Child of Flame

There were other chores to be done. As Aunt Bel used to say, “work never ceases, only our brief lives do.” Work helped him forget. He set to willingly, whether it was gutting fish or, as today, felling trees for a palisade. He learned to use a stone ax, which didn’t cut nearly as well as the iron he was used to and, after a number of false starts, got the hang of using a flint adze.

Could it be that God wished humankind to recall that war had no place in the Chamber of Light? War sprang from iron, out of which weapons were made. After all, it was with an iron sword that the Lady of Battles had dealt the killing blow.

Yet if these people didn’t know war, then why were they fortifying their village?

Kel got impatient with the speed at which Alain trimmed bark from the fallen tree, and by gestures showed him that he should go back to felling trees while Kel did the trimming. Tosti scolded Kel, but Alain good-naturedly exchanged adze for ax. He and Urtan examined a goodly stand of young beech and marked four particularly strong, straight trees for felling.

Alain measured falling distance and angle, and started chopping. His first swing got off wrong, and he merely nicked the tree and had to skip back to avoid hitting his own legs. A man appeared suddenly from behind and with a curse gave a hard strike to the tree. Chips flew and the ax sank deep.

Startled, Alain hesitated. The man turned, looking him over with an expression of disgust and challenge. It was the man who had threatened him yesterday, who went by the name Beor. He was as tall as Alain and half again as broad, with the kind of hands that looked able to crush rocks.

The men around grew quiet; two more, whose faces he recognized, had appeared from out of the forest. Everyone waited and watched. No one moved to interfere. Once, with senses sharpened by his blood link to Fifth Son, who had taken the name Stronghand, he would have heard each least crease of loam crushed under Beor’s weight as the other man shifted, readying to strike, and he would have tasted Beor’s anger and envy as though it were an actual flavor. But now he could not feel Stronghand’s presence woven into his thoughts; the lack of it made his heart feel strangely empty, distended, and limp. Had he given that blood link to the centaur sorcerer, too, or had he only lost the link to Stronghand because blood could not in fact transcend death?

Yet envy and anger are easy enough to read in a man’s stance and in his expression. Rage padded forward to sit beside Alain. She growled softly.

Alain stepped forward and jerked the ax out of the tree. He offered it to Beor who, after a moment’s hesitation, took it roughly out of his hands. “You’ve great skill with that ax,” Alain said with defiant congeniality, “and I’ve little enough with a tool I’m unaccustomed to, but I mean to fell this tree, so I will do so and thank you to stand aside.”

He deliberately turned his back on the man. The weight of the other workers’ stares made his first strokes clumsy, but he stubbornly kept on even when Beor began to make what were obviously insulting comments about his lack of skill with the ax. Why did Beor hate him?

Behind him, the other men moved away to their own tasks. Beor’s presence remained, massive and hostile. With one blow, he could strike Alain down from behind, smash his head in, or cripple him with a well-placed chop to the back.

It didn’t matter. Alain just kept on, fell into the pattern of it finally as the wedge widened and the tree, at last, creaked, groaned, and fell. Beor had been so intent on glowering that he had to leap back, and Urtan made a tart comment, but no one laughed. They were either too afraid or too respectful of Beor to laugh at him.

It was well to know the measure of one’s opponents. That was why he had lost Lavas county to Geoffrey: he hadn’t understood the depth of Geoffrey’s envy and hatred. Could he have kept the county and won over Tallia if he had acted differently?

Yet what use in rubbing the wound raw instead of giving it a chance to heal? Lavas county belonged to Geoffrey’s daughter now. Tallia had left him of her own free will. He had to let it go.

Kel began trimming the newly fallen beech, and Alain started in on the next tree. Eventually, Beor faded back to work elsewhere, although at intervals Alain felt his glance like a poisoned arrow glancing off his back. But he never dignified Beor’s jealousy with an answer. He just kept working.

In the late afternoon, they hitched up oxen to drag the trimmed and finished poles back toward the village. Sweat dried on his back as he walked. The other men wore simple breechclouts, fashioned of cloth or leather. The tunic Adica had given him looked nothing like their clothing. It had a finer weave and a shaped form that was easy to work and move in, even when he dropped it off his shoulders and tied it at his hips with a belt of bast rope. The men of the village had stocky bodies, well muscled and quite hairy. They had keen, bright faces and were quick to laughter, mostly, but they didn’t really resemble any of the people he knew or had ever seen, as if here in the afterlife God had chosen to shape humankind a little differently.