Brus (3)

The taut silence, always a breath from snapping, broke when a weapon clattered to the floor. I’d thrown mine down at once.

At the sight, the lord’s face twisted, and he ground his teeth as though he meant to kill me where I stood.

“Given the gravity of your crime, tearing you to pieces on the spot wouldn’t be enough to satisfy me — but I know how to show mercy. I’ll give you a choice.”

The moment he finished, the guardsmen leveled their spears as one. Not perfectly drilled, but no rabble either.

“Get down and beg forgiveness.”

It was exactly what I’d hoped for. With his attention wrenched onto my weapon, hadn’t he forgotten the helm entirely?

“As you wish.”

Slowly, I knelt. And slowly, I bowed my head.

Of course, I could have cut down the lord and every last guardsman and ground the law itself to dust. But if kneeling once settled the matter, what was the harm in kneeling this one time? This way there was no need to kill the lord of Brus, nor to take off the helm. Was there?

“I meant no defiance. I drew the weapon only to throw it down.”

The lord spat.

“…Filthy commoner.”

That was the end of it. As if he’d lost all interest, he spurred his horse and rode past me.

So I’ve grown old too.

There had been a time when I, too, held my head high. A mere century ago, a storm of blood would have swept through Brus. But I’d smelled the reek of blood until I was sick to death of it. Slaughter had turned tiresome, and whatever could be gotten past without bloodshed, I got past amicably. A hundred years ago I was a hot-blooded modern man; now I was simply an aged medieval one.

I returned to the inn, finished my meal, and turned in for the night. Tomorrow I meant to spend a while looking for work that might turn a coin, and if there was none, to move on to the next city. It had been getting on a full century now that I’d drifted with no fixed destination. Seventy years, was it? Ever since I killed the last of the Lucseon church, I’d taken up this aimless wandering-knight’s life as though possessed.

No, that wasn’t quite the right way to put it. Not once in all my wandering had I been free of the doubt that they were truly, wholly gone. In the end I was wandering to scrub from the world a Lucseon faction that might not even exist, and I wouldn’t be able to stop until I’d combed through every last corner of it. At which point, hadn’t this already left the very idea of revenge behind? The great task of exterminating the Lucseon church still wore the shell of vengeance, but hadn’t it long since become the very engine of my life itself? One thought nipped at the heels of the next, and I sank slowly into a swamp brimming with contradiction.

I opened my eyes, with no memory of when I’d fallen asleep. The night was still deep, and faint moonlight was all that filled the little room. No, that wasn’t right. I strained to listen. It was not only moonlight that filled the room but a foreign sound as well. The sound that had woken me.

“…Damn it.”

It was the sound of a horse dying. I hurried toward the inn’s stable; dark as the night was, finding my way gave me no trouble at all.

“Plibentorinus II!”

I flung the door open, and there lay the fallen horse. Blood pumped in spurts from its throat, far more than anyone could hope to staunch. Plibentorinus II gave a weak, wind-laced cry.

“Goddamn it.”

Knowing it was useless, I clamped my hand over its throat all the same. The horse’s breathing had thinned long before, and soon the last of its warmth drained away as well. The bleeding came, of course, from a long gash across the throat. From how ragged the cut was, whoever had done it had no gift for knife-work at all.

“…”

I could picture the culprit hacking away at the horse’s throat like a man working a dull saw. I wiped the back of my hand across my own throat, beneath the helm. What came away was not sweat but blood.

“Rest easy.”

I closed the horse’s eyes for it. Whatever bold bastard had done this would not get a clean death.

I’ve said it again and again. Needless slaughter is not to my taste. If anything, rather the opposite. But when I judged it necessary, I was not the sort to hesitate, either. Violence was never the best option, of course, but nine times out of ten it made for the next-best answer.

I rose from the blood-soaked ground. A foreign smell hung in the air, one that even the reek of blood, thick enough to numb the nose, could not fully mask. It was alcohol, the smell of drink. Cheap beer above all, by that particular sour tang. A man reeking of it strongly enough that not even a horse’s blood could smother it would be in only one place at this hour: a drinking house. And of the two in town that served cheap beer, I had just come from one, the Red Wildcat, so the culprit would be at the other.

“I’d best go and have a look at his face.”

The cold night wind brushed past me, but warmth still lingered on my two blood-smeared hands.

When the sun set, the city fell asleep, but there were places that blazed with light even at night. The tavern was one of them.

Blame it on Brus being so small.

Unluckily for the men who’d killed my horse, Brus had but one tavern, and this one, the one I now stood before, was it.

The Laughing Dwarf

I pushed the old wooden door open. The rusted hinges shrieked, but not a soul turned to look.

Inside, the place was in disarray. Those who’d come to drown themselves in drink, those driven out by a sleep that wouldn’t take them, others in much the same straits: all of them nursing their grievances against the world, gathered here to while their lives away.

I edged slowly past the ones too drunk to sit upright and worked my way toward the back. The heat of the lamps that beat back the dark seeped in through the gaps in my helm. Those who caught sight of me, drenched head to foot in blood, sucked in sharp breaths and drew aside.

Amid the reek of stale drink and the boisterous din, I was plainly an outsider. The stink of blood had no place in a tavern, and reeking of it as I did, I made straight for the men who’d left that same reek behind them. At the end of it would be the ones who had killed Plibentorinus II.

“Hey, you.”

They lay slumped face-down over the table, snoring, a heap of beer mugs stacked to one side. I half wondered what could have possessed small-time neighborhood thugs like these to kill my horse. But there it was: blood, spattered vivid across their clothes.

“Oi. You there.”

No matter how I called, they showed no sign of stirring. In the end, whatever shred of twenty-first-century conscience still lingered in me flew off entirely. This was a moment that called for the medieval way.

I grabbed one of the two slumped men by the collar and hauled him upright.

“Ngh, guh…”

And then I drove my fist into his face.

— THWACK!

“Kurgh!”

Only after a couple more blows did focus gather in his slack eyes. I hauled the pair of them out of the tavern by their collars.

“Wh-what the—!”

Perhaps the cold wind on top of everything finally brought him around. One of them clutched his face and stared at me; without a word, I kicked him in the gut. I gave the other a beating too, and before long he came to as well.

I asked them as kindly as I could manage.

“Who put you up to this?”
“Y-yes?”

The cure for a mad dog is the rod, or so they say. These two looked little better than dogs, so all the better.

— THWACK!

“Gurk! I-it was the lord’s orders!”

“…The lord?”

One of the men sprawled on the ground spoke.

“Y-yes. We— we’re the lord’s private soldiers. So, uh, he told us to rough you up a bit, sir knight. The lord did.”

So he hadn’t the nerve to come at me directly. While he was still puzzling over how to harass me, he’d gone and laid hands on my property instead: Plibentorinus II. That was that, then. These two were bad enough, but the man who called himself a lord was the greater spectacle by far. Sending private soldiers out in the dead of night to torment a man was the sort of thing only a gutter-thug would stoop to, wasn’t it? No wonder. And here I’d taken him for some big-hearted man letting the matter go. To think he’d been scheming behind my back all the while. I had, in my own way, shown respect for his authority, and this was what came back to me in return.

In the end, he brings it on himself.

To swallow any more than this would make me a doormat. I set my mind on storming the lord’s manor.

“You. Lead me to the lord’s manor.”

“…What?”

I struck the other man, not the one who’d asked back, and knocked him out cold. The one who saw it swallowed dryly.

“Do I have to say it again?”
“N-no. No, sir. Yes — of course I’ll show you the way.”

The man staggered to his feet and set off at an unsteady, weaving gait. Whether that was the drink still in him or the beating I’d given him, I couldn’t say.

The lord’s manor was the largest building in Brus. The servants alone numbered over fifty, and the night watch and household bodyguards together came to more than twenty, or so they said. Of them, three stood guard at the front gate.

I flung the man I’d dragged along down in front of them.

“Whoa there!”

A guard who recognized the man’s face went pale. They stood frozen, strung tight with nerves at this uninvited guest in the dead of night.

“What is the meaning of this?”
“I need to have a word with the lord.”

They leveled their spears, but I did not stop advancing.

“Halt! Come any closer and we’ll run you through!”

Naturally, I had no intention of stopping. Faced with a bearing that betrayed not the least hesitation, it was the spearmen who ended up giving ground instead.

“I— I warned you!”

The guard shouted it as though he’d strike the instant I took even one more step, and I took exactly one step.

The soldier at the front thrust his spear. I stood still, and it ran clean through my solar plexus. Blood dyed my clothes red. They were already stained with the horse’s blood, but what welled from my pierced gut was more vivid still, spreading clear and stark from the center.

Even so, I did not stop. Still run through by the shaft, I carried myself forward until I came to stand before the soldier.

“Uu— hiiik!”

I seized the soldier by the throat and hoisted him off the ground. Lifting a grown man one-handed was nothing at all.

“If you mean to kill a man, you ought at least to be ready to die yourself.”

I tightened the hand around his throat. The neck bone snapped, and he went limp on the spot.

“Uwaaaaaah!”
“M-monster! It’s a monster!”

The two guards and the man I’d brought from the tavern fled screaming into the manor.

“…No weapon, then.”

Having come straight from the tavern, I carried no weapon at all. For armor there was only the rusted helm I always wore, and little else. After a moment’s thought, I drew the sword from the dead guard’s waist. A serviceable enough longsword.

I crossed the garden and reached the manor’s entrance. The door was shut fast, of course, but a couple of kicks tore the hinges clean off.

— THUD! THOOM!

Beyond the flung-open door, a knot of soldiers stood bunched together, strung tight with nerves. They’d scraped together every last man they could in that short span, it seemed, more than a dozen in all.

“…Filthy monster! Have you no fear of God?”

Strolling about unharmed with a spear still dangling from my gut, I could be nothing but a monster in their eyes.

Not that they’re wrong.

That I’d become something far removed from human was a thing I’d understood long ago. And not merely in the physical sense.

“Do you fear God because you’ve nothing else to fear?”
“Th-this monster… blasphemes against God himself!”

A soldier charged, and I brought the sword down like an axe. He toppled with the blade buried in his skull, but behind him five more thrust their spears in turn. Each one pierced a different part of me. I caught the shaft of the nearest, hauled the man in, and hammered the sword down again and again on his head as he lost his balance. Red blood sprayed; the iron reek was sharp enough to sting the nose. When one fell dead, I killed the next.

All the while my body was reduced to a rag, but the days of fretting over such things one by one were long behind me. It was a fight of one against many. A fight whose winner even a newborn could call. And yet, if that one man would not fall no matter how many wounds he took, the story changed. A soldier who would not die however many times you killed him: how was he any different from a limitless army? And so this was not one against many, but infinity against many.

In the end, the only one still standing on two feet was me. Scraps of ground-up flesh and gouts of blood lay strewn across the wide manor. About half of it was mine.

I waited a while, until my body had knit itself fully back together, then made my way slowly to the stairs. Each step rang out with a wet, squelching sound. Footprints redder than the carpet stamped themselves down one after another, leading all the way to the door of the lord’s room.

My head spun. On days I bled, forgotten memories rose to the surface. I had lived long years, and the memories weighing on my mind had grown vast to match. Who was I? A modern man of the twenty-first century, the one and only faith Eladin ever had, and Roan Belgard, the wandering knight.

That was enough.

I opened the door to the room where the lord of Brus would be.