Now came an opening, and Yael faced a howling pikeman of Ghoth. Like all his folk he wore a black turban instead of a metal helm. He thrust his hooked spear at Yael, who turned it with his shield and shoved his own pike forward. Yael aimed directly for the turban and winced when the blade of his pike punctured flesh and bone. The Ghothian died leaking blood from his nostrils, sinking to his knees.
Another Ghothian swept his scimitar at Yael’s head. The minstrel’s shield caught the edge of the blade. Yael’s pike was caught in the dead man’s skull, and already the field was too crowded to use such a long weapon. Yael grabbed at the hilt of his broadsword. The scimitar came at him again in a downward swing. Once more the shield saved his life. His arm went numb beneath it.
Yael swept the big blade from its scabbard. It was far heavier than the rapier he used for fencing. The scimitar resounded from his shield again and slipped sideways to slice his arm open below the shoulder. A shallow cut, but painful.
He drove the point of the broadsword forward with all his strength, as he had done with the pike. It caught his assailant in the shin, and the Ghothian howled. Yael sprang at him shield-first, knocking him backward across a corpse and landing on top of him. He drove his sword deep into the Ghothian’s gut, far enough to pierce the earth beneath him, and he watched the eyes of his enemy grow soft. A great silence seemed to fall about him in the midst of the roaring chaos.
Yael stared into the face of the man he had killed. Only a youth, at least ten years younger than himself. Probably conscripted into the sultan’s army. His skin was brown, a shade darker than that of most Sharoci, and his eyes were dark pools of light. But the light faded swiftly, until there was nothing but lifeless flesh beneath Yael’s heaving body.
Time had slowed so that each moment was an eternity. The roar of battle was like the roar of the ocean in Yael’s ears. Droplets of red blood spilled through the air like tiny jewels, splattered across the muddy ground. Dead boys lay all about him, their skulls and hearts and bellies split open, spilling the red secrets of existence into the black dirt. The whiteness of an ancient bone poked through the mud, a remnant of some historic battle. How many bones, how many skulls, filled the earth beneath this valley? The soil was rich with decayed humanity.
Suddenly, the rush of battle returned and the clashing of metal filled the air between the howls of desperate men and the sobs of the dying. The living men about Yael were moving away, fighting even as they moved, leaving him among a pile of corpses—both Ghothian and Sharoci. The ground trembled, and Yael heard an approaching thunderstorm. He rose to his knees and realized it was not thunder at all.
One of the behemoth spiders scuttled directly toward him, black legs stomping and thudding against the ground impossibly fast. Men were knocked aside or impaled on the sharp points of those legs. A pair of great mandibles clacked at the center of the arachnid’s shaggy head. Rising on the hill of its back was an open-roofed pagoda. A dark and hooded figure stood there, gazing across the battle with flaming eyes. The master of the spider. A Ghothian warlock.
The beast raced toward the kneeling Yael, who could not stand or manage to raise his broadsword. The horrid head passed above him, mandibles dripping with purple poison. Somehow the beast and its driver had missed him among the piles of dead men. The spider paused and snapped up a fallen knight in its jaws, twin fangs piercing through armor, sinking deep into flesh. Beyond the knight a downed griffon attempted to tear its way out of a cocoon of webs. It howled and squawked as its lost rider died in the spider’s jaws. Next the arachnid would turn on the trapped griffon and that would be the end of it.
The spider’s distended belly hung above Yael’s head. He was trapped in the prison of its legs, which rose about him like spiny pillars. He cast aside the bronze shield and wrapped both hands around the grip of the broadsword. He drove the blade upward with all his might. It pierced the outer skin like punching through boiled leather. Yael forced his legs to raise him up, driving the sword hilt-deep into the spider’s guts. Green ichors spewed along his arms and into his face. He vomited but did not relent.
The beast quivered and jerked. Yael refused to let go of his blade. The beast rushed away from the pain in its lower quarters, and the transfixed sword ripped a gash half the length of its belly. A rain of translucent guts fell across the piles of corpses, and Yael barely avoided being caught in the sticky flow. He pulled the blade loose and ran, slipping between its legs as they spasmed and jerked.
As he ran free of its bulk, the monster crashed to the ground, still twitching yet wholly dead. Yael ran toward the griffon in its tangle of glittering webs. The corpse of the knight was still clasped in the mandibles of the dead spider. Yael glanced at the pagoda but saw no sign of the warlock.
The griffon’s exertions with claws and beak were only drawing the webs tighter around its body. Yael cut at the thick strands of web with his blade. It was like cutting rope. Two or three slices broke a single strand here, another strand there. Still the griffon was not free, but he saw the black orbs of its eyes staring at him now through the sliced webbing. He swung again, and something grabbed him from behind.
The sword fell from his hand. Something had wrapped itself about his neck and lifted him off his feet. A stabbing pain seized his back, and he fell to the ground. He lay on his side, writhing and bleeding in the mire. The warlock stood over him, a curved dagger in his fist. The point of the blade dripped Yael’s blood. The griffon stamped and cawed inside the net of torn webbing.
Stiffness grew in Yael’s limbs as the warlock bent over him. The dagger was poisoned, there was no doubt of it. The Ghothian had stabbed him in the back. The blade did not sink deep, but the venom was coursing through his blood. He would be dead in seconds. Of that he was most certain.
The warlock pulled back his hood. He stared, bald and smiling, into the face of Yael. A mark in the center of his forehead resembled a spider tattoo. No, it was a birthmark. The Ghothian’s eyes gleamed with barely contained fires. He spoke in Sharoci with a heavy Ghothian accent. “The great spiders are holy to us,” he said. “Who are you to kill that which is holy?”
Yael stammered through swollen lips. “I’m not a soldier,” he said. “I’m a singer of songs.” His chest constricted. No air would enter his lungs.
The Ghothian’s expression changed. His eyes narrowed, the fires inside them lowering. Yael did not understand this sudden concern. The warlock’s long fingers reached out to remove Yael’s helm and touch his sweating forehead.
“I hear them,” said the warlock. His face was a mask of perplexed awe. “I hear your songs.” He looked like someone who had made a terrible mistake. He muttered something that Yael could not hear.
A rushing shadow blotted out the sun. Something huge slammed into the warlock. It tore him away from Yael, who watched with unblinking eyes, struggling to breathe.
The griffon’s beak tore off the warlock’s arm at the shoulder. The dagger went flying to land somewhere among the heaps of dead and dying. Yael could no longer hear the roar of battle, but he heard the screams of the warlock as the griffon sank its talons deep. Shreds of torn webbing clung to the griffon’s wings as it tore the Ghothian apart.
Finally, Yael saw the griffon’s big black eyes staring at him once again. Blood dripped from the point of its great beak. Then his pain was gone and the world with it.
There was nothing but darkness, not even dreams.
He did not awake nestled in the arms of the Goddess as the dead of Sharoc were supposed to. Instead he lay in a comfortable bed. By the silken sheets and the marble columns, he recognized the queen’s palace. The smells of lilac and honeysuckle floated through the open window.
A bearded man snored in a deep chair beside the bed. Yael recognized Sir Carracan. The minstrel forced himself to sit upright against a mound of pillows, groaning at the fresh pain between his shoulder blades. The first officer awoke as Yael recalled being stabbed in the back. White bandages had been wrapped about his torso, and more about his lacerate
d shield arm. His body was clean, and the sunlight across the marble floor nearly blinded him. He blinked at Carracan when the knight offered him a cup of cold water.
Yael drank and Carracan spoke. “We held the valley, lad. Sent those spider-lovers scuttling southward. I saw what you did. So did many others. You’ve gone from singing about heroes to being one yourself.”
“I only killed one spider,” said Yael.
“Aye, but you saved a griffon. Her name is Yarvona.”
Yael examined his chapped hands. A slight purple tinge discolored his fingertips.
“How am I alive?” he asked. “I was poisoned.”
“The Goddess smiles on you,” said Carracan. “Thousands died with that black venom in their veins, but She saw fit to spare you.”
Thousands . . .
Yael recalled the perplexed look of the warlock, the final incantation the man had spoken before the griffon took his life. The Ghothian had changed his mind. Worked a spell to save Yael from the venom.
I hear your songs, the warlock said.
How could Yael explain this to Carracan? Or the queen? Or any of the Sharoci? He could barely explain it himself, but he knew it to be true. The warlock did not want to kill a singer of songs. The Ghothians obviously valued more than holy spiders and bone-filled valleys. It occurred to him that the Sharoci did not truly know their enemies, any more than the Ghothians knew the Sharoci.
“The servants will help you dress,” said Carracan, stroking his oiled mustache. He wore a courtly robe instead of his silver armor. “The queen awaits your presence. I promised I’d bring you to her as soon as you woke up.”
“I will need a guitarra,” said Yael. “You broke mine.”
Carracan looked genuinely embarrassed. “Yes, well, I’m sorry about that, lad. I’m sure there’s another instrument to be found hereabouts. But you don’t need it today.”
Yael threw back the covers and placed his feet carefully on the marble floor.
“Of course I do,” he said. “I’m a minstrel.”
Carracan shook his head and grinned crookedly.
“No,” he said. “You’re a knight.”
Outside the window a dark shape flitted between the palace and the sun. Yael heard the flapping of great wings. A griffon’s cry resounded through the morning air.
“There’s someone else anxious to see you, Sir Yael,” said Carracan, pointing at the window. “Yarvona carried you from the field. She’s your mount now. She has chosen you.”
Yael sat back down upon the bed. He bent over the bowl of cool water, splashed some on his face. Inhaled fresh air.
“I don’t know how to ride a griffon,” he said. “Or how to be a knight.”
Carracan wrapped a burly arm about Yael’s shoulders. “And I don’t know the first thing about playing the guitarra. We both have much to learn.”
The first officer’s booming laughter filled the chamber. “Sir Yael of the Strings,” he called merrily as he exited the room. “The Singing Knight!”
Servants came forward to dress Yael in the finest silks.
The face of the Ghothian lingered like a ghost in his vision.
I hear your songs.
Yes, he decided. We all have much to learn.
The Gleaners
DAVE GROSS
SOMEWHERE OVER THE NEAREST HILLOCKS, DOGS BAYED IN THE PRE-DAWN mist. Ambros kept his lantern hooded, directing the light onto the wounded earth. The last thing he wanted was the war hounds of some fallen knight to discover him and his companions.
The yellow light slid across the pale arm of a young soldier. He lay on his side as though asleep, no wounds visible on his body but his open eyes blank in death. Ambros shuddered at the sight, thinking as he always did of that first time his mother led him across a battlefield.
She drew him by the hand, guiding him around the severed limbs and limbless trunks. The sudden pools and stenches frightened the boy, who had not yet seen ten years. When he balked, his mother squeezed his hand and said, “We have to find your father.”
That was the only thing she said. Every time she rose from turning over a corpse to see a stranger’s face, she repeated it like a prayer.
“We have to find your father.”
Fifteen years later, Ambros had long since forgotten his father’s face, but he knew the man had answered the baron’s call to war. He did not remember, or perhaps he never understood, the reasons for the war. He remembered only the stillness in the air whenever anyone named the enemy: the Earl of the Ashen Citadel.
The legend had grown in the years since that first battle. The conscripted forces always drove back the enemy, but they never slew the earl, despite the baron’s frequent claims to have quartered, burned, or buried him alive. Sometimes the people even believed the claims, or perhaps their wishing only made it seem they did.
Every few years the earl returned like a plague, leaving black and red fields of corpses in his wake, until the common folk dared not utter even his title. The enemy was no longer “the earl” but “the witch” or “the necromancer.”
Fewer now dared search the battlefields until after the baron’s knights had reclaimed the area. Some sought in desperation for the bodies of their husbands, brothers, or sons. Others picked over the corpses for rings and coins and other valuable things. Like the meanest peasants at harvest, they gathered what was left after the reaping.
They were the gleaners.
“Bring the light,” said Jurgen, a little too loud. Ambros pinched his tunic to feel the athame hanging from his neck. It gave him no comfort, but it reminded him of his purpose.
Ambros carried the lantern toward the sound of Jurgen’s voice, careful to step over a corpse clad in a burlap tunic. The coarse hair on his pink shoulders gave the dead man the look of a slaughtered pig stuffed in a sack.
As the light revealed his brutal face, Jurgen gave Ambros one of his scrunch-mouthed smiles. Ambros could never tell whether the expression indicated pleasure in seeing him or a whiff of a bad smell. The big man poked at the body of a knight with the dead man’s own mace. The eitr filigree gleamed blue even in the yellow light of the lantern.
“Jurgen,” said Ambros. He kept his voice low, as much to avoid alerting the hounds they’d heard as to calm the giant. “Put it down.”
Jurgen could claim an axe or cudgel belonged to him, but any commoner caught with a knight’s weapon would be hanged. Ambros feared that Jurgen no longer understood the danger. The big man blinked constantly ever since a brawler creased his skull with a stool leg. Even with blood filling his eyes, Jurgen had ended that fight by slamming his opponent’s head into the ceiling until the man’s limp body slipped from his grasp. No one had attacked Ambros since Jurgen joined his battlefield gleanings, but the giant remained dangerous even to his friends.
Jurgen raised the mace as if to strike him. Ambros tried not to wince. These little games of menace were the price of his protection.
“Jurgen.” Kaspar called from the gloom.
The giant’s shoulders slumped as Kaspar stepped into the light. A foot and a half shorter than the giant, the slender man took the mace from his hand as easily as a mother might remove a twig from her toddler’s grip. He carried the weapon in both hands and exchanged it for Ambros’s lantern.
Ambros withdrew the silvered bowl from its bag and set it on the ground. As Kaspar held the lantern steady, Ambros laid the head of the mace in the bowl and held the weapon at a steady angle. He drew the athame from its inverted sheath on the thong around his neck. Its blade gleamed in sympathy with the eitr.
Starting from the lowest point of the filigree line, Ambros stroked the athame’s sharp tip over the blue-gray substance. At the ritual knife’s touch, the solid filigree returned to its natural liquid form. Ambros felt the deep, subtle vibration of the transformation through the athame. Its magic trembled in his fingers, shuddered in his bones.
He drew its point along the graceful lines of filigree, never wavering or slowing. Once the
athame had begun working its transformation, to remove the tip even for an instant would break the disruption of the material and leave the remaining eitr in place, irretrievable.
When Ambros was done, star-colored liquid pooled in the silver bowl until there was nothing left of the filigree but a groove in the steel.
Working with deliberate speed, Ambros turned the mace and stroked the opposite side of the flange. A dram or so of the precious material flowed out of the surface of the mace and pooled in the bowl. He repeated the process for each of the other three sides of the mace, careful not to spill a drop.
Laying the mace aside, Ambros took a silver flask from the bag. He uncorked the mouth and poured the liquid eitr over the bowl’s gentle lip and into the flask. Jurgen and Kaspar watched in silence, holding their breaths until he resealed the flask.
More than the gold coins and rings, even more than the knights’ swords and the jewels they dared not steal, the eitr gleaned from enchanted weapons and talismans sustained Ambros and his friends. Rarely did they find as much as the mace contained. After his aunts had taken their portion to use in charms and remedies, the price the rest would fetch might feed the men for the better part of a year.
Kaspar nodded as he watched Ambros return the bowl and flask to the bag. Twenty years older than Jurgen and Ambros, Kaspar had joined them after they crossed paths on another battlefield six years earlier.
Gleaners usually did not speak to each other. Some raced from corpse to corpse to claim the choicest loot. Others fought over the bodies of knights. Others watched with cutthroat patience, letting the others do their work for them, for a while.
Kaspar had been one of the latter, appearing out of the smoke of a burning wagon like a vengeful phantom. He had his knife to Jurgen’s throat before the big man saw him. Feeling the sharp edge against his larynx, Jurgen began to blubber.
“Wait,” Ambrose had cried.
He had never understood why Kaspar hesitated then. When he paused, Ambros had no idea what to say or do to save Jurgen’s life and his own. Ambros knew he couldn’t overcome the interloper. And for all his strength, Jurgen was helpless as a child in his fear. Even if he weren’t, Kaspar’s knife would do its work before Jurgen could grip his throat.
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