NOVEL NEXT 111. The Crossing
As night fell he laid on his belly and watched scores of the expedition's campfires burn up the dark disc of creation. When all of the light had gone out of the sky he rolled over and crept around to the opposite side of the fen careful not to slosh his feet in the standing water. He sat on the bank among stiff grasses that came to his shoulders and he drew his longsword from the leather sheath he had made and he tested its edges with his thumb. He fished the malachite out of his satchel and whetted it along the blade and he pressed his free palm against the ricasso to mute the shriek of the metal. He imagined he could hear the stone's whispering in his hand. He imagined he could hear its approval.
He resheathed the blade and stowed the malachite and he upheld his hands against the bright flaring of the campfires and he studied what movement he could see in the black night around them. The fen smelled like the yeomen's barn and there was hardly a sound to be heard other than his breathing and a light wind in the reeds and the high whine of a billion midges hatched out of the thawed permafrost. He had dogged the expedition's southward progress for days now and as the tundra had warmed and thawed he eyed their castoffs until he was satisfied one among their number must be the baron.
Now he climbed out of the fen and moved across the plain. He kept to the grasses where the ground was firmer yet his feet still squelched three inches into the rapidly decomposing soil. At fifty yards he halted and crouched in the grass and let the fires burn low. He looked east where a strip of stars did burn above the jagged mountains and below the bank of smoke released by the razed capital. He looked there for some familiar star or constellation and finding it he knew he had only an hour before the first of the moons would rise. He looked ahead to the camp. He would be gone by then.
The kingsman on watch wandered twenty yards out of the camp and stopped and looked down. As he untied his trousers Orc came out of the night and with a swipe of the handax severed his windpipe and jugular and he grabbed him under the arm and held him upright. The man bled and his throat gurgled as his diaphragm drew air in and out of it but he could make no other sound. Holding him up Orc walked backwards until he was beyond the light of the watchfire. There he laid down the body and he stripped off the coat and the hat and he put them on. The hat was cold and clammy from the sweat of the man and the coat had blood down the front of it, but the blood of men is the same color as red firelight and was invisible to the second watchman who sat on his helmet and studied a hand of cards fanned out before him.
"It's your play jackass," were the man's last words.
He didn't bother with the second body. He put up his handax and he drew the longsword and took up a firebrand and moved into the camp. Men slept on the ground and covered their heads at the approach of the torchlight and men slept in canvas walled tents with their flaps drawn closed against the night and some snored and some coughed and somewhere he could hear somefolk fucking. He cared not for these. He raised the torch high and looked for some evidence of the one he hunted. They lay all around him in their hundreds, helter skelter lumps of living quivering flesh, secure in their victory, satisfied in their riches.
"Put that out," grumbled one.
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He walked on. He passed trophies of war held in common beside their paychest and he passed their granary and helped himself to a sackful of flour and he passed a picket of horses that ambled toward his coming and shuffled away at their scenting of him. Over a six inch anvil a smith hammered out a dented pauldron and at the far edge of the spread two sentries tended their watchfire. He looked at the eastern sky. He knew of only one way to find the man he hunted. He walked to the powdercart and he set his torch among its barrels and he walked fifty yards over to a dark place between two tents where he knelt down and covered his ears with his hands and shut his eyes.
The blastwave knocked him flat and shivered the tents on their stakes. Men screamed in their deafness and all looked at the rising fireball and some grabbed up their arms and backed away and some grabbed up their blankets and ran toward the places where the flames fell out of the sky like meteors and there was a man sitting up in his blanket with a flaming shard of wood speared through his chest and there was a woman sprinting after the spooked off horses and there was nothing left of the powdercart but a burning crater. Orc watched the kingsmen dashing to and fro and he studied each of them, which ones acted and which ones waited to be told to act and which ones were doing the telling. On the far side of the bedlam emerged a man from a square tent and as Orc watched this man grabbed the arm of a passing woman and he pointed one way and then another and then he slapped her on the back and she ran the opposite way she had been going.
Orc rose and walked forward. Bedraggled men ran past him with buckets in their hands and a squire of some sort saw him in the flaring of the afterblasts and the boy's eyes widened like tea saucers but Orc was already past. The man he stalked had his swordhand up against the light and the heat and he seemed to peer at the burning with one squinting eye and it was that eye that locked with Orc's. The hand swept downward as Orc sprinted at him and it rose again with a pistol. Orc hurled the handax and the pistol flashed and he felt the ball go through his thigh and heard it strike the ground behind him in a spurt of black blood. The handle of the ax struck the pistol and these tumbled off into the night. Kingsmen turned their heads at the report and they saw a strangely dressed sentry coming at their commander with an old fashioned longsword and before they could muster any defense Orc swung down with the blade. It rang off of the baron's twohanded saber that had once been the brigadier's and as Orc passed he saw the manstone resting against the baron's breastbone. He swung once more at the man and again his stroke was swatted away.
"To me," called the baron. He raised the stolen sword at Orc. "Take him."
Orc continued on and out the way he'd come, longsword drawn, leaping over the dead sentry, leg throbbing with every lopsided halfstep and ducking the whitehot slugs that snapped overhead tracing serely into the night. He reached the edge of the firelight and took the rifle off of the body he had left there and he went on. Looking back he saw the torches gathering and some now held high as if on horseback. He labored on through the fen and up over a gentle rise and down into another flooded depression. Behind him he could hear the clamor of the kingsmen as they rallied and sallied forth to find him. He watched the horizon east and the torches west as they clustered and dispersed and clustered again. They became fewer and fewer and as the first sliver of the moon rose up the plain awash in its coming light he skidded down into the floor of another fen where water had collected to the height of his ankles and he laid there a moment and then he cupped the water to his lips. It was cold and alkaline to taste. With his fingers he felt the entry and exit holes in his leg. The hot blood still coming out of them. He fumbled for the malachite and pressed it against each, turning its rough edges against the ruptured flesh, enduring the pain until he could tolerate no more and he thrust his face underwater and screamed into the muck.