by Anthony Ryan
“Ran with him,” I said. “Stole with him. Killed with him on occasion.” I tried to shrug but the gesture just tightened my chain again. It was fixed to the cart’s bed by a substantial iron bracket which, like the bars, was mostly rust free. A sudden anger had me delivering a kick to the bracket, hauling hard on the chain in the vain hope I might see it splinter the surrounding wood.
“Don’t!” the girl hissed sharply, eyes snapping to the chainsman’s bulk in warning. I noticed that the fellow’s song had diminished to a hum and he cocked his head a little so I caught a glimpse of a florid, mottled brow. The girl’s alarm and my well-honed eye for a threat caused me to abandon my struggles, lowering my head and sitting quiet until the chainsman turned his head and resumed his song.
“When the song stops,” the girl advised softly, “that’s when you have to worry.”
Definitely pretty under all that muck, I decided as my anger seeped away and I took a more discerning look at her face. And clever with it, I mused further, seeing the shrewdness in her eyes. Appearing stupid is always the hardest skill for clever people to learn and it seemed to me this one had never bothered to try.
“I introduced myself,” I reminded her. “You didn’t. That’s rude.”
She didn’t answer straight away, instead sitting in silent contemplation of me with unblinking, clever eyes which, I noticed, were a pale shade of blue. “Toria,” she told me finally. “Don’t ask me where I’m from or why I’m in this cage.” Another bland, yellow-toothed smile. “It’s none of your fucking business. Suffice to say, Alwyn the un-Just, I’m not a whore so don’t expect anything beyond conversation.”
“The thought hadn’t occurred,” I replied honestly. I bent my knees to inch closer to her, wincing with the effort of working life back into stiff muscle. Lowering my head, I spoke in a murmur so the words would be missed by our singing captor. “I assume, dear lady, you don’t much like being chained up in here. Nor do I imagine the Pit Mines offer an appetising prospect as to future longevity.”
“That’s a nice bit of word-spinning,” Toria told me with a half-sneer. “How’s about you just say what the fuck is on your mind?”
“I’m saying I’ve got no desire to end up in the Pits so’s I can spend the next few years being worked to death. Between here and there we’re bound to find at least one chance to loose these chains. Be easier all round if we take it together.” I glanced at Raith before adding in a doubtful mutter, “All three of us.”
“For a fellow who’s only been awake a few minutes, you seem awful certain about our prospects.”
“Time is our friend.” I tried a smile of my own, then stopped as it brought forth a bead of blood from my mangled lips. Spitting, I added, “For time brings opportunity. We just have to be ready for it.”
“Meaning you don’t have a plan, just an intention.” She shook her head in faintly amused disdain. “Martyrs save me from ambitious men who think the world will always turn to accommodate their schemes.”
“That’s some pretty word-spinning of your own. And what’s wrong with ambition?”
“Well, for a start, it put you in here with me, didn’t it?”
I lowered my gaze, a sudden weariness pulling a sigh from my lips. “No,” I muttered in resignation, shuffling back from her. “It was sentiment and folly that did that.”
She watched me huddle into myself, hands clamped into fists as I lay on my side to curve my body around them so they wouldn’t freeze. I knew it wouldn’t be wise to sleep, for I might not wake if the cold grew worse, but fatigue had descended with such sudden, irresistible force I felt myself being dragged inevitably towards slumber.
“Oi!” Toria’s foot, a small thing clad in a shoe of thin leather that nevertheless possessed an irksome hardness, jabbed my buttock. “Sleep only when the cart stops. The chainsman lights a fire come nightfall. If you don’t beg he might even toss you some food.”
A grunt of dismissal rose and faded from my lips, for mention of food will birth hope in any starved soul. But still, the weariness gripped me hard, pulling me towards the black welcome of oblivion.
“The guards,” Toria added in a whisper, her tone containing an insistent weight that had me raising my head.
“What about them?”
“They’re lazy. He’s not.” She jerked her head at the chainsman before settling her shrewd gaze on mine. “Hardly seems to sleep. But these guards that follow us, I doubt they’d give a tinker’s ball if this cart makes it to the Pits full or empty.”
The grunt finally escaped my lips, but it was one of amusement rather than dismissal. “Seems you’ve been harbouring ambitions of your own.”
She snorted a laugh before casting a wary glance at the chainsman. Before settling back, she added in a faint murmur, “You’re right. The Pits don’t appeal. Not at all.” Seeing my head dip as the weariness closed in again, she jabbed her toe to my behind once more. “No sleeping! Wait for nightfall. Rest assured I’ll be kicking your arse every minute till then. No need to thank me.”
The next few days provided ample evidence for Toria’s observations. The guards were notably lax in their duties, riding along at too far a remove from the cart, which I guessed owed much to the stench rising from our corpulent, unwaking companion. They also kept only a desultory watch on the surrounding forest, spending much of the day guiding their horses with heads bowed or engaging each other in dull conversation. I noted how they were all older than most soldiers of my experience, not one with fewer than thirty years under his belt by my estimation. They had the scars and hardened looked of men with a good deal of campaigning behind them but, from the unkempt look of their armour and weapons, I deduced it had been quite some time since they had actually been required to fight.
“Old, tired soldiers are my favourite kind,” I muttered to Toria one evening. “Men such as these put great stock in their own survival. Having risked much in their youth, they find their courage has waned along with their illusions of glory.”
“So?” Toria enquired, cheek bulging as she chewed on a carrot tossed to us by the chainsman. He squatted before a large fire, positioned close enough to the cart to afford some measure of warmth to its occupants. However, to enjoy its glow we were obliged to strain our chains, pressing against the Sleeping Boar’s bulk and suffering his odours in the process. Raith didn’t join us in this endeavour, nor did he consent to eat anything despite my urging. Instead, he just continued to stare at the chainsman who, for his part, responded to the scrutiny with complete indifference.
“So,” I replied, taking a bite from my half of carrot, a vegetable I had never much cared for that now tasted sweeter than any honey cake, “should they find themselves presented with a choice between risking their person or allowing us to flee, it’s odds on they’ll choose the former.”
The chainsman was sparing in the fare he provided, just enough to keep us living and not enough to build strength. I suspected Toria remained reasonably vital because her frame required comparatively little sustenance. But every day spent in this cart weakened me and made escape an ever more distant dream, albeit one I refused to abandon.
“So we need to present a danger,” Toria said with a sceptical frown. “Not much chance of that.”
“Danger needn’t come from us.” I glanced around at the forest, which still consisted of mostly pines, rendered tall, anonymous sentinels in the gloom. Throughout the journey I had heard little beyond a distant wolf howl and the nocturnal scrabble and shriek of badger or fox. It was a wild place, to be sure, but not wild enough. “Any notion of where we are, exactly?” I asked Toria.
“Exactly? No. But I’d guess we’re fifty miles from the Pits. They sit at the junction between the duchies of Alberis, Althiene and the Shavine Marches. Makes it a handy place for nobles to dump their undesirables.”
I fell to silence, munching my way through the rest of the carrot and trying to dredge up every scrap of knowledge I could about the Marches’ eastern regions. I had tr
avelled a fair deal within the duchy but never outside of it and rarely more than a few miles from the security of the forest.
“The Nehlis Swamp,” I said when my memory happened upon a fragment of conversation with Klant, another old soldier who had fetched up in Deckin’s band after a falling out with his captain. “There was a battle there, early in the Duchy Wars. Lot of men drowned due to their armour or somesuch. It covers the western bank of the Siltern River for many miles. I’d guess anyone making for the Pit Mines will need to either skirt it or trek through it.”
“So we run off into the swamp and these lazy bastards are too fearful to follow.” Toria’s eyes, shining bright and keen in the firelight, fixed on the chainsman’s bulky form. “Might be true of them, but not him. That’s even if we can slip these chains and get out of this cage.”
I settled my own gaze on the chainsman. As usual he had his back to us, humming as was his wont. The soldiers never shared his fire, preferring to pitch their own camp several yards away. Nor had I witnessed them exchange a single word with this man throughout the journey. Folk of his profession were typically shunned by churls but I hadn’t known they were also despised by soldiers. Noting how they tended to avoid his gaze, I suspected their shunning owed as much to fear as custom. I had gained only a few glimpses of the chainsman’s face, finding it an oddly discoloured mask of red blotches and pale, near-white skin. I wondered if he might be victim of some disease but he appeared healthy enough and certainly he didn’t want for food, sparing as he was with his scraps. Also, he never spoke. The only sound that escaped his lips came in the form of indecipherable song, which made me ponder the contradiction of his lack of facility for it.
I asked Toria if she had any inkling of the language with which he sang these ear-paining ditties. Her gaze took on a wary cast and she shot the chainsman a brief glance before replying in a faint voice, “Caerith.”
“He’s Caerith?” I asked, drawing a glare from her as surprise added volume to my voice. I looked at Raith, seeing for the first time how similar the pattern of marks across his face was to the chainsman’s disfigurement. I had assumed that, as all Caerith hailed from the same region beyond the southern mountains, they would share the same colouring. Also, the language of the chainsman’s song felt very different on the ear than the more melodious tongue I had heard from Raith’s lips.
The novelty of finding myself now a captive of one of Raith’s kind almost brought a smile to my misshapen lips along with a good deal of conjecture as to how this heathen had contrived to end up a chainsman in the kingdom of Albermaine. Clearly, this was an interesting fellow, but experience has taught me that the more interesting someone is, the more danger they are likely to pose. Even then as I neared the end of my callow youth, I sensed a great deal of danger in this interesting soul.
“There’ll be a chance,” I insisted, more to myself than Toria. “There always is. Just a second or two, a fleeting thing that may be gone before we see it, so be watchful…” I stopped speaking as the chainsman’s humming abruptly faded. He cocked his head in the same way he had after my first awakening in the cart. I was certain our plotting had been too softly spoken for him to have any chance of having heard but saw a knowing amusement in the half-smile I glimpsed before the chainsman turned his mottled face away and resumed his humming.
“Alwyn…” Toria began in a worried whisper, falling silent as I shot her a glare.
“Watch for the chance,” I told her, hissing the words as a command. “It’ll come. Just wait.”
The next morning, I awoke with a start, roused by the squeal of the cage’s door being hauled open. The air was even more chilled than usual and I shuddered as I took in the sight of the landscape beyond the bars. The view had changed now, the trees replaced by the befogged, grass-spiked flatness of a marsh. Just a few hundred paces from the road this marsh would, I knew, become a bog where no sane man in armour would dare tread, but a desperate outlaw surely would.
The longed-for prospect of escape caused my heart to beat faster as I took in the sight of the opened cage, my excitement soon dimmed by the realisation that my chains were still firmly in place. Toria lay next to the Sleeping Boar, her features twisting in the manner that told of an imminent waking. Raith, however, was absent. Also, I could no longer hear the chainsman’s song.
“Caihr teasla?”
The voice snapped my gaze to the two figures beyond the cage. The chainsman stood over a kneeling Raith. It was jarring to see a man I had feared for years so cowed, head lowered and shoulders hunched, very much like a child expecting a blow from an angry parent. His expression retained the same wide-eyed immobility whereas the chainsman’s features were set in a hard mask of contempt. For the first time I could see his face in full. The red marks that discoloured his pale skin were far more extensive than those of his fellow Caerith. They stretched from brow to neck, resembling flame in its chaotic pattern and the stark contrast they made with his skin. I found it hard to age him, seeing wrinkles around his eyes and mouth but no trace of grey in the shaggy black mass of his hair.
Leaning closer to Raith, the captor raised something in his hand that gave a faint rattle as he shook it next to the outlaw’s ear: Raith’s charm necklace. “Caihr teasla?” the chainsman repeated, and I could hear the taunt in his voice. Whatever this question was, it was clear he already knew the answer.
Straightening, the chainsman spoke a jumble of words in this foreign tongue too fast for my ears to catch. They clearly held some meaning for Raith, however, for his expression finally changed. Closing his eyes, he drew in a long shuddering breath before raising his face to the chainsman. When he opened his eyes again they blazed with a bright, unwavering defiance and the words he spoke came from between clenched teeth.
“Ihs Doenlisch kurihm ihsa gaelihr.”
The contempt on the chainsman’s face slipped abruptly into anger, though not before I saw a spasm of fear pass over it. His fist came down hard, striking Raith’s cheek. I heard bone break under the force of the blow as the outlaw reeled then collapsed onto the track. He coughed blood while the chainsman shifted to plant both feet on either side of his head, leaning low to voice a question in the same baffling tongue.
“Vearath?”
Raith continued to shudder on the ground for a time, spitting out a couple of teeth until he gathered a few ragged breaths and contrived to lever himself up a fraction.
“Vearath?!” the chainsman demanded in a shout.
However, instead of turning to him, Raith craned his neck to regard me. The silent, terror-stricken man he had been for the duration of this journey was gone now and he was once again the Raith I knew, his gaze uncowed and steady.
“Paths to walk…” he choked, blood dribbling down his chin. “Fates to meet…”
The chainsman let out a feral grunt of rage then, both hands descending to clamp Raith’s head in a fierce grip. The veins on the chainsman’s hands and wrists bulged as he exerted unrelenting pressure. I had seen many men die in different ways, but none like this. I shut my eyes before the end, but the wet crunch of Raith’s skull surrendering to the chainsman’s strength sent a convulsive shudder through me. Had there been anything in my stomach to disgorge, I surely would have.
“Fuck me.” Opening my eyes, I found Toria staring at the sight beyond the bars in stark fascination. “He hasn’t done that before.”
I forced myself to watch the chainsman drag Raith’s corpse into the marsh grass fringing the road, hearing a dim splash as it was consigned to the bog. When he reappeared, the chainsman paused on the verge, face grim as he looked at the charm necklace in his hand, holding it up to examine the bronze trinkets fastened to the cord. I saw how his attention lingered longest on the crow skull, but not with any great interest. Soon his features tightened into a contemptuous sneer and he cast the necklace into the marsh to join its murdered owner.
As he stomped back to the cart and swung the door closed, I heard him voice a harsh mutter in the unkno
wn tongue: “Ishlichen.” It had the timbre of an insult or a curse and the chainsman’s features retained a forbidding glower as he moved to the front of the cart, resuming his usual position on the board. Sadly, his apparently soured mood didn’t prevent him from quickly resuming his song. As he snapped the reins and set the dray to motion, his voice rose high and more gratingly discordant than ever.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It took another three days for our chance to appear, arriving in the form of an unasked-for gift that nonetheless brought a great blossoming of gratitude to my breast.
“He’s dead.” Toria’s toe delivered a series of jabs to the Sleeping Boar’s taut belly, drawing forth the foulest and most prolonged fart his otherwise inert bulk had yet produced. We had woken, shivering with the dawn, to find the usual wisps of vapour were no longer rising from our companion’s fleshy face. The rise and fall of his mound-like gut had also ceased. His skin certainly had the look of a corpse, pale and veiny at the extremities, dark with pooled blood where it met the cart bed. However, I had seen folk in a similar state who would spring to frightful alertness even as their grave was being dug.
Straining my chains to get a closer look at the Boar’s features, lips slack and drawn back from his teeth in the signature grin of death, I took relieved satisfaction in the knowledge that he wouldn’t be sitting up again. Had hunger and cold not combined to stoke my desperation, I would surely have taken more heed of Raith’s fate and what it said of our captor. However, the necessity of removing the Boar’s corpse from this cart presented an opportunity I was determined not to forgo.
“He’s dead!” I repeated Toria’s declaration, raising my voice to cast it at the chainsman’s broad back. He continued to hum, failing to turn as the cart trundled on.
