Festive Frights
Page 20
The wind swept those words away; the snow scraped the letters off the sheepskin. Erik's head reeled as the snow's breath wiped the work of years from his mind. He raised his hand vaguely, a futile attempt at grasping all the hard, disfiguring effort he had put into this version of himself. The wind carelessly unravelled the rag Erik had wrapped around his hand, carried it up in a haunted spiral far, far above his head. He watched it spin, powerless to move, powerless to lower the hand with fingers freezing in the biting gale. It disappeared in the infinite blackness of the night.
Then came the roar.
Without a moment's breach in the gusting wind, roaring assaulted his senses. More an attack in the center of his mind than either in ears or eyes, Erik had the life's breath sucked out of his nostrils, compressed out of his lungs. He felt the cold of the winter's night magnified by the clawing of the wind but could not know its chill. He was now in the court of the Wild Hunt.
The roar coursed around him, dizzying him with its fierceness, crying in a hundred voices—a haunting hail that registered behind Erik's eyes as something familiar. The words called in a tongue he had never before heard but recognized from his dreams. It filled him with a gasping longing that brought tears to his eyes—tears the wind and snow had failed to rouse themselves. It drew him upward by his breastbone until his toes barely brushed the soft snow still swirling against echoes of night.
Slowly, inexorably, the roaring of the Hunt turned to the pounding of hooves, impacting nothing more than the night. The shapes of innumerable horses swam into his vision, outlined by flying snow as though it had coated their figures, though no figures were there. But there they were nevertheless, real in their infirmity of form, holy yet ephemeral. Erik's eyes widened; he had not seen so clearly since the Abbot's third beating.
“Hail!” cried a horseman, breaking from the swirling mass of hoof and lance, sword and bow, rider and saddle. “What have we here? A monk out in the dark of the night?”
Laughter surrounded young Erik in a ring. It was the sound of a dozen brooks running in spring; of clamouring bells in the height of the year; of wailing, sorrowful mourners; of the cold gulf between the stars. He hung motionless at the mind-bending flurry of form and figure, snow and sound.
The rider cantered his mount toward Erik, floating in the air. The steed was of perfect form, so fine of leg and complete of composition that it defied Erik's human eyes to see it. His mind kept glancing off the creature's umber coat, glowing with the sheen of the moonlight. He focused on the rider instead.
There was no respite here for Erik's exhausted eyes. The rider sat tall in the saddle, though thin of limb and short of figure; his stirrups barely hung halfway down the horse's flanks. The rider was still a formidable force as he gazed speculatively at the peasant he had found in the snow.
He moved his horse alongside Erik's form. The monk could feel the heat from the beast despite the fact that he could also see stars shining through the horse. The heat felt like a thousand hearths to Erik's frozen flesh; it felt like the most welcome thing in the world. The rider leaned forward in the saddle and took Erik's chin between thumb and forefinger. His gloves were green like old pine needles; they brushed Erik's flesh like the kiss of first love.
“Not entirely a monk, not entirely a man,” the rider intoned, appraising Erik's face.
Erik met the rider's eyes in a series of jerking glances; his own eyes did not seem to want to look. The being appeared to be a young man, barely out of youth. A fine series of lines crisscrossed the skin of his eyes and two more ghosted their way around his lips, the only indicators of his infinite age. His skin was pale but rosy with the exhilaration of the Hunt, marked by the smallest spattering of freckles. His eyes were dark blue, the color the sky had held at dusk just this previous evening.
“What do you want?” the rider asked him. He tilted his head to the side as he did, the corners of his lips curling into the slightest smile. At the question, the riders stopped as one, instantly holding their positions at attention, stopping faster than any mortal horse could curb his gait. A hundred or more pairs of eyes turned to the monk where he was held by thumb and forefinger in the grasp of their Captain.
Locked in the rider's gaze, Erik was unable to hide. The words of his prayers vacated his lips even as he tried to pray them, flying away like the snow whipping around this tableau of the middle air. The image of the crucifix hanging in the chapel, crudely carved from the boughs of two oak trees taken from Thor's holy wood, momentarily hung in Erik's mind. Dark stones of the chapel surrounded it and dim flickering candles lit it in stoic echoes of wonder. The image disintegrated before the shining face and billowing auburn hair of the Elvish Captain, whose face consumed Erik's gaze.
“I want to go with you,” Erik found himself saying. As the words left his mouth, the leather thong holding his Catholic confirmation cross around his neck whipped apart in the crying winds. The skin flipped and skipped away amongst the snow and ice that circled him, lost amongst the hooves and flowing riding robes of the Hunt. The simple wooden cross, dovetailed into its form, cracked apart again into two pieces. They tumbled to the ground, spent shells of an abandoned faith. Erik could see them fall an inimitable distance to the snow where his feet had so recently tread. Their descent marked the fact that the Hunt had carried Erik quite some distance into the sky.
He glanced to the east, where the moon had barely risen above the bell tower of the Abbey. He had to look down to see it, to see the orb of Luna and the stones of his home. He could see inside the keep of the Abbey with ease; it was cold and still and dead, covered in snow.
“I want to go with you,” Erik said again, turning his eyes back to his captor.
“I go where I list,” the rider replied even as Erik's words left his lips. At this, the rider's company roared as one. They clapped weapon to shield with one thunderous clap that echoed through the halls of the Abbey and beyond over the downs.
“I want to go with you,” Erik cried again, this time with some desperation. He was sick of heart and crying to be saved, but not by the cold stone and stolen wood of the Abbey. Here he was, suspended in the air of the night by the unholy horsemen of the Wild Hunt, at their mercy and dependent upon their whim. Yet despite his terror, he feared more to never again feel this exhilaration of youth, wisdom, and oneness with the world that had spawned him. He would rather have been dashed to the frozen ground far, far below than lose the company of these spiritual men and their fantastic horses—than to go trudging back to the cold stone bed awaiting him for all eternity in the stone house of God.
“And go you shall!” the rider called as he flicked Erik effortlessly up in an arc above his head and landed his whisper-thin form in front of his saddle. Erik landed on his stomach, his feet hanging over one side of the horse, his arms dangling over the other.
The rider cried out in the language of Erik's longing, reared his horse victoriously in the dark, and the company leapt away across the inky dark skies. In the distance, as Erik faded into the night, he saw a tiny form tumble to the ground and land with the barest puff of the powdery snow. A heap of rags and bones, Erik thought, as he turned his head to face the wind and the night of the Hunt.
About Tony Stark
Anthony Stark is a writer and publisher. He is a paramedic and has a background in engineering and the sciences. His latest novel is 'An Incident in El Noor'. He has also been published in Tales From Space, Sleuth Magazine, and Starklight Anthologies. You can find him at: www.starklightpress.com
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