Chapter 5: Talk

“Who can tell me why we celebrate the Ergbeist festival every year?” asked Instructor Dofa. He was a fat, elderly veteran and South Hall's only teacher. His remaining white hair appeared to be waging a campaign of its own to retake the balding portions of his head. Great wisps of it curled out from over his ears and puffed in every direction. I can remember wondering what he must have thought when he caught his reflection in a shop window.

“It’s to commemorate a raid on Korskovyr,” said Farras, “isn’t it, sir?”

The corners of Instructor Dofa’s mouth curved toward a smile bus stopped short. He strode over the dusty floorboards of the school building.

“A raid?” he said.

We all knew he was right, but Instructor Dofa liked to correct us.

“Yes, sir,” said Farras, pushing ahead. “Colonel Wrast and his men-”

The door of the school house crashed open with a kind of gale. Auxt, the blacksmith’s wiry apprentice stuck his head in through the door. He was covered in soot. Before he could say anything, we all knew what was coming next:

“The soldiers! They’re coming!” he shouted. Then, he was gone.

Instructor Dofa did not correct Farras. He did not speak. He did not dismiss us. He blinked a few times, picked up his cloak, and walked out in a trance to see what was going on. It all happened so quickly that a few of my friends exchanged confused looks before following. When we did leave, the speed and wildness of our departure suggested that the building was on fire. Imagine how any school child might feel if they learned that the most exciting thing that has ever happened in their small town is coinciding with an early dismissal from school.

By the time we arrived, most of the villagers of South Hall had already gathered at the town's western gate to watch seven distant blobs ambling slowly along. An eighth, larger blob, was speculated to be a packhorse. After the we spoke to a few of the other onlookers and settled in to watch, it seemed an eternity. The way that my father felt and talked about the military, I almost expected them to charge into town on gigantic war horses. I think everyone did.

The first soldier through the gate was a little taller than my father. There was mud on his face and sweat all over his forehead. Most of my friends and neighbors wore coarse, sturdy fabric of brown, tan, green, or black. White clothes were only for those who could afford them and, even then, only for special occasions or for praying at the House of Civius. The soldier, however, was wearing deep blue cloth beneath a hardened leather cuirass. The second soldier, a shorter man, had on light chain mail, covered by a tabard of the same blue with the Scales of Civius in silver on the chest. Their enormous boots clumped like horse hooves as they trod over the dusty streets past the buildings of wood and mortar to the wall at the eastern end of the village. The rest of the soldiers tramped through the gate as we gawked at them. Here and there, the clearing of someone’s throat broke the silence. There were coughs. I can remember hearing all of them.

Some of the men in South Hall had swords, but from what little we could see of the scabbarded weapons at the hips of the soldiers, these were better. Or so we wanted to believe. As the awe of these men was replaced with curiosity, murmuring began. A few people said, “Hello,” or “Welcome,” but the soldiers didn't stop or speak. At most, they nodded, tiredly, and kept walking. They were unshaven. Dirty. Their breath hung in the air, and we noticed it in the same way that we ignored our own.

Their very presence struck every boy, except Caedrus, with a reverence so deep that all that any of us could talk about until the end of the week was being a soldier. Armor. Swords. The fatigued look of knowledge beyond South Hall. It nearly causes me to laugh, thinking of it now - most of those men probably weren't from much farther away. I would surprise me to learn that any of them had even seen Arkaeus. This is one of many things that I think it will be hard for you to understand. You’ve always known how huge the world is. You’ve seen more of its beauty and ugliness than most men. We had not. I tell you about these soldiers because you’d have thought nothing of them. Imagine a life where you are so awestruck that something as common as these men was the stuff of dreams. That was South Hall. That was my childhood. But, it wouldn’t be for much longer. The moment that those raggedy, backwater soldiers plodded through South Hall’s gate, the question wasn't if my friends and I would become soldiers, the question was when. Talk of the subject didn't stop because we tired of it, it stopped because by the end of that week, there were neither any soldiers left, nor boys around to talk about them.

“It is a good aspiration to be a soldier,” said my father as he scribbled down balances in his ledger that evening, “To serve one's kingdom, to help those in need - I would consider it an honor to have my boy become a soldier. Still, it's not a decision to make lightly. A soldier's life is a difficult and dangerous one.”

“I’m going to be a soldier, sir,” I said.

My father chuckled to himself, and said, “I remember those days. I did, too. You remember what I have told you about your grandfather, though. He was far too concerned with business to ever have a son off wasting his time in some other place. I wanted to go to the Irongantz.”

If a boy's dream was to be a soldier, the Irongantz was Caelum itself. A military academy in Arkana's capital, the soldiers that graduated from those lofty halls almost always qualified to be in the King's Sabers, and they were the most famous soldiers of all. The King's Sabers were selected through some mysterious process and took orders directly from the king’s best general. They solved crimes and went on dangerous secret missions. If there was a battle, a few of the King's Sabers were always there when the fighting started. Usually, they were around before there was even any trouble because they seemed to know everything.

“But they never picked me,” said my father, “You have to have something special about you. Maybe, they only take people who have the Power of Aizo.” He sighed. “Who knows? You have years to decide.”

That statement arrived on my aspirations like the sudden divergence of a river onto a lightly smoldering ember. I frowned.

“Not that many,” I said, “I think that the Irongantz starts taking recruits around my age.”

There wasn’t a lot of definite information around South Hall, and, in spite of the meandering lecture that I knew that this would invite, I resolved to ask Instructor Dofa. My father stopped work for a moment and looked at me. He smirked. It was the same smirk that he gave to workers who he had decided were trying to defraud him.

“We will just see,” he said. “It is a noble pursuit, but as I said before, a difficult and dangerous one.”

And of course, to a boy who has been raised his whole life in the countryside, the words “difficult” and “dangerous” are the same as “important” and “exciting.” Even beyond that, I felt something that I had not, perhaps, ever felt. Was my father doubting me? This was a man who repeatedly said that Civius would help his faithful followers arrive at any goal. Civius had a plan. Maybe, he really did think that Irongantz recruits had to have the Power of Aizo. It didn’t seem likely. The Irongantz was seen as good, and most people agreed that the Power of Aizo was, at best, suspicious. Regardless, my father’s words burned in my ears.

“We will just see.”

We will, I thought. We will.

Any good Arkanian would surely have encouraged his or her son to be a soldier. Soldiers were respected and revered. Field hands' sons could become generals. Wheelwrights could become nobility. There were tales of bakers’ sons being accepted into the King’s Sabers, and their deeds made them famous all across Arkana. Farseys, the best known hero in the country, had supposedly been the son of a night watchman. He was now the Swordpoint in the King’s Sabers. His exploits in the campaigns in Ossyphia were the very definition of legendary. Anyone would have wanted that kind of thing for his or her family. But, even then, there were no women in our army... I knew Arlyan Trias and saw, first hand, her deft leadership at the great Battle of Naviss. But as with just about anything you hear, there is far more to the story than what is commonly known.

Within a day, the soldiers built a primitive log outpost on the edge of town. In order to try to find out anything we could about being soldiers, my friends and I spent nearly all of our time there. The oldest of us was only fifteen, and I cannot imagine that we did anything but bother them with our constant questions:

What provinces have you been to? Can I help? Did you go to the Irongantz? Can I get you some water from the river? How many men have you killed? Can I help you carry that? Have you ever killed a voenus - or for that matter any of the beasts from the Carrowind? Can I help you cut that? Did you fight in the second war with Korskovyr? Can I help with anything? Do you know anyone in the King’s Sabers? They joked back and forth with each other about things that we didn't understand, but we would laugh, knowingly, trying to be more like them.

Instructor Dofa did not know anything about how a recruit for the Irongantz was chosen. When I had asked him, he opened his hands and looked at me as if he had lost something. The information had put such a damper on my thoughts that I did not even have the presence of mind to ask where I might find out. Perhaps, I thought, someone would know something in Hammercleft? I could go with my father the next time he went.

The day after the soldiers had arrived, the hunter and tracker guild of South Hall, only three men strong, put a notice on the House of Civius to suspend all hunting and trapping. They contended that the animals in the area were disappearing. There was talk around town of an animal plague or creatures encroaching from the Carrowind. The farther from it one got, the more the hunting improved. Our own animals began acting strangely as well. The only place that so much as a rabbit could be found was in the woods west of town. A few horses bucked off their riders. Cows stayed in the far western ends of their pastures. Cats and dogs moved their young to the west of town. Sarcen kept trying to fly and would yelp when he found that his downy wings weren't enough to lift his fat little body. Caedrus, distraught by this, focused any and all of his attention on the panicked puppy. The furry little ball nipped at people's feet and fought like he was on fire when anyone tried to pick him up.

Two or three days after the guild's warning, Caedrus cried out from our room and my mother and I ran upstairs calling his name. He was sitting on the floor of the room in shock. Sarcen was staring at him.

“Did he bite you?” my mother demanded, immediately.

Caedrus was in a trance. His brown eyes were fixed on the puppy. He was unmoving and returning the look. My mother looked at me and I at her.

“Caedrus, is something wrong?”

“Yes,” Caedrus said carefully, as if Sarcen might attack him. “No. I don’t know.”

His words were made even more frightening by the bizarre uncertainty of them. I didn’t know what to make of it, but it was scaring me, so I got angry.

“Caedrus, stop playing,” I demanded.

He did not respond.

“Caedrus, what’s happening? Is Sarcen all right? Did he bite you?” my mother repeated.

“No, no, he didn’t bite me,” he said. He looked to us and then back at Sarcen. “Watch this,” he said.

“Tell them what you told me,” said Caedrus.

Sarcen whimpered, whined, and stifled a yelp.

“See?” said my little brother.

“Caedrus Bolingard,” my mother snapped, “you stop playing before I find my wooden spoon downstairs. Your brother and I were worried about you!”

Caedrus looked at my mother, back at Sarcen, and began to panic. His face changed from a blank expression to one of complete terror.

“You just- You heard him! He just said it! He said- he told us that something bad is happening! We need to leave South Hall!”

My mother’s scowl went beyond her serious face to something that looked uncharacteristically frightening. Her face was one of horror. It was not a face of fear but that of unrecognition, of denial. She walked out of the room silently and returned with a wooden spoon, her implement of choice for correcting our misdeeds.

“Mom, it’s true! I, I, I don’t know what! I don’t know if Sarcen knows. He can’t say, he’s just a puppy! He doesn’t-”

“He doesn’t talk!” my mother interrupted, “He’s a candril! Now, if you don’t start making sense, you will be deeply, deeply sorry!”

“I didn’t think he could talk either, mom,” cried Caedrus, “and he’s not good at it. He just started today! I think he’s really scared! Why aren’t you listening to me!? You saw him! He said it, just now! It’s the truth!”

The last few phrases were punctuated with my mother’s purposeful footsteps as she strode across the room, lifted Caedrus up off of the ground by his hand, and swatted him on the behind with the spoon. Caedrus squealed with dismay and began crying immediately.

“It’s true! It’s true!” he howled.

Sarcen abandoned him and ran downstairs.

“It is most certainly not true!” my mother said, “And if you haven’t changed your tune by the time your father returns, I am sure that he will have something to say about it as well!”

Caedrus didn’t.

When my father returned home from having kept his workers as honest as he could, he was greeted by my mother and Caedrus, both of whom were hysterical. Enough time had passed that my mother had begun to question her own integrity on the issue and was concerned that perhaps her son was not playing. She did not let any of this on.

I could hear them speaking in hushed tones from the stairwell.

“Do you think it’s the Power of Aizo?” my mother whispered. “He’s so young!”

“I don’t even know if I believe that that is real,” my father responded. “It sounds like a bunch of excrement put together by those neckless sages at the Misarine Idz. I’ve never actually seen it in action, and I am nearly forty years-old. That should tell you something about how real it is.”

“You didn’t see him this afternoon,” my mother said.

“I don’t need to have,” rejoined my father. “He’s playing a game, and he’s gone very far into it now. If he isn’t set straight, he’ll have us in Naviss by the end of the week. It is a stupid child’s game. I will have him speaking the truth by night’s end. This is the wages for indulging his flights of fancy. Men do not play like this. No son of mine will play like this.”

I loved my father. I did. But I do not think that I can ever forgive him for his ignorance. It was this ignorance and a fear of a larger world that caused him to reject Caedrus’ claim. It was ignorance and fear that caused him to hit his son with his enormous leather belt. It was ignorance that caused him to threaten him with half of a dozen punishments. I really believe that, in the end, when he threatened to kill Sarcen, it was desperation. I wonder if he would have gone through with it. I wonder if, perhaps, had my little brother stood his ground that he would have realized how serious he was.

In the end, Caedrus recanted his stories, but he was sent to bed without dinner and bruised quite terribly. The house was quiet, which I regard as one of the greatest misfortunes of the evening because we didn’t know how little time we had remaining in that house.

When I went to bed that night, I could hear Caedrus, still awake and still crying. I laid there next to him and tried to sleep. It was no good. His protestations had been too vehement. They had been too firm. Not only that, Caedrus was given to flights of fancy, but not to blatant lying. Not to anything like this.

“Was it real?” I asked.

Caedrus didn’t say anything for a very, very long time.

“Was it real?” I repeated.

“You have to swear on Civius you won’t say anything to mom or dad,” he said, flatly.

I knew without even continuing what the next thing would be, but I couldn’t resist since I had already gone that far.

“I swear,” I said.

“Sarcen can talk to me,” he said. “And that’s not all, I can hear the chickens talking, too.”

“What? What do they say?” I asked, almost above the whisper that was keeping both of us from a beating – the path of punishment in that house led to a place that it took some time from which to return.

“They all are saying that something bad is coming,” he said.

“Why can’t I hear them?”

“I don’t know,” said Caedrus, “I have trouble understanding them. They don’t speak like you or me. They speak,” he paused and restarted. “They talk like Uncle Lyrn.” Uncle Lyrn was my mother’s brother whose only goal in life was to stay drunk for as much of it as he could. I don’t know how much Caedrus understood his behavior, but I certainly did. “All of the animals talk like that. Some of them don’t sound like they can even really speak. They’ll say just one word, or a couple of words. They aren’t good at talking.”

“Of course the chickens know something bad is coming,” I said, “They’re going to get eaten.”

“They don’t know that,” said Caedrus.

There was silence for a little while.

“But I think maybe I won’t eat them anymore,” he said. “It’s not right.”

“That’s stupid,” I said. “You’re going to go hungry. What will you eat? What if cows talk? And pigs? And, and, and what if the apples talk?”

We didn’t say anything for a little while.

Shortly after the completion of the outpost, as we went out to cut firewood for the soldiers, my friends and I made claims on who would be the first to get to swing one of the soldiers' swords. We were playing around with the spyglass which my father didn’t need that day because he was going to be out in the fields directly. He would have been angry if he had found out that I had taken it, but I had done it before and he had never noticed. Usually, I could defend myself in that kind of situation by saying that he had never said not to take it. Our friend Garren, who was a well fed boy with puffy, red cheeks, said, “My father was a soldier. He had a sword just like the ones that they have, and I already got to use it.”

We all looked at him, knowing how Garren was. If a person said something about the moon in front of him, he was the kind of child to tell you that his father had been there - owned it, in fact. And what did we know about the moon anyway? I think I know why he acted that way, now. Back then, I just found it annoying.

Garren's lies had reached legendary status because, I think, we indulged him. Most of the citizenry of South Hall knew that his father had been burned for being a follower of Terre. We had all been taught from a young age that Terre was the god of the Carrowind and wilderness and disorder. Terre was Civius' shadow, his opposite. When Terre brought the chill of winter on the wind, Civius gave us fur and fireplaces. When Terre brought his howling, wild animals, Civius gave us steel from iron and fire to defend ourselves. Terre was sickness and hunger. Civius was medicine and crops. Where Civius was our mill, ships and commerce, money, and language, Terre was mold, the mountains that belched fire in the south, currents that drowned men, and any beasts that lurked in our nightmares. Terre lived in the Carrowind. It was his kingdom. Of that, we were certain. Of course we were.

Our parents whispered about an icon of Terre having been found in Garren’s father’s house. The sculpt was of a Pithican, a man that was also an ape. Everyone said that it was a mockery of Civius, and my neighbors were horrified. Supposedly, the people of South Hall had dragged him into the street and burned him for it. Garren's mother, very pregnant with him at the time, supposedly led the charge to make an example of her husband. Rumors abounded about why this happened, his father had been part of an Abraxine cult or was sleeping with Olna, the milliner's wife. But, I don't think anyone would have even come close to asking her. Garren's father was put to death when I was an infant. At this point, there really isn’t any way of knowing what Garren’s father might have had to say, or if any of the rumors were true. What is more important is the fact that it easily could have happened. The parts of the world where rumor and superstition abound do not have to be like this, but they often are.

Garren smiled at me, almost begging me to believe that his father had had a sword and that he had swung it. I was looking at his rosy cheeks and thinking about how he had already gotten out of breath just coming to the woodpile. Then, Kabil who was holding my father’s spyglass shouted, “There’s something on the horizon!”

All eyes were drawn to the Carrowind, which was foolish because we couldn’t see anything at all.

Farras, squinting, echoed this sentiment. Kabil played with Caedrus and Sarcen nearly as much as I did. Because his father was Instructor Dofa, he wasn't to be trusted with anything resembling mischief. We were all willing to risk getting in trouble with our parents, but being South Hall's only teacher had given Kabil's father almost the Power of Aizo with regard to his son.

Kabil handed the spyglass to Farras who confirmed that something was definitely there. Farras passed the spyglass to me, and I to Garren. We all saw it. I passed the spyglass back to Farras. There was a darkish blob slightly below the horizon. That was all. But now, there were soldiers in South Hall. What would they make of it?

“Is that...” Farras trailed off, “...coming?”