A hard season, in a hard land, with ever less for ever fewer. On any day that the sun set and there was food to be shared, and a fire to warm it over — well, that day was a gift of sorts.

A strange thing with gifts: they can be taken, as well as given.

The reavers took what they wanted. They took it with violence and disdain and, poor as we were, there was nothing we could do to stop them. Neya’s husband and his brother were the last to stand against them. Afterwards, as the reavers let their starving hounds squabble over the men’s hands, we hid behind our doors and wept in silence. We learned to share.

And then he came.

I saw him first, a shade against the oncoming dusk, as he crested the hillside high above the old pastures. That trail used to lead to Oretsja, but those fields had lain fallow for years, and we had long since stripped the ground of anything we could use. Nobody lived there now.

His gait was uneven, and I guessed that his knees or his hips troubled him. As he neared the bottom of the slope, he stumbled. I thought he must be wounded. Perhaps the reavers had fallen upon his party elsewhere. I called for Hino and bade her to follow me — call me a fool if you will, but I could not leave him to struggle on his own. Not in this land, not in this season.

Hino hesitated, pressed back against the wall of her hut. I could not fault her, since the last visit of the reavers still lay at the forefront of our memories. I had to pull her along behind me, over hard ground already stripped bare by the goats and the frost. I concentrated on keeping my own footing — I could hardly afford to lame myself in rushing to help another — and so I did not see the overlapping strips of lacquered armor that hung from his shoulders, or the blades sheathed across his back, until we were so close that he could not have failed to notice our approach.

His head was bowed, and he rested on one knee, leaning his weight against a long staff. I came to a halt, and Hino crowded in close behind me. Now, even as the day faded, I could see that he was as ragged a man as his attire suggested. His armor was made up of strips and plates from many different sets, and his clothes were patchworked rags, barely better than my own. Even his body was mismatched — one hand appeared larger than the other, one arm thicker and heavier. His helmet had been made for a man with a broader skull.

I stared for a moment too long. He raised his head, and I saw that his face was marked by the scars of many battles. He had lost one eye; the other was a piercing green.

“Greetings, goodwoman,” he said. His voice was blunt and hollow.

“Greeting to you, master,” I replied. I did not know what else to say. If I asked whether he needed our help, would he take offense? Hino breathed hard against my back.

Fortunately, he solved the question first. “My leg has seized. I would be grateful of your assistance in standing.”

We brought this limping stranger slowly to the village. I supported his weaker side, while Hino stayed out of his reach, curiosity warring against her caution. The man smiled at her once, when she ventured closer, and she shot away toward the huts in a flailing run that brought the others out into the open.

His flesh was cold and hard, like the land, like the winter. By the time we reached my own hut, my fingers were as numb as if they had been buried in the soil all day. I had Hino fetch my stool, and we seated him before the paltry fire that I had not yet lit. Neya, Sario and Jutheyn peered in through the door, blocking out much of the remaining light. The only way to shoo them was to close the door — but that would have meant shutting myself in with him.

“My thanks,” said the man. “What is this place? Is it Oretsja?”

“No, master,” I said. “Oretsja is on the other side of the hill. You have already passed it.”

He nodded once. “Ah. Then I must move on.”

He reached for his staff again. I thought of him crossing the frost-covered river trail alone so late in the day, with the reavers so close by, and I held up my hand to forestall him. “Wait, master. You should rest.”

“I am no master. Not as I am now. And I have little need of rest, these days.”

“Would you at least take a meal with us?”

He looked around, into the dim corners of the hut. “I would not impose when you have so little to share.”

“A gift, freely given.” Yes, it was a bold offering. And by the way he stared at me, he already knew what I intended. I held that gaze, unnerving as it was, and I felt the weight of the eye he had lost.

“Then it would be dishonorable of me to do less than accept,” he said, with a sudden smile. “I am Kan.”

No house, no place, only that. Kan. I heard the others whisper, passing the name back among themselves.

“Nuila, daughter of Tago of the Grey Beach.”

“I have not seen the Grey Beach. But you are a long way from home, Nuila.”

I set the fire as we talked. There wasn’t much to offer as a meal, but my appetite had died along with my love. What I had would suffice. “This is my home now.”

“Not the life you would have wished for.”

“The life I have. I would not have traded it for another.”

He nodded and did not pursue that further. “How long has Oretsja been abandoned?”

“Ten years or so,” I said. “Jutheyn was among the last to leave there.”

“A shame. It was a welcoming place once, I think. But I suppose that these times…”

“The reavers,” Jutheyn put in, from the doorway. She shrank back when Kan’s gaze switched to her.

“Poor times for all,” Kan said. “We have all lost.”

There was such sadness in his voice that nobody wished to speak after that.

 

~

 

Kan bedded down there, on my small pallet, against the back wall of the hut. I retreated to the small shrine at the heart of the village, where the hard stones of the Witness sat beneath a thin, sloping roof of baked tiles. The others followed me, trailing behind like girls.

“Where has he come from? Is he alone?” Neya asked all the questions. “Who is his master?”

“He did not say,” Jutheyn noted. “Perhaps he has none. No lord would have so little pride as to allow his servants to dress in such a manner.”

“What if he is a reaver? What if he has come to trick his way into our homes? Will we wake up tomorrow with everything gone?”

I glared up at Neya. “The reavers know they have power over us. They can take what little remains at any time they wish — they need not sneak around us. The only reason they have not done so already is that we have nothing they could possibly want.”

The others stared at me, taken aback. It was the first time I had voiced the thoughts that clustered in the far dark of my soul. I might as well have insulted the memories of their families. And to have said such things under the roof of the Witness…

“We are all thinking that,” I said, looking at each pale face in turn. “None of you can deny it. We may never speak of it, but you cannot say you do not think it.”

Jutheyn lifted her head, stubborn as ever. “I have lost one home. I will not surrender another.”

She took the others with her. Only Hino remained, scuffing one foot in the dirt just outside the House of the Witness. I sighed and shook out the thin blanket I had brought with me. I had intended to ask either Neya or Sario if I could sleep on their floor, but I thought I would not be entirely welcome beneath their roofs tonight.

“I know, I should not have said that. It was insensitive.”

Hino did not reply. When I looked up again, the stone cold against my back, she was already skipping away toward the splintered fence of the empty corral.

 

~

 

The morning sun brought little warmth. Another cloudless night had frozen the ground over once more; my breath curled sharply into the air. I worked life into my muscles by sweeping the stones of the Witness and brushing back the ground that Hino and the others had disturbed the previous evening. When I had finished, I turned to find the masterless traveler watching me from a seat outside Konimu’s old hut. He had already donned his armor, as if ready to leave.

“Good morning,” I said to him. “I hope you slept well.”

“I am rested,” he said. He didn’t look it. I thought I saw a fever deep in his eyes, and he sat awkwardly on the stones that had marked Konimu’s wall. “I did not ask you to inconvenience yourself in such a manner.”

I shook my head. “There was no inconvenience. And there is no obligation.”

Kan’s smile was as lopsided as the rest of him. “So you said last night. I am almost convinced.”

I felt the weight of the rest of the village on my shoulders — they were watching us, I thought. Jutheyn, Neya, and all the others, they were watching from inside their own huts, through the cracks in the frames and the gaps in the walls, and the holes in the curtains. I had been blunt with them last night; perhaps I should treat this man in the same way.

“Almost. But you will not stay.”

“I must move on,” Kan said. “This is not the end of my journey.”

I left the shelter of the House of the Witness and joined him at the edge of Konimu’s ruins. “But you could rest here for a while, at least.”

“With no obligation.”

“I would swear to that before the Witness,” I said.

Kan nodded slowly. “Yes, I believe that you would.”

He would not be pinned down, that much was plain. And I could not spend all morning sparring with him — there were the goats to check on, if Hino had not already done so, and all the rest of the day’s work too.

“Then we will speak again, later,” I suggested, with enough hint of a question that he would have to reply.

Kan stood and bowed formally to me. “We will, indeed.”

 

~

 

The reavers had worn us back to bare bone, to dry earth, but they had not managed to take everything. Not yet. There were still places deep in the plains where we could shelter a few animals, tether them to dry roots in dips and hollows, to be led each day out to whatever poor grazing land we could keep for them. We rotated our crops in much the same manner, fed with our own waste as well as that of the animals, and the water we carried laboriously from the river when the well refused to yield up. It had never been easy, even before the reavers came.

Landless, masterless, restless. They looked for easy prey, and they circled both our village and Oretsja and feinted and attacked our flanks until they found a weakness. Oretsja’s lord and master, who was also our lord and master — that was the weakness. When he came to confront them, they surrounded him as wild dogs will cut out a single animal from the herd. And they took from Oretsja what they wanted. Again, and again, and again, until Oretsja was no more.

Kan listened to this story in silence, his arms folded over crossed legs. He had barely moved at all through the course of the day. He was a rock of stillness at the heart of the village, and the others circled around to avoid him, casting furtive glances in his direction as they worked. They avoided me too, though it was a rare day indeed when we did not fall out over at least one petty thing.

“And as in Oretsja, so here,” he said at last, looking about at the dried-up plots and the broken walls and fences.

“My husband once said that doubt is contagious. The reavers have never doubted themselves, but the villages have. Those who have not stood against them and died have fled.”

“Yet you remain.” Kan stared at me.

I nodded. “For two reasons. First, the reavers learned from their mistakes. They cut Oretsja so deep that there was nothing left to take. Now, when they come here, they always leave us something. Just enough that we can hope to survive, nothing more. If they starved us entirely, they would starve themselves.”

“And the second? You could leave here.”

I smiled at him. “I think you already know, Kan of no master. This is our place. We belong nowhere else. Even if no one believes in the land, even if the Witness has turned away from us, it is our place.”

“I envy you that,” Kan said.

 

~

 

Another mouth to feed. I suspect that the others would have complained much more loudly if Kan had not done more than his part to compensate for the extra work. He taught Hino new ways to construct small traps, and how to bait them with grains smeared with a paste made from the thorns of the kana bush. As the moon waxed, we had meat over our cookfires — tough and poorly flavored, and in small portions, but before this the burrowing plains rats had been too swift and difficult for us to catch. Kan stood his share of watches, and assisted us in repairing the fences and roofs. He went with Jutheyn and Sario to the river, which we had not done since the last attack for fear of being ambushed again. They brought back not only cleaner water than we could ever soak up from the well, but two small fish and nine iron-tipped arrows that had been lost out on the plains. I considered myself far from useless, but Kan saw the plains in a very different manner from the rest of us.

It helped also that, despite bringing in more food, Kan did not eat much himself. He dined sparingly; after the first couple of days, I noticed that he would always push his meals onto one or another of us, saying that he was not hungry. And yet he did not suffer at all — if anything, his senses and the strength of his presence were as sharp as ever.

It was we who changed — Hino, Jutheyn, Sario, Neya, and myself. We did not look up for the hawk so often; we surveyed the skyline, but with pride more than fear.

At the moon’s fullest night, when the Witness looked down upon the dark of the world to see truth in the shadows, I found Kan sitting motionless inside the shrine, his head bowed so that his chin touched his chest. Moonlight made his skin even paler than usual. He appeared as a statue of the sort that I remembered from the great squares of the temples of the Grey Beach — the stone figures of long-dead lords and heroic travelers. I had never felt comfortable around those larger-than-life statues: they represented something I knew I could never aspire to. Even when garlanded with flowers during the festivals, they always seemed apart from the rest of us. But I had never expected such a figure to sit beneath the roof of the shrine that I had helped to build with my own hands. And, at that moment, the differences between us did not seem so great.

I bowed to the Witness and sat opposite Kan. He did not move, nor did he acknowledge my presence, so I followed his example and sat in silence while the moon crossed the empty sky.

When he did speak, at last, it was as if the words came straight from the Witness.

“I have seen the moon pass across the heavens more times than you can ever know. I have seen the stars turn and fall behind mountains, to rise again seasons later. Like them, I have never stopped moving. I took up arms in the service of my master before my voice had broken. Yes, Nuila, I did have a master, once. I had a shield of honor and patronage, but that is broken now. Broken a long time ago.”

“Where did you come from?” I hesitated to ask, for fear that the question would offend him. And indeed Kan did frown, but not with anger.

“Some other place. The name is long gone. Many places, perhaps. A philosopher told me that we are all the sum of ourselves. It made no sense at the time. Now…” He shrugged, a subtle movement that showed he had left the question behind with so much else.

“There was a man of power. Of unnatural witchery. My master had dealings with him. They prospered. There was no honor in it. I felt the judgement of the Witness upon me every night, even when heavy clouds covered the skies and my inaction. I had to do something.”

This blunt recitation somehow affected me more for having no detail. My own mind could provide any images required: a proud lord; a sly and twisted mage; a boy on the cusp of manhood, the fruits of his growth turning sour. It was difficult to envisage Kan as a younger man. I imagined him from behind, in silhouette, exactly as I had once seen my husband, stiff with strength and pride.

“I confronted them. I was a fool. My master only laughed. He turned his back on me and dined, and ordered my fellows to behead me.”

“Plainly, they did not,” I said.

“No,” Kan agreed after a long pause. “They did not. But sometimes I wish I had fought less well, that I had not been so determined to beat them and see justice done.” He looked up and out at the luminous sky. Moonlight bathed his empty eye. “I ached for death. The floor was slippery with blood. The mage made haste to escape, and my master was already gone, fled like a rat. The mage fell. I vowed to finish the chase, no matter the cost. I sealed my vow with the mage’s life. The Witness heard. And since that day I have followed him, sought word of him, dogged him back and forth. And one day I will find him. That is why I cannot stay.”

I nodded understanding and hid my disappointment. “An oath before the Witness is binding.”

Kan’s gaze lowered once more. “Yes.”

The silence fell like dust upon us. The heavens turned slowly toward dawn. My limbs were heavy with exhaustion. I stood to leave him to his vigil, but it was never in my nature to not offer my help.

“Tell me his name,” I said. “I can ask the others. If we have heard tell of him, we may be able to put you on the right road.”

“I thank you,” Kan said. There was a peculiar quality to his voice. I could not place it. “But you cannot help. It has been so long — I have forgotten his name.”

 

~

 

It could not last. As certain as the cycle of the moon, the reavers came once more.

One afternoon, under a sky starved of clouds and color alike, I saw men outlined on the hilltops to the west. Their shadows stretched down into the valley like claw marks on bruised skin. They numbered ten or so, and one led a mule that looked overburdened with their meagre possessions. I saw them from the edge of the village, where I was rooting out a nest of red ants from beneath the foundations of Konimu’s old wall. One by one we all stopped our work and stared up at them. Neya came running in barefoot from the poor field we still cultivated.

I looked around at our small group and saw the resignation clear upon their faces. Kan had spent long enough with us now that he no longer seemed as dangerous as he had on his arrival. The others weren’t truly comfortable around him, but they had accepted and grown used to his presence. He was like a favored knife that had been worn by years of use. But as he emerged from within my hut, alert and ready to fight, I was reminded that sometimes it does not matter how sharp a knife may be, it is still a knife.

Kan walked to the edge of the village and waited there. The air hung heavy. Slowly the reavers came down into the valley, following the trail in single file. They had long spears, swords, and bows, all as scavenged as the poorly lacquered leather plates they wore. I recognized several of them, even from a distance. The best I could say was that this time they did not have hounds. Perhaps they had eaten them.

“Their numbers are greater than before,” Sario said quietly. Her stance suggested that she had already surrendered. I could not say that I blamed her, after what had gone before. But the story Kan had told me had given me faith. Faith in him, and in the Witness.

And faith in myself. I picked up my trowel and took a fist-sized stone in my other hand, and I stepped forward to stand at Kan’s flank. After a moment Jutheyn came, too, and planted one end of her staff in the ground. Neya and Sario joined us. Hino, silent, skittish, crouched at the corner of a wall and strung our one bow. The iron-tipped arrows we had found hung in a sling over her shoulder.

The reavers could not fail to see us. I saw their leader slow, and then pause. With a couple of gestures he directed his followers into a formation around him. The man with the mule stayed at the rear. They walked toward the village again, weapons to hand and wary. Despite the cold of the afternoon, the weight of expectation dampened my hands with perspiration.

“Is this a welcome?” the leader called out when they were close enough for conversation. Close enough for the archers to be so certain of their targets that they stood loose and cocksure. Too close for any comfort. “How did we miss you when we last called here?”

“I was not here then,” Kan replied. His voice echoed the reaver’s self-assurance. “But I am here now, and I have heard of your visits. Perhaps you should move on.”

“With the day so close to being done? No, I think we will take our rest here tonight, old man.” He took another few steps closer.

Kan did not give way. “I think you will move on.”

I knew by the set of the reaver’s shoulders that he would not stand down. His bright blue eyes shone with determination. I turned the handle of the trowel in my hand. In the corner of my sight I saw Hino fit a shaft to her string.

“I do as I will,” the reaver said. “I don’t know from which grave you were dug, but you’ll bow to me if you don’t wish to be returned to it.”

Kan moved. His lopsided strides were swift, and he was among them before their archers could loose upon him. Steel hissed into the wet sound of cut flesh. Blood sprayed into the air and onto the ground.

One of the archers shouted, trying to follow Kan’s movements, struggling for a clear shot. The other turned and fired at Hino. The arrow sprang off the stone by her face and she fell back, her own aim spoiled. Jutheyn and the rest scattered. I stood where I was, in the open, unable to make myself move.

Kan was surrounded. He seemed to invite attack. And every attack the reavers made was met and turned aside. His swords tore into flesh — the side of a man’s face, the shoulder of another, the hip of a third. A reaver dropped to his knees, his wrist hacked to the bone.

With cries his attackers drew back, breathless and staggering. They formed a ragged circle around him, afraid to come too close, holding him in place with their spears. Their leader was the one who had lost his ear. The archers came to join the circle. Kan turned on the spot to regard the men one by one. Blood dripped from his sword; none of it was his.

An arrow struck the plates over his chest, but he not did stagger. Another dug into the flesh of his thigh, on his weaker side, and this time he was forced to use one of his blades to support himself.

“You should have used the bows first,” Kan said. “Before we even spoke. That was your mistake.”

One of the spearmen jabbed violently at him. He turned the spearhead aside effortlessly and sliced the man’s neck with his other blade. He shoved the hapless man in one direction and stabbed in the other. The circle closed in on him, but he had the better of them now, even hampered by the wound in his leg. One of the archers dropped his bow and grabbed desperately for a knife from his belt. Kan buried a sword in his gut, left it there, and snatched up another from a reaver he had already despatched.

Two more came at him together, working side by side. Kan kicked up dirt, stepped aside, shouldered the swordsman into his spear-wielding fellow. Another two neck-high cuts, and only the leader remained facing him, between Kan and myself.

Dirt settled on dead and wounded alike. Those still able to move were trying to crawl or stagger away from the edge of the village. The reaver who had tended their mule lay on the ground with an arrow in his throat. The mule was half a field away. Hino had another shaft strung and half-drawn.

“Put down your sword,” Kan said.

The leader of the reavers hesitated. He breathed hard, and his shoulders rose and fell. Stiff with strength and pride, still.

The stone was in my hand. I took two steps and swung it hard against the back of his head. Once, twice, again, again. Then I let it drop to the ground alongside him, and I wiped spots of hot blood from my cheek.

Kan stared across at me. “He might have surrendered.”

I looked into his empty eye. “No, he would not.”

“You knew him better than I, evidently.” Kan limped to one of the corpses and retrieved his sword. Then, having wiped and sheathed his weapons, he returned to the body of the reavers’ leader and hoisted it over his shoulder.

“You’re wounded,” I said. “You should rest. Let us clear the bodies.”

“Do as you will with the others,” Kan said. “This one is mine.”

He limped toward the shrine of the Witness, the arrows still protruding from his leg and chest, the corpse slung like an animal slaughtered for the market. Something in his voice warned me not to follow.

 

~

 

Jutheyn caught the mule. We divided up the reavers’ possessions and salvaged the arrows that they and Hino had spent. Two of the arrowheads were broken, another shaft would need re-fletching. The swords were less use to us than the spears and the bows, but we kept them all the same. I buried them safely in the small space beneath my pallet. The bodies — well, there is ever less, for ever fewer.

Kan left the following day, taking the path on which the reavers had come. He would take no payment, no spoils as such. After a night in seclusion at the shrine of The Witness, he was… much refreshed.

I accompanied him as far as the bottom of the hillside. The others would not — they were too horrified to even stand at the edge of the village and bid him farewell. Kan set a strong, insistent pace that I found hard to maintain.

At last he halted and turned back to wait for me to catch up. “Is it that you would come with me?” he asked. “Or is it that you would make certain that I have gone?”

I shook my head. “I told you that this is my place. That I belong here.”

“Yes. And I said I envied you that. I remember it.” Kan paused. “I remember much else too. Oretsja, the dances and the celebrations. The moon ceremonies. The journey from the coast.”

“But you do not remember the name of the man you seek,” I said softly.

He looked away. “No. That is gone. But unless I search, I will never find him.”

Kan moved away, up the slope of the hill, and I watched him go. I wondered how long he had searched, how far he had traveled. How much had he forgotten? How much of himself must he have left behind to have lost that core of his soul, to be an oath with no memory of its own origin?

With two strong, unwounded legs, it did not take him long to reach the top of the hill. He looked back once before he disappeared from sight, as if to fix an image of this place in his mind.

One piercing green eye, one of bright sky blue.

And then he was gone.

 

 

 

 

 

Steven Poore Biography

 

Steven Poore is an Epic Fantasist and SF Socialist. He lives in Sheffield with a crafty partner and a three-legged cat, and cannot move for towers of books. Heir To The North, published by Grimbold Books, was shortlisted for Best Newcomer at the British Fantasy Awards; the sequel, High King's Vengeance, is also available. You can also read some of Steven's short fiction in the Fox Pockets series of anthologies by Fox Spirit Books.

Steven hosts the semi-regular SFSF Social events in Sheffield, supported by the BSFA and BFS.

Follow him on Twitter: @stevenjpoore & @SFSFSocial