The Broken Man Read online

  Table of Contents

  Front Matter

  Dedication

  Prologue - The Shadow Man

  Chapter 1 Piju and the Slave Quarters

  Chapter 2 In the King’s Chambers

  Chapter 3 Judge Brea at Court

  Interlude 1 Piju’s Tale

  Chapter 4 Waylaid at the Library

  Chapter 5 The Hall of Thrones

  Chapter 6 Piju and the Slave Quarters

  Chapter 7 A Simple Meal

  Interlude 2 Brea and Coscar

  Chapter 8 Waylaid and Seth

  Chapter 9 Mob Justice

  Chapter 10 Piju Takes a Walk

  Interlude 3 The Burning Ghost

  Chapter 11 The Waiting

  Chapter 12 The Circle of Death

  Also From Superversive Press

  THE BROKEN MAN

  BY

  HAWKINGS AUSTIN

  © 2018 Superversive Press

  All rights reserved. No part of the content of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database retrieval system, or copied by any technology yet to be developed without the prior written permission of the author. You may not circulate this book in any format.

  Editor: L.Jagi Lamplighter Wright

  Cover Art: Cat Leonard

  ISBN: 978-1-925645-18-7

  First Edition: 2018

  For my dad, who challenged me to do the hard work and finally write my stories down, and for my wife, who is the best boss a man could ask for.

  PROLOGUE - THE SHADOW MAN

  I am the soul of my people,

  Cast out for seeing the light;

  We live in darkness eternal,

  And fear the rising of the sun.

  - Prince Bron niFomori

  The rays of the sun edged over the horizon striking the highest, wispiest clouds. The stars fled the light and the darkness faded to a color just shy of blue, starting the most beautiful part of the day. Little Ella had only the time between first light and full dawn to play, but she knew how to make every moment count.

  She rolled out of the family bed onto the plain dirt floor and raced out of their simple two-room house. Ella carefully closed the hand-carved door, trying not to grind the wood in its pivot hinge. She pulled the string to reset the latch bar and made sure it had caught. If she wasn’t careful, a cow would get into the kitchen again. She was only six years old, but she was supposed to be responsible.

  The land of Pywer had been blessed that spring with an abundance of rain, warmth, and sun and now an equal abundance of growth covered the world. The fields and woods were teeming with life. To Ella, it was simply magic. Thin growth filled every cranny, and any spare stone surface was covered with either moss or lichens. Even the trunks of the old oak trees were mossy higher than she could reach.

  In the near darkness, she jumped across the cow ditch and picked her way carefully across her family’s bean field to the edge of the road. The fields stretched on either side for farther than she could see, but in front of her was the forest, the children’s refuge. In the green shadow of the leaves, she could barely see her pale little feet, but she followed the thin trail onto the base of “The Mountain.” The adults complained if you played in the fields or in the houses, so the Mountain was the playground for all the children in the local farms. It was also the place the bigger ones went to fetch fresh water from the spring, cut peat from the bog hill, or hunt the small roe deer. The forest went on forever back there, if one took the right paths between the fields.

  Her play time was important, so Ella checked the angle of the sun against the high shining clouds, determined to squeeze out every last moment. Soon she would be late for the fields and her work pulling up the grass and wildflowers, what daddy called “weeds”.

  She ran gently across the soft grass from the stream back to the clearing that was her special place. Holding her arms wide, her soft linen dress flowed like the wings of a faded yellow bird. The grass, clover, and wildflowers that were the bane of her day when she was in the fields were a soft carpet for her bare feet.

  The clearing was dominated by the stump of an old oak tree. It had been axe-cut a couple of years before to make the roof beam of a cow barn, but the stump was still chin-high to the six-year-old. Half of it was flat as a floor, littered with square white stones that could have been houses. The back was a jagged tear, which was clearly the walls of a mighty city, laid low by an enemy attack.

  On the other side of the clearing were the pond and the stream. A lot of boys played higher up on the Mountain, crossing the stream on the back of an old black alder log, but not Ella. The clearing was her special place. The log still had its own place in her games. Its bark was full of grubs and termites. Ella couldn’t really tell the difference, but they were little white bugs that Mr. Frog loved to eat.

  There were a different number of children every day, but usually a few of the boys got up early enough to play. Sometimes one of the other girls came to play, but most of them wouldn’t get up early enough. Tal and Galen showed up today, but not Cenn.

  ‘Where’s Cenn?” she asked.

  “He said he was too sore today, or something,” Tal said.

  Cenn’s folks had gone out with him yesterday to the bog to cut peat. Peat formed up big squishy hills in the middle of boggy ground. The ground felt weird, not like real dirt. But the families would cut out large chunks of peat and dry them in the sun all summer. In the winter they made good fires.

  “I bet he got blisters,” Ella said.

  Tal just shrugged, but Ella knew that Cenn never wore his gloves. He was always too tough.

  Ella liked it when Cenn came, but he was nearly twelve and getting too old to play with children now. He was going up to the city, to Ard, to be an apprentice! Ella didn’t know what city people did for work but it had to be exciting, because they didn’t have fields.

  The old frog didn’t much care for the quick and cold stream of fresh spring water. He lived in the muddy bank of the overflow pool at the edge of the stream. It wasn’t much of a pool, but to the children it was The Pond. There the water stayed warm most of the day, and the thick mud made a good home for a frog. He had survived for several years there and become strangely accustomed to the children who played in his home. He rarely ran away and found himself fed a few choice bugs for his trouble.

  Getting the white squirmy bugs out of the log was messy work, but a lot of fun. Ella used a slick black river rock to knock off a chunk of rotted log, and there were dozens of grubs ready to pick out. Those went into the tied-rag bag that she called a pouch. Once the bribes were ready, they could go find their favorite toy.

  Collecting Mr. Frog required a team effort. The boys took the left circle and herded him away from the easy escape into the depths of the pond and into the arms of little Ella. Muddy to the knee and elbow, they carried their victim, wrapped in a wide linen rag, out to the stump. Ella decided she needed to wash off, as the pond mud was particularly oozy today, but found herself alone at the stream after the first splash.

  Grubbing for frogs and meal worms has been hard and dirty work, she thought. I should have a proper washing. The cold stream was welcome after a few hours in the fields, but early in the morning, it was still too cold. A few splashes later, the washing up game ended and she got on to the serious business of playing pretend.

  Tal and Galen crossed the dead-log bridge at a run and headed up the mountain. Ella supposed they were going to check out their fort. Galen was also working on a hare trap and hoped to prove that he could hunt at eight years old. Clearly, to Ella, Galen would be a famous hunter, or at least one of the King’s philosophers, someday. Tal just liked forts; he had built two already, but they hadn
’t made it through the winter.

  She rubbed her chin as she studied the sky. She was trying a bit to look like her father, who rubbed his chin just like that when he was judging the time they had in the fields before lunch. She made up her mind and decided against chasing after the boys who had left her behind...again.

  Ella made sure that everyone was gone before she checked her hiding place. Last week she had tied grass and leaves for a doll. The yellow grass was hard to find this far from fall, but a patch of it made some lovely hair. Yesterday, the doll had been a warrior woman defending the city of Ard from the Evil Daen invaders. This morning, the doll had become a princess preparing to marry someone very important.

  It would have been nice to have red hair for a Ruad princess, like one of King Cail’s daughters from the city, but she couldn’t think of anything red except her mother’s city dress, and mother would be furious if she tore it. This Ruad princess would just have to be proud of her yellow hair, because it was the best yellow hair of all the girls in the kingdom.

  Ella fluffed her hair, which was closer to the hair of her grass princess than that of a true Ruad princess. Still, she was determined to think of herself as “nearly a princess” this morning. With play time running out, neither the boys’ escape nor any other unpleasant reality would disturb the wedding of the year.

  This morning, the newly crowned Princess Greenleaf was deep in negotiations to become Queen of the Bolg. Truly, a princess of the Ruad should have little to do with one of the Bolg, except maybe she would have them as slaves, but Ella knew a little Bolg boy and he wasn’t bad.

  “So in this pretend,” she addressed Mr. Frog, “you are a slave of the Queen of the Ruad, and you are a wild Bolg, but not too scary. And, and you are a prince of the Bolg.”

  She made the head bob in happy agreement, and somewhat unwillingly, so did Prince Frog. The Bolg boy had been named Dommy and was nice, though she hadn’t seen him in a while. But since Dommy was nice, even if he wasn’t a wild Bolg, it was okay for Prince Frog to be both nice and a wild Bolg. And Princess Greenleaf would become their princess and make all of the Bolg people nice.

  Prince Frog of the Bolg was unappreciative of the Green Leaf kingdom, but Ella gathered him up to show him the great stump, clearly a prize worth having.

  “This is the great hill of Ard. Long, long ago it was home of the Fomor Giants! Then…” her subtle grasp of half-heard history failed her, “and then they got dead.”

  She placed Prince Frog between two white stones. She pointed them out to him, holding him as he struggled to leap the city walls.

  “But then, but THEN! The Wise King of the Ruad came and builded a beautiful white city on the hill where the Fomor used to be.”

  A shadow fell by the stump, and she saw the Shadow Man from the corner of her eye. It looked, for just a moment, like the shadow of a man with no man to cast it. She felt a shiver of fear, and she would have called out, but there really was no one near who would hear, which made the game kind of pointless. She knew that the hazy pre-dawn shadows would often sharpen at the movement of a cloud, making scary shapes appear out of thin air. The shadow man was just another game they played, but everyone ran and hid whenever anyone caught sight of a scary shadow.

  In this one instance, Princess Greenleaf decided that she wasn’t being run off from her kingdom. The air was starting to warm and the forest seemed to glow with a green light. This was her time and she wasn’t going to lose it. Ella dismissed the Shadow Man and took Prince Frog from the stump on a long and convoluted tour of her kingdom. Princess Greenleaf had a lovely prepared speech.

  “We shall have the shallow sea on our east coast.” She showed him the pond.

  “We shall have a beautiful palace here.” She showed him the hole in the stump.

  “And the raging ocean to the …” North? Left? What were the other directions? She had forgotten exactly, but there was an ocean somewhere around Pywer. “Here.”

  “The Bolg kingdoms are on this side.” She waved him in the general direction of the fields. She pointed around the clearing, “And you will have farm boys and little girls working day and night in those fields to get you worms and bread and stuff.

  We will overlook these magnificent sights,” she said.

  Prince Frog became squirmy and made a break for the hole under the roots. Ella dropped Princess Greenleaf and scrambled for him. She caught him halfway into the hole. There again continued a struggle as old as mankind, human child against angry frog, and it came to the usual conclusion.

  The very perturbed Prince Frog was returned to the top of the stump and admonished to behave in the future, or he wouldn’t get any treats. Prince Frog had eaten three thick grubs and while he may not have understood the source of his good fortune, he had stayed quiet about the human handling for as long as he could stand it.

  The Shadow Man moved closer, and Ella called out; seeing him twice made her suddenly wonder if he was real. No one jumped up and ran, and she realized again that she was alone. She looked around to determine what she should do, but the frog and the doll could give her no advice.

  “Tal?” She waited.

  “Galen?”

  She hadn’t seen them come down from the Mountain, but it didn’t mean they weren’t sneaking up on her; they could be kind of mean. She looked around the clearing and saw the trees, bushes, and vines that had always been there. There was a bright spot from the east, as the sun was still blocked by the great white city on the hill. Perhaps the old gray squirrel had passed in front of the light, leaving an awkward and frightening shadow across the old stump.

  There was the faintest hint of the other thought, that the boys might have seen the Shadow Man and run away, but none of them had come and told her. She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to be hiding or playing. It was frustrating, and it made her lose her place in Princess Greenleaf’s speech. She almost made up her mind to go, but the shadow had gone from across the stump, where she had seen it, and there was no man or beast to cast any shadow but a tree in the dawn.

  There were no such things as gods, devils, or evil spirits. Those were just things the Fomor, the Daen and the Bolg believed in. Mommy said that reasonable Ruad don’t believe in silly legends about magic and evil spirits. The children told themselves scary stories. Dommy, the Bolg boy, had known a few new ones, but nobody really believed in magic or sorcery, that was just make believe.

  Her time was over. She knew the signs of dawn and it was time to put her toys away; she hid Princess Greenleaf in the crook of a tree for tomorrow, it wouldn’t do to let the other children find her. She set Mr. Frog down by the pond, and knelt for a moment at the edge of the clearing, wiping her hands on the cleaner grass. In the gloom of the deeper shadows, she saw a strange figure of shadow.

  The woods were still. Her games were forgotten and she stilled for a minute, the proper response to danger. Ears and eyes wide open, she didn’t even breathe for as long as she could stand it. The old grey squirrel was as still as she, hanging quietly on a branch above her head. The birds were quiet, and nothing flew from the branches. This was a warning sign she knew: predator. Somewhere, very close, something was stalking this clearing.

  It flickered at the edge of the trees, a faint light in the dark shadows. At first all that could be seen was an empty place, a dark shadow with a hint of starlight at its core. Then a fire would catch, brightening the whole outline, a beautiful fire which illuminated him for a bare moment, arms, legs, torso, and then faded away. The head was always in darkness, never showing an outline, and leaving only the fire of his eyes. The flame had caught there, burning gently where his eyes should be.

  The body faded away, but the eyes remained. They seemed like a pair of dim flames hovering in the darkness. Beneath them, a handful of beautiful lights moved gently in slow circles. There was nothing in the light, but it seemed strangely solid in the shadows. The Shadow Man moved slowly forward through the trees to the edge of the clearing, pushing aside a branch as t
hough it were as solid as a man.

  Ella crouched behind the bushes; afraid to move, afraid to breathe, she held perfectly still, watching the shadow move toward her. Moving like a man, but only a faceless shadow of arms and legs. The light from the eyes caught fire again and the glowing red eyes slid suddenly forward and struck her in the chest.

  Screaming, Ella sprinted across the clearing; tearing through the saplings and bushes, she ran for home. A fiery pain burned in her chest, terror overwhelmed her thoughts, and she raced to clear the edge of the woods. Smashing through the bushes, her breath came ragged and torn, as if she were breathing twigs and leaves. It caught in her throat. She coughed and couldn’t gain her breath. She fell, struggling, at the edge of the woods; her hands gripped her throat as she tried to breathe, the shadow man forgotten.

  Fear was the burning in her throat, in her lungs, and in the pit of her stomach. Her throat closed completely, and she couldn’t cry out. She twisted, struggling, trying to reach the safety of her home, to call her mother for the instant salvation that she knew her mother would bring. She weakened; a single burning coal remained at the center of her being, slowly taking every last drop of life from her. Like a fire, slowly it rose through her body.

  The pain was horrible, but her movements stilled as her energy faded. Her body thrashed once, but she couldn’t raise her arm again. Her soul struggled to leave, feeling the presence of death far before its time. Her soul fought against consumption, but it was caught by that brilliant fire, burning its way through her chest, into her mind. Her last thoughts focused on that terrible fire, her soul crisped away like an autumn leaf before this bonfire. The body stilled, and the beautiful fire burned its way out through her eyes.

  Her body lay beneath the bushes and wasn’t discovered till the sun was well clear of the horizon, though there were many of her folk searching. Such was the fear that her small body raised that none could touch her. Her small, still body spent the day staring sightlessly up at the sun. One of the boys, a small fellow called Tal, cried to his father that they should have gone back for her. They should have but they were afraid, and they left her to the Shadow Man.