The Broken Man

by Hawkings Austin

  “Do you really mean to take Judge Brea’s servant?” Berin asked.

  The group leader paused a moment, looking at the intimidating group, but had not been in the city long enough to grasp the politics.

  “We have a deal with the Daen. You don’t interfere with Ruad business, and we don’t go to war. Nobody wants that.”

  Berin laughed and sat down on the small porch; it was a good bit above the street, and Berin was much taller than the Ruad guard. In sitting down he was bringing himself eye to eye with the Ruad leader.

  “First off,” he said, lifting a finger on his ruined left hand. “You need to understand, little man, that Judge Brea rules this town, not your Goddess-damned king. So, don’t interfere with her business, no matter what your king says.”

  Berin smiled; it wasn’t a pretty smile. His right hand rested on his sword hilt.

  “Second off, I would happily go to war today. It is a beautiful day to go to war. I would like nothing better than to kill all the Ruad in Ard and burn your unblessed fortifications to the ground.”

  Berin had a bit of a dreamy look on his face; contemplating fire and death obviously put him into a much better mood than dealing with an upstart Ruad guardsmen. The guardsman thought to speak for a second, but Berin just waved him quiet, lifting his thumb. The injury was a few years old now and he could hold a shield in his left hand, but he rarely did. He liked people to stare at the stub of a hand and assume he was old, disabled, weak.

  “Thirdly, Mistress Brea keeps me in check and nearly every day she has to tell me to let you all live.” The men behind him nodded and smiled. “But if you’d be so kind as to piss on the mercy of the Good Father, we could get all this Dragon-tongued smiling over with.”

  The group leader took a deep breath and settled on a different, and far more polite, line of attack.

  “We have heard reports of riots in the slave quarters and wild Bolg attacking our farmers. The man you are protecting is clearly a wild Bolg and could be involved in those attacks.” He licked his lips, and continued trying to remain legally correct.

  “We only want to question him to determine where his fellow Bolg are and what they might be up to.”

  Berin smiled at him. He turned to Seth and said, “See, I smiled.”

  Brea’s men nodded with him. He usually was snarling and screaming after dealing with a Ruad for more than two sentences. He had achieved three sentences and was still smiling. Brea would have to respect the improvement.

  “Are we all satisfied that that is what he wants?” Berin asked his men. They all nodded with him, not taking their eyes off of their assigned targets. “Good,” he said, “then I can stop listening to him.”

  Berin cleared his throat and took a measured breath.

  “Fourth, may the Good Father damn your Dragon-speaking, Goddess Bane’ed, lying, filth-speaking, Ruad tongue.” He placed his hand upon his hilt and waited, patiently.

  The Ruad guardsmen all drew their swords and readied their shields; it was even odds and the Daen had not even drawn their blades. One young Daen, who was barely out of training, wiped his hands on his breeches. He was barely thirteen years old and barely taller than the Ruad before him, but he knew better than to draw before Berin gave the command. He had not faced battle before; he would face it like a man.

  The Ruad leader had faced battle before, though not against the Daen. The odds weren’t going to get better and he would lose face if he backed down now. He looked at Berin, the command rising to his lips.

  “Berin, what is this outside my door?” Brea asked, in a tone fit more for finding a broken toy some child had forgotten to put away than a woman walking into a battle.

  Berin winced and then he pointedly smiled. He took his hand from his hilt, pointing at his mouth. His eyes did not leave the group leader for an instant.

  “See? I am still smiling, Mistress.”

  “Did you insult the guardsmen?” Mistress Brea asked.

  “No mistress, I have not insulted any member of the guard,” Berin replied. Unlike Piju, Berin had a moral injunction against lying, but he felt that it was creatively used, at times.

  Piju stood just inside the door, watching half the guardsmen, who vainly believed that they could fight their way to him. He smiled at them, not feeling it, but it seemed appropriate to the occasion. The anger was building in him. These people could decide where he went and when he went. These Ruad owned slaves, slaves that were his friends. These people thought they could just kill him or torture him because they wanted to. Piju was no Daen, but the rage built in him.

  “Mistress Brea,” he spoke quietly, but all could hear him. “They have locked down the gate. For some reason, they believe that there are wild Bolg attacking the city.”

  “Is this true?” she asked the guardsman. “Shall I take this news to the Daen Council?”

  The guardsman to his leader’s right stepped forward and pointed his sword at Berin’s face. “This sack of shit just insulted us and…”

  Berin grabbed the guardsman’s wrist with his right hand, pulling him forward. The sword slid past his right cheek. He struck the inside of the guardsman’s elbow with the edge of his left hand, twisted the wrist around, planted the short Ruad sword in its owner’s shoulder, and gave the hilt a slap with his left palm to sink it through the linen shirt, into the meat. He had not bothered to stand up or draw his sword. The soldier jerked forward and fell backward, his knees gone limp, the blade sticking from between the ties which held the thick sleeve to padded tunic. Red blood pulsed out onto the red wool.

  The leader had held his blade ready but had been so surprised by Berin’s speed that he had simply failed to move. Berin smiled again.

  “First blood,” he said.

  The guardsman’s shield brother dropped beside him.

  “Edden, Edden, don’t let those stupid bastards have killed you.” He drew the blade from his friend’s shoulder and pressed a linen rag into the wound. His own blade lay forgotten on the ground behind him, oddly stacked beneath the bloody one.

  Brea watched Berin move with a battle maiden’s eye, as though trying to find fault.

  “Beautiful,” she said, so quietly that only Piju could hear. Then she pointedly looked away from the drama on the ground a few steps from her door and addressed the group leader.

  “I have not been informed of warfare between the Ruad and the Bolg,” she said. “Furthermore, you have no rights under our charter to slave trade during a time of peace.” She appeared to think about the incident for a moment more. “Finally, if there is a war, the Daen will handle it.” She nodded to herself, ticking the last item off of a mental list.

  “Are we clear?” she asked.

  The guardsmen nodded, stepping back. The group leader slowly sheathed his sword.

  “We apologize, Mistress. I would ask that this doesn’t reach His Majesty.”

  Brea grabbed Piju and pulled him into plain view.

  “This one is mine. If he is troubled, I am troubled. Understand?” She released Piju from her over-strong grip and clenched her fists to keep her anger in check. From a handful of paces her words hammered like an instructor on the drill field.

  “Do you understand?”

  “Yes, your grace.” The group leader bowed, backing away from the force of her words. Two other guardsmen helped Edden to stand and they walked unsteadily away, heading back toward the Eastern Gate road.

  The Judge was watching them walk away, but Piju couldn’t abide the anger any further, it boiled out of him.

  “Piju?” she asked, somewhere behind him, but he was walking away into the alleys of Ard.

  He walked alone for a while, trying to understand the city around him. He had spent little time in the walls this winter. He had preferred to spend his time hunting in the woods north of Ard. Waylaid had taken a journey to a local Fomor holy place. Piju had gone with him to tend the fire and hand him his tools for sacrifice. He supposed it had been training, gathering and tending spirits
was key to magic, but Piju never saw any spirits and didn’t really want to.

  In the Daen colony, he was just a “little man,” doomed never to reach an adult size. Now he tried to get a sense of the city folk, the Ruad side of Ard. He tried to want to understand the Ruad people but noticed that every gaze seemed to hold the same combination of lofty superiority and panic. In the Ruad part of Ard, he was considered a dangerous vermin, not a man. Piju had never been in a Ruad city before and hadn’t considered that the red-haired people hated or feared the Bolg. They certainly didn’t want to see a tattooed, black-haired man in a kilt walking their streets and alleys.

  A few were starting to follow him. Maybe they just wanted to know where he was going, but he couldn’t very well head for the guards for protection and he didn’t really want to head back to the Daen colony for protection.

  Today is not going well. He slipped into an alley, giving himself a few breaths before he was followed.

  He looked up at the bronze roofs that overhung the alley, leaving only a bare shoulder’s width of space between the two buildings. The brickwork went up all the way and it wasn’t very good work. Grabbing the corner of the building, he planted his foot in the decorative frame around a door. He caught the top of the door; a handhold above the wood frame left by a missing brick, and he was standing on the brickwork arch across the top of the doorway. The distance to the roof was farther than he could reach, but he was out of time.

  Piju jumped, catching the thin edge of the bronze roof tile. His feet swung over the alley. He swung his feet into the building; the shock of kicking off the wall nearly pulled his fingers from their fragile grip. Then he swung back, chinning himself into the gap between roofs. The transition from pull up to push down was the hardest. He kicked his legs toward the building to rock his shoulders forward, then the rest of his body was on the roof.

  People moved into the alley below, and he stilled himself. Wanting to pant for air, he remembered a lesson from the Kerrick, “Breathing is the wind, wait for it to blow, do not hurry the wind.” He did not need to move and he let his breathing still. His vision grayed a bit, and the words below grew fuzzy edges on them. Then the wind blew, and he breathed in, gently.

  “Did he go around by you?” asked one.

  “I saw him go through the door here, ask them.”

  There was a knocking at the door, but no one answered. They worked the latch and searched through the house. Piju gently rolled to his feet on the sharply angled surface. Moving on fingers and toes, he worried that either the tiles would slide, or he would simply fall off the house.

  To the sound of banging doors and a general search of the houses, Piju crawled to the roof beam, which seemed much more stable, if a little hot. The centerline of each house had a beam of oak, ten paces long. It was covered by a flat piece of bronze, twice as wide as the center beam and stretching its whole length.

  There was enough bronze here to make a fortune in swords, for all that it was hammered as thin as a sheet of vellum. The Bolg mines of the south were paid with grain from the Ruad north. There war was not forgotten, but the black copper and white tin bought a lot of grain.

  The sun, shining down on this strip of bronze, heated it to an unbearable temperature. Piju’s feet couldn’t bear contact. Unhappily, he pulled the leather house-shoes out of his pouch and slid them on his feet. Mistress Brea required him to wear shoes indoors, on her good wooden floors. He had followed her rules, but could hardly see himself acting like a city born Ruad, wearing shoes all the time. It seemed ridiculous.

  “The spirits do love to tease me, don’t they, father?” He spoke to the wind. He knew his father was always near him, bound to the knife he wore; it seemed reasonable to include him in conversation sometimes.

  Piju looked out upon the city, the high houses on the north side, and down the centerline, the lesser houses farther from the main roads. It all made a kind of sense. He had crossed over South Gate road on his ramble, so he couldn’t see the Library from here. The houses on the South Gate road were very large and blocked him from seeing the east side of the city. He didn’t want to move farther west toward the guard at the West Gate, he couldn’t go north to the Palace grounds, he couldn’t very well go east across South Gate Road by roof tops, so he went south.

  There were no real roads south of the West Gate road or west of the South Gate road. There were just alleys, no more than a couple of paces across, most less than a pace. The roofs touched on some of them, and weren’t far apart on any of them. Piju moved, slowly and quietly, along the rooflines of the city of Ard, working his way south.

  The walls confused him for a moment. There was a wall inside the city of Ard, nearly as high as the city walls. He hadn’t seen the slave quarters before. It was guarded by the usual pack of red-coated men, and he had no interest in getting involved with them, so he sat, watching for a while.

  He saw the dead bird then, not an uncommon site in any city. It was a pigeon, nothing exciting, but it had apparently been cooked through. Piju checked his feet. He wasn’t near cooked, though his foot was a little blistered. The pigeon was still something odd to see. While he sat, sweating between the bronze roof and the sun, he thought of a reasonable explanation involving bronze roofs for ovens. That explanation was comforting, until he saw a dead bird on the top of the wall.

  The guards appeared to be watching for someone entering or leaving the walled area by a gate, but they didn’t seem to watch the top of the wall. Piju couldn’t jump to the top of the wall, but he climbed it easily enough. The brickwork was not good; he had more trouble with the brick edges crumbling under his fingertips than finding a handhold.

  Piju slid over the top of the wall and looked down at the bird. It was also dead, cooked through. The top of the wall was adorned with thick blocks at the corners, which were engraved with the symbol of the raven. He perched next to one of the blocks, invisible to the street below and most of the town. From here, he looked at the birds.

  Pigeons flew freely throughout Ard. Their eggs were small, but the birds were sometimes fattened to eat. The red hen was a better bird altogether. It fattened nicely for eating and produced an egg so large it was hard to get thumb and finger around the widest part.Everyone kept hens, and feeding them attracted the pigeons.

  Piju settled with a hunter’s patience. There was something wrong here, and he would discover it.

  “No one near the wall has a hen.” It was clear now, he checked again. “No one out for several alleys keeps a hen and pigeons won’t fly near these walls.”

  A flock crested the western wall, flew south and east, across the town. They stopped by a courtyard which had a well and a bread oven a few hundred paces from Piju, then flew a half circle, avoiding coming any closer to Piju, till they reached a second courtyard near the southern wall.

  Piju turned and looked into the walled area and asked himself what it was that caused them to avoid this place. He saw that it was full of houses, much like any of the areas outside, though there were differences. The houses were made of wood, instead of brick, but that was a small difference. The roofs were made of tarred timbers, instead of bronze slates, but that wasn’t uncommon in any southern Bolg village. Thatch was better, less likely to catch fire, but it took a whole field of reeds to thatch a single roof.

  There was a courtyard at the center, a bread oven and a small well. Women were at work, heating water and pouring it over clothes, a washing day. Piju decided to look closer, and dropped lightly onto one of the tarred roofs. His shoes stuck. Mistress Brea will never accept these shoes into her house again.

  He dropped lightly to the ground, and found a pigeon on the ground, at his feet. It was burned just like all the others. He knelt by it and picked it up, looking it over. It was still fire warm.

  A small boy turned the corner, a handful of wheat grain clutched in his small fist. “No!” he cried. He ran to Piju and poked the bird with a small finger. “Is dead?”

  “Yes,” said Piju. “It�
�s dead.”

  The boy threw the grains on the ground, angry.

  “Got food for bird,” he said. He wasn’t five years old, but he spoke very clearly in the Ruad tongue “Burn ghost kill’d bird.”

  “A Burning ghost?” asked Piju.

  The boy just nodded. He was a smart-looking boy with clear blue eyes. His hair was a black mop cut short, but still sticking more or less straight up all over his head. His clothing was poor homespun, clearly handed down. For all the thickness of the brown wool cloth, it was torn at the knees and elbows and mostly worn through at the collar. The boy rubbed one bare foot against the other under his close inspection.

  The woman who turned the corner was the most beautiful woman alive. She had long black hair which swept past her shoulders, beautiful white shoulders. Her dress was a simple white linen tube held with straps over the shoulders and a simple woven belt around her waist, but she made it into a royal gown fit for a queen.

  Piju stood quickly, embarrassed suddenly to have a dead bird in his hands. She smiled and looked up at Piju, who wasn’t any taller, but she was scooping up the small boy into her arms. She was protecting the boy against the stranger, but she made it look natural and almost welcoming.

  “Hello,” she said. “Who are you?”

  “Oh,” he said, staring at her beautiful blue eyes, which seemed to be slightly more important than remembering to breathe.

  “Um,” he said, licking his dry lips. “You’re a Bolg.”

  She frowned at him, a little pucker of her nose that made it nearly as pretty as her smile.

  “So are you,” she said.

  “Bird kill’d,” added the boy.

  Piju nodded and after a while, remembered to stop nodding.

  “Um,” he said again.

  “Buck said he had found a bird, but he thought it was alive, he wanted to bring it some grain.” She grinned at herself, “I think that’s what he said at least.”