More voices came, not of this world, and descended upon my ears like swirling arrows. The ashes of the dead, the Blades, the Crossers, the Deadwalkers, the children, all mixed in the sandstorm, dancing and howling together, as if they wanted to become living bodies again, ghosts robbed of everything but their fury, cursing our journey home.
“Is that you, Da-Ren? No, no, you can’t go back. Not this way, not through us,” the ashes and the grains screamed.
Raven was whispering her own words. I held her tighter, hoping her Goddess wouldn’t abandon her.
The storm died as it came—fast and without warning; it lasted long enough to steal the twilight, leaving only a silent nightfall. We were groping in the soft sand, trying to light a fire. Fire and water were our only wishes as we coughed the sand out of our nostrils and our throats.
“Get up, search for the rest,” I shouted.
Raven on my right was already up, but the young man on my left wouldn’t move. I put my hand under his head to try to lift him. My hand slipped across the back of his skull in a thick liquid pulp. I pulled it away as if bitten by a saw-scaled viper. A rock had come flying hard with the wind and crushed his head open. The rock chose him, the youngest one. I was next to him, but the rock spared me. It was probably a small rock, half the size of my fist. Others had been pummeled by rocks too, but only the nameless boy of the Eighteenth was dead. A couple of horses were done for, already put to the knife. One of the men who ran away to hide behind the hills was missing, and we would never find him, not even at dawn’s light.
“You should never hide on the back slope of a hill in a sandstorm. You get buried fast that way.” Baagh sighed.
“Your wise words come a bit late, old Sorcerer,” I replied.
There was no wood to light a great pyre in the desert.
“Is there another one coming?” I asked Baagh.
“I don’t know. They say when there is one sandstorm, there are more.”
My decision to leave the Tribe and wander along in the desert seemed stupid now. This time, I had no need for Malan or Sah-Ouna. I had condemned myself to death.
“If you care for my wisdom, listen to me, Da-Ren. We need to get out of these desolate plains, move north and west. We won’t last here. Let’s head for the Gold Gorge to the west. It is a damned place to camp, but the rocks there will protect us from heat and sandstorms. We can venture north from here, through the mountains.”
“Why do they call it the Gold Gorge?” Garag was quick to ask.
“Why do you think?”
“To the Gold Gorge,” the men called behind me.
“Do you trust this othertriber, Da-Ren?” the Reghen jumped in.
This journey home was getting harder by the day. I wasn’t sure how to answer the Reghen.
“So, why do they call it the Gold Gorge, Baagh?” I asked when the others left us alone.
“You’ll see when we get there. But stay close to me and sleep with your boots on at night,” Baagh said.
Baagh led the forty of us to the dead gorge. As he had promised it had water and shade and the rocky walls were covered with patches of grass. Many colors, but none of them gold. Garag was leading half of the men farther ahead, and he started to ignore my commands. On the second day, he hadn’t found any gold and started complaining that we should go back and join Malan.
“You know, Da-Ren, we have to get rid of him, or more will die. He is going to move on you,” Noki said by the evening campfire.
Night had fallen fast in the gorge. Baagh was doing his chanting and dancing rituals around the fire, rituals I’d never seen before. He was mumbling like a madman, spreading burning ashes with a shovel all over.
“You’re right. We’ll deal with him tomorrow,” I said.
I wasn’t eager for a bloodbath. I was weak and not ready to fight.
“I’ll take care of him, don’t you worry,” said Noki.
Garag’s screams came late in the night and lasted till dawn. He was lying face up on the dirt, exactly where he had fallen asleep and yelling “I’m burning, burning.”
“Stay away from him, he has the sickness,” Baagh said. “Spread the burning ashes. Make a circle of fire around him.”
I had never seen anyone fall so fast from the sickness. Garag wasn’t coughing, he was screaming; someone had poisoned him. The circle was a few paces wide and I stared at the tall warrior who curled helpless in there. His lips and face looked swollen even under the weak torchlight. His eyes moved faster as the night passed, and he panted harder and harder. Even those who were loyal to him stayed outside the circle of fire, staring and cursing.
“That Cross Sorcerer poisoned him.”
“He is leading us to the Deadwalkers’ caves.”
Looking at Garag, his limbs swelling and his eyes bulging in despair, watching him scratching his bleeding flesh like a wild animal, I was close to believing them.
“The Ouna-Mas! Only they can help him now.”
The men had gathered around Ironskull and she was praying to Enaka to rid him of the demons’ poison. “O Goddess, sweet and beautiful, come listen to your children…” She had a deep, imposing voice. After she repeated the songprayer many times, Garag’s face calmed. He was screaming less, though he was breathing harder. And then he breathed slower. And then he didn’t at all.
Baagh stepped in the circle, crouching and waving two blazing torches in front of his feet. He walked toward Garag, and right then I had enough proof that the young man didn’t die of any sickness.
“Did you poison him, Baagh?” I asked as he was pulling the pouch of gold away from Garag’s jerkin.
“No,” he said, and he threw the pouch at me.
“No?”
“Hmm. He should have stayed closer to the rest of us. Maybe I forgot to spread the burning ash around the rocks where he was sleeping. Only thing that stops those damned scorpions.”
I grabbed a torch and stepped with it inside the circle of fire, holding it closer to the ground. The rocks were moving, alive with the large yellow deathstalkers. Noki was ahead of me, his blade moved fast and pierced the foot-size insect that was crawling away from Garag’s crotch. He cut its stingy tail and raised the rest of it high for all to see as its gold pus escaped the insect’s body slowly. I took the harmless scorpion in my palm.
“You can eat that,” Baagh whispered to me. “It is good food for a warrior.”
“But you cannot eat gold,” I said, looking down to Garag, his swollen face unable to defy me for once.
The scorpion’s body was a yellow-brown color, scaled like an armored warrior, its legs a brighter, almost translucent gold. I bit hard at the crunchy shell. The gold goo erupted on my tongue and all over my face as if I were breaking a festered wound.
A worthy Story, my armored friend. I drink your precious golden blood. I honor your fall and your fight. I am grateful to you, scorpion warrior.
After all it was the scorpion who had taken care of the biggest threat of my journey, Garag himself.
“Drink the gold! Drink the gold!” the cheering men shouted.
Garag’s bloated face had been forgotten already. Da-Ren the Uncarved could drink the poison that killed Garag. That was what the men would believe. I jerked it above my open mouth until its last drop dripped inside me. I savored the moment, the startled Reghen looks and the silent Ouna-Mas, powerless without their Goddess for help. I didn’t enjoy the taste of it.
“What now?” Noki asked while Baagh was burying yet another body in a quick and shallow grave. He was a man of God above all.
The horses, surrounded by the night fires, were flicking their ears in fear.
“We make a circle of fire and sleep inside it. With your boots on.” That was all the leadership I could think of.
But the men had lost all sleep, and before long it was dawn in the Gold Scorpion Gorge. It was about time I realized that we would never make it back to Sirol. The sandstorm had prophesied so. I gathered Leke, Noki, Baagh, and the Reghen, while
the rest of the men were killing scorpions with fire and blade. Killing time, and their nightmares. Without the strength of twenty thousand men, even the dullest moments of the journey were unbelievable trials.
“Let’s go rest in Varazam until spring,” said the Reghen.
But spring would be short, and the summer heat would soon return. It would never end. I would not hide behind the walls of Varazam, a coward and a butcher.
“We’d have to cross the desert to get there. I’d rather jump on a pyre; it’s faster,” said Noki.
He hated the heat more than anything else. Summer had ended, but these damned plains of the South didn’t seem to know it.
“We have reached the lower ends of the world,” the Reghen said. He was a thin, hairless man who made my stomach turn. I didn’t trust him, but he knew how to count.
“How far away are we from the valley of Sirol?” I asked.
“Fifteen times a thousand, thousand feet.”
I wrinkled my brow and the corners of my eyes, not able to make sense of his words. Baagh was shaking his head, not even looking at us. The others around me were useless with such numbers.
“What does that mean, Reghen?”
“If we have strength—”
He stopped and looked at my left arm. It had healed but was still weak and sometimes hung like a dead branch that I had forgotten. They all knew that I could not lift a blade.
The Reghen continued, “If we have strength, swift and fresh horses to change every half-moon, and if we don’t stop anywhere for more than a few days, if we do all those things, we would have to ride hard for seven moons before reaching the Blackvein. We could even make it in four moons if we changed fresh horses every night, but we don’t have the gold for that. And those horses need to feed twice a day.”
“Four moons is impossible. We will pass by treacherous paths and unwelcoming lands. We can’t find fresh horses every day,” I said.
“So—seven moons, and more, no less,” said the Reghen.
“But it is the beginning of autumn. Winter will find us.”
“Yes, it will. In the steppe and the rivers of the North.”
Leke was kicking the dirt with his boot, staring down.
Winter at the rivers of the North. Spring against the swelling waters and the floods. But this time we had no Craftsmen and slaves to build bridges. We would have to seek shelter all winter and early spring, and we would need ten moons at best.
“Three times a hundred mornings, the Sun would have to rise and stand above us, protecting us,” said the Reghen. “And we have to avoid any skirmish. I won’t even talk of getting close to the Empire’s warriors.”
“We will pass all those villages where we dug up the dead. Alone, only forty men,” said Leke.
“We have left garrisons behind, but their numbers are thinning,” said the Reghen.
“Most of those who manned the garrisons moved north when they heard that the Thalassopolis army was descending. It’s nothing but chaos and blood everywhere. The dead are out of their graves and prowl at night. No one rules there, the fields remain unsowed, and everyone, othertriber or ours, raids to feed.”
“The Eastern Empire is too vast to be conquered,” said Baagh, speaking for the first time. “Only pillaged.”
The Reghen spat in the dirt in front of Baagh.
“We have gold,” I said.
“Sometimes it helps; usually it brings more trouble,” said Baagh.
The red desert, the untrodden mountains, and the salt lakes were waiting to take their vengeance. Through evil spirits, whose last breath we had stolen before the rising sun, our road of return passed, and we would not be welcome there.
“Will we pass the same villages?” asked Leke.
“Are you afraid of the Buried?”
“I am asking about the living. I fear no one.”
It was unfair of me to ask him that.
“In some places, we will find the supply stations of the Tribe, and in others, we will find only enemies,” said Noki.
“Somewhere, somehow, someone, fifteen times a thousand thousand feet later. Maybe one of the forty of us would make it back by some miracle by next summer. Definitely most of us will never see Sirol,” said Baagh.
Despair.
We could just fall on a blade and get it over with.
The other men had gathered around us.
“Let’s go to Varazam,” I heard one suggest.
“You have to go beg Khun-Malan. Tell him you’ve changed your mind and that you won’t be going back to Sirol,” advised the Reghen.
It was easy for him to say that. For me, for Baagh, and for the rest, our nights were numbered near Malan and Sah-Ouna.
Baagh waited for everyone to fall silent and then he spoke.
“We have gold. You have me. We can get back to Sirol in a moon.”
In one moon, he said. Not in ten.
“No horses are that fast. Even your best horses will never survive the boiling mud fields and the desert,” the Reghen replied.
“Horses—no. Boats with sails and oars—yes. We will need less than a moon to cross the sea,” said Baagh.
“Boats—” Hissing and curses wrapped the word around me. “To go where?”
“North among the Thousand Islands, then we’ll pass the straits of Thalassopolis, and from there it’s only a few days fast sailing to arrive at the mouth of the Blackvein, to the north. All we need is a small merchant ship that sails unnoticed and thirty men for the oars. We have a few more. We can get back to Antia’s port in a few days, and your men control it. We’ll get a ship there,” Baagh said, his voice calm but clear as if he were explaining the simplest feat.
“And the horses?”
“We won’t take them. We will exchange them for more gold at Antia and find fresh horses once we step onto land again.”
Men were shouting angrily over him as he tried to speak, and I could barely hear his last words. Baagh simply continued as if he knew well what he had to say and what he had to do.
“The journey will have many dangers, but it will be ten times shorter. We are just at the beginning of a mild autumn so that we won’t meet with rough seas. Our chances are good. Unlike here.”
But even Leke shouted, “Are you stupid? You want us to go to Sapul with thirty men?”
“He’ll betray us. Let’s stay on the dry earth where we can be masters of our fate,” said the Reghen.
“Wherever we go, let’s go with horses. Not on the black water, Firstblade,” Leke said.
Baagh continued, ignoring everyone except me.
“We won’t need to stop in Thalassopolis. We will need only a captain and me, and we’ll pass as a merchant ship.”
“A captain—” We had many things in our Tribe, but not a captain.
“We’ll find among the prisoners a man of the sea. We’ll bribe or threaten him, whatever works. Best if we can board his family on the same boat. I’ll promise him that if he gets us past Thalassopolis, we’ll set them free.”
It sounded so unbelievable to me that we would get on top of something that floats on water and be in Sirol in less than a moon. Almost as unbelievable as our horses growing Pelor’s wings and taking to the sky.
“I have seen these ships you talk about come into the port of Antia. They move slower than a tired mule. You are an othertriber liar,” the Reghen shouted to Baagh.
“Yes, they’re slower than a galloping horse, but the sails never tire. Nor does the wind. The one feeds the other, and they need no other food. You traveled around the world to avoid Thalassopolis. By sea, the distance is five times shorter. We will sail west, pass Arrowfinger Island from the north shore, and then all the way up through the Thousand Islands. But we are only a thirty-oar boat, and we can cross the straits unnoticed. The whole Tribe could not.”
I walked away from the clamor to think. Baagh followed me.
“Da-Ren, I will come with you. It’s my life too on the boat.”
“They don’t bel
ieve you. None of them will put his fate on the sea.”
“You believe me. I saved your life,” he said with wide eyes. He grabbed my hand. “If you don’t listen to me, all your men will die for sure. You’ll leave your bones in this desert.”
I jerked my leg repeatedly and then thumped it down hard, crushing the scorpion that was trying to crawl up my boot. I had made my decision.
One moon, if he was telling the truth. To return to Kar-Tioo. Not ten. Never again would I have to pass by the open graves of the othertribers where we had stolen the rings off their rotting fingers.
“They don’t believe you. They won’t come.”
“They will if you tell them to. Me, they won’t. Just do as I say.”
How many moons did I have left? Baagh was right. My men feared the Black Sea and only that.
“Black water, I fear you not. Black water, I come to you. I will swallow you, and you will swallow me.”
Never had Selene glowed such a vibrant silver as in the middle of the night sea.
“It was the sandstorm,” I said, not even looking at him.
“Nah, it was the scorpions,” Noki replied, his eyes also swallowing the liquid darkness. None of us had ever set foot on a ship till then. He stuck his tongue all the way out, to drink the saltwater sprinkles that were spraying us every time the bulwark lowered. A grin persisted across his face as if the Goddess had blessed him to be there, with me, his comrades, with Raven, the Ouna-Ma. The sandstorm, the scorpions, the gift of the open sea. We were blessed men.
“It was God’s will,” said Baagh.
“It was a terrible mistake,” said the Reghen.
“It was the North Star,” said the captain of our boat.
Noki looked at me once more.
“Maybe you’re right. It was the sandstorm,” Noki said.
I was watching the stars sparkle above the calm raven seawater.
“Nah, it was the fucking scorpions,” I replied.
LXIV.
And One Wooden Leg
Island of the Holy Monastery. Thirty-Second Summer.
According to the Monk Eusebius
Drakon Omnibus Page 74
