‘The Wild,’ he said. He tried to sound sane and rational and like a man whose word could be trusted. ‘Daemons attacked us. With irks. A hundred, at least.’ He found that he was having trouble breathing.
It was difficult even telling it.
‘Oh, my God,’ he said.
Ser John put a hand on his shoulder. The man seemed bigger somehow. ‘How far, messire?’ he said.
‘Five leagues.’ Alcaeus took a deep breath. ‘Maybe less. East of here.’
‘By the Virgin!’ the Captain of Albinkirk swore. ‘East, you say?’
‘You believe me?’ Alcaeus said.
‘Oh, yes,’ said the captain. ‘But east? They went
Alcaeus heard boots on the steps outside. He raised his head and saw the same man who’d let him into the city, with a pair of lower-class men.
‘They say there’s boglins in the fields, Ser John.’ The sergeant shrugged. ‘That’s what they say.’
‘My daughter!’ the younger man shouted. It was more like a shriek than a shout. ‘You have to save her.’
Ser John shook his head. ‘I’m not taking a man out that gate. Steady, man.’ He poured the man a cup of wine.
‘My
Ser John shook his head. ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ he said, not unkindly. He turned to the sergeants. ‘Sound the alarm. Bar the gates. And get me the mayor and tell him I’m imposing martial law.
East of Albinkirk – Peter
Peter woke at a jerk of his heavy yoke. It was a hand-carved wooden collar with a pair of chains that ran down to his hands, allowing some movement, and a heavy staple for attaching him to other slaves, and he’d slept in it.
Two Moreans, easterners with scrips and heavy backpacks, wearing hoods and the air of men recently released from fear, stood over him.
‘One survived then,’ the taller one said, and spat.
The shorter one shook his head. ‘Hardly a fair return on the loss of our cart,’ he said. ‘But a slave’s a slave. Get up, boy.’
Peter lay in abject misery for a moment. So, naturally, they kicked him.
Then they made him carry their packs, and the three of them started west along a trail through the woods.
His despair didn’t lasted long. He had been unlucky – or perhaps he had been lucky. They fed him; he cooked their meagre food and they let him have some bread and a little of the pea soup he’d made them. Neither of them were big men, or strong, and he thought he could probably kill them both, if only the yoke came off his shoulders.
But he couldn’t get it off. It had been his constant companion for a month of walking over snow and ice, sleeping with the cold and hellish thing while the soldiers raped the women to either side of him and waiting to see if they would take a turn on him.
He bruised his wrists again and again trying get free of the thing. He daydreamed of using it as a weapon to crush these puny men.
‘You’re a good cook, boy,’ the taller man said, wiping his mouth.
The thin man frowned. ‘I want to know what happened back there,’ he said, after drinking watered wine from his canteen.
The thicker man shrugged. ‘Bandits? Cruel bastards, no doubt. I never saw a thing – I just heard the fighting and – well, you ran, too.’
The thinner man shook his head. ‘The screams,’ he said, and his voice shook.
They sat and glowered at each other, and Peter looked at them and wondered how they managed to survive at all.
‘We should go back for our cart,’ said the thinner man.
‘You must’ve had a bump on the head,’ the fatter one said. ‘Want to be a slave? Like him?’ he gestured at Peter.
Peter hunched by the fire and wondered if lighting it had been a good idea, and wondered how these two could be so foolish. At home, they had had daemons. These idiots must know of them too.
But the night passed – a night in which he never slept, and the two fools slumbered after tying his yoke to a tree. They snored, and Peter lay awake, waiting for a hideous death that never came.
In the morning, the easterners rose, pissed, drank the tea he’d made, ate his bannock and started west.
‘Where’d you learn to cook, boy?’ the thicker man asked him.
He shrugged.
‘Now that’s a saleable skill,’ the man said.
The Toll Gate – Hector Lachlan
Drovers hated tolls. There was no way to love them. When you have to drive a huge herd of beasts – mostly cattle, but small farmers put in parcels of sheep, and even goats as well – representing other men’s fortunes, across mountain, fen, fell, swamp and plain, through war and pestilence, tolls are the very incarnation of evil.
Hector Lachlan had a simple rule.
He didn’t pay tolls.
His herd numbered in the hundreds, and he had as many men as a southern lord had in an army; men who wore burnies of shining rings and carried heavy swords and great axes slung from their shoulders. They looked more like the cream of a mercenary army than what they were. Drovers.
