The Red Cross of Gold I:. The Knight of Death

by Brendan Carroll

  These were his last thoughts before his mind closed in on itself in peaceful bliss for several minutes. When he opened his eyes at last to survey his surroundings, he drifted to another place and another time. The horse appeared to be following a well worn path down a dry wash similar to the nameless, numberless desert wadis snaking through the deserts of Egypt, Arabia, Persia, Assyria, Phoenicia, Sumer… He nodded off once more and then jerked his head up one last time. Assyria? Phoenicia? Sumer?! He had to stay awake. Either his memories and his book learning were becoming entirely jumbled or he was suffering delirium from the effects of the mercury in his system. He leaned over the horse’s mane, dropped the reins without knowing it and let the horse go where he would. Mark Andrew needed to rest and recover from the poison before he could manage the unruly stallion with any degree of success. His only thought was to keep the beast moving away from the mansion and keep his eyes open for signs of danger.

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  Beaujold was the first to realize that Ramsay was no longer in the basement with them. He renewed his attack on the German, forcing him slowly back down the hall toward the stairs. He took one last swing at von Hetz and the tall Knight tripped backwards, falling on the risers. Beaujold seized the opportunity and bolted up the stairs. Von Hetz leapt after him and brought him back down the stairs by one ankle, bouncing him painfully on the steps all the way to the bottom. His sword skittered away on the tiles as he rolled over and kicked at the man with his free foot. The Frenchman got off one good kick under the German’s chin, sending him reeling against the far wall, temporarily dazed, and gained enough time to get away and up the stairs. Beaujold emerged on the dark side of the patio and looked around for signs of the Knight’s passage. The moss roses, petunias and marigolds were broken and crushed along the north side of the foundation. Beaujold glanced up at the milling figures on the patio. A man leaned over the railing and waved to him. He smiled and waved to the idiot before dashing off in the same direction Ramsay had taken, away from the crowd of unsuspecting guests toward several shadowy outbuildings in the distance. As he cleared the end of the building, he heard hoof beats fading away into the night. He redoubled his efforts and ran toward the stable.

  Once inside, he chose a skittish palomino mare, taking time only to grab a double handful of the long, blond mane before throwing himself on to her bare back. With the ease of a seasoned rider, he guided the mare out of the stable and turned her with the help of his knees in the direction followed by Ramsay’s horse. He gigged the mare brutally with his booted heels and she bolted, terrified, into the night.

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  Christopher made a dash for the stairs only to be stopped cold by the fist of the Apocalyptic Knight. His feet continued, but his head stopped and he landed on his back, losing both his knives and his breath at the same time. His previously injured muscles cramped in protest and he doubled over in pain while von Hetz focused his attention on the activities of his Brothers in the corridor. He had seen Simon down with blood on his head and he had seen Dambretti toppled under the weight of the woman. The Italian eyed him warily as he stepped over the hapless apprentice with the body of the young woman in his arms and started up the stairs, taking two steps at a time. He laid her out on the cool grass near the basement doors and went back down to fetch d’Ornan. He met Von Hetz coming up with Christopher staggering along beside him, pressing both hands to his injured back. Simon was trying unsuccessfully to get up, but the injury he had suffered to the back of his head would not allow it. Dambretti picked up the smaller man and threw him easily over his shoulder. What a mess they had made. Now the Chevalier d’Epee and the Chevalier du Morte were out there somewhere in the dark together, and it would be just a matter of time before they were all caught by Cecile Valentino’s people, if not the local police. It was a miracle that none of the people on the verandah had seen the commotion already. He stooped to pick up Beaujold’s sword before making his way up the stairs. When he stepped outside, an unfamiliar voice greeted him immediately.

  “I’ll take that.” Valentino’s security man stood in front him, holding a double barrel shotgun trained on his head. “And the other one.”

  Dambretti laid Beaujold’s sword on the ground, and then awkwardly removed his own sword from its scabbard, laying it alongside the first while still holding the healer on his shoulder. Two more men stood near the spot where he had left the young woman also holding small caliber pistols trained on them, looking ready to shoot anything that moved. Valentino knelt beside the unconscious blond, checking her for injuries. Von Hetz and Christopher sat on the grass with their hands behind their heads. Dambretti held up his free hand in a sign of surrender and waited for whatever was to come with a patience only possible from several hundred years of experienced waiting and experienced surrender. It was only a temporary setback.

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  Mark Andrew’s stomach was begging for relief from the cramped position in the saddle, but the horse did not care. He continued his proud prancing along the dry wash, showing no signs of tiring. Ramsay was exhausted and he had also exhausted his mental resources. He suffered a pain like nothing he had ever thought possible and only momentary lapses of consciousness gave him any respite from it. In his long life, he had suffered many things, but this was certainly something new. His tortured brain reasoned that he suffered what no normal man would be subjected to simply because a normal man would have been long dead by now. His head drooped against the long mane and his eyes closed time and again. He felt frozen in place and eventually a sort of blessed numbness spread through his body, replacing the pain with the strange out of body feeling that he knew was death when he drifted away from the hollow shell that his soul called home and he felt he would stay forever in that one position, never moving. The night would never end. The sun would never come up. He would never see Merry again. His mind faded to nothing except one tiny point of brilliant light. He heard nothing and mercifully felt nothing more and his last thought was that he had only just now reached death’s door and he was glad.

  A priest with a shaven head dressed in a long linen robe, walked out of the light and took his hand, leading him from the darkness into the light. The priest’s words were soothing, comforting and familiar as they made their way down into the presence of the Great Lord of Death….

  He did not wake again until something very heavy hit his right side and sent him flying from the horse’s back. The pain returned even before he hit the rocky ground. He rolled twice and came to rest against a particularly hard boulder at the edge of the old stream bed. The stallion nickered and snorted somewhere in the darkness, and the sound of additional hooves stomped the ground nearby as he curled into a ball, clutching both arms across his stomach. His sword was gone along as was his hope of going any further. He wondered what had hit him. He wondered that he was still alive. He wondered that his brain could even wonder at all. His wonderings were soon put to rest as a hand grabbed his ankle and dragged him away from the boulder, banging his aching head in the process.

  He heard himself screaming at his attacker in pain and terror. At first, he did not recognize his attacker as human and he thought some animal or demon was about to devour him alive, but the dragging ceased and his leg fell to the ground with a bone-jarring thud. He drew his knees up and fought to stay conscious long enough to see what was about to eat him. When his vision cleared, he looked up into the enraged face of the Knight of the Sword only a few inches above him. All he could do was utter a pitiful moan and squeeze his eyes closed against at the sight of the man who would now kill him. He had suffered so much and all for nothing, just to be killed for a long-imagined wrong on the part of this Brother.

  “Stand and fight, Sir!” The man invited him to do the impossible. He could neither stand, nor fight.

  The request was accompanied by a vicious kick to his shoulder. He didn’t feel any additional pain, just a jolt. Everything, including the added
insult of falling onto the rocks, was overruled and engulfed by the pain in his stomach. He had no weapon and no strength to move.

  “Get up!” the Knight shouted at him again.

  He rolled slowly on his side and tore one hand away from his midsection. His elbow shook violently as he pushed himself up onto his knees with one hand. It was as far as he could go. Bloody foam dripped from his mouth onto the sandy ground.

  “Thou art naught but a rabid dog!” the man shouted in his face and kicked him again in his exposed ribs. He fell on his side again, rolled onto his back and lay still, unable even to clasp his stomach now. His arms lay limply at his sides and his eyes stared up at the great expanse of the Milky Way above his head. It was a miraculous and glorious sight even to his pain-crazed mind, and he had the unshakable idea that he could simply drift away into the night with little or no effort. Felt as if he had done so many times in the past. The Universe was a wonderful, awe-inspiring creation offering endless vistas, infinite possibilities. Other worlds. Other times. The great yellow and orange striped orb of Saturn encircled by its glorious rings loomed in front of him and he was home!

  The magnificent view was suddenly blocked by the face of the Frenchman leaning over him again and reality closed in.

  “You will not fight?” the man asked him.

  “I cannot fight you, Brother,” he heard himself say the words rather calmly under the circumstances. “I can only offer the Way of Truth to those who would follow. Repent and receive salvation, Brother, for life is all that we are given to perceive the Glory of God.” He knew that he was saying the words, but he had no idea why or how.

  Beaujold made a noise generated by pure animalistic rage and kicked him again before disappearing from sight. Ramsay gazed up at the stars, enjoying the fragile moments of respite. Drinking in the peace and the power exuded by the stars and planets arched over his head, he thought perhaps he would be able to travel there shortly after all.

  The Knight of the Sword, aptly titled, soon reappeared with Ramsay’s golden sword. He grasped the hilt in both hands and raised it straight up as high as he could reach with the point down. Mark Andrew looked up at the sword frowning, trying to comprehend what he was looking at. The sword, sparkling in the moon and starlight, floated as if suspended against the jewel-studded background of the desert night sky without visible support. At the last moment, and far too late, Mark Andrew realized what was about to happen. The French Knight brought the sword down with all his strength. The tip of the blade entered his tormented stomach just below his right ribcage only scant millimeters from his spine. The double-edged blade pierced him easily through and through, embedding itself in the gravelly ground beneath him to a depth of several inches accompanied by a horrid grating noise. Mark suddenly saw himself from above. After a split second in this peculiar position, he plummeted down into the body that lay below him and entered the second reality screaming in renewed anguish. He closed his eyes against this new nightmare and tried to force himself to stay awake. It simply could not be happening.

  When he opened his eyes again, he saw the same face leaning over him. He could say nothing, nor could he move. His brain registered warm blood and cold metal in his hands as he clutched the blade protruding from his body. Beaujold made the sign of the cross on his forehead and kissed him on the lips, before backing away.

  “I’m sorry, my Brother,” the Knight whispered to him. “But you were very close to blasphemy. Do not trifle with me again.”

  Surprisingly, after his initial shock and screaming reaction faded, the sword hurt no worse than the poison, but the idea of what had happened to him now was much more gruesome and much harder to bear. Being pinned to the ground with his own sword was not how he had planned to spend eternity and it seemed that the sword had somehow betrayed him. He soon felt himself drifting in the same hazy dimension from which he had only recently returned, somewhere between life and death, as if he had somehow separated from his physical body altogether. It just could not have happened. It had to be a dream or perhaps hell.

  He turned his head to watch as the Knight of the Sword swung himself onto the back of the palomino. A lifetime had passed since he had first seen this horse in the stable. His back grew warm as his blood poured down his sides and ran under him. The man looked back at him once, declaring his intent to return and Mark thought inanely that his murderer looked like an angel in the silvery moonlight. Mark tried to convince himself that this was, indeed, another of his strange nightmares and that he would wake up any moment. Beaujold kicked the horse’s flank once and was gone. Ramsay listened to the sounds of the hoof beats fading into the distance.

  When he did not wake up, a new sense of panic entered his mind. What if the man did not return? How long could he lay here and what would happen next? He felt blood well up in his throat and fought the urge to cough. The blood bubbled up, choking him and then flowed out of his mouth when he turned his head to the right. The stuff ran down his face into his hair and onto the ground. What if no one came for him? How many of his Brothers had he, the Knight of Death, come for with this same sword? And now there was no one to come for him. If he did not get up now, he would never get up again.

  The hilt of the sword was too close to his body to get the proper leverage necessary to push it up, and his hands, covered with blood, were too slippery to pull it out. It was driven too far into the ground beneath him for that. The sound of coyotes barking somewhere in the night broke the silence. What beast would now come out of the brush to devour him alive? Or would insects come and take him away bit by bit? It was too much! He tried again and again to pull the blade free, but only succeeded in causing himself more and more pain with every move he made.

  He lay still, looking up at the stars again before his eyes closed. Many, many memories flooded his mind in the space of a few short seconds while his life unfolded in a reversal of events from latest to earliest times and he recognized this as part of the death experience as well. If he didn’t really die this time, at least his memory was being restored bit by bit. He saw everything with crystal clarity starting with his run from Merry’s house and going back years and years until he had passed his turbulent childhood, passed into his mother’s womb and out again into the body of another man.

  He stood momentarily in a dimly lit cave and raised a bronze mirror in front of his face, but before he could focus on the face, a loud noise jerked him back from the brink and he understood that his body was trying to sink into a healing coma. Whenever he received a wound or injury of such horrendous proportions, his body would shut down for three days to heal. But this time was different. This time, the object of his distress still in place. Waking up in three days with his arms and legs chewed off and his body still skewered by the golden sword was a very distasteful image that reminded him that he had to get the sword out now. He had to move. It was not the first such wound he had experienced since falling in with the Poor Knights of Solomon’s Temple, but this was the first time he had suffered such a thing all alone. He had been shot, stabbed, choked, poisoned, bashed, battered and drowned, along with his horse, twice, but this was a different matter all together. He had fallen from a cliff, been buried in a sandstorm, he had been run down by an automobile and thrown from a train on the side of a mountain. The bizarre notion that he could lie there and heal around the sword and by so doing, in essence, become a permanent fixture in this barren wasteland, almost caused him to scream again.

  He closed his eyes briefly, trying to force the morbid thoughts from his mind. It didn't work. He imagined himself covered over with dust and dirt and then rocks and eventually becoming encased in minerals. Someday in the far distant future, erosion would unearth his form again he would become a human geode, filled with muscle and bone and blood and… memories. These bizarre thoughts kept him awake and desperately trying to dislodge the sword in spite of the tremendous pain his efforts caused. He drifted toward unconsciousness against all his better judgment.

  A snuffl
ing noise from nearby renewed his alarm a few minutes later. Turning his head slowly, expecting jackals or worse, he saw the black stallion standing less than a dozen feet away, nibbling at a clump of grass.

  An idea, albeit a bad one, suddenly occurred to him. He clucked and called to the horse, causing more blood to pour from his mouth. How much blood did he have? The stallion tossed its head and plodded closer, snorting nervously.

  “Come on, boy,” Ramsay whispered and held up his closed fist and then turned it over as if to offer the horse an apple or some other treat. The horse nodded its head up and down and stepped closer, pawing the ground, nudging his hand for the invisible fruit. Mark caught hold of the reins dangling from the horse’s bridle and quickly looped them several times around the hilt of the sword before the stallion realized he had been tricked. The big horse snuffled the blood on the ground and rolled its eyes.

  Before he could think better of the insane idea, Mark gathered a handful of rock and loose dirt, took a deep breath, that caused him to scream again and threw the dirt into the frightened beast’s face. His screaming continued in earnest when the horse jerked his head up, rearing on his hind legs, hopping backwards, yanking the sword from the ground and subsequently pulling it from his body in one swift, but violent motion.

  Several protracted minutes later, when he had recovered his senses somewhat and the screaming had subsided into gasping sobs, he gathered the last bit of strength he didn’t know he possessed and got up on his knees, half-crawling after the horse. He had to get back on the horse and get away before the one he had, at first, feared would not come back, did indeed come back with his iron-bound chest. He caught the stallion, retrieved his blood-stained sword from the tangled reins and climbed awkwardly into the saddle, cursing under his breath as the bloody reins slipped from his hand. He slapped the horse’s rump feebly with the sword and dragged the sword across his thighs as before. Leaning into the horse’s neck, he wrapped the long mane around his fingers as the horse started forward again, walking slowly through the night to parts unknown.