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.
The Way of Fame
‘WELL?’ GUNDOEN GROWLED. ‘Have you cured him?’
‘Hush: hush, chieftain.’ Melkarth stepped away from the pallet. ‘I have done for his body all that one can do. For the rest…’ She shrugged.
The man upon the pallet lay still, as he had done since autumn of the year before. The gashes on his chest had faded to pale scars, and his chest now rose and fell in even breaths. Melkarth stepped forward again. In her crooked hand she held a wooden stirring-spoon filled with some of the broth still bubbling over the hearth. Gently she offered it to the man on the pallet. His lips caught at the spoon and supped. Melkarth nodded.
Slowly, the man’s eyelids opened.
His gaze wandered about him without understanding. His hand slid across his brow and face. He looked at the two above him: at ancient Melkarth, at massive Gundoen. He sat up. The effort of even so small a feat was apparent. His yellowish skin darkened and paled, and sweat appeared upon his brow.
‘Not so quickly, my lord,’ Melkarth said. ‘It is long indeed since you walked abroad, and it will need time ere you regain your strength.’
The man looked at her as though she had spoken in a strange tongue. His beard and hair streamed over his shoulders and naked chest. He put his long-nailed hands to the edge of the pallet and set himself on his feet. With faltering steps he went to the mouth of the cave. He stood in the open air at the Sontil floor.
‘What is he about?’ Gundoen asked, ‘why doesn’t he speak?’
‘Follow and watch what he does,’ Melkarth said. ‘When the moment is right, bring him back.’
The barbarian muttered something and left the cave.
Outside, the air was warm with the heavy breath of High Summer, but there was coolness still in the gloom beneath the leaf-roof. Gundoen found the Southron at the foot of the hill. There the stream running down the hillside collected in a pond between the roots of a huge tree. The lord of Rukor crouched in an angle of a root, staring down into the dark mirror of the pond, into his own reflected face.
At the sound of Gundoen’s approach, he turned. He looked the barbarian in the face, and his mouth opened as though to speak. Then it closed again, and he turned back to his image.
‘Enough,’ Gundoen growled. He picked up the Southron in his arms, and bore him back to the cave. ‘You are lighter now at least,’ he muttered. By the time Gundoen had brought him again into the cave, the General Extraordinary of Tarendahardil was asleep.
§
THAT NEXT WEEK Gundoen hunted game, and Melkarth simmered herbal broths to feed to the lord of Rukor. Ampeánor won back his strength. By the second week he could climb half the height of one of the trees of the wood; at the end of the third week he climbed to the top and gazed into the brightness of the world beyond. He returned darkened with the effort, thoughtful and silent.
That pass Gundoen and the old woman ate the fifth meal in silence. The lord of Rukor, exhausted by his efforts, slept in the pallet. Outside it was raining, and the raindrops dripped heavily from the leaf-roof far above.
When the meal was done, Melkarth sat weaving by the hearth. She wove cloths of strange designs on a small double-loom. Gundoen watched her, enchanted by the movements of the old woman’s cunning fingers.
‘He does well, our sleeper,’ she said. ‘Did he tell you what he did this pass?’
Gundoen nodded. ‘He recovers faster than I looked for. It is the doing of your potions.’
‘Perhaps. His heart longs to see what they do in the world beyond. In two or three weeks he will leave.’ She glanced over at the pallet. ‘You should go now, Gundoen.’
‘I have thought on it. Maybe I am only a hunter after all, and not a warrior.’
‘So you will stay?’ she remarked after a space.
‘No.’ He stood, and stretched his war-scarred arms until the sound of the joints cracking echoed in the cave. ‘Ara-Karn is my son, and the men of my tribe are in battle. I will leave at the end of the longsleep, and seek out the armies.’
‘You will not.’
The hoarse voice sounded from behind them. By the pallet stood the lord of Rukor. He had cut back his hair and shaved his beard with the war-knife, so he resembled more his former state. But there remained a thing about his eyes and the corners of his mouth, a remnant of the horror of the Darkbeast.
‘You will not go,’ he said. ‘You will remain and await me.’
‘And who are you, Southron, to order my coming and going?’
‘I am the holder of your oath, barbarian,’ Ampeánor answered. ‘You swore to me on your people, the wisdom of your wife, and the first chieftain of your tribe, that you would remain by me and work me no ill as long as we were in this cursed place.’
Gundoen shrugged. ‘Why should I keep that oath? I am only a barbarian, after all.’
‘You are Gundoen.’
The chieftain cast down his head and was silent. But Melkarth said lowly, ‘This is wrong of you, my lord. This man saved your life.’
‘My life would not have been so endangered had he been honest with me and told me we were a walking in a Darkbeast’s trail.’
‘And so you owe him nothing?’
‘I owe him my thanks, and that he has. But he remains a barbarian, as he himself has he said, and my captive.’ He spoke in Bordo, but Melkarth answered him in the tongue of the far North.
‘This you will regret,’ she said.
‘I will do it all the same. And you, Gundoen,’ he said in the language of the tribes, ‘put from your mind all thoughts of leaving, until I am ready. Goddess willing, that will not be long.’
Gundoen spat into the embers and went to the mouth of the cave. His great shoulders cast a shadow across half the cave, and then he was gone. Ampeánor took the barbarian’s place at the hearth, and stared into the flames.
‘Let him go, my lord,’ Melkarth said. ‘Release him from his oath.’
‘No.’
‘Would you be bound to a barbarian’s fate?’
He looked at her angrily. ‘Old woman, what do I know of what has gone on beyond these trees? What cities have fallen, and what is the state of things in Tarendahardil? There is a woman there whom I love more than wealth or life or honor. Do you know what has become of her? Perhaps you do, but you will not tell me. That man is my only winning for a year’s labor. His life is of value to the barbarians, and he holds the secret of the whereabouts of Ara-Karn. I will not let him go.’
‘Yet perhaps he also has a woman he loves, and who loves him.’
‘How dare you compare his love to mine? He is a filthy, ale-swilling barbarian, born where they know nothing of honor or custom.’
‘Ah yes,’ she said, nodding. ‘I had forgotten. No, my lord, there is no comparing you two.’
‘Do you mock me? Listen to me then, and hear the sort of love of which I am capable.
‘When I was a youth, the Rukorian court was among the most licentious in all the Empire, second only to Vapio. My father was a sour, retiring man who all his life had been backward with women, until he fell into the snares my mother laid for him. She was a Vapionil, the third daughter of a lesser noble of small estates. But she possessed a perilous beauty that made her the master of any man. She seduced my father, easily; he could scarce believe his good fortune until he discovered just how good that fortune was. Some at my father’s court remarked that my mother would have made a great hetaira; many said she already was one, in all but name.
‘I grew up in that vileness, but I saw the vileness about me and despised those who took part in it. I saw my mother surrendering herself to innumerable lovers, and my father – if indeed he was my father – grow ancient before his time, a dotard nursing a bottomless wine-jug.
‘The painted women threw themselves about me, but I repulsed them. I roamed the hills about Torvalinal; I locked myself in the tower to pore over treatises by the masters of hunt and war. When my time came, I took the Pilgrimage of Elna; when I returned I put myself to the training of my lancemen, whom I made into the finest in the South. Thus I remained chaste, until my seventeenth year.
‘That year saw my first command. The pirates of the Isles had become a grave danger during my father’s years. Those monies that should have maintained the fleet had gone instead to feed my mother’s lust. The pirates had become a nation unto themselves, building city-strongholds in full view of the coast. Not a merchantman on Elna’s Sea but risked attack; and they were led by a captain famous for his battle-skills and cruelty. Twice the Emperor had sent Imperial navies against him; the pirate mocked us, and returned the generals’ heads on silver basins.
‘It was against this madman I set forth.
‘The excuse of it was a woman. A daughter of one of the Rukorian houses had been taken for ransom. More gold was demanded than we could pay; if it were not paid, the pirate threatened to sell the maiden to the Madpriests.
‘We set out, thirty-five ships and five thousand lancemen strong. For half a year we struggled, this demon of a pirate and I. The length and breadth of Elna’s Sea we battled, in coastal creek, on the hills of nameless isles, even at the edges of the Dark Sea itself. The pirate chained the maiden to the foremast whenever we engaged, to taunt me. I saw her imploring our aid, and felt compassion for her. No lances were ever cast at that ship, for fear lest she be harmed.
‘It was on the brink of the Dark Sea I forced him to a last encounter. He had been retreating for some weeks, and made efforts to slip into the darkness where we could not track him. Goddess was choked with blood on the crests of the swells; the shadows we cast fell like weird giants over the waters. The ships swung about, engaged; the men did battle and broke off, and the ships swung to again. The rowers broke their backs with the effort; the seas were littered with bits of oars, lance-hafts, and corpses. So three weeks passed, he ever striving to turn into the darkness and I to come between him and the dusky border.
‘But I had trained my men well, and we fought for honor, while the pirates only fought for gold; so we triumphed, and I cut the life from the body of the pirate. And the maiden I had saved I cut down from the mast myself, with the blood still hot upon my hands. She was the loveliest girl I had ever seen. Drunk on her beauty and driven out of myself in my triumph, I took her in my arms and drank out of her mouth, and in his very bed, I took her like a madman.
‘She was the first woman I ever knew, but I was not her first man. Oh, far from it! When we were above again, she wept over the corpse of that infamous pirate, and upbraided me for having saved her!
‘It was then I learned the heart of woman. When my father died I cast out the corrupt courtiers, and pulled down the infamous palace my mother had built. Her I banished from Rukor entirely, though I let her keep the rents of certain estates so that she should not go in rags. I saw to my men. And that was enough for me, until I beheld Allissál.
‘After years passed, I knew fully the greatness of her soul, and I knew the fullness of my love. She is pure beyond you other women, so that I pause even to call her by the same name as the rest of you. It is for her sake that I have done all I have done.’
Melkarth bent over her loom. ‘No man can despise women without offending Goddess,’ she said. ‘Have you forgotten all I foretold you when you visited me those years ago, in your Pilgrimage? How you dreamed of the fame and glory of battle, and of being the equal of your ancestors! Alas, it was your downfall. Now you think yourself better than the other nobles of your generation, those who fell with Arstomenes in his pleasure-gardens. Yet I say, O man of a lost age, that it would have been better for you had you given in to the desires of the women of your father’s court, than to go the way you have.’
He stood over her in the firelight. Rage burst from his brow, his fists were knotted at his sides, and he might have struck her. But Melkarth laughed, and struck at his legs with her staff and felled him.
‘Fight against beasts and men first, my lord,’ she advised him gently: ‘but do not make trial of a woman’s strength.’ With that she folded her mantle over her head and left the cave.
The rain had lessened to a sprinkle. All the green stalks of grass in the clearing at the foot of the hill nodded beneath the drops. The smell of wet moss was pungent in the air. Gundoen sat in a stone seat on the hillside. The water beaded and rolled over his great round head, streaming from scar to scar. He seemed like the abandoned idol of an ancient cult. The old woman settled in the seat beside him. Gundoen made no move to acknowledge her.
At length she murmured, ‘Of old habit, I prefer to be alone with my visions, my potions, and the creatures of the wood. But I will miss you when you go, Gundoen.’
‘This is a new song for you to sing.’
‘No,’ she answered. ‘I only wished you go for your own good, and for Hertha-Toll’s.’
‘You never told me how it is you know our tongue.’
‘Oh,’ she said, smiling and showing one or two teeth, ‘yours is a tongue written on the bark of tree-trunks and carved on pebbles in fast-rushing streams. The stone-folk of the mountains speak a tongue very like it.’
‘We were here before,’ he said simply and proudly. ‘Before Elna, even.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why did I bother to save him?’
Melkarth shook her head. ‘You did as you must. I would have spared you, but it was ordained by Her.’
He nodded. ‘Then there is no escape?’
‘None, chieftain.’
‘My wife’s visions will all come true?’
‘All, chieftain.’
‘Will I see again my son, Ara-Karn?’
‘It will be he who decides your fate.’
Again he nodded. He stood, and looked into the forest. ‘Good. It is good for a man to know his end. Let it come! I will spit in its eye when it does.’
The old, old woman bent so that her face was hidden. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It is the way of fame.’
He glanced back at her and frowned. ‘Do not weep, old woman. It makes me uneasy.’
§
AT THE END of the third week following his climbing of the great tree, Ampeánor was strong enough to journey. He fashioned himself a rude lance out of a branch with a jagged stone in its end for a point. With it he brought down game for the journey. Melkarth taught him the trails to leave the Sontil by the shortest path.
For parting-gifts the old seeress gave the lord of Rukor a woven shoulder-mantle, and to Gundoen a necklace she had fashioned out of the teeth of the Darkbeast. ‘I had forgotten it,’ Gundoen said when he slung it over his head. ‘It is good. It is the way I would choose to go.’ He bent and kissed her on the mouth.
The old seeress, standing on the crest of the hill, watched the two men descend the yonder side. When they vanished, Melkarth looked up to the light of Goddess dancing in the leaf-roof far above. Perhaps she prayed: it was a good place for it. After a space she went back to finish her weaving and depart for another of her many abodes. This one had served its end.
§
AT THE SONTIL’S EDGE Ampeánor and Gundoen emerged upon an open, empty land. Ampeánor stripped Gundoen of his weapons and bound his arms with grass rope. The barbarian watched the charan’s actions, a scornful smile on his lips. ‘There is no need for this, Southron,’ he said. ‘I will flee from no man, least of all from you.’
‘I take no chances,’ Ampeánor muttered, drawing the knots tighter.
They ventured upon the grasslands beyond.
Vistas of rolling plains extended around them, conquering at length the high dark wall of the Sontil behind them. The winds blew from a vast distance, huge towers of clouds built themselves into cities in the sky, and Goddess shone over all with a blazing light. From the grasses underfoot the bitter odor of wormroot touched their nostrils.
Ampeánor breathed in that odor. ‘Yes, I know this place. It is the domain of the Charan Farnese, home to the finest horse-tamers in the world. It is the Eglands.’
For seven passes they crossed the plains, journeying North and darkward. They ate the meats Ampeánor had prepared, and drank of streams they chanced across. The flatness of the land spread to all sides: there were only the faintly rolling contours of the land and the great arching vault of sky.
When they camped for the fifth meal on the eighth pass, Ampeánor offered Gundoen his portion of the dried meat. The barbarian shook his head.
‘I do not want that. Give me something else.’
‘What, then?’
‘Cut me loose.’
Ampeánor shook his head.
‘Southron, this is no way for a man to go. It is the way of slaves.’
‘If I loosed you, I could not hold you.’
Gundoen fixed the lord of Rukor’s eye. ‘And if I truly wanted to stop you from bringing me to your stronghold, do you think these cords could stop me?’
Ampeánor considered. In the end, what means did he have to force the barbarian to accompany him besides the threat of death? And death was nothing this man feared. The thought made him see the barbarian in a new light. He had changed, this unlettered savage, since Ampeánor captured him.
‘Do you mean,’ he asked slowly, ‘that if I cut your bonds, you would go with me freely?’
‘Yes.’
‘You would work me no harm? You would go even into the Citadel of Elna, and your death?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
The barbarian shook his head. ‘It’s enough for you to know it’s so.’
Ampeánor shook his head. ‘And the thing that surprises me most,’ he murmured, ‘is that I believe you.’
The barbarian rolled on one side, offering his back and the strong ropes cutting into his massive arms. Only half believing what he did, the High Charan of Rukor drew the war-knife and cut the ropes.
