Scent From the Heart

by Gary Clifton

A massive, handsomely trimmed carriage, surrounded by a single mounted officer and six soldiers on foot, bounced through the rough, heavily forested trail. A soft laugh wafted out into the air, rich with culture and privilege.

Olga, the elderly handservant riding opposite the tittering young princess Elena, smiled uneasily. “Take care, M’lady, Captain Baldwin will caution us again of the need for silence. The barbarians are probably leagues away, but his duty is to protect you.”

Instantly, the Captain of the Guard leaned down in his saddle to the carriage window. Burly, his thick beard giving way to gray, he said softly, “Princess Elena, sound travels widely in these trees. We should reach Aria before sunset. The Bruzaks roam freely in this area, hoping to catch a small party like ours.”

Elena said dismissively, “Captain, you have six heavily armed soldiers. Surely—?”

“M’lady, the Bruzaks are animals whose war parties may have fifty savages. Please make as little sound as possible.”

“Pshaw!” She slapped the curtain closed.

Elena, the sole heir to the crown of the kingdom of Kaspara, had never seen a barbarian, nor much of anything else beyond her sheltered, pampered existence in the castle of her father, King Jannik. On impulse, she had left the castle to visit the village of Aria, the home of her maternal grandmother. It was nestled in the foothills on the far side of the Hermok mountain range.

The passage normally led over the Hermoks, avoiding the thick, nearly impenetrable forest that circled the mountains and was inhabited by the savage Bruzak clan, ancient enemies of all who entered the forest.

Elena had impulsively ordered the trip while her father was away. Baldwin had hurriedly managed to collect only five infantrymen to accompany Elena’s dangerous journey.

Elena had just uttered, “Are our guards cowards, Olga?”

The scream of a foot guard, taken in the back by a Bruzak arrow, exploded into grunts and sounds of men fighting. The carriage door was ripped open by a half-dozen dirty, wild men with shoulder-length black hair and the odor of goats.

Olga drew a stiletto from her bag and stabbed the first Barbarian to enter, only to be dragged out and slaughtered among the bodies of Baldwin, his five soldiers, and the carriage driver. A half-dozen more Bruzaks pulled Elena out, ripping at her clothes with obvious intent.

Lying on her back beside the carriage, Elena saw through the mist, one of the attackers fall with an arrow through his chest, then with incredible rapidity, arrows took a second barbarian, then another. The heads of two of the three remaining savages exploded from blows of a club wielded by a powerful, husky man of more savage appearance than any of the Bruzaks he had just killed. The sixth attacker tried to flee. Elena was horrified to see the new intruder catch the barbarian and snap his neck.

The savage, his shoulder-length hair and bushy beard almost completely obscuring his face, leaned down and extended his muscular arm. “Princess, come quickly, there are probably more nearby.”

Elena responded by kicking the hand. “You savage, I’m Elena, Princess...”

“I know who you are, and you know what your fate will be if enough Bruzaks show up. Come now.” He grasped the kicking foot and dragged her free. Sweeping her up in his arms, he carried her to a sleek stallion grazing nearby, ripped a deer carcass from its back and tossed her astraddle the animal. With ease, he sprang up behind her and, in a flash, the powerful horse was carrying them away at a steady gallop.

Elena stammered, “Who... why are you...?”

“If they had not kept you in a total cocoon, you would have known that I’m Sumari, the only son of King Jannik, Lord Master of this Realm.”

Elena turned back slightly. “I heard from Olga, my handservant, that there are those in the Kingdom who hold such a false tale as truth. But my father swore I am his only child.”

“Jannik, infatuated with the current queen, had my mother executed, falsely claiming adultery. You are the queen pretender’s daughter from a previous relationship, not my father’s child or my sister, if you would. The king beheaded a few true believers for repeating the truth, and the story soon went underground, as did I. I pray you possess the intellect to see that Jannik is capable of inflicting the same fraud on you, should you sufficiently displease him.”

“You’re lying. I am heir to the throne.”

“Elena, you may achieve the throne, but the bad news is that I am the true heir. The good news for you is that I rather enjoy living wild and free. I can kill all the Bruzaks I feel necessary.”

“You certainly did so today.” Despite the negative news, Elena was ashamed to see this unkept, half-nude savage as handsome, ruggedly masculine, with a barely perceptible intoxicatingly powerful odor of a man both free and half-wild.

After a lengthy ride, Sumari turned the horse into a dense thicket. A voice challenged, “Halt, who comes?”

“‘Tis I, Sumari. You sound alarmed, Albeto.”

“Sire, while you hunted meat, we were attacked this morning by a unit of King Jannik’s army. We have one dead and several injured. But we destroyed the attackers.”

Sumari edged the horse through the thicket. Bodies of men in Kasparian army tunics were strewn along the way.

“Ouff, what a horror,” Elena hid her face in Sumari’s massive arm. She was dismayed that, again, she found his strange distant odor stimulating.

Sumari said, “You see, Princess, a few of us have escaped the king’s tyranny. But, once more, he has sent many fine weapons to our stronghold.”

Elena was housed in a fortified room. A peasant woman brought her food and plain but clean clothes to replace her tattered and soiled rags.

During the night, Sumari entered and sat on the edge of her cot. “Princess, my intent was to find a way to return you to your father. Our spies inform me that the king is leading an overnight march against us. You are in our prison’s strongest room, which I hope will save your life.”

“My father would not—”

“It would not be he who enters, Princess. Stay in here.”

At dawn, the sounds of battle, men crying out in pain, women screaming, wafted in. Elena quickly grew frantic at the thought of this strange, intriguing savage, Sumari, being killed.

As the kings’ troops beat back the smaller rebel force, Elena suddenly appeared on a raised parapet near the main entrance. “Soldiers of Kaspara, I, Elena, Princess of Kaspara and heir to the throne, order all fighting to cease.”

Soldiers on both sides stood in awe, weapons lowered. None had anything but contempt for the ruthless King Jannik. Combatants began backing away.

Sumari climbed to the parapet, sword in hand, a bleeding gash in his shoulder. “Great God, Princess, what are you doing?”

From the thick underbrush, several invading soldiers appeared. King Jannik was a prisoner in their midst, bound in chains.

“Release him,” Sumari ordered.

The troops unchained Jannik and boosted him to the parapet. “Sumari, you traitorous slime, I hereby order your head on a pole. Troops, kill him immediately!”

When no one moved, he came at Sumari with a small blade, wounding him in the stomach. The crowd of troops roared in approval when Elena struck Jannik in the forehead with her shoe, then again. Sumari recovered and with a mighty blow, struck off Jannik’s head.

The now reunited army jubilantly escorted Sumari and Princess Elena back to the castle. Sumari’s wound healed with only scars. After several months of word spreading throughout the kingdom that Sumari and Elena were not brother and sister nor related in any way, they married and ruled the kingdom of Kaspara in benevolent partnership for fifty years. Elena, wiser by her survival, bore six children.

Throughout the years, Elena regularly told her ladies in waiting that she had learned when judging a man, fail not to consider him in his full capacity. They all agreed that recognition of an honorable, productive man required considering the entirety of him, including his natural, often barely interpretable, always unique aroma, referred to in the giggling privacy of the queen’s court as “man smell.”

Eventually, the kingdom held a national contest known as The Essence of Man Festival. No means of preserving men’s odors has survived history, but it was said that the genesis of many marriages originated on this date.

The ladies of Kaspara became world renowned for their collective ability to sniff out trouble: politicians, door-to-door spam hustlers, strangers selling extended carriage warranties and other rogues, often with the admonition: “The deal just didn’t smell right.”