The Luck of the Beekeeper

by Daniel Sifton Connolly

Part 1 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

After a rolling lunch of stringy ox meat, the caravans rounded the crest of the slope, entering in an open area of gentle hills and trees with broad waxy leaves and bark of deepest black. They looked as though they had been scorched of late but, on some, white blossoms had burst and the ground beneath was carpeted with tall grasses of green and gold. Two hours before their scheduled afternoon stop, the caravan suddenly slammed to a halt.

Thorne cursed as he walked head first into the hindquarters of the black ox he had been encouraging through a mud filled rut in the road.

His friend shouted through the growing din that rose from the curious drivers, wagon masters, and confused animals, “Must be trouble up ahead.” But it was the noise in the distance — a steady groan of countless brays and snarls that rose and fell like the fetid breath of a giant roused from an epic slumber — that erected every hair on Thorne’s middle-aged body.

Quite suddenly, he no longer felt tired. Fatigue was replaced with fear and the animal instinct to survive. That instinct, tempered with human reasoning, flashed scenarios through his fevered mind. Choices, some filled with risk, some rejected while only half formed, sifted themselves unbidden.

Their best hope would be to stay close, to tighten the ranks and create a fortress against the coming onslaught, but more than half of the caravan’s several hundred members were simply wage slaves, summer hires who took jobs plying the caravan route to E. Qobose doing whatever was asked of them, be that fetching water for cook pots or grooming the soft bodies of the merchant class. When threatened, they buckled and ran. And so, soon the caravan began to dissolve. Far too soon.

The nearest knoll was green expanse perhaps five hundred meters away. As he watched and listened in horror, a great black tide of stinking refuse washed over the hill and flowed with astonishing speed toward them. It was alive, thousands strong, and would most assuredly smash against them in a matter of seconds.

Thorne collapsed. Drivers, herdsmen, and porters bubbled, uttering brief prayers to distant benefactors sotto voce. The stink came first, a cloying cloud of toxic sourness that led the advance of the dark tsunami. His friend gripped the nearest ox with arms of banded muscle while Thorne lay curled in the mud with eyes shuttered against the swirling chaos. His son Telion, delicate youth, floated in his mind just beyond reach as guardsmen rallied about unmarked wagons to protect precious cargoes.

Oiled glaives, artefacts from a dead age, buzzed and hummed to life in hetwomen’s skilled hands. Their sisters wielded static weapons with a zeal that almost compensated for their lack of power. Singly and in groups, blades flashed, biting into the black river of dervishes, wounding few, and killing even fewer.

Unarmed brigands punched their way through the caravan, while others swung ever-full tankards as bludgeons, assaulting oxen, horses, merchants, and elite guards alike. They knew little of fear or tactics, for they were intoxicated beyond comprehension.

Feared like few other groups of bandits, except perhaps the mysterious Union of the Snake, the Ebriosi had ravaged these hills and the men and women that travelled through them for ten thousand generations. Unfailingly stupid and aggressive, they were ruled by their selfish desires, swarming caravans when their numbers grew too few: a regular occurrence considering their penchant for feeding on their own. At those times, when the violent orgy of rape and gutting expanded beyond their kin, merchants were ideal targets. Attrition was an alien concept to the Ebriosi, as were all but the most general applications of cause and effect.

The wave drove through.

Drivers were dragged off screaming as their colleagues died by the dozen, pummelled by fists of iron. These were the lucky ones. Others screamed in the muck as they were sodomized by gangs of men with the strength and boldness of bulls. They barked and shouted at each other in a dozen dialects, some real, some imagined, and gibbered like apes as they lumbered and stumbled through the caravan in a whirlwind of indulgent destruction.

Thorne lay still or at least what he perceived as still, behind the body of a fallen draft horse. His enemies, blind with drink and rage, surrounded his twitching form. Twice he was spied for a heartbeat, but each time, the luck of The Beekeeper was with him.

The first would-be assailant succumbed to a new violent urge, falling upon the body of Thorne’s fellow, standing on his chest for leverage, and pulling with both a hands at the length of silver chain that hung from his neck. Second — fully two dozen heartbeats later — a naked woman the size of an ox, with vomit encrusted hair and a rusted cleaver, charged toward Thorne’s position. She misjudged the distance, attempting to leap over the body of the horse far too soon and fell upon her own knife in the red mud a metre from where Thorne lay quivering, thinking about the mysteries and the terrors of the afterlife.

Would he walk the endless road with innumerable others, engaged in tireless conversation with friends and enemies alike? Or perhaps, as he had long suspected, in death spirits lived on, but like drops in the sea they lived in composite harmony, not as discreet individuals. Answers eluded him.

The caravan had lost a third of its members, and yet up and down the length of the dispersing train, drunkards fell by the score. Caught in the frenzy of their own making, many brawled with each other, killing their cursed brothers. Others fell from exhaustion, quickly passing into comas, and long after the horde had moved on, dying of heart failure. Still others fell with little notice to drown in vomit or blood, having consumed far too much even for their hardened systems.

He looked around. Taris was gone, plucked from the ox like an insect ripped free by the wind. Horses and oxen bleated and groaned and still the storm raged. Wagons were toppled by loose groups and put to the torch as the brigands erupted clumsily into song. They sang with lusty grunts and animal howls as they grabbed the kicking forms of drivers and, in groups of two or three, pitched them overhead into the crackling flames of the burning wagons.

There were simply too many too resist and, as Thorne lay shivering behind the horse, he recalled the augur’s words. The spilling had been correct, almost. Change had come with the force of hurricane. The Decemvir was not the first with a gift of understatement. Call it insurance. He foretold while his listeners, active or otherwise, reacted.

With his head resting on the withers, Thorne watched the scene before him with discrete, half lidded eyes. The force of the wave had passed through the line. Hoarse cries could be heard receding eastward away from the direction that they had thundered into the caravan. Men, women, and animals lay dying all around him.

Fires large and small burned on slowly, fuelled by wood and the bodies of the unlucky. Sounds were slowly hushed. The few that continued were muffled, almost ethereally distant: the crackling of the flames; the muffled cries of the helpless and bleeding; and the sucking of the mud as the few remaining clusters of brigands dragged the bodies their foes away to consume in the coming darkness, or to ply with drink and welcome as their own. The ground was etched with the rutted tracings of their passage.

Sharply accented female voices punched through the fog of sound. They came from the head of the line and rang with steel and crisp words of command as the surviving guardswomen swept along the road, clearing out the remaining flotsam with short well-aimed thrusts of their glaives. Few dared resist these tight phalanxes, each one comprised of six or seven vengeful women. They swung and wheeled about with parade ground perfection. Thorne watched numbly as the few clusters of brigands, their bravado nearly exhausted, stopped and ran, or stood their ground briefly, slurping one last drink before their fate was meted out.

“This death is too good for them.” he spat, before succumbing to exhaustion.

When he rose, the sky was growing dark. From the onset of evening, or the plumes of ash, he could not tell. He made his way to the other survivors gathered around the fires and studied the devastation around him. The injured were dragged or carried toward the flames for warmth. None struggled. Someone rolled a wheel into the flames as the crowd, and the need for warmth, grew. A battle-weary guard, Miessa, filled empty jars and cracked containers with sooty water from a drum. Other guards organized themselves in small triage units, tending to those most in need.

Thorne drank slowly and quietly from the proffered cup, “A she-beast came right at me. She almost killed me!”

Miessa’s grey eyes flashed a trace of sympathy. Considering the scale of what happened here, Thorne had little to complain about. She encouraged him, “Drink this. Rest. You’ll be alright.”

Thorne didn’t see it that way, “She came at me with a knife. It was horrible it was. I was sure that it was the end.”

The injured dozens shuffled anxiously for their water. “Hey we’ve got it bad down here!” shouted an impatient, gravelly voice from down the growing queue.

Stepping to the side of the drum, he slurped noisily, his throat growing hot despite the water. “How will I sleep tonight? Last night was bad enough. How will I ever sleep again?”

“Move on!”

“What’s the hold up?”

“We’re dyin’ down here. Show some courtesy.”

Miessa bowed her head, respectfully, and gripped her glaive tightly with her free hand. “Sire!” she lifted her eyes to meet Thorne’s tearful gaze, “Don’t make this harder than it is, move toward the fire. I’m sure you’ll find food and a sympathetic ear. We’ve no time to share stories here.”

The heat grew, spreading down his chest and subsiding only when to turned his face away from Miessa and her queue.

“We’ve all got it tough tonight,” shouted that same hoarse voice, this time with a little more patience, and perhaps a touch of understanding. Food and drink, not necessarily in that order, could temper some of the greatest tragedies. Optimism was in short supply. But for some it lay in wait like a small seedling, a nugget of hope to be saved for the rainiest of days. Only then would it take root. Only then would it nourish the starving.

“Hello friend, glad to see you’re alright.”

Wreathed in a torn cloak, and ringed by dwarf porters with scowling ashen faces, the augur stood in front of the fire. His arm hung in a makeshift sling. His face was streaked with blood. His forehead mottled with bruises like a ripe fruit. A length of glass tubing snaked upward to his mouth from a tiny bubbling machine encrusted with coloured stones. At his feet a porter furiously worked the machine’s foot pump with both of his small, heavily muscled, and tattooed arms.

Thorne did his best to show the respect due to the Decemvir. “I’m not alright. I’ve lost everything. My hides will never be delivered. And a woman nearly –”

The augur exhaled a cloud of lilac smoke, “I beg your pardon,” it was not a question, “but I seem to recall a certain tall, and rather attractive and charming gentleman warning you about this afternoon. You knew what was to come and you choose to do nothing about it.” The smoke dissipated as he sucked on the tube again.

“You knew! You could have stopped this!”

“No. I cannot stop what is to come. I merely foretell”, said the augur with a single polite nod of his head.

“But we could have prepared. We could have done something.”

“Like what, stood still and built a wall? Turned around, detoured? It would have made no difference. You were warned, and what did you do with your knowledge? Nothing. There are no leaders among us. There are no gods.”

“But the guards...”

The augur raised his voice, not caring who was within earshot, “The guards respond to emergencies. Nothing more. The hetwomen among them show some initiative now and then, but they are soldiers, and as such they are defined by protocols.” He kicked the porter with the toe of his boot, encouraging him to increase the draw on the treadle.

For the first time since the storm passed, Thorne thought of his missing friend. His thoughts flitted and buzzed about like an insect. Taris had warned him about investing too much in augury. He was right, in his own way. Knowledge alone was never enough, and Thorne had never been a man of action. Ten dozen scenarios could have been applied to yesterday’s spilling, each one vastly different from the other. Yet, in his mind he saw his role unchanging. His efforts would be forever reactive. Here the Augur’s observations became facts, not speculations. There were no leaders among them. He muttered half to himself the words of his friend, “A portent is what you make it.”

“It is indeed. More accurately, we like to say that a portent is what you choose to make it. What did you choose, I wonder? A night of urine-soaked sheets and fevered nightmares about lost innocence?” asked the augur as he blew a pair of perfectly formed globes.

Thorne stared in confusion. Tears filled his eyes as the augur’s remark, and his smoke, began to settle.