Free of the walls, Sigmar felt a strange sense of liberation as though he had been confined within the city as a prisoner, but had not realised that all his gaolers had long since vanished. Sigmar climbed the paths that led through the hills surrounding Reikdorf, looking back to see his home as a glittering, torch-lit beacon in the darkness.
Laughter and music were carried to him on the wind, and he smiled as he pictured his peoples’ revelries. Sigmar’s dream of empire had kept Reikdorf safe, and his preparations had allowed the Unberogen to become the pre-eminent tribe of the lands west of the mountains, but he knew there was still much to be done.
Scouts were already bringing word of an increase in orc raids from the mountains, and it was only a matter of time before the greenskins ventured from their lairs in a roaring tide of destruction and death. That, however, was a problem for tomorrow, for tonight was a night for Sigmar, a night for remembrance and regret.
Once within the forests, the tracks and paths were all but invisible, but as well as Sigmar knew Reikdorf, he knew the land better, and it knew him, welcoming him as a man would welcome an old and trusted friend.
Sigmar made his way through the dark trees, retracing the steps of a day long ago when he had walked into the future with only golden dreams in his heart. He heard the sound of rushing water ahead, and was soon descending into a peaceful hollow, where a shallow waterfall poured into a glittering pool that shone as if strewn with diamonds.
‘I should have wed you sooner,’ he whispered, seeing the moonlight reflecting on the simple grave marker at the side of the pool. Sigmar knelt before the carved stone, tears of regret spilling down his cheeks as he pictured Ravenna’s dark hair and joyous smile.
He rested his hand on the stone and reached up to touch the golden cloak pin he had given her the day they had made love by the river.
‘The king of the Unberogen does not celebrate with his people?’ asked a voice from the edge of the clearing. ‘You will be missed.’
Sigmar wiped a hand across his face and rose to his feet, turning to see an ancient woman, her hair the colour of silver and her eyes buried within a wrinkled face that spoke of dark secrets and forbidden knowledge.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
‘You know who I am,’ said the woman.
‘My father warned me of you,’ said Sigmar, making the sign of the horn. ‘You are the hag woman of the Brackenwalsch.’
‘Such a graceless title,’ said the hag woman. ‘Men give vile names to the things they fear, which only serves to feed that fear. Would men be afraid of me were I called the Joy Maiden?’
Sigmar shrugged. ‘Perhaps not, but then you bring precious little joy into our lives. What is it that you want, woman? For I am in no mood for debate.’
‘A pity,’ said the hag woman. ‘It has been some time since I had the chance to speak with someone who appreciates grander things than a hot meal and a soft woman.’
‘Speak your piece, woman!’ spat Sigmar.
‘Such hasty words. So like your father. Quick to anger and quick to promise what should be considered carefully.’
Sigmar made to walk away from the crone, tired of her ramblings, but with a gesture she halted him, his muscles rigid and the breath frozen in his lungs.
‘Stay awhile,’ she said. ‘I wish to talk with you, to know you.’
‘I have no such desire,’ said Sigmar. ‘Release me.’
‘Ah, it has been too long since I walked among people,’ said the hag woman. ‘They have forgotten me and the dread I used to inspire. You will listen to me, Sigmar, and you must listen well, for I have little time.’
‘Little time for what?’
‘Events are moving quickly and history is being written minute by minute. These are the days of blood and fire, where the destiny of the world will be forged, and much now hangs in the balance.’
‘Very well,’ replied Sigmar. ‘Say what you have to say and I will listen.’
‘The victory against the Thuringians was honourably won, but there is still much to do, young Sigmar. The other tribes must come together soon or all will be lost. You must set off once more. The Brigundians and their vassal tribes must swear their sword oaths to you before the first snows or you will not live to see the summer.’
‘My warriors have only just returned from the west,’ said Sigmar. ‘I will not muster the army again so soon, and even if I could, we would not reach the Brigundians and defeat them before winter.’
The hag woman smiled, and Sigmar was chilled to the bone. ‘You misunderstand me. I said that you had to set off once more. The tribes of the south-east will not be won over by conquest, but with courage.’
‘You wish me to go alone into the wilderness?’
‘Yes, for agents of the Dark Gods goad the orcs of the mountains to war. Without enough of the tribes beneath your banner, the greenskins will destroy everything you have built.’
‘You have seen this in a vision?’ asked Sigmar.
‘Amongst other things,’ nodded the hag woman, glancing towards Ravenna’s gravestone.
‘You saw her die?’ hissed Sigmar. ‘You could have warned me!’
The hag woman shook her head. ‘No, for some things are carved in the stone of the world and cannot be changed by mortals or gods. Ravenna was a brief, shining candle that was lit to show you the path and then snuffed out to allow you to walk it alone.’
‘Why?’ demanded Sigmar. ‘Why give me love just to take it away from me?’
‘Because it was necessary,’ said the hag woman, and Sigmar almost believed he could detect a trace of sympathy in her voice. ‘To walk the road you must travel requires a strength of will and purpose beyond the reach of ordinary men, who only crave the comfort of hearth and home. That is what it takes to be a king. This land is yours, and you promised to love it and no other. Remember?’
‘I remember,’ said Sigmar bitterly.
Seventeen
Chains of Duty
The land spread out before Sigmar, more open than the domain of the Unberogen, and even flatter than the wide plains of the Asoborns. The weeks since leaving Reikdorf had been liberating, and though his departure had provoked furious arguments in the longhouse, his decision to travel alone was proving to be the right one.
‘It is madness,’ stormed Alfgeir, when Sigmar had announced his intention to go alone into the lands of the Brigundians.
‘Insanity,’ concurred Pendrag, and once Wolfgart had been dragged from his marriage bed, looking like a whipped dog, he had added his voice to the naysayers. ‘They’ll kill you.’
Sigmar had listened patiently while all manner of alternatives had been voiced: diplomatic missions led by Eoforth, a quick war of conquest, and even a lightning raid into Siggurdheim to assassinate the Brigundian noble house.
He had listened to every suggestion, but made it plain that he intended to go alone into the wilderness, no matter what his friends and advisors said. As much as it rankled to listen to the hag woman’s counsel, the moment he had made the decision to follow her words, a great weight had lifted from him, a weight that he had not even realised was upon him.
As the day turned from morning to afternoon, Sigmar gathered his supplies and marched towards the eastern gate of Reikdorf, passing from his capital and onto the roads that led towards the future.
His brothers had watched him from the walls, and that evening as he prepared a large meal of hot oats and rabbit meat, he had called out to the darkness, ‘Cuthwin! Svein! I know you are out there, so I have made enough for three. Come in and take some warmth from the fire, and some food.’
Minutes later, his two scouts emerged from the woodland and wordlessly joined him for the meal. After it was finished, Cuthwin cleaned the pot and plates and the three of them had lain down to sleep in their blankets as the stars emerged from behind the clouds.
By the time the scouts woke, Sigmar was long gone, and neither could find his trail.
Walking through the landscape was
an awakening for Sigmar, the sheer immensity of the vista before him expanding the horizons within him. He had been too long in the company of his fellows, and to walk alone in the world with the sun on his skin and the wind at his back was a rediscovered pleasure.
Unberogen lands had changed more than he could imagine in the last ten years, new fields in the lowlands, and herds of cattle, sheep and goats in the hills around Reikdorf. The discovery of new mines had changed the landscape beyond recognition, and a man could walk for days still seeing signs of habitation and no sign of true wilderness.
It was different here. This was the world as it was shaped by the gods: wide plains with rocky hillocks and great sweeps of open grassland. Dark, lightning-wreathed mountains flickered in the far distance of the south and east, and the raw, vital, quality of the land spoke to Sigmar on a level beyond words and mortal comprehension.
The sense of freedom out in the open, separated from all ties of brotherhood, family and responsibility was incredibly liberating, and as Sigmar watched a herd of wild horses thunder across the plains, he suddenly envied them. Ties of iron duty bound him to the Unberogen people and the future, but out here, with only the land for company, Sigmar felt those bonds loosen, and the tantalising prospect of a life lived for himself drifted before him.
A life with Ravenna had been denied him, but he was still young, and the world was offering him a chance to leave behind his life of war and blood, to step from the pages of history and become… become nothing.
Even as the temptation came to him, he knew he would never succumb to it, for he could not simply walk away from his place in the world and his duty to his people. Without him, the tribes of men would fall and the world would enter a dark age, a bloody age of war and death. In any other man such conceit would be monstrous arrogance, but Sigmar knew that it was simply the bare, unvarnished truth.
He also knew enough to know that ego played a part in his decision, for who would not wish to be remembered down the ages? To know that future generations of warriors might, in ages yet to come, give thanks to his memory, or tell tales of his battles over a foaming tankard of ale?
Yes, he decided, that would be fine indeed.
Days and weeks passed beneath the wide skies as Sigmar walked deeper into the south-east, and the dark peaks of the mountains drew ever closer. Though still many miles away, the threat from these colossal, soaring spires at the edge of the world was palpable as though a million spiteful eyes peered out from beneath gloomy crags and plotted the downfall of man.
A spear of purple lightning danced across the heavens, and Sigmar gave thanks to Ulric that his lands were far away from these brooding mountains.
No man would choose to live in such a place without good reason, but Sigmar had seen that the land was rich and dark, and loamy with goodness. To survive and prosper in a land so close to these threatening peaks would take great courage, and Sigmar found his admiration for the Brigundians growing with every step he took towards the heart of their realm.
Sigmar knew next to nothing about Siggurdheim, save what merchants who came to Reikdorf had told of it. The seat of King Siggurd was said to dominate the land around it from a natural promontory of dark rock with a wall of smooth stone around it. Traders spoke of King Siggurd as a wily ruler of great cunning and foresight, and Sigmar looked forward to meeting his brother king.
He had thought to check his route at the few villages he had passed through to buy supplies, but quickly found he had no need to ask, for many trade caravans were travelling south and all were bound for Siggurdheim. The one fact that was known of the Brigundians was that they possessed great wealth, trading food and iron ore with the Asoborns and the southern tribes, and even, some claimed, grain with the dwarfs.
As night fell on the fourth week of his travels, Sigmar set up camp next to a small stream, at the base of a jagged hillock that stood proud of the landscape like a lone barrow, its slopes composed of tumbled slabs of masonry and wild, rust-coloured ferns. A family of foxes bared their teeth at him as he set down his pack amid a collection of pottery fragments and began to prepare a fire, but he ignored them and they retreated into their den.
In the shadow of a fallen slab of rock, Sigmar set his fire and prepared a meal of roast deer with meat he had purchased from the last village he had passed through. The meat was tough and stringy, the hunter clearly having loosed his killing arrow while the beast was on the run, but it was rich and flavoursome nonetheless. He scooped some water into a shallow bowl and drank deeply, before washing his hands in the stream.
He lay back on a pillow formed from his armour wrapped in his travelling cloak and gazed up at the stars, remembering looking at these same stars with Ravenna in his arms. Where before such a memory had caused him pain, he now held to it as a precious boon.
Sigmar glanced over at the slab he sheltered behind, seeing patterns in the weathering that he had not previously noticed. The fire threw shadows on the rock, and grooves that Sigmar had thought natural now bore the hallmarks of a deliberate hand.
He sat up and leaned close to the slab, seeing that it had in fact been carved by some ancient hand in a language unknown to him. There were elements of similarity with the script Eoforth and Pendrag had devised, and Sigmar wondered who had written this forgotten message.
He brushed away some of the earth that had collected around the slab, and pulled up the ferns closest to it, seeing more fragments of pottery and the rusted heads of spears. The more Sigmar cleared, the more he saw that he had made camp amid a treasure trove of ancient artefacts, and a chill stole across him as he realised that what he had thought resembled a barrow in fact was a barrow.
Sigmar shifted a pile of pottery fragments, bronze arrowheads and broken sword blades with his foot, noting the unfamiliar design of the weapons. The swords were curved at the end, but straight at the base, though the handles had long since rotted away, leaving the corroded remains of the tang visible with scraps of leather still clinging to the metal.
Who had this tomb belonged to? Clearly a warrior or someone who wished to be remembered as a warrior. Hundreds of years must have passed since this warrior’s interment, and Sigmar wondered if anyone remembered his name. In ages past, this might have been the resting place of a king or a prince, or a great general: a man who thought his fame would live on past his death into immortality.
Here amid the cold winds of the Brigundian plains, a lone man sheltered in the ruins of what might once have been a magnificent memorial to a forgotten ruler. Any dreams of immortality or eternal remembrance were as dead as the barrow’s occupant. Such was the vanity of men to believe that their deeds would echo through the ages, and Sigmar smiled as he remembered thinking such thoughts earlier in his travels.
Would anyone remember Sigmar’s name in a hundred years? Would anything he had achieved be remembered when the world finally fell? Might some young man in a thousand years camp in the shadow of Sigmar’s tomb and wonder what mighty hero lay beneath the earth, little more than food for the worms?
The thought depressed him, and he crouched down beside the slab once more, determined to learn who lay within this tomb, offer a prayer to his spirit and tell him that at least one man remembered him.
Perhaps someone would do the same for him one day.
The script on the slab was faded and hard to make out, but the stark shadows cast by the fire helped pick out the strange, angular shape of the writing. Sigmar had learned the Unberogen script quickly enough, and, while this shared a number of similarities in construction and shape, there appeared to be a great number of pictographic representations that formed the words within each grouping of characters.
Sigmar’s lips moved soundlessly as he attempted to read the characters, tracing his fingers over the carved letters. A warm and arid wind whispered through him as he squinted at the writing and the plaintive cry of a night-hunting owl echoed over the plain. Sudden dread seized his heart as he felt a terrible hunger emanating from deep within th
e mound, a dormant rage born of thwarted ambition and eternal suffering.
Sigmar groaned as he saw the image of a skeletal king in golden armour, lying within a casket of jade and clutching a pair of the strangely curved swords. A cold blue light burned in the eyes of the skull, and a name whispered on the winds that billowed around him.
Rahotep… Warrior King of the Delta… Conqueror of Death…
Sigmar fell back from the slab as though it were afire, the image of the skeletal king at the head of a monstrous army of the dead burning in his mind. Giant warriors of bone and serried ranks of dry, dusty revenants filled the horizon, and the same, terrible, unnatural light burned in the lifeless eyes of every warrior that marched for eternity under the spell of their master’s dreadful will.
The hot winds of a far-off kingdom of endless sand and burning sun gusted around him, and Sigmar felt a nameless dread and horror at the thought that this army of the dead had marched across lands that were now home to men.
And might one day march across it again…
Sigmar quickly gathered his possessions and fled from the ancient barrow, the sick feeling of terror in the pit of his stomach fading with every yard that he put between himself and the resting place of the terrible skeletal king. Fear was not an emotion that Sigmar was used to, but the sight of these long-dead warriors had touched the part of him that was mortal, and which dreaded the cold emptiness of being denied his final rest.
For a warrior of the Unberogen, it was the greatest honour to be welcomed within the Halls of Ulric upon a glorious death, but to be denied that for all eternity, and to be forced to walk the earth forever as a mindless thing of death…
Sigmar ran through the night until dawn spilled over the eastern mountains.
Sigmar had walked swiftly for four days since making camp in the shadow of the dead king’s barrow, passing many farms and villages before finally arriving at Siggurdheim. Numerous rutted earth roads led towards the capital of the Brigundians, and a multitude of laden carts made their way towards the city.
The Legend of Sigmar Page 27
