Alarik's Crusade

CHAPTER 9: HISTORY

​In his travels to the kingdoms in the west, Cendric was told of the strength water had in wearing away even the strongest materials. They said a single droplet would be so unimportant it would be difficult to even measure, but its power lay elsewhere. It was its ability to remain relentless, constantly pressuring, an endless barrage in numbers with drive and determination of an entity that knows no fear nor pain nor disillusionment. Water’s strength could be monumental. If you gave it time.

​So why, then, did the rain seem to be able to cut through to his very core so easily in just a single day? He assumed it would take longer.

​He’d done his best to stay beneath trees, racing to reach whatever protection the large, flat leaves of the next would provide. Still, it found its way. It was unavoidable. It would find him. Relentless. Determined. Those were words he chose for himself once, in his younger years as an explorer. He’d headed into the darkest crevices of the world and brought the light of man, stood atop the highest mountain and challenged the heavens themselves, sailed across the largest seas and… and would get across without being soaked quite the way he was today.

​He could tell Shalmanesser - that miserable, mocking waste of space - would dash from tree to tree in imitation, earning a few snickers from Inaya along the way. He wanted desperately to believe that her laughter didn’t bother him, but there was no use trying to convince himself. It was another baffling frustration of this forsaken rainforest; in all his expeditions he had been no stranger to women. Certainly not. Yet, here, this vexed him terribly. None of his charm proved useful, his fine clothing made to be a punchline, his tales of grand adventure met with the rolling of eyes. He’d been stripped of all that made him strong.

​Now a paper-thin “ally” dared to mock him because he wished to keep his clothing free of damage, of which even a piece would be worth more than the man’s entire holdings. However, he did feel ridiculous in it now. His jacket, made from fabrics farther east than the Khorsuli could even imagine, was stained with sweat and grime. His boots, made from the skin of apex predators he’d hunted himself, were wearing down with the endless hiking. Even his very tireless soul was perhaps not as indomitable as he thought it was.

​He was acting foolish. In fact, this whole expedition made him feel like a fool. Before this trek through the endless rainforest, he would look at his clothing as a representation of his success. He was not born into money, the way Edda had been, who avoided the same criticisms by nature of a very large man with a very short fuse. Cendric had fought and scrapped from nothing, born by the docks, his father a fisherman. Every day he would do the daily chores and watch the merchants come from faraway lands. They’d speak to each other of their tales of adventure and danger, a form of trade of their own, where each respective party would walk away richer in pride before heading to the markets with their catch to make themselves richer in coin.

He’d listen, day after day. Walking along the docks slick with the blood of fresh caught fish, he’d stand as close as he could to hear those conversations. He’d listen to their cadence, their bluster, their cavalier attitude about danger. He’d absorbed it into his very being. Every chance he’d get, he’d beg them for their tales to the point of being obsequious, only the most arrogant believing his incredible admiration justified.

​Years passed, fish were caught, yarns were spun, and Cendric was still on the docks. Eventually, he’d learned enough to walk and talk like one of them. All he needed was the adventure. With every coin he had, he purchased a small boat, just larger than a fisherman’s, to sail to nearby towns to trade. All the listening did him well; he would barter, trade, gather information, learn sailing better than anyone. Soon enough, Cendric of the docks was gone, replaced by Cendric the merchant hero. It was his pride. He wears the part of a trader, navigator, and courageous explorer.

And for that, they’ve belittled him. They’ve reduced him to nothing but a jester, some fool to laugh at and mock for wearing finery in a rainforest. As he thought of his past glories, his linen pants, hand-crafted by tailors half the world away, snagged on a jagged edge of a fallen tree. A once glorious garment, torn and ruined.

​Worse yet, much to his chagrin, he couldn’t get that woman out of his head. She treated him terribly, and he followed after her like a lost puppy. He could ground his teeth to dust at the thought of it. He’d defeated every challenge that came his way, but this one he just couldn’t ignore. His eyes drifted her way again, a magnetism more true than his compass.

​What he should have been doing was keeping his eye on the path forward. He was still the navigator here, rather than just the whipping boy, and the task he was given he was meant to finish. Quality in his work was his lone confidence now. With eyes focussed ever forward, distinctly away from the graceful, lithe Inaya who scouted the trees for beasts as they moved through the rainforest brush, he followed north. Not once did he notice the set of eyes staring at his back with a look of disdain.

​--

​To Farmund, Cendric was everything that was wrong with the cities. The fanciful clothing, the arrogance, expectation of luxury… He was nothing but a bombastic, embarrassing example of every stereotype he’d known.

​Still, Farmund was no fool. He recognized the hypocrisy of tending to the every need of a noble while simultaneously loathing what Cendric represented. However, there was something different about Edda which he could respect. Her very being here was an argument against those inherent failings of nobility. She had no purpose here beyond proving her worth and trying to better the empire. She could just have easily sent others in her stead. She could just as easily have done nothing at all. Instead, she was in the muck and mire, trudging through the rainforest the same as the rest of them.

​Her skin was ravaged by bug bites, replacing what was normally covered in the powders and scents of the makeup room. Her hair, as coiffed and cared for as crown jewels, was burnt lighter by the sun, pieces of old, dead leaves crumpled up in it like gems of a different type. She clearly did not belong here. The death of just one of the crusaders damaged her in ways she struggled to express. Still, she did not relent. Not once did she ask to head back and cancel the crusade. Where she found that strength, he was not sure.

But even the most powerful can see their strength wane.

​“Edda,” he said as she struggled to climb over a fallen tree. “You’ve proven yourself twice over by now. There’s no shame in returning when the crusade is beginning to turn to shambles.”

​“Is that what this is?” she asked, a forced smile on her face. A light scratch was on her cheek. Farmund would have preferred to protect her from the branch, had he known. To her credit, she was at least beginning to look the part. That same cut cheek was not as round and cherubic as it was when they had left Vanda. “Honestly, I’m fine. Hilda…” she turned back to the path, away from Farmund’s eyes. “It was difficult to lose her. I know we weren’t close, but I’ve not seen death like that before. I’ve had the fortune to hardly see it at all.”

​Farmund nodded. He wanted to say it gets much easier, but that sounded worse than saying nothing at all. She truly was thrown into the worst of it. Even to his hardened sensibilities, it was disturbing. “I just want to remind you. Please, if you feel a hint of wanting to go back…”

​“Please, Farmund! I’ve told you I will. I feel I need to remind you again that I’m not made of glass.” She tapped a fist to her other arm. “See? No breaks. No cracks. Tough as any…” Her eyes wandered to Inaya. She pursed her lips. “Tougher than most.”

​Farmund caught the glance. The reasons she changed her hair and back again were not lost on him. “If you’re worried about looking strong-”

​“Farmund! Really!”

​“I don’t mean to bother you, ma’am. But I promised your father I’d protect you, and I fully intend to keep my word.” She reached a hand around his massive shoulder and hugged him. A whole head taller, a few grey hairs stood testament to just how long he had been following through on his promise. Farmund remembered how things came to be as clearly as if it were yesterday.

He’d grown up in the southwest of the Vanderik Empire, son to a farmer in a town full of them, just outside the trade city of Strepsis. He’d known little more than how to eat and how to grow crops, but that was all he had to know, and of those two abilities there were few better. Life was simple. Life was good. Life was calm. Unfortunately, he’d learned the lattermost is a state of being that is most certainly unsustainable, and it tends to ruin the other two.

When he heard the crusade in Khorsul was beginning, his first worries were of conscription. However, the king, knowing that both his citizens and soldiers would be a hungry machine of war, allowed farmers to remain on their land and provide. Relieved, Farmund was happy that he did not have to fight some faraway battle in lands he could only imagine.

Things changed when the war came to him. When Khorsul came to him.

Invading Khorsuli ships raided the coasts, destroying property, burning houses, pillaging anything that was within their grasp before the Vanderik armies gathered in full to push them back. In their retreat, they rampaged through the farmland, burning everything to the ground to stem the flow of goods to the hungry soldiers overseas. Strepsis had been a critical port city during the war, and without it, reinforcements in the form of additional soldiers and food were left burned in the fields.

Farmund’s family farm was right in the path of the retreat of one of those very raids. His mother and father died defending their farm, their livelihood, their crops and the results of their labour. They died defending their son and his future.

The king heard the stories of Strepsis and the attack. In his mercy, he took in the refugees at the capital and had them cared for, clothed and fed. Some say it was a face-saving measure to make the Khorsuli look like a remorseless, ravaging horde and the Vanderik the righteous liberators in contrast. None of that mattered to Farmund, just sixteen at the time. All that mattered to him was that he was taken in by the king’s good graces, and his parents had taught him that it was proper to repay a debt. And this was no small debt.

Immediately, he signed on to the military. With his strength and size he rose through the ranks, eventually tasked with protecting the daughter of an important noble in Vanda, one who was slated to hold a section of the kingdom as the empire progressed outwards. Through this, he was given a second life, one in service to protecting another. It was a job he took with the utmost seriousness.

Looking at her now, so eager to move out from under his protective umbrella, he hoped the rain would land softly. But this was the rainforest; it always poured.

--

The crusade broke for lunch. Inaya and Shal had managed to hunt a few small animals and collected enough edible plant life to sustain the group for the day. To Shal, it felt good to be hunting again. There was a thrill in the success of it, even when simply foraging, that never faded. For a man that never became what he could have been, it gave him a sense of purpose and pride.

The sun peeked through the rainforest canopy as they ate. He rested back against a tree and let the light fall over him. Had it been under other circumstances, Shal would have loved this place. The weather was hot, and with a thin frame such as his, warmer weather was always preferable. Pulling his thin robes up over his eyes, he thought he could have fallen asleep right then and there. A brief moment of peace.

A bone bounced off his forehead.

“Can’t sleep our way through the job, you know,” Inaya joked. She was always far friendlier around him than anyone else. She was far friendlier around Khorsuli, really. However, Shal wasn’t really in the mood for games - and he really was enjoying his moment of quiet, as much as he always valued Inaya’s playful banter. With a little reluctance, he patted the ground next to him and invited her to sit. He noted she had loosened some of the tighter fitting aspects of her Vanderik clothing. Perhaps the conversation he was meaning to have would go a little smoother, knowing she was giving way in some aspects at least.

“Inaya,” he started, “I think we have to seriously reconsider being here. We’re-”

“Shal, we can’t have this conversation again.”

“We’re going to have to. Please. Just listen,” Shal urged. She sighed and leaned her head back against the tree, but didn’t demand him to quiet. That was all he needed from her, and a little more than he could have hoped for. He knew Inaya liked to finish tasks she started. However, since she always had a soft spot for her thin, often lazy companion, she’d hear him out.

​“I’m listening.”

​He sat up right away, the prospect at doing less in the long term spurring him to do more now. “Neither of us knows what happened to that Vanderik woman, but I’m not really too keen on it happening to me. Or you, for that matter. Look. We slip out during the night. It’s not like they could track us. Do you really think Cendric will be able to find us? We’ve got to cut our losses and head back where we had it good.”

​“Good?” she said, tilting her head down and looking up at him with raised eyebrows, a look he knew from experience meant she thought he said something profoundly stupid. “We lived hiding from Vanderik guards in a freezing port getting by on scraps. I don’t know how you’d define ‘good’ but that was certainly no joy.”

​“We got by, and I wasn’t waking up with bug bites covering my entire body. And I didn’t have to witness just how it looks when a body has been turned inside out. That’s not a bad life, in my mind.”

“You’ve never wanted more?” Inaya’s expression was suddenly not so familiar. It was more pleading, more vulnerable than her traditional facade that was harder to break than any Vanderik armour. “Do we really want to live out our lives as vagrants and thieves in a city that doesn’t want us?”

It was Shal’s turn to lean his head back against the tree now. He looked up at the sky the same way he had before Inaya came. “I don’t know. Even if this works, and we find our way through the rainforest - or don’t - and we get back in one piece, do things change much? Is it just to strip a few extra coins from the hands of the Vanderik and… and then what? We just return to the port, moving from squalor to... squalor but with a nicer shack?”

Inaya looked up at the canopy. Little streaks of light found their way through. The leaves danced in the very slight breeze that passed through the rainforest. It was beautiful, and a beauty she wouldn’t have recognized if Shal hadn’t always pointed it out to her. “I know, Shal, it looks bleak. But I’ve got to try. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t at least try to make myself something greater than what I am now. I don’t believe it’s just squalor to squalor. There’s something else. I know it.”

Shalmanesser nodded and sighed deeply. He pulled up his knees and sat cross-legged in the flickering sunlight. “I hope so, for your sake if not for mine. But promise me. If things start looking worse, we get out of here. Just remember,” he said pointing up at the sky, “the sun shines the same here as it does in Khorsul. No reason we can’t enjoy it, even if there’s some Vanderik soaking it up too.”

Inaya nodded and smiled, tilting her head back and resting the same way Shal had, perhaps finally realising there was some wisdom in his words. She could have fallen asleep right then and there, had a bone not bounced off her forehead. “We’re even,” she said with a tired laugh.