Harvest of War Read online

  HARVEST OF WAR

  By

  Charles Allen Gramlich

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Except for brief quotations, such as those to be included in reviews, no section of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the author.

  This story is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and events are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real persons, places, or events is coincidental.

  Dedication: To Tammy Kalb, my niece. Fantastic mother, fantastic nurse. Friend and companion of my youth. You are remembered.

  Text Copyright © 2012 by Charles Allen Gramlich.

  Cover Design copyright © 2012 by Charles & Lana Gramlich.

  Cover Photo: Public Domain, downloaded from pdphoto.org

  Published by Razored Zen Press, 2012

  Contact at [email protected]

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  1. Harvest of War…

  2. About the Story…

  3. About the Author…

  4. Other Books by Charles Allen Gramlich…

  5. Back Cover Copy…

  HARVEST OF WAR

  --- 1 ---

  Across a snowfield that lies red with dawn, the Orc charge comes.

  And is met.

  Axes shriek on shields. Swords work against armor into flesh. The tips of spears are wetted. Gore dapples the snow.

  For a moment, the human line holds. Then the center wavers. In a frenzy, an Orc squad punches through. More Orc pour in. The gap widens. The human forces fold back in desperate defense to either side of the breakthrough. Victory rewards the most brutal.

  Except.

  Across the field of now trampled snow, a new army appears—human cavalry mounted upon chargers of black. Banners unfurl. Horns skirl. Only too late do the Orc realize they’ve been tricked.

  The mounted charge comes crashing. The hooves of warhorses hammer the ground to icy slush as lances headed with black iron are couched. The rear of the Orc army falls like wheat before that scythe.

  The charge carries through. The Orc are sundered. A few manage to flee. Others are surrounded by clots of human foes and hacked down in an orgy of hatred.

  At last, only one Orc stands, dark axe blooded in his fists. A lightning-rent oak wards his back so his enemies can come against him only a warrior at a time. His axe splits a helm; his knotted fist tears a man’s jaw away. A shout makes the rest of his foes pause and draw apart.

  A horseman is revealed. Bronze armor girds him. Gray eyes glare like sullen thunder clouds from behind the full faced helm.

  “I am Lord here, beast,” the man snarls. “And I will not be tasked by such as you!” He couches his lance, spurs his mount forward. The air shimmers with violence.

  The oak that protects the Orc’s back now gives him no freedom to escape that charge. He leaps forward instead, howling, his axe sweeping toward the spear that threatens to gut him. But his desperate attempt at parry fails as the lance tip shifts at the penultimate moment. A spearhead of iron smashes into the Orc’s left shoulder, grinds through muscle and tendon to rip the arm from its socket.

  The agony sends the Orc’s weapon crashing to earth. He grabs with his one good hand at the thick wooden shaft piercing his shoulder. He strives to pull it free, but does not see the warhorse rear, or see the flailing hooves that blast into his skull. Like a broken staff, he is hurled down.

  The horseman holds the remnants of a shattered lance in his hands and stares at the Orc lying beneath his stallion’s hooves. Two of his men move cautiously in. One kicks the inert form and marks how the beast’s chest still rises and falls.

  “It lives, Lord Aaron,” the man says. He draws his dagger for the finish.

  “Nay,” the Lord calls. “Chain it behind a horse. We will drag it to the nearest village. If it dies, all will see the corpse and know these monsters as no more than blood and entrails that can be spilled. ”

  “And if it lives, my Lord?” one man asks.

  Aaron only smiles.

  Victory rewards the most brutal.

  --- 2 ---

  He awakens. Agony greets him. Raw skin burns and oozes scarlet where being dragged over stone has worn away patches of flesh. Torn joints and muscles throb like hammers on anvils. Every breath drives splinters of pain through his chest. Only one arm works, and one eye, and when the working hand reaches to his face his gnarled fingers find nothing of the other eye but ruptured jelly. His hand drops. His heart stutters, then resumes an exhausted thumping, like an old dog’s tail on dry earth.

  Something strikes his shoulder. He looks up but sees only iron bars at first. He lies in a cage looking out over a village square of the humans. Children stand beyond the bars. One hurls a rock, its sharp point gouging. He snarls, tries to rise, but his left arm fails him and he falls back. Still, the children shriek and leap away, then erupt with laughter.

  Another rock strikes him. Then a piece of rotted fruit. One youth grows brave enough to jab a sharpened stick into his foot. He only draws the appendage up against his body. But when a bigger rock crushes into his mouth he surges to his knees and roars with rage.

  Again the children retreat, but they do not stop laughing. His rage drains as quickly as it had come. He collapses back onto a floor covered with blood and offal. Much of the blood is his; the offal is not. Buckets of it have been poured over him, it seems. He pulls himself through the slime into a corner of his cage, his left arm dragging behind. His breaths come panting and harsh. He curls in on himself, his one eye glaring green at the world. For a few minutes longer the children torment him, then rush off to fresh amusements.

  He lies there. It is cold, despite a bright sun overhead. He recognizes that it is winter, though his thoughts are fuzzy and confused. He does not understand how he came to be here. He cannot remember his name. But the sun? The cold? He seems to recall ranging free under the sun, with a freezing wind against his face and the sweet feel of muscles working under his hide.

  His good right hand reaches to explore his damaged left shoulder. A ragged hole greets his questing fingers but the blood has dried and crusted over. The wound is to the muscle and tendons, not the bone, and much of his pain is caused by the dislocated joint. He knows what to do. He grasps his left elbow with his right hand and gives a sudden upward wrench. One lorn shriek is torn from his throat but the shoulder pops back into socket.

  For a long moment he simply lies there and breathes while the pain ebbs. Because of the damage to the tendons he doubts he’ll ever be able to use the arm freely again. But at least it won’t dangle like dead meat at his side.

  With his good arm, he pats around on the filthy floor until he finds the rotted fruit that was hurled at him. He lifts it to his mouth. He eats, ignoring the squirm of maggots on his tongue.

  --- 3 ---

  Each day the children come to torment him. Often more than once. They are boys mostly, with a few girls. Soon they have to bring rocks from a distance, for the ground outside his cage is picked clean. Some of the boys try to urinate on him; it makes the girls giggle.

  In the evenings, fresh from the taverns, the men come to joke and laugh. Their spittle reeks of ale. The grown women never venture close. They are no more afraid than the men but are less likely to mask their fear behind bravado.

  Sometimes he is given water, though never clean water. Sometimes a bucket of slop is poured through the cage’s bars into a rusted trough that stinks of hogs. He is fed little but starvation is not a worry. Among the items hurled at him are rotted vegetables covered with blowflies, rancid fish even the village dogs will not eat, and bones already cracked for their marrow.

  But even though there is enough food to sustain his life, more and more as time passes
he lets it lie. Death’s wolves have his scent now and each day they creep closer. He simply does not care. His remembers little outside of war: the cacophony of steel against shields, the odor of burned huts, the windrows of the slain—both human and Orc. His vision is overlain by crimson, as if painted with gore. He no longer looks for the sun or recalls the cold wind. He wants only blackness and silence.

  He is not to have it.

  --- 4 ---

  “Wake it up,” a voice orders.

  But he is awake, and he understands the words. It surprises him. He does not remember knowing the human language but it is in him now.

  Outside his cage stand a dozen men. Only one is a villager, a long-bearded fellow who is chieftain here. The others are not locals. They smell cleaner and wear armor over fine clothes. They carry swords rather than hoes. A name for such men comes suddenly to the Orc’s mind. Knights! One of them has gray eyes and is remembered with a snarl.

  “So the beast still lives,” the gray-eyed one says.

  “Tough bastards,” another adds.

  “Not as tough as men,” Gray-Eyes says. “We rule this realm now. And these abominations will be hunted until the last of them is meat.”

  The Orc sees something move behind the speaker then, and a small figure peeks out around the knight’s legs. It is a girl child, slender and red-haired, with grayish-blue eyes. The child stares at him; he stares back. Every human face he’s seen before has expressed only hatred, fear, and revulsion. The girl seems more curious than anything.

  A memory pierces him. He is huddling in a shallow cave beneath a sheer cliff while a storm punishes the world outside. Lightning strikes close, tearing a massive tree into shreds. He whimpers in fear and a hulking shape enfolds him in its arms. He hears the low rumbling of a growl that comforts; he smells damp hair and sweat. He smells…mother. It has been long since he thought of her.

  His mouth opens. His throat works to form words that will not come.

  “Father,” the human girl says, tugging at the gray-eyed man’s arm. “He’s trying to talk.”

  The knight stops speaking, looks toward the Orc, then laughs

  “The beasts cannot use human language, daughter. They are no more than animals. Now, let’s go.”

  As the troupe moves away, the little girl keeps looking back.

  “Will you be staying with us long, Lord Aaron?” the village elder asks the gray-eyed man.

  “No,” Lord Aaron replies.

  The voices fade then, but the Orc is left with something he’d not had before. It is the memory of a name. His name.

  Khales.

  It is only of passing interest to him.

  --- 5 ---

  Another day. Warmer than the one before. Spring is on the way but Khales is too weak to enjoy the thought of it. His destroyed eye has healed over without infection; his injured arm is usable, though without its former strength. It is not his wounds that drag him toward death. It is the captivity. And the loneliness.

  He becomes aware, though, that someone is watching him. His eyes open. The red-haired girl child stands a few feet away. Lord Aaron’s daughter. She watches and does not seem afraid. She is eating an apple and holds another in her hand. She nods at him as he meets her gaze, then places the extra apple on the ground just outside his cage and retreats.

  He does nothing at first, suspecting a trick, but the smell of fresh fruit is maddening. He hitches his way to the front of his cage; his fingers thrust through the bars and draw the apple to him. He lifts it, bites. The rich taste explodes in his mouth. He has forgotten what good food tastes like. He wolfs it down, then gazes at the girl with his one eye narrowed. She glances furtively around before tossing him the rest of her own apple. He catches it through the bars, rips at it with his teeth.

  When he glances up, the girl is gone.

  --- 6 ---

  He awakens to rain, then realizes it is not rain. Buckets of water sluice through the bars of his cage. At first he believes it some fresh torment, but more water floods in and he sees the filth of his surroundings washed away from him. He feels the fleas that infest his hide and sores being washed away.

  He smells bitterness in the fluid and it brings back another memory, of the willow-water his mother bathed his wounds with when he was little. He knows then that he is being cleansed. He sees that men are doing this. Reluctantly. The small, red-headed girl stands behind them, but it must have been the power of her father’s name that compelled them.

  From that moment on he is given clean water and fed decently twice a day. Once a week his cage is cleaned of muck. And though some villagers still jeer him, they do so only when the girl is not around. And they no longer hurl rocks at him.

  The girl comes frequently to look upon him. Her father is long gone, on the very day upon which she gave him an apple. He wonders why she remains, and why she seems to care if he survives or dies. Curiosity has stirred to life within him.

  --- 7 ---

  He squats against the back wall of his cage. Shafts of spring sunlight paint him with warmth and he appreciates it. Death’s wolves are in retreat.

  “Do you understand me?” a small voice asks.

  For three days now the young girl has come to speak to him. He has not acknowledged her. Her kind is enemy to him; her father is why he dwells in this prison. All his life he has killed humans. All his life he has seen humans kill Orcs. It is strange to him that he doesn’t wish to kill this one.

  The child turns to go.

  “I…hear…you,” he says.

  His voice rattles like gravel over steel, rusty from too long without use.

  The girl is not frightened. She turns back toward him. Her gray-blue eyes go wide and she smiles. It is somehow a wonderful thing.

  “I knew you could speak,” she says. “I knew it. What is your name?”

  “Khales,” he whispers. Then, more strongly: “Khales!”

  “Khales,” she repeats, her voice lyrical. “I am Ehma.”

  “Why?” he grunts.

  “Why what?”

  “Why…help?”

  “I would not see even an animal so treated. And you are no animal.”

  “Your…father. Would not. Agree.”

  “My father is not here.”

  “Why. Are you?”

  “The abbey,” she says. She points a finger and his gaze follows. Upon the highest point in the village rests a building of stone that stands out from the more primitive wooden structures forming the rest of the town. “I am my father’s fourth daughter,” Ehma continues. “A life of the religious is to be mine. Too, I am not pretty enough for court. As my older sisters are. My mother was no noble lady but a scullery maid.”

  Khales nods, though he does not understand much of what she says. He does understand that she is almost as alone as he.

  “No human. Has ever spoken. With me,” Khales says.

  Ehma smiles, then turns again to go. Over her shoulder, she leaves him with: “I am glad, then, to be your first human friend.”

  It is the beginning of many communications between them.

  --- 8 ---

  “The beasts called Reapers,” Ehma says. “Do you know of them?”

  “Too much,” Khales replies. “Why?”

  Ehma sits in a posture only the young can achieve, with elbows on knees and her hands stretched out to grasp her ankles. She sighs. Her fingers pluck at the weave of the linen skirts that extend below the course gray wool of her robe.

  “My father,” she begins. “He sent word. He is coming for me. The Abbess told me why. The Reapers are flooding down from the mountains. Raiding the foothill villages. Even here we may not be safe.”

  For the first time in what seems ages, fury ripens Khales’ muscles. His heart speeds; the hair stands up all over his body. A savage growl purls from his lips. Then he sees Ehma’s eyes widen, sees her shrink back. Suddenly he is fighting his own emotions, fighting to control them. It is not something he is accustomed to, and it is long moment
s before he masters himself. His fists unclench.

  “I…am sorry,” he says finally, nearly chewing the words from his mouth.

  “You hate them,” Ehma blurts. “Even more than humans.”

  “They raid. Us too. Far more. My mother.”

  Ehma gasps. “I am the one who is sorry,” she says. She rocks forward onto her knees, reaches quickly through the bars. Her fingers brush down his good arm. She sits back.

  Khales says nothing. Does nothing. His body is frozen but his skin burns still where the human girl has touched him. He has cubs of his own, perhaps. In the mountains. But among his people only mothers care for the young. He has never wondered before if his offspring were safe. Nor has he ever felt the wave of protectiveness that rolls over him now for this child of another race. He fears suddenly that he is becoming weak.

  “My father does not know why the Reapers are so numerous this year,” Ehma says, unaware of the turmoil she has caused in Khales. “They never have been before.”

  Khales opens his mouth, then finds his voice. It is harsher than he would like, something he has never noted before. “In winter,” he says. “We raid their birthing sites. In spring. We fight them in the high valleys. They do not come south after that.”

  Ehma bites at her lip. “But now,” she says. “The Orcs… Your people. My father’s war against them has disturbed the pattern. Your tribes no longer provide a buffer.”

  “That is…probable,” Khales murmurs.

  “What are the Reapers?” Ehma asks.

  “Doom! They hatch full grown from fouled earth where the battles of some ancient sorcerers’ war was fought. Like four-legged scorpions, they are. Big as mountain bears. And not of flesh but of metal.”