The Paradox

by Charlie Fletcher

  They see Lucy. Or rather they see the blacksmith.

  Their faces curdle.

  She cannot understand what they say, but the shapes their mouths make and the sounds that come out are ugly and contemptuous. One comes up and spits into her/his face.

  Time jerks and Lucy feels the cut of it as the vision slices forward.

  The hammer in her hand is rising and falling again.

  Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Clink.

  Another day. Cold outside. Low winter sun now, beyond the gloom of the forge.

  Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Clink.

  A commotion. People hurrying past the sunlight, cutting it into strips.

  The hammer stops.

  The blacksmith walks out.

  The sweep of green is gone. The land is white with hoar-frost on the far side of the palisade.

  The commotion comes from the ditch.

  The tattooed men are driving animals ahead of them.

  Horses. Dogs.

  The dogs trot with their heads low, tails between their legs, weaving in and out of the horses’ legs. If one tries to turn back, it is hit or kicked and jabbed with spears. No dog tries to turn back twice.

  The horses’ flanks are slick and wet with sweat and sheeted with blood. A grey mare tries to stop. The jab of a spear sends her forward, a dark red stain blooming on the pale curve of her haunch.

  Time jerks.

  Lucy has moved. Higher ground. Behind the palisade.

  Looking down. The end of the long ditch. A deep pit.

  In the pit, there are things Lucy does not want to see. But her eyes are unblinking. She cannot close them any more than she can turn away and break this connection with the past, hooked into her mind like a barb.

  The ditch ends in a drop to the bottom of the pit, twenty-five feet below it. The things Lucy does not want to look at writhe and spasm beneath her.

  The things are dogs and horses.

  They have been driven over the edge and are desperately trying to keep afloat. Their hooves and paws scrabble the sheer, dirty white of the pit walls, for the pit has been dug so deep that the earth has given way to the layer of chalk beneath, and then been filled with water. They are bloodied and broken-limbed, terrified and drowning. Dogs try to scrabble onto the broad backs of horses who turn round and bite at them.

  The dogs snarl and yelp and bite back.

  Flailing hooves cave in dog skulls, or scramble for purchase on the bodies of other drowning animals. Hounds thrash, their jaws locked on each other as they sink together beneath the water.

  It is the worst thing Lucy has seen.

  And she has, in another glinted shard of the past, seen a woman burnt as a witch.

  The hammer-bearer who both is and is not Lucy shouts a protest and waves the hammer at the group of men standing at the very top of the pit, out of the ditch. They are the tattooed faces who carry the bronze weapons.

  They stand amid a small hill of cages, cloche-shaped half-spheres of woven branches piled one on the other. Oily black feathers and dark beady eyes are visible behind the pale, interlaced willow wands.

  Their leader turns to glare at the hammer-bearer.

  He points a sickle-shaped bronze blade at him and the viewpoint bucks and shifts as he is surprised by hands that grab him from behind. As the hammer falls to the ground, Lucy sees the tattooed blacksmith dragged away through the crowd, towards the bird-cages and the man she has decided is some kind of priest on the lip of the pit. She sees the blacksmith buck and twist and try to free himself. He is strong. The six men holding him are trying to subdue a roiling lightning bolt of pure fury.

  He will destroy them…

  And then he goes limp and his eyes die a little.

  And Lucy sees what he has seen. The red-headed girl dragged after him, a bronze blade at her throat.

  Again she does not understand the language they shout at him, but the meaning is obvious: if he fights any more, the blade opens the girl’s windpipe.

  The girl says something, flat, cold, proud. Her eyes flash contempt at the tattooed men holding her. She tries to thrust her neck on to the blade, but one of them grabs the thick rope of her hair and yanks her back. The blacksmith opens his mouth to shout something but before Lucy can hear it

  Time slices again

  And

  It is night.

  It is night and the stars are scattered brightly overhead. It is cold, so cold the moon has a double halo of ice crystals around it.

  The young tattooed blacksmith is staring at the stars. He has no choice. He is tied to a board, flat on his back. His hands are stretched straight out on either side, lashed to a sturdy cross-piece.

  The leader of the skin-wearers (for this is how Lucy thinks of them) stands astride him, chanting into the night. The crowd now surrounds the pit, faces drawn and expectant in the light of the two bonfires that have been lit on the edge, between which the young blacksmith is spread-eagled on his board. Half are the skin-wearers; the others are the ones in homespun, the ones whose weapons are iron and not bronze.

  The dagger the leader holds up to the moon is neither. It is a wicked arc of jagged flint or some even darker stone.

  He pauses in the chanting and bends so he is nose to tattooed nose with the blacksmith. His grin is a skull’s rictus, his pupils have shrunk down to black pinpricks no larger than the stars overhead. A drool of spittle loops out of his mouth and catches the firelight, glistening as it falls into the blacksmith’s face.

  The board is grabbed by other hands.

  It is pushed between the fires, over the brink, held there, so the blacksmith’s head is lower than his feet.

  The knife-carrier laughs as he straightens and watches. He reaches behind him. Something black and feathery is taken from one of the cages placed in his hand. He jerks the blade through it.

  It was a raven. Its head falls onto the board next to the blacksmith. The body is held above him as the blood spurts then spatters all over his upper body. Then the lifeless bird is tossed into the pit.

  The cages are opened. Skin-wearers push each other aside to grab more ravens.

  One after another they are stabbed and slashed, their blood emptied onto the blacksmith, flowing off his body on the tilted board and splashing into the pit far below.

  Time jerks.

  A deluge of dead ravens tumbles down into the pit, joining the corpse-jam of horses and dogs. Some horses are still alive, and more than a few dogs, which gives the carpet of dead and dying animals a horrible twitching movement.

  Time jerks again. The leader of the skin-wearers again straddles the blacksmith, holds a flat disc of polished stone by a handle, holds it between the blacksmith’s eyes and the stars overhead. In the black mirror, the tied man sees his own reflection, unrecognisable beneath the thick layer of raven gore covering his face like a bloody caul.

  That’s not what makes his eyes widen, shockingly white in the bloodied face.

  What startles and then appals him is what he sees reflected behind his head.

  What makes him stop breathing and forget to blink is the surface of the water below, shown in the mirror. Either it is rising, as if it has a life of its own, or else the charnel-house jumble of the animal sacrifice is being pulled beneath the surface in one huge clump.

  Before he needs to breathe again, the water is clear, rippled, then un-rippled, then still.

  He is staring into a stone mirror and seeing the answering mirror-smooth surface below, black as obsidian. Unnaturally still.

  Right at the end, just before the last tip of raven wing disappeared Lucy thought she saw something sinewy and fluid and wrong moving below the water, black on black, but then the last pinion feather slipped beneath the surface and it was gone.

  All eyes slowly dragged away from the glassy bottom of the pit and focused on the stone knife held at the blacksmith’s throat.

  The knife-wielder said something, the tattoos on his face seeming to writhe and become part of the darkness behind him
, like dark smoke.

  A question.

  The blacksmith spat up into his eye.

  The knife-man roared in anger. Drew back the knife for the killing blow, the straining neck naked to the blade as it began its brutal descent.

  The blacksmith broke the cross-pole. His hands, the broken parts of the pole still lashed to the wrists, smacked together on either side of the head, cupped on each ear.

  The killing stroke lost momentum as the executioner’s ear-drums burst and he shrieked in pain.

  The knife sliced the blacksmith’s shoulder instead of his neck, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  He bucked and kicked and caught his would-be killer between the legs.

  But the bucking action made the board slip, and the two of them slid over the edge before the other skin-wearers could save their leader.

  And as they fell, time slices, a razor cut, not a chunk

  and one minute Lucy saw them tumbling–the blacksmith pulling the knife out of his shoulder and the executioner’s hands flailing to find a handhold in the night air –

  then they were twenty-five feet lower, inches from the flat surface, and Lucy’s eyes seemed to squirm in her head because it seemed as if at the last moment, the mirror-flat surface of the dark water writhed up and leapt hungrily for them, engulfing them and yanking them into the depths beneath.

  And then a bigger time-slice

  And the horrorstruck faces of the watchers on the rim looked down, lit by the guttering bonfires, skin-wearers and normal folk, and there was silence broken only by the sound of breathing and the sizzle and crack of the flames.

  The surface was glass-flat.

  Unmoving as stone.

  Except for one irregularity. One flaw. One knurled lump standing proud on the perfect smoothness.

  The stone knife lay on the surface, not floating, but lying on it as if on a sheet of blackest ice.

  And then someone shouted.

  The girl with the red hair. She pointed at the knife.

  Fingers were clenched around the handle.

  And as the silence was broken, the knife and the hand holding it began to move.

  The angle changed.

  The knife-tip jagged into the black surface like an ice-pick. The hand flexed with the effort of the man below the surface and then the crowd shouted as one as a shoulder burst the surface, then another hand splayed flat on the black mirror. The arm holding the knife shot further out and stabbed a new hold with the knife point.

  A head broke the surface and the shouting and the screaming turned to a buzz and then a rumble as the blacksmith used the stone knife to pull his way back into this world from whatever lay in the depths beneath the black mirror.

  He came out on his hands and knees and hung there, panting, staring down at his face.

  Then he stood slowly, the broken wood of the cross-pieces still hanging off his wrists. He cut the rawhide strips without looking and stared up into the faces looking back at him.

  The blackness, the gore seemed to slide off him, starting with his head, draining down towards his feet. And stranger than that, so strange that it made the crowd shout and point once again, was the fact that his black hair drained of colour too, and the whorls and switchbacks of his facial tattoos drained out as he watched it take the ink from his arms as well.

  The black mirror or whatever lay beyond it, cheated of his body, was taking the darkness out of him.

  He turns and seems to look straight at Lucy.

  She stopped breathing. Her turn now.

  Without the tattooed face, he is recognisable.

  He is not just a smith. Or rather, he is more than that.

  He is The Smith.

  He was The Smith.

  He was always The Smith

  And just as she was reeling with the truth and the impossibility of it, a final lurching jag of the past hit her, like a vicious punch on a new bruise.

  They come out of the dawn, through the marsh.

  Men and iron.

  Rough woollen cloaks, blades and axes as grey as the mist they stride through.

  They do not hurry.

  The chest-high reeds rustle as the grim and silent battle horde filters through, making a sound gentle and constant as the wind.

  The hand that carries the hammer goes with them. A hand now without tattoos.

  They are below the palisade.

  The skin-wearers are waiting for them behind the spiked logs. They have bows. They loose, all together.

  The twang of bowstrings fills the sky with arrows.

  The Smith shouts something.

  As one, the men around him bunch closer, shields overlapping edge to edge, a wooden wall, a sky shield.

  The arrows arc downwards, whistling in with an angry noise.

  The shield wall buckles and gives as the arrows thunk home like a hundred axe blows, but it holds and the warriors surge forward until they hear the next salvo twang into the sky, and then they prepare to receive them again.

  Three more times the arrows loose, three more times the shield wall lurches forward to receive them. Each time closer to the palisade.

  They reach the palings and begin to dig them out under cover of their barrier.

  On the mound above the skin-wearers shriek at them. They bring forward hostages, hands tied. They wave swords at them, shouting at the shield wall.

  The message is clear. The warriors continue to dig out the palisade, swords and picks and hands.

  The first hostages are killed. Their bodies fall like heavy sacks.

  And then Lucy recognises one.

  The girl with the red hair. The blacksmith’s girl.

  She stands there, held by two tattooed men, a bowman and a swordsman who holds his blade at her throat. Her eyes are closed. Her body is limp, held upright by the men. The swordsman roars at The Smith, his eyes finding him in the crowd.

  The Smith shouts at the men behind the shield wall.

  One turns, his shield now a hedgehog of arrow shafts.

  Sees The Smith begin to run at him.

  He shouts at the next man next as he spins the blade in his free hand and scythes the edge through the arrows, shaving his shield smooth.

  He turns the shorn shield to the sky and bends his knees, ready to take the weight of the incoming Smith. His companion grabs the other end of the buckler as The Smith leaps onto it.

  They hurl the shield heavenwards–a human springboard–hurdling him high over the palisade–a sky-born berserker–hammer hooking hungrily towards the horrified swordsman ahead.

  Lucy sees it all.

  The red stain already sheeting from the girl’s neck

  The battle fury dying in The Smith’s eyes even as he takes the swordsman’s head off his shoulders –

  –too late.

  Eyes that will now for ever be too late.

  And the past releases its grip and drops her back in the now –

  And in that now she is looking into the same pale, washed-out eyes.

  Eyes that have been too late for a long, long time.

  The Smith took the hammer gently from her hands and lowered her to sit on the steps as she got her equilibrium back. Her head is spinning.

  “She was your love. The red-haired girl.”

  He nodded.

  “Your wife?”

  He looked away. Shook his head. Looked back at her.

  “My daughter.”

  None of this made sense, except it was true.

  “But… how have you lived this long?”

  “I haven’t,” he said. “I stopped living when I went through the black mirror. Everyone does. What is on the other side is the Other, and the Other is not life.”

  “But you came back.”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  He sat next to her on the step and took a deep breath, eyes closed, head tilted back, as if saying what came next was a heavy weight he needed to brace himself to carry and not drop.

  “I am the Anomaly
. The Deviant. The Aberration. The Paradox, the True Paradox because I am not only the antithesis of reason, my survival contradicts the mortal power of the unreason that dwells behind the black mirrors. I am the dead man that walks, and the living man that dies every day. Because every dawn I wake and at some point I remember she is not here. I remember her on the palisade. I remember what it felt like, that last moment I was truly alive, when I believed she too lived still, the moment I hurried the shield wall, the moment I hung there between heaven and earth with the cold fury of righteousness coursing through my veins, knowing that my strength and speed could save her. The moment just before I failed.”

  He opened his eyes and looked down at her.

  “No man could have saved her,” said Lucy. “I saw, remember? She was dead before you jumped.”

  “No man could have come back from behind the black mirror,” he said, “but I did. I should have been able to.”

  He exhaled and stood.

  “And so you see me as I am: the man who can explain everything… except himself.”

  “You were Sluagh,” she said.

  “They weren’t Sluagh then, not really, not in those days. They didn’t forswear the day and take to nightwalking until we had conquered them,” he said, laying the hammer back on the anvil. “We took their flag and we killed their chieftains, and we buried that damned black well deep below the hill again, and we brought the ravens back to watch over it, and we made an oath-lock in their conquered flags and forbade them iron, and made them fear it.”

  “And then?”

  “And then time happened. History happened. And what was a shrine became a temple, and then a different kind of temple, and then a castle with a White Tower with a town growing around it. And people lived and died and forgot and the world became both simpler in some ways and harder in others. And those sworn to protect the Tower became those sworn to protect the city the town had become, and so the trust was passed on down the generations, mixed blood patrolling the line, if there is a line, and here we are.”

  She shook her head. Something was still wrong.

  “Why are you telling me this?” she said.

  “Because I know metal and materials and what is true and what is not. And there’s something broken in you, Lucy Harker,” he said. “It’s trust. You can’t trust. That’s something we can’t mend or teach. That’s something we can only earn. And there are some kinds of mistrust that are planted so deep by such violent and unforgiveable betrayals that they can never really be uprooted by anyone outside yourself. The only thing that can grub out that deep wariness is love. Not love given, not love taken, but both: love shared. And that’s what I wish you, girl. Love, and the strength to be true to it when you find it.”