Lowborn - Paul Adams

Prologue

The City of Choros,

Ten Thousand and Seventy Seventh Moon

He buried his face in the thick pile of pelts; his hands clamped to his ears as cries filtered from the bed chamber’s curtains. The wailing was unmistakable: the howling of a life ripped from the world.

A long and brutal silence fell. As he lifted his head, he saw servants scurrying by, carrying water jugs in quick succession, the glimpse of blooded cloth removed. It had been only five summers since his beloved Thia lay there. Now, his new wife and queen. It was too much for any man to bear. Ice ran through him, too stiffened with fear to go to her side.

More cries came, different from the first, high and pure and full of new beginning. He had counted more than one a moment ago, though now he heard only the rain splattering in the courtyard. On such a night, there should be thunder somewhere.

Soon, the curtain moved, and an old woman emerged. She had been with his queen since her waters began. She bowed to him abruptly, but as he tried to meet her gaze, she looked away.

“So, all was for nought?” he said soberly. Stifling a moan, he raised his dampened eyes to the roof. Daylight broke through the palace’s high windows. Dawn already: the bringer of the end and the beginning. He swallowed back the catch in his throat; the mantle of kingship allowed quiet grief, nothing more.

“Not all,” the woman said without smiling. “The child was so perfect that the queen would not leave this life without it. But a second one lives.”

A second infant carried with the first - little wonder his beloved had not survived. He closed his eyes, wishing he had been by her side. One living child was the only possible solace - one heir, at least. As long as.. “A boy?” he asked.

The birth woman confirmed it with a nod.

“Thank the gods,” he said. “Will you bring me the child?”

“They are preparing him, your Grace.”

He stood, fidgeting with the hems of his robe, as the woman slipped back through the curtains. In a few moments, she emerged with an armful of precious cloth and placed the wriggling bundle on the chair.

A long-absent smile crossed the man’s lips. “Let me see him,” he said, rushing there. He opened the pale folds of linen, a perfect small arm hidden beneath. Twenty hands of that size would fit into his own.

“Be careful now, your Grace,” warned the woman. “The child is weak. His journey into this world was full of struggle. Do not trouble him long.”

He knelt. The pain of his queen’s passing eased only for as long as he gazed at the child: this thing the gods had gifted, so precious and flawless. In hopeful expectation, he adjusted the swaddling to expose the infant’s arms, then lifted one tiny limb before the other to examine them. The mark was small, but there was no mistaking it.

After a moment of quiet, he replaced the covers, hoping the birth woman understood nothing of the importance of his scrutiny. His shoulders shook as he absorbed what he’d seen, his shudder turning to a laugh, growing so loud it prompted the child to cry.

“Weak?” he said without turning his gaze from the infant. “You think this boy weak?” he said louder. “Hear his strong voice - to suffer the hardships and triumphs in this life, though he will come to understand them only by degrees.”

The child’s lusty cries filled the chamber. The man stifled his laughter to comfort it. “My son,” he whispered. How long Tartessos has waited for you!”

***

Chapter One

Cold Bronze and Moonstone

A cry rang out, sharp and cruel; it slit the forest’s silence like a blade. Eithir stiffened, his heart pounding, his mare skittering beneath him, a step or two sideways for each one forward. He steadied her with tightened reins, scanning the trees. The tremble in his breath vied with the whisper of the wind.

Shadows danced across the track: branches caught in meagre sunlight. No one stood near - the rest of his travelling party were long out of sight, too far out of earshot. Gripping the amulet at his neck, he muttered a prayer. Soon, night would fall, and the place would be the domain of darker things.

Belynn, his bullhound, was somewhere close, hunting something; the reason for pausing here. He whistled for her. At first, there was no sign of her, then broad ferns swayed and parted, and the hound barrelled towards him, her muscled shoulders silvered by moisture, her jowls glistening crimson. The twist in his gut lessened as she ambled to his side, a welcome companion in a place like this.

“Come, girl.” He clicked his tongue and pressed his heels into the mare’s flanks, eager to leave.

Before they had moved three paces, the same sound came again.

Louder this time. Closer.

A snap of broken undergrowth drew his eyes to a figure. Huge in stature, furs covered its shoulders, and its face, if it had one, was buried deep in a hood. Held at its feet lay a bundle of cloth and, in its other hand, a rope.

The bundle tried to raise itself. The figure checked it with a sharp tug. Eithir saw tattered brown garments, half-covered in scrub, a single pale limb protruding. Gape-mouthed, silent, gripped by the collar and kept still by a ligature wrapped once around its neck.

The figure looked at him. Every instinct told Eithir to flee, yet now he’d seen a wretched face at the figure’s feet, he could not. With his senses heightened, he slid out of his saddle, his tread on the leaf-littered ground louder than he wished.

“Who is it?” he dared to call. His words came thin and high.

The figure did not answer. Eithir's clammy hand found his dagger’s hilt. Drawing it gave him scant comfort.

Loosening its grip on the rope, the figure opened its cape and drew a sword. It let the bundle drop and strode forward, blade down to its side like no effort was needed for the kill.

Eithir tried to move, but his legs were leaden. A dagger against a thing such as this? A stout branch lay close, barely adequate. He bent to reach it and waved it in front of him like a child’s toy, awkward and ludicrous. He held his breath, watched for the sword hand’s first twitch, and imagined the blade’s first blow - the splintering of his toy branch. Then what?

The figure stopped - the shift of its attention hardly discernible.

Belynn appeared from the undergrowth, a deep growl in her throat. As game a beast as Eithir had ever owned. Head low, she fixed her quarry in her sight. She’d taken a man down more than once - though whether this was a man before them, Eithir could not grasp.

Sword raised, the figure turned from the hound to Eithir. Back.

A bark split the air as Belynn lunged, saliva spraying, her jaws snapping at its arm. A warning, close enough to matter.

The figure did not flinch. Sword-point lowered to her level, it turned as she tracked, shifting left and right.

She sprung again, teeth and flesh a hair’s breadth apart. Her quarry recoiled a pace back, sword towards the hound’s head, moving as she moved, always between them.

“Go now, or she’ll take you.” Eithir forced out the words.

Belynn hung her head low, growling like thunder. The figure froze, reckoning the odds, and then coolly stepped back from whatever it had held to the ground. Still holding high its sword, it backed away another step, then turned and melted into the trees.

The hound’s haunches twitched, ready for the chase. “Easy,” Eithir snapped his fingers. “Stay with me, girl.”

She moved to his side, calming in an instant, and he dropped the branch to the floor, aware now of the cool wind on his forehead and the tremor in his breath. As he rubbed her head, she drooled spittle over his hand like a pup.

Approaching the bundle, Eithir made out an old man, white-haired and bearded, bloody-faced and bruised - but moving. A thin crimson line encircled his neck, but one of his bloodied hands had stopped the ligature from slicing deeper into his flesh.

“It has gone,” Eithir said, “Can you stand?”

The old man nodded. Helped to his feet, he checked around him wide-eyed, chest heaving, struggling to speak. “Gods,” he said. “I would be dead if.....”

“What are you doing here?” asked Eithir.

“I was travelling to Nivae with several others,” began the old man. “We stopped to rest a little way back. I fell asleep, and,” he shook his head, “when I woke, my companions had gone.” He glanced back in the direction the figure had taken. “It was upon me in an instant. Strong.... to have dragged me from the track.”

Eithir fetched his water skin and gave it to the old man. “It may yet return, and if it does, it will serve both of us well to be gone. I am travelling to Nivae, too. You’ll go with me and the hound from now on.”

“I will gladly, my friend. And I hope the gods reward you for your kindness.” The old man tried to smile. “I am named Daron.” He gulped at the water, spilling much down his front, before returning the skin half empty.

Eithir told him his name and looked up at the darkening sky. “We must hurry to get to the city before nightfall.” He took the man’s arm as they walked to the mare.

“You are brave to be here with just the dog to protect you,” Daron said.

Eithir glanced ahead. “Not brave at all. There were nine of us.” He helped the man to mount.

“A safe enough number. What happened?”

He motioned to Belynn, who was sniffing now at something in the shrub. “She found something to chase, and the others did not wait for us, as I would not in their place. Truly, who would linger here if they had a choice?”

“I would not have come this way at all.” the old man said, settling himself. “But for a landslip on the road by the coast. A host of trees were down, they said.”

“A landslip? Then you must have travelled from Chamalyr.”

“I did at that,” Daron nodded. “I’m on my way to be a tutor of a nobleman’s children. At least, that was my intention. Now I have no horse, no belongings.” The old man smiled at him ruefully. “What will my new employer think of me?”

“I’ll help you get to your employer; we can worry about what he thinks of all this when we are safe in the city.”

Daron nodded. “Thank you again. I am in your debt.”

Eithir pulled the amulet over his head, gripping it tightly, hoping for the spirit Esui’s continued protection for the remainder of their journey. He gave the mare’s reins a gentle tug and, checking Belynn was at his side, led the horse with Daron upon it towards the forest’s edge, following the track the others had taken. If they hurried, he might yet see his home and family that night, though there was little hope of reaching the rest of his party before the great city was in sight.

In time, the track widened, and the soft earth turned to laid stones, firm and reassuring underfoot. They saw nothing more of the figure, but every strange sound made the hairs on the back of Eithir’s neck rise.

Only now, as the trees thinned to a clearing and the last of the day’s sun barely breached them, did he pause to look at the amulet. Its bronze serpent entwined upon itself, set in moonstone the palest of blues. So hard had he gripped it, that a circle of red indentations ringed his palm.

Darkness descended as they crossed from the mainland, approaching Nivae by the only land route: a narrow trackway atop a peninsula that stretched far into the silver-flecked waters of the bay. In Tarshish tongue, the city’s name meant stronghold or refuge; a fitting name, Eithir thought, for a city surrounded by the sea.

A gust of wind whipped hard across the track, bringing drenching spray and the reek of seaweed. He longed for a fire to warm himself and some goat to fill his belly.

“Not far now,” he muttered, urging the mare on. Daron mumbled something back, half asleep.

Little by little, the city emerged from a greying dusk, its silhouette a jumbled mass of roofs and towers, needle pricked with torchlights here and there. The outline of its walls grew distinct, spanning a handful of squat stone towers strung across the land spur, a pair of sentinel’s braziers that marked its gates the only scars of light along its length.

As they approached the city gates, the trackway became more crowded, choked with mule carts, ox wagons, and travellers on foot. There were so many people and vehicles that progress slowed to a halt. In all Eithir’s memory, there’d never been such a crowd trying to reach the city before darkness fell.

In front of them stood a woman with a threadbare shawl over her shoulders and her arms wrapped around a bale of rich cloth likely destined for Nivae’s markets.

“The line is long,” Eithir said, warming his hands in his breath.

She raised an eyebrow. “A curfew. Some bastards from the east causing trouble, I heard.”

He nodded knowingly. At every settlement since Chamalyr, until the bridge that crossed to the Isle, the talk had been of Bannuchus and his border raids, though this was the first he’d heard of trouble this far west. “Are there curfews every night?” he asked.

“Since three moons ago. The horn blows for them as soon as it’s dusk.”

The night was upon them, and the long line of people had barely moved. Eithir glanced up to Daron, now draped in the

wolf skin he’d given him, his shoulders trembling and his face ashen. The figure’s attempt to kill him may yet succeed unless they find him somewhere to rest.

Eithir looked back along the line. “These people won’t all make it in.”

“Dark or not,” the woman said, “the sentinels will sound the horn when they’re ready. When there’s nothing left to get their grasping hands on.” She noticed his puzzled look. “People are fearful. They’d rather have the protection of the city walls and take their chances with the Sorrows.”

She grinned. “Look about you. Want to spend the night here?”

Everyone in Nivae knew of the Sorrows, though few spoke of the place, or stopped there for any deliberate reason. It was safer by far to urge whatever beast you rode to pass through it as quickly as you could and ignore the beggars with their hands outstretched and the waifs that lingered on the roadside.

A city on a city, it lay on each side of the gates, extending as far along the walls as Eithir could see as if a great wave from the ocean had returned the city’s rubbish and piled it against its walls. Old wooden crates stacked into makeshift dwellings, tents made of old sailcloth and limbs of trees. A ramshackle settlement made of things that were stolen and discarded.

Raw-boned dogs skirted around them, hungry and curious but keeping their distance while Belynn stayed close. Eithir turned his attention to three sentinels guarding the gates and watched as people ahead of him bargained their way in.

It seemed that there were few rules concerning entry to the city. One desperate fellow without enough ingots gave a sentinel a leather sack, and a youth entered only by bargaining away the cloak from his back. No one entered without surrendering something.

Soon, it was the woman’s turn. Eithir listened as she haggled, though she seemed to have nothing but the roll of cloth and a single ingot in her purse and wanted to part with neither. She opened the neck of her robes, pushed back her hair, loosening her dress for one young sentinel to view, promising more if he let her enter the gates. Nudging the younger one out of his way, his grizzled superior grabbed her by the arm and walked her smartly towards the side gate with a grin on his lips.

Then, one of the sentinels beckoned Eithir and Daron forward, blocking their path with his spear shaft. He looked at them expectantly.

Eithir looked back, deliberately silent.

“There is a toll to go in,” the sentinel said.

“There has been none before.”

“Orders of the Meren Council,” the sentinel said, grinning at his companion.

The Meren Council. Eithir stifled a laugh. It was likely the Meren Lords knew nothing of this little trade. He rattled the coins in his purse. Not much for a whole season’s trading - folk from the prefectures were hard-bitten and careful with their money; he had the proof of it in his pouch. He took out two bronze half-ingots.

“What’s that?” sneered the sentinel.

“It’s all I’ll pay you.”

“All, uh?” The young man puffed out his cheeks with the effort of it all. “Then you’ll be sleeping out here, my friend.” He waved them to the side. “Now, move away. Let the others pass.”