Still, he was but a man, and dependent upon a magical blade. If he could be separated from the weapon, he would no doubt die easily.
He glanced at the god and then stared down at the floor. “How do I get past the sword?”
“Overwhelm him. He can only kill so many. His death is imperative to our cause – worth any sacrifice – and I require the sword. Drive the others before you. He cannot kill them all. Overwhelm him and you will kill him.”
Vulgur looked up. “I will kill him.”
“You will not divide your forces.” Manon instructed him, another alteration. “Keep them with you. You will need them all when you find the man. As you go south, the second children may feed upon the granaries of the plains, and the first children may feed upon the excess slaves – the aged and infirm. This will eliminate the need for supply trains and speed your journey.”
“I will obey your instruction.”
“You will not divide your forces,” Manon repeated. “You will command them as one unit. Find the man, destroy him, and bring me the sword.”
“Yes, Great Father.”
“End this.”
“I will, master,” Vulgur promised.
49
Marcus sat on the hillside just above the road and watched the men of Elam drilling in the midday sun. The day, after a cool morning, had developed into a harbinger of pleasantly warm spring. Around him the broadleaf trees were greening up with the sprouting of new leaves. Marcus moved his eyes and looked to his right. There, standing with his aides, and with Kitchell, Governor General of the Land Beyond the Gates, General Edverch nervously tapped the side of his leg with a long willow branch. Marcus smiled at the general’s obvious discomfort. The man didn’t want to be here.
Edverch had no experience of combat, nor did he desire any.
War was not known in Elam’s history. The great nation had enjoyed the luxury of being larger and more powerful than all its neighbors – and any potential enemy – for time out of mind. The civil war of ancient times had not touched its borders, though some of its citizens had felt compelled to join with Peleg, others with Magog. At that distant time, of course, Elam had consisted of little more than a few scattered villages and towns, outlying farms, and one or two cities upon the coasts. They were rich and prosperous, but relatively few in number.
After the war, Elam continued to prosper, with a fair measure of autonomy, under the Peace of Joktan. Once again, though, war had come, between Joktan and an ancient entity known as Manon, the same name that was claimed – and undoubtedly usurped – by Soroba’s master in the north. Certainly, the ancient god, and the current prince that claimed his name, were not one and the same.
After that second war, hardship, disease, and hunger, the latter precipitated largely by the loss of the great plains, had driven the world, and Elam along with it, into a dark age of death and despair, an age that seemed to have no end. Nonetheless, Elam had survived. Over time, it had clawed its way upward out of darkness, finally crossing the threshold of uncertainty and had come into the realm of survival. Across the centuries it had grown to greatness, becoming the largest, most prosperous nation on earth, its citizens dwelling in unmolested peace.
Thus, General Edverch’s discomfiture. Elam possessed a mighty army, numbering nearly eighty-five thousand men, that was very well-trained. Marcus’ homeland, however, had never faced a single sword raised against it in anger. Other than occasional altercations in public houses none of its soldiers had ever been blooded.
Elam, in fact, had not experienced any unease about its position in the world until a generation ago. Then, after years of rumor, it became known for certain that the entirety of the great plains to the north and the land of Bracken that lay even farther north, had fallen beneath the heel of a mysterious being naming himself “Lord of the World”.
At the time, Marcus’ father, Waren Imrid, had been High Prince of Elam. When the people of The Land Beyond the Gates, ostensibly under the protection of the High Prince, had become uneasy with that which occurred to their north, Waren had sent his most experienced councilor, Hurack Soroba, on a diplomatic mission to ascertain the intentions of the mysterious lord.
Soroba had come back a radically changed man. The councilor had always possessed qualities of a subtle and nimble mind, and an ingratiating manner, but he had been a steely bargainer as well. Now, there was also a peculiar hardness to him, and that which had once been clever took on an aspect of deceptiveness.
Soroba made many trips into the north, and with each return was ever more eager that Elam treat with the distant lord – who named himself Manon the Great – and enter into an alliance whereby some of the poor and disadvantaged daughters of Elam would be transported into the north where they might gain better lives as wives of the citizens of Morkendril, Manon’s capitol. Women, for reasons unknown, were scarce in the north.
Despite Soroba’s glowing reports of Manon’s greatness and benevolence, Waren hesitated. During this time the High Prince’s younger brother, Rahm, had also developed an interest in pursuing Soroba’s recommendations. Still, Waren was reluctant to bind Elam’s interests to those of the distant lord, and he was even less inclined to encourage the land’s parents to give up their daughters for the sake of increasing another’s population. It wasn’t just because he found the idea distasteful; word had come to the High Prince from other quarters, and these new reports disturbed him greatly. Manon, according to these secondary sources, had ruthlessly enslaved the numerous peoples of the cities of the plains, reducing them to chattel, and had robbed them of their young women.
Sitting in the warm sunshine, Marcus frowned, remembering those days. Waren had finally rendered a decision – Elam would not act belligerently toward Manon, but neither would it enter into any kind of agreement with him.
It was shortly after this writ from the throne that Waren, along with the members of his household, fell ill. Marcus had been in Vergon, staying with his mother’s family, when word came that his father and mother, younger brother and sister, with most of their servants, had succumbed to a plague that apparently infested only the royal house.
Rahm had been on official business in Aniza, an ally of Elam that lay to the northwest, but had hurried back upon the first news of his brother’s illness. Out of concern for the general populace, and because of his elder brother’s incapacitation, he took charge of events and ordered that the palace be quarantined until the source of the contagion could be identified and properly dealt with.
It turned out that the water supply that flowed from a deep spring in the hills above the summer palace had somehow become poisoned by an unknown pollutant or infectious agent. The High Prince, his family, every servant, and all others present in the palace at this time, except for Soroba, died. The council, along with Rahm – who in order that the government should continue to function, was immediately elevated into his brother’s seat – thought it fortunate indeed that the Prince’s eldest son was away at the time, preserving the family line.
Marcus’ frown deepened, as it always did, when he thought back on one peculiar element of that difficult time. Just before leaving for Aniza, Uncle Rahm had sent him a message, begging him to return home and use his influence in helping his father to see the wisdom of a treaty with Morkendril. Marcus had agreed to return, though not to add his influence to Rahm’s, but rather to lend strength to his father’s position on the matter. Then, Waren had issued his writ, and Marcus had received a communication from his father that directed him to remain in Vergon and finish his education.
Had Marcus come home, he would likely have died as well.
Soroba alone, of all the royal house had survived, although he lay ill for many days in desperate condition. When he recovered and grew well enough, he decided not to retain his position in the administration of the new Prince, and had gone back into the north, not to return for more than a year. When at last he did return, it was as Manon’s emissary.
At the time of these
events, Marcus, just then seventeen years of age, had harbored no suspicions of the events, lost instead in a fog of sorrow. During the nine years that followed, however, suspicion had gradually taken root and grown in him that his parents’ deaths were very possibly the result of evil intent and action. There was no solid foundation for his suspicions, and Elam was ably governed, but the more he thought on it, the more his eye became fixed on his uncle, and upon his father’s one-time servant, Soroba.
The confluence of events from that time alone was troubling, but there had also been incidents down through the years. On his twenty-first birthday, Marcus had been assaulted while walking home from a celebration in the capitol city of Calom Malpas. The assailants wielded knives, a weapon of stealth. Only the timely and unexpected intervention of several of his friends had prevented his death. Strangely, the official bodyguards assigned to him by the office of the High Prince had vanished. Stranger yet, his attackers seemed disinterested in money, desiring only his life.
As a consequence, Marcus had become cautious and watchful. He adhered carefully to his duties, and made no challenge for the throne. Nonetheless, from that day forward, he never let careful precautions for his personal security lapse. And he began to quietly cultivate friendships with some of the lower ranking officers in Elam’s army.
He turned his attention away from the tramping soldiers and looked into the east as a patrol appeared around the verge of the hills that jutted down out of the north. So far, there had been no sign of “barbarians”, although one patrol, over in the hills to the south, claimed to have seen a wolf. Marcus doubted this claim. Wolves were fairly common in the Iron Mountains off to the southwest, but their presence was unknown in the forested hills that lay along Elam’s eastern border.
When the army had first encamped, Marcus had gone with a sizeable patrol far up the barren valley of the dry lake to the east, all the way to the foot of a broad black mountain, which sent tendrils of smoke up from its summit, and had evidently spewed forth fresh rock from the bowels of the earth in the recent past. This, presumably, was the scene of the great struggle described by Soroba, but there were no bodies, or broken instruments of war to indicate the veracity of the tale.
In fact, Marcus had seen no sign that any struggle had taken place anywhere along Elam’s northeastern border as Soroba claimed, though he had criss-crossed the valley thoroughly, and searched into the hills north and south. Later, he had gone through the gap and onto the edge of the northern plains, but had found no sign of recent military action there either.
It had always been believed that the regions east and northeast of Elam were frontiers of wilderness, containing few people. To Marcus eyes, as he climbed various hills and gazed into unknown distances, this now seemed proved. No sign of human activity was discovered in the long wide valley that ran up to the black mountain. Nor was there anything in the wild hills to the north, or in those opposite, to the south, beyond the ancient road.
Farther to the south, he knew, there were two or three civilizations that lay eastward along the shores of the ocean. But these civilizations were known and traded with, were not demonstrably barbaric, and were far from the wild country where Marcus now found himself.
Someone – or something – had attacked the trains carrying Elam’s “gift” to Manon – this was known for a certainty. Yet after three full weeks of careful searching and deciphering, nothing beyond that known fact had been discovered. Marcus had finally decided that the women were taken by a roving tribe of bandits, desperate for mates, probably come down from the female-starved environs of the great plains. If so, he was glad of it. The women would have a measure of value in such circumstance. Marcus was not at all certain that the women “gifted” to the lord of the north did not go into dire misery, despite what Soroba and Rahm stated officially.
Calamity had certainly befallen a large group of Manon’s horned monsters. Reports said that their bodies appeared to have been burned by a searing fire. Maybe, Marcus thought, they had been caught out in a severe thunderstorm and had been the victims of a bizarre lightning event. Probably, this event had then been exaggerated by Soroba into the “strange magic” that the “barbarians” were rumored to possess, hopefully frightening Elam into further compliance with the wishes of his master.
For his part, Marcus was ready to try and convince Edverch that he ought to uproot the army and lead it back home, ending the expedition. He entertained no further desire to bivouac in the bucolic countryside. Instead, he intended to go home, and continue to quietly seek an alteration in some of his homeland’s policies toward its own citizens.
In any event, all was quiet; there were no barbarians here.
50
For perhaps the tenth evening in a row, Ka’en stepped out her apartment onto the veranda and walked toward its northern end, once again calling a name softly into the silence. And this time, at last, she was rewarded.
He appeared rather abruptly, near the railing, a hooded figure in a long black robe.
“Lord Joktan,” she greeted him, and bowed.
“Don’t bend to me, child,” the old king said. “You called me and I have come – what is your need?”
“I thank you for coming, my lord.” She replied softly, and then hesitated, catching her breath. Despite the fact that she had sought his presence, his sudden appearance was, as always, startling, unnerving. “I have desired your counsel for several days now.”
“Indeed? Yet I heard you but this time only. As I told your husband, my lady; I am often nearby, but not always. The world is wide, and I have business in it. What do you require?”
Ka’en chewed at her lip and looked eastward, toward the mountains beyond the fields. “Duridia and Lamont have come.”
“I know this.”
“They have pledged fealty to Aram.”
“I know this as well.” A hint of impatience entered his voice. “What is your need?”
How like Aram he is, she thought, blunt and impatient. Turning to look at him, she said, “Their armies came with many banners flying above them. They were beautiful. Lamont’s banners are especially impressive.”
He was silent for a moment but she could feel his eyes watching her from the darkness of the hood. “Are you asking the meaning of these banners?”
“No – well, yes; what do they signify?”
“They serve a logistical purpose and are carried into battle for the benefit of the commander.” Joktan spread the empty sleeves of his robe, as if directing her attention downward upon the floor of the veranda. “When an army is in the field, and engaged, banners of the various divisions and regiments are held high, indicating their deployment to the commander. In this way, he can know where they are upon the field in relation to their brethren, and if and how heavily they are engaged. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” She looked away again, toward the distant hills, wondering how to approach the subject for which she had summoned the ancient king to council. “There is another.”
“Another what, child?”
“Another flag – another banner. Just one, larger, and more prominent. Duridia has but one, and Lamont has but one.”
“Of course,” he stated shortly, “the standard.”
Ka’en frowned at him. “The standard?”
“A land’s flag, if you will,” he answered. “The symbol of its people.”
“I understand this, my lord; Wallensia has such a flag, though it seldom flies these days. And I suppose it might suffice, still –” Her frown stayed and was compounded by an expression of anxiety and regret. “Aram has no flag.”
“I see.” He understood her now. “Your husband is the man that all follow, yet he has no standard to wave proudly above his head?”
“This has nothing to do with his pride.” Her eyes grew sharp. “He cares nothing for such things.”
He went silent for another moment, then, “Ah, but you do.”
She lifted her chin. “Aram should have a standard.”
>
“He does have a standard, Ka’en.”
Her frowned deepened, but she said nothing, waiting for him to continue.
“His is more ancient than any, for it is my own – and that of my fathers. He is my son, after all.”
“I would see this standard, my lord, if you please,” Ka’en’s frown fled her face, replaced by cautious eagerness. “Where may it be found?”
He laughed then, but it was a quiet sound, and filled with sorrow. “Gone. It last flew ten thousand years ago, and was trampled into the earth near my body. It is gone,” he repeated.
“Oh –” She hesitated as her eagerness began slipping away. “I had hoped – I’m sorry, my lord, I didn’t know.” Her voice was barely more than a whisper. “It’s just that I had hoped –”
He bent toward her. “The pattern, however, is not lost, as long as I walk the earth. If you want Aram to possess a standard, you will have to make it yourself.”
She stared at him with wide eyes, her hope returning. “But I will do this gladly,” she declared. “If only you will describe it to me.”
“It’s simple enough – a red field, and in its center is the golden head of Boram the First.”
“Boram?”
“The first horse,” Joktan answered. “Florm’s grandfather.”
“The flag is red, with the golden head of a horse?”
“Ram designed it himself,” Joktan affirmed. “It was ever the royal standard of the kings of Regamun Mediar.”
“The royal standard –” Ka’en’s dark eyes brightened. “Will you tell me what it signifies?”
“I will. The red field stands for the bloodline of kings, and the head of Boram signifies the great alliance forged between Ram and the horse people – the first and greatest of all alliances.”
Kelven's Riddle Book Three Page 55
