Communis

This is the second story about Saraya - read the first one 'Dulce Et Decorum Pro Patri Mori' by clicking on the link on the right - otherwise you may struggle to understand this story. On second thoughts constant reader most people struggle to understand anything I've written....Enjoy!

Communis

As she rode over the rise Saraya could see the fires of the Defenders’ encampment. For nine generations they had met at this spot, at the very edge of the Western Hills in a valley that was hard to find and even more difficult to reach thanks largely to the screen of illusions and deceptive paths laid by the Masters of the Lore. Two moonrises ago a Defender, Arok, had arrived at Saray’s village. Normally Arok was full of chatter with Saraya. On that visit he simply told her where to meet and when. Then he turned his horse. As she thought he would go without another word he looked back over his shoulder.

“Saraya, you are loyal to your father’s deeds and words, now you must decide with us what do about the evil that you may have brought on all the villages.”

Since her father’s death the villagers had all but stopped talking to her. She had dared to fill a Defender’s shoes and dared to protect them from the Overlord. No one with the exception of her childhood companion Red had taken any time for conversation. She thought that her defeats of the Overlord’s knights would have brought some form of gratitude, even a word of acknowledgement, but no; instead they looked at her with continued suspicion, flicking the sign of the Evil Eye at her when they thought she wasn’t looking. As she brought Legend, her father’s horse, to a halt above the valley she wondered at why they had averted what they believed to be evil in her fighting while laying down before the Overlord’s knights.

Saraya had now fought off three attempts from the Overlord’s men. The first, when a knight, barely out of his teens had arrived. Then two weeks after that, the first serious assault. She had woven intricate spells of concealment around the village with the Higher Lore. Three knights rode towards the village, slowly, cautious. The first she had caught in the eye with an arrow and she had shuddered with the horror as the man slumped from his saddle. The remaining two dropped off their horses and approached using the animals’ flanks as protection. These were experienced warriors, not to be easily overcome as the first bravado filled youth had been.

She waited until they had reached the boundaries of the village before circling round. The first man she dispatched from behind, impaling him with a lance pushed through the gap between his helm and back armour. Hardly honourable, but it was her village she was fighting for. The other warrior looked at her warily. She had expected him to attack right away. Instead he took off his helm. Underneath his face was scarred with a livid mark stretching from his right ear down to the base of his chin. As she bent her knees ready for his assault, he had simply walked towards her. Only when within a couple of yards did he draw his sword.

“Your guiles and trickeries don’t work on me,” he spat. “You can’t creep like a witch behind me. I face you. I’ll kill you. And your lovely head will be aloft my pike. Young Gwain, the boy-knight you attacked. We found him dead. He bled to death just a league from the Overlord’s lair. Before he died he told me about the red witch. I promise you I’ll make sure you die as slowly as he did.”

Saraya tried to push the thoughts of the young man bleeding his soul onto his saddle on the long ride. She could see his face, the arrogance. Arrogance! This knight was too confident after watching his two companions die. She dropped, rolling to her left as a lance seethed through the air, nicking her shoulder. She had been the one taken on her blindside.

Turning she threw her dagger. It caught the man’s throat, but he tore it free. The scarred knight was pouncing at her prone form, his huge double-edged blade arcing towards her stomach. She pushed back on her shoulders and kicked out, catching his wrist with both feet. His momentum carried him forward and she swung her father’s black blade quickly at his legs. He fell and she was upon his back, twisting the old grizzled face sideways, hearing the all too loud snap of the man’s neck. His companion tried to reach her across the old man’s falling body, but she pushed the corpse in front of him. As the man wrestled the knight’s body away, Saraya seized an arrow from the quiver on her back and pushed it deep into the wound her dagger had caused in his neck.

Exhausted she fell back, her arms and hands bloody, and her shoulder aching from the lance wound. Sitting, she heard another knight. She couldn’t fight any more. The man, who must have been riding behind the quartet as cover, warily drew his steed away from her and she muttered a few quiet words and Sweetheart, her familiar, her crow, launched at his helm, wings spread, talons beating on the helm and frantic cawing. The man struck out at Sweetheart, but the bird dodged and swirled. She tried to lift her bow, and aim an arrow, but her arms ached. She could barely stand.

As Sweetheart backed off she spoke to the man:

“Go, go back to your Overlord and tell him, tell him this village is not his and never will be.”

He turned his horse and rode off, looking back every few moments. When he was out-of-sight she fell.

2

“What! What do you mean a woman! A woman. You weak-willed weak armed bastard, I will kill you!”

The Overlord leapt from his throne, the huge black sword raised above his head.

“My son, my son killed by a witch, you’ll die you spawn of a bitch!”

The sword arced and the knight stood still as the blade cut through his neck. His body remained standing long after his head rolled across the tables of the lackeys and administrators. They pushed back from their chairs as blood splattered their dinners and cups. When the body finally fell, the Overlord’s knights howled and beat their sword pommels on the table.

“I will skin this bitch alive. Bear witness to this oath, knights, slaves and common people, all the villages of the Western Hills will be burnt. All village women older than 10 summers will be slaughtered. When I crush this rebellion to the east I will exact such tribute as has never been seen. Scribe, issue this proclamation upon my return. Knights! I will crush the giants of the East now. No more feasts with these ignoble men; no more lackeys, no more sitting around as our swords grow blunt. We will return before the winter snows close the passes to the west. Mount, we ride forth now!”

The warriors rose as one, each donning their helm, and pushed through the lackeys, servants and slaves. One did not move aside quick enough. A mailed fist into the child’s face drove the girl to the floor, where her cries were silenced by the tramping of dozen’s of boot heels.

3

“Saraya, welcome! You are, as always a vision of strength, wisdom and beauty, please, sit with us.”

Three score men of many ages sat in a circle around a rough wooden table. The lodge they were in was cloying with burning herbs and the smoke of incense.

“Arok, I thank you.”

“Saraya!”

She turned her head to see an ancient man behind the gathering. His face was lined with agonies and ecstasies. His body withered inside a cloak and rough jerkin, arms naked, their flaccid flesh drooping where once there may have been muscles.

“No girl child, nor no woman has entered this valley, spoken in this hall or entered the circle of Defenders in memory. The scribes record no event in our history. Your father’s bravery and wisdom earns you this honour, but we may have to kill you.”

Saraya looked straight in the man’s face. His eyes were bright, a fierce green glow seeming to sparkle. To show any weakness now would be to forfeit all she fought for and dishonour her father’s memory. She stood on knees she consciously locked to stop the tremor nagging at her legs.

“I…I…I don’t know why I should die for fighting for my village. But you are the Defenders. If…if such…if such a sentence is to be passed I ask for the right to know why you…why you would kill me.”

“Well said child! Come sit! You are truly your father’s daughter. Sit child! Before you fall! There’s many a man here would have fallen before now! I am Mau’un the Eldest. No one outside this valley knows I live, your courage earns you countenance here, but, dear child you may have brought doom upon us all.”

The tension round the table eased a little, but she could see the men still staring at her, as she stumbled to a vacant chair.

“Child, the Overlord has ordered the killing of every woman in the Western Hills more than 10 summers old and the burning of every village. Only the Weather Lore has kept him locked behind the dark passes. This cannot be kept up any longer.

“Today we must decide how to stop this. We may offer your body to him as a sop, but no one in this room will allow the daughter of a Defender to be killed by our hands. It was a test girl child; a test to see what your father taught you beyond how to wield a blade.”

“But can you not fight the Overlord and his men,” she said, before realising the stupidity of the comment.

“Child, you see here all the remaining Defenders of the generation. There are but 24 of us still able to lift a sword, four left that are Masters of the Lore, and four Apprentices of the Lore. The Overlord has 100 knights, or he had before you saw off some of that number, and a slave army of 1,000 that fights for him for fear of death by their master. We could try to halt them, slow them with Lore and try to whittle away their number as one strips bark off a tree. But the branch will still live, only slightly weakened, until the tree snaps us aside. We cannot fight him.

“But tonight, we eat in your honour, come, we have much to hear!”

4


She tried to tell the tale of her father’s death and her battles as they ate, she tried to explain how she felt responsible for the men and women of the village, how she could not bear to see any enslaved, maimed or killed. Her words, she knew, were poor beside the eloquence of this assembly, but they were all she had.

Later, as the men drifted off to unseen billets, and after Mau’un offered her space to sleep in adjoining hut, she stood looking at the stars. She was trying to recall the names of the constellations her father had taught her as her mother’s funeral pyre burned; his eyes streaming with tears of lost potential, lost love and loneliness, but still trying to keep her smiling, still trying to show his love at the time of his loss.

Deep in her thoughts she failed to hear the young man approach, until he was almost beside her. Instinct took over, drawing the Black Blade she turned ready to strike.

“Mistress, Saraya, please, I want to talk and cannot fight, lay aside your sword.”

“Sire, I am truly sorry. Too much as happened lately, I am still quite…well.”

“No apology necessary. My name is Ma’irel. I am a ‘prentice of the Lore, and I simply wished to talk of the Lore you used in your fights. It is unusual to find anyone who uses it at the same time as fighting.”

“My father taught me. I do not know anything different. Please can we sit? I am still tired from the ride.”

As she eased down to soft ground she looked at this man. He was perhaps half-a-head shorter than her, his hair a tousled brown mass that spilled around a face framed by proud cheekbones. His eyes were pure blue, no whites showed. His frame was muscular, but as he eased to the ground she saw his left arm. Where the wrist should have ended in a hand there was a wrinkle of flesh that covered unsightly stumps of fingers. No thumb and fold of flesh. Was it a defect of birth? If so why had he been allowed to live by his village? She looked away hoping he had noticed her gaze.

“Don’t be embarrassed. It’s been like that since I was born. I know the ways of the Western Hills, but I am from the North. My master knew of no way to heal it, so sent me to Mau’un hoping for a cure, and for me to learn the ways of the Defenders and their Lore. Mau-un found me in the passes, looked at my arm, told me I’d never wield a sword, offered to make me an apprentice and sent tribute to my master and father, along with enough Lore to protect them. I have been here for four summers.”

He smiled at the end of this self-conscious speech. It had the rhythm of a long-rehearsed and long-tried explanation. When she smiled back at him, Ma’irel’s face lit with an inner brightness. At the moment there was no barrier between them. Saraya looked long at him. If she survived, this man would be her mate. She didn’t know why, she didn’t know why she felt this, suddenly, like a weak girl in one of the village maid’s stories, but she knew it.

5

Two days later Mau’un called the Defenders together for the final meeting of this cabal. Saraya was invited to the meeting for the first time since that welcoming night.

“Saraya, you cannot be a Defender according to tradition. But you are a Defender. We all agree. You have watched you and debated patiently. We know you deserve the title. You are welcome to this cabal. You are one of us now. We fight for each other, we are a brotherhood. Well, we will have to call ourselves something else now. Next moonrise we defy the Overlord, you have shown us the way.”

“I…I thank you. You honour me.”

“No more words child, you have much to learn, much Lore to master and many exercises in our ways of the sword. And you have to explain to the council why you have a carrion crow as a familiar, and why call it Sweetheart?”

ENDS