by RW Krpoun
“Lots of arrows and then mop up with steel,” Burk observed as we watched them pass.
“Heavy straight blade for chopping infantry, light curved saber for mounted enemy,” I nodded. “Axes for when it seems appropriate.”
“Runts,” Burk shook his head.
“If you could get into cover, they wouldn’t be of much use,” I agreed.
We reached the gathering late the next day; it followed the course of a broad stream that snaked between gentle hills. Square tents of all sizes and colors were set up along the stream banks for a mile and a half, which we found out because the foreigners’ camp site were at the west end, and we had come in from the east. The hills were thick with pony herds tended by young boys.
Luan warned us to remove our armor and stow ranged weapons to indicate our peaceful nature; melee arms and shields weren’t prohibited as duels and fights were not uncommon.
“That determines the duration of a Gathering,” Laun pointed with his pen from his position atop the cart’s load.
“What does?” Hatcher asked.
“The supply of grass. Given the number of animals, a week is about all the time they will have before the herds have to go too far away from the camp to be safe. A Gathering is a time of truce, but when it comes to horses and Buryans, it is best not to risk too much.”
“They’re lovely people,” Hatcher agreed. “They give scorpions a good name by comparison.”
The Buryan didn’t pay a lot of attention to us, but a number of warriors tossed dust at the sight of us, or placed three fingers over their left eye.
“Warding off the Evil Eye,” Hatcher chuckled when I pointed it out. “So Niskers can’t put a hex on them, or steal their luck. Staring at sheep and goats all day makes you stupid.”
The Buryan warriors swaggered about, hands close to their sword hilts. Although there was little variety in manners, dress, or armament, the position of their patch of hair and their braids varied: back of the head, over the right ear, over the left, to the rear at an angle, and one, two or three braids. Luan said this indicated specific clan membership.
Some men were not armored, but wore practical artisan garb, but they still had the patch of hair and braid. Children seemed busy with chores, and wore simple homespun tunics and knee-length pants. Women wore ankle-length dresses with long sleeves, and a close-fitting hood, plus a veil or scarf that left only their eyes showing. Some wore pink, but most were green, and a fair number wore black.
“What’s with the women?” Hunter asked Hatcher, interrupting a lengthy discourse on what thieving bastards the Buryan are.
“Huh? Oh, women are property.”
“Slaves?” Burk asked.
“Not exactly. A girl belongs to her father or the family patriarch until she is married, and then she belongs to her husband. That’s what the colors mean: pink is a girl of marrying age, green is married, black is a widow still in morning, or too old to re-marry. Men can have multiple wives.”
“How does that work out, numbers-wise?”
“It’s a warrior society, and women are not allowed to fight, so there’s always more women than men. Women and kids do all the work; men gamble, hunt, raid, and fight.”
“As a social outlook, that has its points,” the ‘slinger grinned.
“You’ve managed it without society having to make it a law.”
The Gathering was a rather colorful place, starting with the variety of tents; as we headed west along the creek we passed horse races and men dancing in big circles with drawn sabers. We also saw children and women getting beaten with sticks, belts, reins, or saber scabbards without drawing much attention or public comment.
“I’m a strong supporter of using a switch to keep a kid in line,” Hatcher noted. “Got many a switching myself, and deserved more than I got. But that is beyond what is needful.”
“The Buryan are a brutal people. Women in general, and men who are not warriors or skilled artisans are of secondary use to society, and have no rights,” Laun observed.
Provine Sael rented us a small cluster of tents between a double row of ox carts belonging to a merchant selling metal ingots, and a similar cluster of tents and carts that housed a dealer in hard woods.
“There’s a man who will be wealthy,” Pieter nodded towards the wood dealer’s tents as he and the two girls set up our camp.
“Why?” I passed a keg of flour down to Burk. “The mountains have a lot of trees.”
“Not the sort to produce straight-grain dense mhm and hard wood which you need for saddle trees, arrow shafts, and mhm weapon handles.”
“What is a ‘saddle tree’?”
“The wooden frame upon which a war saddle mhm is built.”
“I thought riding saddles are just leather.”
“No, they generally include a wooden frame.”
“That’s a lot of wood, then.”
“It is, indeed.”
The market area was between the end of the Buryan camp and the foreigners’ camp; thankfully, we were upstream from everyone and our water was clean, although Pieter insisted on adding vinegar just to be safe.
I filled a water keg in the center of the stream and heaved it onto my right shoulder, wondering how Burk had gotten around the water detail before heading to the shops. We would have to discuss it when he got back, and by discuss it, I meant I was going to stomp his head flat.
“You must be the Dellian’s bodyguard. I heard she had a tusker that was big even by our standards.”
The voice snapped me back from pondering Burk’s impending thrashing. The speaker was a brute woman, easily six feet tall, wearing calf-high boots, a leather kilt, and a leather vest that was straining to contain her bust. She had two blades at her waist on a belt made of leather cord woven around steel disks, longer and thinner than Hatcher’s knives but with the same forward-angle to the blade; she also had a fighting knife in her right boot.
Her face was much more Human-looking than mine, and very pretty. Her ears were flat against her head, very large and pointed at the top, and she had no tusks, which I preferred. She had a crest of dark hair with a streak of white near the front, and she wore it long and flipped to the right so from that side it looked like she had a full head of hair.
“Ah…yeah. One of her guards. Grog.”
“Moina.” She jerked her head towards the wood seller’s tents. “Chief of guards for the master of timber.”
“I hear he’ll make a lot of money here.” Her arms were bare, and well-muscled, although I judged she was more a precision fighter than brute force; they were flecked with a variety of wound scars, and banded with thorn tattoos. She had a long scar that started in the left side of her forehead, sliced down across her left eye socket, angled down to nearly the center of her top lip, and then ran across her lower lip to her chin. I noticed that her left eye was a different color than her right, but didn’t appear to be blind. She had had thin eyebrows tattooed in place, which I thought gave her a wistful look.
“He usually does. So what is a Dellian doing this far out?”
I shrugged. “Looking at stuff. She thinks a lot, and travels around looking at things. She bought me from the Ebon Blades, a proper barracks of the old school in Fellhome, and gave me my freedom not long after.”
“I’ve heard of the Ebon Blades,” she smiled. “Tough bunch. Me, I was with Master Barthurn’s Carnival until five years ago, blade-dancing.”
“I know them: you worked the circuit; high-rated specialists.” I became aware that my trousers had several crudely-stitched rips in them from previous fights, and one across my knee was coming undone.
“We did. The Ebon Blades have a High Rate who goes by Grog, over sixty matches, I believe.”
“That’s me.” My shirt was patched and showed the marks of old bloodstains, too. Why hadn’t I paid more attention to this before?
“I’m surprised Master Horne sold you.”
“My mistress bought two High Rates. I don’t know what the pr
ice was.”
Pieter came around the tents. “Grog, I need that water…” he trailed off, taking in the scene. “But I can roll it myself.”
I set down the eighty-pound keg like it was nothing and pushed it halfway to the engineer with a shove of my boot. “Here you go.”
“I thought I had scars,” Monia observed once Pieter had deftly rolled the keg away.
“He’s getting them fixed, but it is slow and expensive.” I rubbed the almost-healed knot that ran the length of my left jaw. “I’ll just live with mine.”
“No joke. You can’t imagine what I paid for my eye.”
“That isn’t a blade scar.” That was dumb: obviously it wasn’t.
“Tiger, my last bout with the Carnival, I almost got out of the way of its strike, but one claw caught me, and that was enough for the cat’s purposes. Really cut my price down when I was sold. But the wood merchant, Haniel is his name, freed me after a year, and loaned me the money to get my eye fixed even before I was free.”
“Not all slave-owners are bad, at least if you’re in our business.”
“And now they’ll all be free,” she observed. “It doesn’t seem fair, really: I had to kill at least a dozen bandits over that year, but the Emperor says ‘free’, and all these unskilled nobodies drop their collars.”
“I’ve had sour dealings with unskilled slaves,” I agreed. “You encounter some very poor attitudes.”
“Professionalism is a rare trait,” she nodded, glancing behind her. “And now duty calls. Nice meeting you, Grog.”
“You, too,” I stammered, and cursed inwardly.
Heading out to the trading area, my back plate under my arm, I encountered Burk returning to camp, burdened with two new shields, a new kettle hat, and a stout morning star. “Prices are a little high,” he warned.
“You owe me big-time: I had to haul six kegs of water.”
He tried to remain poker-faced, but a smirk slipped through. “Says you.”
“Says me. Lucky for you, you can pay me back by staying away from the brute girl in the next camp.”
“Brute girl?”
“A real beautiful one.”
“How is that equal to accidently forgetting I had water detail?”
“I can knock your head down into your chest cavity if you prefer. Anyway, I’ve already met her, so hands off.”
He scowled, then shrugged. “I suppose.”
Hatcher was sitting in a Dusman folding chair feeding Rose when I came back. “What’s with all the clothes?”
“I’ve bled on everything I own. Who knows when I’ll get another chance for replacements? Plus I got a kettle hat and ordered a breastplate.”
“Does it have anything to do with Moina?” she grinned wickedly.
I flushed. “I…how do you know that…there… is a Moina?”
“I pay attention to things. And I went over and introduced our group, because it’s good to know who you’re bunking next to. Is she pretty?”
“Who?” I was lost.
Hatcher rolled her eyes. “Moina.”
I glanced around to ensure no one could overhear. “Yes. Very.”
“She’s huge.”
“To you.”
“She’s as tall as Burk,” Hatcher wiped Rose’s mouth. “Of course, that’s still a head shorter than you. I’ve never really looked at a brute girl before; she’s got the curves, that’s for certain. No belly on her, either; I think you could bounce a gold ten-Mark piece off her tummy.” She gave Rose another spoonful. “That’s the last of it.” She gave the baby a loud kiss, and Rose thrashed her limbs and gurgled. “She’s got a lot of scars.”
“So do I.” I started stowing my purchases.
“I like her ears, they’re a nice shape. She has five rings in her left ear, did you notice?”
“No.”
“Well, you better start. Women like a man who notices things.”
“Maybe brute women don’t.”
Hatcher chuckled. Hearing footsteps, she turned and looked: Provine Sael and Torl were coming into the camp. “Provine: in terms of general romance and attitudes, what’s the difference between Dellian and Human females?”
“Height and horns.” She stopped while Torl continued into camp.
“See?” Hatcher grinned at me.
Provine Sael looked from Hatcher to me. “Should I ask?”
“Best not,” Hatcher kissed Rose again.
The Dellian nodded. “Grog, there is a shared sisterhood that cuts across race, size, scars, and what grows out of one’s skulls. Do you know why that is?”
“No, mistress.”
“It’s because most males are, at their core, children. And not terribly bright children at that. That is why the males create power, but it is the females who create civilization.” She headed into camp, swinging her staff.
After supper Provine Sael took counsel with Hunter and Torl; Hatcher then relayed the plan. “Provine Sael is meeting with several Buryan clan chiefs over the next two days; the plan is to get permission to secure safe passage through their areas so we can reach our destination. Keep your mouths shut about what we’re doing.”
“Which is easy, because we don’t know what we’re doing,” I pointed out.
“That’s for the best: you can’t let slip what you don’t know. So far as anyone knows, this is just another group of academics taking advantage of the war to explore areas that are normally risky to travel. You’ll get fully read into the situation once we’re clear of this place. Laun will be leaving us, by the way; he is catching a ride back into the Empire with a merchant. Rose and the girls will soldier along until we get back to Imperial soil.”
“Wouldn’t it be safer for the girls to go with Laun?” I hated to lose the cooking skills, but I expect that our destination would not be a peaceful one.
“Not here; Laun can’t protect them, and a merchant isn’t going to do anything if a Buryan carries off one or both. I can’t say which would be worse: slave of the Dusmen, or a wife to a Buryan. So they stay with us until we reach Imperial soil.”
“I guess.” I couldn’t argue with her estimate of the herders: even my short trip through the trading area had demonstrated that Buryan men thought nothing of beating their wives in public, and vicious beatings at that. The nomad warriors were mean little bastards.
“They’ll be ready to be dropped off somewhere safe once Pieter has taught them enough of our language to be able to fend for themselves. They are both skilled cooks and bakers, so finding them a position will be easy once we’re in civilized lands.”
More slaves being trained to be free. I decided that I liked the idea.
Torl posted a guard roster because Buryan warriors, often worse for drink, prowled around the foreign camps late at night. What their intentions were was never clear to me, but it made guards essential. We kept our camp area small and the mule close after dark, with four lit lanterns marking the bounds of what we claimed.
I sat in a chair where I had a good view of everything, and gave every Buryan I saw a sour stare. Otherwise our camp was silent; everyone but Hunter and the guard having turned in after Provine Sael had conferred with Torl and Hunter. The ‘slinger had vanished into the darkness with a swagger in his step, and his cot was still empty when I relieved Pieter at midnight.
The sky was clear overhead, a vast dome cut to the west by the black crags of the mountains, and liberally coated with countless stars, their hard silver light unchallenged by the moon, which was down. Sitting under that vast sweep of silver pin-points, I felt like I was guarding all the diamonds in the world laid out on black velvet.
Looking at them, I pursued my thought about the girls being prepared for freedom; I thought back to my joking comment to the Centurion in Merrywine about ‘brutes helping brutes’, and considered it from a new light. In the weeks before I had killed Akel he had urged Burk and me to ensure that our lives were more than just a trail of corpses, and while I still did not forgive his treachery, I had to
admit that that particular advice still nagged at me.
At the time I had shrugged it aside with the fact that I didn’t know much, but times had changed, and I had changed with them. I didn’t count becoming a member of the Red Guard as an accomplishment because it was entirely Provine Sael’s doing, but I could read and do ever-more complex sums with each passing week. Over the next eight years a lot of slaves were going to be freed, and I expected that most would not be well-equipped to handle the disorderly world of freedom. But that was something I knew about, and it was something I could do that wasn’t killing: I could help prepare newly-freed slaves with the difficulties that immediately arose when you became free.
That sounded good; I rubbed the scar on my left jawline and thought about it. As a general plan it was excellent, but going past the idea to the actual doing brought me to an immediate chasm of stupidity.
I drummed my fingers on the arms of the chair, seeking a solution as a loud fart ripped through the silence, followed by Hatcher giggling. The times had changed, but I wasn’t any smarter than I was that damp spring day when Provine Sael had arrived at Fellhome perched on a loaded mule’s pack saddle.
Not smarter, it was true, but more educated, I decided; while I was still and always would be a High Rate of the Ebon Blades, a proper barracks of the old school, I was also a free brute who had gathered some hard-won experience. One thing I had learned was that if you minded your place and gave good service, there would be smarter people whose advice you could seek. All I needed was to get the basic outline of crossing from ‘decide’ to ‘do’, and I could work out the rest. After all, training was something I was extremely familiar with, and what was this but training?
