James Silke - Prisoner of the Horned helmet

“Friendship!” Gath grunted with a harsh thick growl. “I have no friends who stand on two legs.” He moved across the glade, stopped and picked up the strip of violet cloth then looked back. “But I will still buy your wine.”

Brown John smiled lamely.

Gath studied the Grillard a moment, then marched into the forest, Sharn at his side.

Brown John started to follow, but gave up. He mumbled unpleasantly, then shouted recklessly, “Barbarian, if you think your pride and arrogance will protect you from the Kitzakks, you are sadly mistaken.” Defying the humiliation which had turned his bumptuous cheeks apple red, Brown John advanced to the edge of the clearing, propped a fist on his hip, raised the other over his head and shook it with the bravado of a commander standing at the head of forty regiments of foot and ten of horse. “Do you hear me? Your pride is not enough. You, the tribes, none of you can survive alone.”

The sounds of undergrowth being crushed by booted feet were the only response he got.

Brown John had an answer for it. He shook a scolding finger and shouted louder, “And do not think I will quit! Not for a moment. Just because I have been beaten, peed upon and rudely rejected, do not think I am unable to see past these trifling humiliations to the greater truth. I may not have your animal power, Gath of Baal, but I have a different gift. I see things coming. Yes! And I can assure you I have not failed to measure the import of the fact that today, for the first time, the Kaven, the Cytherian and the Barhacha rode together. Don’t for a minute think that I am blind to that miracle, or that I fail to recognize it for what it truly is, a portentious omen of an even greater unity to come! Perhaps even a triumphant one!”

Brown John stared at the forest shadows. Only silence answered him now. He muttered to himself, then the bravado went out of him. It shortened him by half a foot. He glanced about at the scene of slaughter, moved to the spilled silver, got down on his knees and began to pick up the coins.

A short time later, when he rejoined his waiting sons, he was leading his horse and deep in thought. When the bastards started to inquire as to what had happened, he silenced them with a lifted hand and thought some more.

After a long while he looked up, said, “You will find some bodies, six to be exact, in a clearing about fifty yards up ahead.” He pointed it out. “Bury them, so that no man or animal will find them. Ever. Bury their armor with them, and make sure you find all their parts. There are, I think, twelve or fourteen, perhaps more. I do not remember clearly.”

Bone and Dirken gave each other a sober glance, then mounted and rode off leaving their father alone.

Brown John stood silently, thinking again. As he did, he smoothed his hair with a hand and tucked it back over an ear with a thumbnail, but this failed to groom his troubled mind. The furrow of wrinkles creasing his forehead dug so deep they grew dark. His brow drooped so low that his bushy white eyebrows tickled his cheeks. Feeling their touch his scowl grew even deeper. Then the words came to him.

It was a line of dialogue from A Fig for the Ice Queen, a line he had delivered on countless occasions on countless stages. But now, as he said them aloud to no one, there was no trace of fiction in the words, no trace of the actor in his tone or in his suddenly boyish smile.

He said, “I’ve got it. I’ll get the girl.”

The Dragon Lizard sprawled lazily on a flat grey boulder in a manner that made hard rock look warm and comfortable. The boulder rested atop a stack of boulders which formed the bend in the river.

He looked contentedly at blue-green water flowing around a rocky bend some fifteen feet below. It rippled over half-submerged rocks, formed ponds at the edges of a pebbled beach until it widened into a large pool. Cascading on, the stream churned itself to white water on a scatter of small boulders and flowed on.

The lizard obviously liked the view.

His sun-drenched body lay just out of dappled shadows cast by a scrub oak. He was the length of a child’s forearm, the color of the stone except for shiny gills reflecting greens of the forest trees and the gold of the morning sun. His eyes flickered closed, then one suddenly popped back open.

The girl, carrying her sandals in one hand and a walking stick in the other, was coming fast, leaping barefoot from rock to rock as she moved along the shaded side of the river. She wore a belted tunic, her pouch slung by a strap over a shoulder. A sheathed knife dangled from the belt.

The lizard dashed down a narrow crack. A moment later it reappeared in the company of three little things a third its length. They scurried to the lip of the rock, lay down, eyes wide.

The girl waded through the water just below, then climbed onto a large rock rising about three feet out of the water. The top of the rock descended in gently rolling swells to the water’s edge. Here and there puddles the size of footbaths glistened in its smooth natural recessions. The girl, splashing through each puddle, moved to the water’s edge, set down her sandals and walking stick, and stretched luxuriously, letting the morning sun bathe her face.

It was a small, triangular face framed by a cascade of red-gold hair that parted at the center and fell sideways in natural waves to the tops of smooth tan shoulders. It had gently arched eyebrows, a small straight nose. The upper lip was as straight as a delicately sculpted knife cut, and appeared even straighter over a voluptuous lower lip the color of a budding rose. There was a hint of the same color in the tan cheeks. The delicate clarity of her features heightened the contrasting lushness of her firm flesh. Her hazel-green eyes were big and active, with brilliant whites surrounded by long dark feathery lashes.

Her name was Robin Lakehair. She was a Cytherian from the village of Weaver, a Sacred Maiden who, like all virgin Cytherian girls, worked spinning the sacred cloth for which Weaver’s temples were renowned. She was an orphan. Since her parents had died of the black death that passed through the forest when she was three, she had been raised by temple priestesses until she was fifteen when, being of adult age, she took a room by herself. She was seventeen.

Robin lifted her leather satchel and emptied its contents on the warm rock: a collection of corked vials carved from colored stones, a bone comb, a crust of bread, a tangle of colorful ribbons and her sacred wooden whorl. After carefully arranging her precious collection, she stood, unbuckled her leather belt and dropped it beside her satchel. Taking hold of the hem of her plain grey square-necked tunic, she lifted it over her head. She folded her tunic neatly, set it beside her things and again stretched, giving her nude body to the luxurious, warm embrace of the sunshine.

The great ball of fire in the sky painted her a golden nutmeg with loving strokes, as if the great orb of endless fire knew well that rarely was there a human animal created to wear only garments made of light.

Robin was no taller than a full-grown deer. Her breasts stood high on her little barrel chest, as smooth and firm and plump as river-washed pebbles. Her arms were short, her hands small, her waist tiny, and her legs long muscular arrows ending in sturdy feet. As young and vibrant as a new blade of grass, as strong as a bowstring.

She looked up and down the river, into the forest, then up at the top of the outcropping of rock topped by the scrub oak. Spotting the lizards, she smiled and made a soft clicking sound. She opened a pouch, scrambled up the rocks and sprinkled a spoonful of dried insects on a shelf of rock. As the lizards scurried down to the meal, she hopped back down to the edge of the water and watched them feed. Robin laughed with delight, then strode into the water and with a joyous shiver sank into the cold blue-green current.