Written in Blood

by Span, Ryan A.

  WRITTEN IN BLOOD

  Ryan A. Span

  WRITTEN IN BLOOD

  Copyright (C) 2015 by Ryan A. Span

  Edited by Melissa Bowersock

  Published by Gryphonwood Press

  www.gryphonwoodpress.com

  This book is a work of fiction. All characters and situations are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons and events is entirely coincidental.

  Foreword by the Author: A Quick Warning

  Personally, I hardly ever read forewords in novels, but I recommend this one. It might be worth your time. And, having no idea how to put this gracefully, I'll just put it.

  This story gets dark. By far the darkest I've written to date. I actually feel a little bit guilty for penning some of these scenes, but I set out to write something that pulls no punches, and that's what I did. As a courtesy to past victims I decided to include a warning.

  If you have a bad reaction to depictions of sexual abuse or rape, don't read this book. If you're not bothered by awful, horrible things in your fiction, keep going. You might just enjoy the story.

  1. Book of the South

  “What's written in blood cannot be undone.”

  - Contractor's First Rule

  Some circumstances in life require a man to get drunk. There are three in particular; when he's bedded, when he's wedded, and when he gets paid. And the best way of getting paid is in advance.

  Take me as an example. I had a bag of silver falcons sitting in my lap, and I was guzzling the local rotgut as if it were water.

  Lost in the dregs of my third bottle, I came to the conclusion that I hated Newmond barleywine. Hated the taste, hated the smell, hated the lumps that floated in your cup and scraped your throat on the way down. It ate its way into the bottom of my mug while I stared, thinking. Thinking. Dangerous activity, especially when drunk.

  Tonight, I thought and I drank because I'd taken a job. The falcons were my advance fee, and by God I spent as many of them as I could. Tomorrow I'd be on the road, long past any opportunity to enjoy them.

  Most people would call me just another mercenary, but the polite term for my particular speciality was 'Contractor,' something akin to a hired bodyguard. It meant I took money from hopeful fortune-seekers and then tried my damnedest to keep them from getting themselves killed. What set us apart from your ordinary rent-a-sword was the lengths we were willing to go to to make sure our charges stayed alive.

  In such a particular line of work, you soon learned to recognise potential clients by the look in their eyes. The woman had it when she offered me long-term employment with a bag of silver and more loot than I could carry. She leaned in, smelling of wild daisies and heather, and asked me to come meet her group before I made up my mind. She assured me I'd be impressed.

  She needn't have bothered. I was on my last two coppers. Work hadn't been plentiful ‒ not because of a lack of business, but because nobody wanted to hire me anymore. My reputation wasn't as sterling as it used to be. Nowadays, most would-be clients would track me down in some taproom or other, take one look, and then run the other way.

  So why did she choose me, I kept asking myself. Things being what they were, with the civil war up north, the whole Kingdom of Aran was crawling with mercenaries. She could've taken her pick from dozens, perhaps hundreds of willing, sober men.

  It certainly set a man to wonder.

  The woman had given me one night to settle my affairs and collect anything I wanted to take. There wasn't much of either. I hadn't made any friends in Newmond. Just passing through. Thus I ended up in a tavern so unremarkable I couldn't have described the place while sitting inside it, trying to make it so I could stop thinking for another night.

  The crowd got progressively more rowdy as the evening dragged on. Plates and bottles started to fly. A brawl broke out in one corner. With my head full of wine, it offered a perfect opportunity for my number one method of recreation besides drinking.

  I took my bottle and smashed it over the head of the biggest, meanest bastard I could find. The one who appeared to be winning. He went down, but only for a moment. Shaking off the impact and the blood from his bald scalp, he pushed back to his feet ‒ it was basic brawling etiquette to only hit them when they were standing up ‒ and grinned at me. I found a kindred spirit in those eyes. He fought because he enjoyed it.

  He drew back one meaty fist and prepared to give me the best walloping of my life. Suddenly, his face went slack. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he slumped over onto a table. There was a knife sticking out of his spine.

  The fight stopped in an instant. This was the lowest, most horrific violation of the unwritten rules. All eyes turned to the wide-eyed, terrified stranger. He backed into a corner and pointed a second dagger at anyone who so much as breathed.

  I caught a glimpse of half a face in the dim, pooling light; honey-gold eyes and skin the colour of cherrywood. He babbled out streams of high-pitched Northern in such a thick accent I couldn't begin to understand. A swollen eye and puffy lower lip told me someone had already roughed him up a bit.

  The facts began to come together. He'd gotten himself caught in the brawl without understanding it, and now he was a dead man. The local reeve would hang him for murder if the other brawlers didn't tear him to shreds first.

  Hanging would be the kinder option. At least it was quick.

  I came forward, becoming the new target for his dagger. He screamed at me to stay back. Tears glistened in his eyes.

  Holding out my hand, I took another step and said, “I think you'd better let me have that, son.”

  He stared, head tilted, as if the gist of my words was getting through. But then he let out a wail of pure despair and lunged wildly out of the corner.

  It was slow, and sloppy, and lacked even the element of surprise. I knocked his arm aside with my left and twisted it into a cruel joint lock while I freed my own knife from its oiled sheath. It slid up to the hilt into his belly.

  He shuddered and gasped in my arms. I wrenched the blade up, then out with a twist and a jerk. He sank to the ground sobbing quietly, dying as I walked away.

  “One less refugee,” I grunted. I wiped the blood on my handkerchief, returned the knife to its sheath, and headed out into the night.

  Northerners. There were too bloody many of them. Everyone could see this place going right to Hell with all the refugees crowding in, and we were a hundred leagues from the front.

  I thought about trying a different pub, but decided against it. Somehow the fun had gone out of the evening. I felt depressingly sober and introspective. Yes, I could've left that man for the reeve. I could've disarmed him. Could have, but didn't.

  I set my feet on a course out of New Town, back to the older parts of the city.

  Everything still smelled new around here, always a hint of mortar-dust and paint and fresh timber. This district had been stamped out of the ground only a couple of years ago, in record time, to house the neverending tide of war refugees. Many of those self-same refugees got pressed into service on the building work. Whoever couldn't afford entry into the city had the option of selling his children, selling his wife, or selling himself into indenture, and the good Earl of Newmond worked his slaves hard.

  The really unlucky ones got drafted to go right back to the front lines to fight.

  The door to my tenement building had long since rotted away and never got replaced. The sagging, woodworm-infested passage closed in around me like a coffin, and I counted the steps so I'd know where to stop. I slotted my key into the heavy mechanical lock, the one thing I'd paid for in Newmond that couldn't be eaten, drunk or ridden. The door swung open and I toppled through.

  I fell asleep before my head even hit the s
traw.

  I dreamed that night. My head was full of wild and confused images, except for one vivid scene which mimicked my meeting with her the day before.

  She placed the knife on the table. Its edge shone in the candlelight, sharp as a razor. It spun like a compass needle, the point following me across the room.

  “Then we're agreed?” she said. Her eyes, so much bigger in the dream, seemed to drink me in.

  I nodded. I picked up the knife and pricked my finger. A little dot of blood welled up around the steel.

  One crimson drop fell onto the parchment. I pressed it in, creating a deep impression of my finger-print. The contract was signed.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, watching the red dot begin to dry.

  “The front line.”

  Red lips curled into a smile. I watched them in a trance. They were a perfect ruby red without the need for paint. Her cheekbones were aristocratic in their sharpness, and changed her from a desperately pretty woman into a true classical beauty. Her voice was liquid summer, distilled into soft, reverberating syllables that hammered straight down to my groin. And those eyes, like reflecting pools of emerald green. She made me wish I played an instrument so I could compose hymns to her magnificence.

  Saints preserve me.

  I nodded. “Oh, good. As long as we're not going anywhere dangerous.”

  She laughed, and I fell in love.

  The tap in the tenement's only washroom had broken about three years back, so I showed up at the gates in the same clothes in which I'd slept, unshaven, smelling of sick and stale liquor. The night left me richer by a few flea-bites and one dull headache. I leaned on my spear with one hand, checked my swordbelt, scratched myself, and headed for the meeting place outside of town.

  The woman met me there astride a sleek little palfrey, sitting sidesaddle like a proper lady. She inclined her head, and her eyes shone, vivid as spring grass. “Master Byren. You don't ride?”

  “Infantry, Milady,” I explained, and tapped the haft of my spear. She didn't seem to understand. “I was an Army footman ten years, and a Sergeant of the King's Own Angian Guard for four of them. I don't ride.”

  She nodded, though still not satisfied. “We have a saddle horse going spare...”

  I marched to her side, which bought me time to think of an excuse. I was no dragoon. I'd never mounted a horse in my life, but pride kept me from admitting to any shortcoming. The grey hairs in my black beard were bad enough on their own, let alone the way my bones creaked when I put weight on them. I patted her horse on the neck. “Forgive me, Milady, but I'm a proud old dog. I'll walk if it's all the same to you.”

  She accepted the explanation, ever gracious. “Are you ready then?”

  “Always,” I replied with a lopsided grin. So I was introduced to my new companions.

  First, the woman owned a smoke-coloured slave girl from the Harari steppe, a hard-bodied little ball of hate in a badly fitting linen dress who stared daggers at everyone brave enough to come near her. High cheekbones and a sharp chin only amplified her thin, hawk-like lines. The irons around her neck and wrists kept her anchored to the supply wagon, but I still didn't care to shake hands.

  Next I met a knight-errant and his young squire, having charged themselves with protecting the lady's honour. The pair were dressed up in their finest velvets emblazoned with the knight's coat of arms, a red raven in flight on a white field. I was no student of heraldry, but you got to know a lot of banners after so many years in the Army, and I'd never seen that emblem before. Though he kept himself clean and shaven except for a bushy black moustache, 'Sir Erroll' gave off a general air of shiftiness which suggested his title existed only on paper. It didn't help that he was built like an ox and carried himself with the confidence of a veteran campaigner.

  His squire was a boy of no more than fifteen by the vague blonde fuzz on his chin. By nature he seemed short and wiry, the knight's polar opposite, but his arms were starting to show some muscle from his master's teachings. He wouldn't look me in the eye, which was odd, but I wrote it off as part of the inscrutable vagaries of highborn etiquette.

  I ignored the obligatory brown-haired farmboy hovering around us. They were like locusts, one in every group, and they never lasted long. This was a particularly bad specimen: dirty, lanky, nervous and undernourished.

  Last but not least, myself. Dirty leathers, scruffy black hair, unkempt beard, and perhaps the one thing worth mentioning ‒ my trademark bronze breastplate. I'd dug it out of the filthy corner where it had been ever since I rented the place, but it still looked polished as a mirror, free of scratches or grime. The previous owner believed the plate was special. Infused with a little piece of magic. Whether I shared his faith or not, good plate was hard to come by, bronze or steel, so I chopped his head off and made it my own.

  Studying my new travelling companions, I tried to put my finger on the exact impulse which led me to sign my name. Money, pride, curiosity, such things were fleeting. But that woman... . She might be my reason for going. I wouldn't mind being near her for a few weeks, or months. I wouldn't mind that at all.

  Together we set off down the Newmond road. The gentle sloping path was flanked by fields of wheat and barley, or fallow grass dotted with old tree stumps. Small farmsteads overlooked the fields, sometimes little more than a roof and chimney. Their hearths all poured trails of grey smoke into the sky.

  Before long, I couldn't see the high walls of Newmond behind us anymore.

  The first of the group to speak to me was the knight-errant, riding beside me in his maille byrnie. This time the red raven emblem was nowhere to be found. It seemed like the velvets and embroidery only got dusted off to keep up appearances. Still, he flashed me a convincingly knightly salute and smiled under his mighty moustache.

  “You have excellent marching form,” he said, in the bombastic tones of someone who always thinks he's performing in front of an audience. “My lady mentioned that you were one of the King's Own. Where did you serve?”

  “A lot of places. It's been a long war, Sir, as I'm sure you know.”

  “I do, Byren, I do.” He stroked his moustache. “I had the honour of facing the King's Own once.”

  I hesitated. Almost shocked enough to break my stride. “You... You were on the Duke's side?”

  Sir Erroll nodded his head without shame or prevarication. I tried to suppress an instinctive stab of dislike, imagining him opposite me on the battlefields of my memory. I'd faced down plenty of Ducal knights on the other end of my spear, usually with their lances couched to charge, full ready to kill me and my friends if given half a chance.

  I went on, “Pardon the question, Sir, but if that's true, how did you make it this far south with your head still attached?”

  “That was another battle altogether,” Sir Erroll said, reminiscing. “They captured me at the siege of Antoriam shortly before the city fell. I was only a light lancer, a younger son of an old house with no lands or title of my own. On my way to the prisoner camp, the big belfry at the walls collapsed like a house of burning cards. We'd bombarded it with pitch so even the rubble burned with the heat of Hell itself.” He shivered. “I led a rescue to dig out the trapped soldiers regardless of their crest or master. Even the King heard of it. When it came time for my judging, he spared me, and offered me a knighthood if I swore fealty.”

  Making you twice a turncoat, I thought to myself. Breaking even your miserable oath to the Duke, after already having betrayed your rightful king. If even two words of that story are true.

  “Forgive me, Byren, I'm rambling. Trust an old soldier to run his mouth, eh?” Sir Erroll gave a conspiratorial wink. “Begging your leave, I really must return to my lady's side.”

  I spared him a wave for politeness's sake. He spurred his horse back to the front of the group in a hurry.

  With him gone, I glanced to my side at the chained slave girl. She marched with her heavy irons held out in front, locked to the supply cart. Really, she wasn't bad to
look at in an exotic sort of way... High cheekbones, a tiny button nose, eyes the colour of roasted hazelnuts, skin like soft desert sand. She never looked up from the ground at her feet, her eyes half-closed in submission. When I heard a faint sound, though, I suddenly realised she was muttering. She didn't even notice me when I leaned in to eavesdrop. Her words were an uninterrupted flow of hate, without a single pause to swallow or draw breath. To my surprise, she wasn't speaking Harari. It was all in Southern.

  “...you smug bastard I pray you get gutted in your sleep your entrails fed to the vultures and your kidneys to the jackals your heart torn out of your chest so you can watch it still beating while your life bleeds out of you drop by drop...”

  Stifling a grin, I pretended not to hear.

  “...and you as well you whore cunt on your stolen horse you deserve to crawl like a dog in your own shit begging for life before you die slowly while everyone laughs and laughs and toasts over your open grave...”

  Yes, I could tell this trip was going to be interesting.

  We reached the Fife and Drum at nightfall, lanterns swaying in the breeze underneath its rotted, run-down porch. Boarded-up windows arched out from the upper floors like bulging eyeballs in a pale, sickly face. The walls of the inn had at one point been painted white; a few stubborn flecks still clung to the worm-eaten walls to prove it, though I doubted there was a man alive old enough to remember what it used to look like.

  I knew the Fife and Drum, had stayed at it a couple of times when travelling on contract, and knew it to be a flea-infested midden heap. It stood in the middle of a copse of evergreens exactly one day's travel from Newmond, serving the dribs and drabs of mercenaries heading for war and refugees trying to flee in every direction the compass had to offer.

  Sir Erroll took one look at the sagging facade and said, “Faro, we will set up tents.”

  His squire looked pained, but started to unload their horses without a word.