‘Just breathe, aim and fire. You can do it.’
Mark wished he was back in Idaho Springs teaching history, telling his students about the Parthian shot: the great bowmen were famous for the feat of turning in their saddles while retreating and shooting surprisingly accurate parting shots at their enemies. Instead, here he was in a fantasy land, about to try the same trick himself. He drew a deep breath and, timing his shot to the creature’s rhythmic stride, released the arrow.
The shaft took the snarling monster in the right shoulder, sinking deep into the muscle and slowing the grettan for a moment as it reared back and howled into the treetops. But the injury stopped it for only a moment, long enough for the roan to make up fifteen or twenty paces, then it was after them again.
Emboldened by his success, Mark drew and fired a second time, screaming obscenities at the beast. This arrow tore through the thin flesh between the grettan’s eyes and flopped up and down in time to its leaps, a grisly metronome. Mark shouted a victory cry, but it choked in his throat when he realised the direct hit had done nothing to slow the creature down.
His hands trembling again, he struggled to prepare his third shaft, aiming and releasing a scant moment before the grettan, its face stained with blood, leaped onto the roan’s hindquarters, spilling him and Garec into the snow.
Mark rolled head over heels, crashing through the rotten wood of a fallen tree trunk. His injured knee was bleeding badly now as he slipped and slid down the hillside, bouncing off trees and through brambles before coming to rest against a rock protruding out of the frozen ground. From above, he heard the roan wail several times like a frightened child and then fall silent. The horse was dead.
Trying to regain his composure, Mark cleared the snow from his face. His knee was a mess; the bandages Raskin had applied that morning had disappeared during his precipitous descent. He had a sharp pain in his shoulder, the damaged knee was throbbing badly and there was a steady, dull pain in his lower back, but he felt as if he could manage to walk. He could hear the grettan, snarling and tearing at the carcase of the horse, and he looked around for a tree he might climb to elude the creature long enough for it to lose interest or wander away. The nearest looked to be fifteen yards or so up the hillside, one he had slammed into moments earlier.
He searched around for Garec, but there was no sign of him. He shook himself and began trudging back up the slope, calling out, ‘Garec!’ – and immediately realising how stupid he’d been. Instead of Garec’s voice, Mark heard the snarling and growling come to an abrupt halt; a palpable stillness fell over the forested hillside.
Mark took another few steps, just far enough to see that instead of feeding on the horse’s carcase, the grettan had lifted its head and was staring down at him.
‘Ah, hell,’ Mark groaned, unsure whether to run, freeze or pray for a massive heart attack. He measured the distance to the nearest branches. ‘There’s no way.’ He glanced around, hoping someone had passed through the forest earlier that morning and accidentally forgotten their machine-gun. Apart from a stocky length of rotten oak, there was nothing. He bent down to pick up the stick, hoping that, like Steven, he might choose the one branch in the entire forest imbued with enough mystical energy to blast this grettan into pixie dust, but the branch just crumbled in his hand.
The grettan moved down the hill, like a jungle cat stalking its prey. Mark thought for a second about running, but he didn’t much fancy the idea of being hamstrung, so instead, he froze.
His legs buried calf-deep in the snow, Mark Jenkins stood his ground, trembling, and waiting for the monster – that’s what the grettan was, a monster from a child’s nightmare – to pounce on him and tear out his throat. He waited for his life to flash before his eyes, but nothing happened; all he could think about was when the creature would leap, and how quickly it would tear him apart. He started to cry. This was not how he had ever imagined he would die.
‘Come on, then,’ he sobbed. ‘Come and get me.’
The grettan moved down the hill, low to the ground, sliding like mercury between the rocks and trees, the consummate hunter.
‘I’m right here!’ Mark looked for a stick, a rock, anything he might use to land one decent blow. Maybe he could blind the creature, or crack its skull… but there was nothing nearby but snow and the rotten branch lying in a crumble beside his feet.
Mark decided to go out in a flurry of noise and anger, to leave Eldarn a raving wild man. He started bellowing, whatever came into his mind, his last testament a loose collection of words and phrases, the stream-of-consciousness farewell of a condemned man.
Pffft! The arrow took the grettan in the throat. Pffft! Another sank deep, inches from the first, until only the fletching protruded. The grettan shrieked, rose up on its hind legs and growled. Pffft! Thud! Another hit. Pffft! Thud! Yet another, and this one was a miracle shot, into the soft flesh behind the animal’s ear and below the curve of its skull; there weren’t a handful of people in the world, any world, Eldarn included, who could have made that shot.
Garec kept the arrows coming, but they were unnecessary, for the miracle shot had finished the grettan. Only adrenalin kept it coming at Mark, dragging its injured legs, screaming at each new arrow that pierced its hide, determined to kill, even in its final moments. Finally, just a few paces away, the creature slumped to the ground and lay still, growling a warning as its life drained away.
Mark wisely gave the dying grettan a wide berth as he climbed back up the hill to join Garec, who was standing by the ravaged carcase of the roan horse, his rosewood longbow still drawn.
‘Here,’ Garec handed him the bow. ‘You finish it.’
Mark shook his head. ‘No. It’ll be dead in a moment anyway.’
‘You don’t want a shot?’
‘No.’
Garec understood; shouldering his bow, he offered a hand to Mark and laughed. ‘What did you say earlier? We have two good legs between us?’
‘Something like that.’ Mark took his arm. Together they pulled themselves up the hillside.
THE BARSTAG RESIDENCE
When Orindale fell to Prince Marek, the imperial gardens surrounding the Barstag family residence became a tent-camp for the occupation forces maintaining order in the city. Tidy rows of delphiniums, larkspur and hollyhocks were trampled to the ground; lilac and buddleia bushes, full to bursting with sweet-smelling blossom, were chopped down for the watch-fires, and thousands upon thousands of rosemary and lavender plants were used to soften the ground beneath many a soldier’s blankets. The fragrance of the bruised stalks perfumed the air for weeks.
The civil unrest that marked the early Twinmoons of Marek’s dictatorship gave way to a more prosperous era. The busy seaport saw a decrease in Malakasia’s military presence, especially as commerce and trade recovered. For hundreds of Twinmoons following Marek’s takeover the imperial palace served as a barracks for the soldiers charged with patrolling the city and overseeing customs and shipping along the wharf.
Orindale was the natural choice for those supervising the steady export of goods and taxes to Malakasia, and most of these officials chose the upper floors of the opulent Barstag family palace for their private quarters. On the few occasions when a significant threat to the Malakasian hegemony rose in the east, the old structure became a command centre for the officers deploying troops to put down whatever grass roots uprising was taking shape in the Eastlands. When civil war broke out, the imperial gardens – a city park in more peaceful Twinmoons – reverted to its former guise as an encampment for foot soldiers securing the city and once again whatever flowers and shrubs had reclaimed the greensward were trodden into the mud, burned in campfires and used to soften the ground where soldiers slept.