But Hero didn’t listen. He hopped out of the woods and spotted Graybur howling from the top of the last hill. Graybur came down at sunset, and they fought a fight that lasted three days and nights. It shouldn’t have taken so long but the wolf enjoyed the relentless fight, enjoyed the agony of Hero, and he drew strength from that. His fur protected him from the antlers as he crouched and slowly bled Hero’s thin hind legs. Hero fell, and Graybur’s canines sank deep inside the soft of his neck. Hero lay there butchered and wide open as Graybur tore his skin and gnawed, his muzzle and the meat becoming the same color of fresh wine.
The forest cried an autumn song of mourning, and the dead oak leaves fell and covered Hero’s body in bronze. The white deer shed a bitter tear to seal the fateful autumn and winter fell on the forest like a ghostly pale cloak of fear.
Graybur was lurking among the naked branches, and no one dared to face him. Fida was hiding behind the ancient trees, hoping that the wolf would go away if she prayed hard enough.
It was a morning so chilly that had brought tears to her eyes even before she was reminded of her dead brother. As she walked scared and alone, she was surprised to see an old friend, the blue swallow.
“What are you doing here, swallow, in the mid of winter?” she asked him.
“I stayed to warn you, beautiful Fida. Run away. Escape the forest. There is always another woodland farther west. All scared does flee west when Graybur comes. I fly away when the eagle owl comes to prey; I fly away to the south when the cold comes; I fly away to the north when summer comes. That’s how I survive: I always fly away.”
The owl was watching and mumbling from the top of the tree and warned Fida:
“Don’t do that, Fida. You cannot outrun Graybur. Graybur will keep coming. He won’t stop. You’ll go west, and then farther west, and then what? Once he has your scent, he’ll keep coming. Remember what mother doe said before she left. A coward never stops the wolf, Fida.”
But Fida had forgotten her mother’s words because she was scared, and she loved the blue swallow, and she never truly forgave her mother for leaving. At least the swallow had stayed to warn her. She listened to the swallow, abandoned the wood and ran to the snowy plains west. And she ran for a whole moon. But Graybur was tireless as all wolves are, and he had large paws to help him fly upon the snow, and he never got cold no matter how strong the north wind howled, and Graybur kept running, until his muzzle touched Fida’s black tail, and then his sparkling white teeth touched her hind leg, and his claws scratched her rump, and they kept running and then his teeth grabbed the left hind and wouldn’t let it go, no matter how much Fida tried and she tried to call the forest now, but it was too late, she didn’t know how to, and so beautiful Fida was dragged and bloodied upon the snow, a sight no swallow would ever dare to see. As Fida’s torn body was covered by the snow, the white deer shed a burning tear. And the tear became a frozen crystal of sadness before it reached the ground.
Spring came, but it was unlike all other springs. Though life was sprouting again, there was no joy or song or love. Life was less daring and colorful, more scared and ashamed. All animals waited for the inevitable: Keri’s death. They hoped Graybur would move to another forest once he killed the last deer. Keri was alone, sad, and desperate. He was not as strong as Hero or as fast as Fida, so what chance did he have? He slept the days starving, hidden in the shadows, and woke up at night. The mumbling owl who did the same by habit became his only friend.
“Keri, do as your mother said: ask the forest for help.”
“How do I do that, owl?” asked Keri.
“You can sing. You are the only buck who ever sang.”
“I sing just to soothe my soul, to ease my sadness and my madness, owl. I don’t have the sweet song of the nightingale and the robin, and the forest won’t listen.”
“You will sing, Keri. Sing your story; sing it ugly and strange and annoying. Keep singing it, every day and night, because the forest wants your story. You will sing, and all the animals will listen.”
Keri listened to the owl—maybe because he had no one else to listen to. The owl couldn’t sing either, only hooted all night, and no one ever told him to stop. So Keri sang for days, and soon he was getting better, especially when he forgot about Graybur, Fida, Hero, and his mother. He sang, but nothing happened.
“I am better, owl, but I see it now myself. Something is missing,” he said. “My song has no heart, just sadness.”
“You’re afraid, Keri. You’ll have to go farther and deeper into the forest, closer to the wolf’s lair. There you’ll find the heart of your song, and then the forest will listen.”
“Why, owl?” Keri asked. “Why did Graybur come here?”
“Wolves have always been here. They are part of the forest. If there was no wolf, there would be no forest. We honor and respect the wolf. But not Graybur. Graybur is a beast, an abomination. The other wolves kill an animal, feed, and breed. Graybur was always different. He met the Forest Witch once, and she became fond of him. She thought she could change him, so she let him hunt here. She told him he could eat only one of the hundred animals of the forest and leave the others be. But Graybur didn’t understand, or pretended not to. Instead, he hunts and kills one hundred animals and then devours only one. He kills for fun and joy. He has gone mad, and the Forest Witch will stop him once your song awakens her.”
When Keri heard that, he grew angry and determined. That feeling fed his song. He remembered the spring days of the past, playing with his brother and sister, and his song grew a strong, pumping, bleeding heart.
“I am going to stop that Graybur,” Keri said.
Keri roamed into the forest, going deeper than ever before. He had small antlers, and he could get through the branches easily.
He waited for the evening to come, the quiet time when it is too late for the birdsong and too early for the wolf howl. And then Keri started singing a song so terrifying and beautiful that all the forest stopped and listened.
And so did Graybur. He pricked up his ears, picked up the scent and came to hunt the last deer before sunset. The wolf came from the east, as he always did to surprise the deer because deer always look to the west when the sun sets, fascinated by the thousand colors of the sky.
Graybur was only a few feet away from Keri and growled, ready to attack. Keri stood still and kept singing.
It started happening before anyone realized it, with the first verse of Keri’s song. The forest listened.
At the moment Graybur moved in for the kill, the branches of the oaks around Keri grew, slithered like living snakes, and fell back to the ground. They became deep roots, prickly hedge bushes grew among them, and dark, thorny thistles rose like a wall. Graybur tried to find a passage but couldn’t get to Keri. He prowled around the thorny wall, but the porcupines slowly covered the grass, silent and hiding, and Graybur stepped on them and howled in pain. He suffered all night, pulling spines out of his legs and paws. He would take a spine out of his left leg only to put weight on his right one and feel more spines push deeper inside his flesh.
As day dawned, Graybur couldn’t move from the torment, but Keri kept singing. The bees and the wasps came before noon and stung the gray wolf. The gold scorpion and the adder came. The spiders came. The roots of the beech came out of the grass and tangled Graybur. They crawled along with the spiders through his ears, his mouth, and under his eyes and pulled out all his teeth one by one. When night fell, the owls came and ripped his eyes out with their talons. And dawn came again, and the moss and the lichen spread across the moist soil, ate away at Graybur’s body and covered his bloodied remains. Soon, nothing was left but a thick green pulp, a dark bog. Graybur was no more. Keri ended his song, and the white deer shed her last tear—one of joy.
“Are you proud, Keri—happy?” asked the owl.
“Proud, yes. But how can I be happy? Fida, Hero, Mother, all gone.”
“Oh, Keri, you among all should know by now. This is our forest, the only t
hing the fairy graced with life among all the deserts and the dead stars. It was born together and grew together, and it dies only to feed itself. The deer’s carcass melted, and it fed the tree and the flowers. Nothing ever dies. It just forgets. It forgets when the song goes away. And that’s what your mother was—a way to remember what you never saw before. Once you found the song, the forest became one again, and it lived. Who do you think rose against Graybur today? It was Fida and Hero and Doe. We die only when the song stops, Keri. When the song has no heart. Blood will be spilled, and loved ones will never be again, but remember: You must never lose the story. It is stronger than blood, hate, or fear. Keep the story strong, and they’ll always be with you. Around you. Everywhere you look.”
Keri, the brave fallow, felt a bittersweet happiness at the words of the owl. For he longed to speak to his mother one more time.
“May I ask you, owl? I’ve lived here all my life, yet I’ve never seen the Forest Witch. Could you take me—”
“Oh, but you have, Keri. You already have. My most strange and beautiful child, love of my life.”
LIV.
Red Was Their Blue
Twenty-Second Spring. Firstblade
We passed the second harsh and dry winter of the campaign camped in Kapoukia, a valley far from any sea breeze. We traded with the caravans of the East and gathered strength, animals, and bounty. The young recruits who had come with us entered the Packs ready to meet their own glorious destinies. The cold continued in the first moon of the third spring, and we waited for the colts to strengthen and the seed to quicken inside the mares. Sah-Ouna ordered the march forward at the Great Feast of Spring, and we made course for the great city of Varazam.
The warriors of Varazam, five thousand men strong, met us a few days’ travel north from the much smaller city of Melea, long before we reached the city walls. They were more than we faced in the first battle of the poppy fields, but they were armed as before. No stirrups. They couldn’t shoot from horseback.
The Legend of the brave Blades who had gone up in flames was all that anyone would talk about during the winter moons. So many wanted to volunteer, most of them Archers this time. The battle of Melea, the largest one so far, was the least memorable. The cavalry of the Cross never reached our Archers. Their infantry endured thousands of quivers, but we had the patience to fire even more. They fell to the last one, all except fifty of them who didn’t flee and didn’t throw down their shields, even when they were the last ones standing at the end of the day against thousands of us. Their banner was woven with the picture of a red-veiled woman, with peaceful eyes gazing down upon the brown-haired infant in her left arm. I learned later that she was a powerful witch, one who gave birth to gods and to men who could rise from the dead. Her magic did not help anyone that day, at least until then. I charged with my Blades before sunset on the few survivors, but before we reached them, the sky opened and brought a storm of deafening hail. Thunderbolts and ice balls the size of eggs struck the field of battle.
“Back,” I shouted.
There was no reason to kill the horses over a battle won. We charged again the next morning when the storm had passed. For a moment, I believed the tales about the Crossers who rise from the dead. The soldiers across from us were not fifty. They had formed four blocks, each one with about two hundred men. They were already lined up in the formation of iron turtle shells, upright, fearless, the first line banging shield with sword.
A Tracker came riding hard from the side. He was panting, exhausted, or too afraid to speak. “They are standing. They’re alive again,” he said.
“The Ouna-Mas have warned us. Undead,” a young man behind me, shot out.
“Where did they come from?” asked Leke. “The Trackers put men in every passage, and they said no one came through last night.”
“Then they came from a passage where the Trackers didn’t put any men,” I answered.
Still, it didn’t make sense even to me. They had no horses. Just men on foot standing. They couldn’t have come from anywhere. Our Archers shot a repeating rain of arrows onto them, but they didn’t take a single step back. I approached alone on horseback. I rode closer and was only three hundred paces away. Their best archers should be able to shoot at me. No one did. At hundred paces, I could hear them banging their shields, singing a hymn, and waving the banner of their red-veiled witch, who looked so solemn from up close. I galloped back.
“This is not right. They don’t fall, they don’t run away, they don’t move, they don’t make much of a sound,” I said. “Rikan, we arm five Packs with spears, and we charge head-on. The First to the Fifth. Man to man,” I said.
Blade had met woman and child one time too many the previous summer. I was waiting for this. A Crosser brave enough to stand against me with a sword. We approached at fifty paces, and the othertribers remained steadfast in their positions. The same at thirty. No arrows came from their side. We fell on them with our horses and our spears and ripped through their lines as if they weren’t even there, and indeed they were not. Most of them were long dead. Some were placed upright on stakes nailed to the ground and between their legs to support their weight, while others stood with spears running through their chests into the wet earth. Standing there tall, fearless, and dead. Only a few of those who made the formation, the outer front line, were alive, and soon not even them.
Some of our horses stumbled and fell panicked to the ground among the standing corpses. I had to struggle to keep mine steady. The field in front and among their lines was a treacherous trap dug with holes and puddles. I lost men and horses in there, and I lost them fighting dead men.
“Those few who survived yesterday did all this during the night,” Amarit, the Chief of the Third, told me.
“How many were still alive? Those we killed today.”
“Fifty.”
“Fifty men, in that raging storm, spent all night nailing hundreds of bodies to the ground? Why?”
“I don’t know.”
We rode until the horses foamed at the mouth looking for any enemies trying to escape. We didn’t find a single one of their warriors, but we did capture a slave, and I questioned him. A young man, with delicate fingers, shaved head, and paint around the eyes. He fell to his knees and begged for his life when they brought him in front of me.
“Tell him that I want to know what happened here last night. Why did they do this?”
A slave of ours was translating.
“He says they had to earn time for their messengers. Their horsemen escaped last night to go back and warn the city of Melea.”
I took the flask off my belt and gave the captured slave some water. I ordered that he be spared, but my men had forgotten the meaning of the word. Before I galloped away, I heard his last screams. Death was the most merciful fate someone could hope for in Kapoukia.
The old Reghen had ordered to strip the othertriber bodies of all armor, and he gathered a large mound with the spoils. Chainmail and scalemail, padded guards for the forearms and the legs. He was eager to explain to me, all the names and the uses, “manikelia, for the arms, podopsella for the legs.”
“What do you need all this for?” I asked. “Not even the Rods wear those.”
“Look at the carvework. They are forged with great art and care.”
“But they are a slow death. They are for defense, not for attack.”
“The Rods will take them,” he answered. “Some of the Archer Chiefs want such armor.”
“The ones who wore them were heroes.” Othertribers, but heroes,” I said.
“I told you that you’d find the defeated heroes someday, Da-Ren. Just before you slaughter them,” answered the Reghen.
“Will you keep the shields as well?” I asked.
“Malan wants them decorated outside his tent. They’re so beautifully painted.”
“Painted with their blood—that’s what they are. Can you tell me why their shields have this shape?” I asked the Reghen.
Th
e shields of the othertribers all had the shape of a teardrop, if one held them upside down.
“They call those shields skoutaria. You should learn a few things about the tribes you are conquering,” the Reghen said.
“You’re not answering me.”
“I don’t know why they have tear-shaped shields. Maybe it’s that sad witch they weave on their banners. They say she weeps whenever her soldiers fall,” he answered.
A few days later, we razed Melea, the city the heroes of the Cross had hoped to warn. The short walls of Melea were not a worthy defense against the siege towers, the catapults and the flaming arrows. Melea was a small and poor city, emptied of both powerful masters and gold. All but a small garrison had fled for Varazam. They left a few defenders, mostly old, to delay us again. They made a lot of noise and lit fires as if there were hundreds of them. They filled the walls with dummies wearing pieces of armor and cooking pots. This time, we realized their trick quickly. They did delay us—a little. The children and the women had fled for Varazam.
“Hellspawns! Curse you, devils. Varazam will not fall. Ever,” the last survivor said before he spat on the Khun, who was questioning him. Malan himself cut off his tongue before having him burned alive.
Almost thirty moons had passed since we left Sirol, and we were nearing the impregnable Varazam, the first worthy trophy of this endless campaign. I had now seen the whole world and burned it without learning much about it. I had seen death, and though we remained undefeated, it consumed and weakened me. I had lost about one of my nineteen Packs, but not one man close to me had fallen. I even added two Packs of recruits. But no matter what I did, I couldn’t keep the only promise I’d given to Zeria.
I came close to losing my life during a raid a few days after Melea. It was a quick ambush on a forgotten village hidden between the mountains, a village of goat herders that shouldn’t even have a name. The Crossers had barricaded themselves inside the one church. To save themselves? Or because they believed we wouldn’t break down the door?
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