Written in Blood

by Span, Ryan A.

  “It will take the others about ten minutes to reach the gate,” said Sir Erroll. He reeled in the line and put the grapnel on his belt. “We'll split up and make our way to the gate separately, so at least one of us should be able to reach it alive. Then we create as much havoc as we can. Make it sound as if we're twice their number, and they should surrender.”

  It was as good a plan as any. In the war I'd seen hundreds of green, poorly-led troops fold to a bare handful of veterans with surprise on their side.

  On the other hand, these weren't levied farmboys sucking their thumbs and pissing their breeches. These were Harari. The plan had plenty of other merits, but I didn't expect an easy surrender.

  Sliding down the packed-dirt embankment, I chose a yurt at random and dashed across the parched grass to hide behind it. From there I threaded through the loose maze of tents like a shadow. The tension set my heart thrumming. Every time I glanced out I expected to see some kind of lookout or patrol, even a single man watching for trouble.

  It turned out the Harari hadn't mounted a guard at all. Maybe they didn't believe anyone would be mad enough to attack in this weather. God knew, if we weren't so desperate, they would've been right.

  The three of us stopped when we reached the vast, open expanse of the central courtyard. This was where they held archery practice and trained their horses. Barely-visible poles and rope lines divided it into sections, ready to choke a careless runner. All that open ground gave us nowhere to hide until we reached the big feasting tent. If we got spotted, it would happen here.

  We'd have to go across one at a time.

  Faro hesitated at the edge of the wooden scaffold where he hid, then launched himself across at a low run. The rope barriers tangled him up, but youthful agility saw him through. He reached the shadow of the feasting tent with a grateful plunge into the sand. There he stayed, almost invisible under his tawny cloak.

  Maille slowed Sir Erroll down, but he spotted and avoided the ropes with blue-blooded dignity. A few more seconds of scrabbling against the loose ground and he was clear. My turn.

  The hard, dense ground of the courtyard provided a good running surface, but here and there the Tzan had piled treacherous drifts of shifting, blinding dust. I slid and scrambled forward on three limbs as often as two, but I found my own quick way through the ropes with sword drawn.

  Sir Erroll and the squire steadied me as I reached them. I tried to speak, but the knight made the soldier's hand signal for absolute silence. We all stayed deathly still. However, I dared to twist my head round to see what was going on.

  Only a few yards away from our poor impression of a dune, a Harari woman in a black veil walked by, crossing to the covered well at the heart of the village. From this distance I could see every fold in her desert robe. At the well she laboriously drew up a bucket of water, filled two large skins, then returned the cover. She walked past us a second time without noticing, without looking at anything except her own feet. The huge flaps of the feasting tent swallowed her back up.

  “Black,” whispered Faro. “She's a widow.”

  Sir Erroll glared at him and fingered the edge of his hide-covered shield. “You are getting far too knowledgeable about these things, boy.”

  The last thing I wanted was to get caught up in their bickering. I pushed my way through the shifting sand towards the gate. The others followed in my wake.

  Here we spotted our first and only guard. A small, wind-battered sentry's tent sat on the wall as a lookout, offering meagre shelter from the wind. It looked out over the steppe, not into the camp, but I'd wager no one could unbar the gates without him knowing. The bronze alarm bell next to his tent looked loud.

  I threw Faro a quick hand signal. He nodded and veered off to scramble up the wall. Sir Erroll kept pace with me, following my lead as I waved my arms like a madmen and shouted, “Farza yathil!”

  The guardsman poked his sand-caked face out of the tent. From this distance I could almost see his frown. He bellowed a challenge. When we didn't respond, he grabbed the bell-ringer and repeated himself, tension building in his stance. Then, suddenly, the bloody tip of an arrow erupted from his left eye. Faro jumped down from the earthwork and quickly tucked the body back into his tent.

  “Good shooting, lad,” I told him. He replied with a grin.

  I went up the wall to oversee our forces, while Sir Erroll threw himself against the gate. He lifted the huge wooden beam by himself in a serious display of strength and threw it down where it couldn't inconvenience us any longer. The gates were open.

  Faro came to join me, passing a row of spikes above the gate. However, when he got a closer look at them, he recoiled and fell backwards. I ran to his side to see what was wrong.

  Atop several of the spikes were human heads, though it was hard to call them human at this point. Rotted skulls staring out into nothingness, dried skin scarred deep by the Tzan. Rows of empty eyesockets returned my look. One skull still wore a dented steel helmet of the Duke's cavalry, but like the rest, his scalp had been flayed off for some warrior's grisly trophy.

  “God,” the boy gasped. Terror-white eyes bulged behind his veil. “My God! Those savages!”

  “Bury them later, lad. First, we fight.”

  He nodded slowly, shakily, and went off to help bring the rest of the group inside the walls. With any luck, he'd keep some righteous fury in his heat for the battle ahead.

  I watched Penn from atop the wall as he helped Faro to bar the gate behind us. Penn was always helping someone. Ingratiating himself. It made me sick. With the bar back in place, he smiled at a job well done and slapped some of the dust out of his clothes, and I took aim.

  The severed head landed right at his feet. It plopped heavily into the sand and rolled to stare up at him, rotted lips pulled back to a grin. The helmet stayed on, set at a jaunty angle. The Harari had nailed it there.

  “Anyone you know?” I called down to him, and he spun around like a spooked deer. The head changed his fear to wide-eyed horror.

  “S-Sergeant Arravis...” He swallowed and looked away from it. “He may have been a Duke's man, but he didn't deserve this.”

  “They knew what they were getting into when they rode across the border. Harari like trophies, not prisoners.”

  It took him a moment to find his voice again, but his reaction surprised me. He knelt down to pick the skull up by its helmet, then set it carefully in a corner where it would be safe from wind and insects, and scooped some sand over it.

  Penn said, “Save him for later. We'll bury the bastard deep.”

  I jumped down to the spy's side. The decision to allow him a weapon hadn't been mine, I disapproved in the strongest possible terms, but she overruled me and gave me the job of finding something suitable. So I handed him an awkward stick I'd fashioned from the dead guard's bow. He took it gratefully. The rest of our forces were already arrayed.

  Faro stood ready, his eyes hooded, gripping his bow tight. He wouldn't disappoint. Aemedd wound his crossbow and tightened the buckle of his helm, while Sir Erroll pulled the covering off his shield, letting the spiked bronze dome shine bright. Adar stood next to them, eyes blank, only becoming alive when his prophecied sword slithered out of its sheath. My hands moved almost on their own, stripping off the robe that covered my breastplate while my blood thundered through my veins.

  Something about the scene hit me deep down. How many hundreds, thousands of years had it been since so many of these pieces fought together? The heavy thudding of my heart made the breastplate vibrate all over. The air around me felt slick and strange.

  My breath caught in my throat as I watched Sir Erroll stride to the fore. I could see him perfectly even in the near-total darkness. His voice boomed like something out of legend, “Advance!”

  I was supposed to keep my eye on Penn, but I forgot all about him in the wild exultation of the charge. We flew across the sand between us and the feasting tent. Adar, the first to arrive, cut a slit in the tentcloth in one smooth st
roke of the bronze sword. The rest of us dove through the opening without hesitation. Surprise was on our side.

  The rest was a blur. Flashes of steel, blood, pain. Caught a glimpse of low tables, cushions, a firepit at the centre surrounded by brass water-pipes. Bodies around the room, in armour and cloth, frozen at their tasks. Then they retaliated, a tide of screaming Harari with swords, knives, pots and pans. The fleeting thought blew through my head that we were outnumbered, desperately so, but we remained undeterred. My sword moved from body to body without involving my conscious mind at all.

  Only a bare handful of details caught in my memory. The air filled with Faro's arrows. The knight bashed people out of the way with his shield as though they were nothing more than puppets, then cut them down where they fell. I duelled three Harari warriors at once and killed them one by one. And Adar...

  I didn't look at Adar, for fear of what I might see.

  Then, suddenly, silence. I stopped myself just short of cutting Faro's head off, halting the blade a bare inch from his throat. There were no more enemies to fight. My head slowly began to clear of the pulsing rush, and I used a nearby curtain to wipe blood from my eyebrows. Adar kept going, hacking at corpses and anyone else who came close. He had to be bashed to the ground by Sir Erroll's mailled fist before he went catatonic again.

  Behind me, Faro ran outside through the slit in the tent, heaving and retching. I could understand why when I looked down. Warriors clutched their weapons even in death, caught by surprise without their thick armour. Women stared glassy-eyed at the ceiling through black or sand-coloured veils. Boys and girls barely old enough to shave lay among them, as dead as the rest. The rough woven mats on the floor squelched underfoot, soaked through with crimson.

  I felt nothing while my eyes absorbed the view. We really had gone berserk. No wounded. No survivors at all, just blood and meat.

  The bodies didn't discomfit me too much. I'd seen worse in the war, done worse in the war. I knew conscience was something you faced later with a stiff drink in your hand. What bothered me was the number of them. I tallied up at least twenty men, seasoned Harari warriors as hard as coffin nails, against our six. We didn't take one casualty. Not a scratch on any of us.

  Tossing the thought from my head, I tore the curtain down and carefully wiped my sword with it, then turned the point of the blade towards my scabbard.

  I couldn't get it down the sheath. My hands were shaking.

  The well water was warm and stagnant, but it washed away the grime and the blood just fine. The tent's awning protected me from the skin-slicing viciousness of the Tzan while I cleaned up. I wiped my face with a fresh cloth, and only trembled a little bit.

  Finished, I pushed the bucket aside and strode back into the little lamp-lit storage yurt where we'd gathered.

  None of us went back to the feasting tent, and nobody touched the Harari. It seemed wrong somehow, sacrilegious, to disturb them. Really, the less I thought about that graveyard, the better. What stuck in my head the most was when Lady Ioanna had come inside. My eyes locked on her face. I witnessed just one flash of emotion, horror in her wide eyes, quickly locked down and sealed behind her wall of regal self-control. Her expression hardened. She spoke only once, in front of the Harari khan's throne; a huge antlered helm lay discarded by its side, and the khan himself was face-down next to it. He'd been raggedly beheaded by a swipe of Sir Erroll's sword.

  “I would have preferred more restraint,” she'd said. Then she left with Penn and Sir Erroll to secure the other tents.

  It was not a memory I enjoyed. Not because of the killing, but because I'd disappointed her. A tiny voice at the back of my head kept telling me that was the wrong way to feel. Slaughtering women and children... A good soldier didn't do that.

  I pulled myself back to the present, a little angry, a little cold.

  Inside the tent, the woman occupied one corner, hunched over a set of maps and whispering to Aemedd. Penn sat on the floor close by, fixing the soles of his boots. Next to him, Yazizi sat looking up at me with her elbows on her knees, leaning forward, and one corner of her mouth twisted up into a faint smile. I shuddered and turned away.

  I knew she'd seen the carnage in the feasting tent. Why did she seem so totally unaffected?

  Adar lay motionless on a pile of straw in the far corner, with Faro to look over him. Sir Erroll sat brooding on another small table while sucking on a skin of Harari wine. Spiced fermented cactus juice. He grimaced at each sip but was determined to keep drinking.

  “We have the supplies we need,” the woman said softly, but I had no trouble listening in. “Enough to get us into the North at half rations. The route I planned should let us skip behind the lines, away from their main forces.”

  “What about forts and patrols?”

  “They'll have no reason to suspect us. We have horses, armour, insignia, everything the Harari captured from those lancers. Who's to say I'm not a lady travelling under military escort?” She smiled. “We can take a quick rest, load everything up, and be on our way before sunup.”

  Sir Erroll grunted sourly, still upset at being sidelined in the woman's decision-making. He finished his wineskin in one mighty gulp and immediately picked up another. No one was inclined to stop him.

  Penn tried very hard to pretend he wasn't listening. The idea of going into the North made him fidgety, which was odd for an enemy spy. Part of me wished I could catch him alone sometime and have a long, candid talk. Just him, me, and a good sharp knife.

  Once we finished planning our route, such as it was, everyone went to find somewhere to rest. Plenty of empty tents to choose from. I stayed here, in the stores, and made myself comfortable on a table. Didn't fancy sleeping in a dead man's bed anyway. That left me alone with Faro and Adar, while Yazizi went outside to kneel under the awning, all wrapped up against the Tzan. Whether she slept or meditated, I couldn't say.

  The night carried on quietly, divided into hours of insomnia and short bouts of fitful sleep in the sweltering tent. Repetitive snatches of dream flashed through me, of gleaming metal things that whispered into my brain and promised that if I only held them, I would understand. When the morning light started to filter in through the storm, I gave up on sleep and spent the rest of the night cleaning and caring for my equipment. We had a tough journey ahead of us.

  Another cold shudder crept up my spine when I glanced in Adar's direction. He'd spent the whole night sitting cross-legged, eyes closed, clutching his scabbard in white-knuckled fingers like a drowning man to a piece of flotsam. I bet Aemedd and Sir Erroll kept their own bronzes equally close. Me, I... Well, I was wearing my breastplate, though I couldn't remember when I'd put it on.

  Somehow I dozed off while polishing my belt buckle, until a voice jerked me awake. “Faro,” it said softly, fearfully. “Faro, I need you.”

  The squire lay curled up in a ball a few feet away and didn't stir for anything. Out of dull curiosity I pushed myself onto my hands and knees and went to see what was going on. The farmboy still sat rigidly in the same place, but his eyes were open wide, his breathing quick and ragged. He saw me, recognised me, though he seemed unable to move.

  “B-B-Byren,” he said. Like this, stuttering and quavering, he sounded more normal than he had in a long time. “I'm frightened.”

  My tired brain struggled to comprehend. “Frightened of what?”

  “Of myself. They're talking to me all the time now. Mother. Father. They only want what's best for me, but every day it gets harder to say no.”

  “What are you talking about? There's no one here.”

  His voice cracked. The life drained out of it with every struggling word. “You can't help me, Byren. There's so much blood and I don't think I'm strong enough.”

  He fell silent, his eyes drifted closed again, and this time nothing could rouse him, not the sound of my voice nor a hard shake by the shoulders. It was like hefting a rag doll, except for his hands, which still held the sword in a death grip. I tried to pry his
fingers away. With all my strength, I couldn't budge them.

  So much blood. My mind returned to the feasting tent and the way the mats bubbled up with red wherever you stepped on them.

  Twenty men. We killed twenty men in a blind rage, and that was with four of the bronzes. Maybe the woman was right. Maybe these things could make a difference in the war after all. What could happen when we had five, or all six? What would the world look like afterwards?

  There's no such thing as magic, I had to remind myself, thinking about Aemedd's words. It's a well-forged item made by a gifted armourer, nothing more.

  No such thing as magic, no land of the gods, and definitely no divine stag to be hunted in some heathen ritual. I wanted that to be true. I wanted to have imagined everything.

  I sat, wrestled with my conscience, and waited for morning to come.

  We were up before dawn, loading our supplies onto the Harari's finest horses. Every kind of animal was on display, from the short, stocky breeds of the northern steppe to the very best of the south, all slender and graceful. Many of them showed battle scars, particularly the foreign breeds captured in various raids and battles.

  One by one we inspected the animals to size them up for use or trade. Penn made himself useful with his supposed background in horse-breeding, and I had to admit he seemed to know his stuff. Yazizi went about feeding and watering each animal as they were chosen for the journey ahead.

  I swigged a skin of cactus wine while I watched Penn saddle a horse, trying to learn the knack for my own sake. He did his best to show me his technique and turned out to be a decent instructor. He even invited me to try my hand at the next beast, and I managed to get the saddle on with only a few pointers. Always helping people, was Penn. Always smiling that slightly desperate smile. I suddenly realised we were alone in the stables, out of sight, and I could cut a few answers out of him before anyone came to stop me...