The Ravens of Falkenau & Other Stories

"Don't the great tales ever end?"

"No, they never end as tales, but the people in them come and go when their part's ended."

— J.R.R. Tolkien

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Author's Introduction

The Ravens of
Falkenau

Dion Ex
Machina

Cold Frontier

Small Victories

How the Lady of Cats Came to
Nagada

Prince Over the Water

Horus Indwelling

Paradise

Slave of the World

Little Cat

Vesuvius

Unfinished Business

The Messenger's Tale

Morning Star

Templar Treasure

Winter's Child

Brunnhilde
in the Fire

Welcome to the Numinous World, where gods and angels intervene in the lives of mortals, and a band of eternal companions unite and reunite over the centuries, striving to make the world a better place despite wars and dark ages, hatred and cruelty.
 
Here are stories from the very beginning of our history, when the Lady of Cats entered the life of a young woman and changed her forever, long ago when farmers first scraped a living from the soil.
 
Here too are stories of the ancient world — of Dion, the peerless scientist of Alexandria, of Lucia, a Roman waif, of a Persian princess and her Jewish sister in law, of Lydias of Miletus who is once and always Ptolemy's man, and of a Nubian girl who begins a long journey toward a strange destiny.
 
There are stories of the Dark Ages, of a last Roman outpost on the shores of Britain and of an Arab warrior who at last comes home to a white city on the sea, of a Scottish witch who serves the Storm Queen and fears no other magic, and a Knight Templar enslaved by the beauty of the world.
 
Others follow — a messenger boy dragged into the Great Story and a desperate ride dogged by the Wild Hunt, and a mercenary captain of the Thirty Years War who finds his destiny in a remote corner of the Bohemian mountains.
 
Here too are more modern tales of the Age of Revolution, when Dion, Emrys, Sigismund and Charmian reunite in Napoleonic Paris, and at last we roll into the twentieth century with a young American girl with extraordinary oracular powers.
 
Of course there is also Michael, Mik-el, Mikhael, who watches over his charges as best he may, though the world may change around them.

These are tiny windows into a miraculous world, glimpses through a glass and darkly of all that might be — for those with eyes to see.
 
I hope you enjoy the journey!

This is one of the oldest stories in the Numinous World, in the sense of having been begun first.
 
I started it in 1995 when I was working at an exceedingly boring temp job.
 
I couldn't put anything personal on their computers, so it was written in longhand on a yellow legal pad and then finished more than fifteen years later.
 
In many ways Georg is the darkest version of our main character.
 
It has been a long time since Black Ships, and the road has not been kind.

I was seventeen when I first came to Falkenau, in the Year of Our Lord 1614, the second year of the old Emperor Matthias, the last king before the wars of religion began. I was young and unemployed, another hopeful boy pursuing the trade of arms unsuccessfully, hoping to make enough in bounty and plunder to live well before I died.

Falkenau was a medieval fortress high in the mountains, situated on a crag swept about on three sides by a river now frozen and pale with a dusting of snow that rested on the ice. There was a village as well, not large, with the usual steep, muddy streets with goats everywhere, and the Church of the Virgin beneath its pitched roof and mushroom dome.

In the summer I'm sure it was all very pretty, but in January it was nothing but cold. We would not have come to Falkenau at all, my companions and I, if the Prince of Anhalt-Bernberg hadn't discharged us in September without even a bonus, and by January money was running out. Rumor had it in the coffeehouses of Prague, which were much warmer and more pleasant, but much less profitable, that the old lord of Falkenau was looking for armsmen, but by the time we got there he had already finished hiring everyone he wanted.

I was ready to leave again, but Marik advised against it.

"Just sit still, boy," he said, putting one hand on my shoulder as we negotiated our way back down the steep road that led to the castle. "Have a little patience."

"I'd have more patience if I had more kroner," I replied. The sack at my belt was nearly empty.

"Some of those bastards he hired won't work out," Marik said. "Just watch and see. In a week he'll have to turn out four or five for drunkenness and then we'll move into their positions. It's a matter of being in the right place at the right time."

I shrugged. "I'm never in the right place at the right time." Beneath me the frozen trickle of water looked blue against the stones, and the valley was encased in snow. I'd sold my horse seven weeks before.

Marik seized my sleeve and pulled me back from the edge, from the leap I hadn't really thought about making. "You will be, son. You've good eyes, good health, a good mind and a way with horses. If you don't do something stupid you'll see thirty."

I shrugged. "And so? What then? I wind up too old to fight with a mess of scars to prove it, broke as I am now, with what to show for it?"

Marik gave me a hard look beneath his bushy brows. "So what did you leave home for?"

"Nothing to leave," I said. I would not talk about that. Ever. "I went to win my fortune," I said.

On that day in the spring two years before, Captain Sylvester Von Boren was hiring, set up at the best inn in town, a mug of hot wine at his elbow, the lace on his cuffs dripping down over his hands. I joined in the line of ragged plowboys, university students, and grizzled middle aged men snaking its way toward the long table where the celebrated captain sat, resplendent in buff and scarlet, captured Mongol gold spread out before him for an inducement, with a young priest at his elbow to write in a fair hand the names of those joining the company, their skills, pay and terms. As each man stepped up the captain had a word with him, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes only for a second or two. The grizzled veterans he sent to his right, to the priest, with no hesitation. The others fared less well. Most shuffled away, disgruntled. Only a few took the priest's quill in hand to make their mark next to their name and sign their life away for ten gold kroner, a knife and pick, and a full suit of clothes.

I noted, hopefully, that most only make an X. I could at least write my name. So could the university students. The plowboys never got a chance. I was acutely aware of the ten pounds of aged metal strapped to my side, a heavy iron sword I bought off old man Gottfried when I left home, who had used it in the last century. It was a pretension to gentility.

At last it was my turn. The captain's blue eyes flicked up and down me once, taking in my faded brown coat, my
scraggling
attempt at a dashing moustache. "Your name, boy?"

"Georg," I managed, trying to make my voice come out deep and manly instead of the pleasant tenor I'm cursed with.

The captain sighed wearily. "Georg what?"

I thought of the cobbler's house I had grown up in, the refuse in the street, the hens picking in the gutter. High above the town I was born in, Marianburg Fortress reared its head, with strong walls and the little chapel that was older than the Son of God, Corinthian columns about the statue of the Virgin.

"Von Marianburg," I said, straightening my back. "Georg Von Marianburg."

There was a glimmer of interest in the captain's eyes. "What can you do, Georg Von Marianburg?"

I swallowed. "I have a strong back and I'm good with horses. I can fight and I have shot a musket and I can write my name as well."

"Can you use that chunk of metal you're wearing?" rumbled a blond, bearded man behind the captain, the company's Second, a Dane named Shorty who wasn't.

I swallowed again. "Yes," I said.

The Dane snorted. "Hardly worth the trouble, Captain."

Von Boren shrugged and reached for his mug.

"Wait!" I said, desperate not to be turned away as so many had been. "I'll fight for my place."

The captain looked up, startled.

"To first blood," I amended. "Any man you choose. It's my risk. But if I put up a good showing you'll make a place for me."

The Dane chuckled.

"Done," the captain said, rising to his feet. "It was near time to take a break from so much sitting. This will at least prove entertaining. Shorty, will you take him?"

The Second gestured to his beautiful blue velvet doublet. "Me? I've small desire to spoil my new clothes with blood and sweat, even if it be another's. Let Lukan do it." He gestured to a smaller man of indeterminate nationality who grinned at me with two black teeth between gray lips.

"Out in the yard, then," the captain said, walking around the table, his suede boots making no sound on the floor.

We went out into the stone courtyard of the inn, a bit of the crowd following us, hooting derisively. I pretended I could not hear them, and truthfully I really could not, seized as I was by a curious sense of unreality. I could get killed here, I thought. That would be a useless end to a useless existence. There was no one in the world besides myself it would matter to. I could not believe that it would matter to God.

Lukan tossed his coat to a friend of his who stood by. I had no friend, so I kept mine on.