No Brotherhood but that of Our Fathers: Warriors of the Iron Blade, #2

No Brotherhood but

that of Our Fathers

Warriors of the Iron Blade

Volume Two

JP Tate

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Copyright © 2016 James Tate. Previously published as ‘Eiji of the Kajhin’ Copyright © 2015 James Tate.

The right of James Tate to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted without the express permission of the author. All characters in this novel are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Books in the Warriors of the Iron Blade series.

Volume 1: An Exile’s Tread on Forbidden Soil.

Volume 2: No Brotherhood but that of Our Fathers.

Volume 3: A War for Generations Yet Unborn.

Other Books by JP Tate.

Fiction

The Most Hated Man.

The Identity Wars: Utopia is Dystopia.

The Curious Tales of Mr Mayhew and Mr Broker.

Dutiful: a love story of consensual sadomasochism.

Non-Fiction

Feminism is Sexism.

Sex-Objects: a little book of liberation.

All God Worshippers Are Mad: a little book of sanity.

Contents

Chapter 1: For the World is Both Large and Small

Chapter 2: No Serfdom in Aenglia

Chapter 3: No Brotherhood but that of Our Fathers

Chapter 4: The Bones of Kardes Iblis

Chapter 5: To Hold the Banner Aloft

Chapter 6: The Prayers of Bleddyn Ifan

Chapter 7: The Sons of the Desert are but Dust

Chapter 8: No Kings in Aenglia

Chapter 9: A Handful of Grass

Author’s Note on the Anglo-Saxon Words Used

Maps: There are several maps online at http://jptate.jimdo.com/maps showing the geography within which the story takes place that may enhance the reader’s enjoyment of this novel.

Chapter 1

For the World is Both Large and Small

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Wind and tide are the twin gods of the seaman. They are jealous, wrathful divinities and are not to be taunted or neglected. They must be shown due reverence and respect. The Wehnbrian crew of the ‘Whitecap’ sweated in the summer heat as they performed their rituals of worship to these two implacable deities. But they did not kneel in prayer, nor did they burn incense or murmur holy supplications or make genuflections. That was not the method of devotion required of sailors. No, their worship of wind and tide took the more muscular form of hauling on hemp ropes, hoisting the billowing tawny-coloured canvas, securing their lines in the cleats, weighing anchor, and the dozen other duties involved in getting a hundred ton cargo ship underway, out of harbour and heading for the sea-lanes. From the inland port of Chiltegn in Wehnbria they would navigate down the Fær Fléot, the wide estuary that was the passageway to the ocean on the southern coast of the Ehngle peninsula. They were setting sail upon a thousand mile voyage to the docks of Porta Aberta in faraway Gathkar.

The Whitecap was a cog with flush planking, not clinker built. It was constructed using the latest marine technology. Only the seafarers of the Canbrai Isles had better. Its master, Captain Wigberht, both loved it and cursed it in pride and vexation. The carved figurehead on the prow was an albatross, a fast-flying wide-ranging seabird, but this fanciful allusion flattered the Whitecap. It was a single-masted round ship, flat bottomed and high-sided. A slow but steady coastal craft, it had been designed to keep safely within sight of land, and was not intended for any purpose except to carry freight more easily than if the cargo were transported overland by wagon. But although it was a lumbering ungainly brute, its eighty foot length from bow to stern was the captain’s kingdom. As he paced the deck bellowing unnecessary commands to a crew who knew their business, his stout figure was a portrait of self-importance with outthrust chest and puffed cheeks. Like all Wehnbrian seamen, he was as sturdy as his vessel and a reliable man in foul weather.

At the taffrail in the stern stood a short but lithely compact woman. Against all expectation in these western lands of forest, field and meadow, she was oriental. The only one of her race in all the Ehngle lands. She was Eiji of the Kajhin, of the community of Alijah, one of the nations of the Menghis Steppes. Although she had spent half of her life in Aenglia she remained, to all who saw her, as foreign as the day she had originally arrived here with her Effendi, the Pæga warrior Ealdræd. Yet on closer inspection her physical appearance gave evidence both of the extent to which she had been immersed in her adopted culture and kept faith with her own ethnic heritage.

Nestled comfortably on her cranium was a plain half-sphere helmet with a one inch iron brim all round, which was commonly called a ‘kettle helm’ because it resembled a kettle cooking pot. This was more usually worn by archers or infantrymen than by those who fought on horseback, but Eiji liked it for its snug fit and because it reminded her of the fur-brimmed Menghis helm that her father used to wear when she was a child. If this style of helmet was suitable for the pony riders of the steppes, then in Eiji’s opinion it was suitable for any cavalry on earth. Beneath the helmet, her jet black hair fell straight around her head and was cut off crudely at the neck.

Her doublet was heavily quilted with Hessian padding for warmth and protection. Having sewn it herself, it was tailored high in the waist with a tapered peplum to create an hourglass shape that exaggerated the breath of her shoulders and thereby helped to distract attention from her diminutive height. Beneath her doublet she wore a thigh-length cotton chemise which exposed an enticing portion of her considerable bosom and which left her bare legs unencumbered. In contrast to the femininity of the chemise, she wore a basket-hilted sabre on her right hip with a small but deadly stiletto stabbing dagger on her left hip, all secured to a wide girdle made of leather that was thick enough to offer support for her lower back and some protection to her abdomen. On her feet were a pair of square-toed boots in soft leather that hung in slack folds around her ankles, Menghis-style.

The vast grasslands of the Menghis Steppes were so far distant to the East as to be utterly unknown to most folk here in the West, and to occupy no more than a mythical status for those rare few who had heard of that unimaginably faraway country. To meet a daughter of the steppes was as improbable as meeting a creature from the moon. The oriental slant of her dark eyes ensured that Eiji had long-ago become accustomed to being stared at by all and sundry. Her face declared her an alien presence. As far as she knew, there was not another of her people within two thousand miles of the deck under her feet.

There was second reason for her to be gawped at by strangers. She wore a peculiar looking weapon-sheath upon her right arm. Both sheath and arm ended at the wrist. She had no right hand. Amputation was a familiar feature of life in a violent world, but the curious arm-sheath of stiff brown leather that covered her right forearm almost to the elbow was an intriguing source of wonder, for where her missing hand would have been there was instead a twelve-inch double-edged blade, like a broad knife, which had been built securely into the end of the sheath. It provided her with the weapon that her absent right hand could no longer hold. It was called a wæpen-scæþ. The armament she wore today was the fourth wæpen-scæþ that Eiji had owned since losing her hand in battle at the age of barely twenty. The leather frayed after a time and had to be replaced.

She ran a calloused thumb along the glistening blade that extended from her wrist. The polished iron caught the summer sunshine and Eiji smiled at the way that the light danced upon its sparkling surface. She had always been one to delight in the menacing beauty of an edged weapon.

The original arm-sheath, designed by Ealdræd of the Pæga twenty years ago, had been studded with iron plates like scale-mail. These were intended to act as a form of shield against any opponent armed with a small weapon such as a knife, affording Eiji a means of defence as well as attack in close combat. But the iron plates had not lasted long. They rusted because they were the devil to keep clean and dry. So thereafter she had worn a wæpen-scæþ of reinforced wrapped leather. In any case, Eiji had never been one to be overly concerned with defence in combat. She was all aggressive offence and let Waðsige, the God of Wars and Lord of Chance, take whomever he chose. That was how she’d lost her hand in the first place but it hadn’t altered her fighting tactics.

Fortunately she was left-handed and her main weapon was the basket-hilted sabre at her hip. It was a cavalry sword and very suitable for a woman who idolized the scimitar-wielding pony riders of her native steppes and who had lived her adult life among the horsemen of the Pæga. She favoured it too because the basket-hilt offered more protection for the fist that held the sabre and, having lost one hand already, she was reassured by a weapon that gave greater protection to her remaining hand.

Eiji leaned against the taffrail and watched the Wehnbrian seamen as they laboured. The Whitecap would transport her eastward on a voyage that she had never expected she would make. She had long since resigned herself to living out her life and dying here in the nations of the Ehngle. Yet, as the poets told us, the gods were whimsical and contrarian in their natures. They had confounded all reasonable expectation. Eiji was now undertaking a journey that might, if she survived it, permit her to breathe the grass-scented air of the Menghis Steppes once more.

It was a prospect that put her in a reflective mood. Eiji had been through so much in these western lands and many memories of the last two decades crowded her mind. There were glories and there were tragedies. Most folk passed from birth to death causing barely a ripple in the pond, but the gods had made sport with Eiji’s life for their entertainment. She did not reproach them for that. She had lived her days. Her pugnacious face wrinkled in contemplative reminiscence.

Ealdræd had been her lover, her husband, and her master. Eiji had been his lover, his wife, and his companion against the world. They had been comrades-in-arms in the face of all hostility. If their union was improbable, once they had found each other the bond between them had been forged in iron. They had been family from their very first meeting, when she had been the wretched slave of a band of filthy Khevnics and he had chanced upon their caravan on the Tundra and rescued her on a caprice. This woman of the East and this man of the West had belonged together from the moment they had met because they shared the beaduferhð, the war soul, the warlike spirit.

Unable to travel home to Menghis by herself she had journeyed with this man, her Effendi, to the home from which he had been exiled in his youth. Unbeknown to them both, it was his return to the Pæga territory of Aenglia which had been the beginning of their true journey together. They had been one flesh for seventeen years. They were good years.

Her Effendi had taught her the strange vocabulary and grammar of Ehngleish half her lifetime ago and Eiji’s command of the language had become second nature to her. She could think in the ghazboutyr tongue and even dream in it, although her accent retained traces of the husky lisping speech of one who has grown up speaking in Menghali. But the customs of an alien culture were another matter.

Eiji had never been able to entirely resolve her difficulty in accepting the ways of foreigners. To her they remained ghazboutyr, the Menghali word for all non-Menghis people which meant those who cannot speak properly. To the proud Menghis, everyone outside of the steppes was ghazboutyr, friend and foe alike. All her years in Aenglia living amongst the Pæga clan and sharing herself body and soul with her Effendi, had not enabled her to abandon the feeling that all ghazboutyr were wilfully contrary-minded. Even her unsparing love for Ealdræd had not convinced her that any culture except that of the Menghis, who had once been the greatest imperial power of the immeasurable steppes, could truly be said to be civilized. It had always irritated Eiji’s truculent personality that the Pæga had expected her to fit in with their ways without their adapting to any of hers. The Menghis and the Aenglian cultures, although separated geographically by two continents, had many things in common but it was always the dissimilarities which rankled.

Over the years her Menghis habits had created a degree of antagonism between herself and some other residents in their community of the town of Rede. Eiji had found a surprising level of acceptance from them when she had initially come to live among her husband’s folk, for at first she had been an interesting oddity from the world outside and they had welcomed her. But they had expected that she would become as they were. They felt entitled to expect her to alter her ways to fit in with the Aenglian view of the world and their place within it. Instead, Eiji had held resolutely to her Menghis customs and beliefs. This had not bothered Ealdræd because his travels as a wandering mercenary soldier had taught him a certain tolerance toward the diversities and peculiarities of foreign cultures. Sometimes they baffled him and sometimes they offended him but they seldom surprised him. In any case, Ealdræd had always found that in everything which really mattered he and Eiji were of one mind.

To Ealdræd, the genuinely foreign presence in their midst was the revolutionary ideology advocated by the followers of Raedwald; the Geinnian Gehwelc. This was the cultural policy to include everyone by which all the clans of Aenglia were supposedly to be united. Under the rule of these degraded peacemongers ever more Pæga territory was being lost to repeated incursions by the Glæd clan and the Wódnis clan. But far from being alarmed by this colonisation, the Geinnian Gehwelc welcomed it and celebrated it. They praised it to such an extent that the Pæga, once the most fiercely independent of all the Aenglian clans, were meekly surrendering their own distinctive clan identity. They were losing their place in the world.

Raedwald had created the Geinnian Gehwelc in the time of Ealdræd’s father who had been a fierce opponent of the new policy. Ealdræd had been set on his long life’s road as a soldier-for-hire after having been exiled as a punishment for his allegiance to his father’s convictions. Upon Ealdræd’s eventual return to the clan in his old age there had been a barely concealed enmity toward him from the council of elders who ruled in Rede, all of whom were fanatically committed to the policy of Geinnian Gehwelc. Raedwald had long since died but the dominance of his political legacy remained unchallenged.

The senior man on the council of elders was the Thegn Caedwalla, a nephew of Raedwald himself. The thegn had hated and feared Ealdræd ever since the prodigal wanderer had returned in defiance of his banishment. Ealdræd had told campfire tales about his adventurous life and Caedwalla had witnessed the effect that these sagas had upon the young men who listened so attentively. The thegn considered the returned exile to be a dangerous subversive.

With a lifetime of mercenary exploits behind him Ealdræd had become the foremost storyteller in Rede, a role which gave him considerable social status. He was a popular favourite for many in the community and for some he was inspirational. Before Ealdræd’s homecoming there had been no significant resistance to the Geinnian Gehwelc but the virtues and values exemplified in his campfire tales had caused political agitation amongst those who regretted the Pæga’s loss of their ethnic integrity and their former prestige. The allegorical message within his bloodthirsty parables had motivated many of the younger generation to seriously consider a restoration of the old customs and beliefs. The clan leaders had been greatly afraid of Ealdræd’s influence over the young but they dared not move against him for fear of splitting the clan. They knew well enough that a significant number of the men and boys would side with the old mercenary.

Ironically, Eiji’s explicit foreignness should have made her the exemplar of a policy to include everyone yet she was married to the most prominent opponent of that policy and her combative personality frequently put her at odds with her neighbours. So the Menghis woman had no propaganda value for the Thegn Caedwalla and, if anything, she was something of an embarrassment to him. She merely proved beyond question that Ealdræd’s opposition to the Geinnian Gehwelc did not stem from any prejudice against foreigners but from a dear love for his own ethnic culture.

Despite her combustible temper Eiji had continued to receive a healthy measure of forbearance from the common folk in Rede because of the increasing esteem they felt toward Ealdræd as an important elder of the clan, even though he was never invited to sit on the council of elders and would not have accepted such a position had it been offered to him. His public recognition of Eiji as a highly valued companion, the wife of his hearth, inclined others to also see her as a person of worth. Nor could anyone doubt her virtues of loyalty, integrity, honour, and courage, since these admirable qualities of character were manifest in her daily behaviour.

Eiji had acquired additional personal status from the fact that she had borne Ealdræd a fine son. Their first child had been a daughter who had died at the age of three in the great epidemic of the Red Consumption. Little Eostre had been taken from them by the same cruel fate which had robbed so many other children of their lives, and there was nothing to be done about that. Eiji’s soul had come close to breaking as she had laid the infant in the ground and covered the tiny body with the cold earth. Many another mother had done likewise. The death of little Eostre had been a loss more painful than the loss of Eiji’s hand but, as before when she had suffered that earlier wound, her Menghis spirit had found the strength to carry the weight of a destiny which could not be altered. She had endured that which could not be cured.

Their son had been only eighteen months old at the time. He had survived the epidemic because he was still small enough for Eiji to carry him about everywhere with her inside her tunic. The birth of her son had been difficult, a protracted and painful delivery which had almost cost Eiji her life. Afterwards she had found that she could no longer fall pregnant and this had made her one son all the more precious to her. His survival had been her survival, for she could not have lived through the agony of a second child’s death. When the calamitous year of the Red Consumption finally passed, Eiji had given heartfelt prayers of gratitude to the gods of the pony riders for leaving her with hope for the future.

The boy’s name was Hereweorc. Ealdræd had chosen this name for their son because it meant a warlike deed and when applied to a person it meant one who performs warlike deeds. It would be a constant reminder to the boy that he was a Pæga spearman. Eiji had been very pleased. She had told Ealdræd that the Menghali word for this was Jangovar and that on the steppes the word was used as a title of honour bestowed upon warriors who had performed deeds of conspicuous heroism in battle. The greatest of all legendary Menghis heroes was called Sükhbaatar Jangovar, the hero with an axe. Hereweorc, she knew in her heart, would grow up to kill many enemies. He would build a monument to himself with the corpses of those that he defeated in combat. Eiji had smiled when she said this; that defiantly proud, indomitable smile of hers. Eiji thought it a very good name for her son and she would whisper it softly to the infant as she nursed him and he grew strong. Bundled inside his cradle-bag as she carried the baby on her back, her lisping Menghis accent would murmur Hereweorc over her shoulder as if to bless the boy with the martial inheritance conveyed in the name.

It had always been their habit that Eiji would practice her swordplay each day against Ealdræd’s consummate spear technique. Although in her young days she had been all aggression and no subtlety, the passage of time had taught her the benefit of combining skill with her natural ferocity and she had acquired considerable expertise and dexterity. From the time that Hereweorc could first hold a half-sized spear he had been expected to join them in this daily ritual and the three of them had exercised their abilities together. This was unique among the Pæga in Rede. In the past sons had learned martial proficiency from their fathers, and sometimes the women had practiced too, but never as a family unit on a daily basis. Moreover, the pacifist beliefs of the Geinnian Gehwelc had discouraged any continuance of the old customs, which meant that few boys now acquired combat skills from those men who still had any, and the women seldom if ever handled a weapon. The ancient ethnic virtues were vanishing. It was one more way in which Ealdræd’s return to the clan had caused a disturbance within the community of Rede.

The Geinnian Gehwelc were not much given to military endeavours. They disapproved of violence and generally went unarmed. Raedwald, the founder of the creed, had been known in his latter years by the name of Raedwald Mildgyð, the latter word meaning battles gently. Although he had once been a celebrated man of the spear, his political convictions had required him to set this aside. His disciples had followed his example so that by the year of Ealdræd’s return from exile there was very little spear-practice amongst a clan whose spiritual kinship with the spear had once been legendary. If the Pæga men of former generations had been alive to see this betrayal of their heritage, the shame of it would probably have killed them. That Ealdræd exercised his combat skills every single day, and moreover included his wife and son in this combat training, was considered by Thegn Caedwalla and the other community leaders to be as politically inflammatory as the tales that the old man told around his campfire. But the other boys envied Hereweorc this martial experience with his father and tentatively encouraged their own fathers to teach them the handling of the spear. When this was not forthcoming, they befriended Hereweorc and sought to learn from him.

Being of mixed race, Hereweorc might have grown up ethnically torn. Yet he had made his choice very early in life and had never deviated from his course. His mother’s fierce pride in her Menghis culture was a conspicuous element in his childhood but the boy was surrounded by Aenglians and he had immersed himself in the Pæga ethnicity of his father. Hereweorc worshiped his father. The lad learned by heart the stories of Ealdræd’s past life. To the growing boy his father was the paragon and exemplar of the manly virtues. Eiji found no fault in this because she viewed Ealdræd in the same light.

It was no surprise that Hereweorc rejected his Menghis birthright and, although this saddened her, Eiji realised that it must be so. It was better for her son to take his place among his neighbours. Eiji was no fool and fully understood that he would have suffered much if he had grown up as the only Menghis boy in a community of Aenglians. He had made the intelligent and necessary choice. She herself had encouraged him to make it, although little encouragement was needed. Hereweorc had to find his own way in the world and it was certain that he would never set foot upon Menghis soil. He must be Pægan and if he became the man his father was, then Eiji would be more than content.

His colouring was not that of his mother, nor that of his father. His complexion was unusual enough to prompt strangers to take a second look but not enough for them to comment on it. For anyone who knew his mother there was a slight but noticeable oriental slant to the boy’s eyes, but for anyone he met who was unaware of his family history this trait was not especially striking. In his childhood Hereweorc himself had been far more concerned about what he considered to be his lack of height. His father was a big man, over two yards tall, whereas his mother was not many inches above five feet. By the age of adolescence it was evident that the boy would be neither as tall as his father nor as short as his mother, but he would be of less than average height amongst his clan, and Hereweorc thought this to be a significant impediment for a Pæga spearman.

On the other hand, he had also inherited his parents virtues. He had the quick mind and subtle wisdom of his father, matched with the furious fighting spirit of his mother. It was due to the latter that, despite his being of mixed-race and shorter than the other boys of his age, Hereweorc had not been bullied as a child. Those few who had tried it had suffered hard knocks for their trouble. The Pægan youth was his mother’s child too, and it served him well. Hereweorc’s Menghis blood made him a natural fighter from infancy and this earned him respect from his peers.

Ealdræd had lived until he was in his late fifties, barely a year from the venerable age of sixty, in a society in which most folk who survived childhood were dead by their mid-forties. At the time of the old man’s death his son had been fifteen years old. Hereweorc’s commitment to traditional Aenglian culture, and especially to his Pæga ethnicity, was passionate. He naturally took the same attitude as Ealdræd on the question of the Geinnian Gehwelc. In this he had the full support of the close friends with whom he grew up. They all thrilled to the stories of Ealdræd’s adventures in the far-flung places of the Ehngle peninsula and beyond, and they understood his subtext. Implicit in every tale was a moral that taught the boys to recognise how the ethnic culture of the Pæga clan had made the Pæga a proud people who were respected by the other clans. They could hardly fail to notice how, in comparison, the new policy of political inclusion had caused the Pæga to abandon all pride and had earned them only the contempt of the other clans. The old storyteller was a beacon of hope to many of Hereweorc’s generation of young men, enabling the adolescent boy to bask in reflected glory, and unsurprisingly his devotion to his father was wholehearted.

The old man had died when the snow was thinning on the ground. The tough veteran of a thousand battles had held out through his final winter as if determined that it would die before he did, though his guts were rotting away inside him from a wasting disease and his once powerful body had shrunken, the muscles emaciated. Yet his spirit was still strong. The flesh withered, but the strength of character remained. Hereweorc had taken great pride in the undaunted stoicism of his father’s death, just as he had always taken pride in the valour and dignity of his father’s life.

Ealdræd had been laid to rest in the Cnéowmæg Cumb, the Valley of the Ancestors. As a warrior he was entitled to be buried with his grave goods and so he was interred with his spear, javelin, and long knife. The corpse was dressed in his mail shirt and helmet. There had been a scurrilous rumour spread by Ealdræd’s enemies in the Geinnian Gehwelc that his grave would be desecrated and his body removed; that he would be exiled in death as he had been in life. But Eiji and Hereweorc had both sworn an oath in public that should his resting place be disturbed they would hunt down those guilty of this sacrilege and cut off the despoilers unworthy heads. Such was Eiji’s reputation as a warrior, and by this time Hereweorc’s own emergent reputation as a fighter too, that the old man’s grave remained untouched. Perhaps the rumours had been nothing more than the mean-spirited and puny spite of the Geinnian Gehwelc.

But Ealdræd’s death had left Eiji culturally adrift. Although there were some folk in Rede that she considered friends, the Pæga were not her people. They never had been and they never would be. She was a Kajhin of the Menghis. Eiji’s immediate family of husband and son had been her entire home and hearth in this western land. Apart from them, she had always been essentially alone. Without her Effendi she found herself with little of substance to which she could feel that she truly belonged except her son, and it was at about this time that she began to realise that Hereweorc’s future might best be secured in her absence.

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The three Aenglian spearmen on the Whitecap were feeling their stomachs. They were unaccustomed to travel by sail and their breakfasts were not sitting well with them. The ship had not yet left the estuary, a pilot was still on board to guide the coxswain at the helm, the Fær Fléot being broad and deep enough to allow for the passage of ocean-going vessels. The Aenglians were wondering what awaited them on the open sea if even this inland channel turned their bellies queasy. They had heard of seasickness but they had never felt it until now. The deck was solid beneath their feet and yet it was in motion, as if the world itself were swaying from side to side. It was an unnerving sensation. It undermined a man’s conviction in the constancy of life’s certainties.

The creaking of the hull was alarming; it sounded as if the wooden planks of the ship were splitting asunder, and the Aenglians were becoming convinced that the craft would surely be broken into pieces when it struck the first ocean wave. They had expected that a voyage aboard ship would be an adventure, not a mixture of the nauseating and the demoralizing. But they took comfort in the fact that the busy seamen appeared unconcerned. Perhaps the rasps and groans of the ship’s timbers were a normal accompaniment to any trip on a sailing vessel.

Bawdewyn, Aldfrith, and Renweard hooked their thumbs into their belts and braced their legs against the rolling of the ship, careful not to allow their apprehension to be revealed upon their faces, for none wished the others to think badly of him. The captain had made full use of his stowage and the heavily laden cargo ship was lying low in the water but the three Aenglians silently determined that if they were all to drown, then they would do so without admitting to any feelings of trepidation. The Whitecap was making headway and all might yet prove safe.

These three spearmen were escorts and companions to Eiji, the wife of Ealdræd the storyteller and the mother of their friend Hereweorc. They had sworn to undergo the perils of the journey eastward with her, indeed they had been eager to do so, and they had experienced no cause for regret thus far. The ride through the Ehngle nations from Aenglia in the north to Wehnbria in the south had been fascinating for three young men who had not previously passed beyond the borders of their Pæga homeland. They’d ridden through landscapes quite unlike anything they were accustomed to, they’d marvelled at the peculiar hairstyles and eating habits of the locals, and they’d heard Ehngleish being spoken in a variety of strange southern dialects which had tickled them pink.

In Sæxyny they had even come across of community of Ymbærnan, the nomadic folk who lived in fancily-painted carts and whose skins had a swarthily walnut brown tint. These people were not Sæxyns, but they were to be found in that country in increasing numbers. The Aenglians had gawped like peasants at the darkly enshrouded Ymbærnan women who were so heavily veiled that nothing could be seen of them, from head to toe, except their eyes. The ride south had included many such abnormalities. It had all been endlessly intriguing.

The expedition had been all the more appealing to them because they considered it an honour to be accompanying Eiji of the Kajhin, a woman they had all long admired. But she had been inclined to a melancholic disposition for much of the trip and now that they were on the Whitecap, trying to keep their breakfasts safely in their stomachs, they could see from her demeanour that the Menghis was in no mood for company at present. Not wishing to intrude where they were not welcome, her companions stood together by the mast amidships and kept their counsel as to the foolishness of trusting in sail instead of horseflesh.

The woman whose extraordinary life was the reason for their journey stood apart from them by the rail, still absorbed in her recollections as she gazed unseeing at the woodland on the banks of the Fær Fléot, the trees slowly becoming more distant as the estuary widened and the ocean drew closer. Her thoughts were full of remembrance of things past. Her features were cast in shadow by the poignancy of her meditations.

For two years after Ealdræd’s death Eiji had stood alongside Hereweorc as he took a prominent place among those defiant Pæga who were seeking to redeem their people as his father would have wished. They were called the Ansæc, the resistance. Although he was still so young, Hereweorc was already much-respected even by those of the Ansæc who were several years older than himself. Ealdræd had taught him the wisdom and the fighting attributes of a true Pæga spearman and this was recognised by those around him. When he spoke, he was listened to. When the young men of the resistance practiced their spear-craft, flouting the disapproval of the Geinnian Gehwelc ruling class, the lithe and skilful Hereweorc could not be bested by any of his peers. He had grown strong. Eiji had been proud to see her son adopt the mantle of his father, more proud than she had ever been about anything in her life.

Ealdræd had been the pivotal figure in the formation of the Ansæc in Rede. Consequently, after his passing there was a vacuum of leadership. It was Eiji’s firm resolve that her son should occupy that position. She knew that he had the mettle and the ability. As allegiance to the Ansæc spread to the youth in other towns and villages of the Pæga clan, the ambitions of the Ansæc became grander. There was even some bold talk of restoring the ancient Aenglian custom of declaring an Anwealda. This long-discarded rank, the Anwealda, was a military leader who ruled during a time of war. He was chosen by the ordinary folk of the clan and was appointed by an act of public acclamation. The Ansæc knew that they had a war of resistance to fight, not only against the Geinnian Gehwelc but also against the colonising intruders of the Glæd clan and the Wódnis clan. These colonists would not sit idly by to see the Geinnian Gehwelc, who were the facilitators of their colonialism, cast down by the resistance. Blood would have to be shed in this war of Pæga liberation, which meant that a military general would be needed.

In truth, the notion of reviving the custom of an Anwealda was little more than wild talk. But, for whatever reasons of her own, Eiji had become convinced that it was Hereweorc’s destiny to be acclaimed Anwealda. She had prayed to the gods of the pony riders for it. She had whispered these secret thoughts into the ear of her son. He was the heir to his father. Who else should lead the Ansæc? Who else should stand at the pinnacle of the Pæga clan as its Anwealda? Her son would not lead the life of an exile as his father had been forced to do. Instead, he would vindicate his father by destroying the Geinnian Gehwelc, driving out the Glæd and Wódnis colonists, and restoring the ethnic traditions by which Ealdræd had lived. Hereweorc would take vengeance upon the ruling class who had imposed banishment upon his father.

Mother and son spoke clandestinely of this many times and Eiji found the young man very responsive to the idea; for their love of Ealdræd, for the pride of his clan, and for personal glory. Hereweorc did not understand why Eiji was so certain that he was destined for greatness, since his reason told him that it was highly unlikely that anyone would become Anwealda, but he was readily persuadable that he should aspire to this illustrious prize. For her part, Eiji had set her mind to it. Nothing must hinder Hereweorc’s chance to lead the army of the Pæga resistance.

But the boy did not realise the level of sacrifice that his mother intended to make for the sake of her ambitions on his behalf. Although he knew her decisive and resolute personality so well, he still did not imagine what she was thinking. It seemed clear to Eiji that if her son was to one day become the Anwealda of the Pæga, then there could be no role for her to play in his future. He would need a Pæga wife, not a Menghis mother. After all, the goal of the Ansæc was the restoration of Pæga ethnicity; a reassertion of their cultural identity as a clan. Eiji’s presence, as so obvious a foreigner, was likely to be damaging to Hereweorc’s reputation and status. He must be seen as the son of Ealdræd the inspirational teller of tales, not the son of Eiji the alien from the Menghis Steppes. She believed that she would be a political liability to him.

Hereweorc was already included among the leadership of the Ansæc but this was partly out of respect for Ealdræd. The son of the man who had instigated the resistance movement could not be ignored, yet the fact remained that Hereweorc was a lad of seventeen. It would not be surprising if his older comrades considered him too young to be taken seriously as the figurehead of the insurrection, especially if there were others who fancied seeing themselves as a future Anwealda.

The more Eiji thought upon it, the more she convinced herself that her presence at Hereweorc’s side could only be a hindrance to her son’s chance of leading his clan. And if so, then the force of logic made her next step unavoidable. Eiji had determined that she must leave Aenglia. It was a hard resolution to make for it meant that mother and son must separate forever, but Eiji did not shirk her responsibilities. She was ready to do what needed to be done.

Eiji was, by her estimation, thirty-nine years old. It was not an age when a woman would normally uproot herself from the community in which she lived. But these Aenglians were not her own folk. She had never abandoned her Menghis beliefs and values. Eiji was of the Kajhin and did not wish to be anything but herself. She was no less a Menghis woman now than she had been on the day when she had been snatched from her homeland by Khevnic slave traders at the age of eighteen. Time had not changed her soul.

Since the death of her beloved Effendi she had thought increasingly of her long lost homeland, three thousand miles to the east. Memories of her Menghis childhood sang a siren song and she yearned for sights twenty years unseen. During her early years in Aenglia, when Ealdræd had been unsure as to whether he would remain with his people or whether he might take to the road again, Eiji had fondly hoped that one day she would see the steppes once more before she died. That possibility had never materialised because they had stayed in Rede. But with her decision that she must remove herself from the Pæga for Hereweorc’s sake, those long dormant hopes revived. The day had come. Having arrived at this bittersweet conclusion, Eiji had informed her son that she intended to attempt the journey back to the Menghis Steppes.

Hereweorc had been shocked. He did not see the situation as she did. On the contrary, he argued that Eiji was no impediment to his position in the Ansæc. Was she not held in high esteem by his comrades in the resistance? Certainly she was. Eiji was a cempestre, a warrior woman, and her fighting prowess was greatly admired. In a war of liberation she would be an asset not a hindrance. Hereweorc was horrified by her intention to depart and he did not believe that her sacrifice was necessary. He had begged her to reconsider and to stay.

But Eiji knew that this judgement came from