by Alex Sapegin
A tall, broad-shouldered man with a black mane of hair commanded the caravan. Gynug cast a fearful, sidelong glance at him and called him “davur.” Davur… hmm, davur. It meant nothing to Andy.
The next day, with Gynug’s help, he learned the language of Ryldan, or the Ryldanes, and he came to understand many words and phrases. They hadn’t gotten to numbers and values; they would have to make due with some simple words. In the meantime, he had figured out that Ryldanes was the name the gray-skinned people called itself. The old woman almost drooled, swearing in her clicking and clacking dialect. An individual was called a Ryldor, and only the black-haired man was still called davur, although Andy could not see the difference between him and a Ryldor.
For his part, he classified her and her fellow tribesmen behind bars as orcs and hoped he hadn’t sinned against the truth too severely. The grayish skin color, the strongly protruding upper and lower fangs, the pointed ears—these were some of the ways Ryldanes differed from humans.
“A-rei,” the old woman cawed from behind him. Andy turned. Gynug indicated by gestures that he ought not to look at the guards; they didn’t like it. Andy spit. If they don’t like it, that’s their problem.
“A-rei,” the orc said again.
“Okay, okay, to heck with it! I’ve turned around, see?”
‘A-rei,’ she’s butchering my name, he thought to himself in annoyance, turning away from the guards. Gynug smiled approvingly, revealing her sizable fangs.
“How many times do I have to tell you, my name is Andy! An-dee, got it?” He moved toward the bars that separated the cage into two cells. Just then, the wagon’s wheel fell into a hole, and Andy hit his face on the cage door, slapping his jaws together loudly.
Gynug shook her head from side to side, grabbed a bit of chalk from somewhere under the scraps of hide, and in a few seconds of careful motions, drew a wolf on the cage floor. The orc was a good artist. The wolf had a grinning mouth, ears pinned back against its head, and hair standing up on the back of its neck.
“Rei,” she said, pointing at the wolf.
“I get it, ‘rei’ means wolf.”
“Ah,” she said. The old woman’s pointed to the chalk when she saw that Andy didn’t understand. She grabbed a bit of leather with some white fur remaining and pointed at it. “Ah!”
“I get it, ‘ah’ means white!” To be more certain of his guess, Andy pointed to a white cloud. “Ah?”
Gynug nodded joyfully and pointed to the drawing of the wolf, then to him.
“‘White wolf’” apparently? Fine, to heck with you all. I’ll be a white wolf if you like; just let me be.”
With that, the meaningful conversation was quieted for a while. Andy tried to think how he could ask the question that was tormenting him for the second day. He asked the orc for the chalk, and on his half of the cage floor drew a schematic of prisoners behind bars, then patted his chest, poked Gynug, and pointed to the other orcs. Finally, he shrugged his shoulders demonstratively as if to say, “Why?.”
The old woman’s eyes narrowed to thin slits. She looked at him for a long time, as if considering whether to tell him or not. She then took the chalk and drew several horsemen with bows and spears. Then she drew people running away from them.
“Gynug, Ryldan, A-rei!” her knotty finger with its calloused fingertips pointed at the running figures. The white chalk in the shaman’s hands moved about as if alive. Using minute, separate clicks of the chalk against the thick wooden planks, she drew arrows piercing the running figures, adding a crown to one of the horsemen’s heads.
“I get it. The royal hunt, and we’re the prey.”
Andy turned away from the old orc. The news didn’t exactly shock him, but with every fiber of his being, he wanted to avoid trying a slave’s shoes on for size, let alone the shoes of someone’s prey. A wild wrath and hatred for everything around him rose up from somewhere deep within his nature. He suddenly remembered a nightmare he had recently in which he had twisted the necks and punched the sides of strange wolves with thick gray lion’s manes. The thirst for blood he felt right now was surprisingly equal to what he had felt during the dream. His desire to twist the neck of the figure with the crown on its head overwhelmed him. He turned to Gynug and poked at the crowned man, then ran his finger along his throat.
Glancing at him, the orc moved back in fear, her back stopping against the opposite wall of the cage. Then her face smoothed back out, and her cackling laugh rang throughout the caravan.
***
Thick branches of tall trees spread to either side, giving way, and the caravan entered a wide clearing. In a few minutes, the wagon, and the cargo of animals and slaves were lined up in a circle, fencing off the center of the clearing from the forest. It was time for a rest and for lunch. From the central wagon, they unloaded onto a bundle of sticks and a sack with charcoal. No one entered the forest during the halt; they were afraid either of robbers or predators. They collected water in leather wineskins where a stream met a river.
Andy turned away from the orc and relieved himself through the bars of the cage. It was a bit tricky to do this while moving. He couldn’t very well relieve himself onto the cage floor. The presence of females in the vicinity had an effect as well. Not all of his moral foundations had undergone cardinal changes.
Only his empty stomach saved him from a more embarrassing scenario. He flatly refused to eat the slop that was offered to the slaves. Just the odor made him want to vomit.
Soon, a pleasant meaty smell came from the center of the clearing. Andy’s mouth watered; he closed his eyes dreaming of a big, beefy hamburger. Shattering his rosy dreams to smithereens, a piece of spoiled meat slapped onto the cage floor. Turning away from the moldy stuff, he looked down. Across from the cell stood a thick, Middle-Eastern looking overseer grinning impudently. A young guard without a mustache approached the other side of the cage on a hass. Andy kicked the rotten meat with his right foot with all his might. It shot at the overseer as if from a cannon and hit him right in the face. Bull’s eye!
An alarm roared out the distress signal. The young guard grabbed a short javelin from a special quiver strapped to his saddle and jabbed it into the cage, aiming for the renegade slave. Reacting to the danger in time, Andy jumped to the side, clutched the spear with both hands and snatched it away from the unsuspecting guard. Screaming like a wounded elephant and rolling his bloodshot eyes, the enraged overseer jumped up and darted over to the cage—where he met the narrow tip of the spear in Andy’s hand.
Cries rang out in the clearing. The guard unsheathed his sword, but he wasn’t able to slash the slave with it. Andy stabbed the five-foot spear into the side of the hass. With that, the animal bellowed in protest and reared, throwing its rider off its back in the process. The orcs began to hoot merrily in their cages. The overseer uttered a strained, dying wheeze from under the wagon.
Abandoning their posts, two guards rode into the skirmish. These guys weren’t about to repeat their colleague’s mistakes. Death smiled at Andy in the form of two feathered arrows placed on bows.
Gynug curled up into a ball and cowered in the far corner, as far as she could get from the black-haired giant. Davur stopped two feet from the wagon, casting a cold, dead serpentine stare at the slave who had killed the overseer. Andy no longer cared where or how he died. He glared back at the commander of the guards. An elaborate tattoo decorated the man’s handsome face on his right cheek. Another ornamental vine-like pattern crept out from under his chain-mail onto his neck. The backs of davur’s hands were covered with a plethora of tiny scars.
He extended his right hand to the cage and indicated with gestures. “Give me the spear!” Andy looked at the man’s outstretched hand, then at the tense guards, their bows stretched to their ears, and with one swift movement, slid his trophy halfway between the bars and broke it off, casting the pieces at the main guard’s feet.
Davur’s face remained unmoving, but a hint of respect flashed in his eyes—or m
aybe it was Andy’s imagination. In the next second, a glass bulb smashed under the renegade slave’s feet. The noxious smoke that came from it shrouded Andy. The last thing he remembered before losing consciousness was the frowning glance the commander cast at the guy with a medallion on his chest in the shape of an eight-pointed star. Gynug called him “gajeen.” She had said he was a Ryldor and, pointing at herself and Andy, added that they, too, were gajeen.
***
A sharp smell brought him around, and a hand with a dirty, smelly rag appeared before his eyes. A whip whistled above his head, and his back suddenly burned with unbearable pain. A lump welled up in his throat. Maybe that’s why Andy didn’t cry out. The second lash made him moan, at the seventh or eighth, he lost consciousness again.
***
The wagon wobbled side to side. The cage wobbled, and with it, the whole world. The alarm ringing in his head resounded with the sound of the wheels on the pavement. His whole back, from his rear end to his neck, stung sharply. His legs were limp. Biting his lips from the pain, sometimes until they bled, Andy wondered why they hadn’t beat him to death like they had that orc. His hands were so numb he could not feel them at all, perhaps because he had been hanging by them. After the flogging, they hadn’t put him back in his “home” cage. He was in a separate one, his hands already fitted with metal bracelets with a new chain. His legs were held by special constraints, bolted to the floor, with chains pulling outward to each side and upward into an “X”. It was impossible to do anything in that position.
Andy didn’t know how many lashes he received. By the time he came to, the caravan had left the woods and was moving toward a castle on a rocky cliff that jutted out over a wide river. A winding road led up to the cliff, and then turned to the left. With their right side facing the castle walls, the caravan continued to a small drawbridge across the wide, moat. From inside one of the narrow arrow-slit openings of the right flanking tower, the pointed helmet of a soldier gleamed in the sunlight. Despite the pain in his back, Andy examined the stone walls curiously. He had read a lot about the architecture of medieval castles but was seeing a real one for the first time.
The base of the walls was reinforced with powerful stone boulders about 20 feet high. Above that, there was masonry of red brick, but the total height of the walls was no less than 35 feet. Thin arrow-slit openings for archers decorated the top, alternating every ten feet with flat openings for crossbows, wider at the edges. At the corners of the walls, flanking towers protruded. A deep moat, dug out before the castle was built, curved toward the road in an arc and full of water. Behind it, forward-thinking engineers and construction workers had installed a palisade and equipped it with stakes like a porcupine. The same palisade was in front of the moat, too. The road ended at a high tower over the gates, adorned with quite formidable tar spikes.
The caravan came to a halt across from the gates, and two horsemen rode out from it. The pair crossed the drawbridge, and the metal gate lifted for the exact time it took to cross under it before closing with a crash. Above the high parapet gallery, concealed by a wooden awning, the helmets of the castle garrison flashed.
Andy closed his eyes and tried to relax. It was all he could do. His mom used to go to yoga quite often and practiced autogenic training, so there was no shortage of literature—books and brochures—on these topics at home. He had periodically leafed through them—they were too tedious to read flat-out. Now, he recalled that information, and in 30 or 40 minutes, he’d begun to relax. Continuing with the methods described in the brochures, he estranged himself completely from the world around him and concentrated on his burning back. It was surprisingly easy; Andy noticed that in his new cage, which was made of simple iron, he felt much more at ease. The old cage had drained him of his energy and pressed on him with an unrelenting doom.
Now, the sensations of the world faded, and the darkness around him changed to whole gushes of rainbow light. A whole ocean of energy roared like a tidal wave, somewhere just beyond the borders of perception. With an overwhelming need, he reached toward that wave and felt a thin border pop. Energy crashed in on him, and acting on intuition, he divided it along the parts of his body, directing most of it toward his wounded back.
The wagon jerked, pulling Andy from his trance. The pain in his back was gone, and he knew the wounds had been replaced with young, pink skin. He was ravenous and prepared to scarf down even the slop that was offered to the slaves.
***
After an hour of waiting, the metal mechanisms in the tower began to screech, and the gates were lifted. The first cart in the caravan entered the fortress. The wagon containing Andy’s cage ended up in a narrow stone courtyard before passing through a second set of gates to stop in a little peninsula of high walls. They took the castle’s defenses seriously, apparently. Under the awnings, there were large cauldrons. Piles of firewood lay around. Barrels of tar stood next to the cauldrons. Pyramids of boulders had been carefully stacked by the walls. Order and cleanliness reigned. The garrison commander earned his keep.
From within the stone walls, the wagon rolled out to a wide courtyard, at the far end of which stood the dungeon tower. But something else caught Andy’s attention. In the middle of a large square, between two tall pillars, a platform had been constructed with ramps attached to it. A blue haze hung in the air between the pillars. Below that, a dozen people in white cloaks with eight-pointed stars on their backs milled about.
The first wagon went up on the platform and disappeared, followed by a second, which repeated the fate of the first. Teleport! Andy guessed. Soon, it was his own wagon’s turn. The female driver gave the horses’ crupper a jerk with the reins, and the wagon left the castle to appear suddenly in a wide square surrounded by walls of white stone. Soldiers wearing chain-mail walked along the pedestrian walkway carrying crossbows. Andy turned his neck to look the other way, as much as was possible in his state. Behind his back loomed a tall arc, illuminated with a bluish haze toward the center.
“Raston!” the driver said happily and spurred the horses.
The wide cobblestone road led down the small hilltop from the fortress they had just entered toward a large city surrounded by white fortifying walls. Curving streets were discernible behind the walls; the spires of churches or other buildings stuck out above them. Andy recognized them as temples. Clay roof tiles adorned the tops of the three- or four-story buildings, forming a carpet of red. Hundreds of little villas stood out like a green patchwork quilt.
The city extended in a care-free manner from the edge of a large lake or small sea, on which a multitude of sailboats scurried about. Long piers, covered on top by stockades, wedged their way onto the water’s surface. Traveling along a road lined with trim, pyramidal trees, the caravan turned at a wide fork toward the grandiose castle visible at the edge of the city.
This new wall was not as impressive to Andy as the first fortress on the rocky cliff. The caravan crew squawked at the soldiers on the wall and in the tower over the gates. The gates creaked, and the carts, one after another, moved forward into the wide courtyard. A wiry man in a long black robe approached the head wagon and spoke with the head of the caravan guards and a young, vile-looking guy with a medallion around his neck. Apparently, he gave them valuable directions, because the guy jumped down from his horse and went to the watch room. The wagon drivers drove the wagons with the slaves along a path sprinkled with fine gravel toward some boxy construction visible behind the trees. The cages containing animals remained on the square.
***
The structures turned out to be not all that boxy. Against the backdrop of the grand castle, the structures looked a bit homely. The carts rode up to the barracks and stopped. The door of the first building opened, and no less than fifty warriors spilled out. Decked out in chain mail with mirrored breastplates, each one carried a spear similar to a Roman pilum, and sheaths with short swords hung from their belts.
The warriors formed two ranks before another couple doz
en eager soldiers joined them with enormous dogs on leashes. They took the orcs from their cages one by one and chased them in the direction of the structures. The dogs chomped at the bit to get off their leashes, and a slave had only to pause or stumble for a moment to receive a strong blow with the shaft of a spear. One idiotic orc contrived to push a warrior with a pilum and run off the other way. The dogs were released, and the runaway didn’t get ten steps before he was knocked to the ground. Another four dogs joined the melee and tore the screaming orc to pieces in a second. There were no more attempts to resist or disobey. The warriors grabbed the dead body with a hook and dragged it away somewhere behind a barn. They poured sand on the blood stains.
Andy was the last one to be removed from his cage. The blacksmith pounded on the rivets of the shackles for a long time to remove them; they had chained soundly. A couple of men with mage’s stars on their black camisole uniforms joined the warriors. One of them carefully examined Andy’s and said something to his peer, whose eyes opened wide. He joined him in the inspection. The mages spun Andy like a doll and clicked their tongues, exchanging words periodically.
Soon, the captain of the guard grew impatient with the improvised medical examination and shoved Andy in the direction of the second building, which had bars on the windows of a familiar grayish color. About ten guards fell into formation around it. The mages walked behind them, still discussing the results of their examination.