Blood Of The Wizard (Book 1) (48 page)

Sir Alistair brought the arrow back, the feathers bent and oddly luminous in the cool light.  He was staring off toward the sound of more approaching men.  His lips were pressed as he said, “Ha ha!  Pigs to the poke, my boys!”

And so it began, a slaughter like Cullfor would have never thought possible.  For ten more hours, they sent volley after volley into Dellish chests and head.

And all the while the Dellishmen screamed in fear or agony, the big captain roared obscenities and screamed things like, “Dip an oily eel in ginger and shove it up my arse if this ain’t a good time!”

.

Chapter 97

“Honor?  Honor is just so many pounds of sausage.  Those willing to die as pigs will know honor
!
”

—Lord Alistair Tenholly.

_______________

When his adrenaline settled, Cullfor was so mentally miserable that even his thoughts were stiffening.  Crawling on his hands and knees back out into the light of the courtyard, he was shivering and exhausted, and he had a fever. 

With every step back up the castle walls, dull aches went crashing through his body, and a bone in his heel had somehow cracked.  The sail barges were gone, which meant that the victory was not as complete as he had imagined, as it took a great many men just to pilot them. 

And the Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm, the fearsome Blackthistle, had eluded capture.

But Bunn was alive, he spoke to himself.

And on the stone parapet, high above the river, he smiled as he fell asleep.

_______________

It was hard to say how much time had passed before he woke, but it was still sometime in the thin and grayish pale of morning light. 

And it was exceptionally quiet.

He heard the sound of the river lulling in the distance.  And he saw Bunn asleep nearby, then a clap of thunder underscored a distant commotion:  the sound of marching warhorses, and the subdued echo of voices.

Cullfor rose and kept to the edge, as ensconced in shadow as he could possibly remain, while he peered over the edge of the parapet’s merlon.  As he woke, he was not surprised the town he had only just noticed, nor at the emptiness, nor the great, enormity of its silence, but at the biting flies that swarmed in tremendous, low clouds.  A fog of them surrounded the wide, urban arm the stretched from the smallish castle at the north of town, down toward the grassy shores of the river.  The only other leviathan was wooden, a massive church at the city’s heart.  Some manner of borderland basilica, a monument to both the One Church and some Elvish deities, it rested atop one of mossy, meandering hillsides so common in this part of the country. 

The sun was an orange sliver, low over eastern hills beyond town, which were so thick with forests they were black.   

Narrowing eyes scanned back toward the town, at the enormous spire of the church.  From here, a half a mile away, it was beautiful the way a mountain is beautiful.  And just as foreboding:  the town was emptied of all but the army he fought with.   At a riverside bend of buildings, succumbing to more and more buildings, the town congested around the basilica, then thinned again into fields, which rolled distantly and softly across the southern sweeps of stone

All of it was capped by the morning’s thin fog, which was sprawling thinly away against the greening and gray light of the river.

Cullfor breathed. 

The sight struck him as if he were still in some sleepy dream.  He looked back at the town, at a scattering of men who were shuffling toward the church at the town center.

And he looked at Bunn, and he slept some more.

_______________

Cullfor woke again, and this time it was to the distant sound of horses and voices.  He woke Bunn rushed to the edge of the parapet, panicked.

But when he looked down, he again saw his own countrymen.  This time, there were thousands of them. 

It was the personal army of Arway’s Halfling-King, Findhorn the Somber.

There were gathering in the fields just east of town, and already the meadow was being transmogrified into something that resembled a hamlet.  Bread or oatmeal was boiling in every pot across a thousand small fires, and the shadowy meadow was alive with those smells. 

Cullfor walked with Bunn, looking at forty or so more halflings marching toward the gathering.  These were the last ranks of the some similar order.  As they snaked down from atop a high ridge, there was a princely-looking man near, of all people, Oxus.  He was flanked on all sides by a livery of men at arms, and as he wound alongside Cullfor and Bunn, he turned to them. 

He turned slowly, and he looked at Cullfor, then arched one brow high onto his head.    Then, bowing, he introduced himself as Findhorn. 

The Sober.  Not Somber, as Cullfor had once thought.

But he was anything but sober.

Cullfor just nodded to him, dumbstruck.

The King of Arway managed a humored, beery smile, and he continued on.

_______________

For a long moment, the wonder of the encounter hung in the air.  She kissed his ear often.  She squeezed his hand as they walked. 

“I love you,” she said.

He told he loved her, too, and that when this was done he wanted to bathe her in milk, then spend an evening lapping it off of her.

She giggled, and something in it seemed like the first giggle of her life. 

They walked away from the sound of the halfling’s laughter, rising wildly behind them.

_______________

The inner-workings of the king’s caravan were make-shift edifices of timber, set up within the vast line of carts that brought them.  And at the edge of all this was fewer men but more things.  More stuff.  More wood, more canvas.   Walking through, Cullfor found himself in a corner of the meadow under the ridge that lined the river valley.  The morning air was cool, and the sunlight was bright and inviting.  Terrible weather for war, he mused.  Then, suddenly felt inexplicably dumbstruck and hollow, and was working to push the sensation out of his mind when he understood what it was.  It was a reality that had been inside of him for some time…

Halflings were already talking about going back to Brickelby, or Real Brickleby, Arway’s capital.

But he knew, for him, that would not happen.

He also sensed something else.  A presence he had not felt since he had felt on the trails outside of Gintypool.  He could sense a dragon.  Bhiers, the Dwarf-King.  He was coming, he knew it as sure as he knew his own name.  Before morning, they would face an enemy far larger and more powerful than even the vast army that surrounded them.  Soon he would face an enemy most men could not begin to fathom.

But he also knew could not hope to convince them of this…

When he focused his mind on Bhiers, what he saw instead was that black thistle helm, somewhere on the river, and when he focused more, all he could see only a ghost-like cluster of bats.  Perhaps it was just a symbol of what was, perhaps not, but somehow the strange mass of smaller creatures formed together into a visage of some happy, pale-eyed beast of a dwarf, his vivacious life force vibrating in that crown like a small sun, his great ghost lifting his dull red shirt and chainmail cloak more so than sinew and muscle.   Now, squalls of his laughing voice encompassed the monstrous vision, emanating from somewhere deeper than the river they surely traveled on. 

_______________

Cullfor shuddered.  He gathered Bunn’s hand, and together they went back into the crowds to sit near a long mead bench. 

Laughing without knowing precisely, sitting with a woman he loved completely, he kissed his exnun on the neck and instead of asking her if she sensed it too, he just smiled.  None of this will be believed.  Even in watersheds where certain lords tell tales of dragons, his tale of this day will be marked as some esoteric nonsense.  A table-tale told by drunken rabble and old plowmen. 

And he didn’t give a damn.

_______________

Soon, they were sitting near the king, laughing and drinking across from him at the head of the mead bench.  Cullfor watched him, drunkenly, laughing as he bolted up from the bench across a stony slip of limestone at the back of the table.  He was racing toward some plump porter-women lugging their heavy kegs of beer.  The king assaulted them with rough swats across their bottoms until they let him help.  Two more helped.

And Cullfor, who wanted nothing more than silence, so, silently, he leaned over to the king and told him that the dwarves are coming.

But he was right.  No one believed him, or wanted to.  And soon, the mead-benches downhill from him were alive again, rocking with laughter again.  Then talking. 

Then snoring. 

Before he realized it, Cullfor was drunken and overstuffed too.  It felt as though mere minutes had passed before the red bars of dusk were stretching down the stony hills.

Cullfor and Bunn found a high, secluded spot to rest.  They could look down through the trees at the king’s great caravan.  There were slow and aching preparations for departure already.  But they could have been making ready some measure of a camp. 

He turned and kissed Bunn.  She combed his hair with her fingers, then she held his face and turned to him.  She rubbed his chest and pulled him down alongside her.  Her mouth and eyes were bright.

He pulled one of her breasts free and suckled at it like a babe. 

“What brought you to become a nun?” he asked, still suckling.

“Oh,” she said with a surprised noise.  “It’s an inglorious tale, husband.”

_______________

Early in life, she tell him, she thinks she has figured out what is wrong:  She has simply made life too complicated for herself.  Thinking she knows a thing or two of the world, she sets out.  She does what it takes to be happy.  To live freely.  It all boils down to simplicity. On leaving her sister, she becomes her, or
like
her, rather.  Whoring is like an ongoing war.  Days of thunder, dark and crazy dusks.  Perhaps there are no entrails of screaming combatants floating in blood so thick in the ditches a man could swim.  But there is strategy.  Avoiding traps, and sometimes seeking them, and a misery the like of which he only just knew was possible.  There is real joy throughout those days, and days of abject pain.  There is always fear.  There is more joy than pain, though the joy comes in dollops of conversation, and the pain is as pervasive as time.  Perhaps that is why the joy is greater.

Perhaps not.

In primordial moments, where not even payment is guaranteed, making love is not unlike single combat.  In the field, she has no trouble holding her dignity in tact atop fat farmers with heavy lances.  It would be foolish to say this is done with ease.  But it down nonetheless.  Yet she dismounts lords with shame in her heart.  At times it is not the nearly the impossible thing that it seems, but sometimes the worthlessness creeps in. 

For the most part, Bunn enjoys it, frankly.  Until the Gray Sunday.  Until she learns that near-invincibility can haunt a woman as terribly as losing.  Until she meets the Frog Knight.

He pays her travel all the way to the borderlands.

The frog, she has heard, is warty and squat, armored, and necessarily barefoot because of his distorted skin.  She has heard he is an unstoppable wrecker.  And a terrible thing to behold in light. 

They are alone in a high fertile ford between two mountain valleys, waiting.  This is the way, sometimes.  A man has the right to some time, to soak her in once he has paid in advance, to arrange things in his life before he alters it forever with adultery. 

At dusk, he disrobes, and the man is quite something again.  He worse than the stories.  He is a nasty thing from another world, and an aquatic fiend whose holdings rival that of a king.  She recoils at the bald and reticulated head.  The throaty movement resembles slithering.  The eyes are rolling, focusing on her as they roll around in that improbable head. 

He tells her to undress.

Soon she stands before him nude.  Both of them, nude.  Her milk-perfect skin a mockery of the animal before her.

Turn around, he says.

But there is something in the command that frightens her.  A crisp, living emptiness.  Now she see something even worse.  The frog’s family, his wife and two teenage boys have come.  They are watching from the edge of the meadow. 

They will be the ones to kill you, the frog whispers.

It is somehow even worse that they scream in glee as she spins and impacts her forehead against his face.  It is only a grazing blow, but the impact shakes the brain.  His nose bursts.  As she lands in the frog’s fields, he vomits and roars.  The frog spins to his feet and now she shoves him again and picks up his belt, beating him, then strangling him,  and as he falls, kicking his ribs.

The frog is gulping, hard, kicking those nightmare feet.  Screeching now, his improbably pretty wife is telling him to get up.  Puking down his chest, he can breathe, but not well.  All instinct is countered, and she runs, runs past her horse.  The beast follows and when she sees the family running after her, she snaps.   She has no sense of direction.  Unconscious for a flash, she wakes to find herself off the horse, choking the wife.   Sweaty.  She has hurt herself somehow.  Her back.  This is the first squeeze on her lower back that will haunt her now throughout life.