Avenge The Brother

There was a light rain.  A haze through which the valley below shimmered dully in moonlight. The falling rain only visible in small pools of silver streaks surrounding the firelights of the buildings below the keep.  A warm evening, the winds stiff at this height, the tallest vantage for miles, this circle of stones atop the ancestral tower, the oldest of the original buildings he’d inherited. 

Tired.  Long hours standing before the expanses of responsibility.  A vigil he’d failed to keep for too long; now so much might die. Moments like this, in the quiet hours when time stopped and only nature breathed… he could almost find clarity.  The forces arrayed against him, brought down upon him by his own impetuous mistakes. Brought down on everyone he loved and everyone who had trusted him. The unexpected brilliance of newfound burdens… they blinded. He had been so light! The dreary obligations of power were just words his father had said from on high, too far a distance for adolescent understanding.  But the great lord was dead, and he had not seen what his father had meant.  Decisions made with power rippled out into the world around him, impacting in places he’d never observed, coming back to him from directions he’d never explored carrying consequences he hadn‘t envisioned. 

Waves of pounding resentment.  How unprepared he’d been.  Yet where to lay that blame? Himself… or perhaps the vicissitudes of the chaos that decided all the great questions.  Had he been free to choose to learn more? To feel differently? Respond to what surrounded him differently? To be different?

The undulating waves of gentle night sounds, a lulling chorus of gusting winds, creaking branches, whispering leaves and the soft hiss of the rain was broken for a moment by the whinny of a colt, somewhere off to the east. The bright call of restless youth pulled him from this reverie, reminding him of his own future, his own road, and the challenge between him and everything that lay beyond. 

First to the shambles of his reign left in the wake of his ruinous choices. His poor attempt at strategy. A strategy based on killing a Lord in cold blood; stupidity, just hubris and the intoxication of newly found power.  Now, hated, mocked, a joke amongst those in the armies assembled against him, and that boy! Where had he come from? A drunken womanizer up to the moment his older brother died betrayed. Once a childhood playmate, now a deadly enemy. They hadn’t seen each other in almost ten years, and in those years they’d followed eerily similar paths. A simple philosophy: shirk all responsibility and reap the pleasures of the flesh as the fortunate ones. Royal nobility unshackled by the reigns of power. Now his own father dead, his adolescent arrogance and moral turpitude, his shameless disgrace that he’d thought so clever. His old playmate putting aside his women and his drink, somehow finding in himself a man of purpose and courage, clever and fierce. He’d been in awe of this surreal transformation. And where was his own inner strength? Between being shoved into every serving girl in the keep it was otherwise absent and in its place only confused and incompetent flailing as Savon’s brother made move after successful move in his pursuit of vengeance.
         
The silence around him, a silence of gentle winds and rustling leaves, a silence of a moment out of time, a moment of clarity and peace filled him. His mistakes were obvious, crude, the remnants of a spoiled life now gone but belatedly set aside. He began to feel the shame slide from him, clean air fill his lungs. And he began to see what his childhood friend had found.
         
He turned, and with deliberate steps crossed the short expanse to the winding stair that ran like a corkscrew through the central tower. The first order of business was waiting in his royal parlor. He’d known Baron Enfeld would be arriving. Until moments before, the visit had loomed over him with all the weight and force of Enfeld’s holdings, soldiers, revenues and taxes. Enfeld had come to sever ties, a mortal wound to his rule. Enfeld was older, he’d been a friend of the old lord. His father had been a different man altogether, bold, gruff, a hint of his capacity for devious calculation behind the mirth always in his eyes. His father had been a Lord, truly, he’d commanded respect, deserved it. Enfeld and he had been through many trials in the years they’d known each other, Enfeld was equally a man of action and calculations. Enfeld felt towards him, the young new lord, something such as must be felt by the clergy for the fornicator, the warrior for a crippled and useless daughter. Something beyond contempt, but veiled in the merest veneer of placation. Just the requisite amount to avoid open conflict. Enfeld would be polite, nominally respectful, and utterly disdainful besides. He had feared Enfeld, how small Enfeld could always make him feel. He did not fear Enfeld now.

Descending the steps, boots clapping with purpose upon the flagstone, his hand drifted to the torq he’d taken in his first mad battle. Not a battle at all, but an insult in the streets, a flurry of blows and the consensual decision to back away, draw blades, and test the God’s favor. In those moments, if only then and for such a short time, he’d felt something disdainful himself, disdainful of hesitation and fear. The cocky sureness of one whose will had woken and breathed deeply the freedom of imminent gratification. He would have blood, and so he did. Thinking as he approached the door to his parlor, he could feel the swelling of something similar within. A new man opened that door, a man who had waited until that clear moment upon the battlements, waited to understand the stakes, to realize the inevitability of truth, that he could let things go on until he lost everything, or that he would go forward from this lowest extremity of his ineptitude with the force of this new comprehension of consequences.  It was this man who pushed open the door to the parlor to gaze down upon the old man at his ease by the window, unprepared, defenseless. With a surge of something unfamiliar and hot within his chest, he met this old mans eyes and swung the door shut behind him.

The Baron was talking, platitudes, vacuous filler as he moved disinterestedly through the motions of propriety, building up to why he’d come. After he’d gotten this all out of his system he’d commence with just why he would need to bring home his soldiers to consolidate his hold on his own province in these tumultuous times, how he’d need his revenues to shore up his industry, maintain the loyalty of his vassals. As yet though he remained the nominally loyal subject, meandering through empty banalities and excuses, praise for the old Lord, how close they’d been, etc.
         
Now that the moment for action had come he was curiously stumped. That he would have what he wanted, Enfelds’ loyalty, troops, revenue, was a foregone conclusion, but how to claim them? Ruthlessly cut down the old man’s ego with the full brunt of his disgust? The maximum yield poised behind pursed lips on the eager leviathan of his tongue? Or with guile… Guile might be a strategy to employ in later confrontations when he couldn‘t afford to be direct, but for now a middle course. He had the near overwhelming desire for candor, for his inner self to at last speak and be heard without artifice. So it would be straight then, no malice or guile. Let his decisiveness speak in their stead.
         
The Baron was still speaking. “The small holdings are beginning to talk, they say that I am not coming back, that they can expand. You see of course how I must return to my lands and pacify them. I hold you in only the highest regard-”
         
“Baron, come, I’ve lost the taste for minced words. I’ve gorged myself upon them enough, so I will tell you what is in my mind.” He leaned forward, forearms resting on the great wooden table that was his fathers -his- desk. Before him amidst the oddities which created a perimeter along the other three sides of the desk lay an old dagger. His father’s like everything else. His appropriation of this room reflected his appropriation of his rule. He’d done nothing to make it his. As a child he’d hated this room, because while in private his father had been affable, quick to smile or gently jibe, here he was always the Lord. Unapproachable, austere or enraged as the day would have it. He had never felt comfortable in this room, even now after his father’d been gone these past months.
         
The dagger, old, unadorned yet sharp, it felt right to pick it up. It didn’t feel like he was picking up his father’s old blade. It felt like he was finding a missing piece from within, a strength. The blade was his claw, his teeth, his power to assert his will. He decided that he liked to hold it as he spoke.
         “You were a friend to my father, yes, I know, but his welp has proven a disappointment unworthy of further sacrifice.”
         “My Lord, I said no such thing-”
         “You did. Your eyes have been saying it for months and now your tongue finds ways to say it with wind-filled words. And of course, you are right. You have seen me fail. You have witnessed shameful acts I lacked the foresight to refrain from. What I did to Savon brought this on us, a quick ploy without principle, killing a man in the hopes of capturing his kingdom. You‘ve seen his brother, somehow arising from his women and his drink to lead this force against me, outsmart me, defeat me. You’ve seen a boy bested repeatedly by a man. And I know you’ve disdained my strategies. You’ve seen the dead my incompetence has left in its wake, and now you think you see before you a hopeless cause. And so you give me reasons thin as leaves for why you must withdraw your support and you expect them to cover my eyes because you think me blind. And again, I lay no fault for that on you. It lies upon me. But I will have your loyalty and your men. I will have this kingdom pacified and Savon‘s brother thwarted in his pursuit of revenge. You have seen in me only what comes from lack of purpose. Now we must see what comes from…” He dropped his eyes from the Baron’s, vaguely registering that that had been the first time he’d held this mans eyes at all. His gaze went to the blade, thumb slid perpendicular across the knife’s edge, skin registering the potency of a well honed instrument. His mind could be such an instrument. “I will require you to do as you’ve requested. In a fortnight you will withdraw from this keep with your entire retinue. You will slight me for others to hear, and you will make for your lands. But you will not arrive there.”
         “Then what will you do?”
         “What any wounded pup would do. I will plea for terms.”

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Morning’s pre-dawn haze hung about the forested hills, the rolling sea of grass a peaceful green-grey expanse, copses of silent trees indifferent to the army of men paused momentarily beneath them. This silent and intimate moment reminded him of the calm which always seemed possible but inevitably beyond his grasp. He had vague associations of such moments with what he imagined life might be like for a farmer, the soothing repetition of the same day done ad infinitum. The same little joys as he woke beside his loyal wife, watched the sun rise, experienced the pride of watching his children as they grew and sat with his ale in the same chair at night watching the stars once again. He imagined that such a man might feel that time hardly existed, would notice it only in the height of his boys, or the moving patterns of the constellations as the seasons turned.
         He’d seen enough real farmers by now to understand just how absurd such an image was. He’d seen enough of everything in the past year. Childhood illusions protected from reality by the somnambulatory effect of power, permitting a nearly endless dream state from which he’d had no need to awaken. A boy still, yet costumed for the world as a powerful man, his muscles taught, reflexes and skill with a blade honed through years of training, his bold step, clever quips. Only he knew it all had been play, taking the role of warrior and leader and man. His mind always filled by fantasy, preposterous images of the nature of courage and the delusion of freedom from consequence. Glorious visions of battles he might win, lives he could take… those days of dreaming now recalled always with a queasy mixture of romanticized nostalgia and roiling anger under which lay a shame so vast that he exorcised it each day since his brothers’ murder with a cold bath in the realities of war and suffering.  Now, as he stood shirtless in the morning mist, skin tingling in anticipation of the transformation from this nights’ silence and the motionlessness serenity of a sleeping world into the coming action of day, he breathed deep the cool air, filling himself with the dream of a calming repetitive life free of anxiety or change and exhaled that dream on a current of purpose that would meet the challenges ahead.

Men were waking, warming their morning meals at hundreds of small fires across the hillside. Leather creaked, hoarse voices spoke sporadically, still acclimating to the waking world. A stout man approached as he walked away from the quiet which had surrounded his tent and made his way through the huddled throngs of men who’d sworn service to his purpose of ending the reign of a childhood friend and murderer.
         “Fifteen days have passed.  This is the day you planned for. I can feel it through the entire camp. We’re ready.”
         “Get them armed and ordered. We’ll need the better part of the morning to reach the ravine in time.”
         “Aye, and they’ll be glad for it. We’re a restless bunch after this waiting.”

The interior of the tent was expansive and cooling. There was a large circle of stools set in the center on which sat the heads of those clans loyal to his brother and now to him, eager to capitalize on the opportunity the assassination had provided. A perfect pretext for war and the undercurrent of righteousness carried their warriors towards what they saw as ordained retribution. These men sitting in this tent however had no delusions of purpose or meaning in this aggression. He knew they rode his quest for vengeance to reap the profits of conquest. No bother to him, so long as they did as he said.

At the center of the circle stood the emissary of his brother’s murderer. Arriving just after dawn with a small armed escort this Lamred of Eorwild begged audience in order to plea for terms. The clan chiefs had initially been struck by this sudden reversal on the part of their adversary but with news of the desertion of one of the strongest supporters of the cause, the change in events was perhaps the most reasonable decision the murderer had made of yet.  His success even in accepting defeat could prove elusive given the appetites of those arrayed against him. That the Baron Enfeld’s own delegation had slipped into the camp just three nights past to offer his support and collusion in undoing the reign of his former liege had only heightened the anticipation for blood and conquest. Publicly the Baron was continuing the march back to his own keep, making plenty of noise and no secret of his disgust with the pup who’d succeeded his comrade and Lord upon the throne. However neither did he give indication that he might consider throwing his lot in with their own righteous campaign.  Only this small delegation arriving in the small hours of the night to beg audience with the new lord of this hungry assemblage who’d come together and now seemed poised to route the impetuous boy lord betrayed his true intent.

The emissary knew nothing of this as was made clear in his opening remarks.

“… I bring greetings from my liege. He has entrusted to my station the task of coming to terms to end this conflict between our two great hosts.  It is not unknown that our friend the Baron of Halsmead has grown tired of this struggle and my Lord would have me give word that He also has grown weary of this bloodshed.  He offers repentance for his actions against the late Lord of Borima. I bring as a gesture of the sincerity of my Lords’ remorse the weight of his Highness in gold coin and an offer of the lands west of the river Aduine, to be ceded to this august body. My Lord hopes this recompense will be sufficient to see an end to hostilities and requests your reply.”

The chief of the clan Carmalute was heavily invested in this campaign and his people had much to gain from a complete victory as his borders abutted the lands of the murderer though not the lands offered as recompense.  He sneered and spoke. “Your liege offers too little at too late a time.  His leadership has led to defeat upon defeat and now he would beg his way out from under the final blow. He knows his fall is coming fast and we bring with our host his judgment and true penance. I will piss on the gold you bring as the reply your liege requests.” All in the tent were silent a moment, the emissary undoubtedly hoping another chieftain would dispute the Carmalute. When the silence had extended until the threat began to loom over him the emissary took up his own case.

“My liege seeks peace but his arm is strong yet and a victory over our people would come at a cost in blood and money many of you cannot afford.  I know the Carmalutes comprise a larger portion of this force than any other tribe excepting the Borimans.  Can these other tribes afford the protracted conflict and the loss of so many of their able men? Can they spare them from the harvest? Perhaps not all the chieftains here hold to the dubious wisdom of the Carmalutes.”

Hardly paying passing attention to the words of either man, the new Lord of Borima listened more closely to the messages coming into him in shuddering waves. The memories of what had led to this point rose in response to this weak fools attempt to escape fate. His brother hiding him in the bread bin when the voice of their governess preceded her entry into the kitchens by just a moment. How he took the blame alone for having eaten the roast left prepared for the feasting to come that evening. He recalled his brothers’ useless advice on women, how embarrassingly without talent his brother had been. Out of love and respect he’d never disagreed with his brother, though he’d also never once wasted an opportunity by employing it either. His father’s death last year, how his brother had led the sortie that killed his fathers killers and reclaimed the body from the desecration that undoubtedly awaited it. His brother had spoken proudly of his father on the day of his own coronation and little of himself. His brother had been a good man, the better man between them he felt no shame to admit. His brother had known throughout his life that he would one day be lord of their people and he’d risen at every test to the challenge of meeting their fathers example of strength of character, integrity and fairness.  He himself had been glad to play the rake and allow the bother of responsibility to sit on his brothers shoulders, but at his death the quality within his brother became unbearably clear and with it, his own poor showing.  He’d vowed then not only vengeance, but to act as the man his brother would have been had he lived to rule. These were the messages he was heeding and what informed his words.

“My brother Savon should be the one sitting at the head of this circle to hear your words. However, your Lord has forced us to leave him in Borima, where he waits as well for a resolution to this conflict. But he doesn’t wait in the warm air you breath, he doesn’t wait with the good food you ate this morning. He waits beneath a mound of dirt alone and cold. Yet, thanks to the choices of your Lord he waits with infinite patience. He has no need to see a speedy end to things. He has no one to receive upon their return. So I know he won’t be displeased when we reply to your master that there will be no peace while he lives, no gold will buy his life, no tribute will spare his fate. If it costs us much to secure your masters head it will be no bother to Savon. And our friend of clan Carmalute speaks truly. You are weaker than you pretend. The Baron’s desertion is but the first proof of the fracturing of your lieges’ rule. By the time I stand before his walls he will stand upon its battlements alone, abandoned by all allies looking out upon a field of hungry, proud men come to see justice done and he will know for true that not only he, but all that he rules will belong to my brother in the hands of these loyal friends around you. So return to your master and offer him this image of his future as our reply.” Standing, he turned his back on the emissary and left the tent with only a curt command tossed over shoulder to a guard. “See his horse fed and provision him for his return then send him on his way. Keep the gold.” The tent flap fell and he disappeared into the camp.