Act of Will

by A. J. Hartley

“There’s a wire brush, rags, some oil for the rust and the moving parts, and some polish to finish them off. Do you mind?”

  I muttered that it was fine, anything to oblige, and so on, and he beamed at me, guessing how much it hurt.

  “Thanks, Will,” he said, his green eyes smiling brightly, “I appreciate it.”

  He slapped my arm good-humoredly as if to say “welcome aboard” or something similarly nauseating, and strode off to his horse. He was already in his armor, complete with helm, ax, and a leather-covered shield. He looked like an adventurer. I, however, looked like a metal polisher. I climbed onto the wagon and looked at the sack sulkily.

  “Got a job?” said an irritatingly cheerful Orgos as he took his place.

  “Of sorts,” I muttered.

  “It’ll pass the time,” he laughed, flashing his teeth. “You won’t be wrestling cobras all the way to Stavis.”

  “Hilarious as ever,” I said.

  It was indecently early when we rejoined the road and turned towards the rising sun, with Mithos and Renthrette (who hadn’t spoken to me today) riding ahead and Garnet at the rear. All around us the trees were filled with the bright, twittering songs of warblers and the shrill stutterings of sparrows. Their cheerfulness annoyed me, so I concentrated on my bits of rag and rusty armor, but within another hour the heat had kicked in and they had all shut up.

  Yesterday’s journey had seen us leave behind the last of the cultivated land east of Cresdon. As the patches of dry grass were replaced by parched, sand-colored earth or coarse heather and gorse, there was even less to look at. No distant houses, no grazing cattle. Nothing. The air became heavy with the aromas of wild sage, thyme, and sweat. It seemed we were leaving the humidity behind, but the temperature continued to rise. I bent over the rusty greaves and brushed them fiercely as the sweat poured down my neck.

  “Drink,” said Orgos, passing me a water bottle. I did so: long gasping swallows almost too earnest for my throat to take. “You have to keep drinking,” he said. “By lunchtime we should have finished this bottle between us. And you should wear a hat, Will. Even a light helmet would keep the sun off.”

  I grinned at his concern and went on burnishing the armor in my lap until I could see my hot, bored face in it. I oiled it and spent several minutes trying to decide where you were supposed to wear it. Orgos hummed tunefully to himself. I noticed when he stopped, but I didn’t look up.

  “Will,” he said suddenly. “How are your eyes?”

  “I can see this scrap metal in my lap pretty well, why?”

  “Take a look over to the left there and tell me what you see.”

  The very slight urgency in his lazy tone showed through, and I turned sharply to the left.

  The wagon and the horses in front were throwing up dust in a thin ribbonlike cloud, but beyond it and the road, five hundred yards or so over in the gorse and heather, were horsemen riding parallel to us.

  “Eight of them,” I said. “Empire troops?”

  Orgos shook his head.

  “Get into the back of the wagon and take the crossbow,” he said carefully, with a quick flash of his eyes into mine. “Don’t worry, it’ll be all right. Maybe nothing at all, but better to be safe. Go to the back, open the top flap, and make sure Garnet knows they are there. Then get yourself a spear and cover the rear. If you can’t hold it, fasten her up and come back to the front.”

  For a moment I just listened; then I clambered through the hatch into the back, my heart thumping. I felt cold, but I had started to sweat. It was becoming clear now; the moment I had climbed up the Eagle’s balcony, I had begun some unbreakable chain of events. Terror was going to follow me about like an overfriendly dog. Or maybe a lion.

  The back of the wagon was dark, hot, and bouncing erratically. I threw the bolt on the top flap with an unsteady hand and raised it to the roof, hooking it in place with a wooden peg. The brightness outside hurt my eyes. Garnet was riding close, his helm sparkling and his mouth set. He had unslung his ax from the thong on his saddle and he clasped it in his right hand. It looked huge and cruel against his thin, sinewy arm. He saw me and nodded slightly, his eyes meeting mine for an expressionless moment. I was conscious that we had increased speed and that Garnet’s dappled mare was in a full canter and sweating heavily. Things were slipping out of control again and my bladder seemed to have suddenly filled to bursting point.

  Then I heard another horse close to the wagon, and Mithos appeared alongside Garnet. They spoke to each other briefly and he called to me over the noise of wheels and hooves, “All right, Will?”

  I nodded, but my eyes were wide. My whole arm trembled as I dragged a short spear from the bundle in the dark interior and returned to my squat by the half-opened tailgate. I wondered if I should have taken an ax or sword but Orgos was right: With this I could lunge through the opening without committing myself.

  Suddenly there was a flurry of movement behind the wagon and I glanced up to see Mithos and Garnet reining their horses. In the same instant, wood splintered to my right as the side of the wagon was hit by an arrow. Mithos bent his bow and loosed an arrow. Desperate to know what was going on, I leaned out and saw them coming.

  The riders had split up. Three rode to the front; five charged the back. They weren’t Empire. For a second I considered ducking back inside and locking myself in, but the futility of that was obvious even in my rising panic. The front was under attack, so there was no point in fleeing in that direction. I couldn’t get out of the back without getting trampled to death, so I stayed where I was, spear and crossbow in hand, motionless as a cockroach that knows it’s been seen but doesn’t have the slightest idea what to do about it.

  The wagon slowed to a halt and the air was torn by the shouts of our adversaries as they came at us. I caught a glimpse of a pinkish male face, red hair blowing back from under his helm and his eyes and mouth distorted by a roar of fury as his horse bore him into us. Garnet shrugged him off with his shield and swung his ax high as the other raised a short and heavy spear.

  A man in leather and ring mail, his lance leveled murderously, was bearing down on Mithos in a full charge. Mithos waited and then, with impossible self-control, shot his bow. The arrow sped in a short horizontal path and found the bandit’s shoulder. He shuddered and his horse all but threw him as he struggled to regain control. By the time the next rider had galloped in close, long yellow hair flying behind him, Mithos had dropped the bow and drawn his sword. They met and their steel rang out.

  Garnet traded blow and parry with the red-haired man. He held him off but looked around in alarm when another appeared, a heavy spiked mace in one hand. I aimed my crossbow with sweating palms and without a thought in my head. Garnet tried in vain to break from his adversary and face the newcomer as the redhead raised his spear to strike. I squeezed the trigger and the bow kicked.

  The bolt struck him squarely between the shoulder blades. I don’t think it went all the way in, but he sort of tipped to one side and fell to the earth. Garnet looked from him to me for a split second and then heaved the bit of his ax at his new adversary. I stared.

  Mithos slashed hard from above. As the blond man raised his sword to take the strike, Mithos undercut the parry and plunged the tip of his broadsword through the mail of the bandit’s stomach. The wounded man went still and taut. Blood foamed at his beard and he slumped forward. At this, Garnet’s assailant wheeled his horse and fled. The one Mithos had shot followed, hanging desperately around the neck of his horse, barely able to stay in the saddle. I stumbled towards the front of the wagon, but the enemy horses were charging away before I reached the hatch.

  Once I got down I found another body on the road, but its face was unfamiliar. We had survived unscathed.

  Suddenly, the enemy horse hooves had faded away and the empty land was utterly silent.

  It hit me like a piece of pipe in a pub brawl. I dropped the cross-bow, which I hadn’t even remembered to reload, and found that my arms were shaking uncontrolla
bly. My breath was coming in gasps, and my whole body was seized with shivering. I sank to my knees, fighting for air and a remnant of personal dignity. Neither was forthcoming.

  The others gathered round me.

  “Get him some water,” said Mithos hurriedly. “Easy, Will, it’s all over. No one’s hurt and you did just fine.”

  “Yes, Will,” added Garnet in a deliberately cheerful tone. “That was a nice shot. I think you saved my neck there.”

  Mithos and Orgos said nothing and returned their concerned gazes to me.

  “Sorry,” I wheezed, “I seem to be coming down with something. It must be the heat. . . .”

  “Don’t talk,” said Mithos.

  I continued to shudder convulsively. Renthrette pressed a flask of water to my lips and I drank from it, the liquid spilling around my chin as my shaking hands tried to keep it in place. I thrust it away suddenly and took a long breath as if snatched from drowning.

  To my further degradation, they laid me on a blanket by the roadside. I could feel the sun beating down but couldn’t convince myself that I wasn’t about to freeze. Mithos emptied a canvas sack and told me to breathe into it. That was the finishing touch, of course. I sat there with a bag on my head like the hunchback in a pub joke and wondered why on earth my body wouldn’t behave itself.

  The sack smelled old and fusty but it somehow helped my breathing to steady. Gradually those shallow, wheezing gasps were replaced by deeper breaths that filled my lungs. I felt a weight lift from my chest and, as my temperature rose perceptibly, the shuddering and trembling eased to nothing. Orgos sat in the ditch beside me and put a strong arm about my shoulders. It was all crushingly embarrassing, and I was just considering the idea of keeping the bag in place for the rest of the day when there was a stutter of horse hooves on the road.

  The redhead I had shot had dragged himself back onto his horse and kicked it into motion. They watched him go and looked back at me emerging sheepishly from my bag.

  “Why didn’t you stop him?” I demanded.

  “Why should we?” said Orgos quietly. “What would we do with him? Take him prisoner and lug him all the way to Stavis? Execute him? We would not.”

  I caught a flicker of a glance between Garnet and Renthrette and wondered if they were all of the same mind. I was, for some reason, outraged. I clawed for some answer that would satisfy me.

  “You could have found out who they were and why they attacked. They were probably working for the Empire,” I insisted, unsure why my voice sounded so unstable.

  “The Empire does its own dirty work,” answered Garnet briskly. “They were bandits, no more. They keep watch for small trading caravans from Cresdon and hit them before they enter the Hrof wastes. It is not uncommon. There is no mystery about it. They just thought that attacking a couple of traders and three hired escorts would have been made worth the risk by whatever was in the wagon. It wasn’t. End of story.”

  Close to the wagon, two horses strayed aimlessly and their riders lay on the hot road, the dusty stone beneath them stained red. I stared at them again and tried to batter the anger, depression, and exhilaration I felt into some more familiar emotion. The bearded man Mithos had killed lay on his stomach. His helm had slipped off and his long blond hair spilled onto the road like blood. He looked quite young. I turned quickly away.

  We buried them some yards off the road at my insistence, but for me it was a matter of closing the incident rather than anything to do with the dignity of the dead. Garnet said we were wasting time and Renthrette looked at me as if I was some peculiar museum piece in a case: not a very interesting or valuable piece, of course, but the kind of thing that you look at sideways and try to figure out what the hell it was used for. Mithos didn’t object, and said that if Empire troops saw the graves, they might just think we were dead. It was unlikely but it couldn’t do us any harm. Garnet, already forgetful of who had saved his neck, muttered that if it did do us harm, he’d know whom to thank.

  We rode for an hour, until we came to a grove of shady trees, and there, in relative silence, we made lunch and rested for a while. They all thought I was still suffering from some kind of trauma. Each of them circled me warily like dogs gauging a bear. It was starting to get on my nerves.

  “You did fine,” said Mithos for no good reason.

  “Thanks,” I muttered, wishing they could find something else to talk about.

  “Doing all right, Will?” asked Orgos.

  “Look,” I blurted suddenly, “I’m not used to being attacked or to watching people get killed, all right? Sorry. I’ve thrown the odd punch in my time, even the odd chair, but shooting people in the back is a new one on me. I realize that you lot have been skewering passersby since before you could walk, but some of us haven’t. Most of the people I know actually get through the day without complete strangers trying to kill them. You seem to think it perfectly normal that you get attacked by bunches of homicidal maniacs. It’s not! It rarely happens, except to people like you. You’re some kind of disaster magnet. Everywhere you go, death and destruction alight on your wagon like a pair of bloody homing pigeons, and you don’t seem to think it’s odd. Let me just say it again: It is odd. Bloody odd, and it is likely to have rather severe effects on those who aren’t used to climbing over corpses to get to the bathroom. I have, however, recovered from the experience. I am now perfectly all right and you can stop treating me like some kind of wounded horse. See? Just get on with your jolly old adventuring and next time we have to slaughter a few people you can trust me to keep my upper lip stiff as a board.”

  There was a momentary silence that felt particularly empty after my rather shrill explosion.

  “Done?” asked Mithos, looking at the ground.

  “Done,” I said.

  SCENE XII

  The Desert

  We’d chosen our lunch spot well, for I think we saw no more trees that day. The scent of wild herbs never left our nostrils but the heather disappeared, and though the gorse persisted, it seemed to get thinner, until it was just a tangled mass of brownish thorns. We were on the edge of the Hrof wastes by four o’clock and I was startled to look up and see huge vultures, grey and pink as dead flesh, the fingers of their wings spread wide as they soared their slow circles above us. I watched them to take my mind off the Empire patrol that was likely to appear on the road at any minute.

  “Those things give me the willies,” muttered Orgos. We had barely spoken since my last little rant. “Great winged rats,” he went on. “In the morning you see them sitting in trees with their wings hanging in front of them, like dead men in rags. You can feel them waiting for you to die. They belong here in the Hrof. This is their territory.”

  Well, that was nice to know. The vultures drifted slowly overhead and watched us with the critical gaze of someone inspecting a forkful of pork pie whose origins had been called into question. It was disconcerting, but somehow not entirely inappropriate. The Empire, some of my old acting companions at the Eagle, and, most recently, Renthrette, had always regarded me as something resembling carrion. If I died of exposure in the next ten minutes, the world wouldn’t miss me and the vultures would get a meal. I could picture the great scrawny birds squatting on my remains, spitting gristle and complaining to themselves about the poor quality of the meat coming through these days. . . .

  Orgos was right. This was their land, and the only way to avoid finishing up lightly roasted and serving six was to get the hell out of here as soon as possible. The vultures circled on anyway, smugly sure that they’d be dining shortly, tucking into Bill the Succulent any day now. I shot them a defiant scowl, but riding into a desert wasn’t the best way of staying alive, and given the day’s events and the dubious nature of my traveling companions, I could sort of see their point.

  On each day of our passage across the Hrof, the party rotated their traveling positions to ease the tedium. On one day Mithos would drive the wagon, the next he would ride at the rear, the next he would lead, and so on.
Everyone would change, that is, except me. I was to sit on the front of the wagon with my crossbow, polishing armor, making idle conversation, studying maps of the area, and getting very, very hot and very, very bored.

  Garnet’s face was pink and peeling by the third day despite his best efforts to keep the sun off. From the morning of day four onwards he put his helm in the wagon and swathed himself from head to toe in a pair of white sheets like the swaddled corpse of some barbarian chieftain. Only his green eyes and the dark pits of his nostrils could be seen. His sunburn and his sense of how ridiculous he looked did nothing to improve his temper, so I avoided him. Most of the time he rode by himself, sulking and flaking quietly.

  That said, he had warmed to me fractionally since my little meltdown with the bandits. I had been a good little apprentice, or whatever the hell they thought I was. To be honest, I had nightmares about shooting that crossbow for three nights afterwards, but I wasn’t about to mention that to him. In any case, he seemed rather more content to have me around and less likely to kill me than he had before, except when he caught me looking at his sister.

  Renthrette was, as you might have guessed, a very different story. She took every available opportunity to treat me with the contempt one normally reserves for bawds, tax collectors, and other social lepers. Once I had been relating some snippets of my life in Cresdon and my activities down at the Eagle. Orgos laughed at my ineptitude. Mithos complimented me on my impersonations. Even Garnet smiled and made some roughly complimentary remark about mine being an uncertain way to make a living. She looked at me with the mild revulsion you might show to a large beetle, and turned away.

  One day we had to ride together. When she came to the wagon, I had already climbed aboard and extended my hand to help her. She hoisted herself up easily without my assistance and gave me a withering look. I withdrew my hand and, for a moment, withered.

  “Would you like me to drive?” I tried cheerfully as she sat down.