Chapter 6 Savage Unbridled Power
Savage Unbridled Power
The world split in a burst of screaming roars.
A beast smashed through a hedgerow of driftwood and furrowed reeds, hulking, standing up to seven meters at the shoulder.
The mountain deer’s antlers spanned up to twelve feet, its dark pelt striped with ash and blood.
It charged, eyes black and glassy, hooves and dewclaws biting into the earth.
Idan’s sheep scattered, their bells jangling in panicked chords.
He, however, stepped forward, a broad shadow against the drizzle of rain and flickering light, and met the charge with a twitch to his lips.
A spear sang from his hands, in a clean arc, burying itself beneath the beast’s shoulder. Even so, the animal slammed into Idan, but his heft and will held.
Muscle and sinew clenched as he whispered an ancient Sacran prayer of sacrifice and drove the weapon home.
The practiced shove of wrist and hip that made the giant deer fold over.
It died with a roar, followed by a short, ragged exhale, as it fell with a heavy thud.
Idan stood over the carcass, chest heaving, hands blood-stained. The spear came free with a wet suck.
The shepherd-warrior cleaned its blade on grass, heaved the beast’s body into position, and dragged it up the mountain with its antlers.
He moved toward the thin smear of smoke marking his hut.
His apprentice, Lago, slept in a straw pallet by the barn’s far wall.
His face was loose and young, hair wild and mouth open in the soft, unguarded peace of sleep.
Idan threw the carcass onto the ground in front of the shack, the thud sparking the outdoor fire in front of it into a bright flare.
He set a cleaver to the beast’s flank with the steady movements of a man who’d stripped leather many times before.
He worked in silence, the only sounds the knife’s steel clang and the wind’s constant complaint through the trees.
The pelt came off in one piece, and he flayed and sliced off all the fat.
Wrapping the entrails in the skin, he strode towards the ocean beyond.
He made his way to a small beach where he threw the off-cuts to the gulls and washed the hide clean, rubbing it down with sea salt.
He returned to his hut, where he hung the beast’s pelage to dry on a wooden frame outside the barn, nailing it fast with crude iron spikes.
The hide shuddered in the wind as the skies above caught the last of the dusk light.
Then he worked on its flesh, carving it up, butchering it with skill.
He salted three legs and the remainder of the flank, wrapped them in parchment, and took them to the cool house by the stream.
Where he placed them under rocks that bled with ice from a fjord deep below the earth.
He returned to the fire to roast his dinner.
Steam and fat hissing into the flames, the scent filling the air.
When Lago woke, he first spotted the skin, draped across a frame of stilted wood, shaking in a wind that wanted to take it.
Then his eyes fell on the carcass, and his eyes dilated.
‘Caught a big’un, Khan?’
I did. You’ll take back what’s left of the leg tonight, a shoulder, and your favorite tendermeats for your family, Idan grunted into Lago’s mind.
‘Sante,’ the young man grinned in delight, whetting his lips as he stared at the roasting shank.
Idan paused his knife strokes for a moment, inclined his ear, and detected a vibration in the wind.
There’s a lost ewe on the north cliff; she’s entangled in brambles and panicking, so take a rope to guide her, then return in time to eat.
Lago nodded and pulled his cloak around him and disappeared into the gust, feet slipping on the packed turf.
Far off, a clamor rose that did not belong to the whistling zephyr or sheep.
A bellow tore across the cliffs.
Idan’s head lifted at once. His hand stilled on the cleaver.
The sound came again, closer now, roars thick with testosterone-charged fury.
Basilisk bulls in musth.
Idan sighed as he sensed the tremor of their pounding hooves through the soles of his feet.
Then came a shout; Lago’s voice broke against the rock, raw and terrified, carried upward on the draft.
Idan shot to his feet.
He cleared the hut in a single stride and sprinted toward the cliff edge, boots striking stone, racing into the descent.
Below, the terrain churned as massive shapes thundered through scrub and shale, horns to the ground, eyes burning as they made their annual musth charge.
Lago stood in their path, his face stricken as he attempted to ward them off with nothing but his shepherd’s staff.
A juvenile bull struck him on the shoulder, flinging him to the ground.
The young man fell sprawling in an ugly angle, his leg distorted at an impossible slant, blood darkening the grass beneath him.
Idan hit the slope at speed, sliding, leaping, clutching at jutting stones as he tore downward.
Hooves clashed as the bulls circled Lago, snorting steam into the cold air.
Idan reached the clamor just as the largest steer reared back, pawing the earth, nostrils flaring, head swinging down, ready to trample and destroy.
Woah!
The beast paused, then rotated, its eyes fixing on Idan.
With a loud harrumph, the tusked creature charged him.
Idan planted his feet solidly on the rocks below, met the animal’s gaze, and raised a hand.
Shuaqagec enough! Your young bull attacked first; you have no recourse to harm my farmhand again. This is not your territory to mark, so go before I flay you and dine on your bone marrow along with the giant deer I just slaughtered.
The giant basilisk skidded to a halt, hooves gouging furrows into the soil.
Its eyes widened, a flicker of confusion rippling through its rage.
You also stink, and I won’t have you lurking around downwind from my farm.
It shook its head and roared once more in irritated belligerence, the piercing bellow echoing off the cliff walls.
If you know what’s best for you and your strutting bull-mates, fokk off now.
With a toss of its head, it turned and thundered away.
The rest of its male companions followed, their retreat shaking the ground as they vanished into the ravine below.
Silence rushed in after them as Idan dropped to his knees beside Lago.
The young man was conscious, gasping, eyes glassy with shock.
His hip lay shattered beneath torn fabric, bone pressing against skin that had already begun to bruise black and purple.
His thigh was bent wrong, and blood slicked from his knee to his ankle, which seemed twisted and was swelling fast.
Lago moaned from the pain, his eyes beseeching Idan.
Sorry, my friend. To help you, I’ll have to knock you out, Idan grunted, speaking subvocally.
He pressed two fingers to Lago’s temple.
The world went mercifully dark for the boy.
Idan placed his palms over the ruined hip and quadriceps. Heat surged through his touch, restrained and focused.
A soft golden glow spread beneath his skin, pulsing once, twice.
Bones shifted with the sound of a wet, sickening crack, followed by another, as the internal structure realigned and fused.
Idan’s mouth twisted with grim satisfaction as the thigh straightened under his hands.
He moved to the fibula and shattered foot, and paused.
He sensed the blood flow to the lower leg was still hindered, and, well aware that his Ssukigrat healing skills were not at the level of a medic, his fingers hovered, and the luminosity from his palms faltered.
He tilted his head in thought as his jaw clenched.
With an exhale, he withdrew.
Tearing a strip of cloth from Lago’s cape, he bound the lower leg and ankle tight.
With a grunt, he slid one arm below the boy’s shoulders and the other under his knees.
Lago weighed little in his arms.
Idan rose and turned toward the long climb back, muscles coiling as he began to run.
His boots struck sand and stone in a steady rhythm, the cliff falling away beneath him while the wind clawed at his hair and cloak.
Night duty was well underway.
Refreshed from a day of rest, Sheba moved through the demountable ward corridors with a quiet efficiency, her footsteps a rhythmic cadence against the synthetic flooring.
Most of the doctors and nurses had long retreated to their quarters, their chatter having long faded from the mess, tent flaps zipped up, and lamps dimmed.
Only the overnight crew - she, Toma, and Rehema - remained, keeping watch over the twenty occupied beds. Their patients consisted of villagers with minor complaints.
Their bodies had already begun the remarkable work of repair, and they’d likely walk out by morning.
She wiped down a metal tray, stacked sterilized instruments, and brushed away the massive moths that drifted in from the gorge despite the mesh screens.
They were persistent, lured by the clinic’s lights. She shooed them without breaking stride.
At 2 a.m., she stepped onto the small veranda outside the ward, drawn by the purity of the sweet mountain air and the rhythmic, percussive trill of crickets vibrating in the scrub.
In her hand was a steaming mug of tea.
Before her, the Lattaya canyon plummeted into an ink-black abyss, its precipices blunted by the velvet reach of the shadows.
Beyond that chasm, the Silent Desert stretched toward the eastern horizon, a pale and motionless expanse where the dunes retained the final, radiating pulse of the day’s heat.
Further still, the ocean fractured the moonlight into a thousand silver shards, appearing as a tempered band of glittering undulation at the very rim of the world.
Without warning, the hairs on the back of her neck stood, and she sensed a shift in the air, a presence ghosting in, a wraith-like trace over her skin.
She spun around and jumped.
A man stood on the porch, tall and broad, his outline starkly silhouetted in the dark.
Long hair hung loose over his shoulders, tangled by wind and exertion. Blood streaked his limbs, vest, open chest, and hands.
Idan.
‘Fokk,’ she muttered, setting her mug down on a nearby table, her heart kicking hard against her ribs. ‘You scared me.’
He lifted a brow, expression unreadable, then tipped his chin downward.