Jonathan Haymaker

by Sam Ferguson

  “Jason Haymaker!” Memaw rebuked. “Where are your manners?” Out came the wooden spoon and she thunked Jason’s right hand. Jason quickly chewed the rest of the roll and swallowed while he held up his hands in mock surrender.

  “Sorry,” he offered.

  Memaw sighed and shook her head of gray hair. “What am I going to do with you?” she asked as she turned back to the stone oven and pulled out another tray. Jonathan smiled wide when he saw it. Not only did they have rolls, but there were sugar cookies as well.

  “I made a trip to town today,” Pa said as he came out from his room near the back of the house. The old door creaked softly as he pulled it closed behind himself. “Mortimer offered me an extra sack of sugar.”

  “Oooo,” Jonathan said as he sat next to Jason and nudged his older brother with his right elbow.

  “Mortimer would like you to pay a visit to Annabel tomorrow,” Pa told Jason.

  “Oooo, Annabell loves Jason! Pig-face wants to marry Jason!”

  Jason turned and scowled at Jonathan. “Better to have Pig-face than that girl who wants to marry you!” he poked.

  Jonathan frowned and squinted. “No girl wants to marry me,” he protested.

  Jason smiled wickedly. “Exactly.”

  “Now, boys, that’s enough,” Memaw scolded. “I’ll give each of you one sugar cookie, but the rest are for you to take and give to Annabell tomorrow.” She looked pointedly at Jason. Jason sighed.

  “So I only get one cookie and the rest I have to give back to Mortimer’s daughter? Doesn’t sound like a fair trade.”

  “You may change your mind in a few years, Jason,” Pa said as he sauntered to the table and pulled the sturdy, wooden chair back to sit in. He lowered himself down and rolled his sleeves up to his elbows and then rested his forearms on either side of his clay bowl. “Young girls have a way of turning into beautiful women. Give it time, and I think both of you will be recanting your words tonight.”

  “Assuming she will still take him,” Memaw said as she turned back to the counter to grab the decanter of water. “Jason has a good look about him, but Annabell is the kind that will quickly tire of teasing. A wife shouldn’t have to raise her husband into maturity.”

  “Ha!” Jason scoffed with a smirk. “I won’t be marrying her anytime soon anyhow,” he said. “I will be off to the Murkle Quags soon enough. When I return, I will have my pick of any woman I want.”

  Memaw lost her grip on the decanter and it slipped the last inch down to the table, sloshing a bit of water on the table. She was quick to hide the grimace on her face, but Jonathan caught it. So had Pa. The two exchanged a glance and Pa sighed. “I’ll get a cloth,” Memaw said.

  “No matter,” Pa said. He pulled a tan handkerchief from his pant pocket and wiped the spill quickly. “You ought not to upset her like that,” Pa whispered to Jason.

  Jason blushed, but he didn’t back down. “I don’t see the point in pretending that it isn’t going to happen. The tournament is coming up, and we all know that I am going to be the top pick for the army. They’ll take others too, but there is no one that can come close to my skill with a bow, and I am fair with a sword as well.”

  “Not as fair with a sword as those trolls are,” Pa cautioned. “You know what happened to your father.”

  Jason closed his mouth at that and looked down at his empty bowl. After a moment he nodded and offered an apology.

  Pa nodded his acceptance and then pulled the chair next to him out for Memaw to sit down. “Let’s eat, honey. I’m starved and you have been slaving over the kitchen for hours.”

  Memaw still had her back turned to the table. Jonathan could tell from the way she bent her head down and her hands moved up that she must have been wiping tears from her face. When she turned back to the table, she was all smiles, but it didn’t hide the moistness in her slightly reddened eyes.

  “He’s right,” she said as she sat down next to Pa. “He ought to be able to talk about it.”

  Pa shook his head and put a hand on Memaw’s shoulder. “It’s alright,” he started. “We can just eat and talk about the work.” He turned quickly to Jonathan to start a new conversation. “How much hay were you able to bale today?”

  Memaw raised a hand and shook her head. “No, let’s not pretend this isn’t happening. If we do, then we’ll regret it after he is gone.”

  Pa sat back in his chair and folded his arms. The disapproving stare he shot Jason was enough to cause even Jonathan to look down at his empty bowl.

  Memaw reached out and took Pa’s bowl in one hand while removing the lid from the stew pot with the other. She scooped out the thick, brown stew in the large ladle and slipped the contents into the bowl. She dished everyone at the table, ensuring to find extra pieces of meat for Jason. After she had filled her bowl she replaced the lid on the pot and then stirred her stew.

  “Well, Jason, have you thought about where you would like to be assigned?” Memaw pressed.

  Jonathan fidgeted with his feet, glancing between Jason and Pa.

  Jason finally broke the silence and looked directly at Memaw. “I want to go to the Quags,” he said. “I don’t want guard duty in Fort Sym, that’s for sure.”

  Memaw nodded and took a bite of stew, but her face drooped as surely as if she had just been told Jason had died. Pa must have noticed the hurt in her reaction as well.

  “Bryce was sent to Fort Sym,” Pa pointed out. “Mortimer was able to pay in order to have Bryce stationed away from the fighting.” He paused and glanced at Memaw before continuing. “I don’t have much, but I could make an arrangement with Sir Bingham. There is no need for you to—”

  Jason shook his head and pressed the matter. “I don’t want to spend my years hiding in Fort Sym. Someone has to fight the trolls and send them back into their holes.”

  Pa shook his head and pointed a finger at Jason. “You would do well to listen to me. Wars are not fought by the honorable, they are fought by the poor. Your commander will be a man of good upbringing, but he has no more desire to be in the swamps than I do. All of the nobles will be in Fort Sym, or perhaps as far south as Battlegrym, but none of them will serve in the Quags. Those who can afford to, pay their way into a safe station.”

  Jason shook his head. “Father didn’t,” he said pointedly. “He chose the Quags as well.”

  “And look what happened to him!” Pa yelled as he slammed his fist on the table. “He died, stuck by a troll’s spear and his body left to rot in the swamps without a proper burial!”

  Memaw broke down and started to cry. Pa retracted his fist quickly and looked to her with soft understanding, but it was too late. The damage was done. Memaw shook off his hand when he stretched out to comfort her, and then she rose from the table and excused herself. She went into her room and closed the door behind her.

  Pa dropped his spoon into his stew, angrily splashing some of it onto the table as he glowered at Jason. “I watched your mother die of grief after we got the notice about your father.”

  “I remember,” Jason said. “I was eight. I remember everything.”

  Pa leaned forward. “Then how can you be so callous? You saw what happened, you know it tore the family down. You are going to be stationed in Fort Sym, and that is the end of it!”

  “How can you pay for that?” Jason asked. “The monsoons have affected the weather here too, and some of our fields haven’t yielded the same crop they used to a few years ago. You don’t have the money.”

  Pa nodded knowingly. “Mortimer does,” he said quickly. “He said if we arrange a marriage, then he would pitch in whatever I can’t make up for myself. I even offered to trade the windows to him for his help.”

  Jonathan’s eyebrows shot up. He was certain he hadn’t heard Pa correctly, but when he looked at Pa’s face, he saw that he had indeed heard him. Jonathan turned around and glanced at the freshly cleaned windows.

  “The deal has been struck,” Pa said. “Now, I don’t want to talk of this anymore.�
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  Jason stood from the table, placing a hand down on either side of his stew. “The trolls are coming,” he said. “If we all stand back and watch them as the monsoons come farther north and the trolls multiply, then we will be at fault for letting our homeland slip into the expanding Quags.”

  Pa arched a gray eyebrow and pointed to Jason’s seat. “You are not going to stand there and repeat your father’s words to me as if you are some fount of wisdom, boy. Now sit.”

  Jason hesitated for a moment, but only a moment before he complied.

  “Your father felt the same way, and I am certain he killed far more trolls than most others sent to the Quags. He was an honorable man, but he was also foolish. One man cannot stop what is coming. Fort Sym is the proper line of defense. It is a great castle with fortified walls and all sorts of weapons. Men were never meant to walk among the Murkle Quags. If we were, then the gods would have given us webbed feet and fish scales. Our place is in the dry land. If the monsoons stretch north, then we will fall back as the Quags expand.”

  “You say that only because you don’t believe the Quags will come this far north,” Jason said. His tone was even, but the defiance was more than evident in his red face and cold stare. “Just because our town might survive the monsoons, that doesn’t mean we stand by and do nothing.”

  Pa sighed and reached down to grab the bottom hem of his shirt. He pulled it up over his chest and head and then dropped it on the floor. Jonathan stared at the myriad scars across Pa’s white flesh. Slash marks ran jagged lines horizontally and diagonally. There were also circular marks of thick, purple scar tissue on his chest and left side.

  “I know more of what I speak than you can comprehend,” Pa said. “I fought in the Quags. I was one of a group of scouts sent to find the heart of the Quags, a place deep within the Warrens that lie in the southeastern region of the Quags. We never found it. We never came close to the Warrens. I saw them once, on one scouting expedition with two of my comrades. Our wizard was able to stop the rains and clear the skies just long enough that the three of us found the edge of the warrens, but we were separated from it by heavily flooded swamps teeming with snakes and other ungodly creatures that still haunt me in the darkness when I sleep.” Pa turned his left arm over and showed a pair of small scars on his underarm. “I was hit by a serpent after taking two steps into the water.

  “When my comrades pulled me out of the water, the wizard administered to my wounds, but we were attacked without mercy. A pair of crocs leapt out from the water and took Silon, each of the beasts making away with half of his body clenched in their jaws. Jaron took a third croc down with his spear, but he backed himself too close to a tree. A green viper was hiding among the vines there that he didn’t even see. He slammed into the snake and it repaid the offense by biting Jaron in the neck.”

  Pa’s eyes grew distant as he folded his arms together and ground his teeth. He took in a deep breath and frowned as he continued. “I still hear Jaron scream even today. You don’t forget a sound like that.”

  “What did they look like?” Jason asked. “The Warrens, I mean.”

  Pa shook his head and slapped his hands to his thighs. “What difference does it make what they looked like?” Pa replied. “It was a vast expanse that rose above the waters and was filled with caves and shafts. It was dead, as dead as the soulless creatures that call it home. For those few moments of seeing it, two of my friends gave their lives, and I was in terrible shape. It wasn’t a price worth paying. The wizard, Kragen was his name, pulled me out of there. He used magic to aid our escape after he managed to pull the venom from my arm, but it made little difference. The monsoon overpowered his spell by nightfall. We huddled together in the darkness, crouched against a large tree and shivering in the cold. We were soaked to the bone and our teeth wouldn’t stop chattering. We were so cold. Even with his magic we couldn’t light a fire. The howls and shrieks of the trolls sounded all around us. Their hunting parties grow strongest at night. Their eyesight isn’t affected by the rain or the darkness.”

  Pa sighed and closed his eyes. “We never slept that night. We couldn’t. We kept our weapons out, shaking and jumping at anything that sounded close. I don’t know what found us, I never saw it. Could have been a croc, or maybe a troll I suppose. All I know is that one second we were huddled together, trying to listen for any sound of approaching trolls. The next moment, Kragen’s staff and arm fell into my lap.” Pa looked up and shook his head as he stared hard at Jason. “Only his arm and staff,” he clarified. “The rest of him was gone.”

  Jonathan sat silently, unable to speak.

  Jason dared to ask another question. “What did you do?”

  Pa scoffed and slapped the table. “I made my peace with death,” he said. “I said goodbye to my dear wife and apologized for failing, and then I prepared to die, but death didn’t come for me then. Whatever took Kragen was satisfied with that. When the morning light broke through the clouds and swamp, I ran back to my unit. When I found them, they were all dead. Spears and arrows stuck in their bodies like…” Pa shook his head and closed his eyes. A tear slipped out from his left eye. He sniffled back the sobs trying to escape from his throat and then looked to the table. “I couldn’t identify all of them,” he said. “There were some bodies that didn’t have heads or faces, and some that were only limbs with bits of meat and bone hanging on. There were no trolls though. The beasts had survived the battle and went on to ravage other parts of the Quags. I made my escape back to Battlegrym and told the commander all that I had seen.

  “I was awarded a commendation and held up as a hero. I was the man who had found the Warrens. Commander Lisent conveniently forgot to tell the others about everything else that I had seen. For the rest of my service I was kept at Battlegrym, as a personal assistant to Commander Lisent. Looking back on it now, I suppose he did that so I wouldn’t scare the scores of men he sent out to retrace my steps. No one ever made it that close to the Warrens again. I was called upon to create maps and advise officers leading patrols out into the swamps, but no matter what I told them or how I warned them, none of them ever returned.”

  “Why haven’t you told us this before?” Jason asked.

  “Because I used to tell your father while he was growing up. After my return he always begged for stories from my time in the war. Your grandmother tried to stop me, and I tried not to tell them, but your father was persistent. He was so convinced that he would be a hero like his father.” Pa stood up then and shook his head. “I indulged him, and his fate was no different than the countless others who tried to retrace my steps.” He turned a soft, but sad eye on Jason again and shook his head. “War is not the place to earn glory and honor,” he said. “The place a man proves his worth is in his own home, by how he treats his family and those around him. I failed my family once, and I won’t do that again. You are going to Fort Sym, and that is final.” He turned and walked to his room.

  Jason stood and shot a hand out as his mouth opened to say something, but as he and Jonathan realized that there were far more scars on Pa’s back than on his front, they looked to each other and were unable to utter a single word more.

  Pa stopped at his door and turned back. “Before you think of snooping around for a map to the Warrens, you can forget about it. All of them were kept at Battlegrym. Your father procured the last one before he departed from Battlegrym to find the Warrens. There is no way to win this war with the trolls. The only rational thing to do is yield whatever ground that the Murkle Quags takes with its monsoons and the monsters it spawns.”

  Chapter 3

  Captain Ziegler held his fist up. The others stopped dead in their tracks behind him. The rain was falling heavily upon them, soaking them through to the bone. Raven used his magic to warm their bodies. Normally he would use his arts to halt the rain itself, but with the casualties they had already suffered, Ziegler thought it best not to draw too much attention. Using magic to halt the rain made it easier to fight, and mo
re pleasant to trudge through the swamps, but altering the weather also brought a greater chance of discovery. The trolls had long ago discovered that if the monsoons were being stopped over a specific location, the humans were sure to be camping or marching nearby.

  Once, Raven had even altered his magic so that he only created an orb around the troupe to keep them dry and warm, but somehow the trolls were able to track that as well. Still, to march a large unit of soldiers through the swamps during the monsoons was to invite disease and death. So, when the army marched out, they used wizards to alter the weather. They could at least fight against the trolls, but foot rot and dysentery were not enemies easily beaten, even with magic, and that was to say nothing of the terrible fevers that so easily beset the humans.

  Despite this, Ziegler had ordered no weather shields as they fled from the Warrens back to Battlegrym. The warmth should be enough to stave off any disease, he figured. There were few enough men that Raven was easily able to keep the foot rot and fevers away, even in the deluge, so long as they made haste for Battlegrym.

  Ziegler moved around a large tree layered in moss and ivy. His feet scraped through the wet ferns and his boots stuck in the thick mud that tugged at his feet with each step forward. The heavy rains masked sounds of movement. Drops as large as the end of a man’s thumb pummeled the Ghosts of the Quags, as well as the ground and foliage around them. Captain Ziegler reached up with his gloved hand to steady himself on the tree. Water squished out between his fingers and the moss tore away as he put pressure on the tree. Tiny bubbles emerged from the flattened moss and the area around his hand sounded as if it was wheezing.

  The little sunlight that pierced the treetops from above did little to help him. The large man peered out through the rain, straining his eyes against the silvery screen of water that shrouded his view. There was a movement some fifty yards ahead of him. A large, dark shape that walked upright and slowly stalked through the trees ahead. The rain obscured Ziegler’s vision so that he could not discern whether he spied friend or foe.