Knight Tenebrae

by Julianne Lee

  Alex thought about that for a moment, then said, “Uh, no. Not those guys. They’d probably want it to sleep on. Or for a winding sheet to bury one of their buddies. But I know you don’t want to sleep on a piece of linen; you’ve got a parachute for that. And you don’t have any dead buddies.” Yet.

  She stared at him for a moment, looking as if she were assessing his reply and making a decision. Then she said in a voice so low he could barely hear her, “I’ve been trying to keep my monthly cycle a secret, you understand.”

  “Ah.” He held up a palm to halt her explanation. “I do understand.”

  “I had a linen cloth I cut up, but I can’t wash the rags and reuse them because hanging them out to dry would be...indiscreet to say the least. So I’ve had to throw them away once they became, you know, unusable.” Her face was aflame with embarrassment, and she stared at a spot on the floor in front of her feet.

  “I said, I understand. I’ll get you some pieces of linen. We’ll carry them as bedsheets and you can cut them up as you need them, then throw them on the fire or bury them when you need to get rid of them.”

  “No, you don’t understand. I need help keeping clean. I can’t...” She blinked back some tears, then continued when she’d brought herself under control. “It’s extremely difficult to know I could be betrayed by a blood spot in the wrong place on my clothing. God knows what would happen to me if they found out.”

  He nodded. “Then we’ll have to see about arranging more opportunities to wash. And the linen. I’ll buy a big sheet of it.” With conscious effort, he made his voice go soft, trying to soothe her. “Do you need it right now?”

  She shook her head and sighed, and seemed to be calming down. Alex didn’t feel so calm himself, and wished he didn’t have to be involved in this. He didn’t know how she felt, and didn’t particularly want to know. He thought she was crazy to want to pass as a man. But he would do as she asked, just to keep her from flipping out. She cleared her throat, wiped her eyes, and said, “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” She turned to leave, but stopped to listen when he continued. “And incidentally, Lindsay. If one of the men had come to me asking for linen, I also would never have assumed he wanted it to make sanitary napkins.”

  For a long moment she considered that, then nodded. “Point taken.” Then she left the tent.

  Soon another siege was under way, this one at Linlithgow Castle, and Alex’s scouting detail was recalled and put to work on short, local patrols. Alex used the opportunity to drill his men-at-arms, and to learn how to wield a sword himself. Alex had never fenced, even at the Naval Academy, and now was guessing at what to do with his broadsword—which everybody called simply a “sword,” because they were all broad. Rapiers, sabers, and such hadn’t been developed yet. There were only “sword” and “great sword”—the claymore.

  Especially, he was clueless about how to handle the claymore. Only the top half of the blade was sharpened, so it was apparent that it was not for close-in combat. But beyond that, Alex was mystified. Lindsay had taken fencing in college, but had never before wielded anything broader than a narrow, edgeless, foiled sport saber. She guided him through some basics with the sword, but her advice was skimpy. Practicing with the men was extremely dangerous, for there were no leather foils to cover the sword edges and Alex had to learn quickly or risk serious injury. At first he only watched his men, as if he were judging their skills. Nobody knew he sought only to improve his own.

  Right away Alex observed why the claymore was sharpened only at the tip. He had been correct that the sword’s strength was in being able to whack hard and fast with the tip at a fair distance from one’s opponent, but there was far more to it than that. In the sparring sessions he saw guys use the blunt middle part of the sword like a staff. They held the blade and blocked with it, often hit with the pommel, and clothing could be snagged by the forward-tilted quatrefoil quillons to pull an opponent from a horse or yank him to the ground. That the function could be shifted so easily, sometimes without moving the dominant hand, made it a stunningly versatile weapon.

  Later, in drill himself, Alex faced off against his best knight who pushed him hard. Sir Cullan was older and far more experienced with a sword than nearly anyone in the unit. Now Alex found himself pitted against an aggressive and merciless wild Island Scot, and had to step lively just to keep his skin intact.

  Cullan had habitually angry eyes and a wicked grin as he sparred circles around Alex. “Ye fight like an Englishman!” He roared like a mad dog as he came at Alex and ended the exchange with a hard hit to the elbow with the flat of his blade.

  Alex nearly dropped his sword, and his face burned for it as he stumbled over tufts of grass in the pasture and backed away from further assault until feeling would return to his arm. Then he came back with a fury. He was the commander of this bunch, and needed to be better than this.

  Particularly with Lindsay watching him. Out of the corner of his eye he caught her lurking by a tree, observing him with Cullan, and it blew his concentration all to hell. He staggered backward after a particularly painful “touch” that shook his entire hauberk and sent tingly numbness to his shoulder, then came back with an aggressive attack. He couldn’t let this guy make a fool out of him.

  But fool he was, for several days. Struggling to make his broadsword an extension of his arm, he kept at it for hours on end, every morning and evening, sparring with whoever wasn’t on patrol at the time. His arm ached all the way to the center of his chest, and the pain kept him awake long into the night.

  After some days of having his armor clouted until his arms were purple and his thighs nearly too sore to hold him up, he finally began to catch on to observing his opponent. Cullan’s style was aggressive, but depended more on bluster than speed. Alex realized he had the reflexes to be quicker, and began to anticipate Cullan’s attacks. He sped up, even to becoming reckless. More sure of himself, he began to set the pace and Cullan couldn’t match him. Alex moved him across the practice field, and laughed aloud for the joy of winning. Now he hoped Lindsay was watching somewhere nearby. Glancing about, though, he didn’t see her. His attention returned to the task at hand, and he forced her from his mind.

  Over the weeks, as Alex got to know his men better, he came to realize they needed some instruction in discipline in order to respond to his modern command style. He also needed to adjust that style to recognize the men he was dealing with had no concept of “military” as he knew it. The fifty knights each had pride of position, however low that rank might be, and he had to acknowledge it or lose them. He also had to acknowledge that each knight had rights over his own squires. Each squire was a knight-hopeful and would do pretty much what he was told, but Alex had to be certain the protocol was observed. A messy and complex thing when the squires barely outnumbered the knights and were sometimes needed to function as a group. Often a knight would decline to pass along an order or would not make a squire available for a particular duty, and that would leave Alex pissed off and unable to respond effectively without starting a fistfight.

  But men were men in any century, and commanding respect as well as obedience was something he’d been taught in the Navy. Over the weeks the problems grew fewer as he earned the regard of his men and learned where their emotional buttons were.

  Then there was Lindsay. She confused him. Not that he’d never seen a woman in a combat role before; women had been flying combat in the Navy since the mid-nineties and he’d flown with them since his earliest days of naval flight training. But this with Lindsay was completely different. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t think of her as one of the guys. With every cell in his body, with every sense, every feeling, he perceived her as a woman, and she was the strongest, most fascinating woman he’d ever known.

  Lurking during training, he sometimes watched her spar with her mace among the other squires, and the sight made him want to throw her to the ground and take her right there. Or at least to try, and the p
ossibility she might hurt him for it made the prospect that much more intriguing. She moved like a panther, quick and lithe, in complete command of her body, and though the men she sparred with gave her no ground she held her own more often than not. Sometimes she bested them. Watching her struggle against the other squires turned him on in ways he’d never thought possible for a straight guy.

  At night they shared a real tent now. It wasn’t large, but it was well made of heavy material that caught the wind a bit less efficiently than the parachute and kept out more of the cold at night. The top was blue and its corner points ended in tethers for real pegs instead of rocks, and the sides were white with abstract blue designs. Alex thought it rather conspicuous out in the countryside, but his fellow knights seemed to consider it very stylish and it was certainly less obvious from afar than the red-and-orange parachute.

  Alex and Lindsay now used both parachutes for bedding atop thin straw pallets, and so they slept separately. Though Alex took on a second squire to maintain his increasing number of horses, that squire slept in a second tent for the sake of keeping Lindsay’s secret.

  She’d relaxed about that, as well. The linen rags seemed to have done the trick, and Alex could see in the way she walked and carried herself she was no longer paranoid about spots on her clothing or other little things that might betray her. She began reading at odd moments a little book bound in leather and tied with a thong. He found her hunched over it one night, sitting by the fire and leaning in to see the pages by the flickering light.

  Alex was on his way into the tent, but paused and said, “How come I never see you writing in that journal?”

  She glanced up at him and held it out for him to see. “This isn’t my journal. That would be a small spiral notebook I don’t let anyone see for obvious reasons. This is a book someone gave me.”

  Alex looked, and found the smallish pages covered in fine, perfectly even script and illuminated by small but intricate drawings. “What is it?”

  “Psalms.”

  “Someone just handed it over to you?”

  Instead of the casual reply he’d expected for this small-talk conversation, she gazed into the fire for a moment before answering. When she finally spoke, what she said surprised him. “Do you believe in faeries?”

  He sure didn’t know how to reply to that. ‘You mean, as in effeminate men?”

  She chuckled. “No. As in wee folk. Magical beings.”

  “Well, there was that one guy we saw. I assume he wasn’t standard-issue human, what with those pointy ears and all.” Alex sat on the ground next to her, the better to talk without being overheard, even though nobody in this century seemed to be able to catch on to their modern language.

  “I don’t have a clue about him, but I received this book from a woman who called herself Danu. She said she was what we would call a faerie.”

  Again Alex was at a loss for how to reply. It crossed his mind Lindsay had lost her sanity, but there was the book in her hands that had certainly come from somewhere. He pointed to it with his chin and said, “A faerie gave you a book of psalms? Isn’t that a little weird?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe she thought it was what I needed at the time. She didn’t stick around long; I don’t know very much about her. She simply handed me this, told me all would be well, then disappeared.”

  He reached for the book to see it and said, “You read Latin?”

  She shook her head. “No, it’s in English. Modern English, in fact. Though I’m certain it’s copied and illuminated by hand. See?”

  Alex was quite surprised to be able to read the page she’d held open. “Huh.” Yet again he was at a loss for words and wondered if she’d slipped a gear. She must have had this with her when they crashed. “That’s...something else.”

  “It was quite a shock, I assure you. So much has happened to us in the past couple of months, I hardly know what to think anymore.”

  “How come she didn’t show herself to me?”

  “I’ve not the slightest idea. How come that fellow we saw in the knoll never spoke to me? Nor even looked at me, as if I weren’t even there. I can’t say. I just know I’m glad to have this.”

  That was something, at least. If it made her feel better, he was all for it. “Good.” A yawn took him, and he stretched out his sword arm to get rid of a kink in his back. “I’m off to bed.”

  “Good night.” She opened the book and continued reading.

  They acquired an oil lamp, so at night they were able to take turns in the privacy of the tent stripping to the skin and picking parasites from their clothing, burning each bug in the flame. For lack of real entertainment, Alex found himself relishing the way the lice and fleas and the occasional tick flared when they hit the lamp. A bit like a medieval bug zapper, and the thought made him grin.

  One night Lindsay came to Alex with a comb. The thing was a nearly circular piece of hardwood, thick in the center and very thin toward the edges, cut with a fine saw into very closely-spaced tines. “Help me with this, would you please?” She handed it to him. “It’s got a fine tooth that’s supposed to remove lice. I think I need help getting them out of my hair.”

  “All right, come.” He was sitting on his pallet, cross-legged. With her armor off and her flight suit unzipped and down around her waist, she knelt before him, and bent her head, but it was an awkward position. “No, here. Lie down and put your head on my knee.” She did so, facing away from him with her back to his other knee, and he began combing out her thick, dark hair. It had grown some since she’d hacked it off, but was still much shorter than it had been the day they met. Its waves shone in the candlelight, and he ran his fingers through it perhaps more than necessary to comb out the nits. He did a very thorough job, making certain every little interloper went into the fire, and combing through every lock front and back.

  He noticed there was a hole in the shoulder seam of her T-shirt, and he mentioned it.

  “I know. I keep sewing it, but it’s threadbare and it comes right apart again. You’d think it being so filthy, it would just hold together like a clump of dirt.”

  He chuckled, and then was silent as he combed.

  After a while she said, “Do you think I’m fooling them?”

  “The bugs?”

  “The men.”

  For a long moment he thought about that, then replied. “Nobody has made a pass at you yet, have they?”

  “No.” Then she sighed. “But I’m often challenged. I can tell by the way they act they don’t think I’m much of a man.”

  Alex hesitated, then said. “You’re not one.”

  “Regardless, I need them to think I am.”

  He thought some more, then said, “What do you do when they challenge you?”

  “I ignore it and go on my way.”

  “Oh. No wonder.”

  She said nothing and he figured he should drop it, but against better judgment he ventured some advice he figured wouldn’t be well received. “You’ve got to challenge them back. Bust their chops like they bust yours.”

  “You mean, be an asshole?”

  That made him chuckle as his fingers fiddled with her hair. “If necessary. Talk tough, even if you don’t mean it. But expect to back it up with at least one fight. Then, even if you lose, if you’ve fought well you’ll gain some respect. If you win, they’ll respect you and fear you.”

  “What if I get hurt?”

  “You’ll heal. And if you’re worried about getting hurt, give it up right now ‘cause I don’t want you going into battle behind me if you’re worried about being hurt. In battle, you can’t even worry about ending up dead, because the odds are excellent you eventually will be.”

  There was no reply to that, so Alex assumed she was thinking about what he’d said. He hoped she was. He hoped he was frightening her, and she would come to her senses and give up the charade. So he continued. “Whenever you’re with just the squires, walk around like you own everything within a ten-foot radius. Just don’t do
it around guys who actually outrank you, or they’ll take you down more than just a notch. But when the other squires mess with you, you need to give as good as you get. Give more than you get, and maybe they’ll leave you alone.”

  She turned her head to look up at him, her brow gathered in a frown. “You understand these barbarians?”

  He shrugged. “Guys are guys. These knights were born tougher than most grown men you and I ever knew, and I think the concept of ‘gentleman’ has a long way to go yet, but deep down they’re no different from me and my brothers back home. If you’re going to pass yourself off as one of them, you’re going to have to think like them.” Then he hesitated before adding, “And you’ve got to behave like them.”

  “I don’t know if I can.”

  “Your other option is to wear a dress.”

  Lindsay fell silent, and laid her head on his knee again. He hoped she was considering the suggestion.

  Eventually, though, when she broke the silence, he knew she hadn’t been.

  “What do you miss the most?”

  “You mean, from the future?”

  “Yes.”

  His fingers fondled her hair, and just then he missed nothing and nobody. But after some thought he said, “Going fast. I hate that it takes an entire day to cover ground I used to be able to drive across in a car in half an hour. Forget about the regularity with which I used to break the sound barrier.”

  “Is that all you miss?”

  He laughed. “No. I miss my family, too. But I always missed my family. We try to make the holiday gatherings, but since Pete and Carl entered the service it’s always been at the whim of the U.S. Navy. Military service is never conducive to family togetherness.”

  Lindsay sighed, and he could feel her relaxing against his knees. “I miss people, too. My job frequently took me away from home, but I could always look forward to seeing them again. Now I’m afraid I can’t.”

  Alex’s only reply was a soft grunt, for another feature of military service was the knowledge that there were no guarantees of coming back from anywhere. He’d grown up in the shadow of death, where uncles and cousins were buried with flags on their coffins, where his mother spoke frequently of friends whose husbands had become casualties during the Vietnam War. He’d never known what it might be like to be certain of seeing his father or brothers again. Now he was certain the time had finally come he wouldn’t.