The Healer’s Touch — “The Sinner”
Chapter XI
The Commander looked at the village below. It was quite a big settlement, considered its location so far north. He turned to his men and grinned. In their faces, he saw the hunger of wolves. The war had been long, the march arduous, the battles bloody, the gratifications few.
He reveled in the sight of the running villagers. Shouts and cries and commands echoed towards him from the valley, magnified by the mountain walls to both sides. The people here hadn’t been warned. Nobody knew that an army of the enemy had managed to slip past the front lines and was about to stab them in the back.
But first, the winter. It was upon them and his battalion needed the resources this village had stored up. The Commander smiled when he saw how a group of men gathered and left the safety of the houses. A delegation, he was sure, of elders and chiefs or whatever these savages called their weak leaders. Sheep! That’s what they were. Sheep trying to negotiate with the wolves. All they would accomplish was to have the wolves taste first blood.
He marched towards them at the head of his men — soldiers packed in thick furs, their feet sinking into the frozen ground with the weight of their gear.
Ten men, ten! That was all they had unleashed to bargain for the lives of their wives and children?
Weak men deserved to die. Life was given only to those who had the strength to hold onto it in the face of death. His hand on the hilt of his sword, the blade still crusted with frozen blood, the Commander greeted them. They had stopped where the road was flanked by a small barn that kept off the wind a bit. More than half of the men carried torches, as if the daylight wasn’t enough to spend sight in this late season.
“Who speaks for you?” asked the Commander, when the silence of stupor had dragged for long enough and was losing its impact.
A young man strode forward. The Commander would have bet his soul, if he believed in such foolish things, that this lad had never swung a sword in his life.
“The Council of Elders greets the guests,” he said. “I, as their representative and spokesman, have been assigned to welcome you and to extend the …”
“That’s an awful lot of words.” His soldiers laughed and he bathed in the sound. “I’ll make it simple. Do you want to surrender your village peacefully or do we need to take it with our swords in hands?”
The lad didn’t shrink under his words as he had hoped. At least he grabbed the torch tighter. “The winter storms are upon us. If you drive us out of our homes, our old and young will perish immediately.”
The Commander yawned and thought of a nice young woman and a warm bed. He forced himself to face the situation at hand and leaned forward, staring the man down. “Do I look like I care?”
The lad’s eyes narrowed. I will enjoy breaking this defiance.
“I would hope so,” said the young man.
The Commander drew his sword and frowned. “Sorry to crush your hopes, lad.” He saw the man swallow, trying to stand his ground. But he still staggered back a few steps as the Commander walked towards him, ready to kill.
The man didn’t even manage to block the blade stroke with the torch. It entered his guts and the lad collapsed. The ensuing skirmish didn’t even merit to be called such. Neither was it a slaughter. The remaining nine men were hewn down before they even understood that doom was upon them.
Sheep! The Commander looked at his sword. The warm blood on the blade steamed in the cold. It would freeze soon and expose the blade to further corrosion. He looked for the lad to swipe off the blood on the man’s clothes, when he saw the rascal was still alive.
He watched him crawl off the road towards the barn, the torch still in one hand, the other clutching his belly, trying to keep the wound from tearing open further and spilling his guts.
The Commander raised a hand to stop one of his men from finishing the job. He crossed his arms and watched the man crawl, pain and horror and determination all mixed together on his face. The soldiers laughed as their Commander strolled after him.
“You have more grit than I’d conceded,” said the Commander and kicked the man. Groaning, he rolled into the barn. The doors had long before fallen off their hinges and sunken into the mud of lost spring seasons. He stopped in the threshold and stared at that pitiable creature on the floor.
The lad turned onto his back, his face now pure pain and fury. “You have no idea what a man is determined to do for his family,” he spat and threw the torch into the darkness of the barn.
The Commander’s eyes flashed as he saw the piles of barrels stacked against the walls, dark powder strewn all over them.
The thought of turning and diving out of the barn sparked in his mind, but he didn’t have time to execute it. The world lit with the fire of a thousand suns and the roar of dragons.
