When Ilfedo reached the sand and sheathed his sword, he heard a low rumble of voices and looked up at the crowds of smiling townspeople. They sent up cheers that shivered up his spine. At the sound, the sisters standing beside him turned to look at the crowd.
Joining in with the masses, Ombre first, then Honer and Ganning, raised their voices. Ombre lifted his fists into the air and shook them.
Suddenly the people grew quiet. Whispers raced through their midst. A chant began.
“Hail! Hail Ilfedo, master of all swordsmen! Hail! Hail the women who stand with him! Hail the Lord Warrior and his Warrioresses!“
When the chant ceased the people grew quiet. Then, one by one, with solemn, eager faces, the men knelt on one knee and bowed their heads toward him. The women fell to both knees, heads lowered.
The sky paled to orange, and the dead serpent king washed onto the shore.
Ilfedo cringed as the people bowed to him. Obeisance—he did not want it.
His discomfort changed to horror when, beside him, the five sisters—his Warrioresses—started to bow. And Ombre, with a broad smile, knelt. Honer and Ganning also fell to their knees.
“No, my sisters!” He pulled them to their feet. “Never, I vow, will the blood-kin of my Love kneel before me.”
Walking through the sand to his three childhood friends, he pulled them to their feet as well. “You will rise with me, my friends. Together we will build a great nation for our people. With you by my side, only with you by my side, can I do this. Do not kneel to me.”
“As you wish,” Honer and Ganning replied, standing.
Ombre rose too, dusted the sand from his pants. “Of course, Lord Ilfedo.” There was no sarcasm in his statement, only a playful congratulation.
Turning to the people, Ilfedo bid them rise. He surveyed the sea of faces, knowing that this was a turning point for the Hemmed Land. Things would never be the same.
He would embrace his new role and use his influence as best he knew how. With a heavy sigh, he prayed to God for guidance, praying also that he would not let this newfound power lift him in pride’s ugly hands.
He thought of his child and set his jaw firmly. The Hemmed Land must be made strong to protect Oganna. She was all he had left of Dantress. Her future was all that mattered to him now.
AN EPOCH’S BEGINNINGS
The storms of Ilfedo’s life had changed him. He felt different. As he marched through the streets of the various towns and settlements in the Hemmed Land, the people’s faces brightened and they bowed. The parents whispered to their children, and the elderly nodded to one another in wordless communication.
“Look well at him,” one father said to his son as Ilfedo marched by with Ombre and the Warrioresses in tow. “This man will lead our people into an era of prosperity.”
“Did he really take on the king of serpents all by himself?” The son’s eyes sparkled as he kept his ear inclined toward his father and his gaze upward to Ilfedo. He pointed with his small hand. “Is that the sword people say was given him by a dragon?”
“He is looking at you, my son! Stand straight and smile. One day you will tell your children that this hero noticed you in the crowd today.”
The boy stood stiff and grinned.
The next several months mayors and other representatives from all over the Hemmed Land sought Ilfedo out, pledging their support. A few men of evil intent came to him as well, but he saw through their facades, found out their corrupt states, and replaced them with simpler, more honorable men.
By unanimous decision, the inhabitants of the Hemmed Land accepted Ilfedo as the Lord Warrior: a title that had belonged to only one other man in recorded memory.
Scrolls made of skins had been passed from generation to generation—scrolls that gave them precious insights into their heritage, though not enough to solve the mystery of their origins. One man was spoken of in the scrolls, a man who’d held the title of Lord Warrior.
The scrolls made it clear that this role not only carried with it the responsibility of safeguarding the people, but it also gave him who held the position final say in all matters of government. Pertaining to responsibility it did not match the position of a king, as it was commonly understood, for the Lord Warrior was obligated to put his life before those of his people. And it was known that he was a man of integrity who would not be swayed by bribes, nor live in the lap of luxury.
Most people considered the majority of the scrolls in which these things were written to be little more than fiction based on threads of fact that were so slight the truth could not be discerned from them. Compounding this belief was the fact that the scrolls had been scribed by a man known only as the Count. His writings were loved by all. However, the vast majority of the Hemmed Land’s people laughed aside his fabled travels, in which he always happened to fill a central role in the saving of a civilization, or the mediation of some territorial dispute, or some other such fantastic event.
The Count claimed in his writings that there had been many Lord Warriors. Some, he declared, purportedly built themselves crafts to fly through the sky. At this juncture, people would smile and advise their children that this was nonsense. And they would point out that the Count, having exaggerated the legends of their ancestors to such a gross extent, could not be wholly believed to have been telling the truth.
But the people embraced the idea of having a Lord Warrior. Ilfedo fit the image that every child, parent, and grandparent had pictured a Lord Warrior to be. He was tall, strong, sober, and his battles with the Sea Serpents, his hunt for the man-killing bears, and his duel with the serpent king had made him a living legend.
In Ilfedo they saw hope for the future and a land freed from the fear of monstrous beasts roaming at will.
The Hemmed Land started to change under his leadership. Most thought it was for the better.
He ordered the building of roads to connect the towns and settlements along the shore of the Sea of Serpents. With travel quicker and easier between once-distanced centers of civilized living, the towns grew and the forest settlements cut down the trees in order to expand.
The five sisters had become legends in their own right. Wherever they went they were treated with admiration, honored, but too closely observed for their comfort. Keeping for the most part out of the public eye, they dwelt in the wilderness, caring for their deceased sister’s daughter.
The bearded old fisherman and his crew gathering their nets on the shore muttered to one another as impenetrable, misty rain seeped through their tunics. It seemed the gray sky thickened with each sopping minute.
The sky lightened for an instant, or rather it flashed. Young and old faces turned upward, blinking back the water that coursed down their skin. Chilled to the bone and weary after a most unprofitable day, they grunted and renewed their attention to their nets. As they stretched the nets on the shore and examined them for rips, a distant rumble made them stand upright.
He looked out to sea, that old Sea of Serpents, expecting lightning to flash. Instead a dull boom echoed from the east above the frothing waves, and a bright object hurtled through the clouds, large and pulsing.
The fisherman let the slimy net slide through his fingers and fall to the white sand. He narrowed his eyes, inquiring of his neighbors with a glance before looking seaward.
Pulsing white light burned a determined path toward the shore. It descended rapidly. The rain thickened and evaporated into steam around it. At last it touched the tumultuous waves, sending a fresh cloud of steam upward as it buried itself in the sea.
“Meteor,” the grizzly-bearded fellow grunted to the others. He returned to his net and began mending a tear.
His friends joined him, picking up the work they’d neglected.
Absorbed in his task, the fisherman let time fly around him. The rain lessened, the clouds thinned, and thinned some more, until moderate sunlight warmed his shoulders. It had to be at least an hour later. “Yimshi’s light is burning today,” one of the fishe
rmen admitted, glancing at his red shoulders. He rolled his net into his wood boat and jogged into the surf.
“Yeah, ‘nuff work for now!” another man said, loosening his tunic and joining the first. “I can use a cool swim.”
The remaining fishermen stampeded into the water, grins brightening their tanned faces. The grizzly-bearded fellow laughed as he watched them, but remained by his net. He finished mending the tear and slung one corner of the tri-sided net over the bow of his single-masted fishing vessel. The prow of his boat rested solidly on the white sand while the sea water lapped at the stern. He held the rail and let his knees buckle, hanging on as his weight stretched his stiff back muscles.
Something knocked into his knee, and he glanced down to find a ghostly-white face glaring up at him. “Shivering timbers!” He jumped back. The other fishermen sloshed out of the water and stood in a half-circle behind him. He knelt and waved his hand across the face of the individual before him. The new arrival’s eyes seemed frozen open, and his shoulder-length white hair pulsed in sync with the incoming seawater.
“Who is he?”
“How should I know?”
“Would you look at those eyes! I thank God I don’t have eyes like that.”
“Yeah, would be a bit embarrassing—girlish, even.”
“Big fellow, though. I wouldn’t cross him.”
The grizzly-bearded fellow flipped their white-haired guest onto his stomach and pounded his fists into the man’s back.
Bile and water spewed from the new arrival’s mouth, and he coughed. When he could breathe freely, he rose to his feet and faced the assemblage of humble laborers. His pink—almost white—eyes made him seem soft and childlike, that is, until he spoke in a voice deeper than any present. “My gratitude to you all. You have, perhaps, preserved my life. Tell me now: what part of the world is this?”
The grizzly-bearded fellow stood in front of him. He crossed his arms in front and eyed the white-haired man up and down. No shirt, only loose-fitting blue-gray pants made of coarse fabric, but around his waist a belt of hammered steel. An assortment of heavy tools hung from it, including an anvil no bigger than a large man’s fists, tongs, a long narrow file, and a curious hammer with a wooden handle and shiny silver head. It was a miracle the stranger had washed ashore with those heavy items attached; they should have drowned him in the depths of the sea.
“Before answering your questions”—the grizzly-bearded fisherman held up his forefinger—“how about answering a few of my own?”
For a moment the man’s pink eyes flared, then he gently nodded his head.
“Good. What is your name and—”
“I am Linsair, a sword smith. My origin is harmless, though none of your affair, and I speak without guile. So you need not fear me.”
The grizzly-bearded fellow unfolded his very large arms and leaned against his vessel. “Smoothly spoken, Linsair the sword smith, but we know not you nor of you. And whatever cause would make you hide your origin concerns me. Well, rather, it concerns us?” He paused.
“Yes,” his fellow fishermen declared.
“So you see, Linsair, I do not desire to make an enemy of you, and I am not forbidding your entry onto our soil. Ilfedo the Lord Warrior himself welcomes travelers who bear us goodwill. It is part of this process of growing many settlements and towns into a strong nation.” He cleared his throat as the other men lent him a short cheer, for he thought he’d handled that phraseology rather fine. Though there was a lack of truth in his statement concerning travelers, for the Hemmed Land, to his knowledge, had not been visited by a foreign human in his generation.
“I am not a suspicious old sea lubber,” he said. “But I do find the timing of your arrival a bit strange. Never in our recorded history has a stranger come to us from the Sea of Serpents. Did you fall from the heavens by meteorite?”
“You have deduced correctly.” Linsair bowed to the grizzly-bearded man and walked barefooted toward the coastal town with his head held high.
It was a strange encounter by all counts, the fisherman said to his neighbors. Some thought they should stop the stranger and moved as if to follow. The grizzly-bearded fisherman held them back. “Let him go where he will. He seemed to be an honest fellow, even if a bit water-logged—‘fallen in a meteorite,’ indeed preposterous! And yet he may prove useful to the Lord Warrior.”
Linsair left the shore in peace and, arriving in town, found the sign of The Wooden Mug. He tried to blend in with the townsfolk. But two men who had too much to drink harassed the proprietor. Linsair bade them go home and consider God’s ways. “Are they not the chief of all ways?” he asked them. “He gave you breath and life. Should we not honor such a glorious master?”
One of the men hiccupped. “Look, Smithy, you’re in the wrong part of town.” He took another swig from his mug and put it back on the table, gazing into Linsair’s pinkish eyes. “Take your preaching to Brother Hersis where it’ll be appreciated.”
Linsair overturned the table and growled with such force that he might as well have been a creature, not a man. The inn quieted around him as he strode to the door and onto the cobblestone street.
On the Hemmed Land’s northern border, Ilfedo camped his makeshift army of five hundred men in the shade of the trees. He spread them thin so as to cover as much territory as possible. If the sorcerer and his minions returned through the desert tonight, the warriors would meet them.
As evening fell he stood between a pair of sturdy trees, stabbing his gaze northward into the stone-strewn desert. Some kind of creature had been reported to come from that desert. In three separate incidents, it had slain three men and two children dwelling along this stretch of the Hemmed Land’s border. All attacks had reportedly occurred in the dead of night.
The wind howled over the desert and whistled into the forest. Ilfedo fingered the hilt of the sword of the dragon. People in his territory had taken to calling it the Sword of Ilfedo. But for him it remained the Sword of the Dragon.
He wondered how well his baby had fallen asleep tonight. So delicate, so precious; someday this land would fall to her as an inheritance. She was already commonly called Princess. He did not doubt that, with her mother’s dragon blood flowing through her veins, his daughter could become a great ruler. But what of her character? Power should not be lightly handed to a youth. The Warrioresses would not spoil her. He felt certain of that. They would keep her safe, too.
“Dantress, why oh why? If you were here now our child would grow in your footsteps. Play with your skirt, learn from your voice, and smile at your love. Oh, I want that. I want that more than anything.”
Someone’s sword clinked against a nearby tree, and Ilfedo retreated into a deeper shadow. No one must see him like this. He would show himself strong at all times for his departed wife. She had sacrificed herself so their child could grow. How could he let his people perceive his still-grieving heart and expect them to focus on a bright future?
A breeze bent the short stalks of grass on the forest floor. He could see for a couple of miles through the trees as long as he kept his gaze near the desert where the trees thinned. First one of his shadowed warriors stepped toward the dry, stone-strewn landscape then another beyond him and five a dozen yards farther. Soon a substantial force marched in a line from the forest. Even in the darkness Ilfedo could see that they all kept their faces toward the desert and their hands on the hilts of their swords.
None of this would be happening if his life had followed a different course. If Dantress were still alive … things would be different. He sighed and leaned his shoulder against a nearby oak tree. The hard bark released some of the tension in his muscles. Every day her death returned to his heart as potent as that fateful morning.
“Release me from this world, dear God,” he whispered through the shadows. “I want my heavenly rest in her bosom.”
“Your time is not yet, my love.” Dantress’s voice wafted so gently into his mind that he almost believed she was reall
y there, standing beside him in the tree’s deepening shadows. “You and you alone must protect our offspring. She is the hope of your people. Stay for the fruit of my womb to blossom.” The voice faded.
“If only you were here, Dantress. If only.” Ilfedo turned toward the heart of the forest and walked into the darkness. A fleeting shadow of a woman slipped deeper into the woods and vanished. He froze, wondering for a moment if somehow Dantress had really spoken to him. The darkened floor of the forest offered him no reply. A breeze rustled the leaves; an owl hooted above him. Ilfedo shook his head and skirted behind the treeline, checking on the warriors as they waited in the shadows.
A long while later, Ilfedo stood again looking out over the desert. A cloudless sky allowed the starlight to illuminate the rock-strewn sand. Nothing had come from the desert so far as he could tell … and nothing indicated anything would come. The sands remained settled on the cool desert floor. The rocks seemed frozen in its midst.
A swordsman crept toward him, twisting to glance at the desert. Another warrior knelt behind a bush and rested his longbow on the ground, peering through the trees at the barren landscape.
Slowly he walked to the edge of the forest. He stood gazing across the desert for a few minutes more, then he strode along the tree line.
Four of his armor-clad men emerged from the trees ahead of him and fell in alongside him. “My Lord, we have seen nothing.”
“Remain at your posts until I give you leave.” Ilfedo waved them back and issued the same command, as every fifty feet he came upon another group of men. He glanced over his shoulder as the soldiers obediently shrank back into the forest. They would await his command, as they always did.
Facing west, he made his way up a steep incline to a thick group of trees. Behind them the ground descended gradually into a large valley where a hundred canvas tents dotted the grass. Not a single tree grew in the valley, but a line of oaks ringed its rim, rising like mighty sentries.
Offspring (The Sword of the Dragon) Page 8