by Cory Huff
The bricklayer walked over and continued screaming, looming over him, spittle flying, showering Aidan. He was sandwiched between the warrior and the bricklayer and was sure he was going to be ground into the earth any minute.
“I’m sorry,” Aidan tried to say.
“You’re sorry? You’re damn right you’re sorry. You’re not sorry yet. You’re going to be sorry,” spat back the heavyset, bald, bricklayer with a fiery red goatee. He looked like he was going to hit the slight boy.
Another one of the warriors, an older man, with dark brown hair just going grey at the temples, suddenly appeared between the two men. Despite the bricklayer’s bulk, the older man shoved the bricklayer back.
“Calm down Anrei. He’s young,” said the older warrior.
When he saw who had shoved him, Anrei the bricklayer bit back a retort. Garrick Cimarron was the Lord Commander of the Knights of the Church of the Creator. Garrick was a heavily muscled man, and despite his age, he held himself with a steadiness that exemplified his leadership. Garrick was respected as a fair, disciplined man who did not suffer fools. In his administrative role he hired the workers for the Church of the Creator’s new temple grounds. He knew Anrei, and all of the other workers, by their names, their families, and their personalities. This attention to the details earned him universal respect, even before anyone knew about his skills with a sword.
Angus glared at the little snot-nose, but remained silent, as Garrick turned to him and said, “young man, no one here is going to hurt you, but you have undone a day of this man’s work. Do you have the money to pay him back?”
“No,” Aidan spoke back, quietly, but with defiance and a straight back.
“Great. What am I going to do?” mumbled Anrei.
Garrick ignored the bricklayer. “Are you perhaps a bricklayer’s apprentice?”
“No.”
“Would you like to be?”
“What?” said the very surprised Anrei.
Garrick smiled as he turned toward Anrei. “Have you ever considered taking on an apprentice? The lad is small, but he is quick, and he could certainly run errands for you so you needn’t climb up and down your ladder so much. If he worked for you he could help you catch up to your work schedule in…less than a week?”
Anrei, speechless, grinned. “Sure. He can fetch bricks and mix mortar for me for a week. That’ll do.” He spat on his hand and held it out for Aidan to shake.
Aidan, head whirling, hesitated for only a moment, then spat on his own palm and shook hands. His slender hand was engulfed in the hard workman’s calloused paw, and he managed not to wince at the pressure of the grip.
“You can start by re-stacking the bricks you knocked down. Be sure to wipe off the mortar before you stack ‘em.” Angus gestured to the heaping pile behind him.
Aidan started walking toward the pile when the soldier who still had his arm stopped him. “That was some neat trick you pulled coming off of that collapsing wall. I seen you watching the soldiers and mimicking us. You want to be a soldier?”
Aidan awkwardly shrugged as if it didn’t matter. But inside he desperately wanted to become a soldier. He had been coming back to the church yard every day for weeks, watching the men.
“I’ll tell you what,” said the soldier, “you do a good job with that bricklayer, no complaining, and I’ll talk to the Lord Commander there about you possibly joining up.”
Aidan’s eyes got big and he nodded.
“Bring your parents around. The Lord Commander will want to meet them.”
And immediately, Aidan’s hopes sunk. There was no way the Lord Commander would let the son of a drunkard join the Knights of the Church. His shoulders slumped in defeat.
“Parents wouldn’t approve, huh?” asked the soldier.
“Em…it’s kinda…em…complicated,” replied Aidan.
The soldier looked at him for a moment. “What’s your name young squire?”
“Aidan.”
“I’m Strom. Look, if your parents don’t approve, the Lord Commander will make you wait until you’re an adult. But if there’s something else going on, just be honest with the Lord Commander. He is a good man, and he goes out of his way to help young people. I probably shouldn’t say this, but we’ve been keeping an eye on you. You’ve been hanging around for a couple of weeks, right?”
Aidan felt the heat rush to his face. He didn’t realize they’d seen him. He thought he’d been careful. Stealthy.
“Hey, if you’re going to be my apprentice, I expect you to get moving,” barked Anrei.
Strom let his arm go and Aidan hustled over. As he was moving, he heard Strom say quietly, “Keep coming back. Its ok.”
Garrick smiled as Strom Thorngood told the young one to come back. Knights of the Church were supposed to be kind and look for opportunities to teach and mentor youth. Strom would be a good Squire when he finished his weapons training. He had the right heart for the Knights.
“If he makes it through the week I’m putting you in charge of his conditioning,” Garrick said. “I want you to follow him home and see to his situation. Don’t spook him. Just stay close and see where he goes. Teenagers with as much time on their hands as he has aren’t usually watched like they should be. I want to know what the Creator has given us to work with.”
Strom saluted, rather over-formally, and smiled. “The molding of young minds is a priority of the the Knights, sir. I take that very seriously.”
Garrick cracked a small smile and tossed the practice sword on the ground to Strom. “We’re not done with this yet, though.”
Strom caught the sword and groaned, “aren’t you done bruising me yet? I’m just a Squire.”
Sweaty in the Summer heat, Strom tried to stretch out his back without drawing attention to himself. It wasn’t working terribly well. He took a few steps into the alleyway next to the small, crumbling, stone house he had been standing in front of and tried squatting to relieve the pain. The alley, connecting back into a warren of intertwined alleys behind all of the old houses, was mostly clear. Very few people took these back alleys. They were mostly hidden from regular view on the main streets. The owner of the crumbling house did a good job keeping the area around their house clean. Just a few weeds in the dirt, and a couple of rain barrels placed neatly below the the downspout. Strom stood up and tried twisting his back to get some relief in his side.
The Lord Commander had given him several hard whacks. Strom didn’t understand how the old man did it. It wasn’t that he was fast. Strom was probably faster. He thought. It should work that way. Strom was much younger after all.
But the Lord Commander was crafty. He distracted his opponents with feints and with look off moves that made you second guess what you were doing. Every time. He wondered if he could best the old man if they switched away from swords. Perhaps pole arms would change it up…
Strom quickly looked down as he watched Aidan emerge from his home. He had come home immediately after finishing up his brick laying work for the day. He had gone slowly. He was probably sore. Carting bricks for two days in the heat was back breaking work, and that short amount of time had not given him enough time to get used to the work.
Following him was easy. He was just a teenager, and had no idea that he was being watched. Following the Lord Commander’s orders, he was watching Aidan to see what he did in his own time. What kind of boy was he? What was his family like? The Knights were strict about who they let into their ranks. The boy had promise. He had shown up for the first day of work right on time. Had put his head down and done the work asked of him. Didn’t whine. Didn’t complain. Strom had seen him rubbing his hands, probably blistered, but he had kept right on working. Aidan had been slower today. It was always worse the next day. The twinge in his own back was testament to that.
Aidan made his way East, out of the rows of shabby houses in the middle of Atania. Was he heading back to the church grounds for some reason? No. He didn’t head to the church, but straight East,
through the old cemetery. This would make following him harder. He would have to give him more space.
Keeping him just at the edge of sight, skulking behind ancient tombs and monuments, Strom smiled when he followed Aidan into the woods East of the cemetery. Aidan was probably meeting friends. That’s what he had done when he was Aidan’s age. The question is what kind of influences did Aidan spend time with? Were they obedient? What was Aidan’s role in their friend group?
Stepping into the woods, Strom crouched low and kept Aidan in sight while he slowly moved forward. Then he saw a woman.
Even though it was cooler here than in the church courtyard, the woods were warm this late in the afternoon. Aidan’s back dripped with sweat. His arms were in agony. His hands were blistered and shredded from two days of carting bricks. Anrei was driving him harder than he had ever worked before. He thought that he had known what hard work was, taking care of the house after his mother passed and as his father sunk deeper into drink.
Aidan had been figuring out how to string together errands and odd jobs since he was just 12 years old. The neighbors knew that his father struggled. They gave Aidan food for him and his brother in exchange for chores like climbing the roofs and fixing thatch, mending fences, or mucking out animal stalls.
But the brick work. Two days of this was torture. He figured that after a few days he would get used to it. He was glad it was only a week. His brother, just eight years old, was complaining about being bored already, and his father was lecturing him about pulling his weight and bringing food for the house. He knew that he should probably be knocking on a neighbor’s door. Goodwife Smith needed her gutters cleaned.
But Aidan was, in spite of his premature assumption of responsibility, a teenager. He needed to break free tonight and see his friend. As he made his way into the wood, he looked around for signs of where she might be. He saw her lean-to. But not her. Which means she was probably watching him from whatever hiding space she had picked out.
“Nia, just come out. Ya win. I canna hunt ya down today.”
A woman stepped out from behind a tree. She was short, perhaps just a touch over five feet tall. She was covered in leaves and dirt. Her hair was matted and sloppily chopped short.
“Why are you so dirty?”
Nia snorted. “I was hiding in the dirt behind that tree. Last time you found me in a tree, so I thought I’d switch it up.” Nia’s voice was deep. Nearly as deep as Aidan’s. “What’s wrong with you? We always do the hide and seek thing.”
Aidan grimaced, “So, this crazy thing ‘appened the other day.” He then proceeded to say he had been shadowing the church’s knights, and how he had knocked down the wall and the subsequent turn of events that had led him to his current state of exhaustion. “So now me ‘ands are all ripped and me shoulders are killing me.”
Her deep voice was full of sarcasm, “You’re going to become a Knight of the Church?”
“It could ‘appen,” said Aidan, “they're alright. Lord Commander Garrick saved me from a beating. The stuff they do wit’ their swords is amazin’.”
“Yes, but … are you going to go to church?” asked Nia.
“I dunno. I believe in the Creator. I guess. I’ll prolly ‘ave to, right?” said Aidan.
“I thought they only took people who were already members of the church,” Nia replied. “But whatever, you’ll join or you won’t. Do they feed you? How will you take care of your brother?”
“I dunno,” Aidan said, again. He was beginning to realize that there was a lot about the Knights of the Church of the Creator that he didn’t know.
Nia smiled. “You’ll figure it out.” She moved back toward her lean-to, “I have a surprise for you.” She moved some leaves and dirt around and stood up holding a dead hare by its feet. “My traps work.”
Aidan smiled. Nia was clever. They had been friends for years, since Aidan was a small child and Nia was a teenager who looked after him on the street. Nia’s parents had died in a freak accident. They had been inspecting the barn behind their house when it caught on fire. No one was sure what had started the blaze, but the dried hay had accelerated the flames to a conflagration almost instantaneously. Everyone’s best guess was that the smoke had overcome them and they hadn’t been able to find their way out before the flames dropped the roof on them. Nia had been their only daughter. The neighborhood had taken care of her. Goodwife Smith had even taken her in.
Nia hadn’t taken it well though. Nia had always been so fiercely independent. She ate Goodwife Smith’s food and slept in the bed with her other children, but refused to be parented by her. Nia began staying out all hours and refusing to listen. She even began mouthing off to Goodwife Smith, which no child in the neighborhood did. She developed a bad reputation. None of the other neighborhood children were allowed to play with her, and Nia decided to run away.
That had been years ago, and Nia had lived in the woods for years by herself. He and Nia frequently ran through the woods. He knew that she sometimes stole food, so he was glad that she had figured out a way to make the snare work so that she could catch her own food. Everyone in Atania had enough to get by and not much more. It was good that she wasn’t stealing any more.
The Church had lots of resources, with their big gardens and their cattle and sheep that they kept on their temple grounds just across the street from the cemetery. The church frequently hosted big feasts, feeding the people of Atania on their high holidays.
Nia interrupted his reverie. “So…are you going to help me cook this thing or what?”
Aidan had been staring blankly, thinking about everything that had happened, and realized he hadn’t said any of it out loud. “Aye, let’s do it.” And he promptly began helping her clean and dress the hare.
Some time later, after they had eaten, and Aidan had set some aside for his little brother, Aidan and Nia walked a little further into the woods. Strom wondered if he was going to witness something inappropriate, but instead what he found was something altogether amazing.
Aidan and Nia had set up a rope course in the woods. With bits of leftover, frayed rope, as well as string, cord, and other bits, they had designed an obstacle course. He watched them run through it. They were both young, strong, and agile. While Aidan did things like jump up and swing off of branches, Nia was naturally more flexible and she bent over ropes and crawled under them, just as quickly as Aidan jumped over and swung around them.
They exercised like this for over an hour as the light faded. They looked, for all the world, like they were young warriors in training. When it got too dark, it was Aidan that first tripped over a rope, bringing down a big section of their course, along with collapsing Nia into laughter as Aidan tried to untangle himself from the mess in the near darkness.
After he was finally extracted from the mess, Aidan said his farewell and headed home, food for his brother in hand. He was earnest. Strom saw no reason to think that Aidan wouldn’t be a good fit for the Knights, even if he was friends with a hermit in the woods.
CHAPTER THREE
Nia
Nia woke up. It was the middle of the night. She was in her lean-to. It was a dark, quiet night with nearly no moon. Everything was cast in that pale, faint light, giving the world a nearly black and white cast. What had woken her up? It wasn’t hunger for once. The roasted hare was still sitting nicely in her stomach, giving her an unfamiliar, but not unpleasant, feeling of fulness.
There it was.
Something was moving around outside her lean-to. She heard a bush moving. She heard a sniffling noise. A dog? Had someone’s dog wandered all the way up here and was now lost, hoping to find something to eat from her leftovers? She rolled over and started to crawl out of her lean-to, looking out the entrance.
She came to a halt. That was not someone’s dog.
A wolf was staring at her. Not a big one. A small, rangy wolf that looked like maybe it was missing some fur. Its fur was grey with black markings. Its eyes reflected the small amount of m
oonlight like mirrors. There was something wrong with its eyes. They had a white covering to them, almost like a translucent piece of glass. The wolf bared its teeth, lowered its tail, and stared not directly at her. Was it blind?
Nia was unsure what to do. She had a big stick next to her in the tent that she used to bat down fruits. She’d never had to use it to protect herself, but she kept it next to her for just that purpose. She moved her hand slowly and grasped it. As she brought it up in front of her, the wolf took a step forward. She heard a low-pitched growl come from deep in its throat. Nia slid her left leg back, then her right, alternating her movements to slowly crawl backward out of the lean-to. The warm Summer night was not the only thing making her back sweat. The wolf’s growl grew louder as it suddenly lunged forward, jaws snapping.
Nia was just as quick. She got to her feet and brought the stick in front of her just in time to catch the wolf’s first lunge, its jaws biting only the stick. It quickly changed angles, charging in low and to Nia’s left. Acting on instinct, Nia shifted her grip and swung the stick with all of her might, nearly losing her hold when the stick connected with the side of the wolf’s face with a solid thunk sound, whipping the wolf’s head to the side.
But Nia was small, and the blow, forceful as she could make it, was not enough to scare it off. The skinny thing circled, looking for a new angle of attack. Nia turned with it, unsure what to do but wave the stick in its direction, keeping it between her and the wolf.
She took a step toward the wolf, hoping to scare it off. The wolf backed off a few steps, then a few more as she continued moving. The wolf ran off, then turned, threw back its head, and howled. Chills ran down her spine and she shuddered. It sounded like a wolf, but Nia broke out in sweat as she also heard the wailing of children. Her nightmares about her parents invaded her waking mind. Images she didn’t want flashed through her mind and she fell to a knee.
The answering howls came.
Wolf calls echoed from all around, and Nia realized that more wolves would be coming. She snapped back into the present. She had to get out of here.
