by Robert Brady
Once again, I sensed rather than heard small, running feet from behind me, and then Nina vaulted up onto Blizzard’s butt, her arms wrapping around my armored waist.
Once again, the stallion reared in surprise. I took hold of his mane and leaned forward until he settled.
“He’s going to bite you if you keep doing that,” I informed her, turning in the saddle.
She smiled wide. “I’m too fast for him,” she informed me.
“I never thought I’d see my daughter on a Man’s horse,” Krell informed me, rising up out of the plains grass. Others popped up behind him. “These are not good days.”
I couldn’t see his face well in the darkness, and an Aschire is hard to read, anyway. I hoped he was kidding but I couldn’t be sure.
“Part of her training,” I said to him, smiling as wide as I could.
He nodded. I didn’t reach down to take his hand because the Aschire didn’t do that. He stared up at me, his head to one side.
“You beat a lot of Andarans,” he stated.
I nodded. “I couldn’t have done it without you,” I said.
He looked around him on the plains. “Don’t know how I feel about that,” he said. Then he looked back up at me.
“Why do you want to fight for this place?”
Krell was one of my Dukes now, so he deserved an answer, however even a trusted ally could know too much about you.
I also didn’t know how much I could spill in front of his people, not that they were likely to talk to anyone.
“I need the lake,” I answered, honestly. “I’m going to build a city on it.”
“I’ve never been to the lake,” he said. “I don’t think it even has a name.”
“Maybe I’ll name it,” I said, smiling again.
He nodded. “Well,” he said, “I hope the lake brings you happiness.”
“Thank you, Krell,” I said.
“Your Grace,” he answered me.
“Pardon?”
“You call your Dukes, ‘Your Grace,’” he corrected me. “You should call me that.”
I nodded. “My apologies,” I said. “I didn’t think you wanted me to, when we are alone.”
Krell considered that. “I didn’t think I’d like it,” he said, finally, “but it seems that other Aschire consider me to be part a Man now, and a leader among our people, for bringing them to you. If that is true, then I can be a Duke, and you can call me, ‘your Grace.’”
“My thanks to your people, and you, your Grace,” I said to him.
“Our pleasure, your Majesty,” Krell answered and, to my surprise, made a fist over his heart. I felt Nina give me a squeeze.
I didn’t know if this was a case of power corrupting, or Krell coming into his own, or Aschire getting a taste for the combat I kept exposing them to from the winning side. Whatever it was, the Aschire were probably not going to be the same anymore.
I felt that this was an example of one of those things War wanted. Whatever it was, it had been added to the price of this excursion into Andoran.
In the beginning of the month of Power, with seasonal storms not uncommon on the Andaran plains and a giant graveyard freshly dug both for my warriors and theirs standing to our north, I crossed a wide, beaten plain where the last battle had been fought. This is where thousands had died, where the land had been scored and the long grass ripped away. Errant breezes pulled the bloody dust across the ground and here and there a bird would land to pick at nothing. I sat Blizzard once again in front of a delegation of Andaran tribes, facing Hungry as a Bull, Angry Lion and Black Hawk again, Tartan stood his mare at my left and Two Spears his stallion at my right, and Shela on her gelding behind me.
This time an older, fat Andaran woman had been brought on a litter; her black hair was streaked with grey and tied into a ponytail behind her head. Her face was leathery and deeply tanned, her crooked nose on its way to meeting her chin. She wore a tan dress that resembled a bag more than anything else, clinging to a round stomach.
This was Hungry as a Bull’s sorceress wife – the one whom Shela had held at bay during the battle. She didn’t look up at us, she held a strand of beads in her hands and she seemed focused on that.
They’d brought a few dozen warriors with them – most of them showing scars from battle. I’d brought my same fifty, none of them injured, though most of them with banged-up armor.
It had occurred to me that the first improvement that my new city needed was a forge.
“We appreciate that you buried our dead alongside your own,” Hungry as a Bull informed me. His horse was a draft almost the size of Blizzard, brown with white socks. He rode it with a saddle, where a large majority of his warriors were bareback.
I nodded, not saying anything. Tartan looked straight ahead beside me. He’d supposedly done his share of fighting from among the lancers, and it had left him a little grimmer. I heard a little chuckle from Two Spears.
“We would like to see you leave this place,” Black Hawk spoke up. That got him a sideways look from Angry Lion and Hungry. “You know you don’t belong here.”
“Seems to me like I do,” I answered him. “At least, it doesn’t look like you can do much about it.”
Hungry opened up his mouth, but his wife spoke instead. Without looking up, she said, “Shela, it looks to me like these men are wanting to fight each other again.”
“Yes, Strong Spirit,” Shela answered, her attention focused on the old woman. “It seems that way to me, too.”
“I have enough to heal among the Sure Foot,” Strong Spirit continued. I hadn’t been introduced to her – they didn’t bother introducing the women unless there was a reason. “Are there so few among the Wolf Riders?”
This was the first person outside of the tribe who’d acknowledged us, other than Two Spears.
“My tents are full of sick and injured,” Shela responded. She shot me a glance. “I have alcohol to treat them, but it still takes time.”
Strong looked up at Shela on her horse. Shela wore her regular Andaran garb, the leather halter and skirt split up the side. The faint stretch marks on her stomach were becoming more noticeable as her pregnancy was starting to show. The light breeze pulled at her long, black hair.
“My people have no alcohol,” she said. “We know that yours use this, and you save many lives. I have hundreds sick with fever. Even if I had alcohol, I wouldn’t know how to use it.”
“If my tribe were friends with the Sure Foot,” I said, interrupting them, “then I would have to share my alcohol, and show my friends how to use it, and how to make it for themselves.”
Hungry exchanged glances with Angry and Black Hawk. It looked to me like the latter wasn’t ready to forgive me yet, but before the days when surgeons realized that germs spread disease and sickness, and that they could be killed with alcohol, more warriors died after a battle from infection than during it from lethal wounds.
The secret of alcohol would make a huge difference to the Andaran people, where the tribes fought frequently.
“If you would do this,” Angry Lion said, “then you would be a friend to my people.”
“And mine,” Hungry added.
The two turned to Black Lion. He stared straight at me.
“I would take it as a bribe not to attack you,” he said, finally.
Good enough.
Until the month of Desire, the Wolf Riders traded with the Sure Foot and the Hunters. In that time my Sea Wolves set sail for Eldador and returned with stocks of raw alcohol and witch hazel extract, building materials and tools, artisans and experts, as well as wealthy commons looking to invest in the new enterprise, the city I would call Wisex, which would rise up from the lake bed.
A cavalcade of Dwarves arrived as well, only one of whom I knew. I’d sent messengers back to the north to ask for more help in designing a new city, and twenty had responded.
Kvitch waddled down the gang plank from one my newest ships, “The Stallion.” She was more in the design o
f a cutter than a warship, meant for speed, a scout ship to precede an armada.
“Dwarves do not like ships!” the ambassador of the Simple People informed me, taking my forearm in his. Once again he wore that golden sunburst amulet that I’d seen on him when last we parted. Other Dwarves were already poking around the dirt and staring out into the lake, probably looking for the island that they’d come to work on. They all dressed in rough brown pants closer to canvas than cloth, white homespun shirts with wide collars and green capes over their shoulders. Their beards were brown and red and black all streaked with grey. These were older Dwarves more experienced in what they did.
“Well, you’ve a few more trips on them in front of you,” I informed him. “We’re going out onto the lake tomorrow and raise up that island you’ll be working on.”
“And you believe your wife – your queen – can do this?” he asked me.
“She believes it,” I said.
“I don’t know of any Uman-Chi who could do something like that,” he informed me, his eyebrows twitching skeptically. “Your wife is very self-confident.”
“I might be able to help with that,” another said, a white-robed figure in a brown cowl. We both turned and watched Dilvesh, my Druid ally from the Free Legion, descend down the gang plank from the same ship as the Dwarves. I’d sent for him, too – Shela felt sure that she could raise the island on her own, but this was more of Dilvesh’s thing.
I felt a smile spread across my face as I stepped forward and reached out a hand to Dilvesh. He returned the gesture, reaching out to me and smiling from under a mob of green, curly hair. He threw back the brown cowl and opened up his out robes to reveal the green question mark, turned upside-down on his white inner robes. I gripped his forearm in mine as the Dwarf looked on.
“This is the returning Druid that we’ve heard about in the North?” the Dwarf asked.
Dilvesh regarded him. He’d probably staid dark and hidden on the ship while it sailed – that was more the Druid’s way. No one had known they still existed a year ago and that wasn’t a habit he’d be quick to break.
Not Dilvesh, anyway.
“Your idea interests me,” he admitted. “This idea of creating a city on a lake where no island exists, starting with the island.”
“I thought you’d like it,” I answered him.
“You’ve seen that there’s lots of good land here,” Kvitch commented.
I pointed out onto the plains at the end of the peninsula, where the beaten down plains stood out between us and where the winter hay blew wild; where horse bones could still be seen. “This land is vulnerable,” I said. “I don’t want something where I can defend myself; I want something where I don’t have to.”
“That idea worked for the Uman-Chi,” Dilvesh noted.
“Until you came along,” Kvitch added, smiling through his beard. “Or had you not noticed that, either?”
I chuckled. “This time I won’t have to conquer it,” I said.
“Not what all of those graves to your north are telling me,” Kvitch said.
Now I squared off on the little man. He’d managed to find a sore spot that I felt like I shouldn’t have. “If you’re not up to the task,” I informed him, “then these ships can take you right to Sental.”
Kvitch frowned. “Oh, if Men can think of it, then Dwarves can make it real,” he assured me. “If your wife can call an island up out of this lake, then we’ll reinforce it, build a bridge to it if we have to – we’ll do what is needed for whatever you want to build.”
He turned his back on us, and looked out over the lake’s black water, where the currents ran fast and crazy and a swimmer could be swept away five feet from the muddy banks.
“I’ll give you your first step to an Eldadorian Empire,” he said. “But you’re the one who will do the rest of the walking.”
“He’s right, you know,” Dilvesh informed me.
He, Shela and I were sitting in the pavilion that had been Shela’s and my home since we’d come here. I’d thought it might be nice to switch to the Sea Wolves once they got here, but Shela had grown up living this way and she’d come to miss it. Our warriors and civilians had been inter-mingling a good bit, the Andarans teaching my Wolf Soldiers their ways, and one thing they’d done is to skin all of the dead horses from the battle. There were horse-hide tents and clothing all over the place now, and uncounted implements made from horse bones.
My Wolf Riders were looking more like a tribe every day; however they’d harvested wood from the Confluni forests and built stables, warehouses, even a few homes. This tribe wouldn’t roam the plains when the weather changed, they’d be staying here.
“Right about what?” Shela asked him. She’d cooked us a dinner of wild herbs and venison. Nina had helped her. Now she and Lee were playing a game with Lee’s bebe in a corner of the tent.
“Kvitch said that this was the start of an Eldadorian Empire,” I said to her. “Wisex is a colony on Andaran soil; the Wolf Riders are my colonists.”
“He’s right,” Dilvesh repeated.
“It takes more than one colony to turn a kingdom into an empire,” I informed the Druid. “It takes a lust to grow, to collect more power, to absorb other people and cultures.”
The Druid looked me square in the eye.
He drove me crazy sometimes.
“What if this is the start of an Eldadorian Empire?” Shela challenged us. She leaned forward on her collapsible canvas chair – we travelled with these, made of leather and bone, because they were easy to move and somewhat comfortable. “What if Eldador expands to other lands, if that is the gods’ will?”
“That all depends on which gods,” Dilvesh said, leaning back. His eyes wandered the canvas top of the pavilion. “Certainly Law and Order don’t seek for Eldador to spread its power.”
I was more concerned with War, Shela with Power, but neither of us said so.
“This needs to happen, regardless,” I said. “If Eldador is now an empire, then the rest of Fovea is going to have to live with it. Conflu is an Empire and no one seems to mind.”
“Accept for us when we’re killing them,” Dilvesh said, not looking away from the ceiling.
Dilvesh knew what he was talking about – this I had to remind myself of. Dilvesh had revealed more to me at the Battle of Tamaran Glen than he’d intended. I hadn’t shared that secret, even with Shela, because it wasn’t mine to share and because Dilvesh would know instantly if I did.
And because I needed Dilvesh, and Dilvesh knew that, too.
Everyone was up the next day with the sun, on the 15th day of Power, and stood looking out at the lake. We still hadn’t given it a name, not that we hadn’t tried. Nothing seemed to fit.
I’d have liked to have D’gattis here, but I wasn’t sure how to lay hands on him and it seemed to me he was probably still angry enough with me that he’d just do his nay-sayer thing until we threw up our hands in frustration.
As I’d said so many times, this needed to happen. Wisex fit into my future plans on almost every level.
“There’s enough rock in the lake bottom to do what you want,” Kvitch informed us. “This probably wasn’t here before the Blast, and the two rivers parted because something like a set of hills parted them.”
That made no sense to me – there Mid River flowed right out of Conflu. Even if the Safe River were created by the Blast, it didn’t flow up backwards to a tributary and then start and then correct itself. He knew more about this sort of thing than I did, so I kept my mouth shut.
“I can sense the collection of hard stone,” Dilvesh informed the Dwarves and Shela. They stood just where the black beach began to meet the water, myself and a couple squads of Wolf Soldier guards behind them. Nina held Lee in her arms and bounced her, while my daughter, hugging her bebe, did her best to go back to sleep.
“So if I can raise that up, you can keep it all together?” Shela asked him.
“Molding it all into one piece shouldn’t be a prob
lem,” Dilvesh answered, “but that is a lot of rock. I don’t see how you can – “
“His plans,” Shela cut him off. “My power derives from what others desire. The stronger the desire – “
“But he’s only one man,” Dilvesh argued.
“He isn’t the only one who wants it,” she said. “If he’s right then I become the avatar for a million unheard voices.”
“And if he’s wrong?” the pessimistic Dwarf asked her.
She turned her head to look down on Kvitch. “Then a lot of my countrymen just died for nothing.”
The little Dwarf said nothing to that, and Shela didn’t expand on it. She and Dilvesh moved right out to the water’s edge, and they began to chant.
It occurred to me both that they’d worked together several times now to combine their magic, and that Shela had informed D’gattis once that, if she weren’t with me, then she’d be with him. I suppressed a little ripple of jealousy right then, and focused on what I wanted.
What I believed my god wanted. What I had to think Shela’s god, Power, wanted as well.
I felt something move through, kind of like a flush. I shuddered but I couldn’t shake it off. People from the tribe I’d created and the Wolf Soldiers gathered around behind us to see what we were doing.
Shela raised her hand before her, her long, black leather raider cloak falling off of her shoulders. She took a step to the side as if she were getting a better stance to lift something.
Maybe she was?
Lee cooed from Nina’s arms and she lifted up one hand like her mother. Dilvesh spread both hands before him.
The lake began to churn. People were pointing and commenting behind us. Shela began to incant, the strain clear in his voice. Dilvesh did the same beside her. Lee began to make nonsense sounds in imitation of her mother.
The churning increased. A shelf of black rock peeked up out of the center of the lake, a sheet of water flowing off of it. More rose around it, then started to level off. They were creating a huge shelf, I couldn’t tell yet how wide. The rock stood out as black as the water around it- the color from the lake might be taken from the bottom, I thought.