The Shadow Isle

by Katharine Kerr

  Berwynna’s mule brayed, tried to rear, then kicked out. All around her, the other mules began to bray as well, to rear and buck as if they were trying to free themselves from their packsaddles and panniers. The hobbled mules swayed back and forth. One of them tried to kick out with its hind legs only to fall when it lost its balance. The fall, and its anguished brays as it struggled to get back to its feet, broke the last of the herd’s morale.

  The mules panicked and ran. A few raced down the road, others across the meadow, a few back toward the forest. Most of them, however, charged straight into the gang of bandits on the left. Perhaps in their mulish minds they thought safety lay among the horses. Be that as it may, they disrupted the barely-begun charge from that side of the road.

  Yelling curses, the bandits to the right charged. Berwynna’s mule kicked out, then joined the panic and galloped straight for the bandit pack. She heard screams and yells rising from the battle in the road as she yanked on the mule’s rope with one hand and its mane with the other. She kicked it hard and repeatedly on its right side and finally got it to swerve away to her left just before it reached the bandits, who had finally gotten their own horses under control and were moving forward. Alternately yanking and kicking, she forced the mule back toward the battle in the middle of the road.

  What she saw sickened her. Men bleeding, screaming, striking out with staves while the bandits and their swords cut and swung relentlessly—as she watched, Aethel staggered back, his throat pouring blood, and fell under the hooves of a horse. Dougie— where was Dougie? She saw a blade flash up, and his red hair. A bandit screamed and fell from the saddle as the horse buckled to its knees.

  More hoofbeats, this from behind her—she turned to see another pack of men, too many, too fast for her to count, racing across the grassland. At the head, someone familiar—Laz! Of all men to be there, Laz! He was yelling orders in some language she couldn’t understand as part of the Horsekin mob swung around to face this new threat. Swords flashed up, blood on the blades. A horse screamed with an ugly half-human sound, then fell dying into the road.

  At the sight, Berwynna’s mule panicked again. When it reared, she hit it between the ears as hard as she could and brought it down. With a bray it broke into a dead run and raced across the meadowlands. She yanked, screamed, could do nothing to stop it. All at once it reared, came down with a jolt, and bucked before she could set herself. She tumbled over its head and fell hard into the tall grass. It leaped over her and raced off.

  Berwynna clambered to her feet. Her back ached like fire, but she could see three Horsekin riding straight for her, and from somewhere she found the strength to run. Tripping and stumbling she sprinted through the grass. Trees, she was thinking, if I could only get to the trees. But the forest verge stood far away, and the three riders gained steadily. Long before she reached it, they caught her.

  She heard one yell a single word as they pulled up their foaming horses and surrounded her. One of them, more human looking than the others, dismounted and made a grab at her. She dodged, ran straight into the flanks of a horse, and twisted away, but he grabbed her by the arm with one huge hand. She kicked him in the shins and screamed, kept kicking and screaming as he struggled to grab her with both hands.

  The other men began yelling at him, perhaps to hurry, perhaps to just let the lass go, because she could hear other horses galloping toward them. Her captor held on grimly with one hand, yanked her hard and slammed her up against his body. He slapped his other hand over her mouth—his mistake, because she got a good hunk of flesh between her teeth and bit down as hard as she could. Blood filled her mouth and made her gag. He yelped and pulled his hand free. His grip loosened just enough for her to squirm away. She stumbled backward, but as she fell, she kicked up and got him sharply between the legs with the toe of her riding boot. He yelped again and doubled over.

  His two companions began yelling at him as the hoofbeats pounded closer. Berwynna just managed to get to her feet before horses surrounded her. One horse rammed into her, but she managed to keep her feet by throwing her arms around its neck and clinging as its head swung down toward her. She could hear men yelling in a mix of languages and see the flash of metal above her. All she could allow herself to think of was getting free of that melee before it killed her by accident. She let go the horse, ducked, dodged, saw a brief opening as a bleeding horse fell to its knees. She raced through it just before another horse closed the gap. She reached open ground and began running toward the road.

  “Wynni!” Dougie’s voice, a blessed, blessed sound, reached her over the screams and shouting.

  Berwynna saw him racing toward her through the grass, his sword in one hand. Behind him a rider was galloping, a Horsekin rider, swinging down with his deadly saber.

  “Dougie, ’ware!” Berwynna yelled at the top of her lungs.

  Dougie twisted around a moment too late—the saber swung down and caught him full in the back. He pitched forward, and the rider turned his horse and galloped off, heading toward the forest. Yet he never reached it. As he passed one of the few muleteers who was still standing, the man swung his quarterstaff with the full weight of his body behind it and cracked the horse across a foreleg. The horse went down, tumbling his rider into the road. The muleteer swung again and struck him on the side of the head.

  Sobbing under her breath, Berwynna ran to Dougie and flung herself down beside him. He was already dead, his back split open, the spine broken, blood and flesh, so much blood, and a glimpse of shattered bone—Berwynna staggered to her feet to see Laz running toward her, holding a quarterstaff at a clumsy angle in both maimed hands. Out on the road, the battle was over. Men lay scattered across it, dead or dying, both Cerr Cawnen men and Horsekin. Wounded horses sprawled in the dirt or tried to get to their feet. A few hobbled mules huddled together.

  Berwynna barely saw any of it. The sight of Dougie’s shattered body filled her mind and her eyes. She would see it forever, she knew, no matter how long she might live, at the merest thought or mention of him. It seemed horribly unjust, that all her memories of loving him would be stained forever by that sight. Laz glanced in the general direction of the body.

  “Wynni!” Laz said. “For the sake of every god, come away!”

  She nodded, let him grab her arm and lead her back toward the road. The survivors from the caravan and the rescuers, Laz’s men, she assumed, since he’d brought them, were trying to gather themselves and their wounded. Richt knelt in the dirt by Aethel’s body and wept. Two of the muleteers had tied the man who killed Dougie hand and foot; they dragged him along, then threw him down like a sack of offal.

  Mic came running toward her, Kov’s staff in hand. “Thank the gods,” he kept saying, “thank the gods you’re safe.”

  “But Dougie’s dead,” she said.

  “I know. I saw. I thought you’d died with him.”

  “I wish I had.”

  “Don’t say that,” Mic’s voice shook badly. “Please don’t say that.”

  “I won’t, then.”

  Laz was giving crisp orders in the strange language that, she abruptly realized, had to be Horsekin. Only then, still stunned as she was by grief and fear, did it occur to her to wonder where Laz had come from. He just dropped out of the blue sky, she thought. And remembered the raven. She caught Laz’s arm as he walked by.

  “That was you,” she stammered. “The raven, I mean. That was you.”

  “You are clever, aren’t you?” Laz gave her a lopsided grin. “No time to talk now, alas. We’ve got to get ourselves out of here. If those bastard swine return—”

  He let the sentence hang there.

  “True enough,” Mic said. “Let me see if I can get Richt back on his feet.”

  “We can’t leave Dougie here,” Berwynna said. “We’ve got to bury him properly.”

  “We will.” Laz turned and looked out toward the meadow. “Faharn took a couple of the men out to fetch him. We’ll bury our own dead and leave the others here
for my compatriots.”

  She stared, puzzled.

  “The ravens,” Laz said. “You’re in shock, Wynni. You’ll be able to think again in a bit. Mic, do you know who these men were? Gel da’Thae cavalry, that’s who. Those tattoos are their regimental numbers and notice: they’re wearing identical shirts, all cavalry issue. Not that it matters to our dead, I suppose, but bandits they weren’t. This bodes more than a little ill.”

  “True spoken,” Mic said. “Bandits would keep running. Cavalrymen won’t.”

  Laz hurried off. Numbly Berwynna turned toward the meadow and saw a pair of men approaching, carrying someone wrapped in a blanket. A third man was leading a Gel da’Thae horse, unharmed except for a scratch along its neck. While she watched, they slung Dougie’s body over the saddle. Something shiny slithered out of the blanket and fell upon the ground. Berwynna ran over and picked up his long-bladed hunting knife.

  “We bury sword with lad,” one of the men said, “when we can.”

  “He’d want that,” Berwynna said. “My thanks.”

  His face smeared with blood and tears, Richt had gotten to his feet and stood talking with Mic beside Aethel’s body. Six of the muleteers had survived mostly unharmed as far as she could see, and two more sat on the ground, badly wounded and sobbing. One of the men Laz had brought with him was helping two of the unharmed men take the weapons from the dead and dying Horsekin in the road while others were leading captured horses toward the mules. The lone Horsekin prisoner had hauled himself up to a sitting position and watched all this with expressionless eyes. Berwynna pointed him out to Laz.

  “That be the man who killed Dougie,” Berwynna said. “Bain’t?”

  “It is.”

  “I do want a word with him.”

  “Be careful, now. I know he’s tied up, but these swine are dangerous. ”

  “Dougie’s knife be here with me.”

  Before he could say more, Berwynna strode away, the long knife clutched in one hand. Dougie’s never going to hold this again, she thought. Or hold me. Her grief turned into a spear of ice, shoved into the place that once had been her heart.

  The prisoner sat on the ground. The muleteers had tied the man’s hands together, forced his arms down over his bent knees, then slid a quarterstaff twixt arms and knees to keep him from escaping or causing more trouble. Indeed, the only part of him that he could move was his head. He tipped it back to look Berwynna over with narrow eyes, pale gray eyes that marked him as a human being, she realized, not Horsekin. His hair, crusted with blood from the quarterstaff blow, was a pale brown. A tattoo of a boar, not some Horsekin marking, decorated his left cheek.

  “So you be the one who killed him,” she said. “My betrothed, that was.”

  He refocused his gaze on the empty air beyond her.

  “You did stab him in the back, you coward!”

  Still no response.

  “Go ahead, ignore me now, but I’ll be having vengeance on your clan for this.”

  “Oh, will you?” He deigned to look at her. “A lass like you? I suppose you think you can swing a sword.”

  “There be no need for me to. I’ll be begging my father to wipe you and yours off the face of the earth.”

  “And I suppose your father’s some great lord.” Contempt dripped from every word. “As if there were any up here.”

  “He’s not, but the silver dragon himself.”

  He considered her again, his eyes flicking this way and that. “You look human enough to me,” he said at last, and he laughed.

  Berwynna stepped forward and entwined her fingers in his hair. She heard someone shout, heard men running toward her, but she wrenched his head back and held the knife blade against his throat. He stopped laughing. His pale eyes stared up at her, wide and suddenly wet.

  “You bastard scum,” she whispered.

  With one smooth stroke she slit his throat. Blood sprayed and dappled her shirt sleeve. She let the dead thing go and stepped back with a jerk of his hair to make his head slump over his knees. She wiped the knife blade clean on the back of his shirt, then looked up to realize that she was standing in the midst of horrified onlookers.

  “Well?” Berwynna said. “It be no different than cutting up venison, except I always do feel pity for the deer.”

  Some of the men pressed hands over their mouths as if to choke back curses. Mic, however, merely looked at her, his eyes as calm as if he were contemplating some distant truth.

  “He did kill my Dougie,” Berwynna said.

  The men all nodded, as if agreeing with her unspoken right of vengeance. Mic sighed with a shake of his head.

  “You’re Rhodry’s daughter, sure enough,” Mic said. “He’s going to be very proud of you when we find him.”

  “If we do live that long,” Berwynna said.

  Mic winced but made no answer.

  As animals go, mules are the geniuses of the four-legged world, but terror can blunt the finest intelligence. Berwynna’s mule, with its halter rope flapping and the saddlebags banging against its withers, ran east until it could run no more. It pulled up, foaming and snorting, in open meadowland only to realize that it was facing yet another terror: being alone with no herd in sight, not so much as a single other mule or horse to join. It stood shivering, head down, until at last it caught its breath and felt its strength return.

  It raised its head, sniffed the wind, looked around, and saw a dirt road. It could smell the droppings of other mules, recently passed that way. In its six years of life, it had learned that roads meant men who gave you nose bags of grain, stables in winter, and piles of hay. With a snort it set off walking down the road, though unfortunately, it continued on east rather than turning back toward its former herd.

  Between them Laz and Richt got the remnants of the caravan organized. They had six captured horses as well as the nine mules who’d been hobbled in time, those carrying the caravan’s food. As they worked, four more mules returned; with their panic over, they had found their way back to their herd. One of the men who’d deserted with Drav had been killed, leaving them his mount and falcata as well. Two of Laz’s original outlaws were dead as well, and another had a mangled arm.

  Horses or not, with badly wounded men the caravan could travel neither far nor fast. Some miles down the road stood one of the southernmost barrows in the middle of a stretch of open land. Fortunately, it stood some twenty feet high and perhaps a hundred yards across. Boulders and stones poked out from the thin soil on its sides and lay scattered all round, as if perhaps its walls had once been higher. At the top grew a pair of straggly trees, bent and twisted Cerrgonney pines.

  “That’s someone’s grave,” Laz said. “A lot of someones, mayhap.”

  “It be so,” Richt said. “We do call it the Ghost House.”

  “It’s also the only high ground for miles. We’ll never reach the downs by tonight.”

  “True enough. Say you we camp on the barrow?”

  “I do. Gather up your dead so we can bury them there.”

  “No need of that. Our folk, when the soul does leave the body, we value not the body at all. The wild things shall have their share of the flesh. Leave them lie with the other dead, out in the open air.”

  Laz stared. He couldn’t decide if he admired the custom or found it revolting, but at the moment it hardly mattered.

  “We’ll take Dougie, though,” Laz said. “For Berwynna’s sake.”

  “Good.” Richt shook his head. “Never have I seen a lass such as her. I do think mayhap it be true, that the dragon be her da.”

  “Oh, it’s true. I’ll swear it to you, and this is no time for me to be making jests, is it now?”

  Richt shook his head again, then hurried off to give orders to his remaining men. They stripped the bodies of Aethel and their other dead comrades, then laid them out in the meadow. Dougie, however, they buried in the side of the barrow when they reached it. Mic helped the muleteers dig a deep trench. They put Dougie’s claymore in his ha
nds, wrapped him in his plaid, and laid him in, then began to shovel the dirt on top. Berwynna watched them without speaking or weeping.

  “He’ll lie with other brave men,” Laz told her. “Only the best would have been honored with one of these barrows.”

  “Just so.” Berwynna’s voice sounded thick with tears, but none fell. “Tonight I’ll be finding me two sticks or suchlike that I may tie together for a cross. He did believe in Lord Yaysoo, and he shall have a cross for his grave.” She turned away, and at last she wept, her shoulders shaking as she doubled over. She clapped her hands over her face as if she were trying to shove the tears back inside. “My apologies,” she sobbed out.

  “What?” Laz said. “Ye gods, tears are the best thing for grief. Weep all you want. They’ll heal you.”

  “Naught will do that.”

  “Mayhap not, naught but time.”

  Berwynna sat down on the ground by Dougie’s grave. Laz walked away to give her the only gift he could, privacy.

  By the time that the men got their improvised camp into some sort of order, the sun was setting, throwing long shadows over the western downs, turning the clouds at the horizon into streaks of blood. Mic, Richt, and Laz walked to the edge of the barrow to discuss their situation.

  “Thanks to you,” Mic said, “we’ve beaten them off this time. I wonder if they’ll come back to try again.”

  “I have the horrid feeling that they’ll do just that,” Laz said. “We have things they need—mules, horses, and food.”

  “They be able to see us up here plain enough,” Richt said. “And when we do leave, there be but one road through this wretched country. They’ll be a-following us.”

  “Roads are where you make them,” Laz said. “We’d better find a different one.”

  “And risk a mutiny?” Richt lowered his voice. “The only thing my men do think of is making a run for Cerr Cawnen.”