by Doug Kelly
Constructing a barrier wall was usually very labor intensive, but to a casual observer, the workers did not appear to be applying much effort today. The playful laughter of the children frolicking in the open field and near the town’s stockade walls distracted many of the workers, who were also the proud parents. Young children were running around, jumping over logs, playing tag, behaving as children were naturally inclined to do. Some of the little ones were bold enough to tease the cattle nearby, which were lazily grazing as they roamed the extensive pasture. The laboring adults, looking for a pleasant excuse to halt their toils, encouraged their children’s play, and some even participated with them. The sound of youthful laughter was intoxicating. At that moment, more men were leaning on their axes than were swinging them. Larn, Tarply’s clan leader, finally noticed the group of twenty men who had arrived near the open front gate and who had begun to hitch their horses to an old wagon, which appeared vaguely familiar to Aton.
The old wagon was long and narrow. The wood was gray, weathered, and splintered. The rear axle was visibly cracked. Its sides were high enough that the weary travelers had not seen the two children playing inside it when the men had begun to hitch the horses to the wagon’s wheels. The two young girls jumped out of the cart, giggling as they did, and picked up a metal hoop and wooden barrel stave, with which they had been playing near the adults as they repaired the burned section of wall. The thin loop of iron had been the largest of three that had held a wooden cask together. The barrel had fallen apart, but the village children put its remnants to good use by making a toy from spare pieces of the cask. They used a wooden slat from the broken drum to roll the metal hoop across the trampled grass and around the perimeter of the village. The two children who had been playing in the wagon ran back to the adults, taking turns using the barrel stave to roll the metal hoop along the ground, not seeming to care about the sudden appearance of the men on horseback. To the young girls or any other undiscerning eye, the twenty newcomers appeared like hill people, whom the townspeople had seen before, most often when they had come to trade wool for metal, but to the discerning eyes of the adults, these men had not arrived in the normal fashion of the bartering hill tribes. There were no flocks accompanying their arrival, no stockpile of wool or goatskins to trade, and the men who had just arrived were all on horseback. To the people of Tarply, who were slowly gathering near the front gate, this prompted a sense of caution.
More villagers turned to face the yard adjacent to the front entrance, some still sweating from the hard work of construction, some still grinning from watching the children play. They had turned to see twenty strangers with twenty horses that had assembled near the main gate. Finally, all the villagers stopped repairing the wall, and Larn was the first to go cautiously investigate the strange, unexpected newcomers. When Larn emerged from a group of his town’s citizens, the others followed behind him closely, with curious children scurrying behind the adults.
Larn was the elected leader of Tarply. This distinguished their village’s politics from other clans. Larn’s clan had traditionally chosen their leaders while other clans had hereditary rulers. Normally, power passed from clan leader to son unless there was a coup, in which case the conquering clan would establish a new clan leader, with hereditary right of rule. Larn’s father had also been the clan leader, and he had been an elected official. Voting for their leaders had always been the tradition since the first settlers had founded their village. Like his father, Larn had been the clan leader for many years. He was middle aged, with gray hair sprinkled through his beard. In his youth, he never had political aspirations. He had intended to find joy and passion with a career as a blacksmith, and the village of Tarply had plenty of them ready to accept Larn as an apprentice, but fate took him into another direction, which was following in the footsteps of his father, and that is what he had done. Therefore, when old age had gotten the better of his father, the town unanimously elected Larn as their new clan leader.
Tarply was a village of commerce. There was some farming, but because so much of their commercial endeavors were for the production of metal tools and woven fabric from the bartered wool of the hill tribes, or cotton from their own nearby fields, they traded their abundance of finished products for grain or other surplus food. During the harvest season, the villagers of Tarply traveled to nearby clans to swap metal tools and bolts of cloth for corn, wheat, and beans. Tarply’s metal tools were the finest. Old tales had said that the founders of Tarply were skilled artisans who had found a plentiful source of ancient metal. That was true. They had settled their village far away from others, to help prevent jealous clans from raiding, disturbing their businesses, or discovering their metallurgical secrets. Soon after the town’s founding, they learned that they had settled near ancient railroad tracks, and they promptly harvested the steel rails. Since their steel tools were the highest quality, they were in great demand, and the village prospered. Word of their quality metal had traveled to a village near an ancient, open-pit coalmine that the Americans had abandoned. Representatives from that village had come to Tarply with a sample of the coal that they had for sale. It was brown coal, lignite, and very low quality, but it was plentiful and better than burning wood to heat a forge. Tarply used the coal. Their steel tools became better, and their village kept growing.
Until recently, the town was peaceful and prosperous. Their village was located far enough from other clans that the distance protected it from rival clans raiding them, because of the logistical problems that extensive travel can create for warfare. Incursions into clan territories by the nomads had been mostly a nuisance, and cannibals from the swamps historically were never any great threat to an entire community. It all took a turn for the worst for Tarply when the nomad threat had elevated into something treacherous. Larn suspected that tribes of nomads must have uncharacteristically banded together, which had increased their bravery and desire for battle. When the nomads began to terrorize the dirt roads and ancient highways unrelentingly, it hit Tarply’s economy hard, disrupting the supply of coal and their ability to sell their metal tools. With their trade restricted, the village had come under financial pressure to pay their debts for the coal shipments. Because of this, Larn had made the mistake of venturing to a distant warlord, Olar Regalyon, and Tarply became indebted to the tyrant. Since its founding, the town of Tarply had been independent of any warlord’s control. Olar understood this, and hoped the village’s financial troubles would continue, so that he could bankrupt Tarply with an unserviceable debt burden, and add it to his dominion by annexing the troubled village.
Then, one fateful day, the nomads attacked Tarply directly and burned a large section of the protective barricade. All commerce ceased on the roads around the remote village. Without trade, there was no way to pay their debt, but the worst tragedy had not been the threat of coming under the control of a warlord. It had occurred during the battle in which the nomads had burned a large section of the town’s wall. On that fateful day, desperate for trade, women who had woven numerous bolts of cloth had traveled with their daughters to a nearby village to try to sell their goods, or at least trade them for food. When the women and their daughters returned to Tarply, it was under another attack by the nomads. Tired of the battle, wanting quick and easy plunder, the nomads captured the female travelers as they returned home. The men who had escorted the town’s women on the business venture had tried to fight, but the nomads killed them along with any of the mothers who had viciously fought to protect their daughters. The nomads had taken the young girls and sold them into slavery. Larn had lost his wife in that attack, and his six daughters went missing, captured by the nomads and sold into slavery. Tarply was a close community, and that was the worst day in its history. The happiest was when the girls returned home after escaping from a slave trader who had purchased them like animals from the nomads. So now, when the community’s children played and laughed, it was understandable why the adults, even when working on something as i
mportant as erecting a protective barrier, would stop, listen, enjoy, and appreciate the town’s innocent youngsters as they played.
At the distance from which Larn had first seen the men, the strangers appeared as hill people, but they were all mounted on horses, and their flocks of sheep and herds of goats that usually accompanied the hill tribes were nowhere to be seen. There were no women traveling with them, either. In his mind, Larn began to question if the newcomers had peaceful intentions when he noticed one of the men, Hauk, had a sword attached to his belt. This was extremely puzzling, because although he had seen men of the hill tribes carry weapons, which were usually wooden spears, he understood them to be mostly peaceful, and none he had ever seen had possessed a sword. Neither the swordsman nor the man next to him, Aton, looked much like the rest of the group of twenty. Most of the hill people had very similar physical features. They resembled each other because of intra-tribal marriages, and all the hill people were at least distantly related to one another, as was bound to happen in such a closed society. With the exception of Aton and Hauk, they truly appeared like people from a hill tribe, but Larn remained suspicious.
As head of his clan and elected leader of the village, Larn led the curious group of townspeople to the yard of the front entrance, expecting to meet an eccentric group of hill people wanting to trade something for his village’s metal goods. He hoped for a trade, or anything that would spread the word that Tarply was still open for business.
As Larn got closer, his suspicions of the men increased even more. He could see that they were dressed in the attire of the hill people, which were tunics made from the yarn of spun wool, and goatskin pants, but he could see that the horses were like the breed used by the nomads. This was troubling to him, because nomads had caused the damage that they had been repairing. Most clansmen, and the people of Tarply were no exception, considered anyone associated with the nomads as a pariah.
The workers continued approaching, still warily carrying their axes. To the peaceful people of the Greenhill tribe, including Aton and Hauk, this appeared aggressive. Now they could obviously see that none of the villagers were smiling or waving friendly greetings to them.
Larn stopped walking, and the men behind him also came to a standstill, but the children playing in the rear of the stalled group of town citizens continued their game of tag, unfettered. From the stranger’s appearances, Larn suspected these outsiders were nomads who had disguised themselves as hill people, or nomads had somehow convinced the hill people to align with them in a ploy to gain the clan’s confidence before the road pirates attacked Tarply again. Larn whispered a word of caution to a messenger standing next to him, and the man ran away, disappearing behind the town’s walls.
Dangling from a leather lanyard around Larn’s neck was a ceramic whistle. As clan leader, he was head of security and military operations. Larn could sound his whistle as a signal to attack, and a shrill whistle from his soldiers, when assembling for battle, meant they were ready to fight. He pulled the whistle out from behind his sweat-covered shirt and handed his axe to a nearby man. After hearing two sharp toots from behind the walls of his village, which indicated that the townsmen were ready to fight, Larn held up the palm of one hand as a signal for his men to stay back and let him make the initial contact with the strangers.
Larn stepped forward from his group. Aton did the same and took the initiative to greet the clan’s leader. The newcomer extended his right hand to clasp forearms as a friendly salutation. As each man gripped the other’s forearm, both were simultaneously concluding each other’s inferiorities. To Larn, Aton was thin, with skinny arms, hardly the build of a man that could work red-hot metal on an anvil. To Aton, Larn had the look of a common laborer, an uneducated man and therefore intellectually inferior, but he was obviously a leader of men, so Aton respected him for that.
“Fresh water is in the stream, just a short distance away,” said Larn, holding the ceramic whistle close to his lips.
“We seek shelter,” replied Aton. “But only with your permission.” Aton lowered his head and eyes, submissively, because he could sense the tension of the group. It was obvious that the village was still recuperating from an attack, so their heightened sense of security was understandable.
Larn lowered the whistle, but raised his eyebrows. Aton had not spoken like the hill people. His accent was more like a clansman from near the giant lake. “Who are you?”
“Aton Matin. Is this the village of Tarply?”
“Yes, it is. If you were from a tribe of hill people, you should already know that. Who are you?”
“I am Aton—”
“No, I mean all of you. Who are you?” Larn pointed to Hauk. “That one. He’s not from a hill tribe.” Larn’s eyes went to the scars on Hauk’s wrists. “He is a slave.”
Hauk was not a politician, and he was not a slave anymore, wanting to keep it that way. He did the politically incorrect thing during an initial greeting between groups of armed men. He grasped his sword’s handle and exposed part of the blade from its scabbard. Aton held up his hand to caution Hauk, so he let go of the sword, and it dropped. The hilt hit the scabbard, resonating a distinct sound of submission.
Aton sternly announced, after a quick glance at Hauk because of his indiscretion, “His name is Hauk, and Tig leads the hill people that we travel with. We all come in peace.”
“Slavery is not allowed here. No one can own him.”
Along with electing their leaders, another distinguished characteristic of Tarply was their abolition of slavery, but Hauk had not understood that when he had partially removed his weapon.
“I’m not a slave!” Hauk barked, interrupting the discussion again, but this time with his deep voice and not the partially exposed blade of a sword.
“And you’re not from any tribe of hill people who I have ever seen! Who carries a battle sword attached to their belt? Not someone from the hill tribes.” Larn pointed at Aton and Hauk. “You come to my village wearing wool tunics and goatskin pants like hill people, but I think you two are wearing disguises. The others, the men behind you, look like men from tribes that we have bartered with, but none has ever rode horses like these. Hill people tend to goats and sheep. I see none with you. In the past, we have had no trouble with the hill people, but they don’t seem to be holding their spears very peacefully now.”
Tig and the others from the Greenhill tribe were holding their spears tightly and leaning them forward, ready to defend Aton. What Tig had thought would be a peaceful encounter had turned intense. It did not get better when Tig gestured for his men to spread around Aton, forming a defensive half circle. To Larn, it appeared like an aggressive posturing of men with spears, a standoff, and it was no longer a diplomatic greeting.
“He’s from Acadia,” Aton quickly interjected.
“Acadia? That’s far away, on the other side of the lake.” Larn took a step back and raised the whistle. “I think you’re lying to me.”
Aton raised his hands. “I can clearly see that you don’t believe us.” He waved his hands in a downward sweeping motion to let his men with spears know that they should lower their weapons. “Let me give you something.” Aton went to his horse. As a gift of goodwill, Aton removed the gold broach from his horse blanket. He intended to give it to Larn and demonstrate his peaceful intentions with this valuable gift. Gold was highly cherished, and he expected Larn to accept the present, graciously.
To distance himself from the strangers, Larn stepped back. Sevi, his oldest daughter, had stealthily crept behind him to view the outsiders more closely. So keenly focused on the group of twenty men, Larn had not noticed the presence of his daughter behind him. Sevi was tall and thin for her age of thirteen years. She had long black hair, like her mother, whom the nomads had murdered during the raid when a large section of the village’s protective wall had burned. Sevi, a victim of the nomads herself, did not feel threatened by these men. Aton and Hauk seemed different from the hill people, but Sevi did not
think that they were nomads in disguise or bandits somehow maliciously aligned with a tribe of hill people intent on doing their village harm. She was staring intently at Aton, giving him the most scrutiny of the group, waiting for him to turn around so she could study his face again.
Aton had already removed the golden broach from the horse blanket. With the present in the palm of his hand, he turned around. While ignoring Sevi, who was hiding behind her father, he got closer to Larn, and Aton extended his hand to give him the broach. Larn’s eyes flashed open, wide and round. Aton had not realized this broach’s design was one that designated a person as a nomad chief. In his extended hand was the horrible symbol of a well-known and very much hated nomad leader. Larn gasped and took a step back, stumbling on his daughter. Upon seeing the broach, Larn believed only one thing: the men were a hoax. He thought that this was a nomad trick, and that the men were spies wanting to gain easy access to the inside of the village and sabotage their remaining defenses for a final nomad onslaught. Larn blew his whistle. At that command, archers appeared from behind the top of the wall and others from their militia marched toward the strangers, going through the open front gate. With axes held high, the villagers begin to circle around Aton and his men.
“Father!” yelled Sevi, as she pointed at Aton. “That’s the man from the slave trader’s wagon.”