Wolf listened in silence, tracing a picture into the dirt with his finger. A hulking, musclebound blond man. In one hand, an axe dripping blood. Over one shoulder, a woman flailed her legs, slung there like luggage.
“Even back in the first invasion, 152 years ago, it’s said <Ill Omen> had no written language. Their weapons and their level of clothing, food, and shelter were centuries behind Atania’s at the time…”
Wolf drew the woman too. An axe dripping blood in one hand. Over one shoulder, a man flailed his legs. Aside from the sex, she looked exactly like the man he’d drawn.
Roy, watching from the side, let out a whistle.
“Wolf, you should be a painter instead of a baker.”
“Hm. Yeah, I think so too. But bread tastes good.”
Wolf nodded, staring down at his drawing.
If you told people on the Atania Continent to draw <Ill Omen>, nine times out of ten this is what they’d produce. In Atania, <Ill Omen> wasn’t a crow. It wasn’t a red moon, or an abandoned house with its door hanging half open. It was a person—blond barbarians who had suddenly appeared along Atania’s northern coast a little over 150 years ago.
“Looks exactly like the illustrations in the history books. Quit school and go join that Kane Workshop on Twenty-Sixth Street. I heard even the royal court painter came out of Kane.”
“No thanks. If I went to Kane, I’d be the worst one there.”
Wolf scuffed the drawing away with his toe, then stood and turned. Just inside a nearby window of the main building, with students slumped over asleep in front of him, the history teacher was holding a book and lecturing to himself.
“For <Ill Omen>, whose iron-smelting never properly developed, the heavy axe was the best weapon available, with no substitute—huh?”
The teacher looked toward the window. Wolf lowered the hand he’d been tapping the glass with and smiled. The teacher closed the book and tucked it under his arm.
“You’re not training. What is it, student?”
“It’s just…”
Wolf slid the window up and leaned both forearms on the sill.
“Listening to your lecture got me wondering, sir. You said <Ill Omen> are stupid.”
“That’s the academic view.”
“Is there any view that it isn’t stupidity, but a lack of sociality?”
“There is, in part. It’s mostly ignored.”
“Could I ask you to explain that view?”
“Hm.”
The teacher pushed his glasses up with a fingertip and smiled.
“First, explain why you’re curious about that minority view.”
“<Ill Omen> aren’t a union of rule-of-law states like Atania. They’re a tribal confederation on the village level. Excluding their capital, most tribes are said to have at most a thousand members, typically only around three hundred. In a tribe that small, they wouldn’t need the complex social order demanded by civilized norms. In Atania, if you use violence recklessly, you’re treated like an idiot. In a civilized society, that makes sense. But as logic to explain the violence of a barbarian society, it feels lazy.”
“That argument nearly matches the minority view you’re asking about. I don’t need to add much.”
The teacher waved one hand.
“Then a rebuttal. You’re aware of the dangers of inbreeding, yes? For example, the neighboring Lenard royal family’s signature shovel jaw. Severe malocclusion—so bad many of their kings die young because they can barely chew even cheese.”
He exaggerated the motion of chewing.
“Among the problems caused by inbreeding are numerous cases of intellectual defect. And across the North Sea, the barbarian continent remained isolated as a single people for a very long time—thousands of years since the first light existed. With that much time, problems are inevitable. For instance…”
A brief silence. The voice that followed dropped a little lower.
“Women who impregnate women. Men who carry children. Mutants that occur only on the barbarian continent. Atanian clergy once claimed it was God’s curse, but that was long ago. These days, the view gaining strength is that it’s a biological tragedy caused by an isolated environment.”
The teacher gave a small shrug.
“<Ill Omen> know that fact too. That’s why they turned the Atanian men they kidnapped into breeding studs… Hm. That example was a bit embarrassing. Anyway, considering that special isolation, the claim that <Ill Omen> are stupid has enough meaningful plausibility to be a reasonable conclusion. Now, student. Your rebuttal?”
“Well…”
Wolf hesitated—when Roy smacked him on the back of the head from behind.
“What the hell are you doing here, idiot?”
“That hurts, you asshole.”
Rubbing the back of his head, Wolf gave a quick bow.
“Sorry for interrupting class. But did I ever promise I’d rebut anything? I’ll be going now!”
He hurried back toward the training yard. Roy slung an arm over Wolf’s shoulder and whispered.
“I heard everything you and that teacher hack were saying. What was that, out of nowhere?”
“Did I sound like a philosopher?”
“Not that bad. You sounded like a poet.”
At Mayer Public School, the boys admired painters. Poets, on the other hand, were targets of contempt—because painters drew nude women, while poets, supposedly, just spewed incomprehensible bullshit.
By common boys’ standards, “normal behavior” meant sleeping through class and scoring only high enough on exams to avoid failing. “Stupid behavior” meant studying hard and reading poetry. A worse insult than “poet” was “philosopher.”
On the way out of school, Wolf asked Roy,
“Don’t spread rumors about what I said to the teacher.”
“You think there won’t be rumors? Even if I keep my mouth shut, the history teacher’ll run his. It’s not every day somebody asks questions in the middle of class. Seriously, why’d you do it? You were saying weird stuff…”
Roy stopped and looked at Wolf with sharp eyes—like a coin appraiser inspecting a freshly minted gold piece for shine, color, and stamping.
“Wolf, you… don’t tell me…”
“Don’t tell you what. Say it. You’ll be wrong anyway.”
Wolf answered gruffly, but in his ears his heartbeat thudded. Roy stared for a moment, then poked Wolf in the chest with a fingertip.
“You! You’ve got your own novel manuscript hidden under your bed, don’t you! Wow! My friend’s a literary boy!”
“Stop talking shit! Just call me a philosopher instead!”
Wolf jumped at the wild misunderstanding. Roy snapped him into a headlock.
“It’s a hero tale, right? A wandering knight wiping out <Ill Omen> pirates—! And you grilled that teacher about <Ill Omen> so you could use it in your story!”
“It’s not! It’s not!”
“Relax, man. Hey, I’ll be your first reader. You wrote porn too, right? I’ll keep it secret from the school guys, so show me tonight.”
Roy pestered him, worked up. Cheap hero tales and porn sold in back alleys, but novels were popular entertainment for boys—right after watching executions and going to plays. But Wolf wasn’t dumb enough to take “I’ll keep it secret” at face value.
“I didn’t write a single line. I barely read novels at all.”
“Whoa. So you already wrote a lot, huh? Now I’m excited.”
“Quit getting excited on your own…”
Truthfully, there wasn’t a single page of any manuscript under Wolf’s bed. The thing Wolf feared most was the moment the boardinghouse owner shoved a thick stack of paper at him and asked him to read the political-intrigue novel he’d written.
“I’m sleeping at your boardinghouse tonight. Been a while. Time for some reading.”
“Knock it off. It takes you half a day to get through four lines of scripture—what ‘reading’…”
Wolf started sweating—when a carriage rolled up and blocked the boys’ path. The carriage door opened.
“Long time no see. You recognize me, right?”
A blond boy their age spoke from inside the carriage. The tone was friendly, but Wolf blinked, confused.
“Who are you?”
“Y-you don’t know? I recognized you the moment I saw you.”
The boy blushed. Only then did Wolf realize who he was.
It was the Red Eagle Prince.
***
A record left by a sailor who first witnessed <Ill Omen> 152 years ago.
From a sailing ship anchored at the pier, dozens of men and women stepped down one after another. All of them were tall as statues in a plaza, blond, draped in animal hides. Their faces and bodies were covered in tattoos, and in one hand they held wooden shields, in the other, axes. It was a bizarre getup no one in Atania had ever seen. Soon the harbor was swallowed by flames and screams…
A vast rectangle. Atanian clergy defined the shape of the world that way. At the edge of the sea, the world suddenly dropped off like a waterfall, and below it, hell waited. In those days, a priest’s word was the voice of God. Some scientists and astrologers insisted the world was round, but almost no one believed them.
Atanians couldn’t even imagine there might be an unknown continent beyond the sea. Of the world’s components—sky, land, and sea—“land” was only one thing: Atania, molded by God. The sea lost value. The North Sea in particular, where storms were frequent, was taboo even for seasoned sailors.
That was before the caravel appeared.
This new type of sailing ship, fitted with triangular lateen sails that could cut against the wind, changed the world drastically. First, navigation advanced. Before, a ship couldn’t move forward unless the wind blew from behind. But with the caravel, people could set out when they wanted.
Second, it summoned <Ill Omen>. As demand for maritime trade grew, large sailing ships were built as a matter of course. One of the many large ships built in those days was wrecked in a North Sea storm and drifted all the way to the barbarian continent. That was the beginning of the disaster. Only then did the blond barbarians realize a rich continent lay beyond the sea, and at a tribal council they decided on a raiding expedition.
Lacking the technology to build large sailing ships, the barbarians repaired the Atanian wreck. They forced the ship’s crew to make navigation charts and learned how to use compasses and astrolabes. They also conscripted strong male and female warriors from each tribe. In two years, the first expedition set out for the golden new continent.
Atania’s coastline became ruins. The blond barbarians, who seized multiple large ships and returned to their base, came back again carrying countless warrior comrades. They even followed rivers inland, plundering and kidnapping. Their atrocities were so vicious that Atanians of the time believed they were a legion of demons crawling up from hell’s trench at the edge of the sea.
Four years after the “Invasion of <Ill Omen>” began, the Atanian state alliance signed a peace treaty with the blond barbarians. The terms were that Atania would pay enormous tribute every year and grant part of the coastline as farmland, free of charge. It was, in effect, a declaration of defeat.
Even now, 152 years later, the blond barbarians still pour into Atania at the slightest chance, kidnapping and plundering, drawing endless hatred. The name of the continent beyond the distant North Sea, the base of those <Ill Omen>, is Stol.
Wolf is one of those Stol people.
His true name is Silver Wolf.