Eathel the Bastard: Chapter 2

Le combat des bois; or, a Duel Arboreal

He followed her calls through amber halls
in the forest that ice never touches.
His hearing hanging on each foot fall,
as her bare feet fell in the rushes.

---

“I never”

Clang.

“counted,”

Clang.

“not even among my”

Clang. Pant.

“remotest hopes,”

Clang. clangclang.

“that I would die”

Pant. Shuffle back. Guard up.

“by the sword of a foe”

Lunge. Clang. Parry. Back.

“as illustrious as”

Clang.

“the bastard boy duke,” said the man who would, within the hour, kill Eathel. At least so saith Serixiphina, the woman who lived in his head.

—
Clang. Swing. Dodge.
Clang back.	
Both shuffle away.
	//
	Be careful, said Sera, this one is going to kill you. I mean it.
	I appreciate the vote of confidence, said Eathel.
—

Despite his short life, Eathel had been in many battles. Sera had been with him for all of them. This was only the second time she’d sounded genuinely worried.

Eathel was indeed a bastard, but the ‘duke’ part of the insult was his father, the Duke of Tera; it would never be Eathel; especially now that his father’s second wife had just a few years past given birth to a son, the real son, the heir apparent to the mightiest region in this corner of the known world.

Men tacked on ‘duke’ precisely to ridicule him for the title he might have had, the vast Duchy he might have led, but never would. He was no real son, nor would he ever be.

The slight stung all the more because it was a title the whole of the Teran people had, not so long ago, expected would likely pass to Eathel himself.

Despite having been born of sin and moral lapse, of a common woman, no less, he was the eldest male child of the Duke by blood. Until his younger half-brother was born.

Early in life his father had Eathel sworn in as the sole heir to the Duchy of Tera, provided there were no legitimate children in the future. All the vassals had knelt before him, child though he was, and swore to be Eathel’s man for life. For a while, they acted as if they meant it. That was, at least until his father remarried. Which no one had expected his ornery father to do.

Clang. Swing. Dodge. Clang back. Both shuffle away.

There, in a little holy clearing, deep in the woods, Eathel and his foe circled one another, en guard. The swords that had been making the racketous grima were held up before them, so close their ends occasionally touched in a few nervous taps.

“My god. You look so much like your father,” said the man.

So this attacking stranger not only recognized him, Eathel realized, but apparently knew his father’s appearance well enough to see the strong resemblance between the powerful Duke of Tera and his off-born boy that everyone invariably remarked on.

A rapid clanging of sword on sword. The woods about them muffled the sharp report of whooshing, swinging metal, instantly arrested to an abrupt stop by an equally deadly swing of a countering scythe, to a sound like the breaths the two men panted out.

Sword fighting was the noise of sharp screams on metal or whispers from the singing swings of the blade—nothing in between.

They had enough space to be loud here, encircled as they were with the rune-carved rocks of the old sacred site.

—
They stood tall, silent sentinels	
to their duel, holding back the		
forest a bit.						
	They reminded Eathel of the passel
of retainers each offended party
brings to a duel of honor between
gentlemen.
	//
	Neither of these two are gentlemen, Sera said.
	You’re right, he said.
	As usual, she smirked.
		His attention went back to the man
	who had, again, conceded that it was
	he, not Eathel, who would perish in 
	this contest.
—

“I am glad I will be killed by someone of consequence,” said the leering man.

“You are so certain of defeat,” said Eathel. “I have not beaten you yet.”

Their blades clanged again, binding for a moment as both men panted in brief respite.

“Oh, but you will,” said Eathel’s foil.

The man feinted a lunge. Eathel rattled off his opponent’s sword. The man shuffled back into a resting guard, his sword up and at attention in front of him.

“I have heard tales of your exploits abroad,” Eathel’s opposite said.

Clang. Shuffle. Clang.

“And of your facility,” he continued

Clang. Tapping, testing Eathel’s left again.

“With the blade,” said the man, lunging, but overreaching, stumbling a bit.

Eathel parried, though, it was really more of a tap on the blade and a dodge out of the way of the man’s stumble.

Let him talk, said Serixiphina. You’re on an investigation; this is your chief lead. He clearly wants to talk.

He nodded at her, though Sera had no face or head to nod at. There was nothing really at all to see to her, save maybe a wisp of shadow at broad daylight and the slim white, glowing sliver of a mouth. A bright crescent where a woman’s mouth would be if a real one stood by him. And these signs of her presence were faint even to Eathel; no one else had ever seemed to notice her phantom grin.

“They say you are guided by angels,”
the man said, smiling. They were
both stepping around one another in
a circle.
	“Well, then that makes it sound 
like I have a lot of help,” 
said Eathel. “it does not much 
recommend my skill if heaven 
itself must intercede.”
	//
	Can you hear anything in his accent,
	Eathel asked Sera.
		I was listening for the same thing, 
	she said. Could be anywhere in Tera 
	or beyond.
		He talks like someone who hasn’t 
	stayed in one place very long, said 
	Eathel.

The man shook his head. “where I am from, our god is angry. It is a warrior god. When its acolytes displease it, it makes war on them.”

“Doesn’t strike me as a fair fight,”
said Eathel.
	//
	Don’t you dare point out the pun of 
	strike on fight, said Sera. I will not  
	expire listening to the final words
	 of a humorless egghead.
		Then make sure you’re not talking 
	when you die, he quipped.

Quitting while he was ahead in the area of wit, Eathel asked his opponent, “And where is this place?”

“A place where we take seriously our god’s calls for violence,” said the man. They were still shuffling in little steps around the same, roving invisible point at their center. They slowly moved closer until their blades were in danger of tapping.

“I’ve been to a place like that,” said Eathel. “Though I found, before long, that the calls we heard for violence came not from any god, but from”

The man lunged to Eathel’s left in a waist-high sweep; Eathel parried a bit too fancily, holding his sword a bit too far up his shoulders.

“I sincerely doubt you have ever been where I am from,” said the man, spitting after his failed sally.

“Who are you? Where are you from?” asked Eathel. “Why did you do what you did?”

“I can’t answer three questions at once. But,” said the man; while he spoke, his eyes flicked to take in the terrain.

Eathel took this opportunity to dive in with a lunge calculated to catch him by surprise.

The man was a bit rattled in his response, but he recovered and, on instinct, batted away Eathel’s thrusting stab with surprising strength given the angle of the man’s sword.

Eathel’s attacker’s hands fought a bit separately from him; Eathel quickly got the powerful impression this experienced soldier he faced had the memories of innumerable battles engrained in his sinew and muscle.

Such was the fighter’s composure that he finished the sentence after the few panting pauses he needed to address Eathel’s foray:

“what is it exactly I did?” asked the man.

“Ravaged an innocent people. Murdered children. Burned their houses and their food,” said Eathel.

“Oh yes, there’s that,” said the man. He lunged then, instantly forward. Eathel parried. “If my god judges their deaths in accord with divine law, my god will grant me serenity and thrill in endless cycle, forever and always, well past the end of time.”

“But if your religion’s followers are anything like you, divining divine law in every case of violence, your god sounds interminably battling paperwork instead.”

Blades tapped. Both shuffled; neither made any move of consequence.

“Is that perhaps not why your god never becomes personally involved in earthly strife?” asked Eathel.

The man laughed. “What a fight that would be, for our god is strong,” he said. “But it does not itself strap on its war regalia”

“to contend with mere mortals.
	No, for those nations that have 
displeased it, god sends its men 
angels to spread evil feeling among 
the offending nation’s neighbors.
	But to brave warriors like you, it 
sends its women angels who rally 
about the warriors who”
	//
	He’s edging closer, said Sera.
		I see it, said Eathel.
		This yarn is intended to distract 
	you from some kind of attack, she 
	said.
		I know, he said.
		Well, Sera said, I have a vested
	interest in your heart continuing
	to beat; you ought not be surprised
	I take an interest in your physical
	wellbeing.
		And his left muscles are tensing,
	said Sera. It’s now.

A smooth, elegant, deadly move and the man was suddenly on Eathel’s outside right with his attacker’s sword somehow transposed to the man’s outside hand. If Eathel hadn’t been looking for the move and ready for it, the man would have had nothing in his path to Eathel’s armpit and up.

But instead, Eathel swung back and out to the right, staying aside the man’s thrust. His sword was too long to get a good thrust of his own into the man, but he could punch the crossbar of his sword into the man’s face. This, Eathel did, with the degree of strength and ferocity he only ever seemed to be able to harness when he was about to die.

The blow landed with a hollow crackle like crumpling parchment, followed by a thick, wet slap right where Eathel wanted it to. The crossbar of his sword passed relatively smoothly through the space just under his attacker’s cheekbone.

It went through the thin bones of his face until the man was wailing in agony, pawing at the hole where until just now his upper jaw had been. He hacked and coughed on molars and shards of jawbone.

Damn it, Sera said. You didn’t hit that part at the back of their brains that snuffs them out like a candle.

Eathel felt elation and power. His hate, borne of fear, for this man flash froze into a cool and insidious hate for this man, this one borne of anger.

Kill him? How dare he try to take his life from him?

Now Eathel would do to him what he and his outlaw band had done to a string of cities across lands he was sworn to protect: kill them like livestock.

Faced with the panic of death, the man somehow hefted his sword and charged—lunged, rather—at Eathel, who parried well enough that, combined with the disorganized fury of the man’s attack, the combatants wound up punching at one another in close proximity.

There was no metal sounding off the trees. Just desperate grunts and heaving groans.

Then the attacker slammed his forehead into Eathel’s nose with a soft crunch and, for Eathel, a lightning bolt of pain that was all there was in the world for a moment. Blood in his eyes. His face felt like had strapped a mask of molten iron onto it.

Eathel spat blood and spit on the man and tore him to the ground.

They went down in an embrace, tumbling down the side of a ridge that lay right outside of the sacred ring of stones they had been fighting in.

For a moment there were just the yells and shuffling of the underbrush. Then one of the two screamed in terror.

---

They fell.

The back of Eathel’s neck slammed into a tree trunk. He went dizzy for a moment.

It was the man who screamed so sharply. In a sudden jostle, his leg slammed into a rock. There was a snap, maybe of the leg, maybe of a branch.

They tumbled all akimbo in one another and thudded hard into a little gulley at the base of the hill.

Shaking his pounding head, his heartbeat drumming at a dangerous pace, Eathel saw they were twisted among each other in a mess of roots from a giant tree.

The man had a bone breaking through the pale skin of his calf, but had already started shuffling his body, moving toward something, squirming his body against Eathel’s.

The dagger Sera had reminded him to bring was half sticking out of its sheath on Eathel’s belt

The man pulled it out and stabbed Eathel in the leg.

The dagger was stuck in his leg—in his thigh, a deep cut. Eathel felt a cold twinge where the metal was. He was rocked by a distinct kind of anguish he felt when wounded while danger was near. There was pain coming from his leg, sharp, ugly pain, but it was distant, he was able to put the roar behind him and distract himself with the matter of killing this asshole once and for all.

They tossed on the ground

A chance move and Eathel had an opening

He grabbed the knife out of the side of his leg.

He did not look at the gush of blood that came out of his leg as the blade came out.

He did not think about the pain that pushed tears from his eyes.

This man’s end was his world entire.

There.

Eathel stabbed it desperately into the man's neck. The left side of the throat opened in an obscene waterfall of blood.

As the red cascaded just a few inches below, the man’s face was now a mixture of pain and resignation. Was there a glint of satisfaction?

Eathel kept pushing the knife into his opponent’s neck as much as he could. As the man's grip weakened, it slid in more easily.

The dying man was able to sputter out, “see? I am vanquished. I said be,” Glug. “fore. You would,” cough, “kill,” cough, “me.”

Eathel stopped before he sawed his way through the man’s vocal cords.

“Your fa” Cough. Goan. “would not,” the man inhaled for the last time in his life in a rattle.

“allow iehg,” he sighed out. His last words just turned into a groan.

Eathel waited to hear if he would say more but the dead man had lost the ability to speak

The life left his manic eyes a few moments thereafter. The blood in his face was gone.

Eathel lay on the ground, wincing, blinking out a few threads of tears as the pain throbbed back and forth like the clapper in a bell, back and forth, striking hard the bell’s waist. After a few moments of receding pain, he crawled over to rest against a tree. He let out a few groans of pain.

They look deader sooner when you get them in the neck, said Sera. So much blood, she said. She spoke like she was watching an amusing play for children.

Eathel caught his breath, staggering; he inhaled deeply and put his fingers to his mouth and tried to whistle. Instead, he spat some blood and coughed. He now felt some deep aches in his stomach. After a few tries, he finally was able to whistle loudly enough that the high, shrill sound cut out through the air and bounced off the mountains of the little valley. He didn’t know how far he’d tumbled down the side of the ridge. He hoped Echobella wasn’t too far away to hear it.

Blood was freely flowing from his leg.

Eathel rolled the man over and looked more closely at him. He had on a thick jacket, but it had an inner lining that was soft and thin enough to make a passable bandage.

While he shredded out strips of cloth, he looked the man over. He found nothing that gave him any idea who he or any of the rest of the men Eathel had been following were. The man was an average size; he didn't look like he was from any place in particular.

As Eathel cut the jacket around his upper arm, Eathel did see a tattoo on his shoulder, but on the side facing forward, so it was only visible head on. Where some legions in the levies put their marks. And indeed there was the number eight where the number of the battalion would go.

But the insignia was a splotchy kind of ‘v’ shape. These types of things were usually a symbol or a depiction of an animal. A weapon, tree, something like that. It looked more a mistake by they who tapped in the ink.

Five maybe? He remembered the eight, though. The curves of the ink in the ‘8’ were as perfect as if they had been printed there. This man was in some sort of legionary levy and in the 8th regiment. Was it a country?

That doesn’t look like anyone’s lands I know of, said Sera.

Me neither, said he.

After he had cut the front of the man’s coat to tattered pieces, his leg was going numb and the bleeding seemed squelched. The bandage-tourniquet he’d ended up making appeared to be working.

He could probably get the dead man’s mail though. Even a poor coat of mail cost what a working farmer made in two years.

He tried standing and fell when he put weight on the injured leg and felt a profound shout of pain.

So much for the treasure of the armor.

Do you think someone tried to cut out that regimental ink? asked Eathel.

People do that? asked Sera.

Deserters do, he said.

That would make sense.

Eathel rested a moment.

Let’s see if that sobbing back there makes it into the ballad, said Sera, her voice laden with melismatic irony.

What happened to the worry in your voice when you told me he was going to beat me and kill me? Eathel asked.

You were right; I was overreacting, she said.

I can’t believe it, said Eathel.

I can overreact, said Sera. I rarely do. But it’s possible.

No, I meant your admission of guilt, said Eathel.

What? asked Sera.

You said ‘you were right,’ said Eathel.

Oh, she said, rolling her eyes. I didn’t even notice I was saying it because acknowledging your rectitude is no great labor for me; I seldom do it because it seldom turns out to be the case.

You have no problem saying ‘I’m right’? asked Eathel.

Not at all, dear heart, she said.

No, wait, I mean that I, Eathel, vis-a-vis myself, am right. Not that you have any reservations claiming yourself correct.

Is this really what you want to be talking about right now? Do you not need to be getting out of here?

It’s in Bella’s hands now, or her hooves, as it were. I’m not going to try to stand any more on this leg if I can help it. Bella will be an hour or two away in negotiating a way down that ravine. What the hell else are we supposed to do?

Talk about what happened, said Sera.

What happened, he said, flatly.

He was in a strange mood, somehow less inclined to a strategic exercise in thinking.

Perhaps it was his having just before slammed a ceremonial knife into a stranger’s neck and watched the man die, moaning on top of him, an inch from his face, in the climax to an intimate, ghastly tantrum of violence during which he’d nearly died himself.

Or, on the other hand, it might very well be that it was the hour following all that he had spent cutting bandages off of his assailant’s dead body.

Yes, she said. What we know. What we think. We have not yet made an inventory of what transpired these three days past.

Very well. Proceed, he said.

Yes, thank you for the permission, she said icily. So, when that herald arrived,

Proceed, he said and paused. After I appreciate for a moment how right I was.

I can’t believe you, said Sera. We were not even talking about anything. I was talking about you crying like a baby. But yes. So right.

Excellent. Now, proceed, he said.

She started again, daring him to start a-japing among them anew. Valuing his sanity, he demurred.

Four days previously, they had been inspecting the works at the south-central garrison. What happened started there three days ago. At first it was nothing but murmurs around the fort.

No, you need to think back to what happened, Sera said. We need to go through it, step by step.

	//
	We’re inspecting the outer
	works of defense in the
	south central. A herald
	arrives. There’s been
	an attack. We chase
	them across the
	Crestel Reondir
	to Dandarken.
		All the while they’re
	shedding cadres of horsemen
	like men leaping off a sinking
	ship; our forces decrease,
	because we have our own cadres
	follow theirs.
		By the time we get to the
	Dandarken,

In the uneven turf, beneath a tree,
covered with roots and low brush,
Eathel soon slowly panted into a
dreamless sleep as she spoke.

Eathel dreamed that he was the real Duke of Tera. This Duke Eathel found out he was about to be assassinated.

While most of the plotters were captured and hanged, the ringleader was a nobleman. A nobleman cannot hang. What’s more, this man was Arandint. The traitor’s family traced itself all the way back to the great founding of Tera. Where is 64 loyal companions banded together to found the Duchy of Tera.

Unfortunately, only one of those founders became the Duke of it.

Though this noble soldier’s blood was laced with gold instead of iron, his august station and family did not protect him from blatant, open treason. And in this case of treason, it would spare them malefactor only the indignity of the news, not the reality of his demise.

But once his doom was certain, this particular nobleman's honor compelled him to render unto the first Duke of Tera an official surrender.

An advisor asked Eathel’s ancestor how he wanted to be served.

A gentlemen could tend me a surrender and I might take it.

From a traitor I shall take his life.

Declining an offer of surrender meant a battle would happen the following day, whether the traitor and his followers wanted it to or not.

Asked how the guard tasked with killing the traitor on the morn of the battle ought bring him in.

Messy, Raw and Alive, said the Duke.

---

Echobella the Blue Horse walked over to him and proceeded to nuzzle his face until he was awake.

He got up at on a limp and kissed her warm nose. He went to get the water from the saddlebag. He was so thirsty. He didn't realize quite how much he had been until he started gulping down the water. Her reins were all a tangled, and one of her stirrups hung so that it dragged on the ground. She looked like she had had to fight her way out of the tree that he had lightly flung her rains over. It must not have been easy getting down here. God bless this horse.

Even though only a third or so if his water had been left, it was enough to take the thick throb in his head from the dehydration away. Traumatized and on a quiet edge, but he still felt better. Clearer.

He looked out among the trees. Earlier they had just blended into the strained and painful background. He had been miserable waiting on Echo. He kissed her over and over and hugged her neck.

Everything hurt. Everything ached. Everything was tired. But he forced himself up into the saddle, ciphered south with his hand and made that way at a hopping trot.

His head drooped down to his chest, and after the first few startle times he woke up, his body had gotten so used to sitting on Echo, he eventually fell once again into a longer and dreamless sleep.