New World: a Frontier Fantasy Novel

New World: a Frontier Fantasy Novel

  Copyright 2011 Steven W. White

  "How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!"

  – William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1611

  "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!"

  – Emma Lazarus, "The New Colossus," 1883

  Prologue

  As the stink of low tide washed over the village of Fort Sanctuary, a little boy named Simon Jones didn't want to get punched again. His nemesis, a seventeen-year-old thug named Marshall Dunster, was stalking him.

  Stealth, that was the key. Change the usual routine. Don't walk home from the printing house down Sunrise Street like always, but turn left at Fife's pub, the Mermaid, where his father spent Friday evenings. Simon's skinny, nervous legs whipped along, taking him through that left turn–

  "Gotcha!" Marshall's iron grip found his neck and pulled at his collar.

  Simon almost worked free, but Marshall punched the side of his head, which rang like a cow bell at his ear. "Give me your money."

  Simon's Adam's apple struggled up and down past Marshall's rough fingers. "My money?"

  "I get bored just pounding you. Your dad's got money... so you got money. Hand it over."

  "You've graduated to petty larceny. Lovely."

  Another punch to his head. The noise made his knees wobbly. "Coin," Marshall said. "Now. And quit using words I don't know."

  Simon reached into his trousers pocket and withdrew a few coppers. Marshall released Simon's neck and clawed at the coins in his fist. Simon let them fall to the dust.

  "Hey!" Marshall threw another punch at Simon's head, but Simon dashed away, and Marshall's fist only swooped through the air.

  Simon ran down the alley beside the Mermaid and crashed into a wall of muscle in a cotton shirt, stinking of beer and sweat.

  Yohann Gordon, the brewer's son, had caught him. Marshall's friend. "I never seen a worm move so fast. Hey, Marsh, where's this twerp off to?"

  Marshall didn't answer. Marshall never answered. The groan of yielding wood, then the heavy crack of splitting beams, came from the front gate. All three boys froze, and the screams that followed chilled their blood.

  #

  Chapter One

  Tiberius Bogg's borderline malnourishment had grown to a powerful hunger that drove him back toward -- he hated to even think the word -- civilization.

  The wilderness was different things to different people. To many, it was some sort of bloodthirsty predator that would eat your guts out if it could get close enough. Plenty of those folks back in the old country -- they would never come here, and just as well -- but some with that sort of thinking whiled away their lives in the settler towns with the high walls.

  To others the wilderness was treasure. This was a more common sentiment among folk on this side of the ocean. To still more, the wilderness was a sort of shrine, a sign of the glorious nature of the Creator. Seemed fair enough. Bogg had no quarrel with those folk.

  Bogg reckoned they were all close enough to the mark. For his own self, he'd call the wilderness a hunter, treasure, shrine... and home.

  His stomach had cinched into a tight ball since his last meal of boiled pine cones yesterday. His feet, pounded past sore and into the pleasant territory of numb, had carried him down below the tree line and into the hills of golden grass. On occasion, as he walked, the deep blue of the ocean winked at him between the hills, a wedge of twilight in the middle of the day.

  He didn't hurry. Food was nice, and tables and chairs and wood floors and fireplaces and soft beds were a curious luxury that he found himself missing at times. But they were like maple candy for a child. Not healthy, by any means.

  Instead, he stopped to look behind him. Back there, the land was nothing but pines, shaggy green pillars like the grizzly hairs on the back of some beast big as the land, bigger than any in all the stories he had ever heard. The pines rose and fell in waves, not like the soft yellow hills near the coast, but steeper, more treacherous, like the waves out on the deep ocean that rise higher than the mainmast.

  Back there in the pine storm, you felt small and lost, like the forest would see you and see a bug and not be clear as to which was which. That feeling pulled at Bogg. He wanted it.

  But he wanted supplies, too. He was plumb out. And he was merely a man, not a badger or a coneybuck or a red rhino. So he walked on, travelling eost out of the woods.

  With some disappointment, he stepped onto a road, with wagonwheel ruts ankle deep. The road ran sept-aust, and would take him to the coastal village of Sanctuary, where his oldest brother lived with his family. Bogg took in a breath of piney air, tightened the rope belt around his tattered deerskin coat, pulled his coonskin cap low over his grimy forehead, and turned sept.

  After a mile he spied a furry lump on the road, bloody and still. He couldn't judge what kind of critter it was until he passed it, because its head was clove completely off.

  Mongrel dog. It weren't that ripe yet. The buzzing flies had just lately made their joyous discovery. But by the end of the day, it would be boiling with stink.

  Bogg spotted the head on the other side of the road. The deed was done by a single strike with a blade uncommonly keen. The sight pulled at his heart a little. Bogg had nothing against dogs. This one didn't seem like it had been the biting kind -- he didn't picture a body defending himself against it. It was more the type to yap and nip his ankles.

  Bogg went on edge. His boots came down softer and more quietly on the road, and he considered in turn each sound he heard.

  Birds and wind.

  He reckoned the only body who would kill a dog like that and leave it to rot must have wanted to shut it up, or else was a powerful cruel creature.

  Uncommonly keen. Muscle behind it, too.

  Birds and wind, birds and wind.

  The road curved gently to the eost and sloped down toward the coast. Patches of weeds sprouted now and then between the wheel ruts. Birch and maple trees grew in clumps on either side of him, and some were tapped with spiles and trays to catch the sap. It was the first sign of human beings Bogg had seen in eight months, unless he counted the dog.

  The road met a low fence of crossed slender timbers. A gate hung from a leather hinge. Bogg opened it and passed an orchard of neatly spaced apple trees. The road continued around a bend to a stout fort's wall of sharpened posts. The gate here had been knocked flat. It lay in the path, bits of dirt trampled onto it.

  Bogg wore a black cloak over his deerskin coat, and he drew it about him. His right hand came to rest on his sabertooth knife, in its sheath at his hip.

  As he placed his foot on the fallen gate to pass into Sanctuary, a woman's scream split the air.

  She emerged from beyond one of the timber-framed, stone-ender houses that lined the road past the gate. A headscarf covered her gray hair, and her eyes were glazed with terror. Her wrinkled face twisted up and she pointed a bony finger at him. "Clovis! They're back!"

  A man strode through the open doorway of a house on the other side of the path. A full white beard lay on his scrawny chest, and in a frail arm he pointed a firelock at Bogg. "Stop yourself where you stand, stranger! Step over that gate and I'll knock a hole in you."

  Bogg jutted his chin forward. Firelocks didn't scare him. "You'd better step closer before you let fly, if you mean to hit me with that thing, if'n it goes off at all. I allow this is Fort Sanctuary, but it's high time you changed the name if this is how you greet people."

  #

  Chapter 2

  Clovis squinted at Bogg. The
firelock drooped. "Sigrid! This ain't one of them. What are you hollering on about?"

  She pressed her hands to her mouth. "Good land, I lost my senses. Who are you, then, stranger?"

  "I'm the little brother of Ackerley Bogg. I heard he lived here."

  Clovis turned to Sigrid. "Ackerley?" he asked uncertainly.

  Sigrid sadly shook her head.

  Bogg buried his fingers in the sandy blond of his beard to rub his chin. Clovis had emerged from a house with no door on its hinges. Instead it lay on the front step in two pieces, not split, not broken or shattered, but cut neatly in two, as if by an axe.

  Fort Sanctuary had been sacked, that was plain to see. "When did this happen?"

  "Sigrid..." Clovis thumbed over his shoulder, toward the rest of the village. "Better show him." Sigrid nodded, and Clovis disappeared back inside the house.

  The old woman said, "I'm Sigrid Minder, maven of this bereaved community." She turned her plump body away from him. "Best follow me."

  They walked down the uncobbled main avenue. Untended brood hens scratched and clucked aimlessly, passing in and out of the houses with the doors chopped down. Nobody else was about.

  "Early this morning. Five men."

  "Only five?"

  "No more. In helms, mail, and heraldry -- traps of the old country. One with an axe, another with a warhammer. Their leader carried a broadsword with a golden pommel and guard. A wicked, wicked thing."

  Bogg thought of the dog. "Mercenaries. Or pirates on a land raid." Bogg stepped over a dark stain of blood in the dust.

  People had fled the old country to get away from broadswords, and all the armies that hefted them, in all the wars waged by all the power-mad kings of that overused and worn-out land.

  Not to mention all the damned dragons.

  That land across the sea was called Algolus, but it was so cursed in the minds and hearts of the settlers here that they called it the old country, rather than sound the name. And when most people left it, they left it for good.

  Some didn't. Some carried Algolus with them still, and sailed all the way to Mira only to pillage this new land and bullyrag the settlers and condemn them as rebels and heretics.

  A long streak of blood, sprayed on the clapboards of a house, was drying to brown in the afternoon sun.

  "My brother is dead?"

  "Ackerley, yes. And his wife, Vespera. And their son-in-law, Oliver."

  "Jupiter Pluvius!" Bogg's lips drew back from his teeth. "The bloody rapscallions. How many altogether?"

  Sigrid let out a whimper before she answered. "Eighteen. Those five cut through the three watchmen on duty, then they stormed house to house, killing anyone who tried to stand up to them. They took provisions, quick as lightning, and made off cleaner than a hound's tooth."

  Sigrid and Bogg came to the square, an open patch of earth where the two main paths of the village crossed. Bodies were laid out in a row here. Bogg looked as little as he could. "Broadsword, all right."

  The smell wasn't as bad as it would be soon, but all the same, it was getting to him. Bogg was in a sweat to run or fight, he wasn't sure which.

  He had seen more death than most, and of the least pleasant kind. In the wilderness, it could come quick as the fang of a rattlesnake. It could also come slow as starvation, or frostbite, or gangrene. He knew there were worse ways to end up than lying in a village square like a side of beef, and he steeled himself as he walked past the bodies.

  There were five women here. The sight of them tightened up his guts.

  Then Bogg came to the body of a man with shaggy hair and beard like his, only white instead of blond. He had been slashed across the arm -- a blow he blocked -- and through the heart, a blow he didn't.

  "Ackerley," Bogg muttered.

  "That's right," Sigrid said.

  "It can't stand." Bogg cast his gaze around the lonely stone buildings at the plaza's four corners, to keep from looking at the bodies. No one else was about. Bogg heard a woman weeping in a house nearby. "What are you people going to do about this?"

  Sigrid never looked away from the dead. "Do? Nothing. Not a thing that'll answer."

  "You won't go after them? They're murderers."

  Sigrid shook her head. "We ain't got men enough. There's our finest, lying there. We need who's left to watch over us. What if those unbearables come back?"

  Bogg stomped a boot. "By jings! Give me provisions and I'll go!"

  "You?"

  "I ain't afeared of these old-country mercenaries. I'll pay for my supplies with broadswords. I'll break those thugs in half."

  Sigrid looked up from the bodies and focused her tired gaze on him. "Think on what you say. I can equip you with victuals and any such truck as you need, and further, if you were to bring even one of their weapons back to us, as maven I could pay you. A pretty penny. Say, a thousand gold."

  Bogg's spit trickled back down the wrong pipe, and he hacked and coughed. At last, he whistled through the gap of his missing tooth. "How can you possibly afford to pay that?"

  A brown and white chicken burst clucking into the square from an alley, and an instant later came the boy who had spooked it. The boy was in wide-eyed flight from something himself, and Bogg's hand found his knife handle.

  "As of today," Sigrid Minder said quietly as she watched the boy, "Fort Sanctuary has a surplus of two things. Estates..."

  The boy was skinny, no more than twelve, with hair dark as black cats in a sack and skin white as a bucket of cow's milk. He stumbled over the chicken and sprawled in the road, grinding dirt into his starched white shirt. He was on his feet and running again as an older boy, eighteen maybe, appeared and ripped after him.

  "And orphans," Sigrid finished.

  #

  Chapter 3

  The second boy was built like a stone wall. He tripped the skinny boy, who went into the dust again, and hauled him to his feet. "Take it back!"

  "Marshall Dunster!" screeched Sigrid. "This is no day for shenanigans. Unhand that child!"

  Dunster drove a fist into the boy's stomach and let him drop to the ground. "He said I was a liar!"

  "Liability," moaned the kid on the ground. Marshall Dunster kicked him in the ribs.

  This was more than Bogg could stand. He marched over, taking time to circle around the poor stiff dead. "Lad! We're all on the hairy edge, and we all mourn in different ways, but you step away from that child or by Jove I'll take you down a peg."

  Dunster hauled the boy to his feet and held his limp body as a shield to ward off Bogg. "Who the hell are you?"

  "I ain't no matter. But you're about to know me real well."

  "You ain't nothing but a dirty mountain man. Go back to the woods."

  The boy's head lolled back onto Dunster's shoulder, his face a grimace of pain. Not a day over twelve! Bogg let fly with his left fist, his knuckles breezing past the boy's ear, and bashed Dunster between his dumb bully's eyes.

  "Mr. Bogg!" cried Sigrid.

  Dunster stared at Bogg hard for a second, without really seeing him. Then Dunster seated himself in the street. Bogg snatched the boy as Dunster fell, and laid him down easy.

  Dunster picked himself up before he was ready, wobbled a little, and reached behind his back. His hand whipped out a blade and pointed it at Bogg. It glinted steely in the afternoon sunlight.

  Bogg's body went on edge. "That's an expensive knife," he said quietly.

  Blood dripped from Dunster's nose, and he wiped it with his free hand. "I ain't afraid to cheapen it on you."

  Bogg's right hand crept slowly to his hip. "Boy, you're looking at a world of troubles. Let's call it a day, you and me."

  "You're just a scaredy, stinky mountain man. Eat any squirrels today, mountain man?"

  "I'd ruther fight the men who did this than fight you. But then again--" Bogg's blade flashed out. The sabertooth canine seemed to reach out from its antler handle a
nd rawhide lashing, pure white in the sun, smooth as Dunster's steel and a hand longer. It gently curved, as the fangs of that animal did, and the natural serrations lined the inside of the curve like the teeth of a saw blade.

  Dunster took pause on seeing it, a pause which Bogg used to whip his knife across Dunster's, slicing it clean in half. The steel tip stuck itself in the dust between Dunster's feet, and Dunster gazed at the hilt in his hand, looking dumb as a stump.

  "The sabertooth cat ain't no normal critter," Bogg said. "You ever see one in the wild, you run."

  Bogg lifted his bone knife over his head until Dunster got the point. Dunster backed away and ran.

  "Pa!" he called. "Pa!"

  Sigrid had approached, but stood ten feet off until Bogg sheathed the knife. Then she helped him lift the boy to his feet.

  "That offer still stand?" Bogg asked.

  "It stands," Sigrid answered.

  Bogg nodded. "Because I don't reckon I'll be staying in Sanctuary long." It wasn't the first time Bogg had caused a ruction in his first hour on returning to civilization. It just wasn't for him. He was a better man when he was out there, on his own.

  The woman had said a thousand gold. Bogg had no love for money -- a prime reason, he suspicioned, as to why he never seemed to have any. There was no shame in poverty. It was just damned inconvenient at times. But with a thousand yellow-boys, he could... why, he could buy enough gear for the trip he had always wanted to make. All the way across Mira, past the Starry Mountains to the sea. That was as far into the wilderness as anybody could go. To lay eyes on the Hestern Ocean! He had never heard of anyone making that trip. Bogg could be the first.

  "That might be for the best." She hunkered close to the boy. "Simon? Are you all right?"

  "Just a minute," the lad said. "I'll be all right."

  Sigrid held him close. "Poor Simon lost his father today. How young boys can torture each other like that I'll never understand."

  The lad managed to straighten up and stand on his own. His black hair was properly mussed now, after the rumpus, but still parted in the middle and combed back over his ears, which stuck out like jug handles over his narrow shoulders. He looked up to Bogg with eyes a stormcloud gray that made Bogg think of rain.