Black River

by Peter Fugazzotto

BATTLE

  THE HORSES WERE useless.

  Shield could see this right away. Spear, Harad and Little Wolf, ahead of the others, had charged to meet the mud men but before they had closed the distance their horses foundered in deep mud. The beasts kicked and whinnied, eyes rolling back, as the mud men swung fists of stone and logs at them. Horses and riders were knocked to the ground.

  This was bad and it had barely even begun.

  The mud men reminded Shield of farmers cutting through a field with scythes, the easy measured step, the broad swings, the sudden drop of the horses to the earth like heavy grasses.

  "Damned warlock." Shield had leapt from his horse and shouldered a thick spear. "They are just going to run us over as if we were nothing."

  "Can't retreat and regroup can we?" said Pullo. He too had slid off his horse. The fat sergeant gnawed at his lower lip. He held sword and shield in front of his chest.

  The others from Lake's End gathered to Shield. Fear widened their young eyes. He could see that at any moment they would turn. They looked to him to lead.

  "We'll never defeat them," said one of them.

  "They're strong but they lumber," said Shield. "Off your horses. We move quick, flank them and penetrate through their mud with our spears."

  "Will that work?"

  "Do we have any other choice?"

  Then the time for words was over.

  A wall of mud men came at them.

  Within a moment, Shield was in the thick of it. The others stuck close to Shield, following in his footsteps as he cast his spear from his shoulder. The spear cut through the air and hit the leading mud man with a solid thud. Wood rent beneath the iron head of the spear. The mud man howled and grabbed at the spear shaft with both hands, wrenching it back and forth as if it were nothing more than a splinter.

  "Flank him. Take his legs out," called Shield.

  Pullo, good soldier that he was, did as he was ordered. He cut to the right, opposite Shield's break to the left. The mud man turned with Pullo.

  Shield, instead of flanking him, had gotten behind the creature. He grabbed a spear out of the hands of one of the young warriors.

  Shield had seen how the spear thrown had done little damage, so instead clutching it in both hands he ran forward and rammed the spear into the mud man's back, his full weight driving the iron head deep. It slurped into the mud, cracked wood, and nearly bounced out of his hands as it encountered stones. But then it finally slid into the flesh of the Northern warrior beneath.

  The mud man screamed and pitched forward. The mud and stones and pieces of wood and strips of peat sloughed from him. A young clansman lay on the ground, his body twisted in its final agony around the spear.

  Shield laughed, a release of his fear and an unfurling of his victory.

  Then mud and stone crashed into the side of his helmet and sent him sprawling. A weight against his spine pinned him into the soggy peat. He struggled against the pressure but was pushed deeper. So deep was his face into the soggy peat that he could not find air, the stagnant water masking him, sucking him down.

  He clawed at the ground. He tried to stretch his arms back to remove whatever it was that crushed him, but his fingers only came away with mud and twigs and smalls stones. His arms were not made to bend that way. His lungs spasmed. The weight lightened and then came down hard. His breath spurted out and then he inadvertently drew a breath.

  Gods, would he drown here in a dismal bog in the North?

  Then he was free, coughing, sputtering, rolling onto his back.

  Pullo was close by, caught between two mud men, deflecting blows with his shield, lashing out uselessly with his sword that could not penetrate the earthen armor of the charmed warriors.

  Shield spit and hacked mud from his throat. He pushed himself to his knees. Bending over the body of the fallen mud man, he wrenched his spear out of the corpse.

  It was chaos.

  They were horribly outnumbered. Perhaps a handful of the mud men had fallen, but a similar number of their own had fallen. Spear and Harad held their own, backs to each other. Urbidis fought in a clump of the young clansmen from Lake's End, but even as Shield watched them, one fell to a crushing blow from a mud man that bounced the poor youth off the soft earth, the snapping of his spine heard above the cries and the cutting of weapons. Vincius huddled by the horses, his small blade trembling in his hand as a mud man lumbered towards him. Eliode was nowhere to be seen. He wondered whether she had vanished into the mists wanting nothing to do with any of this, and then he saw her. Beyond the battle, at the foot of the stone tower, head tilted as if the warlock sang a ballad that she wanted to learn.

  Shield was suddenly filled with fear.

  Not simply a fear of death, but a fear that the whole of his last twenty years had been a fraud.

  What if these battles meant nothing? What if he died here, body being consumed by the bog, with no one to sing his song? What if this was where the Hounds ended? What if his destiny was the one that he had abandoned?

  On the tower, Birgid's eyes were dark, as if looking into another world.

  He lost a life with her. He never laid his eyes upon his only child. He had long ago avenged the death of his father.

  "I made a mistake," he muttered. "I gave up everything for nothing."

  Cradling the spear to his chest, he stood, tottered a moment, and then charged at the back of one of the two mud men that were attacking Pullo.

  He had to get to the tower. He had to save Birgid. Even if he died at her feet, with no one to sing his song, he needed to save Birgid.

  UNRAVELING

  ELIODE FELT IT unfurl through her ears. While the others saw the thinning of the fog, the charge of the clansmen, their fall and rise as mud men, the blows and the blood, she heard it all.

  At first, it was nothing. Then it was insubstantial. A gathering of the winds, the far off vibrations of living beings, a low rumble as of horses in the distance or the great sheets of ice creeping southward. It was the world coming together to one point, its essence being drawn out, lured as if by a fine silken thread, slow and continuous, until the thread itself thickened pulling the smallest parts of the world with it. A sound formed, a single distinct sound, not of any word still spoken but of a word forgotten, a word from when word and world were one.

  Then she heard it for what it was: the voice of Fennewyn, the warlock, who hungry for the paralyzing grief of Birgid, promised vengeance. He had stolen Eliode's mother from her. He stood atop the tower, arms apart from his hips, palms turned open to the world, his pale lips parted, the song of dark magic unfurling.

  She felt what was happening moments before it did. Her eyes confirmed as the words found anchors and materialized in the world, the fog dispersing, the surge of blood in the clansmen who stormed across the peat bog, the sudden twisting in their intestines, the cold tendrils of mud threaded by dark magic slipping through the veil of their skin and into the branches of their veins, the rise of the men of the earth.

  What she saw before she heard was the movement of Shield, the Hounds, the men of Lake's End, the Dhurmans.

  Spears were hurled, swords flashed against the sky, and the heavy arms of mud and stone swung.

  "Can you hear the words?" she asked.

  The Apprentice Chronicler had fallen off his horse with the rush of the others to battle. He crouched on his knees, the end of his cloak and cuffs of his silk shirt black with the muck of the bog. His eyes rolled; his teeth ground. "Of course, I hear them, witch. Every single word."

  "Unravel them," she said.

  "What?"

  "Unravel the words. Take them apart. Counter dark with light."

  "What are talking about?"

  "Do you not know the ways of the words?"

  "I have to destroy the warlock, the witch, everything that is evil up in this forsaken land."

  "I cannot hear the words clearly. But you can?"

  "Yes, witch."

  "Then unravel them."

&nbs
p; "I don't know how."

  "Then what is it that you do? What kind of warlock are you?"

  His laughter danced across the bog. "I take your words."

  She shook her head. "If you can hear them, you can unravel them."

  "And when I cannot take the words, when my quill is lost, my paper sodden, my patience gone, I kill you. I take your tongues."

  He sprang up from the ground, a thin blade in his fist.

  The words slipped out of her lips, words formed in reflex, words that lived below thought. She saw the giant fist of mists gather and felt it as if it were her own hand as it pounded against the Xichil's chest. He flew back the lengths of two men crumpling in a ball at the feet of the abandoned horses.

  She would need to do it alone. She would need to pass through the fighting men and get close enough to hear the words that Fennewyn spoke. Then she could unravel all that he created.

  CHANGE

  GYRN WAS NOT among the first wave of Painted Men to clash with the small band that assaulted the stone tower of Fennewyn.

  Up until the last moment, Gyrn had thought that he would have been by Birgid's side. That had been his charge so he had not expected it to change. He did not want to leave her side. He wanted to protect her from the swords of the Dhurmans, the spears of the other clans, against anything that might threaten her, even Fennewyn himself.

  His loyalty had shifted. He could not put a finger on when it had done so but it had definitely shifted. He had bonded himself to Fennewyn with his word and he knew that the breaking of that oath would forever blacken his name, his clan, his family. But was an honorable name worth more than never returning to his wife? What use was it to die at the foot of the tower, if there was no hope to return? If his bond tied him to the warlock forever, he was as good as dead.

  Gyrn wondered whether he had entered in the underworld when he bonded himself to Fennewyn. He had helped slaughter a legion. He had seen men united with mud and stone. He had witnessed the dead rise.

  If these were not the things of nightmares, what was?

  There was no end in sight to it. Fennewyn would not be content simply to win back the North, and to reclaim the territory north of the Black River. He spoke that lie and those words brought Birgid and the best of the swords to his side, but Gyrn saw what the warlock wanted: revenge and blood in the Northlands.

  Fennewyn had ambushed the Dhurman cohort with the express purpose of drawing more Dhurmans deeper in the North. He wanted to force them to march and to suffer and then when they were nearly broken, raise their own dead against them. What crueler fate than to face fallen comrades?

  Gyrn had shown no outer appearance of change, but as the clansmen gathered, ready to repel the small party that came to the stone tower, the Painted Man knew that he would fight for Birgid. When the time came for him to kill Fennewyn and help her escape, he would.

  He did not need her to ask him again.

  Gyrn had already planned their escape. He would stay by Birgid's side during the entire battle and when chaos rose to its greatest point, he would whisk her away. The conjured mists would be gone. Fennewyn and his warriors would be focused on the attackers. Gyrn and Birgid would be able to strike a clear path to the west. Once far enough away, they would be free of Fennewyn's grasp. Even if trackers were sent after them, the Painted Man would deal with it. He trusted his spear and sword to see them to the edge of the Whale Road.

  But all that changed when the battle started. Fennewyn sent him with the others to the entrance of the stone tower while the warlock prodded Birgid to the rooftop.

  There was no room to turn back into the dark passages of the tower. No time to tear himself away from the other clansmen. There was nothing to do but to play his role and wait.

  When the song of the warlock released the mists, he charged with the flood of warriors, swept up in the blood curdling war cries that leapt from their lips.

  Even so, he lagged. He was not the first to have blade meet flesh.

  Instead, he stumbled. The others stumbled alongside him. The turning of Fennewyn's song changed. Gyrn lost his feet beneath him and pitched forward into the mud. Icy tendrils burst against his skin and he could feel the seep of the cold, penetrating into flesh, needles of ice in his veins condensing at his center. For a moment, he thought that he had been struck down by dark magic.

  Then his core felt as if it were a magnet drawing mud and stone and stick to him. The next thing he knew he was rising, guided not by his own mind, but by the song, words that wove into the fabric of his mind, words that drove his lumbering feet, propelled his new grotesque body, and made his hands smash the heads of the invaders.

  Fennewyn controlled him like a puppet.

  He was lost in the blood and the screams and the blades when the other voice came to him. It was the wind whispering through the grasses. It was water splashing against stones in a brook cutting through a field of green. It was the song of birds high in the branches where the sun warmed the leaves. It was Birgid and her voice separated Gyrn from Fennewyn's enchantment.

  While the warlock's armor of mud and stone still clung to Gyrn, he now controlled his body again.

  So he walked away from the battle, over bodies, past a girl of the clans whose eyes saw only the tower. Then he was at the horses but they were skittish, eyes wide at the terror that he was. He reached for them, trying to calm one. If he could get two of them and return to the tower, he and Birgid could escape.

  But the horses were terrified and a dark man of the South, curly haired, holding a thin blade, cowered in the muck and the mud.

  Birgid's voice came to Gyrn. "He will kill me."

  Gyrn looked at the little man and knew what he had to do.

  REFUSAL

  BIRGID SAW DEATH everywhere.

  For a moment she thought that her knees would buckle, but she steadied herself on the stone merlons that formed the teeth of the battlement on the top of the tower.

  A Painted Man lay in blood-rivered mud. One of the young warriors from Lake's End sat on the ground trying to push his intestines back into his belly. Shouts and curses danced between the blows of spear and fist. Bodies filled the grasses.

  Fennewyn's song was thick in the air. It drove the mud men relentlessly. Yet even as his words of magic drifted out of his mouth, he spoke to her.

  "Raise the fallen," he said.

  "Our days are over," she said.

  Fennewyn's pale lips trembled and he returned to his song, the song that drove the men of the earth to such savagery. Perhaps she could stop him but she doubted that she could do it with her words and even then, what? Would he just unfurl his words at her? Or would he cast her from the top of the tower?

  The warlock was old, well beyond the years of a warrior and no true warrior even when he was younger, but she had felt his grip on her wrist. He had strength of tendon and sinew, not of muscle. Even though he was smaller than she was, he would be able to control her.

  Was it enough for Birgid to do nothing? She was not causing the harm. She was not the one creating an army of dark magic. Or did she need to take a stand? What was it that she truly wanted? How would Fionn be avenged by defeating this small party?

  How would a raised army drive the Dhurmans from the North? The force of arms had failed in the past. The men of the clans, Shield most especially, had not been able to defend their homeland.

  Could a dying land ever return to glory?

  Fennewyn's words seeped out around the flush of the song. "Raise the fallen. Turn them against themselves. In this, victory. The North will rise."

  She saw the vast valleys of heather, the grassy rugged cliffs, the dismal bogs, and the mountains stretching forever in the distances. "We are a dying people," she said. "What we do here will never bring us back."

  "I want revenge. I want them to pay."

  "I have nothing for you, Fennewyn."

  He struck her with his palm, catching her soundly across the back of the head and she fell to the cold stones. Mos
s grew in the spaces between the stones, and the surface of the stones were pitted with unimaginable age, testament to those who called these lands home long before the memory of the clans.

  Were the clans the remnants of what once was? Were they a people dead long ago?

  Birgid refused to rise. Instead, she kept her face pressed to the stones and let words fall from her lips. But she did not create the words that the warlock wanted her to sing. She would never sing those words again. Instead, she sang for the Painted Man, for Gyrn. She sang so that her words cut through the chaos of Fennewyn's words. She did not have what it would take to shed the mud and stone from him. She could not unravel the warlock's magic. That was something that she was never good at.

  Instead, she sought Gyrn's mind so that he could recover his own will.

  But in that maze of words and minds, she found another. She found Vincius. In him, she saw something more black than the heart of Fennewyn. She saw one who only wanted to kill and would never be satisfied in it. He had broken himself. He had betrayed his own, and now singularly he sought to kill both her and Fennewyn. And Eliode, her sweet Eliode.

  Birgid found Gyrn. "He will kill me."

  She let her words spill forth to give Gyrn the strength he would need, even though she already knew that he would do anything for her. She had won him over in the time that they had spent together during these many days.

  Then she heard her own words and Fennewyn's words. It was if they both sang their songs into a dark tunnel and the words bounced back at them. Rather than coming back as hollow echoes, they came reversed, fragmented, and cobbled together. It was their words but it was not their words. Birgid could feel the magic tearing away: her control over Gyrn, the earthen armor falling off the clansmen, the strength in which Fennewyn cloaked his frail body.

  A voice unraveled the words that the warlock and witch had cast.

  The last syllable that she sung stuck in her throat, causing the air to drain from her lungs. She could not stop that last syllable. She was cursed with it. She could not close her mouth. Her lungs tightened and shrunk, her throat rose, and her stomach sucked in. She could not stop exhaling. She could not gather a new breath.