Epic: Legends of Fantasy

by John Joseph Adams

  The flaring light of a campfire stung her eyes. The man crouched before it, raking red coals to one side. He had a thick beard, like the northern farmers, and skin pale enough that it was easy to follow his gestures as he efficiently scalded and plucked her grouse and roasted them over coals. Grease dripped and sizzled, the smell so sweet it was an insult thrown in her face.

  Where were the others?

  Edek lay well out of her reach, slumped against one of the giant stones. The horses stood hobbled just beyond the nimbus of light; she saw them only as shapes. Belek’s litter lay at the edge of the harsh and restless flare of the fire. Still strapped to the litter, he moaned and shuddered. The woman appeared out of the darkness as abruptly as a shaman’s evil dream. She crouched beside him with both hands extended. Lips moving but without sound, she sprinkled grains of dirt or flakes of herbs over his body.

  Fear came on Kereka in the same way a spirit sickness does, penetrating the eyes first and sinking down to lodge in the throat and, at last, to grasp hold of her belly like an ailment. There are ways to animate dead flesh with sorcery. She had to stop the working, or Belek would be trapped by this creature’s magic and never able to find his way past the spirit-lands to the ancient home of First Grandfather along the path lit by Tarkan’s flaming arrows. But she could not move, not even to push her foot along the ground to kick the corpse and dislodge Belek’s spirit.

  Mist and darkness writhed between dying youth and foreign woman. With a powerful inhalation, the woman sucked in the cloud. Belek thrashed as foam speckled his lips. The witch rocked forward to balance so lightly on her toes that Kereka was sure she would fall forward onto Belek’s unprotected chest. Instead, the woman exhaled, her breath loud in the silence; the air glittered with sparks expelled from her mouth. They dissolved into the youth’s flesh as the witch settled smoothly back on her heels. She lifted her gaze to look directly at Kereka.

  No matter how vulnerable she appeared, indecently clothed and armed only with a stone-pointed spear in the midst of the grasslands, she had power. As the begh Bulkezu, ancestor of Kereka’s ancestors, had wrapped himself in an impenetrable coat of armor in his triumphant war against the westerners, this woman was armed with something more dangerous than a physical weapon. She was not the bearded man’s wife or slave, but his master.

  She nodded to mark Kereka’s gaze, and spoke curtly in a language unlike any of those muttered by the tribe’s slaves.

  Kereka shook her head, understanding nothing. It would be better to kill the witch, but in the event, she had no choice except to negotiate from a position of weakness. “What do you want from us? My father will pay a ransom—”

  As if her voice awakened him, Belek murmured as in a daze. “Kereka? Are you there?” Rope creaked as he fought with unexpected strength against his bonds. He looked up at the woman crouched above him. “Who are you? Where is my sister—?”

  The witch rose easily to her feet and moved away into the gloom. The bearded man stood up and followed her. Kereka heard them speaking, voices trading back and forth in the manner of equals, not master and slave. Two warriors might converse in such tones, debating the best direction for a good hunt, or two female cousins or friendly co-wives unravel an obstacle tangling the weave of family life within their tents.

  Belek tried again, voice spiking as he tried to control his fear. “Kereka? Edek?”

  “Chsst!” Kereka spoke in a calming voice. She adored her brother, son of her father’s third wife, but he was the kind of person who felt each least pebble beneath him when he slept, and although he never complained— what Quman child would and not get beaten for being weak?—he would shift and scoot and brush at the ground all night to get comfortable and thus disturb any who slept next to him. “We’re here, Belek. We had to tie you down to keep you on the litter. You’d taken a wound. Now, we have been captured by foreigners.”

  “I feel a sting in my gut. Ah. Aah!” He grunted, bit back a curse, thapped his head against the litter, and yelped. These healthy noises, evidence of his return from the threshold of the spirit world, sang in her belly with joy. “I remember when I charged that dirty farmer, but nothing after it. Did I get his head?”

  “Yes. We tied it to your belt.”

  His hand groped; he found the greasy hair. “Tarkan’s blessings! But what happened to me?”

  He deserved to know the worst. “The woman is a witch. She trapped us with sorcery. I think she must have healed you.”

  “Aie! Better dead than in her debt! If it’s true, I am bound to her and she can take from me whatever she wants in payment.”

  His fretful tone irritated her. “No sense panicking! Best we get free of her, then.”

  “It’s not so simple! The binding which heals has its roots in the spirit world and can’t be so easily escaped. Her magic can follow me wherever I go—”

  “Then it’s best we get back to the tribe quickly and ask for the shamans to intercede. There’s a knife at your belt. You should be able to cut yourself loose.”

  Obedient as always to her suggestions, he writhed under the confining ropes. “Eh! Fah! Knife’s gone.”

  Night lay everywhere over them. The fattening moon grazed on its dark pastures. Kereka clenched her teeth in frustration. There must be some way to free themselves!

  Only then did she see a stockpile of weapons—their good Kirshat steel swords, iron-pointed arrows, and iron-tipped spears—heaped beyond the campfire, barely visible in the darkness. A stubborn gleam betrayed the griffin’s feather, resting atop the loot in the seat of honor.

  The foreigners ceased speaking and walked back into the fire’s aura. The witch still carried her primitive spear and she was now brandishing a knife that gleamed in black splendor, an ugly gash of obsidian chipped away to make one sharp edge. She had not even bothered to arm herself with the better weapons she had captured, although the bearded man wore a decent iron sword at his side, foreign in its heft and length.

  The woman crouched again beside Belek.

  Anything was better than pleading—that was a woman’s duty, not a man’s—but the knife’s evil gleam woke such fear in Kereka’s heart that she knew such distinctions no longer mattered.

  “I beg you, listen to my words. Belek is the honored son of the Kirshat begh’s third wife. He has powerful magic. The shamans have said so. He has already entered the first tent of apprenticeship. To kill him would be to release his anger and his untrained power into the spirit world. You don’t want that!”

  Where there is no understanding there can be no response. And yet, the woman weighed her sorcerer’s knife and, with a flicker of a smile, sheathed it. Instead, she slid a finger’s length needle of bone from a pouch slung from her belt.

  Leather cord bit into Kereka’s skin, tightening as she wiggled her hands and only easing its bite when she stilled. She could do nothing to spare Belek whatever torture this creature meant to inflict on him. Witchcraft had bound her to the rock.

  The woman caught hold of her own tongue. With exaggerated care she slid the fine needle point through thick pink flesh. Then, with a delicacy made more horrifying for the sight of her bland expression in the face of self-mutilation, she slid the needle back out of her tongue, leaned over Belek, and let those drops of blood mingle with the drying froth on Belek’s lips.

  He struggled, but he too was bound tight. He gasped, swallowed, grimaced; then he sighed as if his breath had been pulled out of him, and abruptly his head lolled back. He had fainted. Or been murdered.

  “Tarkan’s curse on you!” Kereka shouted. “I’ll have my revenge in my brother’s name and in the name of the Kirshat tribe! Our father will drive his warband against you even to the ends of the earth—”

  The woman laughed, and Kereka sputtered to a halt, her mouth suddenly too dry to moisten words. The skin on her neck crawled as with warning of a storm about to blow down over the grass.

  The witch gestured, and the bearded man came forward, knelt beside Belek, and dribbled wat
er from a pouch into his mouth. Belek sputtered, choked, spat, eyes blinking furiously. The bearded man stoppered the pouch and dragged the litter over to rest in the lee of the great stone to Kereka’s right. He offered water to Kereka, wordlessly, and she tipped back her head to let the cool liquid flow down her parched throat. She knew better than to refuse it. She needed time to think about that knowing laugh.

  He returned to the fire. Tearing apart the grouse, he ate one, wrapped the rest of the meat in a woven grass mat, then curled up on the ground beneath a cloak. The woman settled down cross-legged to stare into the fire. Occasionally she fed it with dried pats of dung.

  Night passed, sluggish and sleepy. Kereka dozed, woke, tried to worm her way out of her bonds but could not. No matter how hard she tried to roll away from the monolith, she could not separate herself from the stone. She hissed to get Belek’s attention, saw his eyes roll and his mouth work, but no sound emerged except for a faint wordless groan.

  The witch woman did not stir from her silent contemplation of the campfire. Now and again a bead of blood leaked from between her lips, and each time as it pearled on her lips she licked it away as if loathe to let even that droplet escape her. She did not speak to them, did not test the bonds that held them, only waited, tasting nothing except her own blood.

  Very late a sword moon, thin and curved, rose out of the east. Soon after, the light changed, darkness lightening to gray and at last ceding victory to the pinkish tint of dawn.

  The woman roused. Picking up the pouch, she trickled water into Belek’s mouth; he gulped, obviously awake, but still he said nothing. She approached Kereka.

  As she leaned in to offer water, Kereka caught the scent of her, like hot sand and bitter root. She tried to grab at her with her teeth, any way of fighting back, but the woman jumped nimbly back and grinned mockingly. The man chuckled and spoke words in their harsh foreign tongue as he flung off the cloak and stretched to warm his muscles.

  The brilliant disc of the sun nosed above the horizon to paint the world in daylight colors.

  From the bundle of gear heaped by a stone, the bearded man unearthed a shovel and set to work digging a shallow ditch just outside the limit of the stones. It was hard work, even though he was only scraping away enough of the carpet of grass and its dense tangle of roots to reveal the black earth. The woman joined him, taking a turn. The grasslands were tough, like its people, unwilling to yield up even this much. Both soon stripped down to shirt and trousers, their shirts sticking to their backs, wet through with sweat. It was slave’s work, yet they tossed words back and forth in the manner of free men. And although the woman’s form was strikingly revealed, breasts outlined by the shirt’s fabric, nipples erect from the effort and heat, the bearded man never stared at her as men stared at women whose bodies they wanted to conquer. He just talked, and she replied, and they passed the shovel back and forth, sharing the work as the ditch steadily grew from a scar, to a curve, to a half-circle around the stones.

  Kereka waited until they had moved out of sight behind her. “Hsst! Belek? Edek?”

  Yet when there came no answer, she was afraid to speak louder lest she be overheard.

  The sun crept up off the eastern horizon as the foreigners toiled. Shadows shortened and shifted; the sloping land came clear as light swallowed the last hollows of darkness. It was a cloudless day, a scalding blue that hurt the eye. Kereka measured the sun’s slow rise between squinted eyes: two hands; four hands. A pair of vultures circled overhead but did not land. The steady scrape of the shovel and the spatter of clumps of dirt sprayed on the ground serenaded her, moving on from behind her and around to her right, closing the circle.

  The sound caught her ear first as a faint discordance beneath the noise of digging. She had heard this precious and familiar music all her life, marked it as eagerly as the ring of bells on the sheep she was set to watch as a little girl or the scuff of bare feet spinning in the dances of Festival time.

  The wind sings with the breath of battle, the flight of the winged riders, the warriors of the Quman people. It whistles like the approach of griffins whose feathers, grown out of the metals of the earth, thrum their high calls in the air.

  Kereka scrambled to get her feet under her, shoved up along the rough surface of the stone. She had to see, even if she couldn’t escape the stone’s grip. Their enemies heard Quman warriors before they saw them, and some stood in wonder, not knowing what that whirring presaged, while others froze in fear, knowing they could not run fast enough to outpace galloping horses.

  Belek struggled against the ropes that bound him but gained nothing. Edek neither moved nor spoke.

  The woman and bearded man had worked almost all the way around the stones. The woman spoke. The man stopped digging. They stood in profile, listening. She shook her head, and together, shoulders tense, they trotted back into the stones straight to Edek’s limp body. The bearded man grabbed the lad by his ankles and dragged him down to the scar. The body lay tumbled there; impossible to say if he was breathing. The woman gestured peremptorily, and the bearded man leaped away from the bare earth and ran up to the nearest stone, leaning on the haft of the shovel, panting from the exertion as he watched her through narrowed eyes.

  The obsidian blade flashed in the sun. She bent, grabbed Edek’s hair, and tugged his head back to expose his throat. With a single cut she sliced deep.

  Kereka yelped. Did the witch mean to take Edek’s head as a trophy, as Quman lads must take a head to prove themselves as men?

  Belek coughed, chin lifting, feet and hands twitching as he fought against his bonds. He could see everything but do nothing.

  Blood pumped sluggishly from Edek’s throat. The witch grabbed him by the ankles and, with his face in the dirt and his life’s blood spilling onto the black earth, dragged him along the scar away around the circle. All the while her lips moved although Kereka heard no words.

  The bearded man wiped his mustache and nose with the back of a grimy hand, shrugged his shoulders to loosen the strain of digging, and dropped the shovel beside their gear. With the casual grace of a man accustomed to fighting, he pulled on a quilted coat and over it a leather coat reinforced with overlapping metal plates. He set out two black crossbows, levering each back to hook the trigger and ready a bolt. After, he drew on gloves and strapped on a helm before gathering up a bow as tall as he was, a quiver of arrows, an axe, and his sword and trotting away out of Kereka’s line of sight, again carrying the shovel.

  The woman appeared at the other limit of the scar, still towing Edek’s body. Where they had ceased digging, a gap opened, about five paces wide. He gestured with the shovel. She shook her head, with a lift of her chin seeming to indicate the now-obvious singing of wings. The two argued, a quick and brutal exchange silenced by two emphatic words she spat out. She arranged the body to block as much of the gap as possible. With a resigned shrug, the bearded man took up a defensive position behind one of the stones to line up on the gap.

  Brushing her hands off on her trousers, the witch jogged over to the gear, hooked a quiver of bolts onto her belt, and picked up both crossbows. Women did not wear armor, of course; Kereka knew better than to expect that even this remarkable creature would ever have been fitted with a man’s accoutrements. Yet when she sauntered to take a measure of cover behind the standing stone nearest the gap, her easy pace, her lack of any outward sign of nervousness, made her seem far more powerful than her companion, who was forced to rely on leather and metal to protect himself. She propped one crossbow against the stone and, holding the other, straightened. The sun illuminated her haughty face. As she surveyed the eastern landscape and the golden hills, she smiled, a half twist of scornful amusement that woke a traitorous admiration in Kereka’s heart. Someday she, the begh’s daughter who wished to live a man’s life, would look upon her enemies with that same lazy contempt.

  A band of warriors topped a far rise, the sound of their wings fading as they pulled up behind their leader to survey the sto
nes beyond. The captain wore the distinctive metal glitter of griffin feathers on his wings, their shine so bright it hurt the eyes. They carried a banner of deep night blue on which rose a sword moon, dawn’s herald.

  “Belek,” Kereka whispered, sure he could not see them, “it’s the Pechanek! Curse them!”

  Belek coughed and moaned; turned his head; kicked his feet in frustration.

  She, too, struggled. Bad as things were, they had just gotten worse. Belek was healed; if they could escape or talk their way free, they had a hope of riding out again to continue Kereka’s hunt, or maybe tricking their captors into a moment’s inattention that would allow Kereka to kill the bearded man. Tarkan’s bones! How had the Pechanek come to this forsaken place? Only a man who had killed a griffin had earned the right to wear griffin’s wings. The begh of the Pechanek clan was not such a man. But his son Vayek was.

  No begh’s son of a rival tribe would be out looking for three youths who must, after all, make their own way home or be judged unworthy of manhood’s privileges and a man’s respect. Had all her attempts to train herself in secret with her brother’s aid in weapons and hunting and bragging and running and wrestling and the crafts and knowledge reserved for men now come to nothing?

  A bitter anger burned in Kereka’s throat. Her eyes stung, and for an instant she thought she might actually burst out of her bonds from sheer fury, but the magic binding her was too powerful.

  The leader raised his spear to signal the advance. They raced out, wings singing, and split to encircle the stones. Waiting at a distance, they watched as their leader trotted forward alone. He was that sure of himself. His gaze scanned the stones, the two foreigners, the corpse, and the prisoners. Spotting Kereka, he stiffened, shoulders taut. He bent slightly forward, as if after all he had not expected to find her in such a predicament.