Hanno shook his head to clear the memories of the past from his mind and dragged himself up from the bloody ground. The scavengers of the night were all around him and he needed a weapon for protection. Already he could hear the deep-throated grunts and the crack of bones as the desert lions fed upon the bodies of the dead. By searching through the cadavers on the pile he had only recently vacated he found a war axe, a decent slingshot and by a great stroke of luck a skin half full of water. Thankfully he had managed to find them without turning over someone that he had known.
He drank some of the water, it was warm but it would soon cool in the chill of the desert night. Then walking a weaving path through the scattered remains of what once was an army, he moved steadily northwards, for that way lay the Island of Tyre and home.There were only six hours until the Sun God arose again and in that time he needed to be as far away from the victorious army of the Aamu as he could possibly get. Soon the stink of the battlefield faded and he began to travel through a landscape of rough ground and rocky outcrops. Occasionally the ground would become too broken to negotiate and he would have to circle around and use the stars to guide him back onto the right course.Having descended from a nation of seagoing traders Hanno could read the stars like a map.
Dawn found him still on the move and he continued on his journey well into the morning before he picked a group of rocks in which to go to ground against the heat of the day. As the slid between chest high rocks, he came face to face with a horned serpent. It had been sunning itself on the flat-topped rock in front of him and instead of slithering away, as such creatures normally do it withdrew into itself and made a sound unlike any he heard before.It wasn’t a hiss and it didn’t come from the creature’s mouth. Rather it was a ffssss sound that seemed come from the rubbing together of its scales as it retracted.For a moment time seemed frozen and then the serpent shot towards him like an arrow from a bow and he barely had time to bat it to one side before severing its head with the axe.
Kicking the head away from him he picked up the body, it was as long as he was tall and it solved one of his problems. He may have escaped with his life but he wouldn’t last long without food. He skinned the snake chopped it into six lengths, then hacked the meat into strips and after managing to eat some of them raw – he didn’t have anything to light a fire with, even if he had, it wouldn’t have been advisable until he was further away – and laid the rest on the rocks to dry in the sun. In a few hours the strips would resemble leather but he would at least get some sustenance from them by soaking pieces in a little water and chewing on them.
With the snake taken care of he climbed onto one of the rocks and scanned all around, there was no sign of enemy soldiers, or any other living being for that matter. Just a vista of rough, sand coloured ground, dotted with rough sand coloured rocks that stretched off northwards toward a blue smudge of a mountain range on the horizon, beyond which was home. Satisfied he jumped back down and after poking about in the crevasses to ensure there were no more snakes, he found a corner that would stay in the shade for the rest of the day, curled up and slept the sleep of an exhausted man.
He awoke before dark and after a few exercises to loosen his stiffened muscles, took a sip of water and popped a piece of snake leather into his mouth.While he chewed he gathered the rest of the strips of snake together, tied them into a bundle and tied the bundle to the belt of his kilt.
In the barren wastelands it was better to avoid the heat of the day and he didn’t set off again, until Amon had left the daytime sky. A million stars filled the sky and even if the moon hadn’t been shinning, he would have been able to see clearly to find his way. Two hour into his journey he stopped and sniffed, there was faint, as yet unidentifiable odour in the air, he sniffed again it seemed a combination of the pungent odour of corruption, the smoke of a fire and something else that he couldn’t yet identify. Climbing the nearest rocky outcrop he searched without success for the source and it was only when he had given up and moved to climb back down that he spotted the tiny flicker of flame in the distance.
The campfire for surely that was what it was, must have been hidden within a clump of rocks and was only revealed when he changed position. He moved on, trying where possible to keep within the long shadows cast by the outcrops of rock, until finally he was in a position to get a clear view between two rocks, of the camp.The fire was low, no more than a bed of embers and the figure covered by a cloak that lay beside it was still. He stayed where he was for what seemed like an hour and when the figure still did not move he crept stealthily forward, only to come up short when he felt the sword at his neck and a voice hissed, ‘Don’t move.’
