Red Wagon (Owan)

[Ulric]

65th of Summer, 512 AV
The Western Hills

The jowly man was dead.

Ulric jostled the sturdy wagon, divulging a thin groan as he found the cradle vacant of anything but sacks, muddy nettles, and a scatter of rye seeds. The traces were slack, stiff leather slashed. That was as he’d expected. The objective of muggings was acquisition, and the brigands who’d seen to this job had flayed what they might. There’d been more than one of them, the scuff of a particular heel bearing a loose hobnail, abrading deeper, while the others were shallow. Prints trekked everywhere, from behind the jut of boulders lacquered by tufted grass and orangey yellow shelf fungi, to the muddy, twin-rutted trail that plunged through the copse of poplars and gray birch.

Clearly, these robbers had departed, though not quite so long before. Else there’d be a buzzing of flies, tinges of putrefaction.

Ulric sighed, leaving his heavy crossbow, an enormity of blocky lumber, and sooty, unyielding steel nestled by a wheel. The jowly man was dead. That was sorely evident from the knolls of waxy skin, brushed by untidy bluish stubble, to glassy gimlets and the aberrant disgorging of limbs. There was also, he discerned, the extremity of a quarrel projecting from the man’s throat, pinning him there. Trails of stickily crusting blood plunged under a jerkin’s collar.

This’d occurred before.

Déjà vu, it seemed, always bit you in the arse.

Ulric reached for a joist, lugging himself over the strakes so he roosted on the wagon, surveying the greyly-smudged hills. They undulated before his fixed gaze, though he only brooded, sweaty under layers of pocked plate, dented scales, and leather. There were pools under his gorget, the trail of his spine a tepid torrent. They all deluged to the juncture of his thighs, chafing and leaving him tetchy. Toeing the jetsam of nettles, he spilled them over the board, making the cart rock and jolt. “Didn’t think they’d get you, huh,” he grunted morosely. The jowly man didn’t even blink at his japery, just stared. Ulric jerked his sweep of shoulders, adjusting the straps of the shield that protruded just under his head. There wasn’t any point in gabbing with corpses, but at the very least he wouldn’t field any lackwit queries. “Didn’t think they’d discharge the quarrel before even levying their demands, or maybe you’re just an idiot, maybe you ne’er saw it coming. Didn’t even glimpse it until it’d pinned you like a beetle.”

Idly, he kicked at a strake, frowning at the scars jumbling the lips of either side of the wagon. “Unfortunate, that,” he grunted, then squatted. The jowly man’s journey had begun, and ended, during the final leg of his own trek, victimized by docility or skimpy providence. 

Either way, it didn’t matter. 

Ulric’s junction had arrived with that squalid huddle on the periphery, resigned to scraping for silver that he didn’t need for the sake of familiarity, if nothing else. The slums likely hadn’t improved, or maybe they’d gotten worse. Their nebula of thuggery, robbery, and swindling was fairly reliable in its iniquity, if anything. The jowly man had died for its proximity. Ulric grimly patted his cheek, pining for a skin of wine. “You’d bring a few silvers from the knackers, my friend,” he fussed. “But sadly, I’ll be unable to carry your blubber that far, so you’re for the crows.” 

More vitally, he despised biting into sausages and subsequently gleaning its unsavory ingredients as he licked the grease.

[Owan Bardson]

Another raided wagon. Owan couldn't help but smile at the fond memories. His whole childhood had been based on this type of thing. Maybe that was despicable of him -to smile so at the misfortune of others- but he didn't think so. He and his family had done what they had to do to survive and thrive in a dangerous world. Besides, he hadn't had to do with this particular tragedy, so why should he feel any guilt? From the looks of it the man had gotten his just desserts.

Owan looked around the gutted wagon, ignoring the other figure for the moment. He wasn't one of the brigands. If he had been he would've been at arms by now. The cloak was too well-made for a beggar. He could've stolen it, but something about the man's figure spoke against the idea of him being common street riff-raff. So Owan continued to ignore him as he looked around the wagon.

The raid had been done well. They'd taken everything of value and hadn't left much in the way of evidence. Anything they couldn't take they'd destroyed, and they'd trashed the wagon out of general malice. The raid couldn't have happened terribly long ago; the body wasn't decayed and the blood around the quarrel hadn't been dry for long. He leaned in to examine it, pushing it from side to side to examine the wound. It was a good shot. It had taken the man right under his wide chin, not even touching the leather jerkin he wore for protection. Fat lot of good it would've done him against the crossbow that killed him. It would've punched through the cheap leather like paper.

He wiped the blood from his fingers on the man's jerkin and took a cursory glance in his pockets. He knew there wouldn't be anything but it didn't hurt to look. He straightened up and ran a gloved hand through his greasy hair. The summer air was hot and the sun was enough to cook him in his armor. He could feel it trickling down his legs and pooling in his boots. Having enough of searching he made his way over to the squatting man. He dropped down next to him and watched him take a vicious bite of a fatty sausage. It took a hard man to eat with a corpse.

"Dumb shyke if ye ask me. Not a guard in sight. Doesn't even look like he put up a fight. Crossbow'll do that to ye though," Owan said, musing aloud. If the man responded then good. If he continued to eat his sausage in silence that was good too.

"Like to find his wares though. They're not doin' him any good."

[Ulric]

Ulric merely grunted at the scuffing of caked soil, fixing his gimlets on the long, lean man who’d rambled up the trail and plunked by his barren shelf of wagon, apparently surveying the jowly man. That was fine. The fleas won’t mind, but even if they did I wouldn’t give a shyke. Flinty knolls, mumbling trunks, and gray hills departed from his regard, and he glanced sidelong at the interloper. Padded by leather casings, plunging loftier in the shoulder than nearly any man he’d looked on before, shield and axe hefted with a fluency of steelsong, these all presaged warrior, if not ruffian. That disparity he’d let stand for this moment, at least. There were enough of either, he’d found, but that jutting of lips piqued him, skewing behind a scraggly beard.

Grinner, Ulric sniffed, wiping the sweat from his jaw. The fat beads just went awry, trickling under his gorget, his collar, sliding down the camber of his spine. This was a singularly horrid sensation, but after a while he’d ceased to notice. The prunes of his toes would revert. The clammy swish of wool just skipped by his detection, which was more than he’d say for lazy blurs of midges.

Their stingers hurt.

Ulric gave a shrug, for he was hardly fussy at having his repose jostled by this unfamiliar personage. “Not mine, he replied, scooting over the wagon’s cradle to heft his own crossbow. “This’d take his head off,” he clarified, tailing it with the freshly devised moniker, “Grinner.”

This, he surmised, was partially jeering, but largely a signal of a looming camaraderie between them. “They’d be traced easily, these brigands,” he grated. “The soil is loose, their conduct brash, maybe even imprudent. Trudging after them’d be a bother, but mayhap they’ll have a few trinkets for the picking. That is, if you’ve no bones with handling that, Grinner.”

Ulric indicated the other man’s axe, while his undiscerning eyes swept over a hodgepodge of scuffs, abrasions, and bowls of gritty slurry, trying to distinguish where the goods had been carried. That they’d been taken at all, he figured, surely indicated there’d been more than baskets of turnips. There wasn’t an ending to scrapes, ridges, and crusts where muck had surged over the lips of shoes, forming a jumble of basins where that heel, with its untidy nail, strafed with impunity. “May’ve been cagier than you’d imagine,” he jerked his jaw at the jowly man. “Maybe this was a ploy that didn’t fall, for if the farmer that fights gets flayed to bloody rags, the farmer that forfeits his turnips may, more frequently than not, flee with his skin.”

Kneeling, he frowned, for nearby the fringe of trail he’d picked up strings of scuffs guiding to a grove, where the brigands had clearly dragged a burden over the rough ground. “Maybe they just did him for sport,” he mused. “That’s why you’d go after them, right? The silver?” 

Regarding questioning look at the grinner, he shook out his legs and began shambling up a hill, pursuing the scrapes. “Me, I’m doing it because I’m bored, and I feel like killing somebody.”

[Owan Bardson]

"Aye. That's a monster of a weapon," Owan said, admiring the man's crossbow. Grinner? He assumed that must've been him. He didn't mind; in fact the name suited him well enough. "True. Probably didn't expect anyone to give a shyke." Sunberth was like that. After enough wagons were raided and enough merchants were left stinking in the sun it became old news. People stopped caring. When the man asked him about qualms he shrugged. It'd be a right petcher to schlep through the wilderness after the raiders, but the ends'd be worth it; especially if they came across something worth taking.

The man motioned to his ax absentmindedly, eyes scanning the turned soil. Owan did the same, trying to surmise exactly where the bandits would've dragged the goods. The hills made for good hiding, but with a trail as wide as this it wouldn't be terribly hard to track them down. His comrade jerked his head at the dead merchant and spoke.

"Aye could've been. Never did it that way myself. Looks like luck wasn't on his side," Owan said, cracking another smile. The Bard had always held a deep-seated disdain for those who simply threatened. He claimed it was the mark of a coward; that it was dishonoring the profession. Owan'd taken his father's words to heart. "Wouldn't be the first time. Bandits are a bloodthirsty group," Owan said, musing over the blood he'd spilled for no other reason than to prove he could.

"Ye know what they say: it's money that makes the world go 'round," Owan said, rising alongside his new found partner. He had a feeling he and the sable-cloaked stranger were going to get along just fine. "Good a reason as any," Owan said, brushing the dirt from his arse and following the man up the hill, eyes glued to the ground, coming up occasionally to check their surroundings. He loosened his axe on his belt and pulled the shield from his back, sliding it past his disfigured hand until it was snug on his arm. He slapped a midge that had landed on throat and muttered a curse before continuing up the hill.

[Ulric]

Ulric fixed his gimlets on the tracks, regularly mulling over the abraded thistles and brambles heavy with spores. They’d signals in them, but he couldn’t glean anything except their distortion. There was, he figured, reliably more than a single brigand, but apart from that he was murky on the myriad. “I’ve never cared for money,” he remarked as they churned over soil. “I only care for what it gets me.”

The knolls were patchy with sedge, frosty balls of fungi with vivid splotches, tufted by grass. They led him, grunting at the creak of leather joints, to sparse grove. Its larches looked over a depression, a rivulet tricking by a rummage of boulders, and further on, over another hill, pewter tails dispelling unruly over the undulations.

Smoke. That’s sloppy of them.

Fixing his inky gimlets on the other man, he allowed himself to grin as well. This was his flush, the imminent joy of battle and all its barbarity. “If we’re killing, then we do it right,” he grunted. “I’m an oxtail, an upright man, whatever you’d prefer to call it, that’s what I am. It means I’m for doing what’s right, y’see. If they fight, we kill ‘em. If they don’t and we get ‘em, we kill ‘em worse. I don’t take kindly to weepers. If they do take to heels, we don’t pursue unless they give us cause. If they’ve got slaves, we cut loose those with spit and spirit, bring the weak-kneed thralls to the block. If we find anything, we split it. It’s not about how many you kill, or even who you kill. It’s the risk, right? If we’ve both got veins that’ll spill, it makes us even.”

Ulric hadn’t kept to the covenant, but at least he’d tried what others had failed, and he wasn’t going to give that up. There’d always be a kind of justice, or men’d engulf their kind like ripping sharks. This was his way. Take what you find, throw your bones to the dogs with spirit, and petch the corpse of anybody that did you wrong.

“That all right?” Though he kept his voice low, it grated steely with his mulish resolve. There’d maybe be bundles of devils under that rise, stirring kettles and picking out loot. The hardest men, maybe. That’s how you got your name, by being hard.

This man might have one, or if he didn’t then he might gain the one that’d already sprung. Ulric craned his neck for a deeper look, hardly seeming a stork with so much metal fringing the fleshy trunk. Then he nudged the Grinner, keeping jostling of his crossbow away from limbs. There’d be no use in sticking him, too. “Think we should rush ‘em? Try to get close, then let ‘er rip” 

[Owan Bardson]

"Deep shyke that. Yer a deep man aren't ye," Owan said, smiling wryly. He wasn't asking, simply making an observation as the pair trudged up the hill. The sweat trickling down his face made him glad he wasn't dressed like his new compatriot. The metal must've been cooking him alive. No complaints from him though; Owan doubted the man ever complained. A real hard-arse, at least that's what Owan'd surmised from their brief partnership.

When they crested the first hill Owan caught the whiff of smoke. He looked over to the man, imagining that he'd noticed the same. The scene was almost picturesque: the tiny brook, the scattered trees, the smoke wafting over the second hill. Owan muttered a curse. He hated walking over these petching hills. It'd be worth it in the end though. His fingers were itching and a thin red cloud had begun to pulse in his eyes. He'd have his blood before long, and couldn't help but be excited. It hadn't always been like this, but this was how it'd become and Owan doubted he'd change it if he could.

The man turned to look at him and spoke. Owan listened, fixed by the man's eyes. Perhaps it was a diatribe, and perhaps the man truly believed the words he said. It sounded good enough to Owan; aligned as it was with many of his own beliefs. He nodded sharply.

"Aye. The risk is what makes it worth it; it's what makes men like us feel alive," Owan said. He didn't know the man well, but he could sense the likeness. They were both men of whatever means they had at their disposal.

"Works for me," Owan said simply. He looked out over the rise and focused on the smoke. It was a thin trail; the fire couldn't have been very big, and that may have meant the band was small or it could've been a trap. It wasn't too late to turn back, but Owan wanted nothing less. He wanted the axe in his hand and he wanted to pit himself against another man in the dance of mortality. It'd feel good. The other man nudged him in the ribs.

"Aye. Ye go that way," Owan said pointing toward one side of the second hill. "And I'll go this way. That way, we'll spring outta the woods on both sides. Hopefully that'll be enough to take the bastards off guard," Owan said, letting his arm swing back to the other side of the glen. He waited to see whether or not the man had a better plan.

[Ulric]

Ulric dipped his head. “We’ll pincer ‘em, then,” he affirmed. Enthusiasm sparked in obsidian gimlets, a familiar, metallic tang hinting at the underside of his tongue. “Being as there’s only the pair of us, we might not get all the squirters. But it’s the spoils we’re after, right?” Hitching up the crossbow, he grinned crookedly at the only flaw. It was decidedly minor from him perspective. “I’ll try not to spike you from across the flames.”

After all, it’d occurred before. And not just in yarns. Usually in the gloom, but you had to be a bungler to spray your only quarrel haphazardly. That why you couldn’t impede your thinking.

“Xhyvas keep you,” Ulric grunted, even if the sulky prayer to his resurrected deity wouldn’t mean anything. Shuffled off, trying to pick his way over the squishier regions. Difficult with the preponderance of twigs, thistles, and nettles that plunged from the soaking carpet of loam. Clay would’ve been simpler, though slippery. Guiding through the trunks, he tried screening his progress from prying glimpses while peeking for any indication of the brigands.

Venturing nearer, always nearer to where they’d spied the smoke. Voices piped, and he craned his neck, seeing nothing. Sucking a bit of smoke in his lungs, he puffed it out. Abruptly sensed a familiar gripping in his bowels, a gritty dryness in the back of his gullet. His fingers itched, and he petching enjoyed killing. Men aren’t immune to fear, he reflected grumpily.

Mostly because every man dies.

Ulric focused on lodging his heel and then the rest of his boot. Branches covering him like giant parasols. Treading slowly, savoring those tendrils of dread mixed with the proximity of conflict. Though he tried to stay hidden, the grove kept growing sparser. And he was finally discerned.

“What the-”

Ulric’s head jolted, entire body following it around as he glanced cursorily over the gawking, lantern jawed brigand who was pissing on a nearby trunk. Hide bracers fit over his thick wrists, rising to a kind of rusty hauberk that was hiked up, divulging a glimpse of curdled, bristly shanks. The crossbow whanged.

Already reeling, the brigand keeled over as it plunged under his ribs, ripping from his belly with a  trail of viscera. Bowels followed, reflexively emptying in a puddle of brown mixed with crimson. Glassy eyes rolling, not quite departed.

Ulric chuckled, tossing his burden aside and slinging the round shield over his left arm, reaching for the bearded axe. “That’s why you don’t go into the wilds with strange men,” he grunted.

Hustling off with a wild grin, he darted through trunks with mossy beards, bursting out near the ring of stones. Grim faces greeted him, but before he could yell a squat, swarthy man tried to plant a tulwar in his head.

Clumsy of him, really.

Ulric let it slide by his ear, using the impetus to plow his shield into jaw, sternum, and gut, twisting and shoving up with the entirety of his brawn. Swarthy’s bloody ascent was practically icarian. Sucking groan immolated by the dullness of a mallet striking meat, chipped incisors squirting like kernels of corn. Plummeting back into the flames, he rolled limp as a ragdoll. Ulric was already past him, shield’s rim lifting to deflect a poking spear. Tuskers like that are always trouble, he snarled at the range, lunging closer. The spear needled at his face, but he turned it again and reached in, the reversed curve of his axe pulling back at the hand, cutting trenchantly betwixt a pair of fingers.

The brigand shrieked, releasing his grip. That boded poorly.

Ulric kicked him in the groin, twisting from the hips as he viciously crunched his shield’s riveted boss into an already lopsided nose. Already the axe was swinging, slicing through tendon and bone, shearing off an entire leg from the knee down with the pop of a patella. Squawking, the brigand fell, and then the axe cleaved through his chest, splintering bones as it ruptured the gristle of a heart. “Might’ve been alive yet,” he growled into dead eyes, “If we hadn’t gotten bored.”