Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Y BRENIN
by C. Allegra Hawksmoor
An eagle turned in a low gyre over the battlefield. The red and cloying earth churned with rain and blood, turning everything to ochre in the light of a late summer. The sound of a hundred tiny battles between life and death caught in the arms of the valley.
The knight pressed through the crush of the fighting and the fallen. He fought as sunset swept unminded towards evening. Until the air itself seemed to thicken every sound and movement. And still the Red King did not yield.
Some long-forgotten blow had sheared the dulled gold armour of the Red King’s cuisse, black blood boiling through torn metal embossed with golden flowers. He stumbled in the red mud like a dying calf. And still he did not yield.
The knight bulled forwards with his shield, stubbornness and momentum overawing the Red King’s footing and throwing him over the body of a dying horse. The knight drew his sword back to make the killing blow. It took him some time to realise that his arm would not obey. He stood still as a golem shaped from blood-red clay. Only moving to draw deep gulps of air into his lungs.
The Red King’s sword fell from his hand, and he fumbled with shaking fingers at the catches of his helm. His hair and beard were the colour of polished mahogany, but his eyes were pupiless, bottomless black.
“What are your orders?” he said. “What does my brother say is to be done with me, Ser....”
“Mercher.”
The knight removed his own helm. His thoughts ached for the dirty scrap of paper secured behind his breastplate. He knew its words by heart, but the touch of the paper against his skin gave him comfort.
“The Edling of the North would have me kill you,” the knight said.
And take everything from the towns, his lord’s message ordered. Empty their stores. The North must eat.
The eithin aur on the Red King’s armour caught the last of the day’s light, gold petals of hammered metal glinting. The knight’s hand reached involuntarily for its mirror-image, shaped into his own breastplate. The eagle felt its way through the blue emptiness above them, with a mind as clear as polished glass held up before the sun.
The knight was a creature forged of the same base elements: his flesh and his bones, the blade in his hand, all birthed out of the belly of the same earth. The same clarity of purpose hammered clean through him.
He seized the Red King’s shoulder and wrenched him to his feet.
“Begin walking,” he said, turning towards the ancient forest that rolled over the foothills, beyond the slow quiet seeping out into the battlefield.
* * *
They stopped quite close to morning, beside an ancient trackway that had led them to a clearing by the river. The path curved over a huge slab of grey stone that spanned the water, pitted and worn with a thousand years of feet and wheels and weather beneath the moss and lichen. On the other side, the track cut up over the bank and disappeared back into the woods.
The knight knelt beside the stream and washed the sweat and dirt out of his hair while his courser drank deeply beside him. He spread his hands and submerged them in the river until bloody trails of red earth streamed from the knuckles of his gauntlets. The sky glanced blue through sunburned leaves, and early light caught on the metal in the water.
“It is a dangerous thing for a knight to defy his lord,” the Red King said from the shadow of a great old elm. He worked an arrowhead from his armour and lashed it onto a straight arm of fallen wood. “Aren’t you afraid of what my brother will do when he finds out that I am still alive?”
Red water dripped from the knight’s hands and dissolved into the current. “And why should I be afraid of Edling Gwyn when I have the Red King at my back?”
“The Red King? It has been a long time since any northerner has called me that, boy. Who are your family?”
“I wouldn’t know,” the knight said. “I never had any.”
The Red King took a limping step towards him, blood oozing from the torn metal on his thigh. When he came out from under the elm, he flinched and raised a hand to the sky. Tears spilled over his lashes and quickened down his cheeks.
He cannot stand the light, the knight thought. Something is wrong with his eyes. His lips parted to form a question, but the question never came.
The Red King cursed the sun and turned away, snatching up the arrow-headed spear and sliding down the bank into the shallows under the shadow of the tree.
The knight set his gauntlets down. “Are you going to try to kill me with that, Goch?”
“I was going to try and eat.” The Red King tugged at the knots holding the arrowhead in place. “Unless you would rather that I starve. Where are you taking me? Do you even know?”
The knight unfastened the catches of his breastplate and laid his armour in the sun. Beneath it, his arming jacket was sweat-yellow and blood-black. “To Dinas Pair yr Arfaeth.”
“Through the mountains?” The Red King drove the point of his spear into the water. “Taking North Road with the rest of your army would be safer.”
“The rest of my army want you dead.” The knight took his courser’s bridle and untied the barding from around her neck. “And every town and village we passed through would rather free you. That does not sound as though it fits my definition of ‘safer’.”
The Red King crouched down in the water and clamped the thrashing salmon between his hands as it died on the point of his spear. He pulled it free and threw it up onto the bank. Far enough out of the water to suffocate.
“And what will you do with me when we reach the city, Ser Mercher?”
“I will bring you to the Edling of the North.”
The salmon spasmed once and gaped for air. The Red King pulled himself up onto the bank and shelled its eyes into his mouth with his thumb. He pressed them between his teeth until they burst and nodded to the curl of parchment stowed in the hollow curve of the knight’s breastplate. “It seems to me as though my brother would much rather you killed me,” he said. “And pillaged my towns to feed his army.”
“You should not have read it,” the knight snapped, tugging too sharply at his courser’s girth. The horse stamped and flashed the whites of her eyes.
“And when would I have done that? I didn’t have to read it. I know my brother, Ser Mercher. Better than you do.”
“You don’t know anything,” the knight growled, hauling the saddle off.
“I know that he would very much like to murder me and leave the south to ruin. I know that he expected you to break open our grain stores and find them overflowing with all the crops and livestock that we’ve taken, and that when he finds that they are bare, his cities will starve for the sake of his army just the same as mine.”
“What else could he do?” the knight demanded. “Your people have been attacking our villages for months now. Why haven’t you sent word of the blight to Dinas Pair?”
The Red King laughed and laid his hand upon the eithin aur forged into his armour. “You think that when my brother hears about the blight, he’ll open his granaries and forget about this precious war of his? No, he will notice that we are weak. If he is smart, he will seize his chance to strike.”
“Gwyn doesn’t understand,” the knight said. “You’ve given him no choice. When I bring him to you, you will tell him. Then he can decide what he wants to do with you.”
He frowned and stared into the current. Then he can decide what he wants to do with both of us.
The Red King cut the salmon with the point of his makeshift spear and emptied out its innards. “Gwyn, is it now?” he said. “Tell me, Ser Mercher, just how familiar are you with my brother?”
“You should still your tongue,” the knight spat, his aching shoulders bowstring-tight. “You may need it when we reach the capital, but you do not need your fingers.”
The Red King sat back against the elm and linked his hands behind his head. Metal intertwined with flesh.
�
�If you are so certain that all of this is a terrible misunderstanding,” the Red King said at last, “then why have you brought me all the way out here without so much as sending him word?”
The knight glanced up at the tessellated sky, clear blue behind the shifting leaves, and did not answer.
* * *
Through much of the next two days the Red King sat astride the knight’s warhorse, raising his hand to block the sky from his black eyes while the knight walked along beside him. The wound on his leg stopped bleeding when they made camp, but overnight the flesh around it turned an ugly red.
On the second afternoon, it rained, starting in a few large drops that resounded on the knight’s armour and pinged off into the grass and soon pouring straight down in the windless air.
They pressed on for almost an hour before the knight relented, pulling up beside a ring of stones perched over the old trackway—narrow shards of mountain slate projecting outwards like a crown of purple thorns. The knight tethered his horse to a twisted hawthorn that looked as though it had stood there for a thousand years. The only part of it left alive was a corona of dark green leaves clinging to its branches. The courser twisted her head to tug at them, rainwater plastering her mane against her neck.
The knight pulled the Red King from the saddle and set about removing the mare’s caparison—a stained length of white cloth emblazoned with a thousand golden flowers. “We’ll use the stone circle for cover.”
“That isn’t a circle.” The Red King retrieved the body of the young hare they had snared the night before from behind the saddle. “It’s a cairn. A group of farmers from Dirneb dug it up when I was a boy. It was full of ash and bones. Human and animal, all mixed in together.”
The knight shivered and stared into the centre of the circle: a round and gaping mouth ringed with broken teeth and half-smothered by low cloud. “Help me with this.”
The Red King took the edge of the caparison, and between them they dragged it to the cairn and struggled to spread the cloth over two of the leaning spears of stone as the rain drummed down a steady cold. The knight drove his sword into the ground to make a third hitch for the canopy and crawled beneath.
The Red King stooped out of the rain to sit beside him. “Do you even know where we are?”
The knight tried to make out the shapes of the dark mountains drifting in and out of the cloud beyond the edge of the caparison. “Heading north.”
“You realise that most of the Drysau are between us and Dinas Pair,” the Red King said calmly. “Do you know these mountains well, Ser Mercher? Because Gwyn and I grew up in them. And, if he were here now....” He turned the limp, furry body of the hare over in his hands. “He would be telling you the same as me.”
The knight looked at him sidelong. “And what is that?”
“That if you keep following this track....” The Red King sawed the hare open on the edge of the impaled sword. “Then you shall have to go over the shoulder of Y Brenin before you reach Dinas Pair yr Arfaeth. He would tell you that between us and that mountain, there is a valley at the foot of Caer Pwyll filled with nothing but reeds and marsh that is difficult to cross even on a fine day. For a horse, and two men in armour....”
The Red King held his hand out into the rain pouring off of the caparison and rolled his shoulders in a shrug. The knight wrapped his arms around himself, but wet metal-against-metal brought him little comfort.
“And what would you suggest?”
“Take the east fork in the road, half a day from here.”
“Through Bannik and Gerwester?”
The Red King nodded.
“Through two villages sympathetic to you, and a stone’s throw away from the North Road?” the knight asked stonily. He shook his head. “We go north.”
The Red King sighed and spread his hands in frustration. He studied them for a few moments, smeared with blood and rain, then began to strip the fur away from the dead hare in his lap. “You know,” he said, peeling the muscle away from the bone and biting into the slick red meat. “I’m certain that I recognise you.”
The knight watched the Red King suck down raw flesh and fought against a knot of nausea. The Red King chewed methodically, staring out into the rain. This close, the knight could see that his strange black eyes weren’t pupiless at all, but rather that the pupils were so swollen that the brown of his irises was almost swallowed up...
“Is there something that you want to ask, Ser Mercher?” the Red King said.
The knight hugged himself little tighter and looked away. “Caer Isel,” he said under his breath. “You wanted to know where you’ve seen me before? You appointed me, and five other guardsmen, to keep watch over Edling Gwyn when you consigned him to live and die in that tower.”
“You’re the traitor.” The hard bark of a laugh lodged somewhere in the Red King’s throat. He swallowed another sliver of raw meat and shook his head. “The one who helped my brother to escape and take the north from me. And Gwyn knighted you for your trouble, did he? Well then, I suppose that it turned out well enough for you.”
Well enough? the knight thought. It has ended in nothing but war and blight and famine. It has broken this land more deeply than you ever managed to alone.
“So, tell me.” The Red King wiped some of the bloodied fur off of his hands. “I’ve heard that you sleep beside Gwyn. On the floor, like a trained dog. And that the two of you have spent the last two summers bathing in the Ysprid together like a pair of newly-weds. So, I’m intrigued. Does my brother fuck you well enough to compensate you for all the trouble you have put yourself through for his sake?”
The knight clamped down on the plume of rage and embarrassment and watched the rivulets of rain catching on blade of his sword. “You don’t know a damned thing about me!”
Something quirked at the corner of the Red King’s mouth. “I see. He hasn’t had you yet, then. Do you think that’s because he’s ignorant of your feelings, or because he simply doesn’t care?”
The knight swept to his feet, tearing the caparison aside and drawing his sword out of the earth. The Red King watched him calmly and did not move to stand. His lips and chin were smeared with hare’s blood and water.
A gust of wind surged up the side of the mountain and whistled between the leaning stones, turning the low cloud into unformed shapes that hurried through the cairn. The knight shivered and sheathed his sword at his side.
“Mount up, Goch,” he said. “If you freeze to death, I’ll leave you for the crows.”
* * *
“This is madness!” the Red King shouted from the saddle as they crested the wide green saddle of Caer Pwyll and descended down into the marsh, raising his hand to block out the light. “We must turn back.”
They had abandoned most of their armour not long after the cairn, but the sky was still grey and thunderous, and the knight’s feet sank up to the ankle as the track became a stretch of churned-up mud then petered out entirely.
The Red King dug his feet into the stirrups. “Mercher!”
The knight ignored him, leading the courser by the bridle towards the mountain in the east: a low black tangle of granite looming in grey sky. If I can reach that mountain, he thought. Then perhaps the way will be a little easier over its feet.
After an hour, the knight’s legs burned. His courser’s feet dragged in the stagnant water. And they had come less than half a mile.
The knight stopped to swipe the sweat off of his brow, and his courser’s feet bubbled down into the fluid earth.
“You’ll have to dismount,” the knight said, trying not to draw too hard for breath.
The Red King eased his injured leg over the mare’s back and lowered himself out of the saddle. Moss and marsh gave way like flesh under his feet.
“Lovely,” he said. “You know that you’ll kill us both before we reach the city, don’t you?” The Red King checked the empty waterskin on his belt, knelt, and drank from the grey mire with cupped hands.
The kn
ight grabbed the back of the Red King’s shirt and hauled him to his feet. “You certainly will be if you insist on eating every raw dead thing and drinking from every stagnant pool between here and Dinas Pair,” he said. “What’s wrong with you? Keep walking.”
The knight took another step towards the mountain, but his courser was sunk almost up to her hindquarters. She whickered with panic when she realised that she couldn’t move, and the knight took her bridle in both hands to calm her. As soon as she stopped fighting him, they pulled. Straining against the air together, the mare occasionally freeing a foreleg only to slap it back down into the swamp. Then the strength was out of her and she just stood there, panting hard.
“Gather as many of these reeds as you can,” the Red King said. “Give her something to stand on.”
The knight muttered a few half-believed words of reassurance to her and did as he was bade. He’d only walked a few heavy, aching steps when he came upon the bodies.
They were three, he thought. Two adults, and a child. But it was difficult to tell. The marsh had turned them grey. Their faces were bloated and fly-blown. Flesh wrinkled like the skin of an elbow, and open eyes turned to the milk-white of cut quartz. By his reckoning, they had been dead about a week.
The knight tried to remember how to breathe. “We are not the first ones to try this way,” he said.
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