The Book of Heroes (33 page)

The men would venture out into the frozen woods and mountains, hunting animals for meat and hides. Back in the village, the women would work the hides and flesh, first making what clothing and food the village needed to survive, then selling the rest. There would be no green vegetables or fruit until spring, but roots and tubers could be stored in cellars. That would be their main sustenance through the winter.

“Most of the wheat is taken to pay taxes, in any case. Bread’s a luxury item here. For the most part, we eat potatoes. Is your stomach strong, U-ri?”

“I think so,” she said.
But I think I’ll use magic to keep me full for the time being.

The cold air leaking in through the window made her eyes water. “There doesn’t seem to be anyone outside.”

“The women and children are all in their homes. It’s too early in the day yet for the men to come down from the mountains.”

She would’ve expected to see lights in the windows then. Even though it seemed like noontime outside, the weather was so gloomy, U-ri would have wanted light.
Lamp oil’s probably a luxury item too.

“We’re pretty high up here, aren’t we?”

U-ri couldn’t look down very well, standing on her toes, but the clouds seemed close above them. Ash stepped behind her and lifted her up so she could see better. Her toes found a beam sticking out of the wall to take some of her weight.

“My house stands on top of the hill. The Hill of the Dead.”

U-ri trembled. “Why’s it called that?”

“The land around us is a graveyard. You’ll see it immediately if you care to walk outside.”

“And why do you live here again?”

“Because I am close to the dead.”

“There, that’s flint—I think,” she heard Aju say from behind her. He must have jumped off her when Ash approached. U-ri looked around and saw that Sky had finished excavating the fireplace, stacked some logs inside, and was now attempting to start a fire. Aju was perched atop his head.

A small tongue of flame licked up the side of the logs. Sky grinned. “There we go.”

The firewood began to burn. U-ri saw the dancing flames reflected on Sky’s bald scalp.

“There is an oven down those stairs,” Ash said to Sky, indicating a corner of the room where wooden steps led down from a hole in the floor. “Make a fire and boil some water. I’m sure U-ri would like something warm to eat.”

Sky nodded and quickly headed down the stairs. His hard footfalls echoed as he left.

“I’ll help,” U-ri said, standing.

“Leave it to him. You sit.”

“But Sky isn’t some errand boy,” U-ri protested.

“He’s your servant, no?” Ash asked without a trace of humor in his face. “And besides, now is a good time for your precious
whys
. You’ll regret it after if you don’t take this opportunity to ask, and I won’t answer them later anyway.”

“You don’t seem to like Sky very much, do you, Ash? It’s like you don’t trust him.”

“I merely understand that the nameless devout have a role to fulfill, and that is all.”

U-ri was silent. Ash began picking up the bottles sitting on the table one at a time, giving them a little shake to ascertain their contents.

“I think I’m going to go see if we’re really surrounded by a graveyard.”

Without waiting for the wolf’s approval, U-ri ran down the stairs, Aju clinging to the back of her collar.

The ground floor was as cold and as derelict as the floor above. The ceiling was lower here and covered with wattled mud, making it feel like the burrow of some subterranean creature.

Sky was busily preparing the oven. She assumed this was the kitchen, since the oven was here, but there was no sign of any food stores or spices.

When Sky saw her, he smiled. “There is tea, Lady U-ri. And the water in the kettle is fresh. I believe Master Ash has someone to look after his place while he’s absent.”

Too bad he doesn’t have them clean the place up while they’re at it.

U-ri announced she was going to take a look outside, and she headed for what appeared to be the exit. It was a rough door, made of logs bound together with iron. She found it surprisingly heavy.

She pushed, managing to open it several inches, and the snow came swirling in. Her face froze in the cold wind. U-ri squinted against the blast, pulled up the hood of her vestments of protection, and stepped outside into a world of whites and grays, the color of frozen ground. A few steps led down from the shack, with a railing on one side. She walked down carefully, holding tightly onto the railing to keep from slipping. Her black robes were soon white from the snow that seemed to fall ever harder.

Ash had been telling the truth. The shack stood at the very top of a gently sloping hill, covered in every direction by evenly spaced gravestones.

The graves were simple—rectangular stones jutting up from the ground with no adornments—and too numerous for her to count. There were slight differences in coloration between the stones, which she attributed to differences in age and exposure to the elements.

U-ri exhaled a long white stream of breath. “Wow.”

“Yeah,” Aju said from beneath her collar.

“I’ve never seen this many graves in one place.”

It was like the graves had wandered here from some other place to gather around Ash’s hut.

“That’s got to be the whole village under those stones,” Aju said. He meant it as a joke, but somehow it didn’t come out sounding like one. “I mean this town ain’t that big. There's got to be more graves than residents.”

U-ri walked between the stones, careful not to step too close to any. Her feet trod the frozen ground, occasionally crushing frozen chunks of snow. The gravestones really did look like they had gathered there—she wasn’t imagining things. All of the stones, carved with letters she couldn’t read, were facing toward the shack at the top of the hill, looking up at the second-story window where Ash made his home.

U-ri looked down toward the bottom of the hill where a large fence of stone and iron circled the entire graveyard, enclosing the hill and the two-story shack with its creaking windmill at the summit. There was only one gap in the fence with a gate of solid-looking iron. The gate was leaning off its hinges, as though they were not strong enough to support its weight. The side that opened had been wrapped with a chain, from which hung a sturdy padlock. To U-ri it seemed less like Ash was taking care to lock the door and more like someone on the outside wanted to keep him and whatever was under those gravestones from getting out.

U-ri went back up the steps to the shack, brushing off the snow before she entered. The fire was burning in the oven. Sky turned as she walked in.

“I think I’m getting used to the cold,” U-ri said, smiling at him. “Probably thanks to these vestments.”

“I would think so,” the devout said. He sounded concerned. “Just a moment, I’ll bring you some tea.”

U-ri went up the stairs. Ash was sitting with his legs up on the table, slouching against the back of his chair.

“Satisfied?”

She walked into the middle of the room, then sat down, opening her vestments and hugging her knees to her chest for warmth. “Did the people without magical robes like mine all freeze to death here?”

Ash raised both eyebrows and snorted.

“Or was there a plague? Or a war? How many years’ worth of graves is that out there? They didn’t all die at the same time, did they?” She stared at the wolf. “What are
you
doing here, Ash?”

Finally the smirk faded from Ash’s face. “You’ve not read
The Haetlands Chronicle
, I gather.”

“Nope. I hadn’t even heard of it until you told me.”

“No, I suppose you wouldn’t have. It’s not the kind of book a girl your age goes out of her way to read. I’m not even sure it’s been translated into a language you
can
read.” Ash removed his feet from the table and sat up straight with a rustling of clothes. “This country has been an independent country for one thousand years.
The Haetlands Chronicle
is its history.”

U-ri nodded for him to go on.

“As I showed you before, on the globe, the Haetlands is so small as to be easily covered by one fingertip. Yet war rages here incessantly. Other countries invade, or we invade them. There have been civil wars too. We have been entangled in such a war for the last one hundred and fifty years.”

“Don’t you have a government?”

“We do. There is a royal house, and a parliament beneath made up of nobles and those from the privileged classes. We are in essence a kingdom. But there are several bloodlines within the royal house. And they love to feud amongst themselves. That is what leads to our internal strife.”

“But it’s such a small country!”

“Perhaps they fight so viciously
because
the stakes are so small.” Ash leaned forward. “If your grip were to extend just far enough, you could seize this entire kingdom for your own—so do men suffer greed and delusions of grandeur.”

Sky came up from downstairs carrying a heavy-looking tray in both hands. The tray held a large silver pot and some polished silver cups. U-ri hadn’t expected anything fancy, and for a moment all she could do was stare.

“There’s no plastic or vinyl in this world,” Ash said with a chuckle at U-ri’s surprised expression.

“I knew that, I guess. Just…that’s a very beautiful pot.”

“Silver is strong. And good against poisons,” he explained casually.

Good against poisons?

“As there is little point in wasting our time with a lengthy history lecture, I’ll merely touch upon the major points. We don’t need to go back the whole one thousand years. What concerns us most is the last century and a half.”

Taking a silver cup from the tray, Ash continued. “The civil war that began one hundred fifty years ago and continues to this day is, simply put, a feud between two brothers in the royal house. Half brothers, to be precise. They never did get along, even as children. When they became adults, they gathered loyal retainers around them, raised armies, and took their struggle to the field of battle.”

The first round of fighting had gone on for ten years and left most of the country devastated. Then, fearing that the Haetlands would be utterly destroyed, the nobles intervened and compelled the brothers to come to an agreement. Kings would be chosen from both of their lineages, alternating every generation.

“Yet when it came to their grandchildren’s generation—though only thirty years had passed since the accord—both camps began to eye each other with envy. They struggled for rank and territory, found fault with one another and with the terms of their treaty, each trying to claim the right of secession for their bloodline alone. With both sides equally engaged in such foolishness, there was little hope of stopping it.”

It took another few generations—about fifty years, Ash explained—for their struggles to once again spread to the general populace. When the conflict had been confined within the bounds of the royal city and palace, the Haetlands had gradually recovered its strength. Fields once burned grew green, cities were rebuilt, and trade with their neighbors had increased.

“This village of Kanal was founded just in the last fifty years. Man did not live in places like this before. The villagers here now are the grandchildren of the original settlers.”

But, as abundance returned to the land, the struggles of the royal house grew fiercer. The richer the lands one side held, the more eagerly the other side fought to claim them.

“Fifty-seven years ago, in the ninth month of the 877th year of our Holy Calendar, there was a great upheaval in the capital city. That was the start of the current round of fighting.” Ash tapped his chest lightly. “The weaver who made me wrote most vividly about those events.”

That’s right,
U-ri remembered,
this is all a story. A story of war.

“At the time, the elder son’s lineage had just claimed the throne, as decreed by the treaty of one hundred years before. The 17th Holy King of the Haetlands, Cadasque the Third. Incidentally, it was also one of the elder son’s lineage who started the war—the new king’s cousin, a noble yet impoverished lad by the name of Kirrick.”

Cadasque the Third was a boy-king, only eight years old. His father who had been king two generations prior had died of an illness at the age of thirty, and his successor—the current king’s uncle—died in an accident only two years after taking the throne. He had fallen from his horse during a mock battle held to honor the king’s birthday.

“Rumors of assassination surrounded both royal deaths. Tempers flared, and the arguments began to spread outside the bounds of the palace.”

At only eight years of age, the king could do little by himself. He did what his relatives, his steward, and his ministers advised him to do.

“Once again, turmoil spread through the land. Feudal lords and members of the privileged classes who thought of nothing but fattening their own bellies began to devour themselves from the inside out.”

Some of the nobles and landed gentry had begun dealings with one of the Haetlands’ neighbors across a long-disputed border. Together they hatched a plan to install a puppet government in exchange for privileged positions in the new regime.

“You know what we call their kind?” Ash asked, smiling crookedly beneath sleepy half-lidded eyes. “Traitors.” He looked at U-ri. “I’m guessing you’ve never seen a traitor yourself. They don’t have fangs, or two faces, despite what you may have heard. They look like regular folk. It’s their roots that are rotten.”

U-ri nodded. “And this boy Kirrick rose up against them?”

“That’s right. He started a rebellion—a successful rebellion at that.”

There had been several sporadic uprisings before Kirrick came on the scene. But all had been crushed by royal forces before they could spread, or undid themselves before they could pose a real threat.

“The royal army has always held the greatest portion of power in the land,” Ash went on. “There are many in this land who wish to join the army.”

“Why? I can’t believe that anyone in the royal house would have so many devoted admirers, what with the history of this place.”