The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [152]
Tegric nodded. “I will see you once again in the reborn world, my Thane.”
He turned his horse and nudged it back against the current of humanity.
Tegric rested against a great boulder. He had removed his tunic, and was methodically stitching up a split seam. His mail shirt was neatly spread upon a rock, his shield and scabbarded sword lying beside it, his helm resting at his feet. These were all that remained to him, everything he had need of. He had given his horse to a lame woman who had been struggling along in the wake of the main column. His small pouch of coins had gone to a child, a boy mute from shock or injury.
Above, buzzards were calling as they circled lower, descending toward the corpses that Tegric knew lay just out of sight. His presence, and that of his hundred men, might deter the scavengers for a while longer, but he did not begrudge them a meal. Those who once dwelled in those bodies had no further need of them: when the Gods returned—as they would once all peoples of the world had learned the humility of the Black Road—they would have new bodies, in a new world.
From where he sat, Tegric could see down a long, sloping sweep of the Stone Vale. Every so often he glanced up from his stitching to cast his eyes back the way they had come. Far off in that direction lay Grive, where he had lived most of his life: a place of soft green fields, well-fed cattle, as different from this punishing Vale of Stones as any place could be. The memory of it summoned up no particular emotion in him. The rest of his family had not seen the truth of the creed as he had. When Avann oc Gyre, their Thane, had declared for the Black Road they had fled from Grive, disappearing out of Tegric’s life. In every Blood, even Kilkry itself, the blossoming of the Black Road had sundered countless families, broken ties and bonds that had held firm for generations. To Tegric’s mind it was a cause for neither regret nor surprise. A truth as profound as that of the Black Road could not help but have consequences.
An old man, dressed in a ragged brown robe and leaning on a staff, came limping up the Vale. He was, perhaps, the very last of the fleeing thousands. Though they were close to the highest point of the pass, the sun, burning out of a cloudless sky, still had strength. The man’s forehead was beaded with sweat. He paused before Tegric, resting all his weight upon his staff and breathing heavily. The warrior looked up at the man, squinting slightly against the sunlight.
“Am I far behind the rest?” the man asked between labored breaths.
Tegric noted the bandaged feet, the trembling hands.
“Some way,” he said softly.
The man nodded, unsurprised and seemingly unperturbed. He wiped his brow with the hem of his robe; the material came away sweaty and dirty.
“You are waiting here?” he asked Tegric, who nodded in reply.
The man cast around, scanning the warriors scattered amongst the great boulders all around him.
“How many of you are there?”
“A hundred,” Tegric told him.
The old man chuckled, though it was a cold and humorless kind of laugh.
“You have come to the end of your Roads then, you hundred. I had best press on, and discover where my own fate runs out.”
“Do so,” said Tegric levelly. He watched the man make his unsteady way along the path already trodden by so many thousands. There had been, in the gentle edges of his accent, no hint of the Gyre Blood or the Glas valley where Avann had ruled.
“Where are you from, old father?” Tegric called after him.
“Kilvale, in Kilkry lands,” the man replied.
“Did you know the Fisherwoman, then?” Tegric asked, unable to keep the edge of wonder from his voice.
The old man paused and carefully turned to look back at the warrior.
“I heard her speak. I knew her a little, before they killed her.”
“There will be a day, you know,