Path of Revenge (32 page)

‘Bregor, you stumbling imbecile, what do you do instead of thinking? How did you make it to adulthood? Ah, what’s the use? Go on, go find your way back and retrieve it. I’ll wait here.’

And you accuse me of not thinking?
Bregor kept this thought unsaid. He nodded to his captor, head bent
obsequiously, and backed away.
Don’t change your mind, don’t think it through
…

‘Wait,’ Noetos said. ‘The moment you put the pack on your shoulders you will be off back to Fossa. In fact, knowing you, you probably won’t even wait to pick up the pack, forgetting that it’s four or five days’ march back home.’ He put his hands to his head and shook it in disgust.

‘We will abandon it, and get by with what remains in my pack. We can exist on short rations until we get to a village. I’m sure they’ll be grateful enough to give us something to eat when they hear our warning.’

So close…
Bregor couldn’t help himself.
Fossa first,
he thought as the image of Merle’s face hung in his mind. Before he could consider it further he spun on his heel and ran, legs and arms pumping in every direction.
He must be tired, he’ll give me up like he gave up the pack.

He found himself sprinting towards a rainbow: the shower had passed to the north, and in the east a small bow hung over Ossern Hill. The scene jerked from side to side as he threw himself into his escape. Small ruts and hollows threatened to trip him; the grass slapped wetly against his legs, making running difficult. Fifty paces, a hundred, and his calves felt like tree trunks trying to take root every time he planted one on the ground. Trying to breathe was like attempting to suck meat through a reed.

He didn’t make it to the end of the field. His legs went from under him, defeated by the slippery grass and uneven ground, and he ploughed hard into the earth. Something cracked underneath him as he landed. He groaned, spat out a broadweed stalk, levered himself up on his elbows and pulled a dry stick, now in two pieces, from under his hips. The fisherman stared down at him.

‘Thought…you wanted…pack…quickly,’ Bregor said weakly between sobbing gasps, knowing how ridiculous the excuse sounded even as he said it; then spat out fresh blood. He braced himself for what was to come.

‘Don’t speak,’ Noetos said, in a surprisingly gentle voice. ‘You’ve reinjured your throat. Stay where you are; I’ll be back in a minute with water.’

Bregor lowered his head to the wet earth, thoroughly exhausted in body and mind. Within moments he found a halfway place between unconsciousness and sleep, a place where he could ignore the voice that told him he was an ineffectual, cowardly man.
I try to do what is right,
was his last thought.
If only I didn’t get it so wrong.

Some time later he drifted away from his place of pity and came to himself, awakening to the sound of Noetos talking with someone. No, talking with
himself. Not again. Every night since they had left Fossa, and now under the afternoon sun. What must he be like to live with?
Well, Bregor didn’t have to imagine. Opuntia had not exaggerated.

‘…is worried about Merle. Must be. But why didn’t he mention her before now? I could have understood it had he begged to go back, to see if he could save her somehow. It’s what I’d do. What I’m doing.’

A pause, then he spoke again in a more thoughtful voice. ‘But such a fool. An alliance with the Neherians? Might as well have skinned himself on the beach and invited the sharks to feast on his flesh.’

‘Noetos,’ the Hegeoman rasped, his mouth close to the fisherman’s ear. ‘Wake up. You’re dreaming.’ Even the effort of whispering sent him into a coughing fit.

‘Father? Upanas? Be easy, father.’ Noetos’s voice, thick with sleep, sounded uncertain.

Is he hearing me?
Bregor wondered. ‘There were reasons, fisherman,’ he said, using his breath and
mouth to shape his words, protecting his throat. ‘It didn’t seem foolish at the time.’

‘It was foolish,’ Noetos said, his eyes still closed. ‘Bregor is a frightened fool. He knows nothing. But I have done many foolish things myself out of fear. Particularly when I ought to have defended my family. So courageous. I fled when faced with the duty to avenge my family and, with great valour, I hid in that fish-stinking Alkuon-forsaken village filled with fools.’

What is this? What family is he referring to?
‘There is still hope,’ Bregor whispered.

‘There was never any hope. Blame Grandfather if you must blame anyone. He defied the Destroyer’s command and had his dukedom ripped from him along with his life. Now
there
was a fool. And what good did his defiance do? Cost him Roudhos, which is what his enemies wanted.’

‘Your
grandfather?
’ the Hegeoman said, and in his surprise he voiced the words, further damaging his throat. ‘The last Duke of Roudhos was your grandfather?’

‘So you always told us,’ said the sleeping fisherman. ‘You were angry that the dukedom you stood to inherit was reduced to a fraction of the Fisher Coast. A bitter man. Bitterness makes people do foolish things, doesn’t it, father; such as trying to make deals with rival Neherian factions. Leads them and their families to forest glades where their lives are ended badly, while I could only cower and watch.’

‘You saw me die?’ Transfixed by the revelation, Bregor found himself unable to resist playing along.

‘I saw them take your head,’ came the reply. ‘But you were dead already. I watched you die as they butchered your children.’

‘You hate him, don’t you?’

‘Hate…who? Father? Is that you?’ Noetos began to stir, clearly anxious. ‘Father?’

The Hegeoman pulled away from him. No matter how much more he might find out by playing along with the fisherman’s dream, it was not worth the risk of being found out.

It proved to be a wise decision. Noetos continued to stir, rolled over onto his stomach, then awoke and rubbed his eyes. After a few moments Noetos stood and came over to him.

‘How are you feeling, Bregor?’

He began to answer, but thought better of it, shrugging instead.

‘It’s all right, it’s all right,’ Noetos soothed, as if he was a fractious infant. ‘I gave you some water while you were unconscious. You swallowed some of it, so that should see you right for a time.’

‘Sorry,’ Bregor whispered, all breath and mouth. ‘So sorry.’

He meant it. Grandson to the infamous last Duke of Roudhos? His family tortured and slain before his eyes? Opuntia had revealed none of this during her visits with him and Merle.
Perhaps she doesn’t know.

‘So am I, my friend.’ Noetos turned his head away, though not before Bregor caught the edge of shame on the fisherman’s face.

The Hegeoman continued to think things through that afternoon as they walked. The behaviour of the Recruiters suddenly seemed more sinister. How much did they know about Noetos and his family? The fisherman—the
pretend
fisherman, Bregor reminded himself—had obviously chosen Fossa as a hiding place. Now he was being drawn out by agents of Andratan. Could this really be coincidence? What plans had they all been caught up in? And what role did the Neherian fleet play in all this?

‘I give you a choice,’ Noetos said eventually. ‘You can leave, now, in any direction you like, though you’ll have to go and fetch the pack from Ossern Hill.
Or we can rest here today and camp overnight.’ He sat down on the damp ground and indicated for Bregor to do likewise.

The Hegeoman shook his head sharply at both suggestions, but sat anyway. His useless sprint had taken a great deal out of him.

‘What, then? Are you well enough to resume our journey immediately? Is this what you choose?’

Bregor nodded solemnly. What he had heard—what he had coaxed from his oblivious companion—needed to be thought about. Investigated. A need for answers settled on him, along with a conviction that the quickest way back to Fossa was onwards.

‘I’ll make no secret of it,’ Noetos said. ‘I wish to get to the first northern village as soon as I can. Every day we lose is another village fallen to the Neherians, with who knows how many deaths. And my family grows further and further out of my reach. Are you able to come with me?’

Another nod, more emphatic than he felt.

Noetos hauled him to his feet, and they were on their way.

Noetos sensed he had broken something in the Hegeoman. Not just in his throat, but in his spirit. The man, who had been so obviously straining at the bit to return to Fossa, had instead given in to Noetos’s purpose, with no clue as to why. Shamed into it, perhaps, or uncertain of his ability to survive the walk home. Neither reason sufficed. He thought it unlikely Bregor had suffered an attack of virtue.

Whatever the reason, Noetos felt the lift in his own spirits. The man was useless, but any company on the road was surely better than none.

They found their way into a wide, shallow basin, drained by a stream running counter to the direction they needed to go. Two paces across, the stream
looked diseased, with a verdigris stain at either edge. After carefully wading through the water, they climbed the far slope of the basin. Noetos expected to see evidence of the Eisarn diggings at any moment. It was hours since they had left the summit of Ossern Hill; they ought to have come across some sign of the mine or the Palestran Line by now…

Some subtle sign gave him a bare moment’s warning. A glimpse of a wider vista, perhaps, an instinctual feel of space, or a small change in the flow of air. He made a lunge at Bregor’s arm, catching his sleeve and jerking him back from the sudden emptiness at their feet. He fought to arrest his own momentum, and caught a whirling vision of the ground—huts, piles of stones, layers of orange rock, the tops of trees—far below. Bregor sprang back, sending them both tumbling to the ground at the edge of the chasm.

‘We have found Eisarn,’ Noetos said, unnecessarily, after a long silence, and crawled forward.

Stones dislodged by their scrambling were only now clattering to the pit floor, hundreds of feet below. The fisherman watched, hands on knees, as three tiny figures emerged from a nearby hut, cast their eyes over the area, then shouted something up to him. The fractured cliffs of the pit garbled the words. Something angry, no doubt. More men joined the group.

Noetos replied by gesticulating left and right.
Work it out,
he willed them.
Which way down?

Eventually one of the men understood, and waved to the fisherman’s right. Noetos waved back in acknowledgment. ‘Come on, Bregor,’ he said wearily, and plucked at the man’s collar.

They found a path a few minutes’ walk along the edge of the pit, marked by a collection of rusting shovels and picks. No more than a pace wide, it plunged over the lip, then wound off to the right,
notched into the side of the enormous quarry. Knowing the likelihood of the Hegeoman tripping over his own feet at any opportunity, Noetos kept a hand on his shoulder.

The immensity of the pit began to affect his nerves, making his feet tingle and filling his head with mad ideas of falling. He could hear his tutor’s voice in his head:
If one man can dig a rectangular hole five paces wide and two paces deep in a day, how many men would it take
…He shook his head in annoyance.
Far too many.
The tiny-seeming trees at the far edge gave him some idea of scale, as did the collection of huts, the minuscule figures beside them still pointing in their direction. Beyond the huts he could see machinery of some sort, wheels and gears, from which came a nerve-abrading grinding. Further away still, horses and donkeys grazed on bales of hay. Sensing the beginnings of dizziness, he jerked his head away from the unsettling view, studying instead the near-vertical rock-face to his right. Layers of crumbling dirt alternated with rust-coloured rock, as though some giant—presumably the same giant who had later dug the hole—had spread lard and honey over bread again and again. The clearly defined boundaries of each layer sloped down towards him, making the path seem steeper than it was.

‘Dangerous,’ came the hoarse understatement from in front of him.

As they wound around the northern wall of the great pit, a clearer sense of the space began to emerge. A thousand paces wide, a thousand long, two hundred paces deep, Noetos estimated; then, acknowledging his tutor, he added:
It would take a thousand men four thousand days, master.
Over ten years! Unless the hole had already been here, and men had simply enlarged it. The side of the pit nearest to the Palestran Line sloped much more gently and, as they approached, he noted it
was made of a different type of rock. Crushed rock, darker, mainly grey with some brown. A mixture of the lard and the honey?

Halfway to the bottom of the pit they came to the Palestran Line, which climbed the shallow gradient out of the quarry. A man drove a two-mule cart up the Line towards them; the small tray was laden with the brown rock, and neither the drover nor his mules looked in any hurry. Another cart, this one empty, drew towards them from a distant notch in the rim. Noetos waved it down.

The drover, clearly used to giving rides, indicated the tray without comment. Minutes later Noetos and Bregor found themselves walking towards a small group of ragged men.

‘Who’re you an’ whaddiya want?’ one asked, a tall fellow with heavy brows.

‘No threat to you,’ Noetos replied. ‘We are two fishermen from Fossa village, a week’s walk to the southeast.’

‘Heard of it,’ another man acknowledged. Thin and tousle-haired, with pale, dirty skin and black hair growing from his ears, he was not a prepossessing sight.

‘So that’s who you are. Who you
say
you are.’ This from a third man, stockier but just as dirty. ‘What’s it you’re wanting?’

‘Help,’ Noetos said bluntly. It wouldn’t do to try to win these fellows with clever words; it would be the facts or nothing. He knew the type, had sailed with them every day. Until recently. ‘Help, not for us, but for the fishing villages north and east of here. The Neherians are raiding. Their whole fleet is out there.’