Knight Tenebrae

by Julianne Lee

  It did. A wood pile lay tumbled in the yard, and a goat grazed nearby. Chickens pecked at the dirt or roosted here and there, according to their mood. As he and Miss Pawlowski approached, the tiny wooden door of the house opened and a ragged man ducked out through the low frame. When he saw them he stopped cold, unmoving for a long moment. He seemed half-dressed, hairy legs bare beneath a tunic sort of garment belted at the waist. There were no shoes on his feet. The mouse-brown hair was shaggy, and his face bore a two-day growth of beard.

  Alex raised his hand in greeting and said, “Hi. You all wouldn’t have a phone here, would you?” He could have answered his own question, for there were no wires to the house and no poles anywhere that he could see.

  The Scottish man’s jaw fell open, and he uttered something completely incomprehensible to Alex, who then looked to Miss Pawlowski to interpret for her countryman.

  But a puzzled frown creased her forehead, and her head tilted. “Pardon?”

  The short speech was repeated, and she replied, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Gaelic.”

  Then the man said something else, and Alex thought he heard the word “welcome” in there somewhere, an impression strengthened by the gesture toward the door of the hovel. His was the most heavily accented English Alex had ever heard. Normally he could glean meaning from just about any dialect, but this was gibberish to him. He murmured to Miss Pawlowski, “Is this one of those places where they get people to actually live like they did in the past? There’s one in upstate New York like that, where they’ve got sheep and stuff.”

  Miss Pawlowski said something to the Scot in that same odd accent, and Alex couldn’t make heads or tails from it. Then she smiled and said, “He’s speaking Middle English.” By her voice he could tell she was impressed by it.

  “Seriously?”

  She nodded.

  “How do you know?”

  “I’m a journalist: words are my life. My course of study at university was the English language, and I had a full year of medieval literature. I’ve read Chaucer in the original and had to memorize and recite parts of The Canterbury Tales out loud. It’s not that far off from modern English; the variant vocabulary can be picked up like slang, and once you get past the appallingly archaic accent it becomes perfectly understandable.”

  “Well, you know, engineering major though I was, I’ve studied literature, too, and can’t make out what he’s saying.”

  “We were required to hear it spoken, and were taught something of how to converse in it ourselves. It’s different from simply reading it.”

  “Ah.”

  She turned to the ragged man, and said something that included the word “telephone.” But that only brought a puzzled squint even though she made a handset gesture to her ear when she said it. Then she said, “You do speak modern English, don’t you?”

  The man said something like, “Ye beent me rrayt welcome herteleh.” He gestured to the house again. “Ah leck rrayt nowt fa soper.” He nodded toward the door, where Alex now noticed a woman looking out. Three small children crowded at her feet to see the strangers, all of them dirty and ragged.

  Alex said, half to himself, “You know, that’s serious verité.”

  Miss Pawlowski said to the man, “This is a fascinating thing you’re doing. Is it an anthropological experiment?”

  The man repeated his gesture, this time with a measure of frustration.

  She said to Alex, “I think he’s inviting us to eat with him.” Then she repeated her request for a phone, and still got only a puzzled face. The man came to herd them into the house. They went, not knowing what else to do.

  Inside, the house was as authentic as it was outside. Not a sign of modernity. The hearth was a flat, gray stone at one end of the room, the fire vented through a hole in the ceiling, and over it was spitted a piece of meat that looked like a leg of something. It was still pink, but was beginning to smell pretty good, the greasy, smoky aroma permeating the room. Alex’s stomach rumbled and reminded him it was time for lunch.

  For furniture there were only a table and a few stools, and off in a dark corner Alex could see a stack of rough-hewn wooden bunk beds. Wooden boxes stood along the walls, heaped with belongings. The floor was dirt, scattered with dead grass and ferns that had been trampled to mush underfoot. He and Miss Pawlowski were offered two of the stools, and they sat at the table. Perched, really, for the stool Alex sat on was nearly too rickety to hold his weight. With care, he balanced so to avoid a collapse. Miss Pawlowski continued talking to the man, and Alex watched his passenger’s face as she chattered but was only able to snag a word here and there. He smelled the meat on the spit and the grease that dripped from it and flared in the fire. But what should have been a homey scene only disturbed him. There was something wrong. The very realness of this family gave him the creeps.

  Miss Pawlowski continued trying to communicate with the family, particularly the man, who didn’t seem to understand much of what she said. He frowned and repeated himself often, and his barely contained patience with Lindsay’s lack of fluency with the language showed in his voice. Her hands were all over the place, gesturing in attempts to supplement her vocabulary.

  At one point she muttered to Alex, “He keeps calling me ‘boy.’ It’s beginning to annoy me.”

  Alex sure couldn’t see how she could be mistaken for a boy, but nodded to the woman in the long, ragged dress and said, “Maybe he’s a religious nut and thinks anyone wearing pants must be male.”

  “Oh, he’s an odd one, all right. He’s saying all sorts of strange things.” Then she addressed the man again.

  Alex could see communication was happening nevertheless. Every so often a light would go on in the man’s eyes as understanding came. Then he would frown again when she asked another question. As Alex watched Miss Pawlowski talk to the family, he noticed her begin to grow pale.

  “Now he’s telling me his first wife was killed by the English ten years ago. She was raped and then cut open with daggers, stem to stern, and left to die. She was then burnt, along with their house. He was made to watch, then they let him go. He says for a long time he would rather have died with his wife, but now he lives to see the English all killed.”

  Alex peered at the guy, who appeared to be sincerely grieving for a murdered wife, sagging, old eyes glistening with unshed tears. “The English? I thought you all were one big country.”

  “I suppose he blames all English for the actions of one criminal. But daggers, though.” Her eyes darted around the room, and rested often on the children who were now playing and talking among themselves on the dirt floor. At one point she addressed them. “Hello,” she said with a bright smile. “What are your names?” They only stared blankly at her, eyes wide and mouths open, until she repeated herself in the archaic English. Then they each replied with their names: William, Catharine, and James.

  Alex was even more unsettled now. The children spoke Middle English, but not modern English? That was way more than verité. There was something very warped about that, even more warped than telling stories about English murderers with daggers.

  Meanwhile, Miss Pawlowski grew more walleyed and apprehensive. As she spoke to the man again, her tone became more pointed and soon her voice was wobbly. She was plainly shaken.

  “What’s wrong?” Alex asked.

  She raised a finger for him to wait a moment, asked one more question of the Scottish man, and on his reply she stood. “Alex, come.”

  “What?” He would rather have stayed for lunch. Or dinner, depending on when that meat would be ready.

  “Just come with me.” Her voice was trembling, and she was now as pale as anyone he’d ever seen. Rather than argue in front of these people, he followed her from the house and trotted to catch up with her as she plunged into the forest down the trail.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Something has happened.”

  “Yeah. Our plane went down for no apparent reason, and we can’t find a phone.
”

  “We can’t find a phone because there aren’t any.”

  “Well, no. we’re going to have to walk some more—”

  “No, there aren’t any. Anywhere.”

  “No phones in—”

  “Anywhere. Something has happened. I don’t know what.” They came out on the pasture again, and she stopped to look around. The surrounding mountains were still and green, and the pasture sloped gently to the forest opposite. Other than some birds in the distance, nothing moved. “Listen.”

  Alex listened, but heard nothing and shrugged. “Listen to what? I don’t hear anything.”

  “Exactly. You hear nothing whatsoever. No engines, nothing. No planes in the sky. When was the last time you looked up in the sky and didn’t see a plane somewhere overhead?”

  “I’m a pilot, ma’am.”

  “All right, if you were the average person, would you have ever not seen a plane overhead?”

  He thought about it, then shuddered. “September 11, 2001.”

  “Right. One single day. An empty sky is strange and unnatural, because we’re accustomed to seeing planes every day. Do you see any here? Have you seen any since we got here?”

  He looked up, and felt that same uneasiness he’d felt four years ago when all commercial air traffic had been grounded for several days. An uneasiness akin to the realization he’d made of the children in that weird house.

  Miss Pawlowski continued, “Smell the air. Take a deep breath and tell me if you don’t think it smells different. Did you happen to see any roads while we were parachuting down? I didn’t.”

  Alex shook his head. No roads.

  “There should have been roads. That over there is Garnock River. I asked, and that man confirmed it. But there is no road near it. There’s no indication there ever was a road. And there are no houses. We’re supposed to be near Glasgow. There should be houses here. People. Lots of people. Right along in here there should be condominiums on that hill there.” She pointed. “I remember them.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “You saw the plane go down. You saw where it was headed.”

  “A small bay.”

  “The Firth of Clyde.” She paused a moment to let that sink in, but it only puzzled him.

  “Yeah. So?”

  “Remember the medieval F-18?”

  A charge skittered up his spine as he remembered, but he said nothing.

  She continued, “That man in there just told me the year is 1306. That plane they found, more than five centuries old, was piloted by a lieutenant. It was painted on the side.” She reached out and poked his chest with an insistent finger, punctuating each word as she spoke. “I’m betting it originally said Lieutenant Alexander MacNeil. It was your name and rank painted on the side of that plane.”

  “But that doesn’t mean—”

  “They found the plane before it was crashed. Explain that.”

  Of course, he couldn’t. Except, “It’s not my plane.”

  “So the United States Navy loses a lot of aircraft in Scottish waters? I suppose, though, that over the centuries the numbers can add up.”

  “But that’s just—”

  “Nuts. I know. It’s madness. It’s...” Her voice trailed off as something behind Alex caught her eye and she looked away from him. He turned to see, and was astonished to find men on horseback coming from the trees at the other side of the pasture. At this distance they weren’t particularly identifiable, but even so Alex could see they weren’t ordinary riders. For one thing, they were all men. Alex had never in his life seen a group of pleasure riders with no women along. For another, the horses were fitted with faceplates, and the men wore dark chain mail. They carried painted shields that shone brightly in spite of the overcast day. And when they spotted him and Miss Pawlowski, instead of minding their own business as most pleasure riders would have done, they veered toward the two on foot and kicked into a gallop.

  Alex said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  Chapter Two

  Alex pulled Miss Pawlowski by her arm toward the trees nearby, and they plunged along a path into the thick forest. He reached for his sidearm and quickly pulled the slide to chamber a round as they ran.

  But the woman grabbed his arm and dug in her heels to hold him back. “Wait! Do you have any bandages in those pockets?”

  He turned to her. “Are you hurt?”

  “No. But I need bandages. Gauze or elastic, it doesn’t matter.’

  Puzzled and impatient, he thought quickly. “I’ve got a first aid kit; I think it’s got an elastic one.” The thud of hooves approached in the distance.

  “Give it to me.”

  “Why?”

  “Just give it to me.” Her outstretched hand waved and urged him to hurry.

  He sighed and reached into his left shin pocket for the kit, and opened it one-handed. She snatched the bandage from it, and unzipped her flight suit. “What are you doing?” he asked. The hoofbeats came closer, and he raised his gun in that direction while hoping the riders would pass them by in the dense forest.

  She didn’t reply, but doffed her black T-shirt and bra. The bra she tossed into a mass of ferns, and suddenly Alex was presented with her two luscious breasts. “Help me.” She unwound the bandage and laid the end across her nipples. “Help me bind these.”

  “Why?” He looked away and busied himself restoring the kit to his shin pocket, lest his brain turn to mush. Now was not the time.

  “Nobody with a choice would want to be a woman right now. You heard what that man said about his wife. I’m not wearing a dress; I’ve got to make them think I’m a man or I’ll be a target.”

  He looked back at the approaching riders. “I think they’ll be less likely to hurt you if they know you’re a woman.”

  She waved a hand to catch his attention, then drew it to her and leaned in to emphasize her words. “I’m not wearing a dress. If those guys are as medieval as I think they are, they’ll hurt me just for that. I’ve got to pass for a boy, at least until I can figure out what to do.”

  “How are you going to convince them of that?” Just then he couldn’t imagine it.

  “I won’t if you don’t help me bind these flat. Hurry!”

  He reholstered his pistol and stepped behind her to help wind the bandage around her chest. He secured it with its two flimsy metal clasps, then helped her restore her T-shirt and flight suit. The instant she was somewhat pulled together, he grabbed her hand and hauled her along, deeper into the forest. She zipped her flight suit as she ran. “Knife. Give me your knife.” He handed over his survival knife, and she started whacking off her hair to shoulder length.

  Alex turned his attention to the approaching riders who had now reached the edge of the forest. “They’re coming.” There was crashing through the underbrush, and he could hear the heavy, snorting breaths of the horses. He stopped, reached for his sidearm once more, and prepared to hold them off.

  But at that moment a shout came from within the forest ahead, and more riders bore down on them from the other direction. Alex retrieved his knife, pocketed it, then pulled Miss Pawlowski off the path and into a grassy clearing. Behind them, the two groups of horsemen clashed, horses bellowing, weapons and shields ringing. Swords whirled and clanged. Alex caught a glimpse of a mace wielded with deadly force. Wounded horses screamed and men shouted angrily as they tried to kill each other.

  Alex guided his charge away from the fighting, but a member of the first group broke away from the fray and spurred his horse to follow them. “Go,” he ordered, and shoved her into a thicket. Then he turned, leveled the muzzle of his pistol, and shouted, “Stop!”

  The rider in chain mail kept coming at a gallop, and hauled back his sword to strike.

  Alex dodged, and dove to the ground. The sword whacked a fern behind him. Leaves blew every which way. He uttered a vulgarism as he rolled away from the horse and scrambled to his feet in a thicket of the large, curling ferns. Behind him the rider wh
eeled and his horse reared. He shouted something, and when Alex turned to face him the visage inside the helmet was twisted and snarling, red-faced and ugly. The horse pulled up, and the attacker dismounted as casually as if he weren’t wearing a shirt of mail over a tunic and under his flowing surcoat. He circled his broadsword like a windmill and stepped toward Alex.

  “Stop, I said!” Alex lifted the muzzle of the gun and squeezed off a warning shot, but though the attacker flinched at the noise and his glance flitted for a moment, he didn’t stop coming. Alex didn’t want to shoot the guy, but it was beginning to look like there was no other way to teach him what a gun was. His mouth a hard line, he lowered his aim and fired at a leg.

  Blood sprayed. The man in mail bellowed and spun, but didn’t fall. He straightened and came on, the shot having done nothing but give him a limp and anger him more.

  “Whoa!” Alex backed away a few steps, his gun still aimed. “Don’t make me kill you, man!”

  In response to Alex’s retreat the attacker whirled his broadsword again, shouting what must have been curses on Alex and possibly several centuries of his ancestry, and limped toward Alex. Then he hauled back with the sword and assaulted at a run. There was no longer any choice. Alex took aim and fired straight into his face at close range.

  The helmet, hit from the inside, flew off like a champagne cork and the attacker’s head exploded in a rain of gore and brain and skull. He collapsed to the ground in a heap. Alex lowered his pistol and groaned as he stared at the corpse, transfixed.

  It was ugly. Blood ran in rivulets from the ruined skull and soaked into the ground. Alex had killed people before, or at least assumed he had, but had always attacked from too much distance to see who’d been in the way of his missiles and nose gun. He’d had friends, uncles, and cousins who had died in crashes or were shot down or blown up, but had never seen death this close.

  Now, as he stared at this body on the ground, a coldness came over him. Anger rose at the stupid sonofabitch who hadn’t respected the gun. Hadn’t even known what it was. The sword was just as dangerous, for dead was dead and the guy surely had intended to kill him with it; there had been no choice but to shoot. Alex ejected the clip, then emptied the chamber to put the round back into the clip, the clip back into the pistol, and slipped the weapon into a pocket of his flight suit. He jettisoned the holster, knowing now he could never use the pistol as a deterrent. In fact, the thing had made him appear unarmed and had actually invited the assault. It put him at a palpable disadvantage in a world where the sword was state of the art weaponry. In the future he could only draw it if he was already committed to kill. There were ten rounds left in the clip, and Alex hoped he would never fire them.