The Childless Ones, page 37
He resigned himself to not finding anything when he went into the inn to warm up and have a drink. Inside the dank-smelling building a few of his fellow sailors were conversing with local men. Kam wasn’t great friends with the other sailors and he drank his ale alone at the far end of the room.
He’d nearly emptied his cup and was preparing to leave when a voice called from behind. “Sir,” the high voice said, and Kam turned. Sitting at a table behind him was a boy of nine or so dressed in rags. He had tan skin like most other Vilbenians, yet his eyes were of the lightest blue. “Could you come here please?”
Kam was usually fond of children, but something about this boy made him wary. Still, he sat down.
“Are you in love,” the boy said, more statement than question. An odd way to open a conversation.
Kam grinned, but the expression evaporated when the boy didn’t reciprocate. “Why do you ask?”
“Your eyes,” the boy said. “The way you move. She is very beautiful, is she not?”
“You’re here in the tavern alone? Where are your parents?”
The boy said nothing.
“She is very beautiful to me,” Kam said then.
“A beautiful woman requires a beautiful gift, no?” At that the boy pulled out a necklace from the inside of his filthy tunic. At the end of the chain hung a large red stone.
“A ruby?” Kam said.
“More precious.”
“How’d you come upon it then?” Most likely it was stolen.
“It’s been with us a long time,” the boy said.
“A family heirloom then?” The boy smiled for the first time, but the smile seemed unnatural. “And you wish to sell it?”
“How much silver have you?”
“Wouldn’t your mother be angry if you sold your family heirloom?”
“Mother’s been dead a long time.”
“In any case, if the thing’s more valuable than a ruby, I don’t have nearly enough coin.”
“Try me, sir. I want you to have it. It belongs with you and your love.”
Kam took out as much silver as he thought he could spare—nearly half his purse, but still far less than a ruby necklace would be worth—and dropped it on the table. “Very well,” the boy said. “A fine gift this will make.”
When Kam returned to The Finger, he and Olwyn were married, the necklace serving as the wedding gift for his bride. He spent the little he had left, along with the money he received from selling his parents’ house, for a flock of sheep and a small tract of land up the hill from the village. For the remainder of the summer and into early autumn, Kam and Olwyn slept in a tent and built, with their own hands, a house for themselves and a small barn for the animals. Kam would have liked to claim he took the lead with the building; in truth, he served as little more than a beast of burden. Olwyn proved the far more competent carpenter.
Those next three years were the happiest of his life. Coin was never in great supply, but they had enough. Kam sold wool to the weaver and lamb meat to the butcher, and in the warm months, Olwyn brought vegetables into the village to sell at market. Most evenings they would eat a simple meal and then wile away the remaining hours with lovemaking. Olwyn’s appetites were seemingly insatiable and many a night Kam would turn her away from a third go-round so that they might get some sleep. He would have thought that after a half year of this she would surely be with child, yet her belly remained as flat as the sea on the calmest morning. This was not a problem for Kam, more an observation. He wanted a child but was in no rush.
Then the war came.
III
It takes him longer than expected to find the body. Perhaps over the years the ground had shifted gradually, moving the remains a few paces to the left or to the right. It is nearly dusk when his shovel strikes the wooden coffin he’d buried her in. When he is done unearthing it, he casts a simple spell—feeling that familiar tingling down his arm—to lift it out of its hole.
Now that the coffin is here beside him, he finds other things to occupy himself. He gives water to the horse. He chews on a bit of the stale bread and cured meat he’s brought in his sack. He walks down to the shore.
When he returns it’s dark. He’ll make camp for the evening and wait until morning to do it. He’s not leaving until the next day anyway.
It’s cold that night, and sitting by the fire with her coffin across from him, he can imagine she’s alive again.
“You know I’ve missed you,” he says aloud to the damp wooden box. He remembers building the thing. He’d insisted he build it and for this reason it is slightly crooked, the top not closing properly.
“Yes,” he goes on, “things weren’t good at the end. After Ben left, you were never the same. But do we have to judge everything by how they were at the end? All things end badly, when it comes down to it.”
The coffin doesn’t say anything.
“Here we are. How many years now? A lot, I know. Me: with all this blood on my hands.” He throws a twig into the fire. “You wouldn’t approve of what I’ve been up to. But at least I’ve done what I thought right.”
He smothers the fire with dirt, goes inside his tent and lies down. He can’t sleep. His mind is filled with memories: of her and of that insufferable premonition, the only thing he has left. Some hours pass. He thinks he falls asleep, but when he wakes, it is still dark. He will just get on with it.
He casts a lantern spell to illuminate his campsite. The wood of the coffin has partially rotted, so he can pry open the top simply by placing his sword in the space between it and the base of the coffin and pulling downward.
He lays the top of the coffin on the ground and prepares himself for the unsightly remains that undoubtedly await. When he sees her, he recoils but out of surprise, not disgust. In the last six decades she hasn’t decomposed a day; she looks exactly as she did when he buried her: pale skin, puffy cheeks, a few strands of reddish brown amongst a sea of gray.
The stone at the end of her necklace, the necklace he had given her, the necklace he has come for, glows red against the darkness.
IV
The men of The Finger traveled by boat four days north to Hammer Bay. A war had begun with the Alderians, and they would all, they were told, be fighting for the freedom of their country.
They were only in the city for a single night before moving outside the walls to a vast field of tents used to house the soldiers. Kam, having never yet left The Finger except on fishing voyages into the wilderness, marveled at how massive Hammer Bay was with its three and four-story buildings.
The Vilbenian navy was small but able. It was said that the balingers docked in Hammer Bay could, when the oars were fully manned, travel twice the speed of the fastest Imperial vessels. Further, each was outfitted with two metal hoses that spouted Hammer Fire, which could efficiently destroy any Imperial ships that came within range. The strength of the navy, combined with the fact that the seas were stormier than usual that spring, made it likely that the Redcloaks would approach over land.
Kam’s skills as a sailor were meager compared to many of his countrymen, and he was rejected almost immediately from the naval defense forces. Instead he was made a pike man with the other untrained fighters. He remained in the tent city for eight months, practicing formations and movements with his pike regiment for hours each day. He missed Olwyn terribly: the slightly musky smell of her body, her high-pitched laugh, which he’d once thought grating, the feeling that someone knew him. Messengers were still running between Hammer Bay and the Finger, but Kam could neither read nor write and he was only able to communicate with his wife a few times when he managed to scrounge together the necessary funds to employ a scribe.
It was in her second letter (unlike Kam, Olwyn had learned to read and write), two months after he’d left, that she told him she was with child. The night after hearing this, he sat in his cot brooding. This was ill timing. In addition to the war, there were always the normal dangers of childbirth, and he felt these were heightened without him by her side. The months passed.
The road leading into Hammer Bay was completely flat until it climbed up a single hill, upon which the tent city was situated and beyond which lay the city gates. When the Redcloaks finally came, the Vilbenians could see them from a great distance—column after column of crimson far on the horizon. As the Alderians approached, their horns blaring militaristic calls, a dust cloud floated overhead from the endless, synchronized marching.
The Redcloaks halted a quarter mile from the Vilbenian lines and all the drumming and horns and pomp and circumstance abruptly ceased. Kam, standing in the front row of his regiment, pike in hand, had an unimpeded view of the large Imperial host: the infantry, a mass of cavalry, the tall standards waving gently in the breeze. He only just then became aware of the man to his left’s pike, which shook, ever so slightly, back and forth, back and forth. A silence descended on the space between the two armies. After a few minutes, the Redcloaks brought their archers forwards in an orderly, methodical march, as if participating in an exercise or ceremony. The archers, having closed in part of the distance between the main Redcloak host and the Vilbenians, stood in perfectly spaced rows. There was a shout as the archers, all in unison, pulled their bows tight and angled their aim upward. After another shout they let loose the first of several volleys of arrows towards Kam and his countrymen.
The Vilbenians had been expecting archers so they each raised their wooden shields in defense. Kam cowered beneath his shield, which, he realized now, was woefully small to protect a man of any reasonable size. On the first volley, and then again on the third, an arrow struck his shield with a hard thud.
When all the arrows had been shot and their lines, save a few unlucky men, still mostly stood, the rows of archers receded and the Imperial cavalry began their charge up the slow incline of the hill. Kam yanked the two arrows out of his shield and dropped them and the shield in the grass. The sound of the horses grew louder. The one thing that had been impressed upon Kam and his fellow pike men, above all, was the necessity to hold formations. If the formation is broken, all is lost, was the mantra the commanders had them repeat over and over in training; however, so long as the formation held, they could dispel any cavalry or infantry that attacked. Kam gripped the wooden handle of his pike and waited for the onslaught.
The first wave of cavalry crashed against their lines right near where Kam stood. Four or more pikes—including his own—pierced through the light mail and flesh of one of the charging horses. The dying beast made a final, ear-piercing sound and torrents of warm blood spattered the men in the face. The jolt of Kam’s pike going through the flesh of the horse jerked his spear upward, nearly lifting him from the ground. He managed to control the pike at the last instant, but not before feeling something break in his side from the force. The cavalryman riding the slain beast toppled to the ground head first in an awkward heap, almost certainly dead from the fall. Still, Kam’s countrymen didn’t take any chances and the poor Redcloak was skewered by half a dozen pikes in his armpits, above his throat guard and in all of his other unarmored places.
The Redcloaks who managed to fend off the pikes thrusting at them and stay on their horses road back to their lines. The Vilbenians cheered. Down the line to Kam’s left, one of the more enthusiastic men used the blade end of his pike to saw through the neck of one of the dead cavalrymen before placing the bloodied head on the end of his spear and lifting it up with an animalistic howl. The cheers intensified. Kam raised his own pike in solidarity with his countrymen but kept his mouth firmly closed.
The Redcloaks gathered for another charge. The Vilbenians’ success deflecting the first attack had bolstered their confidence, and as the riders approached, Kam could hear his fellow pike men shouting taunts to the oncoming cavalry. Yet, just thirty paces away, the horses stopped in unison. All at once, each of the riders drew, from beneath their horses’ packs, a small bow, half the size of the archers’ long bows.
Someone shouted “Kallanbori!” but it was too late. The Vilbenian lines were so tightly packed together that it was difficult to shoot an arrow in their direction and not hit someone. Some of the men tried picking up their shields, but many did so in vain and fell as the steel-tipped arrows of the cavalry archers pierced their throats, their chests, their stomachs. Instinctively, Kam threw down his spear and ran as fast as his feet would take him away from the lines and the arrows and death.
Shouting and the sounds of battle were everywhere and the pain in his side made each step excruciating. Men were dying now, all around. A mounted Redcloak, this one with sword not bow, closed from Kam’s flank. Having abandoned his spear, the only weapon Kam had was a short knife he kept sheathed at his side—little use against a mounted, armored rider wielding a long sword. Upon the rider’s first pass, Kam dove upon the grass out of the way of his attacker’s horse and sword. The rider spun his mount around and began a second charge. Kam rose to his feet and readied himself to die. But then, just a horse’s length from Kam, both rider and mount toppled to the side as if swept away by a giant wave.
Of course, there was no wave, the sea being more than a mile away.
Kam didn’t have time to second-guess his luck; he ran towards the tree line. Even later, after learning about the meridians and the mystical arts and sorcery, he could only guess as to precisely what had happened that day.
By nightfall the Vilbenian casualties numbered over three thousand dead or wounded, the city had fallen, and Kam, despite his attempted escape into the forests surrounding the city, found himself prisoner along with five thousand of his fellow soldiers. Kam was, more than anything, relieved. The Alderian Empire was known to be ruthless (tyrannical, many would say), and Kam hated it. But they did not have a history of mass executions. There was a good chance he was going to survive.
V
He peers down at his beloved lying in the coffin and touches her cheek with the back of his hand. It is not warm; she is not alive. But the skin feels soft and supple, the flesh of someone who has just passed from this world.
All the years she wore the necklace, he’d never seen the stone glow. He examines it, lifts it from where it rests above her breasts. It is cold, light without heat. In his hand the stone turns clear and the light it emits shifts from red to white. He returns it to her chest and it is red again. He has seen all manner of sorcery and talismans, and read about many more during his years on the island, but he has no idea as to the nature of this stone.
When he unclasps the necklace from around her fleshy throat, her body begins to change. Within the span of a minute her skin dries and shrivels and cracks; he panics and tries to return the necklace to her, but it’s too late. Her skin and muscles and organs dissolve into air until all that is left is dust and bones and her auburn-streaked, gray hair inside her suddenly ragged clothes.
He pockets the necklace and does his best to re-close the coffin before casting a spell and returning it to the hole from which it came. He begins the reburying. As shovel after shovel of earth fall upon the coffin, he remembers the first time he did this. By the time he’s finished, it’s mid-morning. He looks out to the sea one more time—knowing intuitively it is the final time he shall ever see this stretch of coastline—and heads back to The Knuckle.
VI
The Redcloaks spent the next three days rooting out the final pockets of resistance around Hammer Bay, and the Vilbenian tent city was seamlessly transformed into a prison camp. Alderian guards stood sentry in every direction and the prisoners were ordered, under penalty of death, to stay within their tents, except during mealtime. For his part, Kam found captivity a relative improvement to life as a soldier. There was less work, more food and the specter of death seemed to diminish by the day. During all this idle time, his thoughts again went back to Olwyn and his child, who must be nearing birth by now.
When the city was fully secured, the Redcloaks gathered all the prisoners for “processing.” From the rumors Kam had heard, each of them would be briefly interviewed by some Imperial bureaucrat to determine if he was dangerous or could be placed in a work group. Once it was decided a prisoner could be assigned to a work group, they were herded into a further line for interviews where yet more bureaucrats decided whether they were placed in a manual labor or skilled labor group, which had further benefits like improved meals and housing.
When Kam reached the front of the line for his first interview, he was led into a white tent and sat down across from a pudgy, middle-aged man who read from a scroll without looking up.
Would you consider yourself a “die-hard” Vilbenian patriot?
What are your thoughts on the Alderian Empire?
Did you kill anyone during the war?
Before the war? If so, how many, and what were the circumstances of these killings?
If there was a sharp instrument within arm’s reach, would you try and use it to stab me, slit my throat or otherwise do me harm?
Would any close friends or relatives characterize you as an angry person?
Ten minutes of questioning later, the bureaucrat placed a seal on a document and looked up at Kam for the first time. “Work group,” he said, in the most perfunctory voice imaginable. A guard materialized and escorted Kam to the next line.
Back outside, Kam watched two Redcloaks sort through stacks of decomposing bodies. The men seemed to be interested in the cause of death of each and so, with every corpse, they’d roll it over, examining it until they found what they were looking for. When one of the men came upon a decapitated body of what looked to be a boy of no more than fourteen, he tapped the other man on the shoulder. “What do you think?” he said, using his scabbarded sword to gesture to the severed spine, which jutted out from the flesh of the corpse’s neck.
“I don’t know. Plague maybe?” the other said.
