by Liam Weiler
in Issue 101, June 2020
I. Heritage
The orange aura of a few candles rose to the tight loft, where young Sosarna leaned on her elbow, lending her attention to her father’s tale. The slight, thin-bearded man sat cross-legged with his back bent beneath the ceiling. He delivered the story with the meek but fervent wonder of a wild-eyed bard declaring the gods’ glorious deeds to a campfire assembly.
“The Osivni and the Eyrni had dwelt in peace for centuries upon Ngarteyr Isle,” he began. “The two peoples worshipped the same gods by the same rites, mostly letting each other alone. Chieftains, chosen for their prudence, governed close-knit clans. And only a man’s lineage truly bound him to his nation.”
Patriotic zeal smoldered in the jade rings around Sosarna’s pupils. Her slim fingers clung to the edge of her straw-filled mattress. Despite her attentive silence, an emptiness in her flat belly gurgled softly.
“But a man was born in Osivni territory who cared nothing for wisdom or justice. We do not know what he was called, for our ancestors saw fit to not grant his name the dignity of remembrance. In his time, an empire spanned this whole continent, where our home, proud Eyrnan, now lies.” His hand swept from one end of the loft to the other, evoking the wide landscape beyond. “The unnamed man looked to the emperors as his example, and meant to make all of Ngarteyr Isle his domain. The sixth son of a chieftain, he slew his older brothers and began to expand his clan’s lands. Through his ruthless charm and cautious use of violence, he brought all the Osivni under his rule and declared himself their king.”
Sosarna squirmed under her blanket as her father’s voice turned somber.
“Though his father had been friendly with the Eyrni villages near his chiefdom, the unnamed man spurned our folk. With his people united, he set about slaying us and expelling us from our dwellings in Ngarteyr. Entire villages smoked like great sacrifices to the gods, though no god would accept such offerings.”
The ancient injustice chafed Sosarna’s conscience. She sat up, her fists curled in her lap. “But we fought the bastards, didn’t we, Papa?” she demanded, punching her pillow emphatically.
Her father peeked down from the loft before allowing himself a chuckle. “Indeed. When the raids began, we did. If an invader laid his hands on one of us, his skull was already destined to become a drinking-bowl.”
A righteous smile spread across Sosarna’s face as she lay back down, but an elegiac gloom returned to her father’s expression and tone.
“Still, our chiefs lacked the time to band together and mount a sufficient defense against our unified foe.” He sighed, and his shoulders sank. “The Osivni pushed us to the northeastern shores. We built ships as quickly as we could hew the wood for them. Fortunately, our foes had grown slack. They wearied of battle, though their king prodded them onward. They dwelt in what few houses they had not burned and plundered what wealth we had abandoned. But their lethargy allowed us the time to sail for safety.
“Our ships, crudely constructed as they were, soon began to sink. Yet even as the waters breached the holds, our foundering vessels were buoyed up. We looked over the gunwales, and there, amid the surf, were dozens of strangely lithe people, their bodies gray as the sea, straining themselves to keep our ships afloat—”
The squeak of door-hinges sounded beneath the loft, followed by the shuffle of bare feet. Sosarna glanced to the room below, where her mother loitered by the door to the bedroom.
“Cegreyt, should you not rest?” she said, staring up at her husband.
“Can’t Papa finish his tale, Mama?” Sosarna chimed, springing up. Another rumble sounded from her abdomen, but she ignored it. Her hunger to hear the story outstripped her nagging appetite.
Her mother cleared her throat. “The harvest begins tomorrow, Sosarna,” she said, forcing a smile. “Your papa will have to work as long as the sun stays up. He’ll need as much sleep as he can get.”
The girl looked to her father, who leaned over to her and caught up a few strands of her hair up in his fingers.
“I’m sorry, Sosarna, but the harvest awaits,” he said, tucking those strands behind his daughter’s ear. “Besides, if we don’t eat, you won’t hear any more of the tale anyway.” He drew the blanket across the girl’s shoulder.
“Before you rest, Papa,” she whispered, “who were the gray people in the tale?”
Her father smiled, hesitating. “Will you still want to hear the rest of the tale if I tell you?”
Sosarna nodded.
“The sea-elves,” Cegreyt said, his tone hushed with awe.
“I’d like to hear more about them,” the girl said.
“Soon, I’ll tell you all that I know about them,” her father assured.
Sosarna settled her head into her pillow, and Cegreyt straightened the blanket over her.
“Sleep well. May the spirits and nymphs grace your dreams.”
As her father descended the ladder from the loft, the creaking of the wooden rungs transformed into the splitting of the Eyrni lifeboats’ poorly-pitched planks. From the matted rushes that carpeted the room, the gray figures arose. Their slim, strong hands supported each rung under Cegreyt’s feet.
Then Sosarna’s father passed out of her mind, and the sea-elves emerged from their tidal dwellings and ascended into the Cobbled Hills—the low ridges between Eyrnan’s fields and the continent’s western coast, which were inset with weathered masonry abandoned by a vanished civilization. There, the oceanic people danced with the spirits that wandered amid the feral grasses, sandy dirt, and despairing stonework.
Then the earth began to tremble, and the remaining partitions and pillars that protruded from the Cobbled Hills collapsed into piles and tumbled into the depressions in the landscape. The sea-elves fled to the shore, and the phantoms of the ruins were enfolded in heaps of stone.
II. Hunger
The dream-born fantasy faded. The ceiling’s timbers met Sosarna’s haze-stricken eyes. Her ears began to isolate a dull conversation from beyond the walls. As she rolled onto her belly, an empty throb aggravated her stomach. She curled up again, hoping to force the pang away.
A rush of light clinks sounded clearly below her. As the twinge in her abdomen eased, she looked past her pillow. Her parents stood close together, facing one another, with her mother mostly blocking her view of her father. There was a mattock in the man’s hand, which perplexed her—it was a tool for the planting season, not the harvest. Her mother presently set an open-faced leather helmet on her husband’s head. After looking him over, she kissed him and stepped back toward the bedroom.
Then Sosarna noticed the faint luster of chainmail across her father’s chest.
“Papa?” she called, scrambling out of her bed and mounting the ladder.
“Stay up there, Sosarna,” her mother ordered as her daughter clambered downward.
With three rungs still beneath her, the girl jumped to the floor and ran to her father. Cegreyt crouched and tugged his charging child to his chest.
“‘The harvest awaits,’ you said,” Sosarna said, peering into her father’s face. “What are you going to do, Papa? Assail the fields?”
He grimaced.
“Tell me, why the mail-shirt?” she asked, her voice quavering with concern.
The man’s eyes dampened as he stared at his daughter, but he deferred to his wife. “Rucatna…?”
Sosarna looked to her mother.
The woman gestured for her husband to turn the girl over to her.
Cegreyt released their daughter, and Rucatna caught her by the underarms.
“Papa, what are you doing?” Sosarna demanded. She strained her thin limbs, but could not break away from her mother.
“Shush,” Rucatna commanded, drawing her daughter to herself. She slipped a hand under Sosarna’s jaw and pressed the girl’s mouth shut.
Without glancing back, Cegreyt moved to the door and shoved it open. A handful of glum-faced men, armored mostly in well-worn leather and armed with sickles, axes, and other bladed tools, waited beyond the threshold.
Sosarna writhed more furiously within her mother’s clutches. “Papa!”
Her father paused in the doorway, his outline dim against the pale dawn sky. He hefted his mattock proudly upward.
Solidarity with her kin and her people welled up within her heart. “May the spirits and nymphs grace your ways!” she called. Salty dew began to bathe her eyes. She could scarcely see her father’s face, yet some quality of his unlit expression tempered the gallantry that pervaded her spirit with wistfulness. Her bleary gaze drifted. The door closed, darkening the room as it shut the sky out.
Rucatna knelt beside her daughter, slipping her hands down to the girl’s wrists. “I hate to see your father leave, too,” she said. “If there had been a choice, he would have stayed here.”
Sosarna whisked some of her tears away with her knuckles, unsatisfied with her mother’s words of consolation.
“Some illness afflicts our crops,” Rucatna continued. “We do not know how it came to our land, but it has already destroyed many, many bushels. We have been short on food for nearly two months.”
The girl’s stomach groaned.
Her mother offered an unhappy smile. “I’m surprised that you never said anything about our shrinking meals.”
Sosarna shrugged. “They never seemed to shrink by much,” she said. “Besides, I saw you and Papa eating smaller portions, too. But why did you not tell me about the crops?”
“I wanted to,” her mother said. “But your father saw no good in spoiling your spirits like that.”
“Then why should you now tell me—”
“I tell you now because the circumstances are dire,” Rucatna said, hushing her daughter’s protest. She brushed a few of Sosarna’s disordered locks around to the girl’s back. “There is no reason to shield you from the truth now. Lord Adeyr, noblest of all Eyrni lords, has mustered our men. He will lead raids against the nearby villages in the south, in Esperey. The crops there were not blighted as ours were. Our warriors will plunder their storehouses and bring the food back to us.”
“But won’t the southerners attack us in turn?” Sosarna asked.
“Hopefully not. The raids won’t be like ordinary battles. We trust that they will mistake our warriors for common outlaws.”
“When will Papa return? Will he be safe?”
“He’ll return when he and the warriors have something to bring home to us,” Rucatna assured. “And where weapons are involved, outcomes are seldom certain. When they are, it’s usually for the worst. But the gods will be with him, if they will.”
“Can we not aid him, Mama?”
Rucatna released her grip on her daughter’s wrists and welcomed the child into her embrace.
“We have no aid to offer, Sosarna,” she said. “We can wait, and we can hope—that is, we can wait, or we can wait fervently.”
III. Hostilities
Sosarna waited. Her father returned within a month, yet she still waited. The man who came back to his family’s dwelling only resembled Cegreyt in body.
When he first reappeared on his own doorstep, he wore a streaky mask of mud and sweat. His mattock was gone; in its place he carried a thick-bladed shortsword that lacked a sheath. Wiry, uneven whiskers hung from his chin. His chainmail was tarnished from a full lunar cycle of exposure to weaponry and weather alike, and jagged scuffs marked his helmet. Even after he bathed, shaved, and laid his weapon and armor aside, his gloomy demeanor remained.
One evening shortly after his return, he and his family sat around their table, spooning gruel into their mouths. Neither of Sosarna’s parents spoke. They had hardly addressed one another at all since Cegreyt had come home. Their daughter still longed for the continuation of her father’s story, though her mother had advised against forcing the issue with him.
But Sosarna’s patience was exhausted. She laid her wooden spoon on the table and glanced at her father, who sat to her left. Then her eyes fled to the wall across from her. Finally, the question spilled out of her:
“Papa, when will you finish telling me how our people came to this land?”
Cegreyt’s deadened glare met his daughter’s inquisitive expression. His hand froze as he dipped his spoon into his bowl of filmy, beige gruel. “When I understand my own story better,” he bristled.
Sosarna took up her utensil again and continued eating. She thought her father might benefit from telling the rest of the tale. His stories often held age-old advice—wisdom that might renew his spirit.
The evening meal ended wordlessly, and Cegreyt put Sosarna to bed shortly thereafter. “Sleep well. May the spirits and nymphs grace your dreams,” he mumbled to her, which comforted the girl about as much as a leafless tree comforts a traveler in a rainstorm.
And the spirits and nymphs withheld their grace from Sosarna. She tossed to and fro in her bed until her blanket was coiled about her like a vine around a tree trunk.
Since Cegreyt had first left for the raids, the twilight’s breezes and bugs had sung Sosarna her lullabies in lieu of her father’s stories. But the walls seemed thicker that night, stranding her in isolated tranquility. Then a muffled exclamation burst from her parents’ room. Sosarna crawled forward on her belly and bared an ear toward the door.
“You served the Eyrni well, just as our forefathers did when they battled those Osivni bastards,” Rucatna said soothingly.
Sosarna snickered at her mother’s choice of words, but wondered what had prompted her statement. She listened on.
“You’re right—you’re right,” Cegreyt said after a second of silence. “I was serving our people. But these raids are not like the fight against the Osivni at all. The Osivni had left their homes to assail us. We were defending our own. What did I do? I attacked men no worse than myself, men toiling to feed their own families.”
Stirred by the passion in her father’s tone, Sosarna clutched her pillow.
“Within the first few raids, we had gathered enough food to aid our families,” he continued solemnly from behind the downstairs door. “I had seen enough by then. I volunteered to go back with the first-fruits of the spoils. On the return journey, I thought about going back into the south for a few more raids, as a matter of duty. But there’s a rumor roaming among the warriors.”
Sosarna bit her lip as her father paused again. When he went on, he spoke much more quietly, such that she could only make out a few names: Adeyr, chief lord among the Eyrni; Esperey, the southern kingdom; and several others she did not recognize. Then she heard him say, more clearly, “I’m not going south again.”
Neither of her parents spoke for a moment, until her mother replied:
“I don’t know all that you saw in the south. The suffering—I don’t want to imagine it. But think of all the distress that would continue to befall us here if we refused to make the cruel choice.”
“I have,” Cegreyt replied. “That has been the thought behind much of my silence since I’ve returned. I suppose I’m fortunate that so many of our countrymen are at ease plundering others.”
The couple continued to talk, their words too faint for Sosarna’s ears. Then she heard the rustle of sheets, and supposed that she would be eavesdropping on her mother’s snoring before long. She unfurled her blanket and spread it over herself. But as her head sank into her pillow, the guilty fervor of her father’s final words haunted her.
IV. Homeland
Neither dreams nor slumber came to Sosarna that night. She longed to fall asleep, and so bypass the dark hours, but fretting over her father kept her mind aflutter. However many times she turned her pillow over, she could not rest. Raising a finger to the ceiling, she disinterestedly traced the grain of the wood.
Then a succession of soft crunches with the cadence of footsteps crackled below her. Rolling onto her stomach, she peered down and glimpsed the front door as it swung closed with a clatter. Sosarna thought she had seen her father in the entryway for an instant, but she wondered why he would have left the house after sundown.
Putting her worries in motion, she descended the ladder as quietly as she could. She retrieved her shoes from a corner and wiggled her feet into them before turning to the exit. Scarcely breathing, she wrested the door open and gazed across the round dirt yard that linked the homes in her hamlet to the road.
Under a legion of polished stars and a wide gibbous moon, her father’s silhouette followed the lane that led through the fields. His shortsword’s hilt rested in his hand, its brilliant blade reflecting the firmament’s hosts. The weapon’s presence frightened Sosarna, so she decided to trail her father at a distance rather than risk calling out to him from the stoop. She drew the door shut and padded down the path. When she began to catch up, she slowed and crept along the road’s edge.
Before long, the lane intersected another trail, and her father turned to the left. Passing the corner, he looked back over the diseased field, whose rows of cabbages had withered into an acre of browned blossoms. Sosarna stopped and squatted, shrouding her face behind her sleeves. An ensemble of evening insects hummed their persistent tune in her ears, a muddy melody to accompany the quickened drumming of her heart. Peeking under her elbow, she saw that her father faced ahead once again, and she snuck onward at his back. The bubbling song of a stream met her ears.
Her father came to a perpendicular road situated above a shallow slope. Sosarna waited behind him as he crossed to the descending incline. When his waist was level with the trail, she scurried across the lane, circling partway around him to stay out of earshot. From her vantage point on the roadside’s mess of dandelions and wild strawberries, she watched as her father seated himself by the water. He held his shortsword across his forearm. Sosarna shuddered at the steel’s chilly sheen.
Cegreyt then brandished the stout saber near his neck. His daughter knew that no one would raise a bare blade in that manner without the intent to cut.
“Papa, no!”
Her cry overpowered the cicadas’ and crickets’ dulcet droning. Cegreyt whirled to meet his daughter as she rushed toward him. When he saw her tearing through the grass, his raised arm froze in place.
Sosarna flung her arms as far around her father as they would reach and forced her cheek against his chest. She looked up at him, anxious to see his reaction. A tearful grin rent his face. His hefted arm sank to his side, and the sword’s cutting edge grazed the earth’s green blades. Then he pitched the weapon into the tributary, where it cleaved the water and clattered against the stones.
The absence of the sword partly assuaged Sosarna’s fright. “Are you well, Papa?” she ventured after a silent minute.
Cegreyt pried his daughter from his side. “No, I am not,” he muttered, staring into the stream.
The girl lay down beside him. “Papa, I can listen to your troubles,” she pleaded.
“I told it all to your mother, and there was no release to be found in the telling.”
“May I ask—?”
“It’s about the raids, Sosarna,” Cegreyt snapped. He glared at his daughter, but that expression dissolved into a distraught grin. “I won’t tell you any more tonight. Perhaps, when you are grown, you will be fit to know your father’s troubles.”
The invisible insects’ drowsy buzz settled over the girl and her father. Cegreyt sighed again, then looked at Sosarna. “Shall I now finish telling you about how the Eyrni came to Eyrnan?”
His daughter beamed. But before she could answer, Cegreyt had resumed the tale, as if he and Sosarna were back in the cramped, candlelit loft one month before.
“We looked over the gunwales, and there, amid the surf, were the sea-elves, straining themselves to keep our ships afloat,” he recounted. “Many of us feared them, for they looked so unlike us. But they brought our ships into a lagoon of bright waters and beached our boats upon a sandy spit. They laid out a great banquet of fish and fruit for us, and we joined them on the shore. Our chieftains conversed with the undying prince and princess who govern the sea-elves.”
“Papa?” Sosarna interrupted.
“Yes?”
“Are the prince and princess really still alive today?”
Her father flexed his arms behind his back. “If they aren’t, our bards owe us an explanation,” he grunted.
Sosarna giggled, tugging playfully at a tangle of grass stems.
“Some stories I’ve heard say that, after many years, elves’ spirits depart this earth and join their god in a lovelier, more hospitable world,” he said, laying his hands on his knees. “But shall I go on telling you of our people?”
“Certainly, please,” the girl said.
“We thanked the elves for hosting us in their domain, but they stated that, as sea-dwellers, they made no claim over the coast. They offered to lead our people to good lands as soon as we were rested. We accepted, of course. After three days of respite, we set off southward along the shore, guided by a party of sea-borne elves. Half a lunar cycle later, we came to the Cobbled Hills. From there, our people dispersed across the fields and ridges where we now live. We began to rebuild Eyrnan, and then—” Cegreyt broke off and quieted.
“And then what happened, Papa?” Sosarna asked, egged on by her father’s pause.
“And then the Eyrni joined in another war, in which our people are hardly innocent.” He eyed the Cobbled Hills in the west, watching the high grasses sway beneath a migrant breeze. “You know, Sosarna, the Eyrni are presently in a position similar to when the sea-elves rescued us,” he said, facing his child. “We found ourselves endangered by forces outside our control, but we did not escape those circumstances by the sword. Rather, the gods’ mercy came to us by the hands of the sea-elves. We ought to wait for the same—however it comes to us, however it pains us.”
“What will we do while we wait on them?” Sosarna said. She thought back to her mother’s words from the day when her father departed for the south, and recalled how she had tired of patient uncertainty in his absence.
“We manage as best we can until they take heed of us,” Cegreyt said.
“But how, Papa?” she persisted.
“Like this,” her father answered. Reaching aside, he plucked a wild strawberry from its stem and offered it to his daughter.
Sosarna received the tiny fruit into her palm and flipped it into her mouth. Its faint sweetness washed pleasantly over her tongue, though its substance did little to sate her stomach.
Cegreyt got to his feet. “You know that, as a rule, I don’t want you traipsing around outside past sundown, Sosarna,” he said. “But I’m glad that you braved the dark tonight. I would—I might have been lost to you and your mother by now if you hadn’t turned up. As soon as I saw you, I remembered my duties. I hope you will forgive me for so much as thinking of abandoning you.” He lowered a hand to his daughter.
“I forgive you, Papa,” Sosarna replied, grabbing her father’s extended palm as she stood up. “It would be cruel of me not to.”
They embraced once more before hiking back to the road. And as they traced the trails back to their house, the heavens’ indigo tint fell across the fruitless croplands of the Eyrni.
©June 2020, Liam Weiler
A resident of southeastern North America, Liam Weiler writes epic fantasy and dark fantasy. His online haunt is mindsatticspiritsbasement.home.blog. This is his first appearance in Swords & Sorcery.