Gawain frowned again, and silently chewed his frak. At length he swallowed, and then looked a little sheepish.
“I’m not entirely sure,” he said. “It was another insight, or rather more of a feeling… something that came to me as that strange aquamire drained from me and leapt across the void to strike Morloch beyond the Teeth. I can’t explain it.”
“So we have abandoned kings in their hour of need to pursue a feeling?” Elayeen stared at him. “G’wain there must be more than that, surely?”
“I’m sorry,” he replied, and he meant it. “I only know that it’s important.”
“What is?” Allazar asked, as though the answer were a straw to be clutched and he a drowning man.
“Raheen. And the reason why Morloch fears me so, now that he knows who I am.”
2. Of Songs and Shadows
When their frugal yet filling meal was finished and bedding laid out for the night, Gawain placed his weapons within easy reach and was about to announce that he’d take first watch when suddenly he paused, the breath caught in his throat.
Elayeen and Allazar instinctively began to reach for their own weapons, but Gawain let the breath out in a long sigh.
“Raheen’s never been invaded.” He announced, frowning and sitting cross-legged on his saddle at the head of his bedding. “Nor was it ever conquered, not for centuries. Not without dark magic.”
Elayeen shot a quizzical glance at Allazar and received one in return. Gawain looked up at them both, and then off into the distance as dusk turned from steel grey to burnt charcoal peppered with an endless ocean of stars.
“I say centuries, because no-one knows for sure. There’s only one way up to the top of the plateau, and the same way back down.”
Elayeen settled on her blankets an arm’s length away from Gawain, and drew her knees up and her tunic closer about her. Allazar, on the other hand, quietly lay down, pulling a thin cloak over himself and folding his arms over his chest as he listened.
“Some say… some said…that the attack upon Raheen by the Goth-lord Armun Tal of Goria counted as an invasion,” Gawain shrugged, “and also may technically have counted as Raheen being conquered. For about ten minutes. But that’s why most of us would add ‘not without dark magic’ when discussing our history.”
A breeze, long and welcome, sighed across grasses and gorse from the west, as if the Gorian Empire itself was remembering the time of the Goth-lords, and the dread power they wielded, and was relieved that those times were long gone. Elayeen shivered suddenly, and then followed Allazar’s lead, laying down on her bedding, her saddle for a pillow, drawing a blanket over herself.
“In those days,” Gawain continued, “Pellarn was free, and Callodon strong. The Empire knew it couldn’t hope to violate the one without facing the might and fury of the other, and Raheen cavalry to sweep away any invader foolish enough to offend either.
“Scholars and historians taught that the Armun Tal had it in mind to hold the Downland Pass closed against our forces as a prelude to an invasion of Pellarn, to stop us giving military support to Callodon and Pellarn, even all those years ago.”
“What was a Goth-lord?” Elayeen asked softly.
Gawain looked down at her and smiled sadly before sliding gently off his saddle and lying back against it, gazing up at the stars.
“Dark wizards, of a kind. Perhaps Allazar knows more about them?”
But the wizard made no reply, so Gawain continued: “We were taught that the Goth-lords were once noblemen of the Empire who had joined together with a powerful wizard, with the intention of using such powers as they might gain in order to advance their ambitions, even to usurp the Emperor himself. But the powers they learned to wield corrupted them, and they ultimately turned upon each other, through ambition and jealousy.
“The one called Armun Tal is said to have ruled a dominion to the southwest of Pellarn, and knowing that Raheen could bring the might of its cavalry to the field within a matter of days, he sought to bottle us up by blocking the Pass, and with the cavalry thus checked, to launch an invasion of Pellarn. That was…” Gawain paused again, briefly, and drew a blanket around his shoulders. “That was three hundred and eighty seven years ago. The Gorian Emperor apparently gave his tacit blessing to the venture, and quietly moved two of his prized praetorian legions to within bowshot of the Eramak River on Pellarn’s western border. This was in order to claim Pellarn for the Emperor once the invasion began, they said, rather than permit the Goth-lord to claim it for himself.
“It was summer, four years into the reign of Edwyn the Third of Raheen. He was a young king, barely ten years old when the crown passed to him on the sudden death of his father. Those were different times. Callodon and Juria were practically at each other’s throats in those days, so most of the steel in both those lands was pointed at each other not too far south of here, at the border, near Jarn. I told you about my time in Jarn? And my first meeting with the Ramoth there?”
“Hmm-hmm.” Elayeen affirmed quickly, not wanting to spoil the flow of Gawain’s story.
“So. In Raheen the standing army was around five thousand riders, but many more in reserve. Of course, they were spread around the land, though the One Thousand were stationed in barracks at the Pass, always in readiness, always watchful.”
Gawain sighed in disgust. “But we were looking the wrong way. The Downland Pass is on the eastern side of the plateau, and closely watched. With only the one way up or down we didn’t want anyone sneaking in and closing the bottom of the Pass against us.
“We had outposts on the western flank too, of course, but the watchtowers mostly looked north, and northwest, looking for the beacons which would be lit if Callodon or Pellarn needed our aid.
“By the time Edwyn received word in the Great Hall of The Keep in castletown that a ‘strange cloud’ was rising from the south-western lowlands and travelling against the wind towards our homeland, the Goth had already crested the plateau at the western falls of the river Styris. He rode on the back of a great winged beast, a Graken they called it, a creature dark wizard-made, and the ‘strange cloud’ that the watchmen had sent word about was in fact a host of grotesque flying insects, bred through the Goth-lord’s foul magic: Clawflies.
“The Goth really had no need of evil wizardry with such a host at his command. Each of the creatures was the length of man’s hand, and its claws spiteful sharp, like the saw tooth edges of razor-grass. Armun Tal atop his Graken simply soared high across the land, while the great flying host, truly like a vast cloud, swept low above the ground, following the master’s shadow, inflicting great pain and misery on beast and men alike. Clawfly wounds were not fatal in themselves, but so many small cuts, hundreds in some cases, were an agony which drove men and animals to the brink of madness, and neither fur nor hair nor hide nor clothing was proof against the swarm.”
Again Gawain paused, drawing the blanket tighter around him. Nightfall seemed suddenly to draw the heat from the air around them just as aquamire had drawn the sunlight from beyond the Teeth.
“Armun Tal had intended to cross Raheen west to east, to follow the river Styris as far as the Farin Bridge, then head arrow-straight for the market town of Downland, the barracks, and the Pass, and there let his vile host feast on The Thousand. He himself would use his magic to ward off any attempts at liberation the wizards of Raheen might make upon him, so they said.
“But the fact is, when the Goth-lord saw the effect his passing was having on people and horses and livestock, the panic and chaos left in the wake of his swarm, his ambition like that of all his vile brethren got the better of him, and he turned south. South, following the river Styris, heading for the castletown itself.”