Indomitus Oriens (The Fovean Chronicles)

by Robert Brady

  Jerod stood, shifted his sword on his belt. He stood and walked away without saying anything. He shot a sideways glance at Raven—she caught his eye, looking more guilty than anything, then lost it.

  Nina looked at her. “You really don’t know?” she said.

  Raven shook her head—she was getting sick of this.

  “Jerod is the Hero of Tamara,” Nina told her. “That man is one of the bravest who ever put a foot down on Fovean soil.”

  * * *

  Jerod felt so sick of this crap that it burned him inside. Not a week went by when that day hadn’t haunted him, and that had been a lot of weeks.

  Stomping through Kor’s stinking wharves, not really knowing where he was bound for, he relived it again. Lupus’ small city, himself barely seventeen, never having killed a man before, the pampered son of a warlord whom people were wondering about—whether he had it in him to replace the old man.

  Henekh had already taken another wife, to try for another son.

  When those Confluni had swarmed out of the forest, across the glen and into their barricades, his Wolf Soldier guards, one hundred strong, had raised their shields, lowered their pikes and taken them, head on. What amazed him is that they held. Confluni died skewered on hand cut spikes in the dirt around their walls, then to arrow fire from their archers, hiding behind their barricades, then finally on the pikes of their men.

  His first command, the Wolf Soldiers, one hundred strong, slowly being pushed back by thousands, and winning.

  The shield bearers fell back as one, a wall over one hundred feet long moving in unison, then separating to allow swords to stab out and kill more men, then pulling back and closing, so pikes could strike again.

  When it looked like the line would crumble, the Daff Kanaar flooded in from their flanks like water past a dam, taking the Confluni totally unaware, driving them until his Wolf Soldiers could advance back into the breach and stop the flood.

  Precise as any machine, they did it over and over. Fall back, stab, push forward, slash. The Confluni hammered on them, trying to get around the sides of their barricade where the archers riddled them, trying to get over, standing on the bodies of their own dead. Trying to draw out the rest of the Daff Kanaar and failing.

  The Confluni had retreated, and then they had come again, but this time with spears.

  Not normal spears, but long poles born like battering rams held by as many as four men. They smashed through the shield walls, spilling the guts of the swordsmen, the spearmen, toppling the shieldmen as well. The Wolf Soldiers hung on only by the strength of their discipline, some still fighting with the splintered end of a spear protruding from a breast or hip.

  He needed more, and he needed them now, and he knew where to get them, and that is what made him the Hero of Tamara.

  They had walked here, and he had been interested in becoming a Wolf Soldier himself. They took anyone. He could join them, change his name, and he could forget about ever replacing his father, ever having to be the leader of his people—just fight and live and, someday, die.

  In his cowardice, his weakness, he had asked them to teach what they did, and how. The Wolf Soldiers had thought it funny, their leader being taught by the troops he led, but they taught him to march, and the commands they used for advance, for falling back, to wheel to the left and the right. He’d marched as a shield bearer, as a pikeman, as a swordsman. At night when they drilled, he took all of the positions and he excelled at them.

  And at the same time, other members of the Daff Kanaar, their foot soldiers, saw him, and joined him, and together they all learned the moves, and the basics of the discipline, and the regimen of Wolf Soldiers.

  So when he needed them, he knew where to get them. He left the ranks, rallied those Daff Kanaar soldiers and lined them up behind his Wolf Soldiers. On that critical retreat, where it looked like the Confluni finally had the momentum to push them back into the small city, Jerod, then Karl, had given the order to wheel to one side, and Confluni crashed right into the ranks of those fresh soldiers.

  They didn’t fight as well as Wolf Soldiers. They weren’t hard-core killers like Wolf Soldiers but they had the heart, the momentum, and as soon as he could, Karl replaced their casualties with his seasoned troops, interspersing experience where it was needed, taking the pounding from the Confluni and, again, turning them back.

  “Can you hold them?” the warrior, his countryman, Nantar had demanded of him.

  “For a while,” he said. “Until these die.”

  And then the Confluni archers had engaged, and all of the men began falling, arrows raining in and striking them at random, Daff Kanaar and Wolf Soldiers trying to fight with shafts sticking into them, slipping on their own fallen, on their own blood.

  They pushed the Confluni back. Some sort of spell casting was going on in and out of the little city. Karl remembered wiping the sweat and the blood from his eyes and looking past the Confluni horde to the troops beyond—seeing how many they had left to kill.

  Like the god War himself, there rode the Conqueror on his white stallion, in the midsts of the enemy with the Sword of War cleaving down on shoulders and skulls.

  Karl hadn’t really believed it when he saw it—it came to him almost like a dream. Blood flowed down Lupus’ face, oozed out of his armor—a dagger protruded from his ribs already. Karl had taken his sergeant by the shoulder and pointed out their commander.

  “Can you believe that?” he demanded. “Am I seeing that?”

  He and the sergeant both watched the invincible warrior pit himself against thousands with nothing but his sword.

  “He’s showing us!” the sergeant shouted, taking Karl by the upper arms. “He’s showing us that we don’t have to be afraid—that we can fight outnumbered, and we can win!”

  If that had been his message then the Daff Kanaar lancers got it—they charged head-on into the Confluni and relieved him. Lupus had looked bewildered for a moment, as if this was his fight and they were intruding.

  The Confluni soldiers at their front line hesitated, looking for orders, not sure whether to charge again or wait to see how things went on the flank.

  Karl had raised up his sword with one hand and screamed his Volkhydran battle cry. It had energized the men around him, and the men next to them, and the men next to them as well. They started screaming, roaring, going wild in their eyes. They called out out for Black Lupus, started screaming things like ‘He rides’ and ‘He conquers,’ and the troops who had fallen back before demanded to push forward now.

  Karl realized then the arrow fire had stopped. Lupus must have stunned even the Confluni. What madman would attack 10,000 troops like that, with nothing but a sword in his hand?

  “At them, you bastards,” Karl had roared, his own voice strange in his ears. “Save him! Save the conqueror! To his side!”

  And like a swarm they charged, the Wolf Soldier/Daff Kanaar mix in the vanguard, a howling mass of Legionnaires behind them. Karl saw a woman with half of her arm shorn off, a man with two arrows in his shoulder, charging, killing, holding up their position in the mass, refusing to die until they had done their share of killing.

  Karl had been one of them. The sword his father had given to him, the two-handed behemoth that had always seemed too cumbersome to wield, felt light as a feather and graceful as a scalpel now. He caught the rhythm of the Daff Kanaari, his sword slashing down in momentum with theirs, tearing guts, spilling bowels, removing heads. The Confluni fell back in terror and found themselves trampled by the Daff Kanaar lancers.

  The Confluni ranks broke, and from there it became just a matter of containing them. Karl had broken to the right with his men, the rest of the Daff Kanaar to the left, and together they had pushed the Confluni past their leader, their hero, him just staring at them as if Lupus had forgotten the Daff Kanaar had been invited.

  Later, Karl learned it was Shela, not he, who’d turned the battle, but the men wouldn’t have it. In the aftermath, they called him the Hero
of Tamara, and Lupus ‘the Conqueror.’ He had gotten his scar and birthed some kind of legend.

  Karl spat, walking through these stinking streets with these stupid people. He didn’t feel like a legend, any more than he did with his father, who suddenly wanted his council on every move he made, and who had entrusted him with the military of Teher.

  “I know you,” Jerod heard behind him.

  He knew he wouldn’t be able to draw his sword in time.

  * * *

  Another of the Emperor’s changes to modern society was banking ‘skrits.’ You could go to what was now the Bank of Eldador, and what had once been a moneylender, and you could access your account anywhere in known Fovea, if you knew your bank number and your password. A local truth sayer verified a client’s identity, and then you got your money from the local bank.

  If you used any bank other than the one where you kept your money, they transferred it for you. Meanwhile you paid only a small fee per month to them to hold it.

  Those like Glynn with vast wealth could perhaps be paid to leave their silver in the Bank of Eldador, which is what Glynn did. If these Eldadorians found themselves hungry to give away wealth, she certainly found herself wise enough to take it. Every year, the bank took the average of her gold and added two percent to it.

  Having crossed the Theran plains, they’d come across the city of Desdarre, just north of the Lone Wood. There she wrote an amount on the skrit, and she pressed her thumb over it. She handed the skrit to the Uman ‘sayer,’ whose job it was to manage the local accounts. He sought out a record and then returned to Glynn with a bag of coins.

  Another miracle of the system was that it made use of those whose possessed the gifts to use simple magic, but whose mind could not encompass the ultimate truth of things. Those barely gifted used to lead terrible lives, attempting on their own to explore their talents, usually until they killed themselves or fell to the black mind.

  “This is drawn on a Trenboni account,” he said to her offhandedly. “Are you a Trenboni Uman?”

  She shook her head. That would be too obvious. Within her glamour, she opened her peasant-girl eyes up wide and put on the dumbest look she knew. “No, goodsir, I am from the city of Eldador and was paid by a woman to clean dumpsters.”

  “Dumpsters?” the man looked skeptical, holding up the bag.

  It would be like a male with a small job like this to use it for sexual favors. She pushed out her lower lip and let her eyes well.

  He gave her the gold with a laugh. She put on a grateful look.

  “You know,” he said, “I used to keep my gold in a jar, buried by a tree, and I used to check it every week. Once someone saw me and they stole my gold—then I had nothing.”

  “I kept mine in the ticking of my mattress,” Glynn said. “Thank you, goodsir.”

  She left and returned to where she had left Jack waiting, at a tavern on a street corner not far from the bank. He sat at a round table, his back to a wall, a wooden mug of beer before him and the dog at his feet. She sat beside him, kissed his cheek as a girl familiar with him would.

  He looked surprised. “What was that?”

  She did the little-girl look. “But goodsir, would you not expect this of your Uman girl?”

  Jack laughed. “Want a beer, then?”

  She nodded, and batted her eyes. “If I may, goodsir,” she said.

  He raised his hand for the waitress. Glynn leaned forward as she had seen commons do at bars.

  “This entertains you?” she asked.

  Jack nodded. “Better than watching the grass grow, I suppose.”

  She frowned. “And you discuss your ideas, your philosophies?” she asked.

  “I suppose,” he said. “Exchange ideas, opinions.”

  “To what end?” Glynn asked. “You discuss issues you can barely change. You may share you views—”

  Jack waved her question off, as rude as any other Man, and drank from his mug. Glynn tasted of her own bitter brew, wondering how the commons withstood it.

  “You can talk and share opinions even when you can’t change things,” Jack said. “It makes you feel like you control your life. I don’t suppose you would understand.”

  Glynn counted herself a rare enchantress, younger than her peers, learning a discipline whose methods had always been the province of males.

  “I understand,” she admitted. “Perhaps better than you know.”

  They sat quiet for an uncomfortable minute, and each drank.

  Jack cleared his throat. It wasn’t in the race of Men to keep their own company.

  “Should we check on Zarshar?” he asked.

  Glynn shook her head. They had rented a loft above the stable where they kept Little Storm, and hidden Zarshar up there. “He has been fed, he sleeps now,” she said.

  Another uncomfortable pause.

  “They worship the god Power,” Jack said, matter-of-factly.

  Glynn couldn’t help thinking how inane this seemed.

  She sighed. “It was believed for a very long time they were the Cheyak,” she said, and sipped the bitter beer. “But they are creatures no different than the Slee, and they are of Power.”

  “Were they around when the Cheyak ran things?” Jack asked.

  Glynn looked him in the eye. “I couldn’t tell you,” she said. “What literature we have of the Cheyak does not mention them.”

  Jack frowned, as Men will do when pensive. “But the Cheyak worshipped the same gods as you do,” he said.

  She didn’t understand why he would even ask that. “The gods are the gods,” she said.

  “But they don’t all have a chosen people,” Jack pressed her.

  She shook her head. A child might ask such questions, but then isn’t the child a beginner in this world, much as Jack?

  “There are some races that favor some gods, but more often there are types of people who look for a god’s favor in his or her everyday life,” she said. “So the thief looks to Eveave, the warrior to War, the farmer to Life and the fisherman to Water.”

  “And up north, there are Dwarves,” Jack said.

  She nodded. “They are Earth’s chosen.”

  “And the Herd that Cannot be Tamed is sacred to Life,” Jack said.

  She nodded. He had some knowledge, anyway. He had clearly been thinking of this.

  “Where I’m from,” Jack said, “we had Druids a long time ago. They lived in a place called Europe, and they worshipped nature—natural things.”

  Glynn considered that, taking a delicate sip from her mug, then putting it down and running her index finger along the moist rim. She’d seen commons do this, as well, especially females with males they liked. Oddly, it made her feel sexual somehow—Jack clearly noted it.

  “Those here are no different,” she informed him. “They worship what they call ‘the Trinity,’ of Weather, Water and Earth—arguably the gods of nature.”

  Jack frowned again. “When we refer to our one God,” he said, “we refer to a Trinity, but that is different manifestations of the same God.”

  “So it seems there are parallels between your religious beliefs and theirs,” Glynn noted.

  “That may be—and that’s disturbing,” Jack said. “Do you know what the odds are of two groups growing up independently like that, having similar beliefs?”

  “The odds?” Glynn asked. “I don’t know this word.”

  Jack sighed. He expected her to explain everything to him, yet when it came his turn, he became quickly exasperated.

  He launched into a dissertation on what odds were, leaving her to think of gambling, which made more sense. In the end she had to agree the coincidence of these Druids seems somewhat incredible.

  “That makes me wonder,” Jack admitted.

  She smiled. “And what do you wonder?” she asked.

  At that moment they were fed, and Jack tore into his meal as any child of Man could be expected to. He didn’t bring up the topic again and Glynn considered herself glad to be do
ne with it.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven:

  They Came and they Saw

  “You’re Henekh’s son,” the older man said. He had a decade on Jerod, hair shot with gray, weather beaten skin and a jaw rough with stubble. Squint lines framed his probing brown eyes as he scanned Jerod’s face. He had a look like he’d already been cheated.

  Jerod counted fifteen warriors with him, all armed with belaying pins. Not most men’s weapon of choice, but maybe not so out of place in a wharf, Jerod thought. They’d be easy to hide, easy to use, and they didn’t leave a bloody mess.

  Jerod knew of gangs that went out at night and way laid travelers, beating them unconscious and selling them to captains, mostly pirates, who needed to fill out their crews. Out to sea, you learned a job and did it, or you found yourself cut up for bait. Those men would prefer short wooden clubs like these to swords.

  Jerod could draw his sword faster than the first of them could hit him, but he didn’t think he could take fifteen ready to fight.

  “What of it?” he snarled. He turned to put three men behind him. They stood in clumps, not circling him; meaning he could run between some of them and avoid the fight if he had to.

  The old man put the pin in his belt and held up his hands, palms toward Jerod. “No offense, no offense,” he said. “We are countrymen, although I am from Volka, not Teher. You and I have a common friend, I think.”

  “Oh?” Jerod had no intention of letting his guard down. He listened intently for the soft steps behind him that would tell him that the rush was on.

  “You knew him as Lupus the Conqueror,” the man said. “I called him, ‘Mordy.’ Never knew that it wasn’t his first name.”

  Jerod looked the man up and down, then turned his head and spat. “You weren’t a Wolf Soldier,” he said, matter-of-factly.

  Jerod could spot a Wolf Soldier a mile away, even a retired one, not that there were many. They stood straighter than regular men. They looked right into people’s eyes, as Lupus did. They never strayed far from a weapon; either a pike, a long sword or a short stabbing one, depending on the job they did.