War of the Misread Augury: Book One of the Black Griffin Rising Trilogy

by D. S. Halyard

  Jahaksi walked his horse forward, with his hand on his sword hilt. “We are just travelers, and we have problems with those men. We only wish to use this road to go. You are in authority?”

  “We are going to have to fight them.” Jhumar Gaz said from behind him in Brizaki. “Look how they are dressed. These men are certainly bandits.”

  “Aye, we’re in authority, sure enough.” The man on the horse replied. “I’m Bandim, and you’re on the territory of King Otto.”

  “I think you have a king far away.” Jahaksi replied. “This one has heard this.”

  “You mean that puppy in Mortentia City?” Bandim laughed. “We never bent knee to them folks. Now quit ducking your eyes away, boy, let me take a good look at you.”

  Jahaksi gritted his teeth and looked the man straight in the face. “Like I say, we are travelers.” He said. “It is long custom to leave travelers to the road.”

  “Aye, sure. Where such custom holds.” Bandim replied, nodding. “But I guess you folks found out that an’t the custom everywhere, didn’t you? Especially for you cat-eyed buggers, hey?”

  “He has seen my eyes.” Jahaksi said to Jumar, who put his hand on his sword hilt. So did the other Brizaki.

  Their eyes had been the problem, of course. In the wide world beyond this blighted land of Mortentia, the cat’s eyes of halfmen had not been too much of a problem. Where their kind were not welcome, they were at least tolerated, for to single out and persecute Sesseri-man half-breeds was to incur the wrath of the Brizaki Empire, which was built on such people. And while the empire was not everywhere, it could reach out a finger and touch almost everywhere.

  Not so in Mortentia. Here the sorcery that empowered and enabled the Brizaki to dominate or punish the rest of the Known World was dead, and man-to-man the Brizaki were just smaller versions of human soldiers, no matter how much Jahaksi’s vanity said they were more. Additionally, a bundle of weird superstitions and intolerance permeated this land, and when they had attempted to purchase needed food and supplies this morning in a little town west of here, the merchant had made some strange symbol with his fingers and run away. It was scarcely an hour later that the Dunwater knights had appeared, screaming imprecations and waving their swords. Jahaksi and his men had been fleeing ever since, riding down an increasingly narrow road into a barren and seemingly uninhabited country of hills and scattered oak groves.

  “Tis your lucky day, cat-eyes.” Said Bandim. “Turns out we’re the kind of folks who adhere to the ancient custom you describe, but you are going to have to talk to the king about traveling further. Now get back behind the spears, and don’t be thinking of running. We’ve archers in the wood.”

  “You mean to make us prisoners?” Jahaksi asked the man.

  “Hardly. I reckon we’re about to save your skins for you.” The man named Bandim replied. “Now do as I say and get ye behind me.”

  Puzzled, Jahaksi did as Bandim said, riding behind the spearmen and instructing his men to form up together on the road. “We can run.” Jhumar Gaz said. “The road is clear and these men are all afoot. We can be half a league down the road before they know it.” He spoke in Brizaki, of course.

  “We will not run.” Jahaksi said. “I have claimed the guest right, and this man said he would honor it. I should not like to add these men to the ranks of those who pursue us, and although these are good horses, I don’t believe they can flee as fast as arrows can fly. We will stay back and see what develops. Still, we should be prepared to run if we must.” Two archers came out of the scrub trees along the side of the road to keep an eye on their ‘guests’.

  Less than five minutes later a score of heavily armored men in the black armor and black tabards trimmed in red of Dunwater came thundering down the road. The tabards were each decorated with a red skull, and the skulls had white stars for eyes. They halted when they saw the spearmen in the road, and one rode forward, with a long sword held openly in his right hand. He sawed the reins with his left. He wore a helmet with cheek guards tied beneath his chin, and the helmet also sported the star-eyed skull of Dunwater. A white horsetail designated him as their leader.

  “What is the meaning of this?” The leader demanded. “You are obstructing the king’s road and hindering our pursuit.”

  “King’s road? What do you know of our king?” Bandim demanded from behind the line of spearmen, pacing his pony back and forth as he spoke.

  “This here is the king’s road, and all men can travel on it.” The Dunwater man answered. “I’m Ramus Kundrell, and we are chasing those … those things.” He pointed his sword at Jahaksi as he spoke, but the spearmen holding the line neither wavered nor looked behind.

  “Those things are men.” Bandim replied. “And they are under the protection of our king. When you passed that ridge about half a league back, you come into the Kingdom of the Green Hills.”

  “There is no kingdom here.” Ramus replied angrily. “This is all Mortentia. You men are rebels and bandits, and those are certainly not men.”

  “You think so?” Bandim replied. “I tell you something boy, the Kingdom of the Green Hills was here before your king and your people ever come across the water from Tolrissa. We never bowed to any king in Mortentia City, and we never swore no allegiance, neither. We don’t pay any taxes to your king and we don’t send any men for his levies. Now how do you reckon we’re rebels?”

  “Just because you hide out in the hills and claim to be a kingdom doesn’t make you one.” Ramus sneered. “Let us have those men or I will notify the Baron of Arker that he has rebels lurking in his territory. Your little kingdom won’t last a month.”

  Jahaksi listened with interest.

  “The Baron knows we are here.” Ramus replied. “He and his ilk gave up on rooting us out more than fifty years gone. He leaves us be and we leave him be. But whether you like it or not, this is the Kingdom of the Green Hills, and you lot an’t welcome. Not only are you trespassing on our land, but even if this were part of Arker, which it an’t, you Dunwater folk got no writ here. Mayhap it’s us that will notify the Baron that the Duke sees fit to send armed knights across his land, for you surely passed through Arker to get here, didn’t you?”

  “You are harboring witches and evil spirits, not men.” Ramus’ reply promised wrath. “I am going to notify the bishop, and the next time you try to block this road, it will be godsknights along with us.”

  “You go ahead and send them.” Bandim said. “We will be as happy to kill godsknights as you.” Several men in the wall of spears laughed, but Ramus glared at them.

  “You bandits have a good laugh. In a month it will be the drop and the dangle for the lot of you.” He turned to his men. “Come on then. We’ve business more important than this.”

  Hoots and catcalls followed the horsemen as they rode away.

  Bandim waited until he was sure the Dunwater knights were gone, then he turned about to see what kind of cat-eyes they’d netted. Most of the cat-eyes he’d seen were either the whores in the Zoric wood or petty criminals living on the fringes of villages, and the ones the king had taken in never seemed to amount to much. They made good scouts, though, for they could see as well as the cats they looked like in the dark.

  He rode up to the one he’d been talking to, noticing the foreign-looking banded mail and the lighter patches on his shoulder and helmet. There had been military insignia there, and not too long ago, Bandim guessed, but he’d been in a lot of places, and he’d never seen anything like it. Aside from that, looking at the men all together, it was plain to see from the lightly knit frames that these were all cat-eyes, and they all held themselves with military precision. He’d never heard of cat-eyes travelling in packs, but these were plainly a military unit.

  Still, he reckoned there were a lot of strange things in the world he’d never seen, and an army of cat-eyes was probably the least of it. He approached the leader.

  “I reckon you are the boss of these lot, right?”

  “I am
the commander. I am called Jahaksi.” Jahaksi said.

  “And these with you, do they speak Mortentian, too?”

  “No, only I.”

  “Well, that’s a puzzle, an’t it? A little pack of cat-eye sodjers here in the middle of no place Mortentia, and only one speaking the common tongue. The king will want to talk to you lot, I reckon. Come along and we’ll take you to the castle.”

  The cat-eyes leader spoke to the rest of his men and they fell in obediently, after a few words to each other in that strange language they had. Bandim figured it must be a mixture of a couple different languages, for although it sounded almost familiar, there were harsh sounding words mixed with gentle sounding ones, at least to his ear. He’d heard a few different languages in his time, from the jaw-cracking rolling thunder that was Thimenian to the clever ‘cheat you at dice’ sound of Rhuman to the Tolrissan that was so close to Mortentian that if you knew one you could figure out the other if you concentrated. He’d never heard this particular language, but it sure enough sounded like a hash made up of two or three others.

  He chuckled, amused at himself. By the Secret Gods. What was he, a scribe? He shook his head and led them down the hidden roads to the keep.

  Darkness had fallen, and the stars were hidden behind an overhanging thickness of cloud that seemed to make rain likely. Jahaksi could see in the dark, as could his troop, but he thought that the men with them could see nearly as well, for the road was paved with crushed limestone or white granite and visible even under starlight. The gravel was ground fine, and the horses had no trouble with it. They took one of a score of smaller roads that wound away from the king’s road, then split into another two roads, then split again. They traveled over hills and down valleys, and a forest of scrub oak and cedar surrounded them, black in the night. Jahaksi could see the road at his feet split again and again into perhaps a hundred different turnings as they wended their way through the woods. Each road was of identical width and paved with the same white gravel, and he realized that from above the whole thing would look like an enormous maze, with winding roads and turns and splits. Sudden valleys and sudden steep, stone-sided cliffs emerged from the night, blocking pathways and putting forth barriers no army could hope to cross.

  For a long time they traveled beneath a dense canopy of tall oaks, and one of the men with them began to sing. Others would join in from time to time. It was a sad-sounding song, but he did not know any of the words. It was not in Mortentian, Tolrissan or any other language that he knew, and he knew many. It was beautiful. The road continued to divide periodically, and Jahaksi knew that under the dense cover of trees the maze would be impossible to decipher, even from the back of an eagle. It made an impressive defense against invasion, and the military part of his mind admired it.

  It took them four hours of marching to reach the inner fences of the Kingdom of the Green Hills, and Jahaksi’s jaw dropped in amazement when they did. They came out of the forest at the base of a hill, and when they crested it a small town spread out before them. He saw a tavern and several smaller shops, as well as homes for maybe five hundred people. It was not the town that impressed Jahaksi, however, but the keep that loomed above it.

  A stream or river ran through a valley here, coming down out of higher hills to the north, and it had carved a valley nearly half a league wide out of the hills. Around a lesser hill that stood beside the stream someone had dug in a moat, both deep and wide, and on the hill stood a fortress, but what a fortress!

  Walls whose lower halves seemed cut from the bones of the hill itself rose at least twenty paces from the water of the moat, and arrow slits seamed the walls from five paces up all the way to the top. The keep was diamond-shaped, with only one entrance, a narrow wooden bridge across a pond that was guarded by two great towers. More towers lined the walls and overhung the corners, and an inner keep stood within, and all made of great blocks of granite that looked to have been mortared together and splinted with great iron bars as well. It was a fortress that could be held by as few as fifty men against …

  Well, against everyone, Jahaksi supposed. With his trained eye he saw that even if the upper walls and towers were destroyed by trebuchet, the lower walls, cut from the granite bedrock of the original hill as they were, would still prevent any entry to the keep. It was a fortress that could stand for years if the men within had anything to eat at all. It was little wonder that the people here had never been conquered by the Tolrissans or forced to become part of Mortentia. With such a citadel, it would take legions to conquer this land.

  Here in the middle of the kingdom of Mortentia was another kingdom, a tiny land completely forgotten by the world that moved around it. The Kingdom of the Green Hills.

  The shoes of Jahaksi’s horse and the others with him made a loud drumming noise as they rode across the second of two drawbridges guarding the keep, beneath a high portcullis and into the courtyard. They dismounted there, and were shown to a door made of thick oak timbers banded in iron, set in a wall of bedrock granite. Torches in iron brackets illumined the door, and a bearded man in chainmail beneath a faded leather tabard opened it for them. Bandim led them in. Jahaksi noticed murder holes in the ceiling as they entered the antechamber that seemed to have been carved from the native rock, and a second iron-banded door stood before them. Bandim knocked in a pattern and the door was opened.

  The center of the inner keep was a large chamber, and the ceiling hid out of sight among granite columns. It was circular, and several small round wooden tables, rough-hewn with chairs to match, lay scattered about the room. Men in leather clothing similar to Bandim’s sat around them, and all were armed with iron broadswords and large daggers. A collection of bows and spears leaned against the wall, and quivers were much in evidence. A fletcher patiently made split-ash arrows at one of the benches, long and heavy arrows with black crow-feather fletchings. The far wall was dominated by a large fireplace in which a relatively small blaze crackled and popped, and the smell of burning oak and roasted boar permeated the room. A number of large, wolf-like dogs sat around the room or begged at the tables. Above the fireplace hung the stuffed and mounted head of a boar, larger than any boar Jahaksi had ever seen.

  To the side of the fireplace were two large wooden chairs, dark oak finely carved in an elaborate scrollwork of curls and eye-catching star-shapes. An enormous man sat in the left hand chair. He was both tall and broad, with blond hair going gray in lengthy thick braids that hung down over a worn and dented suit of steel half-plate. Instead of a crown he wore a conical helmet, with curling ox horns protruding from the sides. His beard was long and thick and yellow, and his eyes were piercing bright blue, set in a face that might have been chiseled from the same granite as the castle. He said something in a language that Jahaksi did not understand, and Jahaksi shook his head.

  “What about Thimenian?” He asked in that barbaric language. “Do you speak Thimenian?”

  “I do.” Jahaksi replied, surprised. All Brizaki spoke at least a little Thimenian, for it was the language of their closest enemies, and most spoke it fluently. “Do you know Thimenian?”

  The big king laughed. “I should say so. I am Otten Ottenson from Valtheim. I killed three gigantic ogres in the forgotten north, long ago.” He hooked a thumb at the boar’s head looming above them all. “I also killed that son of a tark.”

  He leaned forward, gazing at them intently. “Now, what are five stinking Brizaki warriors doing in the forgotten kingdom, and why should I not hang you all?”

  Chapter 55: One-eye, Muharl Ogre Country

  One-eye left his she in her furs and walked away from the ruins that had been the home base of the Bloodhands, but were now Gutcrusher’s base, wearing only his breastplate and armed only with the sword he’d been given by Gutcrusher from the Black Mountain. He had a long way to go, so he set an easy pace, walking casually, reserving his considerable strength.

  None of the ogres or whelps challenged or greeted him as he walked away from the camp, and
he said nothing. It was the hour before dawn, and most of the ogres were sleeping. His leaving went unchallenged.

  Northward he walked, his booted feet making little of the long journey, and it was nearly noon before he reached his destination. He pissed, ate a little from his meat bag and idly fingered a booger. Then he scratched at the lice that infested his fur-coated loincloth.

  He looked around. Where he stood was not much different than the territory he had just walked through, a land of hills and dales and occasional flat pastures, punctuated here and there with cliffs and streams. All was green, for it was high summer, and he could hear the lazy buzzing of bumblebees and birdcalls. A deerfly, who had been working on the thick hide of his shoulder for nearly half an hour, finally managed to puncture the skin, and One-eye slapped it suddenly, ending its existence in a splash of red and the echo of a very profane curse.

  One-eye did not curse as often or as creatively as did Gutcrusher, and he sometimes envied the king his easy flow of words. Truth be told, One-eye didn’t often have original ideas, nor did he speak often, not as often as Wolf or even Balls. Of course Balls mostly just talked to the king, but Wolf talked to everybody, and was nearly as good at coming up with creative profanity as king Gutcrusher was.

  But yesterday morning One-eye had come up with an idea all by himself, and as it was his and his alone, he had jumped at the chance to implement it. He felt he was best suited for the task, too, so here he was, the one-eyed spy.

  A crossroads of sort lay below him, a place where several regularly traveled ogre paths met at the base of two hills, craggy hills that weren’t easy to climb over. He stood halfway up one of the hills, picking at his nose, or the lice, or whatever. He was good at waiting, and could usually find something to do to pass the time.

  He heard the sound of movement on the path below, heavy bodies moving through the underbrush, coming from the west. He crouched down to watch, keeping as still as possible. It was one of his special skills, this lurking, and he often lurked well enough to catch unwary deer or elk. He was always careful of the wind, and he knew which way his scent would carry.