The Black Chalice koa-1

by Steven Savile

  He ducked his head, gasping at the dead air, then plunged on, fighting his way to the woman's side. All around him the fire raged on, gathering intensity as it found fresh fuel to burn.

  Alymere knelt beside the woman. Her head was down, her chin resting on her breastbone, and there was no strength in the arms holding her child. He placed his hand against her cheek, but there was no way of knowing if her warmth sprang from life or the fire. Her face was at peace which, given the maddening noise and the sheer overwhelming heat of the fire, was damning.

  Alymere tried to wake her, but it was hopeless. He clutched at her shoulders and shook her — and then again, more forcefully — but failed to elicit so much as a groan.

  Her hand fell and lay limply at her side.

  The fire was only feet away. It had raced across the bed and spread to the blanket box at its foot. The family's few clean linens burned. And the more the fire was fed, the thicker and less breathable the smoke became.

  He had to get them both out of there.

  Alymere pushed himself to his feet and looked around.

  There was no way out.

  It was as simple as that.

  The flames closed in around him, darting toward him again and again, and his cloak caught. The fire raced up his back toward his hair. Alymere couldn't breathe; his head swam and colours sparked across his vision. He fumbled with the cloak's clasp, his hands trembling. The metal clasp broke between his fingers and he threw the cloak into the fire before it could spread to his other clothes.

  Gasping and coughing, Alymere stumbled forward and lost his balance. He reached out blindly for the wall.

  He knew that if he fell, he wouldn't get up again.

  The fire had done so much damage that he punched clean through the thin wattle wall as he tried to steady himself. He wrenched it free, the jagged edges of broken branches cutting into his wrist as he did, and then started kicking and punching frantically at the wall, trying to batter it down.

  It splintered and split beneath his furious onslaught, and smoke streamed all around him, pouring out into the clear blue sky above. He didn't stop. He lashed out over and over again until his lungs threatened to seize up on him, and doubled up in a fresh coughing fit. This time he couldn't clear his lungs. The bile and black stuff flecked his lips and stained his tabard. When he finally stopped coughing long enough to see through the smoke and spots swirling across his vision, Alymere could see a narrow shaft of daylight where he had torn through the binders and the branches beneath. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, smearing the black soot across his face and looked around for something to use to make the breach wider, but anything that might have been useful was already burning. Now that he had opened the wall, the flames had a way into the wood beneath the daub and the whitewashed lime and the fire was in, devouring the brittle branches and the weave of dry twigs. Alymere could hear the sighs and groans as the timbers within the walls shifted. In a few minutes everything was going to buckle and fold as the walls came crashing down.

  Alymere threw himself at the wall, using his entire body weight to drive the wattle back. It splintered further, parting around him and, in some grotesque parody of birth, he stumbled out into the snow on the other side. His momentum sent him stumbling and sliding to his knees, skinning his palms as he fell face-first into the snow. The cold hit him, hard, driving what precious little breath he had out of his lungs. He lay there for a moment, face-down and gasping for air. The snow felt so good against his skin, offering the briefest of respites from the heat of the conflagration, but he couldn't savour it, not with the woman still trapped inside the burning building.

  Alymere pushed himself back to his feet and turned. There were people around him, battered, bruised, lost in shock. None of them spoke. The silence they shared between them was the quiet of desperation. There could never be words enough to fill it. He turned his back on them and stumbled toward the building.

  His legs tangled and betrayed him less than five steps later. He fell to his knees, and then forced himself up again, gritting his teeth against the agony suffocating his lungs. Tongues of flame licked out through the wall. He couldn't see anything beyond them, but that didn't stop him. She needed him. He would not let her down.

  Every subsequent step was harder. The scorching heat engulfed him. The smoke was so thick now that he was essentially blind and forced to find his way by memory and touch — where he could bear the contact with anything within the blaze.

  He fumbled his way toward where he remembered her being.

  She hadn't moved.

  Sure that she was dead, Alymere dragged the woman out.

  Fifteen

  People rushed to help him.

  He felt their hands steadying him and heard their voices, but couldn't make sense of anything they said. Alymere could barely stay on his feet. He saw his uncle striding toward him, face grim. He was carrying another body in his arms. Alymere laid the woman down in the snow and sank to his knees beside her.

  One of the women came forward, reaching out for the baby.

  Tears and soot stung his eyes as the woman took the tiny infant in her arms and cradled it to her breast, soothing it and stroking the fine wisps of hair back from its scalp. She slipped a small finger between the baby's lips, hoping it would suckle. It didn't. Next, she pinched the baby's cheeks, hoping the nip would succeed where the suckling instinct had failed. It didn't. The woman's expression didn't falter. She swung the baby around in her arms and delivered a sharp smack to its bottom, once, twice, and on the third the baby's cry filled the silence.

  Alymere turned his attention to the mother, but there was nothing he could do to save her.

  Sixteen

  Other than the child Alymere had saved, seven people survived the reivers' raid on the village, all of them women.

  In a few harrowing minutes an entire community had died.

  The men's bodies were lined up in the snow, some of them barely recognisable from their injuries. Only three of them had died in the fire. The others had been butchered by the Scots' swords. Beside them lay the smaller bodies of six children and the woman Alymere had dragged from the flames.

  So few survivors out of all of those families. Seven women who had lost everything.

  Alymere couldn't begin to comprehend their grief. Generations cut down, grandparents, fathers, mothers and children. It was senseless. All he felt was rage at the men who had done this. It was like a vile black canker in his heart that threatened to overwhelm all else. He wanted to lash out, strike something, someone. He wanted vengeance for these helpless women and their fallen families. Surely that was what it meant to be a knight, wasn't it? To protect those who could not protect themselves, and when that failed, to give their ghosts justice? What had they done to deserve this? The answer was, of course, nothing. There was nothing anyone could do to deserve a fate like this.

  And yet not one of them had wept as they gathered the dead and cleaned them. The tears would come, of course, when the horror subsided and the reality of their situation set in. Only Alymere had cried. He did not feel any less of a man for it. The dead deserved no less from him.

  Sir Lowick took no part in the funeral rites. He rode out in search of the reivers before they could cover their tracks.

  Alymere had wanted to ride with him, but knew that his duty was to stay with the women while they built funeral pyres, although consigning the dead to more flames seemed almost repugnant to him. He saw the need for the ritual, though — it was more about the living than the dead — and he knew the choice of pyre over plot came down to the fact that none of these women intended to stay in the ruins of their village. And why would they, when all they had for company were the ghosts and constant reminders of what they had lost today?

  No-one talked while such grim work needed to be done. Each looked after their own.

  Alymere busied himself with physical work, hacking down branches for the women to build the pyres. And he kept on hacking awa
y at the barren branches long after his muscles began to burn. His face contorted with pain as he pulled the tangled wood free and dragged it over to the growing bonfires. Over and over again, the mindless repetition of it freeing his mind to think of nothing.

  But, of course, all he could think of was the body of the burned child and all of those other bodies lined up in the snow. There was no respite.

  The wood piles grew higher and higher until, with the sun lowering in the sky, he helped each of the women in turn bear their loved ones over to a pyre so that their spirits could be laid to rest.

  One by one the women applied burning torches to the wood piles until the ring of bonfires blazed all around them.

  At last, when all of the fires were lit, the oldest of the women sought him out. "Would you say a few words, my lord?" she asked. He couldn't look her in the eye. He knew she was right; they deserved no less from him, but he didn't know what he could say about these people beyond platitudes. He had never met them before in his life. He inhaled a deep breath and held it, letting it fuel his blood. "Something to send them on their way to their maker so that He might know they are coming?"

  But when it came down to it, he had no deep wisdom, no kind words, only a profound and infinite sadness for what had happened to these people. So that was what he said.

  He took the time to stand beside each pyre, to learn the names of the dead and to hear a story or two about each of them so that they might live on, for another night at least.

  And he cried silent tears for the widows and the orphans.

  Before he left each funeral fire he made a promise to the ones left behind. There would be justice for the ones they had lost.

  Even as he swore that promise he recalled the last few words of the Crow Maiden as she begged him to save her, and knew, on some instinctive level, that this was part of what she needed him to save her from. If his time bonded to his uncle had taught him anything, it had taught him to think. There was no such thing as happenstance. Coincidence was nothing more than a hidden chain of cause and effect waiting to be unravelled. The reivers hadn't simply come marauding south, intent on death and burning for the hell of it; they moved with a purpose. He thought it through: first they breached the wall, taking out the wardens without raising the alarm, which was no mean feat, and then they had struck deep into Sir Lowick's protectorate, leaving devastation in their wake. They seek to horrify, Alymere reasoned, thinking about the human cost of their raid, but something, some ill-formed doubt niggled away at the back of his mind, and he found himself thinking it was more akin to smoke and mirrors — tricks — there was grim purpose to their advance, and there was nothing random about those they had chosen to spare. They were looking for something; not food, and they hadn't taken any of the women, so, something else…

  The Devil's Bible, he thought, staring into the dancing flames. Why else had Blodyweth drawn him into the Summervale? Why else had she made him swear his promise to save her and then bid him follow the smoke? They were linked, like chains that weighed on his soul. The Scots sought the book. Their purpose didn't matter. The Crow Maiden had asked him three questions: what was he prepared to do for his king, for his land and for her, and he had offered the same answer to all of them, anything and everything. Failure meant the land would fall, the king die, and whatever magic sustained Blodyweth in her kingdom of summer would fail. And somehow all of these fates were bound to this book, this bible.

  All of this was for a book? He remembered something Baptiste had been fond of saying: a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Now, in this dead village, he thought he saw what his friend had meant by those words.

  He remembered something else Baptiste had said, his lesson on the quality of mercy. Watching the fires burn themselves out, he was far more interested in the quality of retribution than anything even vaguely merciful. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. A life for a life. There would be a reckoning, he would see to that.

  When the pyres had burned out he shepherded the women back to the manor house, where at least they would be dry and warm. They had precious few belongings to gather, and offered no objections. They followed him, trudging wearily through the deep snow, as they left their lives in the ashes behind them. Gwen, the woman who had taken the baby from his arms, hugged him hard. She was the last of them to enter the great house. She looked at him, down to his feet and back up to his eyes, and said, "God help them if you find them, my lord."

  "Indeed," he said, coldly. The way he said it frightened him. It was absolutely detached from the young man he had been when he woke up that morning. "But even with his help they are damned."

  "I do not doubt it for a moment," she said, sadly.

  He couldn't understand her sadness; he would, but only when it was too late.

  Once the women were quartered in the Manor, Alymere rode out to join his uncle. The storm had abated, but, with midday fast approaching, it was still bitterly cold. But the cold was inside him, in his soul, so that was hardly surprising.

  Seventeen

  Three more settlements burned on the road before them.

  More dead were laid out in lines on the hard ground. More widows and orphans left behind. The senselessness of the slaughter sickened Alymere.

  The smoke led Alymere and Sir Lowick toward the coast and the storm-tossed sea.

  Long before the spires of the isolated monastery on Medcaut6 came into view, Alymere knew where their journey would take them. There were other settlements the raiders could have hit, but nowhere else they might find a blind monk and the Devil's Bible, and Alymere didn't doubt for a moment that the reivers sought the book.

  He spurred his mount on, leaning forward in the saddle, his right cheek pressed to the horse's mane, and urged the animal to run faster and faster as they broached the hilltop. Coming over the top he saw Medcaut and the monastery little more than a mile or more ahead. And what a sight they were, with the harsh whitecaps of the sea roiling and surging as they climbed up the pebbled beach and broke on the cliffs beyond them. Medcaut rose up like the hands of a drowning man.

  Medcaut was a tiny tidal island linked to the mainland by the Pilgrims' Way, a stone causeway that was submerged twice a day beneath the North Sea. The monastery was a place of pilgrimage for the sick who hoped to find remission from their suffering; not that there would be any succour today. Snow capped the rooftops and lined the high monastery wall.

  But that was not what had Alymere driving his heels into his horse's flanks again, harder still. Great wreaths of steam billowed out of the animal's flared nostrils as it raced down the hillside, hooves drumming on the hard-packed winter earth. The wind tore at his face and at his cloak as it billowed out behind him. At his side, Sir Lowick roared his fury and spurred his warhorse on, pulling away in front of him. For a moment Alymere couldn't tell where the horse's misted breath ended and the smoke began.

  The entire west wing of the monastery, including the cloister bell tower, was choking in thick smoke. Great black clouds of it belched up into the blue sky. For a moment, Alymere imagined he could see faces in the clouds — the faces of the dead they had cremated along the way. And then he saw the first licks of flame lash over the wall as the fire climbed higher and higher.

  Alymere rode over the dunes and down onto the beach, the ground shifting beneath the horse's hooves as it negotiated the loose shale and finally, as it reached the water's edge, the sand. Alymere urged his horse on and, side-by-side with his uncle, plunged into the sea. The great whitecaps splashed up around their horses' bellies before they were more than a dozen steps into the water, making it impossible to go any further.

  They stared at the smoke and the flames.

  It would be hours before the tide turned. The causeway was more than two miles in length, curving like a Saracen blade through the bay to the rocky promontory where the monastery burned.

  There was nothing either of them could do. The sea kept them back.

  But it also served to trap the reivers
. There would be a reckoning, cold comfort though that was, for the monks of Medcaut.

  Impossibly, Alymere was sure he could hear their screams across the water; hundreds of voices crying out. They swelled within him until all else ceased to exist. He swung down from his horse and splashed deeper into the water until the waves were lapping around his throat. The mail shirt weighed him down, threatening to drag him under. There was no way he could strike out and swim all the way to the island. It just wasn't possible. Of all the lessons that he might have learned at Sir Lowick's side, this one — that he could not save everyone — was the hardest of all to learn.

  "Forgive me," he said, the wind whipping away his words and carrying them off over the sea. Whether they reached the dying monks or not he had no way of knowing. Not that their forgiveness could have eased the burden on his soul. He sank to his knees and let the water wash over his head, hoping, at least, to drown out the voices.

  But even with the waves crashing down over his head there was no relief.

  He held his breath until it burned in his lungs.

  The saltwater stung at his eyes.

  Then, finally, as the pain in his chest grew too much to bear, he opened his mouth and breathed in mouthful after mouthful of water, taking it down into his lungs until it filled him.

  He struggled then, thrashing.

  He felt his uncle's grip on his shoulder as he hauled him up to his feet, and came up out of the sea in a plume of spray.

  Lowick dragged him out of the water and back up to the beach, and drove the water out of his lungs. The stuff frothed at his lips and dribbled down his cheek. He coughed, spluttering up a mouthful of saltwater, and again, harder this time as the knight pushed on his ribs, pushing down over and over until he coughed up every last drop.

  And then he screamed.

  In that sound Lowick imagined that all of those others could be heard at last, making Alymere a conduit to give voice to their suffering.