Black River

by Peter Fugazzotto

  Spear spoke from the shelter of the house. "There are no cowards among the clans. We sort them out early. If you want, I'll drag him back."

  Pullo cursed. "Five swords to me. We'll find him."

  "This is not our mission," said Vincius.

  "This is not something a Chronicler could understand." The big sergeant and his five men slipped off into the rain, spears in hand, armor flashing against the flickering flames.

  Spear turned to the Chronicler. "Things out here, out here in the real world, are not so clean. Better get used to that. Everything doesn't fit neatly into place."

  ESCAPE

  URBIDIS STUMBLED AND ran, picked his bloody self off the ground. The commander of the fortress at Cullan was lost in the thick mists, not knowing where he ran, whether further into the North or towards the safety of the Black River. But he ran even without direction because if he stopped the Painted Men would capture him again and he could only imagine what they would do to him when they found him.

  The ground suddenly gave out beneath his feet. He tumbled over heather and grass and stone, rolling over his arms and sides until he crashed to a stop in a small stream at the bottom of a ravine. He paused to catch his breath and fill his mouth with water. The icy cold of it felt like a needle plunged through his brow. His hands found beetles and he shoved them in his mouth. There might be fish in here or frogs. He was hungry, but he needed to keep moving. He could not let them catch him, so he cupped more water to his lips and drank deeply until the water fooled the gnawing hunger in his belly.

  He was guided by the flow of the stream. Streams fed rivers, rivers fed into the Black River or the sea. If he followed water, he would mark distance. Each step would carry him from the dark heart of the North.

  The sea would not be good. It was rugged and vicious, so fierce that the vessels of the Dhurman fleet rarely ventured as far north as the mouth of the Black River. He had heard stories of the people who lived there, beyond the Whale Road, a people wilder than the clans of the North.

  But he could survive.

  If he was lucky, this stream would take him to the Black River and from there back to Cullan, his fortress, his men, those that remained of his charge. There he could send word back to Vas Dhurma and the warlock would learn the wrath of Empire.

  His mind drifted back to home and his wife. Giulia had always begged him to take her and their daughters to the meadows of green south of Vas Dhurma. He had promised he would, that they would make a day trip of it: hire a wagon, load up the back with bread and wine and grapes and meats, find a warm knoll overlooking the wide slow river. She dreamed of a life away from the city. She wanted to be on a farm, closer to nature

  He laughed. Here in the north, great nature had another thing for him.

  No idyll, simply survival.

  And survival at its most basic level meant moving forward. There was no choice but to take step after step in the cold water and along the muddy bank.

  To return home he would have to elude the Painted Men.

  Earlier in the day, he had caught his captors by surprise when the invisible sun had begun its descent. They had been pushing northwards throughout the day. At one point, spirals of smoke indicated a village to the east but the Painted Men after a brief conversation continued north veering to the west as if they were afraid of being spotted by the clan that held that territory. They all but ignored their prisoner, stopping every few hours to let him fall to his knees and drink from a puddle or gnaw at the remains of what they threw at his feet.

  During these long past days, his mind had drifted. He had increasingly wondered whether he were still alive. He wondered if he had not taken a blade through the heart in the middle of the battle. He had imagined he was dead and that this endless journey was one through the underworld.

  But he knew he was alive, because he wanted to escape.

  So that day as they dragged him behind their horses, he intentionally stumbled where the path was littered with small stones, his hands finding one with a sharpened edge. As he trailed behind them, he sawed at the thick rope.

  He only had one chance for this to work because when the end of the day came, they would find the gashed rope. If they did not kill him then and there, they would be sure to bind him twice as tight the next day, maybe even break his fingers so he could never again hold a stone.

  He made his escape as they were climbing a narrow ravine trail that ran alongside a wide stream. As he followed behind them, he let the rope fall from his hands and then hurled the sharp stone as hard as he could at the rear of the horse. It panicked, bolting forward into the other horse. There was not enough room for two horses side by side on the trail and it leapt against the high side into scree. Its feet dug into the loose stone, desperately seeking purchase as its rider clung to its mane for his life, but it was in vain. The horse lost its footing and fell head over heels backwards, catching the other rider and horse, and they plunged down the steep embankment and into the creek bed in a pile of blood and bone.

  Urbidis was descending into the ravine to finish off the Painted Men when he saw them rising, bloody, disoriented, but with weapons in hand. The horses were done for: one dead and the other struggling to stand. His captors moved slowly, falling back into the surface of the creek, but rising again.

  Urbidis changed his mind. He was weaponless and they were still alive, injured but not so much so that they could not wield spear and sword, and he was tired and weak. So he climbed back on the trail and began to run, stumble, crawl. He had seen the look in their eyes. They would come after him.

  At first, he had hoped that they were too injured or simply mentally defeated and would not come after him. But an hour later as he sloughed across a long peat swamp, he turned to see them on a rise, small and distant behind him. They were coming and a price in blood would be paid.

  Then the rains came hard and though he at first cursed them, tired of their endless onslaught, he came to welcome them, realizing that they hid his passage, obscuring the distances so that the sight of his captors would be much less reliable and that they would have to track him with heads bent to the ground which would slow them.

  Now he stumbled along the creek bottom hoping to be led to the Black River and safety.

  He could sense the Painted Men. They were gaining ground.

  The creek closed up before him filling with brambles. He tried to climb the sides of the ravine but they were too steep and muddy. He would have to backtrack another ten minutes to where it was level and find a way out. But that would mean ten minutes closer to his trackers, that much closer to the bite of sword and spear. Was this where he would be forced to make his last stand?

  He peered into the brambles. If he got on his hands and knees and floated along the surface of the creek, he could find his way into the brambles. Thorns tore at his flesh. He ducked beneath the water and holding his breath surged forward. The brambles were thick overhead, too thick for him to rise to the surface, and the water moved too fast for his weakened body to reverse his way in the stream. His heart pounded wildly. He had no choice but to keep crawling forward, pressed against the bed of the creek.

  His chest began to heave. He needed air. There was nothing but the white swirl of water before his eyes and the press and tear of the bramble over his head.

  He thought of Giulia and his promise of a picnic along the river. He saw his daughters, hands reaching out for him, arms open, smiles wide. He could not clearly see their faces, could not remember them for what they actually looked like, other than a blank image of Dhurman girls, not his girls, but just girls in the broadest sense, featureless, nameless, welcoming him to them.

  Then his head burst to the surface and he was gasping at the air, sucking in deep breaths. He was through the bramble, on the other side.

  Before him lay a clan village.

  DECIMATED VILLAGE

  HARAD HAD RETURNED home.

  He rode separate from the other riders, some distance to the east, stoppin
g to survey the land from a small rise in the broad plan of heather and forest. The earth smelled right, damp, alive, metallic. The sky had mellowed, the dark ceiling of clouds giving way to a pale, colorless sky. Harad sat his horse in the midst of the greatness and could feel its distances, the bite of the cold wind, the moan through the grasses. This was home.

  They had set out that morning minus one. Pullo had returned before dawn with the armor and swords of Justio. Harad had expected the man to be brought back and publicly punished in front of the other men. He had expected the man to be bound to a tree, his clothes cut from him and a hundred lashes dropped across bare skin. That was the way of the Empire. That was how they kept fear in men and united them to face the blades of enemies.

  But Pullo and his five swords came back without the deserter. Perhaps the people of the island were not all that different from the people of the North.

  Then he thought of the Apprentice Chronicler. Little men like him, who fought with their tongues, who neatly kept their hair, who shaved their faces, who wore the finery that was best left for the women, those little men were not men of the clan, or at least not the warriors. Those men were the ones who drifted towards dark magic.

  How ironic, Harad thought, that a man who would be warlock here in the North, by virtue of his birth in the South, was a man who hunted warlocks. Strange were the ways of the world.

  The giant Northman took one last look down over the valley, and then kicked his horse towards the small column of soldiers, settling his horse in beside Shield and Patch.

  Their voices cut the air like the cries of crows.

  "You'd expect us to follow you into the underworld, wouldn't you?" asked Patch. "And we'd have no say in the matter at all, would we? Just follow you blindly."

  "I've never forced anything upon you, Patch. You've come willingly," said Shield.

  "What other choice have I had?"

  "Have I ever led you wrong?"

  "Have you ever led me right? Ever lead me towards the promised coin? And now this foolishness." The one-eyed man turned to Harad. "He's got other plans for us, this one does"

  "Then what are we doing here?" asked Harad.

  Patch laughed, his mouth stretching as if in pain. "His lost love. He has no intention of tracking down the warlock and securing our pay. No. He's off to find Birgid, to find his love that he left behind here so many years ago."

  Shield nodded ever so slightly. "I have been called to her. And that is where I will go."

  Harad remembered Birgid. How could a man not?

  He had known of her, as all of the Hounds had, for years. They saw her when the clans gathered every summer to share stories, to play the games and to trade. Every summer, the young woman attracted the eyes of the men, and the scorn of the women. What was it about her? The bodies of other women drew more stares. Others had more perfect beauty. But there was something about Birgid.

  Shield was the one she chose: the son of a great chief of the clans, a warrior from a deep line whose stories dominated the campfire at the gathering. His blood was of the original people, those that that had come to this land from far across the Western Seas, the ones who had rid the land of the great wolves, the ones upon whom the gods smiled.

  How could there be any other story except that Shield Scyldmund and Birgid Wordswallow would be one?

  Harad remembered sitting in the shadows of the fires, far from the elders, lingering with the other unscarred youth in the shadows. Shield sat close to the fire. He was scarred. He already had proven himself when the Bear People came for his father while the two of them were far east hunting the elk. The story at that time was unbelievable to Harad. He thought the story fabricated to build up the son of the chief, but now so many years later he knew what Shield was capable of.

  From the anonymity of the shadows of the fire, Harad too had stared at Birgid, unable to take his eyes off her as she sang the poems of their people. There was magic in her voice before any realized that she was a witch, a magic that lifted Harad out of his skin and transported him to the land of the Ice Giants and the great battles among the uncaring gods. With her song, he walked those fields of ice. Tears poured from his eyes when Myngryd took her last breath. Rage burst through his chest when he came upon the tower of the Ice Giants. Such was the power of her words, the deep draw of her dark mysterious eyes, those eyes that saw beyond this world.

  Her words were the same as Harad's, the common language of the people of the North. They were not of the ancient tongue, not the closely held words of power. They were the same words that he would use to talk to his brothers, to barter for food, and talk about the weather. But her words had a power that he never could have imagined before sitting in those shadows, entranced, transported.

  How tragic, thought Harad, that the man who had fallen in love with a woman of magic had spent the better part of his life hunting down witches and warlocks.

  Sergeant Pullo trotted his horse up along the three Northmen. His cheeks were red from the cold and his breath formed small clouds. "The village is here," he said pointing to distant blackened round houses. "I'll be relying on you. I don't know what we'll find there. So be prepared."

  They rode, closing the distance until they came to the woven willow fences that bordered the village. The fences, more to keep out animals and distract raiders than act as any real defense, had been knocked down. The small stream that ran through the clan village was blocked with detritus and had overflowed its banks, spreading wide, returning the land to bog and swamp. There were three roundhouses. They smoldered. The thatched roofs had burned. The stonewalls of one of the roundhouses had crumbled.

  At first, Harad saw no one and thought that the village had been abandoned, the inhabitants slaughtered or fled, but then he saw a head peek around one of the roundhouse walls, then another, until there were maybe a dozen clans people, eyes to the troop of men that suddenly filled their village.

  The clans people huddled together, wet beneath their fur cloaks, their red hair bedraggled and heavy with moisture. One man, a scarred warrior, towered among them, spear and shield in hand. His head was wrapped in a blood stained cloth, brown and wet. His eyes wandered and stared into the distances as if they could not focus. Around him the others flocked – old women, children. They stood so closely that the scarred warrior would not be able to wield spear and shield properly.

  But Harad saw that it did not matter. The man did not stand there defiant, ready to fight. He was ready to die. His eyes told the story. He would not – could not – lift spear and shield. The man had already given in to death and waited for it.

  If it were Harad coming here alone upon this, he would lift his spear to his shoulder and cast it through the other man's chest. A broken warrior was no longer a warrior. One could never walk into battle with fear, for to do so was to have lost already. Then the clan would have been Harad's to guide to another village, to leave them at the edge where they would beg, be taunted but eventually folded into the other village.

  But Harad rode with Dhurma. They did not understand the ways of the North. Their compassion would only mean suffering. Their grand gesture would mean a ghost occupying the body of a warrior, a soulless being wandering the peat bogs and the hills of heather.

  "What happened here?" asked Vincius, his voice cracking a bit as he raised it against the unnatural silence of the villagers.

  They would not speak at first. They crowded, staring at the riders, at the men in armor, at their fellow Northerners.

  Harad could see that they waited for blades to drop and spear points to plunge.

  Finally, an old woman, gap-toothed and leather-skinned, gave in to the haranguing of the Apprentice Chronicler.

  "Dark times have returned. Out of darkness and despair would come a greater darkness. They always sung of light coming out of the abyss. But I see only death."

  "Talk some sense, woman," said Pullo, tight on the reins of his skittish horse. "Dhurmans? Did you see Dhurman soldiers pass through h
ere? Men dressed like me."

  "They came drawn by the fire. We were all dead by then. They came and dark magic fell over us. My son he rose. All the men of the village rose to the song of the warlock and the witch. We are in the abyss."

  "Did any survive? Did you see a great man with a plumed helm?"

  "He was the last among them. The others all fell to rise again or ran off into the grasses."

  "Did he live? Did Urbidis get away?"

  The old woman nodded. "He survived. They pulled him down. I thought they would kill him, tear him to pieces like the others."

  Harad followed her eyes to where the stream had been damned up and overflowed. It was more than just wood and thatch that piled there. He could now see arms, heads, torsos, bodies torn asunder. A few of the soldiers from the fortress bent over and threw up. Harad tightened his lips and averted his eyes.

  "But he lives?" asked Pullo.

  "The warlock gifted him to some of the Painted Men, the clan of betrayers. They went towards their homelands." She pointed north and west out past the distant peaks.

  "And the warlock," said Vincius, "where is he?"

  The old woman cackled. "Over those hills," she said pointing east, "waiting, waiting for you to come, waiting all these long years he said. He told us to tell you that he would not be far, that it would be easy to find him. He is waiting."

  IN THE MISTS

  SPEAR WOULD HAVE preferred to have spent the cold night deep in the heather, away from the damned village, far from the rot of the corpses, hidden from the eyes of the survivors.

  But Pullo barked at his soldiers to set up their tents and a perimeter, to reconstruct the fallen fences, hoping to give his men a bit of rest and the sense of safety before whatever encounter with the warlock and his army might lie ahead.