The Hollow March

by Chris Galford

  The morals of the story were simple enough. Thou shalt not covet, steal, nor kill. Furthermore, most read it as an early critique of law—a crying out against such brutal punishments and such faulty executions of justice. No man should die without all efforts made for truth.

  The Vorges taught these things, but few learned from them. Visaji claimed they walked the peaceful path, but no written word had ever existed that made the world more peaceful than law. The Vorges made a spiritual law, a pact with Assal that all men were bound to follow, but it did not bind without the force of the Church behind it. The Church killed those that didn’t believe. Men killed men for stealing their land, and their women, or because some greater man told them it was just. Women killed men for love, or freedom, or power…for all the same reasons as men, in truth, though few would see it. Mortal law had power because it had the spears to back it up. Men and women could kill, but only at the word of their king, or their lord, and if they did otherwise, the law saw them dead in turn. Death was a threat that had very real power to it. The physical versus the spiritual. The physical always won.

  Four hundred years had passed since the Vorges were written by the prophet Ademius and his men, and still before them stood a man, guiltless and guileless, waiting to be set upon a block and separated from his head. The forms of death had changed shape, ever subtly, in ways men dared to call civilized. But the end never changed.

  Trial gave way to execution.

  They gave him two days. What a thing. Tell a man you’ll kill him, then make him wait to face the displeasure. Her father’s sense of vengeance, she supposed, care of the Empress’s words. That was what they did, whispering and slinking through the halls of the castle at night. Rusthöffen was a strong man, but not so strong as her father’s will. Not so strong as the bodies arrayed behind him.

  The night before the trial, she saw them there. In the halls beyond their bedrooms, in shadow. Her father and Rusthöffen, speaking in low, but vengeful tones. “Do not think to break me,” her father hissed. They turned when they heard her coming. Stared at her with those hard eyes. Unyielding men, but one would break. One always breaks. Here it would be the man that saw less, risked less. It would be the man that thought he had more than he actually had.

  A palatine was the Emperor’s man, and none other’s, yet her father had the Empress in his pocket. What did Rusthöffen have, but for the shadows to grasp?

  Dartrek had set his hand upon her shoulder and led her off, to the curtest of nods from the men, but the stares lingered, until other footsteps beat down the other end of the hall—and there was the witch, in the shadows as well, a finger at her lips.

  Shush.

  No one saw her. Two days and no word. The servants were denied. Usuri’s food was dashed upon the walls or left to rot outside her door. Yet they all heard the screams when Walthere tried his hand. How little Gerold had cried. He buried his head in Charlotte’s skirts and tried to hide from them, to no avail.

  That had taken a deal of explanation. A ward, they said. Daughter of a family friend—quite hush-hush. Sweet, troubled girl. Broke their hearts to see her quite as this. Their darling friends were beside themselves with grief.

  Both the Empress and Sara gave their deepest sympathies, but their future emperor smiled at them and bobbed his head knowingly. Charlotte did not need to be told to worry of that. She had seen his people wandering the grounds at night.

  Kasimir faced them all from his stage upon their yard, a striking, resolute figure. Again, unyielding. Such strength slept there—hiding in the deep and aging valleys time had crafted. The body gave, but lo, the creature that stood before them was as steel itself. He would break before he bent. The knees quivered with the cold, but the eyes—the eyes did not flinch.

  They stood with the Imperial party, shielding against the chill of the flesh as they embraced the chill of the mind. Charlotte held her brother’s hand; her mother held her father’s. Such things as this, no one was permitted to ignore. Not even wives and children. It was as much respect, as blood-dappled curiosity.

  These were the moments that made men. “Don’t cry,” her father told her brother. “It is time you see what it is like. A man that does not see, cannot lead.” He told him not to look away. Lions never turned aside. She doubted his newfound friend, Lothen, would have such instructions, or such desires, his head buried in his mother’s skirts as he contemplated what was to come.

  “Might have asked for a better day,” Joseph said as he stared up at the clouds. Everything was grey as smoke, and rolling on. Furs were not enough against the chill. Wives clung to husbands in states quite unbecoming of the gentry. Children shivered as they looked to the stage. This was their world. The final act of one of their plays. So many ups, so many downs. Where would they focus next?

  The headsman, one of her father’s ex-captains, drew up beside Kasimir and said something in his ear. He stretched out, making a chopping motion with his left hand. His death. He was telling Kasimir how he would die. The lord looked on, and nodded, and the executioner clapped his shoulder and stepped around behind him, hefting his propped sword from its place.

  All bowed their heads in deference as the priest stepped forward next, to administer the final rites. His voice was small, for a man of Assal, and did not carry far. Kasimir bent his head and closed his eyes in prayer.

  “At least it should be quick,” the Empress commented. “I could think of worse, for traitors.”

  “On that I believe we might agree, mother,” Joseph said, half-suspiciously.

  The priest offered Kasimir a tack of tasteless bread called ikir, then dipped his fingers in oil and ringed Kasimir’s head with it. When he was done administering his religious duties, he took a step back to administer his secular ones. The priest asked, one final time, if the lord would repent of his sins. If he were to bend the knee and kiss the priest’s hand, whilst asking mercy of his rightful ruler, there might be yet some touch of sympathy in this world. If not for him, then for his household. Kasimir stared at him dully for a moment, then shook his head in dismissal. The priest lingered longer than he should have, then turned to the crowd.

  “It is my duty, then, to pronounce death upon this man. He has shown nothing but contempt for his earthly masters. Assal have mercy on his soul.” He clapped his hands together and strode from the stage, amidst the somber silence of the crowd.

  The headsman patted Kasimir’s shoulders, urging him to kneel. He asked, “Do you forgive me, lord?” and Matair answered, “Willingly, I do.” The lord knelt down obediently, resting his hands on the block from which his head would be stricken. Faint traces of dried blood remained, flecked deep into the wood. He was not the first to die here. He would not be the last.

  Only three of them remained on the stage—Kasimir, the headsman, and Charlotte’s uncle Maynard. It was tradition that a member of the family responsible for the killing had to stand at the dead man’s side as he went. A sign of respect, for even the lowest of men. Her father was not one for tradition though and he had the Empress to watch besides. Charlotte’s uncle, a soldier himself, and not prone to spells of weakness or nausea, was the natural choice to stand-in. He even looked the grim part—all black and gnarled fur, the vacant chasm of his left eye socket covered by equally black cloth. He could turn his head when the time came to do the striking. Just slightly. Then he would never see it, and none would ever be the wiser. But he wouldn’t. Maynard was a man of too much honor to take so cowardly a way.

  As the final arrangements were made, Joseph turned to Walthere and spoke softly with him. “So I hear rumors, my dear count, that certain lords and knights have already been promised the good traitor’s lands and properties. Like little vultures, picking at the dead.”

  “If it is so, it far from surprises me. Our friend the count of Jaritz must keep his house in order. Even if it were a friend that were set to die.”

  “Truly? A pity. Witold would do well to remember than that those found traitorous to Imper
ial decree have their lands reprimanded not to their lord, but to the Emperor, to distribute and manage as he so sees.” Turning back to the stage, he did not even make the effort to hide his smug smile. “I would so hate to muss up his orderly arrangements.”

  Walthere remained silent, focusing on the execution. Maynard was asking, loud enough for everyone to hear, whether Kasimir had—as was his due—any final words with which to grace the world. Charlotte held out hope that he might depart the world in silence, but the lord waved that altogether sensible and cleanly right. He nodded heavily and Maynard returned it, before stepping aside to allow him the crowd.

  “Seems the man has more words left in him. Perhaps they are more for you, Cullick.”

  Walthere glanced at the prince, smiling severely. The Empress’s young son began to squirm, staring up at her. “Mama, do I have to watch? I don’t want to see him die.”

  “Of course you must, my little baby boy. This is important. Just watch Gerold and do what he does. This is how you be a man.” The boy looked at his friend, who smiled weakly for him, swallowed hard, and looked back to his mother. Already he looked as though he might cry, and the murder hadn’t even begun. The Empress bent down and hugged Lothen close. “Don’t cry now, little one. It will be alright. We all must do things like this. You cannot be emperor if you cannot watch things like this.”

  Joseph rounded on her fast as a shot. The rage in his eyes betrayed a great fear in Charlotte, that he might be so bold as to strike his mother before the crowd. The roar of the peasants kept the others’ eyes at bay. She was in the middle, caught. But Sara’s hand found Joseph’s arm, and she whispered to him, tried to stay him. He listened, seething, but when she finished, he shook her off and seized her arm in turn, so hard she faintly squeaked, and the skin began to redden instantly. Charlotte could not hear the low words he shared with her, but she caught one, “bitch,” and she honestly worried for what the woman had brought upon her head. Sara shrank from him, eyes not meeting his as he lectured her. Then he released her, letting loose some low snarl of disgust, and folding his arms across his chest. Sara stepped away, clearly shaking, and Charlotte was of a mind to take her hand. But she knew it would be improper, so she did not.

  “Will you be my strong little boy?”

  “I will, mama. I will.”

  Kasimir had to clear his throat before he could speak. The cold had evidently worked greater wonders on him than all the rest, deep in his sheetless cell at night. His voice, when it came, was hoarse and broken, but rang with some gathered strength, hoarded for this precious moment of finality.

  “I would thank the Empress for her kindness. I will not waste breath crying for innocence. I have done wrong, and she has done me a kindness still. And to our future emperor, I wish a long reign and a blissful one at that. The grave is no place for regrets. You put me to it, and my name beside me, but I go freely. You kill me, and I will go on, into some other place, to repeat or to rise above these winters. So you have me. Your man.”

  Having said his piece, the lord laid his head against the chopping block, and grew still.

  “Spoken as a soldier,” Charlotte said.

  “Spoken as a fool,” her father countered.

  For all his tribulation, though, Kasimir had much to be thankful for. Even as they put his head to the stone, he went knowing that his family would be spared his fate. The Empress had been kind, casting off the sins of the father from sons and daughters and grandchildren all. Mercifully, they had told him of it as well. They had not needed to. They might have let him die uncertainly. But her father went to him. Told him what would go on after his demise. Walthere left that encounter much elated, and Matair had been ever-silent thereafter, though certain parts of him seemed to have found that relief no other words might offer.

  The family would remain here, behind their walls. For safety, Walthere said. She doubted anyone would overlook the truth. It was insurance. Some as of yet unseen movement upon the board, shifting him nearer to elusive goals. The other sons, she surely thought, would come looking for them. They had one’s wife, his child. They would come, and then Walthere would do as he would. Some might live. Only one needed to die.

  Yet the world moved in currents oft unseen, and one never knew exactly where an action might carry them. This time tomorrow the whole court could burn up into ashes, with her father proudly climbing to the fore. This time next week, they might themselves be put upon a chopping block, without a woman’s word to spare even the tiniest of them. Everything was set to burn. It was merely a question of who would set the match and which way the wind would blow.

  The headsman stepped beside the kneeling lord. Charlotte’s mother bent over her, whispering in her ear. “If you need to look away, my dear, there is no shame in it.” She might have looked at her mother in disgust. Weak-willed women. Cows. Instead she nodded daintily, and straightened herself against the coming stroke. Beneath her, Gerold tensed.

  “Stay strong now.”

  The lord spread his arms and stared out over the crowd. Stared at her. She could see him, like some horrifying portrait, watching her wherever she might go. So be it. Let her be the last thing he would ever see. Her father’s daughter, the one that had brought fire and ash upon his household. She was an unwitting harbinger of destruction, but if such was her lot, then so be it. What was a man, what was a family, before a throne? That, in the end, was what it all came down to. A throne in a castle in a far away city, sitting empty and wanting, its crowns bloodying themselves on other pursuits, whilst suitors flocked and died at its feet.

  All thrones were thrones of blood and bone. All dynasties built upon walls of corpses. History could have it no other way. Her father had tipped his hat toward that throne, and put all desire into its acquisition. The result would be deathand devastation. She could see that. So be it. Either they would have it or they would die in the trying, and so would be the fate of any in their way. Matair might be glad, in truth. He was to die before he saw a world consumed. It was merely a matter of time. The witch’s magic could do many things, but even it could not deny the inevitable. Men would line the fields and fertilize them with their blood, fighting and dying for distant lords, content to smile and curtsy and kiss one another’s perfumed hands.

  Desire was the incentive. The world the conclusion. War was the path, the inescapable road.

  Maynard came behind him and tied a black cloth about his eyes, then quickly stepped away. Charlotte had seen men killed before, when she was as young, if not younger, than Gerold. It was her father’s command, and even then, she went to it, unarguing and unmoved. Fear, after all, was just another thing to be tempered.

  Her father had always kept the same disinterested expression, but now his face was alive. He did not smile, and yet he seemed to gleam, as though walking on air. All this, for a friend.

  Kasimir’s was deeper, though, his eyes a pair of coals that seared through the crowd, and the souls, and straight to her. To Hell, old man, to Hell. The headsman raised the great sword above his head, and held it for an eternity. She held her breath, but did not flinch as the blade arced. She could see it then. Maynard stepped forward, starting to object, but the blade was already in motion. The headsman had the angle just off, and neither the swing nor the blade were nearly strong enough. It bit, and bit deep, but the blade did not go all the way through. The executioner had to saw at it to free his sword. Blood splattered the executioner and the stage, and dribbled down toward the bucketmen below, but the blood kept on, and Kasimir’s eyes rolled, body spasming. The blade raised again, and the head still hung by tatters.

  Someone shrieked—Hendensleuce’s wife, by the looks of it—and fainted straight away. Others turned aside or buried their heads in a companion’s shirts. There was a clamor of unease from the crowd. The rabble howled. Old superstitions held the worst for failed executions. Little Lothen clutched at his mother’s skirts and wailed as high as his lungs would carry him, and the tears streamed down as he bundled himse
lf against her. She scooped him in her arms and tried to comfort him, but he was inconsolable.

  Gerold, however, looked on with wide eyes, nary a gasp or a flinch as the blade rose and fell a second time, severing the head and sending it tumbling to the boards. Fascination, she read upon his face. Matched only by the pleasure on her father’s. His eyes gleamed, and of a moment, he and Joseph were a pair, the only ones that looked at ease with such a death.

  She heard Walthere say to her mother, “Off, woman, you’re making a scene. See to your son, if you must.” He tried to forcibly peel Karlene from him, and she whimperingly obeyed.

  “Is he…?” Karlene asked, stepping toward her. Charlotte nodded, patting Gerold on the shoulder, but he hadn’t moved. With a gentle nudge, she urged him toward their mother, who bent down to follow the Empress’s lead. “Oh my boy,” she said, “my brave little boy. You do your father proud.” There were tears in her eyes as she said it. He moved forward, but slowly, seemingly stricken mute.

  Most of the refined crowd was still, and somber. Occasions like this usually elicited more of a reaction. She glanced back, trying to find Rusthöffen in the crowd, but the duke had seemingly vanished. In his place, Hendensleuce’s wife was ringed in by a small contingent of noblemen fanning her and exchanging soft words with her husband.

  The clap of Joseph’s hands startled her and the rest back from their respective reveries. He grinned and shook his hands together, for emphasis. “Well, that was a thing. If only Melar had gone as such.” He turned, running his eyes over his stepmother and her balling son, and soured somewhat. “Can’t you keep that boy quiet? This is a solemn occasion, my lady.”

  Sara attempted to interject. “Brother, surely some sympathies are in order…”

  “Such blubbering is for women. Death surrounds us every day. If he’s to be a man, he must learn to put it underfoot. Look at the palatine’s whelp. He looks well enough.”