The Merchant Adventurer (8 page)

Relan was wearing a new pair of boots. In fact, this was his first ever pair of boots of any kind. Up until this point he had worn only sandals or wooden shoes. And those had been hand-me-downs. In one way or another, it seemed that everything in Relan’s life had been a hand-me-down. That’s the way it was when you were the youngest of seven on a cold-water farm hidden away in the fog-shrouded mountains of Robrecht. There was plenty of work and nothing else.

But if they could see him now?

Over a linen tunic, he wore a shirt of shining chain mail. It wasn’t the best mail that Boltac had, but it was the best-looking. Around his neck, a cloak made of hammered felt was clasped with a chain of silver. On his hip, the sword Boltac had given him swung from a wide leather sword belt. On his opposite hip was a dirk with its handle worked into the shape of a screaming eagle. Pants of the finest, softest deer skin he had ever encountered were tucked into the black boots, which had high cuffs and silver buckles. This is how a Hero should look, he thought.

Oh, they had laughed at him on the farm–well, his older brothers and sisters had, Ma and Pa had been too tired. They took the news of his departure as they took all news, good or bad, with the tired stare of someone who has seen the worst that the seasons and the ways of man have had to offer. From long habit, they tried not to get excited one way or the other.

“You’ll be back,” his eldest brother had said, in imitation of the hard, bitter speech of his father. But then his stern face softened, and he added, “And you’ll be welcome. If you conquer the world, littlest brother, be sure to save us a piece.” A last smile and a wink and Relan had been on his way. He knew that none of his family expected ever to see him again. One way or another, when someone left the high valley, they never seemed to come back.

But if they could see him now! Mail glinting in the sunlight, hair blowing in the wind and the heels of these magnificent boots ringing off the cobbles. Announcing to all the world that he who walked in these boots was not a man to be trifled with.

Yes, he would go back. Just as soon as he was finished, he would go back home and show them. All of them. His sullen family, the joyless villagers. He would go back like something out of the sagas the strange wandering minstrels sang in a vain attempt to cheer the flat, simple people of the land. But he would wait until he had something more than a new suit of clothes to show for his Adventures.

The farther Relan walked through the city, the more troubled his mood became. Everywhere he looked, he saw the signs of the last night’s carnage. Blood spilled on the cobblestones, bodies lying in the streets. Loved ones gathering corpses. Families fleeing for the gates with possessions hastily piled in wagons. And fear on every face.

The music of his strides against the stones took on a sour note. He wondered if he should have done more last night. But the memory of what he had done, the creature and the killing of it, sent a shiver of fear up his spine. He hadn’t had time to think. Hadn’t had time to be afraid. But now that he had time, he was afraid, and worse. He was honest enough with himself to remember shaking afterwards. And the thought of going out into the night to face more of those snarling, tusked creatures on wolves–it turned his blood to water once again.

He should have done more to help. A real Hero would have fought all night. Would have fought until the enemy was driven from the city. But Relan had not. Why?

Perhaps because it wasn’t his city? At least not yet. He had only been in Robrecht a week. And it hadn’t been a pleasant week. Sleeping in a makeshift tent in a muddy ditch in the shadow of the south wall had been rugged enough. But the people were worse. Unfriendly, mean, shrewd, hard dealers one and all. None had the time to make a penniless Farm Boy feel welcome. For all the wonderful things he had heard about the cities, he couldn’t understand why everyone was so excited about them.

He had almost given up. Then he had met Sabriella. She had appeared to him in the muck and the mire of Robrecht’s agricultural market. Relan was on the verge of giving up. He had come to the farmers’ stalls to look for work. He was a strong lad and knew how to work hard. But as he stood there, hungry, exhausted, covered in filth, somehow he couldn’t bring himself to speak the words.

It would mean defeat. It would mean giving up and eventually going back to the farm in the tiny valley. It would mean that his brothers and sisters were right to laugh. And, worst of all, it would mean that the best he could hope to get from life would be that hard, beaten look that was the battered inheritance his parents had saved up for him.

“You seem troubled,” a voice said.

Relan turned, and gasped. “What are you?” He was taken aback by a vision of perfumed breasts, full, lovely, and contoured under sacred robes.

“I am a Priestess, a loyal handmaiden of the Temple of Dar, but how could you not know that?”

“I, uh, am… uh…”

“You are a traveler!” she exclaimed, saving him from his awkward stammering. “A wanderer, a seeker of Adventure!”

“Yes,” he said, because he would have said yes to anything this perfect, breathless woman said. She smiled, and Relan felt himself go weak in the knees. There was a gap between her front teeth that her tongue darted into and away from. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

“Dar commands us to serve all travelers and seekers,” she said. “Tell me your name.”

“Uh, Relan…?” he said, still bewildered.

“Well is it or isn’t it?”

“What?”

She laughed brightly, in a way that was as far from mocking as the bright sunshine is from the rain. “Very well, Relan. I am Sabriella. I am pleased to meet you,” she said with a curtsey. Then she slipped her hands around his arm and guided him from the marketplace.

“My, you are very strong,” she exclaimed, accidentally telling the truth.

She guided him along Robrecht’s streets until they were walking beside the nicest part of the river. The great keep loomed off to their right and almost managed, in the afternoon light, to look regal. Sabriella talked with him gently and gave him the gift of listening well and laughing often at his awkward stories. In no time at all, Relan was completely at ease with the radiant creature on his arm.

“Oh, but you must be famished!” she said, and dragged him into a small cookshop. The owner greeted her warmly, and they were soon seated. To her great delight, Relan had three bowls of stew. Best of all, the owner wouldn’t take payment. Which was good, because Relan was completely broke.

They went back out in the street and walked for a time that felt to Relan like both an instant and an eternity. The sun cast longer and longer shadows through the narrow streets and alleys until finally they heard the tolling of the temple bell.

“But I must return,” Sabrellia exclaimed, “I had not noticed the hours passing so quickly in your company. I have only been granted parole for the day, and the streets are not safe for such as I after dark.”

“I will walk you to the temple and keep you safe,” Relan said with all the sincerity there was in the world.

“You must not! I cannot be seen with you. And you cannot be seen with me. I know that to one so experienced in
Adventure
, the hardship of a dungeon and the Temple’s Questioner mean nothing, but I am a much frailer creature.”

“But, I don’t think–”

She placed a finger on his lips. “You are so strong, so handsome, so brave. I know that if I were in trouble–in danger, I mean–you would come for me. That you would save me. Just like a Hero. My Hero.”

He nodded like the idiot he was. And was going to follow her anyway, but then she paralyzed him with a kiss.

Of course, he had been kissed before. But the simple, sullen, load-bearing creatures of his village hardly seemed the same species as the delightful girl that pressed her painted lips to his. Such a kiss! He felt his feet break into a sweat. He closed his eyes and saw colors that he never imagined existed. It was the kind of kiss that would make a more experienced man ask some pretty hard questions about the purity of the Virgin Priestesses of Dar.

“Promise me you will meet me here tomorrow. Dar has inflamed me with love for you, and you cannot deny the Goddess her divine purpose. Say it! Say you will meet me.”

He swallowed hard and said, “I will.”

And then she ran off around the corner. As her sandaled feet slapped the cobblestones, Relan caught flashes of her milk white thighs beneath her flapping robe.

When she was out of sight, he rubbed his lips and smiled to himself. This was the start of it then. The grand Adventure of his life that he left the village to find.

Then the screaming started.

Relan rounded the corner so fast that he lost his footing and slipped on the cobbles. With the strength that came from long days of hard work on the farm, he caught himself on his palm and shoved the upper half of his body back into balance.

He saw two men in black running away with Sabriella, one holding her over his shoulder, the other glaring back at him and brandishing a wickedly curved knife. He was pretty sure
they
weren’t priests of the infinitely kind and forgiving Dar, Goddess of Mercy.

On the street in front of him, a third man lay on the cobbles. He lifted a hand weakly and called after the kidnappers. “Please! Don’t hurt her,” he sobbed. Sobbed, thought Relan? What weak, unmanly, un-Heroic behavior was this? Had this man not heard the sagas? The full-throated minstrels singing of Heroes rescuing beautiful Ladies in Distress through Selfless Acts of Valor? This was not how it was done.

Clearly, this man would be no help. Relan dashed past him and turned the corner. In front of him was a long alley. Sabriella was nowhere to be seen. What sorcery was this? Relan ran faster, trusting in his belief that if a Hero was pure of heart, he would prevail in the end.

In defense of this naiveté, Relan had spent many of his formative years listening to the wandering minstrels who came to the village longhouse to coax a meal out of the flint-hearted farmers with Tales of Valor. He knew them all by heart. And in not a single one of them had the Hero ever stopped to check the doors he ran past.

Relan ran on and on, running out of patience before he ran out of breath. He trotted to a halt and spun around, glaring at the blameless buildings of old Robrecht Town as if they had personally wronged him. But, in the end, he was left with the ugly fact: they had gotten away with the Love of his young Life.

Cursing his luck and the perfidious sorcery with which Sabriella had been snatched away from him, he returned to where he had lost her. The wretched man was still sobbing in the middle of the street.

When he heard Relan’s sandals, the man looked up and said, “She is my sister. Oh, cruel Gods, it is all my fault.” He dropped his head, and his long, stringy hair fell across his face. Sobs shook his shoulders.

Relan picked the man up and set him on his feet. The wretch weighed almost nothing. “Who?” he asked. “Where?”

“It’s all my fault,” the man repeated. His large dark eyes seemed like haunted pits sunk into his pale skin. “The dice. I lost too much money at dice. And they have come for her.”

Relan said, “I can rescue her!”

“You? You have money?”

“No, I have no money. But I have courage.”

“Courage?” he said, gazing into a hopeless middle distance. “They won’t take courage. I owe them money. Do you have money? Can you get money? I meant to get money at dice. But…” and here the pitiful sobbing took over once again.

“I can rescue her! If you would but tell me where they have taken her.”

“No, they would kill her before they would let you have her. No, money is the only way. It is the only way to do anything in this world,” the man with hopeless eyes said.

“Look at me. Look at me!” Relan commanded. “I will return your sister to you. This I vow. Now tell me, where they have taken her?”

“You?” said the man with a laugh bereft of hope. “You don’t even have a sword.”

The man’s pitiful wails seemed to follow Relan through the streets as he went in search of a sword.

Of course, a sword was hard to find. Relan had tried to beg or borrow one for two days before he worked up the nerve to go and talk to Boltac. He had gone to the market again, looking for work as a laborer. He had begged for change from rich passersby. But nothing had worked. Sabriella’s brother, a poor wretch named Stavro, lived in a shack built against the outside of the south wall. Every time he saw Relan, he wailed and cried. He told and retold his sad tale, claiming that it was all his own fault, but he would not
do
anything about it. He lacked the courage, he said. He lacked the strength, he said. All he had was Love for his sister and hatred for himself.

He was worthless, except for the information that Relan managed to extract from him. The men who had taken Sabriella worked for a thug named Hogarth, who controlled gambling in Robrecht. They had taken her to a hold in the south, a pile of dark stones on the river Swift known as the Tower of Forgetting. There they would keep her for a week. Then the rapes would start. The week after that, they would cut fingers off. Relan did not think to ask how this creature, Stavro, could describe such tortures in detail without breaking down into tears.

Relan, of course, vowed that he would rescue his lady (with all Faithfulness and Heroism) but the how of it had been impossible until he had saved the Merchant Boltac. Now that he was armed, free, and left to his own devices, the question became: what should he do? His lady had been kidnapped and wanted rescuing. He could think of no saga, song, or lay in which the Hero had left his lady in peril to embark on a larger, more important quest.

But, in a moment of unusually clear thinking, it seemed to Relan that the needs of the city should come before the needs of one heartbroken Hero. Shouldn’t they? Robrecht must be avenged, and the threat of these Orcs and that flying Evil Wizard had to be dealt with. Clearly, that was a selfless Hero’s first duty. Wasn’t it?

So it was that, lost deep in the shallows of his limited philosophy, Relan bumped into a wheelbarrow with a corpse in it. He muttered half an apology before he recognized the man pushing the barrow. “Stavro! You have survived the assault. I am so glad.” Relan heard a sharp intake of breath. A decidedly
feminine
intake of breath. He looked up to see a teary-eyed Sabriella on the other side of the wheelbarrow.

“Sabriella, you have been rescued!”

“Why, I uh, yes, Relow! I, uh, have been…” She looked from side to side, unsure of what she should say in this situation. Relan’s smile faded when he realized that the man standing behind her was none other than the man in black with the knife who had carried her away from him in the first place.

“My lady,” Relan said, “I thank the Gods that you have been returned to me unharmed, but I am confused by…”

“Oh, I just bet you are,” one of the men in black quipped.

“Silence, varlet, or I will stave in your head,” Relan said, because it seemed like the kind of thing a Hero should say in this situation.

“Let’s steal his boots!” said the man in black, because it was the kind of thing a Thief should say in this situation. Relan answered by drawing his sword.

“Oh ho, ho. Look who’s a man at arms now!” exclaimed the man in black, as he drew his wickedly curved dagger. “You’d best grease that up so it will hurt less when I take it away from you and stick it up your…”

“Whack!” said the man in black’s skull as the pommel of Relan’s sword came down on it.

“Please don’t hurt me!” cried Stavro. “Haven’t I been through enough?”

“You?” shrieked Sabriella, “What about me? How could you forsake your own sister, so recently rescued from ruffians of, uh, ill-intent!”

“Sister. You’re not my sister! I swear, they forced me to do it. Please don’t hurt me. Oh, Shirley, you sure know how to pick ‘em. I thought he was just a country bumpkin. Did you see how fast he moved?”

“Wait,” said Relan, feeling that he should have some part to play in all of this, “You know the men who kidnapped you?”

Stavro said, “Ah,
there
it is. You can take the bumpkin out of the country, but you can’t take the–OH MY GODS, I take it back, please don’t kill me.”

“I haven’t killed anyone… here,” said Relan, “What happened to him in the ‘barrow?”

“Torn apart, by those things,” said Sabriella, “those Hork-Hork things. He died trying to protect me.”

“Protect you!?!” cried Stavro. “We ran and you locked him out. I still remember him clawing at the door and screaming. Don’t look at me that way, Shirl. This grift is blown, this town is done for, let’s just bury Herveaux here and get on down the road.”

“Shirley? Your name is Shirley?”

“Well, I see you two have a lot to talk about,” said Stavro, “I’ll just wheel poor Herv out the east gate, and when Thorvin wakes up you can catch up with–”

“NO!” Relan and Sabriella/Shirley shouted.

“Those things are coming back, you know,” Stavro said ruefully. “It’s not safe.”

“I go to root out the source of this Evil,” said Relan, not taking his wide eyes from Shirley.

“Then you’re an idiot, kid,” said Stavro.

“No, he’s brave,” said Shirley, not taking her eyes off of him.

“But I see it is not the only Evil that plagues Robrecht Town. Treacherous woman. I… I… Loved you.”

“I know you did,” said Shirley, not without kindness. “That’s my gift. As for the rest,” she shrugged, “don’t blame me. It’s the world that’s treacherous; I’m just trying to keep up. Besides, a girl’s gotta make a living, hasn’t she? And I don’t have a big, strong man like you to protect me.” As she said this, she edged closer to Relan, unafraid of the naked blade in his hand. She pushed the flat of it gently out of the way with her fingertips.

“We were trying to take whatever money you could scrape together. I’m not proud of that.” She ducked her head bashfully, then threw her hair back to reveal an expanse of perfect, pale throat that drew Relan downward into her dangerously plunging neckline. “But the feeling was real, you know.” Then, like the sun breaking through the clouds after a storm, her pouty frown was replaced with a dazzling smile.

“Come with us!” she said. “We could journey the land together. Make money, have Adventures, share love–we could have it all. And with you I can finally ditch these losers.”

“Right here,” said Stavro, grunting as he struggled to push the unconscious Thorvin on top of the corpse already in the wheelbarrow.

Relan almost believed it. Shirley almost got away with it. But whether the Gods were looking out for Relan or Shirley’s luck had run out, didn’t matter. Relan caught a flash of morning sunlight as it glinted off the thin-bladed dagger Shirley was concealing along her wrist. It wasn’t stout enough to chop off a limb, but it was thin enough to slip between chain mail rings, just far enough to tickle his heart and kill him.

“What are you going to do with that?” Relan asked. And then he did it right. He didn’t give her time to explain. He didn’t give her time to stab him. He hit the beautiful creature in her beautiful face with his fist. Then he looked down in horror at what he had done. A Hero never, ever hit a lady.

Relan ran away in shame.

When he heard the punch, Stavro had just finished getting Thorvin into the wheelbarrow. When Stavro turned and saw Shirley unconscious on the ground, he said, “Aw, come on!” He was already sick of this day.

As Relan ran north, he thought he might have just learned some kind of lesson. The confusion, the pain in his heart, the feeling of being totally inadequate to the moment–yes, that’s what it always felt like when he’d learned a lesson before. But it wouldn’t be until years later that he would be sure.