Samples from books that we have published at Eartherean Books.
This is another in a series from the third book in the 4-book series The Doom-Quest of Ara-Karn: The Iron Gate.
© 2009 by A. Adam Corby
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
Gundoen’s Dream
THE OLD WOMAN led Gundoen through the Sontil gloom. From her rags she drew meal-cakes wrapped in leaves. He chewed upon the cakes slowly, finding in them sweetness and a source of strength.
After a while, she stopped and indicated they should rest. Gundoen laid the Southron’s body on the moss and found a hollow beside a root. He did not know if it was the hour for sleep, but sleep sucked him down for hours.
A gentle prodding of the seeress’ staff woke him.
‘I have looked upon your friend,’ she said. ‘His hurt is grave. If I am to do anything for him, we must get him to my home.’
‘He is no friend of mine,’ Gundoen said. But he shouldered the Southron’s body once more and followed her. Along the path she gave him another cake and he drank from a stream.
After two passes they came upon a steep hill, the base of which was broken by a wall of stone. Into the stone delved several cave-mouths. The old woman led Gundoen into the midmost cave. It was spacious and bright. Against one wall was a low pallet of unsquared logs and leaves, upon which Gundoen laid Southron’s body.
Melkarth removed the tunic and armor. When she laid bare the chest, Gundoen saw deep, blue-green gashes. The stench of them filled the cave.
‘But this is worse even than I feared,’ she said. ‘I do not know if there is anything any mortal strength can do here.’
‘It was the Darkbeast,’ he said. ‘It was the Darkbeast’s tongue.’
The sight and smell brought back memories of the battle. He shook his head and left the cave.
A shallow stream jumped down the hillside. Gundoen stripped and lay in it. The chill waters washed over him, soothing his limbs. It seemed as though his spirit drifted up from the stream-bed like smoke, and filled the space beneath the leaves. The memory of life’s sourness left him, and he slept the sleep of peace.
§
THE WEEKS passed slowly in the Sontil. Gundoen regained his strength, except for an ache about his left hip. He hunted and fished, and gathered the leaves and roots the old woman described to him. That was a task he knew well, for he had often done as much for Hertha-Toll. Melkarth seemed to take a liking to him, and they often sat upon stone seats on the hillside and spoke of the ways of wood-beasts and the turns and tides of weather. Autumn drew to an end, and the bite of winter closed about the Sontil, and Gundoen gathered wood and stored food.
Upon the low pallet the Southron lay still. He had not opened his eyes since the battle of the Darkbeast. Each waking the Melkarth lay new dressings on his wounds, poultices and leaves crushed in steaming water. The bones set and the wounds healed, leaving behind them only whitish scars, but Ampeánor did not wake. Only the green gashes about his chest were unhealed.
Melkarth sent Gundoen out for still rarer herbs. Sometimes the hunt led him far from the hill, and he was gone for many passes. Yet the green wounds did not heal.
‘These are a deadly evil,’ the old woman said. ‘The poison will not leave his flesh, and it is all I can do to prevent it from deepening and spreading. All his flesh thereabouts is choked with it.’
‘Hertha-Toll could heal it.’
‘Perhaps she could. Perhaps I can, but it will take much time. And even then, how do we know this is for the best? You know as well as I what effect this poison can have even on those who survive its bite.’
‘Use a knife dipped in flame, and cut the poison out.’
‘If I did that, I might cut untouched vessels and spread the poison further. It might enter his heart.’
‘Still,’ Gundoen grumbled, ‘do something. This is not working. I grow impatient.’
‘Then why stay?’ The old woman returned to her place beside the fire, where the stone kettle bubbled. ‘I do not hold you here. Return to your armies and your son, and leave this man to his fate. For your wife’s sake you should do this.’
‘You still need me to gather herbs. If you left here for more than the length of a pass, he would die.’
‘That may be true, but why does this concern you? This man is your enemy.’
Gundoen sat on the stones at the far side of the fire. In his hand he held one of the long, curving teeth. ‘We fought and slew a Darkbeast together.’
‘If he wakes, he will take you among his people, your enemies. You will die there.’
‘Old woman, my death has been foretold me so many times that now it only makes me sleepy. First it was my wife. Years ago she told me that Ara-Karn would bring me death. But instead he brought luck and power and wealth. Again and again she foretold evil, but each time the story changed, and nothing came of it. Now you tell me this man will bring about my death, but I think he will be lucky to escape his own. What is there about you women, that all you can speak of is death?’
‘Death is a strong thing, easily scented from afar,’ Melkarth said, ‘especially a death such as yours. And there is this also, Chieftain: these foresights of ours came from Goddess alone, and She speaks to us most of those She favors most. Does it surprise you now to learn that She has favored you – you, the hunter who disdains women? Yet it is so, Gundoen Strong-In-Girth.’
‘She has not done me much good in the way of sons.’
‘That is a tale that, were I allowed to tell it, would surprise you. But this much I will say, Gundoen, because knowing it will do you no harm, and this will be the only chance you will have to learn of it. A child will bear your name after all, and your wife will raise it with the greatest love any child ever had. And that boy will do great things in lands beyond your knowledge.’
‘Well, at least that is better than this talk of dying,’ Gundoen said. ‘But what of the Southron? If you are so wise, do you know what fate will befall him?’
‘Goddess has had nothing to say of him for years. I know no better than you whether my mixtures will save him, or what the state of his spirit will be if he wakes. But if you will heed my counsel, Chieftain, you will pray to Goddess for his death.’
§
FROM THAT WAKING, Gundoen stayed longer away from the cave. He went on long hunts, and returned once a week. The moss was thick with leaves, and the rain came more often. It grew colder in the Sontil. Gundoen ranged about the forest, learning its streams and hills and trees. Yet he did not go beyond the hills where Melkarth lived, nor venture near the Darkbeast’s vale.
Now and again he thought of the army, of his tribe and fellow-chiefs, and of Ara-Karn. He thought of the joy of battle. He dreamt of past campaigns, and he saw the mistakes he had made: he saw in the besieged cities weaknesses hidden before, he saw how to order the ranks of men more strongly. Once he grew so eager for it he would have set forth without delay if only he had known where the army was camped. But in the cave his pride would not let him ask the old woman of those things. He would not admit to her that her words might have cast fear into his heart. He was Gundoen.
So he remained in the Sontil and awaited the Southron’s fate, though in his heart he knew well it was wrong and he should have gone long before.
He brought down a large elbuck of the southern kind, slaughtered it and bore the flesh back to the cave. Melkarth made a feast of it, and even took out beer she had brewed, and that was the first Gundoen had seen of that. Gundoen let the cave ring with his songs. The old woman laughed and clapped her hands.
‘And will you sleep here this sleep, and stay here this pass?’ she asked him. And Gundoen, who would have denied her almost nothing then, nodded.
When he woke, Gundoen felt none of the pains he usually felt after drinking. The cave was still. The Southron lay upon the low pallet, breathing harshly, his chest covered with a yellow muck of herbs. The fire at the hearth was all but dead beneath its ashes. The old woman was gone.
Gundoen ate of the elbuck thoughtfully. He washed the meat down with the water in the stone bucket.
The hillside was quiet. There was no sign of the seeress. Gundoen washed his head in the stream, shook his hair and went back to the caves. He sat in one of the stone seats and shaved his skull with the Southron’s war-knife.
It rained, and Gundoen unburied the embers and built a fresh fire. He slept that shortsleep on the stones before the hearth. The smoke and the pattering of the rain without made him drowsy. He slept past the time of the fifth meal. When he woke, it was in the manner of a beast in the wild: all at once his eyes were open and he woke. It rained still. In the bright circle of the open cave-mouth he saw a low, dark figure.
The figure extended one of its arms. ‘Come.’
‘Where have you been?’ Gundoen asked. ‘I thought you had forsaken us.’
‘There were preparations to be made,’ the old woman said vaguely. ‘Many things are possible this pass. I was readying a gift for you.’
‘What is this talk of a gift?’ he growled. ‘And what is special about this pass?’
‘Do you not know what pass we enter on, then?’
‘It is a cold one, I know that.’
‘At the end of the longsleep, it will be the Pass of God.’
She led him out into the rain. At the mouth of the last cave she beckoned, and Gundoen passed within.
‘I cannot enter now,’ she said. ‘But take this, drink it, be at ease. There is nothing to fear.’
‘I fear nothing,’ he said, taking the bowl in both hands. He sniffed at the dark liquid. It was warmed spice-beer, the kind they served on winter festivals in the far North. The vapor rose through the back of his head as he drank. When he lowered the bowl he found that Melkarth had returned to the other cave.
He shrugged, sat on a stone, and finished the beer. Then he noticed something strange about his right arm. Just above the inner wrist he had been scarred by a burning coal when he wrestled Ara-Karn the length of the village in a fight that had all but killed them both.
Now that scar was gone.
Other scars from other battles were also missing. His skin was smooth and tight and shone as it had when he had been young.
‘Gundoen.’
The voice was strange, yet he knew it.
A maiden stood in the doorway of his hut, tall and slender and lovely in a tunic she had woven by the cunning of her own hands. Her long, thick hair, the color of late-summer straw, was drawn back over one shoulder by bright cords strung with shells. There was the blue feather of a corjan bird as well. Her eyes were like green pebbles on the seabed. It was Hertha-Toll as she had been twenty winters earlier, before their courtship began. She stepped forward, and her body swayed like a green bough in the Spring.
For a moment Gundoen was so enchanted that he could not think of what to say or do. Then all at once he caught her up in his strong young arms, spun her about and kissed her.
Her mouth tasted of the open air, of the salt sea, and the sweet grass of the fields about the village.
They went out of the hut of Tont Ornoth. A light snow was falling on the thatched roofs, but on Gundoen’s head and shoulders it felt like flowers, not chill at all.
Silently, hand in hand, they went down the village. Gundoen cast his eyes from Hertha-Toll to the huts about him. The village of his fathers, how he had missed it! But there were no folk about, only they two.
At the shore the sound of shallow waves curling up to swallow the snow came muffled to their ears. Gundoen knew that somewhere beyond the snow, dark God rose out of the bright horizon.
The Pass of God began.
He looked into his young wife’s eyes. He asked no questions. ‘We will return to the hut of Tont Ornoth,’ he said. ‘Upon this pass there will be no one who will disturb the chief.’
‘Until dark God falls,’ Hertha-Toll agreed. It had been many years since Gundoen had known such hunger for her.
They lay upon each other beneath a pile of pelts. The great old hut was empty. Upon the walls were arrayed the relics of the tribe, among them the tooth of a Darkbeast slain by Oro-Born in a hunt still sung of, and the bones of all the champions Gundoen had slain in wrestling-bouts. Only the hilt of the sword of Tont-Ornoth was lacking. The blade of that hilt had tasted the blood of Elna on the peak of Urnostardil, but Gundoen had ordered a new blade forged for it and had presented the sword to Ara-Karn.
When the time of the fifth meal drew near, Hertha-Toll dressed again. ‘I cannot let you leave hungry.’
‘Ah, I’ve eaten too much of Southron dishes.’
So Hertha-Toll stood at the fire-pit and made food that they shared silently. Both knew that somewhere beyond the thick dark walls, beyond the snow and the white trees and the shining hills, God fell to the dark horizon.
‘There is only one thing I would ask of you, wife.’
‘Ask, my chieftain.’
‘There is a man who lies sick and dying in a cave in the South. He and I slew a Darkbeast together. Tell me how to heal his wounds.’
Hertha-Toll gazed into his eyes, and Gundoen saw the wisdom and the sorrow of the old woman he had wived. ‘And do you wish him saved?’
‘He is a brave man, a good hunter and fighter. He is an enemy, but an honorable man.’
‘It could be better for him as well as for you if he died now as he is, an honorable man.’
‘Wife, when is death ever better than life? Whatever may come to him, let this much at least be said of him: that, one of two men, he fought the greatest Darkbeast and lived to tell it.’
‘Very well. Your friend will live. But I need tell you no secrets. Melkarth knows well how to save him.’
He frowned. ‘Then why has she not done it?’
‘There is only one thing that will dry the venom of the Darkbeast, a mushroom that must be ground fresh-picked: and that mushroom only grows in the weeks of high Summer. Now no more words, Gundoen. Dark God is falling, and this pass is ending – can you not feel it?’
He took his wife in his arms, and held her so tightly it was a wonder she could breathe. He buried his head in the soft hollow between her breasts, and he grieved to think of all that he had lost when he had lost his youth. And when he woke, he found himself in the cave again, alone.
Gundoen rose and shook himself. He looked at his arms and knew again the many scars of his life.
He thought to himself, ‘These are not things to grieve but boast of. Each scar is a prize no other man has won, and no other man can rob me of. I am a chieftain now and general, and a boy no more.’
He took up the bowl and went into the rain. In Melkarth’s cave he stood over the fire and the old seeress mixed her potions. ‘Was it real?’ he asked.
She stopped. ‘Would it be worse for you if it were not?’
‘No. But why didn’t you tell me you could heal the Southron only in high Summer?’
She shrugged, and went back to her mixing. ‘I hoped you would lose patience and go back to your own life.’
‘Would you have saved him then?’
‘Who can say?’
Gundoen frowned, shaking his head. ‘Never in my life will I understand the ways of women,’ he growled. ‘Give me warriors and swords. Iron knows no guile.’
He stood at the cave-mouth. In the gloomy Sontil the dismal rain still fell. The sight filled Gundoen with disgust. Rain was wrong for winter’s cloak. Winter was an old man with a cold white grin.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘this has been no common pass. And I wonder how it went for Ara-Karn?’
