The Brand of the Warlock

by Robert Kroese

  “And a horse.”

  He gaped at me, and for a moment I thought I had overplayed my hand. “We only have one,” he said. “We use it for carrying supplies from the city.”

  “I’m sure it will do.”

  Again he hesitated. “You understand that I have no control over who is remanded to my care.”

  “I do.”

  “Good, good. I realize it must be tempting to—”

  “You are, however, responsible for the treatment of the prisoners.”

  He paled. “Oto!” he shouted. “Saddle up Safflower and bring her here!”

  We waited there in silence for several minutes, the warden stamping his feet against the cold and studying the ground with great interest. At last Oto arrived with such a sorry-looking nag that I almost regretted asking for her. I climbed into the saddle and walked her slowly to the gate, which Oto had run to open. The sky was overcast, but even so the glare from the opening seemed to pierce to the back of my skull. My eyes hadn’t been exposed to anything brighter than the glow of a torch for over six years.

  I pulled the hood of the cloak over my eyes and rode out of the garrison without looking back. Without needing any direction, Safflower continued across the muddy yard in front of the gate and onto the narrow trail that wended through the foothills to the city of Nagyvaros. I guessed that it was late morning. From the reckoning of the days I had kept for some time, I knew that it was ten days past Telkozep, the winter solstice. The air was crisp and still, the temperature hovering just above freezing. The sparse grasses that clung to the hills had long since acquiesced to the demands of winter; except for a few shaded patches where clumps of snow lingered, the ground was a mottled yellow-brown.

  After an hour of traveling, my eyes had adjusted to the light. Not much later, we came to a vantage point on the trail from where I could see the Plain of Savlos open below me. Barely visible in the distance were the black rock walls of Nagyvaros. I pulled the reins, turning Safflower to face the direction we had come. The garrison was hidden behind a hill; the only evidence of it was a plume of gray smoke coming from its chimney. Except for a few places where it was hidden by sharp bends, the trail was visible for nearly three miles. After watching for a few minutes, I managed to convince myself that no one was following me. It had really happened, then. I was free. Safflower gave a whinny, and I climbed down from her back. She took a few tentative steps, and when she was satisfied I wasn’t going to stop her, walked to the edge of the trail and began chewing at the greenery that clung to the rocks.

  I climbed to the top of a hill with a good view of the trail, sat down on a boulder and pulled the envelope from my shirt. I tore it open and unfolded the letter inside. It read:

  Dear Eben,

  If you are reading this, it means that my efforts to get you released have succeeded at last. I am very sorry for the delay and the suffering it has caused you, but securing a pardon for a sorcerer is no easy feat these days, even for someone with my connections and influence. I must confess as well that it is not entirely for your own good that I have undertaken this labor. The truth is that I need your help. The evil which we have long sought to check has renewed its onslaught, and I am afraid I am not strong enough to stop it on my own. If we fail, Nagyvaros will fall. Because of my position, I must be careful, but I will come to you when the opportunity presents itself. In the meantime, make whatever preparations you can. I have provided you with some clothes and a small amount of money to facilitate your return to your laboratory, which I trust remains undiscovered.

  Your friend,

  R.

  I read the letter twice more and then folded it, put it in the envelope, and tucked it back in my shirt. I sat watching the trail until my stomach began to growl; I hadn’t eaten anything since the previous night’s dinner, and the excitement and exertion of the day had made me hungry. I climbed back down the hillside and found Safflower nibbling at grass not far from where I’d left her. I climbed back into the saddle and continued my journey to the city.

  As I rode, I reflected on the contents of the letter. It seemed that my release was not unconditional after all. Having spent six years in a dungeon for the crime of sorcery, my benefactor now expected me to resume that occupation to forestall the destruction of Nagyvaros at the hands of some great evil. It seemed a laudable goal, but the plan possessed a critical flaw of which my benefactor was evidently unaware:

  I am not Eben the Warlock.

  Chapter Two

  To explain how I came to be in this strange and precarious position, I must return to a time that seems to me little more than a half-forgotten dream. I remember the events clearly, but it is as if they happened to someone else. Perhaps they did.

  I was born in a village some eight leagues east of Nagyvaros, the son of a man who possessed nothing more than a tiny house a stone’s throw from the creek called Sebastis and a flock of sheep that varied in number but never amounted to enough to allow us to stay more than a week ahead of starvation. My mother, who was said to have been exceedingly beautiful but of whom I know almost nothing else, died in childbirth. I was her only child. My father named me Konrad.

  Still, it was not an unhappy existence. My father was a kind man, and generous to a fault; I remember being baffled that he would give food away to needy travelers when we ourselves had so little. He insisted the good we did would come back to us, and for a time it seemed that he was right: despite the ever-present threat of hunger, we rarely missed a meal.

  For the most part I enjoyed caring for the flock, and I amused myself by practicing with the bow and sling, quite inadvertently becoming an expert marksman. Other shepherds in the area had trouble with wolves, but we rarely did. I flattered myself that the animals had learned to associate my scent with the sting of stones and arrows and opted to seek their sustenance in less dangerous locales.

  My father had suffered wounds in some ancient conflict of which he would rarely speak, and his health seemed to degrade as I grew stronger. By the time I was ten years old, he was no longer able to walk from our house to the valley where the sheep found the best grass, and he generally occupied himself with tasks around the house while I tended to the flock. By the same sort of equilibrium that had characterized my early childhood, we remained always a day or two from hunger, but never more.

  In my fifteenth year, I offered to watch two dozen sheep belonging to a farmer who lived about half a mile down the road, reasoning that I could save him some work with little additional effort on my part. If he would be willing to pay me an erme a week, I could use the money to pay the grazing fees on a larger parcel of land, which would allow me to significantly expand my own flock. I had begun to imagine a time when I would tire of shepherding and thought perhaps eventually I could sell the flock, earning a profit that would allow my father to live in reasonable comfort while I sought my fortunes elsewhere.

  This half-formed plan was soon frustrated, though happily, when I met the farmer’s daughter, a girl of ethereal beauty called Beata. Beata was two years older than I and at first showed little interest in the poor shepherd boy who cared for her father’s sheep. She was tall and pale-skinned, with intense blue eyes and honey-blond hair that reached the middle of her back. Beata’s family was by no means wealthy, but they had acquired enough property to have developed aspirations for their daughter, who, like me, was an only child. Hoping that Beata might, through a combination of her natural beauty and an instillation of cultural refinement, acquire a husband from the ranks of the lower nobility, they spent lavishly on tutors for her. These learned men would travel from Nagyvaros and stay for a few days at a stretch at the farmer’s house, instructing Beata in history, philosophy and logic as well as those peculiarities of behavior of the nobility that seemed to be designed to frustrate the ambitions of those whose energies are too depleted by the requirements of mere survival to worry about which fork to use.

  Beata was as clever as she was beautiful, and took so well to the lessons that—s
o I understood from her father, who may have exaggerated—the tutors began to offer their services free of charge and even compete for the honor of being able to say that they had a hand in the education of the fair Beata. My initial amorous advances having been rejected out of hand, I found an opening by feigning an interest in Beata’s studies. She was eager to speak about what she had learned, her parents being, despite their ambitions, simple people with no interest in erudition.

  To Beata’s surprise, I had no difficulty following her lessons, and I managed to pick up in an hour or two stolen here or there what had taken her most of a day to learn. Beata took this as evidence of my prodigious intellect, and I confess I did little to dissuade her of this idea, but in honesty it was Beata’s skill as a teacher—as well as the rapt attention I paid to her—that explained my aptitude. At first I met Beata only in the evenings, when I brought her father’s sheep back for the evening, but soon she began to meet me in the mornings as well. When the weather was good, we sat outside under an old oak tree. When it was not, we met in her father’s barn. Her parents tolerated these meetings, judging that it did Beata good to review her studies. Perhaps they imagined too that she might someday occupy herself by tutoring the scions of noble families, further enmeshing her in the social web of the aristocracy. I don’t think it ever occurred to them that their daughter might have any romantic interest in a poor shepherd boy two years her junior.

  Beata seemed to share her parents’ prejudices, at least in the beginning, but we grew to be close friends over the next several months. My initial infatuation gave way to a deep admiration for her intelligence and kindness. I made no secret of my feelings for her, but rarely spoke of them lest I frighten her into putting an end to our liaisons. A year to the day after we first met, Beata confessed she felt the same for me as I did for her.

  I think her father had suspected my amorous intentions for some time but had thought little of the matter. Beata was a fierce, strong-willed girl, and he knew me to be a conscientious young man, so as long as she maintained an air of condescension toward me, he didn’t worry much about our liaisons. She did her best to pretend to be disinterested, but after her confession she found it difficult to maintain the ruse.

  We were spared her father’s intervention only by the sudden, if not entirely unexpected, death of my own father. My grief at the good man’s passing was great, and it was tempered only by the joy I felt every time I saw Beata. Perhaps Beata’s father saw this and didn’t have the heart to express his disapproval under the circumstances. He was not, in his way, an unkind man.

  Given what I have said of my father’s health, it might be imagined that despite my grief, my material situation would have been somewhat improved by his death. I soon realized, however, just how dependent I had been on the man. Although he had been unable to offer much assistance with the flock over the past several years, he had still done a great deal of work in and around the house. He had gone to the market twice a week for foodstuffs, cooked all our meals, did our laundry and mending, and maintained a sizeable garden of vegetables and herbs, some of which he sold or traded at the market. I spent what little savings we had on his burial, and soon found myself struggling to keep up with everything that was to be done. The garden was the first casualty, and with no produce to trade I found it impossible to buy enough food.

  My plan to save enough money for my father’s retirement had long since gone by the wayside; it was dependent on increasing the size of my flock, and raising lambs would have required an investment in time that I had been loath to make, given my interest in Beata. I did save the ermes Beata’s father gave me, but rather than actively increasing our wealth, they remained buried under a stone behind our house—and as I said, I spent them all burying my father.

  The flock which I had once thought of doubling or tripling began to shrink in size as I was forced to sell or butcher sheep to remain fed. I eventually had to give up watching Beata’s father’s sheep, which was probably just as well as I no longer had more than a few minutes a day to spend with Beata. From Beata’s father’s perspective, the problem of our affinity had been solved by circumstance. I could no longer even afford to meet his daughter, to say nothing of being the sort of husband he thought worthy of her.

  At this time, the Barbarok Wars were heating up, and the Eastern Princes were recruiting aggressively for janissaries. I was young, in the prime of health, and more proficient with a bow than any man within ten leagues. Heroes were being made every day in those wars, and I imagined it would be no great challenge to rise to the rank of captain after a few years, garnering for myself a decent salary as well as a level of prestige approaching that of the minor nobility. Eventually the war would end, and the Princes, wary of overtaxing their provinces in peacetime, would begin looking to thin the officers’ ranks to cut expenses. I’d request a discharge and return to marry Beata. We would buy a small farm and raise a family.

  I sold my father’s house and what was left of our flock, entrusting the proceeds to Beata and securing from her a promise that she would not marry until I returned or word reached her of my death. At this time Nagyvaros had no official interest in the Eastern Princes’ wars against the Barbaroki, but the government’s unofficial support extended as far as allowing the janissaries to maintain a permanent recruiting station in the city. I traveled to Nagyvaros, reported to the recruiting station, and was eagerly accepted into the ranks of the janissaries. The next day, I was part of a ragtag group of fifty or so outlaws and bankrupts traveling east toward the frontier. I remember thinking that if these men were representative of the infantry, I should be an officer within a year. It wasn’t until later that I reflected that by the same token, I might well be dead.

  After three days of marching, we reached the outpost called Erod Patak, where I and the other recruits received a week’s worth of training before being dispatched to the front. Competent archers are in high demand, and I assumed that given my skill, I’d be assigned to a unit of bowmen; I’d even brought along my little hunting bow to facilitate the decision. Unfortunately, I had forgotten one of the hallmarks of the janissaries, which is standardization. Every archer uses a bow of identical size and construction. It is not the best bow one can find in Orszag, but it is sturdy and powerful enough to penetrate chain mail in the right hands. I was handed one of these bows to demonstrate my fitness for inclusion in the archers’ corps. It was six inches longer than my hunting bow and much heavier, with a considerably greater draw weight. I thought I acquitted myself rather well, considering that I was given only three practice shots, but evidently my performance was not sufficient: I was handed a pike and pointed toward the officer who oversaw the foot soldiers.

  I did attempt to appeal the decision, protesting that with an hour of practice I could outshoot any archer in the camp, but I was hampered by my inability to speak Keleti, the language of the Eastern Provinces. I was also acutely aware by this time that a janissary officer would lead an army of blind men equipped with cudgels before he would brook insubordination. When I saw that there was nothing to gain and much to lose by further protests, I resigned myself to my status as pikeman.

  There really isn’t much to being a janissary pikeman. The chief virtue of the pike is that it can be effectively wielded by a moron. Your role is primarily defensive: you stand your ground, rest the butt of the pike in the dirt, and point the sharp end at your enemy. If you are lucky, you impale the horse of the Barbarok charging you or knock him from his seat; if you are not, you are cut in two by his scimitar. Your odds in this endeavor are fairly good, if you keep your nerve.

  That said, our training was absurdly abbreviated; I am convinced that the janissaries’ reputation as skillful warriors derives primarily from their fear of disobeying what few directives they’ve been given. With the exception of my love for Beata, I’ve never been one to be given over to emotion; the base fear evinced by my fellows for their commanders never gripped me with the same fervor. My obedience arose from ration
al self-interest: to flee was to lose my chance to marry Beata; to flinch was to risk death or, worse, being maimed. So I stood and I fought, if holding a pike and occasionally lopping the head off a fallen Barbarok can be called fighting.

  The truth is, mostly we marched. The terror of the Barbaroki is in their skill with horses. As far as I could tell, we outnumbered them by as many as three to one, but they outpaced us with those terrible satin-black steeds. They rode from the Videki Basin to the pass at Keskeny and back, probing for an opening, and we did our best to meet them with our pikes. Sometimes they would break through, at which point they were no longer our problem. We would hear of villages being raided and burned, and eventually the duchies of Eastern Orszag would mobilize a cavalry unit to deal with the invaders. If the duchies, the Eastern Princes and the Governor of Nagyvaros had worked together with more cohesion and enthusiasm, we might well have provided enough resistance that the Barbaroki would have turned southward, to less desirable but also less well-defended lands. But the Barbaroki were always somebody else’s problem until they were at one’s doorstep, at which point one railed against the short-sighted allies who would not come to one’s aid. This had been going on since before I was born; I recall hearing about the Barbaroki raiding villages only a few leagues east of my father’s house. During all this time, however, the Barbaroki had never reached Nagyvaros.

  My direct experience with these waves of invaders was, as I say, limited to brief skirmishes along the frontier. For two years I marched back and forth, occasionally stopping to plant my pike in the ground in an attempt to dissuade or skewer an advancing horseman. I was one of a unit of eight hundred pikemen, who were not after all such bad specimens of men; you’d be amazed at what a competent officer can do with such a collection of dissolute and dissimilar creatures. Put them in uniforms, hand them pikes, and instill in them the fear of Turelem, and suddenly you’ve got an army.