It didn’t matter though, he thought as he
picked up his lute and began to play. The pain in his face as his
one good eye looked out from under the Oak, watching his village
smoke and burn in the distance, the pain in his hand as his three
remaining fingers picked unsteadily over the lute strings, slowly
adjusting to play without two fingers as he went. Even the pain in
his heart. None of it mattered.
As he sent a dark, sorrowful dirge out across
the plain, he played not for himself, or for the tree, or for
anything he had ever played for before. He played for the town, for
the life he had just lost. For everyone he had known and loved. The
song was slow, mournful, and above all, black. He had never played
a song as black before, and it tugged at his heartstrings even as
it helped him. He wove into the song everyone he had known. He
played for Lady Vaen, for Sheane and Mae, for his parents. He
played for the town as it burned, and as it smoldered. He fell
asleep and woke again, and played as the town smoked. He would play
for his village until he could play no more, then he would lay down
and wait for death to take him to the people he loved.
II
Erris woke groggily as the wagon rolled to a
quick stop. Just as its steady rocking had lulled her slowly to
sleep, the wagon’s sudden stop had her awake and blinking the sleep
from her eyes. They couldn’t be home yet, she thought as she slowly
rolled to her front and, pushing on the rough wood of the wagon and
sat up. In between sleep-crusted blinks of her still-heavy eyes,
she could see the canopy of a forest all around the wagon. It
placed them in one of the small, patchy forests that dotted the
path from Oortain’s Copse to the farm, but gave no reason for the
stop.
Before she could sit up herself, someone
unseen grabbed her shoulders and lifted her up, turning her to face
the side of the wagon. Her mothers face was frantic, her brown eyes
touched with fear as she thrust a large, canvas sheet, normally
used to protect goods in the back of the wagon in case of rain,
into Erris’ hands.
‘Quick’ she said, looking towards the still
sleeping Joahn and Boll, curled up side by side as they slept,
‘Hide them.’ Then she moved to the front of the wagon, where Erris
could hear loud, indistinct, angry words. She unfolded the canvas
sheet as she looked at the children, wondering sluggishly,
sleepily, why she should have to cover them.
The two children had their arms wrapped
around each other as they slept. Joahn had one small hand laying
across the side of Boll’s face, clutching his earlobe. Erris
thought of how many times she had been the object of the same
attention from Joahn; earlobes were soft, and for some reason
caressing one helped Joahn sleep. Boll on the other hand had one of
his fingers wrapped tightly in his sisters’ still curly hair. They
barely stirred as Erris spread out the sheet carefully, covering
them as gently as she could.
She shifted towards the front of the wagon,
slowly as to not wake Joahn or Boll, and the angry voices came
fuzzily into focus as she looked forward.
‘We don’t want any trouble’ her father said
as he stood a few paces ahead of Marmot. Omah was with him, one
hand on his shoulder, the other hugging tightly to his arm, as if
to both calm him and use him as protection. In his other arm Johan
held the short, heavy hammer that always sat in the wagon bed, in
case repairs had to be made en-route.
‘Yeah, well that’s just too bad, isn’t it?’ a
man in front of her father said. There were five of them standing
in the road, five broad-shouldered soldiers in bright red coats,
and Erris recognized them from the tavern. She saw the one that had
grabbed her, and the one that had drunkenly leered at Serah, and
the one her father had attacked, his arm bandaged and held in a
sling. She looked around quickly. Yolan and Serah were both sitting
in the front seat of the wagon, arms around each other, and past
them Erris could see Jayke and Johan the younger, standing to
either side of Marmot. Johan was holding Marmots reins, calming the
horse with soothing words and slow strokes to his nose, and Jayke
was on Marmot’s left, slowly untying the straps of Marmots saddle
that held her fathers old rifle in place, clearly trying to do so
without being noticed.
Erris had been looking around, but the
soldier confronting her father had not stopped talking.
‘Y’see, we’ve got a problem’ the soldier
continued, walking slowly towards her father as he spoke. ‘You hurt
one of my brothers here,’ he said as he pointed back aimlessly, and
the soldier with his arm in the sling, possibly broken from when
her father had hit him with the chair, grimaced and spat noisily on
the ground, his lips curling up in disgust, his brow furrowed in
anger, as he glared at Johan.
The first soldier, the one doing all the
talking, had walked close enough to put an arm on Johan’s shoulder,
her father stepping back with one foot and lifting the hammer
slightly.
‘We won’t hurt you, we just want some…
compensation’ the soldier grinned.
‘We’ll give you what gold we have, if you’ll
leave’ her father replied angrily, reaching for his purse with one
arm.
‘Ah, you misunderstand,’ still smiling, the
soldier looked towards the wagon. He didn’t seem nearly as drunk as
the soldiers had all been at the tavern, and he was smiling
entirely too much for Erris’ comfort. Not for the first time that
night, Erris wondered why she had ever liked soldiers.
‘We want your daughters.’ Erris went cold,
and could have sworn he looked straight at her when he spoke. ‘Just
for a while, you understand.’ He said, looking back at Johan, still
grinning. Her father was turning bright red with anger, but the
smiling soldier continued anyway. ‘An hour, maybe two, and we’ll
give them back to you, mostly undamaged. Maybe.’ The grin was still
there, but it slid off like melting wax as Johan growled furiously.
Without the grin, the soldiers’ face matched his eyes: cold.
‘You sick bastard, I’ll give you nothing. You
touch any of my daughters and I’ll…’ Johan started, knocking the
soldiers arm from his shoulder with an angry wave of his arm, the
one carrying the hammer, now clearly more of a weapon than a
tool.
For a second, Erris thought everything would
be alright. Her father had denied them, and Jayke had a gun. They
would drive off the soldiers, return home, and forget that any of
this had happened. They would go to sleep, and wake up early the
next morning, and farm life would continue, and Erris would never
ask to leave the farm again. Erris thought that it could still
happen, that everything would be alright.
Then the soldier did something, somehow
wrapping the arm that had been on her fathers shoulder around her
father’s arm, the hammer falling slowly, heavily to the ground as
the soldier twisted her fathers arm upwards.
‘I knew you’d say that’ the soldier said,
interrupting her father mid-sentence, and there was no emotion on
his face as he stepped into Johan.
Erris couldn’t see what happened next, her
father’s body blocked her view, but her mother started screaming as
the soldier stepped back, and Johan fell slowly to his knees, his
hands grabbing ineffectually at the hilt of a dagger that protruded
from his chest, just under his ribcage. Time slowed to a crawl
again as Erris moved to hold the children down, keep them hidden
under the canvas cover, to keep them from waking and running to
their mother as she herself wanted to.
So much seemed to happen at once. Erris’
mother dropped to her knees and started crawling, her bundled
skirts slowing her, towards her husband, her eyes full of tears and
disbelief. Johan, no longer the younger as his father died several
paces in front of him, yelled and reached a useless arm out towards
his fallen father as Jayke swore, and lifted the rifle from Marmots
saddle. Serah buried her face in Yolan’s arms, trying to shield
herself from the violence, and Joahn began to cry, startled awake
by the screams and yells.
The man who had just killed her father slowly
looked down at Erris’ mother as she crawled painfully forward. He
frowned, as if considering, and then backhanded her hard across the
mouth. Omah went down, blood flying from her cut mouth as an
explosion rang out through the forest around them.
The explosion was loud, louder than Erris
could understand, and it echoed painfully around the trees on
either side of the cart. It hurt Erris’ ears, and she went to cover
them in pained reflex as another explosion rang out, just after the
first one. The explosions were loud, they were painful, they were
death.
Jayke was lifting the old, worn rifle to his
shoulder when the first rifle ball took him. It caused his head to
jerk slightly as it ripped through his throat, spraying a fine mist
of blood over Marmot and Johan, just moments before a second ball
tore open the side of his head.
Erris could barely follow what was happening
through the explosions and the screams, but she saw Yolan jump from
the cart and start in towards a crumpling Jayke, as five more
red-jacketed soldiers walked slowly out of the forest to the left
of the wagon, three rifles pointing forward as two stood to
reload.
Erris wondered absently, in some strangely
detached, still asleep, part of her mind if the jackets were
coloured red to cover up the blood of the people they killed, or
their own, as Johan yelled out, his single word somehow clearly
audible in the chaos.
‘Run!’ he screamed, and he slapped Marmot
hard before taking off towards the forest to the right of the cart
himself. The three remaining soldiers with guns fired on him, and
he stumbled and cried out as a ball took him in the shoulder,
spraying a red mist on the grass in front of him. But he somehow
kept his balance, and made it to the trees before the five newly
appeared soldiers took after him, drawing their swords and turning
to run around Marmot in pursuit.
At the same time, his slap had done the
trick. Marmot, already frightened by the screams and explosions of
gunfire, took off. His eyes were wide from fear and the wagon
behind him weighed heavily on his straining legs as he started to
run.
If there had been more room between them and
the soldiers, if Marmot had been able to gain more speed, if the
heavy wagon had not been slowing him down, they might have escaped.
As it was, the wagon had barely made it to the soldiers when one
reached out and grabbed the reins, pulling Marmot to a sharp stop
at the side of the path.
Serah looked quickly back at Erris as the
wagon stopped, mouthing two short words before she jumped from the
wagon, almost collapsing as her twisted leg hit the ground hard.
She cried out quickly in pain, but then ran, limping heavily,
towards the forest. Two of the soldiers took off after her, and had
to go wide around the horse and wagon in their path, but they still
made it to the forest only seconds after Serah had, swords drawn as
they disappeared into the brush.
There were only three soldiers remaining
around the cart now. Five had disappeared after Johan, and two more
after Serah. One, the soldier who had killed her father, held
Marmot’s reins, and was calmly tying them off to a low tree branch.
The other two, one the bandaged soldier from the fight at the
tavern, the other the soldier that had leered at Serah, were
struggling with a kneeling Yolan, trying to rip off her dress as
she thrashed wildly, screaming and throwing blind, ineffectual
punches and kicks.
Serah’s mouthed words flashed in Erris’ head
as she looked to the forgotten children. They had long ago
abandoned the questionable safety of the canvas cover, and were
crying together in the corner of the wagon.
Erris started trying to talk to them as she
grabbed their arms and pulled at them, trying to move them to the
open back of the wagon.
‘Get up, get up, you have to run.’ she cried
as she pulled, ‘please, you have to run.’ She realized she was
crying too as she pulled at them, but they just shook their heads
and pulled away.
‘I want Mama’ Joahn cried loudly, and Erris
could think of nothing to say. She could hear the other two
soldiers arguing as she worked her mouth noiselessly.
‘Ey, Fraen, Daegon said t’share’ one of the
voices by Yolan said angrily, and Fraen, the soldier her father had
knocked flying at the tavern, replied. ‘Shut it Caer. I got my arm
broke fer this one. I’m takin’ her in the forest. Take th’older one
if y’er so desperate.’ He started to drag Yolan by the hair as he
talked, tugging her jerkily towards the woods. She screamed and
thrashed as he pulled, but his grip with his uninjured hand was too
strong for her to break, and he just grunted as he dragged her
slowly, inexorably, towards the woods.
Erris could hear Serah in the distance,
sobbing loudly as the soldiers with her laughed, could hear Yolan
start to yell at the injured soldier, could hear him curse as he
tried to control her. But she could not hear Johan, or any of the
soldiers that had gone after him. Had he escaped, or had they
simply gone too far to be heard?
Before she could really register the noises
from the forest, before she could process what was happening to her
sisters or think of a way to get the children to run away, Erris
felt a hand grab her hair and lift her painfully into the air.
She gasped in surprise as she rose off the
ground, and kicked back, but the man that had lifted her so easily
just threw her to the ground by the side of the wagon, and kicked
her in the side.
‘Where do you think you’re going, eh?’ the
soldier asked as Erris curled into a ball and gasped for air,
clutching the side of her stomach where the hard leather boot had
made contact.
Joahn and Boll were crying and trying to
reach her when the soldier shoved them too, Boll crashing into
Joahn and both landing hard on the ground.