Blade Kin (3 page)
Authors: David Farland
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Genetic Engineering
Chapter 3: The Wall
Tull did not like lying to his wife about his dreams. He had dreamt that night, fragmented troubling dreams that spoke to him of things faraway and perhaps things yet to come.
He could not know the truth of his dreams, if they were really of import, or if they were merely caused by the sense of an approaching storm, so he put it from his mind.
That morning after their wedding, he woke early to fix Fava breakfast, but Fava rose with him, and as he pulled out some presents that he’d bought for her at the market—figs from South Bay, candied hazelnuts, leatherwood honey for their bread—Fava had revealed some treats that she’d bought for him: his favorite pork jerky soaked in fish sauce and covered with ginger, lemon-mint tea, oatcakes.
He discovered that she knew his tastes perfectly, far better than he would have ever guessed.
As they moved through the room, setting the fire, warming the cooking pot, slicing meat and preparing breakfast, it seemed that they were dancers in the kitchen.
He’d known Fava since childhood, and when she moved to the right, or stepped back, he somehow anticipated her every motion, and she did the same with him.
She was eager to make breakfast for him, to show him kindness.
He’d never had that before. With his first wife Wisteria, she had been born to wealth, and offered no help in the kitchen. Tull had always felt as if he were her servant, and though he had never begrudged that, it felt good to realize that Fava was someone that enjoyed helping out, even in little ways.
With Fava, Tull discovered how intimate, how loving a small act like cooking muffins could be. As they moved around each other, he felt the warmth of her body, the power of her love, the strength of her devotion.
I have never known a love like this,
he realized, and it was air to a drowning man.
Our love will bind us together, become stronger than anything that I’ve ever imagined.
Still, that morning, Tull did not tell Fava the whole truth. He had felt compelled to come south, as if somehow in his bones he had known that he needed to sleep on that bed of stone. It was a place of power for Spirit Walkers, and perhaps something inside him knew that it was time to begin his training. The dreams he’d had that night troubled him, but they did not do much to enlighten him. The few that he remembered were mere phantoms that raced across his memory.
Now he felt constrained to sail north, so they ate that day, and left early in the morning and stopped at sunset. They did this six days in a row, so that on the sixth night they slept in their cabin at the Haystack Islands.
Tull wanted to go farther that night, return all the way to Smilodon Bay, but a bank of clouds came and the wind blew contrary and their light failed.
In his dreams on the bed of stone, he’d seen an old man, one who was running, a man whose mouth was sewn closed. Yet in the dream, Tull had seen into the man’s eyes, had felt that he was racing to Tull, to bear a message.
Tull felt sure that he would meet the man soon, that he needed to find the stranger.
He slept soundly, that night, partly from weariness, and partly because the thick clouds kept the night warm. Lightning played above the clouds, sent down a grumbling noise like a dog circling its bed, but the storm brought no rain.
At dawn as they lay in the cabin, Tull heard a guttural cry, and his eyes sprang open. He ran to the door and looked down into the forest.
The clouds above had dissipated, showing a pale blue, but the ocean was covered in fog, as was most of the forest. He heard the cry again, and the sound of branches cracking among the firs downhill. He grabbed his gun, loaded it, and stood at the door.
A Neanderthal came running toward them uphill in the deep ferns, his legs pumping mightily, weighed down by a heavy pack and thick winter furs that flapped as he moved. He was gasping for breath, his head rolling as he struggled uphill, and in one hand he carried a longspear, wrapped with dull red cloth, feathers tied around it.
He was an old man with silvering in his hair, fatigued, ready to drop. He shouted incoherently and fell in a bed of ferns.
Tull watched where he lay, saw him struggle to rise, then drop, resting his head on his forearm and gasping.
Tull’s breath quickened, for it was the man from his dream.
Through the silver mist downhill, from between the black trees, he saw the pursuers, two men all in crimson, startling red body armor of leather, brilliant red capes—yet their faces were black, hidden behind iron masks. The men loped uphill in step, as if they were a single entity.
“Blade Kin!” Tull whispered. Everything in him wanted to attack, yet Tull restrained himself, like a hunting dog awaiting its master’s orders before treeing a bear.
The fallen Neanderthal rose up on his hands, looked back, gave a wordless cry, lunged toward the cabin.
At first, Tull suspected that the Neanderthal had seen them and was calling for help, but then he realized that the old man was running blindly up a game trail, that his eyes did not focus on them, for the cabin was concealed between standing stones and had blackberry bushes trailing up the sides of it.
The old man rushed past the cabin, sweat pouring from his forehead, terror in his face, blue eyes wide with fear, his long red hair in tight braids, wrapped with green cloth. He stumbled past, clipping the branches of a tree.
Tattoos of ownership were on his left hand, and he clutched a long circular map case made of stained wood.
He rushed to a fallen tree, turned and leveled his spear at the warriors.
The armored Blade Kin charged uphill, seemingly unfatigued, fluid in their movements. In seconds they would have the fleeing slave.
Tull stepped forward, still in shadows, pulled up his gun and fired.
One Blade Kin was lifted from his feet, blood spraying from his face mask, and flew backward in the ferns.
The other warrior hesitated only a moment before reaching into his belt for a long-barreled pistol.
Tull didn’t have time to reload. He dropped his rifle, pulled his sword of Benbow glass and leapt downhill, gambling that he could attack before the slaver fired. Tull shouted, and the Blade Kin fumbled the pistol, misfiring as he yanked it from the holster.
For one crazy moment Tull was leaping toward the man, his sword gleaming in the morning sunlight as it flashed, and the Blade Kin put his hands up to ward the blow, and then Tull chopped through the Blade Kin’s armor with a whack, cleaving the man in half, right down the middle.
Tull saw movement downhill. The warrior he had shot was struggling to rise. The bullet had hit the man in the face, but his armor must have deflected the lead.
With a cry, Tull leapt onto the struggling warrior and swung, taking off the man’s head.
Tull stooped and grabbed the warrior’s pistol. He lunged downhill, and Fava shouted, “Where are you going?”
“There’s one more!” Tull yelled over his shoulder.
Fava cried out and ran to follow him, and Tull rushed down through deep fern beds.
The Blade Kins’ trail was not hard to follow—they had knocked the morning dew from ferns, and while the wet ferns gleamed, these seemed dull and lifeless. Tull ran as fast as he could, given the limp in his right leg, and Fava was hard-pressed to keep up.
When they reached the bay, through the fog he saw two sailboats in the harbor. In one sat a Blade Kin in red armor, fingering a pistol.
He looked up at Tull, pulled off a shot. The bullet exploded into a fir tree not three feet away. As the man hurried to reload, Tull raced to the water’s edge.
Tull leveled his pistol at the Blade Kin. The warrior tossed the gun, as if to surrender, and then reached for his sword.
Tull fired into the Blade Kin’s unprotected throat, blowing the man backward into the water.
He began to sink slowly as water filled his leather armor.
Fava came and stood, stunned. The fog around Tull and the boats dimmed the scene, making it seem surreal.
“Who were they?” Fava asked.
“Judging by their armor, palace guards to the Slave Lords in Bashevgo—a thousand miles from home,” Tull said, unable to stifle the awe in his voice.
He glanced back uphill. The old Neanderthal had come down to the ridge above them, and sat in the ferns, gasping, resting on his spear.
The feathers on his spear fluttered in a slight wind. Tull saw now that what she’d taken for furs were really ratty old woolen rags, the kind of clothes many others would throw away.
The old man tried to speak, grunting and making urgent gestures, but the slavers had removed his tongue, a practice common in the houses of the Slave Lords where secrecy was a way of life.
Tull’s eyes rested on the map case. The old Neanderthal held it protectively, as if to guard it even from Tull and Fava.
“I think he is a slave of some importance,” Tull said.
The whole incident seemed unreal, and he found himself shaking.
“How did you know there was a
third
Blade Kin?” Fava asked.
“I heard him running,” Tull answered.
“No you didn’t—he was sitting quietly in the boat. How did you know he was here? You couldn’t have seen him through the fog.”
Tull started to say something, and his eyes widened as he sought an explanation. “I just … I heard.…”
“Ayaah, you heard him,” Fava said, “just as I heard him a week ago, in my dreams while sleeping on the altar of stone.”
***
Chapter 4: From out of the Wilderness
The night that Tull and Fava returned from their wedding journey, the young Pwi of the village gathered to celebrate three miles south of town at the edge of a small lake that the Pwi called “Perfect Mirror for a Blue Sky.”
They sat beside a bonfire, singing and drinking beer all evening, and told stories about Tull and Fava in the same way that humans will when someone dies. In a way, Tull and Fava would be leaving their single friends forever as they clung to one another in their new life.
Beside Tull the old Neanderthal sat, looking suspiciously at the group in his ragged clothes. He still clutched his map case and spear, as if fearing that someone would attack him at any moment.
Since he could not tell his name, Tull called him
Uknai
—the Pwi word for “cripple,” and the old slave seemed not to mind.
Tull’s little brother, Wayan, was combing Tull’s hair, and as one boy finished telling a story, Wayan asked Tull in Pwi, “You feel buttery. What makes you feel buttery? Is it because the moon is shining on you?”
“The word is
sweaty.
I feel sweaty because I am too near the fire and I’m dressed in hot furs.”
The smoke from the crackling fire crept low over the lake; two of old Anorath’s dogs yapped as they hunted mice beneath a tangle of mossy logs. Thor hung overhead, yet enormous redwoods blocked the moon and starlight, deepened the night.
On the other side of the fire was a human girl, Darrissea Frolic, a dreamy-eyed young artist who crafted finely scented paper by hand, then inscribed love poems on it.
The love poems were sold to men who were too clumsy or too illiterate to create a poem themselves, and seldom did a ship leave Smilodon Bay without a sheaf of Darrissea’s poems. Tull felt honored to have her here this night.
Darrissea pulled her wool cloak tightly around her throat to keep out the crisp air, stirred the yellow-hot coals at the edge of the fire with the toe of her finely crafted otter-skin boots.
She looked out of place, the only human at the celebration. Her awkward features contrasted sharply with the blunt, chinless faces of the swarthy Neanderthal boys with their deep-set eyes. Her long wavy hair was nearly as black as her eyes—far from the hues of the redheads and few platinum blonds among the Pwi.
Darrissea was thin with a slender artist’s hands, not the knobby fists of a Neanderthal. She wore a brilliant blue cloak embroidered with golden geese flying around the edges, a white silk shirt with a lace collar, cream-colored leather pants.
Many Pwi boys were wearing only moccasins and long black cotton breechcloths, as if to prove to each other that the chill air did not bother them.
Among the Pwi, Darrissea appeared almost alien. But even among the humans of town, she’d always been a misfit. Her father had been a freedom fighter—a stern man who hunted slavers and openly fought pirate bands—until he’d died of poisoning right here in town five years back. Darrissea lived alone in his house now, never making close friends with her own kind, somehow more comfortable among the Pwi.
Darrissea sipped cautiously from a mug of warm green beer, the kind the Neanderthals liked, and scowled at the taste, then peered around nervously to see if anyone would notice her scowl.
“Would you prefer wine?” Tull asked. “We can have one of the boys go back to town to fetch it for you.”
Darrissea looked up, and her dark eyes glittered in the firelight. “No. You’re a Pwi, now that you’ve turned your back on the human half of your heritage. This should be a Pwi celebration—even if it means drinking beer that tastes like … this.”
Fava cut in. “It would not be a bother—”
“No bother, I’m sure,” Darrissea said. “But you Pwi are taking on too many human customs. A hundred years ago every Pwi on this coast lived in a hogan, but now a stranger can wander the street in Smilodon Bay and not tell where the human part of town ends and Pwi Town begins. You work the farms and mills, but your grandfathers hunted with spears, trailing the mammoth herds.” Darrissea nodded at some of the boys and girls who had painted their faces blue and decorated their hair with swordtail ferns and strips of cloth—not the kind of garb they would wear while working in Ferremon Strong’s fishery.
No, tomorrow they would come to work with their hair combed down, many wearing pants and tunics like any human. But tonight the young would party the night away in celebration of the wedding just as their ancestors had even done on Anee for a thousand years, perhaps as their ancestors had even done on Earth a hundred thousand years before.
Though Darrissea and Tull had been speaking English, the universal trading language used by her Starfaring ancestors, Darrissea raised her mug and spoke in the soft nasal language of the Pwi. “
Hezae, anath zhevetpwasha palazh
. Friends, let us reverently continue to give life to the past.”
Tull and Fava drank to the toast, and Tull asked, “Will you give us a poem for our wedding present, something I can read to Fava?”
Darrissea looked into the fire, dancing flames reflected from her black eyes. “I think your life should be a poem to the person you love. You just live the poem—each act, each carefully measured step, designed to convey your love, so that as your lives unfold the catalog of your deeds reveals the depth of your passion.” Darrissea smiled and looked up at Tull and Fava. “But if you want words on paper, I will give you those, too.”
Anorath, a young Pwi of nineteen, got up and walked to the beer barrel; his bracelet of painted clamshells rattled as he scooped out a mugful of beer. “I gladly remember a time,” he said, “when Tull first moved here. That old human, Dennoth Teal, had a big peach tree, and every year he hid all the peaches away like a pack rat and would not sell any, so Tull and I decided to steal some peaches.
“We went at night, when Freya and Woden gave just enough moonlight to pick the peaches, and we each carried three bags. No wind blew; the only sound was the mayor’s dogs howling as we picked, when we suddenly heard humans sneaking toward us.” Anorath laughed and stomped on the ground, imitating a human trying to sneak in his clumsy boots. “So Tull and I climbed and hid in the thickest branches.
“When we were at the top, I heard a human whisper, ‘Here it is! This is the tree where I saw them!’ and I was so scared I thought I would pee, because I knew old Dennoth would club us.
“But two men climbed till they were so close, I could smell the humans’ stinking breath. I was sure I could smell a gun in Dennoth’s hands, and I hoped only that he would beat me instead of shoot me. I got all dizzy from fright and thought I’d fall until Tull grabbed my arm and pulled me higher.”
Anorath stopped for a long drink of beer. A boy pushed another mug full of beer into Tull’s hands and Tull downed it quickly.
Anorath continued. “The humans began picking peaches. They were only humans who had come to steal the same peaches. They worked several minutes, filling some large baskets—and friends let me say; it’s wrong for us Pwi to always pick the fruit; with their tiny, clever hands the humans worked faster than Tull or I.
“They began at the bottom and picked the tree as they climbed. When they were almost on us, Tull grabbed one human by the neck and shouted in English, ‘Now I’ve caught your ass, you thief!’
“The human squealed like a pig and dropped his peaches. He fell from the tree, and they both fled so fast that when we got down we found a shoe left on the ground. Tull and I took all their peaches and ran home.”
The Pwi laughed, and Tull smiled. “I’d forgotten about stealing those peaches,” Tull said. “That was a good time.”
“Ayaah, I had almost forgotten, too,” Darrissea said from across the fire. “I’m the human girl who fell from the tree—though I’d say that rather than squeal like a pig, I squeaked like a rat!”
Anorath nearly dropped his cup in surprise.
Fava and the other Pwi laughed. Tull had never told anyone about stealing those peaches. He felt a great sense of peace and realized that he had been drinking too much and now he was drunk; yet he was drunk on more than beer. He was drunk with kwea, a deep sense of satisfaction, of merriment, at being with old friends.
Tull sighed. “It will never be like this again,” he said, “with all of us here. All of us drunk and laughing.”
Fava hugged Tull. “Just because we’re married, it doesn’t mean the world will end. We’ll still get together with our friends.” Fava turned to Darrissea. “You must come and visit us soon.”
Tull looked across the fire, smiling a melancholy smile. The slow gravitational wind hissed through the tops of the redwoods, signifying that Thor would set shortly. Tull said, “I hope you’re right, Fava. May we all get together with our friends and laugh often.”
Darrissea nodded her head solemnly, looked at the ground, mist in her dark eyes.
“The peaches were good,” Tull said, “if that consoles you. They tasted sweeter for having been stolen twice.”
“I’m glad you enjoyed the fruits of my labor,” Darrissea said. “I forgive you.”
In Darrissea’s eyes Tull saw only sincerity. “You always speak the truth. I like that in you.”
“It’s a bad habit. One that I’m trying to break.”
“Don’t break the habit,” Tull said. “I find it entertaining.”
Darrissea cocked her head, questioningly.
“I remember when we were young,” Tull said. “Your father was still alive, working with freedom fighters up at Storm Hold. He had come home for a summer, and you were mad at him. You stood in front of Moon Dance Inn, yelled at him, ‘You know, if you stick your ear up to your ass, you can hear the ocean.’ Everyone laughed, but your father slapped you. Now that I think about it, I’ve always enjoyed watching you. You can say the most amazing things.”
Darrissea raised an eyebrow. “Which entertained more, the remark or the beating?”
“The fight was fun at the time, but I still laugh at your joke all these years later.”
“I remember getting hit, but I’d forgotten why my father hit me. You know, you remember those words simply because it is something you wanted to say to your own father. You were always a quiet rebel, full of anger. I could see it in your eyes. I was always a noisy rebel, a dumb one with a bloody nose.”
“You had the courage to speak the truth,” Tull said.
“And you had the wisdom to keep your mouth shut.”
A log broke in the fire, and a shower of cinders spiraled upward. Tull raised his mug. “To rebellion, and truth, and martyrdom.”
Darrissea raised her mug in return and shook her head, “To all but the last.”
The old Neanderthal, Uknai, suddenly stirred in his coat of rags. He grunted softly, got up, and went to the keg of beer where a lantern lay, then set the lantern next to the fire and grunted, gesturing for everyone to come near.
Uknai carefully unscrewed the lid to his map case and all around the fire, people drew close. He pulled out a thin piece of cloth, unrolling it gently on the ground.
Tull wondered what would be on the map, but as the crowd of Neanderthals drew in close, he could see little over their backs except a flash of color, while those nearby gasped.
Tull pushed his way forward; the cloth did not have a map drawn on it, but a painting, and something in it took his breath.
It was a large painting—a landscape of a bleak plain. In a junkyard littered with broken guns and swords was a pale green swath of land with some tired daisies where a young Pwi man and a Pwi woman made love. But above them mountains towered, and carved in the purple-gray stone were the greedy faces of the Slave Lords of Bashevgo: ruined old men slavering and leering, as if they would eat the young lovers, or as if they pondered something more evil.
An ingenious use of contrasting colors, a grandeur in design, made the portrait stunning. Tull could feel the kwea of the art, as if the painting itself were vibrating and causing movements throughout the crowd. He seldom got that feeling from mere objects—yet some pieces of art carried it, held more power than they should. Uknai’s painting was that way—an icon of power.
The crowd around Uknai quieted, and the Pwi became solemn. Tull realized that there was little beauty in the picture. Only horror. Pain and suffering.
And the beauty that existed in the lovers upon the green swath of lawn was all overshadowed by the horror of the Slave Lords. The picture was a story Tull did not want to hear, yet he could not take his eyes from the painting.
Uknai pulled out a second canvas, spread it before them and once again the Neanderthals breathed in awe.
The young Pwi woman lay tied to a beautiful bed carved of ivory, gazing out of the picture, and tiny crows flew from her mouth. A handsome human straddled her voluptuous naked body, smiling curiously. The human seemed intent on the pain and terror etched in his victim’s face. He wore a shirt of golden butterfly wings, and golden rings adorned his ears, and everything about him spoke of wealth and grace. Behind him a string of other beds lay, each holding a dead woman.
In his right hand he tenderly fingered the Pwi woman’s throat, but everywhere there were crows flying in the background, so that the background became only a mass of black crows, and on a distant hill, Uknai sat by a wall of stone while a crow perched above him, speaking into his ear.
Tull wondered if the picture represented a real rape, or if it represented the rape of Uknai’s people in Bashevgo. He listened to the murmurs of the Neanderthals, heard their unspoken outrage. Uknai was a master artist, playing his audience carefully, a man of wit and passion and skill, and his works stunned the Pwi.
A third picture showed Uknai running down a city street, a small and insignificant creature charging full tilt between tall buildings of stone that opened like a dark throat, a bloody knife in one hand, a child’s doll made of reeds in another.
From every window, from every darkened passageway, eyes looked out, and from above, one could see that the world was a maze of dark passages with no escape. Tull knew then that this was Uknai’s story, his personal story, and not a symbolic retelling of the horrors of all the slaves in Bashevgo. Some of the Neanderthals looked at the bloody knife, grunted, “Well done!” for they were happy to see that Uknai had killed a Slave Lord.