Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) (11 page)

    
A hand as hard as steel pushed through the choking dust and clamped onto my injured shoulder, pulling me to one side.  Another found my ankle.  I must have been passing by the barricade – the Dwarves that had scattered before must have come back for me!  I felt incredible pain as they dragged me across the falling earth, unable to help and barely to see through the growing dust storm as the mountain came apart.  This went on for several seconds, then an explosion shook us all and both hands vanished.  I rolled to my left against the avalanche, sensing its momentum building, and pried the sword loose from its scabbard.  Stabbing it into the ground beneath me, feeling my hands slip on the hilt, I hung on and shut my eyes against the flying grit, waiting to see if I would live or die.

    
The ground shook and I heard a horrendous screaming.  The blade whined a protest in my hand, digging deeper into the shifting debris.  I turned the blade sideways, endangering the point, half-sure that the thing would bend or break in half from the strain, digging it into the ground to slow my descent.  Finally it struck something that wouldn’t give and I stopped moving.  I was helpless, waiting for the last of the meteors to find me.  I kept my eyes shut, the seconds passing like hours, dust choking my and fighting for air, until the roar began.

    
I opened them and was immediately sorry.  The dust and grit had me blinking and my eyes watering.  I rubbed my face on my shirt, knowing that would make it worse, not better.  Dirt and blood covered me.  I coughed once, gasped, breathed in more dirt and then started coughing again.  Finally I just surrendered to the pain and, blinking furiously, coughing and spitting out dirt and debris, tried to look around.

    
When my vision cleared I saw the Dwarves engaging possibly half their number in armed and unarmed Dorkan soldiers to one side of the valley.  The Men were having the worst of it, unable to coordinate a defense while the Dwarves, coming in as a phalanx and roaring their battle cries, were systematically trapping and killing them.  The valley itself was awash with rocks, dirt and bodies.  Some still moved, though weakly.  The Dorkans still fighting must have either been smart enough to get out of harm’s way or not quite bright enough to get into the original battle formation.  I could believe either.

    
Every muscle ached and the dust rising from what once had been a bowl choked me.  I stood with difficulty and had a look around.  I still held onto my sword, though loosely.  I could see the stallion up the mountainside, obviously trying to pick a path down.  Above and to my right I could see the bodies of four Dwarves, probably those whose hands I had felt when they tried to save me from the avalanche.  Apparently the missiles meant for me had found them instead.  Fire and lightening had scorched and rutted the ground around me, the new mountainside revealed from beneath the old looking much worse for its wear.  I had lived somehow, through the efforts of valiant Dwarves who had given their lives, knowingly or otherwise, to try to save me.

    
All I had were guilty feelings of relief that someone else had died instead of me.  I kept reminding myself that I had helped the Dwarves in
their
battle, but survivor’s remorse still haunted me.

    
As the battle raged below me, I started the slow climb up the mountainside to keep my horse from breaking a leg trying to reach me.

    
The ax came in low and to the inside.  I stepped back and parried down, against the handle rather than the blade, absorbing its power and damaging the weapon.  My opponent switched his grip and swung the heavy blade around his back and high for an overhead smash.

    
I stepped back and struck the side of the ax with my sword, upsetting his balance.  I moved too quickly for him to recover before my sword pressed his throat.

    
“Gaak!” he choked, dropping the wooden weapon.  I dropped mine as well.

    
“Pull your hits, you clumsy Man,” Hrrech complained, rubbing his throat.  He was right.  I would have killed him had we been using real weapons instead of these wooden ones.

    
Of course, that was the idea.  Hrrech had been introduced to me as the Dwarven Master at Arms.  It surprised me when I had heard the term; in the Navy, the MAA served as the “ship’s cop,” the same as here.  Hrrech had supposedly mastered every weapon in the armory, which he maintained with about ten Dwarves.

    
After about a week he couldn’t match me.  I marveled at how bad these Dwarven warriors fought.  Still, they had only lost about eight men against the Dorkans, and half of them defending me, so they had to be doing something right. Fighting Hrrech with my Sword of War or without it, my reach extended longer, my touch lighter, my body moved faster and I prevailed time and again.

    
I had learned a lot, though.  I didn’t doubt that, in a fight with another Man, or Uman, I would have a chance of staying alive.  I had also started learning how to use my bow better, how to use a crossbow, a little about mining and metallurgy and a
lot
about geography.

    
“Sorry,” I told Hrrech.  He took my forearm in his hand, and I took his.  This is what passed for a handshake here.  I looked into his deep, brown eyes.  The Simple People remained as hard inside as the stone they dug their tunnels through.  Hrrech especially so.

    
“Nah,” he said, “I had it coming.”  Together, we put the weapons away and swept up the room.

    
Fovean civilization centered itself around an area about the size of the Mediterranean.  The central body of water, called “Tren Bay,” had been named for the ‘Plains of Tren,’ that had existed before it.  Trenbon is an island in the center of it, home of the mysterious Uman-Chi, supposedly the foremost Wizards on the planet.  Northernmost, to the east of the Dwarven Nation, cradled between the Great Northern Mountain Range and the Forgotten Sea, lay the nation Dorkan, whose people I had already encountered.  Normally, they held an active trade of goods and provisions for gold and iron with the Dwarves.  The Dwarves had recently increased their prices, however, precipitating the invasion, probably more of a warning strike.   The government of Dorkan, as I had guessed, existed as a patrician class maintaining a stranglehold on the education system, creating a plebian class almost unable to elevate itself.  What they called education really only reaffirmed the necessity of the class structure and had been effective for generations.

    
South of us could be found highly neutral Sental, an Uman nation.  The Uman were somehow related to the Uman-Chi and a popular intelligent life of the region.  They were long lived (a Dwarf might see 150 summers, while an Uman could expect 230 or more), slender, not as strong as a man and more emotional.  Being lighter, they were quieter and considered more intelligent than brutish Men.

    
Sental existed as a collective of Uman.  Those were Kvitch’s words, not mine, and I had no idea what he meant by that.  As an agrarian society, the Sentalans produced the bulk of the “farmed goods” in Fovea.

   
Volkhydro lies to the West of Sental and is a collection of free cities, much like ancient Greece, except that they had a king.  Hvarl is the Dwarven King.  Kvitch, oddly enough, served as a foreign Ambassador.  Because the Dwarves maintained no foreign embassies, they held a largely honorary position, although Kvitch was readying himself even now to go to Dorkan.

    
Volkhydro had once been the two human nations Volkha and Hydro.  Humans here were called ‘Men,’ even though males were called ‘Men.’  That could be confusing even when I got used to it, although it didn’t seem to bother the Dwarves at all.  Farther to the east of Volkhydro lay Conflu, also a land of Men, which had threatened to overwhelm Volkha until it had formed a permanent alliance with Hydro.  Together they had formed a united front, which had held off the Confluni expansion.  Now they were a nation divided, ever bickering internally.

    
Those caught within Conflu’s borders never returned. This meant that there were no maps of the nation and little could be said of them.

    
South of Conflu lay the Andoran Plain.  Clans of herders roamed it freely and maintained only two large cities.  Conflu had never expanded there permanently only because the Andarans, also Men, were excellent horsemen and the Confluni army an infantry. 

    
This made sense to me – the mounted warrior held an advantage on the battlefield.  Fighting with a lance or even a sword, his weapon had the momentum of a greater mass moving faster, and thereby struck deeper than the infantry.

    
The forest and the people between the Eldadorian and Andoran nations called themselves the Aschire.  Loose tribes of a mysterious people lived there.

    
King Glennen ruled Eldador.  Hvarl considered Glennen to be a strong man but a poor ruler and the cities in his nation were more like free cities than parts of a greater nation.  Internal bickering arose mostly between the apartheid-style rule of noble Dukes and Barons, mostly Men, over the Uman majority, who resented it.

    
The punch into my rib cage reminded me that I needed to be cleaning, not daydreaming.  I grunted at Hrrech and pitched in with the broom I held.

    
He laughed and joined me.  The Dwarves are a clean people, which is odd because the most pervasive factor about living underground is the
incredible
dust.  It gets in everywhere and on everything.  The harder the stone, the more dust it leaves.

    
I swept the smooth floor and put the sizeable dust pile into a receptacle.  The receptacles were regularly emptied and the contents dumped outside.  Over centuries, just with these sweepings, the Dwarves had paved a white sand road running miles from their mountain nations towards the Tears of the World.

    
I had woken up beside that lake when I got here.  It has some religious significance that the Dwarves didn’t like discussing.  Regardless, if you drank the water long enough, you would go into a deep depression and die. The Llorando ran south from it and, if you travelled many miles downstream, you could drink the water.

    
“So how much longer am I stuck with you, Man?” Hrrech asked me as we left the chamber.  The Nation consisted mostly of a series of tunnels and chambers converted from mining to habitation.  As the Nation explored more of the mountains for gold and iron ore, as well as coal and other treasures, it expanded.  There were likely ten thousand Dwarves spread out through the mountains.

    
“Seeing as I can kick your butt at will, not too much longer, Dwarf,” I told him, smiling.  He laughed and nodded.  They were not prideful people and they
were
blunt.  Hrrech seemed unwilling either to admit that I had a name or to get close enough to me to use it.  The first day I had met him we had wrestled and he had bruised my ribs against a wall.  I had slapped both of his ears at the same time (nearly killed him, I hadn’t realized that the differences in Dwarven anatomy made a move like that very dangerous) and knocked him out.  While healing the next day he had admitted to the creativity of the move and decided he could train me when he and I had the time – for about eight hours a day every day.

    
He had spent hours with my sword, as well.  He swore it was divine in origin and that the Simple People needed nothing to do with it.  No hammer could dent its finish; no forge could melt or even really heat it.  Nothing even adhered to its surface.  Although he admired the workmanship, he didn’t see a point in adding it to the Dwarven arsenal.

    
Hvarl had proclaimed me an honorary part of the Simple People because of the tactics used at what they called The Battle of Two Mountains.  They named me
J’ktak,
the Good Man, because I put their needs above my own. It was useful but I didn’t like the title.  I had caused as many of them to die as their enemy had, all in their efforts to keep me alive, and while without my idea they might all have died, but it didn’t make me feel better.

    
My horse grazed on a small goat plain they kept and had been fitted with a saddle and bridle.  He didn’t like them at all.  The Dwarves had made him “barding” also, consisting of a coat of rings that covered him to his knees, but he bucked constantly as they tried to put it on him, and I decided against it, settling on a thin plate across his rump and around his noble neck.  His strength was in speed and this would protect him without hindering him.

    
I had decided to call him
Blizzard
– fast, powerful and deadly.  Naturally, he didn’t respond to it.  Still, I didn’t feel right calling him “the horse.”  Fully fed as he had been for the last week, he’d filled out and ran even faster than before.  The Dwarves had explained that the plains to the north were the home of the “Herd that Cannot be Tamed.”  Like Blizzard, they were bigger than other horses, and they tended to be mean.  Men had tried before to catch and tame them, but the animals were too swift to catch and too bold to break.  Colts usually died if they were taken into captivity, and those that didn’t die had to be put down, too violent to tame.  He couldn’t explain why Blizzard came to be different.

    
I had trimmed his mane down to a stiff bristle from his long, flowing locks; and cut about three feet of hair from his tail.  This left him with a crew-cut mane and another three feet of tail to poke out from the back of his armor.  I had the feeling we would see combat in his future and, if so, the hair would get in our way.

    
Hrrech and I were walking through the tunnels beneath the mountain.  Buttressed with stout timbers, walls carved smooth and polished by Dwarven hands, every tunnel had been a mineshaft, and now every one of them had a name and a meaning to these people.  I had spent several hours with a master craftsman,
Kuruul,
who had explained a little of what it took to turn mine shafts into personal dwellings, both above and below ground.  Yes, there were some Dwarves who lived in fine, stone dwellings on top of the Dwarven Mountains, either as goat herders or farmers or watchmen.
Just as some tunnels were “founded” by certain Dwarves, and some were named for certain important events, some parts of the land above had special names and significance for them.  The Simple People were Earth’s children, and they held all of His creations precious.

    
From experience, I knew I would be lost here if I were left alone. 

    
Dwarves like Kuruul formed widened areas among the tunnels into rooms, chambers and homes.  The Dwarves had no doors and no locks, not even for their king.  They shared all wealth and sought all ideas, which is why they took my advice so easily.

    
“You know, no one will complain if you stay longer, Man,” Hrrech said.

    
“Going to miss me when I go?” I ribbed him.

    
He looked up at me with those soulful, brown eyes.  “Would that be so bad?”

    
I had likely made a really insensitive comment in his eyes.  He and I had spent a lot of waking hours together.  Likely he would miss me.