Morgan! He thought, and looked up from Hugan’s butchered corpse to see his younger brother standing across the square, sandy blonde hair matted with blood, a huge Orc towering over him. Whose voice? he thought, and suddenly it dawned on him like lightning, and the calm shattered like glass. “Gareth!” The call again… Gareth knew the voice. “Gareth!” The shrill cry managed to move through the calm somehow and rise out of the uniform din of bestial grunts, ringing steel, and death moans that seemed thicker than water, thicker than mud. The heavy hoe Gareth had carried back from the fields was still in his hands, and even though Gareth could feel every seam, crack, and knot in the smooth wood of its handle, he could not bring himself to swing it at one of the man-beasts who were slaughtering his kin. Gareth could even feel poor Hugan’s blood all over him, hot and sticky. With it had come a dazzling clarity – the thick, hot taste of the smoke from the burning hous-Įs, the gleam of the crimson sunset on the Orcs’ blades, the smell of blood and death – all of these were impossibly bright and clear. The terror had passed like a summer rain, leaving him filled with a strange, empty calm. The battle swirled around him, a bewildering dance of sounds, colors, and shapes, with Gareth standing in the very eye of the storm.
How long had it been? Only a moment or two? It seemed impossible.
As the massacre wore on, Gareth was still standing there, bathed in his uncle’s blood, gasping. Then the hulking brute barked something in its own hideous language (could it have been laughing?), and ran to the next hut, leaving Gareth to watch as his home died around him.
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The Orc had regarded him for a moment, his tusked face full of hate and loathing. The sight of that had been too much: Gareth had frozen in terror, unable to strike or even flee. The Orc’s hulking arm swung, lightning fast, and half of head had vanished in a hot red spray of gore. Hugan had yelled out a battle cry, and Gareth had turned to help his uncle, but in less than a second the fight was over.
Gareth and Hugan had rounded a burning hut and come face to face with a massive Orc, the blade of his wicked battleaxe slick with innocent blood. Stories are just air, and dreams even less than that. How many nights had he lain awake, imagining himself in the thick of a great battle, strong as an Ogre and braver than any knight, hacking through a swarm of foes? The farmer’s son had finally come to his first battle, and now he knew the truth. He’d listened to his Aunt Mirryn’s stories of the High King and his valorous knights, and shivered at Uncle’s stories of Orcs and fouler creatures. Until now, all Gareth knew of battle and death were old stories and a boy’s imaginings. Gareth was only fourteen years old, and had never seen a battle before – until this autumn, Korbing Village had been spared the troubles that blighted the rest of the World. As it was, Gareth had sprinted back to the village with the rest of the men as soon as the first bellows had sounded, but by the time they returned it was far too late: the village was dying, if not already dead. In the bitter nights to come, Gareth would often wonder if the Orcs had meant to avoid the men working in the fields, so they could torment them with the screams of their wives and children before the real fight began. If the Orcs had come from the south or if Gareth had been working his father’s plot instead of helping his Uncle Hugan with the harvest, the Orcs would have come upon him first and he would no doubt be dead already. Gareth had been working in the millet fields south of the village when they came. The Orcs had attacked at dusk, their brutal cries echoing across the valley the very moment the sun had touched the horizon. Blind luck was the only reason the boy wasn’t dead already. inside back coverĪ NEW WORLD Gareth had no idea that he was dying. 103 Chapter 11 – City Assets and Tradesmen.
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