THE DOGMAN
1016 words
By Christopher Rowe
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| Art by Carlos Castilho |
When he left his holdfast on the Heights, Dafid took along two of his wolfhounds. His wife, Calla, chose them. The twins, Job and Kit, fiercest of their litter. For a parting kiss, Calla bit his bottom lip hard enough to draw blood. “Go and get yourself killed,” she said, “and I’ll never forgive you.”
Dafid believed her. She was an honest woman.
It took two weeks of walking to reach the wooden stockade on the Marches where his old comrogue, the Fink, held command. Dafid approached close enough for the men on the towers to see him, but not shoot him. He sat on his heels. The dogs gamboled a bit, but settled down when he clicked his tongue.
After a while, one of the gates opened. It might have been designed to swing on a hinge, but it had settled. It took four men to shove it through the mud while the Fink sat his saddle and watched.
Finally, the brown gelding crossed the killing ground burned around the fort. The Fink pulled reign a few yards short of where Dafid crouched scratching Kit’s ears.
Dafid wasn’t much for talking, but the Fink was as wordless a man as had ever breathed, so he started it.
“The Fink,” he said.
“The Dogman,” said the Fink.
“You sent a bird,” said Dafid.
“Did,” said the Fink.
“Told you to never send a bird,” said Dafid.
“Did,” said the Fink.
“Calla read what was wrapped around its leg.”
“Always smart,” said the Fink.
Dafid did not know how to read. The last he knew, the Fink did not know how to write.
“I was to bring a sword,” said Dafid.
“Was.”
“Don’t have a sword anymore.”
“Don’t have a sword anymore.”
The Fink looked down on him, his expression unreadable. The he drew the broadsword at his belt and tossed it over. Dafid caught it by the hilt, old reflexes kicking in.
“Something you can’t do?” asked Dafid.
The Fink kicked and the gelding turned. As it cantered back across the field, Dafid barely heard what his friend said.
“Something I won’t.”
***
T’jool the Old, the woman who found them all, rescued them all, fed them and armed them all. The
woman they then watched slowly die as the purple wen on her neck grew big as an apple.
Dafid, the Dogman, had been the first gathered up. Then Calla Farshot with her arrows. Then the Fink with his blades.
Then Syndra.
Syndra with her demons.
T’jool had discouraged them from pairing off, but they were young. Dafid saw that the Fink had his eye on Calla but Dafid was just that much more glib, just that much prettier a man. That’s what he told himself, anyway. Later, when he knew Calla better, Dafid knew it hadn’t been his choice.
So. The Fink and Syndra.
It was never going to end well.
Syndra was… Calla said she was voluble, and then explained that that meant talking so much was an important part of her.
Dafid wished that so much of the talking hadn’t been directed at the demons endlessly fluttering about her.
But it was, and she talked to them more and more, and to the rest of them, even to the Fink, less and
less. After T’jool died, she hardly talked to anyone else.
Dafid learned some of their names in their travels. Choker. Smoke. Little Heart. They each saved his life at one time or another. Syndra was the deadliest of them, in her way. She was the softest of them, too.
When they’d done all the killing Calla could stand, they parted ways. Dafid followed Calla up to the Heights. The Fink joined the army.
Syndra went mad.
***
He expected Dafid, loving her somewhat less, or somewhat differently anyway, to go and do the job.
“Three villages,” said the Fink.
“You know it was her,” said Dafid. “Couldn’t be anybody else.”
“Couldn’t be anything else,” said the Fink, and Dafid caught the change. Caught the fact that the Fink
had strung four words together, too.
***
Job and Kit tracked her and treed her.
When Dafid caught up, he quieted them down. Their howls disturbed him. They didn’t sound bloody. They sounded mournful.
He couldn’t see her. She had climbed high.
“Syndra,” he said. “It’s me. It’s the Dogman.”
It wasn’t a voice that answered him, but voices. Syndra’s might have been in there, might have been one of the eight or nine or ten saying in unison, “Dogman. Not Iason? Not the Fink?”
Dafid made a sign with his hand, directing the hounds away. Job gave him a willful look, but then broke for the edge of the woods with Kit.
“The Fink couldn’t come,” he said.
“Wouldn’t,” said all those voices. “The Fink wouldn’t come.”
Dafid shook his head and drew the sword that he’d been given. He’d not examined it closely until now, now when he needed his eyes to be looking anywhere but up in that tree. It had some words etched in the blade. He wondered what they said.
There was a chorus of hisses. The branches trembled.
“Put it away,” said the voices.
“Oh,” said Dafid. He understood, then, what kind of blade the Fink had given him.
“Don’t put it away,” said just one voice. One tired and frightened voice.
Then they dropped down from above and he was fighting for his life.
***
“You knew,” said Dafid.
The Fink did not answer.
“It didn’t touch the demons,” said Dafid.
The Fink did not answer.
“It just…sliced her right up,” said Dafid. “Then they were gone.”
“Three villages,” said the Fink.
***
“Here’s my Dogman come home,” said Calla. She put her hand to the torn flesh where his right eye had been.
“Come home half blinded,” he said. “Half blinded and sorrowful.”
She took his face between her hands and looked at him straight. “He’s home,” she said.
___
Author Bio: Christopher Rowe has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Neukom Institute, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards. His stories have been frequently reprinted, translated into a half-dozen languages around the world, and praised by the New York Times Book Review. His short fiction was collected in Telling the Map from Small Beer Press.
He also co-wrote the Supernormal Sleuthing Series for middle grade readers with his wife, novelist Gwenda Bond. He is a graduate of the Bluegrass Writers Studio, serves as a founding board member of the Lexington Writer's Room. He lives in a hundred-year-old house in Lexington, Kentucky, with his wife and their many pets. You can learn more him here: https://www.christopherrowe.net/
