Aram wrenched his sword from the man’s body and stood up to strike again but Kemul was already finished. His broad, handsome face bore a look of overwhelming pain and shock. His arms automatically continued their swinging motion but the heavy sword fell away from his hands.
He went to his knees then as his arms fell limp at his sides and watched in dying fascination as his guts tumbled out of the open cavity that had suddenly appeared in his chest and abdomen. Blood gushed out in a savage flood and soaked the ground around him.
He looked up at Aram in surprise, his mouth hanging open. Then his eyes went flat and he crumpled backward over his legs in a heap. In his fury, Aram callously wiped the gore from his sword on the dead man’s clothes. There was another sound from above. Remembering Ka’en, he looked up.
Ka’en was slumped against the railing of the balcony with her hands over her mouth and her eyes wide in horror and streaming tears. Aram’s sudden fury subsided in a wave of sickening anguish as he stared up at her. The expression on her face as she looked from him to Kemul and back again made him go cold as death inside. It was as if she were gazing upon the vile business of hell being accomplished and Aram was its executor.
He looked down upon the ruin he’d made of Kemul and then focused his attention on the dead man’s companions. They moved back in fear. He glanced at Findaen. Findaen seemed stunned and stared back at him open-mouthed and with rounded eyes. A terrible anger filled the cold emptiness in Aram. His hard gaze swept around at all of them. He did not dare to look up again at Ka’en and see the horror and revulsion registered there.
But then she made another small, odd sound and he heard her move. He looked up just as she turned away and fled into the house. The thought came that she could no longer bear to look upon him after what he had just done and that thought finished him.
His fierce, defensive anger erupted into words. “So instead of fighting Manon, we’re killing each other. These are your laws?”
He slid his sword back into its scabbard and turned harshly to Findaen. “You called me a barbarian once, Findaen. Let me tell you something—with laws like this that allow for the killing of your own citizens—you people are the barbarians, not me. You’re lucky that I am not lord of these lands. I would alter many things.”
Findaen gazed back at him in stunned surprise. Aram glanced upward one more time. Ka’en was gone and had not returned. He realized then the terrible thing that had just been wrought in his life by the killing of this man. She could no longer bear to look upon him for she could see him for what he really was—a vicious killer. And there was another thought, one that brought him an even larger measure of agony—that maybe, in truth, she had really loved the man he’d just slain.
He took two steps backward, reeling from the horrible understanding that all his hopes had just died with the killing of one foolish man. He felt sick. He gazed with hardened eyes at the men surrounding him and the still-bleeding mess he’d made of Kemul and suddenly he despised them all. “But I am not lord of anything—only my valley. I am going back now. Let me never see any of you again.”
He heard Findaen gasp at these words but he didn’t look at him. Without another word, he turned and strode blindly down the street and out of the town, leaving behind him a shocked and stunned populace. No one followed.
The guard at the gate moved to open it for him but he kicked it open with his boot and went through and out into the hard sunshine of the open plain. A mile beyond, he turned off the river road and crashed up the hillside through the trees toward the top of the long ridge.
The pain and soreness in his head, side and shoulder increased throughout the afternoon but he went on, ignoring the possibility of infection and continued climbing up the long ridge in a blinding fog of heartache and anger. Sunset caught him near the camp he and the horses had used the year before, but still he went on, into the night.
He topped the ridge about noon on the second day and went down toward the river. His soul was filled with anguish and sickness. Night caught him before he came to the stream. When he reached the riverbank, he didn’t go eastward to look for the crossing in the pale light of the moon but plunged directly into the dark, quick current. He no longer cared if he lived or died.
He crossed the second river in the same way and carelessly climbed the steep cliffs beyond in the waning depths of the night, coming above the rim just as the sky lightened in the east. The pain in his soul grew. There was no chance now that he and Ka’en would ever mean anything to each other. He’d slaughtered the man that, for all he knew, she’d intended to marry. He had cut him down like an animal as she watched.
Morning found him in the valley five miles from the city. His legs trembled from the unceasing exertion and his lungs burned with every shuddering gasp but he kept on. When he came into the orchard, he collapsed onto his face in the grass, exhausted and soul-sick. Darkness crept over him and he slept through most of the day.
When he awoke, the sun had dropped below the great mountain. He went up and sat on the bottom step of the south stairway. Only then did it occur to him that he’d not seen Borlus or Hilla. He gazed around the valley in the failing light but could see no sign of them anywhere. Neither Willet nor Cree were visible in the sky but since he didn’t want to talk to anyone anyway, he let it go.
That night, he slept in his room below the tower. He spent the next few days wandering the valley near the city, looking for Borlus and Hilla. But it was only for the purpose of distraction. Always, he could see Ka’en’s lovely face before him, staring at him in horrified realization of the kind of man he was. He could not shake it. He tried to reason with himself but to no avail. The fear that he’d lost any chance with her forever pervaded all.
He needed to do something. He needed action that would distract his mind from its pain and harden his aching heart. Most of his crops were two or three weeks away from maturity and he was tired of farming anyway—and of farmers. He decided to make more weapons.
First, he used up his stock on hand, making seventeen pikes and forty-two lances, another bow and more than a hundred arrows, then he went into the foothills and collected more green stock and stacked it in the granary to dry. That process used up five days and still he was unbearably miserable. His thoughts turned then to the field from which he’d escaped all those years before.
There were lashers there that he could kill, or that could kill him—it didn’t really matter to him now—and at least one overseer. He no longer cared about the slaves—they could do as they pleased once their masters were gone. And there was a practical side. Combined with the actions taken against the logging operation earlier in the year, Manon might be further convinced that he had troubles nearer to hand than Derosa.
It would buy Ka’en time. Though she would never love him, he still loved her—all the more desperately now that she was beyond his reach forever. He gathered his weapons, one pike, one lance, two swords, and a bow, with arrows, and provisions for several days. Then he went through the tunnel in the mountain below the tower, coming out into the jumbled foothills above the broad slope that looked down upon the distant fields of his servitude.
He camped that night beneath a tall jagged spire of rock in a cluster of pungent brush. During the afternoon’s trek he’d encountered two of the serpents with the odd diamond markings like the one he’d killed below Cree’s nest so he slept curled up on a rock above the level of the ground.
The next morning, he angled to the northwest as he went, intending to intersect the dike cutting into the slope from the west that eventually became the main ridge separating the fields where he once worked from his old sleeping quarters. It took two more days of picking his way around clumped piles of jumbled rock and through thick stands of the pungent, prickly brush to gain the dike.
There were lots of small, furry creatures that inhabited the rough tangles of the slope and snakes were plentiful. He was glad to reach the higher ground where there were fewer rocks and more soil, gras
ses, and trees. Once on the dike, he went quickly to the west throughout most of the third day, traveling more cautiously as it became the ridge that separated the broken hills above the fields on the left and the round valley containing the slaves’ sleeping quarters on the right.
Late in the afternoon, he eased through a small stand of trees and out onto a brush-covered promontory where he could look down into the valley that contained the fields. It had been planted with a grain crop of some kind—wheat perhaps, or barley that was just beginning to ripen. There were no workers in the fields.
He slipped to the north and made his way across the top of the ridge and looked down into the round valley containing the habitations. Here, a surprise confronted him. During the time of his servitude there had been a single row of huts along the eastern side of the assembling ground. There was much more now.
Now, there was a walled village, with dozens of huts, a granary, and a main street leading diagonally out of a central square to a large double gate on the northwest corner. There were guard towers on two of the other corners—one over on the northeast by the stream that came out from the hills, flowed under a bridge near the main gate, and plunged into the canyon beyond. The other tower was on the southwest where the access road cut through the ridge toward the fields.
And there were women and children. It had become a sizeable village in his absence. Eight years had made a difference in Manon’s commitment to this operation. In the center of the square stood a large house with a flat rooftop and high railing on all sides. A very fat man, probably an overseer, and a thin, bony woman lay naked on a bed in the middle of the rooftop.
Aram turned away in disgust from the sight of what they did there and examined the rest of the village. There was a lasher on each of the guard towers, though neither was overtly involved in keeping watch. One was leaning languidly over the railing of his tower, watching the villagers below. The other, nearest to Aram, sat in a corner of his tower gnawing on a pile of bones. This was another item of interest. During his time there had been three lashers; now, though he studied the village and its surrounding environs for some time, he could see only the two.
There were not many villagers in sight, only a few women cooking evening meals, a half dozen men sitting outside their huts, and three small children playing in a puddle of muddy water. Aram slipped down the ridge through the brush and trees until both lashers were in range of an accurate shot from his bow. Standing up and leaning against the trunk of a tree, he drew back his bow and targeted the nearest lasher.
One of the most basic of human urges stopped him. Curiosity. He released the pressure off the string and lowered his bow. There was time, and he could kill these monsters at will. He no longer feared a mere pair of lashers; especially when there was enough distance between them to allow him to deal with them one at a time.
But there were things he wanted to investigate first. How was this village managed? How many people inhabited it? Was there just the one overseer? And there was the surrounding countryside. He knew very little of this part of his world and it would be advantageous to explore it now before he raised a ruckus in the village below.
He watched the villagers until the sun rested on the hills to the west, then he went back up the ridge to the east until he found a spring. There was a large patch of sweetroot growing on the hillside above the spring, so, even though it was not the finest fare, he would not lack for food. He was tired, physically and mentally, so he curled up in a copse of trees east of the spring and slept.
The next morning, he went northward through the narrow valley, waded across a shallow place in the small river and entered the hills beyond. There was grass in abundance on these hills but very little vegetation of any other kind except for the pungent gray brush. The soil was soft and sandy and the outcroppings of rock that jutted up along the spines of the ridges crumbled under pressure from his fingers.
The deeply eroded, jumbled hills seemed to go on forever. Every time he crested a ridge, there was another one beyond, further but just a bit higher. And, as he gained altitude, there were scattered trees that grew thicker the deeper he penetrated the sandy hills. Short, stubby, and ravaged by an apparent lack of water, they were pungent like the brush that was interspersed among them.
Finally, several miles north of the village, he topped a ridge beyond which the sandy hills fell away toward a broad valley through which a wide shining river trended from northeast to southwest. It evidently had its origin in the distant mountains that lay to the north of his own valley. Keeping to the ridge tops, Aram descended throughout the morning and by the time the sun stood overhead, looked out across the wide valley from the vantage point of the lowest hilltop. As he gazed across the valley with its coiling, meandering river he saw that, running through its center, there was an ancient road.
To his right, the valley cut a broad swath between its surrounding hills as it went toward the northeast until eventually the distant mountains swallowed it up and the hills far off in that direction took on the green hue of timber. About a mile along, in a bend of the river, were strewn the ruins of an ancient town.
To the west, on his left, the valley broadened and its floor was deep in grass. Two or three miles away in that direction, Aram saw the telltale squares of yellowish green that indicated the ripening of summer wheat. Near those distant fields, tucked up against the flanks of the hills, was another village. The edge, at least for the moment, of Manon’s empire. Even at that distance, Aram could tell that this village, also, was walled.
Out on the plains of his youth, there was never a need for walls. Except for the great marsh, which only the very foolish would enter, there had been no place to run. But here, on the border of the wild lands, Manon had to cage his slaves. Aram wondered idly if his own escape had engendered that result. More likely, as his empire grew and the frontiers expanded, Manon had simply found the need for more oppressive measures to control his subjects.
On Aram’s right, far beyond the place where the valley merged with the hills north of his valley, tall, gray mountains marched away into the far northern reaches of the world, piling up to impressive heights. To the west, the valley broadened toward the distant plains. And to the north, far beyond the hills that tumbled up across the valley, away over the rim of the world, dark smoke rose up and blackened the distant sky.
He turned around and ascended to the south back up the sandy hills until he reached the top of the main ridge, then turned west, intending to come out on the road in the canyon below the village. Sunset caught him still on the ridge a half mile north of the village. He ate a cold supper of jerked deer meat, laid his weapons at his side and stretched out on his back in the grass, gazing up into the vault of the heavens as the sky deepened through all the hues of blue toward black. Tired from the many days of incessant travel, he slept.
In the morning, he went on to the west for about an hour, until he came out above the bridge over the stream where the dirt road that came up the south side of the long valley forked at the bottom of the canyon. One tangent went to his left—southeast up the steep-sided little canyon toward the village of his servitude—and the other angled away toward the village that lay on the opposite side of the broad valley. This long, wide valley, then, was the one that had lain at his back as he was trundled from the plains all those years before in the vile gloom of the wagon.
He went down to the road and turned southeast up the canyon toward the village, moving cautiously. There had not been any rain for some time so he couldn’t be certain, but it appeared that there had recently been traffic on the road. At midmorning, he rounded the canyon’s last bend and looked into the little round valley with its walled village. The river turned sharply and ran at right angles to the road beneath a bridge at the entrance to the valley. The gates of the village were just beyond the bridge.
The gates were closed and from his hiding place in the brush between the stream and the road he could see both guard towers. A lasher was on each.
The fat overseer was outside the wall to the north, to his left, seated on a chair near the stream. He was watching a group of men from the village construct something of stone by the water’s edge. The lasher on the northeastern tower was also watching this group.
He studied the situation. He did not care about the overseer—he could kill him easily—but he had to be sure of his plans for the lashers. There was a small tributary creek that angled into the larger stream just below the bridge. It flowed out of the south, from the ridge that separated this valley from the fields, and meandered northward across the west end of the little valley. Along the whole of its length, it was bordered by thick willows. It would bring him into the foothills of the ridge near where the road cut through it to the south.
He went down and waded the larger stream at the bottom of a long pool and then crept along the meandering creek under the cover of willows until he had passed the village and came to the base of the ridge. Then he moved eastward through the rocks and brush at the base of the slope until he could see the southwest tower with its lasher.
He decided to kill that lasher first, and then deal with the other as he either came out of the gates onto the level ground or crossed the village to check on his fellow guard. Moving cautiously, Aram found some high ground on level with the tower that had cover and was within arrow shot of the guard tower.
The lasher’s back was to him. He counted the arrows in his quiver. There were fourteen. If he could get in a lucky shot with this first lasher, maybe hit something vital right away, he could finish him at a distance, using perhaps no more than three or four arrows. That would give him time to quickly deploy down the slope to level ground, lay his lances and swords to one side and by firing his missiles rapidly, kill the other lasher as he charged across the hundred yards or so of open ground.
Kelven's Riddle: The Mountain at the Middle of the World Page 39
