by C. B. Currie
‘Was it painful?’ The prior asked with a grimace.
‘I gave him a tonic and he slept through it,’ the priest answered flatly.
Some of the others looked at him with raised eyebrows. He knew that his medical knowledge made them nervous, that they suspected dark magic at work, the potions and cures of wild women in the woods or worse, something gleaned from his readings of the Heathen texts.
‘Then we must all get some sleep, it must be past midnight.’ The prior concluded, cutting off any further inquiry into whatever form of treatment Haendric had prescribed.
Almost wordlessly, the clergymen shuffled out of the prior’s chambers and Haendric, the last, exchanged a glance with his old friend before closing the door.
Vanis was waiting to escort the priest back to his chambers, loyal as always. Haendric thanked him but told him he needn’t have bothered.
‘I was worried the thieves might still be about,’ the novice explained, though Haendric knew any criminal worth his bag would be a league away by now.
‘The roads have become dangerous, more brigands about,’ Haendric lamented. ‘That poor girl captured near the mill last spring and the priest they found dead in the woods near the Crossroads Inn. And now there’s this business with poor Father Caddock.’
‘His Lordship should mount more patrols,’ Vanis offered, referring to Lord Dorand of Castle Bastion, who was responsible for the shires of Somersvale and the Breadlands, but was considered notoriously thrifty in comparison to his famously generous grandfather.
‘The reeve here could train more lads, as well,’ Haendric grumbled. Most Havenside townsfolk who concerned themselves with such affairs suspected the reeve was hoarding some of the silver that should otherwise be used for the management and protection of the village.
‘In any case I’m glad you’re well, Father,’ Vanis said, and the old priest appreciated it.
He patted the boy’s arm as they arrived at the door to his room and Vanis left him there. The fire had burned down to embers again and the candle was much shorter than he’d left it. He’d forgotten to blow it out in the commotion. Listening to the night, Haendric realized for the first time the rain had finally stopped. Heavy drops splattered off the sloped roof and gurgling sounded from drains in the courtyard, but otherwise the air was silent again.
He sat down in his old chair and found another log for the wood stove, poured some more wine and picked up the book once again. A curious night this had been and he longed for sleep. But the scholar in him had to read just a few more pages before bed.
Beland noted how like the tales of Celimar these stories seemed. The Prophet of the Faith had suffered temptation, much like the unnamed man in the Qureshi text. He had overcome these with the Light of Heaven and he wondered if the man in the story was also drawn by a higher power or if, as the book suggested, he found his strength from within.
Haendric wondered, though would not speak it aloud, if such strength within him came from his own world or from above, or even if he had any strength left. The Strictures taught that all men were sinners, but of miracles in this life he had seen precious few. Of sin, he had seen far too much, including this night. He wondered if all priests suffered from such doubts. He had no doubt the fat bishops in the great chapels of the cities cared little for such self reflection. But men like Prior Algwyn and father Caddock, like the wandering friars who ministered to the poor and sick. They were certainly doing good works for the Faith but were they always so sure that faith was more important for their souls than simply helping people in need?
Haendric snorted a chuckle at the thoughts that clouded an old man’s head on such a stormy and eventful night. He said a soft prayer under his breath for poor Caddock in the infirmary, put down the ancient volume, blew out his candle and put himself to bed.
Five
Castle Road wound down from Juniper Keep, winding through rich fields and thick orchards. It passed the farmsteads and cottages of the peasantry who tilled the Order’s estates and soon passed the first of several small woods of birch, oak and ash, now starting to color with seasonal brilliance and smelling sweetly of damp leaves. The morning was fresh after the night’s rain and the sun was climbing. Though rain had passed in the night, the sky was blue again, and grey clouds were chased ahead of the cleansing breeze.
Beland’s horse was a strong mare from the stables – all of the Order’s riding steeds were good ones – and her brown coat matched his penitent’s tunic, which reminded him of his disappointment. She carried him well along the road, as greylarks flitted across his path ahead and a woodcock scuttled into the underbrush with some morsel snatched from the road in its beak.
When Beland had first found out he was a father he had regretted it. The idea of a son did not repulse him, for he had often wondered, even wished to know, what it would be like to have had a family. The reminder and the evidence that he had broken the vows of his actual chosen path in life did however make him wish he had never strayed.
Beland had often allowed himself to remember what it had been like to be a young man, and to love a woman, and to have dreams. She hadn’t been notably beautiful, but her hair had been flowing chestnut and her eyes a deep brown; her nose perhaps a little sharp and her teeth a little crooked. He had promised to leave the Order, they would flee together and find a life by the sea, raise children and crops and keep chickens. But the wars had come and he had been called away; time passed and he heard she’d married. He had given up that youthful fantasy, prayed for Heaven’s forgiveness and returned to his duties, body and soul.
The wars had been hard on both. He had spilled much blood and seen many good men and boys perish. Worse, he had seen women and children slaughtered and the terrible things soldiers did when their blood was high. Those foolish invasions of the east had been the toughest, with parched and arid land, trackless desert, starving men and horses. They had taken the Holy City of Sulimh, searched high and low for the missing Chalice that the prophet Celimar had drunk from beneath the Lifetree before his ascent to Heaven, and had not even been able to agree on the location of the old temple or find the tree. The locals – those who’d survived and learned to live with their new foreign masters – swore that there had never been a tree at all, but the Chapel Fathers had been certain, and so they searched anyway.
After Beland and most of his order had returned, those that stayed had held the city for barely a generation before the Heathen hordes returned, sweeping from the deserts on camel and horseback, to take back the city that their people had occupied for centuries. It was a loss, a cutting one, but part of him wondered also if it had been a senseless endeavor in the first place, to send an army a thousand leagues from home, to a scorched wasteland whose hardy people were led by warriors who would never surrender.
Not so much the wars closer to home. Raiders from Normarden still came in their longships, though fewer than in years past. These brutes who worshipped old gods had posed a serious threat to all the realms some hundred years in the past. In those days, they had swept across the island, burning and raping, carrying off slaves and butchering survivors in a savage attempt to carve their own kingdoms. Now most of their kings and chieftains had embraced the Faith and cemented their alliances with southern kingdoms through pious betrothals. All that were left were the desperate and dispossessed: pirates and brigands chased from their own shores to seek a fortune on others. Though none such leader had ever mounted a proper army in over a century, their war bands could still pillage a town, and occasionally the Order had mustered alongside the King’s levies to repel sizeable fleets. Yet Beland had not even seen a skirmish like this in at least a decade.
Local brigands were more frequent but rarely put up much of a fight. Most ran, but those cornered knew they would face the noose and, though the fear showed, were no less willing to challenge an armored knight at sword point. One of them had even managed to wound him once many years ago with a punishing cut to the knee which still plagued him on c
old mornings. But that had been a lucky strike, and though many a good knight had been killed by a mere lucky strike, the highwayman instead had met justice on Beland’s sanctified blade that day.
The blade was a castle-forged, Chapel-blessed bastard sword – one he could draw with a shield or if needed, wield in two hands. The Chapel priests had said words over it and the weapon smith had cast holy runes in the side that he could not read, but they claimed was the ancient tongue of Selevia, when the Faith had first left the deserts around Quresh and slowly made its way westward. These words were said to give it power: against the heathens, pagans, unbelievers, apostates, sinners and it was whispered, even the undead. Beland had never seen the undead but he had heard tales of what lurked in ancient crypts. The Strictures also spoke of the power of the Underworld and of demon lords and necromancers who would raise corpses and challenge the armies of the Faith. Beland had seen enough evil from the living, and it was the living who caught his eye now.
The road leveled out and the land to his left, the east as he trotted southward, stretched out into almost flat farmland. The Breadlands spanned a wide, uneven plain, spattered with copses, dykes and streams small holdings and hamlets. To his right, the ground sloped upward and became thickly wooded with red oak, maple and ash, many already fading from deep summer green to red or gold. There was a swift-flowing brook, the Rushwater, that followed the road a few paces away and Beland knew that over the slope beyond it the land groped higher into the Sunset Peaks which wrapped around the northern reaches of the shire.
But nearer than all this, in the trees, was a figure. The man had spied Beland and just watched for a while as the knight rode on. Lurking was the only word to describe him. He was lean, slight, thinly bearded and weasel-faced, dressed in roughspun clothes and a brown woodsman’s cowl. He appeared not to be armed, though Beland could only see him from the waist up above the bushes, and he could easily have placed a bow or sword at his feet, or concealed a knife under his shirt.
The man might have had several companions hiding over the ridge or behind the trees and shrubs where they could not be seen from the road. They would not attack an armored knight on a charger in broad daylight, an hour from the keep unless there were many of them, and even then they would fear losing a man or two. For all their viciousness, common highwaymen were not brave and had not had the years of training that knights and nobles possessed. Like the man he was looking at, they were usually smaller than knights and nobles, untrained in sword skill, weakened by hunger and disease and hard living. They preyed on common folk, the same stock from which they had sprung, and the only people weaker than they were.
Though Beland had nothing immediately to fear from this man and whoever else might be skulking about, he still watched him cautiously. A lifetime of dispensing with the dishonest told him that this man was a ruffian and likely up to no good. More recent news of resurgent brigandage on the roads about all but confirmed his suspicion. But suspicion was all he had. The man waved a good morning to the knight as he passed, a fishy smirk on his face. Beland nodded in return, his own face a stern mask of disapproval. Just as he had dealt with this kind for so many years, he imagined that the man had seen his share of brushes with the law, and would understand the look in the knight’s eye said he was not fooled by mock courtesy. He rode on as the trail veered away from the slope, leaving the fellow to lurk in the trees and resolved to let every passerby know what might lie ahead.
Passersby did not often travel solo. He overtook a group of pilgrims not long after, near the fork in the road that led to Regent’s Sanctuary and Brookleith. They were half a dozen freemen traveling south on foot, with pack mules and armed with plain swords at their hips for protection. They said they had passed the night at the crossroads Inn and Stables a short distance to the east. He mentioned the man in the woods, but they had seen nothing when they had passed the same spot earlier.
In the late morning he passed another mounted knight he knew, some years younger, who was returning to the keep from an errand in Bastion. They exchanged pleasantries, and the news of suspicious lurkers in the trees, and the younger knight’s eyes noted Beland’s brown penitent’s tunic. He shared the same news with a merchant’s caravan around noon. They had stopped by the roadside for water, bread and cheese; two wagons and four draft horses, as well as a pair of riding steeds belonging to two of the half dozen armed guards. Such men in Beland’s eyes were often not much better than bandits themselves - sellswords who would as soon plunder a town as protect it depending on who paid them. Yet he supposed these particular guards looked honest enough. The caravan’s foreman explained they were headed to Regent’s Sanctuary with barrels of ale, wheels of cheese, casks of Ventish wine and sacks of malt and barley. They shared lunch and talked with him, and gave him some of the cheese to take along despite his protestations.
After eating with the merchants, Beland passed no more travelers for hours. He was overtaken himself by a man on horseback galloping by without a word, likely a courier or messenger for some noble house or chapel, though he did not recognize the livery. By late afternoon, the Rushwater had widened into a small river and was flowing less swiftly; the road ran into lowland and farmsteads became more frequent as woods gave way to more cropland. Common folk working in the fields tipped hats as he passed for his armor and station invited respect, despite his penitent’s colors: a Knight of the Chalice was a guardian of both the people and the Faith.
As the shadows lengthened and the air started to cool, he saw smoke on the horizon, the usual grey-brown pall above the city of Bastion, but it would still be some time before he could see the town walls. A pair of brown-robed friars passed on the road, one with a limp and a walking staff and bulbous swollen growths clustered on one side of his face. Both were perhaps forty and their sandals were worn and poor. The knight exchanged pleasantries and duly warned them of the potential danger ahead but they said they would not travel so far before turning eastwards across the lowlands and making their way to the hamlet of Landel’s Mound. Beland remembered the place as a cluster of cottages, a simple ale house and a wooden chapel. Ancient barrows nearby gave the settlement its name. There was also a hospice there in a converted barn, where the Brothers of Solace tended the sick and dying from nearby communities. He wondered whether the lame and disfigured friar was traveling there to cure or be cured.
As the sun dipped low, nudging the distant peaks that took their name from it and bathing the land in orange light, the town of Bastion appeared to the south. The brook had meandered back near the road again, wider now, and led south to run alongside the crenellated walls. The spires of its great chapel and those of several smaller ones poked above the battlements, competing with the tips of a few pine trees that grew within. Smoke drifted up from hundreds of households and pooled into a dirty brown pall above the southern horizon.
The city housed a thousand families or more and had grown for several hundred years. There were taverns, chapels, a priory, the lord’s keep and merchant houses. A great market was held outside the north gates on the fifteenth day of every month and for two full weeks in the late summer. The city sat on the River Burr with a busy dockyard outside its south wall. There was also a chapter house of the Order of the Chalice, where passing knights, even penitents, could take a bed for the knight and sup from the well-stocked kitchens.
Bastion was halfway to the priory at Havenside, a journey he would have to resume in the morning. Beland half dreaded the morning for by afternoon he would have to face his son and tell him the truth. Haendric had waited years to tell Beland about his son. Perhaps it was because the knight had been posted abroad or away on campaign for much of the time; perhaps because the old priest had needed time to shape and mold the lad into a novice monk. In any case the boy was a young man by the time he found out he was a father, and well on his way to becoming a learned chapelman.
The other truth was that Beland was proud of his son. He was a decent lad, though somewhat distant. Perhaps t
hat was because the boy believed he was an orphan. The knight didn’t see much of himself in his progeny but was frequently reminded of the boy’s mother. Though it was a sin to be proud, and he did believe that Father Haendric was the one responsible for his son’s education and maturity, he was satisfied that Vanis was learned and talented, and destined to be an honest and faithful cleric, and he allowed himself a father’s satisfaction in that knowledge. He would not be able to share it with his son.
As he neared the gates he could see that parts of the battlements had crumbled away, but the thirty-foot walls were still sturdy and could be defended. At each corner were rounded stone towers with arrow slits and guard platforms, though there was little need for archers pacing atop them in these times. Trees and bushes grew on the side of the wide brook that served as a moat now, thirsty willows hanging languidly into the flowing waters, as ducks bobbed along or waddled ashore into tall brown reeds. A few houses nestled under the walls on the far side of the brook with small fishing boats pulled up on the muddy banks before them. Further downstream the Rushwater flowed into the Burr, a wide, slow waterway that wound its way southwest from the mountains, east, south and eventually west again into the sea. Around the walls on the riverside there would be larger ships berthed at long piers, outside busy warehouses and sailors’ drinking dens.
The knight’s steed clattered through a cluster of houses as the road veered toward the gates. He passed by a tanning yard, a blacksmith, cottages with kitchen gardens and small fields of pens for a handful of sheep or pigs and the larger structure of a commoner’s inn with a faded sign naming it The Drawbridge swinging above its door. In these peaceful days, the actual drawbridge to the town had long been replaced with a sturdy stone one, arched over the brook, but in its time the old drawbridge had been the famed savior of the city in several battles and sieges.