Douglass, Sara - The Axis Trilogy 1 - BattleAxe

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Book Information:
Genre: High/Epic Fantasy
Author: Sara Douglass
Name: BattleAxe
Series: Book One of The Axis Trilogy
Extra Series Info: The series has 3 books in total; There is another sequel trilogy,
called the Wayfarer Redemption
=================================================
BattleAxe
Book one of THE AXIS TRILOGY
Sara Douglass
The Prophecy of the Destroyer
A day will come when born will be Two babes whose blood will tie them. That
born to Wing and Horn will hate The one they call the StarMan. Destroyer! rises
in the north And drives his Ghostmen south; Defenceless lie both flesh and field
Before Gorgrael's ice. To meet this threat you must release The StarMan from his
lies, Revive Tencendor, fast and sure Forget the ancient war, For if Plough, Wing
and Horn can't find The bridge to understanding, Then will Gorgrael earn his
name And bring Destruction hither.
StarMan, listen, heed me well, Your power will destroy you If you should
wield it in the fray 'Ere these prophecies are met: The Sentinels will walk abroad
'Til power corrupt their hearts; A child will turn hex head and cry Revealing
ancient arts; A wife will hold in joy at night The slayer of her husband; Age-old
souls, long in cribs, Will sing o'er mortal land; The remade dead, fat with child
Will birth abomination; A darker power will prove to be The father of salvation.
XIII Then waters will release bright eyes To form the Rainbow Sceptre.
StarMan, listen, for I know That you can wield the sceptre To bring Gorgrael
to his knees And break the ice asunder. But even with the power in hand Your
pathway is not sure: A Traitor from within your camp Will seek and plot to harm
you; Let not your Lover's pain distract For this will mean your death; •
Destroyer's might lies in his hate Yet you must never follow; Forgiveness is the
thing assured To save Tencendor's soul.
Prologue
The woman struggled through the knee-deep snow, the bundle of dead wood
she had tied to her back almost as great a burden as the weight of the child she
carried in her belly. Her breath rasped in her throat before frosting heavily in the
bitterly cold southerly wind. She was short and strong, her legs and shoulders
finely muscled by twenty-eight years of hard-won survival in her harsh
homeland. But she had always had the help and company of her people to aid
her. Now she was alone, and this, her third child, she would have to bear
without assistance.
This would be her last trip across the valley. The severe winter storms of the
past few weeks had kept her iced into her shelter so that her supply of the
precious hot-burning Timewood was almost exhausted; if she did not have
enough wood and dry stores remaining for her confinement, then she would die
and her child would die with her. Only in the past day had the weather broken
sufficiently to allow her to struggle through the snow to reach the Timewood
trees. Now the wind was growing harsher and the snow heavier and she knew
she had only a short time to reach her shelter. The knowledge that once the
baby was born she would not be able to travel far from her shelter drove her on.
Although her current solitude was a path she had chosen freely, worry ate at
her bones.
And worry about her child also gnawed at her. Her previous two pregnancies
had been uncomfortable, especially in the final weeks, but she had borne those
children with little fuss. Her body had recuperated quickly and had healed cleanly
each time. With this child she feared her labour more than the lonely winter
ahead. It was too large, too . . . angry. Sometimes at night when she was trying
to sleep it twisted and beat at the sides of her womb with such frantic fists and
heels that she moaned in pain, rocking herself from side to side in a futile bid to
escape its rage.
She paused briefly, adjusting the burden of wood on her back, wishing she
could ease the load of the child as easily. Last night it had shifted down into the
pit of her belly, seeking the birth canal. The birth was close. Perhaps tonight,
perhaps tomorrow. She could feel the bones of her pelvis grating apart with the
pressure of the child's head each time she took a step, making it hard to walk.
She squinted through the snow to the thick line of conifers about three
hundred paces ahead. She had done her best with her camp. It was sheltered
well behind the tree line in the lee of a rocky hill that, jutting above the peaks of
the trees, was the first in a long range of hills leading into the distant Icescarp
Alps. Well before her pregnancy had begun to show, she'd slipped away from her
friends and family and travelled the Avarinheim to reach this lonely spot far to
the north of her usual forest home. From the first of the autumn months,
DeadLeaf-month, she had occupied her days with gathering and storing as many
berries, nuts and seeds as she could. As hard as she searched, however, she had
found only small amounts of malfari, the sweet fibrous tubers that provided her
people with most of their winter sustenance. She had been forced to go without,
and fears of what malnourishment might do to her and the child kept her awake
at nights. The remains of a few scrawny rabbits, dried into leathery strips, were
all she had for meat. She sighed and absently rubbed her belly, trying to ignore
the fiery ache in her legs and pelvis, desperately wishing for a few chickens or a
goat to supplement her diet.
She should never have tried to carry this child to term. Had she remained
with her people she would not have been allowed to. It was a Beltide child,
conceived during the drunken revelry of the spring rites, a time when her people,
the forest dwellers, and the people of the Icescarp Alps assembled in the groves
where mountain and forest met. There they celebrated the renewal of life in the
thawing land with religious rites, followed, invariably, by an enthusiastic excess
of whatever wine was left over from long winter nights huddled by home fires.
Beltide was the one night of the year when both peoples relaxed sufficiently to
carry interracial relations to extremes never practised throughout the rest of the
year.
Every Beltide night for the past three years she had watched him, wanted
him. He came down to the groves with his people, his skin as pale and fine as
the ice vaults of his home, his hair the fine summer gold of the life-giving sun
that both their peoples worshipped. As the most powerful Enchanter of his kind
he led the Beltide rites with the leading Banes of her own people; his power and
magic awed and frightened her yet she craved his skill, beauty and grace. This
last Beltide night past, eight months ago now, she had drunk enough wine to
loosen her inhibitions and buttress her courage. She was a striking woman, at
the peak of her beauty and fitness, her nut-brown hair waving thick down her
back. When he'd seen her striding across the clearing of the grove towards him
his eyes had crinkled and then widened, and he had smiled and held his hand
out to her. Eyes trapped by his, she had taken his outstretched fingers,
marvelling at the feel of his silken skin against her own work-callused palm. He
was kind for an Enchanter, and had murmured gentle words before leading her
to a secluded spot beneath the spinning stars.
"StarDrifter," she whispered, running her tongue along the split skin of her
lips.
The snow that had been drifting down for the past few hours was now
falling heavily, and she roused from her reverie to find she could hardly see the
tree line through the driving snow. She must hurry. His child dragging her down,
she stumbled a little as she tried to move faster.
His hands had been strong and confident on her body, and she was not
surprised that her womb had quickened with his child. A child of his would be so
amazing, so exceptional. But although both peoples accepted the excesses and
the drunken unions between the races on Beltide night, both also insisted that
any child conceived of such a union was an abomination. For most of her life she
had been aware of the women who, some four to six weeks after Beltide, went
out of their way along the dim forest paths to collect the herbs necessary to rid
their bodies of any child conceived that night.
Somehow she had not been able to force herself to swallow the steaming
concoction she brewed herself time and time again. And finally she had decided
that she would carry the child to term. Once the child was born, once her people
could see that it was a babe like any other (except more beautiful, more
powerful, as any child of an Enchanter would be), they would accept it. No child
of his could be an abomination.
She'd had to spend the last long months of her pregnancy alone, lest her
people force the child from her body. Now she wondered if the child would be as
wondrous as she had first supposed, whether she'd made a mistake.
She clenched her jaws against the discomfort and forced her feet to take
one step after another through the snow drifts. She would manage. She had to.
She did not want to die.
Suddenly a strange whisper, barely discernible in the heightening storm, ran
along the edge of the wind.
She stopped, every nerve in her body afire. Her gloved hands pushed fine
strands of hair from her eyes, and she concentrated hard, peering through the
gloom, listening for any unusual sounds.
There. Again. A soft whisper along the wind...a soft whisper and a hiccup.
Skraelings!
"Ah," she moaned, involuntarily, terror clenching her stomach. After a
moment frozen into the wind, she fumbled with the cumbersome straps holding
the bundle of wood to her back, desperate to lose the burden. Her only hope of
survival lay in outrunning the Skraelings. In reaching the trees before they
reached her. They did not like the trees.
But she could not run at this point in her pregnancy. Not with this child.
The straps finally broke free, the wood tumbling about her feet, and she
stumbled forward. Almost immediately she tripped and fell over, hitting the
ground heavily, the impact forcing the breath from her body and sending a shaft
of agony through her belly. The child kicked viciously.
The wind whispered again. Closer.
For a few moments she could do nothing but scrabble around in the snow,
frantically trying to regain her breath and find some foot or handhold in the
treacherous ground.
A small burble of laughter, low and barely audible above the wind, sounded
a few paces to her left.
Sobbing with terror now, she lurched to her feet, everything but the need to
get to the safety of the trees forgotten.
Two paces later another whisper, this time directly behind her, and she
would have screamed except that her child kicked so suddenly and directly into
her diaphragm that she was winded almost as badly as she had been when she
fell.
Then, even more terrifying, a whisper directly in front of her.
"A pretty, pretty...a tasty, tasty." The wraith's insubstantial face appeared
momentarily in the dusk light, its silver orbs glowing obscenely, its tooth-lined
jaws hanging loose with desire.
Finally she found the breath to scream, the sound tearing through the dusk
light, and she stumbled desperately to the right, fighting through the snow, arms
waving in a futile effort to fend the wraiths off. She knew she was almost
certainly doomed. The wraiths fed off fear as much as they fed off flesh, and
they were growing as her terror grew. She could feel the strength draining out of
her. They would chase her, taunt her, drain her, until even fear was gone. Then
they would feed off her body.
The child churned in her belly as she lurched through the snow, as if intent
on escaping the prison of her poor, doomed body. It flailed with its fists and
heels and elbows, and every time one of the dreadful whispers of the wraiths
reached it through the amniotic fluid of its mother's womb, it twisted and struck
harder.
Even though she knew she was all but doomed, the primeval urge to keep
making the effort to escape kept her moving through the snow, grunting with
each step, jerking every time her child beat at the confines of her womb. But
now the urge to escape consumed the child as much as its mother.
The five wraiths hung back a few paces in the snow, enjoying the woman's
fear. The chase was going well.
Then, strangely, the woman twisted and jerked mid-step and crashed to the
ground, writhing and clutching at the heaving mound of her belly. The wraiths,
surprised by this sudden development in the chase, had to sidestep quickly out
of the way, and slowed to circle the woman at a safe distance just out of arm's
reach.
She screamed. It was a sound of such terror, wrenched from the very
depths of her body, that the wraiths moaned in ecstasy.
She turned to the nearest wraith, extending a hand for mercy. "Help me,"
she whispered. "Please, help me!"
The wraiths had never been asked for help before. They began to mill in
confusion. Was she no longer afraid of them? Why was that? Wasn't every flesh
and blood creature afraid of them? Their minds communed and they wondered if
perhaps they should be afraid too.
The woman convulsed, and the snow stained bright red about her hips.
The smell and sight of warm blood reached the wraiths, reassuring them.
This one was going to die more quickly than they had originally expected.
Spontaneously. Without any help from their sharp pointed fangs. Sad, but she
would still taste sweet. They drifted about in the freezing wind, watching,
waiting, wanting.
After a few more minutes the woman moaned once, quietly, and then lay
still, her face alabaster, her eyes opened and glazed, her hands slowly
unclenching.
The wraiths bobbed as the wind gusted through them and considered. The
chase had started so well. She had feared well. But she had died strangely.
The most courageous of the five drifted up to the woman and considered
her silently for a moment longer. Finally, the coppery smell of warm blood
decided it and it reached down an insubstantial claw to worry at the leather
thongs of her tunic. After a moment's resistance the leather fell open — and the
one adventuresome wraith was so surprised it leapt back to the safe circling
distance of its comrades.
In the bloody mess that had once been the woman's belly lay a child, glaring
defiantly at them, hate steeping from every one of its bloodied pores.
It had eaten its way out.
"Ooooh!" the wraiths cooed in delight, and the more courageous of them
drifted forward again and picked up the bloody child.
"It hates," it whispered to the others. "Feel it?"
The other wraiths bobbed closer, emotion close to affection misting their
orbs.
The child turned its tusked head and glared at the wraiths. It hiccupped, and
a small bubble of blood frothed at the corner of its mouth.
"Aaah!" the wraiths cooed again, and huddled over the baby. Without a
word they made their momentous decision. They would take it home. They
would feed it. In time they would learn to love it. And then, years into a future
the wraiths could not yet discern, they would learn to worship it.
But now they were hungry and good food was cooling to one side. Appealing
as it was, the baby was dumped unceremoniously in the snow, howling its rage,
as the wraiths fed on its dead mother.
Six weeks later . . .
Separated by the length of the Alps and still more by race and circumstance,
another woman struggled through the snowdrifts of the lower reaches of the
western Icescarp Alps.
She fell badly over a rock hidden by the snow and tore the last fingernail
from her once soft, white hands as she scrabbled for purchase. She huddled
against a frozen rock and sucked her finger, moaning in frustration and almost
crying through cold and sad-heartedness. For a day and a night she had battled
to keep alive, ever since they had dumped her here in this barren landscape.
These mountains could kill even the fittest man, and she was seriously weakened
by the terrible birth of her son two days before.
And despite all her travail and prayers and tears and curses he had died
during that birth, born so still and blue that the midwives had huddled him away,
not letting her hold him or weep over him.
And as the midwives fled the birthing chamber, the two men had come in,
their eyes cold and derisive, their mouths twisting with scorn. They had dragged
her weeping and bleeding from the room, dragged her from her life of comfort
and deference, dumped her into a splintered old cart and drove her throughout
the day to this spot at the base of the Icescarp Alps. They had said not a word
the entire way.
Finally they had unceremoniously tipped her out. No doubt they wished her
dead, but neither had dared stain their hands with her blood. Better this way,
where she could endure a slow death on the dreaded mountains, prey to the
Forbidden Ones which crouched among the rocks, prey to the cold and the ice,
and with time to contemplate the shame of her illegitimate child . . . her
dead
illegitimate child.
But she was determined not to die. There was one chance and one chance
only. She would have to climb high into the Alps. Barely out of girlhood arid clad
only in tatters, she willed herself to succeed.
Her feet had gone to ice the first few hours and she now could no longer
feel them. Her toes were black. Her fingernails, torn from her hands, had left
gaping holes at the ends of her fingers that had iced over. Now they were
turning black too. Her lips were so dry and frozen they had drawn back from her
teeth and solidified into a ghastly rictus.
She huddled against the rock. Although she had started the climb in hope
and determination, even she, her natural stubbornness notwithstanding, realised
her situation was precarious. She had stopped shivering hours ago. A bad sign.
The creature had been watching the woman curiously for some hours now.
It was far up the slopes of the mountain, peering down from its heights through
eyes that could see a mouse burp at five leagues. Only the fact that she was
below his favourite day roost made the creature stir, fluff out its feathers in the
icy air, then spread its wings and launch itself abruptly into the swirling wind,
angered by the intrusion. It would rather have spent the day preening itself in
what weak sun there was. It was a vain creature.
She saw it circling far above her. She squinted into the sun, grey specks of
exhaustion almost obscuring her sight.
"StarDrifter?" she whispered, hope strengthening her heart and her voice.
Slowly, hesitatingly, she lifted a blackened hand towards the sky. "Is that you?"
The Tower of the Seneschal
Twenty-nine years later. . .
The speckled blue eagle floated high in the sky above the hopes and works
of mankind. With a wingspan as wide as a mart was tall, it drifted lazily through
the air thermals rising off the vast inland plains of the kingdom of Achar. Almost
directly below lay the silver—blue expanse of Grail Lake, flowing into the great
River Nordra as it coiled through Achar towards the Sea of Tyrre. The lake was
enormous and rich in fish, and the eagle fed well there. But more than fish, the
eagle fed on the refuse of the lake-side city of Carlon. Pristine as the ancient city
might be with its pink and cream stone walls and gold and silver plated roofs;
pretty as it might be with its tens of thousands of pennants and banners and
flags fluttering in the wind, the Carlonites ate and shat like every other creature
in creation, and the piles of refuse outside the city walls supported enough mice
and rats to feed a thousand eagles and hawks.
The eagle had already feasted earlier that morning and was not interested in
gorging again so soon. It let itself drift further east across Grail Lake until the
white-walled seven-sided Tower of the Seneschal rose one hundred paces into
the air to greet the sun. There the eagle tipped its wing and its balance, veering
slowly to the north, looking for a shady afternoon roost. It was an old and wise
eagle and knew that it would probably have to settle for the shady eaves of
some farmer's barn in this most treeless of lands.
As it flew it pondered the minds and ways of these men who feared trees so
much that they'd cut down most of the ancient forests once covering this land. It
was the way of the Axe and of the Plough.
Far below the eagle, Jayme, Brother-Leader of the Religious Brotherhood of
the Seneschal, most senior mediator between the one god Artor the Ploughman
and the hearts and souls of the Acharites, paced across his comfortable chamber
in the upper reaches of the Tower of the Seneschal.
"The news grows more disturbing," he muttered, his kindly face crinkling
into deep seams of worry. For years he'd refused to accept the office his fellow
brothers had pressed on him, and now, five years after he'd finally bowed to
their wishes and accepted that Artor himself must want him to hold supreme
office within the Seneschal, Jayme feared that it would be he who might well
have to see the Seneschal - nay, Achar itself -through its greatest crisis in a
thousand years.
He sighed and turned to stare out the window. Even though it was only early
DeadLeaf-month, the first week of the first month of autumn, the wind had
turned icy several days before, and the windows were tightly shut against the
cold. A fire blazed in the mottled green marble fireplace behind his desk, the
light of the flames picking out the inlaid gold tracery in the stone and the silver,
crystal and gold on the mantel.
The younger of his two assistants stepped forward. "Do you believe the
reports to be true, Brother-Leader?"
Jayme turned to reassure Gilbert, whom he thought might yet prove to have
a tendency towards alarm and panic. Who knew? Perhaps such tendencies would
serve him well over the coming months. "My son, it has been so many
generations since anyone has reliably spotted any of the Forbidden Ones that,
for all we know, these reports might be occasioned only by superstitious
peasants frightened by rabbits gambolling at dusk."
Gilbert rubbed his tonsured head anxiously and glanced across at Moryson,
Jayme s senior assistant and first adviser, before speaking again. "But so many
of these reports come from our own brothers, Brother-Leader."
Jayme resisted the impulse to retort that most of the brothers in the
northern Retreat of Gorkentown, where many of these reports originated, were
little more than superstitious peasants themselves. But Gilbert was young, and
had never travelled far from the glamour and cultivation of Carlon, or the pious
and intellectual atmosphere of the Tower of the Seneschal where he had been
educated and admitted into holy orders to serve Artor.
And Jayme himself feared that it was more than rabbits that had frightened
his Gorkentown brethren. There were reports coming out of the small village of
Smyrton, far to the north-east, that needed to be considered as well.
Jayme sighed again and sat down in the comfortable chair at his desk. One
of the benefits of the highest religious office in the land were the physical
comforts of the Brother-Leader's quarters high in the Tower. Jayme was not
hypocritical enough to pretend that, at his age, his aching joints did not
appreciate the well-made and cushioned furniture, pleasing both to eye and to
body, that decorated his quarters. Nor did he pretend not to appreciate the fine
foods and the invitations to the best houses in Carlon. When he did not have to
attend to the administration of the Seneschal or to the social or religious duties
of his position, there for the stimulation of his mind were thousands of leather-
bound books lining the shelves of his quarters, with religious icons and portraits
collected over past generations decorating every other spare space of wall and
bringing some measure of peace and comfort to his soul. His bright blue eyes,
still sharp after so many years spent seeking out the sins of the Acharites,
travelled indulgently over one particularly fine representation of the Divine Artor
on the occasion that he had presented mankind with the gift of The Plough, a
gift that had enabled mankind to rise above the limits of barbarity and cultivate
both land and mind.
Brother Moryson, a tall, lean man with a deeply furrowed brow, regarded his
Brother-Leader with fondness and respect. They had known each other for many
decades, having both been appointed as the Seneschal's representatives to the
royal court in their youth. Later they had moved to the royal household itself.
Too many years ago, thought Moryson, looking at Jayme's hair and beard which
were now completely white. His own thin brown hair, he knew, had more than a
few speckles of grey.
When Jayme had finally accepted the position of Brother-Leader, a post he
would hold until his death, his first request had been that his old friend and
companion Moryson join him as first assistant and adviser. His second request,
one that upset many at court and in the royal household itself, was that his
protege, Axis, be appointed BattleAxe of the Axe-Wielders, the elite military and
crusading wing of the Seneschal. Fume as King Priam might, the Axe-Wielders
were under the control of the Seneschal, and within the Seneschal a Brother-
Leader's requests were as law. Royal displeasure notwithstanding, Axis had
become the youngest ever commander of the Axe-Wielders.
Moryson, who had kept out of the conversation to this point, stepped
forward, knowing Jayme was waiting for his advice. "Brother-Leader," he said,
bowing low from the waist with unfeigned respect and tucking his hands inside
the voluminous sleeves of his habit, "perhaps it would help if we reviewed the
evidence for a moment. If we consider all the reports that have come in over the
past few months perhaps we might see a pattern."
Jayme nodded and waved both his assistants into the intricately carved
chairs that sat across from his desk. Crafted generations ago from one of the
ancient trees that had dominated the landscape of Achar, the well-oiled wood
glowed comfortingly in the firelight. Better that wood served man in this way
than free-standing on land that could be put to the Plough. Thick stands of trees
were always better cut down than left standing to offer shade and shelter to the
demons of the Forbidden.
"As always your logic comforts me, Brother Moryson. Gilbert, perhaps you
could indulge us with a summation of events as you understand them thus far.
You are the one, after all, to have read all the reports coming in from the north."
Neither Jayme nor Moryson particularly liked Gilbert; an unbrotherly
sentiment, they knew, but Gilbert was a rather pretentious youth from a high-
born Carlonite family, whose generally abrasive personality was not helped by a
sickly complexion, thin shanks and sweaty palms. Nevertheless, he had a razor-
sharp mind that could absorb seemingly unrelated items of information from a
thousand different sources and correlate them into patterns well before anyone
else could. He was also unbelievably ambitious, and both Jayme and Moryson
felt he could be better observed and controlled if he were under the eye of the
Brother-Leader himself.
Gilbert shuffled back into his seat until his spine was ramrod straight against
the back of the chair and
prepared to speak his mind. Both Moryson and Jayme repressed small
smiles, but they waited attentively.
"Brothers under Artor," Gilbert began, "since the unusually late thaw of this
spring," both his listeners grimaced uncomfortably, "the Seneschal has been
receiving numerous reports of...unusual . . . activities from the frontier regions of
Achar. Firstly from our brethren in the religious Retreat in Gorkentown, who have
reported that the commander of Gorkenfort has lost many men on patrol during
this last winter." The small municipality of Gorkentown, two hundred leagues
north, huddled for protection about the military garrison of Gorkenfort. Centuries
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