[NSW-Fic] Excerpt from Gryphonrider II

[machievelli]

I was going to post a portion of my first published work, but it was too long.

 

This is from the sequel. Wanderer: Gryphonrider II available at Lulu.com.

 

What goes through the mind of a banished warrior?

 

Alone

Dhyanna picked her way down the pass, looking up at the mountains around her. She tried to engrave every vision, every vista. If she came this way again, she would be enemy, fit only to die. A person stood off to one side just within sight, dressed in the soft leathers of a scout. The scout waved, then vanished. So, there were those watching her departure.

 

Soon enough, she reached the upper part overlooking the Chanard plain. To her left was the scout's road, and she considered going that way. No, she would visit the burial mound, say goodbye to her beloved dead, then on.

 

The mound was green, a fitting tribute by the gods for those that had died here. Dhyanna dismounted, then walked to stand below it. Part of her wanted to climb it, lay down, and never get up. She should have died here, so many others had. If she had, she wouldn't have failed their trust so completely.

 

Giving up? She looked around, but no one was there. Did we give up when you led us here? She was sure it was Erykah, but the woman had died almost two years ago and lay dead within that bier before her. It was her mind trying to ask her what she planned for her future.

 

Damn it, for the first time in her life, she didn't even have a purpose anymore! All of her hopes and dreams were beyond those mountains, leading, she found she was crying. Leading her troops into battle. Defending a nation that had betrayed her.

 

Now? She was alone.

 

The night came slowly here, unlike the mountain valleys of home. She made camp, gnawing on dried meat and drinking Kaffe rather than trying her hand with the cooking. Soon enough she would be forced to cook. She dreaded the very idea. The night was silent, almost unnerving. In her years, she had never spent much time alone, always there had been her companions, her troops, even her enemies. The stillness made her flinch, looking around. Was that a scout coming closer to test her? Had the dead risen to complain about her hubris?

 

She finally slept, a fitful slumber broken by her snapping awake, reaching for her sword. She found herself dreaming, sitting at a fire with those she had led here. But it was skewed horribly. They were as not as they had been on that last march, rather as she had last seen them after the battle. Erykah with her face pale as milk, her wounds still visible. Michella, her head caved in passing a wineskin, then suddenly they were all there, wounds still fresh- She snapped awake with a start, then turned to see Samandra, and Mairee, laying together. When she had seen them in the tent dying, Samandra had been unconscious, her head addled by a mace. Mairee, had been whimpering in pain from her wounds, barely awake enough to know. Now they both stared at her with reproach. She tried to move but behind her the rest were there again, shoving her toward the two figures, toward a grave with her own name on the stone.

 

"No!" She found herself standing by the mound, looking at it. How she had climbed from her bedroll, and walked here was a mystery. "What do you want from me!" she screamed into the night. A figure rose from the mound, and she spun to face it, drawing.

 

The figure moved down, feather soft on the sod. A woman she had never met, dressed in a soft red robe. The hood lay back, black hair shot with grey fell to her back. "What does any of the dead want, girl?" The woman touched the ground, and looked up at the sword. "What is it even the gods fear as much as any mortal man?"

 

"Can you speak plain?" Dhyanna's voice was rough with fury and pain. She slid the sword back into its sheath, hugging herself.

 

"How plain must any speak when you refuse to hear the answer?" The woman stood, a foot taller than the girl. Has she grown in the past moments? "Answer my question, girl. What is it that men do that even the gods fear?"

 

Dhyanna shook her head, her fury draining away. "I am not sure."

 

"Really, how many of the gods of home do you know?" her hand waved languidly toward the mountains.

 

"Tamara, Serah, Balome, Ygraine…" Dhyanna stopped. Of the dozen or so worshipped, she remembered only four?

 

"Healer, mother, killer, lover, is that all your life is, girl?" The woman seemed amused. "Which are you? All or none?"

 

"I don't understand."

 

"Ah, wisdom at last. Consider, child, why did they come here?" The sweep of the arm encompassed the mound. "Forty lie here, another seven up there-" She waved toward the Scout's Road, "Where those that died upon the march were laid to rest, along with the last two. Why did these women follow you to this death?"

 

"I don't know!" Dhyanna screamed in anguish. "I led them here, and what did it do?"

 

"Consider the greater picture-"

 

"I don't care about the greater picture!"

 

The woman seemed surprised. She reached out far to her left, and a point of light glowed where her finger stopped. The hand moved, but the light remained, a miniature star in the heavens. "But even a simple warrior needs to understand the greater picture! As a farmer needs to know what will grow from the seed she plants. Or a forester needs to know how a tree should grow."

 

Her hand came up on her far right, and as she spoke lights appeared. "Here is your birth, and your childhood, the seed of the tree that you are. Here is your test before the Academy, if you had refused the test, or admission, this," she waved toward that first light still glowing forlorn “Would not have happened, or might have happened much later in your life.” Everything in her life even things of little importance were added to the skein of light. Her confrontation with Lyddya, her appointment to the officer's course, the battle in the south. Her confrontation with Hypollyta which had led to her plan. As she went, the woman laid out her life like a tapestry, so many threads vanishing into nothing, or mediocrity. Finally her hand reached the scene before them. Then it became complicated.

 

"Here is you and these brave ones." Another, and another, as they flared, the woman spoke on. "Here they die, but you do not. But they gave you purpose. You go on to form a new legion. Train and lead them in battle. Discover and teach to fight in ways man has not imagined before." Now there was a line of lights like a necklace, or a single branch of a tree. "What if you had not? Most of your compatriots would have ignored that single lesson and chance." The finger moved back before the first light, then down, and another line of lights appeared. These glowed a different color. "You could have never suggested this bold stroke, gone on to be a rather mediocre commander, never taking chances." Another string of light, ending in darkness. "Or quit because of these dead. Stayed home, pining for what you might have been."

 

The hand moved back to the ending point of the first line, Dhyanna's life to this time. In a bewildering array, lights appeared at each point, as if a tree were sprouting death. The Guard crushed rather than being allowed to flourish. Her failure at Candarchas, rather than her victory. Dissappearance from the Citadel leading to a line of light that for some reason terrified her. Ola killing her instead of Tallesun. Taking her own life as custom allowed. Then the woman's finger touched the last light of that first chain, and she felt as if the finger prodded her chest from a distance here and now.

 

"You can never go back, not because your own would kill you, but because your fate belongs out there." Her hand waved. As it did the skein of hundreds of lights spun, forming a small galaxy above her finger. With a slight smile, her hands came together, dowsing the light. "But for you, I have a gift."

 

The woman pointed, starting at the top of the mound, and began naming names, each cut deeper, each someone Dhyanna had known only briefly, (had she commanded them only a week?) Then she heard the woman recounting their lives. As if she were there to see it, she saw it all, their lives on a page, and their death's.

 

Erykah's love of wine, and brawling. Erykah backed into a corner, sword broken, only one of her attackers survivng to ram a blade into her chest.

 

Michella's enjoyment of music, and the way others laughed at her horrible japes. Turning to face an enemy, missing the man that came from behind with a war hammer.

 

Colieen afraid every minute of her decade of service, Dhyanna had barely even remembered the small quiet redhead, but suddenly had a vision of her standing over the body of another, Kilara, trading blows with three men as they tried to force their way past. Her mind aquiver with terror, but not giving an inch, because the Legate had said they would stand here.

 

Kilara, a quiet somber woman with a deep love for her wife and her farm, dying from a thrust to her neck, wanting to tell the Colieen to run, but unable to say it, the sole caring witness to a fight that deserved a song!

 

And more. Every woman's life became part of hers, every death part of her own eventual demise. She suddenly saw that they had died for more than one reason. The least obvious of which was to place her feet upon this road, and to have her stand here this night.

 

"But I failed them." Dhyanna's eyes closed in pain.

 

The gentle voice spoke from that self imposed darkness. "You have not failed them. If you had given in to the queen, if you had given into your sword, then they would have died for nothing."

 

She looked up. "Who are you?"

 

The woman laughed. "Remember when you answered my question of the gods of home? I was among them." She laughed again. "Now which one might I be?"

 

A hand touched her face, and Dhyanna was suddenly back alone, laying on her pallet. She sat up, looking over the mound. Now she knew she was really awake, that dream had segued into dream. Even the woman she had been screaming at merely part of it.

 

Unsure of her voice, she began a hymn, a paean of life from Tamara's church. She regretted the attempt. She had a voice like a raven, and the words were ill-remembered, from when she was a child, not the apostate adult she had become. But the woods stilled, as if everyone and thing had fallen silent to listen.

 

"I had not forgotten you." She whispered at the end, touching the ground. She could almost feel fingers touching her from the grave, brief caresses. "That is what a god fears, and the dead fear. The one thing men do so well. That those who care will forget and make them nothing." She took a pinch of the soil, putting it in her pouch.

 

She slept, and all of the fear drained away. At dawn she mounted, and she snapped a salute at the gravesite. "No cohort ever gave more honor to their commander, no group of women will be missed more sorely by her. I will honor you all the days of my life."

 

Here outside, she wasn't sure where to go. Candarchas might accept her, but there would be those who expected her to be traitor in deed as well as outcast. Navron to the south would be as welcoming as someone who discovered that the cook at the feast was a leper.

 

She dug out the map, and looked at it. North were people that even in the best of times would treat her like a ravening beast. Perhaps, she ran a finger down the great river Flood. Perhaps that way.

 

The wind rustled the grass on the mound as she rode away. Behind her, the scrap of red cloth caught in a small bush fluttered as if to attract her attention. Then it was caught, swirled into the air, and was gone.