The Path of the Sword (10 page)

Still engrossed in their adventures, the others had not noticed the approaching figure and so it was up to Jurel to warn them.

“Guys, I'm off to the pond for a bit.” As he started his trot, he called over his shoulder, “Oh, and Valik's at the bottom of the hill.”

Did Darren groan? Did Trig sigh? Jurel was not sure but the idea was comforting as he made his way down the steep slope toward the water. The pond rippled like wrinkled silk and tufts of reeds poked out like unruly hair. The sun reflected so it looked like he was seeing a glowing pool of quicksilver. It was for this reason that he did not notice the presence of the three boys that sat at the pond's edge until he was no more than a score of paces away from them.

A little surprised—it was a rare thing indeed to see newcomers of any sort—he called out, “Halloo.”

In unison the three figures jumped, went ram-rod straight as though they had been caught at some crime. One of them twisted and almost fell over in the process. In the midst of regaining his balance a hint of clay caught Jurel's eye. A pot? A jug?

The boy handed whatever it was to another and rose on unsteady legs to face Jurel. Of an age with Jurel and the others, he glared bleary eyed and wavered where he stood.

“Whaddaya want?” the boy slurred.

Jurel had continued his approach and now that he was barely more than an arm's length away, he saw that it was an earthenware jug. A flash of shock accompanied the realization that these boys were quite drunk. He was proud of the fact that he hid his surprise and he shrugged as nonchalantly as he could manage.

“Nothing. My friends and I often play down here so I was coming down to enjoy the sunset.”

As the other two rose to their feet, mirroring their leader's glare, and his stagger, Jurel began to think that maybe these boys wanted to be left alone.
Too late for that,
he thought apprehensively.

“Well, yer
friens
don't seem t'be ere, now do they?” he asked with a smirk and his friends chuckled.

“Do your fathers know you're here?” Jurel asked and he could have gladly kicked himself for it.

“Do yer fadder's know yer ere?” one of the others mimicked in a sarcastic falsetto and this time the chuckle was louder, and less friendly.

“Look
boy
,” the leader said. “I don't care if you an yer friens use ta play ere. Dis is our pon now an I don' wanna see yer ugly face roun ere no more. Got it?”

As if to punctuate his meaning, he raised a fist and shook it at Jurel. Swallowing the lump in his throat, Jurel took a step back, raising his own hands in a gesture he hoped would be seen as mollifying.

“The pond is plenty big for all of us,” he tried and again he berated himself. Entirely too whiny, he thought.

“Ain' none too bright, is yer? I jus said this ere's our pon. Scram you lil turd.”

He did not need to be told again. He fled, racing up the steep slope until he reached the summit and he did not stop running until he reached his own circle of friends.

He did not care that he interrupted Valik's tale of some woman who did him all sorts of favors in some city far away. It was not true anyway; Valik had never left the farm as far as Jurel was aware. He barely registered Valik's hands clenching into fists, or the angry glare on his pinched rat face.

“Well well. Look who had the balls to show his face around me,” he sneered. “Unless you want a good beating, get lost. We don't want a lying coward with us.”

Although Wag hesitated, uncertain whether he should side with Valik or with Jurel, the others ignored the older boy's comments.

“What's the rush, Jurry?” Trig asked. “We thought you were heading down to the pond.”

When he finally stopped gasping enough to speak, he gestured back over his shoulder.

“There's some other boys down there. I'm pretty sure they're drunk. They told me to get lost-”

“Seems there's a lot of that going around,” Valik cut in darkly.

Surprisingly, it was Erin that came to his defense—along with her ever present echo.

“Leave him be Valik,” she chided. “What's wrong Jurel?”

As might be expected, by the time he finished telling them what the drunken boys said, hiccuping and gasping his way through, there was a general uproar. Muttered comments turned to angry proclamations that they would reconquer their territory.

They stood in a tight circle like a fist, as Valik told them what they would do. He turned a glower on Jurel but it was not a glower aimed at him. For the first time in memory, Valik seemed to have forgotten his animosity toward him, instead focusing his anger on their mutual enemy.

“How many are there?”

“Three,” Jurel said with burgeoning fear at the direction the conversation was taking.

“Three of them, four of us,” Darren asserted with a wolfish grin.

“And they're drunk,” added Trig.

“Hey what about me? There's five of us!”

Wag was jumping up and down, excited as a puppy and he seemed genuinely afraid that the others would not include him in the upcoming war.

“Four and a half, at best,” Valik smirked. “What exactly is a pipsqueak like you going to do, eh? Bite their ankles? Eh?”

He laughed at his own joke, well satisfied when he saw the resentment and disappointment on the little boy's face.

The mood was certainly a dark one and it seemed that the entire sky dimmed for it, though Jurel was not sure if this was so or if his imagination played tricks on him. There was no doubt what the others were planning and icy fingers crept up his spine. This could not happen. It was just a pond, after all. Surely when the other group was sober they would not be so belligerent, right? But the course was set and he was not sure he could bring himself to do his part. And if he did not, he would be an outcast.

There was an unspoken law among boys. They backed each other up without fail in any situation. If one was caught in a prank, the others joined in the blame. If one was in danger, the others rallied to defend him. If one got into a fight, the others would stand at his shoulder. He was not sure he could if it came to blows. None of them knew what he knew. Fighting was not the way. Fighting only led to pain and loss. He was already trembling with dread and they had not even begun to walk back down to the pond.

“Please let's not fight,” he begged.

Contemptuously, Valik rolled his eyes but Darren placed a comforting hand on Jurel's shoulder.

“Don't fear Jurel,” he said in what was surely meant to be a comforting tone though his eyes were fierce. “We'll talk with them. Once they see we're serious, they'll surely leave.”

“Just talk?”

“Of course,” Trig said. “None of us really wants to fight after all.”

He should have been comforted. Their words should have made him feel better. But as the boys turned and marched like a troop of infantry toward the pond, he felt only a hollow place, dark and shadowed like the mouth of a cold, damp cave, open up in him.

With nothing else to do, he swallowed the lump in his throat, and he followed.

* * *

The boys were sitting right where Jurel had left them, still passing around their jug. They were singing a tune—though perhaps
singing
was too charitable a word;
bawling
may have been more appropriate. By their laughter, it might also have been bawdy if the words had been intelligible, and Jurel's friends halted only a few paces away, just about the same spot that Jurel had stood a few minutes before, without being noticed.

Valik stepped forward and tapped one of the intruders on the shoulder. With a yelp, the boy spun to goggle owlishly at him. The song dwindled to nothing and the other two turned to look up at their opponents. In unison, the three rose to stand unsteadily facing them.

It all seemed like a bad dream to Jurel. Like the dream he sometimes had where he stood in a grassy field and all seemed well at first. The sun shone, the breeze cooled him and everything should have been right. Except somehow it was not, somehow there was the feeling of impending doom, as if the wind itself whispered to him to run, to hide. But he could not, even when somewhere in the distance a rumble began and roared toward him at unimaginable speed. Even when he found that the source of the roar was the ground falling away, disappearing into the depths of nothing and it was getting closer. He always tried to run then, always tried to do as the wind so urgently whispered, but his feet were planted to the spot and they would not obey his command. Clouds roiled in and covered the sun, faster than was possible and in steel gray gloom, he watched as the ground collapsed, as the line between standing firm and falling forever raced toward him...

“So I hear we're not welcome at our pond anymore,” Valik said and Jurel could not help but be impressed by the amiability of his tone like they were old friends catching up. “Might I ask who you would be to take our pond away from us?”

“None o yer bizness.”

The leader was of a height with Valik and they stood eye to eye. Valik's mild demeanor fell away as they stared at each other: two wolves challenging each other for dominance.

“I tol yer stupid frien there you weren welcome ere no more.”

“Well, you see, we have a little problem with that,” Valik said, smooth as silk and hard as steel. “Why don't you pack up your little wagons and walk out of here while you still can.”

“You threatnin sumpin, boy?”

“I'm not threatening. I'm promising.”

Each boy took a step toward the other, each boy raised a fist and they seemed like two knights preparing to duel over an insult.

Frantically, for he thought he could feel the ground start to fall away, Jurel tugged at Darren's sleeve as he watched the unfolding horror with wild eyes.

“I thought you said we were just going to talk.”

“We did. They don't want to listen.”

A new voice began screaming,
NO! NO! NO!
Jurel almost turned to search for the new voice before he realized it was his own and it was in his head. He blinked. Somehow there was water in his eyes and it stung like...like sweat. But it was not hot enough for sweat, was it? If his breakfast had not been so far away, he was certain he would have lost it then.

“Well in that case,” the drunken boy began but the voice was hollow and seemed to come from the other side of the pond.

Instead of finishing his thought, the boy swung a wild fist at Valik and although Valik reacted quickly, it was not quite quickly enough. The fist caught him solidly in the shoulder and he cried out. Simultaneously, Trig and Darren responded, lunging forward. Like him or not but laws, even unspoken ones, had to be obeyed.

Jurel could not make his feet respond.

Come on! My friends are in trouble.

NO! NO! NO!

Please.

NO!

His mouth worked wordlessly and he watched helplessly with blurred vision as the battle was well and truly joined. Arms swung like clubs, bodies writhed. Voices yelled angrily when fists were hurled, and howled in pain when they landed.

Still Jurel stood rooted to the spot, motionless except for the trembling that shook him like a sapling in a gale.

NO!NO!NO!NO!

The drunken boys attacked furiously, seemed unaware of the blows they took so fortified were they by whatever they had been drinking. He watched and he saw. Darren went down under a flurry of fists falling like an axed tree, Trig's head snapped back and he stumbled as blood sprayed from his nose glittering in the sun like rubies from a broken necklace. He saw all of this and still his feet would not obey him.

There was a growing pain behind his eyes, like an iron band stretched too tight and in his ears, he heard an unearthly ringing like a hundred crystal bells struck over and over. In that ringing, he heard sorrow and loss. But there was more: he heard fire, rage, and longing.

“Jurel! Jurel, come on!”

Valik's voice reached him from far away, so far away that it could have been from the other end of the world, beyond a chasm of falling ground, and even the sight of him seemed obscured as if he looked down a metal tube and through dirty glass. He blinked, tried to clear his eyes but instead of clearing, he...

Blinding light
flashed
, seared his eyes, like a bolt of lightning that struck too close.

His father stared at him. Not Daved. No, his
father
. Gram. He was wide-eyed with fear as he gazed at Jurel. The acrid stench of burning clawed at him, made him gag.

Another bolt, a second
flash!
and Valik punched someone in the gut. He was holding his own but there was an angry gash along his jaw. It reflected the angry glare in his eyes. Trig pulled someone off Darren and spun him, punched him in the cheek. He knew the voices still yelled, he saw their mouths working with it. But it all seemed lost in the insistent pealing of the bells in his ears.

But that was not quite right. He
did
hear screaming. It was not the screaming of children fighting. No, it was the screaming of men dying, forlorn, bereft of hope, full of loss, emptying of blood. There was another voice too. A keening voice, thin and reedy. A tormented voice that he dimly realized was his own.

Flash!

He cowered under the wooden table in the tavern. Even at his young age, he knew he was only moments from dying. A glance toward a darkened corner revealed his mother staring at him but she did not see him. Her mouth hung open as though surprised by something and a silken thread of blood dripped from her lip to the floor.

He averted his gaze, back to his father who was being held by filthy men clad in leather. A third, standing in front of his father, facing him with his viciously serrated sword. The filthy man thrust forward...

Flash!

The ringing in his ears was deafening, maddening, so powerful that he clamped his hands to his head but that did nothing. It continued to rise in pitch and volume. It was so loud that it even affected his sight; he could no longer make out the battle that waged in front of him. He did not see Valik spin, eyes wide, as a tooth glittered, spun lazily in the air. Instead, he stood in a world of black, shot through with ragged colors, blood red and pus green, that pulsed like a demon's heart.