The axe came down heavily. And all hope that Cordelia had for another trick Esme might pull to salvage that blunder deserted her when she marked the blonde’s face. It was fright - fright as never before she had marked in the girl - fright of one seeing no way out.

“Fidele!” the barbarian barked sharply.

Whether for his captain’s sudden command or by his own discretion, the man pulled back his stroke just in time, and so instead of cleaving Esme in half, it grazed her shin. The bloodshed ended the combat at last.

The fierce warrior stood back, heaving under his horned helm. A mirthless grin affixed upon his face, tauted by incredible exertion. Then he sighed greatly, releasing the tension and hung the axe on his girdle. “You are undone by your own doubt,” he said, extending a hand.

Breathing hard also, Esme took it and pulled herself up, grimacing as blood oozed from the flesh wound in her leg. “Take not so little credit for yourself,” she said. For all that her face was blanched still for pain and fear, her voice was measured with the effort of a dignified loser. “It took me all I had to last so long.”

“I do not,” he shook his head. “Your spirit faltered, and that is the mark of an inexperienced fighter. Otherwise not even I would’ve made that reckless charge at so skilled a foe. Take care of it and you will grow into a fearsome soldier one day.”

For the first time since they appeared, the Broggarts men raised their voices. Cheers and rude shouts, while galling for the losers, betrayed the anxiety that had plagued these grim men till then. Raising his shield in response, Fidele broadened a smile to bely his stoicism before the duel.

As for Esme, she limped back to Sir Kamaric. And on her knee she began to express her shame for the loss, even as blood dripped from the pressed wound. The knight checked her impatiently. “Have your injury tended to first. The blame lies not on you, for few hardened warriors could have proved a better fight. Go and consider yourself a proven one.”

“I am grateful, sir.” And she retreated to the back of his line, where Cordelia and the women awaited. The physician at once attended to the gash on her shin.

Cordelia stooped low and squinted at it, then clicked her tongue. “It is no easy job serving a warrior, isn’t it?”

“Better get used to it,” Esme said, trying to raise her own spirit. She was still pale, and it did not take Cordelia’s keen sense to see that the exertion of battle and the shame of a loss had taxed her greatly. Any other women or men would have collapsed at the combined intensity of such emotions and fatigue.

“It could have been worse,” Cordelia said.

“Well, did you learn what you wanted of that man?” Esme asked.

Cordelia chuckled, reminding herself that the girl was more perceptive than she appeared to be. “I don’t have an infallible strategy for your next time facing him, if that’s what you’re asking. But I did learn something alright. And I’m just glad drawing it out didn’t cost you too greatly.” The duel had ended with both duelists mostly unscathed. No doubt it was the preferable outcome. And she was sure the barbarian did not check Fidele’s killing stroke out of mercy, but for that a death could have provoked the strained tension between the two warbands.

“Will it scar?” Cordelia asked the physician, changing the topic.

“Not a wound so shallow,” he said. The women had also gathered around, curiously peering at the one among them who had come back from a battle. The general mood was lighthearted, seeing that all fears of a bloody battle had vanished ever since Kamaric agreed to a confrontation between champions only. Galilea especially fussed about the northern man’s tattoos.

“A warrior should be no stranger to scars,” Esme said stubbornly.

“All the same,” Cordelia said, “I would hate to see you scarred in the wrong place, like your face.” And secretly she was glad that Esme’s injury was not too debilitating, for that would harm her plan to deal with the einheri later.

“I would not mind it,” Esme said.

To this Cordelia only smiled bitterly. But Esme’s attention was already demanded when Kamaric rode from his battle line once more towards the barbarian.

There was a general expectation that the confrontation would soon conclude, but that was not to be. The barbarian had another surprise for Kamaric. At his signal, one of his horsemen descended the slope, leading with a rope tied to his saddle a bound man on foot. He was the only person who had hidden out of sight since the start. Cordelia had paid him no heed, for he presented absolutely no harm. The man limped with a weirdly twisted leg, his face miserably swollen. Whoever this man was, he had been roughly and violently treated by the Boggarts.

“You will not have me for a hostage to demand wergild from your neighbors,” said Drogva, “but I trust this man will serve just as well, if not better, for unlike me he is noble born.”

“Is he one of the deserters you speak of?” Kamaric said.

“Nay, sir. The opposite, actually. The injuries you see inflicted upon him owes to his loyalty to my cause more than anything.”

“Speak plainer and make it brief, barbarian. Who’s the man?”

“Brevity is the soul of wit, eh? But do oblige me for a moment, sir. I’m sure you will find the full story worthwhile in the end. Now, about the man, he’s the second son of some baron or another whose name and land you would pardon me for not caring enough to recall. Yet insignificant that he is, for a time he was our tyrant and us his cattle to be driven like slaves. He was, you see, a clerk.”

At this the barbarian paused and chuckled as though he found the sound and nature of that profession profoundly amusing.

“Well, as you are perhaps aware, we of the Boggarts are tasked with the collection of tithe for my lordly employers’ villages. For his stock and literacy they bound this man to us, so that he would see that naught of their subjects would cheat them of their rightful possession. And so he lorded over us, dictating, with careful calculations based on scientific observations of the weathers and peoples and signs and omens, the correct amount we must extort from each tilled land. Did I grudge him who was my superior and my yoke? Nay. For I knew since the start this land and its people had their own silly rules and laws, and so I endured. And so we collected the tithe according to his numbers, and I must boast, sir, we did a whoreson good job at it, meeting every penny that he ever demanded. But one day, I tell you, sir, one morning I chanced to walk by this clerk’s tent furnished with scrolls and such chests of coins as we have filled for our employers’ treasury. And there, to my disbelief, I harked the sound of prayers!

“Now, I was no stranger to the religion of the land. And most men in my company pray to your gods before a battle, while some others make offerings to certain pagan deities of the distant past. I do not grudge them it, for one who knows war knows one’s human prowess is a little thing before the whims of the gods. You saw how your girl slipped back there, sir. Only a naive fool would think their skills alone should avail themselves in battle and keep them from such blunders. But I digress. Back to the man. This clerk, sir, believe it or not, was not praying for himself but for our souls!”

And the barbarian roared aloud. It was a guffaw with ferocity behind it. Suddenly he raised his spear and struck the butt on the man in bondage, so that the pained man fell to the ground with a whimper. As he groveled, the back of his head became visible, showing hair caked and darkened with blood from many such cruel assaults.

Kamaric looked deeply disgusted by the display, but before he could say anything, the barbarian continued.

“I beg your pardon, sir. As it happened, the day before the event we had been raiding a village. Well, raid is not a polite word, as I have learned since coming into this country. I shall say we enacted justice, as my employers call it. Anyway, we carried out justice and killed many men who refused to answer for the goods and money they had failed to pay us. Not all of the men, mind. For we are not crazed wolves filled with primal bloodlust. We did our job only, and did it well, so that the rest of them would seriously consider our demands. Blood did not stream rivers and skulls did not pile up mountain high, sir. We were certainly not paid enough to labor ourselves so. We did our job. And that is another curious phrase I have learned from your people: we only did our job. This miserable clerk also merely did his job, to be sure, nothing more, nothing less. He maintained that his calculation was right. Judging from the weather of the past year, the state of the fields, the well-fed children, and seven raven calls that morning, these people should have no problem paying the demanded tithe, he said. Even when I had tied him to a post with a whip ready in hand, he maintained that he was right. He only did his job. Us though, the rest of us were sinners for killing those peasants. Can you believe that, sir? Our souls were corrupted and evil had been our deeds. And so he prayed for us who were sinners. When I asked him what we soldiers should have done to fulfill his demanded numbers if not through violence, he said he did not care. The facts were plain: we had killed, and thus had sinned. And he only did his job.”

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And here he stopped, fixing his gaze upon the man on the ground. There was no more mirth in his eyes, if ever there had been such a thing in them. The tattooed face darkened.

“And what is your point?” asked Kamaric.

“My point, sir,” the barbarian lifted his gaze darkly, “is that the man is right. We all of us only ever do our jobs. The Boggarts, the clerks, our employers, you and your men and women. We do our jobs. There is perhaps no higher truth than that. And that perhaps is the only truth in all the lands and all the times. The only difference is, somehow, your people have twisted its meanings beyond recognition.”

Again, he paused. This time, something different glinted in his dark eyes under the tattooed brow. And he asked, almost sentimentally, “Do I bore you, sir? I know you are impatient to get your wife back to the security of your castle, but will you hear a barbarian’s story?”

Surprisingly, Kamaric gave him a strange look, as though something in those eyes had caught his interest. “Tell it, man,” he said softly.

“I thank you, sir. Seldom is the bemoaning of a barbarian listened to by civilization. Yet mine is not the cry of woe, no more than the flagellant’s whimper at a whipping, for I confess I sought what I now dread. My own misunderstanding drove me to this place where I now stand before you, neither a barbarian nor a civilized man.

"Sir, I was born and brought up without ever seeing your High King in battle, but all around me was evidence of his presence: a broken world left behind after the war for our people. We none of us crave vengeance against your long-dead king, and why should we, what with the two score years that had passed since last his warhorse trampled our land. Yet the year I was born, Gunther had just been freshly slain by the Groens, and the following years were all but a great pondering of how we were to proceed, both for your people and mine. As for us, the handful of fishing villages we were left with might suffice to sustain a people and a way of life, so long as there was still a shaman apprentice with a story to tell by the firepit. But wherever there is not a power or spirit to hold a fragmented nation together there is not a united people. And who is to step up and take charge? Years of rites of passage went unattended by adults but a bunch of fumbling and broken kids and shaman apprentices. Who to give us the confidence, who to inspire and to be admired? We could not even give faces to heroes in stories because there was nary an adult faces in resemblance to one in our lives. Certainly there were adults after a generation, but even they were children inside. For without guidance, children grew up to be faux adults, posturing and fighting among each other how they think a warrior of old would have. But inside they were children, unassured of their own ways and their own lives. They moved through life in skittish steps, stopping every few paces to look inquiringly over their shoulder at the untrained shaman, who threw a turtle shell in the fire and watched anxiously as the thing cracked and revealed the proper course. But often the gods are not so easily read. And so with every stumble their confidence crumbles, thinking they had been living their lives all wrong, and how things could have been better with a real adult around to tell them what to do. Then to their hut they retreat, leaving valor at the door, never again emerging but with a head full of gray. Sir Knight Marquess, such is the world I grew up in. A broken world of two generations lost, where slowly and gradually the spirit of our people withers to dust. What is right to do, what is not? No one could tell with surety anymore. In a generation, I suppose, old stories will lose their meanings, old tradtitions their substance. And without a culture, what are we but animals who do not live but merely survive the days before we die? How was I to let it remain so forever? I thought someone ought to do something about it. And if no one would, why could that someone not be me?

“For how long the matter was pondered, it came to me one day with such ease I wonder if the trickster god had not planted it there for the sudden finding. For what an obvious answer it seemed then. That there had been one mighty warrior presented in our lives all along, in every acre of scorched earth, every soul of a defeated people, every mound of the fallen - your High King Gunther himself! He who was the worst enemy and also the greatest warrior to ever set foot upon our ancestral land. In his successors and people I was determined to seek a way to mend our broken land. And so on a fateful day with my sibling I departed, the both of us but scantly furnished with the clothes on our backs and some cold venison. And off we went, hoping to regain our past in a country new, as birds beckoned to their ancestral route for winter migration.

“Now, sir, I shall tell you what I found in your lands in staggering quantity: promises and promises and more promises. So much and so many told and betokened by innumerable scholars and their exotic libraries. And it seemed to me that deeper beneath the complex layers of this prospering society and its colorful folks so assured of their ways, the spark I was searching for must surely be lying hidden. And thus believed, I mingled with them all: the street urchins, the prostitutes, the priests, the warriors, the captives, the festive, the sorrowed, the serfs, the slaves, the brave, the wise, the dunce,... all them! Everywhere I turned, new things sprawled freely for the studying eye, from the marble walls of Camelot to the grand fortresses of Gehenna, from the marches to the sea, from dingy dirt huts to kingly keeps. All the things and all the places. But in the end, what do I find? Aye, sir Knight Marquess: that they do their jobs!” Now he punctured the speech with a horrible sound that only half-way approached a guffaw. But as he lifted his tattooed face to the sky and the great mane fell back, the impactful impression of a howling wolf struck so strongly it caused in the maidservants and their lady a chorus of panicked whimpers.

“They do their jobs! Merely so! And no sir, I do not mean to say yours is a simple people without complex and varied beliefs and inspirations,” he breathed, “all that, they do have, I shall give them that. Your laws, your traditions, your sense of honor and your religion, your noblesse oblige, your agape love, your great charity, your loving of your neighbor just as yourself - ‘tis your society and culture, sir. And, I beg your pardon, sir, but that’s all a goddamn lie! ‘Tis a speech, your people’s speech, but merely a speech! How, after all, in a society where every single soul believes in your ‘good’ gods and such laws of goodness, there could still be murderers and traitors and villains? Have you ever wondered, sir? For I’m sure even these lowlifes believe in the Good Gods just as you, if sometimes not even more.”

“Some think,” Kamaric hesitated, “they could earn God’s pardon should they repent in the end.”

“Ah no, sir, that is completely wrong! No one really believes such people exist, save outsiders who have not mingled so completely with your people. For the greater the villain, the more he afraid, and anxious is the sleep of the traitor. Those who commit the worst of deeds harbor a fear for all things mortal and immortal. Nay sir, but to those people sins cannot form until their tongue has given its permission. The lords and ladies who employ me, what are their sins, sir? They are sinless. They are masters of their lands and the serfs their subjects. It stands to reason that tithe must be paid, but threatening, beating and killing are still wrong. And so they may not beat the coins out of a serf. Nor did they ever order such things. What they did was have a clerk lord over us, demanding through him such numbers as no benign means would ever collect. But they merely do their job. And, from the bottom of their kind and sinless hearts, they pray for our souls who are sinful.”

The barbarian snorted. He raised his spear as if to threaten another blow on the groveling man, but decided against it, and continued. “Not to say we are much better, sir. We Boggarts did only what we could to fulfill our duty. And we claim it to be nothing more and nothing less. We only kill a few, we say, to let the peasants know fear and thus muster by all means the coins and goods to pay us. And how are they to do that? Who knows. Banditry, pillaging the next village over, even selling their children or themselves. Whatever they do to gather the tithe, not our problem. We only did our job. We only look after ourselves. If we don’t do it, someone else will do it in our stead anyway. It is inevitable. It is how life is. We say all such things to pardon ourselves. The clerks and the stewards who count the numbers, the soldiers and guards who oppress the peasants, the merchants and artisans who lavish the world with such luxury to be bought by blood money. The pardon that they grant themselves with their logic is far more effective than your god’s salvation!

“And that, sir, is the kind of civilized conviction and confidence I found at the tail end of my adventure: the cure I do not wish to inflict upon my people’s malady. Better that we are meek and base, that we kill and plunder for greed and a faltering tradition without dressing it up in such a roundabout way to conceal our true nature! Why must we be good and kind-hearted people who murder and steal, then call ourselves just? Let us simply be murderers and thieves - raiders - that’s how we are. As lies and hypocrites should never be the foundation of a people’s future.”

Now the barbarian ordered his horsemen to untie the rope from his saddle, presenting the prisoner to Kamaric. It was a signal that he had said his piece.

But Kamaric was not satisfied. “I still don’t get it, man. I understand wanting to vent your frustration. And though you insulted my people, I cannot fault any of what you say. But why me? And why here? Why did you feel the need to tell me all this?”

But the barbarian was already turning away. For one moment only, he turned on his horse to look at the knight in the eyes. “Mayhap, sir, after all this time wandering your land and commanding your people, I have found some few exceptions, some people I have observed to be of the truly honorable sorts. Mayhap I have developed a soft spot for them. And mayhap also that I feared you still had not read between the lines... Let me ask you this, Sir Knight Marquess: why would the lord of a land suddenly cause unrest and slaughter his people for a few more coins? Unless he is mad, no farmer would slaughter his cattle and ravage his field but in preparation for some great and terrible event. And, somewhat less relevant, take it as a passing thought, if you will, why would this lord not use his own soldiers for the task, in lieu of hiring a bunch of mercenaries who are liable to undermine his wealth? Why would he even go so far as to spend those hard earned coins to furnish them with arms and supplies and also ample battle experience? An interesting matter to ponder, don’t you think? But I must take my leave now. Make good use of my gift, sir. For the next time we meet I fear it won’t be so pleasant.”