The Season of the Plough

by Luke R J Maynard

  When enough of it had been done, and Robyn had exhausted her quiver, she moved in to stand shoulder to shoulder with her brother, and her sword’s fresh edge cut smoothly and deeply where Bram’s had hacked away the armour of its leering insectoid face.

  It could not even be said when the Horror passed over from living to dead. So unbroken was its intent, so pure its purpose, that it fought on well past the certainty of its own death, well past the endurance of some of the men. Venser, wielding his heavy sword in his weak hand alone, struck at its flank again and again until pain and exhaustion caught up with him and he slumped against its writhing side, nearly falling beneath its trampling feet. The others renewed their assault when he fell: none really knew whether it had struck him again, whether it had killed him, whether it would kill them all, whether dying at the hands of a Horror of Tamnor was somehow a viler end than dying from a fall or an illness or a knife in the back.

  “Regroup,” Robyn called, hoarsely, when her sword-arm seemed ready to give out and the creature lay still. Its shadow had gone out; it lay out grey and leathery in the afternoon sun and in spite of its twitching mandibles was probably dead long before the rain of blows abated. Until the most panicked of the men could be calmed, blade after blade and spear after spear found their place in its flesh. It was impossible to tell then whether the sickening dread in the air was some power of the creature, or the logical reaction to such an attack. It was impossible, too, to tell when they ceased to battle a living foe and passed on to hacking at its corpse.

  Bram’s hands were steady as stone, but his fingers were bruised nearly blue when Robyn closed her own around them. She looked down at him to find the tears running down his face as he stood motionless before the monstrous husk of the moadon.

  “We killed it,” she said, though he did not respond.

  She could hardly brush the tears from his face with a gauntleted hand, but she peeled away the last traces of the flaking, rusted iron cross-guard from his sword. Beneath the rust, the unmarred stamp of House Fane—a four-rooted oak, ringed with a narrow annulet—was capped by a simple maker’s mark.

  “Good steel,” said Bram. “Though I’ve ruined her edges both.”

  Robyn brushed her thumb over the maker’s mark as she embraced her brother.

  “Tysen would be proud,” she said.

  Bram studied the blade ruefully for a moment.

  “And Gilbert… Elana… Silandra?” he asked. She wrapped her shaking arms around him.

  “Especially her,” Robyn sighed. “Her most of all.”

  The metal shone brightly—as brightly as when he had last oiled it and put it away—but both edges were pitted and gouged where the monster’s keen jaws had hit it. He tested its balance in his hand, found it true.

  “That, at least,” he said, “was the work she was meant to do.”

  Robyn smiled wistfully, and might have said something else, if Tsúla hadn’t interrupted.

  “Captain,” he said with a heavy face. “Fletch is gone. And you’d better come have a look at Venser.”

  There are dreams that come and go in the night as silently as if they had never been. So, too, come dreams that end only with the waking of the dreamer, strange windows into inner worlds that force their way into memories, some as close as a monster’s breath, some as distant and sad as the buried dead’s last memory of starlight. And then, in extraordinary times, come those that linger on long after sleep—dreams that rise and walk with the dreamer into the misty world of early waking.

  So it was with Aewyn, who found herself wandering in thought, not far from a trail, within range of voices raised in argument. She had talked with her mother for moments, or for months; she could not now tell which. The kiss of a dryad—for she had certainly had one—had shrouded her memories in fog. There was a perfect and drowsy peace in that moment, but also an intangible sadness. It was like rising from a familiar bed for the last time.

  A pungent reek in the autumn air brought her back to her senses abruptly. It smelt of blood and scat and fouler things, and it hung in the breeze like a billowing shroud. The trees here, she saw, had already begun to wither. She knew, somehow, they would not last the winter.

  Robyn was the first one she saw, kneeling in the lee of what seemed like a massive grey boulder. She was bent low over a heap of kindling, trying to strike a fire with trembling hands. Her dull armour was unbuckled and smashed in at the breast; it gleamed under striped ribbons of red and black—and her face, caked with blood and dirt, fared no better.

  “Robyn!” she called. The older woman looked up but hardly acknowledged her. Her hazel eyes were ringed with red and wide with mad terror. She looked up only long enough to see that Aewyn was no threat—perhaps not even long enough to recognize her—before she returned to her work.

  “Damn it,” she spat. “Bram, help me.”

  As Aewyn came closer, she could see Bram crouched over Venser, who lay splayed on the ground, clutching at his shoulder with grim resignation. The arm below that shoulder was ragged and torn, impossibly twisted like the branch of an old dwarf beech.

  “Venser?” he asked.

  “Go on, help her,” the big man grunted. “It won’t get any more broken now.”

  Bram turned himself about with some difficulty and staggered to his sister. If he was not the first to spot Aewyn, he was the first to pay her any heed.

  “Come here, you,” he said.

  “What happened here?” she asked. “Are you all right?” Bram shared a glance with his sister that, even to Aewyn, seemed somehow wordy. The older woman rose. The stench in the clearing was everywhere, but much of it was on her.

  “Come,” she said.

  Aewyn walked with her around the great grey mass while Bram struck the fire. On its far side she could make out the head—a many-horned, many-eyed thing. It had the face, if it could be called that, of a wolf spider, dominated by four bulbous, lidless black eyes, beneath which a row of smaller eyes glistened like plums in the mocking shape of a grin. Some had been pierced by arrows buried almost to their fletchings, and sent up an awful stench where they had leaked their black innards. Below them were two opposed sets of mandibles, crushing jaws as long and thick as her thighs, coated in blood and still twitching. It had not been dead long, if it was indeed dead. It was not long departed from life, if indeed it had even been alive.

  “Do you remember your parting with Celithrand?” Robyn asked her.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Do you remember taking up the Leaf?”

  Aewyn nodded. “I was accepted.”

  “You swore yourself to us.”

  “Yes,” she said eagerly.

  Robyn’s eyes pooled with sadness for only a moment. Then she backhanded the smaller girl, hard, across the face. A plated gauntlet made the blow no less ferocious, and Aewyn fell almost to her back, reeling in pain and confusion.

  “Never desert the company again,” said Robyn, in a tone Aewyn would not soon forget. Blood streamed at the corner of her mouth as she rose, fell dizzily back to earth, and climbed back to her feet with the aid of a nearby trunk. Her limbs shook like the legs of a newborn fawn: it was no gentle city knighthood, this.

  “The men are gathering dry wood,” said Robyn. “Take what they bring you and arrange two biers, one large and one small. Opposite sides of the road.”

  “Biers…” Aewyn breathed, which earned her a stinging glare. “Yes, Captain,” she finished hastily.

  Tsúla was first back to the road, his arms loaded with fat branches and his saddlebags slung over his own shoulders, likewise burdened. She thought at first that he was bent low by their weight, but his ashen face was downturned even after he had dumped them out.

  “Tsúla?” she asked. He shook his head, hollow-eyed and broken, and went back for more wood.

  A pair of the others, men Aewyn had seen casually but who were less known to her, followed suit. They all came through the thicket in their time—all save one. Then Tsúla came ane
w. She struck out an arm; she would not let him depart again with downcast eyes.

  “Where’s Fletch?” she asked.

  He shut his dark eyes tight and sighed. “Underneath,” he said. It was all he could manage.

  She was not prepared for what awaited her.

  It was hardly the first corpse Aewyn had seen in her short life. There had been the deserter from Travalaith—only a few days before, it seemed. The year before that, she had been with Grim when he died. But where Grim’s corpse had been something like an old, abandoned house, vacated quietly in the night, the house of Fletch’s spirit was made a ruin. A hideous gnashing of jaws had driven him from it and laid waste to it entirely; his keen dark eyes were gone, lost somewhere in the mass of him. Aewyn could not bear to look on him long enough to learn what other parts of him were left, or where they had come to their final rest. She bit her fist in grief and backed away and looked on him no more.

  “Firewood,” said Robyn coldly. “Stack it.” She drew her sword and approached the creature.

  Aewyn felt the weight of a man’s hand, then, before he spoke, though he had approached in silence. These were strange times indeed, that a bloody hand on her shoulder should bring her comfort.

  “There are none, dear girl, who can bear to see him,” said Bram. “Not you, nor me.”

  Aewyn’s tears were her only reply. They streaked hot down her cheek, and stung in her right eye, which had begun to swell up.

  “You could not have saved him,” he whispered. “None of us could, though we tried. Gods, how we tried.” The quiet was split by a leathery crack as Robyn swung Fletch’s sword struck the creature’s neck and clove down a few inches. With a coarse grunt and a foot laid aside of its head, she pulled the blade free to swing again. It was no work for her own sword, and would ruin the blade before it clove through. But the weapon was of young Travalaithi steel, poor in its make, and the boy would have no more need of it.

  “I have never seen such a thing,” said Aewyn.

  “It is a moadon,” said Bram. “We think. It is a lesser Horror, in any case, a spawn of Tamnor, or of his lieutenants. A terrible living relic of a dark time. Its blood is poison. Its very being is poison. I would tell you not to touch it, if you did not already feel sick at the thought.”

  “It came out of nowhere,” called Venser from the ground. “Hit us fast. All that training, all they give us…no damn good.”

  “Is it dead?” Aewyn asked. She sat down on a stump beside the wounded man, and looked out to Robyn, who continued to cleave into it in anguished fury.

  “It ought to be,” said Bram. “Safe practice is to take the head off, though, it seems to me. Then burn head and body together, if they’ll burn. That’s good enough for most things. But these are no ordinary beasts. It is nothing like a bear, or wolf, or sabercat.”

  “We’re not even rightly certain it is a moadon,” said Venser. “None of us have ever seen one. No Horrors of this size have been seen since the Siege of Shadow. The fool I was, wanting to see one for myself.”

  Tsúla threw another pile of firewood onto the ground, then returned vacantly to the woods.

  “What’s he at?”

  “Aldwode,” said Venser. “We’ve all been Blooded, save you and him. He fought well, considering. But there’s one remedy for it, and it takes time to prepare. Repetitive tasks keep him from going too far mad.”

  “Celithrand knew of another,” said Aewyn.

  Venser winced as he adjusted his mangled arm. “Gods willing, he’s a hundred miles from here by now. We get by on what we’ve got.”

  Staring into nothing, her eyes directed earthwards, Aewyn could not help but note the little river of red blood—Fletch’s blood—spilling into the creature’s darker stuff.

  “Did he fight well?” she asked. Bram unstoppered his flask—not his waterskin—and took a long draw of it before answering.

  “He would have,” Bram said.

  “Never saw it coming,” added Venser. “He had no chance.”

  For the first time, Bram’s eyes softened. “Venser, there—he took it head-on. Even Blooded men can lose themselves at the sight of these unsouled monsters. Sloppy technique, of course—” here he kicked the dust affectionately at the wounded man—“but he fought with such valour, at least, as would be worthy of song.”

  Venser tilted his head disapprovingly, though he dared not shrug his shoulders.

  “I tried to save him,” he said simply. “They write no songs for them that try.”

  Robyn had, by now, made it most of the way through the thick leathery neck of the creature. The stench was overpowering, in any case, and she had to stop. She let go of Fletch’s smoking sword, which clattered to the stained earth, and walked back to the others. Some of the men had begun building the biers. She motioned for her brother’s flask and he reluctantly surrendered it for a moment.

  “I gave her a job, Bram.”

  Bram patted her on the back and nodded to the firewood. “Best get to it,” he said. “Live in the work, if you can. Nowhere else.”

  Aewyn nodded, and joined the others while Robyn took her place on the stump.

  “How are you?” asked Bram.

  “I think I’m going to throw up,” said Robyn. “Venser, how’s your arm?”

  “No polite word for it,” he said. “Let’s call it ‘broken,’ at least. That’s the only term fit for a lady’s ears.”

  “This deep in the old woods, I might find you some lodris,” said Robyn. “Help you sleep. It could soften your memory of the fight, too. Maybe strip it from you completely, if I can prepare it right. I saw Celithrand do it once. Might mix some of it for Tsúla to keep him calm until his Blooding.”

  “I’ll have no sleep here,” said Venser. “Let me ride, Captain. If I can’t ride, by Tûr and the Ten, just let me walk. I can’t make it far, but I’ll have no part of this evil place. If I have a mile in me, if I have a hundred feet, give me that.”

  “We’ll talk once the boy’s at rest.”

  Venser frowned. “He deserves a decent burial. A memory stone, maybe, to tell of his deeds. Not to be tossed on the fire like a damned roast.”

  “His ways are not our ways,” said Bram. “In Khihana, cremation would have been a royal death. Only the very wealthy could burn this much wood. Fletch will go out like a king of his people.”

  “He should not have gone at all,” said Venser. “I failed him.”

  Bram laid a hand on his good shoulder, searched his wits for consoling words, and found none.

  “We have all failed him,” Robyn said, her breaking voice raised, seeking a trace of the presence it usually commanded. “Too long we have been a ceremonial guard. Too long we have kept the peace against stock-thieves and outlaws. Ninety years, now, the teachings of the Dragons of Veritenh have come down to us. How low our swords are fallen! What a rude town watch have we become! We bleed our townsfolk for coin as if we were scutcheoned vasils, and the worst we’ve been ready to fight for it are wolves and poachers. The people of Widowvale, and of Aslea, and of many other towns besides, have hard bought our bluster and pageantry. And now one of our own, a child at war unready for horror, has bought them most dearly of all.” She sighed and threw down her dented breastplate, for want of something else to throw down.

  “I wish Toren were here,” she said. “Gods, though I hated him. I wish he were here now.”

  The Havenari had gathered about her by now, but none dared venture a response. Aewyn fell to her knees in a scatter of firewood, clutching the earth in her grief. Robyn said no more, but completed the biers alone. If she for a moment stopped moving her jaw, or her hands, she feared she might be of little more use herself.

  The pyres were lit in silence. Bram’s little source-fire was smoking and guttering under some foul concoction of the monster’s ichor, but the flame served well enough to kindle the others. In a few minutes’ time, the boy called Fletch with the unpronounceable Southern name was laid to rest by fire. The Horror had to
be burned where it was, for the combined efforts of the men could not move it. Aewyn watched it burn with ferocious curiosity, mostly because she could not bear to look on the pyre behind her. In her hands she clutched her little bow of elm—the weapon she had used against a man only a few days before. She felt as if Fletch were there somehow, in the wood; but his presence did little to comfort her. She knew, then, how close she had come to ending a life, and in the moment of Fletch’s burning she did not suppose she would ever have the stomach for it, now, under any conditions. The last images of her future as Celithrand’s champion, thundering across the battlefield on a stallion like the heroes of the Hanes, were forever replaced her mind by the gleaming smile of a dark-skinned boy taken out of the world too soon.

  The stench of the moadon as it surrendered its skin and fat to the flames was like nothing else of this world. Venser, too weak to move himself away from the smoke, emptied his stomach at the smell and was hoisted onto his side to keep him from choking. Some of the Havenari said prayers to Tûr or the Ten, or to their own personal gods, while Aewyn simply gazed at the pyre with weary resolve, watching the eerie flesh rise and fall as its natural spirits left it. Roald returned from the woods with Robyn’s bow and a young doe, whose blood they saved before preparing to roast their supper.

  As the flames tore on through the hide, the undulations grew more pronounced, until the distended belly was so disturbed by the flames that Aewyn saw fit to point it out.

  “Someone give me a sword,” said Robyn, rising.

  The monster’s hide was as tough in death as in life, and it was no easy work slitting it open. Fletch’s dull sword was unwieldy, and refused at times to bite; but by sheer determination Robyn slit the underbelly to let the gases out.

  What emerged froze her in her tracks. It—they—were unspeakable copies of the original, three of them, rendered in perfect miniature, slime-covered and keening with the unmistakable, unearthly noise of their mother. If they were unready to be born, they were no less ready to die.