Brian Ruckley: Tyrant

Brennan was as hot as he had ever been. Sweat was pouring out of him, and felt like it was boiling off his face. The skin on the nape of his neck had been burned by the sun and hurt every time his collar touched it. He had been bitten in the night by some evil kind of insect. A whole swarm, in fact, since his ankles and the backs of his knees itched and stung almost unbearably. His tongue and lips felt fat and clumsy from want of water. In short, he was suffering.

And yet he was happy. His body might be chest-deep in misery but his heart and mind revelled in every hard moment of it. He was where he wanted to be.

His two companions were not of quite the same mind.

‘My mouth feels like it’s full of sand,’ Manadar complained.

‘Probably is,’ said Lorin. The older man was usually a reassuring, encouraging presence, full of stubborn resilience. Apparently that resilience was at a low ebb.

Brennan glanced down at the bare earth beneath his horse’s hoofs. He did not think it was really sand. More like dust. Ancient, exhausted soil that had forgotten the taste of water. And, if he was honest, he rather liked its colours. Looking out towards the horizon, he could see all the subtle changes of the vast plains in hue and texture. More browns and ochres and faint reds and yellows than he had known dust could be. Somehow, he doubted the other two would be interested in that.

‘Wet your tongue,’ he said instead, holding out his goat-hide water bag to Manadar.

He could tell from the weight of it in his hand that it was more than half empty.

Manadar looked at the bag, smiled-or grimaced perhaps-and shook his head.

‘I’ve some of my own still. We wait our thirst out till dusk. That’s the rule.’

‘We drink sand until then.’ Lorin nodded approvingly.

‘It’s more like dust than sand though,’ Brennan observed as he hitched the water bag back onto his saddle.

‘Grit,’ Lorin suggested. He brushed his horse’s mane absently. The fine cloud that rose from the hairs still looked like dust to Brennan.

‘Does it matter?’ Manadar grunted. ‘It’s dry; it’s in my eyes and my nose and my mouth. It’s in my ears. I can feel it rattling around in there like salt in a pot.’

‘No, you can’t,’ Brennan said. He had known Manadar long enough-more than a year now-to recognise that the man never met a slight discomfort that fell short of agony, nor a small pleasure that fell short of ecstasy.

‘You don’t know what’s going on in my ears,’ Manadar said. ‘You want to slip your finger in there? It’ll come out dressed in sand, I promise you.’

‘Grit.’ Brennan smiled.

‘One of you boys put your young eyes to work,’ Lorin said quietly, ‘and tell me what that is out there.’

Brennan looked where Lorin was pointing. There was a shimmer and a sheen across the meeting point of earth and sky. Like water or glass. He blinked a bead or two of sweat away from his eyes. It hardly helped. The distance was still a blurred and tricky place.

But he could, just about, see what Lorin was talking about. A dark hint of a shape. ‘Whatever it is, it’s moving,’ Manadar observed.

‘It’s human,’ Brennan said. He was not certain of that beyond all doubt, but wanted to say it before anyone else did. Eyesight was almost certainly the only weapon he could best the other two with. ‘Should we hide ourselves?’

He twisted around in his saddle, surveying their surroundings. Hiding places were not exactly abundant. The three of them were sitting on big horses on a gently falling slope, with the pale earth at their backs and not a bush or rock more than knee-high anywhere to be seen.

‘They’ll have seen us by now, unless they’re blind,’ Lorin grunted. ‘Seems to me they’re coming straight at us.’

‘We wait, then?’ Manadar asked, resting his hands one atop the other on his horse’s neck. He leaned slightly to one side and spat on the ground.

Lorin frowned at him.

‘You should swallow that,’ the oldest of them said. ‘Waste of wet to spit it out.’

Manadar wrinkled his nose.

‘My mouth’s as full of sand as my ears.’

‘Grit,’ Brennan murmured.

He was not really paying attention. His narrowed eyes were locked on that distant figure; he was sure it was a figure now. A solitary human being out there on the hot, flat plateau. And just as Lorin said, that lone madman was indeed coming closer. There were birds up above. They were too far out to be sure of their kind, but it was easy enough to guess. Corpse-crows or vultures. They knew a madman when they saw one too.

‘It’s going to take them a while to get here,’ Manadar observed, reaching inside his jacket.

‘You bring that flute of yours out and I’ll ram it so far up your nose I could scratch my name into the inside of your skull,’ Lorin growled.

Manadar shrugged, unperturbed. He withdrew his hand.

Lorin glanced over his shoulder, back the way they had come.

‘Brennan,’ he said, ‘get up on top of the rise. Make sure there’s no evil creeping up behind us.’

Brennan began to turn his horse, even though it seemed a waste of time. They were the ones doing the tracking, not the other way round. They had only come over the top of that low ridge a few minutes ago, and these vast, bare plains were not the kind of place surprises could creep up all unseen and unexpected. Not during the day, anyway.

‘Never hurts to take every care,’ Lorin said, as if he knew the shape of Brennan’s thoughts. ‘I’ve lived through twenty and more years of the Free by holding fast to that notion.’

Which was better than ten times as many years that Brennan had been riding with the Free, so he was content to do as he was told.

His horse’s hoofs slipped and sank a little in the soft, loose dust. Or sand, or whatever they were calling it. The animal was tired. They all were. Two days and a night out in these searing wastes would tire anyone or anything that was not born to it. And as far as Brennan could tell, the only things born to it were biting flies, carrion birds and the little lizards he had noticed now and again scurrying around among rocks.

Cresting the ridge, he thought for a moment he felt the faintest brush of a breeze across his face. So brief and faint it might have been imaginary. It was pleasant, real or not. He looked down the line of their tracks. Nothing but stones and bare ground and a few clumps of dried grass as far as the eye could see.

He was struck by the reality of what he was doing, what he had become. It was so easy to forget when the day offered so many difficulties and discomforts to occupy the mind. But sitting astride his horse there on the high ground, with emptiness all around him, he smiled to himself.

Here he was, a child of fisherfolk, grown to be a man who rode among the Free. He had heard tales of the Free, the last and greatest of the independent warbands, from his earliest childhood. They had been figures of wonder and terror alike to him and all his friends. Their wars and victories-only victories, never defeats-were the stuff of games and dreams and shared longings. His friends were grown now, as he was. But they lived the lives of their parents, riding the boats and hauling the nets; he lived the life of stories and legends. He fought with the Free. He had friends of a very different kind now. Another kind of family in its way.

And staring at the many-hued desolation which surrounded him he could only smile again at the absurdity of how things turned out. He could so easily have been out there on the waves. Instead he was here, miles into the Empire of Orphans, the dread and constant enemy of his homeland, the Hommetic Kingdom. An Empire riddled with madness and cruelty, built upon the backs of slaves and conquered peoples. Over centuries, it had spread like a bloody stain across the land and now the Emperors in Arnothex ruled over much of the continent.