The Bones of the Earth (The Dark Age)

by Scott Bury

  Javor reached the knot of fighters and ran his sword into one’s back, pulled it out and slashed at another raider who was about to decapitate Slawko, the refugee from Kletka. Allia was behind him, brandishing a small knife used for filleting fish. She looked terrified and grateful at the same time, but then Javor jumped past her and killed another raider coming up from behind. It’s no good. There are too many of them.

  Photius and Mstys were beside him, then, and pulled them toward one of the buildings where a group of people from Bilavod and Kletka had grouped to make a stand. They had bows, long knives, a scythe, axes and a few captured swords. They stood against the low wooden wall of a store-house, facing ten armoured raiders. Most of them were wounded; Mstys was bleeding from his face, another man—Lesek?— from the leg.

  Then Javor became aware of something that had been bothering the back of his mind for some time: it was getting darker, but the time couldn’t be past noon. Dark clouds had covered the sky, which had dawned clear and blue. The light grew dimmer and dimmer. It seemed to be bothering the raiders, who hesitated to attack the villagers.

  Photius muttered and the end of his staff started to glow again, but before he could do anything, a cry like a huge raven’s came from overhead. There was a rushing sound, and something huge with wings swept above them.

  The raiders looked up, yelling in dismay. The raven’s scream came again, and the villagers cowered, looking skyward. Photius and Javor kept their eyes on the raiders. Then came the rushing sound and something big as a large dog with wide feathered wings dove out of the darkening sky and knocked down a raider.

  The thing settled on the ground and folded its wings. It looked at first like a monstrous eagle, but it had four legs: the forelegs were like the legs of an eagle, too, but thicker and more powerful than any bird’s, and its body behind was like a huge cat’s. A hooked beak terminated a feathered head on top of the long neck, also covered in golden feathers, but long ears like a horse’s stuck out on the sides. The beak opened and it uttered a loud, harsh scream.

  The raiders ran, scrambling over the stockade, leaving behind their fallen fellows. Someone groaned on the ground, but the villagers were frozen with fear.

  The creature looked straight at Javor with huge, yellow, intelligent eyes. It took a step toward him and Javor reached his left hand toward the amulet that hung from his neck against his breastplate.

  The creature slowly walked to Javor until he could have touched it with an outstretched hand. It reached a front claw out in an oddly human gesture toward Javor’s chest. Javor clutched the amulet in his left hand and drew out his great-grandfather’s dagger with his right.

  The creature jumped back, screeched again and launched itself into the air. With two flaps of its wings it disappeared into the lowering clouds. Rain began to fall. Allia, still holding her filleting knife, fainted behind him.

  Javor realized his mouth was hanging open. He stared where the creature had disappeared. “What the hell was that?”

  “A gryphon!” Photius exclaimed. “I thought they were extinct since the Scythians were conquered.”

  Javor turned to him. “What?” he and Mstys said at the same time.

  “A mystic creature, guardian of treasure, servant of the sky gods,” said Photius, still gazing at the clouds. “They lived on the broad steppes. I had thought they disappeared centuries ago. And they have never been heard of in these lands.”

  “Well, it’s gone now. I suppose we should be thankful that it came at all,” said Mstys. He looked around at the devastation that had been his village.

  “They’ve gone!” called a sentry. “The raiders, their horses, all gone! The creature drove them away!”

  Javor and Photius slumped down. “Are you hurt, boy?”

  Javor checked. “No, other than a few bruises. No cuts, though.”

  “I daresay your amulet protected you again. It seems to like you.” He smiled a little.

  “That thing—what did you call it?”

  “A gryphon. A creature of the sky. A servant of Zeus. Part lion, part eagle …”

  “What did it want?”

  Photius looked at Javor. “What else? The amulet. But the amulet did not want the gryphon. And your dagger scared it off. Those items have great power, my boy.”

  Javor didn’t know what he meant.

  Cleaning up after the battle was a grim task. Mstys told them the score: besides the ten young men killed under the trees, they had lost 15 more to the raiders. Of those, there were eight dead inside the stockade, another four outside, felled by arrows burning or conventional.

  Mstys ordered the raiders’ bodies stripped of weapons, armour and any valuables. A number wore jewelled arm-rings and other precious items of gold and silver. Then they dumped the bodies in a pit in an area they used as a quarry, covering them with stones and mud.

  A group of villagers, including many from Kletka, dug common graves for those they had lost. They put the bodies of the brave young men into one, and Mstys promised they would erect a monument at some time. They had another for the people of Bilavod who had died in the raid, and a third for the people of Kletka. Javor and Photius stood at the little graveyard with weapons ready in case the raiders, or the gryphon returned during this time of great vulnerability.

  But the forest around the holody remained quiet. Even the birds seemed quiet, mourning the loss. Mstys supervised the burials and said a few words of prayer, and then the survivors hurried to lock their gate.

  As the sun set, the villagers gathered in the middle of the holody and shared what food they had. They had defeated the raiders, but no one felt like celebrating. Their losses, especially of the young men, were too fresh. Mstys announced that the people of Kletka would stay in Bilavod, that the two communities would become one. Then he sat down beside Javor and Photius, looking concerned and sympathetic and sheepish all at the same time.

  “I want to thank you for your help these past days. We could not have survived without you, and Bereh and Alia have recovered well. We didn’t think they would even survive, let me tell you!

  “But I think—we all think—that it would perhaps be best if the two of you moved on now. I don’t want to be ungrateful, but it seems as though these new dangers, that creature, well, they’ve only come since you two have been around. It seems they’re after you more than us. I have to think of everyone in this village. As I say, I don’t want to be ungrateful, but I think everyone is better of if you moved on to where you’re going sooner rather than later.”

  “Not to worry,” said Photius, chewing on a piece of bread. “My companion and I were just talking about how long we had tarried here, and how far away Constantinople is. So we’ll be leaving in the morning.” Mstys seemed satisfied, and clapped Javor on the shoulder, then walked away.

  They retired to the empty house they had been given, and that night, well after dark, when the fire had almost died away, Lalya came into his bed again, and they made love quietly and desperately, and when they were done, Lalya left him again before dawn.

  Chapter 11: Into Dacia

  The people of Bilavod gave them as much food as they could carry: bread, dried meat, apples that were just starting to ripen. “They’ll get redder on their own,” Mysts promised.

  Javor felt grateful for the extra weight in his pack as he hoisted it to his shoulders. Photius made a flowery, smiling farewell speech, but Javor couldn’t feel anything but regret and dread. He could not meet Mstys’ eyes, and he did not see Lalya anywhere. Mstys does not want her to come near me.

  A few other villagers watched them go from the gate. They were not sad to see the pair leave, but they were mourning their dead—especially the young men who had run to their own slaughter. Javor did not see the woman who had accused him of betraying them, of plotting to lead them to the raiders’ spears. Maybe she’s dead.

  The two of them stepped down the slope without looking back. Javor checked the sky as he went: clear and blue, with only a few high wisp
s in the north. The days are starting to get shorter again.

  When they were out of sight of the holody, Photius stopped under an oak tree, took out some of his powders and chanted and cast spells. “To keep us hidden,” he explained. Javor didn’t ask what he wanted to hide from, but feared that he already knew: the thing that had swept down from the sky at him on the climb up Ghastog’s mountain, the thing that had smashed against the stockade around his own village. He climbed a large poplar and scanned the landscape as far as he could, but he could not see very far in these hills. He did not feel any better as he jumped down.

  “Your amulet, I believe, hides you from their direct sight,” Photius hypothesized in his elaborate way as they walked south.

  Walking across country is a slow process, and a day after leaving Bilavod the ground grew steeper in the south. “The Montes Sarmatici reach out toward the west here,” said Photius, pointing left to a succession of peaks that grew higher as they grew more distant. “But we need to cross the hills here, where they’re still relatively easy.” They bent their course slightly westward.

  For days, they saw no one: just slopes that grew steeper each day, stands of trees broken by wide meadows, birds, rabbits and squirrels, and once at sunset, a doe and fawn.

  “At one time, this was part of the ancient imperial province of Dacia, conquered by the Emperor Augustus, and then further by the great Trajan,” Photius said one day as they walked through gently undulating forests. Far to their left, they could just see the tops of mountains, usually masked by dark clouds. “But when the barbarians attacked—the Goths and the Gepids and later the Huns—the Empire retreated behind its proper frontier of the River Danuvius. Emperor Diocletian, hated and loved in equal measure, had fortifications built along both sides of the river to preserve the sanctity of the Empire.”

  The names of kings, empires, countries and peoples meant nothing to Javor, but he tried to absorb as much as he could.

  At other times, Photius would continue to teach Javor Greek. “It is the language of learning and culture today,” he explained. “Its superiority over the Latin language of Rome is being proven by the numbers of educated people who depend on the tongue for its precision and verve.” Javor surprised himself with his ease in learning a new language, especially one so different from his own.

  One evening when they had crested the hills and had started descending, the weather changed abruptly. Clouds swept over the sky, faster than Javor had ever seen before, and blotted out the remaining light. A sudden flash and roll of thunder split a tree only paces away. Wind hit them like a fist and drove fat, heavy raindrops into their faces. They couldn’t see more than a few steps ahead.

  Javor saw a small bluff where a stand of trees struggled to live. “Let’s take shelter there!” he shouted above the din of the rain on the leaves and the roll of thunder in the mountains, which didn’t seem so distant now. The shelter wasn’t much, but the rain didn’t seem to be getting in.

  Photius was not happy with Javor’s choice of shelter, but they scurried over, ducking and crouching below some boughs. They were still cold and wet, but they were not quite so exposed.

  The storm grew steadily more intense. Bolt after bolt of lightning flashed behind the hills and the thunder nearly deafened them. “Perun must be angry!” Javor shouted.

  “The gods are battling,” Photius agreed. “The sky gods are striving against the earth gods for supremacy in the universe. This storm is just the earthly manifestation of that struggle.”

  “What do you mean?” Javor shouted.

  “What we humans can see and hear and feel is only a miniscule portion of the titanic energies being expended now. It is a struggle we can only guess at.”

  Javor could barely hear him over the noise of the storm, but he had to agree about the enormous energies. Just then, a burst of light combined with a terrific crack as lightning burst a tree into fragments just paces down the slope. They ducked as shards of wood and bark flew into their shelter.

  The wind changed direction and the rain came into their shelter almost horizontally. In the flashing lightning, Javor thought he saw a deeper shadow at the bottom of the bluff only a few steps away.

  “I think there’s a cave over there!” he said, pointing.

  Photius squinted against the rain and shook his head. “Caves are dangerous in these parts, Javor. You never know what else may be living in them already!”

  “Staying out here could cost our lives!”

  Photius considered that for a moment, then nodded. “All right, let’s have a look.” They edged along the bottom of the bluff until they saw that Javor had been right: the shadow was a low, narrow cave. Photius murmured and the end of his staff began to glow. He poked it inside and saw that the cave led inward and turned. “I daren’t look what’s around that corner, Javor. It could be a bear’s den.” They went inside just far enough to be out of the direct rainfall and wind. Photius doused his light and they stood there, shivering and miserable, to wait out the storm and the night.

  Sleep was impossible with rainwater dripping from the cave’s shadowy entrance, lightning flashing and thunder rumbling almost continuously. Must be one terrific fight among the gods, Javor thought idly.

  The storm finally moved toward the east, fighting in the higher mountains. Without lightning, the cloudy night was almost totally black; Javor couldn’t even be sure he could see his own hand. He shivered. His wet clothes stuck to his skin and his sword-belt chafed, and the straps of his pack dug into his shoulders.

  Photius was uncharacteristically silent. He seemed to be staring out into the inky blackness of the night, but Javor couldn’t even be sure his eyes were open. For that matter, are mine?

  Gradually, he became aware of a tickling feeling on the back of his head. At first, he thought it was rainwater dribbling down the cave wall, so he shook his head. That stopped the feeling, but it returned a minute later, moving lower. Then Javor realized that whatever it was, wasn’t wet. It moved lower and reached around his neck.

  “Gah!” He reached up and felt something he had never felt before: cold, dry, scaly. His hand closed around something as thick as his arm, and he yanked downward, pulling something unseen off the cave over his head. He threw it to the ground as hard as he could and yanked his dagger out of its sheath.

  Photius lit his staff, and in its cold, bluish-white light they glimpsed something long and utterly alien scuttling away down the grassy, wet slope.

  “Lizard?” Javor asked, panting.

  Photius shook his head. “No natural lizard, Javor. We cannot stay here.” Shrugging to adjust his pack, Photius lifted his staff high to give them some light and led the way down the slope, careful to go in a very different direction from the creature that had just attacked Javor. The wind had died and the rain had turned into a miserable drizzle.

  “What was that?”

  “I cannot be certain in the dark, Javor. But be assured it was no mere lizard. There are not many lizards in these parts, and certainly none that large.”

  “Then what was it?”

  “Some minor demon,” he answered, almost casually, stumbling on the wet slope in the dark.

  “I thought they couldn’t see me!”

  “Your amulet hides you from their searches. But if you walk right into their homes, then the demons of the underworld will of course see you. Or at least, feel you.”

  “So that cave was the home of a demon?”

  “I don’t know. It was probably the home of a bear. It was big enough. Or at least a wildcat or something equally nasty and dangerous. But that cave must have seemed inviting enough for anything in this weather. These lands have long been haunted, Javor. In these dark times, evil grows.”

  Javor was afraid to ask more questions. They tramped through the dark, wetter and miserabler with every step, until the sky greyed and the rain turned to a cold, clammy mist. When they could see without it, Photius extinguished his staff again. They were in a forest of thick, ancie
nt oaks and beeches, birches and pines. Photius somehow found a path that led along the edge of a ravine, and they walked as fast as they could to warm up.

  At sunrise, they found a slightly dryer spot under a wide, spreading oak. They stopped and broke their fast with some of the food from Bilavod. The bread, thought Javor, was delicious—better than any he had ever had at home, even though it wasn’t as fresh now. The villagers had also given them some cheese, and he broke off a piece and gulped it down. Water was plentiful, and they filled their skins where a brook rolled over a rocky decline.

  By noon, the sky was high and blue, the air hot. They stopped at a clearing in the forest and spread their wet clothes on rocks and logs to dry in the sun, then sat down to warm themselves and rest.

  Naked, Photius did not appear as old as Javor had first thought. His face was grizzled, but his belly was flat, his body lean and hard, like it was carved from wood. He bore scars on his arms and one across his back, but muscles rippled as he moved. He didn’t look like the old men that Javor knew from his village, men broken and defeated by a lifetime of hard labour and scant food.

  When his tunic was dry, Javor pulled it on and, barefoot, went in search of berries. Near the edge of the clearing he found low blueberry bushes, and started picking, moving closer to the forest edge. Using the front of his tunic like an apron, he gathered blueberries, eating half of them as he went.

  The day faded, narrowed to nothing but blueberries. Yum. Blueberries.

  There’s more. Lift those branches. Careful, they’re prickly.

  He stepped down a little slope into a hollow, around a small tree, picked more berries and took a step backwards to look for more, focused on finding more blueberry bushes, when his back bumped into something that gave way just a little. He heard a deep grunt and turned, thinking blueberries, and his focus was yanked to a huge, dark mass rising before him, a strong foul smell and a roar as deep as the underworld.

  Javor jumped back, dropping his load of blueberries. Fumbling for his sword, he tripped on the slope that rose up behind him and realized he had left his weapons with his other belongings, drying in the sun. He fell, lucky as it turned out, for he felt the air move as something huge swiped past his head. He was dimly aware of huge claws and long teeth and felt panic rising in his belly.