Hero Risen (Seeds of Destiny, Book 3)

by Andy Livingstone

  He reached his own people, stretching his arm behind him. ‘Water.’ His voice was a croak. He felt the water skin pressed into his hand and half turned to take it, movement beyond catching his eye as he did. A stretcher was being carried towards them, with a familiar figure upon it. A dozen paces from him, a gruff command had it set down and the man started to rise. Supported by the two soldiers who had borne the stretcher, Ossavian walked slowly towards him, effort and strain in every movement and a crimson stain on the bandage wrapped around his waist and stomach. Despite all, his bearing was as proud as ever.

  Brann drank quickly, then glanced at his opponent. The man stood patiently waiting, so Brann saw no reason not to walk to meet Ossavian. The match had to be finished in any case, whether they restarted now or minutes from now. One of them would die, and the survivor would not be concerned with the time of day at that point.

  Ossavian reached out and grasped Brann’s arm, his hand shaking but his grip strong. Brann felt himself swaying, and caught himself, but the old general had noticed. His eyes locked on Brann’s and his free hand came up, Brann feeling the rough fingers against his cheek.

  ‘Oh my poor boy,’ he said. ‘What has he done to you?’ He coughed, a spray of fine red spots caught on the sleeve he raised to shield his mouth. ‘I have watched from afar, but now I come close, for my sight is dimming.’

  The coldness formed Brann’s thoughts even now, and he regarded the man: the shaking, the seeping wound, the blood on the breath, and then the darkening sight – this man was strong indeed to still be breathing.

  ‘I have watched from afar and even from there I know well the style of such a man. All I can give you is this: for such as he all is in balance, all is perfection. Even is aligned, odd is imbalance. Always, the moves of his weapon in even numbers and with two weapons, moves in total of four, of eight, of twelve must therefore be followed. It is ingrained over years, nothing else feels natural to him.’ His other hand came up, and Brann felt his head held with urgent strength. ‘If you remember anything, boy, remember what my brother Cassian believed: remember the power of six. Three with each hand keeps you even, but unsettles him. Remember my brother’s six.’

  Brann nodded. The man meant well. ‘If you say so.’

  Ossavian smiled gently, swaying slightly himself, and lowered his hands. He drew a figure six in the blood on the back of each of Brann’s hands, and Brann looked at them blankly. He frowned, but left them as they were. There was no need, nor reason, to wipe them away.

  ‘I say so.’ His eyes were sad. ‘One other thing, boy. Let me travel on my path alone today. Do not accompany me.’

  Brann nodded. The words did not make sense to his logic, and he discarded them, but clapped the man on the shoulder in thanks. Ossavian was trying to be kind, and there was no reason to be rude in return. He returned to Grakk and reached again for the water.

  As he drank, he assessed himself. His strength was low – even walking left a fatigue in his legs, and the half-empty water skin felt heavy. The sun felt hot, and pain was everywhere. He looked at his opponent, impassive patience and calm assurance in his relaxed stance. He looked at Grakk, and he could see that the tribesman suspected what was coming. Brann considered his situation, his capabilities, his choices. And he knew.

  ‘I have one option alone,’ he said to Grakk. ‘If I live but do not… return, will you care for me?’

  Grakk’s eyes bore the sadness of one who knew he must watch what he dreaded, but would watch out of love. ‘Of course I will.’

  Brann nodded. ‘That is all I need to know.’

  He dropped the water skin, it being already forgotten. Shahkam Davar handed him his sword and axe, inclining his head in respect. He took them, his hands feeling complete once more. He walked into the emptiness between the armies – an emptiness but for four bodies and one man awaiting him with swords cradled in his arms.

  He stopped. He bowed his head. He closed his eyes. He drew in a deep breath, and slowly let it drift out.

  He felt for the other within him. The other part of him. The part whose essence drifted through him when he fought. He felt for the source of the essence.

  He found it.

  He set it free.

  His head came up with a deep gasp. His eyes opened. He saw the crowds around, and drank in their eagerness. He saw the wounds on his body, combining to threaten his life in time, but not now. And not impairing – that was what mattered. The pain was immaterial. The pain was good. Dead men felt no pain. He saw the man before him, competent, skilled, agile, dangerous: a challenge. He forced strength into his muscles; either way, he would rest later. He smelt the blood on his body. He tasted the blood on his teeth. He ran his tongue along his teeth, savouring the taste. He looked at the man.

  He smiled.

  He strode at the man and swung his sword. Taken slightly aback at Brann’s renewed vigour, the man stepped back several paces before the two fell into a rhythm of blows. Brann’s mind worked as he fought. The man was good, but fought only with his swords. Perhaps his skill had been gained at the loss of any awareness of other ways of killing. Perhaps the skill had meant he had never required any other ways of killing.

  A sword lanced forward past the axe and caught the back of Brann’s wrist. It was trivial, but Brann’s eyes caught a number drawn on the back of his hand, a strange thing to see. His mind shrugged. Six was as good a number as any for him.

  He hit with groups of six blows. Alternate, three with each, then withdraw. Two with the sword, an axe, a sword, an axe, a sword, withdraw. Straight back in, two sword, axe, two sword, axe, withdraw. He liked this. Axe, parry with sword, axe, sword, sword, axe, withdraw. Two, two, one, one. Always six. It felt good. It felt better when he sensed the stutter in the other’s rhythm; he knew not why, but why was immaterial. That it was there was enough.

  Be unexpected. Predictable brings death. Assumption brings death. Opportunity brings death for the other. Unexpected brings opportunity.

  Six, then six, then six. He waited for the stutter again. It came, and with it a hesitation, a blink in the concentration. In that instant, Brann swept both of his weapons high out to the sides and down in great arcs, back up in gathering speed to rise as one between them. They were aimed not at the man, but at the sky, and the two swords they crashed into, braced as they were with years of training for attacks coming inward, were knocked towards the sky with the passage of Brann’s weapons.

  The way was open to the head, to the chest. It was the chance. He knew it. The man knew it. And as the man twisted to bring down one sword to protect it, Brann ignored the chance.

  He dropped to one knee, letting go of his sword and axe, useless as they were at this range. He grabbed the black-bladed knife from his belt and stabbed hard and fast into the groin before him. Even before the man’s scream started, he had sliced across the back of one knee, buckling the already weak legs and rose as the man started to sag. Without pause, the black blade cut the throat as if it were silk.

  There was no roar from either half of the crowd, only the soft patter of blood drops on the hard earth, and Brann’s own heavy breathing. In the silence, he looked at the man at his feet. He looked at the four other bodies he knew had been sent to kill him. He looked up and saw a man in a cloak of many-coloured feathers standing before a crowd of men broad of build and powerful. The broad men started to hum, a deep oppressive sound. The man in the feathered cloak stared at Brann, his eyes wide with an emotion Brann did not recognise or understand. He knew, though he did not know how he knew, that this man had sent the five.

  He looked at the bodies. They were too heavy to drag quickly, so he lifted his axe. The dark metal cut through each neck with ease.

  He walked to the man five times, and each time placed a head before him.

  He looked into the man’s eyes. ‘Now I need yours.’

  The man turned, stumbling backwards. He stopped and looked at Brann as if a thought occurred. ‘My people,’ he said, his voice almos
t a whisper. ‘Who will they survive? Who, but me, can save them?’

  Brann cocked his head in curiosity. Why did the man not understand such an obvious answer? ‘People who want to live, find a way. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but if many people try, someone finds the way. It is what we do. It is within us not to welcome death, but to fight it.’ He frowned at the man, lifting his axe slightly. ‘You do not know this? Do you welcome death?’

  The man said nothing, but his answer was clear in his widened eyes and his flight into the crowd behind.

  Brann did not follow. The man’s people were too many to defeat. But the man’s people hummed louder, stronger.

  The man pushed aside people in his way. Brann noticed his movements were becoming more frantic, and the willingness to move of those he pushed was becoming less willing. Then the people stopped moving out of his way. Still the humming grew.

  The man was part way up a slope when Brann saw the people close tight around the feathered cloak. Tight enough to halt it. The humming grew deeper still.

  The man screamed and beat at the unmoving people. They remained unmoving. The humming rose louder than ever.

  The man turned and looked at Brann. Even at that distance, the hatred blazed like fire from the man. Then, at the final moment, it turned to terror. A weapon rose, then fell. Another, then another, then another, all rose and fell, rose and fell. The feathered cloak fell with them. The humming stopped.

  The feathered cloak was one colour. Blood red.

  There were others with the broad men, others with a wild look in their eyes and movement of restless twitches. He had seen their like before in the City Below, his home. He had fought their like before. The fights had not lasted long. Those who needed to chew herbs to find the courage to fight were not natural fighters, nor competent ones.

  The broad men fell on these others without warning. All along that crowd, the others fell as the feathered man had done, shouts of surprise quickly turning to screams of horror; those few who escaped fleeing in any direction that took them from the fearsome slaughter.

  Brann turned to see if the crowd behind him would turn to such violence also, but found them slumping to the ground as if a great weariness had settled over them. He wondered if they had drunk too much of the fermented juice he had been given after a victory in the pits.

  The broad men, thousands of them, had finished their killing. Turning towards Brann, they dropped their weapons and sank to their knees. A strange action, he thought.

  A man, his bald head covered in tiny black symbols, moved to Brann’s side. He recognised him – he was a friend.

  ‘Grakk,’ he said to the man. The man nodded. ‘Why do they not cheer? The crowd should cheer. The crowd normally cheers.’

  The man’s smile seemed sad. ‘When people are faced with the unexpected, they do not know what to do. What they don’t do, is what they would normally do.’

  Brann looked at the headless body of the man with the two swords. ‘He found the truth in that.’

  The friend Grakk clapped his shoulder. ‘That he did, young man, that he did.’

  Two men accompanied by warriors aplenty strode to the pair, the shorter one bare-chested other than for a waistcoat, the tall one with a metal tunic resembling a fish’s skin, and both wearing a simple crown.

  ‘We are in your debt, Brann of the Arena,’ the shorter one said.

  The tall one fixed pale eyes on him for a long moment. ‘This will not be forgotten, I will ensure as much. I have never seen its like. Not one of us has.’

  Brann frowned. He had won fights before, and this reaction seemed a little excessive, especially given the lack of cheering. ‘Thank you,’ he said. It seemed appropriate.

  The tall man looked at the huge crowd of men kneeling amongst the bodies of their erstwhile comrades. ‘What about them?’

  Grakk looked at them. ‘Let them go,’ he said softly.

  ‘What?’ The word burst from the shorter man, while his taller companion merely stared.

  Grakk’s voice was even, measured, as he seemed to think as he spoke. ‘The path taken by a religious fanatic is usually that which is shown to them by one claiming to be a representative of their gods, and where it is a path of pain and suffering inflicted on non-believers, that representative tends to be one who serves personal aims more than those of the heavenly masters, no matter how much the self has been deluded otherwise. The zealot has not a mind of his own but has been cleverly manipulated to believe that the thoughts of another are actually his but, for that very same reason, he will follow a path of good just as easily as one of evil. We can hope that the next religious leader these people follow will be one of a more caring and peaceful nature. Most immediately, one who believes the people of Tucumala are best moving out of the path of a god’s anger.’

  The smaller man thought for a moment. ‘It makes sense. And, in any case, we have enough mouths to feed and shattered lives to rebuild to keep us busy without the administrative bother of them to add to it all.’

  The tall man looked at him, then nodded. ‘Very well.’

  Another friend, with wild black hair, ran to him, closely followed by a young woman whose hair the colour of the sun flew behind her. Each looked as worried as the other.

  Brann knew them. ‘Gerens. Xamira.’

  ‘How do you feel?’ the boy Gerens said, concern filling eyes that burned like cold dark fire.

  Brann looked around at the scene. ‘I feel right.’ He nodded to himself. ‘Just… right, as if this makes sense. As if the gods approve.’

  A look passed between Grakk and Gerens, and though Brann did not know what it signified, the black-haired boy seemed to understand. ‘At least you live,’ he said. He turned to the woman and spoke in a low voice. She nodded, understanding passing over her face also.

  Grakk said, ‘Come, Brann. I made a promise, and I will keep it. We have a journey ahead of us, but first you must rest.’

  Xamira, however, stepped between them. ‘I have something that may work.’

  Brann was puzzled, but many things were puzzling him and he accepted that, if he needed to know, they would tell him.

  The boy Gerens looked at Grakk, raising his eyebrows. Grakk shrugged. ‘It cannot do any harm, I suppose.’ He passed a small jar to the girl.

  She took him by the hand and Brann let her lead him through the crowd. Men and the few women among them moved to clap his back, grasp his hands, and say words of gratitude and admiration. Maybe this was what they did instead of cheering in this place, he mused. She led him from the crowd and to the city wall beyond, finding a gap in the structure. The buildings were empty, and she found one with a well. Raising water and ripping a sheet she had found in the house, she gently bathed his wounds and spread the salve contained in the jar Grakk had given her. It was absorbed quickly and she bound the wounds tightly and with care, one by one, with strips cut from the sheet. She examined her handiwork and nodded, satisfied.

  ‘Come,’ she said, leading him to the bed where she had found the sheet.

  It was not the twining of their bodies that brought him back, nor the pleasure that came with it, overwhelming though it was. It was the look in her eyes in the instant before she kissed him, long and deep, and in the instant after. He looked there, and saw his soul reflected, and in the reflecting, it was returned.

  He saw her from deep within himself, felt himself drawn to the world, to his memories, to his awareness, to her. A slow surge of energy, growing in a wave of vitality, rose through him, filling mind and body alike.

  He was alive, in every way. He knew himself once more, and he smiled.

  When they lay in each other’s arms, peace settling through him, he raised himself on one elbow and looked at her, stroking a stray lock from her eyes.

  One corner of her mouth twitched into a smile, a look of melancholy. ‘Now you must go to her.’

  He frowned, his thoughts in turmoil, love producing longing and guilt and confusion in equal measur
e. He gathered the thoughts slowly, trying to make sense of them, or at least set them into some order. ‘I love her. But there is something with you also. I cannot justify it, or even rationalise it, but I also cannot deny its existence.’

  ‘Your time has been with me, but now is with her.’ He looked at her. ‘Would you have had her in all this? In the blood and the gore and the biting and stabbing and screaming?’

  ‘She can fight, you know. Women like you, Breta and Mongoose are rare around here, but in her land, all women are taught to bear arms just as the men are.’

  She looked at him with narrowed gaze. ‘Maybe so, but would you have had her be a part of this?’

  He took a while to answer, but when he did, he looked into her eyes. ‘No.’

  ‘Then go to her. I am for the life you were forced to have, but she is for the life you deserve. You need her love, and you deserve the chance to give her yours.’

  He stared through the window at the clear sky, as if seeing that life being lived. ‘I would like that,’ he said softly. His eyes found her face again, and he touched his fingers to her cheek. ‘But I will leave a piece of me with you. I will miss you.’

  She laughed, her blue eyes dancing. ‘Oh, of course you will. You will not be rid of me that easily, Brann of the Arena. We will meet again. There are some things a woman just knows. Now go, live your life.’

  He had never had cause to doubt her words before, and he found himself glad that he felt the strength of their certainty yet again.

  He reined his horse on the side of the hill, above the village, figures moving on unknown tasks and voices heard in the cool of the summer morning. However, it was a spot to one side of them, no more than a dozen paces away, that his eyes sought. A spot where a crossbow bolt had taken his brother from him. He silently sent a greeting to Callan, but said nothing to the others. It was not their sorrow to carry. He hoped there was indeed an afterlife, that Callan and Cannick could meet there as they had not while alive. Perhaps Ossavian, too. He thought they would like each other, and the thought made him smile.