‘Don’t begrudge me, wench.’ Stavro clambered over the barrier. ‘I’ve nothing against you. But business is—’
He didn’t complete the sentence, for Ciri was already on him, was already holding Swallow, as she had named the gnomish gwyhyr. She used a very simple, downright childish attack and feint called ‘three little steps’ – but Stavro was taken in by it. He took a step backwards and raised his sword involuntarily, and was then at her mercy – after stepping back he was leaning against a post and Swallow’s blade was an inch from the tip of his nose.
‘That move,’ Bonhart explained to the marchioness, shouting over the roaring and applause, is called “three little steps, a feint and a lunge in tierce”. A cheap trick, I’d expected something more refined from the wench. Though one must admit, if she’d wanted it, the fellow would already be dead.’
‘Kill ‘im! Kill ‘im!’ the spectators bellowed, and Houvenaghel and Mayor Pennycuick pointed their thumbs downwards. The blood had drained from Stavro’s face, and the pimples and pockmarks on his cheeks were repugnantly visible.
‘I told you not to make me,’ Ciri hissed. ‘I don’t want to kill you! But I won’t let anyone touch me. Go back where you came from.’
She moved back, turned around, put down her sword and looked up towards the box.
‘Are you toying with me?’ she cried, voice breaking. ‘Do you mean to force me to fight? To kill? You can’t do it! I won’t fight!’
‘Hear that, Imbra?’ Bonhart’s sneering voice resounded in the silence. ‘Clear profit! And no risk! She won’t fight. Thus you can take her from the arena and deliver her alive to the Baron of Casadei, so he can freely amuse himself with her. You can take her without any danger! With your bare hands!’
Windsor Imbra spat. Stavro, still standing with his back pressed against the post, panted, gripping his sword. Bonhart laughed.
‘But I, Imbra, bet a diamond to a walnut that you can’t.’
Stavro took a deep breath. The girl standing with her back to him appeared distracted, preoccupied. He was seething with rage, shame and hatred. He couldn’t control himself. He attacked. Swiftly and treacherously.
The audience didn’t notice the swerve or reverse thrust. All they saw was the rushing Stavro making a truly balletic leap, after which – less balletically – he fell belly and face down in the sand; sand which was immediately stained red with blood.
‘Instinct takes the upper hand!’ Bonhart shouted over the crowd. ‘Reflexes come into play! Eh, Houvenaghel? What did I say? You’ll see, the mastiffs won’t be needed!’
‘What a splendid and profitable spectacle,’ Houvenaghel said, closing his eyes in bliss.
Stavro raised himself on trembling arms, jerked his head, cried out, croaked, puked blood and slumped down on the sand.
‘What’s that blow called, Mr Bonhart, sir?’ the Marchioness de Nementh-Uyvar asked huskily and sensuously, rubbing her knees together.
‘That was improvised.’ The teeth of the bounty hunter – who didn’t even look at the marchioness – flashed from beneath his lips. ‘An exquisite, inspired and, I’d say, visceral improvisation. I’ve heard of a place where they teach that kind of improvised butchery. I’ll wager our maiden knows it well. Now I know who she is.’
‘Don’t make me!’ Ciri screamed, a truly ghastly note trembling in her voice. ‘I don’t want to! Understand? I don’t want to!’
‘You hellish slut!’ Amaranth nimbly vaulted the barrier, circling the arena to distract Ciri from Matted Hair, who was entering from the opposite side. Horsehide cleared the barrier behind Matted Hair.
‘That’s fighting dirty!’ roared the halfling-sized Mayor Pennycuick, who was sensitive to fair play, and the crowd yelled with him.
‘Three against one! That’s unfair!’
Bonhart laughed. The marchioness licked her lips and began to wriggle her legs more urgently.
The threesome’s plan was simple – pin the retreating girl against the posts. Then two would block and the third one kill. Nothing came of it, for a simple reason. The girl didn’t retreat but attacked.
She slipped between them with a balletic pirouette, so lightly she almost didn’t touch the sand. She struck Matted Hair in passing, precisely where he ought to be struck: in the carotid artery. The blow was so subtle it didn’t jar her rhythm. She ducked away in a reverse feint, so swiftly that not a single drop of the blood gushing from Matted Hair’s neck in a two-yard stream fell on her. Amaranth, behind her, aimed to slash across the back of her neck, but his treacherous blow clanged against a lightning-fast parry of her blade, held up behind her. Ciri unwound like a spring, slashing with both hands, amplifying the blow’s power with a jerk of her hips. The dark gnomish blade was like a razor, and cut his abdomen open with a hiss and a squelch. Amaranth howled and flopped forward onto the sand, curling up in a ball. Horsehide leaped at Ciri and thrust towards her throat, but she dodged, spun fluidly and struck from close quarters with the middle of the blade, mutilating his eye, nose, mouth and chin.
The spectators yelled, whistled, stamped their feet and bayed for more. The Marchioness de Nementh-Uyvar thrust both hands between her clenched thighs, licked her shining lips and laughed in her nervous drinker’s contralto. The captain of the Nilfgaardian reserve horse was as wan as vellum. A woman tried to cover the eyes of her child as he wriggled free. A grizzled old man in the front row vomited loudly and spasmodically, and hung his head between his knees.
Horsehide sobbed, holding his face, as blood mixed with snot and spit poured through his fingers. Amaranth rolled around, squealing like a stuck hog. Matted Hair stopped scrabbling against a post slippery with blood, spurting from him in the rhythm of his heartbeat.
‘Heeelp meeee,’ Amaranth howled, tightly clutching his innards spilling out of his belly. ‘Comraaaades! Heeeelp meeee!’
‘Bheeeh . . . bhooo . . . bheeeeh . . .’ Horsehide spat and snorted blood.
‘Fin-ish-’im-off! Fin-ish-’im-off!’ chanted the audience, stamping their feet to the rhythm. The puking old man was shoved from the bench and kicked towards the gallery.
‘A diamond to a walnut,’ Bonhart’s sneering bass resounded amongst the racket, ‘that none will now dare enter the arena. A diamond to a walnut, Imbra! What am I saying – even to an empty walnut shell!’
‘Kill ‘em!’ A roaring, thumping of feet and clapping. ‘Kill ‘em!’
‘Noble maiden!’ Windsor Imbra shouted, gesturing his subordinates to go forward. ‘Let them remove the wounded! Let them enter the arena and take them, before they bleed to death! Have a heart, noble maiden!’
‘A heart,’ Ciri repeated with effort, only then feeling the adrenaline strike her. She got herself quickly under control, with a series of well-drilled breaths.
‘Come in and take them,’ she said. ‘But come in unarmed. Have a heart as well. Just this once.’
‘Noooo!’ the crowd roared and chanted. ‘We-want-blood! We-want-blood!’
‘You rotten bastards!’ Ciri turned around gracefully, sweeping her gaze over the stands and benches. ‘You despicable swine! You scoundrels! You lousy whoresons! You want blood? Come here, come down, taste it and smell it! Lick it up before it clots! Bastards! Vampires!’
The marchioness groaned, trembled, fluttered her eyelashes and softly nestled up to Bonhart, without taking her hands from between her thighs. Bonhart grimaced and shoved her away from him, not bothering to be gentle. The crowd howled. Someone threw a half-chewed sausage into the arena, someone else a boot, and yet another chucked a gherkin, aimed at Ciri. She sliced the gherkin in two with a flourish of her sword, provoking an even louder roar.
Windsor Imbra and his men picked up Amaranth and Horsehide. When Amaranth was touched, he howled, while Horsehide fainted. Matted Hair and Stavro no longer showed any signs of life. Ciri moved back, to stand as far away as the arena permitted. Imbra’s men also did their best to stay away from her.
Windsor Imbra stood motionless. He waited until th
ey had heaved out the dead and wounded. He looked at Ciri through narrowed eyes, his hand on the hilt of his sword, which – despite his promise – he had not removed on entering the arena.
‘No,’ she warned, barely moving her lips. ‘Don’t make me. Please.’
Imbra was pale. The crowd stamped their feet, roared and howled.
‘Don’t listen to her!’ Bonhart shouted over the racket again. ‘Draw your sword! Otherwise it’ll get out that you’re a coward and a turd! From the Alba to the Yaruga everyone will be talking about how Windsor Imbra ran from a slip of a girl with his tail between his legs!’
Imbra’s blade slid an inch from the scabbard.
‘Don’t,’ said Ciri.
The blade went back in.
‘Coward!’ roared someone from the crowd. ‘Shithead! Chicken heart!’
His face impassive, Imbra walked to the edge of the arena. Before seizing the hands of his comrades reaching down from above, he turned back one last time.
‘You probably know what you’re in for, wench,’ he said softly. ‘You probably already know what Leo Bonhart is. You probably already know what Leo Bonhart’s capable of. What excites him. You’ll be shoved out into the arena to kill for the amusement of the swine and scum in here. And even worse than them. And when the fact that you can kill stops amusing them, when Bonhart tires of doing violence to you, then they’ll kill you too. They’ll send so many to face you, you won’t be able to watch your back. Or they’ll set dogs on you. And the dogs will tear you apart, and the rabble in the stands will sniff blood and applaud. You’ll expire on this blood-stained sand. Like the men you slaughtered today. You’ll remember my words.’
Oddly, it was only then that she noticed the small escutcheon on his enamel gorget.
A silver unicorn rampant on a black field.
A unicorn.
Ciri lowered her head. She looked at her sword’s openwork recasso.
Everything suddenly went quiet.
‘By the Great Sun,’ Declan Ros aep Maelchlad, the captain of the Nilfgaardian reserve horse, abruptly began. ‘No. Don’t do that, girl. Ne tuv’en que’ss, luned!’
Ciri slowly turned Swallow around in her hand and rested the pommel on the sand. She went down on one knee. Holding the blade with her right hand, she aimed the point with her left towards her breastbone. The blade cut through her clothing and pricked her at once.
Just don’t cry, thought Ciri, pushing harder and harder down on the sword. Just don’t cry, there’s nothing to cry over. One quick thrust and it will all be over . . . It will all be over . . .
‘You won’t do it.’ Bonhart’s voice resounded in the complete silence. ‘You won’t do it, witcher girl. In Kaer Morhen you were taught how to kill, so you kill like a machine. Instinctively. To kill yourself you need character, strength, determination and courage. And they couldn’t teach you that.’
*
‘He was right,’ Ciri said with effort. ‘I couldn’t.’
Vysogota remained silent. He was holding a coypu pelt. Motionless. Had been for a long time. He had almost forgotten about the pelt as he listened.
‘I chickened out. I was a coward. And I paid for it. As every coward pays for it. In pain, dishonour and hideous humiliation. And an absolute revulsion towards myself.’
Vysogota said nothing.
*
Had someone crept up to the cottage with the sunken thatched roof that night, had they peered through the slits in the shutters, they would have seen in the dimly lit interior a grey-bearded old man and an ashen-haired girl sitting by the fireplace. They would have noticed that the two of them were staring silently into the glowing, ruby coals.
But no one could have seen it. For the cottage with the sunken, moss-grown thatched roof was well hidden among the fog and the mist, in a boundless swamp in the Pereplut Marshes where no one dared to venture.
Whosoever sheds man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.
Genesis, 9:6
Verily, great self-righteousness and great blindness are needed to call the gore pouring from the scaffold justice.
Vysogota of Corvo
CHAPTER FIVE
‘What seeks the Witcher on my territory?’ Fulko Artevelde, the Prefect of Riedbrune, repeated the question, now clearly impatient with the lengthening silence. ‘Whence is the Witcher coming? And whither is he headed? With what purpose?’
That’s what comes of playing at good deeds, thought Geralt, looking at the prefect’s face, which was marked with thickened scars. That’s what comes of playing the noble witcher out of compassion for a bunch of shabby forest folk. That’s what comes of the desire for luxury and sleeping in taverns, where there’s always a nark. That’s what comes of travelling with a loudmouthed poetaster. Here I sit, in a room like a windowless cell, on a hard interrogation chair bolted to the floor, and on the chair’s back – it’s impossible not to notice – are cuffs and leather straps. For binding the arms and restraining the neck. They haven’t been used yet, but they’re there.
How the bloody hell do I get myself out of this pickle now?
*
After five days of trekking with the Riverdellian forest beekeepers they finally emerged from the wilderness onto a boggy reed bed. It stopped raining, the wind dispersed the mists and clammy fog, the sun broke through the clouds. And mountain peaks sparkled snow-white in the glare.
If a short while ago the River Yaruga had signified to them a clear dividing line, a border, the crossing of which represented an evident passage to the next, more serious, stage of the expedition, it was even more so now; the sense that they were approaching a limit, a barrier, a place which could only be turned back from. They all felt it, Geralt above all – it could only be thus, since from dawn to dusk they had been faced with a mighty, jagged range of mountains barring their way, rising up in front of them to the south, and gleaming with snow and glaciers. The Amell Mountains. And rising even above the saw-toothed Amell was the forbiddingly majestic obelisk of Mount Gorgon, Devil Mountain, as angular as the blade of a misericorde. They did not talk about it, didn’t discuss it, but Geralt felt what everybody was thinking. For when he looked at the Amell range and Gorgon, the thought of continuing the journey southwards seemed sheer insanity.
Fortunately, it suddenly turned out there would be no need to head south.
This news was brought to them by the shaggy forest beekeeper, owing to whom they had acted as the train’s armed escort for the previous five days. The husband and father of the comely hamadryads, next to whom he looked like a wild boar beside two mares. He who had tried to deceive them by saying the druids of Caed Dhu had gone to the Slopes.
It was the day after their arrival in Riedbrune, a town teeming like an anthill and the destination of the forest beekeepers and trappers from Riverdell. It was the day after parting with the forest beekeepers, for whom the Witcher was no longer needed. He hadn’t expected to see any of them again. His astonishment was thus all the greater.
For the forest beekeeper began with effusive expressions of gratitude and the handing to Geralt of a full pouch of mainly small change; his witcher’s fee. He accepted it, feeling on him the somewhat mocking gaze of Regis and Cahir, to whom he had occasionally moaned during the trek about human ingratitude and stressed the pointlessness and stupidity of selfless altruism.
And then the excited beekeeper literally shouted out the news. ‘The, you know, Mistletoers, I mean the druids, are camped, dear Master Witcher, in the oak groves by Loch Monduirn, a lake, get my drift, thirty-five miles from here in a westerly direction.’
The beekeeper had heard these tidings at a honey and beeswax trade market from a relative living in Riedbrune, while the relative had been given the information from a diamond prospector acquaintance of his. When the beekeeper learned about the druids he ran as quickly as he could to tell the Witcher. And now he was glowing with happiness, pride and a sense of importance, like every liar when his lies accidentally turn out to be true.
The druids, they chorused, won’t run away.
‘Utter coincidence though it may be,’ added the vampire Regis with a curious smile, ‘our company is on exactly the right road, and heading in exactly the right direction. For since we are clearly and absolutely destined to encounter the druids, a day or two’s delay makes no difference.’
‘And as regards haste,’ he added philosophically, ‘the impression that time is quickly running out is customarily a warning signal enjoining one to reduce the pace, and proceed slowly and with due prudence.’
Geralt didn’t protest or argue with the vampire’s philosophy, although the weird nightmares he was being haunted by still inclined him towards haste. Despite his being unable to recollect them after waking.
It was the seventeenth of September and a full moon. Six days remained until the autumn Equinox.
*
Milva, Regis and Cahir took upon themselves the task of making purchases and acquiring the necessary equipment. Geralt and Dandelion, however, were to reconnoitre and gather information in the town of Riedbrune.
Situated in a bend in the River Nevi, Riedbrune was a small town, if one only took into consideration the densely-grouped brick and wooden buildings inside the ring of earthen embankments bristling with a palisade. But the serried buildings inside the embankments were currently merely the centre of the town, and no more than a tenth of the population could live there. Nine tenths resided in the noisy ocean of ramshackle huts, shacks, cabins, sheds, tents and wagons serving as dwellings which surrounded the embankments.
The Saga of the Witcher Page 123