The Heart of the World

5. Nebesta’s Finest

Chapter 5

Nebesta’s Finest

Voran surveyed the slaughter-fields from a promontory. Bodies twisted out of recognition. Two buzzards fighting over a corpse. A banner of gold and purple streaked with mud, trampled into the green of young grass. A cracked shield pillowing a head with no lower jaw.

It should leave some impression on him. Something. At least revulsion. But Voran felt nothing. Seeing years’ worth of battlefields on a weekly basis did that to a person’s soul. If he even had a soul left in that cold, barely-beating heart of his.

In the middle of the field of the dead, strangely separate from the rest, lay a youth barely out of his childhood. His was a faint smile in a face white as milk. His mail was barely tarnished from use, set like a jewel in a casing of spotless clothing in the bright colors favored by noble families. A pendant hung around his neck, bearing the mark of a Sirin or some other Power. A single arrow flowered from his chest. There was almost no blood visible on him.

That enraged Voran. So many years of warfare among the city-states left abandoned by Vasyllia’s loss to the Gumiren. The youngest and best men cut down, sometimes by their own fathers. Why did they not take the enormous energy needed to kill their own, and direct it to where it would be useful? Why, in the many years of his wandering through battlefields, had hardly a single battle-lord so much as listened to his call for peace?

What was the point, anymore? Why should he labor in the fields, searching for the dying and the wounded, wasting precious days trying to convince the great of this world to follow a cause that he no longer believed in?

But what else was there for him?

As habitual as a nervous tic, his left hand fondled the flask at his hip. The Living Water was still there. Still so heavy. Still draining him of his life and his energy.

More to silence his mind than anything else, Voran ran down the hill toward the pavilions of the victors.

“I’ve heard of you, sir,” said the young warrior, sitting uncomfortably in a chair too big for him. Not the commander, then, thought Voran. “They say you do everything, save raise the dead.”

“Then you also know of my conditions.” Voran said it by rote, already groaning inside at what he knew would be only polite attention on the part of the young warrior.

“Ah, I had heard of it. Well, get on with it then.”

“Should I not speak to your superior, young man?”

The warrior, a sub-voyevoda probably only a few battles away from a command of his own, flushed. “I did not say? Forgive me. Parfyon Krivoshey, the commander of this force, is badly wounded. I was assigned to take care of the administrative details while we wait for official word from Lord Yarpolk Dolgoruk.”

Ah, so these are Nebesta’s finest. What are they doing so close to Vasyllia? Last I heard they were fighting off Karilan bandits.

They were geographically closer to his home than the Dar-in-exile Mirnían, still hiding on Ghavan Isle. The thought gave him a strange sense of urgency.

“I will want to see Parfyon first, to heal him. Then I can make the necessary arrangements with him.” Voran made to get up from the rough camp stool they had provided him, but the young man stiffened. Voran stayed seated.

“That will not be possible,” said the young man, apologetic in word only. “Parfyon is to be remanded to the Veche’s judgment. He killed two of his own during the battle.”

“Ah. So you are to be the unfortunate recipient of my sermonizing?”

Voran tried to deliver it with levity, but the words thudded on the ground as soon as they left his lips. The youth looked embarrassed, more for Voran than for himself.

“You would not have seen many battles, I think, young man,” said Voran.

“Enough.” He smiled.

“May I ask you why you do it? Is it for glory?”

The young man laughed. “Glory? Certainly not. It is what I do best. Killing. I do not pretend to have lofty ideals, healer. I was born in a world of war. I deal in it, because it is what I know.”

“But why do you wage war against your own blood?”

The young man’s face darkened. “Negodi are not our blood…” There was a hint of a growl in the voice.

“No? You don’t know, then, that Negoda, only a hundred years ago, was a district in Old Nebesta? That a group of Nebesti woodsman and their families founded a small village for the sake of adventure, and that it grew into its own city?”

“That’s not possible, healer. What is next? Will you suggest that we are brothers with the accursed Vasylli?”

Voran’s heart dropped. It was worse than he had thought.

“Vasylli and Nebesti have been brothers for a thousand years. How can you have forgotten this in less than a generation?”

“So it is true, then,” said the youth, dismissively, “all they say about your drivel. You wish to restore the ancient monarchy of Vasyllia, yes?”

Voran nodded, a half-hearted gesture.

“Why? It was because of Vasyllia that Nebesta the Old was razed to the ground. Where were our brothers when the armies of the Gumiren nomads came to burn our cities and wipe out our people? Vasyllia would not even harbor our refugees. They left them in camps outside the city walls, for the Raven’s sake! How many of them were then slaughtered when the Gumiren came unexpectedly and besieged the so-called Mother of Cities?”

Voran forged ahead as he had done so many times, though he came up against the same arguments again and again. Not once had he convinced a single person. Not yet.

“Vasyllia is not blameless for what happened, I agree. But it has paid a heavy price. And what good has come of the end of the monarchy? Has there been anything but bloodshed since then?”

“No, but the answer to the bloodshed is not to go back to a repressive old order. I will never bow my neck to a Vasylli dog.”

“You don’t understand, do you? Vasyllia is not merely a city-state. To be Vasylli is to subscribe to an ideal above allegiance to a city or even a bloodline. To be Vasylli means to protect the weak, to set aside personal desires for the good of the Dar and the people. To be a Vasylli warrior is to be a man of peace, a farmer, a scholar. The sword is the least-used of his tools. It is an ideal that bends down the Heights of Aer to the level of earth. Sirin sang in Vasyllia’s trees; Powers walked its cobbled streets.”

“Quite the fanatic, you are,” said the young man, smiling crookedly.

“It’s not a matter of faith alone. I saw the ideal. I tried to live it. I am Vasylli.”

“Enough!” The sub-voyevoda’s face was flushed. “I have listened. For the sake of my men, I will not throw you out, though I dearly wish I could. But no more. Will you heal my wounded?”

Voran sighed as the flask at his hip grew heavier, filling with the necessary Living Water to heal them all. He nodded.

“Healer,” said the young man, a bit repentant for his outburst, “would you allow me to come with you? I may not be a devotee of the cult of Adonais, but I believe in my own way. I would be honored to see the Living Water at work.”

Voran was more gratified by this than he expected. “Thank you. That would be pleasant for me as well.”

The youth stood up and proffered an ungloved hand. “My name is Novvik, sir.”

Voran took him by the forearm in the traditional warrior’s grasp, prompting a surprised smile from Novvik.

“Vohin Novvik, my name is Voran.”

There were only about twenty wounded. Far too few for a battle with so many dead. Perhaps the rumors were true. Perhaps Nebesta was on the cusp of taking the high hand in the never-ending Internecine War.

The first had an arrow in his chest. His breathing was labored. Voran tied him to the cot and placed a leather strip in his mouth. He caressed the man—dark-haired and blue-eyed, a typical Nebesti—on the head, whispering consoling words so habitual that he himself didn’t attend to them. He pulled the arrowhead out quickly and heard the collarbone break. The warrior convulsed in pain and grunted and sweat sprouted on his forehead. But he subsided quickly.

“Your men are strong, Novvik. My compliments to Lord Yarpolk.”

After Voran had stuffed the gushing hole with clean rags, he prepared the poultice, made of bitter birch bark, lavender, and clover root. The pleasant aroma lightened the heaviness of the tent, and the wounded man’s shoulders relaxed a little.

Voran concentrated his scattered thoughts into himself. It took longer than usual, but finally all he sensed in his mind was the warm throbbing of his own heart. Calm at last, he took the flask from his hip and poured several drops on a fresh rag. In a swift, practiced motion, he pulled the bloody wad from the arrow-wound and wiped it with the Living Water.

Novvik’s eyes were large, the whites striking in his war-tanned face.

“You…wiped it away! As if there never were a wound. Remarkable. How do you do it?”

“I don’t know how it’s done, Novvik. Sometimes it heals outright, like this. Other times, it provides relief, but not healing. My own hands do little but provide physical relief with herbs and manipulations.”

Novvik stood in thought, as though he were having a difficult time coming to terms with what he had seen. It was a typical enough reaction, though this youth’s battle with his logical mind took longer than it did with most. Most simply chose to disbelieve the evidence of their eyes. Voran imagined that it was easier that way.

Novvik looked at Voran with something very near admiration. “Why do you not choose a side, Vohin Voran?” Voran noticed that he used the warrior’s honorific. Novvik had just admitted Voran to be a fellow-soldier, an equal. “You do realize that with that power of yours, you could end the war in weeks? And I don’t doubt the legends of your fighting ability, either. You are of larger build than most of our best warriors.”

“I did choose a side once,” said Voran. “It… didn’t end well.”

Novvik seemed to wrestle with his courtesy for a moment, but his youthful energy would not be bridled. “Would you not reconsider now? I will even let you in on a secret. Nebesta is on the verge of something great. There are new alliances with certain great Powers that…well, I would even venture to say guarantee our place as the new Mother of Cities. You believe in a higher ideal? Why not be there, at the inception, to see it come about in Nebesta? Such an ideal need not be bound by physical place. Why can Nebesta not be the new monarchy?”

This sort of response was not typical, not in Voran’s experience. It was a tempting proposition, but only for a moment. He remembered his first passage through the realms of the world, led by the mysterious Pilgrim. The details of that day were still vivid in his mind—the rustle of dry leaves underfoot, the wet smell of birches in the morning, the Pilgrim’s mischievous eyes. And his words, branded on Voran’s memory: “Whatever happens, my falcon, do not forget this. Vasyllia is everything. You must never let Vasyllia fall. She is everything.”

Voran had not been able to prevent Vasyllia’s fall. But he would never stop his work until Vasyllia the Old stood anew.

“Forgive me, Novvik. I cannot.”

There was something else that churned his stomach. What are these great Powers he speaks of?

Someone screamed outside. It was not the scream of a wounded man. This was a sound Voran knew far too well.

“You are not…” he turned on Novvik, his body tense.

“It’s not what you think,” said the young man, his hands palm-out, placating. “There was more to this battle than a tussle between cities. Come, I will show you. You of all people should be pleased.”

Voran wondered what he meant.

Behind the tents of wounded was a clearing with a single old oak in the center. Someone was tied to the trunk. No, nailed. His hands were nailed to the trunk, and his feet were barely above ground, unable to support his hanging body. His torso was chained to the tree, the links biting into his exposed skin. Two arrows shuddered in his right leg and his left arm. Another had missed but took a bit of an ear off. All that was not as horrifying as the realization—brown skin, flat face, angled eyes—this was a Gumir.

Voran felt his breath grow ragged. The Gumiren were more hateful to him than all the powers of darkness. If not for the Gumiren, he would not have been separated from his beloved Sabíana for twenty years. The Gumiren were the reason a wall stood between Vasyllia and the rest of the city-states. This hateful race was the source of everything that had gone wrong in the world.

Now, looking at the face of this tortured man, Voran felt only pity. Not merely for his physical pain. The Gumiren, he knew, were trained to endure uncommon levels of pain. It was his eyes. They were mindless with fear, a different fear than the fear of torture. This man had seen something so horrifying that it had robbed him of his mind. What is going on in Vasyllia?

“Why are you having your way with him?” asked Voran, his voice cold. “This man is a broken vessel. He was so, even before you began toying with him.”

Novvik’s eyes widened. “You can tell, just by looking at him? Remarkable… But what does it matter? This is a Gumir. I would prefer the Ghan himself, but he will do. We will not kill him. Just disfigure him enough to make a point. Then he will go back into Vasyllia.”

“NO!” screamed the man, his eyes clearing for a moment. “You not make me go back there. Not…” His eyes filmed over with the madness again, and he began to babble in Gumir.

“Novvik, let me heal this man. You are above such bestial cruelty.”

Novvik’s expression was like a door shutting in Voran’s face. The hatred there was staggering.

“Captain,” he said to the man who had been shooting arrows at the Gumir. “Throw this charlatan out of the camp. If I so much as see his face again, I will string you up to be shot at.”

Outside the camp, Voran washed his hands in a fetid pool of rainwater. It stank, seeming to only add to the grime on his body and to his general sense of heaviness, even old age. The sun cleared a bank of clouds, making the water sparkle for half a second. In that instance, he saw his face. There was no trace of age. He looked younger than ever, nowhere near his forty some years. He had looked exactly like that when it all began, when he had been the one pinned to a tree with arrows. Though then, it was no enemy, but his own future brother-in-law who had attacked him. Mirnían, now husband to Voran’s sister Lebía.

Where was he now? Why had the remnant of Vasyllia not entered the fray in the Internecine War? What were they waiting for?