The Bark of the Bog Owl (14 page)
Read The Bark of the Bog Owl Online
Authors: Jonathan Rogers
“Remember! Remember!”
Errol Finlayson
Longleaf Manor
Corenwald
Dear Father—
I’m not sure I can explain why I’m doing this,
but I imagine it’s what you would do if you
were here. The first time I met the Truthspeaker,
he told me to love goodness more than I fear
evil. I kept thinking I had heard that advice
somewhere before. It just now dawned on me: I
had never heard it before, but every day of my
life I had seen it in a father who always, always
made sure his sons remembered what sort of
God we serve.
I trust I shall see you soon.
Your devoted son,
Aidan
On the day of the combat, at the appointed time of midday, the two armies arrayed themselves along either edge of the valley that separated their two camps. Normally a peaceful little vale, now the place bristled with thousands of spears and pikes, swords and battle-axes.
On the eastern rim the Corenwalders’ uniforms formed a wall of blue and gold. Their faces were pale and sickly. Their eyes darted to and fro. They believed themselves to be on the brink of defeat and enslavement. On the western edge of the valley, the grim Pyrthens, in their black armor and spiked helmets, formed a black sea ready to surge over the little valley and the kingdom beyond.
On the valley floor paced Greidawl, the Pyrthens’ iron champion. His eyes burned with pent-up rage. He was a killing machine, and yet he had spent more than two weeks on a battle plain with no release for his murderous impulses. No Corenwalder champion had yet presented himself. Greidawl’s bloodlust grew as he imagined the destruction he would unleash on the cowards of Corenwald should they fail to deliver a champion. He abruptly stopped his pacing, though, when he saw a boy, unarmed and dressed in the homespun tunic of a country boy, scrambling down the eastern wall of the valley.
A murmur of speculation arose from the Pyrthen side. Was this the armor bearer of the Corenwalder champion?
He wasn’t bearing any armor. Was he a messenger boy, bringing a message from the champion of Corenwald to the champion of Pyrth? He did have a side pouch like a messenger boy, but this boy wasn’t wearing the hat that messengers usually wore. The Pyrthens, and Greidawl especially, watched the boy as he loped toward the middle of the valley floor.
A few late wildflowers were blooming in the valley. The midday heat had long since overwhelmed the cool of morning. When he had closed half the distance to the Pyrthen, Aidan knelt. He needed sling stones, and he selected five flat, well-balanced ones that had been rubbed smooth by years of flowing water when the river still ran here.
Greidawl turned toward the Pyrthens behind him. “Look!” he boomed, pointing at the kneeling form of the boy at the brook, “the boy is praying! Ha! He’d better pray!” He turned to the Corenwalders. “You all had better pray!” He laughed at the Corenwalders, and the Pyrthens laughed, too, bowing and waving their hands in mock prayers.
Aidan placed the five smooth stones in his side pouch, where he kept his sling. Then he rose and walked with slow, sure steps toward Greidawl. His gaze was steady, his face a picture of pure calm. The Pyrthen was confused and a little agitated by the boy’s actions. He was still waiting for a mighty man of Corenwald to appear.
“Who are you, boy?” he snarled. “Where is the champion of Corenwald?”
“The Champion of Corenwald is here already,” answered Aidan. “You stand before him now.”
Greidawl looked at Aidan with some annoyance. “You are no champion. You aren’t even a man.” He looked scornfully at Aidan’s skinny frame. “You’re hardly even a boy! Look at you—you’re a stick.”
Undaunted by Greidawl’s scorn, Aidan met his gaze. The Pyrthen was furious. He raised his spear and pointed it at King Darrow, who watched the scene from the edge of the valley. “Am I a dog,” he roared, “that you should come at me with a stick?” He was shaking with rage. “Send a champion to face me!”
“Corenwald has a Champion,” said Aidan firmly. “He is the One God.”
“The One God?” Greidawl mocked. He laughed cruelly and pointed his spear at Aidan. “Could the One God do no better than you?”
Aidan stood with his hands on his hips, his feet apart. “The One God can deliver me. But even if he doesn’t deliver me, I still won’t bow down to you or any other Pyrthen.”
Greidawl laughed again. He looked past Aidan to the Corenwalders on the valley’s edge. “I see no God. I hear no God. I feel no God.” He raised his massive spear. In his gigantic hand it seemed no bigger than a shepherd’s staff. “But this—
this
is real. Twenty-five pounds of ash-wood and iron. What do you suppose your ‘One God’ can do about this?”
With a quickness that seemed impossible for such a huge man, the Pyrthen hurled the spear at Aidan the way a normal man would toss a dart. A cheer erupted from the Pyrthen side of the valley as the massive spear careered toward the shepherd boy. Greidawl’s aim was sure: he
could hardly miss his target at such close range. Nor could anyone hope to dodge a spear thrown with such suddenness and velocity. Aidan didn’t flinch. The iron spearhead—heavier than his own head, heavy enough to spill his life in an instant—whistled past, only inches from his ear. The spear stuck in the clay ten paces behind him, its ashwood shaft still quivering from the force of Greidawl’s mighty heave.
The Pyrthens’ cheer died on their lips. On the Corenwalder side, terror gave way to relief, but hope was still far away. Aidan smiled an unworried little smile at the enraged Pyrthen. “Are ashwood and iron more real than the living God? Who buried the iron in the ribs of the earth? Who makes the ashwood to grow upon the hill?”
Aidan reached in his side pouch for his sling and one of the smooth stones he had picked up. He swung the slingstone over his head with a free looping motion, as if he were slinging at targets in the bottom pasture. “And the One God,” Aidan continued, “has given you into my hands.”
Aidan’s nonchalance was too much for Greidawl to bear. He reached for his battle-ax, a ridiculously large and heavy iron thing, as wide across as Aidan’s shoulders. Raising the ax above his head, he bellowed like a bull in its fury, then charged Aidan with all the speed his iron armor and lumbering size would allow.
The lazy loops of Aidan’s sling tightened into whipping circles as the champion of Pyrth bore down. The earth shook with each ironclad footfall. But Aidan stood firm and waited for Greidawl to bring himself into range.
The stone whizzed in a circle around Aidan’s head, and the roaring Pyrthen came on. He was determined to split Aidan in two, the way a farmer splits a log. He got so close that Aidan could see the curling hairs in Greidawl’s nose. Aidan could almost feel the stinking heat of the great warrior’s breath. The looming Pyrthen filled Aidan’s frame of vision, making a target so large that Aidan could hardly miss him. At last, the shepherd boy let fly.
Greidawl was reaching back with his battle-ax, poised to deliver an obliterating blow to the insolent little Corenwalder, when the stone struck him. Embedding in his forehead, the flat stone jutted out over his one black eyebrow like a little shelf. He staggered back one step, forward two steps, then back another step. His eyelids fluttered. His arms went limp, and the ax fell with a heavy thud behind him. He crumpled down on himself, and with a crash like a dozen iron kettles dropped from a rooftop, he fell forward, his head at Aidan’s feet.
But Aidan’s work wasn’t done. Greidawl was senseless not dead. With both hands Aidan laid hold of the battle-ax and dragged it the seven feet from the great Pyrthen’s feet to his head. The ax weighed nearly as much as Aidan did, and he prayed he would be able to heft it before Greidawl came to his senses. He had never wielded a battle-ax before, but he had driven many a post with a heavy iron sledge. The practice served him well. He squared his feet to Greidawl’s fallen form, centering on the patch of bare neck left unprotected by the skewed helmet. With a groaning effort, he raised the ax, staggering under its massive weight.
The ax hung in the air. Here was the future of Corenwald, fifty pounds of iron balanced precariously over the head of a shepherd boy. Would it fall backward, toppling the boy and the kingdom with it? Or would it fall forward to end the terror that had so enslaved the imaginations of Corenwald’s fighting men? Aidan struggled to balance the ax, which now seemed determined not to strike a blow against its Pyrthen master.
Greidawl’s huge fingers began to move, then his arms. He was trying to raise himself. Seeing his enemy stir, Aidan summoned his last reserves of strength. As he tipped the ax forward, he made the valley echo with a shout such as no Pyrthen, and very few Corenwalders, had ever heard before:
“Haawweee!”
Greidawl was just beginning to regain consciousness. He groggily turned his head toward the shepherd boy’s shout. The last thing he ever saw was his own battle-ax plunging down on him like a thunderstroke.
The Pyrthens on the western bank stood in shocked silence. They never thought they would see their champion slain. The Corenwalders were silent, too, but only for a moment. They quickly erupted in wild whoops and shouts and hoots of joy and relief. Turning to face his countrymen, Aidan lifted Greidawl’s helmet in salute to the fighting men of Corenwald. The Corenwalders cheered all the more, then they grew quiet again when it became clear that their young champion had something to say to them.
Aidan’s victory speech was short—only two words, in fact. But those two words echoed across the Bonifay Plain and throughout Corenwalder history: “Remember! Remember!”
The Corenwalders did remember. They remembered the One God who had delivered them from the Pyrthens so many times before, who was even now delivering them. They remembered what it meant to be “Corenwalders free and true.” They remembered that they were brave men and mighty warriors. They remembered why the great empire so hated the free Corenwalders.
Greidawl, while he lived, had been like a heavy fog descended on the Corenwalders. When they looked about them, they couldn’t see the world as it was, only the fog. But now Greidawl was dead, and it was as if the fog had been burned away by the bright light of day. The Corenwalders could see again, and the world they saw was even more beautiful than they had remembered. They, and not the Pyrthens, were the masters of their island kingdom. According to the terms of Greidawl’s challenge, and thanks to the bravery of a shepherd boy and the providence of the One God, the invaders were now their slaves.
Aidan surveyed his countrymen. They weren’t the same men he had seen only an hour before. Gone were the hangdog looks and the sour faces of defeated men. They stood straighter now. The glint of the sun on their weapons was now matched by a glint of confidence in the warriors’ eyes. They looked like Corenwalders.
That’s all
they needed,
thought Aidan.
To remember.
He remembered the Wilderking Chant:
He will silence the braggart,
ennoble the coward.
Watch for the Wilderking!
Thunder
Aidan was drifting into a pleasant reverie of the Corenwald of old when he heard a strange sort of music from the Pyrthen line behind him—three
twangs,
pitched a little lower than the low string on a lute—
twang-twa-twang
—so rapid as to be nearly simul-taneous. Black-feathered arrows whistled past, one just inches from his left ear, one over his head. A third arrow grazed his right arm just below the shoulder. He instinctively dropped to the ground. Four more twangs; four black-feathered arrows sailed over him, right where he had stood a second earlier.
He quickly took cover behind the ironclad hulk of Greidawl’s lifeless body. The strange music, he realized, was the twang of Pyrthen bowstrings. Aidan crouched as low as he could; arrows continued to whistle just over his head or deflect off the iron plates of Greidawl’s armor.
Then a hail of blue-feathered arrows came flying over from the Corenwalders’ side of the valley. On the Pyrthen side, five archers fell. The battle was on. Before Aidan knew what was happening, foot soldiers from both sides were spilling into the valley and charging toward one another. The armies collided in two long lines along
the middle of the valley, and Aidan found himself in the midst of ferocious fighting.
Lacking either arms or armor, Aidan thought it best to lie low. His arm was streaked with the blood trickling from the wound left by the grazing arrow. He improved his defensive position behind Greidawl’s bulk by pulling the huge shield over himself, making an iron lean-to where he was hidden and a little safer. He realized there was little he could do but wait it out. The hacking and jabbing were terrible to see. The pounding of swords and axes on shields, the screams and groans of wounded men were awful to hear.
A hand grabbed the edge of the iron shield and flipped it over. His covering gone, Aidan was as exposed and vulnerable as a cockroach when a boy turns over a log. He almost wept with relief and gratitude when he realized that it wasn’t a Pyrthen who had uncovered him but his brother Brennus.
“Now look what you’ve done!” said Brennus with mock sternness. He was smiling. “You’ve saved Corenwald. That’s what.” He motioned to Percy, Jasper, and Maynard, who were also searching for their little brother among the chaos of the battle. They formed a guard around Brennus and Aidan.
“You’re bleeding,” observed Brennus. “How bad is it?”
“Not bad at all,” Aidan assured him. “But still, I wouldn’t mind getting out of here.”
“You’ll be back in the camp in no time.”
Maynard, Jasper, and Percy formed a rear guard. Brennus put a protective arm around Aidan, and they made for the Corenwalder camp. As they ran, Brennus
leaned in toward Aidan’s ear and said something that astonished his little brother: “Hail to the Wilderking!”
Though Aidan insisted he was fine, the brothers deposited him at the surgeon’s tent to have his wound treated. Then they returned to the battle.
The surgeon, an old man with a white mustache and wet blue eyes, dabbed at Aidan’s bloodied arm. “Just a flesh wound,” he observed. “Not much more than a nick.”
He reached for a jar of turpentine gum. “This is going to burn a bit,” he warned, “but it will seal you up nicely— and keep the termites out!” He laughed at his own joke. “There,” he said as he coated the wound, “good as new.”
The surgeon was wrapping Aidan’s upper arm with cotton strips when he noticed the feechiemark on his forearm. “What happened there?” he asked.
“That?” answered Aidan, a little startled. “That’s a … that’s a …” He decided it would be better not to get specific. “That’s a burn scar.”
“It almost looks like an alligator,” the surgeon remarked. “Look, there’s the mouth; there’s the tail curving around.” A look of remembrance lit the old surgeon’s face. “I once saw a scar like this one on the forearm of a man I was treating.”
Aidan’s eyes grew wide. The man the surgeon spoke of must have been a feechiefriend. “Who was it?” he asked eagerly.
“Oh, heavens, I couldn’t possibly remember. It must have been forty years ago. I was still a surgeon’s apprentice.” He smiled wistfully to think about those days. “And besides, it was in the middle of a very hot battle.
I’ve forgotten the man—if, indeed, I ever knew him—but a scar like that is hard to forget.”
The din of battle resounded outside the surgeon’s tent. “But there are Corenwalders lying hurt on the field even now. I must go to them.” He began making preparations to leave.
“You’ve made us all proud to be Corenwalders, young Errolson,” the old man announced.
Aidan smiled at him. “Corenwalders free and true.”
“Hear, hear,” the surgeon answered. “I’ll leave you here to rest. You need it. Just stay here, and I’ll be back to check on you when I can.” He gathered up the last few things into his surgeon’s bag and left for the battlefield.
Aidan lay back on his cot and wondered for a minute about the mysterious feechiefriend that the old man had met so many years before. But only for a minute. Aidan had no intention of lying in a tent while his brothers and countrymen battled an invading army.
The camp was more or less deserted, so he walked to the armory and helped himself to a small sword and buckler. Then he hurried out to the battle, sword raised, mouth stretched with a primal shout of exuberance.
By the time Aidan got to the battle valley, his countrymen had pushed the skirmish line all the way back to the slope leading up to the Pyrthen camp. At last, thought Aidan, they look like the mighty men of Corenwald, riding fast and striking hard in defense of their island. But it is no easy matter to fight uphill, even for men who, like the Corenwalders, have just rediscovered strength they forgot they had. Fighting downhill, the Pyrthens, with their superior numbers, were able to hold their line at the
edge of their encampment. They dug in, and the Corenwalders were unable to get the momentum to push up out of the valley floor and overrun them. The Corenwalder line was stretching thin.
By the time Aidan caught up to the rear guard, King Darrow realized that his army had to fall back and regroup before it could take the Pyrthen camp. The retreat flags went up, and the Corenwalders began to withdraw eastward toward their own encampment. The Pyrthens didn’t pursue. They had had all they wanted of the Corenwalders that day; they seemed content to lick their wounds and wait for the next day’s fighting.
Aidan had fallen in with a cluster of soldiers from the Tambluff Regiment when a crack of thunder split the air above him. Striking the earth about fifty strides ahead of him, the thunderbolt sent earth and men flying through the air. Aidan looked to the sky. It was cloudless. Another clap of thunder was followed by another shower of earth. A third flattened two tents in the Corenwalder camp.
Behind him, from the Pyrthen camp, Aidan heard taunting cheers. He turned to see what was happening, and through a film of white smoke he could see that the Pyrthen foot soldiers had withdrawn from the valley’s edge to make way for three heavy carriages. Laid across each carriage was a huge tube of black iron, as big around as a saw log and almost as long, pointed toward the Corenwalders. A cluster of Pyrthens worked busily around the near end of each tube—though Aidan couldn’t see what they were doing. Then one of the soldiers poked what appeared to be a mop into the tube and jabbed it around a few times, and a soldier with an
officer’s plume touched the other end of the tube with a lit pine knot.
Then the thunder came again. A flash of white fire shot out of the tube’s open end. A high whistle soared over Aidan’s head, and behind him, nearly at the Corenwalder edge of the valley, came the earth-shattering crash and the screams of men thrown skyward by the impact.
The Pyrthens, Aidan realized, had figured out how to make thunder in those iron tubes. And mule teams were pulling three more into position. Aidan joined the throng that was now running panic-stricken from the enemy they were so thoroughly defeating only a half-hour before.
The camp offered little protection. The Pyrthens could easily throw thunder clear across the valley. The only good news was that the Pyrthens, though they knew how to make thunder, weren’t very good at making it go where they wanted. The great majority of thunderbolts landed in the valley short of the Corenwalder camp or in the open plain beyond.
Nevertheless, the camp was in an uproar. The thunderbolts that did find their way into the camp did considerable damage, and the shaking of the earth and the deafening noise shattered the Corenwalders’ nerves. By now, they could barely see the Pyrthens for the curtain of white smoke that issued from the thunder-tubes. They mostly saw the bright flash of the thunder-fire. The sweet, acrid smoke, carried across the valley by a westerly breeze, burned their eyes and noses.
In the confusion, Aidan was unable to find his brothers’ tent, so he picked his way through his thunder-
struck countrymen to the command yard. That was, after all, where his tent was. The guards recognized him and saluted as he passed their checkpoint.
Inside the command yard, King Darrow and half a dozen noblemen were circled around a crater where one of the thunderbolts had come to earth. Lord Grady was tapping his walking stick on something smooth and metallic at the bottom of the crater. It was the top half of a big iron ball, a little smaller than a cantaloupe.
“It’s not thunderbolts they’re throwing at us,” Lord Grady observed. “It’s these iron balls.”
Another deafening explosion shook the earth not twenty strides away. “They might as well be thunderbolts,” Selwyn remarked grimly, “for all our ability to defend against them.”
“Oh, the fiendish imagination of the Pyrthen!” groaned Lord Radnor. “To rain down destruction from half a league away!”
King Darrow had been deep in thought this whole time, pondering his options, racking his brain for a plan that would get them out of this predicament. Now he spoke: “That’s enough poor-mouthing. We haven’t come here to lose this battle. The One God is with us.” He looked at Aidan. “Young Errolson showed us that. If we despair, our men will despair. And Corenwald will be lost.”
Another thunder-ball whistled overhead and flattened a tent four rows over. “We mustn’t despair,” the king repeated, more to himself than to anyone else.
Just then two soldiers approached. One wore an officer’s uniform; the second was an older foot soldier—too old, really, to be a foot soldier—who had the earthy, sun-
burned look of a farmer. They both saluted King Darrow. “Your Majesty,” began the officer, “I am Captain Perrin of the Bluemoss Regiment. This is Harlan Ebbetson, one of the soldiers under my command. He has information you may find useful.”
The king addressed the foot soldier: “Speak, Harlan. Your king listens.”
The soldier removed his helmet to address the king, but when the earth shook again with the impact of a distant thunder-ball, he thought better of it and put it back on with a sheepish nod to Darrow. “Your Majesty,” he began in the slow drawl of the Middle Shires, “when I was a boy, my family farmed this land. Our house stood hard by that big live oak where the giant stands—” he caught himself and nodded toward Aidan, “—used to stand to taunt us every day. The house is gone now. The Pyrthens burned it to the ground in the first invasion, and we moved away to Bluemoss.”
Another Pyrthen thunder-ball shattered the air. When the noise subsided, Harlan continued. “About fifty strides beyond that oak tree, there’s an underground cave, just a hole in the ground. We used to store cheese and eggs and smoked meat there in the coolness.” Amid the chaos of battle, the old farmer’s slow, meandering way of telling the story was maddening. The noblemen grew fidgety.
Harlan pointed north. “And up this way, about a half-hour’s walk, there’s another cave.”
Selwyn spoke impatiently. “Enough preliminaries! What’s your information?”
Harlan blinked at the nobleman, then blinked again. “Well, sir,” he drawled, “that
was
the information.”
The captain broke in to explain. “The point is, the two caves might connect underground—like a secret passageway.”
King Darrow was starting to get the idea. “So we might be able to send a troop of soldiers into the very heart of the enemy camp—”
“Right,” answered the captain, visibly excited by the prospect.
“And who knows what havoc they could wreak,” added Radnor.
The captain nodded his head eagerly. “That’s what I was thinking.”
“Perhaps they could capture the Pyrthen thunder-tubes,” suggested Lord Halbard.
“If they were part of a larger assault, maybe so,” the king remarked. He spoke to Harlan. “So what are the chances that these two caves connect?”
“Oh, I’d say there’s a pretty decent chance,” answered the farmer-soldier. The growing excitement among the noblemen was palpable. “But that ain’t the problem,” he added.
“Not the problem?” huffed Lord Selwyn. “Then what
is
the problem?”
“The problem’s finding the way. When that limestone melts away to make a cave, it can leave a maze of tunnels and twisting pathways about like an ant bed.” This news dampened the group’s spirits. Harlan went on. “Then there’s a good chance the path you’re looking for is underwater. Cousin of mine drowned in a cave like that.”
He paused a few seconds out of respect for his cousin. “And dark!” he continued. “Man, you never seen such
darkness. No such thing as daytime in a cave!” He shivered to think of his last expedition underground, more than thirty years earlier, before the first western invasion. “Low ceilings, tight squeezes, sore back, bruised knees— I don’t ever want to go in a cave again.”
King Darrow and his advisers were dejected now. Their hopes of finding a secret tunnel to the Pyrthens were all but crushed.
“But then again,” Harlan added cheerfully, “you might get down there and find it’s a straight shot from here to there. You never know in a cave.”
“So to summarize,” sighed Selwyn, “there’s a chance that there’s an underground path from our side of the valley to the Pyrthen camp. There’s a chance it isn’t underwater. There’s a chance this path won’t have places too narrow for armed soldiers to pass through. There’s a chance we’ll be able to find this path. And there’s a chance that if a troop of soldiers actually made it to the Pyrthen camp, they’d be able to do us any good.”