Slaves & Tyrants

By John Bearheart

After his father is betrayed and murdered, a young fisherman seeks revenge, and undertakes a quest that will take him from the dusty sierras of southern Spain to the wave-battered rocks of northern Britain, where he encounters wild outlaws and brutal Viking warriors, and confronts the depths of human depravityand compassion. Along the way, he is guided by his own peculiar sense of honor, which ultimately leads him to question the nature of his own goal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483609614

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Copyright © 2013 by John Bearheart.

ISBN:               Softcover          978-1-4836-0960-7

                        Ebook               978-1-4836-0961-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Rev. date: 05/29/2013

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Contents

The Basque Country, Northern Hispania

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The Basque Country, Northern Hispania

Late November

901 AD

The wooded mountainside was freshly laden with a cover of scintillating snow that caused the branches and twigs to sag under its weight. The pure, gleaming whiteness made the bark of the trees seem black in comparison. Two heavily cloaked figures marched slowly through the forest together, shaking the snow off the branches as they brushed past them, leaving deep, crunching footprints in the soft ivory blanket that lay sprawled across the forest floor. The foremost of the two carried an ax in his gloved hands, as he glanced from side to side, up and down, scrutinizing each bough and limb that he passed. Every once in a while he would sweep a layer of snow off a low-lying branch so that he could further examine the branch’s size and shape. Behind him walked his young son, carrying a small hatchet with a notched blade.

Several saplings had been so heavily burdened by the snowfall that they had bent over until their top leaves were pinned to the ground by the weighty snow and ice, and they stayed like that, in constant tension, bent in an awkward arc, until the ice thawed enough to release the saplings and let them fling back into an upright position. Every once in a while, the two men would hear a brief stirring in the woods, as another sapling was freed and whipped back into place, flinging snow in every direction. Other than that, the forest was silent.

The foremost of the two men was only about forty years old, but the damp hair that lay matted to his weathered brow was already grey. Beads of condensation clung like dew drops to the silver bristles that sprouted from his chin. He was not a big man, or a tall man, but he had been toughened by wind and rain, after decades of eking a living from the precarious sea. The grey limestone outcrops that protruded from the mountainside seemed to claim him as one of their own, old and hard. His name was Harkaitz.

Behind him walked his son, not the oldest, nor the youngest, but the middle son of three, the one named Argider. Argider had dark, wavy hair, almost pure black. His frame was short and stocky. Like his father, he had never bothered to keep track of his exact age, but he figured himself to be about seventeen or eighteen years old.

You have to respect the natural shape of the wood, said Harkaitz, as he ran his gloved fingers over the ice-coated bark of a holm oak tree, carefully studying the subtle curvature of the wood beneath it. You can’t just impose your will on it, and carve whatever you want out of a branch that was not meant to be made into that shape. Look at the form of the wood and see what you can make out of what is already there.

Argider nodded. His father had told him this before.

Only tyrants are foolish enough to try to cut against the grain of life, remarked Harkaitz. Everything they build cracks and falls apart at the seams. No man should be a tyrant. Or a slave.

Harkaitz was primarily a fisherman, but in this remote place where there was no professional carpenter for many miles, many fishermen were compelled to build the very boats from which they cast their nets. Harkaitz had developed many skills, becoming a boat builder, a net-maker, a whaler, and even an expert carver of wood and whalebone. When Harkaitz and his sons had to harvest new wood to build or repair a boat, they used the ancient knowledge that had been passed down over the generations, waiting for a period when the moon was waning, in the frigid cold of winter, because this was when the holm oak wood contained the least sap. It was important to cut the wood when it contained as little sap as possible, because this would improve the material’s chances against rot and decay. Harkaitz and his sons had to trust their lives to their handiwork, and nobody could trust a rotten boat out on the open sea.

As Harkaitz roamed the snowy November forest, he was constantly searching for boughs of the right size and curvature to make a keel and ribs and strakes for his new vessel. He had developed a keen eye for such things, more so than anyone Argider had ever met, and he was notoriously selective, sometimes searching for hours until he found the branch that he wanted. Argider simply followed him in silence, waiting for his father to point out the next branch to cut.

There it is, proclaimed Harkaitz, as he pointed towards one of the thick lower limbs of a regal-looking holm oak, standing several yards away to his right. That will be the keel. It’s just long and straight enough. The weathered fisherman kept a mental log of each piece of wood that he chose and which purpose it would serve.

If we can cut it loose, replied Argider ominously.

Of course we can cut it loose, said his father. You just tell yourself it needs to be done, and do it.

Argider knew that his father would not be satisfied until that limb had been cut down and dragged back to the seashore, so he handed the hatchet to his father and began to ascend the tree. It was a slippery climb, because much of the bark was coated in a thin layer of ice. The ice was so cold that it was painful for Argider to touch too long with his bare skin. At last, he hauled himself onto the desired branch and straddled its large girth between his legs, clinging to another branch above him to keep his balance. Dead leaves still clung to the tree’s limbs, and they crinkled and disintegrated whenever he touched them.

There’s not enough room up here for me to swing an ax, Argider called down to his father. You’ll have to toss up the hatchet.

Harkaitz gently handed the hatchet up to his son, handle first, and Argider leaned down and grabbed it. With one hand to steady himself, and the other hand gripping the hatchet, he began to hack his way through the thick bough. The progress was slow, and Argider was dismayed by the miniscule size of the chunks of wood that he was dislodging. Sometimes the metal blade barely seemed to bite into the pale wood at all. Holm oak wood was extremely hard, and it always dulled a blade quickly, but it had to be used. Argider did not want to trust his life to a soft wood that would bend and break while buffeted by the waves.

Harkaitz went to look for some potential gunwale strakes, and he returned an hour later, dragging a pair of well-curved branches that he had cut. He found Argider still sitting in the tree, laboriously chopping through the adamantine wood. A pile of wood chips lay scattered across the snow. Argider did not tire easily, but Harkaitz could tell that his son was feeling haggard and sore, because his motions were slower and his aim was deteriorating.

Take a rest, and come down, urged Harkaitz. You’ve done enough for today. I’ll finish cutting it down tomorrow.

I can finish cutting it myself, replied Argider stubbornly.

I know you can, said Harkaitz, with a bemused smile. But that doesn’t mean you have to. Let’s go home.

Argider thought about this for a moment, and, reluctantly, he dropped the hatchet into the snow and climbed out of the tree. Then he picked up the hatchet again and helped his father drag the branches out of the woods.

They could smell the salt in the air before they could actually see the crystal blue surface of the sea on the northern horizon. Their village sat alongside a harbor on the coast of the Basque Country, facing the temperamental Sea of Aquitania to the north. It was little more than a cluster of fisherman’s cottages with thatched roofs, with a fleet of small boats spread out across the rocky beach. Most of the cottages were made of chunky grey stones stacked together without mortar. The snow that lay on the cottages’ thatched roofs was being turned an ugly grey by the smoke that was wafting up from each house’s cooking fire. This had been Argider’s home all his life, and he knew the harbor as well as he knew his own body, every rock jutting out of the sea, every tide pool, every good fishing spot.

The people who lived here referred to themselves as the Euskaldunak, or those who speak the Euskera, but in Latin they were known as Vascones, or Basques. They had inhabited this part of northern Hispania for as long as anyone could remember, long before the arrival of the Franks, or the Arabs, or the Visigoths, or even the Romans. For centuries, they had resisted waves of invaders, clinging to the remote highlands, their homeland a stone bastion besieged from all sides. Most people in Hispania now spoke either Arabic or some dialect of Latin, a legacy of their Roman ancestors, but many Basques continued to speak the Euskera, a language unlike any other in the world. Likewise, most of the people in Hispania were either Muslims or Christians, but many Basques, including Harkaitz and his family, were still pagans, worshipping the same gods that their ancestors had adored since ages immemorial.

Literacy was unknown in the remote village where Harkaitz lived. The Euskera was not even a written language at that time, so everything that was thought worth writing down had to be recorded in either Latin or Arabic, and everything else was passed down orally over the smoke of a warm hearth. Argider’s maternal grandmother, Nekane, had taught him many stories