by Oliver Higgs
The scimitar is coming down.
Reflex alone saves me. My arms go up. The blade catches on the walking stick. The sword bites into the wood, draws back again, bites again. I shove back with the stick, get my balance beneath me, and suddenly I’m in the only swordfight I ever hope to be in–and I don’t even have a sword. I’m parrying desperately, inexpertly. He thrusts and I turn the blade from my stomach with the staff, but it slides off the wood at an angle, skewers my shirt and leaves a long cut along my left arm. He swings at my midriff and catches me with the tip, slicing a six-inch arc across my ribs. I crack him once across the jaw.
Ten seconds, maybe–the longest ten seconds of my life.
Then I catch a vicious overhead stroke solidly on the walking stick–so solidly that the blade digs an inch into the wood and sticks. I swing one end of the stick at his face, which twists the scimitar and forces him back, and suddenly the weapon comes free from his grasp. I put one foot on the end of the wood and yank the scimitar free, dropping the makeshift staff.
There’s the briefest pause as Cabal’s eyes meet mine, mutual shock that the scimitar has changed hands. But he wastes no time. Maybe he doesn’t want to give me any range. Maybe he’s just angry as hell. Either way, he lunges forward to tackle me. I swing from the shoulder. He almost makes it under the blow. Almost. As he’s putting his shoulder forward to ram me, the blade bites through the flesh between his neck and left arm, penetrating down to the collar bone.
It doesn’t stop his momentum. I’m thrown backwards to the ground with him … but as soon as we land, he’s drawing away from the blade, face ashen, right hand clasping the chasm in his flesh. His eyes are glazed in shock. A red river spills between his fingers. He staggers to his feet as I scramble to mine. He’s unsteady. He gapes in disbelief. There’s a touch of betrayal in his eyes–this wasn’t supposed to happen. I’m heaving, covered in dirt and grass and blood, my face a terrible mask, and for once in my life I do exactly what Conan would’ve done.
I swing the sword.
I’d like to say that the blow is clean, that I’ve got some final message for him, that it ends neatly, but life is messy, and sometimes death is too. Things get … brutal. He puts his arm up and the first two blows rip gashes into the meat. It’s no different than hacking a large, raw steak. Grizzly, nightmarish, but there’s no stopping now. I have to be merciless. I keep hacking until he’s tilting toward the ground and the arm fails to come up and the blade goes through most of his neck.
His eyes change. He’s still alive, but a part of him goes away. His expression empties. He’s gazing into a hidden abyss. His muscles go lax. He hits the dirt. His mouth works for air that won’t come. His heart pumps blood from a severed artery in absurd, mechanistic spurts. A terrible sight. It carries the fascination of the horrific. One arm spasms weakly. Then it stops.
Cabal is dead.
I whirl around. Jarvis is on the ground, dazed. Ensine is on top of Echo again. The knife is nowhere in site, but he has full control. His back is to me. His fist comes down tiredly at her face, his other hand around her throat. Absorbed in the struggle, he doesn’t hear me approach. There are no thoughts. I’m in an animal place. I scream as I run him through. There’s a vicious exhilaration in it. A bloody triumph. He gasps and convulses with the sword through his back, lurching to his feet … only to stumble against me and fall again. I have a death-grip on the hilt, but the weight of his body pulls it from my grasp. When he’s on the ground, I withdraw the blade. He crawls toward the trees. I don’t bother to watch. He’s dead. He just doesn’t want to admit it yet.
“Annabel,” I whisper.
Her face is bruised and bloody. One eye is already puffy, swelling shut. Her nose is bleeding, her lip split. She’s covered in blood, but I can’t identify the source.
“No, no,” she says angrily, pushing my hands away, and turns to crawl toward Jarvis.
She rolls Jarvis over. Oh. Now I see. He’s holding his stomach, his hand shaking. Beneath it is a small circular wound, a crater of red-black flesh. He looks up at us with bleary eyes. My heart drops.
“Stupid, so stupid,” Echo says.
“Echo?” Jarvis asks vaguely.
“Why did you do that?” she whispers.
“Sorry …”
“He saved me, Tristan. He grabbed at the gun, but he got in the way.”
But the gun is empty, I think. I saw the shots popping into the dirt. My thoughts are thick and slow. How can Jarvis be shot? It’s not until later I learn it was the very first shot. Ensine pulled the weapon as soon as Cabal was attacked. He aimed for Echo. Jarvis reacted. The rest of the time he fought with a bullet in his stomach. Would he do it again if he knew the cost? Maybe so.
Echo cuts strips from a blanket with the scimitar and binds Jarvis’s wound, though her hands tremble violently. She must know there’s little hope. We’re miles from anywhere that might aid us, and Jarvis won’t stop bleeding. He blinks at us, opens his eyes wide, takes deep breaths. Ensine had almost knocked him out with the last blow. There was a struggle for the knife; it fell from the bigger man’s hands and Jarvis kicked it somewhere into the forest before the tracker dealt him a hard blow and wrestled Echo back under him.
Echo talks about moving him, getting him to Apolis, but Apolis is more than a week away. We try to get him to his feet, but it pains him and he pales. He could ignore it during the fight. Now it’s catching up with him.
“Where’s Octavia?” Jarvis asks.
She’s dead, I think. The words repeat in my head, a phenomenon all their own. My teeth are chattering. I’m numb, distant. I’m also wrong. It’s not five minutes before Octavia stumbles in from the forest, her hands bound behind her back, blood drying from a lump on the side of her head. Cabal or Ensine must’ve snuck up in the darkness, hit her with a weapon, bound her wrists. She’s pretty; the bastards were probably saving her for later.
Octavia calls Jarvis’s name in an increasingly panicked voice when she sees what’s happened. I cut the cord binding her wrists. The girls both kneel by Jarvis. They use a pack to prop his head up. He groans and shivers with every shift in position.
“It really hurts,” he says earnestly, with a bit of surprise, as if maybe we’d thought he’d only been joking before.
“We can’t just stay here,” Octavia says. There’s nowhere to go, but nobody wants to admit that. I look for broken branches. We can make a harness, bring him toward the road, look for someplace or someone who might help. We’ve been lucky before. We can do this.
I check on Ensine. The tracker made it surprisingly far into the forest, just kept dragging himself further, finally stopping to die behind a large bush. Back at camp, Jarvis is able to drink some water. He refuses everything else. The bones of the stretcher are mostly in place when he calls my name. My heart falters. His face is shockingly pale. This can’t be happening. He reaches for my arm so that I have to kneel with the others.
“Stay here,” he says.
His eyes are pained. They fade in and out of awareness. There’s more light now. A pink smear spreads along the horizon, growing slowly as we watch. Echo’s eyes are red. Octavia cries silently, telling him or herself or all of us that he’ll be okay. Jarvis is on the verge of sleep for a time, but Octavia shakes him, worried that it’s deeper. His eyes widen and he looks around as though he’s never seen the place.
“This world–it’s not so real. It’s not what it seems,” he tells us, shaking his head. A stranger might mistake it for babble, but I remember that night he talked about his time under Vermillion’s control; the places he visited in his head, the quiet realm he insisted had some greater substance.
More real than this, he’d said.
A red sliver of sun breaks through the trees, flooding the land with light. It draws all eyes, paints us crimson. Jarvis sighs, almost gladly. I don’t have to look at him to know it’s his last breath.
Epilogue:
It’s been years now since that terrible night in t
he forest, since the four of us shared a last sunrise together. For a while I wanted to forget it all–everything from the Library to Apolis–but there was a lot of good in with the bad. Besides, it would be a disservice to those who died. When I do think back, it’s as though I lived a whole life on that journey. The old may have counted the time in months, but to me the duration was immeasurable.
We brought Jarvis’s body back to his family in Apolis. Their devastation is not something I wish to recall. I expected them to blame us for his death. I wanted to apologize, to be punished, to feel the pain I deserved. Cabal had come for us that night, not him. But if anything, his mother was grateful to us in her sorrow. We’d brought back his body. We’d shared our stories of his journey north and his time in Haven. He hadn’t died alone. Didn’t she understand it was all my fault? How could she even bear to look at me?
Octavia’s mother was in Apolis too. Their reunion was brighter, though bittersweet with Ambrose gone. After the funeral, we were eager to be elsewhere. They gave us a writ describing the full protection and support of the city-state. We hadn’t asked for it, but the excuse for our trip had come out somewhere, and one of Jarvis’s relatives had taken the task upon themselves. Even so, the writ was never put to use. Echo and I didn’t want to return to Haven any more than we wanted to remain in Apolis. When we’d left, both had seemed like possibilities. Jarvis’s death changed all that.
We struck out northeast instead. At some point, we eliminated the “north” part and aimed straight for the rising sun. It was a somber journey, but there was a sense of freedom mixed with the sadness. We had no idea what lay ahead. We only knew we didn’t want what lay behind. The air had grown cold and the days short by the time we found it: the abandoned ruins of a small house in a massive forest. The trees rode up into the foothills of a mountain, and a great lake sat cool and blue beside it.
We’d passed through plenty of ruins. Only a few things made this one different. First, it was a single house, disconnected from any town, and although part of the roof had fallen in, what remained wasn’t entirely unsalvageable. Second, the occupants, though long dead, were still inside. We found their skeletons lying side by side on the remnants of a mattress. I don’t know how the couple had come to pass away in the same bed, or if someone else had arranged them there afterwards, but I like to think they died old and happy, free from the wars and diseases and troubles of more “civilized” areas.
Lastly, I found a book in the house.
It was in a cache beneath a broken floorboard, along with a rusty rifle, a pair of antlers, a necklace, and a number of old gold and copper coins. The tome was black and leather-bound, with an aura of age and weight. I have it to this day. Across the front, it reads:
The Complete Works of Robert E. Howard
Every Conan story ever written. They may not be in graphic form, but the images in my head are rich with detail. If I ever get back to Franklin the Ferryman, I’ll have to show him. When I saw that some of the old coppers in the cache were similar to the oversized cents Jarvis was fond of–well, that was the chocolate on the cookie, as my grandfather used to say. As far I’m concerned, the universe couldn’t have been sending us a clearer signal: this was where we’d make our home.
There was another factor in the decision I haven’t mentioned yet, not a sign but a need for urgency–Echo was pregnant. Granted, it was a dangerous choice to have the baby so far from anyone with medical knowledge, but we were still young and stupid, and we believed in ourselves far more than we trusted strangers. We also caught a lucky break. A middle-aged couple had settled in a cabin six miles around the curve of the lake, and I befriended them while ranging for game one day. They’d lost two children and a third had gone west, so the woman, Kerra, was a great help when she agreed to assist with the birth. By “assist” I mean “took over entirely and kicked me out of the house.”
Jarvis II was born in the spring, and he was an energetic explorer from the start. He’s so far shown no interest in electronics. Animals and plants are his thing. He watches them for hours, imitates them, talks to them. A real child of nature. We appended the “II” so that we’d always remember–and he’d always know–that there had been a first, even if the original Jarvis had been no blood relative.
As for Annabel Lee (who lived by New Sea), she made her peace with the past, or at least moved so far beyond it that it disappeared from view. Soon after we arrived, while I was still repairing the roof, she stood on our porch looking out into the forest and said, “I like when you call me Annabel.” I never called her Echo again.
After the birth of our son, Annabel swore off kids, but life had other ideas. Life doesn’t give a shit who does or doesn’t want kids. It throws them like candy to a crowd–and some in that crowd rejoice, while others cry out in terror and regret. In my opinion, no sane person would want the responsibility, the worry, the sacrifice … which is just why evolution all but removed the choice early on, hiding their creation in an almost irresistible act, leaving things to the more certain hands of Nature.
Accordingly, our son Jarvis was followed by Layla, a small squalling girl who nearly killed her mother upon arrival. That was another terrible night, though it turned out all right in the end. Afterwards, Annabel swore off kids again, more adamantly than ever, and I thought: we’re definitely done this time. For a few hours I had been facing the possibility that I might need to care for a newborn while grieving for the girl I loved, and I never wanted to face that again.
But once more, life stepped on our desires with an elephant’s uncaring foot; Annabel is now six months pregnant with our third child. Am I worried? Yes. Sometimes I look at her and wonder if she’ll only be a memory this time next year; if this is the thing that will kill her, coming like clockwork, the days ticking away. What can I do? Annabel tells me not to worry so much. I don’t tell her my fears, but she takes one look and knows. Since Layla, she’s been more philosophical. More relaxed. Less afraid. Recently she told me:
“We’re all going to die someday, Tristan. A day, a year, a decade. It doesn’t matter; when it happens, it will be now. What’s the point of living at all if we spend all our time being afraid of what’s to come?”
In quiet moments in the forest, on the slopes the mountain, by the calm waters of the lake, I know what she means. The fear fades away, and the world seems less like something one has to struggle against and more like something to be experienced and cherished. Still, my paranoia creeps in to whisper otherwise. It’s a constant practice, keeping the fear at bay. Living here, now–not in my head.
It was in a fearful moment that I considered moving everyone to Apolis. Annabel was four months pregnant and I wanted access to doctors and better medicine. Plus, we’d been saying for years that we’d go back to visit Octavia one day. The only problem was that the road was both unpredictable and dangerous. Even capable, well-armed travelers could disappear between here and Apolis; we’d have two children and a pregnant woman. Maybe our food would hold out, but what about bandits, mercenaries, roamers, Cyberians? I brought up the idea to Annabel. Her reaction was immediate.
“We’re not dragging Jarvis and Layla all the way to Apolis to have this baby. Apolis is not our home, Tristan. This is our home.”
It wasn’t until later that I let the issue go, but she was right. We’ve put our stake in the ground. We’ve made a life here. We did make one compromise, however. When I’d stocked enough rations to last Annabel and the kids, I spent two weeks on a trip to Redtree, the nearest village of any consequence. There I expected to trade for relevant herbs and medical supplies. What I didn’t expect was to see someone I knew. Someone I hadn’t seen in a lifetime.
“Yow show tchi!”
The words came at me across a cobblestone road as I headed for an apothecary. For a moment I couldn’t place them … Then Toyota was there with a big smile on his face, wearing the same round goggles and weather-beaten poncho. He’d just stepped down from a solar-electric vehicle. I hesitate to
call it a “wagon;” it was more like a small tank. It even had a turret on top.
Toyota was clapping me on the back and gesturing to the tank before I could even recover enough to speak. Someone else was heading our way too: his eldest son. He’d finally let the boy come along. It was a joyous reunion. Even though I’d only seen Toyota two or three times a year, those brief visits had meant a lot to me–not only in practical terms, by providing new goods, but in mental terms, by providing something to look forward to. I may have been just one more stop in his travels, but to me he was like an old and cherished friend. Meeting him out here, far north of z-line, felt like coming full circle. The three of us sat together in a local eatery. I insisted on buying them dinner. I told Toyota how much Volume Seven had meant to me, how I’d been taken captive by Foundry’s scouts that same night.
“Find something good, I see you next time!”
Those had been his last words back in the ruins. I hadn’t found anything to match Volume Seven, but I’d wanted to give him something unique. Luckily, I had just the thing. As he boarded the vehicle with his son again and prepared to leave, I threw him the little leather pouch I’d found the morning of the Grass Man’s ambush, the ancient black dice still inside. The dice were valuable, but I’d grown attached to them and never found the right trade. Seeing how Toyota had always called me some variant of “Little Luck,” I figured he would appreciate the gift.
“You make your own luck now,” I told him.
As he shook the odd dice out of the bag, his face bloomed in delight. He promised to visit Redtree on his next trip north and agreed to bring Wade and Franklin word of our health, should he happen down that way.
On the way back to Annabel, I thought a lot about the Library. Seeing Toyota again had put it all in perspective. There was something else on my mind too. In Redtree, I’d discovered a book. Not an old book. A new one. The biography of a woman out west, from someplace called New Cali. The book had been reprinted in Cove. The name “Cove” still brings up bad feelings, and New Cali is a long way off, but those can’t be the only two printing presses in the New World–can they?
