Offspring (The Sword of the Dragon) (12 page)

“Look well at him,” one father said to his son as Ilfedo marched by with Ombre and the Warrioresses in tow. “This man will lead our people into an era of prosperity.”

“Did he really take on the king of serpents all by himself?” The son’s eyes sparkled as he kept his ear inclined toward his father and his gaze upward to Ilfedo. He pointed with his small hand. “Is that the sword people say was given him by a dragon?”

“He is looking at you, my son! Stand straight and smile. One day you will tell your children that this hero noticed you in the crowd today.”

The boy stood stiff and grinned.

The next several months mayors and other representatives from all over the Hemmed Land sought Ilfedo out, pledging their support. A few men of evil intent came to him as well, but he saw through their facades, found out their corrupt states, and replaced them with simpler, more honorable men.

By unanimous decision, the inhabitants of the Hemmed Land accepted Ilfedo as the Lord Warrior: a title that had belonged to only one other man in recorded memory.

Scrolls made of skins had been passed from generation to generation—scrolls that gave them precious insights into their heritage, though not enough to solve the mystery of their origins. One man was spoken of in the scrolls, a man who’d held the title of Lord Warrior.

The scrolls made it clear that this role not only carried with it the responsibility of safeguarding the people, but it also gave him who held the position final say in all matters of government. Pertaining to responsibility it did not match the position of a king, as it was commonly understood, for the Lord Warrior was
obligated
to put his life before those of his people. And it was known that he was a man of integrity who would not be swayed by bribes, nor live in the lap of luxury.

Most people considered the majority of the scrolls in which these things were written to be little more than fiction based on threads of fact that were so slight the truth could not be discerned from them. Compounding this belief was the fact that the scrolls had been scribed by a man known only as the Count. His writings were loved by all. However, the vast majority of the Hemmed Land’s people laughed aside his fabled travels, in which he always happened to fill a central role in the saving of a civilization, or the mediation of some territorial dispute, or some other such fantastic event.

The Count claimed in his writings that there had been many Lord Warriors. Some, he declared, purportedly built themselves crafts to fly through the sky. At this juncture, people would smile and advise their children that this was nonsense. And they would point out that the Count, having exaggerated the legends of their ancestors to such a gross extent, could not be wholly believed to have been telling the truth.

But the people embraced the idea of having a Lord Warrior. Ilfedo fit the image that every child, parent, and grandparent had pictured a Lord Warrior to be. He was tall, strong, sober, and his battles with the Sea Serpents, his hunt for the man-killing bears, and his duel with the serpent king had made him a living legend.

In Ilfedo they saw hope for the future and a land freed from the fear of monstrous beasts roaming at will.

The Hemmed Land started to change under his leadership. Most thought it was for the better.

He ordered the building of roads to connect the towns and settlements along the shore of the Sea of Serpents. With travel quicker and easier between once-distanced centers of civilized living, the towns grew and the forest settlements cut down the trees in order to expand.

The five sisters had become legends in their own right. Wherever they went they were treated with admiration, honored, but too closely observed for their comfort. Keeping for the most part out of the public eye, they dwelt in the wilderness, caring for their deceased sister’s daughter.

The bearded old fisherman and his crew gathering their nets on the shore muttered to one another as impenetrable, misty rain seeped through their tunics. It seemed the gray sky thickened with each sopping minute.

The sky lightened for an instant, or rather it flashed. Young and old faces turned upward, blinking back the water that coursed down their skin. Chilled to the bone and weary after a most unprofitable day, they grunted and renewed their attention to their nets. As they stretched the nets on the shore and examined them for rips, a distant rumble made them stand upright.

He looked out to sea, that old Sea of Serpents, expecting lightning to flash. Instead a dull boom echoed from the east above the frothing waves, and a bright object hurtled through the clouds, large and pulsing.

The fisherman let the slimy net slide through his fingers and fall to the white sand. He narrowed his eyes, inquiring of his neighbors with a glance before looking seaward.

Pulsing white light burned a determined path toward the shore. It descended rapidly. The rain thickened and evaporated into steam around it. At last it touched the tumultuous waves, sending a fresh cloud of steam upward as it buried itself in the sea.

“Meteor,” the grizzly-bearded fellow grunted to the others. He returned to his net and began mending a tear.

His friends joined him, picking up the work they’d neglected.

Absorbed in his task, the fisherman let time fly around him. The rain lessened, the clouds thinned, and thinned some more, until moderate sunlight warmed his shoulders. It had to be at least an hour later. “Yimshi’s light is burning today,” one of the fishermen admitted, glancing at his red shoulders. He rolled his net into his wood boat and jogged into the surf.

“Yeah, ‘nuff work for now!” another man said, loosening his tunic and joining the first. “I can use a cool swim.”

The remaining fishermen stampeded into the water, grins brightening their tanned faces. The grizzly-bearded fellow laughed as he watched them, but remained by his net. He finished mending the tear and slung one corner of the tri-sided net over the bow of his single-masted fishing vessel. The prow of his boat rested solidly on the white sand while the sea water lapped at the stern. He held the rail and let his knees buckle, hanging on as his weight stretched his stiff back muscles.

Something knocked into his knee, and he glanced down to find a ghostly-white face glaring up at him. “Shivering timbers!” He jumped back. The other fishermen sloshed out of the water and stood in a half-circle behind him. He knelt and waved his hand across the face of the individual before him. The new arrival’s eyes seemed frozen open, and his shoulder-length white hair pulsed in sync with the incoming seawater.

“Who is he?”

“How should I know?”

“Would you look at those eyes! I thank God I don’t have eyes like that.”

“Yeah, would be a bit embarrassing—girlish, even.”

“Big fellow, though.
I
wouldn’t cross him.”

The grizzly-bearded fellow flipped their white-haired guest onto his stomach and pounded his fists into the man’s back.

Bile and water spewed from the new arrival’s mouth, and he coughed. When he could breathe freely, he rose to his feet and faced the assemblage of humble laborers. His pink—almost white—eyes made him seem soft and childlike, that is, until he spoke in a voice deeper than any present. “My gratitude to you all. You have, perhaps, preserved my life. Tell me now: what part of the world is this?”

The grizzly-bearded fellow stood in front of him. He crossed his arms in front and eyed the white-haired man up and down. No shirt, only loose-fitting blue-gray pants made of coarse fabric, but around his waist a belt of hammered steel. An assortment of heavy tools hung from it, including an anvil no bigger than a large man’s fists, tongs, a long narrow file, and a curious hammer with a wooden handle and shiny silver head. It was a miracle the stranger had washed ashore with those heavy items attached; they should have drowned him in the depths of the sea.

“Before answering your questions”—the grizzly-bearded fisherman held up his forefinger—“how about answering a few of my own?”

For a moment the man’s pink eyes flared, then he gently nodded his head.

“Good. What is your name and—”

“I am Linsair, a sword smith. My origin is harmless, though none of your affair, and I speak without guile. So you need not fear me.”

The grizzly-bearded fellow unfolded his very large arms and leaned against his vessel. “Smoothly spoken, Linsair the sword smith, but we know not you nor
of
you. And whatever cause would make you hide your origin concerns me. Well, rather, it concerns us?” He paused.

“Yes,” his fellow fishermen declared.

“So you see, Linsair, I do not desire to make an enemy of you, and I am not forbidding your entry onto our soil. Ilfedo the Lord Warrior himself welcomes travelers who bear us goodwill. It is part of this process of growing many settlements and towns into a strong nation.” He cleared his throat as the other men lent him a short cheer, for he thought he’d handled that phraseology rather fine. Though there was a lack of truth in his statement concerning travelers, for the Hemmed Land, to his knowledge, had not been visited by a foreign human in his generation.

“I am not a suspicious old sea lubber,” he said. “But I do find the timing of your arrival a bit strange. Never in our recorded history has a stranger come to us from the Sea of Serpents. Did you fall from the heavens by meteorite?”

“You have deduced correctly.” Linsair bowed to the grizzly-bearded man and walked barefooted toward the coastal town with his head held high.

It was a strange encounter by all counts, the fisherman said to his neighbors. Some thought they should stop the stranger and moved as if to follow. The grizzly-bearded fisherman held them back. “Let him go where he will. He seemed to be an honest fellow, even if a bit water-logged—‘fallen in a meteorite,’ indeed preposterous! And yet he may prove useful to the Lord Warrior.”

Linsair left the shore in peace and, arriving in town, found the sign of The Wooden Mug. He tried to blend in with the townsfolk. But two men who had too much to drink harassed the proprietor. Linsair bade them go home and consider God’s ways. “Are they not the chief of all ways?” he asked them. “He gave you breath and life. Should we not honor such a glorious master?”

One of the men hiccupped. “Look, Smithy, you’re in the wrong part of town.” He took another swig from his mug and put it back on the table, gazing into Linsair’s pinkish eyes. “Take your preaching to Brother Hersis where it’ll be appreciated.”

Linsair overturned the table and growled with such force that he might as well have been a creature, not a man. The inn quieted around him as he strode to the door and onto the cobblestone street.