Two men bound Mark’s hands behind his back in shackles, which were attached to a chain, then hammered the chain into the ground with an iron peg. Mark lay there in a puddle of rain, mud and his own blood, too exhausted to move. He could just about open his eyes enough to see the key to his shackles being handed to Maedoc, who slipped them into his belt.
Maedoc strolled over to him and leaned down close to his ear. “We’ll speak soon, Mark. Try not to die.”
Mark didn’t watch him leave, his swollen eyes closed to the world, but he could hear him laughing along with his sons as he left.
The crowd were dispersed with angry grunts from Maedoc’s brutes. Mark was left alone, for now, to lie in terrible pain as the rain pummelled down on him.
Mark was left there, chained up out in the open like a dog right in the middle of Fangmar. There he was at the mercy of the elements, battered by the rain, chilled to the bone by the freezing, blustering wind. The locals would come to spit on his, piss on him, throw sewage at him, and when nobody was looking, they’d kick him. Nobody tried to kill him. Maedoc’s order must have been to keep him alive as his own personal plaything.
Mark drifted in and out of consciousness as the pain of his wounds and the suffering in his body occasionally overwhelmed him. He rarely slept, but when he did he was soon awoken by a kick to the ribs, or a barbarian shouting in his ear before running off laughing.
When Mark was conscious, all he could do was sit there in the mud and watch passers-by with cold, murderous eyes. Fangmar was a horrible, foetid place, covered in mist half the time, and the sky above was rarely anything other than storm clouds, as if the gods were trying to wash the whole horrid place away. The people were mangy, half-starved and rabid. They hissed at him like cats, barked at him like dogs. They were animals, and Mark was their pet. He wasn’t fed, and so over time he became weak and starved.
A few days passed. Maedoc paid him no mind during that time. The only event of consequence, in between the suffering and humiliation, was the arrival of rival warlords. Three of them came throughout the day, announced by their own war-horns and recognised by the Morrowfow drums. The gates swung open, and in came a warlord and his chariots, laden down with bodyguards, all armed to the teeth. Even the most lunk-headed warlord wouldn’t be stupid enough to rock up to Fangmar unarmed. They were raiders all, by the look of them, though Mark didn’t recognise their tribes, bearing various tattoos, scraps of armour and cruel serrated weapons.
Each posse, when it arrived, waded through the mud towards Fanghall. As they went they were cursed at and spat at by the miserable populace of Fangmar, and the newcomers responded with curses of their own. There was no love lost between these raider tribes and their fellow pillagers, the Morrowfow. But equally, they took the opportunity to shout at, spit at and goad Maedoc’s pet Darlothian before heading on up to Fanghall.
Maedoc’s feast began, fittingly enough, in Fanghall’s feasting hall. In contrast to Fangmar, the hall itself was a well-built thing, and inside it was comparatively lavish. Maedoc enjoyed the fineries of life as a warlord. A welcoming fire roared. The tables were laden with meat and drink. Tapestries and trophies hung from the walls. The only evidence of the squalor outside was the invasive smell of filth which overpowered the smell of the food.
Maedoc sat, contentedly, upon his imposing black wooden throne as he ate his meal with his bare hands, one careful mouthful at a time. He was sat around a large circular table with his three guests, who were tucking in to a roast boar which sat steaming on the table. One sported an eyepatch, a long black beard and a horned helmet, and wore chainmail. Another was young and bare-chested, with a shaved head and a bushy blonde beard. The last was older, with a white beard and hair, wearing a fur-rimmed hat and animal pelts.
It was an uncomfortable scene played out in silence, save for the gulping and slurping of the four warlords as they ate. When they looked up from their food, very occasionally, it was to cast cutting, paranoid glares at Maedoc, who ate with a satisfied grin on his face. The three visiting warlords were backed up by their posses, all glaring hatefully at the Morrowfow who crowded around Maedoc’s throne. All were armed to the teeth. Everyone was on edge, apart, it seemed, from Maedoc himself. Everyone was ready for a brawl, and it felt as if one could break out at any moment.
Maedoc suddenly clicked his fingers. A couple of people jumped, such was the tension in the room.
“Music!” he grinned. “That’s what we need. Barax, go fetch that musician boy we brought in last week.” His man looked a bit flummoxed. “The one who’s been getting to know our lads.” That rang a bell, and so he ran off to fetch him.
“Didn’t take you for a music lover.” snuffed the eyepatch-wearing warlord. “Apart from those infernal war-drums. Are you going soft, Maedoc?”
“Certainly not, Babakar, but I do appreciate expertise where I can find it. The ancestors know there’s little enough of that in Fangmar, unless you consider rapine and pillaging an expert practise! I have collected several musicians to amuse me while I eat. A horse-breeder to sire by horses. A kennel-keeper to train my hounds. Medicine men and herbalists for when my children are sick. I have…Aha!”
Maedoc beamed as the musician boy was dragged in, beaten, half-starved and dead-eyed, his head shaven and dressed in rags. He had a flute shoved in his face by one of Maedoc’s men.
Maedoc looked the boy dead in the eye. “Play.”
The boy took a few slow breaths to ready himself, as if he were alone in that room, completely dead to the world. Then he began to play. It was a sweet, melancholy melody, completely as odds with the roomful of tense barbarians.
Maedoc smiled broadly as he breathed in, as if sniffing mountain air. “Beautiful.”
He returned to his meal, and things returned to how they had been before – tense, with no sound apart from the eating, and now the flute playing over it.
“You have a chef, too?” asked the younger warlord eventually as he wolfed down some more of the boar-meat.
“Hmm?” said Maedoc, pretending not to hear him.
“You must have a chef. This stuff is far too tasty to have been cooked by a Morrowfow. This boar is fucking delicious!”
“Oh?” said Maedoc, unable to keep the grin from his face. “I wouldn’t know. I’m having mutton. A very underrated meat, in my view. I haven’t tried the boar.”
“You should. It’s good.” grunted the younger man.
Maedoc chuckled. “That would be unwise.”
The two older men stopped eating immediately, and turned to Maedoc with startled looks. The younger man kept eating. “Why?” he said obliviously, between mouthfuls.
“Because there’s deathwort berries in it.”
The young man spat out what he had in his mouth and shot to his feet. At once all of the men in the room were reaching for their weapons.
“Stop, men, stop!” roared Maedoc, shooting up and addressing the warlords’ posses. All were still for a moment. All were silent, though the flute kept playing sweetly over the macabre scene. All the men, Morrowfow and otherwise, were itching for a fight. Some of them were sweating. Their hands were on their hilts. Their thinning eyes picked out their chosen targets. The three warlords had looks of horror on their faces as they began to feel the effects of Maedoc’s poison.
“Before you rush to arms, men, listen well.” Maedoc began. “If you attack my men, there will be a bloodbath. Many of you will die. Many of my men, too, but I fancy our chances, not to mention that there are hundreds of men waiting outside Fanghall. If you attack, you will all die. That is a certainty. But there is another way.”
As he spoke the warlords began gasping madly, glugging down mead to wash away the fiery taste in their mouths, their desperate hands clawing at the tabletop.
“These men are dead.” he said of the three. “They might not be in their graves yet, but they are dead, as dead as dead can be, and nothing, no witch-doctor or herbalist can save them. But all of you can get out of this situa
tion alive, and greatly enriched.”
The warlords began convulsing, and then started spewing blood. The flutist played on over the sound of their heaving.
“Agree to rule your tribes as my enforcers and I will let you go free. You will have no real power, but if you rule over your people in accordance with my instructions then you will be greatly rewarded. Be under no illusions, your warriors will be press-ganged into my warhost, your farmers squeezed for all they are worth, and your women will become the playthings of my Morrowfow. But you, men, you in this room will be showered with gold and concubines. What do you say to that?”
The warlords began suffocating as their necks swelled up, blocking their windpipes, and at last they flopped down onto the table, dead, their heads thudding down one after another.
Silence followed, save for that sorrowful flute.
The warlords’ men saw the wisdom in Maedoc’s proposal. It’s no good being loyal to dead men. They consented, by way of a series of nervous nods and grunts.
“Splendid.” smiled Maedoc as he excused himself from the table. “See yourselves out and return to your homes. I will send you my instructions in due course. If you will excuse me, I’d like to spend some quality time with my family.”
Maedoc left with a grin on his face, leaving the flutist playing and the disparate gangs of barbarians flummoxed.
Maedoc made his way through the corridors of Fanghall and out into his garden. It was a peaceful place, with many bright flowers, a swinging bench and blossom trees. It was idyllic, save for the stench of rot and filth.
Maedoc’s boys were fighting with wooden swords. They were going at it with some gusto, shouting battle cries and thrashing away at each other. His wife was sat on the bench, swinging gently. She was a frail-looking woman, with a dignified kind of beauty, who wore a fine emerald dress and silver bracelets. She was combing her greying blonde hair with a silver comb. His daughter was crouched down nearby playing with a stick. She was young, maybe only five, a sweet-faced little girl in a blue dress, with Maedoc’s tell-tale white hair and eyebrows so fair it looked like she had none. Unlike his sons she shared her father’s heterochromia. She was using her stick to squish a ladybird, and inspecting its mushed remains with interest. A shaggy wolfhound slept nearby.
One last figure stood apart from them all. Their bodyguard, a silent, scarred, bald man wearing a hauberk and with a double-handed sword strapped to his back. He stood as still as a statue with his arms folded.
“Keep at it, boys.” Maedoc said to his sons, ruffling the hair of his eldest as he passed. “Hello, angel.” he said, kneeling down and kissing his daughter on the forehead. “What have you got there?”
“A dead bug.”
“How did it die?”
“I squished it.”
“Well look, the ants are coming to take away the body.”
“Oooooh….” she said, suddenly distracted by the columns of black ants that went to and fro.
“Good evening, darling.” said Maedoc as he sat on the swing next to his wife, kissing her on the cheek. She barely responded to him. She just kept on combing her hair. She had a face like a slapped arse.
“Come on darling, what’s wrong this time?”
“You said you’d find me a seamstress.” she snapped.
Maedoc sighed. “Fine, sweetest wife, I’ll ask my raiders to interview the women we enslave to see if they’re skilled at needlework before they drag them off and…”
“Maedoc, not in front of Sionna!” she chastised. “Besides, I don’t care what your men do to them as long as they’re not left with unsightly scars.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” sighed Maedoc, rubbing his forehead.
“Daddy, daddy, the ants took the ladybird so I squished one of the ants and they took that away as well!” declared Sionna, excitedly.
“Well, pumpkin, they must be cannibal ants then!” beamed Maedoc, putting her on his lap and swinging the bench.
“Ewww!”
“What, you wouldn’t want to eat another little girl?”
“No, gross!”
Maedoc’s eldest son screamed as he was whacked over the head. He ran to his father in tears.
“Angis hit me really hard!” he complained.
Anger flashed through Maedoc’s eyes. He put Sionna down and loomed over Jansen, his eldest, giving him a clip round the ear. “Silly boy…What are you going to say when your enemies hit you really hard? Are you going to squeal like a pig and come running to daddy then?”
Jansen looked down at his feet in a sulk. “We’re only supposed to be practising…” he muttered.
“You let your younger brother beat you?” snapped Maedoc. “You should be ashamed of yourself, boy. You need to buck up your ideas, or I’ll make Angis my heir, and not you!”
Angis beamed, swinging his sword around contentedly.
“Now go and practice some more! No pudding for you.” chastised Maedoc.
“But dad!” squealed Jansen.
“To the victor go the spoils, Jansen! Your brother’s eating your pudding tonight. In fact, no pudding for you until you beat your brother in a fight, fair and square!”
Jansen stormed off in a huff. Angis raspberried him as he went past.
“You shouldn’t be so harsh on him.” said his wife, who until then had barely registered the tantrum.
“He’s going to be warlord one day, darling.” sighed Maedoc, sitting down and hugging his daughter. “He’s going to have to be ready.”
“You could make me warlord!” giggled Sionna. She giggled some more as Maedoc tickled her.
“Oh really? That’s not a bad idea, pumpkin. You’d whip those smelly old raiders into shape, I’m sure of it!”
“I’d be queen of everyone!”
“I’m sure you would, sweetest. Why don’t you go and take Hellhound for a walk, and if you see anyone slacking, you give them what for! A walk would do that lazy mutt some good.”
“Okay daddy!” she squealed, and ran over to the dog and started hitting it over the head, madly. “Get up, lazy dog!”
The dog got up wearily, tongue protruding from its gribbly jaws. Sionna took its lead and smacked it over the head a few more times, pointing onwards.
“Go, lazy dog! Go where it tell you!”
As the dog loped off and she tottered along behind, the silent swordsman followed after, keeping his beady eyes on her.
She walked the dog around Fangmar, going this way and that, followed every step of the way by the silent swordsman. The savages scuttled out of her way as she went by and whimpered as she shouted vague, nonsensical orders at them. But then she saw, from a distance, something new. Something interesting. It was a man, chained up like a dog.
“Let’s go and tell that man to stop lying around and do some work!” she declared.
The swordsman put his hand firmly on her shoulder. She gasped and looked up at him. He shook his head, sternly.
Interesting, she through, as she continued her stroll, curious eyes cast over at the shackled newcomer. If it’s forbidden, then it must be very interesting indeed.
Mark caught a glimpse of the little girl staring at him before she was ushered away by her imposing guardian.
Mark thought that he would never see anything as horrifying as the War Pit, his beloved Hesetti among the dead. He was to learn that he was terribly wrong.
Mark was awoken by a commotion. Fresh slaves were arriving to Fangmar. The barbarians were gathering by the gates, licking their lips, eager. He could hear the screams of the slaves long before the gates swung open. In came the chariots, laden down with prisoners. There were women and girls screaming and terrified. There were men, beaten up, whipped.
They were all dragged off the chariots and herded into a terrified huddle right in the middle of Fangmar, made to stand there in the sodden mud as leering Morrowfow gnashed their teeth and spat at them. All of Fangmar had gathered to see the fresh meat.
Maedoc arrived to hold court, his sons
following close behind. Thrones were brought for them and they sat further up the hill, overlooking proceedings. They looked down on the terrified prisoners like demented judges at a hellish trial. Maedoc caught Mark’s eye and grinned at him, lifting a goblet of wine in a toast before taking a sip. Then he stood up to address his men.
“Those on this side take the men.” he said, waving his hand over roughly half of them. “Those on this side take the women.”
The ‘men’ crew voiced their displeasure. “Patience, patience, you will all get your turn with the women. Now move!” insisted Maedoc, placating them.
The women screamed as they were dragged away from their fathers, brothers, husbands and sons.
The horror began. The women were set upon by the Morrowfow, forced down into the mud and raped. Their screams were terrifying. The howls of the barbarians no less so.
The men were forced onto their knees and made to watch as their wives, daughters and mothers were brutalised by the Morrowfow dogs. Blades were put against their throats. They cried, cursed their captors, screamed in uncontrollable anguish.
Maedoc watched all this like a man watching a cock fight, laughing, grinning, taking slow sips of his wine. His sons leered at the grotesque proceedings.
Sensing the time was right, Maedoc ran a finger across his throat. The men had their throats slit, all at once, and they were thrown down in the mud. The women screamed as they watched their loved ones murdered before them.
Then the Morrowfow who has been manning the men went to take their turn with the women.
Mark could watch no more. He curled up into a ball facing away from the horrible scene and covered his ears with his hands, eyes shut fast, trying to shut it all out. The pain. The anguish. The screams. It would be some time before it all ended, with the corpses of the men being dragged off to the War Pit, and the women being dragged off to the beds of their captors, crying and screaming still. They would do so long into the night.
Warlord Slayer Page 20
