A Hero's Tale

  "We have wasted our time on a fool's errand," I said.

  "Now, now," said Bru. "The worst is over. Don't lose heart. We have only to follow Elen's army and wait upon our chance."

  Finn, who sat beside me, turned me to the firelight. Though my face must have been concealed by soot and dirt, he read my eyes. "You say you were locked up?"

  I nodded.

  He turned to Bru. "I think she doesn't know."

  "Know what?" I asked.

  "Your friend has gone with Elen's warriors."

  "That may be," I said, "but she has no need of rescue. She is content where she is."

  "How can she be content?" said Bru. "She is a prisoner."

  "Not anymore."

  Bru looked as if he couldn't comprehend what I was telling him. I saw that we were talking at cross-purposes, but I didn't know where the trouble was.

  Finn touched my hand. "Someone has deceived you," he said. "Your friend was taken out of Elen's house in shackles. She left with Elen's guard this morning. I think they mean to use her as a hostage."

  Now I was the one who couldn't comprehend what I was hearing. "It must be someone else."

  Finn shook his head. "I made very sure. When we heard they were going to bring a prisoner out, I thought it might be you. It wasn't, but the gossip of the crowd told me what I had guessed already."

  Finn saw that I was still confused. He gave me a lengthy explanation, while I gathered my wits together. Finn had waited every day in the kitchen yard for word of me. At first he worried, because I had been accused of theft, but punishments in Elen's house were swift and public, and when nothing happened, he believed that I had made the most of my opportunity.

  The day before, word went out to gather Elen's army. The warriors of the mighty were gathered there already, as well as the king's brother's men-at-arms, because of the return of the assassin. To these were added many of the common folk, some who served Elen's house as warriors, and others who had come hoping to profit from the gathering and now saw a chance for plunder.

  All day they were busy making preparations. An advance guard left late in the afternoon, with the main body to follow in the morning. They told none of the common folk what might be the cause. It was something everyone was used to. With one thing and another, Elen kept her warriors occupied.

  All day the armorer had work to do. In the evening he and Finn, together with Bru and his band, talked things over. They decided to wait until the army had departed before they tried to find me. In the morning Bru and Finn joined the crowd outside Elen's gate. When they saw Maara brought out with Elen's guard, they thought it wisest to do nothing until they heard from me. They believed that I had planned it all.

  They still believed it. I saw it in their eyes. Though I might not have known that I had succeeded, they never doubted, when they saw her, that I had made it happen. It was the most difficult thing, the one thing they thought might be impossible -- to bring a prisoner out of the fortress that was Elen's house. Yet it had been easily accomplished, not by force, but by stealth and trickery.

  Even while I listened to Finn's account, my heart beat with the words. They brought her out in shackles. Maara was a prisoner. Elen told me she was free. It was a lie. So Elen was a liar, and nothing Elen said could be believed. By her own words, she had condemned herself. You find the lie, you pull its thread, and the whole unravels.

  What a conjuror she was! I began to awaken from my enchantment.

  When Finn had finished, the men were silent. I felt them wait for a response from me.

  "Someone did deceive me," I said, "but I will not deceive you. Elen convinced me that Maara had come home."

  Then I told the men the story of my sojourn in Elen's house.

  I would soon have to come to terms with myself, with what I had done and left undone, with what I had believed, against the evidence of my own heart. Where was the flaw in me that Elen had sought out and used against me?

  No time now to think of that. My feelings must be mastered, before they overwhelmed me. I used what Maara taught me. I faced them without indulging them. Anger and regret. Disappointment in myself. And shame. Shame most of all, that I had given in so easily, that I had been so willing to believe. Then I swept them up into a bundle and set it aside.

  Now there were things to do. Now we must lay our plans. As Bru had said, we could follow Elen's army and await our opportunity. We resolved to set out before first light. With so few warriors left in Elen's house, we might make our way undiscovered to the falls. The leap into the Giant's Maw held no terror for me now.

  I kept watch while the others slept. I had slept enough. I used the time to think, not about the past I couldn't change, but about what lay ahead. We would be a full day behind Elen's army. If we were quick, we might catch up to them before the battle. Then we could bide our time and wait for the fighting to begin. Once it did, the fog of war would cover our intentions.

  I made only one mistake. I neglected my injury. Though its cause may have been a fabrication, the injury was real. I might have begun my healing by remembering Maara's love for me. As I had plundered my memory for evidence against her while I lay under an enchantment in Elen's house, I could have brought back, with clear vision, all the evidence of love, but the injury itself prevented me.

  After the first time I took a life in battle, Maara said that I had stepped into the unknown, but that would not be so when I had to kill a second time. When my trust in her was shattered, I stepped again into the unknown, and now I knew the pain that breaks our hearts. I still guarded mine.

  I hid my caution from myself. I believed that I believed. Maara in shackles could mean one thing only, that she was Elen's prisoner. But as the night wore on, doubts came to trouble me. As soon as I looked for them, other explanations offered themselves. It might have been a show, for the benefit of the common folk or the king's brother. It might even have been someone else. I tried to put my doubts away, but I would not believe again so quickly until I had the evidence of my own eyes. Until I heard the words from Maara, I would put my trust in neither one thing nor the other.

  In the morning, we leapt, not into the Giant's Maw, but into the maw of Elen's army. A warrior band of half a hundred, latecomers, caught us on the road. Bru's quick thinking deflected their suspicions. We were latecomers too, he said. As we were all well armed, they chose to believe us.

  With our new comrades in arms, we climbed the cliff, up the same trail we had descended. It took us half the morning. As we traveled through the forest, Elen's warriors stopped often, and we had no choice but to stop with them. Where we would have made up time, they dawdled along the trail. They were in no hurry to find the battlefield. They were hoping the battle would be over by the time they got there.

  When we stopped to make camp for the night, Bru volunteered to keep the first watch. Still untrusting, our comrades appointed one of their own band to watch with him, but he soon nodded off, and we crept silently away.

  The trail wasn't difficult to follow, even at nighttime. After all, we were following an army. At last we too had to stop for a few hours of sleep. At first light we continued on our way.

  All that day we traveled through the forest. I saw no part of it that I remembered, but my companions knew it well. They told me that by the next afternoon we would be in the wilderness. It was, in fact, no later than midday when we reached the forest's edge. Before we set foot into the open, Bru gathered us together. He thought it wise to send a scout a little way ahead of us, and he asked for a volunteer.

  "I'll go," I said, but he shook his head.

  "We know this country," he told me. "My son will go."

  It was the first I had heard of their relationship. The boy's name was Matha, and he was the youngest of us all. His beardless face revealed his pleasure, that his father trusted him with our safety.

  We made a cautious camp that night. We dared not light a fire in the open, so we had a supper of cold barley cakes and smoked venison. Bru sent ou
t no less than five men to watch, all at some distance from our camp, so that we would not be taken unawares.

  Again I volunteered to stand a watch.

  Again Bru shook his head. "Your time will come," he said.

  We had an uneventful night, and then an uneventful day, but when we sat down to another cold meal that evening, the men seemed wary. They glanced out into the darkness, as if they expected trouble to come at any moment. Our watchmen notwithstanding, each man kept his own watch. No one had much to say, and when anyone did speak, it was hardly above a whisper.

  Despite their nervousness, or perhaps because of it, I slept well the whole night through. I relied on my companions. I trusted myself to their skill and their experience, as well as to their good intentions.

  The next day was as uneventful as the day before. While we paused at midday for a bite to eat, no one said a word. They were listening. All day we had traveled under a cloudy sky. All day we had heard nothing but the wind. Now I could no longer feel the wind, but I still heard it. At first I thought it must be my imagination, but the others were listening to something too.

  Then Finn said, "The battle has been joined."

  When we resumed our march, Bru sent out two more scouts to go with his son. As the afternoon wore on, the clouds descended, until we were surrounded by a swirling mist. Our scouts returned to us before they lost us altogether. It was still early, but the mist grew so thick that we had to stop, or we might have stumbled into danger without warning. We listened again for the sounds of battle, but all we heard was silence.

  In the field an opportunity for sleep is never wasted. We hoarded it. We stored it up, against the time when sleep would be impossible.

  In the morning we awoke among the dead. They lay all around us. Some appeared to be asleep, but most lay in some grotesque posture, as if death had taken them as they writhed in pain. Blinded by the mist, we had blundered in amongst them.

  When morning came, the air was clear, to show me what I had done. The dead had come to haunt me, I who caused their death. It was a truth I had recognized already. I had used the lives of innocents to accomplish my own ends.

  Finn saw me sitting up. He took my arm and helped me to my feet.

  "Come away," he said.

  I couldn't move.

  "Don't be afraid," he said. "They can't harm us now."

  Living men could have been no greater threat to me.

  Finn led me away while Bru and his men scouted the battlefield. As we ate a cold breakfast, they each made their report. It had been only a skirmish, they said, a meeting of Elen's advance guard with scouts from the northern army. A score of northern dead had covered the retreat of the rest, who would have hastened back to bring warning of the advancing enemy.

  "Was this what we heard yesterday?" I asked.

  Bru shook his head. "Not many fought here."

  If the death I had seen that morning was just the remnant of a skirmish, how many would remain, lifeless on the battlefield, after a clash of armies?

  Bru studied me. "Have you lost heart?"

  I shook my head.

  "Nevertheless, I think this is not what you expected."

  "No," I said. "This is just what I expected. When I foresaw it, I didn't care, but now I do."

  My mind turned inward, trying to remember who it was that counted these deaths as nothing. Her words echoed hollow in my heart. Death is our destiny, and nothing matters. I remembered her and understood her, but I had left her back in Elen's house.

  Bru frowned at me. "Will you turn back?"

  Would these lives too, these innocents, Finn and Bru, the armorer, the men whose lives I had saved in Merin's house, would they too be sacrificed?

  "This is my undertaking," I told him. "I have not words enough to thank you for the help you've given me. I never meant to risk your lives along with mine. You've done enough. My turn has come. Go home."

  Bru smiled. "I'm glad we understand each other."

  I nodded and started to stand up. I had no heart for long good-byes.

  "Let us now meet in council, you and I," said Bru. "We have an undertaking of our own, and we will need your help."

  I sat back down.

  "For the mighty we care nothing," he went on, "but many of my kinsmen fight beside them. So they keep their pride as fighting men, as I keep mine by keeping to myself. Now they are in peril. If I can help them, I must do it."

  The men all nodded. No one accused me. They had no need to. I was quick to accuse myself.

  "If I can help you," I said, "I will. This evil is my doing, and I will try to make amends for it."

  Bru shook his head. "It is true that a little nudge from you has moved the world, but when that happens, the world was already inclined to move. I feel a great change coming. Whatever has been set in motion, let us ride it."

  He reached his arm out to me and I took it. The men sat by, silent witnesses to our agreement. When we stood up to continue on our way, I saw on each man's face a light that came, not from the rising sun, but from within. They too felt change coming, and they transformed my guilt into a sense of hope and common cause, that we could bring some good out of the evil I had set afoot.

  82. Battlefield

  The sounds of battle that we had heard the day before could have come from quite a distance. A cloudy sky reflects sound as well as light, and in the wilderness there were neither trees nor hills high enough to form a barrier against it. All the same, caution was our watchword. We sent out no scouts. All of us together crept carefully to the top of each rise and peered over before descending the other side. From time to time one of my companions paused to sniff the air, but the wind blew from behind us and told us nothing.

  At midday we reached a hill a little higher than the rest, and Bru and I ascended it while the others waited out of sight. From its top we had our first view of the battlefield. It was a landscape from a nightmare. No armies fought there now. Only the dead remained. At first they were all that I could see.

  Though I knew better, my heart began to hope that these men were all asleep and that any moment they would wake and spring up again. I waited for these dead men to spring up.

  Then someone did. It was a living man, plundering the dead. A mist blew by him, hid him for a moment. Not mist. Smoke. For no apparent reason, other living men had lit a bonfire, with logs stacked up into piles almost as tall as they were. In the distance I saw two more. Where they found so much wood to burn here in the wilderness I could not imagine, until I saw that they were not burning wood. They burned the dead.

  The sight horrified me more than any I had yet seen on that dreadful day. At home we would have opened up the earth to place our dead within it, within the Mother's womb, so that she would take their bodies back into herself.

  As living plants spring up from the dead seed, so their spirits would spring up again in time, clothed with living flesh. These dead would suffer a fate more cruel than they had met the day they died. Burning would release their spirits into the air, where they would wander, lost in a shadow world, longing for a house of flesh. Then they would seek out the living, and this battlefield would become a haunting.

  I must have made a sound that told Bru of my dismay. I felt him watching me, and because he had before mistaken my regret for cowardice, I said, "My people would not dare to burn the dead."

  "Nor mine," said Bru, "but the battlefield is a place unto itself. The mighty say the spirits of warriors killed in battle fly at once to the halls of their god of war, where they will be rewarded for their valor."

  "Words are only air," I said, remembering an old saying whose ending was not spoken but understood, that it was one's deeds that mattered. Yet a deeper truth lay within it. How easy to speak such things to the innocent and gullible. How joyfully might a man go to his death if he believed such empty promises. This was a wickedness that baffled me.

  "And how else could they dispose of them all?" said Bru.

  If they wouldn't place them in the
Mother's womb, they could at least leave them lying on her breast, I thought. And they did indeed leave many. When I asked Bru why some were burned and some were left, he said, "They only burn their own."

  I would have preferred the mighty to treat me as the enemy, until I saw the ravens, plucking out their eyes.

  I turned away, leaving Bru to read the battlefield. Elen had won the day, he told me. That was why her men now plundered the enemy dead and honored, according to their strange beliefs, their own. Bru reckoned that Elen had lost at least a hundred, and the northerners more than twice as many.

  "Then it's over," I said. "Their hearts have been defeated. Now they will go home."

  He shook his head. "Their chieftains will return for the negotiations."

  "To make a treaty?"

  Bru smiled at my ignorance. "No one treats with the defeated," he said. "They will come to negotiate a ransom for the prisoners."

  Of course. Elen's army would have taken prisoners. But what did the northerners have to offer? Was I the only one who understood their poverty?

  "How can they ransom them?" I asked. "Other than their arms, they have little of value."

  Bru frowned. "Elen will take those first, before she takes their lives."

  "What?"

  "She won't leave any who might come back to threaten her again."

  "Will she murder them all?"

  "Some she will," he said. "The chieftains first, when they come to her tent under a banner of trust. Then she will pursue the remnant of their army until they scatter leaderless back into the hills they came from."

  "Why would she do such a thing?"

  "Because she can."

  "Will she also kill the prisoners?"

  "If they are troublesome, she may. If they behave themselves, she will enslave them."

  He seemed so certain of Elen's plans that I wondered if he had some experience of her dealings with her foes. He answered my unspoken question.

  "I have heard many stories of her ruthlessness," he said, "but I also have a story of my own. Many years ago, before Elen became a queen, her mother sent her to deal with a troublesome band of outlaws, bandits who robbed the caravans of her trade goods. When Elen learned from her spies that they were, as she called them, only a ragamuffin army, she disguised her band of warriors as a caravan and tricked the bandits into attacking them. Once defeated, they would not have been a threat to her again, but she murdered their chieftain and made the rest her prisoners. They were too fierce to serve as slaves, so she put them in cages and displayed them, as she would have displayed savage beasts, until they all died of shame and grief."