by AJ Kalliver
‘What Warriors Do’
(A 15,000 word Novelette)
By AJ Kalliver
Kindle Edition 1.0
Copyright © 2012 by AJ Kalliver
http://www.ajkalliver.com/
Cover design by Ronnell Porter
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Other stories by AJ Kalliver
Only Echoes Remain
What Warriors Do
AJ Kalliver
Copyright © 2012 by AJ Kalliver
This one is for Melanie
Her name was Rain, and like all the other small children she was staring, spellbound, at the old uncle who was telling them the story.
“…And then the mad King’s army pursued the helpless folk through the passes and into the high mountains, slavering like wolves as they gave chase to our people.” He paused, taking a sip of his cider and enjoying their wide, anxious eyes. All around them, the common room of the village’s largest lodge was warm and cozy despite the deep snow that covered the world outside. Several dozen members of Rain’s extended family remained, even though the feast of midwinter’s night had ended hours before, some conversing quietly amongst themselves, others listening to the old uncle, sipping from mugs of their own and nodding along as he told the familiar tale. “Those of our kin who were too slow to escape, the King’s warriors slew, their ears deaf to the pleading of men, women, and yes,” He eyed his young audience significantly, “of the children, also. Many, many were killed before we reached this place, brutally murdered at the orders of a madman.” Leaning back in his comfortable chair, he seemed content to leave it there, but a small voice came high and clear through the dimness that had fallen as the hearth fires burned low.
“Why would they do that?” Rain asked from her place among the youngest of the children. Old uncle frowned, regarding the little girl from the lofty perch of his comfortable chair and advanced years, yet she pushed on, undaunted. “If the King was mad, and everyone knew it, then why would his warriors do what he told them, and kill so many people for no reason?”
Shaking his head slightly at the foolishness of the very young, he gave a weary sigh.
“Because, little Rain, he had given them their orders. Brutal, needless, unspeakable orders, yes, yet he gave them, and because he had been named King, they were obeyed. Without question, without thought, they were obeyed.” He glanced around, and from those adults who sat nearby he received another silent round of nods. To the girl he gave a sad, sober look. “That, after all, is what warriors do.”
* * * * *
It was a glorious summer day, and Rain had come with Thad, a boy only a little older than her own eleven years, down to the lowest end of the valley to watch the men building upon the Wall.
Made of coarse, grey stone that had been laboriously dragged down from the high reaches, it spanned the whole of the narrow canyon that was the only path into the mountain basin which their folk made their home. A hundred paces wide and as tall as seven men, the enormous construct had been begun in her great-grandfather’s time. Every summer, no matter how much work needed doing among their gardens, or fields, or herds of sheep and goats, the men set aside a number of days to build the wall ever-higher, ever stronger.
“Why do they do that?” Rain asked, watching as the men struggled with a roughly-squared boulder that must have weighed as much as a horse. “Every year someone gets hurt, hauling the stone or working to get it up on top of the Wall; why not just leave it as it is?”
Thad turned his head to regard her curiously. With her dark brown hair and green eyes, she looked much like everyone else he knew; after generations of living so isolated, their people had intermarried so often that anything but brown hair and light-colored eyes were nearly unknown. Still, despite her very ordinary features, there was something about Rain that was different, that had led him to allow her to come along with him to watch today.
And not just the fact that she could outrun and outwrestle any boy her age, and many who were years older; that aspect of her wasn’t interesting, it was just annoying.
“They have to keep building it,” He finally answered, looking back to the men toiling upon the wall. “If they don’t, then when the King’s army finds us someday, they’ll be able to break through and kill us all.”
She looked at him, wrinkling her pert nose in disdain.
“Don’t be silly; that King must have been dead for almost a hundred years, now. For all we know, he died the same year our people fled here.”
He only shrugged.
“It doesn’t matter if he’s dead; someone of his line will still be King, and he will still want all of our people dead.” Glancing up at her (she was inches taller than he; another source of annoyance), he gestured back at the high valley that stretched out behind them. “If his Warriors got past the wall, then they would end all of this. They would burn the fields, slaughter the flocks, and destroy our homes. They would kill us, and kill everyone we know.”
Despite her odd, questioning ways, that image obviously disturbed the girl.
“That would be horrible,” she murmured, her eyes troubled. “After all this time, they’re still hating us, and hunting us, and all for something that no one living was even alive to see?”
Thad nodded as he turned back to regard the wall, and spoke the words that they all knew were simple, inescapable truth.
“It’s what warriors do.
* * * * *
The ringing of the hammer was loud beneath the smithy’s sheltering roof, and the fires of the forge were more than welcome on this chill Autumn day. Geran the blacksmith paused in his labors for a moment, straightening up and thrusting the horseshoe he was shaping back into the furnace to heat. Movement caught the corner of his eye and he turned to find Rain, fourteen years old now and taller than ever, watching from the doorway. The big man scowled.
“Here, girl; what’re you doing wasting the day here when you’ve surely got chores that need tending?” He said this with a certain amount of exasperation, for it was well-known that Rain was a troublesome child. Not lazy by any stretch, but… difficult. She would rather muck out a stall than churn a crock of butter, would argue and struggle against washing linens and yet cheerfully join the older boys in cutting and hauling sheaves of hay. In fact, it was one of the hand scythes hanging from pegs upon the smithy wall that she was studying intently just now, all the while ignoring his question. Geran shook his head at this fresh proof of the girl’s willfulness, and turned away to resume his own labors. From her place by the wall, Rain suddenly asked a question of her own.
“Have you ever made a sword?”
He very nearly dropped the red-glowing metal gripped in his tongs.
“What?!” he bellowed, rounding on her. Undaunted, she faced him, as no proper girl-child her age should have done.
“It’s just like a long knife, isn’t it?” she asked, “You’ve made plenty of knives. Or one of these,” here the brat raised the scythe she’d taken from it’s peg, “Only with a straight, heavy blade. Surely you could make one if you wanted to.”
Geran could hardly believe the pluck of the girl.
“Could make one, aye; won’t make one is where the mark lies, and well do you know the reasons why!”
She nodded, though it looked to him to be a reluctant gesture.
“I know. ‘The people are a people of peace; no one of the people shall take up war, or the instruments of war, lest they be lost to the shadow of madness which did consume all those in the lands below.’” She shook her head then, and cast her eye about t
he shed. “That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me; almost anything here could be an ‘instrument of war’ if you needed it to be.” Her gesture took in the scythes upon the wall, the pick-axe leaning in the corner, the heavy-bladed sheath knife on his belt, even the iron tongs he still held. “And can you truly say that if, oh, a wolf were to bound in here and leap at your throat, you wouldn’t do your best to kill it? Just for that moment, wouldn’t you have ‘taken up war’? Who would blame you if you did, to save your own life?”
The smith knew himself to be a simple man, unlike this too-clever maiden, yet the answers to those questions were known to all the people. They lay at the heart of who his people were.
“The difference, girl, is that these things I make, the knives and the scythes, and the rest, are tools. Tools for building, or harvesting. Though they could be turned to an ill deed like shedding blood, that isn’t their true purpose. A sword, though, is a wasteful, wicked thing, and its only purpose is the slaughter of the innocent.” He drove that statement home by slamming the half-formed horseshoe down upon his anvil with a clang. “As for myself, I’m a maker of things. If I had no choice, if I were backed against this wall by a wolf that meant to take my life, then aye, I’d lay into it with whatever came to hand, and if I had to then I would slay it. That wouldn’t make me a soldier, it would only make me a poor, flawed human being; a tool that had been turned to an ill purpose. It’s those that do nothing else, that live only for the killing of men and women, that exist only as a sword exists, to do murder, that are the true evil. And that, girl, is something that none of us here will ever be.”
She still didn’t have the proper air of respect about her, the deference that a man of his standing among the people deserved from a youngster of her age, and a girl besides, but she finally nodded in acknowledgement of his words even as she muttered a last question.
“How can we be so sure that everyone who lives as a soldier is such a horrible person? Do all of them really do nothing but kill helpless people wherever they find them?”
It was a valid question, and an easy one to answer.
“They do kill; without question and without mercy. It’s what they train for, it’s all they know. That’s what warriors do.”
Rain departed, and Geran turned back to his work, the matter settled. It was only later that he discovered that one of his metal files had been misplaced, along with a whetstone, and for the life of him he couldn’t find either one no matter how he searched.
* * * * *
That afternoon had been a time to live forever in his memories; the rains of early spring had ended at long last, and the first warm days had brought the wildflowers into their blooming with marvelous speed. In the thick, luxuriant grasses of the western meadow, he and Rain had lain beside each other, exchanging the breathless kisses of first love, exploring one another’s bodies with soft sighs and sudden giggles, lost in the wonder of what their childhood friendship had suddenly become.
Thad grinned as he crept through the darkness, anticipation making his heart beat faster. Rain was somewhere up ahead, he’d been following her for nearly an hour as she climbed into one of the high, rocky reaches of the valley where few ever had cause to go. He’d gotten lost for a brief time, turned around somehow when she moved quickly through a mazelike region of tumbled boulders and small trees. Obviously she knew her way, while Thad did not; even so, he was certain that she remained unaware of his presence behind her, and when he caught sight of her on the trail far ahead, he hastened his pace.
He had been especially fascinated with the odd details discovered as they lay amongst the grasses and flowers. Rain’s body, still slim despite the startling strength she sometimes displayed, persisted in remaining inches taller than his own. He longed for the height to overtop her, but at eighteen years it seemed that he’d reached his full growth. That her fingers held calluses was no surprise; everyone put in long hours of labor at one task or another, and yet she had the most peculiar scars scattered here and there, narrow little lines that were tantalizingly paler than the rest of her gold-tanned skin. “A thorn scratch,” she said of one, when he asked, and it very well could be just as simple as that. She did, after all, persist in the odd habits that had characterized her as a child. She went everywhere, rambling through the valley and up into the wild, wooded reaches that stretched like fingers into the surrounding mountains, much to the dismay of her mother and aunts, who would much rather she stayed in among the comfortable confines of the village itself, as was considered proper. She disdained the gentle arts of cooking and embroidery that the matrons taught the other maidens who approached adulthood, preferring to sit at the feet of those few men who did a bit of hunting and trapping in addition to tending their herds. From them she’d learned the basics of tracking, and then gone off alone to build upon that knowledge. ‘Wildling’ was what the elders called her, and not entirely out of fondness.
Still, Rain had a way about her, a depth to her eyes, an aura of steady determination that belied her often sprightly humor, that ultimately charmed enough of the village that her strange ways were tolerated, if not appreciated. There was, of course, the hope that once she was married she would settle down and leave her impetuous childhood ways behind. Thad found himself hoping this would indeed be the case, just as he hoped --with some cause, after this afternoon-- that it would be he who would be the other half of that union.
At this moment, however, his first and foremost hope was that once he caught up with her, they could continue what they had started in the meadow. Having had his first taste of her lips, having touched her as he never had before, he was consumed with the longing to do so again. And wouldn’t she be surprised that he had managed to find her, in this remote place she’d run off to in the middle of the night!
That thought brought him up short; for the first time he managed to think past his excitement and wonder just what it was Rain was doing up here. They were above the tree line now, and though it was spring in the lower valley, it was near-freezing here in the rocky heights. Set into the steep slopes here were low, scattered structures of carven stone; crypts that held the honored dead of those who had led the people here all those long years ago. Thad looked about uneasily. These were the men who had seen the world beyond the Wall with their own eyes, who had fled the mad King and ultimately found this safe refuge from the violence and death that held sway in the lands outside. It was not, strictly speaking, forbidden to come here, and yet it was a place that was left alone. Why would Rain sneak off in the middle of the…?
There, up the trail and to the right, he saw a glint in the moonlight that surely must be her. Either that, or some restless shade of his forefathers, stirring in response to this brazen intrusion. With a shiver that owed little to the cold, Thad crept forward. He heard a shuffling sound from ahead as he came closer, interspaced with a strange rustling, like someone moving through stiff grasses. Which was impossible, as there was naught to be found in these windswept heights save lichen, mosses and barren stone. Increasingly uncertain, Thad nevertheless pushed on, and when he reached the end of the path and peered around the final tomb, he found Rain at last.
How he wished he had not.
She held a sword in her hands; a long, slender sword in those same hands which had held his own scant hours before. With the blade held high, she advanced upon a rigid caricature of a man; a scarecrow of sorts, wooden frame braced in the rocks and bound about with straw and rags. Steel flashed in the moonlight, the same pale glint he had seen from below, and the sharp edge caressed the scarecrow’s left arm, sending a small shower
of straw drifting down. Rain hopped lightly to one side, and again the sword moved, flicker-swift in the night. Again, the whisper of sound and the shower of grasses, this time from the arm on the right. The speed of the movement, and the grace with which it was performed, had a perverse, horrible beauty. Thad felt sickened, as if it was he who had been wounded by the grisly implement his love wielded so skillfully. When she spu
n and suddenly thrust the point home deep in the straw man’s throat, he instinctively flinched away, scattering bits of loose stone from beneath his feet.
Rain whirled to face the sound, her eyes wide and the sword raised as if to strike.
The two of them stared, each at the other, for what seemed an endless time.
“Why?” He whispered, when at last he had regained the power of speech. “Why would you do this?”
She lowered the glittering, evil thing she held in her hand, but she did not set it aside. Her eyes dark, her expression unreadable, she looked nearly as stiff and inhuman as the scarecrow that stood behind her.
“Because it’s what I am meant to do.” Her voice was soft, and yet there was no apology there. “I’ve always known that I would be different than the rest of you, that there was something inside me that I needed to find before I could really know myself.” Her empty hand indicated the crypt beside her. “What I discovered here showed me what that something was. This sword,” a glint of moonlight on steel as she raised it, “and some other things as well. It’s like….” She shook her head, sending her long hair rippling, and it was so bizarre, seeing that familiar gesture from his childhood friend, his newfound love, while at the same time her words proved that he had never truly known her at all. “It’s as if they were waiting for me to find them here, so I could become what I needed to be.”
Thad shook his head uselessly, trying to deny it all, though of course he could not; not when she was standing right there, so openly speaking the ugly truth of it.
“So you could become what? A killer?” The words were bitter on his tongue. All his hopes, the dreams he’d only begun to see stretching out before the two of them; marriage, children, a home full of love for all their lives, gone now, crushed by the moonlit stranger standing before him. “And will you kill me, now, to keep the secret of what you’ve become?”
