Fiction
Fantasy
My assignment regarding Sir Chahan went horribly awry from the moment I found him. Certainly the events occurring near Donevsk alone should merit an early retirement from His Majesty’s service. Never again will I go through such lengths simply to add a page to the annals of the knights of Salincia.
I began my work in the knight’s hometown of Debraun, two hundred miles south along the Towamer River. When I arrived one afternoon, the town was celebrating a spring holiday unknown to me, one I suspected they made up just for the sake of drawing in visitors. Booths lined the town’s main street, most of them constructed of stick frameworks covered with goatskins. Hand-painted signs with crooked letters and misspellings announced what the vendors offered. I asked someone at the “julry” stand where I might find Chahan, and several passers-by who overheard my inquiry pointed him out.
Chahan’s name would have been forgotten by the next generation if not for my intervention, so I expected to be honored accordingly when I met up with him. His reaction, unfortunately, was less than admirable.
“A scholar?” he asked. “So you want to write a song about me?”
Pinching the bridge of my nose, I said, “Perhaps you are thinking of a minstrel. A scholar writes for educational and historical purposes. It is of a much higher calling.”
After a resounding belch that stank of hops and barley, he said, “Well, I hope you consider writing a song after you finish with that other stuff. No one’s sang a song about me yet, and I’m beginning to think I might not get one. You could call it ‘The Ballad of Sir Chahan’ or something like that.”
Before I could voice a sarcastic reply, a man behind me shouted to the knight. Chahan laid one of his huge hands on my shoulder and swept me aside.
I was able to avoid stumbling into a juggler tossing apples, and as I turned to look back, the stranger punched Chahan square on the jaw. “Where are the authorities?” I cried, hoping someone might run for aid.
Chahan returned the blow, but the comparably strong assailant seemed little fazed by it. I expected the altercation to escalate, but the two men began laughing. “Thomas, what brings you to southern Salincia?” Chahan asked.
“Someone has to straighten this place out after what you’ve messed up,” the man replied. His grin seemed like a permanent expression, and only twice did I ever see it distinctly change in all the weeks we were with him. “I came to escort you to the tournament, if you’re still up for going.”
I approached the men cautiously. “Sir Chahan, are you actually friends with this ruffian?”
Chahan frowned as though I weren’t doing him an enormous favor in trying to follow this conversation. “Who is this plump, little man?” Thomas asked. “Your father, perhaps?”
“I’m not quite that old!” I protested, but I doubt they heard me over their own guffaws.
“He’s a scholar here to learn something about me.”
“Is that right? Well, I am Sir Thomas.” He threw his hand forward so quickly that it took me a moment before I could react to shake it.
“My name is Cole of Arkessler, and I am pleased to make your acqu—”
“All the chosen knights are leaving from Debraun, or so I was told,” Thomas said to Chahan; even though I was in his hard grip, I had lost all of his attention.
Chahan nodded. “We leave in two days.”
While the two knights continued their discourse of fighting, beer, and women, I slunk away to find something half-edible and wondered why I had not contended my assignment. Besides following such a simple-minded brute around, I had more traveling to look forward to, and it had taken me days just to get to Debraun in the first place.
Just after the sun began its climb on the cool morning of the seventh of Dalp, more than one hundred of us left Debraun. There were seventeen knights along with their squires, pages, heralds, and an assortment of others whom I can only describe as enthusiastic tournament spectators—those who enjoy passing the time by recounting previous competitions in extremely minute detail. Ladies rode with us as well: wives and betrothed of the knights along with those seeking affection (apparently three were vying for Chahan).
I can recall the names of some of the knights, but the only other one that stood out to me was their captain, Sir Borodin. He was nearing fifty but looked as stout as the others, and his eyes conveyed intelligence.
At night I would speak with Sir Chahan, learning the details of his life. By day, I would ride among the squires, quietly ranking them by their mental aptitude (apparently a scholar has no place riding with knights, even if he is doing a great service to one of them).
The only disturbances to our peaceful journey came from knights sounding their trumpets on two separate occasions. Chahan told me they had spotted a few highwaymen in the distance, slinking about. It seemed peculiar that a small band of assailants would step within twenty miles of us, and had I thought more carefully, I might have realized that what the knights had seen were not men at all.
On the afternoon of the tenth day, a signal from one of the knights diverted my thoughts. I peered ahead, viewing a horse-drawn wagon that Borodin and Chahan were quickly overtaking. Out of a scholarly interest, I joined the two knights to observe their interrogation, expecting to find a band of brigands nestled away under the cover of the wagon’s canvas. Instead, I discovered a couple who could not be more disparate. A fat man sat in the driver’s seat, holding the reins in one hand and wiping sweat off his brow with the other (though it was hardly warm enough to perspire). Next to him was a wiry girl with golden hair.
Borodin was telling of the coming tournament, and the fat man nodded so slowly that I could hardly observe any actual movement. “We’re all going up there as well,” he said. His actual words were a grammatical catastrophe, and to imitate him precisely would require that I become incoherent.
“Spectators of the tournament?” Borodin asked.
“Well, not so much,” the driver replied. “Myd and me are just going to Donevsk for our own reasons. I’m a merchant, or a bit of one at least. Salincia’s our home, though.”
“Perhaps we could escort you and your daughter there,” the captain suggested. The girl looked to the hefty man for a moment, but she did not speak. “After all, you are citizens of Salincia. We have a week until the tournament, which should allow us to slow to your pace.”
The man laughed loudly. “Wondermous!” As if his poor quality of speech wasn’t enough, now he was just making up words.
With a slight bow from his seat, he said, “Jerrick Trade.” Then, pointing to the girl, he added, “This is Myd.”
“Never heard of a ‘Myd’ before,” Chahan said, entering the conversation in a rather drab kind of way.
“It’s short for Mydrianna,” she said, rather articulately for a child, and especially so given Jerrick’s dialect.
The two knights must have introduced themselves before I arrived, for they made no mention of their names. Had I not cleared my throat repeatedly, they might very well have neglected to mention mine at all. When I was brought up, Chahan said, “This is my scholar, Cole.” His scholar? I swallowed the grunt (or perhaps it was bile) that I felt rising within.
That evening, Jerrick and the girl joined the knights around their fire. I was still allowed within this circle in the evenings, provided I was speaking with Sir Chahan and not interfering with any other business the knights might undertake (though from what I could tell, such business involved reminiscing of better days). When we had finished the meal, it seemed that Chahan had little to share with me, and I expected to be ousted from their cluster in favor of the strangers at any moment.
Myd sat so near the fire that I had some concern she might get singed. The noises beyond our camp, especially those coming from the south, made the girl jump. “You’re not used to the country, are you?” I asked casually.
She started to say something until Jerrick bellowed, “Just different here, is all!”
Myd’s voice snapped a stillness that had seeped among us. “Do you use your swords in the tournament?”
“Swords, lances, shields, horses, maces,” Chahan said.
Thomas, still grinning stupidly, added, “Fists.” He made small circles with his closed hands. Hitting the air before him, he cried, “Pop! Pop!” Myd giggled.
“Do they fight, too?” she asked, pointing to the other camp.
“No,” Chahan said. “But we do train the squires and pages, for they endeavor to become knights one day.” I smirked at his use of the word endeavor, since he had learned it from me only two days earlier.
She pressed her lips inward and looked away. “How does a boy know if he wants to be a knight? Is there something special about himself he notices? Can he do things none of the other boys can do?”
“Myd!” Jerrick blushed as we all looked at him. “Myd, just get some sleep. Please.”
The girl looked to Borodin, and he simply added, “Obey your father, child. We can speak more another time.”
We made it to Donevsk on the first day of the tournament. By this point, I had heard enough of Jerrick’s voice to last two lifetimes, and I was perhaps the only one cheered when we parted company. In truth, after so much traveling and challenges to my own sanity, I was excited to watch the tournaments. My own genius had been sequestered by more barbarous inner tendencies, and I found myself clinging to thoughts of one man bashing another, fueled by the overwhelming charge of the entire city.
Donevsk pulsed with the tournament. It was on everyone’s lips. All the dealers were selling paraphernalia or souvenirs. Then, there were the cries from the stadium itself, rising over the din of the city wherever you were.
Multi-colored banners hung from homes and shops or flew on poles. Confetti swirled in the air. Musicians played in any spare corner. Knights and squires were in abundance. Even someone (such as myself) with no interest whatsoever in jousting or skill contests would find themselves unable to resist the pull and would happily melt into the very throng of the moment.
Within the hour, we picked our way to the stadium, a horseshoe-shaped building with rows of bleachers filling in the eastern gap. Everyone but the knights and their attendants entered through a gate on the south side. For a bronze coin each, we received a colored mark on our hands and were ushered along without so much as a thank-you. It was at this point that I thought I might faint from being pressed between so many people, ambling along without any inclination that we were making progress.
As I was just about to fall to my knees in a panic, the tall man before me walked down a set of stairs that I had unknowingly been following him toward. It was then that I saw the interior of the stadium, a great bowl in the earth, ridged in stone and half populated with spectators. At the bottom was an open field more than one hundred yards long and about fifty wide.
“Keep going, Cole.” One of Salincia’s fanatics thrust his pointed hand in front of my face. “I think there’s enough room down there for all of us.”
I led us to the area he had discovered, and we huddled together there so close that I could smell the noxious perfumes of the ladies in our company. The impressive stadium held my attention for at least ten minutes, but then I began to grow weary from sitting and wished I had brought one of my books along rather than leaving it with the rest of our baggage. “How much longer must we wait?” I asked.
“They should be out soon,” the man next to me said.
Soon was, in actuality, a metaphor for an hour. Then, with the stadium seemingly crammed with every person in the world, trumpeters played from the western end of the field. At this, the crowd roared with such enthusiasm that I thought my heart had stopped in my chest.
In rode the knights of the tournament, arranged by the lands they hailed from. Our knights were the third group to appear on the green, and they gathered themselves into three rows on the northwest end of the field. I counted seven groups and recognized the banners of each, even though we were thirty rows or more from the plain.
The day’s main event was an archery contest, but sadly the men were shooting at targets rather than one another. The crowd wanted something more as well, I felt, and we were all assuaged when a dispute of unknown origin triggered a short brawl between two of the competitors.
“I don’t see any of our men in the archery contest,” I said aloud, not caring who answered.
“Knights don’t use bows and arrows,” a man behind me said. “It’s beneath them.” I turned my face as far as I could in his direction and asked what they would do. “Riding, lancing and mock combat, all of which Salincia could triumph.”
“When is the mock combat?” I asked.
“Next week,” he replied.
At the end of the first day’s events, we retired to an inn, and I slept more soundly than I had in the past month. I waved off the first knockings at my door that came from the fanatic supporters of Salincia. Dawn had not yet broken and was not likely to do so anytime soon. “You won’t get a good seat if you don’t come with us now,” one of them said.
“That’s fine with me,” I replied. As interested as I was in the tournament, I hadn’t lost my sanity.
The second knocking seemed like it was right after the first, though it was in fact hours later. “Go away,” I muttered, but the raps only increased in volume.
Throwing back my blanket, I rose and unlatched the door. Jerrick Trade stood there with his lips parted and eyes open like a madman. I took it that he was drunk, even in this morning hour.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“Didn’t take much, just some talking to folks.”
Yawning, I said, “Well, good to see you again. Come back later when I’m awake.”
He took my arm. “No time to talk. Myd’s gone!”
I started to notice his heavy breathing and the perspiration on his forehead. “What do you mean?”
“They took her, I think. They’ve been following us for a while now. I thought we’d be safe here. After she was asleep, I went away an hour or about, but I wouldn’t have never left if I knew they’d come!”
“Slow down. Who took your daughter?”
“She’s not mine,” he said. “Just a girl I found on my travels here lately. I knew she’s in trouble, just didn’t know it was this bad.”
I wiped my eyes. “So you picked up a girl that’s maybe seven or eight years old and just took her along? Her parents probably thought you were a kidnapper. Did someone come for her to take her back home?”
“You don’t understand. She’s got no parents. I don’t even think she’s human, and it wasn’t people as came for her. It was darivs.” I blinked a few times, my mind reeling to take in all of this information.
“Darivs? Are you sure?” Commoners would have little knowledge of darivs aside from the stories parents tell to their children. Some of the tales caused such a dread in me as a child that I would lay at the foot of my parents’ bed, unwilling to return to my own cot in the loft of our home. I knew from past research that the darivs had existed at one point in time, but with only the faintest of reports on them in the past hundred years, I agreed with the general consensus that their race had vanished.
“She warned me about them, and I seen them myself. You’ve got to get those knights to help me get her back.”
Moments later, we were rushing towards the stadium. Between my pleas and Jerrick’s tumultuous shouting, we were allowed to pass through a gate into the knight’s preparation area on the eastern end of the stadium, behind the bleachers.
We found Borodin and Chahan standing together, wearing confused expressions as we jogged towards them. Jerrick started to explain, but I hushed him, knowing that I could relay the message more succinctly. “Get the squires and knights,” Borodin said to Chahan once he heard from me.
“My lord, should we not also get the pages?”
Borodin shook his head. “If we were riding into a battle against men, I would take them, but darivs will not respect their position. No, the pages are not yet ready for an encounter such as this.”
We should have tried to get more knights to go with us, and maybe Borodin did, but at midday, there were only thirty-five of us riding out of Donevsk: the seventeen knights, their squires, and me. After all, leaving the tournament to help one abducted girl, a commoner at that, seemed a bit preposterous. Perhaps that’s why Borodin told the men that their mission in life was not competition; it was to serve and protect the citizens of Salincia.
I reflected back to my last words to the captain after he briefed his men. “Take me with you. I can’t properly chronicle Sir Chahan or the darivs without being there myself.” My scholarly curiosity had overcome fear, but that was within the security of the city, and with Donevsk’s protection stripped from me, my scholarly curiosity was shrinking fast.
Borodin led the way, following I know not what. I hoped that we would turn another direction when I saw the edge of that great forest known as Arsdale, recalling its reputation as a haven for thousands of darivs in the past. My hopes availed to nothing at the moment the captain’s horse darted into the tree line, and we all followed.
When I glimpsed Chahan’s face, it looked angry. I saw the same fierceness on Borodin and a few of the older knights. Even Sir Thomas had lost his smile. The younger knights had blank expressions, and the squires appeared as squeamish as me.
The darivs fell on us at once, a ghastly brood of beings resembling deformed boys. Most of them had only torn rags to cover themselves, but some wore scale mail and pointed helms. Their voices were silent, but their knives smote with crashes upon the heroes of Salincia. I wished I had been trained with more than a modicum of self-defense and frowned at the simple dagger in my clutch.
Fighting from the mounts of horses became futile as the darivs would simply climb atop a steed in twos or threes, overwhelming the rider. So we all got on our own legs. That made it easier to pull together and defend our ground, but after seeing two of our knights felled, I wasn’t confident that this new formation would add much time to our lives.
“Chahan,” Borodin called out. “I see her up ahead to the left. There’s a small group guarding her. Do you think you can get to her?”
I squinted to see. Myd was there, and she looked alive from what I could tell. “Scholar, come with me,” Chahan barked. I’m not sure why he chose me, but it could have been because his squire was missing, and I was the only person not directly engaged in battle. We looped back around a long way, leaving Borodin and the others to fend off the seemingly limitless waves of darivs. Chahan cut through one or two strays and then slew the five surrounding Myd.
I knelt beside the girl while Chahan stood at the ready. “Get her back to the others,” he said. “I’ll cover your escape.” The sight of him trudging forward into a horde of foes will never leave my mind.
Turning to Myd, I found her mouth gagged and a blindfold concealing her eyes. I stood her on her feet and then noticed that her wrists and ankles were bound. “I’ll have to carry you,” I said, and then I threw her over my shoulder.
She shouted through the gag the whole time I ran back to our men, and it was a wonder that no dariv took notice and killed us both. As soon as I set her down, I whipped the blindfold away and started working on the gag. “I know you want to be able to see and talk, and since you may not have much longer to do either, think carefully on how you want to use these abilities.”
“I already know,” she said, and her voice was much deeper. I jumped back a step when her eyes became completely white. Uttering two words that I could not quite hear, her remaining bonds burned away.
The air felt like a storm was coming, but I knew the only building tempest was in the young girl, and I was more afraid of that power than of the darivs. Her words were unlike that of a child, boldly spoken with a resonance as though shouted into a canyon. I threw myself to the ground and clasped my hands over my ears, certain that my doom was in those words if I heard them all.
Some of the darivs burned as her bonds did. Others became airborne in a peculiar way, like giants were flinging them about. This would have turned back the most determined of men, but the darivs continued to press against our group, within feet of the nearest man.
There was some boundary Myd created between us and them, something imperceptible to me, but the darivs could not go past it despite their screeching, clawing and leaping. “We have to go now,” she said with authority. “I don’t know how much longer I can hold them back.”
“What about the others?” Sir Thomas asked, pointing south to where some of the knights and squires had gone during the battle.
“They’re all dead.” Her response was so flat.
“What about Sir Chahan?” I asked, but I knew the answer before she even shook her head.
“You must believe me,” she said. “I don’t know how I know. I just do. If we don’t leave now, we won’t escape.”
Borodin shouted, “Mount your horses!”
“What about their bodies?” someone asked.
“They are lost,” he said. “May Onarre curse any dariv who dares to defile them.”
I don’t remember much of the ride back to Donevsk, only that I kept looking over my shoulder to see if the darivs were overtaking us. I was relieved when the trees of Arsdale were a mile behind us, but I have never felt completely secure to this day.
Before we entered the city, we came upon a man dressed in assorted browns, his cloak being the most notable garment. Leaning upon a staff in the middle of the road, he cried out repeatedly to us, so we surrounded him with our horses. “What business do you have?” Borodin asked.
“I need to speak with her,” he answered, pointing to Myd as she peeked around the side of the captain.
The knights drew their swords at once, and I took it that they believed he was in league with the darivs. Myd, however, climbed down from Borodin’s horse and stepped to within touching distance of the man. “I’ve seen you before,” she said to him. “I’ve had dreams with you in them.”
“I am Roquios,” he said with a nod, “and I hope that you are Mydrianna.”
“I am,” she replied.
“I’ve had dreams as well,” he said. “You are to come with me to be my apprentice.”
The captain dismounted and approached the two of them, and though he had sheathed his sword, his hand never left its hilt. “You can’t just take her away,” he said.
Roquios removed his hood to reveal the face of an older man with a black beard streaked with silver. “I thank you for her rescue. I can tell by your faces that your efforts were costly. Take solace in the fact that Mydrianna’s skills and knowledge will grow in an honorable manner under my tutelage. Such would not have been her fate had the darivs delivered her to whomever they now serve.”
Myd turned to Borodin. “I’m supposed to go with him. I know this is right.” He nodded, and I think I did, too. After our short farewells, we gathered what was left of our original company and left the tournament that night, foregoing the competition out of respect for the dead.
It took me little time to write a report on Sir Chahan, since I had learned his history directly from him and witnessed his last days personally. Those who wish to label him as lesser in intelligence or wit, I might pardon, but those who would label him as lesser in determination or courage, I would box in the ear. I am no poet or minstrel, but before I submit my report for the annals, I will search for someone with enough talent to write a ballad worthy of his name.
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Copyright 2010, Matthew Wuertz. All rights reserved. Matthew Wuertz is a software developer by day and fiction writer by night. His stories have appeared in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, The Sword Review, MindFlights and Aoife's Kiss. Matthew resides in Indianapolis, Indiana with his wife, daughter, son and three amusing cats. To learn more about Matthew, please visit his website: www.matthewwuertz.com.
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