The Bear

FOUR

He let the wind be his guide as he meandered across the lands devastated by war, paralleling the roads that had been viewed as a sign of hope and progress by the people of Honce. Those networks had been built to open trade, it was said, and to allow the lairds to move their armies to rid the land of powries. Few foresaw that those same roads would carry the engines of war to holding after holding as the two most prominent lairds, Delaval and Ethelbert, laid claim to a unified kingdom of Honce as their dominion.

Bransen avoided one battered village after another, having little desire to repeat the dialogue he had suffered with the widow from Hooplin Downs. Truly, after his encounter with the folk there, he didn't wish to speak with anyone, other than his wife, who remained so far, far away.

He did sneak into the clusters of farmhouses when he found them, though. In the dark of night the Highwayman made his way about the communities, pilfering food and drink where he could. With his great skill he was never seen or heard and was always well on his way long before the sun lightened the eastern sky. He tried to leave behind firewood or anything he could find to repay his unwitting hosts.

Each morning seemed to dawn a bit warmer as summer came on in full to this southernmost region of Honce. Still moving due west, Bransen kept expecting the road to turn north or to bend that way at least. But the towering mountains remained in clear view to his left, day after day. He was in lands unknown, for this was not the route that he and Jameston had taken from Pryd Town to Ethelbert dos Entel. In those first hours after fleeing the city, after his defeat at the hands of Affwin Wi, Bransen must have veered farther south than he had intended. Many times the battered young man considered backtracking to the coast and running due north until the coastline curved eastward, taking him to Chapel Abelle and Cadayle.

But Bransen found himself strangely transfixed by the scenes opening before him. He didn't know it, but he was following the route Yeslnik's army had taken when they had departed the field outside Ethelbert dos Entel's walls, the would-be king running from fear of Laird Ethelbert's strange Behr assassins. The same assassins who had murdered Laird Delaval and taken Bransen's sword and brooch. The same assassins who had taken from Bransen his hopes of a better Honce.

His travel became more difficult over the next few days, for there were no more farmhouses from which he could steal food-no standing ones, at least. And there were no chickens in any barnyard nor any living sheep or cattle or… anything. The crops had been burned and trampled, the ground torn and ruined. Bransen noted thousands of footprints and hoofprints and deep ruts caused by many passing chariots and wagons.

Bransen bent low to inspect the ground. Utterly, intentionally ruined, he realized to his horror. Most of it was simply black and red dirt common to the region, but Bransen also found white specks, as if someone had scattered something atop the trampled areas. He tapped his finger to one such speck and brought it up to sniff, then tasted it. Bransen's face crinkled, and he spat out the powerfully salty substance.

Some army had purposely done this. This was far more than the result of a march. One of the lairds-Ethelbert or Yeslnik-had devastated this region, had ruined the villages and the livelihood of the folk of southernmost Honce. Yeslnik, he figured, since the most recent tracks led to the west and since Ethelbert's army remained in his city on the eastern coast.

So Laird Yeslnik had crossed here in his retreat to Delaval City and had destroyed the farmland behind him. But where had all the residents gone?

Bransen's gaze went out to the north, toward where he approximated Pryd Town to be, and he imagined his former home overrun by bedraggled refugees, dirty and hungry and desperate. He sighed deeply at that probability but just shook his head and moved along.

Soon after, he came to a fork in the road, where one branch turned decidedly north and a broken signpost indicated it to be the road to Pryd. The other branch, continuing to the west, was marked for Delaval City. The army's passage, still due west, was clear enough to see, but the north road showed no fresh signs of any substantial passage.

Bransen went north for the rest of that day, moving near to the road, left and right, and searching for wagon marks or hoofprints of the slow, scraping boot marks of refugees. He found nothing recent.

The next morning he intended to continue north, knowing he would still have several days of walking before he reached Pryd Town, but he kept turning his curious gaze to the south. Without ever really understanding why, without questioning his urge, Bransen reversed course and headed that way, his pace swift all the way back to the signpost on the east-west road. He went right across the path, jogging across the despoiled fields and past the husks of burned-out houses. He happened upon one sizable community, or what had been, and found the scene of a ferocious battle. A small ruined keep sat on a hill at the southernmost point of the former town, its walls battered and torn down in many places, gray smoke still wafting out of its hollowed-out walls.

Bransen had to turn away when he moved up to the keep, or he would have vomitted the meager food he had scavenged over the last few days. For unlike the many deserted communities he had crossed, this larger one revealed to him the fate of its inhabitants. Their bodies covered the ground inside those keep walls, dead of arrows, hacked down by swords, charred by flames. A flock of crows lifted away when Bransen stepped inside, and a stench of death more powerful than anything the young warrior had ever imagined washed over him. This time he could not resist the urge to throw up.

They were all in there, men and women, old and young-very young. In one corner, Bransen found a dozen children, the largest among them surely not more than eight years, huddled together. Even at this state of great decay, with the crows having taken much, Bransen could see that their innocent bodies had been violated by many brutal chops of sword and axe.

How could any man bring himself to such depravity? What savagery had years of warfare brought to the participants, robbing them of their very humanity? He thought of the fop Yeslnik, for surely this was his doing. Bransen tried, unsuccessfully, to place this reality within the knowledge he had gained of the man during their previous encounters.

Was that weakling Yeslnik really capable of this?

The answer lay starkly before him.

Anxious thoughts crept around him like the black wings of the many cawing crows. He had to get to Cadayle and, with her and Callen, flee to Vanguard. They needed to be as far from this wretched and despoiled land as possible.

Bransen started to leave the ruined keep when he heard the distinctive whistling of an arrow cutting the air. Crouching low in the shadows, he scanned the area, using his skill and his magic, his inner ki-chi-kree, to propel himself up the rubble of the keep's southwestern corner. The roof in this section was fully gone, allowing Bransen to peer over the wall top. Spying three archers down a hill and across a field, he realized that the arrow had not been aimed his way. The men had a woman in tow, and one was pulling her along by the hair while the others took turns kicking at and spitting on her.

Bransen felt the blood running thick in his veins, felt his heart pumping strongly. His fingers tingled with anticipation.

"It's not my fight," he told himself determinedly, conjuring images of Cadayle, reminding himself that she was pregnant with his child. He had gone to Pryd Town to deliver his message and to Ethelbert dos Entel in search of a greater truth.

And he had failed. He had lost everything-everything except for Cadayle and their child and her mother. They were his responsibility now. That alone, and not some unknown woman being dragged away by ruffians in a land he did not know.

The stench of death continued to waft up about him, a pungent reminder of the awfulness of this place, a reminder that he could not stay here. Instinctively he looked west where the sun was low in the sky. He went back down the wall, exited the keep, and moved swiftly away to the north. He had almost made the road again, stubbornly telling himself with every step that this was not his fight and not his business.

But Bransen could not bring himself to cross that road. He turned about, to the south, in pursuit of the men and the captured woman. He turned his back to the north and to the responsibility he had proclaimed as his lone care and to the lie of dispassion.

As the miles rolled out beneath his feet he was surprised to find that those he pursued had not stopped with the setting sun but had continued on long into the night. Finally he spotted their campfire on a distant hill to the south. The ground was more broken now, for he had entered the foothills of the Belt-and-Buckle. Exhausted and hungry, Bransen still did not stop until he had drawn very near, almost to the base of the rounded hillock.

He heard the woman crying and screaming for someone to stop.

"Ye belong to me now, wench!" a man yelled back. "I'll take ye as I want ye!"

"Me husband," she pleaded.

"Dead and pecked by the crows!" the man shouted back. And she began screaming again.

Bransen crept up the side of the hill as fast as he dared, trying to remain silent and unnoticed. For there were others up there, he realized, and the top of the hill was bare of trees or any other cover he could discern.

Flat on his belly he crawled along, serenaded by the woman's soft cries and the grunts of her attacker. He peered over the hill and spotted them off to the side behind the two burning campfires where they lay behind a log, the man atop the woman, having finished his deed. But Bransen could hardly look that way, more surprised to see other women and children all about the place, some curled on the ground and sleeping, others milling about, their eyes vacant, their faces and hair filthy with soot and mud.

A pair of young boys began to fight, one quickly gaining the advantage. He knocked his opponent down and dropped atop him, straddling him and pummeling him mercilessly.

Those nearest adults seemed not to notice, and several other children just giggled as the beating continued.

The boy continued to rain blows on his victim, then, to Bransen's horror, reached out and picked up a small stone and smashed it down hard on his opponent's face again and again.

"Don't ye kill him," a man instructed. "Just hurt him."

Bransen found it hard to breathe. Across the way, the rapist stood and brushed himself off, then kicked the prone woman and spat upon her.

"Here now, don't ye do that," the man who had just spoken to the vicious lad called out. "My turn with her."

He headed over toward the log, opening his belt as he went, and no one seemed to pay him any heed at all.

"And if ye try to run again we'll do worse, don't ye doubt," said the man who had already had his way with the woman. He kicked her again for good measure and moved back to the main camp. One younger girl watched him with wide eyes, and he shouted at her, "Get me some food!" How she scrambled to obey!

Bransen couldn't comprehend the scene before him. He tried hard to keep his wits about him, to take a measure of the opposing force. He noted only three men-the ones he had seen from the keep wall-then he spotted a fourth coming up over the back crest of the hillock with an armload of wood.

This is not your fight, Bransen stubbornly reminded himself. You can't save the world, fool. It's all beyond you. There is no point!

He almost convinced himself to walk away. So despondent was Bransen that he nearly surrendered, there and then, to the darkness. Before he had even finished that internal battle, fate mercifully intervened, for a girl spotted him and let out a shriek, pointing and hopping.

Bransen probably could have melted into the forest at the base of the hill before any of them got a weapon drawn, but the sudden tumult shattered Bransen's pathetic justifications for leaving. He stood up and took a few steps toward the encampment, in full view then of more than twenty sets of eyes.

He noted the man behind the log scramble up from the beaten woman, hiking his pants as he went. He noted the previous attacker reaching down to grab a short bronze sword as the man with the armload of wood dropped it all except for two sturdy little clubs, one of which he tossed to the fourth man.

Bransen walked in. They obviously didn't recognize him as the Highwayman; he wasn't wearing his distinctive, one-sleeved shirt or telltale mask. Had he thought about it, he would have donned those clothes, using his reputation to his advantage. Too late now.

"Leave her alone," he said to the man still behind the log.

"What clan are ye?" the man with the sword demanded. "And what foolishness is in ye to think ye can walk into Clan Huwaerd? Get ye gone!"

"Clan?" Bransen replied skeptically. "I see four ruffians and a score of helpless prisoners."

Some of his bluster was lost as he spoke the words, though, as the young girl who had spotted him ran over to the man with the sword and hid behind him, calling him "father" as she went.

"What is this?" Bransen asked. He pointed back to the north, toward the distant, burned-out town and keep. "Was that your village?"

"He telled ye to leave," said one of the men with the clubs, who, along with his partner, advanced menacingly.

"No, but he ain't going nowhere," said the other man, slapping his club into his open palm repeatedly. "He'll just come back for us with his friends."

The man with the sword moved toward Bransen's left flank. Of more concern, though, was the man who had just started with the woman reached down and produced a bow and arrow.

"Look to the trees for others!" the man with the sword ordered. All the women, save the one on the ground, and all the children rushed to different points along the hilltop and peered down into the darkness.

"Now ye tell us who ye are," the swordsman demanded of Bransen.

"And if I do tell you, will it matter?"

The man looked at him curiously.

"I am Bransen Garibond of Pryd Town, son of Bran Dynard of the Order of Abelle and of Sen Wi, who was Jhesta Tu. None of that means anything to you, I am sure, except that you know of Pryd Town-"

"You fight for King Yeslnik!" yelled one of the club wielders.

Bransen laughed at the absurd notion, but he bit it short as he added, "I fight for no one."

"I'm not thinking that's true," said the swordsman. He gave a slight nod at the archer, a movement Bransen caught clearly so that he was not surprised when the archer let fly an arrow. It came in true and fast, center of mass, but just before it stabbed into the center of Bransen's chest he snapped his left forearm straight up and ducked, deflecting the arrow high, where it flew away into the darkness.

Nothing happened for a few heartbeats, the four men gawking at him. But all at once the archer reached for another arrow and the other three charged.

The swordsman was closest, blade leading. As soon as Bransen turned toward him he cowardly skidded to a stop and fell back a step.

Bransen turned back to meet the two others, who were swinging their clubs with abandon and shouting wildly as if they meant to simply run him over. Bransen started to retreat, as seemed the obvious route, but he noted the pattern, side to side, of the respective clubs, and marked his opening.

The swordsman to the side slipped around to keep up with Bransen's retreat and started in again. Across the way, the archer leveled his bow.

Bransen darted forward, twisting and bending as he went to avoid the backhand from the man to his left and the forehand from the one to his right. He slipped in between those clubs, the men frantically trying to realign with him, punching out with their free hands, bringing the clubs back to bear.

Bransen stopped short and spun fast, then threw himself around backward and to his right, turning into the backhanded reverse of the club. He crashed into the attacker's leading elbow, hooking the man's forearm and jerking it out straight. Understanding the movement of the man who was now behind him, Bransen dropped down diagonally, turning and tugging as he went, throwing out his foot to trip up the man he had caught. That thug rolled down over his leg just in time to catch the swinging club of his companion.

The other man, to his credit, managed to pull his strength from his swing and didn't hit his companion very hard, but still the jolt shocked them both enough for Bransen to continue through with his move. He jammed his left hand against the man's elbow and yanked back hard with his right, painfully straightening the arm. He tugged right through it with his leverage and his deceptive strength, pulling the club from the man's grasp as he flipped him right over to the ground at the feet of his companion.

Bransen straightened, spun, and swung, smashing his club hard against the club of his opponent but down low enough to catch the man's gripping fingers in the process. How he howled! His weapon flew, and he grabbed at his shattered hand, stumbling backward.

Bransen turned fast to meet the charge of the swordsman. He heard the bow fire behind him and instinctively dove diagonally down and to the right, guessing rightly that the archer was aiming left, away from the approaching leader. Bransen went right through a roll and back to his feet, barely two strides from his enemy. Instead of lifting the club to block he tossed it up into the air, calmly saying, "Here."

The swordsman's eyes reflexively followed the ascent, and he looked back just in time to see Bransen lunging forward, close enough for him to stab certainly, except that he hadn't the time to react. Bransen rolled his shoulders, his right arm coming forward in a devastating, driving punch that hit the man in the face, just under the nose, and drove through, sliding up past the nose as the man's head snapped backward.

The swordsman's feet came right out from under him, and he dropped hard to his back. Even before the man tumbled Bransen retracted, shoving off his front foot to straighten quickly, gaining momentum as he powerfully reversed his spin so that as the next attacker-the man he had flipped to the ground-leaped in at him, Bransen's elbow shot out behind, smashing him in the face.

The man grunted and staggered, his legs going weak. He didn't fall, though, as Bransen whirled about, a long-flying left hook chopping the man across the jaw. That blow, too, would have knocked him sidelong to the ground, except that Bransen needed this man upright. He caught him firmly, lined him up, and drove forward with all his strength toward the archer.

After a couple of strides the dazed man started to resist, but holding him in both hands by the leather jerkin, Bransen jerked his arms out straight, then yanked them back in as he lowered his forehead and snapped his head forward.

The crackling sound and gush of blood showed this one's nose to be broken. Again Bransen bulled him across the hilltop at the archer.

The Highwayman recognized that he didn't have the time to reach the bowman, for the two behind him weren't out of the fight quite yet. As he neared the central fire, Bransen threw the man backward. He clipped the logs and fell over, still a few feet short of the archer. Bransen went down low, almost to all fours, cleverly scooping a stone. He came up straight again and looked at his foe's leveled bow.

"You have only one shot, of course," Bransen said and smiled and began to walk steadily at the bowman. "Perhaps you will kill me, though I think that unlikely."

He could see the man trying to steady his hands, clearly unnerved by the ease with which Bransen had just dispatched his three companions-and after Bransen had used his arm to deflect the first arrow away and had dodged the second with his back to the bow!

Smiling, mocking the man with a chuckle, Bransen hopped left, hopped right, and threw the rock.

The bowman cried out and let fly, but he was ducking as he did, thinking more about turning to run away than anything else. Still, his shot came dangerously close, whipping past barely a finger's breadth from Bransen's head.

He was too close, the arrow too fast. He never could have blocked that shot, and it occurred to Bransen that he had just come an inch from death.

No matter. The archer was fleeing. The man he had head-butted writhed on the ground and seemed none too eager to try to get up anytime soon. Bransen turned.

That left only two.

The swordsman swayed as he stood there, his face bloody, his eyes already swelling from the brutal punch. The club wielder held his weapon in his left hand, the shattered fingers of his right hand tucked in tight against his side.

"Is this a dance you truly desire?" Bransen asked.

"Who are you?" the swordsman asked.

"I already told you."

"Why are you here?"

"Curiosity and disgust."

"Disgust?" asked the man with the club. "Have ye seen our homes? Have ye seen me kids, then, eight o' them, trampled dead under the spinning wheels of a chariot?"

Bransen had no answer to that. He lowered his eyes for a heartbeat and replied quietly, "I will go my way." Then he looked up and added in a much more sinister tone, "And if you try to stop me again or if I see you mistreating your own again like the dogs of war, I will kill you."

He was about to add that any who wanted to go with him would be welcome, but before he could speak he found himself reacting to a barrage of stones and sticks. He turned and blocked the most dangerous missiles, his eyes widening as he noted the charge.

The charge of children with sticks, some aflame, in hand. The charge of battered women, including the one who had been attacked behind the log. She came on most ferociously of all, throwing herself at Bransen, clawing at the air like a feral, rabid beast when he dodged aside. The look on her face, an expression locked in absolute denial, unsettled Bransen most of all.

A few stones hit him, though nothing serious, and the swordsman and club wielder hesitated, more than willing to let the children and the women begin the fight.

But it was no fight Bransen could accept. He darted for the side of the hill, catching the awkward swing of a youngster's stick. He shoved the child to the side as he sprinted past just to get clear of him. Bransen reached the lip of the hill, more stones and sticks following his every step, and he leaped and fell into himself, into his ki-chi-kree, mimicking the magic of the malachite gemstone. He flew, he floated, he leaped far into the darkness, out from the hill at such a height that he caught the branches of the trees below and half pulled, half ran along those intertwined elevated walkways.

By the time he dared stop, by the time he had ended the enhanced magical trance, the campfire in the hillock was a distant speck of light, the continued shouted protests a distant din. The troubled young man sat back against the tree trunk, shifting so that his vantage point gave him a clear view of the starry sky. He tried to digest what he had just seen, tried to play past the incongruity of the battered woman coming at him with such primal hatred and violence. He replayed what he had seen on the hillock and affirmed to himself that he had not witnessed it in the wrong light. She had been taken against her will and beaten into submission-of that, there could be no doubt.

Were these people so desperate, so out of sorts, that such behavior had become acceptable to them? Was their loss so profound to their sensibilities that any semblance of order, even if it was order under the stamp of a heavy and painful boot, brought a measure of security and comfort?

Bransen could hardly comprehend the reasoning behind it, but he quickly came to understand the reality of what he had seen: the ultimate breakdown of civilization itself. This was the result of war, taken to the extreme, the desperate and forced primitive order out of inflicted chaos and agony. This was the result of utter helplessness in the wake of complete loss.

He tried to sort it out, conjuring past experiences and knowledge. He thought of the Book of Jhest, with passages describing such atrocities. He thought of his own life in war. Towns in Vanguard had been similarly razed by the hordes inspired by Ancient Badden, but never had he seen anything akin to this!

The difference in Vanguard had been the faith the survivors held in Dame Gwydre and the other nobles. Even when all had been lost except life itself, those people in Vanguard knew that their larger constructs of society, the dame and her court, the Order of Abelle, remained and would be there to shelter them and to feed them and to help them build anew. The people on this southern hillock had no such comfort. To whom would they turn? Yeslnik had done this, but his foe, Ethelbert, to whom they had pledged fealty, could not come forth, could not protect them. Did he even wish to?

These people had lost many of their loved ones and their very way of life. Because of the scorched earth and utter ruin, because of the absence of hope itself, they saw no way to reclaim it. As brutal as those four men leading the clan had been, they were the only measure of security and stability those poor folk on the hillock could hope to know. They were darkness, to be sure, but they were also the guides through the darkness, however wretched.

The young warrior knew that he could go back and kill those four and perhaps convince the others to then follow him. He could take them to Pryd, or even to Ethelbert.

He stared up at the stars and he shook his head at the helpless futility of it all.

He slept there, up in the tree, exhausted from his ordeal and from, most of all, the emotional battering he had taken in the shock of the cruel reality.

He awoke before the dawn, thinking to go straight off to the north to Pryd Town. Instead, Bransen went along the foothills of the Belt-and-Buckle. He avoided the hill where he had fought, but he looked for other clans. He found many of them scattered among the hills, desperate people living in caves or under overhangs or atop hillocks that provided them a defensive position. Bransen didn't get close to any, the bitter experience fresh in his thoughts, but he viewed them from the nearest vantage points, one after another, throughout the rest of that day. He ended by climbing as high as he could among the nearby mountains, a clear perch to widen the view below him.

Dozens and dozens of campfires dotted the night terrain, one or two at a time, mostly, but with one congregation of more than a score.

Bransen marked that spot and went there before the dawn.

He found the same situation as he had witnessed on the hillock, only many times larger in scale. This was the prime clan of the region, it seemed, with no fewer than fifteen armed bosses, men and women alike, brutalizing and commanding many others, young and old and infirm.

Soon after he left that complex of rudimentary dwellings built under the overhangs of red-rocked cliffs, Bransen came across the scene of a recent battle-probably one between the clan he had just left and a lesser group that had happened upon them.

Crows picked at the bodies scattered in the region, which included a few who might have fought back and a few more, very old, who would have no doubt been helpless in the face of the assault. There were no children to be found, however, except for the body of a single young girl. Bransen glanced back at the large clan and wondered how many among the children he had seen there were recent acquisitions.

The troubled young man did not sleep in that devastated region that night. He couldn't sleep. So he walked back out to the road and to the northern fork that would lead him to Pryd Town, and north beyond that, he hoped, to Chapel Abelle and Cadayle.