The Season of the Plough

by Luke R J Maynard

  “To arms,” she breathed, more terrified than bold. “Men, to my side!”

  Aewyn recoiled at the sight when the first of them spilled out. It seemed to fix her with those unsettling rows of insect eyes; but these were different and altogether more terrible than the lifeless eyes of the corpse. They had in them a blackness like the blackness beyond the stars, some unspeakable cunning and malevolence belied by their monstrous forms. The first came free of the flesh as the other two emerged, staggering slightly, but undeniably proceeding toward her.

  Bram’s battered sword flashed in his hand, ringing out as it hit home, but failed to penetrate the creature’s hide. As the recoil shook him, he clutched the weapon by its chipped edge and threw all his weight down on it, guiding the tip of the sword through skin and bone and whatever else might have been inside its target.

  The others were barely a step behind him, some falling on the impaled creature with whatever weapons they had close to hand, others turning to the remaining spawn. Tsúla was first to reach them, but in the gaze of those terrible eyes a shadow seemed to fall upon him and he shrank back in despair as his allies streamed around him. In a few moments it was over: stirred to life by the urgency of death and of fire, the little spawn sustained themselves on rage alone, being unready for survival outside the womb. But the sudden shock of this secondary assault was enough to unsettle every one of them—and in the long, uneasy peace that followed, their fears only grew stronger.

  “Unless that was some insidious design of the beast,” said Bram, “I believe those were babies.”

  “Gods and worms,” Robyn breathed. “It’s not possible.”

  From the ground, Venser let out a resigned sigh. “Nothing about them is possible. Would that Celithrand were with us now—if that’s really who he was.”

  “If they bear young in the manner of ordinary beasts,” said Bram, “there must be another one out there. There can be no mother without a father.”

  Robyn’s reply was sharper than it might have been. “Yes, we’ve all figured that out, now; thank you, Bram,” she snapped.

  “There’s been no word of it in Widowvale,” he said, ignoring her tone.

  “It may be the outlying villages have heard or seen more,” Venser offered. “If not Widowvale, maybe Aslea. Maybe Seton, up the way, was in its path.”

  “That’s the direction we’ve been travelling,” said Aewyn. The sound of her own voice surprised her, as if it were coming from somewhere far away.

  “My wife’s in Seton,” said one of the men whose name Aewyn had not yet heard. She watched the colour drain from his face. “Or she was.”

  Robyn stared long and thoughtfully at the twitching spawn before kicking them back into the fire consuming their mother. “Our duty is first to the towns,” she said at last. “Roald, see about cutting a splint for Venser’s arm. We’ll search for tracks till that’s done. If we find only the one set, we ride for Seton, wet-kneed and through the night, if we can. Venser, can you ride?”

  “Aye,” he said. “Get me up in the saddle, and I can stay in it.” Bram slipped past Aewyn and into the brush. Her eyes turned to the smaller of the pyres on the far side of the road. The licking flames had risen to claim the body, which already seemed smaller than she expected. Stripped of his armour, which was too valuable to leave with him, Fletch was smaller than even Aewyn remembered.

  “We should bury him,” she said. “Fletch’s bones, I mean.”

  “His people burned their dead on a pyre,” said Robyn.

  “But the men of Widowvale bury their children,” replied Aewyn. “Was he not one of ours, too? Did he not make Haveïl his home?”

  Robyn frowned and looked down at the smaller girl. One of Aewyn’s eyes was wide in innocent earnest, and the other was starting to swell and darken from the gauntleted backhand. Without ceremony she jerked her head toward Tsúla’s horse, which was heavily loaded with gear on account of his small size.

  “Take the shovel,” she said at last. “We’ll bury him if you can dig deep enough by the time we’re ready for the Blooding.”

  The labour of digging earth was no new chore to Aewyn. The round-bladed shovel was smaller than most farm tools, sized for packing on the horse; but Aewyn was accustomed to the little tools she had used with Grim, and the repetitive labour of digging came rapidly back to her. She was small and her arms were spindly, but some of the men marvelled just the same at how easily she set spade to earth. Her technique and familiarity with farm work made her appear far stronger than she was; and those men who favoured burial as their end looked upon her with newfound admiration.

  By some art unknown to Aewyn, and with some guidance from Venser, Robyn prepared a foul concoction over the fire and distilled it to a single clay vial. Pouring a few drops of it into Tsúla’s waterskin, he took a long draught of it, and would have thrown the waterskin away if Robyn had not brought it over.

  “Drink,” she said, and Aewyn’s mouth burned a little—but not overmuch—with the acrid taste of something vile and altogether unnatural.

  “Am I one of you, now?” she asked.

  “Drinking a potion doesn’t change who you are,” said Robyn. “To be a Havenar is to live by your word, and by your deed. Those alone.”

  The mood of the Havenari was strange and divided. Those who had known Fletch the closest, who considered themselves his fast companions, were in some ways the slowest to grief. Tears came easily to the men who had looked on him as a boy: one or two had young sons of their own in the forest towns, and saw the boys’ faces in him. Those who saw a comrade in arms were stern and sullen, and wore their grief within—Robyn with more anger than most. Some men wore their tears upon their faces, as rain collects on hard clay. Bram was impassive and unflinching in his tending of the fire and his collection of the boy’s blackened bones, a task he performed, like Aewyn’s digging, with the ease that comes from practice. As rain falls on softer soil, the tears did not linger on his face, but wound their way deep into him where none could see.

  A real rain, too gentle to be cleansing, broke overhead as the fires died down. Aewyn’s arms and back burned with the effort, but still she sank the shovel-blade into the earth, hollowing out the ground with a steady rhythm as if to the beat of some inner drum. Grim had often sung as he worked, in a low half-spoken voice that came between grunts of exertion, a means of keeping time. They were work-songs, most of them, ill-rhymed and repetitive. But one of them, a harvest-song, came to mind as Aewyn carved out the hole to plant Fletch’s bones, like a winter wheat, out of season with all the rest of the world.

  The girls have all gathered for harvest.

  The boys call the beasts to the stone.

  The red moon is redder than heartblood;

  The white moon is whiter than bone.

  The seasons of harvest are sudden;

  The winters are all ever-long,

  But precious and few are my verses,

  For my days are as short as my song.

  My vines are a garland of garnets;

  I’ve gilded the furrows with gold;

  The river shines brighter than silver;

  Stars glimmer with riches untold.

  My boat is but laden with memories,

  My barrow is narrow and small,

  But bury me under the moonlight,

  And I’ll be the richest of all.

  Aewyn’s tears, it seemed, had come only in the form of sweat. She was drenched and muddy by the time Bram laid the boy’s remains in the little hole she had made.

  “Grace find you, lad,” he said simply— then, to Aewyn, “let me cover him.” He took the shovel and hastened to fill in the little grave; the loose soil, damp from the gathering rain, was heavy but yielding. They were none of them master healers, but with a degree of effort Venser’s arm was roughly set and splinted, as Aewyn had seen Celithrand do with her leg, and he was hoisted into his saddle. The horses, hastily watered as Bram filled in the grave, were unsettled by the stink of burned fles
h, and by the Horror that had come among them, and were champing and snorting nervously, eager to be on their way.

  “To Seton,” called one of the men, vexed to see if those in the village were living or dead. The men organized rapidly. Aewyn stood over the grave, seeking words of farewell that did not come. The rain had drenched her autumn-red hair and soaked it almost to the deep brown of late summer. In her hands was the little bow of elm he had made for her, its arms splayed wide as the wet string began to slacken. In time, Robyn was at her side; with eyes half-closed, Aewyn felt the woman’s broad-shouldered figure block the rising wind before she felt the hand on her cheek. The single knuckle of Robyn’s gauntlet brushed gently where it had struck, not with threat but with something like tenderness. The wrought metal stung her sharply, though, where it touched, and she flinched out of her reverie.

  “Mount up, soldier,” said Robyn. She gave Hendec’s old mare a swat in Aewyn’s direction, and it loped over obligingly as she headed for her own saddle. Even the horse seemed to understand that Robyn was in no mood for hesitation.

  The rain picked up suddenly as the Havenari walked their horses back into patrol formation. At the head of the line, beside his sister, Bram hoisted his wineskin nearly to his lips before distastefully casting it, half-full, down into the dirt.

  “Gods, I hate the rain,” he said.

  With a sharp cry, Robyn kicked her horse into a long-strided trot, and the others followed suit. Standing forward in the stirrups, Aewyn thought back to her time in the woods with her mother and wondered if it was well spent. Her mother’s words already seemed to fade into mist, and their time seemed longer ago and farther away now than her parting words with Poe, her time at the Harvest Fair, the seasons at the plough that were now behind her. Her time in Widowvale was so vivid, such a part of her, that she began to understand the changes her mother had told her of.

  The business of prophecy seemed far away, too: the rain and the trail, now, were all she knew. Robyn, posting high in the saddle as she led the Havenari down the hill and away, seemed a long way herself from the carefree woman in the green dress, and Bram farther still from the drunkard still mocked by the men of Widowvale. Her mind over the next few miles turned to Darmod’s fields, and the far meadows of his sheep, to carrot seeds shaped like tiny mace-heads, to the widow Karis and her children, in whose vine-wreathed fields she had spent the last years of her childhood—and finally, to the trail, and the forested hills below, and the villages that lay beyond. She felt with uneasy certainty the weight of Fletch’s little bow upon her narrow back, and knew then that the time for farming was past.

  In the jagged foothills beneath a high cliff, on the steep edge of a long gorge many miles to the west, Poe sniffed at the air and shivered, though not from the cold.

  “That smell is no smell of this world,” he said. “There is smoke and ash, and some…thing, a dead thing, too terrible to name.”

  Below him, Celithrand crept up from the stream, his back bent like a willow-branch under the weight of full waterskins and a tremendous dirty bag of roots and saplings.

  “There, perhaps, burns the last of the Horrors of the Siege,” said Celithrand. “I cannot smell it, myself, but I know too well the scent you speak of. Were I close enough to make it out, though, I should much prefer the scent of one dead to one living.”

  “I am sure to be happier,” said Poe, “when it is burnt and the land reclaimed it as though it had never been.”

  “That will never be,” said Celithrand. “The land will heal in time. But always will it tell the story of its wounds to those who know how to read the scars. Do you see water that feeds this land?”

  “I see a stream from the high hills,” said Poe. “It must feed the river that runs by the town.”

  “Today,” Celithrand nodded, “it runs into the river that turns the wheel that grinds the wheat for Widowvale’s bread. Şarcruthamar, my folk called the stream, at its distant source. Long ago, in days of great storms under wilder moons, this was a mightier river by far. All this valley is a deep scar of that time, riven in the rock by old waters. It has no name, that I know of, in younger tongues. It is only a stream, now. But its banks tell an ancient story.”

  The old man, leaning heavily on the cane he had cut for himself not long ago, picked his way up the hill with storied sure-footedness. Once or twice he stumbled, and Poe thought he might fall, but they had made the treacherous descent down the rocky cliff to the northeast, and came out soon from the shady trees onto a trail that, after some days in the deep wood, seemed as wide and finished a way as the Iron Road itself.

  “I know this place,” said Poe. “How is it that we have come so far south?”

  “The deep wood has many paths,” said Celithrand, “though men do not see them. In time, I hope, the path to Widowvale will grow over like these ancient ways—impassable to all who would come, but free to those that leave.”

  “That is a good wish,” said Poe.

  “It will be best for the town, now,” said Celithrand, “if it has no more to do with Travalaith, or its soldiers, or its jockeying vasils. A season or two of fruitless searching, if it comes to that, will take the wind out of Haukmere’s forge.”

  Poe snorted. “What is in Haukmere?” he asked.

  “The worst you can imagine from the ironmen,” said Celithrand. That was good enough for the karach, who hurried his pace on the old roads until it was all that the old druid could manage to keep up.

  “These evil men accuse you of treason,” Poe said as he pushed through the underbrush. “This means betrayal.”

  “Yes,” said Celithrand.

  “All my life,” said Poe, “I have never known you to have dealings with the ironmen. Betrayal, as I understand it, is a crime against family or friend. A traitor breaks faith with someone who trusts you. How can you betray a stranger?”

  “Treason to the realm is something like opposition to those who control the realm,” said Celithrand.

  “So you are a rebel. A member of this Uprising.”

  “No,” said Celithrand. “Well, yes and no. But I am now a fugitive, I suppose. I am a bit baffled by the Mages’ Uprising, myself. It has sprung up in a generation. It has little enough to do with the war we fought against the dark powers. I concern myself with the wickedness of the gods, until the day that the wickedness of men has grown to eclipse it. The specifics of the accusation—that it was I who taught Jordac in the ways of magic—those are certainly false. I have heard many stories of that man, but have never met him.”

  “Then why accuse you?”

  Celithrand began walking, then, along the edge of the road but within reach of the trees. He was not accustomed to sitting still as he spoke.

  “The politics of the Iun are of little concern to me,” he began, “and the nature of my crime is political. When the Siege of Shadow was lifted, I stood beside Valithar, who was my brother in arms, and who became Imperator in the years between. I had equal claim to the viceregency of old Travost, if we had pursued it. I suppose in the eyes of some, that makes me a claimant to the Empire itself.”

  “You could have come to us,” said Poe. “Lived all your days in Widowvale, free from their grasp.”

  “I came there only once, and was captured immediately,” Celithrand pointed out. “And my life is in no one place, not while my strength endures. Do not be fooled by the strife of men, my friend. There are yet terrible evils in this world. The petty evils of small folk are of no concern while such things last.”

  Poe shrugged. “I know nothing of dark gods,” said Poe. “The karach have stories of cowards and tricksters, light-stealers and—pardon me—traitors. But in our stories there are no gods of darkness. Wickedness is the work of men, and of caitiff karach with no honour, not the work of gods. The Iun who say that great power brings evil, I think, are mistaken in their understanding of what power really is. The power that brings evil is not true power—it is merely vanity clad in might.”

  “So you have b
ecome a philosopher,” said Celithrand, not unkindly.

  “Philosophers can read,” said Poe.

  “I will teach you to read,” said Celithrand, “and many other things besides. I will teach you all you need know of Tamnor, who is the source of wickedness both great and petty. And perhaps of reading, too; there is some disagreement on the matter.”

  “Tamnor sounds to me like an excuse,” said Poe. “A story made up by wicked men too cowardly to own their own evil deeds.”

  “When you confront true evil,” warned Celithrand, “you will see how it eclipses the petty feuding of ordinary folk.”

  Poe spent a few moments in silence before he spoke, turning the words over in his mouth. “Those who think themselves above the petty feuding of ordinary folk can still be hanged for it,” he said at last. “And those who are hanged by ordinary folk may not live to confront true evil. Your life’s story, old man, was very nearly finished that day.”

  Celithrand rubbed the back of his neck. “I have not forgotten,” he said.

  “It was no lord of darkness who took my tribe from me,” said Poe. “It was no monster of legend that ran my mother through and burned her. It was no dragon that burned the village of my father. It was men, Celithrand. Small, vile men in black mail-coats, with weapons as ugly and coarse-edged as if they had been hammered by children.”

  “You still have a tribe,” Celithrand reminded him. “She knows your stories, your mother’s stories, all too well.”

  Poe snorted. “Now she too is lost to me. Again over treason. Again over politics.”

  “You will see her again,” said Celithrand. “I swear it. And when you do, you will have learned much about the nature of evil, and of virtue with it. You will see the forest of Nalsin, so unlike this one, and the wide sea, and you will dine in the halls of my ancestors. When the time comes to return, I will not keep you from her. And until that day, I will teach you all that I know of this world.”