The Wanderer's Tale (16 page)

Some likened him to a raven, the Peladane’s symbol for death, but it would be perhaps more accurate to compare him to a crow, with his square-cut black hair, sharp and pointed face with its beaky nose, and his bitterly keen hand-and-a-half sword ever at the ready. Like a carrion bird he stalked about Nordwas in his high blue-black boots, ever alone, as if patiently waiting for a kill. A charcoal-grey coat that almost reached down to the ankles concealed most of his black leather tunic and trousers. He bore no shield or other armour, save for a long, black, brass-studded cape that covered his shoulders almost like a pair of folded wings. Concealing most of his head, he wore a slate-grey hood decorated with two long black feathers that stuck up on the left side.

Despite this hood, the more Methuselech studied him, the more a sense of discomfort crept over him. Whatever was the matter with the man’s face?

The Nahovian squared up to the Peladane.

‘Go easy on him, Nibb,’ Methuselech said with a smile. ‘He might turn ugly.’

The practice commenced. Even as a practice, by the Peladanes’ standards this was a tough one. As the two fighters faced up to each other, it appeared to be a blatant mismatch: the magnificently accoutred Warlord’s heir, with his haughty demeanour and intimidating bulk, against some ragged scarecrow who looked too elongated to even stand up straight. Yet, as soon as the steward had given the signal to begin, Nibulus felt the tip of his adversary’s sword pressed to his throat.

There did not seem to have been even the slightest split-second between the starting signal and the blade already grazing his neck.

‘One to you,’ Nibulus conceded, his voice faint with awe. It was clearly going to take a lot more than his flashy armour to score against
this
one.

As round two began, Nibulus immediately closed in on his opponent, only to find him not there, and himself sprawling on his face with a mouthful of grass.

Yet Nibulus Wintus was considered one of Nordwas’s finest, so round three commenced. This time he leapt back sharply, hoping to buy at least a second of time in which to react. As he did so he swept the Greatsword around in a wide arc, to keep the mercenary at bay. Unferth, for all its size, was easy to handle, and the armour hardly hindered him at all. Maybe he could win this one round at least.

And so their practice began in earnest. Nibulus had heard something of the Nahovian’s reputation, but he had never competed against him, and it seemed now that this was probably the way it should have remained. Indeed, it seemed he was fighting for his very life . . .

Methuselech looked on with growing fascination. At one point Paulus’s hood flipped back, and at last his entire face was revealed. Pallid, bony and deformed, it was not a pretty sight; below the thick eyebrows that met in the middle, there was only one sound eye, pale and grey. The other was no more than a white, featureless orb and even the skin around it was encrusted with livid sores.

‘What an unholy mess!’ Methuselech gagged. ‘How did he ever get like that?’

‘I yield!’ Nibulus boomed as he lay upon his back, with Paulus’s sword less than an inch from his right eyeball. The Nahovian smiled knowingly, and with the tip of his sword tried to flip his foe’s boar-shaped sallet up. But an especially good charge had built up in the Tengriite helm, and with a loud crack the ensuing electric shock almost knocked Paulus from his feet and caused him to cry out in surprise and pain, dropping his weapon.

‘It does work, then.’ Nibulus smirked, and got to his feet.

Paulus was outraged. Where he came from, defeat meant only death, and in that country there was no concept of a fair and honourable tournament. But he was especially outraged at being defeated by this Warlord’s son. Jerkily he rose to his feet, picked up his sword and, in increasingly spasmodic movements, turned to walk away.

‘Oh no,’ Nibulus muttered. ‘Here we go again . . .’

As he went, the whey-faced warrior slowed, trying desperately to regain control of his movements, then his whole frame began to shake in spasms. Through gritted teeth a deep, strangled cry forced its way out, and he fumed with anger and frustration. The electric shock had triggered his ‘condition’, and robbed him of control and dignity. All he could do now was to retire from the tourney field, stumbling and jerking like a puppet.

The two men watched him go with a mixture of pity and disgust.

‘So what’s
his
problem?’ asked Methuselech.

‘He’s never told us,’ Nibulus replied. ‘He gets these fits . . . I don’t know if it’s connected with his hideous deformity or not. He never talks about it, always keeps himself to himself. I doubt if even his own countrymen know much about him. All he’s ever told me is that his father was both an undertaker
and
a tanner—’

‘Probably never had a shortage of fresh skin to cure, then,’ Methuselech commented darkly.

‘True. Anyway, we’ve been hiring his services for years now, and he’s one of the best fighters in this part of the world. A right vicious bastard, I can tell you. Did you hear what he wrote on his application letter this time?’

‘No, what?’

‘In the section on hobbies and interests he put: “Tampering with the dead”.’

‘I can believe it, from what little I’ve heard about his kind,’ Methuselech commented. ‘Is it true Nahovians kill their old folk with mallets?’

‘Only if they’re too weak to throw themselves into the family quicksand,’ Nibulus replied. ‘Anyway, we’ve had no trouble with him yet, and he does his job well. I don’t think his appearance and typically Nahovian temperament have endeared him to prospective employers, so he’s had a pretty lean time of it over the years. He seems happy to throw in his lot with us – and even if I wouldn’t say I trust him that much, he is extremely good at killing.’

‘Poor sod,’ Methuselech murmured as they headed back to the hall.

‘Come on, let’s get some beer.’

‘
We leave in three days!
’ Wodeman recalled the words of the mage-priest, still ringing in his ears, as he strode away from the temple. Just three.

It was so little time to prepare, Wodeman realized. The commotion of this town was seriously befuddling his brain, so he headed off to The Chase. The sorcerer needed to sit down, to think, to plan.

‘
No holy man is going to get to me!
’ Bolldhe repeated inwardly, as he marched away from Wintus Hall. He too needed to think and plan, but most importantly, to drink. And he knew just the place to do that.

‘Bolldhe!’ came a familiar voice through the barred window of The Chase as he approached. ‘Come in and join me. I’ll buy you a drink.’

Bolldhe looked up sharply, half in shock. It was not often he heard
those
words.

‘Oh, Wodeman,’ he registered, nonplussed, but decided to join him anyway, more out of a sense of novelty at this rarest of opportunities than any desire to converse with the shaman. He patiently manoeuvred his way through the excitable throng of ginswigging farmers and mead-quaffing foreigners with their amusing voices and interesting smells, and sat down heavily next to his new companion.

‘Two pints of ale and a packet of pork crackling,’ the wolf-man bellowed, above the din of the assembled carousers.

‘You have money?’ Bolldhe asked the woodland shaman, trying not to sound astounded.

‘I’m not a healer for nowt,’ Wodeman replied as he tendered a silver zlat for ale and pork-rind. ‘They pay me enough for my simple needs . . . Here, to
your
good health and
their
bad. Cheers!’

Bolldhe resisted the temptation to sneak a look at the shaman’s feet to see if they were hairy and the rumours were true. He also carefully ignored the curious bone amulets that jangled about on the man’s waist; as an augur himself, he recognized them for what they were, and did not wish to be drawn into any conversation along
those
lines.

Instead he kept his eyes on Wodeman’s face as the shaman downed the ale in one long, blissful slug. His eyes closed with what could only be described as utter ecstasy, savouring the blend of warm, malty hoppiness with a rapture that only one possessed of Wodeman’s heightened senses could attain.

He finished the mug, slammed it down on the greasy table-top and almost shuddered in euphoria. Then, after a pause in which he seemed to forget everything in the world save the dizzy glow now spreading up from his feet, he turned to Bolldhe.

‘We don’t spend
all
our time in the woods, you know,’ he informed his bewildered new acquaintance. ‘There are certain pleasures even in this smoke-hole that I might as well partake of, since it’s available.’

Bolldhe shrugged, and tipped a quantity of ale into his own mouth. He swilled it around, relishing both taste and texture, as the nut-brown liquid left its oily deposit upon tongue and gums.

‘All the other, er, forest-magicians I’ve met keep themselves to themselves, as it were,’ he explained.

Wodeman spat in contempt. ‘Not much good as sorcerers, then, if they act like that. We Torca are not hermits. Keeping yourself to yourself is as damaging to the world as it is to you. Take this pork-rind, for example; if you cut it off the living pig’s back, it rots . . . and the pig itself is that much worse off too. We consider ourselves, all of us, an essential part of the world.’

Bolldhe just blinked, dumbfounded. Wodeman had been sitting with him for less than a minute, and already the bloody man was trying to
enlighten
him.

‘Thank you, mentor,’ he replied, not sure of his nuances in this foreign tongue, ‘but that’s the sort of horse-shite
I
normally talk myself – and get paid for.’

Wodeman laughed, without a hint of rancour, at Bolldhe’s bluntness. ‘Well, that lesson was for free. As will be all the others in our weeks to come.’

‘I can hardly wait,’ Bolldhe sighed, and wondered again if he had made the right decision about joining this enterprise.

Wodeman, in Bolldhe’s mind, had now become a disembodied, floating mouth that just would not stop talking.

‘Dreamers,
real
dreamers,’ the sorcerer was explaining to his glazey-eyed guest, ‘do not run away from reality; they dream in order to change the world. In dreams we’re able to think freely, to release the imagination. And from this release, comes
creation
.’

‘Really.’

‘Those mage-priests can never dream properly because their minds have become too bogged down with their dogma. They cling to the affirmations of their faith like a drowning rat to a lily-pad. If only they would simply allow themselves to
feel
, but they prefer the stagnant reek of their smoky halls to the sun and the air, so cut themselves off from Life itself.’

‘Is that so.’

‘Only openness to everything snaps the fetters of misunderstanding – and allows the soul to go forward. Therefore do not believe or disbelieve. Just stay open-minded! Life is a series of questions and nothing is certain.’

‘Certain, right – Oh look, here comes Nibulus. Nibulus, over here! Quick!’ Bolldhe yelled through the open window.

Most of the punters in The Chase became aware of the presence of the Warlord’s son before he even arrived in the square, for a large and rapidly growing crowd was forming. Gasps of amazement waxed into cheers of jubilation as Nibulus, still clad in his magnificent armour, swaggered down Pump Street with Methuselech. Men clapped, women swooned, and even the yellow dogs seemed to have smiles on their faces.

‘Bolldhe!’ Nibulus cried, all smiles and lofty gestures to those around him, relishing this new, heightened adulation he was receiving on this most excellent of days.

‘We’re heading down Neph Lane to watch the players there,’ he explained. ‘Fancy tagging along?’

Normally Bolldhe would have declined the invitation, but at the moment he would have accompanied Nibulus to a leper colony rather than spend another minute with the droning shaman.

‘Sounds great,’ he enthused.

‘I’ll come too,’ agreed Wodeman.

So, within minutes, all four of them had piled into a pair of passenger-carrying cyclo-tumbrels. The two drivers cackled inanely, and excitedly repeated the destination, before hurtling off through the throng lining Pump Street, gleefully running down anyone who got in their way. As tumbrel-drivers tend to do.

While his three companions whooped with joy, and pedestrians flattened themselves against the walls to let them past, Bolldhe reflected on the uncanny uniformity of certain aspects of life around the world. One might assume, considering the vastness of Lindormyn, and therefore the isolation of so many settlements, that each town or village would be fairly unique. But as far as tumbrel-drivers were concerned, they were a constant: uniformly horse-toothed, grimy and ignorant, they seemed to like nothing better than hanging about their patch with their own kind, squatting around a game of cards, smoking mystery substances and boasting about their latest fares, however meagre.

Amid the clatter of rickety wheels and flapping sandals, the constantly yammering drivers charged ahead. Along increasingly narrow streets they hurtled, herding all before them like the Wild Hunt. Men, women, children, animals, none were spared by the tumbrel-drivers from hell. Dogs barked savagely but were too craven to attack. Drovers and tradesmen yelled with indignation, but their fat-mouthed grimaces soon turned to smiles when they saw who it was seated in the lead tumbrel. No one else would have got away with it, but Nordwas truly was notable for the zeal with which its poorest inhabitants would always champion the cause of the richest and most privileged.

The streets were now so narrow that Nibulus could almost touch the walls either side with his outstretched hands. Soon the beating of tymbals and the crack of staff upon staff could be heard. Within moments they had arrived at the six-way junction of Neph Lane, Sump Road and Ueno Parade, and ventured unto the jovial pandemonium that was the Levansy Theatre.

The place was packed, on this glorious sunny day, with what must have been half the population of Nordwas. Everyone from beggars to barons, far-flung foreigners to indigenous inhabitants, one-year-olds to one-hundred-year-olds, had gathered in this turgid spot. Even the rats had turned out, and were chattering animatedly with each other from their elevated position on the spital-house windowsills, or hurling down morsels of corn or verbal insults at the people below, excitedly awaiting the performance.