by Jon Jacks
*
Chapter 52
The bodies were left where they had fallen.
The men were too exhausted to carry them anywhere, their nerves too shattered by the fearful waiting.
They had considered beheading the wolf, parading her head in triumph around the villages. But the storm that had been threatening to strike now came at them as if nature herself were angry at their slaughtering of her strange creation.
The sky darkened, such that it could have been night displacing the day. Heavy drops of rain beat at them, making their heads ring inside their constantly pummelled metal helmets. The wind snatched at their cloaks, whipping them about the men as if transformed into scourges that relentlessly flogged legs, arms, even faces.
Soon, the men reasoned as they rushed away, the beasts of the forest would take care of bodies that were now nothing but butchered flesh. After the beasts would come the birds, then the insects, until not a piece of the two remained. Now they would serve as a feast for the animals who had so willingly given up their own flesh to feed the girls.
As the men emerge with sighs of relief from the dank forest, however, another enters. He follows the serpentine course leading him to the clearing, the storm rescinding. Rather than the sun, however, it is the moon that rises, casting out her own particular glow.
First, he steps inside the little house, picking up the clay Tamesis from the window sill. Stepping outside once more, he places this by Prytani’s side (where, of course, Tamesis has always lain) before tenderly covering them both in the cloak of wren feathers he has brought with him.
Reaching beneath the veiling cloak, he pulls Tamesis out – and Tamesis smiles up gratefully if a little sleepily at the boy.
‘We have much to do, little fox,’ the boy says, grinning warmly.
*
The spears have to be pulled free from Sabea’s body, and cast aside.
The arrows, with their evilly barbed heads, are harder to remove. So the boy breaks the shafts, his strength a surprise to anyone fortunate enough to have met him.
Similarly, he lifts and carries the huge wolf with surprising ease, Tamesis trotting faithfully and trustfully alongside his heels. He finds what he’s looking for very quickly: a stream, gathering its waters into a pool.
He carefully tips Sabea’s limp body into the pool, watching it sink, sink deeper than the pool itself descends, deeper than a body would naturally sink under its own ends.
‘Cast away,’ he says, ‘whatever impedes the appearance of light.’
Tamesis watches too. She starts in surprise when, down in the darkness of the pool’s underworld, there’s a sudden, bright flash of colour. Emerald, sapphire. Flickering gloriously.
With a powerful swish of her glistening tail, the mermaid swiftly ascends, up and up, reaching for the clearer, sparkling waters of the surface. She breaks the surface, her wings already spreading, her feathers glittering with the hues of deep pools and the clearest sky.
The kingfisher rises, up and up, as if heading towards a welcoming Moon.
The boy smiles down at Tamesis.
‘Come, little fox,’ he says, heading back towards the track leading them out of the forest, ‘we still have much to do, you and I.’
Tamesis follows, but glances back towards where Prytani has been left beneath the cloak of wren feathers.
This time, she’s not surprised by what she sees.
Like a flash of moonlight, the wren swiftly rises from the ground.
And, catching up with the soaring kingfisher, she also rises up and up, up towards a warmly smiling Moon, the Great Queen of Heaven.
End
The Halo Crown
The Teutonic Knights urge their strange, horseless mounts to move as swiftly as they possibly can across the vast, snow-ridden plain.
The thick, black cross normally worn on their shields is here stamped on the sides of these strange, mechanically powered carriages. The heavy armour the knights once wore has been magically hammered and forged to construct these wondrous devices, the men instead hiding away in small groups within them. The carts have innumerable wheels, so many they’re set in overlapping rows, a segmented armour revolving around them, churning up the snow, even the ground itself.
The knights’ warring against the Slavs, however, continues. Not so far off, you can hear the dull crumps of an endlessly falling Greek Fire, the blasts of hot flame turning parts of the evening sky a burning red Mars would be proud of.
On the horizon, the forest they’re hurtling towards flows like a black serpent across the thick white cloak of snow. Without a break in their tremendous speed, they rush down a muddy track snaking through the closely-packed, branch-entwined trees.
It’s only when they arrive at what, in this dense woodland, could be claimed to be a clearing that they at last slow their pace. The armoured carts slew to a halt, throwing up spumes of snow, their angrily growling voices gradually stilled one by one.
As if escaping from netherworld monsters forced to spew up the dead, the men rapidly clamber out. They nervously take up defensive positions around the clearing, their eyes wary, fearful.
Only one man remains in the clearing’s centre. A man dressed unlike the others, who are similarly garbed, clearly soldiers.
No, this man has the long black coat, the large dark hat, the knowing smirk, of a wizard.
He approaches a large boulder, one strewn with mystical symbols, ancient carvings. Its top has been smoothly hewn and flattened, apart from a socket of about a hand’s depth.
Reaching into a coat pocket, the man takes out an ivory flask. From this, he pours out a crimson liquid until the hole is entirely filled. As he does this, he mumbles a carefully practised incantation.
Then he waits, the snow falling gently, softly. Even the endless crump of Greek Fire, dulled to an infrequent thump by the surrounding trees, can hardly be heard here.
The only sound he hears is the uneasy fluttering of his own heartbeat.
He senses, though, the nervousness of the men around him.
They are deep within enemy territory. He has persuaded them of the importance of his mission. That, as he sincerely believes, it could turn the tide of war in their favour once again.
Even he jumps, however, at the abrupt, harsh clank of iron.
He glances edgily over his shoulder, looking back to where the noise had unexpectedly originated from.
Two sheepishly apologetic men have dropped one of a number of weapons they’re unloading from the back of an armoured carriage.
The man whirls around as another sound draws his attention, this coming from the direction he’d expected, had hoped for.
Peering into the darkness of the impenetrable maze of interlocking twigs and branches is like staring into a pit of the underworld. There’s no light there, not even a reflection from the all-encasing snow.
He can hear the twigs breaking, being broken. There’s a low shuffling, like feet crunching step by slow step through the luxurious carpet of fallen twigs and snow.
Steps drawing closer. Heading towards him.
And yet, he can’t see anyone.
Nowhere, in any of the legends he had avidly sourced, collected and read, had it said that the guardian was invisible! There were the heavy footprints, however, every closing step disturbing the snow, revealing the darker tapestry of twigs lying beneath.
The uneven, irregular cracking of the stems has become a rhythmic clacking. The crumpling steps are drawing nearer to him, unhurriedly crossing the clearing. Heading towards the centre, where he patiently, nervously, waits.
The footsteps of disturbed snow, the cracking and clacking, stop directly in front of him.
And still he can’t see him. He can’t sense any presence at all!
The slithering whisper of shuffled branches continue by his feet. He looks down.
It’s so horrific, he almost instinctively stamps on it, stamps it out of existence.
A stea
dily clicking black stag beetle, the size of a shovel’s blade.
The clicking, the cracking, grows louder, the sounds of bones being painfully broken. The beetle shakes, vibrates, its many legs frighteningly extending, its body bloating.
It grows quickly, too quickly for the man to respond to his instinct to flee.
The creature rises swiftly on legs that are becoming more human, its already shell-like skin hardening all the more into plates like black iron. Two pairs of its legs entwine like sprawling vines, meld, becoming heavily muscular arms encased in a gruesomely barbed armour. As they sprout into hands, however, they continue growing, creating on one side a blade of whispering shadows, on the other a shield of impenetrable blackness. The beast’s underside expands, transforming into a broad chest behind a thick breastplate, the head into a dark helmet, its heraldic device of pincered horns snapping angrily.
The face only partially revealed within the helmet’s visor is only partially human.
Even so, it speaks with a gnarled, man-like voice.
‘Who challenges me?’
The eyes behind the visor are dark, penetrating, as round and small as poison berries.
‘I see no one in armour!’ he complains furiously. ‘No one mounted, ready to face me!’
The man facing him wonders who could ever hope to take on such a creature and win. The black knight is now far taller than him, and obviously incredibly powerful and muscular behind the covering plates of dark armour. No knightly weapon could prevail against such armour, with its whirls and whorls of barbed decoration, its barbaric skewering spikes.
‘No one is here to challenge you, guardian of the greatest crown.’
The man had carefully remembered his lines. Every word is important. It’s the only way to appease the guardian: to obtain his help.
‘I seek only the Halo Crown. I seek it only for the challenge of kingship.’
‘That is still a challenge,’ the guardian rasps. ‘A far harder challenge than facing me.’
‘I know. Yet this is the challenge I wish to accept.’
The guardian nods his approval.
‘Then follow in my footsteps,’ he says, turning, heading back into the forest.
*
Passing through the tightly interwoven branches of the forest is like fighting through a dark thicket of thorns.
They snatch and tear at the man’s coat, his boots, the skin of his face and hands. They whip off his hat, yet he leaves it lying amid the snow, fearful that the guardian – effortlessly moving on ahead as if the branches are magically parting for him – will leave him behind. His coat is quickly shredded, whole sections of it ripping off, draping across the branches that have claimed them as their own, like torn veils.
He hopes the handful of well-trained soldiers he’d ordered to follow on after him are faring better than he at making their way through this dark underworld of labyrinthine tracks. Behind him, he hopes, they’re advancing through the black undergrowth silently, swiftly, as stealthily as animals. He’s tempted to glance back, to seek signs of them: but he doesn’t want to risk giving away their presence to the guardian.
At last the trees begin to thin out a little, allowing him to catch up with the unhurriedly moving guardian. Still, though, the trees blend into their surroundings, made partially invisible by thickly swirling snow. It takes him quite a while to make out the river lying ahead of them, its icy sheen making it as one with the sheets of snow settling everywhere about him.
He stops a moment, blinks his eyes, clearing them of the soft white flakes blocking his view. At first he’d thought it was a trick of the light, of his imagination, shapes forming in the rapidly whirling snow.
But no; he was right.
It’s there, now, right in front of him.
Beyond the river lies the looming castle, grey as the sky, its unlit windows only apparent where ice patterns glisten, reflecting the stars.
*
The river isn’t as easy to cross as he’d thought it would be, the ice thin, cracking wherever he stands on it.
The cracks rapidly spread, maze-like. The ice sheet breaks up into jagged pieces, floating on the water but precariously, delicately, unbalanced. He slips and falters a few times, loses his own balance. A few times, too, he nearly slides into the freezing water, where he would surely die.
He’s relieved when, at last, he makes the other bank, the steadiness of the land beneath his feet suddenly seeming odd, weirdly unnerving.
Gazing ahead, he briefly holds his breath in his excitement: he’s only a short walk away from the steps leading up to the castle’s great doors. And, as so many of the legends he’d read had informed him, the foot of the flight of steps are flanked by life-sized statutes of ferociously leaping lions.
For the very first time, fear and doubt surges through him.
How many of those legends say that these lions spring into life, attacking the seeker of the Halo Crown?
How many say they are only figments of the imagination? That all you have to do is ignore them, and they will vanish?
Naturally, the guardian passes between them unmolested. He stops for the very first time, halting on the steps just beyond the roaring lions.
He waits.
So, is it a test? the man wonders.
He hopes his men are close by. Their weapons, surely, could destroy stone lions far easier than the swords and shields their makers had thought they’d be facing.
The man warily puts his foot on the first step, ready to step back, to run if needs be.
Nothing happens. The statues don’t move.
The guardian has continued on his way. The great doors open up before him, revealing a dark, unlit hall.
The man takes a few more steps. The lions still remain frozen, lifeless.
He trips along more lightly now, chasing after the guardian a little, who has moved far ahead of him. As he enters the darkened hall, candelabras against the wall blaze into life, their flames fluttering in a wind the man no longer feels.
Behind him, he hears the abrupt growling of lions, the shrieks of terrified men.
He risks a fleeting glance over his shoulder. His men are there, taking on the stone lions that have sprung into life.
The lions maul the men. The men aim spears that spit flame, that magically shatter the stone bodies of the lions from afar.
Even so, one man is dead, his blood spilling out, soaking into the snow, turning it a glorious pink.
The guardian seems or acts as if he’s unaware of the attack taking place behind him. He leads the way up a narrow, winding staircase.
The soldiers pad silently through the open doors, spreading out, slipping into nearby rooms, prepared to kill anyone who resists them.
*
The top of the long, winding stairs at last open out onto a vast hall. The walls are decorated with an incredible array of shields, swords, spears.
A vast armoury of outdated weapons, the man thinks to himself with an amused smile.
At the end of the room, a huge window opens up onto a balcony. Beyond that, there is only the darkness of the sky, the white sheet of fallen snow covering a plain endlessly stretching out to meet that sky.
The guardian is standing on the balcony, waiting. The man joins him there.
Somewhere far in the distance, the falling snow starts to spin, millions of flakes drawing together as if caught in a whirlpool.
In the moonlight, this orb of snow glows. It could be the moon itself, fallen to earth.
The glow begins to draw closer, passing over the frozen plain, its own bright shine making the snow below sparkle as if the stars have been strewn across the land.
The closer the glow approaches, the more the man can make out its shape.
It’s a crown.
The Halo Crown!
Where it has already passed over the land, the snow has melted in its ever expanding glow. Beneath the snow, there’s a glass-like ice.
And beneath the ice, th
ere lies the vast army of legend.
The Dead Legion, waiting for their new king to lead them to war.
*
The Halo Crown hovers in the air just out of reach of the man.
It sparkles like a hoard of purest white diamonds melded together, like a mass of rising bubbles within abruptly frozen water.
‘Who serves the crown?’
The guardian asks the question. He waits patiently for the answer.
Inwardly, the man sighs with relief.
Yes, this was one of the questions that most of the legends had predicted would be asked. He gives the answer that had appeared in most of the texts he’d studied.
‘The people serve the crown.’
‘Whom does the crown serve?’ the guardian asks.
‘The crown serves the people.’
‘How can the one that serves also be the one who is served?’
‘The people and the crown are one and the same, each having no meaning or purpose without the other, and therefore can never be separated.’
The hovering, glistening crown trembles. Unhurriedly, it draws closer towards the man, rising slightly as it does so.
Below, across the entire plain of ice, cracks begin to appear, rushing outwards at a rapidly growing pace, like a vast tree swiftly sprouting crooked limb after crooked limb. The floes move, tip, the warriors from below the waters rising up and effortlessly climbing onto the shifting ice. There are warriors from every age; mounted knights, soldiers of the Great Empire, men garbed in similar jerkins yet carrying odd weapons.
Thousands of them, stretching far back across ice that is already reforming into a smooth plain beneath their feet, the hooves of their mounts, the great weight of elephants.
Hundreds of thousands.
Far greater numbers than the man had ever possibly imagined.
The Halo Crown is hovering now just above is head.
It gently slips down, anointing him.
Hundreds of thousands of warriors cry out their approval.
‘All hail the great king!’
*
