“You do not need to steal anymore,” I told him, and brought him under my protection. “You may eat from my trencher and drink from my cup.” Although his master came back for him, each time I saw the man, I raised my weapon to greet him so that he would know that to get the boy back in his service, he would have to fight me first. He never accepted the challenge.
On long marches, Thibaud Dustifot regaled Frey and Ewen and me with tales of ancient heroes, of Arthur, and Lancelot, and of the Faerie Queen who had built a castle from the dreams of the dying upon a lake of mirrors within the heart of our Great Forest. For a child, he had an enormous ability to spin stories of straw into fine gold. I hesitated telling my own stories of the Forest, but knew that I would one day sit with him and tell him the tales even he had never known.
3
But I paint too kind a picture of my travels with the soldiers.
The battles happened often, and a day was a fine one when I saw fewer than ten of my brethren-at-arms slaughtered.
The smell of blood of that time is one I shall never forget. It was not an intoxication, but was a stink of rot and sourness, and had a milky consistency, mixed with dirt. To see a battlefield of rock and dust, laid out as if in a carpet to God of my compatriots and fellow Hospitallers, their arms sliced off, heads separated from bodies, the little boys slaughtered on pikes and spears, as well as the bodies of the enemy infidel similarly displayed—it did not make me wish for yet another battle in a day’s time.
The days of siege were long and terrible. The blood ran to our ankles in the worst of a day that seemed to never end. I remember there was a man of twenty-five or so who clung to my leg even after his torso had been sliced down the middle. And yet, that was simply a moment within the blackened smoke of war, for I tugged myself free and continued to wield ax and short sword as I took down those who came at me to bring me to the grave.
4
It was a world of blood, and what was not blood was the coal black smoke of the charnel house. The ash of human death seemed to hold the gates of the city closed as much as it did the horde. The mournful sound of the horns sounding along the battlements—and the strange chants and songs, so foreign and godless to the soldiers below whose commanders had plotted out the day and night and the day next, and planned the deaths of many, and the victory of few.
From one of the great cliffs by the sea a bird swooped down, spreading its dark wings as it glided far above the lines of soldiers.
I glanced up to the dark morning sky, seeing the majestic creature of ill omen, remembering my falcons and doves, and thought not of my own death, but of those I would slaughter that day in the name of righteousness. I felt afire with the potency of a war-lust that I had learned from my brother. My love for my mates and for my country and for the maiden who waited for me in a distant land, all conspired against my own natural fear of what was to come. Yes, I thought of Alienora, my sweet, who had lain with me in the chapel and had drunk sacred waters of bonding so that our souls should always be as one, even though the world kept us apart. I saw her face when things got too terrible for me to bear. I saw her face and felt the warmth of her hand on my cheek when death got close enough to singe me with its icy breath.
I breathed in the fear of others beside me. I glanced at Ewen, and felt the need to make sure that he survived another day of war. Thibaud, too, although he was often at the camp during the worst of the battles, for his talent was for healing and not slaughter. It brought me strength. It made me feel as if I were no ordinary nineteen-year-old foot soldier. My hands were large, used to the heft of the blade. I had sprouted—as if they were wings—strong, broad shoulders—and was a head or more taller than the others beside me.
I tasted fear, coppery on my tongue, hoping it would bring me more power that day.
The smell in the air was of dust and sweat and a distant and unfamiliar perfume, as well as the stench of the unburied dead. The battlefield stretched out across an endless wasteland of rocks and towers and the savage and alien world of the infidel at the great towering fortress of Kur-Nu. But Kur-Nu would fall—we and others like us had been laying siege to it for years, with the precision of a Roman phalanx. We were a small piece of the larger puzzle of the fight for this castle of legendary treasure. Walls had tumbled, the rubble spread like frozen lava along the valley between the jagged and imperious cliffs. Carcasses of horses and men lay in a heap near the ash pits of destruction; still, the smell of some aromatic flower wafted on the viperous air, taunting me as I awaited the first signal of battle. The men around me, some barely men, others too old to be in battle, were covered in the yellow dust from the windstorm that had passed the previous night, unable to clean it from our bodies, tunics, armor. It was as if the earth had begun taking us down into her womb, into the dust that we would soon become.
It was a game of men and Death, and only Death won in this game. But I would not die, I knew.
To Frey, more skilled at battle and more bloodied by it, it was all a joke. He had been at this war long, and had grown into a husky, powerful man with it. He knew the use of five different blades, and had, by his own account, lopped the heads off the best among the hundreds in the enemy camp. Had he not been of lowly birth, he no doubt would have been a great knight and commander. He had told me just the evening before that what he loved most about warfare was the feeling of invincibility that arose within him, the knowledge that should he die, his reward in Heaven awaited, and there would be no death for him until he had reclaimed the Holy Lands.
I was less skilled, and less confident. This was no game, no match. This was a chaos of cries and torments, and a vision of any hell that might exist.
I tensed, waiting for the cry in the field. My muscles ached, but I held my breath in a prayer.
With the first battle cry, I shouted to my brother for victory, and he back to me. This stirred our blood, and even Ewen joined in the great war whoop that went up from the infantry as the battle began.
Raising his ax, my brother ran ahead on foot as the first arrows flew over our heads and over the hordes of descending infidels. Frey turned about like a windmill, swinging out at the enemy, taking one, then two, then three down. His laughter seemed that of a madman; I caught sight of him when I could. He brought down several more men, like a lion taking down a herd, their spears and swords falling as he slit their throats or hacked arms free of shoulders.
The arrows of the archers struck the great gate ahead of us. The sergeant-brothers and the siege machine, which we had come to call the Bad Neighbor, had moved into position, and the first great stone was flung against the enemy line along the battlements. We would come to know these gates as the Gates of Hell, for it was the most powerful enemy who held within them the torture chambers of others from the Holy Crusade; the stories of how the men would be roasted on spits or tied together with ropes and then starved to death until it was rumored that one man would begin to devour the other while still alive...the horrors were ungodly in that terrible place, even if our own men had done that or worse with the enemy. But we were all; they were nothing. This is the way of war. This castle and city needed to burn and be destroyed beneath the feet of the Holy Crusade.
The heat grew intense as flames danced across the enshrouded sky.
I felt enormous power as I swung my sword against the enemy. There was the brutality of violent death all around, but I felt above it, or so inspired within it, seeing the absurdity of all human pain and suffering, feeling like I was playing the game of the gods. Twice, I hacked at an infidel who nearly took down Ewen. I grabbed the youth by his waist and flung him forward so as to keep him from harm’s way. Ewen returned the favor threefold, scoring men with death as he went, hacking, hitting, stabbing, grabbing up a mace from a fallen enemy and using it to bring down a great bull of a man.
Too many men fell around us. Too many boys died at my feet. Death traveled, touching the shoulders and necks of soldiers, and I nearly felt it myself. My mission here was to kill or
be killed, to move forward by my commanders’ signals, so that by the end of the battle, my companions and I would still breathe and taste of the delight of life itself.
The human storm raged, roiling winds of man against man, cross against crescent, sword and spear and ax and arrow swirling in the acrid smoke of the burning fortress gate. The land had been cut with the rubble of other battles, and we added a new wound to it. The armies of the Cross were going to be victorious, I could feel it. I could feel the great swell of the ranks as we pushed toward the goal. I felt that we would take this castle, then have peace. I truly believed it.
I could not even see the fire at the gate, for the bodies of both living and dead and the dust they stirred blocked all sight beyond a few yards. I lost sight of everything but the infidels who crossed my path, and of Ewen, who had managed to fight well and take few injuries.
My brother rode out on horseback; a fallen knight or commander’s horse had loosed itself, and he had grabbed it before it could gallop off or be killed. Frey, astride, jabbed and speared at the horde that circled around him.
An infidel leapt up onto the horse, a curved blade aimed to slice my brother’s throat.
When I remember it, it is as a moment frozen. A mere mote of time, where all else faded into sulfurous yellow around the outline of my brother and the jackal that had held his life in the shiny crescent of metal.
“No!” I shouted, as I cut the infidel before me down. I swung my sword in a neat arc through the oncoming flesh. Its double edge, like canine incisors, met flesh as if it were a reed slicing through water. “Frey!”
Frey turned at the shout. I was certain that he raised his hand to me, in need of aid, for his own sword had fallen. Frey reached at his side for his ax or a dagger.
I leapt over the dead, but felt as if I were moving against a strong current.
Frey’s eyes widened, his mouth opening in a battle cry. The enemy warrior sliced his throat, and, in the next instant, threw his body from the horse.
“Demon infidel!” I cried out, my tears mixing with sweat as I turned on the enemy.
I brought the sword down across the man’s shoulders, cutting in deep. With all my strength, I drew it out again. My muscles twisted as I turned the blade. And brought it down again. I sawed my weapon in and out of the enemy, then brought it out again, with blood spraying from the wounds.
The man who had murdered my brother fell to the earth. The horse my brother had been riding took off into the billowing smoke. I took my hand ax and began chopping at the dead man until he was no longer in the form of a man at all, my anger unquenched even as I obliterated the body of the murderer.
I searched among the dead and dying, in the blood-caked rocky ground.
Frey lay in the dirt. I got down on my knees beside him, clasping his hands. “Don’t die, brother,” I wept, unaware of the battle raging around him. I pressed my face to my brother’s hands as I held them together. “You shall not die, brother. By the power of God and of all the gods.”
But the wound was deep at his throat, and blood had burst from him like a long red cloak.
“Aleric!” Ewen called out. He ran toward me, pulling me away from my brother’s body. “He’s gone.”
Tasting gall in my throat and fury in my blood, I rose up. I pushed Ewen away from me, and began to strike blow after blow to the oncoming enemy. I felt power in my arms, and a strength in my chest that beat against my cage of bones as if it were a bird of prey within me seeking release.
Something sparked like a flint against stone within my soul. With wide strokes I slashed across the oncoming infidels, and only an instinct for life kept me from falling into despair.
My sword sang in the air that day.
It cut through flesh after flesh, and my face and body were spattered with blood as if I’d been baptized in a sea of red.
I leaned to the left, plunging the bloodied sword into the next man’s side. I had only a vague awareness of those around me—Ewen and the other soldiers fighting with daggers and great batons clubbing at the enemy; the knights on horseback, swinging mace and sword and lance and poleax; the archers to the rear shouting each to each as another shower of bolts from their bows found release.
From behind, I felt a knife dig into me, just beneath my shoulder blade. I spun about, ignoring the pain, and hacked my sword into the shoulder of yet another of the faceless infidel.
Chapter 9
________________
THE HORNS
1
Then, it was over. For a full hour or more at the end of such a day of attack, there was a terrible silence on the field, and the billows of smoke blinded us to any sight of conquest or victory. The only sound might be the whistling of wind, but on that day, the air stilled, and only yellow-and-black smoke rose as if carrying souls to Heaven.
“Aleric! Falconer!” It was Ewen’s voice, breaking through the last of the silence. I glanced up, and Ewen raised his ax high with victory. His face streamed with the blood of the enemy; his scalp was dark and wet as well. His left shoulder had been cut, and he limped, but he had a look of elation. He had become a man in war, and I could see upon him the mark of death as surely as if the Angel of Darkness stood behind him. His happiness at the end of a terrible day’s fighting should have gladdened my heart, but it did nothing for me.
We would all die there.
All of us would be dust and smoke, soon enough.
Like my brother.
The world took from man. Took, and took again, and the only way to live happily was to pray for Heaven and give up on this world.
But for me, there were no prayers, and no Heaven.
2
I turned away from him, dropping my sword in the dirt. I stood, brushing dirt from my tunic, from my knees, feeling the itch of lice, which was common enough among us. The blood on my skin and clothes had caked with mud and sweat, and flies had begun hovering over the battlefield and around my form. Above, the vultures circled the blackened air. All of life was parasitic. All fed upon all. I glanced through the throng of men, then, up to the sky as if it contained answers.
The heat of the sun beat down upon me. We had fought for hours, but it was not yet nightfall.
One of our commanders rode among the crowd of victors, sword raised high. His horse was bloody with the life of fallen infidels. His cuirass, dented where the spears and sword thrusts of the enemy had failed. With helmet still upon his head, this great knight held both hands aloft.
In one, his sword.
In the other, the fresh-cut head of our enemy’s chieftain.
Tossing the head onto a pile of corpses, he roared so that all might hear and speak of it. “Christendom has conquered the Legions of Hell!”
I felt a stab beneath my heart—it was not from an enemy, but from within. I fell to my knees from weakness. Dirt in my fingers felt like the blanket of my own grave. The memory of my brother’s face faded from me as if it were as insubstantial as smoke. My mother’s face, too, seemed a fiery yellow memory and did not possess any feminine feature that I could recall. The faces of my enemies were more powerful in my thoughts: from Corentin to the baron to Kenan Sensterre to the infidels. Even our commanders seemed enemies to me.
Only one memory of hope within me, but it was nearly dead: Alienora’s sweet, pure face, as I had last seen it when I had kissed her lips. Yet, she would never see me again. Those who held power and sway over others—and God and the gods—had commanded that whatever love I kept in my heart for her would wither and die as my love for all mankind must.
The sounds of the Earth died for a moment.
I hated all mankind. I hated its works. I hated that I had been born in a time and place, cursed from birth onward, which sent me and my brother and my friend to this hell for the benefit of the knights. For those like the baron, who would watch my mother burn but would train a dove for his sick wife, who would keep Alienora from me. I burned with anger over this world—the world that God had ordained and all must
accept. I hated that I could expect no more from life, nor would life offer more, that even in the life to come, the kings and dukes and barons and knights would remain powerful, while such as myself would be a servant even unto the end of days.
I felt a fever overtake me in this anger. A ringing in my ears began, blocking out all other sounds. The world seemed to grow into a whiteness, as of snow. I smelled a burning of oak, as if I were in the Great Forest, around a campfire. Was I going blind? Deaf? Why could I hear only a distant ringing as of one bell tolling in a long, drawn-out tone? Why the light that ripped at my vision of the world? Then I heard a strange voice, almost as if it were within me, whispering. Then, it grew louder. It was a woman, not Alienora, but some stranger.
Come home, she said, and I tried to remember where I had heard this voice before, but I could not. It was of the Old Tongue, but I could not recall it. This phantom inside me said two words, again, and again: Come home.
The moment was broken. The smell of bloodied dead, of sweat, of human pain, all around again. The dust still rising, obliterating the gates of the great city before our throng, a city of purported riches. The men around me, cheering their heroes, raising the whoop and cry of the battle well won.
The boy, Thibaud, found me by the torn banner that our men had raised among our dead. Piles of bodies lay there, as if for a feast of some terrible demon from Hell. The boy searched among the dying, and after a time, trotted over to me, raising a skin filled with water. “Are you wounded?”
“In my shoulder,” I said.
Thibaud ran about and touched both my arms and shoulder. He tore at my coverings and tunic until I lay there, bare-chested. “There is no cut here. You have but an old scar.”
What infidel magic is this? I thought. For I was certain I had a wound from the day’s fighting. I could not remember an old scar at all, but then, when he touched the edge of it, I remembered my beating at the hands of Corentin before my journey to this desert hell had begun.
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