The Lady of the Snowmist (War of the Gods on Earth Book 3)

by Andrew J Offutt

  The mask gazed at him. “How much distrust we have taught you.”

  Jarik forewent comment on that. “Can you carry me to the smokehouse behind the house of Kirrensark himself?”

  “Aye.”

  Thus spoke the child, and as Jarik started to turn toward Jilain to say he knew not what before they went into battle, Snowmist caught his hand and he was gone amid the rushing and the floating of his stomach, and then he staggered a bit. That was because his feet had impacted earth; he was beside Kirrensark’s smokehouse. All about him the crisp air was chill and full of shouts and the sounds of preparations for battle.

  For a moment the diminutive figure in the mask of silver looked at him, and Jarik thought that She was going to say something, deliver some injunction or word of encouragement. He needed none. Perhaps his face showed that, and perhaps She merely decided that all had been said. She vanished and he knew She had returned into Cloudpeak, for Jilain.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Railing against war makes as much sense to me as a man screaming in reproach of his own testicles. War is a fact. I believe it is as much a part of man as sex. Creation and destruction are sprung from the same pod and grow into a single tree — Man. No war would be like no sex — an affront to one’s self a gouging out of the eyes because the color of daylight displeases.”

  — Jeffrey Weinper, Pfc.

  K.I.A. Vietnam, 8.iv.68

  Jarik thrust himself away from the furze-roofed smokehouse and stepped out of its shade. Into the clamor and frenetic bustle of a community preparing for war he prowled, a wolf come among them with cold blue eyes and a sword like night itself. A child ran dodging past. She held an eight-foot spear close to the head. The shaft’s end dragged and bounced behind. Someone’s leather jerkin hung on her, falling past knees to chubby calves.

  On an errand for father, Jarik mused, just as a harried woman in long dirty-blue skirt rushed from the other side of the smokehouse. She narrowly missed Jarik without ever seeing him. Behind her she half-dragged a squalling child of three or so. In her other hand she lugged a well-made bucket bristling with arrowheads. The mess of age-greyed homespun over her shoulder, Jarik realized, would become bandages.

  He did not know who she was. He knew few people of Kirrensark-wark, and could identify perhaps as many as four women here — two of them of Kirrensark’s family.

  A boy of twelve or so, already shouldery and snakehipped, dagger-girt, his head like a haystack sprouting a nose, saw the man in black mail.

  “It’s Jarik!” he shouted, pointing.

  Someone else called out and also pointed, and soon even cheers rose amid the excitement at his unaccountable reappearance. Children wanted to run to the hero Jarik with his Black Sword, so long gone from among them. Most were barked or screeched at by this or that adult, who ordered them to continue with their errands. So many people on so many errands, their directions often conflicting so that constantly their paths crisscrossed, imparted to the community the chaotic aspect of a kicked anthill.

  Mothers sought to hold back smaller children, the while they wiped at drooping strands of hair. Already they were harried and sweaty, the women of Kirrensark’s wark. Jarik sought as assiduously to ignore them, for he did not care to be bothered. Children were not among his favorite creatures, if he had any.

  Besides, he kept fancying that he saw potential little Jariks.

  The Hawkers have come to Kirrensark-wark, he thought, at those who once came a-hawking from Kirrensark-wark to Tomash-ten ofAkkharia. I wanted to fight them then, even at age eight. This time I will. For Her and the Forces of Man and these children, not Kirrensark or all his wark. Let these invaders with their pointy helms create no orphan Torsys or orphan Jariks among the children of this wark!

  He came face to face with a helmeted Delath Berserker then, at a nearness of four paces of a tall man. Bronze seemed to glow with its own dull fire on Delath’s age-darkened leather jerkin. Their eyes met and both men stopped. Bright eyes, with no morbriner rage on them as yet. Orphan and his foster-mother’s slayer; Oak’s slayer and thus midwife to his strange birth within Jarik. Seconds passed, and each was long, while the two stood studying each other.

  Delath was waiting; Jarik was deciding.

  “Jarik,” the white-hair said at last. His voice was flat. Jarik heard neither warmth nor deliberate coldness. He thought that Delath’s helmet, drilled to accommodate its decoration of an oblong of fly-housing amber, looked silly.

  “We have wondered about you, Jarik Blacksword.”

  Jarik, too, spoke natural words. “We have visited long with the god,” he said, knowing that he stated the manifestly obvious. It occurred to him just then that gods were gods and mortals were mortals, and sometimes among mortals the manifestly obvious was either necessary or a human courtesy. “Then She saw this coming attack.”

  “Ah.” After a silent moment Delath added, “She will be coming?”

  Jarik evaded. “There are only three shiploads of attackers, Delath. Can they require more than you, and Jilain, and me?”

  Delath gazed at him a moment before glancing about. “Jilain is here, too?”

  “She will be.”

  And again they were silent — amid a vast almost manic disruption, negation, denial of silence. Staring at each other. At last Jarik’s chest swelled and fell in a long sigh. Linked chain rustled. He had decided, about him and Delath.

  “She will be. We will take them, battle-brother.”

  Delath nodded, and nodded again. “We may never be friends,” he said, knowing what he had heard, knowing the decision Jarik had come to. “But I am your brother, warrior.”

  “Ah!” It was a woman’s voice that intruded. “They come flying, those eerie birds that flap not their wings.”

  Delath’s wife, Jarik remembered — or was it his sister? They had been introduced on that festive evening of homecoming. It seemed two or three nights ago, that night over two weeks past. Jarik glanced up, following her skyward glare.

  Two of the birds of sorcery came in from the ships, on unflapping wings. They glinted, for the sun was high and bright on this cool day. The birds of them. Of the Others. The Forces of Destruction. They came to spy, to reconnoi-ter, and Jarik Blacksword knew it. Of a sudden it occurred to him to disguise his presence here.

  “I am Jarik,” he said to the woman, who had as much silver as snow in her hair as copper and straw, and who was girthy as a rainbarrel. “Will you loan me your cloak, now, and quickly?”

  With a look that showed incomprehension without question, she complied.

  Jarik muffled himself. The birds came soaring over, looming above flowing shadows like night-demons that soiled the land. A god-bird’s shadow fell onto the round face of a white-haired child, and was gone from it. Jarik was right about the hawks’ purpose; they made no attack. Nor did they espy the Black Sword in Kirrensark-wark, or Jarik either. And the three ships swept in toward the land while Kirrensark’s people prepared like impossibly noisy ants.

  This anthill shall not be kicked, a man thought, and under a woman’s cloak a knuckly hand closed on the red pommel of a sword of night.

  Jarik made his way toward the edge of the brow of land fronting the sea. He paced, hooded now, voluminously cloaked, a prowling wolf among them with glacial eyes. All around him people were readying for their resistance, for none thought that trio of strangers’ ships came to talk or trade. Arrows went zizzz up at iron hawks, and missed. The hawks reconnoitered without swooping, without attacking. Men and women alike struggled with large stones. And then a big man with grey in his big beard wheeled and his blue eyes met Jarik’s. On him was a round, gently domed helm, sided with wings copied from the helm of Snowmist. On him a big leathern jerkin all set with amber studs and carbuncles and mean-looking bosses of bronze standing forth in beveled points.

  “Jarik! Well met!”

  “Think you that you can beat them off, Kiddensok?”

  The voice was cold; Oak’s voice and Oak’s a
rrogant healer’s gaze. A frown shadowed over Kirrensark’s face.

  “Jarik?”

  “Oh, aye, Jarik. Jarik who saved your life from Ahl’s assassins, Uddensok. Jarik who saved your wark from Ahl’s attack — with Jilain and Delath,” he added, mindful of Delath beside him. “Jarik, aye. Shall I fight still again for you, Kiddensok?”

  Kirrensark looked as if he wanted to speak; appeared to be trying. His face was stricken and his beard worked with the movements of his mouth.

  “It seems to me that if my Black Sword fights again for you and your wark, Kiddensok, this place should not be called Kiddensok-wahk.” As he uttered those words Jarik watched resignation come over the big firstman’s face, not fear; and again he was not made happy to be impressed with this big old leader. Kirrensark must think the younger man meant he wished to change the community’s name to Jarik-wark, which it could be only on the death of its present firstman. Yet Kirrensark showed resignation but neither consternation nor fear.

  Homs winding in unearthly sounds, the attackers were bringing their ships in to shore, over two hundred feet below the wark.

  “You destroyed my first home, Kiddensok, that day the man beside me destroyed my stepmother and unborn brother. It stood on a bluff above a strand, above the sea, just as this wark does.” Jarik swept an arm to take in the community visibly becoming a spear-bristling, helmet-glinting armed camp. “That farming community of Akkharia was called Tomash-ten: Oceanside. Would be a good name for this wark, if it survives this new onslaught, wouldn’t it? Oceanside.”

  A new tension held the three men, as Jarik had offered a bargain and was awaiting an answer. Kirrensark drew breath —

  “THEY COME!”

  That shout from the hilltop barricade was unnecessary. The ululating cry blown up by the sea-wind was announcement enough. Three ships bearing foreign attackers were making landing. It began.

  Atop the bluff sprawled the wark, its buildings cozily clustered near the incline’s brow. Yet not to its edge. There, all along the very beginning of the downhill slope to strand and sea, a bulwark of stones had been raised. They were piled there, not fitted as a wall. Some of them only the strongest of men could have borne there on legs like the low branches of oaks. Others were huger, and had to have been rolled into place, by several stout men at once. Others were head-size and larger. They formed a bulwark, a seawall standing atop the natural wall of the land.

  They were not mortared.

  In a mass of flashing iron and pointed shields below dagger-like spires that seemed to dance atop helmeted heads, attackers ran yelling from their surf-beached craft. They flowed in a living tide over the sand to begin mounting the hill, and their number was scores and scores.

  Behind them, others of their dark ilk sent up a humming cloud of arrows in an effort to force back the defenders. The sheet of slim wooden shafts whirred darkly and sang in the air — while stones, grinding upon stones as they were shoved, provided a contrapuntal basso. Down upon the attackers rumbled the stones of the wark’s “seawall” defense. Warcries became screams. Men were knocked flying by bounding stones far bigger than they; were crushed like scarlet bugs beneath rolling grinding chunks of rock; were struck by flying granitic missiles so that they spun and fell to writhe in pain.

  One of those three ships died, smashed by two rolling bounding boulders at once, and both bigger than five men interlinked.

  Yet the tumblers of those stones were sore harassed by arrows, and more than one Lokustan was struck down by a missile lofted blindly from below. Someone’s daughter, turning to rush from the barricade to her yelling little sister, went stiff and huge-eyed when an anonymous arrow dropped into her back behind the left shoulder. Only a few paces away a man grunted at impact, stared at the feathered staff standing from his chest, and yanked it forth. When he saw no blood, he bellowed a laugh and threw it over the stones.

  Men still came up the slope, shrieking rage and brandishing oval shields and spears and war-axes. Every shield was brightly painted and nearly every helm was not domed, but drawn up into a nasty-looking point that seemed an elongated onion sprouting a shortened spearhead.

  They were not Lokustans. They were not Akkharians. They were not Kerosyrans.

  They were like no men their quarry had ever seen, in this time when the world was small indeed, and peopled with gods still quarreling over their creations.

  These were in general shorter men than the Lokustans, and much darker, as if they were born not pink but perhaps the hue of Jilain’s eyes or of new-tanned doeskin, to be sun-darkened not into bronze or tan but brown or very old copper. Mystic amber gleamed on none of them. Many wore bits of blue, though, and pieces and touches of blue, and had the heads of blue hawks scratched and painted on then-long shields.

  They are not of Lokusta or Akkharia, Jarik thought staring, and they are not of the Iron Lords! Yet the same black hawks accompany them. It has begun indeed. These must be minions of those gods She called Lord and Lady Cerulean — Lady Cerulean, whom I vision-saw fighting at my side against just such men as these. (Didn’t I?)

  But not this day. Not this day.

  And … how could men be so dark? Could their land have so much sun?

  Whatever their source, those men were paying heavy toll to rolling falling bounding bouncing stones and boulders, and now their outré allies came hurrying to their aid on extended wings.

  A hawk — black, even blue-black in the sun, but not blue — swooped and dived to strike a man who was throwing his weight against a big mica-glinting chunk of rock. Arrows missed the bird or ricocheted from it; the man cried out. Both hands flew up and he toppled backward, even as the bird seemingly rebounded straight up. Its victim’s cohorts saw the hideous red ruin that had been his face.

  The great bird, bigger than raven or true hawk, wheeled in air with never a flap of its nighted wings, and it dived.

  A man earned shame by hurling himself from its path with a scream. At the same time several arrows missed the diving hawk and a spear glanced ineffectively from its gleaming body. One of the arrows arched. It fell and fell until on the hillside an attacker gasped and looked stupidly at his hand, into which a nearly spent arrow had driven a half-inch.

  Above, a second warkman was hurling himself at the hawk, leaping from stone to stone and through the air with rustly chiming of his black armorcoat of links. His sword, in hue the same as the armor and the iron hawk that was not iron, flashed a blade some said was so sleekly smooth a walking fly would fall off its flat. The mindless bird drove on at its intended victim. This was a tree-like man on stumpy legs with calves like big rocks, who pried at a boulder with an oaken pole thick as his thighs.

  The yelling, leaping Jarik struck, so that the Black Sword clove through the demon-bird. It fell in pieces down the slope and men cheered — even while another such unnatural bird of prey banged off a defender’s helm with such force as to turn his head two-thirds way round. With a broken neck and sundered vertebrae slicing through his trachea, he fell. He lay kicking and did not rise. After a while he stopped kicking.

  More and more arrows came whizzing up over the dwindling pile of stones. Some found human targets while men continued to ascend from the ships. Scattered here and there along the rampart, the wark’s archers acted as marksmen, rather than loosing in volleys. As specific targets they picked the foremost attackers and those beyond the reach of tumbled stones and boulders. Only seventeen men of the wark wielded bows, and nearly half of them missed nearly as often as they hit. Of the hits, half again failed to inflict incapacitating wounds. Strave Hot-eye, felling his sixth target with his tenth arrow, wished for Jilain Demonslayer.

  Bent solely on attack and menaced only by defenders directly ahead and above, the foreigners had no need of rearguard. They had abandoned their ships on the sand without leaving any of their force to guard them. What need?

  On one of those ships appeared now a shining, magnificently martial figure, a scintillant statue of silver to which life and mov
ement had been vouchsafed. So swiftly had the child borne her there and departed that no one saw Her. No one was watching the vessels anyhow. What need?

  They took note now, the defenders; for the attackers did not look back. Lokustans cried out her presence, and cheered, and among them only one man knew that this was not the Lady of the Snowmist come to save her own. Jarik knew that he looked upon a most mortal woman, in the armor of Her. She bore the serpentinely curved bow any man of Seadancer recognized: the bow of Jilain Demonslayer of Kerosyris. She began to use it at once.

  The foremost of the attackers on the hillside above the strand threw up his hands and arced backward, seemingly trying to curl over the arrow in his back. Those of his fellows who noticed cursed their own archers — the rearmost of which was at that moment dropping with a shaft in the back. Moments later another man on the slope fell suddenly flat, his fingers clutching earth with breaking nails. An arrow stood above him as his only monument. Invader archers cursed each other, and another died with a cry. While a boulder plowed down over and through three, then four men, another man on the slope squealed in the way of a hog at slaughter time. With an arrow in the back of his neck he fell twisting to roll down and down. Perhaps it was Milady Chance who caused another dark man to turn — so that Jilain’s hard-driven shaft smashed into his face and dropped him kicking.

  An invader archer turned and saw the source of that arrow-death among his own. Just as he started to point and yell, an arrow from Jilain’s bow rushed into his mouth and burst out the back of his head.

  Activity atop the incline nearly ceased as wark-defenders stared in awe and exultation at the toll of … Her? Another climber fell to an arrow loosed by her only Jarik knew was not She.

  Gane the Dogged turned frowning to him. “Jarik — ”

  “Yes. It is Jilain. Come — the two of us should be able to budge this piece of mountain, and tumble it and the one atop it as well.”

  They could not, but with the aid of a third man they sent trundling hurtling death down into the invaders. Meanwhile an eighth arrow missed an attacker because he lost his footing, dodging a rushing stone, and slid several feet back and down. A ninth arrow found its bloody home in an eighth foreigner, and a ninth man soon fell to Jilain’s tenth arrow. That it took him through the thigh rendered him no less ineffectual as a climber or warrior.