“And none other.” Shevlov shielded his eyes. “Have that freak taken from the wagon and hand her over. And you take a few of the boys and ride around the place. Various odd settlers remain dotted throughout the clearings and logging sites, you need to inform them as well to whom they’re now paying rent. Should anyone offer resistance, you know what to do.”
Fryga smiled evilly, flashing her teeth. Shevlov sympathised with the settlers she’d be visiting. Although their fate didn’t bother him much.
He glanced up at the sun. We must hurry, he thought. It’d be worth knocking down a few Temerian posts before noon. And driving in a few of ours.
“You, Poker, follow me. Let’s ride out to meet our guests.”
There were two guests. One was wearing a straw hat, had prominent jawbones and a jutting out chin, and his whole face was blue with several days’ beard. The second was powerfully built, a veritable giant.
“Fysh.”
“Sergeant.”
That annoyed Shevlov. Javil Fysh—not without reason—had brought up their old friendship, the times when they had served together in the regular army. Shevlov didn’t like to be reminded of those days. He didn’t want to be reminded about Fysh, about serving, or about his non-commissioned officer’s pay.
“Free company.” Fysh nodded towards the village, from where yells and crying reached them. “Busy, I see. Punitive expedition, is it? Will you be doing some burning?”
“That’s my business.”
I won’t be, he thought. With regret, because he liked burning down villages, and the company did too. But he had no orders to do so. The orders were to redraw the border and collect levies from the settlers. Drive away insubordinate individuals, but not touch goods or property. For they would serve the new settlers who would be brought there. From the North, where it was crowded even on barren land.
“I caught the freak and am holding her,” he declared. “As ordered. Tied up. It wasn’t easy. Had I known I would have asked for more. But we agreed on five hundred, so I’m due five hundred.”
Fysh nodded and the giant rode up and gave Shevlov two plump purses. He had a viper curled around a dagger blade tattooed on his forearm. Shevlov knew that tattoo.
A horseman from the company appeared with the captive. The freak had a sack over her head reaching her knees, with a cord restraining her arms. Bare legs, as thin as rakes, protruded from the sack.
“What’s this?” Fysh pointed at the captive. “My dear sergeant? Five hundred Novigradian crowns? Bit steep for a pig in a poke.”
“The sack comes free,” replied Shevlov coldly. “Like this good advice. Don’t untie her and don’t look inside.”
“Why?”
“It’s risky. She bites. And might cast a spell.”
The giant slung the captive across his saddle. The freak, until then calm, struggled, kicked and howled in the sack. It was very little use, as the sack was holding her fast.
“How do I know it is what I’m paying for?” asked Fysh, “and not some chance maid? Like from this here village?”
“Are you accusing me of lying?”
“Not in the least,” Fysh appeased him, helped by the sight of Poker stroking the shaft of a battleaxe hanging from his saddle. “I believe you, Shevlov. I know I can count on you. I mean we’re mates, aren’t we? From the good old days—”
“I’m in a hurry, Fysh. Duty calls.”
“Farewell, sergeant.”
“I wonder,” said Poker, watching them riding away. “I wonder what they want of her. That freak. You didn’t ask.”
“I didn’t,” Shevlov confessed coldly. “Because you don’t ask about things like that.”
He pitied the freak a little. But he wasn’t too bothered about her fate. He guessed it would be miserable.
CHAPTER TWELVE
A signpost stood at the crossroads, a post with planks nailed to it, indicating the four points of the compass.
Dawn found him where he had landed, tossed out of the portal, on the dew-soaked grass, in a thicket beside a swamp or small lake, teeming with birds, whose gaggling and quacking roused him from his sound and exhausting sleep. He had drunk a witcher’s elixir during the night. He always made sure to keep some on him, in a silver tube in a hiding place sewn into his belt. The elixir, called Golden Oriole, was used as a panacea which was particularly effective against every kind of poisoning, infections and the action of all kinds of venoms and toxins. Golden Oriole had saved Geralt more often than he could remember, but drinking the elixir had never caused the effects it had that night. For an hour after drinking it he had fought cramps and extremely powerful vomiting reflexes, aware that he couldn’t let himself be sick. As a result, although he had won the battle, he fell wearily into a deep sleep. Which may also have been a consequence of the combination of the scorpion’s venom, the elixir and the teleportational journey.
As far as the journey was concerned, he wasn’t certain what had happened, how and why the portal opened by Degerlund had spat him out here, onto the boggy wilderness. He doubted whether the sorcerer had done that deliberately; more likely it was simply a teleportational failure, something he had been afraid of for a week. Something he had heard about many times and had witnessed several times, when a portal, instead of sending the traveller where they were meant to go, threw them out somewhere else, in a totally unexpected place.
When he came to his senses, he was holding his sword in his right hand and in his clenched left hand he had a shred of material, which he identified in the morning light as a shirt sleeve. The material was cut through cleanly as though by a knife. It didn’t bear the marks of blood, however, so the teleportal hadn’t cut off the sorcerer’s hand, but only his shirt, Geralt realised with regret.
The worst portal failure Geralt had witnessed—which had forever discouraged him from teleportation—had occurred at the beginning of his witcher career. At that time, a fashion for being transported from place to place had prevailed among the nouveaux riches, wealthy lordlings and gilded youth, and some sorcerers offered such entertainment for astronomical sums. One day—the Witcher happened to have been there—a teleportation enthusiast had appeared in a portal bisected precisely down the middle. He looked like an open double bass case. Then everything flopped out of him and poured down. Fascination with teleportals decreased perceptibly after that accident.
Compared to something like that, he thought, landing on a marsh was quite simply a luxury.
He still hadn’t fully regained his strength, was still experiencing dizziness and nausea. But there was no time to rest. He knew that portals left tracks and sorcerers had ways of tracking the path of the teleportal. Although if, as he suspected, there was a flaw in the portal, tracking his flight would be virtually impossible. But in any case, remaining for too long in the proximity of the landing place wouldn’t be prudent.
He set off at a brisk pace to get warm and loosen up. It began with the swords, he thought, splashing through a puddle. How had Dandelion expressed it? It’s a streak of bad luck and unlucky incidents. First, I lost the swords. It’s barely three weeks later, and now I’ve lost my mount. Roach, who I left in Pinetops, is sure to be eaten by wolves, presuming somebody doesn’t find and steal her. The swords, the horse. What next? I dread to think.
After an hour of traipsing through the marsh, he emerged onto drier ground, and after another hour happened upon a tramped down highway. And reached the crossroads after half an hour’s march along it.
A signpost stood at the crossroads, a post with planks nailed to it, indicating the four points of the compass. They had all been shat on by birds of passage and copiously dotted by crossbow bolt holes. It appeared that every traveller felt duty bound to shoot at the signpost. In order, then, to decipher the words, one had to approach quite close.
The Witcher went over. And decoded the directions. The plank pointing westwards—according to the position of the sun—bore the name of Chippira, and the opposite one pointed to Tegmond. The
third plank indicated the way to Findetann, while the fourth God knew where, because someone had covered the lettering in pitch. In spite of that, Geralt already more or less knew where he was.
The teleport had tossed him out on the marsh created by two branches of the River Pontar. The southern branch, owing to its size, had even been given its own name by cartographers—and thus appeared on many maps as the Embla. The land lying between the branches—or rather the scrap of land—was called Emblonia. At least it had been once. And quite a long time ago had stopped being called anything. The Kingdom of Emblonia had ceased to exist around half a century before. And there were reasons for that.
In most kingdoms, duchies and other forms of government and social communities in the lands Geralt knew, things were in order and in fairly good shape—it would be reasonable to state. Admittedly, the system faltered occasionally, but it functioned. In the vast majority of the social communities the ruling class ruled, rather than just stealing and organising by turns gambling and prostitution. Only a small percentage of the social elite consisted of people who thought that “Hygiene” was a prostitute and “gonorrhoea” a member of the lark family. Only a small number of the labouring and farming folk were morons who lived solely for today and today’s vodka, incapable of comprehending with their vestigial intellects something as incomprehensible as tomorrow and tomorrow’s vodka. Most of the priests didn’t corrupt minors or swindle money out of the people, but dwelt in temples, devoting themselves wholly to attempts at fathoming the insoluble mysteries of their faith. Psychopaths, freaks, oddballs, and dullards kept away from politics and important positions in the government and administration, busying themselves instead with the ruination of their own personal lives. Village idiots hunkered down behind barns and didn’t try to act as tribunes of the people. Thus it was in most states.
But the Kingdom of Emblonia wasn’t part of the majority. It was a minority in all the above-mentioned respects. And in many others.
Hence, it fell into decline. And finally disappeared. So its powerful neighbours, Temeria and Redania, fought over it. Emblonia, though a politically inept creation, possessed certain wealth. For it lay in the alluvial valley of the River Pontar, which for centuries had deposited silt there, carried by floods. Fen soil—an extremely fertile and agriculturally high-yield variety—was formed from the silt. Under the rule of Emblonia’s kings, the fen soil began to turn into a swampy wasteland, on which little could be grown—much less harvested. Meanwhile, Temeria and Redania were recording considerable increases in population, and agricultural production had become a matter of vital importance. Emblonia’s fen soil tempted. So, the two kingdoms, divided by the River Pontar, carved up Emblonia between themselves without further ado and struck its name from the map. The part annexed by Temeria was called Pontaria and what fell to Redania became Riverside. Hordes of settlers were brought in to work the soil. Under the gaze of able stewards and owing to judicious agriculture and drainage, the region, though small, soon became a veritable agrarian Horn of Plenty.
Disputes also quickly sprang up, becoming more heated the more abundant became the harvests yielded by the Pontarian fen soil. The treaty demarcating the border between Temeria and Redania contained clauses permitting all sorts of interpretations, and the maps appended to the treaty were useless because the cartographers botched their work. The river itself also played a part—after periods of heavy rain it would alter and move its course by two or even three miles. And so the Horn of Plenty turned into a bone of contention. The plans for dynastic marriages and alliances came to naught, and diplomatic notes, tariff wars and trade embargos began. The border conflicts grew stronger and bloodshed seemed inevitable. Then finally occurred. And continued to occur regularly.
In his wanderings in search of work, Geralt usually avoided places beset by armed clashes, because it was difficult to find a job. Having experienced regular armies, mercenaries and marauders once or twice, the farmers became convinced that werewolves, strigas, trolls under bridges and barrow wights were actually trifling problems and minor threats and that by and large hiring a witcher was a waste of money. And that there were more urgent matters like, say, rebuilding a cottage burned down by the army and buying new hens to replace the ones the soldiers had stolen and devoured. For these reasons, Geralt was unfamiliar with the lands of Emblonia—or Pontaria and Riverside, according to more recent maps. He didn’t especially have any idea which of the places named on the signpost were closer and where he ought to head from the crossroads in order to bid farewell to the wilderness as quickly as possible and greet any kind of civilisation again.
Geralt decided on Findetann, which meant heading north. For more or less in that direction lay Novigrad, where he had to get to if he was to recover his swords, and by the fifteenth of July at that.
After around an hour of brisk marching he walked right into what he had so wanted to avoid.
There was a thatched peasant homestead and several shacks close to the logging site. The fact that something was occurring there was being announced by the loud barking of a dog and the furious clucking of poultry. The screaming of a child and the crying of a woman. And swearing.
He approached, cursing under his breath both his ill luck and his scruples.
Feathers were flying and an armed man was tying a fowl to his saddle. Another was thrashing a peasant cringing on the ground with a scourge. Another was struggling with a woman in torn clothing and the child hanging on to her.
He walked up and without thinking twice or speaking, seized the raised hand holding the scourge and twisted. The armed man howled. Geralt shoved him against the wall of a hen house. He hauled the other one away from the woman by the collar and pushed him up against the fence.
“Begone,” he stated curtly. “This minute.”
He quickly drew his sword as a sign for them to treat him in accordance with the gravity of the situation. And remind them emphatically of the possible consequences of wrong-headed behaviour.
One of the armed men laughed loudly. The other joined in, taking hold of his sword hilt.
“Who are you assaulting, vagabond? Do you seek death?”
“Begone, I said.”
The armed soldier tying on the fowl turned around from the horse. And was revealed to be a woman. A pretty one, in spite of her unpleasantly narrowed eyes.
“Had enough of life?” It turned out the woman was able to contort her lips even more grotesquely. “Or perhaps you’re retarded? Perhaps you can’t count? I’ll help you. There’s only one of you, there are three of us. Meaning you’re outnumbered. Meaning you ought to turn around and sod off as fast as your legs can carry you. While you still have any.”
“Begone. I won’t say it again.”
“Aha. Three people are a piece of cake to you. And a dozen?”
The sound of hooves thudding. The Witcher looked around. Nine armed riders. Pikes and bear spears were pointed at him.
“You! Good-for-nothing! Drop your sword!”
He ignored the instruction and dodged towards the hen house to have some protection at his back.
“What’s going on, Fryga?”
“This settler is resisting,” snorted the woman addressed as Fryga. “Claiming that he won’t pay the levy because he’s already paid it, blah, blah, blah. So, we decided to teach the oaf some sense, and then suddenly this grey-haired fellow sprang up from nowhere. A knight, it turns out, a noble man, a defender of the poor and oppressed. Just him alone and he went for our throats.”
“So high-spirited?” chortled one of the horsemen, advancing on Geralt and aiming his pike at him. “Let’s have him dance a jig!”
“Drop your sword,” ordered a horseman in a plumed beret, who seemed to be the commander. “Sword on the ground!”
“Shall I spear him, Shevlov?”
“Leave him, Sperry.”
Shevlov looked down on the Witcher from the saddle.
“You won’t drop your sword, eh?” he commented. “Are y
ou such a hero? Such a hard man? You eat oysters in their shells? Washed down with turpentine? Bow down before no one? And only stand up for the unjustly accused? Are you so sensitive to wrongs? We’ll find out. Poker, Ligenza, Floquet!”
The three armed soldiers obeyed their leader at once, clearly having experience in that regard. They dismounted, their movements well-drilled. One of them held a knife to the settler’s throat, the other yanked the woman by the hair and the third grabbed the child. The child began yelling.
“Drop your sword,” said Shevlov. “This second. Or … Ligenza! Slit the peasant’s throat.”
Geralt dropped his sword. They immediately leaped on him, pressing him against the planks and menacing him with their blades.
“Aha!” said Shevlov, dismounting. “Success!”
“You’re in trouble, peasant champion,” he added dryly. “You’ve obstructed and sabotaged a royal detachment. And I have orders to arrest and put before the courts anyone guilty of that.”
“Arrest?” The man named Ligenza scowled. “Burden ourselves? Throw a noose round his neck and string him up! And that’s that!”
“Or cut him to pieces on the spot!”
“I’ve seen this fellow before,” one of the riders suddenly said. “He’s a witcher.”
“A what?”
“A witcher. A wizard making his living killing monsters for money.”
“A wizard? Urgh, urgh! Kill him before he casts a spell on us.”
“Shut up, Escayrac. Speak, Trent. Where did you see him and in what circumstances?”
“It was in Maribor. In the service of the castellan there, who had hired him to kill some beast. I don’t recall what. But I remember him from his white hair.”
“Ha! So, if he attacked us, somebody must have hired him to.”
“Monsters are witchers’ work. They just defend people from monsters.”
“Aha!” Fryga pushed back her lynx-fur calpac. “I said so! A defender! He saw Ligenza flogging the peasant and Floquet making ready to ravish that woman …”
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