Shattered Shields - eARC (18 page)

The Gleaners

Dave Gross

Somewhere over the nearest hillocks, dogs bayed in the pre-dawn mist. Ambros kept his lantern hooded, directing the light onto the wounded earth. The last thing he wanted was the war hounds of some fallen knight to discover him and his companions.

The yellow light slid across the pale arm of a young soldier. He lay on his side as though asleep, no wounds visible on his body but his open eyes blank in death. Ambros shuddered at the sight, thinking as he always did of that first time his mother led him across a battlefield.

She drew him by the hand, guiding him around the severed limbs and limbless trunks. The sudden pools and stenches frightened the boy, who had not yet seen ten years. When he balked, his mother squeezed his hand and said, “We have to find your father.”

That was the only thing she said. Every time she rose from turning over a corpse to see a stranger’s face, she repeated it like a prayer.

“We have to find your father.”

Fifteen years later, Ambros had long since forgotten his father’s face, but he knew the man had answered the baron’s call to war. He did not remember, or perhaps he never understood, the reasons for the war. He remembered only the stillness in the air whenever anyone named the enemy: the Earl of the Ashen Citadel.

The legend had grown in the years since that first battle. The conscripted forces always drove back the enemy, but they never slew the earl, despite the baron’s frequent claims to have quartered, burned, or buried him alive. Sometimes the people even believed the claims, or perhaps their wishing only made it seem they did.

Every few years the earl returned like a plague, leaving black and red fields of corpses in his wake, until the common folk dared not utter even his title. The enemy was no longer “the earl” but “the witch” or “the necromancer.”

Fewer now dared search the battlefields until after the baron’s knights had reclaimed the area. Some sought in desperation for the bodies of their husbands, brothers, or sons. Others picked over the corpses for rings and coins and other valuable things. Like the meanest peasants at harvest, they gathered what was left after the reaping.

They were the gleaners.

“Bring the light,” said Jurgen, a little too loud. Ambros pinched his tunic to feel the athame hanging from his neck. It gave him no comfort, but it reminded him of his purpose.

Ambros carried the lantern toward the sound of Jurgen’s voice, careful to step over a corpse clad in a burlap tunic. The coarse hair on his pink shoulders gave the dead man the look of a slaughtered pig stuffed in a sack.

As the light revealed his brutal face, Jurgen gave Ambros one of his scrunch-mouthed smiles. Ambros could never tell whether the expression indicated pleasure in seeing him or a whiff of a bad smell. The big man poked at the body of a knight with the dead man’s own mace. The eitr filigree gleamed blue even in the yellow light of the lantern.

“Jurgen,” said Ambros. He kept his voice low, as much to avoid alerting the hounds they’d heard as to calm the giant. “Put it down.”

Jurgen could claim an axe or cudgel belonged to him, but any commoner caught with a knight’s weapon would be hanged. Ambros feared that Jurgen no longer understood the danger. The big man blinked constantly ever since a brawler creased his skull with a stool leg. Even with blood filling his eyes, Jurgen had ended that fight by slamming his opponent’s head into the ceiling until the man’s limp body slipped from his grasp. No one had attacked Ambros since Jurgen joined his battlefield gleanings, but the giant remained dangerous even to his friends.

Jurgen raised the mace as if to strike him. Ambros tried not to wince. These little games of menace were the price of his protection.

“Jurgen.” Kaspar called from the gloom.

The giant’s shoulders slumped as Kaspar stepped into the light. A foot and a half shorter than the giant, the slender man took the mace from his hand as easily as a mother might remove a twig from her toddler’s grip. He carried the weapon in both hands and exchanged it for Ambros’s lantern.

Ambros withdrew the silvered bowl from its bag and set it on the ground. As Kaspar held the lantern steady, Ambros laid the head of the mace in the bowl and held the weapon at a steady angle. He drew the athame from its inverted sheath on the thong around his neck. Its blade gleamed in sympathy with the eitr.

Starting from the lowest point of the filigree line, Ambros stroked the athame’s sharp tip over the blue-gray substance. At the ritual knife’s touch, the solid filigree returned to its natural liquid form. Ambros felt the deep, subtle vibration of the transformation through the athame. Its magic trembled in his fingers, shuddered in his bones.

He drew its point along the graceful lines of filigree, never wavering or slowing. Once the athame had begun working its transformation, to remove the tip even for an instant would break the disruption of the material and leave the remaining eitr in place, irretrievable.

When Ambros was done, star-colored liquid pooled in the silver bowl until there was nothing left of the filigree but a groove in the steel.

Working with deliberate speed, Ambros turned the mace and stroked the opposite side of the flange. A dram or so of the precious material flowed out of the surface of the mace and pooled in the bowl. He repeated the process for each of the other three sides of the mace, careful not to spill a drop.

Laying the mace aside, Ambros took a silver flask from the bag. He uncorked the mouth and poured the liquid eitr over the bowl’s gentle lip and into the flask. Jurgen and Kaspar watched in silence, holding their breaths until he resealed the flask.

More than the gold coins and rings, even more than the knights’ swords and the jewels they dared not steal, the eitr gleaned from enchanted weapons and talismans sustained Ambros and his friends. Rarely did they find as much as the mace contained. After his aunts had taken their portion to use in charms and remedies, the price the rest would fetch might feed the men for the better part of a year.

Kaspar nodded as he watched Ambros return the bowl and flask to the bag. Twenty years older than Jurgen and Ambros, Kaspar had joined them after they crossed paths on another battlefield six years earlier.

Gleaners usually did not speak to each other. Some raced from corpse to corpse to claim the choicest loot. Others fought over the bodies of knights. Others watched with cutthroat patience, letting the others do their work for them, for a while.

Kaspar had been one of the latter, appearing out of the smoke of a burning wagon like a vengeful phantom. He had his knife to Jurgen’s throat before the big man saw him. Feeling the sharp edge against his larynx, Jurgen began to blubber.

“Wait,” Ambrose had cried.

He had never understood why Kaspar hesitated then. When he paused, Ambros had no idea what to say or do to save Jurgen’s life and his own. Ambros knew he couldn’t overcome the interloper. And for all his strength, Jurgen was helpless as a child in his fear. Even if he weren’t, Kaspar’s knife would do its work before Jurgen could grip his throat.

Ambros plucked an eitr-painted talisman from his bag.

“Look,” he said. “This is worth a bag of coins. It’s yours.”

Kaspar ignored the talisman. His gaze fixed on Ambros.

Panicked, Ambros explained the value of the eitr. “My aunts know its uses, and they know others who pay gold for just a drop or two. Take it, and let us go.”

Slow and skeptical, Kaspar made a counteroffer. One man, even a giant, was not enough protection from rival scavengers. Ambros needed two guardians, as Kaspar had just proven.

Ambros wasn’t sure there would be enough to split three ways, but he preferred the prospect of extra labor to the thought of defying the man with the knife.

Kaspar became their third partner.

The bargain lasted, even after they had quit the field and turned over their gleanings in exchange for coin. Split three ways, the profit was smaller. But they covered more ground and frightened off more rivals after the next battle. Those who did not flee at the sight of the giant took one look at Kaspar’s cold eyes and decided their fortunes lay on the other side of the field.

The eitr secured, they continued their search. Ambros once more carried the lantern while Jurgen and Kaspar spread out to either side. A thud followed by mush-mouthed curses told Ambros that Jurgen had tripped over corpses again. He climbed the nearby hillock to join the giant, but a premonition made him close the lantern’s hood before he reached the crest.

Standing atop the promontory, Ambros saw the faint gray line of dawn to the east. Mist hugged the ground, pooling in the channels between the hills. Here and there, a lone tree or a crooked banner pierced the fog. He saw the silhouette of a weary mule struggling to escape its harness, the cart behind it half sunk in mud. The animal brayed, at first with a weakness, then with fierce panic. A dark shape the size of a wild boar charged into the beast, knocking it to the ground. A moment later, a second animal attacked. Even muted by the fog, the sound of bestial gorging sent a chill through Ambros’s veins.

“What’s that?” Jurgen’s head whipped toward the sound as he freed himself from a tangle of dead bodies.

Ambros shook his head before realizing Jurgen wouldn’t see the gesture. “Let’s go the other way.”

They climbed back down the hill, where Ambros once again opened the lantern’s hood. They moved away from the dreadful sounds they heard and found a dying horse lying atop its dead rider. The animal’s legs were shattered, slick with blood.

The horse wheezed and blew, too weak to scream. Jurgen’s lip trembled.

Ambros went to the dead knight and found the sword lying under his cold body. He pulled it free and examined it, finding no eitr. He took the sword to Jurgen.

“You know what to do.”

Jurgen tried to take the sword in two hands, but the grip was too short. He knelt beside the horse and stroked its neck. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, sorry.”

He stood and raised the sword. Ambros watched because he felt he should. When it was done, Jurgen turned to walk away, sword still in hand.

“Jurgen,” said Ambros.

The giant shook his head as if waking from a bad dream. He threw the sword down and walked on.

Kaspar whistled like a nightingale. It wasn’t a half-bad call, but Ambros never thought anyone would mistake it for a real bird. He and Jurgen went to the sound. They found Kaspar crouched over a headless peasant, a pitchfork still in his grip.

Kaspar gave Ambros one of those looks he could never understand. It was as if he wanted the answer to a question he hadn’t asked. Finally, Ambros gave up guessing. “What?”

Kaspar gestured to the severed neck. Ambros still didn’t understand. He shrugged.

“Someone took this head after the battle,” Kaspar whispered.

Once he pointed it out, Ambros saw how fresh the blood looked, and how little had poured out of the wound. He lowered his voice. “How long?”

“Minutes.”

They heard another voice, this one sweeter than their own. It was the voice of a woman. “Manfred! Otto!”

“Looking for her sons,” said Jurgen. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. In the lantern light, Ambros saw tracks on the giant’s dirty face. Jurgen loved a fight. He hated to kill animals, even for mercy.

“She shouldn’t be out here alone,” said Ambros. He thought of his mother, whom he had left with her new husband ten years ago. By the time he heard of her death, the murderer was already gone, conscripted.

“Forget about her,” said Kaspar. “She’s none of our concern.”

Ambros didn’t like it, but he knew Kaspar was right. The eitr from the mace was as good a find as they had ever had, but its presence hinted at more. One well-armed knight seldom went to battle without others at his side.

They resumed the search. Ambros heard the jingle of coins as Jurgen took a purse from a fallen soldier. Kaspar brought a dagger back to examine under the lantern, but it was only silvered, not enchanted. He made it disappear wherever it was he kept his other blade. Ambros had never figured out whether it was tucked into his belt or hidden up a sleeve. Sometimes he thought maybe there were several knives. Sometimes he thought maybe Kaspar was a magician.

They reached another edge of the battlefield, where they found fewer and fewer bodies until only the dew-kissed grass lay before them. They turned back, heading toward the center of the conflict they had heard from a safe distance the night before.

They found a crater where some spell had turned the men standing there into a thin red spray surrounding the blast. Nearby they found the hacked bodies of men who had died long before the battle began, their withered flesh gray and tough as leather.

“The necromancer’s men,” whispered Kaspar. His sudden appearance startled Ambros. One look at Kaspar’s face told Ambros that he had come to the lantern not to frighten him but for comfort. Dangerous as he appeared to others, Kaspar was no less dreadful of the enemy.

“It can’t be,” said Ambros, without much hope. “It was only last fall they found him at Whitepool.”

“Who else conscripts the dead?”

No one, thought Ambros.

Jurgen came galumphing over, his thick hands cupping some small treasure, a terrifying grin on his face. Ambros knew the expression indicated joy, but only because he had known the man since they were boys.

“Eitr!” cried Jurgen. He held out his hands to reveal four talismans and a ring, all with intricate traces of silver-blue metal.

Kaspar shushed the giant.

Ambros raised the lantern over the jewels. It was indeed eitr in the filigree and mixed into the lacquered ornaments. Set upon the ring was a brilliant blue stone that drew Kaspar’s hand like a moth to the light. He hesitated before touching it, deferring to Ambros and his athame.

Producing the bowl and flask once more, Ambros bent to do his work. Sometimes he had wondered why Kaspar did not simply kill him and steal the athame for himself, but he suspected the older man feared the magic of the ritual knife.

Ambros had feared it, too, at first. But once he learned its simple function, and his aunts had drilled him in the careful handling of the liquid eitr, which must never touch his skin, he shed some of his fear. Yet he knew the others watched him work as if he were performing magic. The truth was that he had simply learned a chore. He was privy to no mysteries. He knew no secrets, except the one: it is power to let others believe you know mysteries.