Jacob's Ladder

Chapter 1

Every man steals his life. A little here, a little there. Some of it given, most of it taken. He wears himself like a coat of many patches, fraying at the edges, in constant repair. While we shore up one belief, we let go another. We are the stories we tell to ourselves. Nothing more.

The plough cut a straight line, turning the sod, leaving in its wake broken earth, and an offering of torn worms for the gulls. To create we destroy.

"Sails! Sails!"

Jac looked up, fixing his eyes upon the headland. A small figure came tearing down the path, weaving between wind-stunted gorse. "Sails, Da!"

Smoothed wooden handles slipped from callused hands. The ox, Mortum, plodded on as the ploughshare left its furrow.

"Sails!"

He glanced to where the farmhouse stood across a patchwork of fields, black against the pasture beyond. Ten bleak winters had weathered the timbers grey and the recent snows had barely released their grip. But in this moment of rare sunshine the thatch turned to silver and gold.

"Sails..." Milo came panting across the field, fear and excitement lighting his face in equal measures. Jac felt only fear. Sails on the West Sea always meant trouble.

"Fishing boats?" Jac asked. Sometimes a boat from Durnsport would venture this far, though the drowned cities were said to sour the waters and make for strange catches.

"Square sails, Da! Lots of them!"

"Tell your Ma to bring the sword, then run to the village. Let everyone know. Brone first if you can find him, but don't delay."

Milo heaved a breath, nodded and took off running toward the house. For a moment Jac watched his retreat. Eight seemed too young to learn true fear but Jac had been younger when his lesson came. He sighed and started toward the headland. Some things a man had to see for himself.

The wind on the high ground blew cold and relentless. The old ways had it that Ymnir exhaled the west wind from the gates of the frozen hell and that summer was just the giant pausing to draw breath.

Cresting the last rise Jac looked to where the land fell suddenly away and the sea rolled out to the horizon. And on that rippled expanse, amid the sparkles and the white-flecked waves, the rectangular sails of Sverland raiders. Jac stood a moment, counting. Ten ships. One would have been too many.

Catalin met him as he hurried back down to the field. She held the sword before her in two hands, and little Baya trailed behind her clutching a stick.

"It's not..." Catalin held his eyes.

"It is. We need to clear the village."

"But they'll take everything." She looked beautiful in the sunshine, her hair bound tight in a golden plait, a flour smudge on her cheekbone.

"If we stay they'll take us too."

Jac reached for the sword, and hesitated, his fingers inches from the hilt. No one else in the village had a weapon. They had tools that might serve. Wood axes, butcher knives, pitchforks, but nothing save this length of rusting iron had been forged for battle. He gritted his teeth and made to take it.

"Why would you, Jacob Summer?" Catalin stepped back, moving the hilt out of reach. "You've no notion how to use such a thing. And who will they throw a spear at first? The only man with a sword!"

Jac advanced on her. "Better at me than at you." And seeing that held no sway with her. "Or Milo, or Baya."

Catalin stopped her retreat when she reached Baya's side. The child gazed up at them both with an angel's face, a snotty nose, and incomprehension. "Here then, take it."

Jac forced his fingers to close about the leather-bound grip. They remembered that it had once burned him, though it had never been hot. The rust came from the years it had lain buried after he first took it. Even now memories seared through him and his hand spasmed, nearly dropping the sword. The feeling wasn't so different from times he had touched the wreckage that sometimes washed up on the cove beach after a great storm. Jac would hear faint echoes of the screams of sailors falling from the deck. Their cries always seemed to sound from where his fingertips touched the salt-stained wood. The sword did the same thing but where the boards of a wrecked ship might whisper the sword would roar.

Jac had been younger than his son, Milo, when war first found him. He had lived then in Granite Bend, a larger, older village closer to Renstown. The lord of Abervan fell to feuding with his neighbour as country lords are wont to do out on the fringes of civilisation. And in time the tide of their battles swept through Granite Bend where the Entwill scours its course across the bedrock.

The village folk hid as peasants do when their masters set to blood-letting over matters of ownership disguised as matters of honour. After several hours the fighting had been drawn away to the east, Abervan's riders harrying Gerrent spearmen and the foreign mercenaries hired to bolster their numbers. Jac's father had dragged him out to scavenge the battlefield before the Abervan warband returned. His father had always had a greedy streak and a tendency to reckless acts, neither of which Jac recognised until the man had been laid beneath the sod long enough to take the scales from a child's eyes. That day though Jac had followed him out among the slain thinking his father a hero.

The battle had been a particularly bloody one and nearly half a hundred men lay dead between the high pasture and the low. Jac remembered the stink of it now as he took the sword from Catalin.

There had been one man, a huge Arkasian in black iron armour, whose foes were heaped around him, few of their bodies in one piece. He lay pierced by many wounds but it was the spear that had pierced him just below his breastplate that would kill him first. The splintered end of its haft still jutted out from him. In one hand he held a greatsword that would have been two yards had it not been shattered. A smaller sword impaled the ground just beyond the reach of an outstretched hand whose fingers were darker than the mud.

Jac had been tugging at the sword though his father had told him to look for rings or coin. Somehow even amid that butchery, and the moans of those too wounded to crawl away, that child of seven summers had wanted to lift a blade. Without warning, the enormous mercenary heaved in a sucking breath as though he had broken the surface of a deep lake. He slung his head to the side and on seeing Jac an unexpected horror had filled his face. Immediately he rolled the other way, stopped only by the spear that still impaled him. With a roar he reached for his belt knife and began to drag himself toward Jac's father. Kennan Summer backed away rapidly, and to be fair, so did every other villager. But Kennan was the only one abandoning his son, and also the only one who tripped.

The Arkasian caught Kennan's ankle, hauled him closer, then thrust with his knife. Somehow he missed his mark, just opening a shallow cut along his victim's upper arm. Kennan screamed and flailed about, and in the confusion the mercenary's next stab found only earth.

Despite the multitude of weapons scattered within reach of Jac's father the man only struggled in blind terror, wholly unable to break the giant's grip. When he thought back on it Jac could never understand how so deadly a warrior could slash at a trapped peasant so many times, roaring vile insults, and leave only the shallowest of cuts. He struck perhaps seven blows before Jac managed to work the sword free of the ground. The weapon had seemed impossibly heavy but somehow Jac had lifted the thing and staggered forward with it, one hand on the hilt, the other supporting the blade as though it were a lance. He knew enough not to aim for the man' back-plate or the gleaming steel of his helm, and angled instead at fleeting glimpse of dark flesh between the two.

The sword had driven in shockingly easily and Jac found himself sprawling across the mercenary's back, blood spurting over the blade to scald his hands. Jac had rolled clear, indifferent to the man's death throes. The blood on his hands held all his attention, a startling red, staining his fingers, seeming to sink into his flesh like water into cloth, burning all the while.

Jac had fallen senseless and a week had passed before he opened his eyes again. And when he did it seemed that he saw a different world. The boy who had wanted that sword was gone, and Jac knew that if he lived a hundred more years he never wanted to see another man killed. In the seasons that followed they had kept the sword. First his father kept it, and acted as though he had been the one to kill its former owner – a title Jac was happy to cede. Then Jac himself, though for years he kept it buried in oiled wrappings beneath the great oak that marked the boundary of his fields and Artur Coal's. If he so much as touched the steel it would burn beneath his skin, the battlefield screams loud behind his ears, a trembling violence in his limbs, and for many nights after he would dream strange dreams of lands and lives unknown to him.

Jac should have sold it, of course. Tinkers rarely travelled as far into the margins as the village for there was nothing beyond, but every year would see at least one or two come wandering. Any of them would have traded for forged steel. He should have sold it. But somehow he never could.

"How long before they reach us?" Catalin came from the house lugging a sack of corn and her prized saucepans that had been her mother's before her.

"I don't know." Jac hefted the corn sack onto the cart. Mortum, their ox, stood in the traces now, chewing the cud patiently, immune to the tension and bustle all around him. "They're fast ships and the wind is with them. It depends where they land. I don't think they could beach at the cove ... one or two ships maybe, but there's hardly room and there are rocks too."

Catalin went back into the house for more that just couldn't be left. Baya trailed her, clutching a shapeless rabbit-skin doll. She favoured the lumpen thing over the wooden one with jointed arms and legs that Jac had whittled for her over the long winter nights. Jac released a sigh and went to turn the animals out. With luck the raiders wouldn't stay long enough to round them up. The goats were wary and might survive. The pigs though were too trusting and would come running to any Sverlander with the sense to rattle the swill pail.

The cart began to overflow before Catalin ran out of precious things to heap upon it. Everything they had was precious to them. The lack of any piece of it would eat at the already thin wall between any peasant farmer and starvation.

Milo came running back before the loading had finished. Panting, red-faced, and much sooner than Jac expected.

"Trouble?"

The boy stood gasping, hunting his breath.

"Milo! Was there trouble?"

Milo shook his head. "Met Brone on the road... Said he would ... tell everyone... Sent me back."

Jac forced himself to relax. Brone would be believed faster than a breathless child. It was better this way. The cart was full. They had to go.

"Come along." Jac flicked the switch at Morton and the ox began to plod forward. Typically he would take a dozen steps then stop, so the art was to add another flick on the tenth.

"Wait!" Catalin came hurrying with the churn in her arms.

"We have to go." It seemed that a dozen hooks were holding him back, lodged deep in his flesh, tearing at him with each of Morton's steps. He had worked so hard. Taken enough rocks from his land to fill the West Sea. Raised the farmhouse with his own hands. If the raiders fired it something inside Jac would die. He couldn't imagine finding the strength to rebuild.

Catalin caught up with the cart and swung Baya onto the mound of possessions. Jac glanced across at his daughter, then his wife, finding in her look of quiet determination the certainty that whatever the damage they would carry on. The sword that had already grown heavy in his hand seemed suddenly lighter and the sounds of battle that had faded to a background now swelled above the birdsong and the wind's complaint. Milo walked at his side as they left. Jac set his blade on the cart and rested a hand on his son's shoulder. They would return.

The Coals' farmhouse stood close to the rutted lane that led into the village. Gaia and her daughters were already at the front loading what they could into grain sacks. Artur lay where he'd been since the summer-fever took him less than a year ago, beneath a marker-stone out the back. The harvest had been hard without him and, though Jac did what he could to help, Gaia had had to sell their cart.

"Is it true?" Rula, the eldest daughter came breathlessly to the lane, leaning over the gate in the hedgerow. "Raiders?" She caught sight of the blade in Jac's hand and her eyes grew round.

Gaia shouted for Rula and began handing out the lightest sacks to little Sharli. "We're coming, Mister Summer. Wait for us!"

Jac waited though every instinct yammered at him to go. He watched Catalin. The fear ate at her too, he could see it, but that old strength ran through her, the farmer's strength which endured the changing seasons and was equal to the work that every day demanded. It had been her strength that drew him when they first met. True, she was pretty too, with an easy smile and an appetite for life. But her steadiness had held him. She anchored him to the life he wanted when other dreams tried to carry him away. Somehow he had always been haunted by the feeling that he was an uninvited visitor in his own life. Like a tenant farmer it sometimes seemed to him that he was a guest in his own flesh, a temporary resident. Catalin dispelled such nonsense with the solid fact of her being, her bravery, and her beauty. She needed him steady. The children needed him steady. And so he was.

Jac crouched beside the cart and beckoned his children to him, taking Baya on his knee and putting an arm around Milo. "It will be all right. Do as your mother says. Stay with her no matter what happens. It will be all right." He would rather lie to his son and daughter than have them terrified on what might be their last day. He squeezed both of them to him, wanting his words to be true, wanting his arms to be an unbreakable shield about his babies. But the world is as full of death as it is of life. Every farmer knows that. And a chill ran the length of his spine.

"We're ready!" Gaia led her girls through the gate, all of them bowed beneath the weight of what they couldn't bear to leave for the raiders to take, break, or burn. In Gaia's long, dark hair a faded red ribbon, a gift from her Artur and a memory of happier times.

Within a quarter mile Jac found himself burdened beneath Sharli and Rula's sacks. The girls were too small for the loads and he hadn't the heart to say the family's possessions should be hidden in the hedge while he had three times as much riding on a cart.

"Where will we go?" Gaia asked the question that Jac had been wrestling for an answer ever since turning his back on the sea.

"To Hermit's Ridge." His mouth made the decision for him.

"He won't like that." Catalin shot Jac a worried look.

"No!" Jac managed a laugh as he shifted his burdens. "No he won't."

"What's he like, Mister Summer?" Rula asked the question, blonder than her sister, pretty too, though a scarlet birthmark reached across the left side of her face like a bloody handprint.

"What's the hermit like? I thought every child went up there for a dare?" Jac shook his head. Most of the village had crept to the mouth of the hermit's cave when they were small. The lucky ones saw only darkness and hurried away claiming differently. Nobody ever went there twice.

They rounded Cotter's Corner. The Cotters looked to have left in hurry. Their gate hung open and their hens were pecking about in the lane. From the lane's corner the village rooftops could be seen. No more than two dozen homes, with the solid bulk of the shrine rising amid their huddle.

"Smoke." Catalin pointed.

Jac dropped his sacks. He hurried forward to pull on Mortum's halter and bring the ox to a stop. He squinted. Catalin was right. A dirty smudge of smoke rising at the south side where Miller Samm ground corn and Old Jaymes brewed his ales. "Too much smoke. I don't..." Realisation's cold finger ran down his neck. "Others have already landed!"

Milo was suddenly at Jac's side, bravado gone, a small boy clinging to his father's leg. Baya held her mother's hand, having to reach up for the contact.

"Quick! We'll turn the cart in the... No! We'll just have to leave it. We can't..." Leaving everything behind could be a death sentence for them all. But if the village was burning... "Come on. We'll cut across the Cotters' fields and make for the hermit."

"Mister Summer." One of Gaia's girls called to him, something fragile in her voice.

Jac turned and there, coming up the lane behind him half a dozen Sverlanders, looking unreal in so familiar a setting. All but one had the fair hair of Westmen, though it hung lank and dirty. They were lean, some old, some young, bright-eyed, teeth in their smiles. They carried kite shields and all save the dark haired man held axes, long-handled and broad bladed, for shearing flesh rather than splitting logs.

"Get behind me. All of you!" Jac's voice quavered. His body seemed remote from him, his fingers and the bones of his cheeks tingling. It was a terror more absolute than any he had ever known. All that he loved stood within a yard of him and he had no hope of defending it. He pulled the sword from the cart and for a moment saw only blood and fire. "Get behind me."

The dark haired Sverlander was a bigger man than his fellows, of middle years, barrel-chested, his beard short and bristling. The sword he carried was of a length with Jac's but broader and without a guard.

"Have them run. We like a chase!" His accent made the words thick and blunt. The lack of reaction from his comrades had Jac think him the only one of them to speak the Holy Tongue.

"Run!" Jac snarled it from the side of his mouth. Eyes locked to the foe. "Run for where we said."

"But Baya can't-"

"Just do it!" The tremble in Jac's hands grew so that he could hardly hold his sword. "I'll stay."

"But-"

"Do it!" Terror put a harsh edge on Jac's words but at last Catalin started to move, pulling Milo from his leg. Gaia and her daughters were already racing through the Cotters' gate, the youngest one starting to scream.

The raiders seemed in no particular hurry. In fact they appeared to relish the prospect of a lone farmer in their path clutching a rusty sword. The leader nodded to the youngest of his group, a mean-eyed lad who might have been sixteen, maybe not that. Young or not though he would have spent years practicing with that axe of his. He may even have spilled an enemy's blood already.

The boy came forward, grinning, shield raised, axe back. The others called out encouragement or insults at him, swapping glances as though delighted by the prospect.

Jac watched the axe. A peasant farmer had to do the slaughterman's work himself. He knew what ruin a sharp edge works on flesh, knew it from his pigsty, from the memories of that battlefield where he killed a man, and from the red dreams that had haunted him ever since. He curled his fingers around the sword hilt and a crimson haze seemed to enfold him. The world focused down to the sword, the axe, and the bodies that held them.

With two yards between them the lad paused, just for an instant, and glanced back.

Without thought Jac stepped forward, cracking his arm out, and the tip of the blade sheared through the boy's throat. He turned as he fell, blood spraying from the wound.

For a long moment the silence was broken only by the thud of the body hitting the mud, birdsong, and a gurgle like drowning.

The Sverlanders came on together then with a roar. Even as they ran Jac saw the dance of destruction that would take him through their ranks. He moved to follow it but his body couldn't answer the demands he placed upon it. He ducked an axe, threw himself at narrow gap between two shields and hacked at a passing leg. The leader's blade stabbed into Jac's side as he tried to twist away. A hot wet pain blossomed in his sword hand, and a shield barged him aside as though he had run headlong into a door.

Jac flew through the air. He moved through his trajectory in a stuttered series of frozen moments in which, somehow, impossibly, Jac felt aware of every drop of his spilled blood following its own arc. He sensed the impact of each droplet upon the skin of his enemies, felt it spatter and spread... In the next heartbeat the world spun to its usual speed, the hedgerow swallowed him, and his head hit something harder than it was.

Jac glimpsed running legs, a thicket of twigs stark against a blue sky, then nothing more.