“I recognize you.” The bishop held its hand before it, as if trying to clear away the drizzling rain. “The thane. But you’re so young—you’ve changed. It won’t help. It’s too late, there’s no time now, you must know that by now.”
“I don’t understand,” said Daenek. He suddenly felt very cold, uneasy in the midst of the priests.
The bishop turned away, the angle of its head somehow exuding an air of infinite sadness and regret.
It started its slow walk again and the priests followed, passing on either side of Daenek.
The last one stopped for a moment and laid its cold hand on Daenek’s shoulder. “The bishop is old,” it spoke softly. “Soon it’ll rest. Like your father.”
“What do you mean?” Daenek reached for the coarse brown cloth of its robe, but it was already too far away. He somehow knew that it would do no good to run after them, that no answers would come to his questions. He stood in the road long after the priests had finally disappeared.
Chapter V
The Lady Marche was becoming old. Time, the last two years especially, seemed to diminish her, leaving a smaller, grey figure in her place. Daenek went to the village market-place each week, to spare his mother the long walk down the hillside. The villagers still glared in hatred at the sixteen-year-old youth, but accepted the coins from his hand readily enough.
Sometimes, on his way back from the village, he would stop in the middle of the fields and watch the silent white cylinder of the house. She’ll die soon, he knew. And then I’ll leave.
A month before his seventeenth birthday, he began to think the end was very near for the old woman. He did no more overnight wandering out in the hill range, but stayed in the house and listened to her moving restlessly about through the long, dark hours. Something seemed to be haunting her, consuming her grey, stooped figure from the bones outward.
Once, Daenek came down in the first light of dawn and found the trunk she usually kept locked sitting with its lid flung back in the middle of the floor. One of the shimmering veils, dull and lusterless now, was ripped in two. He found the Lady Marche in an exhausted sleep with her head buried in her arms upon the kitchen table. Her face was fever-hot and damp with perspiration. Daenek carried her up to her bed—he was dismayed at how light she seemed—and brought her soup when she was awake. She refused it, but beckoned for him to bend down closer to her. “Forgive me,” she whispered into his ear. Her mind’s going, thought Daenek as he slowly went down the steps with the bowl of soup that had finally grown cold. He passed the night, and the next, sitting in a chair beside her bed. Sometimes he would fall asleep for a few moments, but would awake to see the old woman’s eyes gazing up at the dim ceiling. His eyes closed before hers did, and his head sank to his chest without waking him.
Noises outside the house. Voices. Daenek opened his eyes to a thick shaft of late morning sunlight sliding into the room. He glanced at the bed. The Lady Marche seemed to be asleep, her eyelashes motionless above her hollowed cheeks. Pressing the heels of his palms into the sleep-stiffened muscles of his face, he arched his back, cramped from sitting all night in the hard wooden chair, then stepped to the wall’s transparent panel. His heart tensed as he saw, gathered in front of the house, a score of the subthane’s black-uniformed militia, mounted on their nervously moving equines. The men were laughing and calling to each other, throwing a leather-covered bottle back and forth among themselves.
They’re waiting for something, thought Daenek. But what?
Suddenly, the men below fell silent and the bottle was flung into the weeds with a spray of brown liquid. The subthane’s grossly-fleshed figure, looking almost wide enough for two equines rather than just one, was ascending the narrow trail up to the house. His militia captain rode to one side of him.
Daenek drew away from the window. Asleep, the Lady Marche moaned softly. The villagers were always saying it, thought Daenek grimly. He stood in the doorway, clenching the frame in both hands. That they’d come for me some day. He glanced at the old woman in her bed. She knew, he realized. Tomorrow I’ll be seventeen years of age. Or would have been.
He wiped his damp hands on his shirt as he walked down the stairs. If I step outside, he told himself, before they begin to pound on the door, she won’t awaken. An uncomfortable feeling moved under his ribs. She could have warned me, though. I could’ve been long gone, running, before my time was up—
The mounted subthane formed a bulky nucleus surrounded by his men. They seemed too thin to be of the same species, but the flat planes of their faces were like the bones under the subthane’s jowls would be. As Daenek stepped outside the house, carefully pulling the door shut behind him, he heard the large man’s voice break off in mid-sentence to his men.
The subthane’s equine, a circle of white showing around its wildly staring eyes, bucked and reared beneath him. His face flushed with anger, the subthane clouted the animal near its ear with a solid blow from his gloved fist, then spurred it forward towards Daenek. His men men followed, forming a rough V behind him.
Daenek looked up at the coarse-pored face of the subthane.
Rivulets of sweat had formed in the creases and folds of his skin.
Only once before had Daenek seen the man, across the length of the village marketplace, but even from a distance the sense of something like the odor of blood had been apparent. Now, the subthane was rubbing the back of his leather glove over the bristles on his chin.
“Well, Daenek,” wheezed the subthane, sounding pleased. The skin of his cheeks tightened as his lips drew apart in a parody of a smile. “Are you so surprised at our coming? Don’t you know? Didn’t anyone tell you?” He glanced quickly at the laughing faces of his men on either side.
Beyond the half-circle of equines and men, Daenek could see the stalks in the field bend with a light breeze. “I know why you’re here,” he said quietly, looking at but not seeing their faces for a moment. He noted a dark bank of clouds cradling the morning sky at the horizon. “But take me someplace else and do it,” he said, focussing upon the subthane again.
“Oh, but it’s not that simple, boy.” The subthane lowered his head beside the neck of his equine. “You’ve got a choice to make, you have.”
Daenek took a step backwards from the malicious grin. “I don’t care how you kill me,” he said. “Suit yourself.” I’ll die, he thought, without knowing the truth about my father’s death, but I’ll die—like him, maybe.
“Kill you? We don’t want to do that, boy,” the subthane said gleefully. He sat up in his saddle and beckoned the militia captain over to himself. The man reined his equine closer to the subthane, then took a small black case from a pouch dangling on his saddle and handed it to him.
“Just look here.” The subthane snapped the case open and, holding it by its lid, thrust it in front of Daenek. “What do you see?”
He suspected already what the shining chrome tube in its plush-lined niche was, and said nothing.
“You see,” said the subthane, holding the case in the crook of one arm and stroking the object inside it with his forefinger, “we take this little gadget and put it against your head, right up over the ear. And not even a drop of blood, but no one ever worries about you again. Because everything in your head is all chopped up and muddled around. Harmless.” He laughed. “Have you ever seen that idiot that works in the quarry? The one that look like a shaved ursine, and never talks?”
Daenek nodded slowly, feeling his eyes draw into slits as he looked at the grinning face.
The subthane’s smile widened even further. “He used to be a very powerful man. Your father’s right hand. But the thane’s been dead a long time, and the big man had one of these put up to his skull.”
A spasm of rage and contempt welled up inside Daenek. “If those are my choices,” he spat out, “then I’d prefer a knife.”
“Ah, but maybe I lied when I said you had a choice, boy. I really want to see how one of these things—” He fell silent, his eyes l
ooking up and past Daenek.
The Lady Marche was standing in the doorway of the house, Daenek saw as he turned around. Her face was white with the strain of moving under her fever, and the hand that gripped the silver head of her stick trembled. “You are a day too soon,” she said in a tone of fierce authority and loathing. She raised the point of the stick at the subthane.
“What’s a day?” mumbled the obese figure on his equine. “The damn kid’s old enough—why should we wait? Come on,” he whined, “let’s get on with it.”
“The Regent’s orders,” intoned the Lady Marche, “said that for seventeen years the son of the old thane would be protected. The Regent would be interested to hear how you heed his wishes.”
“Who’s going to tell him?” blustered the subthane. He glared at the old woman but looked away after a few seconds of her sharp gaze in return. “All right, then,” he said, jerking on his equine’s reins and wheeling the animal around. He pointed to one of his men. “You—stay here with them. To make sure they’re here,” he glared over his shoulder at Daenek and the woman, “when we return in the morning.”
The trail through the fields erupted into dust as the men rode away from the house in its little clearing. The guard left behind glanced at the Lady Marche and Daenek with a smoldering hostility submerged somewhere beneath his narrow, hard-planed face. He dismounted from his equine, then walked to the edge of the field and stamped a wooden stake into the ground with his boot. When the equine was securely tied—it seemed to be always trembling in a state of constant hysteria—the guard pulled something wrapped in cloth from one of the pouches on the saddle.
“C’mere,” the guard called, but Daenek remained where he was standing, with the Lady Marche a couple of meters behind him in the doorway. The guard crossed the space between them and held out the object, nested in the unfolded cloth. “Know what this is?” he said. “Don’t touch it.”
Daenek looked at the man’s extended hand. “It’s a gun.” An old one, he thought. The kind that shoots metal bullets, like in the old stories in the books. A very old one. Maybe so old that—
“Uh-uh, I know what you’re thinking,” said the guard. His eyes darted to the Lady Marche and then back to Daenek. “But it works. One of the last ones around here that does.” A note of childish boasting tinged his voice as he picked at one of the rust specks on the long barrel. “And I know how to use it, too.” Threatening. “So don’t try running, boy. Or I’ll drop you.”
Silent, Daenek turned and walked back to the house. The Lady Marche put her hand on his shoulder but he pushed it away and stepped beside her into the dark interior.
Stepke’s books weighed in his hands like stones. The words on the pages flowed over his eyes like water, leaving nothing behind.
He put the last faded volume on top of the pile and leaned back against the wall of his room. My father spoke that language, he thought. And all the others. A sense of loss opened inside him, like a phantom heart. It’ll end with me—no one will know all those words again. Regret, but no fear, moved inside him when he thought of the coming morning.
He heard the Lady Marche calling him from downstairs. With a sigh, he got to his feet and walked to the stairway. She was waiting for him at the bottom step.
“Go to the kitchen,” she said. Her voice was firmer, as if from several years ago, but the muscles of her face were still tight and the skin moist with fever. She supported herself on her silver-headed stick.
Puzzled, Daenek turned and saw the subthane’s guard sitting in the front doorway, his back against the frame and his eyes watching the little scene with suspicion. It had been more than an hour since the others had left, but the guard still had his gun cocked and ready in one hand, cradling the weight of its barrel in his other.
“Go on,” she said. He glanced at her eyes, but they were unreadable. Slowly, he moved towards the kitchen.
“What’s going on?” called the guard, leaning forward.
“It is a day like any other,” said the Lady Marche, “and people become hungry.” She walked over to the guard and looked down at him. “Would you like something to eat?” she asked stiffly.
The guard started to scramble upright, grasping the door frame with his free hand and pushing himself up from the floor with the hand holding the gun. “Yeah, maybe some—” he began, when the Lady Marche suddenly moved.
Daenek saw the blur of motion from the corner of his eye. He spun about in the kitchen doorway and saw the end of the arc the silver-headed stick drew through the air. Its point did not crack across the guard’s face, but noiselessly laid itself against the skin of his cheek. There was a sharp, loud noise, an explosion of light reddened with blood, and the guard crumpled away from the stick. A fragment of a howling noise was choked off in his throat.
Daenek, frozen where he stood and not yet comprehending, watched the little wisp of smoke, faint in the sunlight from beyond the door, emerge from the stick’s point and dissipate into the air. The Lady Marche turned her face, now looking very old and tired, towards him.
“Look out!” cried Daenek, as he saw the guard clench a fistful of cloth and pull the Lady Marche on top of him. One eye in the ruined face still glared with pain and hatred. Three muffled roars sounded as Daenek ran towards them, each shot sounding longer and longer, the last like a rumble from below the ground.
He fell onto his knees and jerked the gun away from the Lady Marche’s stomach. It spun out of the guard’s hand, clattering on the floor behind them. The guard’s fingers spread in the final release of death, mirrored in the one dulling eye.
“Lady,” moaned Daenek. He cradled her shoulders in one arm and desperately pressed his other hand to her stomach. The blood welled out between his fingers.
“What does it matter . . . if an old woman dies,” she muttered, almost too soft to hear. Her eyes wandered away from Daenek’s face. “What was I so afraid of . . .”
He could say nothing, but silently supported her shoulders, those of an old woman, against himself.
“No time for that . . .” Her voice was a little louder. “The stick is useless now . . . leave it . . . take the gun. And the equine . . . go—”
“I—” began Daenek, then he compressed his lips and nodded.
“Where?”
“Where?” A small laugh that ended in a gasp, her eyes squeezed shut with pain. “Go anywhere. You’re the son of a thane.” Her eyes filled with tears as she looked at him. One of her pale hands reached inside her clothing, then slowly pulled out a small chain of fine links. A tiny square of white metal dangled from it.
“There was so much—to tell you,” she said, her voice fading again. “But now . . . I’ve forgotten, and it’s too late.” The chain fell across Daenek’s wrist, the links miring in blood.
She was suddenly heavier in his arms. He laid her onto the floor a little distance from that of the guard. He stood up and, without thinking, looked over the room until he found the gun against the bottom of the stairway. Picking it up, his first thought pierced the numbness. She waited until the others were far enough away. So they wouldn’t hear the shots. The wet redness on the gunmetal ran, mixing with a few drops of salt water.
Chapter VI
The equine seemed to sense the urgency in its new rider, and ran over the trail through the hills with its mane streaming towards the dust that flew up from its hooves.
Daenek’s legs were shorter than the dead guard’s had been, so that he had to keep them tightly clamped against the animal’s sides. For the first few miles, every motion had jolted him painfully up and down in the saddle. At last he found the way to move with the equine as it ran. It was stupid but well trained, more responsive to him and less skittish than it had been with its former master.
The trail ended at the edge of a little stream at the foot of the hill. Daenek pulled on the reins, halting the equine. Its hooves splashed the shallow water into spray, and then it lowered its sweating head to drink. Twisting around in the saddle, Daenek
looked back at the hillside they had just descended. Beyond its boulder-crested top, on the opposite slope, was the house with two corpses inside it. Further on, in the valley, the subthane and his men were probably roistering in the single inn of the stone-cutters’ village.
Daenek took from his jacket pocket the chain that the Lady Marche had given him. A key, he thought, looking at the little square of white metal. That’s what it is. He slipped the chain over his head and then tucked the pendant inside his shirt. The fine metal links felt cool and liquid on his neck.
Digging his heels into the equine’s ribs, he reined it around to face upstream. As the hooves thudded along the water’s bank, he thought about where he was heading. And after that? I’ll think about that when I have to.
There was still light when he reached the monastery, but the setting sun tinged the cluster of low buildings a dull red. As the equine trotted down the path leading out of the surrounding hills, Daenek heard the bell that was mounted on a little platform inside the walled courtyard. It rang seven times and then a robed figure walked away from it towards the central building.
Daenek had come across the monastery before, in the times he had spent wandering. That had been more than a year ago, but he had kept the location fresh in his memory, planning for the day he would seek it out with a purpose.
He halted the equine at the aged wooden gate and dismounted. The wall, made of crude earthen bricks, was too high for him to see over. He pounded with his fist on the gate, stopped and listened, then pounded again until he heard the odd, slightly different from human, footsteps of one of the priests striding across gravel.
The gate swung away from him and the priest’s impassive face, shrouded by the cowl of its robe, looked out at Daenek. “We offer no shelter, traveller,” it spoke in its flat, uninflected voice. “But for your soul. So ride on if you would escape the storm that approaches.” It motioned with its hand toward the dark clouds filling half the sky.
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