. “I am afraid he will bolt if I dismount him.”

  The little man chuckled. “The Simple People have a saying: ‘Men are so tall that only the thinnest air feeds their brains.’ I think that you are proof of it, Rancor. I doubt the poor beast could walk even to the river, the way you have ridden him. He will not stray far.”

  I narrowed my eyes at the insult, once I figured it out, but I had to agree. I dismounted and dropped the sword, point-down in the ground, then extended my hand to the little man.

  I expected him to take my hand, but he grabbed me by the forearm instead. Fingers like pieces of steel probed the flesh between my radius and ulna. “Kvitch,” he told me. I assumed this was his name.

  “A pleasure,” I said, looking into his deep, brown eyes. They were hard yet friendly. We broke the grip and his eyes moved from me back to the sword.

  “That is no way to treat the blade, Rancor,” he said.

  “I have no sheath for it,” I told him. Pulling it from the sand. I noted that the grit didn’t stick to it. Kvitch seemed to, as well.

  “That isn’t a normal sword, Rancor,” he said. “And that stallion is from the Wild Horse Plains, from the Herd Which Cannot be Tamed. You are a penniless vagabond, or close to it, in my nation without leave, coming south, not north, which means you either fought the ogre tribes in Volkhydro and traveled hundreds of leagues east, or passed here without being seen. Neither of those seems very likely.”

  I could tell that he thought I was a liar. Fair enough. Kvitch seemed to be screwing up the courage to tell me something he knew I wouldn’t like, and I had already guessed what it would be.

  The stallion stood still as a stone, his head high. I assumed that if I jumped onto his back he would take off like a rocket again. My ears strained for some indication that Kvitch wasn’t alone but I couldn’t hear anything.

  “So, what is your game plan, Kvitch?” I asked him.

  “My what?” he asked.

  American slang – I needed to watch that. “An expression from where I am from,” I explained. “You don’t seem like you are just making idle chat.”

  “No,” he said, smiling. “Not with a Man, anyway. My problem is that if you take that horse south there will come a steady stream of Men and Uman from Sental and Volkhydro with the idea that the Herd Which Cannot be Tamed is now changed somehow. I also don’t think you came here with that sword and no sheath, but that you found it in my nation. That makes it the property of the Simple People.”

  “Ah,” I said, nodding. “So you plan to take them both, I imagine.”

  “That is the plan, yes,” he told me.

  I had finally placed the stand of archers. About three of them, behind a rise, twenty yards straight to my left. One had creaked his bow while Kvitch talked, another had dropped an arrow at the same time, and now I could hear one speaking softly in his own language. Another legacy of my Navy experience: engine-room ears. The same ability that let a watch supervisor hear a steam turbine generator dip two hertz while three big men beat a piece of steel decking with a hammer. I could hear the small sounds over the big ones.

  “And your archers over that rise, are going to help you with that?” I asked him.

  “What archers?” he asked me. “Since when do Dwarves have archers?”

  “What are Dwarves?” I asked him.

  You know, you can be too clever. Yes, three men hid on the other side of the rise, but they just happened to be here at the same time as me.

  Kvitch had reflexes like a cat, surprising in one built so thick. From behind the rise one tall, thin man, dressed in beige leathers, pulled a feathered shaft back on a long bow as he stood. His two friends charged from either side of th
e rise. The Dwarf whipped out a circular disk and threw it in their direction. The thing spun through the air and took the archer in the stomach before he could react. By then Kvitch had his mace up and had squared off on the three of us.

  I might have picked the side of the other two men if one hadn’t charged me with a short, double-edged sword raised. I had my sword up in a stance that I had learned from fighting in events at the Renaissance Fair. I put my side to the opponent, sword up in an angle over my head, blade pointed down. I positioned my left hand straight down, ready to come up for a punch or, if possible, to grab his shield or another of my weapons.

  He didn’t have a shield and I didn’t have another weapon. He looked at me and stopped dead in his tracks, obviously wondering what I was doing. I took the initiative and struck the first blow, sweeping the sword in a wide arc. In this stance, all of the power would come from turning my hips. I thought that, by holding the blade parallel to the ground, I could take him in his neck.

  The blade was light, true and strong, and I swung it as hard as I could. Even though he brought his own blade up at the last second, the blow aimed for his neck glanced from his weapon and caught him in the side of his unprotected head. Brains and blood spattered and his sword rang as it flipped end-over-end to one side. I spun on my heel, totally off balance, and crashed backwards into the stallion’s side.

  The huge stallion nickered and leaned against me. When I had gotten my balance back, I looked to my left and saw Kvitch trying to keep a bigger man at bay. The length of the man’s sword made it more effective than the Dwarf’s mace for one-on-one combat and kept Kvitch from getting in a killing blow. I looked for other combatants and saw none. I guessed that there were, in fact, only three.

  I stood, got back in my fighting stance behind the man’s back, and chopped straight down into his shoulder. The blade cut him to the groin and he fell, spewing blood on the swearing Dwarf. I held onto the sword so that the dead man’s weight wouldn’t pull it from my hand and looked the Dwarf square in the face.

  “That was a mean blow,” Kvitch said, wiping blood from his eyes. “Delivered to the back like that. Not very honorable.”

  “I’ll get over it somehow,” I told him. In fact, I had never killed anyone intentionally like this before and had started shaking. I dreaded that I would get sick or pass out. I wanted to stand strong in front of Kvitch; I didn’t know his character, and this might do nothing to make him change his mind about me or my sword and horse.

  “Yeah,” he said, looking into my eyes, “I think you are the kind who will.” He looked at the other body. “You made short work of both of them, I don’t suppose I’ll be taking that sword or that horse from you, will I?”

  “I don’t see it happening, no,” I told him. I felt relieved, though I tried not to show it. I needed to sit and my body wanted to shake from not eating and the shock of having killed. My head pounded for need of a cup of coffee and I really didn’t know if I could take that mace from the powerful little man.

  He looked down at his blood-soaked body. “Ugh, I need to wash these,” and looking at me, added, “It might be nice if you had gotten a little blood on you, Rancor, if only for show.”

  I chuckled, relieved a little, and followed Kvitch to behind the rise where the archer had been hidden. Fortunately he walked in front of me, so he couldn’t see the sick look on my face.

  My two blows had been killing, Kvitch’s one merely crippling. The thin, pale man sat groaning, holding the disk where it stuck two-thirds of the way from a bloody hole in his flat stomach. He looked up at us as we came around the rise, reaching for his bow.

  Kvitch leaped forward and kicked it out of the way. The man sank back into the puddle of his own blood, shaking.

  “I will finish you quick if you answer me quick, Uman,” Kvitch said. The other nodded, waiting. I wondered what an Uman could be, probably a people from farther north, judging from the pale skin.

  “What brought you here?” Kvitch asked.

  “Raiding,” the Uman replied.

  “I can finish you slow too, you know.”

  The Uman swallowed. “We are scouts for the Dorkan Guard.”

  “Wrong side of the mountains for that, no?”

  “They are coming through the Dead Oak Forest and up through the Plains of Sental. Two thousand heavy infantry. They’re paying Sentallan scouts in gold and, so long as they hug the Great Northern Mountain Range, Sental won’t interfere.”

  I had learned a lot and nothing at the same time. I had identified four, maybe five distinct civilizations: Volkhydrans, Dorkan, Sentalans, Dwarves and, something Kvitch might have called me earlier. There were nations to east, west and south. Nothing lived north of here but Ogres and horses. There were Men, Uman and Dwarves, maybe Volkhydrans and Dorkans as well. As I looked at the wounded man, I saw subtle differences between him, the Dwarf and myself. The Dwarf had tiny, flat ears, a broad nose, thick, folded skin and a lot of hair. The Uman had thin hair, his ears pointed and long lobed, his skin thin and pale, with the veins close to the surface. His blood was a light red – he liked warm, southern climates – a surprise because of the pale skin, but he couldn’t be from the north. His bones were thin and light. The Dwarf’s body, on the other hand, was built nearly as wide as he tall and his biceps were nearly as thick as my legs.

  Perhaps all from the same gene pool but certainly distinctly different evolutionary paths. They could be a different species altogether. Kvitch had called me a Man, so at least someone here came close to my DNA. He took the disk and shook it a little, and the Uman groaned.

  “Ever taken one of these apart, Rancor?”

  “Nope.”

  The Uman looked up wide-eyed.

  “They bleed all over the place and they scream like a devil,” Kvitch said matter-of-factly. “They have very sensitive internals, nerves all through them. But they are tough – they take a real long time to die.”

  “You Dwarven scum,” the Uman cursed. “I told you what I know.”

  “Gave it up awfully easily too,” I said. Kvitch looked up at me.

  “Think he’s lying?”

  “Hard to tell. Guess we need to keep him alive until we check out his story.”

  To the Uman, the Dwarf said, “How far ahead of your army were you?”

  “Days,” the Uman said. I laughed. Kvitch looked up at me.

  “Like hell,” I said. “You don’t range men on foot that far ahead. If you lost one of your scouts, your enemy would have too much time to get ready for you. ”

  The Uman shut his eyes, and Kvitch studied me. “You are a military man?” he asked.

  I felt the corner of my mouth quirk up. Yeah, Navy – we did this all the time. In fact, the knowledge came from reading book after book at sea about Greek, Roman and Celtic history. All of my life, I had devoured books on battles and tactics - a hobby, really, but useful now.

  “Yes,” I half-lied. “Of a sort. An army that small would keep its mercenaries close to the vest.”

  “Small?” the Uman scoffed. “I said two thousand, Man. I don’t suppose you could take them on yourself.”

  True enough, I thought, and another important lesson. Either they were not very heavily populated civilizations, or they maintained small armies because they were, by and large, peaceful.

  Kvitch twisted the disk in his guts. “How far, Uman?”

  He groaned again. “A day on foot.”

  Kvitch looked at me, and I nodded. “More likely,” I said. “Are you actually alone here?”

  The Dwarf nodded. “I am here only to guard the beach path.”

  “How far to your people, on foot?” I asked him.

  “For a Dwarf? Three days. For you? A week or so.”

  “So … maybe you should go back and warn your people, and I should go and take a look at this approaching army?”

  Kvitch snickered at me. “All out of the goodness of your heart, you would do this?”

  “No, actually, I want something,” I
told him.

  “I might have guessed,” the Dwarf said. “The sword and the horse?”

  “No,” I said, smiling, “I already have those.”

  That got a wry smile from the Dwarf.

  “Food and water for now,” I said, indicating the stream. “The horse won’t drink this, and I don’t like it, either.”

  “Done. And later?”

  “Your time.”

  “My time?”

  “Yep, as long as it takes for you teach me geography, some sword play and everything you know about all the people that live here.”

  “In this range?”

  “In this Land.”

  The Uman sat quiet. Kvitch looked deep into my eyes.

  “You are not, then a Fovean,” he stated.

  “Something like that,” I answered, not knowing what that was.

  The Dwarf laughed, a sound like rocks grinding together that I didn’t altogether like. “Well, then, sure, Rancor – if I live to do it. After about two hundred Dwarves meet two thousand Dorkan warriors, I would be happy to gossip about Fovean politics with you.”

  Ah, they called this place Fovea. Better and better.

  The Dwarf gave me food similar to what I had been carrying before, and a skin full of water. He showed me how to water the horse without getting slobber all over the end (which, if you think about it, is a pretty useful thing to know) and added, unasked for, a steel sheath only a little too large for my sword.

  “I found this on a Volkhydran who tried to flank me, like those three did. Volkhydrans are Men,” he added, looking at me significantly. “They move louder than Uman, so they didn’t get by me. Volkhydro has rich northern mines and commonly use steel sheaths. I was going to bring it back and see if there was any point in us making and selling these to other nations.”

  The sheath made a welcome addition. After I dispatched the Uman and shook the blood from my blade, I strapped it across my shoulder where I could get at it while riding. I would have to be careful not to cut my head off in the process.