The Fall to Power (15 page)

             
“Yield?”

             
The Slave, miraculously still alive, looked up at the King with swollen eyes, coughing a tendril of blood from his split lips, before spitting out a tooth and reaching out with broken fingers to grasp the haft of his hammer. As he watched his opponent rise, hammer in hand and shuddering with pain, he had nothing but respect for the man, for he saw past the outward appearance of a raving berserker, seeing instead the proud and skilful warrior and tactician that he had once been before being imprisoned and forced to duel for the entertainment of his obese overlord.

             
This man had potential. And perhaps, with time, the gibbering madness would recede.

             
“What is your name?”

             
“Slave,” came the gurgling reply from a ruined mouth.

             
“What is your
real
name…?”

             
The Slave thought for long moments, eyes blank, as though forgetting he’d had a life previous to this existence of constant slaughter.

             
“…Bavard, they called me.”

             
Invictus nodded, smiling.

             
“Well, Bavard, thanks to you it appears I’m down exactly one General.” His eyes glinted in amusement. “Care to put yourself forward for the role?”

             
The half-dead warrior’s mouth dropped open and his swollen eyes pricked with tears.

             
“Of course,”  continued the King, “I would have to ask you to renounce your former service…”

             
The warrior span on the spot, his hammer sweeping up, before releasing it to hurtle end over end. The toad-sheikh didn’t even gasp in surprise before his head was split like an egg by the heavy stone weapon.

             
The Slave, now Bavard, General of the Clansmen Armies, turned and dropped to one knee before his new master, gurgling through bloodied teeth.

             
“Consider it renounced.”

***

Invictus awoke on silken sheets, puzzled, as the silver light from the three moons streamed in through his chamber window.

             
Again with the memories. Granted, he’d allowed himself to fall asleep this time, no bewitchment implicit in his slumber, but twice now in recent months he’d had such strong and vivid dreams of the past. Why was his unconscious mind reaching back so far into his past? Was it searching for something? For what? Answers? To what question? He was Barbarian King now, a God-King by all measures, above stress and petty concerns, his every whim a command, every pleasure his for the taking. What question could there be that plagued him?

             
Yet, despite his power, he couldn’t help somehow feeling as though he were caught up in something bigger, even, than himself. He was feeling of late, as though he were being swept along, as though what he’d started a century ago was now bigger than him, overtaking him, and that now he was no more than an observer, despite all his might and supposed authority.

             
At times like this, when even a God-King was blighted by uncertainties, this was when he usually turned to Ceceline. He rose to his feet, padded his way barefoot across the floor to the open window, where he looked out, spying in the distance the Isle of Storms, ever wracked by the fury of the ocean. That island bustled with activity right now and it was there too that Ceceline currently dwelt, her keen intellect focused almost entirely on the construction of the Beacon, imbuing it with her power and knowledge, with the potent sorceries of Those Beyond the Veil.

             
The Beacon, yet another example of something that he felt out of his control. Ludicrous, he knew, for the whole thing was virtually a monument to himself, to what he’d achieved in the last century. Yet the reasoning behind it, the manpower Ceceline had requested, it all seemed a bit flimsy, a bit shallow, for his liking. But still, he trusted his Seeress, his friend, his lover, his counsel.

             
Invictus would never have an equal, not now. His power, what the whispers had wrought him into, rendered him above mere mortals, even those rendered themselves nigh-immortal by virtue of his presence. He could experience pleasure – and did – in all its many forms, but he could never truly love. Never find an equal.

             
But Ceceline, that ice-queen, with her raven hair and her bewitching smile; she was the closest thing he could think of to it. A nagging doubt, flashes of half-glimpsed dreams in the back of his mind, of frolicking pixies in a green glade, deep brown eyes full of warmth, telling him that he was wrong, but in an instant they were gone and all he could see once more was her slender pale face and her amused blue eyes.

             
Trust in her, Invictus.

             
Were those thoughts his? He didn’t know any more. Perhaps there was a limit to the power of a God-King, a limit to the energies that could be contained in one vessel before it finally shattered, body and psyche, into a million fragmented pieces.

             
But with a resignation and a heavy burden of knowledge, he knew that it were not so.

             
His body, his psyche; there was no limit to the power they could channel.

             
Power was a drug, the ability to change one’s fate, to influence the world around you addictive, pleasurable. Imagine a drug that gave you ecstasy, on demand and that you could take it freely with no risk to yourself. Would you ever stop taking it?

             
That was Invictus; a drug taker, addicted, yet who could never overdose, for the very drug he took, the power that channelled through him, kept him safe from its influence, whilst in the same breath keeping him bound in its grip.

             
He knew that he would not – could not – let go of the path he was on, no matter how out of control he felt.

             
His green eyes bored into the distance, searching out his Lady consort, his counsel, his almost-equal, wondering what, in truth, was happening on that blighted isle, yet knowing that he would go along with it, come what may.

***

His hands almost slipped once again on the slick, black rocks as yet another wave nearly blasted him to his death.

             
Yet they still kept coming. They’d already eaten his boots – his boots, by the seventy-seven djinns! – yet they still hungered for the rest of him. He remembered, with a despairing laugh, hearing about crabs from a merchant he’d met, only last year, as he’d roamed the desert with his tribe.

             
Insects, he’d told him, yet they live in the sea. And people eat them, he’d asked? The thought was disgusting and he’d sworn at that point, despite the unlikely odds with him living in the desert, that he’d never let one pass his lips.

             
The revulsion was obviously not reciprocated.

             
With a clack of claw on stone, they continued climbing, hungering after him, their eyes on swivelling stalks, their huge, chitinous claws snipping together in anticipation of his soft, juicy flesh. He scrambled up, further and further, the callouses of his hard labour threatening to tear off with the effort of grasping the sharp, sheer cliff-face. His hand flailed, empty air, and he turned, seeing a narrow ledge that dug in a couple of feet into the rocks. He clambered onto the prominence, wedging himself in place, with his legs pointed out to the raging ocean a hundred feet below.

             
A silhouette climbed into view, the round, spider-like form of a many-legged crab. With a grunt, Jafari avoided its snapping pincers, kicking out with a leg, crying with triumph as the beast hurtled from the cliff to land, with a splash, in the depths below. Another crab appeared and he fought that off too, then another, until after a few minutes all his would-be devourers had been dispatched.

             
Regaining his breath, he chanced a look down, fighting his vertigo. With a sinking heart, he saw the shapes of the crabs clambering, slowly, yet surely, back out of the sea, resuming with dogged determination the climb to their meal.

             
He settled back, tears stinging his eyes as the stormy winds gusted salty brine into his face.

             
He recalled the journey across the causeway, days before; the storms receded during the daytime. If he could make it through the night, then perhaps he could make it back to the mainland come morning.

             
Not across the causeway, djinns no, that would be suicide, what with all the Clansmen transporting the never ending flow of slaves to the construction site. Although, he thought with a rueful smile, it wouldn’t be any harder than the climb to the rocky coast these past couple of days. No, not the causeway, but maybe he could swim.

             
The thought sent a shiver down his spine, for he was a desert man, and the sum total of swimming he had done amounted to brief paddling in the oases his tribe between which his tribe had wandered. But swim he must. He could learn on the job.

             
Jafari gulped as the tell-tale scratchings of the determined crabs grew closer and closer in the stormy night.

             
This all assumed, of course, that he could make it to the morning.

Chapter Six
:

The wheel turned, as it always had. It had turned during his youth. It had turned during his father’s youth. It would turn during his son’s youth too.

             
The wheel would always turn.

             
Alann stood, eyes half-closed in the cooling mist thrown up by the rushing mountain stream as it cascaded over the wheel, a smile on his face, for he could hear the laughter of the children as they played amongst the buildings of the village, running round and round, chasing each other past the stone blacksmiths, the squat tavern and finally, the mill-house itself. The village, quiet, peaceful, its folk content, the faint sounds of industry overpowered by the melodious whistling of birdsong and the burbling of the crystal brook.

Life in the Hills was easy and Alann had no cause to grumble. His arms were strong from working the forest, his young son, Roget, hearty and hale, and, gazing up at him from the banks of the stream below, his beautiful wife, Felice, her dark curls of hair plastered to her smiling face as she beckoned him to come join her in the cool water.

He smiled, sadly, taking in the sun-dappled scene with mournful eyes; his carefree wife, his playing son. Sadly, for though he longed to join her in the stream below the mill, to call over his son and enjoy this summer as a family, he knew that he must all too soon awaken.

And when he did, the wheel would stop.

***

             
“My lord?”

             
Practiced by now at waking their reluctant leader, the young lad jumped back as he bolted upright with a start, his white-knuckled hand about the haft of his axe. As Alann cleared the sleep from his eyes, Iain regarded his sweat-beaded forehead, pondering, not for the first time, what manner of nightmare forever haunted the slumber of the woodsman.

             
“What time is it?”

             
“About an hour before dawn, my lord.”

             
He knew his mistake, even before the woodsman shot him a look of warning.

             
“Don’t call me that. My name is Alann.”

             
“Of course. Sorry...”

             
…my lord, continued his inner voice, rebellious, yet at the same time reverential. For this man before him was more than just Alann, more than the simple woodsman he appeared to be. To some, he was a leader. To others, a father, a brother, a friend. To all, he was a symbol.

             
For they were all orphans here, those that slumbered high up in the trees of the forest. Families, loved ones, all gone. But here they had a new family, a new purpose, a new reason to go on living. To keep on fighting.

             
Alann. How unassuming a name, how plain and unadorned. Even his manner, humble, reserved. Yet beneath it a steel determination. For, unwilling though he may be, he was their leader, their founder, the one who tied them all together, finding the lost, the wandering, the broken, and forging them into more than the sum of their parts.

             
He had turned them into the Foresters, a name they bore with a pride they never thought they’d feel again.