Nobody’s Son

by Sean Stewart

  Must be one of the workers. Mountain stock, to judge by the accent. Mark nodded; the pain was fading to pins and needles, as if his hand had fallen asleep and were just now waking. “Nowt but an awd scratch. Gets me sometimes.”

  The newcomer nodded sympathetically. “I’ve one in me shoulder. Devil’s brach when the weather turns. Fletcher’s Bill, hight I.”

  “Out late or up early?” Mark asked, deciding not to let on who he was. If Bill didn’t recognize the Duke, so much the better.

  His companion laughed softly in the gloom. “Early, sure. A damn sight too early, I wis. But I promised lad I’d shew him a tiff o’ sword-play. Is nae time on duty, and his mother’s agin it, so an it be fine, we meet afore cock-crew.” The stranger yawned hugely; Mark could just see his teeth and his sleepy smile.

  “Damn good of you,” Mark said softly. “It’s a lot of trouble.”

  Bill shrugged. “Well, it’s my son, isn’t it?” Suddenly he winced. “Shite.”

  “What’s bit you?”

  “Damn. I thought to get loaned a second sword, but I baint memorized to. And nowt’s bloody stirred at ilka hour.”

  Swiftly Mark unbuckled Harvest.

  “O, no call, friend! Simon’ll last well enow one day wi’out—”

  “Take it,” Mark said. “Don’t make your son wait, not even a day. Please, take it. I don’t use the damn thing anyway. Not any more.”

  “Mercy, master,” Bill said slowly. “I’ll oath to bring it back by cock-crew.”

  “Oh no you don’t! I mean to be sleeping! I’ll collect it from you. Fletcher’s Bill, right?”

  The other man took the sword and put out his hand. “Certes. And who mun I mak Simon courtsey to?”

  “…Mark. Just Mark.”

  The two men shook hands, and then Bill hurried away; Mark listened to his footsteps patter softly into the darkness. Then all was quiet again, save for the sound of the river.

  Simon, eh? Another hoy up before the dawn to learn his swordplay.

  Only Simon wasn’t alone, lunging and thrusting and stumbling over molehills. He had a father to be there with him.

  A grief grew in Mark, but did not make his happiness less. More strongly than ever he felt his feelings come alive, like roots stirring at the touch of spring rain. The joy he’d felt with Gail, for one; the heart-knowing that they were meant for one another. You’d given up on that a time or two. You’ve got summat to look forward to, all right.

  Yet even as he thought this he was looking back, turning to face a shadow that had followed him from the Ghostwood: the shadow of a little cottage where a mother sang her boy to sleep, and an angry father rummaged for his things, about to leave. About to leave again.

  Mark stood upon the western wall and wept while the eastern sky paled, pink at last as the inside of a rabbit’s ear. He cried steadily and silently, spilling into the morning, weeping for what he had found, and what he had lost. Once by chance he raised his right hand and wiped away his tears; they stung on his scar like salt on an open wound.

  At last the rain stopped streaming from the cloud within his breast. He left the Keep, and lay down beside Gail just as the sun was rising.

  * * *

  “Mark?”

  Val.

  Ugh. “G’way. I’m dead.”

  “Milord, I think you would do well to rouse yourself.”

  Something in Val’s voice drove away sleep. Mark blinked and shook his head. Gail had risen and was nowhere to be seen. Bright. Must be well into morning. “What is it?” Mark mumbled, pulling on a pair of pants.

  “I think you would do better looking for yourself,” Valerian said nervously.

  Great. All I need in life is a valet who loves surprises. He buckled on his belt and frowned: where’s the damn sw—Oh, right. Fletcher’s Bill. Hat, hat: oops. Down by the river, in that little grassy place where…Must look for her earring before someone finds it in the tall grass shite…

  “Well?” he said, stepping out and squinting in the sunshine. “Hey!” he said, frowning. “Where’s the west wall?”

  Master Orrin and Valerian exchanged startled glances. “We can’t possibly begin work on the west wall this year,” Orrin said.

  “But—!” Something writhed and twisted in Mark’s gut. Of course the west wall wasn’t up. None of the walls were up. “But I was there,” he whispered. “I’d swear I was there last night.” He shivered. “Must have been a dream…”

  “Perhaps you dreamt, but I doubt it.” Valerian gestured at one of the workers. “We resurrected this from underneath the rubble of the western wall,” he said grimly.

  Mark leaned forward, and felt an icy fist close slowly around his heart. The workman held a sheet of canvas between his hands. Harvest lay upon it. The beautiful blade was now in three pieces, and so pitted with rust he could barely make out its pattern of vines. The silver wire around the haft had tarnished into nothing and the gem in the pommel had fallen out. Lying next to the pitted steel were a few rags of what might once have been red leather.

  “From the condition and the placement of these fragments, I would guess your sword has been lying in the rubble for many centuries.” Valerian’s high brows arched as he met Mark’s eyes. “I find that very curious. Don’t you?”

  * * *

  Leaving Orrin to manage affairs, Valerian, Mark, Gail and Lissa withdrew to a shady spot behind the ruined northern walls. It was a hot day, but the moss-covered stones on which they sat were cool.

  Gail shuddered. “Ghosts!”

  Lissa smiled in her cool, ironic way. “Now consensus is complete: first two, now four among our merry band believe in ghosts.”

  “Wonderful! I knew you’d come around. Nobody could tell stories like you did and not believe in magic. But what made you change your mind?”

  Swiftly Lissa told Gail and Val about seeing the terrible Ghost on the battlements of the High Holt.

  “And think on this,” Mark added, as his mind turned to the mysterious events at the Holt, and its equally mysterious past. “Jervis says their family name used to be one titch longer: it began wi’ Nobody’s, back in grandfather days. They used to have a tricked-up coat of arms too, but somewhen all but the silver sword were blanked out.”

  “Nobody’s son? Their shield blanked and stripped of charges? We must infer some great humiliation in the line, some terrible disgrace,” Valerian mused. “Even those accused of treason do not have their charges censured so.”

  “Well, summat must have caused the Time of Troubles,” Mark said slowly. “Why did Duke Aron have to lay the ghosts and their horrible King? Were they always abroad, or did summat wake ’em from their graves?”

  “Clearly something happened, and it happened at the dreadful crimson Keep whose challenge you alone have met,” Val said excitedly. “It must be so. Duke Aron drove the darkness to the Ghostwood, this we know, and so the direful time was closed. Now, what did he do? By your tale we know ’twas always the same day at the scarlet Keep. My guess is that Duke Aron cast a spell to trap the Red Keep in time, to never let it go past the day the spectres first arose. He spread his magic like a bandage on the wound through which the spirits bled; no consequences from that day could spring, trapped in a coil of eternity. Until…” He looked up at Mark, eyes widening.

  “Until I broke the spell,” Mark whispered. “Like pulling out the keystone from a dam. That’s what Stargad meant when he said that without the dagger the heart must bleed.” He remembered how he had felt, sitting on the bank looking at the Red Keep with his boyhood stirring in his breast, the wash of miracles rushing by him into the world. “When the spell was broken, time started running again from in the Red Keep, and all the magic and all the ghosts bottled there so long started spilling out!” Mark stared at Gail. “Oh shite, your father was right! All this really was my fault!”

  “We cannot say for sure,” Lissa said. “And even were it true, there was no way you could know.”

  “I wonder if the Ghost King will re
turn?” Valerian mused.

  Mark looked desperately from one face to another. “Why? Why the bloody decree, that the King should grant one wish to the man who broke the Ghostwood’s curse, if that curse was all that kept the Time of Troubles back?”

  Valerian winced. “My guess is, they forgot.”

  “Forgot!”

  “Duke Aron has been dead nigh on a thousand years,” Val murmured. “More than enough time for people to forget what exactly waited in the Wood. And in time no one believed in spectres any more. No one believed in ghosts, and the Wood was just a place of menace, and finally no more than an inconvenience.”

  “Is bravery cowardice too? Is light dark? What else do I have wrong?” Sitting in the shadow of Borders’ crumbled northern wall, Mark felt the past rising like a flood within his breast.

  You were a fly in spiderwebs at Court, boy, but this is worse, far worse. Court you can dodge: but the past is everywhere. “Nobody” has a son who has a son and so on for fifty generations, and even now every bloody thing Duke Richard does is framed by things a thousand years old he doesn’t know a thing about. His life touches yours, yours Gail’s, Gail’s Lissa’s and so it goes, everyone thinking they’re on solid ground, but really just floating on the river of the past.

  Mark felt empty as an eggshell, as brittle; his hollow insides swirled with diamonds of moonlight and the scent of Gail’s hair, rotted red leather and the sound of a dead man teaching swordplay to his son. Father and son now both dust. They might be sticking to your boots, or blown against this very rock you’re squatting on.

  Mark swore and jumped to his feet.

  “The Ghostwood was a dark place: that was at the root of things.” Valerian’s voice was soft with wonder. “Duke Aron’s magic perished with him, and with it all enchantment else. Perhaps the end of magic was the price they paid to chain the ghosts within the Wood. One mighty spell, one terrible sacrifice: a dam, Duke Aron built, that trapped not just ghosts but all magic else behind it. When Aron died, and his line faltered, the secret of the Ghostwood faltered with it. It was a dark place, a blot upon the kingdom.

  “If my memory serves, Jasper II it was who offered first a princely sum to any hero who could free the kingdom from the pall that crept o’er it from the west. This is twenty generations later, understand. Duke Aron’s line was long gone into dust, and its secrets lost. Jasper blamed the evils of his day upon the wood. An easy gesture. Probably he never thought to pay, for who could do what mighty Aron left undone?”

  “What a stroke of genius!” Lissa said admiringly. “Thus did he the Crown absolve by making of the Wood a wellspring for all woes: a scapegoat that need never suffer persecution, yet would never go away. Add to this that many charismatic knights of proven worth—the sort of men who otherwise might challenge for the throne—would undertake the Ghostwood Quest instead. Very neat.”

  “How do you know so much about these ancient proclamations?” Gail muttered. “Don’t tell me history is another one of your hobbies.”

  “Er,—well, um, actually…” Val fumbled with his spectacles, and avoided answering. “Im—, er, imagine if you will what happened after Fletcher’s Bill returned from practice with his son. No doubt he asked around for Mark; but no man did he find who could claim such a name, and such a blade.” He pointed at Harvest’s rusted bones. “He thinks, I must have seen a ghost!” Valerian’s brown eyes looked far into the past. He was almost chanting now. “From time to time as his life passed, Fletcher’s Bill would draw a pint and tell a new acquaintance of his meeting on the wall. Did he think you walked unquiet without your blade in hand? Or did he fear he had been cozened, tripped up by the Devil into unholy bargain when he took the fancy weapon from its hellish master? Perhaps as he lay dying he bade his son to lay the blade beneath the wall where you had met, in hopes to end his bargain with his life.”

  “Stop it. You’re scaring me,” Gail said sharply.

  “You are right to be afraid. I am. I wonder at the scar that pains your husband’s hand; I wonder at his cold black knife. That iron dagger at his hip was buried in this kingdom’s heart; and when he drew it forth, blood gushed from the wound.”

  “What blood?” Gail demanded. “What gushes from the Red Keep?”

  Valerian shrugged. “Poetry.”

  “Magic,” Lissa added.

  But Mark said, “The past.”

  He drew in a long breath. A dark tide was running into him, a strange flood of old griefs and ancient sorrows. He felt it each time his right palm ached. That wound’s a chink through which the draughty past comes creeping in.

  And yet…

  And yet the sun was shining overhead, the sky was blue, the summer day was warm and full of life. The air rang with shouts and orders, the chink of hammers, horses whiffling as they cropped the grass; farther off, the river’s hiss and chatter. Larks sang amongst the chestnut trees. On a stone nearby a grey thrush hopped, glancing at them warily, hunting for beetles.

  Mark looked at his friends: Valerian enchanted by the strangeness of things, Lissa inscrutable, Gail frowning and determined and a little scared. “You know,” he sighed at last, “for the life of me I just can’t seem to hang on to my damn swords.”

  Lissa laughed. “Good thing they took dead Stargad’s weapon from you! The King would not be pleased, to see Sweetness gone so sour,” she said, pointing at the heap of rust that had once been Harvest.

  “Father won’t be happy as it is,” Gail said glumly. “And that was your wedding present too.”

  “When I was a lad,” Mark said dreamily, “I wanted to be a famous hero and have a sword with a name. For a long time it was to be a great two-handed blade named Head-Slicer.”

  Gail and Lissa burst out laughing. “Head-slicer?”

  “I was young. When I got older, I changed the name to Decapitator; it sounded more grown up.”

  “Oh, infinitely more adult,” Val said.

  “Then I went through a noble period. Longswords, mostly: a knight rode through town wearing one that moved me greatly. Justice was a favourite, and Defender.” Mark was smiling now, looking back over so many years. These were his secret boy’s thoughts; and silly as they seemed, they had flowered into the man he was today.

  “Thief, Sweetness, Harvest,” Valerian mused. “It seems to be the kiss of death when you name your swords, Mark. What will you call the next one? May I suggest The Sword That Has No Name?”

  “How about ‘Spear’?” Lissa suggested. “A cunning name to baffle your misfortune.”

  “‘Overcoat’!” Gail cried. “The garment that keeps off death!” She toppled off her stone seat, whooping, and even Lissa cackled with glee. Mark wiped tears of laughter from his cheeks. “Mebbe I’d better do wi’ nowt for awhile. Giving me a sword’s a waste of good steel.”

  Master Orrin came hurrying around the side of the building. “Ah. Enjoying yourselves, are you,” he said, pursing his lips. “I’m glad you can take this morning’s events so lightly. Pray, do me the honour of coming around to the Main Gate. I think I can give you yet more cause for hilarity.”

  There was something in his pinched face that stilled the laughter on their lips.

  “I sent one of your Vagabonds to clean the arch,” Orrin explained when they had assembled, along with the rest of the men, in front of the main gate. Master Orrin pointed up to the centre stone at the top of the archway. “And that’s what he found.”

  The old arch had been cleared of ivy, and the moss scraped from its stones. There, clearly carved to hang above the gate, a symbol now appeared: a large, coiling serpent, with its tail in its mouth, and dark sockets where once garnets might have flashed for eyes. It was the same design as on Husk’s wooden charm, the same as on the amulet Queen Lerelil had given Mark; only here it was graven into stone.

  Valerian whistled. “Steady now. The answer to this mystery is not hard to find: Queen Lerelil must have come from Borders, and come into the Red Keep’s clan by marriage.”

  “But h
er husband wasn’t at the Red Keep,” Mark objected. “Leastwise, she never mentioned him. I’d swear her son was cock-o’-the-walk there.” Mark spat and sighed. There was so much he didn’t know: the past was lurking under everything he touched these days, like bass in a deep pool. From time to time he caught a glimpse of tail, a flash of fin: Lerelil’s bracelet or Duke Richard’s family name. Ancient signs that made the present shiver as they darted to snap the surface, and then were gone.

  Only you’re the fly, he thought glumly. Buzzing ower that water wi’ nowt to keep you from the jaws of the past.

  It was a bad day. The past hung heavy on Mark’s back. Gail grew troubled and irritable, worried that she might have gotten pregnant when they made love. They fought before going to bed.

  That night Mark dreamt a terrible dream. In it, he woke in his own bed in the finished Borders. It was night, and dark; the taper on the wall had burned down to the nub.

  A shadow fell over his soul.

  something

  Like black water running into a foundering ship, dread filled his feet, his legs, his groin. It rose into his chest; touched his heart; and he was lost. It struck down his soul and everything alive in him could only lay face down, grovelling, and wait for the coming horror.

  in the house.

  A long time later he breathed. Dread had crushed his heart to a hard cold thing, a pebble rattling in his ribs. Slowly he got out of bed. He reached for his sword and walked around the room to reassure himself.

  something

  He saw nothing, heard nothing: but still the dread grew, heavier and heavier, rising up from the floor, pressing down from the darkness overhead.

  something in the house.

  The words whispered in his heart.

  Something that should be outside, that should never be allowed in. Something dark and evil had crept into his walls, his home, his heart.

  Evil. He’d never known what the word meant before now. Evil. Like a wild animal, evil had come, drawn by the light of his fire.

  Evil was in the house. He couldn’t keep it out. He couldn’t resist it. If it came on him, on his wife and friends and family, he would lie coward in the dirt and pray it did not see him. Shielder’s Mark, the great hero, soldier, Duke, would fall on the floor and weep and cower. He would sell them all rather than see its face. They would cry to him for help and he would fail.