03 The Hammer of the Sun by Rohan Michael Scott

Author:Rohan, Michael Scott [Scott, Rohan, Michael]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-04-10T22:21:40.477000+00:00

If the chronicles recount them in such detail, while ignoring or merely glancing over so much else, that is only to be expected. All through the years of his thrall-dom a fierce strife was raging throughout the land of Kerys. In small bands at first, and sometimes, unpredictably, in substantial armies, the Ekwesh were striking more and more often into the lands of Kerys itself. They never sought to hold territory, or even linger any longer than they had to in one place; they came to destroy and pillage, and when they had done they moved on. Fighting them was like chasing quicksilver; yet fought they had to be. The border lords who bore the brunt of their incursions grew more and more restive under Nithaid's hand; what were they paying his levies for, they demanded, if not protection? But that protection he simply could not give to each and every one. He had to guess as best he could where the next strike would come, and gather his forces there, or risk losing them piecemeal. Often, too often, he was wrong: because, he suspected, hostile eyes were watching him and his movements. So did Elof, though whose he never said; and only because of this is it mentioned.

Those great events the chroniclers choose to treat remotely and from afar, as Elof himself saw them, and not without reason; for in the end it was he who mattered. To those of Kerys who lived through that time, who saw their fields laid waste, their homes burnt, their kinsfolk slain and at last, perhaps, their own blood freezing even as it spilled across the uncaring snow, it was the breaking of a world; yet in small things, the fall of a feather, the opening of a long-closed door, lay the roots of other events against which that strife was to seem almost insignificant. Not even the Powers who from their strange heights watched the wintry slaughters, or the no less bloody counters that followed, when Nithaid the Bull with the black blade would hunt the reivers back to the very snow lines and set heads upon every burned tree in gruesome mockery of spring - not even they could weigh events with the certainty of the chronicles. For theirs in all its stark irony is the judgement of time, and time ruled those many lives and deaths to be ultimately of small account. Perhaps there was a purpose in each; but if so, even from the Powers it is hidden. For they also dwell within time, and it is mightier than they.

Elof and Roc, for their part, eagerly followed Nithaid's campaigns, when they could come by any news of them, and were grateful even for such scraps and rumours as the guards who brought provisions could tell. The sergeant, when he came, was most forthcoming of all. The first news he brought set the pattern; that Nithaid had won his most telling victory against the reivers for many a year, decimating

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