by Doug Kelly
Time passed slowly, and no one came. He called, and the guard appeared at the door, but only to see what was the matter, and after finding his prisoner safe, resumed his march back and forth. For his own sake, the guard did not dare have a conversation with a prisoner under arrest for this capital offense, because Grinald’s spies might suspect him, too. Had it been merely theft or any ordinary crime, the guard could have talked freely enough and maybe even sympathized with the prisoner. As time went on, Aton grew thirsty, but the guard ignored his request for water. He remained confined there until late in the afternoon. When they marched him out, he begged for an opportunity to speak, but the guards did not reply and simply hurried him forward. He feared they would execute him without the chance to say a word in his own defense, but to his surprise, he noticed that they were taking him in the direction of the warlord’s tent. As he marched along, new fears gravely clutched him because he had heard of sentries turning men loose, making them run for their lives, and then hunting them down with dogs for the amusement of powerful men. What he desired was that Grinald review the case instead of an appointed judge. A magistrate would be nearly certain to condemn Aton and confiscate any of his possessions that the judge could lay his hands on, which was nothing, but he was afraid a magistrate might not know that and would send him immediately to his death. Grinald might pardon, because the scraps from a condemned man meant nothing to a leader that ruled by divine right. It was as Aton had wished. Grinald had ordered that the guards bring the prisoners to him that evening.
The guards led Aton inside the warlord’s quarters, unbound, and commanded him to stand upright. There was an assembly of clan leaders anxious to see the judgment of the warlord on the two prisoners. The other man, someone hardly known in the camp, was an alleged accomplice of Aton’s, and kept apart from him, just in case the two might collude their defense.
The warlord returned to his tent after an afternoon of celebration. At the ebb of war, ale flowed as freely around Grinald as water did down mountain streams in the springtime. That afternoon had been no exception. Although the war was not over, because the siege had just begun, he had acted as if he were already the victor.
Grinald sat at the table in the rear of the tent and called for a flask of water. Aton was dehydrated and hungry. He had not drunk or eaten since the previous night. It was a hot day, and his tongue was dry and parched. He felt like confessing to any heinous crime just to quench his parched lips.
Aton was first to be accused. He denied any treasonable thoughts or tendencies. As for the other prisoner, he was some vagrant who worked odd jobs around the camp for scraps of food, and he said that he had never even spoken to Aton.
“Is this true?” asked the warlord, as he turned to Aton.
“It is true,” replied Aton. “We have never spoken to each other. He knew nothing of what I said.”
Grinald sat bolt upright. He was surprised to hear someone dressed so shoddily speak so correctly, while so brazenly facing him as Aton did. His eyes narrowed and he suddenly recognized Aton from the battlefield. He had been standing near the dead flagbearer. Grinald remembered the bloody sword and dead bodies strewn about, and thought that Aton had killed his share of the enemy that day with the bloody weapon that he had held in his hand. That image attenuated the warlord’s anger. Maybe Aton would live.
“Are you a traitor?” Grinald asked.
“I can’t be a traitor. I never swore my allegiance to you,” Aton replied in an unexpected tone of defiance.
“So be it.” Blank Fang lifted his mighty arm and twirled his hand at the wrist. With a quick look at his guards, he declared, “Banish him!”
Therefore, they did. The guards seized him; they dragged him off his feet, and hastily carried him outside the tent. They pushed him along, beating him with the butts of their spears to make him run faster. The groups of soldiers they passed laughed and heckled. The dogs barked and snapped at his ankles. They hurried him outside the camp, and while thrusting at him violently with their spear butts, the angry guards knocked him headfirst onto the ground. They gave him the warning that if he ever ventured back to the camp, they would hang him. Like a dead dog, they left him on the dirt.
A while later, in the dusk of the evening, Aton slinked away, skirting the forest like a wild animal that was afraid to venture from its cover. He stayed in the shadows of the trees until he reached the road that led to Acadia. He needed to reach his boat. He would have gone the whole way through the woods, but that was not possible. Without an axe to hack his way through the dense tree branches or a machete to slash the tangled brushwood, he knew it would be treacherous because he had already seen how thick it was. He ached and trembled in every limb, not with physical suffering, but from the emotional pain that follows unwarranted harm. They had bruised his ego more than his body. He followed the road as fast as his weary bones would let him. He had drunk nothing that day but water from the stream that flowed past the camp. Regardless, he continued without pausing, his head hung forward, and his arms listless, but his feet mechanically plodding onward. The shadow of the forest crept across the ground and covered the road with a dark blanket. Under cover of the night, he continued walking the road back to Acadia and his boat. He walked like a ghost, by sheer will alone, because there seemed to be no life remaining in his body.
The rustling sound of tall grass by the roadside, dancing with the wind, accompanied by the serenade of insects calling for their mates, were his only companions in the solitude of nightfall on that dark and lonely road. He was all alone; it was sink or swim, do or die, survival of the fittest, and Aton wanted to live. Making it back to Acadia on foot seemed like an impossible task, but he had no other choice. He knew that if he made it back to the city by the lake, he could get his boat and leave all of this behind him.
With each footfall, a billowing puff of dust escaped the dirt path and floated silently away like a gray spirit. As he pushed forward, he resolved to make it, or he knew that he would surely die on this road all alone. He turned every bit of his body’s pain into determination. Despite his thirst and hunger, he continued to plod onward, thinking about the joy he would attain after making it to his destination. As he stumbled along in a stress-induced hypnotic trance, something occurred to him that he believed was of great importance. Before he could let himself pass through the city of Acadia and escape in his boat, there was one other thing that he had to do in that town.
END OF BOOK ONE
Thank you for reading Across The Lake. The story concludes in its sequel, The Long Journey Home.
Doug Kelly
