Warrior's Tales

Danielle Longbow’s feet ached. Her boots were almost worn through, and she had blisters from heel to toe and up to her ankles.

            “What was it like when your mother threw you out?” Anne Hyland asked.

            “Shit,” said Danielle without looking at her friend.  The forest they were walking through had been home to more than one ravenous pack of wolves that had taken them for prey. Life or death though it had been, she hated to kill such magnificent creatures.

            “Shit, that’s descriptive.” Anne stopped and prodded her own foot through her tattered boot and winced. “Fucking wolves, our poor horses.”

            “They were hungry. It’s not as if we haven’t killed when we had to. We killed the wolves.”

            “Yeah.” Miss Hyland sighed. “You said you were homeless. I want to know what that was like.” She had her veil tucked out of the way inside one of the brown headscarves they had all worn to escape the city of Jekopran.

            “Try it then,” said Sir Longbow, gasping as one of her blisters burst with a hot, wet pain. “No description could do it justice.”

            “Did you sleep outside, under the stars?”

            “Yeah, it was really romantic shivering in the rain because the village had disowned me.” She kicked a stone that went flying off into a bush. Her foot howled with agony, making her regret the outburst.

            “Come on, you’re not homeless anymore. You’ve got a roof with Lupita. It’s just a story now. Tell me. We’ve got hundreds of miles to walk, and I’m bored out of my mind.”

            “FINE!” Danielle growled with fury worthy of a wolf and glared at her friend. The others in the party kept their heads down and kept walking east.

            “I stole scraps that people had thrown out. I caught fish in the river with my bare hands. I slept in the house of a murdered family when I had the nerve. I heard the whispers of the wind, or the spirits and I didn’t know which was which. I slept in my own piss because I didn’t want to move.

            I didn’t talk to anyone for months at a time. People ignored me as if I wasn’t there. They pretended I was invisible. When I tried to talk to them, they acted as if they didn’t know me. I cried myself to sleep because it felt as if I was a ghost.

            In winter, when the water was frozen, I had to beg. I got so thin I could see my bones. My hair started to fall out because I wasn’t eating enough. People looked at me with fear in their eyes like some rabid dog. They threw food at me to get rid of me.

            I ate things that made me ill because I wanted something in my stomach. I nearly died eating poisonous mushrooms because I didn’t know which was which. I learned the hard way what to eat and what made me sick.

            Sometimes it felt as though I would be better if I was dead. I just wanted there to be an end to the loneliness. I wanted people to pay attention to me. If I was a body in the street, they would have to pay attention to me. Maybe my mother would even cry if I was dead. Would she finally admit I was her daughter that way?

            I didn’t do it because I was scared people would just leave me there to rot. I didn’t want my body to be picked at by birds and to have people see me like that. People who used to play with me, talk to me, who had known me all my life might have just left me.

            I never knew why. You met my mother. You heard her story. All of it was because of her fear. She feared who she was, so she pushed me away. Part of me is never going to forgive her for that. She turned my home against me, for years.”

            “Years?” Anne asked, her brown eyes tried to lock onto Danielle’s hazel eyes.

            “Years.”

They walked in silence for miles more. The sound of stomachs growling punctuated birdsong and the whisper of the wind in the leaves. Trees there were not the ones Danielle knew from Crann. There were no oaks, willows, ashes, or birch. The trees there spread out more from the trunk. Each was like a dozen trees stuck together at the base. Enormous leaves cast the green shadow of their veins upon the travellers.

            Furry caterpillars crawled on the leaves and made Danielle’s skin itch to look at them. A rainbow of butterflies fluttered from flower to flower at their feet. The footprints of small mammals, possibly deer, cut tracks across the forest floor.

            Variants of the razor-sharp grasses that had cut her hand days before grew in any patch of light beneath the canopy. All the party members had learnt their lesson and stayed clear of what Barra called knife grass.

            Barra Mohani led them through the foreign lands with confidence. The red acolyte of the Church of Red Knives had been to Iripth before. Speaking the language and knowing the flora and fauna made him their best guide as they ventured towards the unknown.

            “What’s your story, Barra,” Anne asked. Red and orange tints in the blue sky told them it was time to make camp. They found dry wood for a small fire and made a hasty shelter with branches and leaves around them.

            “My story? What do you mean?”

            “How did you become an assassin?” Anne asked, with the tact of a punch in the face.

            “How did I become a red acolyte you mean?” The followers of the God of Dire Necessity didn’t like to be called assassins, even though they openly killed for money.

            “Sure, that.”

            “My parents couldn’t feed me, so they gave me to the church. I worked with the brown acolytes until I was old enough to begin my training.

            When I was three, they started training me to fight. I learned to use everything as a weapon. There’s a test where you’re shown a table laid out for dinner in a room with weapons on the wall. The tutor asks you how many weapons are in the room. The new children count the weapons on the wall and give that as the answer. Later the same children will realise that the tutor has weapons hidden in his clothing. Eventually they realise that everything in the room can be a weapon, or they’re told. The tutors prefer if they don’t have to point it out to you.

            I was taught languages by men and women from all over the world. They made me practice the accent constantly. After a year with the tutors, I was forbidden to speak to them in any language but their own, with any accent but theirs. They told me about the town or village they had grown up in. I had to memorise local history; things people who had lived there would know. I was sent away for months at a time to those places to learn from the locals, to blend in.

            I was taught to steal, to move so quickly no one sees my hands.” Barra’s hand disappeared and had a knife in it for a moment. “I was taught to be the most inconspicuous version of myself. How to be so boring no one would ever notice I was there.”

            “You’re good at that, mostly because I wish you weren’t here. You have one of those faces where you could name anywhere, say that’s where you come from, and I would just believe you.” Anne winked to the assassin, who shrugged. She turned to Barra’s fellow. “Your turn assassin number two.”

            “My name is Una,” said the petite woman with a hint of anger in her voice.

            “Assassin Una, tell us your story.”

            “Grey acolyte.”

            “Almighty grey acolyte, if I get your title right will you tell us about your life while we pass the time, walking through a forest filled with wolves and goodness knows what? I have a thousand blisters all trying to talk to me and I want anything to distract me from the pain. Unless you have some magic that protects you from walking hundreds of miles, day after day, I’m guessing you’re in agony just now as well?”

            The short woman in a brown saree that was presumably once orange gave an exasperated sigh. “Fine. If it will stop you talking. I was an orphan in a village visited by one of the red acolytes. He told me that I could go to a place where I would always have food in my stomach and a bed to sleep in. I would have work and a roof over my head.

            He took me to Carraig City. I joined the Red Church. I did everything I was told. I ate the good food. I was taught like Barra. I went on pilgrimages all over our continent.”

            “Sorry, let me stop you there.” Anne held up her sunburnt hand. “Pilgrimage for you lot means assassination, doesn’t it?”

            “No,” said Barra in a growl.

            “Yes, but don’t say that in front of them.” Danielle shot her chatty friend a warning glance.

            Anne waved away Miss Longbow’s look with a hand. “Sorry. Go on.”

            “As I was saying, I was hurt during one of my pilgrimages. The God of Dire Necessity determined that a man was to live. He broke my leg proving he was worthy.” Una looked at her left leg.

            “I returned to the church. I recovered but I decided that I didn’t want to go on pilgrimages anymore. I became a grey acolyte. That means more intensive combat training. Day after day with traditional weapons.

            Someday I’ll be too old for the life of a grey acolyte, and I’ll take a brown robe.”

            “You know you didn’t really tell me anything there don’t you?” Anne said. “Do you have a husband? A lover? What are your passions?”

            “I’ve had lovers. Acolytes rarely marry. Reds especially don’t like to be with someone they might never return to. The God of Dire Necessity shows us no favour when it is our time.”

            “What does that mean?” Danielle asked. Was the woman talking about suicide missions?

            “You know very well. At times an acolyte is asked to prove their faith in the ultimate test. We give ourselves to the God of Dire Necessity. Our lives for the faith. Our lives for balance.

            “Like the two sent to pretend they were going to kill our queen?” Danielle asked. That was how she had come to know about the Church of Red Knives originally.

            “Yes. Though it is extremely rare. Once in a generation we’re told.”

            “Do you miss being a red?” Barra asked, barging through a gap in the conversation.

            “At times. I missed travelling. That’s why I volunteered for this pilgrimage.”

            “We’re not on a pilgrimage,” Anne scoffed. “We’re trying to find better fire lances before the empire wipes out Crann with theirs.”

            “That’s what a pilgrimage is for us. A mission where the outcome is determined by the God of Dire Necessity,” Una said. Barra nodded beside her. “Anyway, I need to sleep. We all do.”

            “I’ll take first watch. The rest of you sleep,” said Barra.

            “Goodnight,” said the rest, trying to get comfortable on pillows made of their rags and the leaves or rocks around them.

Danielle was woken to take her watch by Sir Euan before he lay down again to sleep. She watched the sun rise on a horizon she had never imagined before. The mountains in the south were visible through the trees. It was a clear day but even so she was dumbfounded that she could see the peaks of the mighty mountains that were many miles to the southeast.

            She fed the fire and woke the others when it felt time.

            They ate berries that Barra said were safe. They were red and sweet but flavourless. There could never be enough of them to make a meal. Her stomach was starting to ache. She knew that ache from her time as a vagrant in Fisher’s Gasp. Starvation was an old friend.

            She wished she had her bow. With it she could have shot any of the birds that mocked them with joyful songs in the canopy above.

            They walked and walked.

            Three more nights in the seemingly endless forest.

            Three more days walking and walking

            Smoke rose from a town in the distance.

            “That’s Makt,” said Barra.

            “Or was,” said Anne.

            “War,” Danielle said. She sighed.

            On they went. Trying not to remember when their own city had been burnt by invaders, their people overwhelmed by invaders intent on wiping them all out.

            “I grew up in Leonor. Born and bred.” Sir Euan shocked them all when he started talking during their slow trudge to the border of Iripth and Thraca. “My father was a knight, obviously. Sir Alan Errol, son of Sir Martin Errol, son of Sir Euan-”

            “Yes, there’ve been a lot of knights in your family, we get that. Get to the story Euan. Sorry. Sir Euan.” Anne bit her lip.

            The young knight smiled and tilted his head. “Yes, sorry. I ramble on sometimes. I remember the tournaments. I would go and cheer on my father.

            I remember your father, Danielle. That apple fell far from the tree I’m glad to say, and rolled further still. He was a reasonable fighter, but he had no discipline. I never saw him sober.

            My father fell to Sir Darren in the first round of the tournament one year. He made a point to thrash your father the following year.”

            “I remember both fights. I cheered Darren on in both, but I bore your father no ill will for beating my father to a pulp in the second.” She frowned. The crowd had roared for Sir Alan Errol as he smashed at her father’s shield with his sword. The year before only a handful had clapped when Sir Longbow had knocked Sir Errol from his feet with a shield bash and forced him to submit.

            The knights in their coloured surcoats had been peacocks strutting before the crowds. Most of them had shining armour. Sir Darren had rusted crap that whined with every hit.

            “Sir Lorenzo Castel, there was a fighter,” said Sir Euan. “Greatest swordsman Crann has ever known.”

            “His son, Fabian is an excellent fighter as well.” Danielle wanted to defend her friend. She had watched Lorenzo fight and admired his brilliance, but his son Fabian had taught her the way of the sword. He was without a doubt the greatest swordsman in the kingdom now, forever in the shadow of his father.

            They came to a stream.

            “This is it. This is the border between Iripth and Thraca.” Barra stepped across as if it was his first step.

            “Good. About time Iripth sees our backs.” Anne hopped across the shallow water. It flowed over yellow sandstone. The grey mountains to the south guarded Thraca’s border with Niquin. They would cross those mountains when they were far enough east to avoid the war between Iripth and Niquin.

            “Fish, I just saw a fish. If you’re hungry, I can catch some.”

            “With what?” Asked Sir Aled Cadogan, who had barely spoken in days.

            “My hands, knight of the fish.” She refered to the sigil of Afon Kingdom, A red fish on a grey background. A blue line cut across that shield from top right to bottom left to represent the rivers that had been the lifeblood of the fallen kingdom.

            “Don’t call me that please,” said Sir Aled, turning grim.

            “Sorry. Who’s hungry though?” Danielle asked.

            “All of us.”

            “Then build a fire.”