Traitor (Fantasy Fiction)

 

Blood, heavy in his nostrils. He snorted, as though he could clear it out, but the smell was pervading: fresh, coppery, mixed with the stink of sweat. He was confused, trapped in a struggle that seemed outside of time. Images flowed into his vision, of screaming, crazed men.

Arus brought his sword up. He gripped the hilt with two hands, feeling the weight of the weapon and finding it heavy and reassuring. He was not reassured by the target of their ambush. It’s not right— He blocked the thought. Men were dying around him in this glade in the forest and he did not want to join them.

He looked for an opponent to fight—he looked for single combat—but it seemed to him that the men around him were engaged in frenzied brawls, where two men of the same allegiance would mob an enemy and bash at him until he fell. Others fought one on one for moments, then would be sucked apart into other skirmishes.

It was chaos. Fear surged in him… what place had a boy here? You’re not a boy; you’re a man now. You’ve passed your fifteenth name-day.

An axe blade arced through the air. Arus leaped backwards, not thinking of his sword, only of escaping the axe’s path. It sliced, silver-laced death, through empty space. The half-moon of the axe blade was clean, shining clean, while dirt clung to the enemy soldier in every crease of his face, every link in the chain shirt that hung to his knees.

The man was roaring as he swung. Arus saw his mouth gaping, his thick beard surrounding it, braided and hanging onto his chest, his eyes small and beady and dark as obsidian. The barbarians of the north. They sing as they kill, and they scream.

Arus sprang to meet him.

He ducked under the axe, sensed it swing above his head and knew he was inside the soldier’s guard. He slashed at the man’s belly and the blade tore through the skin cleanly, emptying the man’s stomach. Guts spilled from the gash to the muddy ground.

Arus jumped back: he was suddenly terrified to have the stuff splash on him. He felt warmth on his hands and looked down. Blood had splattered them.

Two braided warriors filled Arus’s vision, men that were not looking at him because they were hacking at a single soldier. One of Sir Helos’s men-at-arms.

Arus yelled his challenge and ran over the body of the dying man. He roared in madness as he ran, forgetting that barbarians did that, not Allarianknights, and crashed into his enemies before they could hack down his comrade.

 

 

From his earliest memories of childhood, he had wanted to be a knight. Resplendent in their polished, burnished plate, they appealed to him because they spoke to him of a code, a way of living that gave importance to life—you were part of a whole, a knighthood, and together you had ideals and standards. Life might not be that way, but it should be, and if you knew that, you could always aim for it.

As his father was a knight, and the Duke Norwaard, it was natural that his son should follow him into the knighthood when he was of age. He must serve as a squire to Sir Helos, and later prove his valour when he had the opportunity, and once proven he could then undertake the period of fasting and prayer.

Sir Helos had summoned him before dawn, and given him that opportunity.

But that opportunity involved killing a woman.

 

 

A page summoned Arus.

“Sir Helos requires you to prepare his armour,” the boy had said, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Arus nodded and dressed.

The knight was eager for haste, but was more talkative than usual, as Arus helped him with his armour.

“My scouts have returned. They report that barbarians had entered the Duke’s lands. Be glad you have the opportunity to defend your father’s Dukedom, lad, for we ride to stop them!

“The witch Roselai is in their party. They appear to be escorting her. I do not know what magic she has planned, but she will die tonight. We cannot wish for a greater stroke of luck! The witch! Guarded only by a meagre escort of soldiers. Ha!”

Arus had not wanted to question the knight. It was not his place. The man had answered him, almost as if he had heard Arus’s thoughts.

“I have dispatched a messenger to Duke Norwaard, but I cannot wait for his reply; war is about acting, taking the gamble, knowing when to exploit opportunity. Remember that, lad.” Sir Helos clapped him on the shoulder. “You ride with us tonight, squire. You’ve earned it.” The older man grinned through his blond beard. “You’ll make a good knight. Now, let us leave!”

It was unspoken between them, but Arus knew the knight was giving him the chance to show courage—or lack of it. How he handled himself in the battle would be remembered.

 

 

Arus killed neither of the two barbarian soldiers. He fought them in a furious combat that he could remember little of later. Mostly, he could bring to mind only heat and the sound of his own hoarse breathing in his ears when he could not hear ringing steel. Sometime during the short fight, the man-at-arms died beside him. Arus noticed only vaguely. He was focused on escaping the blows of his enemies, and trying to move faster, always faster, so that he could get in a blow of his own before the enemy recovered from his last swing.

Then other bodies were crushed against him and the two barbarians were swept into another live-or-die combat that he could see but not reach, trapped in the press of bodies. Panic surged in him—he couldn’t move, was too close, couldn’t defend himself. He kicked and stabbed. A man bearing Sir Helos’s coat of arms nearly ran him through. He twisted snake-like and avoided the sword. The man looked at him with no sign of recognition in his eyes, though Arus’s coat of arms (that of House Norwaard) was clearly displayed on his chest. Arus lost sight of him a moment later. It was a memory that stayed with him: the man staring vacantly, the sword dangling at his side after he’d tried to stab Arus, as though he were lost and unknowing what to do. Mud, striated with red blood, was smeared over his cheeks, and his eyes were devoid of emotion. Then the man ran into the forest, scrambling up a leaf-scattered rise with a stumbling, ragged gait.

The battle left Arus. Or at least, it left him in a pocket where no men fought. He saw a woman, and knew who she must be.

She knelt by the bodies of two barbarian men, not far from him. She was closing the eyelids of one and though Arus could not hear her words, he could see her lips move. She was dressed in soft leather breeches. He’d never seen a woman wear pants. They were truly very different. She was closing the eyes of her dead and speaking to them. Witchcraft. No, saying farewell. She’s not so different. He wondered if she had known the men. He could not see her face too well, because it was hidden partially by the hair that fell past her cheeks, but the skin looked soft and unlined. She was young: older than him but not so old that one of the men couldn’t have been her lover.

The crazed rush of blood and anger, the fever, had left him now that there was no immediate danger. In the midst of the battle, the reason for the ambush had quickly become meaningless to him. It was fighting for a single life—his own—he felt, and if that was true, then the loss of a friend seemed much greater. He watched her put her hand on the barbarian’s head, feeling as though he’d lost something himself.

She straightened and cast a look around the battlefield. Her eyes met his, darted away to the sword he held. There was a mark on her skin—on her left cheek. He’d never seen anything like it before. It looked as though the mark had been drawn on her with ink and quill, but it was deeper, part of her skin, not something that could be smudged away. It was not a brand, burnt into her flesh; it was too subtle for that, the lines too finely done, and too detailed. Nor did he know what the mark symbolised or represented: it looked like a knotted rope across her cheek, formed of many smaller lines. He would have liked to see it closer.

Then he realised that she was staring at his sword, with her eyes slightly wider than normal and her hands drawn up tensely by her thighs, and abruptly he felt something like embarrassment and wanted to drop the sword or put it away, get it out of sight.

He could see the question in her eyes: What is he going to do? How is he going to act? Feathers were in her brunette hair. The foreignness of her hit him; the feathers, the breeches, the ink-mark on her cheek; she looked wild and out of place with the image of women that he knew: those women were so far from the scene of battle it was incongruous that she was there.

She was tense and still. He noted her eyes flash to a riderless horse to her right, not far from the dead barbarians. Ah. She was wondering if she could make it into the saddle before he reached her. She made as if to move and he leaped forward two paces, forced into action because though he was unwilling to kill her, he was unwilling to let her go and fail his duty. She stopped and he stopped also, and they returned to waiting and watching and wondering what move to make.

Sir Helos’s words, spoken before the ambush, came to him: ‘Kill the witch Roselai… She must die.’ He’d said it like he’d said, ‘Help me with my armour’. Not human. Why had he thought that? His grip on his sword was sweaty. It rose like a bloody splinter of rock between him and her. Bright blood was on his hands and arms too. I don’t want to kill her, help me, but I don’t. I don’t want my arms covered with this mess. Get it off me!

‘Find the woman… Kill her… She must die.’

Why? Why must she die?

An image of his sword red with her blood, with strands of her hair stuck in the blood, flashed in his mind. He saw her tumbled on the ground like something discarded. He shied away from the image. I can’t kill her. Not as she is now. But I must. I must kill her.

Her eyes were observing him as though they witnessed his struggle. There was no crazed battle-light in her eyes; there was more than a little fear, but it was controlled fear. It was humanity he could see in her: she wasn’t ruled by the rage that had taken him over earlier so that he would survive—and do anything to do so. She was master of herself. Perhaps she was listening to those standards he wanted to live by, had thought he had lived by. He did not know if she was; he could not read her like she seemed to be reading him. She was watching, calm and very frightened, to see the outcome of the conflict in him. Retaining that control, keeping hold of that humanity, took more courage than he had.

He did not want to be a slayer of humanity.

He held her gaze and gave a slight nod towards the forest.

She understood.

He saw gratitude flare in her eyes, and felt an answering warmth bloom in his own chest; it was sudden and wrong that he should feel it—she was his enemy—but the warmth was born from aiding someone who had the odds stacked against her; and as she nodded to him in return and ran to her horse, he felt the urge to lift his sword in a salute, as if to wish her luck in escaping.

He watched her draw closer to her horse, and felt relief, as if her escape was his salvation.

A man-at-arms flowed after her.

She was oblivious, pursuing freedom, reaching her horse with elation in her stride, elation at the sudden return of life when it had seemed he must take it from her moments before.

I should turn away. I don’t want to see her die. It’s murder. Turn your head away and you won’t have to see.

But he was moving, moving quickly because she hadn’t seen the man-at-arms, nor the spiked flail that danced on the end of its chain as the man stalked her.

He stepped between the man-at-arms and the barbarian woman, thinking to tell the man to cease this insane act. She wasn’t evil, to be hunted and killed. She was young, like Arus, and beautiful—and perhaps the only one in this mess that wasn’t trying to slaughter lives.

“Halt,” Arus said.

The man took him in, absorbed the coat of arms blazoned across Arus’s chest. His eyes widened. “Traitor,” he breathed.

He came towards Arus in a rush. The flail spun in the blood-tinged light of dawn. Terror coursed through Arus. You can’t dodge that thing. You can’t dodge it and you can’t deflect it with your blade, it’ll wrap around it! He didn’t want to fight the man and his mind screamed at him, unable to come to terms with the pace of events. He reacted, his body listening to his fear and obeying its signals.

He feinted to the left, darting on the balls of his feet, hoping he’d be quick enough to jump out of the flail’s path. The man grinned: Arus was moving directly into range. He shifted the flail’s flight, directed it towards the squire with a snap of the wrist.

Arus sprung backward and sidestepped. The fever was on him again. His mind shrieked—too slow! It’s going to catch you as it swipes past! It’s going to— The ball raked across and a spike tore a shallow gash in Arus’s leather armour. Alive! I’m alive! Exultation exploded in him and flooded him—the joy at living and surviving, the joy at not having it end in that savage swipe. Was this how the woman had felt when she ran towards her horse?

Arus stepped into the gap the flail left in its passing.

His sword was feather-light in his hands.

He drove it into the man’s belly.

The man jerked and tried to pull himself free of the blade impaling him—

—A giant fish, struggling—

—and the sharp steel edges rent the wound open as he pulled, letting bursts of blood gush down the steel and Arus’s hands. His eyes rolled in their sockets. Arus stood motionless, stunned. His fingers had locked around the sword hilt and he hung onto it as if he could not release it, as though he was bound to share the man’s death. Arus staggered back, tugging at his sword. The man slid slowly off the blade to the ground.

The exultation, the sweetness of survival, had drained from Arus, along with the fever. I’ve killed one of my own.

It had happened quickly: seconds and he’d killed the man. In the moment it had seemed inevitable, a chain of events: fighting to live, an opening, the final sheathing of the sword in the man’s body.

Arus did not want to see the man die. He looked away.

His eyes met Sir Helos’s.

The knight sat his horse beyond the thick of the fighting. His visor was raised and his beard was caked with blood, muddy brown instead of its usual blonde. Anger travelled across his features. He saw.

Arus had seen blood-rage on men’s faces in this battle and he saw it on Sir Helos’s now.

The knight spurred his horse towards Arus and thrust through the knots of fighting men. He guided his animal with the experience of years, Arus knew, and the sword in his fist was bloody with the life of his foes.

The young man lifted his blade.

“You should not fight now. You will not live.”

Arus turned.

The woman sat in the saddle of her horse. Roselai, her name is Roselai. Her face was composed. It was the hardest face he had ever seen a woman wear. In the dawn light she looked pale as a faerie queen. But the knot and the feathers marked her as someone entirely different. A witch? He wondered that she could speak his language.

She extended her hand to him.

He took it.

She pulled him onto the horse’s rump, behind her, and he wrapped his hands around her waist as she heeled the mare to a gallop.

With a woman from a land he had never seen, but known as enemy territory for his entire life, he fled the knight into the protection of the forest.

 

 

Roselai slowed the horse to a walk. He assumed it was to rest the beast while there was no sign of pursuit. He didn’t ask her. He was reluctant to break the silence. Really, there was no need to ask: the horse was lathered with sweat, and heat radiated from its body.

Her body was soft against his chest and she shifted gently against him with the movement of the saddle. He was aware of the scent of her.

The trees were becoming denser as they rode, and the ground was uneven. Ridges of earth made the going difficult and Roselai had to pick a path for the horse to descend the small ridges. The ground was rocky, and the stones were moss-covered and sometimes loose and treacherous for the horse. Arus feared Sir Helos catching them there: galloping would be a nightmare.

She broke the silence.

“You have killed. For me.”

“No! No, I didn’t. I—” He stopped. “Yes. I did.”

“Your own comrade. Why?”

He hated that she reminded him. He saw stricken eyes, felt warm, syrupy blood on his skin. He tried to force the image from his mind but it was stubborn and remained. He focused on her voice.

“Why?” she repeated. Her syllables came out harder than his, and she talked slowly, carefully forming the words. For all that, he could understand her easily. Her voice was husky and low for a woman. It added to her strangeness.

“I… It seemed wrong… to hunt you.”

She was quiet. He wanted to see her face. It might tell him what she was thinking.

He hesitated. “They say you are a witch.”

“I did not cast a spell on you.”

“I know. I think witchcraft would not be so subtle to give me choice. Or to fool me into thinking I had choice.”

Riding behind her, he could see the half-curve of her lips as she smiled. Perhaps it was because he could only see one side of her face that made her smile seem secretive.

“Are you?” he said.

“Am I…?”

“A witch.”

“I don’t know what you mean when you say ‘witch’. But I have heard stories. If ‘witch’ means to you, as it seems to mean to all your people, that I can see the future, and kill men with a word, then no, I am not a witch. I do not kill small animals and drink their blood, and I do not dance naked under the eaves of the forest. Is that what ‘witch’ means to you?”

“They are the only stories I’ve heard, so I suppose that is all it can mean to me,” Arus said. “But… I do not think that was what I meant.”

Once again, he could not tell what she was thinking. He spoke into the gap.

“You can speak my language well. I would have thought ‘barbarian’ would be the only word of ours you know.”

She tilted her head as though acknowledging that. She did not explain how she had learned his language.

He asked her something he’d wanted to know for some time. “What is the mark on your cheek, here,” he said, taking the excuse to brush her cheek with his fingertips. Blood flaked from them and he dropped his hands hurriedly, but though he saw her notice, she did not flinch from his touch.

“You are not a warrior,” she said. “You fight well, and bravely, but you are not a warrior. You are wasted as one.”

Arus stung from her words. She said them so calmly and matter-of-factly. Words of his own came to his lips: defenses, justifications, proof that he was a warrior. He’d spent his life aiming to be all that a knight was. Noble, chivalrous, those ideals, they were part of him. How could she say they weren’t? Then he wondered if that was what she was saying.

She was speaking. “…Is the mark of—I do not know how to say it in your language… I am daughter of… the daughter of all my people. I am… storyteller? I remember our past and tell it to the one who comes after me. I keep our story alive.” Arus listened to her intently. She was struggling with her words, searching for the ones she needed. He thought he understood.

“I know the past of my people best, so therefore I can best decide the future,” Roselai said. “Does that make sense? The mark on my cheek is… all my people as one. Many small lives create the whole. I am the binding holding them together.”

She was saying that she was their leader. He rode in silence, shocked, and she did not speak or explain further. The creak of the saddle leather and the movement of the trees, like sighing breaths, were all Arus could hear. He wondered if he would have warning of the approach of a man on foot.

“What will you do?” Roselai said.

The question caught him off-guard. “What will I… I don’t know. I don’t want to run for the rest of my life.” He exhaled and looked at the spread of the trees above him. Their trunks rose high before any branches arched from them. Ancient. Older than him, older than her. He let his gaze fall to the back of Roselai’s brunette swept head. “I think… I will go to my father and tell him what I have done.”

“Why? They will kill you.”

“True,” he said with a weary smile. “But I have this.” He touched the hilt of his sword, which was sheathed at his side now.

“That won’t save you,” she said, sadly. “It won’t save you at all.”

Arus lifted his gaze to the trees again. They shifted almost imperceptibly with the wind. He had no answer to give her.

“What is your name?” Roselai asked him.

“Arus.” He didn’t look down.

“Only Arus?” she said. “I realise your people have two names. Sometimes three? She laughed as though that were very, very strange.

He laughed with her and brought his gaze back to the ground. “No, not just Arus. But the rest doesn’t seem to matter.” No, it wasn’t important if he was of noble blood or common, not to her. He’d prefer if she knew him by a simple name, just as their relationship seemed simple in the woods. “Arus is fine.”

She nodded, accepting that. She twisted in the saddle to look at him. Her eyes were grey in the light filtering through the trees. He saw something of what he’d seen on the battlefield in them, when she’d sat tall and straight on her horse and told him he should not fight, he should run if he wanted to live. He thought it was knowledge of what had to be done—purpose. Knowledge like that was often hard, and the grey of her eyes had steel in it.

“Arus. I am here for a reason. I did not enter your peoples’ land on a whim.”

Arus realised that it should have been obvious she had a mission in his father’s lands, but it had never occurred to him to wonder. He felt uneasy, hoping she wasn’t about to ask him to betray his people. It came home to him, for the first time since escaping the battle, that she was his enemy.

“I believe I can trust you with that reason. You are a man that can bring change, Arus. Perhaps you can help me—”

Pain blasted into Arus’s shoulder, exploding from the muscle and spreading through his body. He caught a glimpse of arrow feathers sticking from his arm as he slid from the saddle. The ground clubbed him and he lay crumpled. He could hear the cries of men and horses. He tried to push himself to his feet. He got to his knees, swayed, fell and pushed himself up again.

He saw Roselai’s horse rear. He thought she surely must be bucked from the saddle but she held her seat. An arrow jutted from the horse’s foreleg, rivulets of blood streaking its muscle.

Men darted from the trees. They bore Sir Helos’s coat of arms.

Arus saw the bowman step from behind the cover of a fallen, moss-carpeted tree. For a terrifying instant Arus feared he would draw his longbow and shoot Roselai from the saddle, then he saw that she had already fallen. Two men-at-arms stood over her with drawn swords. Sickness spread through his guts and he wanted to vomit. They would kill her. She can’t die now, I have started to know her. You don’t kill people you know. What? Is that true? But they don’t know her, what they know is that she is a witch. His thoughts tumbled through his head, rambling, tripping over themselves, earnest and panicked, and beneath, angry too. They kill so easily. They’ll kill you too. Maybe they should; you have killed. When you stab a man there is nothing right about it. But I’m going to do it again because they’ll do it to me.

He wrenched his sword from its sheath. It felt good, this act of defiance. He dug it point first into the ground and used it to haul himself to his feet. The blood pumped from his shoulder. Left arm. You can still fight. He could hear hooves thudding against the wet earth of the forest.

He spun the sword upright. He staggered. He could see several men-at-arms. Anyone would do. None of them were people any more. He wanted to hurt them; they’d taken those moments he’d had with Roselai as the two of them rode through the forest, and it was the cruelest kind of theft because it was done for a lie. ‘Kill the witch…’

The hooves were thunder in his ears. So close. Where? Behind him. He turned sluggishly, trying not to let the sword waver in front of his chest.

Sir Helos rode at him. His face was no longer asphyxiated with blood lust. It was calm and cold. The knight swung his sword and Arus attempted clumsily to parry it. He missed cleanly and the frost-cold flat of the knight’s blade sent him spinning to the ground.

He lost his sword as he fell. He didn’t suppose it mattered. His ears rang and his vision was dark. His mouth was full of dirt and leaf, and his face was pressed against the earth. He fought the dark—he wanted to remain conscious, as if that was a victory in itself.

He heard Sir Helos’s voice. “The boy will be tried as befits the son of a Duke.” The voice was controlled, but there was anger beneath it. “But you, witch, will meet the blade now!”

Roselai’s voice: cool, calm, truly controlled. “On what grounds do you execute me, Sir Knight?”

“Witchcraft!” Sir Helos’s voice was rough.

“Is that all?” she said.

“And for travelling through Allarianlands. This is the property of Duke Norwaard and you have no right to travel here without his permission.”

“I have been granted permission.”

Darkness extended its claws for Arus.

Sir Helos laughed. “By whom?”

As the claws snared Arus and pulled him into starless night, he heard Roselai speak.

“By the Duke,” she said with sorrow. “We were to talk of peace between our people.”