Samples from books that we have published at Eartherean Books.
This is another in a series from the fourth book in the 4-book series The Doom-Quest of Ara-Karn: Darkbridge.
© 2009 by A. Adam Corby
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
Refuge
FAR AWAY from the happenings in the cities of the world, on the Ocean of Death in the far North, a little village stood. Compare it with Tarendahardil and it would seem of no importance whatsoever. In this village were three or four score huts of logs and mud, and seven larger buildings recently begun, whose walls were made of stone.
Women and children were there, tall, with light hair, large bones and wide, bright eyes. But there were few men to be seen, and they were small and lithe, with dark hair and eyes black like olive-stones. These men worked on the new buildings of stone and plowed the fields on the hillsides. A few women worked also in the fields, and the children went in bands into the forest, bows and long sacks slung across their shoulders. The children vanished in the dappled shade of the forest, their legs brushed by the light-green ferns. Spring had reached at last this final corner of the world, after a bitter winter: time to stock the storing-holes and eat fresh greens again.
Above the sandy clearing in the center of the village one hut stood apart from the others, built of stout logs thicker than a woman’s hips, sealed with bark and mud and straw. A long veranda faced the clearing, roofed with fresh green boughs. White smoke poured from the hut’s roof-hole, filling the village with the savor of roasting meat.
From the open doorway of that hut, a squat old woman walked on the veranda. She wore an old woolen dress with a shoulder-mantle pinned about her neck. Some women hailed her from below the sandy clearing; the old woman nodded and answered them.
She went through the village, moving slowly as though to soothe the ache out of her bones. A band of merchants had arrived and were unloading their packs and rich bundles from the backs of their ponies in the clearing. With boisterous cries the merchants called the women of the village, displaying their wares. Other women came running, but the old woman went her way.
At the edge of the village she looked out over the Ocean of Death. There for generations beyond memory the village had sent their dead in simple little barges. The stony beach was littered with fishing boats, most in ruins. Away from the fishing boats a marble shelter stood above the beach, six ornate columns with a roof tiles. Inside the shelter a death-barge hung on silk-rope lines. The beach was empty of people, all the women and their children having been drawn by the call of the merchants. But one woman, a stranger, stood in the shadow of the marble shelter, staring upon the death-barge.
It was a death-barge of curious workmanship. The rim was a band of hammered gold. On the prow there was a sunburst of gold half-eaten by the sea, and along the sides were ornate friezes of oddly-angled charactery impossible to make out, and stylized figures writhing in odd postures.
The woman looked at it as if awed by the barge’s frailty and seeming antiquity. She was not of the tribes, but she was young, tall, and in rags and a dark green hooded hunting-cloak from Gerso, fastened with a blood-red opal brooch-pin cut in the likeness of a spider. The rags were open below the long throat, baring most of the bosom; before it the women was held a long jade-handled knife of workmanship as curious as that of the barge.
‘Are you a pilgrim, child?’
The stranger woman started. For a moment she stared at the old barbarian women, saying nothing; then thrust the dagger into her rags.
‘A pilgrim, yes.’ She spoke the tongue of the far North well for one born below the Spine. ‘Did he – did Ara-Karn truly cross in this?’
‘This very barge, to come to land upon this very spot,’ the older woman answered. ‘Kuln-Holn drew it ashore despite all the fear in his heart. We knew not what to make of him then. My man was the one to name him; yet he never received naming-gift.’ Heavily the bosom of the old woman rose and fell. ‘Well, and there was nothing else to do. I was afraid of him, but all the same I helped spare him, and so became his tool.’
She stooped and placed beneath the shrine the basket she had brought. In the basket were vessels of food, drink and clothing. In the straw-mixed sand around it were many other offerings. The tribeswoman seemed even older now, standing with her broad shoulders bowed as if in prayer. Strands of gray hair slipped from the shoulder-mantle and fluttered in the wind. She stooped lower, raised herself, and stepped back.
‘Of course the poor take most of it, and birds eat the rest,’ she said. ‘But still I have hope that Goddess will see that the offering has been made, and provide for my husband, who is unvoyaged. I am now the leader of this tribe in the name of the Warlord. I am called Hertha-Toll. Won’t you come with me, child?’
Silently they walked up from the beach. The older woman leaned a little on the arm of the younger when it came time to mount the slope just at the edge of the beach.
‘My husband was Gundoen Strong-In-Girth,’ the old woman said. ‘Many children I bore him, but none lived to reach the rites of blood and spear. And even so he loved me. He might have taken any of his concubines to wife, but would not. He was a hunter, a spearman, and chief over all our tribe, but he loved to wrestle best of all. And never once, not even in his youth, was he beaten, save only by Ara-Karn who fought with more than strength. What a fighter my husband was! But he perished in the wars, in one of the cities of the Southron folk. They would not tell me how he died. They only said he arose like the smoke of a feast-fire out of his own body and soared to the Happy Shores under the guidance of Ara-Karn himself. That is what they told me. But I know the truth of it, even if they do not.’
They reached the edge of the sandy clearing, where the women of the tribe clustered around the merchants’ wares. The women shouted as they tried to outbid one another, waving hands full of gold above their heads. Hertha-Toll tugged at the younger woman’s sleeve and led her past smaller, poorer huts.
‘Yes, he thought it was only a joke when it began,’ Hertha-Toll said. ‘A way to mock poor Kuln-Holn. Kuln-Holn was the man who readied our dead and took the barges out, and he was filled with the fear of Goddess and the promise of great things to come. You know, he was the only one who truly in his heart believed that man to be a god.’
They passed by a charred ruin. ‘That was Kuln-Holn’s hut. He gave it to his daughter and her husband and went away to serve that man. I always liked Turin Tim, she was a hard-working girl. When the word came that her man had been killed, she took to drinking the fiery southern wine. One pass her hut burned to the ground: she was dead, and her little boy too. No one knew what happened. They called it the work of the immortals, but that was ever the way with ignorant folk.’
The green branches cast webwork shadows over them, and the salt tang of the sea vied with the savor of the roasting meat. Above them on the hillside the dark-haired men labored to raise the long, gaunt walls of stone of the new buildings.
‘As you can see, ours is now a wealthy tribe. They bring us robes of silk, golden goblets, wines and linens. We are growing fat as Southrons, as poor Alli’s jest once went. Still, it does not suit us. We were not born for riches. The younger girls hardly know what work is anymore. We have too many slaves. Once we despised slaves – now we rely on them. Well, maybe it is just my age showing. Surely it is lonely here without the men, I cannot blame the younger women, whose blood is hotter. And Kuln-Holn foresaw it all. He prophesied an age of peace and fatness, and here it is come already. Myself I was not so wise, seeing death and burnings but not beyond.
‘Ara-Karn has given us much,’ she said suddenly, bitterly. ‘Even at his price. Do you know, my dear, that this winter, only six children died of hunger. Think of that: only six dead in the whole village.’
They stood now before the steps leading up into the great hut of Tont Ornoth. Here of a sudden the nameless woman hesitated, and seemed not to want to go on. But the dead chief’s wife held her by the arm and spoke soothingly to her, the way a hunter speaks to a bear, an untamed hound, or an unbroken pony.
‘Please, child,’ she said, ‘enter and guest with me. There will be a goodly meal for you and a soft dimplace, and unworn linens from southern looms. And we will bathe you with cleansing oils. It grows lonely here now, and I should be glad of the company. Why do you draw back? None will harm you or speak words against you here. There are no wars in this place. Come, and I will tell you of my husband and, if you like, of Ara-Karn.’ In the end the stranger ceased resisting, and let herself be drawn into the darkness of the smoky hut.
And so it came to pass even as Kuln-Holn had foretold, that the Empress of Tarendahardil the City Over the World came as a shabby beggar to the tribe that had fostered Ara-Karn.
