Casca 9: The Sentinel (3 page)

"No! I don't think eternity should have to wait that long for one such as you. You like to stick things into young girls. Perhaps you should know what that feels like."

Casca gave him a solid smash in the spine with his knee. As the man's back arched in pain, he grasped his spear with both hands and struck down, pushing the head of the spear into the thin skin between the collarbone and shoulder. Leaning on the haft, Casca put all his weight behind the thrust, forcing the point deeper into the kneeling man. The cold point sliced through lungs and intestines until it found the only exit available, Still Casca leaned on the handle. Forcing the point deep into the earth, he pinned the squirming Gepid to the ground.

It was done. He told the remaining women to go outside the compound and call in the rest of the villagers. They did as he ordered. While they were gone, he untangled the dead child's legs from the breeches of the Gepid. He regretted that he hadn't gotten to them sooner. He knew that his decision to go after the other raiders first was the right one, but it didn't make the brutal death of this child any easier to accept.

The people of the village crowded around Casca, wanting to touch him in gratitude but afraid to lay hands on him. What if he was just going to take the place of those he had killed?

They had no reason to worry. Casca wanted nothing from them. The passion was gone from his spirit, and this day's work had done nothing to make him feel any better. Reluctantly, he accepted their offer of hospitality and stayed the night, sleeping in a hut whose owners had been killed by the raiders.

The food brought to him was tasteless in his mouth, as though he were eating ashes. He even sent away the woman who came to him in the night and slid under his blanket. He wanted nothing from anyone.

When the woman reported back to Hogar the results of her effort, the old man shook his head in wonder. Surely this man was not like any he had seen before.

When Casca had stripped to wash the blood from himself, Hogar had seen the scars on his body. To his old mind returned many of the legends of his childhood, when he had believed in the story of the immortals and of those who were half gods.

There was a power to this man with the scarred hands and twisted muscles that worked under his hide. The old man had been a warrior in his youth and had seen many wounds inflicted in battle. He knew that several wounds on the bathing warrior should have killed the man. Had a godling come to save them?

Why else would the warrior refuse what they had offered him? Even their most beautiful woman? But then, what can mere mortals offer that the gods don't already have? Hogar shook his gray head in confusion. It was too much for him to reason out. He knew only that there was no evil in the man who slept in the hut, his sword by his hand.

To Hogar's simple mind, Casca was the representation of Tyr or Wodan, the ancient gods of war of the barbarians. He couldn't be a god of the Romans. He had seen statues of them when young, and they never had bodies like Casca's or carried the scars of a hundred battles. No! He was not a god of the Romans; he wasn't pretty enough for that. But he was still something that was outside the old man's experience.

Casca rose well before first light and left the village, striking straight out toward the high peaks that glistened in the clear, crisp night sky. He didn't try to plan his steps but just let them take him where they wanted to go. And that was up. Up high, past the line where trees could live. Up past where man could exist. Up to the clean mountains, where the stench of death was only a dim breath from the lands below.

It felt good to feel the snow beneath him as he reached the level where early snows had already come to the mountains and soon would work their way down to the green valleys. Ahead of him, he knew that it would be even deeper.

Numbness reached up to Casca's thighs as he forced his way through the growing drifts of white crystals. His lungs ached from the thin air as he stopped to try to catch his breath. Everything around him was a shifting sea of snow. Breath came in short gasps of mist from his open mouth.

Ice tears tried to force his reddened lids together. He rubbed away the grime with the back of a scarred hand. Raising his head, he saw through the swirling clouds the heaven-reaching peaks of the high Alps.

To the south below, in the still, warm valleys of Italy, new masters ruled. The empire was finally destroyed. He knew that she would not rise again. Gaiseric, the Vandal king, had looted Rome for the third time, a systematic sacking of the city that had once and for all broken any remnants of pride or spirit that remained in the hearts of the people.

Only the Eastern Empire remained as a force to be reckoned with, and he knew that it was only a matter of time before the barbarians on her borders would drag down the walls of Constantinople as well.

Casca would have laughed if his face hadn't been so numb from the cold. A matter of time. Gods, he was tired of it all. The last few months since the death of Attila had not eased anything for him. They had brought only one struggle after another that had finally driven him to this desolate valley of ice, where he couldn't see any sign of the works or slaughter of man.

He moved on, his feet growing heavier with each step as his booted feet punched holes in the crisp crust of the drifts. Behind him, his trail was erased in a matter of minutes by the wind. He wished that he could be erased as easily.

He remembered the dream of Alaric the Visigoth, how he wanted to rebuild the empire by infusing the vitality of his race with the culture of Rome. Perhaps it would work, perhaps not. Casca was so tired that he really didn't care who ruled the world or in what name.

Casca's lungs ached from his exertions. Reaching the base of the peak, he stood in a sheltered place between a
schism of granite that had been split open by the expansion of drops of water that had collected in a thousand tiny crevices. Finally, during some unknown epoch, the water had been frozen hard enough to expand a thousandth of an inch and then hundreds of times more over the next ten thousand years, repeating the process, each time forcing the granite farther apart until the ice won and the tons of rock gave up, to burst open.

Looking back over the way he had come, in the valley below, he could see the face of a glacier, blue lights bouncing from its surface as the wind eased and then finally ceased, leaving the countryside clear to view: clean, cold, and pure.

Without knowing why, he began to climb the mountain, following a narrow trail for five thousand feet. Then, where it ended, he saw a small cave facing out over the shining valleys below. Here the wind had swept away most of the snow. The chill of the thin air cut like a dagger, but he didn't care; it meant nothing. In a strange way it felt good.

He sat down a few feet from the entrance, his legs crossed, holding his sword in his hand, with the point of the scabbard between his legs. For some reason he put on his helmet, the iron nasal guard down, his shield on his back, the spear by his right thigh. The thick black bearskin was draped over his shoulders as he sat waiting for something. But he was content. There was
a peacefulness to the cold. His lungs had quit aching for breath as he stared out over the ice fields below, waiting, waiting, weary.

Outside of the cave the valleys and peaks of ice cast rainbows over the horizon. He was so tired. As the blood in his veins began to thicken, he started to feel warmer, comfortable,
alone in his granite tower. He leaned his head against the pommel of his sword, letting the winter sink deep into his soul, taking him away. His eyes couldn't move; tears had frozen them open. But he felt no pain. His body was a distant thing that he was only vaguely aware of.

His thoughts came slowly as the feeling drained from him, beginning in his legs and then rising slowly up into his abdomen till he could barely sense a warm chill touching his heart and slowing it down.

He sat, sword in his hands, head leaning against his weapon. His unmoving eyes saw nothing as he let the cold claim him. Before it took him completely, his distant mind whispered to him a piece of verse he heard a hundred years before:

Endlessly weary, the Silent Sentinel guards the Tower of Darkness.

Endlessly, endlessly weary.

The warrior slept, eyes open to the winds, not caring, not knowing when his mind ceased to be aware of anything, anyone, even himself. Not knowing or caring about the ice that gradually encrusted his body or the paleness of his hands and face that could no longer move or wished to.

The warrior, with his weapons, slept the long sleep of the ice-mountains in his own tower of white darkness.

It was the next spring when the villager found him in the cave. All color was gone from his face, and his hands still grasped the sword between his legs. His eyes were open, sightlessly watching the valley below. Even though the glaciers beneath him were starting to give off streams of clear melted ice water to flow to the rivers and thence to the distant seas – there in the heights it would always be winter for the sleeping warrior.

The shepherd stood in superstitious awe of the frozen man. Making a sign to ward off evil, he ran back to his village as fast as his legs could carry him, rushing in to breathlessly call the people to come and witness what he had seen. The warrior had not left them; he was still there: above them, waiting, watching over them.

Hogar the elder questioned the shepherd, shaking his gray head in confusion and wonder, for the man swore that the warrior was not dead. He had seen many who had frozen to death in the mountains, but there was a difference to this man of the sword. He couldn't put the difference into words, but if they would just come see for themselves, they would know that he spoke the truth.

In the morning Hogar took two of his men and a woman with him, the one whose murdered child Casca had avenged. Together they made the long climb up the narrow twisting trail, far past the line where trees grew and only a few stubborn bushes and gray lichens could survive. When they reached the cave, Hogar stopped, his heart pounding more in anticipation of what he might find than it had from the climb. Summoning up his courage, he looked inside the cave. It was true!

The warrior was there, legs crossed in front of him, holding his weapons, staring with unblinking ice-gray eyes. He knelt in front of the warrior as the others crowded behind him.

There was something different about him, a feeling that he was not dead, though he certainly looked to be. No man could survive a winter in the heights alone, without food or warm shelter, yet there was no sign that a fire had ever been made here. But there was still something about the warrior that just wasn't right. Timidly, Hogar reached out a hand to touch the cheek of the man who had saved them from the bandits.

He jerked his hand back as if it had been burned. The skin should have been hard as a rock, yet there was an odd suppleness to it in spite of the chill that lay behind the gray unmoving flesh.

Beneath the sleeper, the world turned as always. Powers rose and fell. Babies were born, to grow until they had their own children and then die. Wars came, famines struck, and nothing really changed except the names. Man was as he always had been and always would be, driven by the same fears and motivations that had plagued him since the first cell had crawled out of the primal slime of creation to eventually stand erect and leave the shelter of the cave.

None of this mattered to the sleeper, for he considered his long sleep as an escape for a time from the conflict of life.

Only the boundaries of nations changed. As new masters rose and fell in the year 454, the Gepids, under the command of Arderic, turned on their Hunnish overlords and destroyed them in a great battle at the Nedao. The surviving Huns retreated back to the steppes of central Asia, to the shores of the Sea of Azov, pushing the last survivors of the glory of Ermanrich's Ostrogoths into a small pocket of the Crimea.

By A.D. 455, after the conquest of Africa by the Vandal King Gaiseric, the Mediterranean was a German lake. Gaiseric built a great fleet and claimed the Balearics, Corsica, Sardinia, and the western end of Sicily. His wild raiders struck east and west at will and sacked Rome much more thoroughly than it had been pillaged when the Goths of Alaric rode through the gates.

By 470, the final disintegration of the Western Empire was complete. The Visigoths expanded to the Loire and Rhone rivers in Gaul and then conquered Spain except for those portions already held by their cousins, the Suevii, and small inaccessible and hostile regions populated by the fierce tribes of the Basques.

The names of many tribes disappeared as they were either totally eliminated or absorbed into larger ones, such as the Burgundians, who now ruled from the Alps to the Mediterranean, as the Franks and Alemanni slowly spread out from their borders.

Italy was in the hands of Odoacer, a barbarian general who finally dispensed with the services of even a puppet emperor and took all power to himself. He did acknowledge the suzerainty of the Eastern emperor, but only with the proviso that no attempt be made to enforce his fealty. Odoacer destroyed the fierce Rugians so completely when they attempted to cross the Danube into what was now his land that they vanished as people from history.

The last province where a Roman emperor ruled in the west was Dalmatia, and after the death of the last of the "Roman emperors," Romulus Caesar, he annexed that province and proclaimed himself King of Italy, only in 489 to fall to treachery at the hands of Theodoric the Ostrogoth after four years of hard- fought battles.

Italy changed masters as other men change wives. All of the proud empire of the Caesars, from Europe to Africa, was now in the hands of the German tribes, and barbarians sat on the eagle throne of Rome.

All this took place as the warrior slept the long sleep, not noticing the offerings that were placed before him by the villagers. His eyes of ice never saw the flowers set before him that quickly withered into brown dried husks that blew away with the winds or tasted the food that was set before him by the villagers. The warrior had no need of these things, for he knew neither hunger nor thirst.

For the first hundred years, the people of the village came to his cave at regular intervals to place their offerings, but eventually the worshipers found new interests and the offerings became fewer with each passing season until at last years would pass before anyone would take the effort to climb to his granite nest. It was too much trouble.

There were a few among the older people who still told of how he had come to their valley and saved them. By the cooking fires, the children would sit at their feet at night as they told of the warrior and how he had gone to the mountain so that he could always watch over them. If the day came when he was needed again, he would awaken and come down from the gale-swept peaks to do battle against their enemies.

The children would listen with wide eyes at the story, and once in a while one of them would gather his courage to climb the mountain and see whether the warrior was really there.

They would return from their adventure, breathless with excitement and fear at their own daring, to tell the others that the warrior was there. He was still sitting holding his sword, eyes open, his face as gray as the stones around him, ice crystals forming diamonds in his hair, covering his fur robe in a thin crust of rime.

In time, as they grew older, they no longer believed in the legend, for that is what it had become by then. The warrior was just a man who had frozen to death. That and no more, though several times a young man found enough courage to try to take the sword from the hand of the warrior, for swords such as he held were of great value. Such a weapon could buy a man enough cattle to start his own herd.

But always, when they reached out to force the stiff white fingers from around the blade, they stopped. There was something that came over them, a nameless dread that said, "Leave this alone," when they touched the cold scarred hands. The eyes of the warrior watched them, unmoving, but they seemed somehow aware. No one ever succeeded in taking the blade from its master's grasp or even spoke of the attempt to do so.

The warrior was left alone in his tower.

Ireina followed the thin trail up to the heights. She'd sneaked away from her older brother, who was watching their small flock of goats and sheep below. The story of the warrior, as told her by her great-grandmother, filled her with too much childish curiosity to resist going to see for herself.

Even though she had been born in the highlands, her heart pounded under her ten year old rib cage as her lungs labored under the thin air.
The wind whipped her long strands of silver hair about her head and face under the garland of spring flowers she'd woven.

The journey was taking longer than she had thought it would, and she knew that she would be in trouble when she got back to her brother – but she had to go. She turned a corner around a jagged edge of granite, and there was the cave.

Hesitant now at her own daring, she walked slowly forward, shivering under her thin tunic. A patch of ice in the shade of the monolith nearly caused her to slip and fall. If she had, it would have certainly killed her, for the next stop was over five hundred feet straight down.

Shadows were on the face of the entrance to the cave as she crept slowly forward. Finally, she could see a dim figure near the mouth. For a moment she thought it was just a strangely shaped boulder. Then, as she neared, she saw the man.

Moving in to see him better, she squatted on her thin haunches directly in front of him, not moving until her eyes adjusted from the glare outside to the darker shadows in the cave. The man's face came into full vision. She caught her breath. He looked dead, yet there was something that said he was not. She knew that most of her people believed him to just be a frozen man, but she knew different. Slowly she moved closer to him, careful not to touch the sword in his scarred hand. Moving a little to his side, she looked him over from all angles.

The face was not cruel – hard, yes, but not cruel. In her child's heart she saw a terrible sadness in the set of the mouth, a great weariness in the manner in which the broad shoulders sloped under the frozen robe. She moved her face closer to his, nearly touching him. She looked into the eyes, eyes that never blinked, yet she felt that they knew she was there.

A strange desire came over her; she set her young lips to the pale ones of the warrior, expecting to feel stiff, ice-frozen flesh. She jerked back when the flesh yielded under her lips. His lips were cold, but she knew that there was life behind them. She became frightened of her boldness and her thoughts. Removing the garland of flowers from her hair, she set them in the lap of the warrior and turned to race back down the mountain as fast as her legs would take her.

That night she didn't think of the slap her brother had given her for going off. Instead, her mind was filled with the face of the man in the cave, and she dreamed childish dreams of how one day he would awaken to take her from the mountain down into the warm lands. He was hers.

As she grew, so did her fantasies about Casca. He represented all the things she dreamed of: a sleeping noble who would make her his bride and come to her rescue when danger threatened.

Keeping the secret to herself, she made regular trips to the cave, spending hours there talking to the man, not minding that he didn't answer. She told him all her secret dreams and thought that she saw his head nod in understanding or his mouth twist just a bit in a tiny smile.

Each time before she left, she would kiss the gray lips and tell him to rest well till she came again. The young men of the village who courted her found themselves rejected firmly. No matter what they offered, she would not lay down with them or take one to mate, even though she had now reached the sixteenth year of her life and was as beautiful and wild as the mountains of her home.

Her father shook his head in resignation that his daughter was a bit strange, but he hoped that she would grow out of it and take a mate soon. But she never even entertained the thought of taking one of the men of the mountains to wed. She had her lover high in the mountains; he waited, and so did she. One day he would come for her, and she would be there.

Ireina's high valley was seldom visited by the new masters, for it was off the beaten paths and had little to offer in the way of riches. Occasionally a rider came to tell them that they were to pay tribute in the amount of a few sheep or cattle, either to the Burgundians or to the Ostrogoths, whichever was most in power at that moment. Sometimes they had to pay both, for they sat near an undefined border between the two states. The Ostrogoths controlled Italy proper and were the stronger, but they had other richer regions to tax and were seldom hard pressed enough to send warriors into this sparsely populated region for the sake of few sheep or cows. They only came in the summer months, when the passes were clear of ice and snow.

Their worst fears were about the bands of raiders and bandits who wandered the mountains, taking refuge from the warriors of the new masters. These were not so choosy. All knew that it was only a matter of time before they showed up again, though now it had been two full generations since a band of brigands had last entered their valley. That had not been too difficult an ordeal. A patrol of Burgundian
s was hot on their trail, and the brigands moved off after killing a few villagers and taking what little they had in the way of movable goods. Their loot consisted of less than ten silver coins and a few pots of copper. They took nothing else – even slaves would have slowed them down – as they were short of horses.

Ireina prayed for her sleeping lover to awaken, but he didn't.

The old ones of the village said that he would not come down until the village was in desperate danger. Ireina was torn between hoping for disaster to strike and fear that it would.

It was the fall of her twentieth year when what they'd dreaded came to pass. A band of fifty warriors from different tribes rode into her valley and made themselves master there. This time there would be no pursuit, for the first snows were already beginning to close up the narrow passes and trails. There could be no aid until the spring thaw.

The village had increased in size but still numbered no more than a hundred males, of whom fewer than twenty were of an age to fight.

The bandits rode in nearly unopposed. Several young men attempted to resist but were quickly cut down. The leader of the bandits was named Herac, a tall, darkly handsome man with a shaven face who was half Greek and half Goth. He affected cleaner habits than his cohorts but was not lacking in their greed and cruelty.

As the leader, he had first choice among the women, and he picked Ireina. She was led to him where he had set up headquarters in the longhouse for bachelor males. It was the largest building in the village.

She closed her eyes and her mind to what happened to her as he forced himself into her body, his rough hands bruising her breasts, whipping her to try to get some response. She lay still, saying nothing, doing nothing, as he performed one vile exercise after another on her. She took her mind away from what was happening to her body, giving Herac, who considered himself quite a lover, no satisfaction. Finally he beat her and threw her out of the longhouse, cursing her for being a stupid cow
who couldn't please a real man.

That night the first heavy snow came falling in a windless sky to cover the earth and fields. The old women treated her wounds, washing away the blood from her thighs. When they at last left her alone, she dressed, ignoring the pain, took food and a warm robe, wrapped her legs in wool breeches, and climbed out over the stockade wall. She knew where she had to go.

Her trail was covered in a matter of minutes as the snow continued to fall in fat, gentle flakes.

It was dawn when she reached the opening to the cave where the warrior slept. Wrapping herself in her robe, she lay down beside him.

The cold of dawn woke her, her body aching and her legs cramped under her. The temperature had dropped too far past the point of freezing. Sitting up next to Casca, she rubbed the pain from her legs, trying to get the circulation started again. She had to stay warm, or she would join her sleeping lover. The thought appealed to her: to sit beside him through eternity, never knowing pain or hunger, to be always young.