by RW Krpoun
“Huh.”
“Torl’s plan was solid enough; one of the vassals was in fact a practitioner of the Arts, but she made the mistake of decorating her robes with the symbols of her estate, and I killed her just as our part of the plan came into play. The Ukar cut down most of the slaves before they realized that outsiders were attacking; there’s an underlying issue there, I’m sure. Bad luck for the slaves, but it provided us with an invaluable, if brief, interlude which was put to good effect. Still, had you and Burk not arrived when you did it might have gone hard against us. Between the four of us we managed to kill one Ukar and cripple a second. Provine Sael and I were about to enter the fray with cold steel when the Dusmen fell and the odds shifted back into our favor.”
“Huh.” I sat and stared at nothing while Hunter read. After a while a haggard Provine Sael came up and put her hand on the top of my head while she whispered to herself.
“You’ll be fine, Grog.” She handed a small vial to Hunter. “Help him onto a cot and have him drink this. You’ll sleep, and wake up better,” she advised me, and strode off.
“And there you have it,” Hunter set the folio aside and stood. “Can you stand?”
I was able to stand well enough, although I had to keep a hand on Hunter’s shoulder to steady myself as I walked. My armor was already off, and Hunter grabbed my baldric and Fallsblade, which had been leaning against the back of the chair. He led me to a cot in a tent and talked me through removing my boots. The little vial contained the drink I had had before, and as before it dropped me into a pit of sleep before I had really gotten settled.
I dreamt of the water under the karst, and of a fight I had when I was just a new Low Rate, back when most of my age block was still alive. Back then we had been openers, the opening act, our job to whet the crowd’s appetite for blood. Three low-rated fights in quick succession, the dead left on the sands until the three bouts were finished. My age-block had lost one or two of our number every time the pit was open back then, killed in the quick bouts.
I remembered the crowds back then; I hadn’t fully developed the skill of battle-focus to as much a degree, and I recall the serious gamblers chatting amongst themselves, ignoring the openers as too small-time for their attention, and the rich boxes just starting to fill, fashionably late (I didn’t really understand what that meant). We fought and killed for the entertainment of the cheap seats, the small-time bettors and the blood-lovers, who whooped, cheered, and booed with gusto. Later, as I progressed, I had learned to turn the crowd into just a noise in the background.
When I woke the sunlight coming into the tent looked to be closer to noon than dawn; my shirt was gone and I had fresh bandages on my face and my right calf; the rest of my injuries were gone.
The tent was big, but it was empty save for two chairs and another cot, which was neatly made up and had Burk’s pack on it; my gear was stacked at the foot of the cot I lay on.
Hatcher was sitting in one of the chairs, pulled close to my cot, cuddling Rose. “About time you woke up,” she grinned. She had a spray of scabbed-over abrasions across her left cheek, and a bandage peeped out from her right shirt sleeve.
I rubbed my eyes. “How long?”
“The fight was yesterday. Provine Sael says you’re fine, but you’re going to have to let your face and leg heal with nothing more than blacksap and time, which means you’ll have scars. Too many wounded for her Arts.”
“I have scars already. How are you?”
“Banged up a little, mostly from dodging and ducking. Thank the Light you and Burk came into our fight when you did. Turns out Torl is good with a sword, but the Ukar got lucky with a shield bash and I had my hands full keeping the bastard off Torl while he tried to get free of that tent.”
“Burk?”
“Better off than you, although he is getting three new scars for his troubles. He’s on watch right now, in case anyone comes up from the camp inside the vines. Yesterday was more violence than I want to see again, I can tell you.”
“Huh.”
“Only one slave survived the fight, but we killed some very high-ranking vassals yesterday. The Dusmen will be very unhappy when they get the news.”
“Good.”
She hopped down from the chair. “I have stuff to do; Pieter and Igen, the slave, are finishing burying bodies, and Provine Sael is sleeping again, she’s worn to a nub. Watch Rose until I get back.” She plopped the baby onto my bare chest and trotted out.
I stared at Rose who goggled back, opening and closing her toothless mouth as she worked to get her limbs under her. When she was situated, she grunted thoughtfully, and then blew a raspberry at me. “Stay calm,” I advised her nervously.
With some effort she crawled up my chest and batted at the bandage across my jaw. She smelled faintly of soap and something, something nice, a sort of fresh bread and clean linen smell. I gripped her around the torso and lifted her up to keep her away from my jaw, and she squealed and waved her limbs animatedly.
A little height seemed to meet her approval, so I lifted her to the full extension and she thrashed some more. Her head seemed a bit unsteady so I put my right thumb under her chin to support it. She seemed to weigh nothing at all.
She stared at me with her big dark eyes for a bit, and then hissed while she thrashed some more, finishing with another raspberry. I carefully lowered her to my chest and let her go, and she amused herself by slapping my chest for a while before putting her head down and thankfully became still.
I tried to remain motionless and breath shallowly, hoping that she would fall asleep and I could cede the cot to her, but Torl limped in and sat in the chair Hatcher had vacated. Hearing him Rose perked up and rose to all fours to begin the process of turning to face him.
The scout had a leather girdle strapped around his chest, to support his ribs, I guessed. “Torl,” I nodded.
“Grog.” He reached out and touched the tip of Rose’s nose, which caused her to grin toothlessly and thrash a bit. “Head feeling better?”
“Yeah, fine. The jaw, not so much.”
“You looked half dead when you came up to the camp, and Burk was no better.”
“Are there more Dusmen in the vines?”
“Not from what I’ve seen in this camp and what Igen, the slave, has indicated. They didn’t feel too concerned about security this far north, I believe. Still, there will be more killing when we go after the camp in the vines, or if they return here.”
“I’ll be ready.”
He nodded tiredly. “I expect you will. Hopefully we will have a couple days to recuperate before we must fight again.”
Rose was trying to go over the side of the cot, so I carefully picked her up and turned her so she was facing me. She immediately began the laborious process of turning to the side.
“Is the Nisker we got from the vines still alive?”
“So far.” Torl pushed himself erect, sneering a little at the pain as he did so. “You did well, yesterday. It was a plan born of desperation and risk, but you saw your part through.”
“It worked. Do you want to hold Rose?”
A smiled flickered across his face. “No.”
Hatcher finally came back, which was very good, because Rose was getting annoyed at not being able to get off my chest.
“Have you even moved?” she demanded.
“She keeps squirming around.”
“Men.” Hatcher shook her head. Grabbing my rain cloak from my gear she spread it across the bare floor of the tent and laid Rose on her back in the center of it. The baby immediately began the process of getting onto her stomach.
Freed, I sat up and found my boots. “Is there anything to eat?”
“Pieter is making lunch.”
I grabbed my baldric and my cleaning things, and headed out into the sunlight.
Cleaned up and immediate needs attended to, I returned to the tent; Hatcher and Rose were gone. I donned clean clothes, and examined my gear. Someone had cleaned the blood of
f my armor and baldric, but my breastplate was ruined, having taken far more damage than I had realized; luckily, I had hung onto my old scale shirt.
Emerging from the tent, I headed for the cooking area, which was under a canvas overhang next to the stack of crates in the center of camp. Hatcher was helping Pieter prepare a meal while Rose crawled unsteadily across a blanket. A slip of a young woman squatted on her haunches watching Rose; she was short, perhaps an inch under five feet, and as slender as a whip, with loose black hair that reached her waist, dressed in a tunic the color of oatmeal and a gray skirt. She looked up as I approached, and flinched, dropping her eyes, which were large and soulful; she had an oval face and a delicately pointed chin. This would be Igen, I figured, the only slave who had survived the fight. She looked like she weighed about as much as my left arm, and I wondered what use she would be in the field.
There were several chairs, so I sat down as Torl came from around the crates and took another chair. We sat in silence, watching Rose crawl and Igen occasionally moving the baby from the blanket’s edge to the center. Hatcher was chattering to Pieter about making Bekker sauce, but that was the engineer’s concern, and I just leaned back in my chair and relaxed, Fallsblade leaning against my chair.
Igen was dispatched with a full mess kit and a pot of ale from the Dusman stores for Burk, and Hatcher took a bowl of broth to feed to the injured Nisker, whose fever was receding, but who still wasn’t very lucid. The rest of us ate stew and fresh flatbread, washing it down with a dark, strong-tasting ale that came in round quart clay pots.
“We are in an excellent position mhm in terms of supplies,” Pieter noted as he scrubbed the last of the stew from his bowl with a piece of flatbread. “There is a considerable store of provisions for the Human mhm vassals and slaves here.”
“What do the Dusmen eat?” I asked helping myself to a second bowl of stew and another round of flatbread.
“By preference, the flesh of Men, Dellians, mhm brutes, or Niskers,” Pieter noted as the slave returned. “Igen, help yourself.” He waved to the stewpot and made eating motions., and finally the girl edged forward and picked up an unused mess kit. “But in the field, any sort of meat. mhm They seldom eat anything else. I have separated their rations, mhm and will haul them off later today.”
Igen sat, nervous as a stray cat, on the blanket near Rose, who was laying on her back gumming the hem of the shirt she wore, and swiftly consumed a small amount of stew. Finished, she started washing the cooking gear.
“Poor child,” Pieter said quietly. “No doubt things were bad before, but now mhm she is surrounded by violent strangers whose very language is a mystery.”
“She can’t understand us?”
“No.”
“But she’s a Man.”
“Not all men speak the same language,” Hunter noted as he came up from behind me.
“I didn’t think you were going to mhm join us,” Pieter said as the ‘slinger filled a bowl and chose a chair.
“Interesting reading,” Hunter shrugged, prying the cork out of a clay pot the size of a grapefruit and taking a long drink of ale. “Say what you will about the Dusmen, they commission good ale,” he sighed.
“You’ve cleaned the place up pretty well,” I observed in the silence that followed. “Do you need any help with the bodies?” Dirt had been raked over the blood-patches, and the Ukar’s gear and tents had been dragged into a single pile a short distance from the camp.
“They’re dealt with,” Pieter advised. “Igen and I used oxen to drag them mhm to an old well Torl found; it was already half-collapsed. We tipped the bodies in mhm and finished the collapse. The entire enterprise took remarkably mhm little effort.”
Hatcher returned with an empty bowl as I was getting thirds. “Did you leave me any stew?” she grinned at me.
“A little.” There was at least a quart left.
“How is our new friend?” Hunter asked.
“Better. His name is Laun, and he is more upset about the loss of his journals than of his arm.”
“You get anything else?”
“I didn’t press. You find out anything new?”
“A lot of interesting things which have very little to do with our current situation. The chief point of interest is that I’ve confirmed my theory that this group is here in the hopes of learning how to grow the vines. They aren’t much interested in anything else. The group in the vines conducts the core study, and send their notes out for the vassals here to sort and study.”
“Were they close to their goal?”
“I can’t tell,” Hunter admitted. “This is plant-lore and fringe Arts all mixed together. But this was a new effort, I’m sure of it. I don’t think the Dusmen knew what this place was until recently, if they even knew it was here.”
“If they could transplant shoots of the vine, mhm it could mean fortifications that cost nothing to maintain,” Pieter noted.
“Worth its weight in gold,” Hunter agreed. “But they’ll have to start over with a new crew.”
“So you speak their language?” I asked.
Hunter grinned. “No. But scholars and practitioners of the Arts all use the same written language, a dead language older than the Empire.”
“How can a language be ‘dead’?”
“That means no one speaks it any more, so there is no slang, no regional dialects, or anything else. It never changes. That way a scholarly work by a Nisker can be easily understood by a Man in the service of a Dusman, and so forth.”
“Huh. So, how long have they been here?”
“A month, more or less. But they came with knowledge we didn’t have.” Hunter wiped his bowl clean with flatbread, ate the bread, and then pulled something from his pouch, which he tossed to me.
It was about the size of a thick candle, and felt sort of like wood, only lighter. It was light brown, and looked like compressed oatmeal or coarse flour. “What is it?”
“I’m not sure, but if you set it on fire, the smoke keeps the vine peaceful and out of your way. It smolders rather than burns.”
“I believe it is made from compressed sawdust, mhm including several kinds of wood or plant material,” Pieter noted.
“There’s cases of it,” Hatcher jerked her chin towards the crates. She had finished eating and was sitting on the blanket feeding Rose some of the white stuff. “That’s why the main camp is out here: you have to burn the stuff all the time, the more people, the more sticks burning, so they kept the team inside the vines to a minimum. They have a lot of the sticks, but it goes quick.”
I cleaned my bowl and stood. “I better go relieve Burk.”
“Hey.” I found Burk sitting on a handy stone in the midst of a clump of bushes.
“Hey.” He slid over and I sat next to him. “How’s the face?”
“Sore.”
“It’ll be a good scar. Those Dusmen knew their trade.”
“They did,” I inspected the view, which was first-rate. “What are you going to do without your star?”
“That’s a problem,” he admitted. “I’m carrying that bearded axe we found in the vines for now. The Dusmen had a collection of weapons in their stores, and I’m going to look them over. Did you see the swords they used?”
“No.”
“They’re light, very light for their size, and strong. Some sort of alloy.”
“That explains a lot; one stroke split my kettle hat.”
“Their armor was strange, too: a sort of mesh on leather that was like sharkskin.”
“I know it was a bear to cut through, even where it was thin. No wonder they have such a reputation.”
“Well, they’re no Ebon Blades,” Burk noted with satisfaction.
“Nope. Close, though.”
“Not close enough. Only one leaves the pit.”
“That is the rule.”
As the shadows were drawing long Hatcher came out to tell me my watch was done. “They won’t be coming out after dark,” she noted. “And H
unter has wards up, anyway.”
She rode my shoulders as I headed back to the camp. “How’s your face?”
“Sore.”
“And your head?”
“Fine.”
“Provine Sael said you were dying when she got to you, and Burk wasn’t much better, something about internal organs. She was really upset about it.”
“She worries a lot.” I almost said ‘too much’, but that would not have been proper.
“I hate to think what would happen if we lost anyone; I don’t know how well she could handle it. Watching strangers die is tough enough on her.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that, so I just shrugged.
Igen had made biscuits, which were light and golden and a much welcome change from flatbread, and had fried salt pork and chunks of potatoes with some sort of long green stalks and little red bits, producing an excellent dish. She still looked fearful whenever she glanced at any of us, but perhaps she was just a nervous type; she didn’t sit in a chair, but squatted at the edge of the firelight, keeping her head down.
Laun ate supper with us, but he appeared to be in a daze, and did little besides slowly dip a biscuit into his broth and eat it. He wasn’t much taller than Hatcher, with gray hair and beard, now looking shrunken inside too-loose clothes, his eyes dull and distant as he huddled within a blanket, surrounded by strangers and a long way from home.
“This is really good, Igen.” Hatcher said; hearing her name, the girl looked up and Hatcher pointed to the bowl and then rubbed her belly, grinning widely.
“Is Provine Sael still asleep?” I asked.
“She got up about an hour ago, ate, checked Laun, made more food for Rose, did something to Torl’s ribs, and went back to sleep,” Hatcher noted. “Too much use of her Arts in too short of a time, as usual.”
