by Thomas Head
And he heard the crunch of her fall.
His face bunched. Still he did not look directly at her or the archers. Under him, she started to vibrate, as if Death was pulling at her. If it did not stop soon she would let go. He forced her still and pulled the arrow from her back, blood squirting upward into his teeth.
She rolled onto her back, mumbling in shock. Cullfor nodded a little to let her know that was okay. He pulled off his cape and held it to the wound. It was wettening quickly.
Then he was grabbed by each arm.
Two large knights pulled at him, told him to rise.
And rise he did.
There were ten more beyond them. Armored. Thirty more were flanking them. Encircling him now, then hundred or perhaps thousands more, and he looked and trusted that the notion of a fight was ludicrous...
But the notion did nothing to stop him.
Shocked, they merely crouched as he bit the face of the first. The man fell back, roaring like a wound pig as the second man chopped at his ankles with a broadsword. Cullfor leapt as high the man’s head and landed atop him, sliding down him until he could bite out his throat. The man was dragging himself away along a new pool of blood as the others rushed. They fell on him like sharks, but he exploded from the black gravel of the beach like a nightmare. Everything blurred. Chaos exploded. Arms, fists, and steel were whirling in every direction. The swords and arrows flashed in impossible sweeps; it was impossible to distinguish the bite of one from the sting of another. Cullfor bore his teeth, biting as many as he felled with the sword. The fearsome thwacks and pings were chorusing death-grunts now. Animalistic wailing rose. Dozens lay dead. Then hundreds. Cullfor was tearing his way through the tumult, chopping swords in half, his sword shooting like arrowfire, popping any skull too close. He could only vaguely sense the surreal gravity of the moment, but he crunched a man’s face into the gravel, then another, and he could not free his soul with his growling—his mind was being eaten by the image of Bunn’s bleached-out pallor. His eyes bloody, he bit another man, wrenching from him another tremendous sword, swirling even as his body seemed to swell a foot taller than he was. One of the men, shocked, pulled away, retreating into a pile of corpses
The sight of a second wave of attackers sent a pained pressure through Cullfor’s head. It was beyond a headache. The pressure in his temples threatened to explode, send blood misting all around him. It rocked through his body, as he turned, ripping toward the first man, who was the largest. And life gushed into him with every man that fell, and it rinsed away the pains of his wounds, growing now across his chest and arms. It was little matter. He had perforated the edge of the black madness, burning with the perverse high of it, when he noticed two arrows protruding from his right thigh and third just under his left arm. But it only reminded him of the arrow in Bunn.
Suddenly, a demon appeared to him, fighting alongside him. It asked him: Would they shudder, the unfallen angels? Jot something in record of her smile? Would they make you this offer of strength?
He told the fiend: One would think there is something to measure her against. Something. But in this entire world, there is only this woman. So fuck off.
And the demon fled.
Cullfor turned, laughing now, baring the red teeth.
Lunging back toward the fury and bedlam, Cullfor watched the rest of them fall back. Defensive and low, they went crouching, their backs to their boats. Some crawled in the gravel as they stared into his seething eyes. For a moment, there was stillness. The only noise was his raspy breath.
Then there was movement in the distant fog.
Out in the gray, two hundred Dellish barges were coming toward the shore.
Then with the abruptness of an animal one of the knights ran. A blur of fog whisked. An arrow shot from the fog, up the beach. Falling to the ground, the knight turned with a stark slash of red dripping from the top of his nose. The arrow-pierced socket was cracked across the bridge. The eye dripped clear liquid. The fog whirred again, toward the rest of them. Then another. Another. As the fourth or fifth arrow flashed through the fog a thwack resounded and red mist popped from the skull of a horse he had not seen. It reared and rolled backward, galloping ten feet with that terrible stick in its brain. More arrows dropped as the foremost barge unleashed it human cargo.
The Dellish leapt from their boats onto the gravel, but went scampering backward. Someone was roaring orders out in the fog. Scooting behind dead mare, the man wore a black thistle in his helm, growling in an accent so thick it seemed loud rubbish. The army was running now onto the beach, but another army came from the same direction.
Arrows were zipping now down like a torrent. In every direction. Cullfor crawled toward Bunn, both of his legs completely soaked with blood. There was yet another arrow in his left, and still a fifth one in his foot.
He saw her running crookedly up the beach under a storm of arrows. He screamed for her to stop but all that escaped was a fizz of groaning as pain ripped from his groin to his head. She faltered and crashed. Staring at him.
He motioned with his head for her to hide, for her to bury herself if she had to.
Her eyes rolled upward.
In the next instant a thousand warriors were all around them. And he recognized them. Bloody madmen. His own damned gorgeous countrymen, at last, pouring in from up the beach and down from the wrinkled hills. Thousand more running up the beach to meet them. He felt himself starting to feel faint.
He looked down at the arrow sticking through his foot. The other was sideways through his hand and thumb. He leaned his head against a broken abutment of rock felt himself fading, watching Bunn stare lifelessly beyond him to the water.
Cullfor tried to scoot toward her. He felt only cold stone pressed against his cheek.
He was numb, shaking.
Leaving. Leaving without really going anywhere.
Chapter 96
“My soul is not delicate ether, made for saving. It is an anvil, damnit! An Anvil! I keep another soul for a hammer! And I pound the sons of cock sucking bastards into soup!”
—Lord Uncle Fie Wyrmkiller.
_______________
Cullfor stands atop a rock so large it seems like a chunk of mountain. It rises from a wide and otherwise smooth beach. A small grove of windswept cedar grows at its worn top. Young puffins caw somewhere behind him. The surf crashing. Breathe comes deeply.
He turns.
There is a man standing across the peak. They stare at each other a moment. His muslin shawls flag without noise on the wind. He is a witch perhaps. Yes, he exudes it. The air around him comes alive in some untellable way, as if the moon is closer. He is smiling, and Cullfor is taken by his pleasant and curious aromas. His unblinking gaze tells him they have met before. Sometime deep in their youth. He searches him up and down, then the man begins prodding him with his staff. To make sure he is real, it seems. Perhaps to gauge how deeply it would sink into his thickening middle. The touches his nose, tracing it like a miracle. Then he blankets him in a womb of arms.
“Uncle,” he says.
“Oh, my boy,” she says.
He feels confused, as if he only just realized he was at peace.
Fie allows him, by dint of his smiling eyes, an acknowledgement the confused feeling.
“You thought, perhaps, you were damned?”
He laughs. You can feel his breath.
“I did.”
“What you’ve become, Captain, is a dragon, and in that becoming you have simply been made more of what would have been otherwise.”
He harrumphs. Captain? He knows a few notes of the old mage songs but he is just a simple fellow.
Uncle Fie holds him at arm’s length.
“God winks at you, Captain. Yours is a gorgeous anger. A Sampson’s anger. He made you feisty enough at birth to crunch a few skulls. But soon, hero, He will make you a poet with the sword.”
Something in him gets cold. “He would have me live?”
His smile confes
ses the truth of the nakedly mad news.
He is still alive.
The sun and the slow happy warmth. Leaving now. Leaving without really going anywhere. Her voice is still in his ear, as faint as music over another hill.
If the old barrow-king chose not to take you seriously, there is another who has. The power of an ancient evil lay coiled with him. Trust, my son, that he is the grander anathema. He is a fiend in the manner of the old ones, cunning. But unlike the one you faced, he dreams not of power. He dreams of tooth-work, Captain. Of taking a great and terrible price for what you’ve become. With her at his side, he knows your heart, so be wary your dreams of returning her. Yesss, my boy, Dhal came to him of her will, and laughed as he slay those who bound her. This one, he knows hunger. And like you, he knows servitude and humility, and he knows your face...
Be wary the one who wears the Black Thistle Helm.
Then his dead mother places a white little berry under his brain.
An eye flutters, and with it comes skull-twisting pain.
_______________
Not all who are worthy are known to men, but they are known, he realizes.
_______________
Cullfor smelled the backside of horse, then felt an unyielding agony as he stared back toward the distant forms. Hundreds of men were running around the dwarf with the black thistle helm, forming the great folds of shield wall. Thousands. Others too. They are further still.
Only then did Cullfor feel the motion of the horse under him.
He was tied or secured in place with ugly gut rope. Someone nearby thundered atop a different horse.
“Goddamn Dellish.”
“Goddamned maybe,” the voice at the reins said. “But the devils will hide under hell from our wrath.”
The voice was not familiar, nor even the accent.
“Pah, under hell indeed boy. Hell won’t take dogs like that,” the other rider said, and spat.
Behind them now, beyond the dwarf with the black thistle in his helm, beyond his retreating knights hundreds more of Cullfor’s countrymen appeared. They came snarling and yelping the old war cries as they halted their rush. A few were mounted atop chargers. The rest were so much crazed foot soldiery, soaked with sweat. They looked good, all the world like a swarm of bearded rats, forming a shield wall atop the shale the ensnare the Dellish wall on the beach. They were Brickelby Guard, Arway’s best, funneling down the rocky river beach, a great maelstrom now engulfing the Dellish to send them back on the water.
Cullfor’s mind left him a moment. He was blacking out again. The horse sped past the last of the helmed men, these staring at him. Some taking off their helmet to see him better. He stared back with an eye that felt as if it were floating on the river. Ten or a dozen of them slipped nearer to touch him.
Far down the beach, the shield walls were complete and things were getting louder.
Their forms were blurring now in the fog.
“Goddamn,” the man riding nearby said. “This’ll prove a mess if nothing! Forge it, boys. Tight and deep or by God we’ve turned the tables for no one but the morning’s crabs!”
Cullfor felt himself blacking out again, but he saw a great swarm of arrows, rising from the river toward them.
“Volley,” he rasped.
The man at the rains turned and looked. And the horse under his belly began to run and pounce him until he was writhing and spitting blood.
_______________
Cullfor’s head swam for a moment in a bath of firelight. With one eye, he found himself in a pile of hay in a rounded room. Stone walls. The eye turned: a solitary window-slit to his left. A fire burning in a thin brick inglenook. He could smell the pine burning. Maybe the smell of fishy riverwater in the air too.
Everything felt too quiet. Too still. As if something was wrong with his senses or the world had been replaced with a dim replica of itself. He sat up on the edge of the bed, instantly aware that the arrows had been removed from his body. He had been bandaged around his ears and felt foolish for being a little surprised by this. A day had passed ,maybe. A whiff of burning flesh met his nose.
Beyond the door, random bits of conversation were floating. An ugly woman... Of some importance… Or bad grace.
He tested his legs, then looked out of the window-slit.
A small mountain of corpses was burning outside the blunt walls. The early sun was softened by the smoke of it, the columns of smoke looked like conjoined spirits, rising from the bodies.
There was another arrow slit. This one was wider, on the opposite side of the room.
Walking across to the other, he wrapped himself in a blanket. He breathed the fishy air. They were close to the Gardenwater. He was high up. From up here, it almost seemed he could throw a stone into the river. Only when he looked down at paths curling up from the water did he see they were several hundred yards away from it. The land fell from it in stony tiers. Small fruit trees of some sort lined the trials, fading off northerly toward greener fields and forests.
To the south, the land was boggy and wrinkled. Fog still fowled the air. He looked down again, at the thick walls. The structure was a portrait of sturdy elegance. It was a massive old castle. Or aging poorly. But it was built not just with stone but on stone, he could see it even from her, so that no tunnels could bore into the interior. From some periphery he could not see he could hear men talking outside too. There were close or in some neighboring tower so that their voices rode the wind. He craned a cramped and stiffened neck, but could not see them. The wind picked up, pouring cold air across him before he went to warm himself by the small fire. It did not warm him.
He coughed, and the cough made a round of laughter from outside the door splash into a deep watery silence.
The quiet hung for moments.
He stepped softly toward the door. Eleven tiny steps light as mice. There were three or four men standing outside.
Then one was speaking again, a learned man by his voice.
“Not a great use,” he said. “The stoutest destriers couldn’t fill her gaping, pustuled arse.”
Three men were laughing, but he sensed they were trying not to.
A fourth began talking. “Even the beasts were protesting her stench. A smell too ugly, they neighed. Beyond their noses’ bearing.”
Subdued nonlaughter rose again.
“And so the whole while that we’ve got the porters bringing the mounts back the ol’ growly whore never seemed to breathe. Thought we’d have our way with her, she did.”
There were smiles in the silence.
As he leaned against the door he could feel that his eye socket had cracked. Two ribs were grinding.
“Worried like a pig in the poke, and Sweet Rollicking God, but we were worried ones.”
The laughter flitted low but wildly, then dissolved. He breathed, and something… insane rose in him. Maybe some need to interact. He reached back and without really knowing why and pounded the door.
“Whoa, damn!”
The men outside shuffled wildly. Grunting, one had retreated a distance down some steps before he heard said, “The hell is he doing in there?”
Someone began laughing.
Now more men in mail were bouncing up what sounded like narrow steps. They were quick but halting. The sound made him thoughtful.
“What in God’s name, lads?”
The voice was a captain, by his rough tenor. It was the nature of the voice to command everything around him. Even without using it. Cullfor heard the shuffle of people getting out of the way. Another silence was followed by a great quick rustle.
“You harbor a living devil,” she said.
A happy eye cocked. A tingle rose in his back and his mouth.
Bunn.
“Little doubt,” one said, opening the door.
Bunn stomped in quickly, smiling but hard-faced, and immediately she was insisting he sit back down. She wore a good dress, sown with skilled hands from green leather and cotton. She was gorgeous in
it.
He tried to look outside, but in a flash of activity, she pushed him down and began pulling down his trousers. Washing his wounds, she looked deeply troubled. Then again, she seemed happy with his grin. She sat facing the bloody cut-up groin studying it as much as she cleaned it.
“Very good,” she said. “You’re healing like a team of saints has been licking your beautiful body.”
Cullfor tried to speak, but as her hand wisped across his testicles, he breathed.
The captain marched in and leaned over and kissed Cullfor’s forehead. He rose, then bent over Bunn and looked down at him.
“What would you do, man?” the man asked.
Cullfor raised his head. “Do? Who are you, Master?”
“That depends on your answer. Now, sir, I ask again, what you would do. Would you lead? Would you rule?”
“You’ve met my wife?”
“I have.”
“Then you know full ball-kissing well what I would do, sir,” Cullfor said.
The man bowed.
“Then the answer is thus: I am Sir Alistair, former Captain of the Brickelby Guard, for I hereby, with all rights, submit.”
“Brickelby Guard?”
“Aye.”
“But you’re a human, sir.”
“Wrong Brickelby, son. You’re in North Brickelby, and in the Borderlands yet. Of the Three Rivers, Borderlands, to be more precise.”
Good lord, he thought. All this travel and travail… and I only managed a hundred mile of my journey!
A small, shocking white moth fluttered from the arrow slit. Everyone looked as it drifted like an animate snowflake, rose upward. Disappeared into the smoky sky.
“They lay coiling in the fog,” Alistair said. “A forward guard of the Delmark’s ranks. They grow even now.”
Young, polished men were coming in now with armor and weapons.
“Rise, if you can, Captain,” Alistair said.
Cullfor nodded.
“I can.”
“Then dress yourself for battle.”
