Love And War (10 page)

“A scratch, nothing more,” he told himself as he limped away. He considered tossing a
stinging retort over his shoulder, but thought better. “I would only be lowering myself.”
And he might, he admitted silently, need the breath.

The second time, panting and exhausted in the Glen of Thorns, he had lain frozen under a branch of blooming sorrow's end, waiting until the
draconians had plodded past him to slip quietly away, unmissed until a soldier looked back
and saw the white mane as the transformed stag scuttled, head lowered, through the thorn
bushes.

“A fawn's trick,” he panted, ashamed. “I got away by hiding like a fawn.”

He stared at his own side, mottled with thorn scratches and rock scrapes. “No wonder it
worked. Still, perhaps these creatures don't see well by day.” But he looked at the sun,
already sunk below treetop level, and he knew that there would be no third escape.

By dusk he was tottering, barely ahead of the draconians, barely able to move his legs.
His eyes showed white all around the edges, and he smelled his own blood in his nostrils.
Each step brought a new ache, each breath another side-stitch.

There was no question but that they would kill him. All that mattered was when and where.

Once he nearly sank down on a patch of deathwort, ready to let it end appropriately. If
this were but one more death in an endless series, what did it matter whether he died well
or badly?

But he heard them coming and struggled wearily to his feet. “I have,” he gasped, “an
appointment. With a friend, and with - others. I will fail no one this time.”

The sun was no more than a blood-red sliver in the brush when he lurched across the trail
and into the small glade. He looked around dazedly, though he knew the place well. Even
where there were no trees, there seemed to be shadows, and the grass itself seemed tainted
with death.

The stag nodded. “Here.” His voice was rasping, half choked.

As the draconians arrived in the clearing, he half-fell off the trail and sank down on the
grass a few lengths away.

A draconian saw him and called, “Captain.”

The lead draconian shouted in triumph and leaped off the trail. The others followed.

The draconian cried, “Pride of kill belongs to Captain Zerkaz.”

The stag reared up. “Pride, it seems, is universal, Captain. So is kill.”

He punched forward with a hoof. Zerkaz had time to screech with pain before his heart
ruptured and his body turned to stone. It wavered once, but remained standing.

While the soldiers gaped, the stag charged another head lowered. He had forgotten that he had but a single horn, not antlers. As he pierced the draconian, the dying soldier brought his sword down as hard as
he could at close quarters. The horn cracked all the way into the stag's skull.

He staggered back with closed eyes, barely noticing as the second soldier turned to stone.
A third, sword out, was facing him, but the others had closed behind him and stood almost
touching each other, staring into the field. Their blades wavered, almost trembled.

Around them, dead human warriors, Darken Wood's best guard, were rising, at last ready to
fulfill an old promise. Beside them stood King Peris in full battle gear a thousand years
old.

The king's armor was white silver over steel, decorated in rubies, for the blood of
enemies, and emeralds and sapphires, for an archer's clear eyes. It was, as the stag had
often noted, largely ornamental. Perhaps that was why the king and his body of men had
once failed to guard against a real menace.

The soldiers of the dead king writhed up from the grass, unbraiding from it as though
their bodies were recomposing. Swords in hand and no shields, they fell into a battle
line; their empty eyes showed no mercy, no hatred, and no hope.

The stag cried in what voice it had, “Forward!” It leaped awkwardly and took a sword full
in the chest as it punched a third draconian. As the sword withdrew, the stag made no
sound at all.

Peris the King leaped over the falling animal. “I, not you, lead my men, beast. Forward!”
The troops of the dead advanced, and the draconian ranks, weakened already, wavered.

The battle was like some deadly mime. The dead's weapons made no noise - yet their
attackers fell, bleeding green liquid and turning stony in anguished poses. Blows against
the dead passed through - yet many dead spiraled back into the carrion-tainted earth, and
their lightless eyes glowed with an odd relief as they sank.

Forces were in disorder, yet few commands were needed; the dead fought as they had for so
long, and the draconians fought for their lives. Except for a few cries of anger and pain
from the draconians, the only other sound was the slow fall of stone bodies as, one by
one, the draconians fell to earth clutching unseen wounds and half- twisting scaley faces
in agony. Starlight flickered off real and ghostly weapons; bodies twisted or toppled into grassy shadows and were bodies no
longer.

To an onlooker it might have seemed some strange dance without music. It was a war with
little sound and no corpses, a battle for nightmares.

Through it all walked the king, his sword flashing right and left at arm's length. By
himself, in the brief fight, he accounted for three draconians, and his heart seemed to
beat again with his own pride as they dropped to the right and left. His arms felt, not
the endless weariness of the accursed dead, but the growing soreness and strain of a
living warrior. His eyes flicked back and forth alertly, noting even how a sweet night
wind ruffled the grass into which allies and enemies were falling.

Ahead of him a draconian crouched over the prone stag, bringing a sword down with all the
force he could above the near-motionless neck. The stag had not even looked up, dust and
chaff barely moving in its nostrils.

The king dove forward, sword aimed at the draconian's heart. He made no attempt to parry
the descending sword as it passed through his ornamental armor and into him.

His own blow took effect a moment later; the draconian doubled over, gasping, and froze
that way, a corpse carved from a boulder. The king, carried by his own momentum, rolled
against the stone body and winced with the pain. “I'll have a bruise tomorrow,” he thought
vaguely, unsure after all these years what a bruise felt or looked like.

He lay still and listened, hearing nothing but the stag's labored breathing. He struggled
to his feet, barely able to hold his sword but aware of triumph and of great pain.

The stag opened his eyes. “Peris. The draconians?” “Dead.” Never, in Darken Wood, had the
word been said with such satisfaction.

“An unusual way to end a hunt, with dead hunters.” “You have said so before.” The king
knelt, taking the stag's head on his lap. The stag's chest wound, pulled free of the
ground, re-opened, but the king paid no attention. “You have often said that at a hunt's
end the hunter should be alive, the quarry dead.”

“I have often been insulting.” His eyes blurred; with great effort he shook his head and
cleared them angrily. “What will happen now?”

“If I know soldiers, the commanders who ordered the search of Darken Wood will decide to
delay another search until they feel they can risk further loss. They will also hope that
their quarry, the questing party of the other night appears elsewhere, as someone else's responsibility.“ He shuddered. ”At any rate, we will
have saved this part of the world for a while - if, as they say, I know soldiers.”

“You know soldiers well. You lead them still better.”

“Thank you.” The king sat down heavily by the bleeding stag. “A satisfying night, but not
an easy one. I have been wounded.”

“Recently?” The stag grunted as its forehead horn, cracked by the sword-blow, split all
the way to the skull.

“Tonight, in fact.” “At any other time, I enjoy a joke - ” “Seriously.” Red leaked through
the holes in the king's armour, as though the rubies were melting. “I had forgotten how painful this was.”

“You could have asked me.” The stag raised its pain- wracked head. Now the split horn
sagged apart, its cleft gaping, and exposed bone at its root.

“I could have,” the king agreed. “It seemed rude.” He spoke with difficulty. “It seems I
have fulfilled a pledge and will die in service.”

The stag said, “I also.” He added, “Could you help me over to the last standing draconian?
I would not mind dying with such memorial.”

The king, gasping, carried the shuddering body of the stag to the foot of the standing
draconian. “He has - ” He coughed.

“Can you speak no more clearly than that? I seem not to hear well just now.” The rumble of
the moving horns covered all sound.

The king braced himself and said distinctly, “This one has a hoof-print on his chest.
Yours?”

“I would nod, but I have a headache.” Blood ran from his split forehead. As though
watered, the twin horn-shards sprouted buds of antlers.

“Then he will wear my marks as well.” Holding the stag with one arm, the king removed his
own crown and placed it on the stone figure before sliding wetly down its side to the
grass.

The stag rasped, “Either I am overly sensitive by nature, or this seems harder than
usual.” Blood was flowing darkly around the dust in his chest wound. “Could you not
distract me?”

“I could try.” The king tilted his head back in pain as he inhaled, and sang in a
quavering voice:

"FOR EVERY WRAITH WHO BREAKS HIS FAITH MUST WANDER WITHOUT CEASE AND, COLD, PERFORM WHAT HE DID, WARM, AND NEVER REST IN PEACE.

He coughed, and a hairline of blood ran from the corner of his mouth. The stag, looking up
through filmy eyes, took up the song for him:

SO, EVERY NIGHT THE STAG BETRAYS THE LOVE HE COULD NOT KEEP AND KING AND HOST DESERT THEIR
POST TO HUNT AND NEVER SLEEP.

They finished, singing together. It took them a long time, since one or the other often
stopped to gasp for air, and it seemed important to them that they finish as one:

AND SO THEY SHALL BETRAY AND HUNT, UNTIL THE DAY THEY SHOW THAT THEY SOMEHOW FULFILL THE
VOW THEY BROKE SO LONG AGO."

Done, they collapsed against each other. “Not a bad song, really,” the king said. “Needs a
little tightening here and there, perhaps, fewer cousin-rhymes, but at least it's
something of us left behind.”

“True. Many have died with less fame and with worse poetry.” The stag's antlers shuddered
painfully back into place. The stag, eyes upward, lay his head on the king's lap and
stared at the draconian. “Who would have thought that I should be hunted by such as this?
Or that you should hunt them?”

The king's voice was low and halting. “True. They are vile, and we were proud. But for
once, we both have died for something besides ourselves. And when you have been dead as
long as I - ” he wavered, and said in a last breath - “a little variety in one's chosen
way of dying is not such a bad thing.”

And as the stag joined the king in final death, he thought sleepily that after a thousand
years of nightly betrayal, transformation, pursuit by the dead, painful death and more
painful rebirth, almost any change was pleasant. He cradled his head against King Peris's
stomach, and the two accepted death as, long ago, it had accepted them.

No one but Time removed the bodies; eventually they disappeared. The stone draconians became overgrown and powdered under the pressure of
weather and vines; time's best warriors. Only the one draconian, wearing an ancient crown
and scarred on its breast with a cloven hoof, remains. For reasons no one living knows, it
does not crumble. Go to the wood, no longer called Darken, and you may see it yet.

Once, not long ago, the Forestmaster came into the glade and stood before the single
draconian. The crown was tarnished, the sword rusted; only the hoof-print was still sharp
and clear. The Forestmaster stared at the print, then looked thoughtfully around the
glade. There was not so much as a mound to show that anyone had died here, and even the
memory of the draconians was fading from those who lived in Shadow Wood.

The unicorn tipped her head up and quietly sang two stanzas she had heard recently, added
onto a very old ballad:

"THE SHADOWS IN THE WOODS ARE PLAIN AND MINGLE NOW WITH LIGHT; THEY FLOW AND PLAY WITH SUN
BY DAY AND DANCE WITH MOON BY NIGHT.

FROM DARKEN WOOD HAS SHADOW WOOD BEEN GRANTED ITS RELEASE, THOSE WHO WERE KILLED IN VOWS
FULFILLED HAVE THERE BEEN GRANTED PEACE."

She strode to the edge of the woods and thrust her horn in among the vines, circling it
quickly. Walking back to the statue, she lifted her horn to the stone and slid a floral
wreath onto it. It slid down too far; she moved parallel to the sword and adjusted it. For
a moment, sword and horn both pointed to the north star, faintly visible in the darkening
sky.

She stepped back. “Sleep well, beloved” She turned and was gone.

The wreath of Paladine's Tears stayed fresh a long time. Hide and Go Seek Nancy Varian Berberick For a long time Keli did not know where he was. Sometimes he smelled the forest and the
river, sometimes only dirt and rocks. Once the boy thought he heard thunder rumbling far, far away. Then, on the tenuous bridge between darkness and consciousness, he
knew with the flashing certainty of lightning's strike that it was not thunder he was
hearing.

It was the voice of nightmare: the voice of a goblin.

“Tigo, let's dump the little rat in the river. We have what we want.”

Keli expected to feel the goblin's huge gray hands drag him up and cast him into the river.

Far back in his mind he knew about the leather thongs pinioning his arms, binding him at
knee and ankle. Too, he felt the hard earth, the fist-sized rock digging into his ribs.
Pain, however, was not as immediate as death-fear.

A second voice, sounding like the rattling of old bones, growled, “Bring him over here,
Staag; see what he's carrying first.”

Someone shouted, then yelped. Keli's eyes flew open, his heart leaped hard against his
ribs. He was not alone in his captivity!