Road Brothers

  “Maybe nobody will have to carry water for my son again.” Red Sky made the sign of sorrow, his hand descending on a wavered path. “There is no disputing your right to fight him. But you fought as though he were our enemy, not a brother.”

  “I...” Harrac drew in a long breath. “There is only fighting or not fighting. Fight or do not. He didn’t ask me to dance.”

  A muted ripple of laughter through the children, but the men exchanged glances. Red Sky turned to look at Harrac’s father. Carry Iron looked too, the blackwood club in his hand.

  “You must go to Ibowen, Firestone. Tell the king what you have done. He will send you back to us, or he won’t.”

  It made no sense. Why would Harrac’s own father try to steal his victory? Were they jealous? Just three days a man and already he had humbled Broken Bowl. Harrac felt the red tide of anger rising in him again. He set his jaw and looked Carry Iron in the eye. “I will go to the king.”

  He turned and started walking, knowing they all watched him, knowing the stories and talk around the fires tonight would be his. Pride and anger bubbled in him, a bitter taste in his mouth. He spat his own blood as he walked, red as betel juice.

  A mile on Harrac stopped by the marula trees, anger, pride, bitterness, gone, as if it had leaked from him, colouring his footprints. He crouched in the shade wondering what madness had taken him, sore in every limb. He carried no food, no water, he didn’t even know the way to Ibowen. West, past the River Ugwye. Not the best of directions. Lion country too. No place for a man alone.

  He sat for the longest time, staring at his hands, the same hands that had beaten Broken Bowl. He remembered the looks shot his way as the men had carried Broken Bowl toward the huts. A mix of disgust and horror, as if he were a rabid dog rather than a warrior. Harrac’s eyes prickled with tears though he couldn’t say who they might be for.

  Three days he’d carried his name before disgracing it. One day recovering, two days walking, and just minutes beneath the eyes of his village. Long Toe had said there were deeper secrets to a man’s name but that the elders did not teach them, only pointed the way across the years – they were learned, or not, as a man carried his name beneath the sun. Long Toe said the secrets lay in the Haccu songs and stories, and in the way men lived, laid out in full view. Harrac wondered what the king-of-many-tribes would say. If he was sent away he would never know the full truth signified by his true name, earned in pain and suffering.

  Ragged Tail, the eldest of Harrac’s three younger brothers, came to him as the sky shaded red in the west. He bought a hard slab of bread-cake, a grass bag of lebo nuts, and a gourd of water.

  “Broken Bowl has woken.” Ragged Tail watched his brother with wide eyes as if he were a wild creature off the yellow grass, seen for the first time. “He has broken ribs but Long Toe thinks he will recover.”

  “Ribs?” Harrac didn’t even remember hitting him in the side. He drank from the heavy gourd. “You fetched me water, ‘Tail.”

  “You’re my brother.” He didn’t sound entirely sure.

  Harrac put his hand on ‘Tail’s shoulder. “Fetch water whoever asks you. Make all men your brother.” He took the gourd, the bag, and the bread-cake then started to walk.

  “You’re not coming back?” ‘Tail called after him.

  “I’m a man now. I can’t just say sorry. I have to do what Carry Iron told me to do.”

  Ibowen lay farther from Harrac’s village than he had ever imagined, and the city itself lay further beyond his imagination still. First he discovered a road – a trail beaten into the ground by the passage of many feet, marked with stones, rutted with wheels. Then came the houses. It seemed that a thousand villages had gathered together. It started as clusters of huts made from mud and straw, though taller than those of the Haccu, but before long the buildings became mud-brick, hard-angled, longer than the long hall, taller than a man holding his spear above him. Harrac walked through a wholly alien landscape, without grass, without views to the distance, hardly a tree, everything edges and windows, noise, strangers, multitudes, none of them interested in his arrival. They spoke strange languages here, or familiar ones with strange voices.

  At length, following the directions of a man who recognised his Haccu scars, Harrac came to the high mud walls of the king’s palace. He circled, tracking around the perimeter, passing dozens of houses that put Carry Iron’s hut to shame. The palace gates stood taller than an elephant, thick timbers, bound with an extravagance of iron, gates that would stand against a hundred men.

  A multitude camped around the entrance, naked children, men in loincloths, priests with bird-skull necklaces and the ia-lines painted red across their arms and chests, warriors with spears and so many honour scars they almost lacked the skin for more.

  Two warriors stood by the gates, splendid in leopard skins, ostrich feathers in their woven hair, iron-tipped spears, curved iron swords at their hips. Strangest of all though, the man standing in conversation with one of the pair, his back to Harrac as he worked his way through the seated crowds.

  Where the man wasn’t covered in folds of white linen he had the palest skin Harrac had ever seen, white as fish meat on his hands, an angry red on his forearms. And his hair – a white mass of it beneath a broad-brimmed hat of woven grass.

  Harrac came closer still and realised how huge the man was. Head and shoulders above the guardsmen, but both of those were as tall as any man Harrac knew, and this man stood thick with muscle, far broader across the shoulders than Broken Bowl, a white giant.

  The man turned as Harrac approached.

  “A boy fresh in off the grassland.” The white man grinned down at Harrac, his teeth showing amid the thickest beard, cut close to his chin. He watched for a reply then narrowed his pale blue eyes. “Did I say it wrong? You look Haccu to me.”

  “I am Haccu.”

  “What’s your name, boy?”

  Harrac found himself on the point of speaking his true name to a stranger. “Firestone. I’m a man of the tribe.” He turned to the closest of the plumed guard. “My headman sent me to speak with the king.”

  The guardsman nodded unsmiling toward the crowd. “Wait.”

  Harrac looked back. The people seemed settled in for a stay of days or more, food supplies heaped beside them, shelters erected to provide shade. “For how long?”

  The guardsman stared ahead as if no longer seeing anyone before him. Harrac felt his name scars sting, his pride pricking him even in this strange place of walls and iron. He stood, immobile, held between the angry heat in his blood and the cold fact of his station. Older and more important men than him sat waiting by the roadside – the doors belonged to the king-of-many-tribes. And still he couldn’t walk away.

  “Ha! The boy doesn’t like to wait.” The huge foreigner grinned still more broadly. “And who does? Especially in this damned heat!” He reached out to slap Harrac’s shoulder.

  Harrac caught the white man’s wrist. He felt ridges of scar tissue beneath his fingers. “I am a man.”

  “Of course you are. Firestone wasn’t it?” The man looked surprised, though with his face half covered in beard it was hard to tell. “I’m Snaga ver Olaafson. May I have my arm back?”

  Harrac released Snaga’s wrist and the big man made a show of rubbing it. The scars there were ugly – nothing ritual about them – matched on the other wrist.

  “Snaga?” Harrac asked. “Why do they call you that?”

  “It’s my name.” Again the grin, infectious. Harrac found an unwilling echo of it on his lips.

  “Your true name?”

  Snaga nodded. “We don’t view it the same where I come from. A man wears his name. None of this hiding it.”

  “You are from the north. Across the sea. The lands of Christ, where men are pale.” Harrac felt pleased he had listened to the wisdom of the elders at circle and remembered enough of it to keep him from seeming ignorant before this stranger.

  “Ha!” Snaga nodded to the side and led
off into the shadow of the wall, raising a hand toward the two guards. “I’m from the utter north. Across two seas. My home is a place of snow and icy winds and our gods are many just as yours. The men of Christendom call us Vikings, axemen, and they fear us.”

  “Snow?”

  Snaga sat cross-legged and patted the ground for Harrac to join him. “You have to learn to trust me before I tell you about snow. I wouldn’t want you to call me a liar.”

  Harrac crouched, wary, eyes on the straight iron sword now laid across Snaga’s lap. “You don’t have an axe.” All Broken Bowl’s cattle and cowrie shells might buy him an iron sword, but not one so long or heavy as this.

  “I left my axe with my son.” Snaga’s smile became thin. “A good lad. Big. He’d be about your age, Firestone. When I sailed from home – oh, it was autumn some ... four years ago now. Odin take it. Four years ... ?”

  Harrac didn’t know ‘autumn’ or ‘Odin’ – they didn’t sound like Haccu words – but he knew about listening.

  “Anyway, when I sailed I consulted a vo- ... a witch, and she told me if I sailed in that season I wouldn’t return to the shores of the Uulisk. So I left my axe, Hel, with my son. My father wielded that axe, and his father. I didn’t want it to be gone from our people.”

  “Why did you sail then?” Harrac had never seen a sea, or even a lake, but he knew the Nola pond that came in the rainy season and it seemed no great leap of imagination to picture it many times as wide with men crossing the waters on wooden rafts. “If the witch said-”

  “A man can’t live by prophecy. I had a duty to my clan mates. How many of them might not have come home if I stayed in my hut? How would my son have valued me or my axe then?” Again the smile. “Besides. I might go back yet!”

  “What happened?”

  “Sailed too far, into warm seas, lost too many men, got taken captive, taken south, sold as a slave, taken further south.”

  Harrac’s eyes returned to the scars on Snaga’s wrists. The Snake-Stick tribes dealt in slaves with the Moors beyond the north mountains. Took men captive too sometimes. Only the ghost plain stood between the Haccu and the Snake-Sticks with their ropes and markets where men were sold like cattle.

  “Did you escape?”

  “Your king bought me for his guard. The Laccoa.” He nodded back at the wall.

  Harrac knew a dozen stories about the Laccoa. If there were a more dangerous band than the king-of-many-tribes’s elite the elders of the Haccu had no knowledge of them.

  “The Laccoa has slave-warriors?” Harrac knew they had men from many tribes and even lands beyond the king’s domain, but he hadn’t heard of any enslaved to fight.

  “Not any more.” Snaga patted the sword across his knees. “I won my freedom after our first battle. Salash from the deep Sahar had taken a desert town. We took it back.”

  “The Salash-”

  “There’s a better question you should be asking.” Snaga cut across him.

  Harrac sat back on his haunches. He looked across at the waiting crowd. Old men playing mancala with wooden boards and shiny pebbles. Tribal warriors hunched under their spears, chewing betel, merchants seated on cushions beside their mounded wares.

  “Why is a warrior of the Laccoa sitting to talk with me?”

  Snaga nodded. “Because you have fire in you.” He gave Harrac a narrow look. “Why did you come here?”

  “I beat a man. My father sent me to tell the king.” Harrac felt more guilty saying it out loud before a stranger than he had before the people of his village.

  “Was he an enemy? This man?”

  “The son of the leader of our warriors. A warrior of repute and a rich man.”

  “What was it that made you attack him?” Snaga asked.

  “He told me to fetch him water.”

  “What really made you attacked him?”

  “He told me-”

  “No.” Snaga slapped Harrac across the face, a heavy, casual blow, so unexpected that even Harrac’s speed couldn’t help him.

  Harrac surged up, toward the Northman, but Snaga planted a hand on his scarred chest and pushed him back without apparent effort. “Why?”

  “Because he was there. Because he was big.” Harrac’s face burned with the blow.

  “Now you know why I’m sitting with you, Firestone.” Snaga stood, brushing the dust from his robes. “Because I saw the killer in you.”

  Harrac stood too, willing himself not to rub his cheek. “I’m sorry for what I did. I hope Broken Bowl gets better. I don’t want to be a killer.”

  Snaga shrugged. “Perhaps you’re not. I was the same at your age, too ready to put my fist into someone’s face for looking at me wrong. Full of fire and anger, without reason or anything to aim it at. Young men show the world a fierce face, and behind it? Confusion. Lost angry boys not know their place in the world yet. That’s just how some of us grow – most grow through it, some die, some are stuck with it. Those are the true killers, blood to bone.

  “Killers who fight against what they are make better soldiers than those who don’t. Marry a killer’s instinct to a conscience and you may not get a happy man, but you get a useful one.” He started walking back toward the gates. “Come on. We’ll see if you’ve got enough in your arms to match what’s in your head and heart.”

  “But -” Harrac hurried to catch up. Snaga waved at the guards to open the gates. “I need to speak with the king. Then go home.”

  “Better to serve first – speak later. Our king is not a kind man.” Snaga led on through the gates. “His justice tends toward ... harsh. Go to him once you’ve wet your spear in his service though and you’ll get a more reasonable judgment. Oomaran appreciates warriors.”

  Harrac stopped, with the gates closing behind him, narrowing away the world he knew, the path home. “I’m not a killer...”

  Snaga came back, put his hand to Harrac’s shoulder to steer him. “My life didn’t end the day they put chains upon me. I endured. So will you. Perhaps we’ll both go home in the end.”

  Harrac looked up at the giant. “Why don’t you? Go, I mean. You’re free.”

  “Free and a thousand miles from the coast. Lacking money or the skills to travel these wilds. But most of all? I’m a Northman.” He held out his arm and pulled back the sleeve of his robes. Harrac wasn’t sure if he was more shocked by the skin, white as the linen itself, or the sheer amount of muscle heaped upon the bone. “It’s dangerous for a Haccu to travel out beyond the tribes he knows. Even in the lands that pay tribute to the king-of-many-tribes there are villages where you would be speared or find an arrow in your back. For me – ten times as hard.” He patted the sword at his hip. “Not so good against arrows, and Afrique is a land of hunters.” Snaga looked back toward the gates. “If I’m ever getting out of here it will be in a war party, a small army – a band of brothers, men bound to each other. No man’s an island. Not even the ones that think they are. Especially not them.”

  Harrac proved himself strong and fast, balanced in hand and eye. A year proved him hard enough of mind and spirit, ready to endure, ready to bleed. A second year proved him ready to kill.

  Snaga sat with him that night, backs against a baobab tree, away from the low fire set to draw in any remaining enemy. They had found the tribe-less raiders at noon, a large band of men outcast from many nations. Camped without care, secure in their numbers. They called themselves sand-wolves. Jackals would be closer. Most carried hide shields, machete, spears. A group of ten Laccoa broke among them having crawled through the scrub beneath grass mats. Snaga led them, laying about with his heavy sword in a red carnage before running for the casca bushes that hid the rest of the Laccoa.

  Harrac had waited among the bushes with his bow and his spear and his sword, a curved blade – only the Northman carried straight iron. He had crouched among his brothers, sweating. Each time the casca thorns pricked him it seemed that he heard his name spoken – Long Toe calling it as he had the first and only time it fell upon Harrac
’s ears. More thorn pricks, and other voices spoke his name – his father, Broken Bowl, his brothers, a chorus, all of them calling him home, calling him any place but there among the thorn bushes with the sand-wolves racing toward him howling for blood.

  He loosed two arrows and brought at least one man down. Another died upon his spear, set into the ground, a longer thorn amid the casca spines. In the clash and chaos of blades Harrac had kept his head, the red heat running in his veins, all thoughts of fleeing burned away. There had been a joy in it. Aloor of the Nuccabi had fought beside him, fat and strong, a clever warrior without mercy. Three Stars of the Haccu had fought on his other side, tall, serious, turning to grey, a master of the sword. Three Stars had fallen, taken by a wild swing of a machete. Harrac’s blade had all but severed the head of the man who killed him.

  Now, sat with Snaga against the baobab he felt sick. The visions wouldn’t leave him – flesh laid open to the bone, men screaming, limbs parted from bodies, more blood that he had imagined possible.

  “You learned a lesson here today, Firestone.” Snaga kept his eyes on the night. He spoke low, amid the whirr and chirp of the darkness. “It’s a lesson that will burn you, but if you hold it close even so, it will make you the man you were meant to be. That’s the first lesson – choosing what to hold on to, even if it scars, or marks, or changes, or ends you. We may not understand why we choose one thing to take close over another, but it is important that we do, and keep them tight. That faith makes us one with the gods.”

  Only the night spoke, the endless, ageless voice of the dark.

  “Do you hear me, Firestone?”

  “Harrac.”

  “What?”

  “My name is Harrac.”

  “Thank you,” Snaga said.

  Three years proved Harrac ready to sacrifice.

  “You should have gone to the king last year. You’re a blooded Laccoa. Oomaran would have sent you home with cattle, or at the least paid you a handsome fee to stay.” Snaga scanned the bush land around them. Dust trails rose in several places.