Mordraud, Book One Read online

  His hand shook uncontrollably in the meantime. He couldn’t feel his fingers. The tendons in his wrist were crossed by a shudder that made his teeth rattle in his mouth. His whole left arm was entirely out of control.

  “Hiding like a rat, isn’t that right?! Beneath the wood like a rat, crawling in the earth like a worm! OUT WITH YOU!”

  A lump of wood fell near him. The enemy had reached the walls, and was using all his might to seize the castle. Another log and an avalanche of dry branches. A pine-cone landed on the boy’s head. Mordraud was curled up at the foot of a precarious pile of wood.

  “Screw you, you damn swines!”

  The enemy subsided in his attack. Unexpectedly, he beat a retreat. The Stranger’s footsteps dragged on the gravel outside the shack, and Mordraud could start breathing again.

  ‘I won... You didn’t get me, you bastard...’

  His hand was still clutching the sword hilt. His fingers wouldn’t release it. The juddering had spread to his whole body. Mordraud felt panic whip through his bowels. The fear he’d smothered to escape his foe had returned to claim its rightful sacrifice.

  Suddenly, he no longer knew where he was. He couldn’t make out the walls, the dirty ground, the distance between him and the stack of logs. Space had become abstract. The shapes on the edge of his vision bent inwards as when looking through the bottom of a glass bottle.

  “Mum?”

  Nobody replied to his distraught whisper. He wasn’t even sure he had a mother. That might not be his house. He couldn’t recognise it. He was alone in a foreign land, surrounded by fleeting presences and indiscernible forms. Inexplicable aromas tortured his nostrils. The light had veered to a crimson red tainted with yellow.

  “Mum?!”

  Mordraud managed to slither out from under the heap of wood, and followed the faint shadow of sundown to make it beyond the threshold of the half-closed door to slip into the courtyard. Not a sound – a sign that the enemy had now returned to his camp. But where was he, he asked himself in bewilderment. His head was spinning. However hard he might try, he couldn’t focus ahead without feeling a violent retching rack his stomach. Like when he was subjected to The Stranger’s deformed stump. Before panic could get the edge on him, Mordraud ran flat out into the forest, stumbling on every root and bumping into every branch.

  Night fell in a hurry, marked by a pale crescent moon. He ran until he felt his legs give way, paying no heed to his exertion. He knew that if he stopped, his disorientation would return with even greater force. But while he moved he had no time to think. The hours marched by, and when exhaustion finally crushed him to the forest floor, the tremor had dissipated. Mordraud fell asleep huddled up on a pile of dry leaves.

  Dawn embraced him pitilessly.

  Without realising, Mordraud had nearly reached the village: he was a few feet from the last row of trees in the wood. But it wasn’t the light that woke him.

  It was a sharp kick in the back, accompanied by muffled sniggers.

  “Look here, it’s the witch’s child!”

  “We wanted to go hunting hares... But we’ve had better luck!”

  Another two kicks. A punch in the stomach. Nothing, compared to The Stranger’s. It was the boys from the village. The same he’d charged, head down. Including the one whose teeth he’d knocked out. The leg taking revenge on his kidneys belonged to that boy.

  “I’m gonna make you pay for these!” chomped the stockiest lad, pointing to his gappy mouth. “Come on, hold him down for me!”

  A tangle of arms pinned him to the damp earth. A long butcher’s knife appeared in the toothless boy’s hands.

  “What shall it be? An eye?”

  The knife tip hovered a few inches from Mordraud’s face. “An ear?”

  Mordraud felt the shaking return, so overpowering he nearly bit off his own tongue in his mouth. The judder rippled through his tendons and crumpled them. His fingers became numb stones.

  The lads’ faces were all the same. The trees above his head merged into a single green mass. Colour, he thought deliriously. Colour everywhere.

  The red and yellow of the sky. The black earth. The unattainable green of salvation.

  “I’ve decided!” the boy with the knife yelled triumphantly.

  “HIS TEETH!”

  Mordraud arched his back and yanked a leg from their grip. A blow to the chest propelled the toothless boy to the ground, along with the large rusty knife. Mordraud’s reaction took everyone by surprise. He elbowed himself free and got back on his feet.

  “You damn rat!”

  Their voices were all the same. Their eyes too. The Stranger had multiplied and had come back to finish off his assault of the night before. They couldn’t know, but Mordraud was good at enduring a beating. Miserably good. Day in day out he had to deal with an old mercenary whose hands were as hard as iron.

  Their punches were like caresses by comparison.

  Mordraud grabbed a broken branch and battered the first head within range without hesitation. The trembling mellowed in intensity. The boys stepped back, then all charged together.

  The shaking in his arm ceased entirely when he saw the first of them drop with a pulpy face.

  Mordraud leapt backwards to avoid the blades of the knives and billhooks that had flashed from their belts. He felt calm and at ease, as never before. His stick flew, striking at random. When his left arm came to a standstill, five older and much bigger boys lay on the ground groaning. Some were not moving. Their eyes were swollen and blood ran from long gashes on their cheeks.

  Mordraud looked at his left hand. He’d just discovered a way to stop that blasted shake.

  To smother fear.

  To find peace.

  ***

  That evening, Mordraud didn’t follow the usual steps in the ritual. He just looked in through Gwern’s window to check everything was in order, and went in the house. The padlock he’d stolen was smashed. The Stranger must have found a hammer. Luckily, he’d been knocked out by the drink before he’d got as far as going in, Mordraud saw with relief.

  But he’d soon be back. Mordraud knew he would. He placed a pan of soup over the fire, and went out to the woodshed to get a crowbar. He returned to the house and stood before his mother’s door. He forced the lock by wrenching the loop from the frame, and went in, closing the door behind him.

  Nobody would prevent him from carrying on in his habits. His mother would eat her soup. Just as she had in their previous life, before The Stranger had found them.

  He sat beside Eglade, lifted her head and slowly began spoon-feeding her. She was fearfully thin. Her hair had turned grey. Her once smooth flawless skin was like soggy paper. It disintegrated between his fingers.

  “There’s something I have to do tonight, mum...” whispered Mordraud. Eglade was staring at him, but her eyes saw nothing. She didn’t recognise him. She’d forgotten even him.

  “Something I should have done a long time ago.”

  “Ealon... Sial’nar... “

  “What was that, mum?” he asked her, moving closer to pick up her murmur.

  “Endless... Night... Endless... Night...”

  Mordraud heard Varno enter the house with uncertain footfalls. He bashed into the walls, hammering them with his one hand. He was drunk, as usual. When he saw the door had been tampered with, and that Mordraud was carefully feeding his mother, he began shrieking. He plummeted into the room and seized the boy by the neck.

  “I told you, you rat! You’re to obey me!”

  Mordraud was used to being punched, but that evening Varno had with him the club he used to help him walk. It struck Mordraud in the face, on his side and on his back, relentlessly. The bowl of soup spilt on the mouldy covers. An ear was done for. He felt blood trickle down his neck. The stick splintered in two on his forehead with a repulsive crack. His shaking left arm had turned him into a trembling mass.

  “Sial’nar! Sial’nar!” coughed Eglade, eyes wide.

  “Curse the day I brou
ght you into this world! You and that repulsive reject of your brother, along with that whore, your mother!” Varno yelled, purple-faced and drooling like a dog. “She deceived me! Foul demons of the forest! Aelian children, that’s what you are! SHE THOUGHT I WOULDN’T FIND OUT...”

  Mordraud’s hand moved on its own.

  “...THAT DAMN WHORE!”

  His sleeve revealed the rusty knife belonging to the village boys. He stabbed it into the heart of Varno’s chest, thrusting it down to the base of the worm-eaten wooden handle. His father tried to shout out, but his voice died in a liquid wail. Mordraud pulled the blade out and plunged it in again. The shaking in his arm suddenly ceased. He went on piercing the flesh in silence, looking straight in the man’s eyes. Eglade ushered out an inhuman cry. He didn’t relent. He thrust the large knife into The Stranger’s neck, his stump, his arm, and dozens of times into his belly. Until he’d gutted him. Even when Varno was on the floor and no longer breathing. He disembowelled him until he reached the spinal cord.

  He only stopped when he saw Gwern staring at him, ashen-faced, his hands clutching his chest. His face taut in a frozen mask. Mordraud was soaked in blood from head to foot. The bed was splashed with red spurts. Eglade was whimpering, hunched up in a ball, and went on mumbling some Aelian words he couldn’t fully grasp. Ealon Sial’nar.

  Endless Night.

  “Help me,” was all he said, to his brother.

  Gwern moved automatically. Without uttering a sound.

  Together they took her out of that massacre and settled her in their room. Gwern and their mother stayed in the bed, hugging each other, while Mordraud dragged The Stranger’s mutilated body out of the house, across the yard and into the heart of the wood. There he threw it into a deep pit gaping among some roots.

  And spat on top.

  He covered the corpse with damp earth and dead leaves.

  He didn’t look back. And he said nothing.

  That wasn’t his father.

  Varno had never come home from the battle where Cambria had slain him.

  ***

  Eglade failed to wake up again after that night. Gwern and Mordraud stayed with her, in the desperate wait for her to open her eyes, at least one more time. But it did not happen. She died two months later. With no jolting, no pain. She simply stopped breathing. Her face tensed into one last demented smile.

  Gwern hadn’t uttered a word up until that day. His mind had stayed nailed to that night, when he’d seen Mordraud standing over his father’s body, knife in hand. He couldn’t stop seeing the scene in his dreams. But that smile finally coaxed him to cry. As if a burden had slipped away. Or he’d sunk even deeper within himself.

  A tiny lead ball that had lodged somewhere in Gwern, in the shadows.

  His brother could only hope that memory would mercifully fade, sooner or later.

  They decided to bury her at the foot of the tallest tree in the wood, in the innocent hope that this was the way the Aelians honoured their dead. They said no prayers. They knew none.

  Once alone, they gathered their few belongings that could still be useful and made ready to leave. Mordraud set fire to the house, starting from the room The Stranger had died in. The floor was stained with his black blood. Mordraud also tossed his father’s old blunt sword into the flames.

  “Where do we go now, brother?” murmured Gwern, as he felt one of his seizures coming on. They’d worsened worryingly since his father had almost finished him off with his kicks and blows.

  The year was 1630. Eldain, the nobleman helming the Alliance of fiefdoms against the Empire of Cambria, was beyond middle age but was still powerful and determined to win the war. The fighting had been raging for decades now, and at just a few weeks’ walk from their village.

  “We’ll go to Eld. I’ve got to find work. For both of us,” replied Mordraud, as he stared enraptured by the flames rising from their old house. The roof creaked and collapsed, puffing out a vague cloud of searing sparks. “Someone there might know how to cure your illness. But first I need to find a way to put a bit of money by.”

  He’d do almost anything to get away from there. But he had to choose where to take them. Mordraud would rather give himself up to die than head for Cambria. He didn’t want to see Dunwich. He had other plans for him, but it was still early.

  Eld was the only place he could hope to find work quickly. And, when the time did come, he already knew what he should look for.

  An employer who was always in need of manpower. One who paid well, for good workers. And whose sole aim was to destroy the city where his brother was hiding, the capital that had taken his father from him.

  The war.

  VI

  Dunwich tasted his discovery of Cambria as if living in a slow hazy dream. The first bends in the path leading him away from his home had already revealed that something different surrounded him. A particular softness of the light. The wind carrying scents that had never reached the clearing where his parents had chosen to settle. The first night outdoors was unforgettable: the skies were vaster and studded with more stars than he’d realised. The small camp fire condensed the air into a quivering bubble. Seneo, the man who’d convinced his father to let him go to Cambria, talked to him at length. But Dunwich could merely recall a few snippets of that strange detachment from reality. Images, impulses. Seneo’s way of speaking was minutely descriptive. As if he were always scrutinising a painting.

  During the weeks riding with the chanter, Dunwich had the opportunity to conjure up his own Cambria – an ideal city he forged from Seneo’s slow and weighty words. He pictured the safety of its streets, the cleanliness offered by its villages, the large number of soldiers patrolling in the forests and countryside. He imagined their dialects and the musical lilt of their expressions. He pretended he had reached the city, so great was his excitement to get there. He was left speechless by the size and majesty of its grey stone walls. His eyes wandered among the slim towering steeples piercing the clouds. He felt tiny and powerless before the great brass city gate as tall as ten men. Once past the first line of outer defence, the low white houses bordered orderly streets drawn with geometric precision, arranged in segments and districts enclosing all the world’s known trades. Moving inwards, the buildings grew in luxury and the first gardens began to pop up, edged by iron fencing, with large trees and well-tended hedges cropped into the most surprising shapes.

  Walking on, the visitor could see the houses suddenly disappeared. The road came to a park, and pushed ahead towards the heart of the city, skirting clear pools and waterfalls designed by a landscaper who had given creativity full rein, fashioning nature into scenes of unequalled elegance. Further ahead, the park ended, and a windowless tower – unsettling but of perfect beauty – peeked out among the treetops. A gold-plated gate was presented on both sides, as tall as the walls circling the city centre. They were rhythmed by another two turrets, identical to the first. These were the time-honoured seat to the chanters, the fulcrum of their studies and their research. Brilliant minds from all over the continent had lived and studied here.

  The golden gateway was awe-inspiring. It shone in Seneo’s descriptions with the might of a divine work. Rich in swirls and pointed tips, it could seem useless for defence, compared with the huge stone walls embracing the city, but nobody had ever ventured to knock it down. It was the oldest surviving construction in the people’s memory. Nobody knew who had erected it, or how the gold had been given that surreal effect of plasticity. A single arch sealed off by railings contrasted with its whorls, opening up the route towards the core of the capital. This was flanked by sumptuous mansions, and then reached the Emperor’s colossal residence, which was taller and more robust that all the other creations. Its balconies provided views of the mountains that, far in the east, sandwiched the Camhann River – a vigorous branch of the Hann – in a procession of bends, gorges and slopes blanketed in chestnut groves.

  Dunwich guided his imagination beyond the words of the man who
would become his chanting master. He watched the city inhabitants from above as they crowded the streets and the markets. The scene was varied and bustling. Many foreigners travelled for days and days just to buy and sell the most prized wares in Cambria’s markets. The aristocracy moved around in carriages, slowly making their way through the hordes, often escorted by armed horsemen, while people quickly moved aside and the shouts of street-sellers and passers-by muted the air.

  This shapeless and colourful swarm curbed its din only when the troops heading for the front marched by. Seneo’s voice was a pained murmur. In the early years, when they still believed everything would be resolved in a brief season of bloodshed, the streets were literally invaded by sizeable bodies of well-trained cavalry protected by hefty armour. But the war had been dragging on for too long, and most of the troops were now young recruits from the countryside, attracted only by vain promises of wealth and career. More out of respect for their sad lot than fear, the crowds fell silent at their passing, bowing their heads, as some quietly recited a prayer. Eldain’s rebels were their mortal and tireless foe. They fought concealed by the lands they knew down to the smallest crag, making the most of the seasons and the rivers’ highest levels to constantly mutate the shape of the front. They knew how to convert allies in outlying villages to their cause. It was no longer a war of conquest, just a slow and harrowing slaughter.

  The spectacle was quite different when the legendary Imperial Lances passed by. Their black armour inlaid with gold and their rich cloaks flowing in the wind were a fearful yet magnificent display, worthy of their fame. There were few of them, compared to the regular troops. They were nonetheless considered the most terrifying and unstoppable battalion on the whole continent. Chanting expert and warrior merged into an awe-inspiring soldier. Emperor Loralon’s armed right hand.