Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all?
--King Lear
The wind picked up and over the hills as the horse clopped miserably toward the woodside village, the distant grasses rippling in soft, emerald waves. As if in welcome the grey sky began to drizzle, spitting cold little droplets of tentative rain. The way had been long, and now it seemed the rider would be drenched on top of everything else before his duties were complete.
The hamlet, such as it was, was sparse as a beggar's table, and not much more to look upon. Times had evidently been humble since the Saxon wars. The smithy stood cold and little-used, the distant chapel still bore the visible scars of arson, and even after all this time few menfolk could be seen amongst the pale figures dotting the huts and fields. The messenger rode irritably between clucking hens with a single barking hound, well advanced in years, yapping at his mount's hooves. A brisk trot along the wood's edge, and he drew alongside a scattering of peasant women who bent to the sparse field, tending to the earth. A few of them glanced up, some curiously, some in badly-concealed suspicion. One or two in candid interest. He cleared his throat, remembering his purpose.
"Ho there!" he called, "Is this the village Demdyke?"
"Aye," spoke an older woman, dubiously.
"I seek the castle of the Red Virgin," the messenger stated, "The knight in black said to be unvanquishable."
"You after a challenge?" she looked him up and down, "Not had a challenge in ages."
This wasn't going quite as he expected.
"...The castle, good woman?"
"No castle," scowled the woman in reply, "Shepherd girl's gone in the woods on some fool errand."
"Mind how you speak of God's chosen in fair company, old mother!" piped a younger woman kneeling in the furrow beside her.
"You can go stuff them high words up your backflap, Dierdre Tallow, don't think I've not seen how you follow that girl with your eyes! There's some good Godly behavior all right." The elder woman spat on he ground, heedlessly, "
Virgin, my foot."
The younger girl flushed red and turned her attentions quickly back to her labors. The rider let out an explosive breath and set his jaw, drawing himself up as best he could in his weary, saddle-sore state.
"Now look here," he proclaimed, "I come on order of the Regent himself and I am sworn to bring tidings to Ysobel of Demdyke! I have ridden hard for some miles without food or rest, and would be done with this without delay."
"Well, you'll not find 'er in the wood," sniffed the harridan, "Deep after some ne'er-do-wells hidin' out in the trees. Ask me, the girl's dead as mutton like as not."
"It's wrong you are," muttered the younger woman, not deigning to look up.
"I
must find her," said the rider, heading off another spat. "
Where in the wood am I to go?"
"I'll take thee," came a deep, dry voice from behind.
The messenger turned, beholding a crook-backed yet strong old man, his beard long and knotted. "See me to yon horse and I'll take thee true," he swore. "Know the girl well. Not hard to track. Armor weighs a swivin' ton."
The day had light left to spare, but a swelling river of thick, brooding rainclouds drifting lowly through the sky above had cast the already gloomy forest into an early twilight. And deep within the darkened wood rang a strident, clarion voice; young, foolish and pure.
"Black Piotr!"
The Kettle Knight stood girded before a crude palisade of felled logs, singing her challenges to the man that lurked within. Two of Piotr's outlaws had broken and fled at the sight of her and the terrible certainty in her voice, but two more, cruel in spirit and foul in body, now moved to flank her, each more than a head taller than she.
"Pete don't want to talk, lamb." chuckled the fiend moving to her right, a heavy club weighing in his hands. "But
we do."
"So be it," Ysobel sang in rebuke, bracing her shield. "Beg thy penance now or plead for it before the throne of God!"
"Oh I'll 'ave penance a'right." Avowed the one moving to her left. His teeth clenched in a yellow-toothed leer and spittle frothed at the edge of his lip, his sword tracing circles between them. "We'll see how sweet ye sing when me an' ol' Tom have you bare an' trussed and spit clean through like a suckling pig."
"Aught more to say before we carve, little lamb?" growled the first, hungrily.
"I forgive thee," she said, flatly.
They lunged. There was a brittle ring of metal, a whip of air, a thud, a sickening crack, and the first man thumped to the earth like a heavy sack, jaw shattered, neck snapped. His head rolled at an obscene angle, smeared with blood as the second came in from the side, colliding with her and coming off the worse for it. The shield thumped once, the heavy mace two, three times more, each blow pounding the fallen brigand deeper into the leaf-strewn mud. There was something heedless in the way she fought. As though she simply didn't understand that she might lose.
Ysobel took a handful of breaths and crossed herself, filling her capacious lungs.
"
Black Piotr, come out!" she shouted in her piercing young girl's voice. "Thy dogs are slain at thy doorstep!
Come out! Or hast thou turned too craven to face one more true and honorable than thee?"
That was enough.
The ragged gate burst outward and the brigand leader marched forth across the trail of dead branches, a giant of a man, white-haired, thick with scars and a mangled, twisted lip warped into a perpetual snarl. Ragged old chain hung about his chest, a vicious pike gripped in his right hand, and his bare arms were like the trunks of battered trees. There were no words, no reason left in his mad eyes as they burned into the girl's own. He only snarled, set his weapon and then charged like a wounded bull, roaring.
The pike slammed full-force against the virgin's shield and slid along its length with a tortured scream of iron as she backstepped heavily, bracing her feet in the shallow mud. Piotr roared and hammered at her with the polearm's butt, striking twice against her armored breast before her counterblow sent it ringing from his hands. His fingers were stricken nerveless with the force of it, but still he grabbed her kettle-forged pauldrons and with impossible strength flung her sidelong against the trunk of a towering oak, scrambling to recover his weapon. She shouted a piercing war-cry in return and pushed herself off, ducking the shaft of the giant's blade and slamming the ball of her mace into his exposed knee.
Crows left the treetops shrieking as Piotr screamed, staggering and striking back against the hateful girl, pitting all his weight against hers for a good minute before his leg buckled in a white blossom of pain and he collapsed backward into the wet midden of the forest floor. At once, her boot planted square upon his chest like a black anvil, and for all the difference in their size, her armored weight upon him was so crushing and great that he could not rise no matter how furiously he tried. She bent there, breathing near as heavily as he, regarding him. The heavy club hung from her black-gloved hand, unmoving, dripping red blood onto the earth.
And he, he was overcome. Years of battle and ravenous hardship, only to be brought low by a dressed-up girl in pantomime mail, barely a child, an arrogant, sheltered whore with no knowledge of the world. Pain, frustration and rage overtook him. His eyes bulged with violence and his bellow was like that of a mad beast.
"End it then!" he spat, red-faced and snarling, "Witless, snot-nosed little sow! I'll have no quarter from the likes of you!"
Ysobel gazed down at him in the wooded twilight, her eyes liquid and unreadable and totally without fear. The leaves rustled in the upper wind, and cold, grey raindrops began to patter down upon them from the twilit eaves above.
"...What ails thee, father?" she asked, softly.
Father.The stricken giant gaped, blinking up at the idiot girl through the raindrops and sweat and the maddening fog of pain.
Barely a child."...What?" he swallowed, "What say you..?"
Would have been her age, now."What sorrow is this that hath driven thee from the arms of God?"
Her mother's hair."Don't bleat to me of God!" he shrieked, gripping her plated boot and struggling against her weight, straining to rise as she leaned forward and crushed him back down into the mud and wet leaves. His voice shook like the boughs above them, and hot tears spilled from his eyes unbidden. "I spit on him, and on you! End it or just swiving DIE, you little fool!"
Her father's eyes."This wouldst I do," she piped in her sing-song voice, "And Christ forgive thy blasphemy. But Falken, Smith of Demdyke hath been a friend to me, and fought once beside thee, in the King's militia."
Closed forever."Old Falk," he sputtered, half-crazed, "Old Falk is dead. Done in and gone!"
"Nay, he liveth still, though he canst fight no more. He named thee once stalwart and true. And in thine eyes, I see not hatred, but grief whenst thou look'st upon me. ...Old father, whither now is thy house, that thou liveth as a beast in yon thicket?" The girl's brow creased in guileless concern, gesturing slowly with the dripping mace to take in the broken, lifeless bodies. "Whither those thou love'st, that thy bread is broken with such curs as these, and taken from the mouths of others?"
"No words... No words for you. What do you know of the rack of this world? Taken... You can't know.
A child can't know!" The giant roared, rocking under the girl's boot. "YOU CAN'T KNOW WHAT HE TOOK FROM ME!"
The Kettle Knight hung her mace from her belt, watching him still.
"Teach me," she said.
"My Grettr," he choked, "My little one. Oh Devil in Hell... Years of toil and war for your bastard King. And what reward? A bier and two bodies! End it. Let it be over."
"Yet it is not," the girl said with her damnable, idiot certainty, "And in this vale of tears hath I found thee, 'pon this dark hour. Poor father, wilt thou not come with me, to look upon thine old friend, and pour out this bitter cup with those who wouldst share it?"
The ruined giant stared up at her, panting beneath her boot, raw with old wounds and fresh pain. She offered her little hand, gazing back. Barely a child. Would have been her age, now. Her mother's hair. Her father's eyes.
"Even now, it is not too late." Ysobel murmured softly.
"Little fool," Black Piotr sunk back in the mud, gasping, beginning to shake as grief overcame him. "Stupid, witless little fool."
"Perhaps," she said, in a small, sad voice.
And so it was that when the messenger arrived to bring his tidings to the terrible guardian of Demdyke, he found instead a little red-haired woman in black iron kneeling in the leaves, cradling a scarred giant who wept brokenly against her shoulder, like a lost child in the pouring rain.
