The Bones of the Earth (The Dark Age) (7 page)

The monster saw Javor and swatted one huge hand down on Javor’s head. Javor fell to the ground, sending a fresh, unbelievable jolt of pain up from his thigh. The only thing he could think was
Hold onto the amulet
.

He could hear the monster coming closer, could feel its breath on his back, but he could see only blackness. Then he felt the dagger’s fish-shaped handle find its way into his palm. He rolled, slashing the dagger upward and kept rolling to dodge the thing’s entrails spilling onto the ground.

The monster fell to its knees. Though mortally wounded, it would not stop. It flailed its arms as if trying to swat Javor, to squish him like a fly. Ignoring the pain in his leg, Javor stood and brought the dagger down like he was chopping wood. He felt it dig into something and kept pushing it until the monster’s arm fell, severed, to the stony floor.

The monster screamed, but there was no more power in its voice. Javor gripped the amulet in his left palm and straightened. Holding the dagger in both hands, he brought the blade down as hard as he could into the monster’s head. The dagger bit deep and extinguished the red glow in the monster’s eyes. It slumped forward, limp on the ground and did not move any more.

Javor stood looking at the beast for a long time. The only sound he could hear was his own panting. Photius staggered to his side and put his hand on the young man’s shoulder.

“
You’ve done it, boy!” he panted. His voice was hoarse. “You’ve destroyed the scourge of Dacia, the bane of many fine warriors who have tried. And you have achieved your revenge.”

Javor didn’t answer. His mind whirled. He saw the monster lying at his feet, and his parents’ bodies in their own home. He didn’t even know how he felt, himself. Should he laugh or cry, or howl in triumph? He didn’t feel triumphant. He felt —

“
Owwww,” came a low groan from his throat.

Photius crouched, holding his blue-glowing staff next to Javor’s thigh. Carefully, he pulled the ripped cloth away and frowned. “Well, it could have been worse. Much worse. I can help it, but I’ll need water. We’ll have to get out of here quickly.”

He asked Javor to hold the glowing staff and, using Javor’s small axe, hacked off all eight of the monster’s claws one by one, dropping them into a bag. Javor’s stomach squirmed as Photius picked up the severed arm and arranged it on the ground to make chopping the claws easier. Then he pulled the head around and, to Javor’s great disgust, used pliers to pull out two of its teeth.

“
What are you doing?”

“
A demon’s claws and teeth contain powerful magic, Javor,” Photius answered without looking up. “And power like that can be very useful if one has the knowledge.”

“
Is that why you brought me here—to kill the monster so you can get its magic?”

Photius still didn’t look up. “Remember, boy, I didn’t bring you here. You came of your own accord, seeking revenge. And you’ve succeeded. I would not have predicted that.” He took back the staff and poked through the debris on the floor. “Well, this monster has been here for some time. Less than a century, though.” He stooped, picked up a handful of gold and silver coins, and dropped them into a pouch tied at his waist.

“
Well, well, look at this, here.” He brought a long sword in a metal scabbard to Javor. Photius looped one of its two belts around Javor’s waist, and the other over his shoulder. In the bluish light of Photius’ staff, Javor could see that the scabbard was decorated with triangular patterns. He drew the sword and saw more triangles and some spiral patterns. He thought looked similar to the markings on his dagger.
More runes
? Somehow, the sword felt good buckled on.

Photius gathered more gear from the debris of other warriors who had tried and failed to kill the monster. He buckled a short sword around his own waist, and took a helmet for Javor.

Javor took a a few treasures for himself: a metal wristlet with jewels worked into it, a necklace and some coins. He put his grandfather’s knife in its sheath on the sword-belt on his right hip, and tried the helmet for size. A little loose, but not bad. The visor would take some getting used to, he thought. The throbbing in his thigh would not stop.

A sudden shriek: above them, a shadow darker than the gloom of the cavern’s heights fell. In less than a second it was upon them, the winged dragon from the slope outside. Photius threw himself face-down on the cavern floor, but Javor held his hands up, foolishly trying to ward off the danger. Somehow, the amulet was again in his left hand. At the last instant, the dragon swooped up again, shrieking angrily, and disappeared, impossibly, Javor thought, down the narrow tunnel.

A rumble came from deep below their feet and a fume came out of the glowing chasm. The cave seemed to shake. “We had better get out of this cave,” said Photius. “But first, we must return this monster to the depths it came from. Come, help me push!” He put his hands against the monster’s mutilated shoulder. Javor started pushing on the legs and felt pain stabbing up from his thigh through his whole body. Somehow, they heaved the monster’s carcass toward the chasm. With one final push, the body went over the edge and fell down, down, down until they could no longer see it. They heard no sound of it hitting bottom, no splash. Photius tossed the severed arm after the body and it, too, disappeared into the shadows.

The whole mountain began shaking. Noise, fumes and flames leapt out of the chasm. Photius grabbed Javor’s arm and pushed him into the tunnel, yelling “Run!” They ran as fast as they could for the surface, not daring to look back at flames and molten rock leaping out of the chasm.

With a dash and a roll, they reached the open air just as a violent wrenching of the ground knocked them down. Javor scrambled to his feet, but Photius could not find his footing with the mountainside crumbling beneath him. Javor helped him up, then snatched their packs. Together, they slid down the steep slope as the cave entrance collapsed into a ruin of tumbled rock.

Finally, they came to a stop at a relatively flat spot, scattered with stones as big as Javor’s head. “Well done, my boy, well done,” Photius coughed. “Maybe we shouldn’t have rolled the monster into the chasm, after all. Still, how was I to know? Ah, well—next time.”

“
Next time for what?” Javor demanded.

“
Next time I find a dead monster.” He straightened his clothing, pulled his pack onto his shoulders, picked up his staff, pulled his hood over his head and started back down the long path. “It’s getting late, but we’d best get as far down this mountain as we can before it’s too dark to go any farther. It’s still an evil place. Come, Javor.”

“
What about the dragon?”

“
It seemed scared off by your amulet, my boy. At any rate, we’ll have to take our chances, and we need some water to tend to your wound. I don’t fancy sitting on this mountain all night long.”

They stumbled down the mountain through the deepening darkness. Soon the nearly full moon rose, and in its pale light they managed to find a relatively flat area. “See if you can build a fire,” Photius suggested. He put down his pack and pulled out little sacks and a wooden bowl. He started mixing powders and water from a skin into a strange-smelling paste in the bowl, while Javor limped to find firewood.

When he had gathered a small amount of dead wood, he realized he had no way to start a fire. Photius poked the tip of his long walking staff into the midst of the wood and a bit of smoke rose. Soon, a campfire was burning, merry in its own way in that wasteland.

Photius rubbed the paste onto the wound, as gently as he could. “I’m sorry, my boy, it’s the best I can do out here,” he said as Javor flinched and gasped. But when the old man was done, Javor was surprised that his leg actually felt better.

So he let his frustration out. “Don’t give me any more round-about answers. How long have you been searching for this monster?”

Photius allowed his staff to dim, and the night closed around them. “Very well, I’ll tell you what I can.

“
I have been searching for quite a long time, following tales and rumours of evil and destruction. This monster, whose name is Ghastog—at least, that’s what my order has called it for over a century—has destroyed many villages and towns, and burned down a substantial portion of a city in Greece, too. For the past decade, it has travelled about Dacia and Sarmatia, taking life where it wants, and it has also wandered far from here at times. During that time, it gathered other evil forms to it, like the cold-drake you killed yesterday.

“
Two monsters in two days! What a warrior you have turned out to be, Javor!”

“
Never mind that, old man. Tell me what
you
are doing here now!”

Photius sighed and gazed into the fire. “My mission was to find the monster and find also a warrior fit to destroy it and all its foul brood. For it was more than wild and wanton, Javor. It was purely evil. Look about you: it exuded an evil spell that sickened, weakened and killed, sooner or later, anything in its vicinity. That’s why there is nothing living around here, save other evil creatures like it, and they spread around devouring what they need to live, and so their circle of evil spreads.

“
Creatures like Ghastog are old, Javor, old. Many centuries of centuries, older than you can guess. They may be older than the world we live in. They hate humanity, and fear us and are bent on destroying us.

“
For over a century now, their numbers have been increasing alarmingly. They seem to come from some source far in the east, in farthest Asia or the legendary islands beyond it. There is great evil coming from the east, Javor: pestilences and foul airs. That is why Rome has been overrun by wild barbarians from across the steppe lands—they are running from others who are themselves running from the evil that seems to have vomited from the doors of Hell itself. And that’s not all: the seas are rising. Whole coastlines around the Euxine Sea have been submerged, villages and towns drowned. It is as though the Earth itself was striving to destroy the human race.”

Javor shivered and leaned closer to the fire. “How do you know all this?”

“
I belong to an order of scholars and priests from many lands. We have many different beliefs, worship different gods, but we have drawn together to try to avert this threat to civilization, to humanity. We seek the Answer to the riddle of the nature of the world and these plagues and how we might destroy them forever. We are working together, as well as we might, to gather knowledge of these calamities, to share it and to fight them. We search for heroes, for dragon-slayers and monster-killers to remove this evil spawn—heroes like you, Javor.”

“
I
told
you, I’m no warrior!”

Photius smiled. “I have seen evidence to the contrary. Look at yourself—with no training and virtually no weapons, you just destroyed two monsters. A few days ago, you armed yourself with a knife and a farmer’s axe and set off fearlessly to rescue two girls from a gang of thugs. Those are warrior traits, as I see it.”

But Javor didn’t feel like a warrior. He realized how tired he was, how his whole body ached and how hungry he felt. He lay back against a rock, tried to get comfortable and soon fell asleep.

Chapter 6
: pain

Every step was agony. Pain shot up his left thigh every time he put his foot onto the stony ground. An ache snaked from his right hip, around the small of his back and up to his right shoulder. Javor realized it resulted from favouring his left foot. His boots were nearly worn out. His right boot was pinching his little toe where it poked out the side, and grit had worked in and scraped his sole.

The bruises on his chest and side smarted with every little bump from the salvaged armour—none of which fit very well. The helmet had become too hot and uncomfortable a long time ago, and he had tied it to his pack. Now it bumped against his hip with every step.

Photius talked all the way down the mountain and continued as they walked through the forests and meadows. “It seems as if the earth itself has determined to eradicate humanity. A century ago, Hell opened its gates, somewhere far to the East—perhaps even beyond Asia on the edge of the world. Out of those gates have issued hosts of evil: evil men and all sorts of monsters, and pestilences, diseases that men had never seen before,” he prattled on. “But that was not the first time that the earth has seen monsters or evil. No, evil has been with us forever. And the races of monsters are far older than the race of men. You can feel it, can’t you, the immense age of these fiends?”

Javor realized that he had not heard much of what Photius had been saying all day. There had been stories about monsters and demons and gods. But his attention was claimed by his thigh, back, shoulder and bruises.

Javor looked at the sky.
Clear tomorrow.
The farther they got from the monster’s cave, the more familiar and predictable the clouds and the weather looked, and the monster and dragon seemed less plausible. He had given up on looking over his shoulder for the dragon that attacked them on the mountainside because Photius did not seem concerned about it. The clouds made him think of sitting in the pasture again, and that made him think of his father …
not now.

To keep from thinking about his parents, he paid attention to Photius. “The dragons—which, of course, originated in the far East—their race goes especially far back, perhaps as far as the beginnings of the earth,” he was saying as he used his walking stick to push branches out of his path. “One of my colleagues, now, believes that the dragons embody the essence of the earth itself. Of course,” he laughed slightly, “I don’t hold with that, myself. How can they represent anything but the spirit of evil, when they wreak so much destruction wherever they go?”

How much farther is it to home?
Javor wondered.

“
Of old, a race of immortals arose on the earth and they began a war to rid the earth of the monsters. Some they imprisoned deep under the earth, others they pushed into the depths of the Ocean Sea, and some they simply slew with swords and other weapons. These monster-killers travelled around the world, destroyed many monsters and earned many names for themselves: Zeus, Apollo, Gilgamesh, Herakles, Siegfried. There are many stories, and some of them are simply fabrications. But doubt not, dear boy, that all those stories have some essence of fact, or at least they once did.”

Photius’ ceaseless voice began to irritate Javor. “I don’t know many of the old stories,” he said.

“
No? You never heard of Herakles, or Zeus, or ... “

“
Sorry.”

“
Hmm. Well, I’ve been doing all the talking today. Tell me the stories you have heard.”

“
The only story that I know is about my great-grandfather, Medvediu.” Javor could not stand the pain in his leg any longer. He sat on a log beside their path and stretched his legs in front of him, letting the pack fall into the brush behind.

“
Medvediu—that means ‘bear’ in your language, doesn’t it?” Photius asked, putting down his own pack.

“
Sort of. Medvyd is ‘bear.’ I never thought about that, before. He was a soldier in the Imperial Army, and fought against the Persians. He went to the Caucasus Mountains and killed a giant that had been terrorizing the people around, and he threw its body off a cliff, but no one ever found its body. Then he took some treasures from the giant’s cave ... ”

Photius pulled a small metal bottle out of his pack, then gingerly parted the torn trouser leg and applied two drops from the bottle onto the long, red welt that ran the length of the thigh. “Just as we did yesterday, your great-grandfather took that enchanted knife and magic amulet, and passed them down to you,” he said.

“
Yes. That’s why I had to get them back, you see: they’re the only things of any worth that my family ever had, and my mother gave them to me at my—my birthday ...” Tears welled up in Javor’s eyes, and finally a dam of some kind broke in him. He sat down by the path and cried. His father, his mother, six brothers and sisters, all killed one by one by pestilence, by a silent, mysterious death in the cradle, or in their mother’s womb—and now, most unbelievable of all, by a monster. Javor cried until he felt drained.

The sun was high. Photius gave Javor a small towel to dry his face. They sheltered in the shade of some beech trees, sipping Photius’ wine.

They started again when the afternoon had worn on and a northwest breeze cooled the air. Javor stepped gingerly on his left foot until he was sure the pain had decreased. His thigh was still uncomfortable, but he was surprised by how well Photius’ potion had worked.

“
I know how hard it is,” said Photius as he shrugged his pack onto his shoulders and led the way. “I lost my wife, too, to a pestilence, a mysterious plague from the East, when we were visiting in Persia.”

They continued in silence until Javor asked “How long have you been were you following it, searching for it? How did you come to my village a day before this—this monster?”

“
Indeed, I was looking for Ghastog. As I said, I belong to an ancient order of learned men (and some women, too, by the way) whose purpose is to find and destroy as many monsters, fiends, ogres and dragons as we can.”

“
But why?”

“
I told you: they’re inimical to mankind. It is the theory of my order that the legions of Hell began a war long ago and conquered the Earth, destroying many of the gods. And there is another phenomenon happening now: the arising of the one God. I am not certain what it means, but the old gods, it seems, are dying out.”

“
What does all this mean to me?” Javor asked, impatient.

“
It is your destiny, Javor.” Photius stopped dramatically. “You have been chosen.”

Javor stepped around Photius and kept walking. “Chosen? For what?”

“
To help rid the world of monsters, to clear the way for the development of mankind. You are destined to carry on the struggle to rid the world of monsters.”

“
Forget it, old man. I’m going back to my
holody
and putting my parents’ farm back together. I’ve had enough of monsters.”

With another dramatic gesture, Photius swept back his cloak to reveal a long sword belted to his side. “A long time ago, I was chosen. I have carried the struggle on. In my time, I have destroyed dozens of such things, werewolves and ogres and monsters that beggar description. I have seen comrades, friends, loved ones ripped apart by them. But I did not shy away from my fate. I was chosen, I took up the arms, and I fulfilled my destiny.

“
Now my doom has called me not only to follow demons, but in my old age, to find one to carry on the struggle for me when I am gone. And that one is you, Javor. You have been chosen to follow me.”

“
Choose someone else, old man. I don’t care about your monsters. I don’t want to chase ogres around the world. I want to go back to my village and marry Elli and raise children. Forget it!”

Photius laughed again. “I did not choose you, Javor! You have been chosen by a power far higher than me or the Emperor of Constantinople, or the Patriarch of the new Church. You cannot evade this fate, Javor. It will follow you.

“
Do not doubt yourself, Javor. Look at yourself: you’re taller and broader by far than anyone else in your holody, even your parents. You fought and defeated that monster without any training in warcraft, or in wielding a blade. And the magic amulet of your great-grandfather leaped into your hand of its own accord—because it knows its rightful owner.”

“
I don’t care, Photius. I want no part of this.”

“
If you’re so sure of that, my boy, then why haven’t you taken off the armour and sword?”

Javor swore and strode on, but he didn’t take off the armor or the sword.

By late afternoon of the next day, they could see Nastasciu again. Still, no one was out.
Just like the last time I came back, with Elli and Grat. I guess I’ll never get a hero’s welcome.

The villagers were still hiding inside the holody, but this time, he did not find it any more damaged than when he had left. Javor waved at a woman wearing a flowered kerchief on her head who was watching over the log-wall. She called down to someone else to open the gate.

People had set up temporary shelters inside. They were tending fires or cooking, afraid to venture outside the stockade. They stared at Javor and Photius.

Javor went to the big wooden cistern in the centre and scooped water into his hands to drink. He washed his head and when he looked up again, there was Roslaw. That fool, Borys, was behind his shoulder.

“
You’re back,” Roslaw said. Javor nodded and drank more water.

Hrech ran up and threw his arms around Javor. “You’re back! You’re alive! I was so worried for you!” He let Javor go, then hugged him tight again. Finally, he just stared as if he could not believe that Javor was really there.

The villagers gathered around them. “Where did you get the weapons?” Roslaw asked.

“
From the monster’s cave,” Javor answered. Small children came up to touch his buckler. One started to play with the helmet on the ground. “Don’t touch that,” said Roslaw, sharply, and the children backed away. But the whole village stood around them.

Javor pulled his boots off, wiggling his toes gratefully in the dirt of home.

“
So what happened to the monster?” asked Borys.

Photius put his hand on Javor’s shoulder. “Javor slew it after a tremendous battle, using the dagger of his great-grandfather, Medvediu.” From the back of the crowd, someone guffawed. “After dispatching the fiend, he despoiled it and then tossed its foul carcass back into the abyss whence it sprang.” Someone else snorted at that.

“
The monster is really dead?” Roslaw asked.

“
Verily!” Photius reached into the purse hanging from his belt. “Behold its claws!” And he held up one of the cruelly curved claws for all to see. The villagers drew back as if Photius would attack them with it himself.

Then Roslaw patted Javor on the shoulder. “Well done!” He smiled broadly, which twisted the scar across his face hideously. But his eyes were not smiling. “Thank you. Come, join us for supper. Tekla!” he called to his wife. Soon, Javor and Photius had bread, wine and meat and a crowd had gathered to listen to their story.

Photius did most of the talking. “We walked for days, three days trailing the fiend, on a trail as hellish as you can imagine. Every step was more and more desolate, until finally we were in the midst of a lifeless landscape. We stopped to rest for a moment, a minute’s respite from our labours, when we were attacked — ”

“
By the monster?” someone asked.

“
No, by one of its underlings, a minor cold-drake, a huge worm, the length of five tall men. I would have been devoured in an instant had it not been for the quick reflexes of young Javor here. He moves like a cat, indeed he showed himself a true warrior. He leaped and in one blow of his father’s axe dispatched the evil monstrosity ...”