Maerbrang
If one had stood upon that border hill where Gaelic woodland met open moorland, one would have watched the cyclic toiling of the Wind, threading itself amongst the standing stones that crowned the summit like knuckles forcing through the hill’s skin. The tall menhirs suffered that long attention in their weathering: windward faces worn smooth, leeward sides pitted and scabbed with lichen that clung to any surface the gale could not scour clean. Between the stones, sheep’s fescue trembled, whilst tormentil spotted the grass with small yellow blooms, and upon one stone the cupmarks swallowed centuries of rain. The Wind followed the slope down, carrying the tannin-smell of the woodland below, where oak and hazel and blackthorn formed the weald’s margin in a dark tangle, bracket fungi clamping to the nearest trunks like pale limpets, feeding on rot. At the foot of that slope the Wind halted and rolled against the canopy; and for a moment the whole weald cast its penumbra uphill, back to the knuckling stone.
Descending this scarp came a wayfarer smooth-gaited, unhurried yet purposeful, weight slung low in his hips. The Wind worried at him, snatched at loose line of thread and hair, yet his stride remained oiled, each footfall deliberate. Well-garbed was he, in muted ochre linen, the collar snapping in the gusts, and beneath it a sleeveless gambeson of flax quilted tight as chainmail, and over that a harness of oxhide, creaking faintly with each flexion. At his flank hung a spear of ash-wood, its haft wound round with snakeskin at the grip, the scales still discernible beneath lacquer, and the iron head leaf-shaped, narrow, long, etched with a coiling motif that snagged the daylight. From his girdle clattered an oxbone flute, incongruous, thumping against his thigh. His scalp was practical, close-cropped, hair black as hellebore and swept back from the brow, shorter still at the temples where thin streaks of silvering glossed the darkness like frost on burnt timber.
Very calm was that countenance, the eyes amber-green. To them, the whole tumult of Wind and hill was only the rustling of parchment in a scriptorium. The countenance spoke not of serenity but of a certain settled readiness, of body and mind reconciled to violence.
The man, as he entered the wood, brushed a filament from his brow. The gesture was habit; he performed it without full awareness, as a bearded man might twist a whisker. Yet this particular wood wanted that particular gesture ceaselessly, for the spiders which lived therein had woven their snares with such profligacy that the canopy seemed strung with a second, spectral foliage: gossamer catenaries drooping between hazel wands, guy-lines anchored to pollarded oaks whose lopped crowns had thickened over centuries into grotesque boles of knuckled wood, each fist of regrowth bristling with suckers no thicker than kindling. The coppice stools which interspersed the space had grown stranger still, their centres rotted hollow so that hazel rose in bizarre circlets, multi-trunked coronas surrounding black cavities; and from certain angles, the low-cut stumps jutting above the leaf-litter resembled nothing so much as dinner plates, abandoned by some slobbish giant and left to fossilize. Underfoot the sorrel released its acid tartness with each footfall, and this scent mingled with the fungal must of the rotting heartwood and the faintly mineral smell of webs. After a quarter-hour’s passage, with the silk collecting on forearm and collar and spear-shaft in pale striations, the man seemed almost enswathed, as if in the shed integument of some enormous and indolent worm.
And yet for all the density of this woven habitation, for all the evidence of manifold arachnid generations industriously spinning their geometries into the understory, the man heard no song of bird, nor saw the flicker of furred body, nor the winking of mammalian eye within the shade. He found himself almost wishing for some such wary thing whose gleam might surface and vanish when he turned. But naught of the kind did the forest yield; only indifference, which settled over him like the cobwebs; an assurance that whatever spirit-of-place dwelt here had ceased to concern itself with the passage of men.
Prey that runneth sidelong harboreth either cunning or terror - rarely anything betwixt.
The man, Maerbrang, turned that thought; not aloud, yet with the voice of his mind the same as his speaking voice; soft and unhurried. The scout whose track he now followed served the warlord Semprovius Thessamander Kurz; and that warlord did not take as servants men who blunder into bracken without purpose. Had this scout sensed pursuit? The spoor said otherwise: no hesitation in the stride, no backward glances scored in the loam. Yet why not skirt the forest then? One does not vanish into a pathless, nameless wood unless he wishes to misplace something: himself, or whatever clings to his boots.
Maerbrang exhaled through his nose, a faint sibilance. The forest swallowed reasons as well as men. As the way, he allowed, and walked on beneath the boughs.
As he went, the scout’s track unrolled itself in crumpled bracken, in leafmold, in gossamer veils of torn spider-silk—a plainsman’s spoor, the track of a man who walked woods as a stranger. Hours bled as Maerbrang threaded the hornbeam colonnades, a wraith in the dimness, gilded where slants of afternoon pierced the canopy, ere the murk swallowed him again. He paused; knelt; read the disturbed ground; listened; resumed the hunt. Once he found the prints deeper, the leaves more thoroughly crushed. The scout had stood here, straining perchance to hear something, and Maerbrang halted now too, scanning. He closed his eyes, flared his nostrils, let the forest soak him in its creaky vegetal musk.
Through that hush came a single liquid spill, a descending trill that pierced the silence like a wedge through green timber. Still stood Maerbrang, breath held. He opened his eyes.
The goldfinch perched on a wand of hazel at the level of his eyes, its claws hooked into the lichenous bark, still as a carved thing: the citrine of its breast deepening to saffron at the coverts, the jet cap glossed, the white chevrons of its wings banded against velvet black, each barb and barbule distinct. The finch canted its skull and fixed him with one eye; no flightiness was in that bead of vitreous jet, but a curious appraisal, unafraid.
The goldfinch turned its head with a motion slow. Its eye, black as sloe, held the green gloom of the hazel-brake.
“Woe upon thee,” it said, and the voice that issued from that painted throat was clear and carrying and altogether cold. “Woe upon thee, and upon thy lord Guss, and upon all that have sworn him fealty. It was told me, ye shall all of you meet your deaths in the hall of Semprovius Thessamander Kurz. I would it were not so, but this is so.”
Maerbrang unstopped his waterskin. He let fall a thread of water into the moss at the hazel’s root, where it darkened the earth and vanished. The bird watched. He said: “What quarrel hath this Semprovius with us, then, that he should compass our deaths? Methinks a man slayeth not his neighbour’s oxen save he hath first counted some injury against them. What offence gave we him, that our ruin should seem sweet to his purpose?”
The goldfinch descended upon the wet moss and drank, three quick dips of its vermillion mask. Then it hopped back and composed itself, and its eye found his again.
“Others have poured out water for me,” it said. “Thinking to cozen my secrets for so little. But I am a journeyer on the Wind between worlds, and water is easy-found for such as I. I tell thee this not for thy water’s sake.”
“The cause of our end, it seemeth, is blown beyond my reaching. So be it. Yet tell me the manner. A man may walk more steadily toward a terror if he knoweth its shape.”
Near had Maerbrang drawn, so near he might have cupped the creature in his hands. It did not start, nor spread its wings to flee. It only blinked, once.
“The shaman’s laughter,” it said again. Measured came the words. “That alone I wot of. I can tell thee naught else. The rest is set upon the wind, and thou must walk against it or with it till thy legs be spent. I have told thee all that was given me to tell.”
The sunflower seeds were the vessel. Maerbrang knew this without the goldfinch uttering a syllable. He had learned such lore from the withered hedge-shaman of his youth, mumbling anchorites who tallied each exchange between The Red World’s mortal bodies and The Ochre World’s shades: either a man proffers the appointed oblation and yokes the visitant to the Red World forever, or he spurns the compact and watches the apparition dissolve back into the grey countries. Those who had performed such bindings spoke of it in hushed recollection; how the spirit-creature would diminish into gossamer luminance and sink through skin and sinew until it nested in bone, transmuting some sliver of the summoner’s body into its permanent tabernacle. The goldfinch, were Maerbrang to scatter those seeds before its waiting beak, would vanish from the branch and coil itself into a molar at the back of his jaw, gilding the enamel to lustrous saffron. Thereafter he would possess the lay of the goldfinch: that lilting persuasion which bends the hearts of simple folk, a charm potent enough to make any common man or woman cleave to him with unshakeable devotion. Maerbrang drew forth the pouch. He pinched a measure of the dun-gold seeds between calloused fingers and held them there, and weighed what manner of man he would become, and felt the coldness of that knowing settle upon him; and placed them upon his own tongue.
Fled the goldfinch then.
The Carsobrine was the dreariest morass in all the wilds uncharted, a fenland so steeped in the vintages of prehuman ages that no coppiced stool nor pollarded boundary-ash had touched its verge for generations uncounted. The runnels grooved elsewhere by tusked boar and sure-footed ibex here drank themselves into the sodden loam. No spoor remained save the scout’s faint scuffings, still legible in the peat. Had wan light attempted ingress through canopy gap or streambed glint, it would have curdled first in the sulphurous exhalations that seethed from certain virid pools, holding only the green-mirrored hush of waters that had never learned to move. Yet where the mangroves convened in blasphemous conclave, their boles grown wider and massier than they stood tall, a curdled radiance did penetrate the fissures overhead. Maerbrang, standing amid those primordial trunks, beheld the trackless expanse unfurl before him, like the floor of some drowned and fever-lit temple.
The scabrous log that was not a log detonated from the shallows, brackish gobbets of swampwater flung wide. Its serried jaw yawned, a clawtrap wrought for some antediluvian sloth. As a summer squall cracks the glazed stillness of a lake and lashes the willows to a frenzy, and so sends the marsh-birds shrieking from their roosts, and churns the placid water to a boil of whitecaps, ere it spends itself, leaving only trembling reeds in its wake; just so did Maerbrang’s hidden deftness unfurl from his sliding gait. His seax keened. He gouged the brute’s snout. Carved a furrow through its warted nape. Stabbed four times into the soft folds behind its forelimb, where the pale hide bunched loose above the joint. The fish-dragon wallowed in a slick of its own ichor, maw agape and hissing. Finding this meat too costly, the monster slid, hurt and sullen, back
Thereafter Maerbrang sought a ford, a causeway, some egress from the mire. He found none. The shallows gaped back from all ways. So he clambered onto the nearest tussock where the morass yielded to moss and sedge, and hunted for a path along the verge. The sun hung fixed in its azimuth, albeit the hours bled away. Heat mantled his shoulders and draped across his countenance. The earth beneath his tread sucked and clutched. The demesne buckled through fens and quagmires; each promontory dissolved into slough; each gallery of stunted alder ended in impasse. Twice he retraced his own spoor. Thrice he circled back to ground he could not name. The rival scout’s trail, that faint susurrus of bent grass and disturbed loam he had pursued since dawn, had vanished. Time unspooled in strange skeins. Distance contorted.
And then the dank copse parted. Maerbrang staggered onto a silted strand. Before him sprawled a lake of such breadth that fog devoured its farther shore. Gray and unbroken the water stretched into a mist-wreathed horizon.
Out of that mist came a craft.
The bargeman stood at the stern of his vessel, his posture the patient vertical of a mantis. The fog moved about him, thinning and thickening in turns, now veiling, now baring the weathered mask of his countenance; skin stretched taut over a bladed nose, a strait-lipped mouth pressed to a permanent seam, a brow that jutted over the pooling shade in the sockets beneath. Hair the color of slag hung slicked with tallow against his skull. A coat of waxed linen draped his frame, its left sleeve patched at the elbow. From his girdle a single iron nail on a tarred cord tapped faint rhythms against his thigh. Those long callused fingers, which were forever halfway curled, gripped the hard ashwood pole as he fixed Maerbrang with eyes that held no welcome. From that strait-lipped seam came a low churring, not so much a greeting as the ratchet-trill of a Grebe.
Maerbrang spoke the first words, his voice carrying flat across the mist-wreathed water.
“Passage I require o’er this water, if it please thee.”
The bargeman’s lipless mouth unseamed itself, and from it came a single croak: “Cull.”
A silence festered between them, broken only by the faint slap of current against hull strakes. Maerbrang’s brow furrowed. A name? A command? He extended his hand across the gap of dark water, palm upturned in the old greeting, yet the bargeman only stared. His long fingers neither releasing nor tightening on the punt pole, flexing.
“Men name me Vetch,” Maerbrang said, withdrawing his hand, “and I am bound in sworn service unto Thessamander Kurz.”
The bargeman’s fingers clenched, unclenched, clenched again. “Cannot ferry thee,” said he, the words bitten short. “Kurz-men. Kurz-men only. None else cross.”
Maerbrang let the silence coagulate again. Let it thicken until the mist itself seemed to curdle. “Even so: Kurz’s man,” he repeated. “I spake it plain enow.”
“Kurz-man, eh?” The bargeman’s jutting brow creased. “In truth?”
Maerbrang only watched, his countenance betraying naught; and still he watched, until the barge groaned forward, its driftwood bulk grating against the gravelled mud. Cull the bargeman gestured once with his chin toward the vessel’s black deck. “Thy footing. Mind it.”
Silence held them for a moment. The bargeman’s pole rose and plunged in metronomic sweeps, each stroke a genuflection to the mire, and the water received the ashwood shaft without sound. Soon the fog closed around them, swallowing the shore behind and the shore ahead, until Maerbrang could not say whether they moved at all or merely hung suspended in some null-space between the living world and its Ochre echo.
Maerbrang kept his eye fixed forward, though he felt the ferryman’s attention turn toward him. The creature’s scrutiny came first in sidelong flickers, then in longer, wetter assessments; his lids clicking with each blink, the sound obscenely loud in that muffled emptiness. The strait-lipped seam of his mouth compressed further still, until it seemed less orifice than scar. His brow, a promontory of knobbed bone, appeared to swell and thrust itself outward by degrees, until his eye-sockets became twin cisterns of shadow from which fell his yellowed gaze. Maerbrang turned not to that countenance. He kept his breathing shallow and even, watching the fog. Then the bargeman released his grip on the pole with one hand; those fingers uncurling in tiny explosions of knuckle; and extended a crooked digit toward the oxbone flute that hung at Maerbrang’s girdle.
“Liar,” the bargeman said. “Killer. Serpent.”
Maerbrang’s hand had already found the black ash haft ere the last syllable of serpent dissolved. His spear vaulted from the thwart. He thrust for the ferryman’s sternum with economical viciousness, but the gaunt creature merely canted his bladelike torso with the skiff’s own yaw, letting the iron point hiss past his ribs, and in that same rocking motion swept his dripping pole across Maerbrang’s jaw - a wet crack. Amber light scattered behind Maerbrang’s eyes. What followed was graceless. Necessary. The pole, wrenched. Half-curled fingers hammering at Maerbrang’s throat and floating ribs with knuckles like river stones. Maerbrang closed, seized the bargeman’s waxed lapel, drove his gutting knife into the man’s belly with methodical intimacy; seven insertions. Eight. Nine. Then, with a cording of muscle through shoulder and back, with a single heave, Maerbrang hoisted the twitching ruin overhead by scruff and haunch, and cast it into the vitreous water.
Silent sank the bargeman’s body, and left no ripple.
Villainy hath no set habitation. The thought rolled through Maerbrang’s mind whilst he drove the dripping pole into the murk and felt the barge shudder forward through the vaporous stillness. ‘Tis a migrating word, now nesting in one heart, now another, and at each lighting with different plumage. Would those wayfarers whom the bargeman had ferried poorly naysay this slaying? Would the bones moldering in whatever oubliette Thessamander Kurz maintained for such unfortunates weep for their jailer’s gutting? To them, Maerbrang would appear as the left hand of valor.
Thus had it been with all his killings. Wode the shaman. Others, their faces grown gauzy in recollection. Each death wore the raiment of atrocity only when beheld through the bereaved eye, the partisan eye. Maerbrang had apprehended this truth, even as a whelp. Morality was a prospect, only the hillside from which one squinted at the deed. And if to others such coldness made him ophidian, well then let him be a serpent; but let that serpent be an adder, tame and coiled at his lord Guss’s heel.
With eventide’s approach the sinking sun tinted the fog blackly. Through that grey murrain the far shore at last resolved; not the sedge and mire of Carsobrine but a hummocked headland, scabrous with lichen-crusted stone, where no tree had purchase and the Wind had scoured all softness.
Maerbrang poled the vessel to within a score of meters of the barren strand. He stayed, and looked down upon the deck where the ferryman’s blood lay drying in long runnels against pale wood. The craft had been wrought with cunning: driftwood branches laced and wattled, caulked with bog tar and stopped with rags of ancient cloth.
Something in that patient binding of dead wood stirred in Maerbrang a sudden choler. He raised the ashwood pole high and brought it crashing down through the latticed timbers. Again. The branches splintered; black water came welling through. The barge groaned and listed and began its slow surrender. Maerbrang cast himself over the gunwale into the bog’s cold embrace, swimming with hard strokes toward the shingle. As he neared the shore, behind him the ferryman’s craft slipped beneath the surface, bearing its cargo of blood and craftsmanship down into the silt.
Maerbrang’s knees struck the shingle. He dragged himself from the shallows onto a strip of wave-smoothed slate and gravel. The Wind came sheering down the naked headland, pressing the sedge flat against the scalped rock, scouring the standing water from the hollows until the whole moorland gleamed with mineral wetness. Beyond the immediate tumble of shore and stone, the hills rose in bald succession, each crown worn to a grey pate by centuries of gale, each saddle pooled with shadow and the last thin vapors of the lake fog. Past these, more hills. More grey. Silence. An entire realm of barren undulation stretching toward a horizon that refused to offer tree or wall or smoke-smudge. From some unmeasurable distance came the attenuated shriek of an erne; the cry for the soul, the shamans said, for the eagle carried some unbodied spirit out from the Ochre silence into the wet Red wailing of a newborn’s first breath.
Yet the moor showed Maerbrang nothing of people. If the moor had her settlements, her cookfires, her living hearts, then shuttered she kept them.
Maerbrang crouched low in the lee of a glacial boulder, fingers scrabbling at the sodden pouch where his flint and steel lay. He struck spark after spark into the pitiful nest of bent gorse. But the Wind snatched each ember ere it could catch, scattering his tinder into the colourless air, and leaving him clutching the useless steel with hands gone blue and white. His teeth clattered. He tried again, hunching his body into a Windbreak, curling around the tiny architecture of kindling. Nothing. His fingers were wood. He fumbled the flint into the grass where it vanished amongst the stems. Maerbrang ceased; then, cocking his ear toward the keening emptiness, he listened. For what he listened he could not name: some voice of guidance mayhap, or perchance the song of the Goldfinch. But there was only the Wind’s idiot howling. He shouted back at it, a raw syllable without meaning that the gale devoured ere it had travelled the length of his arm.
For a long moment Maerbrang simply knelt, eyes fixed on the middle distance where the hills repeated themselves unto grey infinity.
When at last he raised his head, as though his skull had filled with an early Spring’s cold river water, Maerbrang marked against the pallid skyline a darker massing of stone. He rose. He walked toward it, his gait a stiff shamble. The dark mass was perhaps a quarter-league distant.
So long was the crossing that the dusk had begun its slow curdling ere he reached it.
The henj stood at the hill’s crown, a work of older builders. The encircling bank now slumped inward, its crest gnawed down by heavy frosts and the patient treachery of bracken roots. The ditch that had once guarded the inner sanctum, cut inside the rampart in the manner of sacred precincts, lay scummed with black water and the decomposing lace of autumn leaves. Whatever oaken or ashwood logs had once crowned the ringwork had been rendered to punk, to loam, carried off by Wind and the scavenging of peasant generations. Yet the mortared plinth whereon they had stood remained: a circlet of dressed stone rising only to the height of a knee, gapped where sections had tumbled into the interior bowl. Within that broken crown the ground showed the pugmarks and scat of creatures who had denned here through the seasons; the cloven slots of roe deer pressed into frozen mud; twisted rope of fox droppings atop a fallen lintel; tufts of coarse hair. Yet it was the henj’s throat that held Maerbrang’s eye longest: an aperture, lips of stone gaping at the enclosure’s nadir, its steps descending into water the color of old bronze. Water that did not ripple, though it wore no ice. Water from which rose the faint exhalation of peat and the breath of interred air and the susurrus of silt long unstirred.
No warmer here, methinks, than on the scoured moor.
Maerbrang’s flint kissed iron and sparked life into a fistful of rotten wood. The flame caught. Held. By its stammering glow he saw himself twinned in the still black water of the passage; haggard countenance below, the point of his spear glinting both above and beneath the surface.
As Maerbrang waded deeper, names crowded the dressed stones: Varek Thornmane, Ulthed the Galled, Brennis Who Kept the Ford. Each name men unmade by time, their souls long since ferried back to the Ochre World by the crows.
What claim have I, that I should trespass amongst such names? Maerbrang moved downward, inward.
But does the river ask permission of the gorge it cleaves? Does rain apologize to the cistern?
Then the torch found it; a name ending in Kurz.
Maerbrang halted, and he began to laugh. Low and wondering was the sound. It rolled outward, struck stone, returned.
But the voice that came back was not Maerbrang’s voice. It was Wode’s voice. It was the dead shaman’s cackle, arriving a full minute late.
The smile died on Maerbrang’s countenance. With one stroke of his spear’s point across the carved letters, Maerbrang unmade the name on the rock. The soft plashing resumed as he waded the remaining length of the vault, reading by guttering light other names. Moldrus. Coriandus Vex. Zess from Dusty Shelves. Names that meant nothing now. Maerbrang did not trouble himself to scratch them out.
The passage terminated in a blind stone wall, with a little platform where the water did not reach. There upon that slight hummock Maerbrang folded himself down, spear across his thighs. Rains might come, belike. He thought idly. Let them drown me in this culvert. His brain fell slowly silent, until at last the warrior slept a sleep without vision or visitation, black as the water.
Maerbrang woke in perfect darkness. His fire-splinters had long since crumbled to cold punk, but his palm found the clammy wall and he groped toward what emerged as grey light. With the light came Wind. And with the Wind, voices; and numerous were they.
Maerbrang clambered from the henj’s maw into a raucous industry—the clank of mattocks biting chalk, the grunts of men heaving baskets of loaded wicker. Dazed by the wan daylight, he blinked. A digger glanced up, tallow-varnished beneath his leather coif. The man’s mouth gaped, then shaped a warning that split the morn.
“Guss’s man.”
The cry multiplied. They converged from their earthworks, and from their cookfires, and from their trenches at the henj’s edge; Kurz’s sworn men, clad in stained gambesons and piecemeal ringmail, their faces hollow from too long a labour, too scant a ration.
Maerbrang’s nostrils flared and his jaw grew taut. His eyes narrowed to flint; each man, measured. His frame underwent a settling, a sinking of weight into the hips; his shoulders squared; his hands found the spear’s grip. High and hungry cut the sharp tip through the air. There would be no quarter asked. He knew their lord’s name had already begun its long forgetting beneath the hill, and they knew it too in their hearts.
Now spear-hafts bristled around him. The foremost man—a lantern-jawed fellow, his gambeson begrimed—spoke through his teeth. “We know thy countenance well enow. What errand draws Guss’s hound hither?”
Maerbrang let his hand rest upon his seax-hilt, scanning the encampment’s margins. “Where lieth your warlord? I have matter would concern Semprovius Thessamander Kurz.”
The man with the lantern-jaw set his eye stabbing into Maerbrang’s. “Lord Kurz summoned his final breath ere the dawn light gleamed.”
“Then ‘twas his last dying, for scarred is his name stone. His soul departeth this Red World for that other, and returneth nevermore.”
“Aye.” The man breathed deep through his nose. “That much I ken when thou didst crawl from that begrimed tunnel.”
Ere the man could speak further a muddy runner burst through the perimeter, gasping. “Sarks. An hundred methinks are their numbering. A mile… mayhap. They come apace.”
Men scrambled toward the stonework ring, snatching up shortbows and hard javelins. Three warriors remained by Maerbrang, encircling him with their iron. “Shall the glaive on thy back serve thee against a host?” the youngest demanded.
Maerbrang folded his arms across his chest. “To what purpose bear I it so? Thou wouldst gut me swift once the sarks lay bloody upon the grass.”
“Perchance we perish first,” another offered. “And then thou walkest free.” The third spat into the waving grass. “No blood yet flows from my lord Kurz’s cold hurts. We must serve no lord’s vengeance now; only draw arms for the foe.”
From the henj’s rim: “They are at the ridge.”
“Thy oath,” the lantern-jawed man pressed. “Swear that thy spear turns not against us in this fray.”
Maerbrang’s smile was a wound. “What worth is an oath from a man that hath walked roads of death, and marred name stones? Oaths bind not such a one. Were I to swear thee fealty on every spirit betwixt here and the henj, thou wouldst be a fool to sleep the easier for it. I should but swear again when the wind changed.”
“They are upon us!”
Twelve spears held the broken henj - thirteen if Maerbrang counted his own arm amongst them. The first wave of sarks met that bristling welcome with the witlessness of driven cattle. A clay sling bullet took one through the eyesocket mid-scramble. Another pitched forward into a stake pit, and an axe crunched through his nape ere he could thrash himself free. Maerbrang’s own spear licked out, skimming through gristle and the soft meat of the throat as one scrambled toward him, and that sark folded sideways, pawing at the ruin of his windpipe as he slithered off the wall. Only a moment passed, yet seven, perhaps eight of them lay twitching in the ditch and the grass, their snarling gone to wet gurgles. Already two more were hauling themselves over the coping-stones, clawing toward Maerbrang with fingers hooked like talons; beyond the embankment’s lip the silhouettes of scores more crowded, and their heads cresting the low wall, and still more pressing behind.
The first man fell within arm’s reach. Maerbrang saw him buckle, a squat spearman from Semprovius Thessamander Kurz’s warriors. He saw another warrior, helmed in boiled leather gone black, cleave through the sarks that had borne the man down. That man’s hatchet split the crown of one and lodged in the clavicle of the second. When he knelt to haul his fellow upright he saw the spearman’s throat gaping, the windpipe shredded to pale ribbons, the blood sheeting down his corslet in a burgundy apron that steamed in the cold.
Twelve remaining… if Maerbrang counted himself amongst that sum.. He torqued his ash-haft free from the sark whose belly he had just punctured. The entrails slopped out in ropes. It twitched.
Then hands seized Maerbrang from behind. He felt fingers of hemp cordage, an arm hooked beneath his chin; he smelled rotted teeth, and something older, loam mayhap. Maerbrang was wrenched backward, his heels skidding furrows in the churned mud whilst the sark bore him earthward. Its knees slammed his ribs. One fist hammered his own wrist each time he reached for the fallen spear three handspans distant.
Maerbrang’s gorge rose. His vision curdled at the margins. Across the trampled garth he saw two more warriors crumple; one took a sark with him into the mire, their bodies interlocked; the other dropped, hamstrung and screaming until a heel silenced his cry. A second sark vaulted a gap in the low rubble-wall, its gaze fixing on where Maerbrang lay pinioned. It loped toward him with that hitching, disjointed gait, limbs remembering purpose but forgetting grace, closing the distance whilst the pressure at his throat squeezed the world to a shrinking aperture of amber.
The doom whereof the goldfinch sang. Here? In this muddy ruin of a yard?
And then Maerbrang’s fingers found the haft of Wode’s mace where it hung at his girdle. That bludgeon arced blind over his shoulder, and with a wet crunch stove the sark’s brainpan. The strangling arm loosed. Maerbrang drank the air. Through blurred eyes he watched a flung javelin punch through the sternum of the sark that had been charging him. It too toppled.
Maerbrang heaved himself upright on weak legs. He snatched his fallen spear. A loping grey shape lunged near; he slid deftly aside and cut its hamstring with the speartip, the blade biting deep where tendon joined the great muscle of the calf. Maerbrang scrambled toward the remnant half-ring of warriors braced against the highest portion of the henj’s ruined wall. Eight bloodied figures there were, panting, blades outthrust. As Maerbrang slipped past a sark, rough hands seized his harness and hauled him gasping into the bristling front.
Though none amongst them could have reckoned its precise duration, the slaughter concluded shortly after. The sarks, doughty on the surface but craven in their bones, had not anticipated quarry that bit. When twoscore of their pallid bodies lay opened and steaming in the ruin, the rest scattered. Back into the weald they fled.
Nine men remained upright, Maerbrang amongst them. The dead piled around them; corpses heaped at their feet, limbs tangled with the defenders’ greaves, fingers hooked in mantle hems and their leather girdles; as though death had merely interrupted their animal fervor. Beyond this mass, other carcasses lay strewn across the henj’s broken floor, draped over toppled lintels, crumpled in the little channel left by rain gutters of old. Above it all the henj wall loomed, that solitary upright slab of lichenous granite, and cast its penumbra over victors and slain alike. Moments before, the air had rung with the wet percussion of iron meeting bone. Now there was only a communal heavy breathing.
With Thessamander Kurz shorn from the world, his warriors found no quarrel left worth killing over. In the wake of the fray, Maerbrang stooped beside the lantern-jawed warrior, prising stones from the henj’s tumbled ring. They heaped four rough kerns over the four fallen men. From the survivors Maerbrang gleaned the shape of the land: where lay the fens, the droving roads, the halls and homes still standing. At dusk the men scattered, each to his own refuge or ruin or master’s hearth; and Maerbrang turned his feet toward his master Guss.