Act of Will

SCENE XII The Desert

We’d chosen our lunch spot well, for I think we saw no more trees that day. The scent of wild herbs never left our nostrils but the heather disappeared, and though the gorse persisted, it seemed to get thinner, until it was just a tangled mass of brownish thorns. We were on the edge of the Hrof wastes by four o’clock and I was startled to look up and see huge vultures, grey and pink as dead flesh, the fingers of their wings spread wide as they soared their slow circles above us. I watched them to take my mind off the Empire patrol that was likely to appear on the road at any minute.

“Those things give me the willies,” muttered Orgos. We had barely spoken since my last little rant. “Great winged rats,” he went on. “In the morning you see them sitting in trees with their wings hanging in front of them, like dead men in rags. You can feel them waiting for you to die. They belong here in the Hrof. This is their territory.”

Well, that was nice to know. The vultures drifted slowly overhead and watched us with the critical gaze of someone inspecting a forkful of pork pie whose origins had been called into question. It was disconcerting, but somehow not entirely inappropriate. The Empire, some of my old acting companions at the Eagle, and, most recently, Renthrette, had always regarded me as something resembling carrion. If I died of exposure in the next ten minutes, the world wouldn’t miss me and the vultures would get a meal. I could picture the great scrawny birds squatting on my remains, spitting gristle and complaining to themselves about the poor quality of the meat coming through these days.

Orgos was right. This was their land, and the only way to avoid finishing up lightly roasted and serving six was to get the hell out of here as soon as possible. The vultures circled on anyway, smugly sure that they’d be dining shortly, tucking into Bill the Succulent any day now. I shot them a defiant scowl, but riding into a desert wasn’t the best way of staying alive, and given the day’s events and the dubious nature of my traveling companions, I could sort of see their point.

On each day of our passage across the Hrof, the party rotated their traveling positions to ease the tedium. On one day Mithos would drive the wagon, the next he would ride at the rear, the next he would lead, and so on. Everyone would change, that is, except me. I was to sit on the front of the wagon with my crossbow, polishing armor, making idle conversation, studying maps of the area, and getting very, very hot and very, very bored.

Garnet’s face was pink and peeling by the third day despite his best efforts to keep the sun off. From the morning of day four onwards he put his helm in the wagon and swathed himself from head to toe in a pair of white sheets like the swaddled corpse of some barbarian chieftain. Only his green eyes and the dark pits of his nostrils could be seen. His sunburn and his sense of how ridiculous he looked did nothing to improve his temper, so I avoided him. Most of the time he rode by himself, sulking and flaking quietly.

That said, he had warmed to me fractionally since my little meltdown with the bandits. I had been a good little apprentice, or whatever the hell they thought I was. To be honest, I had nightmares about shooting that crossbow for three nights afterwards, but I wasn’t about to mention that to him. In any case, he seemed rather more content to have me around and less likely to kill me than he had before, except when he caught me looking at his sister.

Renthrette was, as you might have guessed, a very different story. She took every available opportunity to treat me with the contempt one normally reserves for bawds, tax collectors, and other social lepers. Once I had been relating some snippets of my life in Cresdon and my activities down at the Eagle. Orgos laughed at my ineptitude. Mithos complimented me on my impersonations. Even Garnet smiled and made some roughly complimentary remark about mine being an uncertain way to make a living. She looked at me with the mild revulsion you might show to a large beetle, and turned away.

One day we had to ride together. When she came to the wagon, I had already climbed aboard and extended my hand to help her. She hoisted herself up easily without my assistance and gave me a withering look. I withdrew my hand and, for a moment, withered.

“Would you like me to drive?” I tried cheerfully as she sat down.

“Did you drive yesterday?” she demanded.

“No, Garnet did,” I said, thinking that that rather strengthened my position.

“And the day before?”

“Mithos drove.”

“And on either occasion did you offer to drive?” she persisted.

“Er. no, why?” I answered guilelessly.

“Then how dare you offer today?”

“What?”

“You think I’m incapable of steering a wagon along a straight road because I am a woman?”

“No, of course not,” I stammered hopelessly.

“Then what?”

“Well, I was just being civil,” I suggested.

“Don’t be,” she said, and set us in motion with a crack of the reins.

She had stoically refused to cover her pale skin as her brother had done, because she said it impeded the movement of her sword arm. I was starting to see a lot of that stoicism and I didn’t much like it.

“You really should cover up,” I said. “You obviously have delicate skin. Plenty of Cresdon ladies would be jealous of it. Shame to let it burn. ”

“Why don’t you look after your own skin?” she remarked acidly. “You’ve had lots of practice.”

Great, Will, I told myself. Another triumph. Will the Smooth. Debonair Bill strikes again. All right, a man can only take so much. It’s time to shock her into submission with your forthrightness and straight talking. Put the pressure on. Give it to her hard and direct. Call her bluff. Here we go. “You don’t like me very much, do you?” I said with a disarming smile.

“No,” she said flatly.

“Oh,” I said, thrown by her candor. “Well, er. why not?”

“You are an ugly little worm of a man with no scruples or principles other than those that preserve your worthless hide.”

She turned to me to say that, and her blue-grey eyes blazed into mine. Her voice had a strident edge to it, since she was speaking over the noise of the horses, but her tone was calm. I stared at her and tried turning on the charm.

“You don’t mean that.” I beamed mischievously.

“Don’t bet on it.”

“You can’t mean, for example, that I am physically ugly! Many women-”

“I mean exactly that,” she said bitterly. “Look at yourself. Skinny and with the belly of an old frog. You’re what, eighteen?”

“About that.”

“You have the physique of someone twice your age. Look at that!”

She poked my stomach with her index finger until it hurt. I wanted to slap her but I was too chivalrous, and didn’t want the further humiliation of her beating me up.

“That’s nothing a little exercise won’t fix,” I breathed, pushing her hand off my gut testily.

“You never do any exercise.”

“I carry wood and stuff,” I said in an injured tone.

“That’s not exercise, that’s light work,” she snarled. “Call yourself a man?” she sneered. “You’re an actor. A professional liar. You’ve never done a day’s work in your life.”

“Just because I don’t use my biceps all day doesn’t mean I don’t work. Can’t a man earn his keep with his brain instead of his arms?”

That ought to get her, I thought.

“Of course he can, if the work is honorable.” She sat back, pleased with herself as if she had said something unanswerable.

“Honor!” I spat. “A fine, airy nothing to get yourself killed for. Honor, God help us! If, according to your honor, I am damned for acting on a stage, but you and your brother are praiseworthy for theft and murder, then you can keep it. Better still,” I added, warming to my subject, “you can stick it right-”

“That’s enough,” said Mithos, who had appeared trotting at my side. “You two had better learn to live with each other for a while. And Renthrette?”

“Yes,” she said, a faint pout puckering the slim pink line of her mouth.

“Mr. Hawthorne is our guest.” At that her lip began to curl and he, catching her look, spoke more forcefully. “Conditions will not be good until we reach Stavis. Some degree of harmony is essential. Drink.”

He indicated the cloth-covered bottle and I passed it to her. She took a long, slow mouthful and I watched her throat as she swallowed. Passing it back to me, she caught the hard glitter of Mithos’s black eyes and forced a smile.

“There you are, Mr. Hawthorne.”

“Thank you ever so much, Renthrette,” I said.

Mithos nodded and rode on. She watched him go and said, “In future, Mr. Hawthorne, have the dignity to fight your own battles.”

I felt I had cause to protest at this, but the conversation was clearly a circular one. I fell silent and looked at the unchanging road ahead.

When we stopped to eat, Orgos caught me by the arm and beamed into my face.

“Had a romantic ride?” he asked.

“Get lost, Orgos,” I replied. He gave his characteristic whoop of laughter and I grinned at him despite myself.

In the second half of the week in the Hrof, I started secretly doing exercises at night, when it was cool and I was on watch. The others, Renthrette in particular, were asleep, so I could move away from the wagon and wheeze my way through some sit-ups and push-ups. There were no improvements in my physique, but I felt virtuous and that was enough at present. One night Orgos interrupted me. “You don’t exactly tax yourself, do you?” He smiled.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I replied, insulted.

“You’ve barely broken a sweat. There are a few weights in the wagon. Want to use them?”

“Er, yes, all right,” I agreed reluctantly. He went into the wagon and reappeared with a pair of small dumbbells, a four-foot bar, and a set of weights, all carried with irritating ease. In order to stave off actually having to use the bloody things, I said the first thing that came into my head.

“Would you teach me to use a sword, Orgos?”

He smiled again and said, “I’d be glad to. Though you aren’t going to be a sword master this time next week, and it will take a lot to impress Renthrette.”

“This is nothing to do with Renthrette,” I lied. “I just need to feel safer and more useful to the party.”

“Fine,” he said, “but you’re going to have to get yourself in shape first. I’m not sure you could manage much more than a fruit knife at present.”

I shrugged off his sarcasm and made as if to go to bed.

“All right, all right, I’m sorry,” he laughed, coming after me. “We’ll start now if you like.”

“Can I see your sword?” I asked.

He reached for the left one but I stopped him.

“The other,” I said, indicating the one with the amber stone in the pommel. He seemed to hesitate for a split second and then handed it to me. It was heavy, too heavy for me to use, though not as heavy as I had expected.

“What’s this?” I said, touching the stone with my fingertip.

“Nothing,” said Orgos. “Decoration.”

“Yeah?” I said.

“I’ll get a pair of spears. Better start there.”

As he got a couple of spears out of the wagon and bound their tips with cleaning rags, I wondered why I didn’t believe him. Decoration? Orgos? That didn’t sound right. And there was something else: a vague and unsettling memory.

A flash of light.

I looked at the amber gem, and, as the sun caught it, it seemed to glow with exactly the same inner fire that-crazy though it sounded-I thought had somehow incapacitated those Empire troops back in Cresdon. I considered the stone, then told myself not to be so bloody stupid and put it out of my head.

I couldn’t help thinking that the spears were less glamorous than the sword I had hoped for, but Orgos assured me it was a good place to start. The spear was light and required more dexterity than strength. In my current physical state that was a good thing, as he had so penetratingly observed. I stood legs apart as he told me, and grasped the shaft with both hands.

“All right,” he said, “now face me and do as I do. Grip the spear like this. Fists outwards. Your right hand a little further down. Now lunge at me. Good, but make it a smaller movement. The bigger and more obvious the lunge, the easier it is to anticipate and the harder it is for you to recover. Always get back on both feet with your weight evenly distributed like this. Right. Now try that lunge again and recover. Good.”

So it went on, and I suppose I made progress, and I actually enjoyed it so much that I didn’t realize how late it was getting until the minuscule wound in my thigh began to throb faintly. I also didn’t notice Mithos and Garnet watching from the fireplace, or hear what they had to say. I learnt fast and my reflexes were quick, so they should have been fairly impressed. Orgos was pleasantly surprised and said so. I was flattered, even if he was just encouraging me. Still, it would take more than a bit of training to make me into the stuff of heroes. They couldn’t train me in honor and bravery and the other “qualities” that would one day get them all killed.

Of Renthrette’s views on the matter I heard nothing, but I strolled around the camp, spear in hand, and occasionally brought up the matter of our sparring when we were all gathered together to dine. Whenever I did so she would give me a long indifferent look as if to say that she knew she was supposed to be impressed and wasn’t; then she would go back to her slow, meticulous brushing of the horses’ tails or whatever the hell she was doing. But I knew her resolve was weakening. She wasn’t the first to have tried to convince herself that I was some kind of repulsive and despicable rodent. I’d read the literature on such things. I’d written some of it.

Orgos, anxious to improve my other skills, encouraged me to sit on a horse, but I felt so high and ridiculously unbalanced that I could not be persuaded even to have him walk the beast round the camp. I sat on it; that was all. As far as I was concerned, that was progress enough for one day, or indeed for several. I don’t trust things with more feet than me. Come to think of it, I don’t trust things with fewer feet either. If it doesn’t look like me, I find it suspicious, and if I ever met someone exactly like me, I would trust him still less. Trust is a highly overrated commodity, I think.

By the sixth day, the wound on my leg had vanished. On the eighth day I noted a distinct weaving of grass in the hot earth, and by evening there were trees again. Earlier on in the same day I had been gratified by a glimpse of the famous Hrof ostrich. It had been a good four hundred yards from the road, but you couldn’t mistake that leggy ball of feathers powering up and down the desert on those clawed, pinkish legs of tight muscle and sinew. I think I would have been disappointed if I hadn’t seen one, since in my former life it was the only image that mention of the Hrof lands might have called to mind. By the late afternoon of the ninth and, somehow, longest day, we could see the distant flashes of light and color from the rooftops of Stavis. And still the Empire hadn’t got me. We, and more particularly, I, had made it.