Keeper of The Shade
Overture
Overture
Black haired men in tattered smocks felled trees from the forest and pulled them in front of the broken wooden gate. Behind the gate was a village devoid of life, where nothing but the wind stirred. In front of the gate a fire raged in a pit, and waist-high pyramids of stone had been stacked at the pit’s ends. The flame was one pace across and fifteen paces long. The men stripped the bark from the trees and set the bare logs on the rock braces, high above the flame, so that the water in the wood would boil and steam but the fiber would stay undarkened. Two wheels of a great wagon were laid on the ground, already built, the spokes being decorated by the hand of a man called Wheeler. Each wheel’s rim was a single tree’s trunk, slowly bent until two sides touched. When they were upright, the wheels would be taller than a man standing on the shoulders of another. It had taken two days to bend each trunk into a circle.
“One more of seventeen paces,” a man called Driver said. He was dressed in a prisoner’s smock, like the rest of his wagon crew.
“We will reign destruction, mighty Driver,” a thin man called Snake said, his back curled into a c. He drooled onto his linens as he grinned.
“It will be as the Grand Driver steers,” Driver said, looking towards the mountains. In truth, he longed for his home wagon, which was mightier than any that could be built with the young lumber of this eastern land. He thought of his wives and their soft skin. He stroked the branded designs on his arm, a flower for each of his pretties. But they would not make it through the lands of their warring brothers on foot. He had seen too often the wagonless Wagoneers running across the plains, run down by his mighty train.
“Was it not strange to find the village empty?” another man asked. He was similarly dressed, but thicker and taller than the Wagoneers. He wore a beard over his scarred and dry skin. He carried a large club built from a large branch. His people were from one of the mountain tribes and had not wanted to stay. In the dark stories told by the grandmothers, empty villages with the gates shut from the inside were a common trope.
Their cave was less than a two-day walk from the empty village beyond the gate. Yet his men did not return to the mountain. They followed their leader’s word and slept beside one another on the ground outside of the walls. The Wagoneers had promised gold and new weapons, meat and women.
“It was a blessing of the Grand Driver, no doubt,” Driver said. “As was the lion that took down the holy oxen that drove our prison. If you want your gold, you’ll get your men to work on the wagon’s frame,” the driver nodded towards a stack of lumber that had been taken from the spiked log wall.
“It is night, Wagoneer. We do not tempt the haunts by working in the moonlight.”
“The carts of the dead will protect us,” Snake hissed.
“Your ancestors do not roam on this side of the mountain,” the tribesman said.
A scream came from inside the village. The mountaineer turned and ran through the open and splintered gate. He could tell it was Vine Warren, one of his blood brothers.