by Sean Stewart
Duke Richard shook his head. “You can imagine the panic that ensued. However well a common man performs his duties, he will not keep his wits when faced by such a spectacle. What people were left in my Keep were mad with fear, shrieking and falling over one another in their haste to flee. Seeing that my house was on the edge of rout, I seized the bell of audience and declared the session over. We then withdrew and left the Ghost to his own damnable devices. Immediately I sent for horses, gathered those trifles you saw when I arrived, and set out. My meaning was to warn you of this evil, then make for Swangard by the straightest route. There I trust the King and I and Bishop Cirdon may consult with Cabinet on how to baffle this Ghost.”
Lissa frowned, her face a mask of polite puzzlement. “But who will rule in High Holt if the Duke is gone and the steward dead?”
“I assure you I was not remiss in statecraft. I named a second steward as I left, and sent a messenger to Father, bidding him return from his retreat,” Richard said smoothly. “It is a pity to disturb his well-earned rest with care, but the people still recall him, and in a time of crisis will rally to a member of the blood.”
Lissa nodded, as if she understood the arrangements all too well. “Much do I admire the family bond between you, to trust your father with the handling of so grave a threat to properties you swore an oath ever to defend.”
Richard’s eyes narrowed. “My father is a capable man,” he said tersely. “I suggest that Borders had better concern itself with its own business. This place is nice enough,” he said, waving a hand at the building Master Orrin’s men had worked so hard to resurrect. “The view in truth is very pretty: but it is nothing like defensible, is it?”
“It wasn’t meant to be a fortress—” Orrin objected.
Duke Richard’s eyebrows rose. “Excuse me,” he said pleasantly. “Have we met before, Master…Orrin, was it? I think we have. I was at your daughter’s wedding, two summers back. She married that extremely worthy glazier: a good catch, I thought.” He smiled politely. Orrin wants to stuff a chisel up his arse, Mark thought. Look at his fingers twisting in the tablecloth. “You are Astin’s architect.” Richard glanced around at the old-fashioned stone floors, the mullioned windows glazed with horn, the sawdust coating every beam. “I must remind myself to tell him all about the job you’re doing here.”
Orrin’s pinched face paled.
“I asked Master Orrin to remake Borders as it was a thousand years ago,” Mark said. “He’s done miracles here. I hope that’s what you’ll tell the King, milord.”
“You need not ‘milord’ me,” Richard said easily. “Astin will be jealous. You are not my vassal, my dear Mark: we are equals, now. And you may trust that my report will grace Orrin with all the credit he deserves.”
“And anyway I don’t see what being defensible has to do with owt,” Mark snapped. “This is not a toy. I can protect my own. We aren’t talking about an invading army.”
“Mark.” Under the table Gail dug her fingers into his, trying to hush him up.
It only made him angrier. “We’re talking ghosts in the graveyard, spectres on the battlement. No weight of stone will change that.”
“Very likely not,” Richard said urbanely. “But soon you may contend with more than ghosts. When the common people panic, they will flock to Borders, Mark, to the Hero of the Ghostwood. You clearly cannot house them, but with your present forces and position you cannot hope to throw them back. So what then will you do?”
“I don’t know.” Under the table Gail pinched harder; across it, Lissa eyed him sharply. That’s it, that’s it: pet me into place. Don’t let the nasty commoner foul our pleasant little chat. “I don’t know what I’ll do,” he said distinctly. “But I don’t think, if my people were in danger, that I’d tuck tail between my legs and fly for the King’s skirts, leaving my father to face the danger.”
There was a long, shocked silence, broken at last when Duke Richard pushed back his plate, smiled coldly at Mark, and said, “But here you have the vantage of me, Mark. Perhaps we all would be so brave, if we had no fathers either.”
I’ll kill him.
Wiping his mouth with his napkin Duke Richard rose from the table. “I think tempers are a little short. With your permission, I would like to take a look around your place while dinner settles.” With that he bowed to the others at the table, Gail last of all, and turned to leave the room.
“When are you going to grow up?” Gail demanded that night as she and Mark prepared for bed. Angrily she took off an earring and hurled it into her jewellery box. “For the first few years here we must depend on my father to survive, Mark. Do you think insulting his friend and greatest subject is going to help?”
“You were a cat to his kitten,” Mark said contemptuously. “Rushing out to tour him round the place. I’m sure he liked having his fur licked.”
Gail whirled and slapped him, hard. “I hate that man,” she yelled. “I should never, never have been forced to trail behind and listen to his loathsome compliments. You should have been there, Mark. You should have been there. You’re my husband, damn it.”
Mark grabbed her wrists, burning with anger. But the bitterness, the terrible unhappiness in her voice brought him up short.
Good God. You were just about to hit her.
Mark’s angry hands clenched around her wrists. “If you hate Richard, why are you so mad wi’ me for shitting on him? What the hell did the prick say? You’ve got to learn not to let bastards like that get to you.”
Gail stood suddenly still, as if stabbed. “What did he say?” she whispered. Tears of rage beaded in her eyes. “Here we sit in this heap of rock while the dead walk around us and the frost closes in and all you can do is antagonize the most powerful man in the land. Are you trying to make the things they say come true?”
“‘They’? Who is They? People like Richard? Like Lissa? Court songbirds in scent and satin? Is that who we’re trying to impress?”
“Oh yes we hate them, don’t we,” Gail said, narrow eyes murderous. “That insufferable King with his simpering courtiers and his pampered bitch daughters. We really are too good for trash like that.” She turned away, shaking her head. “God I’m lucky to have married up in the world, that’s all I can say. At least my whelps will be born into a better class of family, eh?”
“That’s what all this is about, isn’t it?” Mark said, voice dead. “That’s why you won’t let me touch you. You don’t think I’d be a father for your children, do you? You think I’ll do what my dad did and cut out. Or stay in: which would be worse?”
“At times like tonight, Mark, it’s so hard to choose.”
Mark sat down heavily on the edge of the bed.
How, from where we started, did it ever come to this?
His dreams, his quest, his title, his love: all dead. Frost on his palm, the taste of ashes on his tongue. “Don’t let’s be like this,” he said. “We were meant for one another Gail. Don’t let’s be like this.”
“Right now,” Gail said, “I can’t see any other way for us to be.”
The harvest moon was full that night, but Mark’s heart was empty. His duchy was in ruins, his people would go hungry. Evil stalked the countryside and he had no way to stop it. His friends were ashamed of him, his wife despised him. Everything he wanted, he had gotten: and all of it was ashes.
Empty, he rose from their bed, leaving Gail lying stiffly in the dark, pretending to sleep. Empty, he dressed and buckled the black dagger to his hip, his right hand ice. Empty he left his Keep through the gate in the tall west wall. Empty he walked down to the river, and crossed the bridge, and passed into the Ghostwood, where the moonlight failed.
11
Ashes
It was dark and Mark was alone. He had turned to water, black water, running down, down, down to find its lowest level. Down through his fight with Gail, down through his ruined dreams of love for her. Down through the cares of his duchy, the bitter fruit of his pride and ambition. He had dem
anded love and gotten grief, demanded power and gotten care in its place. With his sweat and his drive and his relentless will he had built up this thing, this Shielder’s Mark: soldier, lover, Duke, Hero. Now Shielder’s Mark was crumbling around him.
He walked like a wraith from the ruins, into the woods, alone.
At first the dread was on him, the dread from his dream. Around him tall trees groped into the sky with hidden hands; an evil mist crept along the ground. The air was dank and cold as the side of an open grave.
In his dream, there had been something in the house, some wickedness seeping between the stones, inside his strong walls, inside his loving circle of friends, sinking into his flesh.
But now he was outside. He had come to it, come to where the evil lived. He remembered turning to Gail as they walked away from Swangard, her fox-face dim in the twilight and spattered with rain. “Take down your hood, and hear how big the darkness is.” The evil scares you less because you’ve become its creature, Mark. You too are a thing of darkness.
You thought you knew loneliness the first time you came here. That was nowt. You were a boy then, hung about wi’ hopes and dreams.
Now his dreams were dead, for they had all come true, and were turned to ashes. He could imagine no tomorrow, nothing ahead but trees and darkness, and the sad smell of cedar. He was black water, creeping to a low place.
But with each step forward into darkness, the past behind got brighter and brighter.
He remembered the smell of dirt, and bracelets of dew cold around his wrists, doing push-ups in the Commons before dawn, one for every syllable of the sheep-counting rhyme, six verses, seven verses, eight…And for what.
So his mind went back, touching each point of pain, each grief, each wound: unsparing, relentless as February rain. Back to the beginning, back to the lullaby day, his father standing over an open trunk with his back turned.
With his back turned.
And there Mark’s memory stopped and pooled, turning slowly around and around on itself, gathering tears. And his father was always bending down, picking up his shield, his stiff back was always leaving, the door was closing, he was walking away and Mark knew, had known even then that his father was going away and would never, ever come back. He was leaving, leaving, leaving.
He was gone.
And he never came back.
No matter how hard Mark worked, he didn’t come back. No matter how many chores he did. No matter how handy he was, how good, how clever, how charming. He was nice to other children and his father didn’t come back. He swept the steps and lit the fire and his father didn’t come back. He took care of his mother and tried to fill her grief, but he failed there too. He grew stronger, tougher, faster, smarter: got up before dawn and pushed himself until he dropped, a little more each day nine verses ten verses twelve verses, and he never came back. He took for himself a sword as his father had, and when his mother died he left her as his father had and he left the village as his father had and he went into the dark Wood and he came to the Red Keep and he broke the ancient spell and he made the King do his bidding and he married a beautiful princess and he became a mighty man and he lived in a great stone house and still it wasn’t enough it wasn’t enough he had done everything he could do and the tight voice had called in anger and the stiff back had left the cottage door and he had gone, he had gone, he had gone.
And he wasn’t ever coming back. He wasn’t ever, ever, ever coming back.
And he would never come to the great main gate of Mark’s fine new house and say, “It was enough.” And the tight voice would never say he had been wrong to leave. And the door would never open, and the stiff back would never turn, and Mark would never see the face that he could not remember o god he could not even remember his father’s face, his god damn face.
He walked along the darkling path, out of sight, and time, eyes blind with tears.
It was dark when he came to the Keep. It was always dark in the Wood, now. Sometimes it was twilight, the wind the dying day’s last breath, full of regret, passing, remorse. Other times it was midnight, black with a blackness that choked out the stars, and he had to feel for the path with each careful step, reaching ahead with his hands, splashing suddenly into unseen pools.
When he came to the Keep it was the paler darkness of the last hour before dawn. How well he knew the night-blue sky, the indifferent stars, the grass cold with dew! This was the hour least known. The workman did not know it, waiting for the sun to start his day. Neither did the reveller, who staggered home in the smaller hours. Few people know that time, when dawn can’t be seen, but only smelled on the wind. It is the loneliest hour of the day, and you cannot touch its heart in company. You cannot feel it from a carriage, you cannot get its scent beside a fire. Only outside, in the darkness, alone, can you touch that time and know it for what it is.
Mark knew it well.
The cherry trees were bare. No scent of them lingered in the air; dead leaves, damp with dew, sank beneath Mark’s feet as he walked through the barren orchard.
The mere was gone and in its place a ditch. He stumbled through margins rank with skullcap. Underfoot long grass like human hair tangled around bits of bone and metal, rusted swords, rotten shields, stilled hands, tongues long silenced by a drink of black water.
Mark crossed the ditch. Once he felt something give beneath his foot with a wet crunch, felt it splay and drag across his ankle. It could have been a twig.
The Red Keep was empty. No sentries walked its crumbled battlements, no guards looked down from atop its rusting gate. Inside, no horses clopped slowly home to rest, no voices chattered and sang from within the great hall. All the busy life was gone, and even the ghosts had fled. Where once the Keep had been thick with memories, there now lay only dust.
How old it is, how terribly old. Men lived here once, and married and fathered children and died here too, generations of them, and now they’re nowt but dust beneath your feet. All their proud voices quiet now, dark their eyes, cold their hearts that laughed once and loved and struggled through their lives. Gone, gone, down into dust and ashes.
O God O God the world’s a slaughterhouse. Every cobble in the street could be pressed from human bones; every pot on the fire could be made of human clay.
In the kitchen a little fire still burned, sunk almost into embers. Before it sat the Old Man, stirring in the ashes with a blackthorn staff.
Mark watched him for an hour, or a day, or a week, before at last he spoke. “Where are they?” he said. “There were princes here and lovers; grooms, soldiers, clothiers, dyers, cooks, scullions, chambermaids, ostlers, maidens. Little boys. Where have they all gone?”
The Old Man turned then. His skull bore a long white scar, his face was hard and white as bone: his eyes were black. “That was long ago,” he said. “Now even their ghosts have grown old and died.”
Mark asked, “Who are you?”
The Old Man turned back to the fire. “I am Nobody,” he said. “My name is dead.” He stirred the ashes with his stick, staring at the patterns he made as if they revealed some deep and terrible mystery. “And dost tha cum to give back what tha stole?”
Mark’s hand strayed to his hip where the dagger lay. “It was you!” he whispered. “Your awd scar: that’s where I clubbed you when I took the dagger! You were the Prince.”
“Am still,” the Old Man said, with a spasm of hatred. “Hedrod my father taught me nought of ruling: I could not hold what I had taken. Even in death he must be King.”
Slowly Mark drew the black dagger and held it out to the Old Man, who took it, laughing with a sound like bone splintering. “And wherefore cum tha, whelp?”
“I do not know.”
“Then tha must learn.”
“Yes.”
“I warn tha, ’tis nae always easy for boys to learn what old men teach. It will go hard for tha.”
“I can learn,” Mark said. Gently, fearfully as a lover, he approached the Old Man’s turned back. “
I promise I can learn your teaching.”
Suddenly the staff whipped back and caught Mark a staggering blow on the side of his head. “Tha mewls,” the Old Man said. “Tha’rt soft.”
Mark’s head rang, yet he barely felt the blow. “Aye. Aye, I’m grown too soft,” he whispered, feeling himself like a pool of black water, a teardrop, barely able to hold his shape, breaking around the blackthorn staff, lapping around the pain in his head, his hand.
And he thought suddenly that evil was the same as emptiness, and the dread that lay upon the Wood was made of darkness, wind and water. It was emptiness that crept through the stones of his fine house, emptiness that ran into him through the wound in his hand.
And a great fear came over him, that he would be empty forever. He craved filling as he once craved light and air. He had lost his edges in the darkness and he had to have a shape. “I am too soft,” he said. And he wanted to beg the Old Man to fill him up, to give him shape, to teach him how to be a man.
He had never had that. Never had a man to show him what a man should be. Never worked at his father’s side, never rambled in the woods with him. Never learned to ride and shoot and hunt with Duke Richard, never learned swordplay from Sir William.
He’d taught himself as much as he could, but something had gone wrong, terribly wrong: now his dreams were dust and his love was ashes and his fine castle lay abandoned behind him. But he dared not beg the Old Man for his teaching, for fear of showing how soft he was.
At last the Old Man said, “Cum then: look into my fire and tell me aught you see.”
Weeping tears of gratitude Mark drew near, and crouched beside the Old Man’s stool, and stared into the fire. “I see nowt,” he said at last.
The Old Man beat Mark with his staff, beat him with an old man’s wiry strength, and Mark did not resist. Then he bade Mark lie amongst the cinders, beside the fire, and go to sleep. And this he did.