Black River

by Peter Fugazzotto

  "I stand for myself."

  "You are bound to me, to Dhurma."

  He shook his head. "I am going east. To Birgid." He climbed onto his horse.

  "Who?" asked the Apprentice Chronicler.

  "Birgid?" asked Spear. "You'd return to her after all this time? You're more of a fool than I thought. You know what she is, don't you?"

  "What is she?" asked Vincius.

  "I am done with this servitude," said Shield. "I am done with Empire. I am returned to the North, to my past."

  "You may not like what you find," said Spear. "Your dream of the North is a lie. The North dies, day by day. Maybe it could have been different. If we would have fought back, if we would have banded together instead of drawing knives on each other, but it doesn't matter any more. Those days are lost."

  "I am going to Birgid."

  "No," said Vincius. "We go North or I will not pay you and the Hounds."

  "Give my coin to Spear, for his new North, for his grandchildren." Shield turned his horse and descended down the crest and towards the wide plains and distant forests of the east. Harad and Patch cast one look at their companions and then turned their horses to follow their leader.

  "Always running away," called Spear. "Everyone looks up to you like you're some great hero. But I know who you are, Shield Scyldmund. You're a coward. Always running away. But you'll come back. You always do."

  BLOOD PRICE

  URBIDIS LAY HIDDEN in the tall grasses, one hand clamped over the grubby boy's mouth. He was covered in blood, his own, the boy's and that of the villagers. The boy had long ago given up struggling but the Dhurman commander needed to make sure that the Painted Men on the trail below were not alerted to his presence before the time of his choosing.

  The escape from the village that morning had gone all wrong. But then again, how could he have imagined it happening smoothly? The boy finally had come to the pen, lured by the promise of the gift of the reed horse. It had been too much for him to resist and Urbidis felt a twang of regret even as his hand caught hold of the boy's wrist.

  The boy's screams had brought out the villagers. The old woman urged one of the young warriors to shoot arrows at the Dhurman, but the Northman refused. The woman argued to no avail. He heard the word for fire and he was struck with the horror of being trapped inside the pen while flames consumed him.

  The old woman had thrown up her hands and stalked towards the pen. Urbidis felt behind him for a bone fragment but found only skulls. The woman neared. He kicked a foot behind him and felt the roll of a femur beneath it, but it was whole, not fragmented. He stretched his foot out again. The old woman was nearly upon them when his foot found a shattered bone and pulling it to his free hand, he thrust it through the bars so that the sharp end drew blood from the boy's chest near his neck.

  This had stopped the old woman. The other villagers surged forward only to immediately step back as Urbidis pressed the blade deeper and the boy howled.

  The boy had more value than he had expected.

  Cajoling words and the deepening twist of the bone shard made the boy lift the latch. Urbidis was free.

  But as he squeezed out of the pen, he loosened his grip and in that instant the boy ran. The woman and a handful of villagers had rushed him, blades and spears in hand. He should have died right there, outnumbered, weakened, with only a small shard of bone for a weapon.

  But he was a soldier, a man hardened on the battlefield, and more than that, he was desperate – for his freedom, for revenge, and to return to his wife and daughters.

  If he were ever asked about the fight in the village, he knew he would never be able to accurately recount what had happened. It was a blur, some things remembered, most lost, the events unfolding apart from his consciousness.

  What he did remember was the bone shard gashing a bloody smile in a villager's neck, a spear pinning the old woman's thigh to the ground, a crude sword snatched off the ground, screams, blood, pain, and stumbling back towards the wood pile as the villagers swelled. Then he had the boy again by the arm and they were on a horse, riding hard, as the black skies opened and the flood of rain swallowed up Urbidis and the boy.

  Now he lay in the grasses, the boy in his embrace. The exhausted horse was hobbled in a cleft of stones on the far side of the small hill on which they lay. The rain still fell hard, and below them on a narrow and muddy trail rode the two Painted Men. Their blue woad was nearly gone at this point leaving their skin gray and streaked. The arm of one was bound tightly beneath his cloak. The leg of the other was bloody, the skin sickly swollen. But still they came for him.

  He pulled himself to his knees and pressed his finger to his lips. The boy started to rise but the soldier pressed him back to the ground.

  Then Urbidis was running through the grasses. The Painted Men saw him only as he was coming on them. He was a big man, a lumbering man but he charged without fear. Even as he closed the distance with the two Northmen, fear rose. Not fear of death, but a fear that he would never make it back to his daughters and his wife.

  He expected more of the Painted Men, but they fell quick to his blade. He yanked the first one from his horse. The man bounced hard on the side of his bound arm, struggling to draw his sword. Urbidis hacked his hand, nearly taking it off. The other clansman wheeled his horse about, spear leveled. Urbidis stepped inside of the thrust and jerked the spear dragging the man off the horse. The man's face closed in pain and Urbidis slashed between neck and shoulder. The first Painted Man screamed staring at the profusely bleeding stump where his hand had been, but the commander of Cullan town ignored him, grabbing the reins of both horses and leading them back up the hill.

  The boy cowered in the grasses, lips trembling, eyes to the bloody blade of the naked sword.

  "Find food," Urbidis said. "We'll take all three horses back to Cullan."

  The boy lifted a recently killed marsh fowl for the folds of the saddlebag. Half an hour later, Urbidis turned the plucked bird over a small fire that he made the boy build. His mouth watered as the skin crisped and the fat dripped and hissed flaming into the fire.

  "Who was the old woman?" Urbidis asked. During their time together, the commander had discovered that someone had taught the boy something other than his clan tongue. The one-handed Painted Man had not moved for close to fifteen minutes. Urbidis would have to go down there before dark and finish him off if need be, and see if he had anything on him worth keeping.

  "Grandmother."

  "Your grandmother?"

  "Village's grandmother."

  "Why did they care if I killed you?"

  The boy shrugged. "My father was a great warrior, killed many dirty Dhurmans."

  "Where is he now?"

  "Gone. Went to fight Dhurmans beyond the Black River. He will come back."

  "How long ago did he go?" asked Urbidis handing the boy a leg from the bird.

  "Six moons ago." The boy held the meat in both hands and tore at it with his teeth. He could not have been more than eight or nine.

  Urbidis remembered the raiding party of Northman that his patrol had discovered and ambushed. His men planted the raiders' heads on wooden stakes on the north side of Oron's Belt. That seemed a lifetime ago, during the period when the clansmen increased their harassment of the settlers near the border. He recalled crossing the river and seeing the heads, months later, eyes pecked out, skin torn and desiccated, more bone than flesh.

  "What is Cullan like?" asked the boy.

  "Hopefully still in one piece."

  "You take me there?"

  Urbidis nodded. The boy had value. It was better to bring him along in case the villagers happened upon him, and then when they got back to Cullan, he would decide what to do with the boy. Urbidis supposed he could keep him around the fort to do chores or sell him to one of the merchants. They were always looking for orphans. He imagined what it would be like to bring the boy back to Vas Dhurma, to surprise his family with a small boy, but then he thought otherwise.
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br />   It would be better to get rid of the boy once he got back to Cullan. He would need to summon a full legion or two and then head back north across the Black River. No use in keeping the boy with him then, especially since Urbidis planned on returning to the boy's village and burning it to the ground.

  The next morning they rode south, a gathering of crows rising as they passed the corpses of the Painted Men. The sky remained heavy and dark, and a cold wind rushed at them from the west from well beyond the Whale Road. The boy was wrapped in a fur robe, dark with the blood of the fallen riders. The boy shivered.

  "Are there other clans people in Cullan?" asked the boy.

  "What stories do they tell you of us?"

  "You came from the south, from dried out, dead lands. Your soldiers have no hearts. They are taken out before they are sent into battle so it is easier for them to kill the children and mothers of the North. Vas Dhurma is an angry, hungry god and eats everything around it. It ate its children and all the trees and drank all the water and that is why you come North and every day you eat up another piece of the North until in the end there will be nothing left, except an empty world. But we retreated across the Black River and know that as long as you stay beyond it that there will be a chance for the North to rise again, for the world to recover from Dhurma."

  "I guess we all have stories to tell."

  In the middle of the day, an hour or so after they had stopped to eat and rest the horses, they came upon a field of dead Dhurmans, the ones who had not come with him. Urbidis saw it exactly for what it was.

  It was his remaining men, the lives of those who he had been charged with protecting. He had failed.

  They must have come after him, either to investigate why his party had gone missing or to engage with the warlock and witch.

  It did not matter why they came. What mattered was what happened to them.

  Swarms of flies and screaming crows rippled into the air as he walked among his men. They had been slaughtered. Necks were snapped, limbs severed and chests caved in. They were still in their armor and their swords and spears lay scattered about them.

  Were these the last of his men? Was Cullan emptied out, overrun now by Northmen like Spear who always hovered in the shadows waiting for his opportunities to seize advantage, to become the lord of a little kingdom of insignificance?

  Tears came to the eyes of the commander.

  Even if he wanted to, he could not give them a proper burial. There were too many of them and too little wood to start anything other than a small fire. Their souls would not ride twisting smoke to the heavens above. No. They would fester and rot, and bloated with death would sink into the muck of the swampy peat. They would be torn apart piece by piece by the relentless crows.

  He walked among them, saying their names, remembering where they came from, the individual misfortunes, whether of action or birth, that had found them exiled at the edge of Empire. They were the men no longer of use to Dhurma, but they were his men, and he remembered each of them fondly.

  Pullo the Xichilian was not among them. Urbidis widened his search but there were no more bodies. Instead he found signs in the soft earth: the blurred tracks of giants, a spot where a single man had stood apart from the death, and hoof prints racing north.

  Some had survived. They had headed north. Why not back to Cullan?

  "What is north, boy?"

  The boy shrugged, looking off in that direction at the low craggy hills, the dark wall of clouds.

  "This warlock? He is north?"

  "Fennewyn? He lives in one of the old towers. My father said it was a foul place. Grandmother says he will save the world."

  Urbidis looked into the pressing dark to the north. Light seemed to be drawn into and swallowed by the wall of clouds. Without a word, he remounted his horse and turned north.

  RETURN

  THEY TRAVELED FOR days in the lands where they had been born.

  The three Hounds had returned and Shield finally felt at home.

  In their travels below the Black River, in Cullan town, and even south of that in the scattered villages, Shield had felt as if they had been visiting another land, no different than the back hills of Dhurma or the isolated oases of Hopht. In these places, he was still an outsider, a sword of Empire, pledged to the culture that consumed all others.

  But now as they were crossing hills of grass and heather, Shield felt free for the first time in as long as he could remember.

  "She sent word for you?" asked Patch.

  "A boy came and said that Birgid needed me."

  "And you think she will still be at Lake's End?"

  "The boy said nothing more, so what else would I think?"

  "What will she look like after all this time?" asked Harad. "Do you think she married?"

  Patch shot a sharp look at his companion.

  Shield wondered too what the passage of time would reveal.

  The land was familiar. The sky was expansive, swirling with black-hearted clouds, the edges of which unfurled and dissolved. Rain came and went – some times a light sheet that misted through the gaps in their clothes to touch skin, other times icy pelting that pricked cheeks and backs of hands, and more often than not a deluge that shrunk the distances to the few yards around them.

  Shield was cold the whole time. What a difference it had been in Vas Dhurma or Hopht where their bodies were always damp with sweat. While there, he had hated that heat and fondly remembered the invigorating cold of the North. But now that he had returned, he was uncomfortably cold.

  He was not sure what had changed. Did he lose that toughness he once had? Or was it merely the passing of the years and his body's weaknesses rising? Or maybe it was colder than he remembered.

  After their days of travel, they were close to Lake's End. He dismounted to give his horse a break in anticipation of the final climb and to stretch his legs. They had ridden more than he had liked and was accustomed to. The waving blades of grass left wet lashes across his thighs. Then they climbed a narrow rocky trail towards a pass in the high hills. Behind them, the wide grassland swept across a valley. He had felt that as they moved through those grasses that it was as if they sailed across a smooth sea.

  How things had changed from when he had last passed through this valley.

  The world was his then.

  They had gathered so many years ago, the clans for the summer games. He and his Hounds, boys more than men he realized now in hindsight, had done well at the games, almost as well as the scarred men. Led by Harad, they had nearly dominated all with the wrestling, throwing boy after boy and man after man into the hard dirt of the wide circle, egged on by the whoops of the elders and the smiles of the maidens. In archery, they had done fair, not as well as the older men who spent their days deep in the woods, but in the middle of the pack, a respectable showing for ones as young and as impatient as they were. They had excelled in riding, bodies craned forward, fingers laced in manes, racing to grab the silks amidst the jostle of other riders. This is where the Hounds had proven themselves to the clans.

  In that euphoria of victory, in the recognition that the Hounds, still unscarred, were what the future held for the people of the North, Shield Scyldmund, latest in a line of great chiefs, had taken his band of young roughs, and ridden off to win their scars, and to eventually come back men of the clan.

  And now, near twenty years later, the Hounds had returned. Three out of nearly two dozen. Scarred, older, and uncertain. Returned but in what way?

  They crested the hill and stopped at an area that had been cleared by generations of horses' hooves.

  He had remembered sitting his horse in this very spot years ago, turning his mount for a glance back at the lake, at the village where he had left Birgid, where he had made a promise.

  The surface of the lake rippled beneath the wind, the dark sky reflected in dull steel. At the far side of the lake, a great forest rose, untouched by axe, home of wild creatures preserved for the hunters of the tribe. The
forest extended far to the north before meeting with the distant snow tipped mountains. He had always wanted to travel through that forest, to lose himself in the trees that existed since the time of the gods, and to climb those mountains. They lured him. It was a place where old warriors went for their last great journey, never to return to the world of man. But a warrior had to survive long enough to earn such a journey and few lived long enough to see great-grandchildren, much less grandchildren.

  The thought of a family brought Shield back to the exposed ridge top, the cold wind biting beneath his furs, his broken and worn down body. It brought him back to Birgid and his promise.

  He had promised her a family and he had meant it. Over that unforgotten summer, they had come to know each other. Her every word pulled him to her, even when she did nothing more than talk of the weather, the hunt or a sick child in the village. There was a magic that extended from her to him, that magic that happened between two people.

  He found every chance he could to be near her. He watched her walk the edges of the lake looking for herbs. He pretended to inspect the horses of other clansmen so he could hear her laughter near the cook fires. He talked to her mother so he could see what it would be like to be part of the family.

  She was drawn towards him as well. In the midst of the games, he would see her at the edge of the crowd, her eyes on him, her eyes turning away when caught by his gaze. She brought him dried meats before he went out to the hunt, and she was there waiting when he and the others returned.

  Eventually the desire led to boldness and they talked late into the night just at the edge of where the campfire light danced. He walked the lake with her, holding her basket as she bent for herbs and roots. Then they found themselves in each other's arms, far from the camp, bedded in the long fragrant grasses beneath the spinning prickle of stars.

  What he promised he did because he meant it. He did not promise it simply to have her. He wanted her forever. He wanted to have her children. He wanted her love.

  But then he left, and he never came back. Until now.