Ayenwatha soon caught back up with Deganawida, bringing word that there was a fair distance yet to go before they came within range of the lines of battle. Deganawida was gladdened by the tidings, as it meant that the refugees were not under any imminent threats.
The column stopped for a few brief hiatuses, near creeks or streams. Deganawida watched as the Midragardans partook of the fresh waters of his lands, and ate a little of the salted fish that so many of them carried.
Deganawida allowed himself a small portion of the roast cornmeal that he kept in a hide pouch at his waist, consuming what was a staple of a tribal warrior on the path of war. Sweetened with the nectar of the maple tree, it tasted altogether wonderful in the face of the hunger that dwelled within him, even if he continued to ignore it.
Even with the short respites, the grueling gait of the march accumulated fatigue as the day’s light began to fade. The gloom of the forest grew ever darker, and at last even the most optimistic among the warriors did not think that they could long sustain the pace that they had been enduring. Only the strange wolf-skins and the lone bear-shirt seemed to be physically unfazed, looking fresh, as if they had only just begun the march.
Gunnar and Ayenwatha finally called out for an extended rest, and the column drew to a halt, fanning out under the trees. Inwardly, Deganawida was immensely relieved, as his old muscles and joints had given all that they had to give for the day. He did not want to entertain any thought as to whether they would recover in time for the next march. It made him feel only marginally better as he saw Gunnar take in and release a long, slow breath, which gave outward evidence to the Midragardan’s own fatigue.
Deganawida and Gunnar plodded over together towards the wide trunk of a tree, where Gunnar sat down heavily, leaning his back up against the bark surface. He set his shield down at his side, within easy grasp.
Deganawida slowly sat down cross-legged at Gunnar’s side, his face tensing a little as he keenly felt the soreness in his back and knees. The wince ebbed from his face, as he gradually began to settle in.
At first, the two leaders were very quiet, content to let their minds and bodies ease further. Ayenwatha came over to join them after seeing to the organization of a few sentinels.
Gunnar looked over towards Deganawida, as Ayenwatha took a place on the elder sachem’s other side. “We are not far now from the fighting. It is time to think of what must be done. We must find a way to locate the strong points of the enemy… the places where their forces have concentrated their greatest strength. Have your scouts located where such places may be?”
“The enemy has attacked us along many points,” Ayenwatha replied grimly. “Their numbers are great, and they have been able to cross into our lands in strength at many places. Each loss we suffer is a heavy one, while the enemy can replace those who fall.”
“We will soon see to that problem,” Gunnar stated determinedly, with a look in his eye that closely resembled burning embers. “As soon as we can set Midragard’s axes to the trunks of the Gallean trees, we will see if they can grow them faster than we can cut them down.”
Deganawida did not doubt that there was no exaggeration to the sturdy Midragardan’s claim.
A rueful smile surfaced on Ayenwatha’s face. “May it be so, Gunnar, but even with your men, we cannot challenge them at every point.”
“Then we decisively meet them at fewer points,” Gunnar replied without hesitation.
Ayenwatha nodded.
“The Ulfhednar, the ones you call wolf-skins, and the Berzerk, will pursue the battle in their own way,” Gunnar stated, “but the enemies that encounter them will wish that they had run headlong into five hundred of my other warriors.”
“The matter of these wolf-skins and the bear-shirt… a conversation that I wish to have with you when we have some time,” Deganawida commented. “But my curiosities must wait. Now, we must each do what we can to keep the enemy away from the people of our tribes.”
“Agreed,” Gunnar replied, as his face took on a look of concern. “Many of your people are not holding up well. I looked upon many as we walked by, who do not look as if they can last much longer. Can they keep moving at the pace that you ask of them?”
Deganawida and Ayenwatha grew silent, as their countenances shadowed over.
“They must,” Deganawida finally said, in a low voice. “Anything less is certain death.”
Gunnar gave a low chuckle. “Is not death certain for all, anyway?”
Ayenwatha grinned. “What is certain depends on whether you believe death is a veil to cross, or an endless sleep.”
“I sure hope that it is a veil to cross, or there is no hope of justice, for those who live with honor, or for those who do not,” Gunnar answered a little more somberly. “I know little of this Palladium I hear so many speak of, but maybe it has a great warrior’s hall too. I have known several with great honor that I could not bear to think met only nothingness… and some other vile ones, that I would hate to think escaped their actions into nothingness.
“I do not think that the good of this world meet the same fate as the most vile,” Deganawida said.
“It would be a very ugly world indeed, if that were true,” Gunnar remarked. He then shrugged, and gave a slight sigh. “I can only choose my own path, whether it is an ugly world or not. And I choose to wield my sword for the good among your tribes, and the good among my own people. Yet I cannot deny that what has happened to your people shakes my hope in the All-Father.”
“As great tragedy does to many of a good heart,” Deganawida replied. “It is hard to believe that a Creator would tolerate such great evil, an evil that continues in generation after generation… and many would say has grown worse.”
“And not all of it of a man’s doing,” Gunnar said. “Failed crops
…disease…many things that do great evil are beyond the means of a man.”
Deganawida nodded. “It makes this path in life difficult. Seems that there are only choices, where there are no answers.”
Gunnar looked upward, and let out a long breath thick with frustration. “And the evils that plague the mind. I do not know whether this storm from the west will come to strike my own wife, my children, my brothers, father, sisters…”
“Maybe somehow we can put a halt to it, in these lands,” Ayenwatha offered in a low voice.
Gunnar glanced back down at the two tribal leaders, and Deganawida noticed that the stalwart Midragardan had a pained look glazing his eyes.
Gunnar spoke slowly, voicing a heavy inner burden, “It may yet be true that I have set my eyes upon my children and good wife for the final time. It is a very strange thing to think about, and one that I do not dwell upon, but it is always there, nonetheless.
Gunnar’s expression shadowed further.
“And if it is the final time? Then it may be that if this storm does indeed come to the shore where my wife and children now live, I will not be standing there before them, to wield Golden Fury against those who would seek to harm them. Yet at the same time, I could not stay on that shore to wait and see if the storm would come, while it falls heavily upon your lands.”
Gunnar clasped his hands between his knees, clenching them tightly, bowing his head towards the ground as he became silent. Deganawida could feel the anxiety tormenting the Midgragardan warrior. The man was not afraid of battle, or of risking death. His fears were concentrated in the thoughts of his family.
Deganawida did not want to think of how many tribal warriors had realized the fullness of such a fear, blood ebbing out into the soil of the woodlands, as their fading consciousness clung to final thoughts of wives and children. It was a horrific image to bring to mind, but it was something that no sachem of good conscience could shy away from.
Only a better world beyond that could reunite such warriors with those that they loved would bring any sense of goodness and beauty to the struggle of life, and the hardships of the world. Anything less would mean that life itself was ultima
tely senseless, and immersed in tragic, hopeless folly.
Faint and ephemeral, a part of Deganawida beckoned to him, as if to remind him of something long forgotten. He had experienced the odd feeling before, whenever doubts struck him particularly sharply.
It was an all too brief ray of light, one that inflamed burdened hopes, the radiance cloaked in an ambiguity that was tantalizingly close to the grasp of understanding. Yet just as he caught a wisp of the feeling, and reached out towards it with his focused attention, it always eluded his clutches like a dissipating smoke. Frustration, doubt, and sorrow, though, had no qualms about maintaining a clear presence within his besieged mind.
“This is truly a march filled with many pains, for all of us,” Deganawida added softly, as his expression saddened under the weight of his own feelings.
As the air grew quiet around the three leaders, they each turned to their own thoughts.
Deganawida’s contemplation centered once again upon the exiles. They were now laboring to move forward, somewhere off to the east, as his vivid remembrances of their strained, weary faces rose again in his mind.
In a way, all of the tribal exiles were warriors, and each and every one of them was fighting a battle. It did not matter whether they were a respected war sachem like Ayenwatha, one of the great clan matrons, or simply a young mother from a village, like the one that the wolf-skin had aided at the stream. All were engaged in a terrible struggle, from the strongest to the weakest, from the newborn to the eldest.
Yet it was the clan matrons that tended to occupy Deganawida’s thoughts most often as of late. They were at the center of the five tribes’ entire world, and the tremendous burdens that had been unceremoniously thrust upon them gave Deganawida many fears.
His concern for the revered clan matrons grew with every passing day, as many were of an advanced age. Stoically, and seemingly indefatigable, the clan matrons were striving to lift the spirits of everyone in the march, as Deganawida had observed time and time again. The clan matrons reflected every bit as much inner strength as that being showed by the warriors engaging the enemy in combat.
The deep, troubling worries were not unfounded, considering the place that the clan matrons had within the tribes. Their authority was not limited to enveloping their immediate family lines that they each headed within their own villages. In many ways the matrons were at the apex of both their own villages, and their greater tribe. Collectively, they were at the summit of the entire Five Realms.
The matrons held the exalted power to remove or place the deer antler headdresses upon the heads of sachems for the Grand Council. Selecting the fifty sachems of the Grand Council, and removing them whenever the matrons determined that Great Sachems were failing in their tasks, placed a tremendous responsibility into the hands of the eminent women.
The responsibility for designating, and ultimately continuing to evaluate, the members of the Grand Council flowed out of a very central core of authority that had been accorded to the great matrons within the tribal culture. Its nature spread far beyond the boundaries of a matron’s own village.
The great matrons headed the revered clan societies that all of the tribal people belonged to. The various clan societies, in turn, were not confined to just one particular village or tribe.
Deganawida himself belonged to the Bear Clan. Though his memory of his younger years had regrettably misted over, he knew that he had gained his clan affiliation at birth, as was the way for all new children in the five tribes. The Bear clan existed among the Kanienke, Onondowa, Onyota, and Gayogohon, as much as it did the Onan.
Others of the animal-affiliated clans existed only among a few of the tribes, but all of the clans represented a type of bond that transcended village and tribe on several levels. The way of the sacred clans was ingrained into the very heart of the tribal people’s identity and entire culture. It was through the clans that each village was organized. It was through the specific clans, the ones present within an individual village, that the matrons were identified.
This was the way of things that had led to the very day when the deer antler headdress was first placed upon Deganawida’s own head. That sacred day had anointed him as a very special sachem from the Bear Clan in his village. He had been carefully selected, to be sent forth to serve in one of the fourteen permanent positions reserved for the Onan sachems on the Grand Council. That reserved place had bestowed him with a storied name, one that he had kept ever since.
In truth, his was the most preeminent position on the Grand Council. It hearkened back to the very founder of the Council itself, the legendary figure for whom Deganawida was named. His selection to the prestigious seat on the Grand Council was just one of the ways in which Deganawida’s own life had been greatly touched, affected, and guided by the clan matrons.
There could be little doubt that the great clan matrons truly represented, and were imbued with, the spirit that bound the Five Realms together. There was also little denying that as the great clan matrons went, so did the morale of the tribes.
Above and beyond everything, the clan matrons would have to be protected and sustained, if the very foundations of the tribes were to survive. It was not a small burden, with the tribes moving into such a foreboding period of darkness. With the physical frailty of several of the matrons, the task would increasingly take on the appearance of hopelessness.
Gunnar reached out a hand, placing it firmly upon Deganawida’s shoulder, breaking him out of his deep, morose thoughts with a slight start.
“We will be there in time, Deganawida,” the Midragardan said firmly. The exasperation and sorrow that had clung to Gunnar’s face before had since been replaced by a stony look of resolve. The Midragardan had obviously called upon the depths of his fortitude after giving voice to his innermost torments. “Deganawida, do not forget that the sky warriors will continue to give the enemy much to think about. We will soon be able to watch their movements, as they have watched yours.”
“I had almost forgotten,” Deganawida remarked, with a brief smile at the buoyant reminder from Gunnar. “I have so firmly come to believe that the skies would never be an ally that we could count on during this time.”
“They will be,” Gunnar reassured Deganawida with a fierce pride echoing within his voice. “The accursed Darroks have been driven off, and you have seen that the Harraks are now absent from the skies. Over three hundred Midragardan warriors upon Fenraren have survived the fighting. The steeds will be resting tonight, and they will be at your people’s side tomorrow, ready to take part in the continued struggle.”
“I wish that we could be at their side in the skies,” Ayenwatha commented ruefully.
“How many of your valiant Brega steeds still survive, Ayenwatha?” Gunnar inquired. “They are indeed such magnificent steeds, who belong in the sky with as much honor as the Fenraren of our own lands.”
It was no vain compliment, as Midragardans did not idly equate anything with themselves. Gaining the esteem of the hardy people of the south was no easy thing.
Ayenwatha shook his head, his face a look of resigned frustration. “So many died in fighting off the first assault from the Darroks. As with our people, the number of Brega in our lands has never been great, and the number trained for bearing riders even less. They were once a gift of the Onondowa to the Grand Council, another great light joined within our Sacred Fire. It was the Onondowa that first tamed them, but we have never been able to breed great numbers of the winged ones.
“Among all the tribes, we may have a hundred trained sky warriors remaining, but less than fifty steeds that are healthy, and can be ridden. As all of the tribes have provided sky warriors, many of these trained steeds were kept in our villages, and are being brought along in the march. But there are far too few of them left to risk any more losses… unless circumstances grow most desperate.
“There are a few more adults and young steeds in the breeding herd, but those are not trained for riding, or fighting.”
“And what of this breeding herd now?” Gunnar asked Ayenwatha, bringing his gaze up to the war sachem’s eyes.
“The breeding herd was kept within the territory of the Onondowa, where the Brega first came from. But I do not yet know what has become of the herd,” Ayenwatha confessed.
“That is very ill-news, when we do not know what fate befalls a shining jewel among the Skiantha,” Gunnar responded, in a despondent tone.
Gunnar tilted his head downward as he again clasped his hands together, looking highly distressed by Ayenwatha’s uncertain tidings. Deganawida shared the Midragardian’s great dismay, fearing any harm that might have come to the precious breeding herd.
The bear-like Brega were a creature unique to the lands of the Five Realms, exceedingly rare animals in the eyes of the broader world. They were renowned for their steadfast nature, and their courageous loyalty to their riders.
The idea that their full population might be threatened to extinction was debilitating enough to a Midragardan that sincerely respected such steeds. To men such as Deganawida or Ayenwatha, who had lived alongside Bregas all of their lives, and understood their revered place among the tribal people, it was a most horrifying prospect.
“I must then ask you about the breeding herd,” Gunnar finally stated, his head still down, and his voice low and tense. “Can we find out what has become of them? Now that the skies have been regained, perhaps we can use our Fenraren to search them out… and if they find the herd, maybe something can be done. Our riders just need to know where the Onondowa sachems might be.”
“To the best of our ability, Gunnar, sachems are sending word out that all who are not engaged in combat are to be moved to the south and eastern region of our lands,” Deganawida replied.
The southern edges of the Five Realms, bordered by the tumultuous seas that separated them from Saxany’s coastlines, were not under any imminent threat. They held the greatest potential in the Five Realms as a place of refuge. Aided by long strings of cliffs and tempestuous waters, a large part of the southern coastline had its own natural lines of defense. There were very few good places to land galleys, or lay anchor for sailing vessels.
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