Age of War

Chapter 25

The herdsman looked at them from beneath his fur-lined hood. He wore a kind of sleeved cloak, much worn and patched, and fashioned of weather-proof leather which encompassed almost his whole body. Jonis could hardly blame him. Up here, the weather was ferocious, and they had now climbed high enough that the snow covering the peaks would never melt – even if summer did ever come again. The old man was leading a scraggy herd of cattle down the mountain trail. They were a hardy breed, squat and shaggy, with wide horns and fringes that covered their eyes. She wasn’t sure if they were bred for meat or milk, but it was hard to imagine where he grazed them in either case. The slope hereabouts was bare rock and ice with only moss and lichen clinging to the stones. Further up, she could see the shape of a rude hovel with a curl of smoke rising from a hole in the roof. The man’s face was brown and as weathered as his clothing. And still he peered at them in something like incomprehension.

“Ruins,” she repeated slowly. “Do you know of any ruins nearby? Maybe that way?” She pointed up the trail.

“Maybe he does not speak Atlantian,” Huldane suggested. The Talosi warrior was wrapped up as thickly as all of them in heavy, stinking furs. After travelling for so many days though, they no longer noticed the smell. His hood was pulled back but at least he wasn’t wearing his helmet and his sword was hidden. They’d scared enough people in this remote country already. His round shield was slung onto his back though, so there was no hiding his profession. Neither could the twenty soldiers accompanying them, city guard from Atlas. They carried spears and wore even finer armour than his. In all, they must make a bizarre procession. No wonder this fellow was struck dumb by their questions.

“Well, I don’t speak anything else,” she told him with a sharp look.

Huldane leant in and spoke a few words of his guttural tongue, but this only seemed to confuse the poor man even more.

“Ruins,” Jonis said again. She tried to mime it, but how did you mime ruins? She sighed. This was the first person they’d seen in what seemed like a long time. The horses that had carried them into the highlands of north-east Atlas had been left in the only substantial town in the region: a miserable cluster of windswept buildings clinging to the base of the mountains. Since then, they’d encountered only desolation. She thought of this country as being locked in an eternal winter anyway, but even here there must be seasons – grassy pastures for these cows to graze, trees for the herdsman’s little hearth, vegetables to accompany the lean cuts of beef from his animals. But it was all dead. Every sign of habitation spoke of abandonment and, in some cases, banditry. They’d seen more than one burned-out shell standing silent watch over bare earth that might once have been a farmstead.

The man finally pulled back his hood and revealed a scrap of grey hair clinging to his pocked scalp. His face was thin, but his ears were his most arresting feature – or rather the lack of them. They appeared to have been cut away and only lumps of scar tissue remained. He cocked his head. “Speak up,” he said in an accent so thick she had to play his words over in her head to make sense of them.

“What happened to him?” asked the captain of the militia. Jonis knew her – she was called Tayne, and she’d travelled with them the first time she’d met Rayke.

“Bandits?” her sergeant suggested.

“Frostbite,” Huldane said in a low voice, “I have seen it back home. He cut off his own ears.”

Tayne cringed. Jonis leant close to the man and, as requested, raised her voice. “Ruins,” she said. “Are there ruins this way?” She pointed again.

“Roons?”

“Ru-ins.”

“Roons…?”