I paid the price of my berserker rage in days of solemn contemplation. I had forgotten that. I knew that my brain had more to handle than it usually did. I felt sure that War exulted in the wanton violence of it, but it left me feeling like a rapist who hadn’t been caught.
Now when in moments of silence I fell into dark consideration of even darker memories.
We discussed fermenting, processing and purifying alcohol, and killing germs. We discussed cultivating witch hazel, an easy plant to find in this forest. They had actually believed that demons caused infection when they preyed on the blood of the dying and that puss and gangrene were their unholy excrement. They treated the infected with exorcism, bleedings and fasting – which of course either weakened the infected to the point of death or didn’t kill them because they were strong already.
As we discussed these things, we heard reports from Drekk, Ancenon and Dilvesh from time to time. The reports were always the same – the Confluni weren’t going to catch us and weren’t going to believe that until they were too late. Thorn and Arath pretty much kept to the troops and relied on the other three to report for them.
We saw no sign of Genna. We could have used her, because those patrols of ten that the Confluni kept around hadn’t gone away.
All day, random arrows flew out of the forest and killed or wounded our men, or lamed our horses. The enemy didn’t engage – they would be foolish to – but they would fire once, maybe twice, and then vanish. No way to tell if the same group, many groups or just random Confluni harried us. We had no way to catch them when they did it, either. We wasted hours searching the woods for these ghosts. Twice Dilvesh cornered and destroyed small squads that he came across, but this never lessened the assaults on us, leaving us wondering how many we faced.
At night we made camp in our “small city.” If didn’t matter anymore what the Romans had called it, it had saved us. I didn’t know for sure if we would see it spring up in the Confluni infantry along with squads of ten, but I didn’t think so. The men who escaped were foot soldiers and the government they belonged to had long-standing and successful traditions on how to fight war. Maybe in time our ways would be adopted, but not quickly and not before we could exploit the advantage.
On the third day, I’d just inspected the pickets and walked the rows as I always did, and came across Ancenon. I didn’t see a mark on him – he hadn’t come here for sword fighting.
“You seem well occupied, your Grace,” he informed me.
I didn’t even know what that meant, so I grunted at him. I tried to move past him but he didn’t give ground.
“I am informed that our troops are rife with healing, even as they march,” he continued. “Your method invokes no magic and no god, and yet shows power that a dozen Uman-Chi Casters couldn’t match.”
“It’s not magic,” I informed him. “I’ve explained this to you.”
“You are free with your secrets,” Ancenon told me.
I looked into his the silver on silver eyes. “It shouldn’t be a secret,” I said. “It saves lives.”
“The lives of your enemies as well,” he argued. “Would you face the same Confluni army again?”
I smiled grimly. “Small chance of that,” I told him. I remembered Fat Jack. “No man should have a limb cut off for no good reason.”
That didn’t dissuade him. “Magic that strong,” he told me “can be taken farther. If given the ability to kill this in-feg-shun, then why not the ability to raise the dead?”
I sighed. “It isn’t magic,” I told him again, “it is basic chemistry. You had the knowledge to create it but you didn’t have the technology to use it. In time someone would have poured alcohol on an open wound, just as you saw me do.”
“You speak in odd terms since the battle,” Ancenon accused me, his pencil-thin eyebrows knitting. “Chem-stree and tek-no-gee and magic that is not magic. Next I expect I will see you purify salt water and predict the weather.”
“Anyone can do those things,” I told him, turning toward my pavilion. If Ancenon wanted to argue then let him, just not with me.
“You are serious, aren’t you?” he asked, pursuing me. “You can do these things?”
“I could make something that could do these things,” I said. Actually, maybe not the barometer. “Where I’m from, it’s simple.”
“Where you are from,” he answered back. “I hear much and nothing of where you are from, Lupus the Conqueror, man from the Ogre Lands. I see simple things that you cannot fathom and magix that you work out-of-hand. I see a lust for blood and a love for the living from a man who hacked almost one hundred to pieces – “
He would have said more but I had him by the throat faster than either of us could have imagined. I felt the steel in my gauntlet sink into his flesh and realized how little his body weighed as I lifted him to his toes.
“I won’t hear you mention that again, Ancenon,” I told him, looking into his eyes.
“The fire bond,” he rasped. “You risk the wrath of Adriam.”
“There are forces at work greater than Adriam,” I countered. “If he wants me, he can come and get me, Ancenon. Until that happens, you watch what you say.”
I released him and he fell. He rubbed his throat and then remembered himself, getting to his feet, looking at me the entire time. Ancenon wasn’t used to having his authority questioned, much less being manhandled, and I doubt he like it.
Same here, pal.
He straightened. “I am sure you are dismayed from the battle,” he said, “so I forgive this oversight. But know that I am Uman-Chi and have seen more from centuries of living than any Man could learn in his short breath of years. You would be unwise to alienate me.”
“Whatever, Ancenon,” I told him, turning my back to him. I wanted to see Shela and this didn’t help.
When I entered the pavilion I saw her sitting up in bed. My whole world changed right then. Shela had come back in it. I ran to her and took her in my arms.
“The baby?” she asked, her hand on her stomach.
“Perfectly ok,” I told her, covering her hand with mine. “We were lucky – Ancenon was right there.”
“I – I seem to remember,” she said. “I lowered my guard – I thought their Wizards were preoccupied…”
“You’re ok,” I said in a hoarse whisper. I looked into her dark eyes, stroked her olive skin with my finger. “Your butt is still in trouble when I get you home, though.”
She lowered her head, embarrassed, knowing that I had been right, even if she had saved us. Better I should die than our child – this we both knew.
But for right now we were all right.
“Where are we?” she asked and then held up her hand. Her eyes seemed to glaze for a moment, and then she said, “Ah, yes – in Conflu, still. I see Nantar arriving in Teher – they will give him a hero’s welcome. We are still two days’ march – and behind us, I see nothing. No pursuit of any kind. The Confluni do not believe that so many were bested by so few. They are even now executing the survivors of our battle – the Battle Of Tamaran Glen.”
She looked into my eyes, held my cheek in her hand, her face dire and serious.
“Lupus, I see no sign of Genna,” she said. “None.”
“You picked all of that up?” I asked her. I had never seen her exercise her power so easily or thoroughly – it made me wonder if she had been holding back up to now.
She smiled warmly at me and touched my cheek with her cool fingers. “The very forest sings of it, husband/master,” she told me. “Every woodland creature that sees it or smells the blood and rotted flesh of it, every vile thing that gnaws a bone or scavenger that flies overhead, even the worms in the ground speak of the bounty of so many left for dead.”
“Well, yuck,” I told her, smiling. I never really got the forest’s perspective on this up until now. “Did you pick all of this up from Dilvesh, then?”
She looked away and nodded. “Yes, I have learned a lot from the Druid,” she
admitted. “He is powerful in his way, but he is not of Power, and that limits him.”
“And of Genna?” I asked.
She shook her head. “She does not walk the Earth,” she said. “She is lost, I fear.”
I nodded. “I just came from a little spat with Ancenon myself.”
She looked deep into my eyes for a moment, deeper than just my surface feelings. I could feel her sniffing around in the tumult of emotions that circulated through my mind since she had fallen, feel her lay her hand on my heart and soften the beating, then pull away.
“So, you have come to yourself under War, have you?”
I nodded. “I didn’t really know what it meant to serve Him until now,” I said. “I thought that all of these things, this sword, the ability to fight and survive, the armor and the stallion, were just gifts.”
She smiled again. “Gifts with a price,” she chided me.
“I know.” My throat grew hot and tears came to my eyes unbidden. I took her in my arms and drenched her shoulder unashamedly with my tears. For that moment, right then, I let the grief that I had been holding back from my first kill by the Llorando just overwhelm me, let her finally step in and pick up some of the burden because I just couldn’t bear it all alone anymore.
“I don’t know how many I have killed,” I sobbed. “I don’t know any of those people. I don’t know how many had kids who are going to starve, I don’t know how many of their wives are widowed, I don’t know what I ruined just so that I could live life a little easier.”
She rocked me, holding me, adding her tears to mine, not knowing the deeper guilt that Genna had awakened in me, the unanswered question of Aileen.
“You fought for your life, White Wolf,” she said, trying to comfort me. “You have a right to go on living.”
I shook my head. I broke my hold on her, held her at arms length and let her look into my eyes.
“No. I’m no victim, Shela. It has almost always been me going where I don’t belong to take something that didn’t belong to me. Like the gold from Outpost X, or getting in with the Dwarves in the Battle of Two Mountains, or the strife I caused for the Dorkans or this escapade into Conflu.”
She drew back and looked at me, her eyes soft and brown and loving, her back straight. She held my chin in her hand and she looked me right in the eye.
“White Wolf,” she said, “you have come here, as well you know, to serve the god War. In this you were chosen – chosen, my husband/master – for your knowledge and ability to survive battles with your men.”
“I was no great general – “ I began.
“I’m sure you were not,” she said. “You were called to the service of a god, White Wolf. Where you a general in the field, you would have already been in War’s service.”
That made sense, but I couldn’t imagine where this would take me.
“What you are doing, you are meant to do,” she said, confirming that fear. “And it is likely what War will keep you doing it until the day you die.”
It came as so final and true. So obvious to me now, no matter how I had tried to fool myself or just not address it. I had used the battle plans of Caesar, of Genghis Khan, of Stalin and of a score of real and fictional conquerors whom I had read about all of my life. Whose stories and whose history and whose lives I had always hungered for, without ever really appreciating why.
How long had War wanted me, then?
And now, of course, I had become them. More to the point, I understood them. I knew why the warrior screamed out his battle cry, why the general let his family go for his conquests, why the crowd cheered the gladiator, and why the gladiator saluted the crowd. I could feel what made them what they were.
The hero whom others might admire, but no one wanted to be.
No one.
I held Shela until I fell asleep in her arms. When the next day dawned I found her polishing my armor and worrying about how to take the dents out of it. Thorn reported that we’d outrun our pursuit – the Free Legion would just walk away from the whole escapade with a bloody nose and an invincible reputation.
Our futures were, essentially, guaranteed.
Thousands of bloody tabards waved like sick flags in the air from Teher’s walls, towers and parapets. I let Blizzard bear me for that short march – let them see The Conqueror in his glory. There were actually waving masses of people to celebrate our re-entry to the city.
Henekh greeted us himself at the city gates, mounted on a charger only a hand smaller than Blizzard. His son walked right up to him with his Wolf Soldiers, a vial of alcohol and a look in his eyes.
“And who is this blooded warrior?” Henekh asked with mock surprise. Karl looked him fearlessly in the eye, then spat upon the ground, taking the whole situation none-too-seriously.
“About time,” Nantar whispered to me. I chuckled to myself.
Henekh scowled and looked to raise his hand. Karl’s went right to his sword-hilt. More importantly, every Wolf Soldier mirrored him. Henekh stood stunned and made no secret of it.
“So I see you took it to the Confluni, Karl,” he said, recovering himself quickly. Henekh, after all, hadn’t been made a warlord over night. He looked over what remained of our army. “Helped the mercenaries to get things done?”
“There was a fight,” Karl said. He remained sullen, but adamantly so. I started to see the man that he would be – intractable and stubborn. He would lead by his deeds and not care whom they impressed. Let anyone who would gainsay him do better.
“We smashed ‘em,” he concluded.
Henekh nodded, impressed. He delivered a cart filled with gold coins to us. “It was worth it if what your vanguard said is true,” he told Ancenon. He didn’t intend to let this troop inside of his gates. We’re mercenaries, after all. You can’t trust people like that.
He looked at his son, who looked stubbornly back at him. Karl held his back a little straighter. He had no off-hand comment to make because he didn’t need one. Henekh looked back at Ancenon again.
I saw something in Henekh’s look that you can only see in a father’s eyes just then. Sometimes men reconcile themselves too soon about important things, and I think Henekh had realized that he had done this with his son. He curled his upper lip in a smile.
“It was worth it,” he said.
In my ‘civilian clothes’, meaning what I walked around in when I didn’t wear my armor, I liked my leather pants, my white homespun shirt, open at the neck, my boots – the same ones I had woken up here with – and a thick, leather belt, which I could wear over my shoulder or around my waist, depending on how I wanted to wear my sword.
It was a quarter inch thick, three inches wide, smooth on the outside and rough on the inside.
It had left deep, red welts on Shela’s back, behind and thighs.
We were alone in a room in the city. Our men were camped outside the gate. I didn’t intend to sleep here; neither did I need to do this in my tent, where the whole army would know her discipline.
Shela had been told to leave, and Shela hadn’t done it. She’d done it out of a love for me, but she knew full well that she’d disobeyed me, and that there’d be a price.
If I’d have let this go, then she’d have thought I didn’t care about her enough to discipline her, and she’d have done something worse to get my attention. She’d been raised in a culture where men weren’t ‘strong’ if they couldn’t keep their women in line.
So I’d put her up against a wall, ripped her clothes off and lit into her. Afterwards I’d thrown her down on the room’s one bed, barely large enough for two, and taken her. There was no love-making, there was neither any hatred or disdain. I held her now in my arms, my back against the headboard and a pillow underneath my shoulders, her head on my chest and the curve of her belly on my hip.
Her tears on my chest and her cheeks. I’d shed mine when she couldn’t see me.
“Who owns you, slave?” I demanded.
“You do, master.”
�
�Who?”
“You do, master.”
I took a fist full of her long, black hair, feeling my fingernails scratch her scalp, and tilted her head back. I forced her to look into my eyes.
We both needed this. I took back control; she relinquished hers to me. I am her master and she is a slave.
“What were you told?”
“Stay in Thera.”
I shook her. She closed her eyes. She needed to be the property of a strong man. That requires a certain amount of control, and consequences for bad behavior.
“What did you do?”
“I followed you.”
I took her delicate jaw in my other hand, and squeezed it.
“And when you were told to leave?”
“I stayed,” she managed, sounding like she had a mouth full of marbles.
I released her, and looked into her eyes.
My god, Shela, I thought, I am so in love with you.
“What are you?” I demanded.
“Your slave.”
“What do you do?”
“Obey you.”
“You have displeased me, girl.”
She looked up at me. That hurt. I could do anything I wanted to her, but my words scarred her worse than my hand.
“You had better try harder, girl.”
“Master, I am so sorry.”
“I don’t believe you.”
I released her head, giving her a little push. Her hands explored me and I pushed them away, denying her. She started crying again.
“Master, I swear to you, I will be better.”
I just stared down at her, naked, pregnant, debased, humiliated, and beaten. The welts on her back shown in the dim light of the little room.
“I swear, Master. I love you. I won’t shame you again.”
I let her chew on that promise.
She expected to be beaten. In some ways she liked it – not the pain but the thrill of losing her control to me. I didn’t want this to be something she did for attention.
Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) Page 47
