The Patrimony

16

The majordomo, Tonos, chose the three fastest runners from among the young men of the hall and sent each off to one of the three hall villages; it was all he could do, as only the two northern warhorses were left in the stables and he knew better than to attempt to mount either of the stamping, head-tossing, eye-rolling beasts. Then he and his picked band of menservants armed and set themselves to the pleasurable job of butchering all other servants—male and female—not definitely known to be loyal to the lady and the True Faith.

He decided to start in the kitchens with that arrogant bastard of a meat cook, Hahros, and his adopted son/apprentice, Tchahrlee, the both of them loudly self-avowed pagans. But such was not to be.

The kitchen, when they reached it, contained no living men. The pantries had been partially looted and Mitzos, the storeskeeper and a good Christian man, lay face down in his own blood with his head stove in. In the bakery, only two or three foot-trampled loaves were left of the day’s baking and the baker, Kristohfohros, was huddled before his ovens with an iron spit run clear through his chest from front to back.

But the most horrible sight was come upon in the caldron room. The legs and hips of a man hung limply over the rim of a huge soup caldron, flesh and clothing smoldering in the heat creeping up the sides of the vessel from the coals beneath. When they at last got the body out of the soup, they discovered it to be Leeros, the pastry cook. There was no wound in his flesh, so they could only assume that he had been forcibly drowned in the boiling broth.

From his fruitless search for horses, Tonos already knew the stables to be empty of Tahmahs and his godless crew as well as of any save the two warhorses. Therefore, he and his murderers carefully surrounded and ever so carefully crept closer to the house of Sir Geros, their reverent bloodlust well-tempered by the knowledge that this quarry was a warrior of storied skills and valor and likely to be armed, as well. But when finally they kicked open the door and burst into the neat rooms, only an old, white-muzzled boarhound lay regarding them with rheumy eyes, his tail slowly thumping a welcome. Raging with frustration, Tonos jammed the broad, knife-edged blade of his wolf spear into the body of the aged, inoffensive dog again and again and again. Then he turned and stomped out of the tidy house.

In the rear courtyard, the pack claimed their first human victims—old Gaib, the hall farrier, and Hail, his strapping but seriously retarded son. Caught in the open, unarmed save for the drawknife he had been sharpening, Gaib was easily struck down, yet he rose again, his lifeblood gushing out, when he saw the mob stalking his childlike son. Lifting the heavy honestone, wooden cradle and all, he hurled it with such force as to smash the ribs and spine of one of the men. Then, hurling his rapidly dying body onto the back of another, Gaib bore him to the ground and had pulled the drawknife almost through the neck before the stabbing spears and hacking swords finished him.

Tonos ruthlessly thrust his spearblade—bloody with the gore of the father—deep into the belly of the towheaded son, then stood laughing as the boy stumbled about, screaming piteously, until be tripped on his own guts and fell sprawling into the gory mud. When one of the white-faced men stepped forward, his sword raised for a mercy stroke, Tonos pushed him back.

“No! Let the heathen halfwit die as did Father Skahbros … slowly.”

Then they went on in search of more prey.

Mahrkos Kahnstahnteenos sat up and yawned widely, scratching at his hairy chest and reflecting that rural life was not so bad after all … not when the alternatives included the distinct probability of dancing a kahlahmahtzeeos at the end of a rope. City-born and bred, he had had no slightest intention of leaving the city of his birth, until his mother had caught him having his way with a younger half-brother and he had, in a rage, slain both of them. Only a few jumps ahead of the law, he had stolen a mule and ridden west and north to fade from sight in the—to him huge—metropolis which was the capital of the Principate of Karaleenos.

For five years, he had plied various trades—footpad, sneak thief, pimp, hired bravo—anything requiring muscle and ruthlessness rather than wit. Then, one drunken night, he had thrown a drover into an inn fire after an argument over the favors of a pretty boy. But such things were not unusual happenings in the low places he frequented, and after the drovers had quitted the city, his life might have continued as usual, had he not compounded matters past mending by slaying the innkeeper—a full citizen—as well.

He had been languishing in the city dungeon for long weeks, awaiting trial and the certainty of either a quick hanging or the slower death of a sentence to quarry, mine or road and fortress building, when a burly jailor and two well-armed city guards fetched him from his cell to throw him, still weighted by his heavy fetters and chains, into a bare chamber some four levels up from his place of confinement.

Shortly, three men—gentlemen by their dress, manners and speech—entered by a door in the opposite wall. All three wore steel helmets, with beavers up and visors down so as to completely cover their faces and impart a muffled, booming quality to their voices.

“Fagh!” snorted one of the men. “He stinks! He stinks worse than the others even. Let’s get this done with quickly. My stomach can’t take much more of the stench.”

“Please … please, my … my lords.” stuttered Mahrkos, blubbering, “I … I didn’t mean to kill ‘im! As God’s my witness, I din’t. I … I jest thought …”

Another of the helmed men waved a gloved, beringed hand in a curt gesture, saying, “We are not interested in what goes on in your sewer of a mind, you pig. Speak when your betters tell you, not before.”

The speaker turned to the third man and said, “The bastard’s name is Mahrkos, no one seems to know his family name … if he had one … and he has not volunteered any. From his accent, I’d imagine he’s from farther south, but he’s lived here about five years, I’m told. He burned a drover alive and strangled an innkeeper, a citizen.”

“He’s to hang, then?” asked the third man.

“Oh, no,” replied the second, grimly. “Just look at the shoulders on him. The mines need men of such strength, the quarries, too. Why he might even live ten years … if he doesn’t prove too intractable.”

Mahrkos shuddered and whimpered, wetting his filthy rags in his terror. Lost in horrible mental imagery of all he had heard of the mines and quarries, and picturing himself enduring the agonies of the drawn-out and hideous death such a sentence represented, he was deaf to the first questions put to him. It was not until one of the gentlemen put half an inch of sword-point into his arm that he again became aware of just where he was.

Carefully wiping the tip of his ornate, bejeweled small sword on a corner of his voluminous cloak, the second man said, “Answer the questions, you whoreson, or you’ll suffer for it! Are you of Ehleen stock or barbarian? Do you reverence God or something else? If we could free you from prison, would you go where you were told, do as you were told, kill whomever you were ordered to kill, so long as you were well paid?”

And so, within a few weeks, Mahrkos had found himself among some eight score other hard cases, gathered from all over the principate and beyond, living in tents pitched in the forest of some duchy south of the capital. For two hellish months, they had undergone intensive military training at the callused hands of grizzled veteran soldiers and a few nobles, these always masked or helmed.

Mahrkos had always thought of himself as tough, dangerous and cruel … but that had been before he learned the true meanings of those three words in that woodland camp. Not all of the men who started finished. In the beginning, some ran away from the harsh discipline and unaccustomed labor under pitiless taskmasters. Those who were run down and killed were the lucky ones; the others were—in the full and horrified sight of their erstwhile fellows—slowly whipped to death, impaled or crucified on a beam lashed to a tree near the camp latrine. Tormented by hunger and thirst and pain, pecked at by crows, they sometimes took three days to die; but still they hung there and it was only when the stench became too bad that the cadremen hacked through the ropes and, after sinking hooks into the rotting cadaver, had the corpse’s former comrades drag the carcass off and dump it in a pit. No one ever got away clean, and, after a few examples, no one tried.

At the end of two months, the survivors of the original number were divided into three groups of between forty and fifty men each, then Mahrkos and two other bully types were placed in charge of the contingents. Slowly, a few men at the time, traveling in various ways and under various guises, the hundred and fifty bravos were funneled westward, laying over for long or short periods in many out-of-the-way places, often in woodland tent camps, sometimes in tiny villages, sometimes in towns or just outside them.

It had taken them the best part of three months to circuitously cover the distance to the far western Duchy of Vawn in the foothills of the Misty Mountains. There, the hundred and fifty had been reunited one last time, for two nights and a day in another wood, but this time without tents. Then two of the helmed nobles had come riding in, trailed by three men who rode barefaced. None of the bravos had seen any of the three before, but they did not need to know them to know immediately just what they were, not after two months of hell.

The voice booming from within the metallic confines of the helm sounded almost inhuman. “All right, you gutter-swept scum, gather closely about. These men,” he languidly waved at the three, hard-faced men sitting their mounts beside him, “are Deemos, Plehkos, and Ahreestos. They will henceforth be your commanders and will own the powers of life and death over you. They will march you to the villages in which you will be quartered until the weapons skills you have been more or less taught are needed.”

“Arms will be provided you eventually. Until they are, you will drill and practice with wooden substitutes. You will drill and practice, you swine, practice and drill, for you may think you are warriors now but you are not. A bare tenth your numbers of first-class soldiers would go through you like a dose of salts, would make blood pudding of the lot of you. It takes years to make soldiers out of first-grade material, which you poor shits certainly are not. But we have invested money and effort on you, nonetheless, and we will see to it that you give us at least a bare minimum return on our investment.”

“Insubordination of any sort will be considered mutiny and will be dealt with harshly and fatally. These three captains will choose four sergeants and one senior sergeant to assist them. Orders from these sergeants will, in the absence of the captain, be considered as binding as if they came from the officer.”

“Understand, please, if dimwits like you can understand, you are here without legal leave in a basically hostile duchy. It will be as good as your life to go wandering about the countryside, not to mention the danger your capture by the local barbarians would cast all the rest into.”

“Do as you’re told, stay where you’re told, hone your arms skills and you’ll have food, lodging and your pay … with the probability of a bit of loot in time. Disobey in any manner and you’ll be killed. Filth of your like are easily replaced; the gutters and jails are full of such.”

Thanks to his abilities with cudgel and staff, as well as to his bullying assertiveness, Mahrkos was chosen by Captain Deemos to be his senior sergeant. After the village headman and a few other natural leaders had been killed or terrorized, Deemos, Mahrkos and their forty-one men had experienced no trouble in taking over the village.

After another gaping yawn, Sergeant Mahrkos threw off the blanket and looked about for his shirt and breeches. Arising, he hopefully shook the wine jug, then raised it to his fleshy lips and thirstily guzzled the last few ounces before starting to dress. He had just buckled the sword belt about his waist when he chanced to notice the red-brown blotch on the mattress and the trail of crusty splotches leading from the bed to the door.

Chuckling to himself, he thought of the red-haired boy, the freckled youth he had dragged—bawling and sniveling and begging to be let go—from his lean-to hovel last night. He thought, deliciously, of that smooth, hairless body writhing and struggling futilely, of the way the little darling had screamed when Mahrkos entered him, took him. He was still musing and rubbing himself when Deemos, in three-quarter plate, sword and dirk at his sides, an axe in his hand and his helm under one arm, stamped in.

“You wallowing swine, aren’t you dressed yet? Get into your cuirass and rouse the men. The summons just reached me. We’re to march on the hall immediately. Damn your lights, you lowborn cur, move!”

Vahrohneeskos Tahm Adaimyuhn rode in high spirits at the head of his party of young Ahrmehnee and Kindred retainers. They had left the little town nestled at the foot of Lion Mountain well before dawn and set a slow pace, easy on horses and men alike. Shortly after dawn had first reddened the sky, they had been met and joined by Tahm’s cousins, Kahrl and Bahb Sanderz, and their party. Bahb, a couple of years older than Kahrl, his brother, had been designated to stand for his father, Vahrohnos Tchahrlz Sanderz, too old and infirm to make the journey to Sanderz Hall. Nor were the three gentry the only relatives among the two entourages, so the two columns were soon one intermingled cavalcade.

Though both the Sanderz men were somewhat older than the swarthy, black-haired Tahm, the nineteen-year-old had their full respect and occasional deference. Right often, their glances strayed to the Ahrmehnee necklace of silver links and semiprecious stones, each stone representing a warrior’s head taken by Tahm in personal combat. Since his fourteenth year, the big-boned, brown-eyed young man had taken part in many of the frequent raids made by his sire’s tribe upon the mountain folk always encroaching upon the Ahrmehnee holds.

Three hours after sunrise, the combined parties stopped to rest the horses and munch journey food on the banks of an icy brook. Almost all the men were young and they chatted, gambled, wrestled and foot-raced; they threw knives and light axes and darts at marks on trees or devised difficult moving targets at which bowmen could try their skill. Finally, they saddled the horses and rode on to the beat of a small brass hand drum, the damned-soul wail of an Ahrmehnee flute and bursts of song.

Less than five miles from their objective, a faster-moving column caught up to them. Komees Dik Sanderz was fully armed, as were they all, but his old, lined face was grim and his men rode in tight column, with targets unslung and weapons ready.

“Greet the Sun, uncle,” grinned Tahm. “Why so grave? Whose funeral are you riding to?”

“Yours, mine and all the rest of our kin and Kindred, belike,” growled the aged fighter—who had been a grown man when the Clan Sanderz had fought its way east from the Sea of Grass and helped to hack out a duchy in Vawn. “Form your men up on ranks, young kinsmen, for we may well have to fight our way to the hall … and fight again when we get there.”

“The elderly prairie cat who lives at my hall, old Steelclaws, was far-spoken by Ahl Sanderz. Tim Sanderz is alive and has returned to Vawn. He’s at the hall now, preparing to defend it against some rabble the bitch, Mehleena, has sneaked into the duchy and armed. It smacks to me of the Great Rebellion reborn!”

With Komees Dik commanding the main body, Tahm Adaimyuhn took the strong vanguard, maintaining a quarter-mile of distance between the two groups, riding as warily as ever he had in his five years of raiding. When they came to the outskirts of a village—one of the three hall villages, as Tahm recalled—he had it carefully scouted out before he led his men down the dusty street between the silent houses.

The only things in sight that moved were a few chickens, a pig rooting in a garbage heap and a couple of shaggy dogs. A quick search of the cottages, hovels and outbuildings showed signs of a hasty departure—hearth fires were still alight. Pots bubbled and chores were left half-done. But the only sign of humans was in the form of a red-haired boy child lying dead in a lean-to shelter, the grayish little body evidencing the unmistakable marks of shameful abuse.

Tahm sent a rider back to Komees Dik, then had his patrol remount and ride on, drawing his flankers in tighter since the broad, cultivated fields to either side left insufficient cover to hide ambushers, and if any force should come out of the distant woods, the open stretches they would be forced to cover would allow for more than adequate warning. The road, moreover, showed the recent progress of a sizable body of men, moving in close order, four, maybe five horses, the rest on foot, Tahm estimated their numbers at some four tens, horse and foot, together.

Grudging the loss—for he led only fifteen men—he sent another galloper back to the main body to tell of his discovery and urge that the column close the distance rapidly, for a bare mile ahead the road entered a twisting, turning, forest-flanked way.

Mahrkos squirmed, raised himself off the sharp, bony ridge of the plow mule’s spine, but could find no comfortable way of sitting the beast. Cursing under his breath, he simultaneously envied Deemos his saddle and wondered for the umpteenth time why he and the other sergeants must ride the bags of bones and could not trudge in comfort along with the men. After the ride between the mile or more of fields, under the blazing, baking sun, the coolness of the trees around and about was pleasant. So too was splashing through several tiny streams, still bitingly cold from the mountains that gave them birth.

After marching in that pace that Deemos called quickstep for half a mile, the men were set to a jogging run for the same distance, before, panting and huffing, they were allowed to slow back to the march. Mahrkos held his bruised rump and crotch up from his jolting, bony seat as long as his thigh muscles would allow, then sank back, groaning.

Beyond a tall, broad cairn of moss-grown rocks, Deemos abruptly halted and Mahrkos all but rode into the horse’s shiny rump before he could make the mule stop. In the roadway before them, three noblemen sat their warhorses, blocking the narrow track, which here wound between gradual, grassy slopes grown with brush and small trees.

One of the three armored men kneed his mount a few paces forward and exposed his face—eyes, skin tone and an errant lock of black hair spoke of the kath’ahrohs or pure-blood Ehleen.

“You come from the Lady Mehleena, my lord?” asked Deemos.

The strange noble nodded, his right hand resting easily on his thigh, nowhere near the haft of the light axe lying across his saddlebow.

Deemos advanced a few feet closer, opened the front of his helm and asked, “You are of the Brotherhood, then, my lord?”

Again, the stranger simply nodded silently.

“My lord must give me a sign,” said Deemos, tracing some complicated pattern in the air before him with the forefinger of his right hand.

“Aye, I’ll give you a sign,” agreed the stranger in flawless, cultured Ehleeneekos, smiling. Still smiling, he raised his hand and, with a flick of his gauntleted wrist, sent something shiny spinning through the air between him and Captain Deemos.

The officer grunted, then his horse screamed and reared and, in the split second before Deemos’ body tumbled from the animal’s back and the deadly sleet of arrows began to fall, Mahrkos saw the polished bone hilt of a knife jutting out from Deemos’ left eye socket.

Komees Dik rode slowly along the gentle slope, viewing the road, now littered with bodies and weapons and liberally besplattered with blood. Across the road, Vahrohneeskos Tahm came out of the forest and trotted down the hill, three fresh-severed heads dangling by their hair from his big right hand. He and all his Ahrmehnee relatives who had ridden out in pursuit of the few survivors of the road slaughter were smiling and happy, even those who did not carry heads.

“Did any of the bastards get away?” demanded the old man.

Tahm shrugged. “Maybe one, certainly no more than two. One of those was mule-mounted, but he was wounded severely, I trow. He’ll not ride far.”

The old komees nodded brusquely. “That was good work, Tahm. A brilliant plan, brilliantly executed. But there’re more of these late bastards’ kind about, or so Ahl bespoke old Steelclaws, so let’s collect such of these weapons and armor as we can use and get back on the road to the hall.”