Work in Progress: Excerpt from "The Ghost Knight" |
The Ghost Knight Chapter One Did birds sing in Hell? Not likely, yet where else could he be now? Great claws wrenched open his skull. His head must be swollen three times its size in life. His body shuddered with cold, and a terrible thirst rasped in his throat. And still the birdsong rose around him, a subtle torture. Birds carried the souls of the dead to feast with the Goddess or to suffer in the halls of Bremerdin, Lord of Justice. Morach heard the echo of Edwin's mocking prayer: May the Mother take your hand, proud warrior. She had not...would not. He had not died in clean battle against his sworn enemies. He had been murdered...slain by his own brother. Weren't victims of kinslaying supposed to walk as ghosts, unresting and hungry? But this was Hell, and he was damned. Ah, he might deserve Hell, for men he'd killed in battle, for the innocents who'd died or lost their homes, caught in the wildfire of his civil war. Or was he damned for his pride, to think he'd have won the throne? Brave Sir Morach, hero of ballads, leader of the rebels...aye, he'd been proud of his strength and his right, and proud of the love his men bore him. The love his hero-worshipping younger brother bore him... Now he breathed the stench of death. His dry, dead throat craved water. An endless death, an endless thirst...and he was so cold. He'd thought of Hell as blazing hot, a desert landscape like he'd seen west of Sarderei long ago. His anger had been hot, a shocked, uncomprehending anger that stole his breath even before the axe fell. In fury, he had cursed Edwin to die as he had, by the hand of one he loved. He'd called on his patron, the Spear-God, to carry out his wish. "Edwin, why..." He said it aloud, a clear, bitter sound that momentarily stilled the birdsong. How could a man turn so suddenly from trust and love to hate? Yet it was worse to think that Edwin might have hated him for a long time, plotted this quietly all those years they rode together. Something rustled, tugged at his neck. He felt a soft brush of feathers. Morach tried in vain to open his eyes. They must be somewhere within the whirling globe of pain that was his head. "Who is Edwin?" The voice was like a bird's, high and sweet. A taunting demon, doubtless. "You well know," Morach groaned. "Mama!" lilted the bird-voice. "Mama, come see! This man talked to me!" "Stay back from him, Kel," warned a woman's low voice from some short distance. Not demonic at all; it reminded Morach of his foster mother Lady Cherlton's practical sharpness. A touch burned against his cheek, and he moaned and moved feebly from it. A small hand persisted, pushing a wet, dripping weight from his eyes. Then hands reached around his neck, lifting some heavy collar up and off, over his head in a clamor of pain like a thunderclap. The realization was slow in coming. This was life, the pain of wounds after battle, not some afterlife of calculated torture. He lived. Morach examined the thought in silent wonder. He felt the wet ground beneath him and heard the morning sounds of an ordinary moorland around him. Sedge grouse boomed some distance away. Songbirds vied to welcome the springtime. Human voices sounded closer, the murmuring of a woman, the soft whispers of a child. Like a rusty hinge, his eyelid squinted upward against a dry, stringy barrier. His left eye. Only his left eye opened. The barrier that had held it closed was dried blood, his own. The right eye -- that he could not feel outside the beehive seething of pain through skull and forehead. He had lived through the night, and this was day. Pink light sifted through clouds. The sky seemed very close above him, like a thick blanket pressing down. Even the clouded light hurt his head. Beside him on the ground, strangely out of place, rested a dried willow wreath. A dead horse blocked his view of the battlefield. A crow perched on the horse's head, its beady black eyes staring at Morach. Some crows were messengers of the gods. This one likely was just here to feast on carrion. On him, if he didn't rise. Where were his men? Did they lie fallen all around him, or were the dead his enemies? He had slain Siluran. But afterward, how had the battle gone? If he lived, then the world and the gods weren't done with him. If he lived, and if Edwin lived, then he had more yet to do. For surely Edwin would seek the throne, and even more surely, Edwin must not be King. "Are you a knight?" Morach turned his head to see. A fair-haired young boy crouched by him. No demon, this, but a gap-toothed peasant brat set to gleaning the battlefield. Morach reached a hand out to clasp the child's wrist. "Who...were the victors?" he croaked. "How went the battle, boy?" The child gazed curiously at Morach. "The Riders won it, sir. The rebels. They killed the bad King." He was calm, unfrightened, in the midst of the carnage. "Water. Do you have water?" He'd thought his thirst an expected torment of the damned, not the simple blood-loss thirst of a wounded man. He tried to push himself up off the boggy ground. The right side of his head raged at him for the movement, and he gave it up. Gods, he hurt. He lived! If he could mend...if he could survive to face his brother again...the Mother would not be so cruel as to grant him this awakening, then let him die anyway a few hours hence. "Mama, come see. He wants some water." The boy crouched close, marveling. "Mama, look. He's like that rabbit you skinned. I can see his head bone." "His skull, Kel," the woman's dry voice corrected. "Stand off away from him. If you touch him, you'll bring more dirt into the wound. Good morrow, warrior." She knelt near Morach, drawing Kel back with hands on his thin shoulders. "I had not thought to see a dead man come to life this day." A weatherworn peasant, perhaps his own thirty years, she wore a hooded cloak against the early spring frost. In one hand, she lugged a sack of booty gathered from the slain. Would she merely kneel there and stare at him? Wait until he died, then take his valuables too? Just another carrion crow... "If you'd help, bring water," Morach said. "Or take my knife and slit my throat, woman." "Nay," was her startled response. "Nay, sir..." "I'll not lie here another day and night until death truly comes. Send me off, and be done with it." Gods, how he wanted to beg for life. But even a near-corpse could cling to pride. "Mama, you won't," said the child. "You'll help him." "Say you so?" the woman murmured. "Aye, tend him, and drag him somehow home, to see him die there and have the burying of him." But she pulled a fleece waterskin from beneath her cloak and held it out to Morach's lips. The cold water trickled in, almost choking him. He drank gratefully. It tasted of sheep. "Nay, he will not die. Mama, he's a knight, you can see by his shield. A green rabbit and...and a fish." "A hare and carp," said the woman. "Signs of his house. The Oakgarth foresters...Sweet Mother, it has the mark of the eldest, the branched staff. This is Morach of the Riders." "Morach," the child trilled. He began to sing a familiar tune, his voice light but true. "'And all adreaming Morach rode, Of fair Lyandra dear betrothed, So long forsworn, for bitter road, No, ne'er her soft arms he'll behold...'" "Kel, hush," said the woman. Hero of ballads. He and Edwin had laughed over that one, the forced rhymes and the sentimental harping over some lost beloved he'd never heard of. Morach shut his one working eye against the sudden sympathy, the warmth in the peasant woman's face. He would not beg for her help. "Fetch your sister, and the two of you bring old Bony Jane. Get the blankets from my bed. He must be warmed. Go, Kel!" The sharp worry in her tone gave Morach a gleam of hope, a dim red path before him. Edwin would pay for what he'd done, not in the afterlife, but as soon as Morach could ride again. The haze of wakefulness lasted only long enough for him to wince as the woman poured some dead man's wine over his split head. # |
