Rethga crouched patiently at the top of the narrow path. His famous sword Decider, of fine Elfin steel, lay across his knees covered by his cloak that its gleam might not give him away although, with the Gruarcs, his scent would be enough. Scarcely human, gross, and wolf-like in appearance, they could track by scent and they never gave up when vengeance was involved. They had been following his trail for days. Until now he had managed to keep ahead of them but, although he had ridden up stream beds and chosen pathways across solid rock seeking to avoid a fight, they had always managed to find his way again. It was time to make a stand in a place of his choice. During the day, he had deliberatly let them gain ground without being too obvious about it. They would probably make their final move once both moons were down. The larger moon, Sangur, had already dipped below the horizon and the cold brittle gleam of the stars had hardened. It would not be long now.
Below him, in the valley, he could see their fire but was certain that they were no longer near it. It would have been banked up to deceive him but it had faded just a little to tell him that they would be creeping up the path and probably already quite close. He had hobbled his pack-horse well back on the grassy plateau and his mare Sora had been readied for flight, in the event that it should come to that, and ordered to ‘stand’ at a distance. Well trained, she would make no restless movement now that the biting flies had gone to rest with the sun and she would come immediately at his call. There must be nothing to mask the small sounds that the bare-footed Gruarcs would make.
His precautions were very likely unnecessary. There were only three of them and he had fought as many at one time in the recent war. Hence his hunters. That he had fought fairly and in a just cause would make no difference to them. There was no-one to watch his back this time which was why he had chosen his stand carefully. The narrow defile where the path emerged onto the plateau allowed for only single combat.
It was a pity that it had again come to this. He, who had killed scores and made a name for
PLAYING GOD. Page 2 SOSIAS himself, hated killing. Even that epitome of evil, a Gruarc, had the right to life when not interfering with others. But it seemed as though he had been manoeuvered into danger at every turn: as though some bloodthirsty god had been controlling his every move. Though not a mercenary, there had been no battle in the seven kingdoms in which he had not taken part, always in the thickest part of the battle, always somehow turning the tide at a decisive moment.
He could see no glory in warfare. Men whom he had come to know and respect and love as brothers had been permanently maimed, lost limbs and eyes, were painfully slain and he asked himself, “In the end for what?” Bards embroidered and extolled heroic acts and battle prowess, turned warriors into legends, and increasingly among them Rethga himself. But Rethga had had more than enough of it. Better that sons preserve his name than bards. Better a wife and daughters and to be back on his family’s small land holding than this constant strife. And yet these things seemed not to be allowed him. There was something strange about his life. It was not just his feeling of being led in a halter but the inexplicable gaps that existed in his memory.
He had not the least recollection of his childhood nor any of living with his parents and siblings in his young manhood. There seemed to be nothing before that day when he returned from the Upland Games to his family’s remote holding to find his parents and sisters dead, their possessions looted or wantonly destroyed, the family’s famed breeding stock of war horses run off. He seemed to have sprung into life full-grown on that day and to have had no prior existence.
His older brother, Cedren, was at that time lying with severe wounds in the distant keep of Duke Cosmore having been wounded in that one’s service during a skirmish with the Asseggi of the Lowering Mountains who came down sporadically to raid the Duke’s lands. Which had left Rethga alone to bring justice. He had tracked the marauding band far back into the wastes of Kahkaz where only the foolhardy went without weight of numbers and without magic wards. He had dogged their way and picked of the unwary in ones and twos concealing the bodies and continuing to do so when
PLAYING GOD. Page 3 SOSIAS hunted in his turn. He had lived on the scant rations that he wrested from them: had used their own weapons against them. It had taken most of a moon cycle but by slow attrition he had whittled them down. The twelve had become two and he had finally ridden out to face these two. He now wondered at his temerity in doing so. He did not then have his Elfin blade and where and how had he, a farmer’s son, acquired his sword skills? Now that was something else that he didn’t know. He had bested them but it had been a hard-won fight and he had not come off unscathed. He would wear a livid scar on his left cheek until his dying day.
He had led the brood mares and the stallion back the way they had come. They knew him and would follow and the horses of the marauders , including the pack horses, had followed them also as horses will do. These additional horses and their tack he had sold to put their worth into the restoration of the family holdings so that when his brother returned home from service, now with a pronounced limp and unfit for soldiering, they were there for him to take up. That return had seemed to be their first meeting. As though his brother had sprung into existence fully formed.
But breeding horses had become too tame for him though he loved horses. Young and restless and still besotted with the romance of arms, he had left his brother and gone to offer his own services to the Duke. He had fought outstandingly in the years-long war against the upstart consortium of minor nobles and had risen through the ranks. He had led the expedition into the Lowering Mountains that finally subdued thr Asseggi and left the area open to trade. It was mainly as a result of this that he was made captain of the Duke’s guard.
But then came another gap and his memory began again with him, now in the service of King Cordor, riding with a picked troupe through the leagues-long Mahzuur Swamplands. The had been seeking to reach the keep of the Dark Mage who was behind the miasma that was slowly spreading through the kingdom bringing madness in its train. The ancient road, overgrown and under water in many places, had been built by a people whose identity was now lost in the mists of time in an age
PLAYING GOD. Page 4 SOSIAS when the land was higher and drier. There was no other way through the now bottomless mire.
To leave the road would have been certain death, to stay on the road was only a little less dangerous. That foul swamp had attracted more that its share of hideous acquatic and amphibian horrors that saw the travellers and their mounts as food and these had been a constant danger. An additional danger had been the sprites of some of the drier wooded knolls along the way. These, by illusion, had sought to entice the travellers to their doom. The Mage, who must have scried the riders’ approach from afar, had, fortunately, not used his considerable powers to stop them apparently believing the swampland to be the sure protection that it had always been hitherto. But how wrong he had been. The swords and powerful wards that each man carried had won them through.
The death of the Mage Rethga remembered in detail, every trick that they had had to counter when he was finally at bay, but nothing at all of the return journey which surely must have been just as fraught with danger as their first passage. So why didn’t he remember it? And he must assume that there had been jubilation and feasting on their return. Yet again, he could remember none of it. His next memory was of helping to hold the by-then depleted Fortress of Lahngro against a siege force of Fedron giants.
Then there was the matter of aging. So much had happened even in what he remembered, and there was obviously much more that he didn’t remember, and yet he appeared no older than that day long ago when he returned from the Upland Games. Yes! There was definitely something strange about his life but this was hardly the time or place to work out what it was. He pulled himself sharply back to the present and just in time.
A tiny stone rattled on the path below, so small as to need an acute ear to hear it, and as the sound reached Rethga’s ears, a writer in a converted London mews was typing, ‘a tiny stone rattled on the path below’ into his word-processor. The writer was Gareth Freedman and Rethga was his creation
PLAYING GOD. Page 5 SOSIAS or, to be more accurate, his day-dream self. It was Gareth who was besotted with the romance of arms and heroic warfare. The name Rethga was Gareth rearranged. In childhood, being a somewhat withdrawn child, he had had trouble coping with the real world and had been wont to escape to an inner world. A world of small feudal kingdoms and primitive technology. A world where the fey creatures of folk-lore had place, where sorcery and magic abounded, where the map-maker’s ‘Here be dragons’ was a true statement. He had fantasised himself as being the world’s greatest warrior, saving kingdoms, righting wrongs, and rescuing fair maidens.
The dream world had later become the basis of his books which had sold in their millions. Gareth Freedman was not alone in seeking escape from reality. He was not alone in imagining himself as Rethga the Warrior. He had quickly learned that his readers had an insatiable appetite for gore, cleft skulls, limbs sundered, frantic attempts to push back spilling intestines. Always provided, of course, that these things happened to Rethga’s enemies who, human or otherwise, were portrayed as cruel mindless killers without a single redeeming feature and thus deserving of everything that was dished out to them. The Rethga annals were strictly black and white, good versus evil, with Rethga and those who fought at his side occupying the moral high-ground and laying claim to everything heroic. Rethga had to constantly be written into life-and-death situations against surely impossible odds only to have him cut his way out because this was something else that readers demanded.
Having lived vicariously in this other world since childhood, it took Gareth a few moments to realise, with sudden shock and dismay, that he was there in person, his mews flat gone. As an imaginary world, no way could it have a real existence. Yet apparently it did. The entire concept of real and unreal had been shattered. The waiting man with breastplate, greaves, and sword was now himself and he had inherited the ache behind the knees that comes from crouching too long. Some molevolent deity was rewriting his story to make him the one to face the coming danger, and was manipulating him as he had manipulated Rethga and others.
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There was no escape for him. The Gruarcs were immediately at hand and he knew that he was not going to be allowed to run, that would not be part of the revised script, and also that even if the mare Sora was close at hand, as he had written, she would not be allowed to answer his call. His unseen puppet-master would be taking a sadistic delight in teaching him, a long-time voyeur of warfare, what it was really like to fight for one’s life. And the result could be readily seen. He was no Rethga. No match for even one Gruarc. And, as their creator, he knew that they would just toy with him and carve him with exquisite slowness and finesse.