He unbuckled his belt and took off his boots. The touch of the water on his feet was agony but he forced himself to stand, unsteady on the slippery rocks beneath the shallow flow. He watched the dirt and blood billow and mingle with the water, quickly lost in the enthusiastic stream. He imagined a purifying experience.
He heard the girl approaching just in time to get the glove back onto his hand.
Otto scuttled from behind Gregor’s gravestone and picked up his sack. He knew what he had seen. He took the long way back to the village.
Gunter pinched the skin above his eyes, his hand clasping together at the bridge of his sharp nose. He shook the ash from his clothes and, wiping his eyes again, looked around the cottage. Breakfast. No Anja. No Dagmar. He took a knife from the roof beam and began to eat the spiced tomatoes. He tried to remember the conversation of the previous evening. Had he gone so far as to mention Otto’s name? That was unworthy.
Gunter had long disliked the butcher and declined to eat his meat, preferring to kill and smoke his own, but he had no evidence that the man was a murderer. What had possessed him to tell a witch hunter? Dagmar had been talking about mutations caused by exposure to Chaos he had had experience with and had mentioned that such a man might become extremely fat but otherwise remain normal. That did fit Otto’s description.
Gunter had to admit that the Tilean wine was mostly to blame for the liberties he had taken. It was not fair to his guest, who seemed to be a decent man, to burden him with wild suspicions.
Gunter lurched to his feet like a becalmed ship which suddenly finds the wind, and went off in search of Dagmar.
* * *
Anja sat on a dry rock in the stream and listened intently to Dagmar’s story. The man was charming, there was no doubt of that, and appeared to be well recovered, almost impossibly so, from his illness of the previous day. There was colour in his cheeks and his beard seemed to have grown overnight.
Dagmar was standing solemnly on the bank of the stream in mock concentration as he related an apocryphal tale about an acolyte of the Temple of Verena in Nuln. The story was convoluted but Dagmar told it faithfully and well, keeping his face serious until the punch-line, which made them both laugh.
Dagmar bent double, exaggerating his laughter and slipped on the muddy bank. He fell heavily on his right arm and his face screwed up in pain. Anja pounced across onto the bank and helped him to sit. Her face was a flag of concern. A great deal of blood stained the sling she had made and she could see bone sticking through the skin below the elbow. He held her away with his good arm, which was surprisingly strong, like a man shielding himself from the sun.
Eventually she calmed him down and they both sat together on the bank. When she went to put her head on his good shoulder, he let her.
Gunter stood on the bridge and gouged the moss of the low stone rail with his knuckles. He felt the water flow beneath his feet and felt the blood flow through his body. He made himself breathe the air as he watched them. Gunter remembered how he felt when he saw Anja dance with other men on Taal’s Day. He stood there for some time.
When he finally managed to uproot himself from the bridge and make his way down through the trees to the stream he walked noisily, so they might hear him and untwine by the time he reached them. Gunter completely forgot his purpose in seeking Dagmar.
Anja met him as he emerged from the trees, smoothing her dress and pulling leaves from her hair. She matched his gaze and her eyes danced.
Dagmar stared into the stream and cradled his right arm like a babe. Gunter could have sworn he was talking to it.
When Anja had gone, the two men looked at each other for a moment, the kind of moment which might be the prelude to anything. As it was, Gunter suggested that they go together to examine the tracks at the place where Gregor was killed.
Otto knocked on the door again. He was sure someone was in there. This was the one time he had ever been desperate enough to call on the help of the militiaman. He was dismayed when the door was opened not by Gunter, but by his harlot.
* * *
Dagmar stood behind Gunter as he crouched over the tracks, pointing at various features which he had indicated with muddy sticks in the turf. They stood like a blighted forest, marking the last steps taken by the man called Gregor.
Gunter was trying to understand how Gregor could have been ambushed by the mutant in such an open area as, apparently, he was always a careful man.
Gunter did not suggest that Gregor might have been very drunk on that night. Perhaps the bottle he had found did not fit the fiction of the man’s death which Gunter was trying to write in muddy characters on the killing ground.
Dagmar suggested that perhaps Gregor had been the attacker and the mutant had merely tried to defend himself. Gunter was vehemently opposed to the suggestion.
Dagmar explained to Gunter his own version of the tracks. He moved some of Gunter’s markers with his good arm, showing exactly where the mutant had been surprised, where Gregor had picked up a stick, and where the broken halves of the stick now lay, stained with the mutant’s blood. He finished by showing where the mutant had finally fought back and where the body had fallen.
Gunter concluded that Gregor must have been drunk to be so foolhardy.
I am trying to tell you. I am amongst you. I am Chaos. Destroy me.
Anja sat on Gunter’s bed and stared into the fire. She had heard what the butcher had had to say, heard his testimony about the scaled hand of the witch hunter. She had asked him what business he had had in the graveyard but Otto had pressed his case. The man, apparently, had red-green scales on his right hand below the wrist—a sure mark of Chaos. The fat butcher had pointed out how badly the man’s clothes fitted him, how he was clearly not a natural rider of that perfect stallion.
Anja had listened to all of this and she saw that it might be true. She promised Otto she would fetch Gunter, and told him to retire to his cottage and wait for them. Then she sat in the dark and tried to recall the taste of the man’s breath, as it had been on the bank of the stream.
She tried to remember the taste of decay, of corruption, but she could remember nothing but the sound of the stream and the look in his eyes.
Gunter came slowly back to the house as the burning galleon of the sun sank behind the Grey Mountains. He thought about what Dagmar had said, how he had shown him a different way of looking at the signs in the mud. How he had forced him to see the truth which had all the time been set before his eyes.
More than ever, Gunter felt he was in a great library, like the one he had seen in Middenheim, where all the knowledge of the world was kept and yet he could not read a word of it. He walked past the waiting pyre and smelt the oil. A small group of Kurtbad residents stood about it, like birds of prey who anticipate a kill. Gunter felt it too and began to trot back to his cottage.
Anja was waiting at the open door for him, a sight which grasped his heart. She brought him inside and after looking to see that he was alone, she closed the door. She told him: I have found the killer.
Dagmar stood on the slope above the village in the struggling light. He looked at the cottages and their hearth-fires which sent up vines of smoke from holes in the thatch. He imagined the meals being prepared. There would perhaps be children, certainly animals, underfoot. There would be both happiness and unhappiness in those cottages. He hated them, every one. I am hatred.
Except her. He thought of her by the stream. Reflected sunlight splashing her face, cooling her eyes. He thought of the way their faces had touched.
How can you not smell it on my breath?
He shattered the picture with the mallet of his hatred.
How dare she?
Do not touch me.
Doesn’t she know what she’s done to me?
He pulled off his right glove and shook his arm free of the sling. As he flexed it he felt blood course through it and the cuts at his wrist opened again and bled freely.
There is poison in my blood.
/> How dare she?
I am a killer.
I am Chaos.
I will show her.
He drew the witch hunter’s sword from the witch hunter’s belt and strode down the hill, I have changed my mind. I will not die. I will live as I am and I am as I will.
Gunter surveyed the assembled crowd. Fifteen or so men and boys had gathered in the gloom. Each carried a weapon of some kind, many carried torches which they lit from the coals of Gunter’s fire. Anja sat on the bed and said nothing.
Gunter gave his last instructions and the group moved out. Gunter led them. He was the only man with military training and although they felt they knew their quarry, who could tell what strength the curse of Chaos could lend to a man? They were not scared—there were too many of them for that—but there was a thrill which ran through them as they moved closer. They spoke of revenge and justice, though not one was thinking of Gregor.
Gunter gripped his sword and strained his eyes in the dark. He thanked Sigmar that Anja was safe, having come so close to danger. Images of the library returned to him but Gunter no longer needed to read.
Anja heard him coming. He was walking loudly and didn’t seem to know anything about the mob. She stood behind the door and cancelled her breath while he tried the handle.
Dagmar staggered into the room and she saw that his left hand held a sword. His right hand hung at his side, the fingers moving, almost as if he was not aware of it. It looked as if the first two and second two fingers were in the process of fusing and they did not move independently. Perhaps that was why he no longer wore the glove.
“Dagmar?”
He turned on her like a cornered boar and she saw his face contorted by pain and rage. She brought the iron firestick down on his left hand and the sword bounced off the flagstones.
He moaned, No, growled in pain and sank to the floor. He looked at her. Tears of black blood streamed from his eyes.
Gunter gave the signal and the mob moved forward. They had trapped the murderer in the house and all that remained was to apprehend him. As far as they knew, he was alone. Hardly surprising. By all accounts, Chaos carried a stench that was enough to make a soldier cry.
Gunter steadied himself and kicked the door with his mercenary’s boot. It gave way easily and he almost fell into the room. The sole inhabitant of the cottage leapt up in shock, banging his head on one of the butcher’s tools which hung from the central beam. The mob piled in behind Gunter, pressing him forward.
Otto cowered away from them, but some spark of unworthy courage flared and he grabbed a cleaver. He wore no shirt and Gunter stared in disgust at the rolls of fat which hung over his linen breeches. The skin was pasty and white and the whole cottage smelt of dead flesh. Gunter disarmed the man with a chopping stroke to his right wrist. The mob grabbed him and silenced his protests.
Anja met them at the pyre. She held fresh torches in her hands. She watched without flinching as the unconscious Otto was lashed to the stake. It had been easy enough to convince Gunter. He had seen Otto many times with the blood of pigs on his hands. Such a man could kill. There was little distance between the butcher of Kurtbad and the Butcher of Kurtbad.
Otto was a hateful man and Anja told herself that the village would be better off without him.
Gunter was calling for the matter to be settled and judgement to be passed. The eyes of the crowd, hungry and violent, turned to where she stood, supporting Dagmar with her shoulder. His right arm was back in its sling and the hand was tightly bound with linen bandage.
She nudged him forward. Dagmar stepped into the torchlight. He smelled the oil. He looked at the circle of people, death in their faces. He turned to look at the fat butcher tied to the stake like a grub about to be roasted. He thought of the dead, drunk man, buried by the butcher in the graveyard. He thought of the witch hunter, stiffening beneath a pile of forest leaves. He thought of the militiaman, who surely knew and wondered why he stood there amongst the ignorant, blood-driven rabble.
He thought mostly of Anja, of what she had said to him, of how she had looked at him, of what she must have seen when she did, and of how she had again brought him back to himself. He tried to imagine what might happen after this night was over. Someone was forcing a torch into his left hand.
He spread his damaged fingers apart and held the wood as if in a claw, between thumb and forefinger. He hesitated. He asked the crowd: Why should this man die?
The crowd told him: He is Chaos. Destroy him.
Dagmar’s right arm twitched and stretched against the fabric of the sling. Anja touched him gently with her fingers, a reassuring squeeze. The sling tore and scales backhanded her away.
Dagmar leapt onto the pile of oil-slicked logs. He looked at the men and women with their torches and their murderous fear.
We are so much the same, and so different.
The butcher tried to lift his head. Dagmar thrust the torch into the logs and a forest of flames sprang up. Otto screamed and Dagmar howled. He embraced the fat man and locked his claw hands around the back of the stake.
The people of Kurtbad drew back from the thick, fetid smoke and the stench of decay. All except Anja, who stood in the glow of the flames and wept gently, her tears mingling with blood from a cut on her cheek.
Gunter dragged her away, put himself between her and the flames.
Dagmar’s body melted like a candle as if the blaze inside him was hotter than the fire of oil and sticks. It took longer for the butcher to die.
I am burning now as I will burn then.
* * *
Though Kurtbad remained a single stitch on the merchant’s map it was never the same town. Some believed that they could always smell the stench of the mutant on the common. Chaos had touched them, they said, and that was the reason the crops were poor. The lonely gibbet was demolished and the wood used to make a new sheep pen.
Gunter tried to resign his post but he was forced to stay by the people who said that now they truly understood the gravity of the threat. He tried to learn to read. Anja left the town on the black stallion with the silver hooves, which she was said to have sold for a fair price in the market at Nuln. She never returned to Kurtbad, either with a child or a brand on her arm.
SON AND HEIR
Ian Winterton
“By the grace of the Lady!” The Grail Knight’s voice echoed throughout the forest clearing. The heads of the four beastmen at the entrance to the shrine turned to look at him, claws reaching for weapons. Drawing his own blade, Sir Gilles Ettringer, Knight of the Grail and champion of Baron Gregory de Chambourt, spurred his steed towards the hated abominations. How dare they tread upon this holy place?
Though righteous anger burned in his heart, he did not let it consume nor cloud his mind, for he was a loyal servant of the Lady of the Lake. Nourished by the water of the holy chalice, his soul was as strong and sure as the steel in his mailed hand. These defilers would pay dearly for their trespass.
The first was dispatched before it even had chance to bring its sword to bear. The second’s head, that of a half-starved dog, flew from its shoulders, crashing into the undergrowth.
A goat-headed enemy came at him from the side, baring foam-flecked teeth, scrawny arm preparing to throw a crude spear. Sir Gilles tugged sharply at the reins, sinking his spurs deep into his mount, and manoeuvred it round. The warhorse, rocking forward onto sturdy forelegs, kicked sharply backwards, its iron-clad hooves snapping the beastman’s neck.
A spiked mace was swung vainly. Sir Gilles brought his shield up, absorbing the blow, then flicked his blade deftly out, its point sinking for a fatal second into the breast of his final foe.
Hardly out of breath, Sir Gilles surveyed the carnage he had wrought. The only sound was the pounding of his horse’s hooves as it pawed the blood-soaked ground.
Darkness came prematurely to this part of the forest, the sun blocked out by the plateau that was Sir Gilles’ home. Though the base of the Chambourt was only an hour’s ride dist
ant, to be alone in the forest at this time was far from desirable, even for a warrior of his stature.
Before he could resume his journey, there was something he had to be sure of.
Armour clanking, Sir Gilles dismounted. He raised the visor on his helm, revealing the face of a middle-aged man, lined and white-whiskered. He walked towards the entrance of the shrine and knew immediately that his task was not yet over.
From inside he could hear the buzzing of flies.
Lying at the heart of Bretonnia, the Chambourt was a vast shelf nestling in the foothills of the Orcal Massif, thrusting high above the crag-filled oaks of the Forest of Charons.
From the window of his chamber, the baron gazed out at his realm with a contented heart. Set against the monotonous, cloud-wisped expanse of the forest, the Chambourt glowed beneath the last rays of the setting sun. Squares of corn caught the fading sunlight, intersected with pasture, dotted with healthy cattle. Irrigated orchards flanked the river that flowed down from the snow-capped peaks of the Massif, cutting a life-giving path through the land.
There was a light knock at the door.
“Enter,” the baron said, turning from the window.
Pagnol, his ageing manservant, shuffled into the room, gaze respectfully averted. The baron shuttered the window.
“The banquet hall is prepared, my liege,” said the old man. “We wait only for your presence.”
“Any word from Sir Gilles?”
“No, my lord. He has not yet returned.”
Taking a robe from his bed, the baron fastened it at his shoulder and stepped towards the doorway, held open by the faithful Pagnol. “No matter. It is not to be helped.”
Tales of the Old World Page 87
