Snakewood

by Adrian Selby

  The raiders in that high pass nearly beat the life out of him, and he took on the instincts of an animal amid those cold black ravines and passes. Yet his reading, writing and grasp of Hespen took him quickly to the heart of their chief, too quickly for some. He was wise enough to know it, finding the read of faces once so vital at court among his father and counsellors now vital here.

  The first attack he had expected; two sleepless nights with one of the raiders on a hunt to some loose woodlands a few miles from camp. The cold tea he’d sipped from the flask of the other man, whom he’d seen snub him at a meet, was too bitter. He feigned to drink the rest but returned each subsequent sip back to the cup until he could tip it while the man sorted his skins out.

  Just before dawn Petir lay still, holding a knife close to his chest, curled up under his sleepskin. He fought with his fear to breathe slowly as the man shifted and got to his feet. In the moment of silence with which the murderous intention sought to mask itself he spun and slashed wildly with his knife. The man was stood over him, closer than Petir had read it, so the knife’s point caught the man in his thigh, driving into the muscle there. Petir got up to his knees and stabbed the flailing man’s belly repeatedly until he collapsed. He told me it was a euphoric feeling, a moment that changed his life.

  Returning a day later with some rabbits and a calf that were too slow for his bow he realised, unlike so many men, that to get anything from the world wasn’t to wait for it to act on him, but to act on it. His first real and intimate fight to the death was alchemic; he was surviving.

  He made his case with the chief and the others for why he had returned alone. There was no open dissent. As he stood there unchallenged he saw the woman his hunting mate had shared his tent with. She took him from the gathering and to the man’s tent, and Petir took his place fully in the camp.

  This, he knew, was sure to draw out those others who were jealous of his position. The woman helped as he dug holes and covered them over with straw, just inside the tent. When they came, the first stepped into the hole and fell forward. Up from his skins, Petir killed him with a shortsword as he tried to fight back from his knees. The man behind fled but Petir was after him and shortly ran him through as he caught up with him.

  The chief called for mugs of wine at dawn the next day, spoke of being for each other, of the common good they needed in these hard times to survive and prosper. Enough of the respected men in the camp knocked cups with him, burying further dissent through their show of support.

  A daughter was born to him the following summer. He knew and loved her only briefly, a baby with a shock of red hair like mine who didn’t live long enough for her naming.

  The chief of so little outward distinction proved an inspired tutor to Petir in the art of hit and run. He was soon leading his own squad with iron conviction, killing the fighting men of other bands of raiders and the Ahm Plainsmen around the south edge of Jua’s Teeth.

  Nothing gets noticed like success. The Post was roused by the growing attacks on its caravans. My years with Laun have shown me that it protects nothing so fiercely as its reputation.

  The Ahm clans, suffering Petir’s contention of their hunting grounds and being defeated in sorties of their own to muzzle the raiders, found the Post willing to supply a plan and the means to carry it out, for their mutual benefit.

  They soon entreated Petir’s chief and his advisers to meet and discuss what fealty they could pay to reduce the incursions.

  Petir accompanied them to a gathering at the heart of a vast plain where surprise and ambush could not be countenanced.

  With Post silver and supplies of kannab and skins the arrangement was made.

  Reds and mercenaries, armed with the whereabouts of Petir’s camp from the vengeful members of defeated clans, moved against them; the camp was burned, his wife and daughter among those who did not escape.

  The Ahm clans concluded their talks a day later, leaving Petir, his chief and the other raid captains to return into the trap. Fighting out of the ambush, he fled to the high passes with only two other survivors.

  A month later he walked south alone, a gaunt thief wandering through the great wilds of northern Issana before turning east to Vilmor and a king he said was bent on creating a legacy for his sons while instead slowly destroying his father’s.

  A stint as a carpenter’s mate gave Petir some of his strength back, enough that he could once more do his forms and try to prove a way back to fighting, where all the coin and respect was. He became a mercenary, and learned much about the managing of an army, while proving himself fearless in battle. In a few years he found himself at the Virates bordering with the Wild and he found a clan chief, Imil of the Rivershall, and captains that took him in and trusted him after he’d led back forty of their people from a camp hit by Wildmen. He led Rivershall sorties on the hit-and-run work he knew so well and soon the clan got noticed, as much by the hast leaders and chiefs in the near Wild as those of the other Virates clans. He stayed away from the sea; treachery enough among men let alone from under your feet he told me. The learning at his father’s feet of the skill at winning minds and brokering oaths took his clan from one of the Third tables to the Black Table in the Reckoning feasts the Blackhand Virate held to debate and empower their common cause, which was sometimes to resolve conflict with each other but more often their common enemy, the hasts and raiders out of the Wild. There, in Rivershall, he soon fathered another girl, paler than her friends of course and with much-admired blue eyes. This child at least he got to keep.

  Imil, chief of the Rivershall, flushed with bravado stoked by Petir’s successes, was soon overplaying his hand in all inter-clan matters, with Petir too much away at their borders to see the rot at the heart. He returned from a long sortie with a tithe of plant, weapons and a treaty with some nomadic raiders to find Imil executed by his captains and another clan, the Standhals, controlling the Rivershalls. The Standhals were in no mood to entertain the tactics and strategies of a mercenary from the north, hardened against all his good reason by their prejudice. They had a mind to appease the Wildmen more than the Rivershalls had, especially where Rivershall land was concerned. Returning to Rivershall, he was found a day out by a scout warning him that a run of skins expected from his home fort was late, with no weger returning from its aviary.

  Bidding his men to continue on, he turned west to follow the south edge of the great forest that bordered the Blackhand Virate. A day later, despite seeing no evidence of raiders, he arrived at the fort to find it also unsullied; no burned buildings, no forced gate and no living thing. Desperately he made for their hut, calling for his woman Aliam and the daughter he’d named after me. Inside, despite his inks and parches missing, all was as it was kept by Aliam.

  At their small table he saw a straw bird his daughter, Galathia, had made with bits of coloured ribbon woven into the rough blonde stalks. He held it, hoping it would somehow still be warm from her hand. He stepped out of their hut clutching the bird, unsteady with grief. Outside the wind had picked up, chilly evening gusts ripping through the silent lanes. At the gate to the fort he’d entered only a short while before stood a giant of a man, a long sword hanging like a dirk, in a plain scabbard, the boiled leather armour soiled, ruptured in places. A short well-kept beard framed a handsome sun-beaten face that looked as though it was chipped from a boulder. His black hair was plaited and woven with dried blue poppies.

  “Petir. I’ve heard much about you. A formidable squad leader, a captain in all but rank.”

  Petir walked forward; something about this man demanded it. This could be no trap or ambush because it would not befit him.

  “Where is my wife, my daughter Galathia?”

  The giant appraised him, hands at his hips.

  “She is well. They all are.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Caragula. I came here hoping you would return once word had spread about the sacking of this camp.” His speech was clear, though King’s Common was
not his own tongue. His voice was a smooth rasp, as though the words were formed by a blade being sharpened on leather.

  He extended a hand, a Virate greeting custom to hold the forearm.

  As Petir approached he heard no others besides Caragula’s horse, nustling at grasses beyond the gate. They were alone.

  Caragula’s fingers fully enclosed Petir’s forearm, as though he held a twig. Petir said that he may as well have grasped a slab of marble in return. Caragula’s eyes shone with a captivating, fatherly lucidity. Petir had to look hard to see a sign of fightbrew in the skin.

  “It is good to meet you, Petir, I have a great need for men of your quality. Would you prefer us to speak in Hespen or Common?” He gestured for them both to sit.

  “Common’s fine.”

  “I hope you will hear me out and join me as your family have done. More than that, join me to lead far more men than this sad little Virate would allow you for the mere fact of your not being of Rivershall blood. Your blood is nobler than that, isn’t it? You are the rightful heir to the throne of Citadel Argir. I believe we can be of a great help to each other.”

  As they settled, Caragula smoked of Petir’s pipe and told him of the great change coming in the world.

  “The people of the Wild live barbarous lives, beholden to the seasons, raided and plundered, within and without. Numbers beyond count, along all the borders of the world you know, stretching from the Virates to the Citadels, are killed and worse. The Old Kingdoms were built on our plant, grew and then fattened on our blood, were served by our enslaved. Hevendor, Ahmstad, Razhani, Lagrad, these are lesser provinces the Old Kingdoms shaped and moulded from whichever tribes were greedy enough to take their iron, their plant and their rules. They are mere protectorates with the illusion of freedom, civilisations of straw, yet they are still the armour that protects the Old Kingdoms’ cultures and wealth and greed. But what do these Old Kingdoms know of the Wild? Do they know that it stretches east and north many times further than all the lands west of the Razhani clan’s? We are, in our languages, history and stories, as rich as they, but our recipes are crude, our fighting men disorganised, our ambition stunted. Yet we have overcome these failings.”

  They were sat near a small pile of hewn stone. Caragula rolled towards him a stone that was ready for pitching. “Do you know anything of a mason’s skills?” Petir shook his head. Caragula took up a pitcher and a hammer, ready to shape it.

  “You should watch a good apprentice mason at a quarry. My mother was one of the best, a master. She would look over a stone, feel it, then with a strike seemingly of little strength she would crack it in two, as if she could crack it to the shape she wished it to be.” And Caragula did just that. He turned the stone, ran his hand over it and positioned it. Then, with the tools, he smacked the stone as though slapping a fly, and it sundered to a surface almost as level as a pond’s.

  “Inside something seemingly as solid as this stone was, there are faultlines. The stone represents those protectorates, those lands with their border patrols and their forts and roads. They have laws, some have cities now. Perhaps they think of themselves as the Young Kingdoms. But I know their faultlines, for they are the tribes, like planes in the stone, adjacent but weak. Their histories are the pitcher. I am the hammer. When they break I will unite them anew. When they see the Old Kingdoms for what they are, for what they have done… when they remember, then the armour is gone, and we may shape Sarun as we see fit, you and I.”

  Petir was free to debate at length then, but found reason in all the answers, little in the way of boasting. He maintains that Caragula is a wise leader, with a charisma born of humility and surety, with no little humour. He felt something like hope for the first time that he could remember and I knew when I walked into the Juan Commune how that felt. Like all the other men serving him, Petir found an older brother in Caragula, a brother he then swore to serve with his life.

  Kigan leaned forward to move a lock of my hair that had fallen over my brow and nose as I leaned towards him.

  “I have not heard of Caragula, but I have not been east since I saw you had beaten me to Sho, and I did not stay for news of the Virates and the Redwall Confederacy. When will this army be upon us?”

  “A few months, maybe less.”

  “What is its number?”

  “A hundred thousand or more. My brother tells me a thousand drudhas and plant enough to sustain them on many battlefields are with them.”

  I thought he would be as pleased as I that things were changing, that my brother and I were at the heart of a change in the order of the world. He whispered something to himself before his eyes came back to me. He smiled, and I wondered if he had just instructed himself to do so, but my need for him rushed me now that the story of my life, my victory over it, was told. I grasped his head firmly, opening my thighs to better guide it to what I needed from him.

  Chapter 11

  Gant

  Shale was waiting where we stashed the saddles before the battle, grimmer than I’d seen him in a long while. He put his arms around me, managing a smile.

  “Wound in’t that bad, Shale,” I said, making light of his affection, but I too was glad to see him again.

  “It were a fierce oppo, fierce enough wi’out yer trouble. Din’t know if you’d make it. We got to get the horses from the ’jacker.”

  “I took Gilgul down. Fucker must’ve bin there with his crew. Made the last couple o’ days a bit more bearable at least.”

  “How’d I miss ’im?”

  “You had three or so on you or I’d have give you a shout. I needs me wound sorting out anyway, it stinks,” I said.

  He was shaking his head as we did it.

  “Yer patched up, I found some decent bark nearby, nice bit o’ luck fer once. Now we get the horses an’ figure out where we’re headin’.”

  “We only knows of Bense in Jua and what Araliah told us, that Valdir were likely in Langer’s End,” I said.

  “It may be Valdir in’t there, Gant, but we know Bense is.”

  “And if we knows it then whoever’s doing the killing must know it,” I said. “There’d be some fierce Post in Jua and what went on in the vineyard’s going to be stoking up some vengeance on men of the colour.”

  “Old men o’ the colour in particular,” he said laughing. “I reckon it in’t more than a few weeks to take a route through Marola an’ find where Valdir is, a warm autumn so far and once winter’s in then it’s slow,” he said.

  “We should go see Valdir then. We only bin running the killer’s way and not ahead either since he were tracking us. If he knows Bense is alive he might be thinking he’d get the three of us at once,” I said. We didn’t say it but each was thinking that it must be too much to take on three of us, but he already had accounted for near all of us with no comeback, according to Kailen’s letter.

  “Valdir always said Langer’s End was a shithole,” said Shale.

  With nothing else said that day we moved late evening with saddles and the bags we had hidden and went for the horses.

  If it wasn’t quite the shithole, Langer’s End was a quiet place with little pleasure in seeing strangers. There was little of the Post here either, which was something. Langer’s End was at the northwestern end of Marola, a marketplace for the cattle and grain that were traded inland. It was called The Court by the districts hereabouts for it was a group of landowners what run the justice, though heralds and banners we seen at camps, and some villages suggested some three fiefs were bordered here.

  We got some good food for our coin and were shortly pointed the way to Valdir’s family’s farm, for his da was once on the court so was well known.

  The stone walls about the farm and the bit of land it had enclosed were only secure at a few points. I reckoned a lot of those about were setting their own walls with the pieces of this one. The farmhouse was on the top of a rise, backing onto some woods. The thatch was in disrepair and there was a clutter about of broken forks, flails and
a cart that spoke of hard times, not least because this was harvest and they should be making the coin now more than later. As we approached I saw a face at an open window, then a woman stepped out, smoothing out a blackened apron.

  “It’s soldiers, mum,” she said, calling indoors. “Expect they’s after food.” She addressed us then. “We got little food with a bad harvest and two shites for farmhands probably off smoking kannab. I can get you some brin, been baking this morning.”

  “We were looking for Valdir,” I said.

  “You found his sister, but he lost an arm. He won’t be signing for you even if he was here. You’d best come in. It would have been nice to have word he was well.”

  She said to tie the horses near a hay cock, which was a kindness.

  It was damp all through inside, despite a big fire where the main table was at the back of the room. A fat old dog was stretched out by a window to the front but the place needed more light in it than the two small candles what were sat on the table. Their mother was an old age for sure. She was adjusting a blanket and presently dozed for the time we were there, small like a bird and as free of concern for the plight of the place.

  The daughter, herself grey, greasy hair drawn back with a tie, stared for a moment at her mother as though she was another chore waiting its turn. She had a bit of a lith, which softened her words.

  “I can’t spare you long, the brin there cooling needs running to Picket’s and he screets if you’re not on time.”

  “We’ll do that for you… um…”

  “My manners! I’m Julir, did you know Valdir before?”