What Was Forgotten (5 page)

“It would dissuade me,” Daruthin said, grinning slightly before leaving Zayd’s side and heading to their carriage to rest.

They were still in the forest by the time night fell, and they managed to find a rocky plateau near to the road where they could see the surrounding countryside in the light of the moon. Zayd had slept little during the day, so he would take the second watch while Tascell Wick and his men took the first.

The Tauthri were skilled warriors, but in the darkness, they were unparalleled. He could see the six sentries as they took up their positions around the perimeter of the convoy, moving silently among the trees. As Zayd leaned against a nearby tree and looked up into the stars he could hear a few distant voices sharing war stories and, more than likely, sharing a wineskin as well. Sleep came to him quickly, and, like most nights, there was a fading moment of consciousness where he thought he was home.

The sound of shouting ripped him from his shallow rest. Zayd kept his sword, unsheathed, beside him whenever he slept, and he shot to his feet with his blade at the ready. Other soldiers were waking up and arming themselves as well. There was more shouting, but none of the sound of combat; no cries of pain, no sword-strikes on shields… They were not under attack.

A crowd was forming near the light of a small fire, and as Zayd hurried over he could see several soldiers restraining one of the Tauthri sentries. It was Renton Allus, one of Tascell’s men, and he was struggling violently against the soldiers who held him. As Zayd pushed his way through the crowd, he saw a bloodied sword lying in the dirt at Renton’s feet, and on the ground next to the fire was a Ryferian soldier, his hands covering a horrendous wound to the stomach. Blood ran down from the soldier’s mouth. His eyes stared blankly up into the night.

“Silence!” Zayd yelled. The shouting stopped as every eye in the crowd turned to him. Renton still struggled. “Tell me what happened.”

“He killed Perinn,” one of the soldiers from the Ninth Regiment said, pointing to Renton. “Perrin wasn’t even armed. We was sitting by the fire, nothin’ more.” Zayd looked to the Tauthri. Renton met his stare and said nothing. Zayd stepped forward and picked up the bloody sword by the hilt, looking from it to Renton.

“What have you to say?”

Renton looked around the crowd. The face of every Ryferian soldier was hot with rage.

“He called me
dark eyes
… and said I was at home in the night because the Tauthri are corrupted by the Beyond!” Renton renewed his struggle against the soldiers holding him. More shouts erupted from the crowd.

“Enough!” Zayd held up his hand. He saw, at the edge of his vision, that Barrett Stern had pushed his way through the crowd and stood watching him. He expected Stern to take over; as a knight of the Silver Sun, he greatly outranked Zayd. Yet he remained silent.

“He said all Tauthri were unworthy,” Renton cried, his anger fading into panic. “Unworthy of redemption!”

Zayd grimaced and, as he looked away from Renton, noticed that all eyes were now upon him, fixed and hard with anticipation. “You have only proven that you are unworthy, Corporal Allus.” He stepped closer and lowered his voice. “Stop struggling. It’s done. You know what needs to happen now, so accept your fate with dignity. Pray for forgiveness.”

Renton spent the night bound tightly to a tree next with Talazz sitting close by. The way the morning sun gleamed off of the blade, it was clear that the giant had spent the last hours of the night cleaning it in preparation for the morning’s duties. For the En Kazyr executioner, meting out the law of the Empire was a sacred duty and was done with great reverence.

“We’ll see the sentence carried out at dawn,” Areagus had said the night before. “The Beacon will watch over us. I’ll not feed the evil in the dark with another death.” The commander returned to his tent, cursing the evil of the foreign land as he went.

The sentries changed watches, though Zayd doubted Tascell or any of his men would find rest after what happened.

“What of the others?” Zayd asked Tascell. “Are they all as impetuous as Renton?”

The lieutenant furrowed his brow and frowned. “I would have said that none of them are. Renton is as even-tempered a soldier that I’ve seen. How this simple mockery could have stirred him…”

“Watch the others closely,” Zayd said. “I’m going to tell Daruthin the same.”

Zayd spent most of his watch within sight of where Renton was bound. There was a look of confusion on his face as he sat waiting for the morning to come, when his life would end. He was staring blankly, perhaps reliving the events that led him to this. It would have been more merciful to kill him now and not to have him languish in these long hours.

He carried that expression, the profound dearth of understanding, to the very end. As the ranking officer, Areagus needed to deliver the sentence formally despite the sentence being safely assumed by every soldier already, and they were all watching as Talazz, towering over a kneeling Renton, heaved the massive blade over his hand and brought it down with such force that the Tauthri’s head shot forward and rolled into a tree ten feet away. The blade lodged half its own length into ground from the incredible power of the swing. If there were any lingering thoughts of disobedience from his men, Zayd hoped they would be dispelled after this display.

Areagus stood over Renton’s body and held a scroll over his head. “As is the mandated punishment for traitors, I have completed the writ for the family of Renton Allus.” The commander handed the writ to one of his lieutenants. “I have tasked several men from the Ninth Regiment to carry it out, and I thank these men; it is a hard sentence to deliver, but our laws must be upheld.”

In the year following the Ryferian victory over Tauth, Zayd had witnessed the punishment meted out to the families of traitors and deserters, the wives and children paraded about for all to see before they bled out on the ground. In the first years of his service, Zayd had nightmares where he saw the faces of his family, pale and lifeless on the ground in his village. But those nightmares faded after a time. His wife and son were alive because he had yielded all those years ago and had been loyal every day hence. It would be Renton’s family now who would share the sentence for his crime.

They were marching again within the hour. Still in uniform, Renton’s body was strung up by the feet and hung from a tree, a reminder for passersby of how the Empire rewards disloyalty. Zayd climbed into the covered carriage with the rest of the scouts. They stared sullenly at their feet or at their hands or the ceiling. Zayd was tired but thought better of falling asleep in front of his men.

“Did Renton speak with any of you before?” Zayd asked the group.

“No, sir,” came several replies, along with shaking heads.

“Did anyone hear what was said? What Corporal Perinn said to him?”

“Just what we all heard him say,” said Gavras as he tapped his fingers on his kneecap. “The same things they always say to us.”

Zayd leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. Every Tauthri in the army could expect to experience this sort of behaviour from the Trueborn, those born within the natural borders of the Empire. As the Empire expanded, it brought those it defeated into it, and over time, made them in mind and spirit no different from any Trueborn. The En Kazyr were among the oldest of the conquered and thus did not experience what the more recent vassals like the Tauthri did, though Zayd assumed their stature was likely a factor as well. Renton would have been accustomed to this sort of hate. Indeed, he would have expected it each day.

It made little sense to Zayd, so he determined that there must be more to it than what they knew. But if Perinn had committed any crimes against Renton, he was already dead and beyond punishment. There was nothing more to be done.

“If Perinn did something besides taunt him, then he has already paid the price,” Zayd said.

“There was nothing else,” Gavras said. “I saw what happened. Only words. That’s all that passed between them. Words, and nothing more. Renton did not even look angered until the blade was already bloodied.”

They were out of the forest a few hours before dark, and though there were still conifers all around them, they were less dense, thanks in part to the increasingly rocky terrain. Areagus called for forward scouts, so Zayd led three of the other Tauthri, including Gavras, to the front of the column, and they clambered up the rocky slopes that flanked the road ahead of them. They stayed low to the ground as they climbed up, and once at the top they remained crouched. From atop the rocks, Zayd could see the land before them awash in the red glow of the setting sun: a sea of trees and rolling hills, all dissected by the road they travelled.

“One landslide on this stretch and we’d be forced to turn back,” Gavras said.

Zayd nodded. “That carriage can’t manage these rocks if we were forced to go overland.”

“If we had a few more giants, they could carry those gold slabs and we wouldn’t need the bloody carriage.”

“No problem cannot be solved with more giants.” Zayd allowed himself a laugh, but Gavras was right: they were marching an unknown path. The army had not come down this direction when they had marched on Yasri, so the only knowledge of the terrain they had were maps they after the siege, and the maps were next to useless as the Dramandi had drawn them to a strange scale and had few annotations, if they had any at all.

The rocky outcroppings shouldered the road closely for miles, leaving the column with no defensible place to make camp for the night. Zayd and the scouts made the descent back down to the column. Commander Areagus, accompanied by Barrett Stern and Alain Tullus, approached on horseback.

“The road is hemmed in by rocks like this for at least another four miles, perhaps five,” Zayd reported.

Areagus looked into the sky and frowned as the sunlight diminished further by the moment. He grunted as his glare traced the horizon, as though he could try to convince the sun to rise again.

“I could scout further ahead to find a more suitable area to set up camp,” Barrett offered.

Areagus looked to Stern briefly before shaking his head. “We should get clear of these rocks immediately.” The commander turned again to Stern. “Give the men a short rest, then we’ll start again at a double march.”

Stern wheeled his horse around and gave the orders to the column, his booming voice echoing off the walls of rock around them. Zayd heard grumblings from some of the soldiers, but he could tell his own men were pleased; night marches always reminded them of home, and a reminder would help ease their minds over the troubles of the previous night. He remained at the head of the column as the rest of the Tauthri returned to the carriage for a short rest, and as the day’s light began to relent, Zayd sat on the hard-packed earth next to the road and could not help but think of home.

There had always been a great anticipation in them, energy that was barely contained, as he and his kin would set out into the night to menace their enemy. The unrestrained jubilance he had felt since doing so as a child had not faded over time; careening through the night, their senses as keen as a blade, was a celebration of what they were. They embraced it.

It had been over three years since Zayd had been home, and then only briefly, and nearly ten since he had left it after its defeat, yet he still felt the exhilaration when he thought about their night raids against the encamped Ryferian army. They were like vengeful shadows, and the fear they struck in the Trueborn was palpable. If only the sun never rose they may have won the war. It must have been the will of Xidius that he survive the war and become a servant to the Empire and to the Beacon. It was a mercy, he knew, that he could relish times such as this when he could still embrace his nature, to know where he came from, and to acknowledge that he had been saved from the darkness he and his people had worshipped for so long.

Zayd sat there, unmoving, until Areagus ordered the march nearly an hour later, when the sun had released its grasp on the horizon. The sound of the hundreds of soldiers stirring pulled him out of the forests of his homeland and back to this foreign, enemy land. He exhaled as he pictured Symm’s face and the expression she could not hide when he had left home again, when this campaign had started.

He set his palms flat on the soil. Soon enough he would place his palms on the ground of his home, in his own village. Only a few months more. Once they delivered the golden monolith to Lycernum he would be released from his service. Ten years of loyalty, unquestioning and unwavering. He could see Cassian then, too, and the man he had become. Zayd wondered what his discipline would be. A scholar? An artisan? A poet? Perhaps he had trained to be a warrior like his father. He would listen as his son recounted the past decade of his life. And if it was the will of Xidius, Cassian would return home with him.

Habit took hold of Zayd as he traced lines in the dirt. They came easily as a practiced ritual does, the four flowing lines converging to a single point inside the convex centre of an imperfect crescent. Zayd often traced the Cothar sigil into the earth, as his father had done. It gave him peace to know that this sigil on foreign soil had a twin somewhere in Tauthri. ‘When there is conflict’, his father had said, ‘the earth knows who you are and will remember you. And your enemies will know you. And remember you.’