The North Wind Read online



  "The North Wind"

  A short story set in "the Prometheus Cycle" Universe

  By Silas A. DeBoer

  THE NORTH WIND Copyright © 2014 by Silas A. DeBoer.

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For information contact; prometheuscycle.blogspot.com

  Book and Cover design by Silas A. DeBoer

  ISBN: 9781311393050

  First Edition: July 2014

  A Note from the Author

  Like the other free short stories in this series, The North Wind predates the novel "The Prometheus Cycle: The Star, the Sword, and the Mirror" and focuses on a supporting character's life prior to involvement with the main characters. This story is centered on the rural northeast of Umbria, the first of several provinces conquered by the Western Realm after the High King disappeared in the Bleak East Campaign and the Council took stewardship of the kingdom, transforming it into an empire. This story takes place at least a century before the novel, but the main character is vital to the early chapters and is integral in spurring the novel's main characters.

  As with the rest of these short stories, you do not need to read any of them to understand the novel, but I hope this free short story will help to spread awareness and prompt curious readers to buy the book.

  You can learn more about this novel and supporting short stories at prometheuscycle.blogspot.com

  "Now is the winter of our discontent."

  ~Shakespeare, The Life and Death of Richard the Third, Act I, Scene i

  The north wind blows from the peaks bordering Caledonia and Umbria, bringing frost and darkness to the villagers of Travaska huddled under the shadow of Mynydd Gwyll. The mountain dominates the horizon, and those who ply its slopes for furs and timber know they survived at the edges of the Realm. It was dangerous to be so far from the regional capital of Umbria and its Legions, let alone forgotten by the Council in Illyria. The old tales about these scarred lands were full of tormented beasts watching from the forest's edge eager to snatch a young boy or girl who erred from the path. There were older stories about the Unseen Tribe, who once made their homes on the mountain, queer folk who rode stags and wielded bronze swords and spears of black ash, their bows bent of elm with quivers full of hawk's feather arrows. Darkness gathered in these mythic hunters' bear cloaks and the stars winked out at their presence. It was said that a tribal warrior could stalk a man for three days without ever being noticed. When the first fields were ploughed, dozens of bronze arrowheads lent credence to these tales.

  Myra's head was full of such thoughts as she traversed the Novo Path, hewed three generations ago from the living wilderness and lined with crushed white gravel. The way markers were carved from oak, rowan and mulberry, whatever tree grew close to the trail. Several side deer paths branched from the Novo, but only a few woodsmen and their families used them. Myra knew that the woodsmen were almost as feral as the wild beasts come spring, and only a few traded in the village for ironwork beaten at the forge by graying Dromir.

  A hawk cried in the approaching dusk, the angry red orb of the sun in the process of being swallowed by Mynydd Gwyll. Myra knew she must hurry. Her basket empty, she quickened her pace by holding her long skirt up with her worn but supple doeskin gloves. Her green wool cloak caught in nearby bushes, but she did not care; the lengthening shadows, the call of wild animals to the fading light all lent speed to her pace. She could mend it later when she was indoors.

  Myra was out of breath when she finally emerged from the forest onto the village green, the communal space the villagers used to graze their few sheep, goats and ponies. The log wall palisade encircling Travaska was a welcome sight, as was the watch tower near the gates with its beacon lantern. Only a century ago had the Realm's knights and levies pushed the heathens back into the sea and burned their longships, but the men of the mountain remembered. Should Ostir fortress on the Penury Coast fall, the mountain held a vital pass to Caledonia. Her cloak's edge in tatters, Myra scolded herself for being silly at shadows. Still, as she glanced back at the tree line she could feel the oppression of moss covered arboreal titans and her back prickled at the thought of unseen, predatory eyes watching. She gathered up her skirt again and hurried towards the gate, only slowing when she was halfway to her goal. The thought of something leaping out at the last moment and dragging her back was difficult to push aside.

  "Ho, Myra, late are you?" The watchman tonight was Vacla, a hunter, armed with a yew longbow and a quiver bristling with iron tipped arrows. He wore a thick lambskin cloak, a wool cap and was bundled against the cold wind. A ladder thirty paces tall gave access to the small watchtower, and a short wall and peaked roof was the only defense against the frigid wind.

  "Please to open the gate, I tarried too long at the Widow Sana's cottage." Myra glanced around again.

  Vacla laughed as he called down to Stenov and Bohda. The gate opened just enough for Myra to slip through, and the gatemen pushed it close with great labor.

  Stenov gave Myra a dark look, while Bohda sighed. Neither liked to open the gates for just one person as the cross timber was a heavy oak bole ten paces in length and two paces in width. Sweat beaded from both men's foreheads despite the chill of evening.

  "Thank you Stenov, Bohda, I would rather not sleep outside the walls on any night."

  Stenov snorted and Bohda simply smiled. The latter was sweet on Myra of late, and the older man's callused hands marked him as a carpenter. His wife died in childbirth the previous winter, but Myra had no desire to marry so soon, let alone to someone else in the village. Bohda was a second cousin at any rate, and she cared not to tempt the Divine Empress's edicts on marriage with close family members.

  The streets of Travaska were muddy from the morning's rain, and the knee length lawns smelled sweetly of wildflowers. There were no trees in the village, nor within a hundred paces of the timber walls. The cottages were worn, with stone foundations dating back to the village's founding a century ago. The walls were dilapidated, the shutters repainted with dozens of coats of paint. Half the roofs were thatch, while every few years someone converted to wooden tile. Hay was of better use for animals, but many of Travaska's people came from the east of Umbria and traditions kept the darkness at bay. The wind from the dark mountain howled through the streets and Myra pulled her cloak tighter about her shoulders.

  Myra passed Zdisla the Cooper, Rada the Horseman and Vala the butcher's wife before she entered the small cottage that her father Jana owned with uncle Bora. Her mother Mila stoked the hearth as Myra closed the door behind her, shoving bits of old rags into the gaps.

  "Ah, Myra, we were worrying!" Mila gave her daughter a broad smile, but uncle Bora snorted at the table with his whittling knife and a piece of oak. "Did the widow settle her accounts or must we wait until Spring?"

  "She did. Where is Papa?" Myra looked around the small cottage, but she did not see anyone in the loft, and the two small rooms on the ground floor remained closed. Looking in her satchel, she gave a small pouch of polished stones to her uncle.

  "Working late with the new batch. The hunters came at dusk. He will be home at mid moonslight," Bora stated without taking his eyes from the small figurine emerging from his knife's edge. A leather satchel of tools lay in front, but Myra rarely saw her uncle use anything but the small st
eel blade.

  "I will help with supper Mama."

  "Ladle out bowls for the three of us, and after we eat, you can take a bowl for Papa at the tanning sheds."

  ~

  The north wind howled from the mountain, a roaring banshee freezing Myra to her bones, the warm bowl in her hands clutched to her bosom a paltry defense against its onslought. The tanning sheds lay across the pond far from Travaska's cottages. The palisade enclosed it all, the tanning sheds to the west, the pond in the middle, the village to the east, mostly because the forest was an inexhaustible resource. Not for a hundred years of tree felling could the people of Travaska do more than keep what they had already cleared for their animals and terraced fields. The older folks swore that a Green Man ruled nearby, his song calling vines to spread and trees to grow tall and wide. The mountain's dark soil was rich and thick, and the forest quickly reclaimed any land that lay fallow for more than a few seasons.

  The light from the tanning sheds guided her path, the moonslight obscured by a blanket of clouds that first appeared in the morning and grew darker throughout the waning day. The north wind changed the seasons and Myra knew that with the smell of frost in the air in mid-Autumn promised a winter of ten span high drifts and more than one villager dying of the cold. Would it be lazy Deko who was still in the middle of re-thatching his roof? What about Neva the tailor who had no son to chop his firewood and depended on his next door neighbor Rada?

  The door to the tanning sheds was heavy and squealed on in its wooden wheels.

  "Papa? Are you here?" Myra called out, but aside from the stretched hides on the rowan racks, it was empty.

  Nearby, a wolf howled long and low.

  Myra hastily closed the door to the shed, built as large as any barn in the lowlands, with numerous racks of skins drying from the ceiling to the floor, draped across every wall. The smell was awful, but the skins were the primary reason Travaska still stood. The nobility and merchants of Carlisle all preferred sable and fox, but the legions needed deerskin to supplement the regulation cowhide for their armor and shields. Umbria was cold and forested, the growing season not quite long enough to meet the needs of a herd of cattle, and the Dog Soldiers never had enough armor with the campaign against the Centurian League, now in its fifteenth year. The war consumed young men and resources from Umbria to Mercia, from the Glittering Isles to the Penury Coast. The Realm's colonies in the Shining South suffered as Legions were recalled to march on Centurian lands.

  "Papa? Where are you? I brought you stew." Myra left the bowl on the workbench, a bit of leather braiding laying half complete. It would become a whip to sell to the slavers in the south. She had never seen a Catiin, but the beast men from the Shining South had a bad reputation across the Realm as savage and hot tempered. News came to the village a year or two after a major event in the world, whether it was the sack of Ishtar in the East by the Dread Legion or plague in Pelos-by-the-Sea. The sinking of Eigeon Tyrrau into the Sea traveled three years before its revelation as an offhand comment by a peddler explaining the high price of ink.

  Myra jumped in place at the next wolf's howl, seemingly coming from the other side of the shed's wall, built against the palisade.

  "Papa! Papa!" Myra wailed in despair, hastily climbing the ladder to the loft, sure that the beast would tear down the walls to get at her. Her mind raced at the tales of the Unseen People and their Wargs, huge wolves the size of horses trained to rend and tear any who stood against the tribal folk.

  "Myra? What is the matter?"

  Myra looked down as the shed door closed, and her father stood looking befuddled, his bald pate and bushy white mustache a stark contrast. His leather apron stained by oak tannen, he wore his sheepskin cloak and the same dark baggy clothes he always wore, complete with his worn brass buckled shoes cinched to the knee. It was spare clothing for so cold an evening.

  "Oh Papa, the wolf... did you not hear it?"

  Jana the Tanner laughed seemingly unafraid of the howling beast. "We stand behind a log palisade twenty spans tall! No wolf can climb, nor can any jump over our wall! Do not fear little Myra!"

  "You are sure? It... it sounded so close."

  Jana laughed again. "Do you hear it now? No. It is gone. The smells from the tanning sheds sometimes draw them near, but the same smells drive them away. Now, is that a bowl of stew on the ground?"

  Feeling abashed, Myra descended the ladder to the floor as her father greedily ate with the wooden spoon carved by his brother. Everything in their cottage was either leather or wood, and the only ironware were tools protected with great care. Despite the mountain's proximity, no serious mining attempts produced more than the stone for foundations.

  "Ah, here, take this back to your mother unless you want to help me with the skins!" Jana laughed again, his smile baring clean white teeth as he shoved the empty bowl at Myra.

  The girl looked curiously at her father, unsure if she had seen what she thought.

  "Yes Papa, you will be home late?"

  "Ah yes, of course. Now run along little Myra, I have much work to do if I am to save some of these skins that the hunters brought."

  Myra walked out, but as she closed the door, she thought she saw puncture marks in the neck of a stretched out deerskin. The puncture marks looked about the size of a wolf's jaws.

  ~

  The north wind whipped her cloak about her as Myra nearly ran home with the empty bowl and spoon. Her mind raced at the memory of her father's amber eyes catching the lamplight and the laugh, so different than the meek and homely Jana that she knew. The more she replayed that moment in the shed and her escape, the more she was sure that there was something predatory in Jana's smile.

  As Myra opened the door to the family cottage, the smell of the stew greeted her and the warm hearth called to her bones. She lashed the door shut with the strip of rawhide, shoving the old clothes into the cracks of the door before heading to the wooden bench in front of the hearth.

  "Cold eh?" Bora sat in his chair wrapped in a sheepskin. The stones from the Widow were gone, the ledger closed on the shelf. Bora ran the trading post and traded anything and everything.

  Myra ignored her uncle and wrapped her cloak more tightly about herself as she thrust her hands towards the hearth's bronze grate, rescued from a field on the south side of the mountain and traded for iron nails and leather.

  "Your father, he never minded the cold, even though he is so lean and stringy. Once, I saw him wearing next to nothing while shoveling a snow drift from the porch." Bora snorted, his fingerless gloves still at work whittling the figurine. Myra could just make out a quadruped shape, some kind of animal, lean and long.

  "Is it a horse you are carving Uncle?" Myra did her best to keep the man pleased, and getting him to talk about his woodcraft was the surest way to do so.

  "A horse? No, it is a wolf, and it will be wolves who do well this winter, you mark me."

  "Oh hush, Bora, you scare my daughter with such talk! We will be fine this winter, we always are."

  Myra looked at her mother knitting in her rocking chair, a blanket drawn over her lap, a shawl draped around her shoulders. She was making a new shawl of mohair, a decorative piece for sale to the peddlers when they came in the Spring.

  "I see you found your father."

  Myra nodded. She rubbed her hands in front of the hearth, working absent mindedly.

  "When I was little, you told me about the Unseen Tribe and their Wargs..." Myra began.

  Mila laughed but she never looked up from her knitting. "And?"

  "I... would like to hear of it again."

  Bora snorted but said nothing more.

  Mila sighed. "Yes, tonight is a night for the old tales. Do not tell Sister Agnis of the Temple come the next holy day!"

  "I won't Mama, I promise."

  Mila thought for a moment, then the clicking of her needles began again. "Ah, yes, I believe this is a story you have never heard because it is very sad, and it was not appropriate for a y
oung girl. You are nearly an adult Myra, and you must know what is in the heart of every Man. The Unseen Tribe used to live under the shadow of Mynydd Gwyll, long before this poor village was founded. You see, back in those long centuries ago, the world was smaller, and there were no cities such as there are now. The people were spread out thinly across the landscape, and the only life anyone knew was to hunt the wilds and collect the bounty of nature. No one farmed, no one built houses, we all moved about in packs, just like the wolves of this land. Everything was falling apart you see, and it seemed as if everything was dying with no one to mourn Man's passing. This was before the rise of the beast races in these lands, before Athan the Wise pulled the greatsword Sartorious from the Anvil of Stars, before a single ship of Thule plied the ocean's waves to bring torch and bloodshed to the Realm.

  One such pack called itself Gwyll Blaiddiau, or the Dark Wolves, and their leader was a tall, lean man with golden eyes who wore an enchanted wolf skin which allowed him to change into a Warg when the moonslight touched it. This wolf leader had a great ash spear tipped in bronze strengthened by magical spells that allowed it to pierce iron mail, and at his side he carried a bronze knife as long as a sword, which could cleave a Man's head off no matter how he crouched behind a shield. Some called him Melynion Llygaid, or Amber Eyes, but we remembered his real name, and Idriss Wolfskin was a mighty warrior and hunter. He was always accompanied by his young cousin Urian Snowmane, a brave lad who would become a hero to his people.

  In a valley far to the west of here Idriss and Urian found cloven hoof tracks too large for a goat or a sheep. Intrigued, they followed these tracks near a river clear and cold and there they saw a beautiful beast of pure white, with the fetlocks of a goat, the body of a horse with a single perfect pearled horn growing from its forehead which glowed with its own light. The creature saw the hunters and fled upriver, never once splashing any water for it could run on top. Idriss gave chase all day, but never once did the beautiful creature turn away from the river's protection. When night fell, Idriss turned his shape into a Warg, opening his senses beyond what a mere Man might smell, hear, or see. As a Warg, Idriss had a boundless constitution, but Urian was only a boy and rode the Warg through the night. They followed the trail by scent, and the fantastic beast smelled of newly fallen snow, pure and white and lovely. Sometime in the night, Urian fell but the hunt was in Idriss' nostrils, and he could not be stopped.