Chapter Thirty-Nine Felnir #2
Hearing the sounds of the camp, suffused with song for the first time in weeks, Felnir saw the wisdom in the old man’s words.
“It is a trap, after all,” he realised. “The fruit is bait. Intended to make us tarry here until it’s all gone.
Then, once again we face endless miles with empty stomachs.
The fever will claim even more of them once they understand that.
” He shook his head in reluctant admiration for the cruel cleverness of it before fixing Wohtin with an insistent stare, asking his next question in a tone that brooked no dissembling. “How many days to the next jewel?”
He expected another bland statement of ignorance, so the precision of the old man’s response surprised him: “Twenty days at most.”
“Why so certain?”
“Because, if we march west at our current speed for twenty days, Karnic’s Spear will no longer be visible.”
Twenty days… Felnir’s gaze roamed the camp once more.
They had perhaps three days’ meat and hard tack left, and then only with strictest rationing.
“I’ll tell them to gather as much fruit as they can carry,” he said, heading towards the orchard.
“And to be ready to march on the morrow, though how many will obey the order I cannot say.”
In all, only a dozen refused to march come the dawn. They were all from Audheld’s contingent and therefore immune to the sword’s glow. Despite her pleas, they proved deaf to persuasion, and indifferent to Beyorn’s threats to hang them from the trees they seemed to love so much.
“You know you’re choosing death?” Felnir asked them. “Once you’ve eaten your way through this orchard, there will be no more succour for you.”
“Better a death among greenery than another day slogging through the Swathe,” one of them replied, a sell-sword of grizzled features and many gaps in his teeth. “Fucking place steals your soul with every step.”
Seeing that his sentiment was fully shared by his companions, Felnir bade them good fortune and ordered the menda to commence the day’s march.
Each warrior carried a sack or bundled cloak filled with fruit which sustained them well until it began to rot.
After that, and a return to the grim, meagre daily allotment of dried horse meat and hard tack, Swathe fever once again began to exact its toll.
Some desperate souls, about a score in number and not fully succumbed to despair, deserted with the stated intention of making it back to the orchard.
Felnir forbade an enraged Beyorn from cutting them down, reasoning at least they now had fewer mouths to feed.
The baleful trudge of the Sea King’s menda was made yet more miserable by a change in both weather and terrain.
A few miles west of the orchard, unremitting flatness and dry scrub gave way to hill country dappled in greenery thanks to frequent rainfall.
It ensured full water skins but made climbing the slopes a tedious, mud-afflicted exercise that slowed progress to a crawl.
As a result, the fever transformed from a persistent, deadly visitor to an outright plague.
Eight days after departing the orchard, Felnir woke to find no less than three dozen bodies littering the surrounding hillside.
Some had killed each other, most had done the deed with their own hand.
Felnir had no option but to order their corpses ransacked for any scraps of food before leaving them where they lay.
The next day, it was worse. He didn’t bother making a count, for he needed no precise number to know this menda was now bleeding to death.
He repeated the ritual with the sword again and again.
But, even though the blade’s glow reflected in a host of eyes gleaming with devotion, the fever ravaged their ranks with unabated cruelty.
By the twelfth day, Felnir estimated that perhaps half of those he had set out with still marched at his back.
Later, as they struggled to the crest of a ridge, he began to notice an increasing detachment in Tyrheld’s demeanour.
He knew enough about the fever by now to spot its influence and saw it clearly in the maiden’s faltering step and unfocused gaze.
She responded to his queries about her wellbeing with flat, distracted assurances and, when they stopped for the night, failed to eat.
Instead, she spent hours staring at the surrounding hills with a mix of bafflement and suspicion.
Though his own strength diminished by the day, Felnir insisted on tying cords around her wrists, one attached to his arm, the other to Falk’s.
He stayed awake for as long as he could, worried by the fact that Tyrheld failed to succumb to exhaustion.
Eventually, he slipped into slumber only to wake a short while later to find his bodyguard determinedly chewing her way through the cord about her wrist. After that, Felnir tied a length of thick rope around her arms and chest, spending succeeding days tugging her along like a dog on a leash.
She voiced no protest at this treatment, becoming a wan, silent figure in their midst. The only emotion Felnir noticed in her was a faint grimace of envy when they rose each morning to find a fresh crop of bodies littering the ground.
Felnir lost track of the days after they ate the last of the hard tack, surrendering himself to a degree of hunger he had never known in a lifetime rich in privation.
He forced water down Tyrheld’s throat and croaked orders at the others to drink as much as they could in order to fend off the pain that came with starvation.
They may have walked for the full twenty days estimated by Wohtin, but if so, he had no way of knowing by the time the old man reported Karnic’s Spear was now absent from the sky.
“And yet…” Felnir observed in a voice as thin as a withered reed “… I see no jewel.”
He had sunk to his knees at Wohtin’s side, having crawled to the top of a low hill that seemed a tall as a mountain.
He didn’t know how the old man still lived.
His face sagged upon his skull like a worn mask, eyes sunken in their sockets and lips cracked.
But Felnir hadn’t yet seen him fall, something he couldn’t say for any of the others who still straggled in their wake.
He wondered if it was Wohtin’s unnatural lifespan that enabled such endurance.
If so, then Felnir might well share the same blessing, if it could be called such.
For, if true, he and this ancient wretch would linger after hunger or fever had claimed the last of their companions.
“A jewel… can take many forms,” Wohtin croaked in response, and Felnir saw a new focus to his gaze. Following it, he saw only another hill to climb, then blinked when he made out a solitary figure standing upon the crest.
“Is that… real?” he whispered.
“I hope so,” Wohtin replied. “Else we share the same dream.”
The figure stood in immobile regard for what seemed an age, then started towards them.
He carried a staff but moved with a steady stride.
As he drew nearer, Felnir saw his garb was fashioned from a pale wool, save for the waxed leather cloak about his shoulders.
He was tall but of thin build, his face showing no sign of emaciation.
His features were bearded with high, angular cheekbones and the lines of middle age about his eyes.
Although certain he had never seen this man before, Felnir was still struck by a sense of recognition.
Judging by the way the man’s gaze narrowed as he halted, this newcomer was experiencing a similar sensation, though not in regard to Felnir.
“So, you’ve come at last,” he said, eyes and voice directed at Wohtin as he added, “Father.”
During the long interval of silence that followed, Wohtin swayed as if he had been struck, gaping at the man before him in stark disbelief until a soft croak emerged from his cracked lips. “Antak?” He tottered towards the newcomer, hand outstretched. “My son…”
Taking a backward step, the bearded man raised his staff.
“Do not touch me,” he instructed. Felnir judged his accent as similar to the denizens of Vorunvahl, but with a laboured harshness to it.
In response to the command, Wohtin stumbled to a halt, though the mix of need and awe lingered on his aged features.
“How…?” he began. “How can you be standing before me?”
Antak ignored the question and turned his attention to Felnir. A brief survey of his ragged, and decidedly un-kingly person provoked a frown of consternation. It deepened when Antak shifted his gaze to Tyrheld’s tethered, emaciated form and the menda straggling down the slope beyond.
“They,” he said in his strained Ascarlian, “are not supposed to be here.”
“Yet here we stand,” Felnir replied, resting a hand on the Sword of the Altvar. “I have a destination, and will brook no attempt to prevent me reaching it.”
He saw a twitch of amusement in Antak’s face at the threat, though it faded quickly as his eyes lingered on the sword.
Felnir perceived a glimmer of understanding in the man’s gaze before he turned about and strode away.
“Come then,” he called over his shoulder, staff raised in a beckoning gesture.
“Or stay and starve if it is your wish.”
Throughout the trek that followed, Felnir was unable to ask any questions of their guide for he walked ahead at a distance of thirty paces or more.
He did consent to the occasional brief pause to allow the hunger-weakened host to catch up, but proved deaf to Wohtin’s entreaties for information.
Felnir gauged the distance they covered that day at little over five miles, but in his weakened state it felt more like twenty.
When Antak came to a halt, it required a good deal of effort for Felnir to remain upright as he staggered to the stranger’s side, still tugging a vacant-eyed Tyrheld along.