“You waste your time. You cannot win, Vaccar,” said the chief.
Vaccar swung his ax overhead with a grunt and brought it straight down over the chief.
Bakti stepped aside gracefully and snapped the staff against the handle of the ax to knock it out of Vaccar’s hand. An inch closer, and he would have crushed Vaccar’s hand. “Stop this at once.”
But Vaccar did not stop. Once he recovered his ax, he unsheathed his hunting knife, turned and swung both of his weapons at the chief again and again, not caring that the chief was flinging them off both sides of his staff. “If I win,” the warrior panted, “I become Chief of the Dhanani. The boy dies.”
Bakti spat on the ground. “Even if you could win, no man of the tribes would follow you. You’d be dead before the sun fell.”
The hunter snarled over him. “And if I lose—”
“—your bloodline must be destroyed,” gasped Aidan.
Vaccar grinned wickedly. “The boy dies.” He feinted his ax upward to draw Bakti’s strike and brought his knife up across the chief’s silvered chest to leave a stripe of blood. The cut was not deep, but Bakti’s muscles rippled against the pain. Instantly, the Verge of Anado crashed down against Vaccar’s shoulder, sending the satisfying crack of breaking bone rippling through the wood to Bakti’s hand.
The warrior’s shoulder was broken, and he dropped the knife to the ground with a gasp of pain. He turned his stronger shoulder toward the chief to protect himself. Then he slashed awkwardly with his ax, leaving a thin scratch in the staff. He turned, tossed the ax in the air to change his grip and brought it down with all his power toward Bakti’s neck.
The chief shook his head sadly as he looked into Vaccar’s eyes for the last time. Then with a fluid blur of motion followed by two quick snaps of the staff, Vaccar lay dead at the chief’s feet, his neck broken and his ax embedded in the ground several feet away.
Bakti collapsed to the ground beside Vaccar’s body. “Aidan, when I have recovered my breath,” he coughed, taking a tiny leaf full of salve from Aidan’s hand and smearing it over the cut on his chest, “it will be my duty to see that no one of Vaccar’s blood remains in the tribe.” He looked up at the healer, then glanced at the blank face of the boy. Chul was staring into the astonished eyes of his father’s corpse. “See that I find no one.”
* * *
“But Aidan,” whispered the boy as the healer cinched the belt around his waist for him. “I don’t understand. The chief should kill me. It’s the law.”
They stood just outside the edge of the Kharkara plains, beyond the last Dhanani camp to the southeast. The sun was still well above the horizon. Good, thought Aidan, plenty of time. Chul should reach the edge of the Bremondine forests by nightfall. From there, it should be no more than a few days’ run with water from the forest streams and plenty of good hunting along the way, not to mention the late berries. He would be fine.
“My father was right,” the boy went on. “I stole, I deserve to die.”
“No, Chul, you don’t understand. Chief Bakti made a wise decision. Don’t waste this chance he has given you.” The healer smiled into the boy’s frightened black eyes. He held up a scroll case bound in a green ribbon. “Now remember what I told you. This is the letter of introduction that you will give, to whom?”
“Lady Renda—no, Gikka of—” The boy’s shoulders slumped, and he looked down, kicking himself automatically for his stupidity. “Some Invader woman.”
Aidan studied him closely. Chul knew both names, of that he was certain, but the boy had grown so used to hiding his intelligence, even from himself. The healer smiled gently. “Lady Renda of—” But the boy’s eyes were blank. He would not hear it. Aidan took the scroll case and quickly penned her name on it, both in Dhanani script and in Syonese, with the same ink he had used to write the letter itself. Then he blotted it against a strip of birch bark before handing it to Chul. “Now when you reach Brannagh—you can remember that much, that you seek Castle Brannagh?—just give this to the guard at the gate. If you go straight there, you should arrive before their Mid-Gathering Day. The house is still in mourning until the Feast of Bilkar…” He saw the confusion in the boy’s eyes. “The Groggy Bear’s Moon,” he amended, “but I pray they will receive you just the same.” Aidan looked up into Chul’s eyes. “And Lady Renda is not ‘some woman.’ Renda of Brannagh is fully as valiant a warrior as,” he lowered his voice, “as our own chief. I rode with her a while during the war, and my name will make you welcome in her home. Gikka of Graymonde is her squire, and it is Gikka I have asked to take you in.”
He had considered sending the boy straight to Graymonde Hall; it was a day’s run closer than the castle, and he could keep to the plains most of the way. But if Chul should get there while Gikka was away, which was as likely as not, he would be at the mercy of the miners—Hadrian miners, Aidan thought with a shudder—bored, malicious men who would love nothing better than to see how deep the Dhanani fear of the underground ran. Aidan shut his eyes against the horror and the rage even the memory of Hadrians raised in him. No, Brannagh was farther away, but the path was much safer.
“Gikka of Graymonde,” Chul repeated, turning the name quite naturally over his tongue. Good, thought Aidan, such a skill with accents will serve him well. “But why should this Gikka take me in?” muttered the boy. “I’m no good; I’ll probably steal from her.”
“Steal? From Gikka?” Aidan laughed quietly. “I think not.” He looked the boy over one last time. New leathers, knife and sharpening stone, bow, arrows, sling, bundled furs on his back for the cold, a few silver coins Aidan had found. The healer stuffed a sack full of herbs and unguents into the fur bundle and found there something that raised his brow. It was small, and he might not have felt it at all had he not pressed the sack so far into the furs. It was a ring, and pulling it out into the late afternoon sunlight, he saw, just as he feared, that it was the chief’s sapphire ring. He swallowed hard, wondering if he might also find two gold armlets in the shape of coiled serpents in that bundle.
His gaze locked upon Chul’s, and they stood a moment, both unsure what to do. Then quickly, Aidan stuffed the ring back into the boy’s furs. “You may need it,” he murmured absently. Then the healer grasped the boy’s forearm in a warrior’s salute. “Now away with you, Chul Ka-Dree, and may Anado provide for you.”
The boy nodded obediently, gratefully, then ran away across the long shadows of the afternoon.
* * *
He cleaned the dead rabbit expertly, casting the clean organ meats to the east and the foul to the west. As he worked, he allowed himself a quick smile of satisfaction. He had taken the animal’s life instantly, before it could feel a moment’s fear, and left the meat sweet with Anado’s mercy, and, though none of the hunters were there to see it, he had passed the first of the rites of manhood. This rabbit was a big fat buck; the meat would last him the entire journey if he was careful. More than that, he could get most of two fur boots just from this rabbit’s fur, and what he lacked he could fill in with leather strips. Or the skin of another rabbit, he thought, licking his lips. Excited, he slung the carcass over his shoulder by its ears. Then he ran again, dodging between the trees and jumping over the undergrowth, proud of his kill.
That fur’s worthless, boy. Any fool could see that.
He stopped running and blinked into the darkness of the shadows around him. The voice was that of his dead father, ringing with scorn and contempt just as it had hours ago. Except now, it was inside his own head, and he could not escape it.
Vaccar was dead; Chul had watched his father challenge Chief Bakti for the right to kill him, and he had been hoping for his father to win. His father was right; he did not deserve to live. If Vaccar had won, the pain would be over by now. But he had watched the quick, merciful strokes of the chief’s staff break Vaccar’s neck and drop him lifeless to the ground. In the strangeness of the moment and the whirlwind of activity that followed while Aidan readied him to leave
the tribe, he had not had time to feel anything. Now, he was not sure what he felt.
Something inside him was clawing its way through his heart, but he fought it back, desperate to keep it locked away. He wanted only to run, to keep the horrible voices of the afternoon away, to keep this feeling away. His father was dead and dishonored, and now he was alone. Alone with his kill. Chul looked down, ashamed to think of what his father would say about the rabbit he had prized only a few moments ago.
Look at it, idiot! That rabbit was changing coat for the coming snows. What were you thinking?
Suddenly, he turned to look at the rabbit he had just killed and saw that indeed the coat was a bit thin and blotchy. He could pull tufts of the hair out with his fingers, and below them, he could see the new cold weather hairs at the skin surface. They would grow a bit if he left the skin untanned for a few days, but not enough to fill it out. He sighed in defeat. The fur was worthless.
“But I killed it for the meat!” he cried into the empty woods. “For the meat!” But the trees only looked down on him with loathing at his wastefulness, and outlined in their leaves and shadows, he saw his father’s sneer.
This boy reasons no better than a javelin dog; he’d be better off dead.
He ran. His heart pounded in his chest with fear, and his breath came in short panicked bursts, but he ran.
Behind him, he imagined his father’s corpse with its broken neck coming after him, a thick wooden staff in one hand and a broad homemade candle in the other. In his mind, he felt the sizzle of the candle’s flame burning his flesh and the thick crack of the staff against his legs and arms, and little gasps of pain escaped his lips. But he did not look back. He could not let himself look back, because if he did—if his father was behind him, if his dead father’s corpse was running right behind him—he would never get away. The rabbit fell from his shoulder, but he did not stop to pick it up. Instead he ran on, two miles, three.
The boy is no good. He deserves to die!
Ten miles. Twelve. He cried with his fear, running headlong through the dark forest with no idea what lay ahead of him, knowing only that he could not look back.
Then, abruptly, he broke into a clearing. Some ten or fifteen people around a campfire stopped their singing and dancing when they heard him crash through the bushes, a few of the men rising in surprise with weapons drawn. But they saw he was no more than a boy and a scared boy at that, and the men seated themselves again to resume their songs and stories.
“Come, child,” called one woman in Bremondine. She was a young mother with chestnut hair tied in a weary bow and a harried look about her features that seemed just now to have relaxed. She sat with her two children asleep on her lap and her husband’s arm thrown round her shoulders, and she smiled invitingly to Chul, patting the ground beside her. “The night air’s a touch to the chill.”
The Dhanani boy only stared at her, so she rose and settled the sleeping children against her husband’s lap before coming near him as one might approach a strange dog. “Come sit, lad,” she cooed. “You’ll see no harm here, and we’ve a bite of stew left in the pot, if you’ve stomach.”
To his surprise, he understood most of what the woman said. Her accents were not as clean as those of the bards who sometimes came through the Dhanani camps, but the words were the same.
Stew, she had said. His stomach was still tight with fear and exertion from his run, but he could not resist the wonderful meaty smell rising from the pot. He took a step forward hesitantly and looked at the pot hanging over the fire. “I’m hungry,” he said weakly in Dhanani, hoping one among them might understand.
The woman came closer and took his hand to lead him to the fire. Then she smiled again. “Ooh, Dhanani’s no tongue of mine,” she apologized gently, “but I know a hungry child when I see one.” She took her own bowl and filled it from the pot. Then she handed it to him and watched him accept it gratefully. “There, now, fall to it and clean the bowl, there’s a good lad,” she said.
“Feed a stray, Creda,” the woman’s husband muttered.
“Nonsense,” she said haughtily. “The boy’s half-starved, and we’ve extra in the pot. Where’s your charity? He’ll go his ways soon enough.”
Chul lapped up every drop of the cold, greasy stuff so she scraped the bottom of the pot to get him some more. Around him, a few of the men had started singing while three of the others moved away to speak to each other in strange heavy voices. Plays. They worked at plays, learning their parts. He watched with fascination.
“Like the plays, do you?” Creda handed him his bowl again and sat beside him, watching the men step through their scenes.
Chul scraped the bowl with his fingers.
“Bards and actors, us,” sighed the woman, “not that it much matters. We’s not so much welcome as we was during the war. No news to spread as hasn’t been heard six times. And of plays,” she said, brushing wisps of her hair back from her sweaty face, “they’ve not the patience to hear one ’less it bubble up their mirth.” She lifted herself to take his bowl now that it was empty. “Me brother, Farney, that one to the left, there, he set a fine play on the war, look you, the Fall of Kadak, with a proud Duke Brada and Lady Renda and the knights and all, but Brannford booed it from the stage, demanding instead the Merry Horseman.”
“Merry Horseman?” Chul repeated. He had no idea what she was saying.
“Aye,” answered Creda with a sideways glance at him, “can you imagine? No wonder it is, people think so low of us Bremondines.”
His cursed mother must have whored herself to a Bremondine. No son of mine is he.
He found a smile for Creda, but behind it, he felt a seductive blackness creeping over his soul again. An unfocused but intense anger too dangerous to loose. He would not let it out, could not. Chul drew a few quick breaths and closed his eyes, and soon the feeling passed.
“Creda,” muttered her husband shaking his head. “The boy’d not be understanding a word.”
“Hush, now,” she frowned over her shoulder at him as she pulled the empty stew pot from the fire. “So he don’t understand it, ain’t no reason I can’t speak it to him? Sure you won’t hear it.”
“Because you cannot tell a good play from aught.” Her husband shifted himself against the log at his back. “The Horseman’s true, at least, and not half so bloody dull.”
“Who’s to say what’s true and not? After all,” she said, “weren’t no one there to see at the end, and with the duke dead…” She shrugged. “Well, Farney’s got to fill the holes somehow, aye.”
“Holes,” he grumbled, “more like chasms, you ask me. Do like the way the Hadrians run away screaming.” He laughed. “That were funnier than the Merry Horseman.”
“Oh,” she huffed, “you’re as bad as them at Brannford.”
Her husband only shook his head and cast a long suffering look toward Chul. But Chul had been watching the man’s hand absently stroking his sleeping children’s hair, and tears welled in the boy’s eyes. Somewhere in the back of his memory, he remembered the feeling. His mother had touched him that way long ago.
Creda sat beside him again and touched his arm. “Oh, there, there,” she soothed. Her plump face showed a frown of concern when she looked at the cuts and bruises of his face. “You’ve had a hard go, haven’t you, lad? But it’s all right now. You’re with us, now, and you’re welcome to stay as long as you like.”
The boy nodded. “Th–thank you,” he managed in Bremondine, to the young woman’s delight.
“So you do speak, then,” the husband was saying. “Well, well. Tell us, lad, whither would you go?” He ignored the glare from his wife. “Considering you came from the norwest, I reckon you go southeast?” When Chul looked at him in confusion, the man pointed away through the forest. “Southeast,” he repeated.
Chul nodded. “Brannagh,” he said simply.
“Brannagh,” laughed one of the singers, stopping in mid-verse. “What use has Castle Brannagh for a Dhanani, ju
st now? The whole house is in mourning, what with the dead granddaughter and all. Bad business, that.”
“P’raps they needs of a servant?” offered a woman who sat stitching costumes by the fire. “Though why a Dhanani…”
“Stables, maybe. They’ve a way with horses, the Dhanani.”
“Aye.”
Creda looked up sharply. “I’m sure it’s no business of ours,” she scolded. “If the lad goes to Brannagh, the gods help him there, say I.”
“Castle Brannagh is three days’ journey afoot from here,” said an old woman who sat casting birds’ bones on the ground between her feet. “Two an he runs. Yet I sees him there by sunset tomorrow.” She scowled up at him, and for the first time, he could see that her eyes were clouded over with cataracts. Pale, colorless, the eyes of Mohoro of the Underground. Without thinking, he backed away from her. “Behind him comes a storm over Brannagh,” she said, casting the bones again. “A terrible, terrible storm.”
“Brings he the storm, this boy?” asked the singer, rising to his feet. “Should we stop him here?”
“Nay, nay. He is its herald, but he must help to fight it.”
Creda stood back with her hands on her hips. “Tevy, sit you down, you fool. Stop him here, the very idea!” The boy looked quizzically at the young woman who had fed him, but she only shook her head. “Sada reads fortunes for them as pays her, and it’s her what keeps us fed just now.” She winked at him and lowered her voice to a whisper. “But sometimes she forgets it’s but show.” She put her arm around Chul and rubbed up his shoulders to make him warm. “Need you a bed for the night, boy?”
“Creda,” began her husband with a sigh, “where would you put him?”
“Why, anywhere at all, but I’ll not have a child sleep out in the woods!”
Her husband snorted. “Child, indeed. By his age, the Dhanani father sons, Creda, and best you remember it ere you set him up in our own bed.”
Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1) Page 10
