Kelven's Riddle Book Two

by Daniel Hylton

  Aram put his gauntleted right hand to his head. It came away smeared with blood. “Well, it doesn’t really hurt either, much, but my left arm –” Twisting his head around, he looked down over his shoulder and felt all around his upper arm with his right hand. He turned so that his left side faced Thaniel.

  “Has my armor been pierced, Thaniel?”

  The horse came closer and lowered his head to inspect Aram’s arm and back. “No, my lord, but the way you hold your arm looks odd to me. Perhaps the bone is broken?”

  “I don’t think so.” Aram gingerly felt all along his upper left arm and around to his shoulder, and then he moved it carefully. There was intense pain but the bone beneath the flesh felt intact. Odd, he thought, but this same arm had been savaged years ago by wolves and had never fully regained its strength. Now it was damaged again. He looked at Thaniel.

  “I need to look at your wound, my friend.”

  “It is nothing.” Thaniel answered, and once again Aram noticed the undercurrent of strain in his voice. He went nearer the horse. “Are you hurt in another place, Thaniel, one that I cannot see?”

  “No, my lord.”

  Aram watched him. The horse was gazing out over the wide valley and to Aram his distress seemed obvious and intense. “What troubles you, then?”

  Thaniel looked at him. “It was my fault, my lord; I am very sorry.”

  Aram stared. “Your fault? What was your fault?”

  “That we blundered into the lashers.” The horse looked away. “And then I stumbled and went down and put you at risk.”

  “Nonsense, my friend.” Aram answered, and though he was beginning to feel the effects of his head wound his voice was firm. “I will not hear such talk as this. It was I. I made two errors – one that put me at risk, and another that endangered us both. It was not you.”

  Thaniel turned his body stiffly and looked at him. “What possible errors did you commit, my lord?”

  Aram rubbed his hurt shoulder and laughed quietly. “I did not wear my helmet and now I have a sore head.” He looked up into the clear blue and cloudless heavens. “And I will never again go into enemy territory without Lord Alvern patrolling the skies above my head. It is folly. And it is my fault. Now, let me look at your wound.”

  He went to the horse and undid the stays on Thaniel’s shoulder armor. One had been broken by the lasher’s pike. It was difficult to undo the deerskin ties with one hand but he managed it. Then he lifted the upper plate of steel and looked beneath it. In the thick muscle of Thaniel’s shoulder, toward the front, near the breastplate, there was a deep, symmetrically round wound, mottled and discolored, red and gray and brown, already filling with clumps of clotted blood. He looked into the horse’s eye.

  “It looks serious.”

  “No, Lord Aram,” Thaniel disagreed. “It did not reach bone, believe me. It hurts, but there is no serious damage.”

  Aram looked past the horse, back up the road, which seemed to waver like water in the sunlight. “We need to wash it out, anyway, as well as the wound to my head. There was water flowing in that hollow back there. Let’s go and cleanse our wounds before we do anything else. I do not know how filthy a lasher’s weapon is, but I suspect that it is not clean.” He started to move past the horse, but Thaniel barred the way.

  “I will bear you, my lord. You should not walk.”

  Aram looked at him sharply. “You cannot carry any extra weight, Thaniel. Not on that shoulder.”

  When he answered, Thaniel’s voice was thick with anguish. “Please, my lord, do not doubt my word. I am not seriously hurt, as you are. I will bear you. Do not let my errors be compounded.”

  Aram’s head was throbbing now; pain had discovered the gash along the right side of his head and had taken up residence in that part of his skull. There was a dull ringing deep in his ears that slowly intensified. He was beginning to find it difficult to focus; the humps and hollows in the sandy hills seemed to move about oddly, as if of their own accord. Still, Thaniel’s behavior and anguished words puzzled and worried him. He gazed at the horse.

  “What are you talking about, Thaniel?”

  The horse glanced at him and looked away. “Lord Florm warned me about rashness, Lord Aram. He said that you had become too important to continue to assume the role of a lone warrior. Wherever you go now, my father believes that an army should accompany you. Manon is not a fool – if he does not know it now, he will soon understand that to kill you is to end all resistance to his evil.” Thaniel looked at him. “It is a simple thing – if you die, we are lost, my lord; all is lost.”

  Aram stared back at his friend. The ringing in his brain was growing louder, but not loud enough to drown out the pain, which was also becoming more insistent. Thaniel continued.

  “I am sorry, my lord. When I saw how easily you destroyed the lashers at the village, I thought that with the addition of Kelven’s weapon to your already great strength, you had become invincible. I thought that you might strike Manon down with ease if only we could approach him.” The horse lowered his head as if he would drive his face into the earth. “My father warned me against pride and rashness. He warned me against bearing you into dangerous lands carelessly and unprotected, yet that is exactly what I have done.” He looked up. “Forgive me, my lord.”

  “There is nothing to forgive.” Aram shook his head. The motion blurred his vision and brought a wave of nausea. He stood very still, letting it pass, trying to keep his attention focused on the horse at the exclusion of all else.

  The horse gazed at him a long time, as if he now saw something in the man that had been hidden from his eyes until this moment. “My father is right, Lord Aram. Your death would be the end of all things.”

  Careful not to move his injured head, Aram nonetheless spoke sharply to his friend. “No. That cannot be so. Every life upon this earth has value Thaniel, and the loss of each life is a great loss for someone somewhere. Mine is no greater.”

  “Nay, lord. My father’s wisdom is true, as always. You have been given the weapon of the enemy’s defeat – by Lord Kelven himself. If you were to die and that sword were to fall into the enemy’s hands, all would be lost forever.” Thaniel looked away, out across the broad valley toward the distant river shining in the sun. “Many will die in this war, I see that now, and every life lost will be tragic.” He swung his armored head back and looked at Aram with both eyes. “But you, my lord, you must not die. Your loss would be disastrous.” He shivered beneath the black metal plates of his armor. “And I nearly brought it about today.”

  Forgetting himself, Aram shook his head and the movement pained him, bringing a gray fog into view before his eyes. “No, it was not your doing. But Lord Florm is right – this weapon must not fall into Manon’s hands because we are careless. We must return to our own lands and raise an army. It is the only way.” He swayed and put his hands to his head. “If you can bear me, Thaniel, let us go. I need to find water.”

  When they found the stream tumbling down the sandy draw, Aram slid off the horse’s back, fell prostrate beside the small brook, and plunged his head into a shallow pool, letting the cold water clear his head. Then he drank deeply. After a few minutes, he felt well enough to stand. Cupping water in his hands, he washed the wound in Thaniel’s shoulder, rubbing at the exposed flesh of the puncture until fresh blood erupted and flowed from the wound, hopefully taking the filth of the lasher’s pike with it.

  “I’m sorry for the pain, my friend, but it is necessary.”

  “It is nothing, my lord.”

  Aram hadn’t brought any medicinal herbs with him, another error, he realized, to add to his tally. He glanced around the hillside but could not readily see any of those plants that grew in his valley, certainly none that would aid in their present circumstance.

  After checking the horse’s wound again and seeing the diminishing flow of blood running red and clean, he retied the good stay on Thaniel’s shoulder armor and sat down in the grass. He looked up. The s
un was almost straight overhead.

  Back at the village, Nikolus and the others would no doubt be just halfway through their preparations to leave on the morrow. And he and Thaniel hadn’t yet caught up to the men that had escaped them the previous night. He glanced over at the horse. Thaniel had his nose in the stream, drinking deeply of the clear cold water and he was standing firmly on both his front hooves.

  Aram got slowly to his feet and went over and leaned against the horse. “We still need to catch those men.”

  “Perhaps we should let them go.” The horse suggested.

  Aram shook his head, his forehead lying against the cool metal of Thaniel’s armor. “No, you were right. We must catch them and stop them.” He leaned back, holding onto one of the spikes in the horse’s armor to maintain his balance. “Can you bear me, my friend, without undue pain?”

  “I told you, my lord.” The horse protested. “I am not hurt badly. But I should return you to the safety of your own lands. There may be more lashers on the road.”

  “Then we will be more cautious and not repeat this blunder.” Aram pulled himself up into the saddle on the great horse’s back. “Let’s continue down the road a ways, until we can discover whether or not our quarry has passed that way. If they have, we may catch them yet.”

  Thaniel hesitated. “Are you well enough to ride, my lord?”

  “I am. Let’s go.”

  A few miles beyond the scene of the fight with the lashers, they found the mangled remains of the men. The lashers had evidently come upon the men earlier that morning, either camped or still fLeeing from the slaughter of their superiors, and after gaining what intelligence they could from them, had slain them for their cowardice. This explained why the lashers had been ready for battle when they encountered Aram and Thaniel.

  Aram’s head was aching, and his eyesight was blurred. After continuing down the road a mile or so beyond the remains of the men and finding no one else upon the thoroughfare, they turned back toward the village. The sun had slipped toward afternoon, and Aram wanted to be back at the village before evening. He lowered his head and closed his eyes as Thaniel jogged easily back up the road to the east.

  Thaniel put the ground behind him quickly with his long, smooth strides and they entered the canyon with the sun still well up in the sky. Aram wanted to be clear-headed and did not want to appear badly injured when he faced Nikolus and his people, so he asked Thaniel to stop, and he dismounted and made his way down the slope to the tumbling stream. Sitting on its bank, he washed his face and head repeatedly. Though the cold water made his wound ache his vision cleared and the dull throbbing inside his skull lessened a bit.

  He massaged his left shoulder and upper arm. His left arm still pained him, but it had become more limber with the passing of the hours and he had regained some of its use. The bone was not broken but the muscle was severely bruised. He sat for a while longer while Thaniel watched him with concern from the roadbed above. The breeze wafting through the canyon cleared Aram’s thoughts and just the act of sitting quietly in the cool, pungent air near the stream began to revive him.

  In the dimness of the shadowed canyon, at the edge of the tumbling stream, he pondered the mystery of the Guardians. Why had they not helped during the fight on the road? Did they come to his aid only at the last extremity, or when there was an imminent danger that he would be overwhelmed? If so, he had come perilously close to such a state during the fight with the lashers. Perhaps it was their intention only to prevent an incidental death from finding him – a stray arrow, or random sword thrust – and not to interfere in direct confrontations. As he considered the question, he realized that in the battle of Derosa two years earlier, he had been protected from missiles fired at him from long range and from massed spear points, but when the fight was reduced to him and Thaniel in a struggle against a single lasher, they had been on their own. He looked for meaning in this fact for a few minutes but found nothing certain. The sun fell down the sky, his head cleared, but understanding did not come.

  When the sun dropped below the far rim of the canyon, he rose and climbed the slope. Then he and Thaniel went on up the canyon to the village. He left Thaniel to graze on the grass near the small river and went in search of Nikolus. He found him on the far side of the sleeping area, supervising the loading of food onto Timmon’s poled transport devices. Nikolus looked up and saw him approach.

  “My lord, we are almost loaded. If there were but a few more hours in the sky, we could leave now and make good progress before dark.”

  Aram glanced westward at the declining sun and considered it for a moment, but then he shook his head. “No, Nikolus, the people should get one more night’s sleep here where we are sure of wood and water. The road ahead will be difficult enough.”

  Nikolus was watching him closely. “You’re injured, my lord.”

  “Yes, but not seriously,” Aram answered, though with the dull, persistent aching on the right side of his head beginning to creep slowly down through his neck muscles, he suspected that it was a lie. “We encountered more lashers on the road. They were coming here.”

  Nikolus narrowed his eyes. “Do you fight all your battles alone, my lord? Is that wise?”

  Aram was surprised once again by the man’s quick and perceptive mind. He smiled slightly. “No, Nikolus, it is not wise, but I have already been lectured once today. I do not need another.”

  “I’m sorry, my lord – I did not mean to offend.” Nikolus’ eyes widened with consternation. “I sometimes speak before I think.”

  Aram shook his head. “There is no offense, Nikolus, and I appreciate your honesty. Do not alter your character in my presence. You must always speak your mind.”

  The young man’s relief showed on his features. He glanced over at Thaniel, whose broad back just showed above the slope leading down to the stream. “My lord, there are several strong men here, and most are armed. If there is a need for another patrol, let us go with you. We can – and will – fight.”

  Aram nodded. “I am glad to hear it. But there will be no more patrols down the road to the west. All we need are watchmen to take turns watching through the night. Perhaps you could assign men for that task – three or four men for two to three hours at a time. They can relieve each other at intervals and make certain that we are not molested before dawn. We will leave at daylight.”

  Nikolus inclined his head. “At once, my lord.”

  As the young man strode away to oversee the finishing of his business, Aram went to the hillside above the bridge where he could see down the canyon road and watch the villagers at their work. His head still hurt mightily and he felt tired and weak. As the work in the village wound down, the sun slipped behind the rim of the world, and fires were started on the valley floor, he saw three men walk across the bridge below him and move a short distance down the canyon. They nodded respectfully to him as they passed. They were the first of the night’s watchmen. Nikolus’ stewardship of his people was efficient and effective. Aram leaned his head back against the sandy soil and closed his eyes.

  Fourteen

  The dull throbbing in his skull let him sleep only fitfully and he awoke before dawn. Glancing down the canyon road, he saw three dim figures standing on the road. As he stood up, one of those figures detached itself from the group and came toward him. It was Nikolus.

  “Good morning, Lord Aram. Are you better this morning?”

  “I am well, Nikolus, thank you.” Aram looked down the canyon, beyond the men. “Is all quiet?”

  “Yes. Very shortly, I will rouse the people. Should we let them eat something first?”

  Aram turned and looked to the east. There was only a faint pale ghost of light above the horizon. “Yes, but let them sleep a little longer. Do you plan to cook something?”

  Nikolus nodded. “Mealcakes – they’re not tasty, but they’re quick. We can feed everyone in a few minutes.”

  “Good. I might have one myself.”

  “Of course,
my lord.”

  Nikolus stood gazing at the blackened remains of his village, a broad, dark shadow in the predawn gloom. After a moment, he looked over at Aram. “My lord, you said that we are going to a valley to the east?”

  “Yes, beyond the black mountain.”

  “Pardon the questions, my lord, but you also said that there are towns there that can be rebuilt?”

  Aram nodded. “Yes. There are several ancient towns – the ruins of towns, at least – in that valley. For your people, Nikolus, I was thinking of one in particular, down near the crossings on the southeastern side of the valley. Several of the buildings are relatively intact, the streets are sound, and the ground around is very good ground.” He glanced at the young man. “Do you enjoy farming, Nikolus?”

  Nikolus hesitated, and then sighed. “No, my lord, I confess that I don’t. But I will do what you wish – whatever is required, without complaint.”

  Aram laughed. “You misunderstand. You will not be a slave in my valley, Nikolus, nor even a tenant. You may do as you like. It is my intention to grant you and your people ownership of that town and its environs. The people who lived there will never return.”

  “Why – where did they go, my lord?”

  Aram thought of his own city, breached and abandoned by its citizens long ago, and of the slaughter perpetrated by Manon on the high plains. “They were killed, all of them, thousands of years ago, by the armies of the grim lord.”

  Nikolus was quiet for a long moment as his eyes searched Aram’s face. “By Manon?”

  “Yes.”

  “This same Manon that enslaved my people and destroyed our lands – and brought me to this place?”

  “The same.”

  The young man frowned in puzzlement. “He has been alive all this time?”