THE BLACK KNIGHT’S CONCUBINE PART I

Ava had lived her entire life in fear. Her mother had been a Silvan soldier, killed in the wars, and so Little Ava had learned early what death was, and to fear it.  She had learned to fear her grandmother too; the ancient Silvan Diva had taught Little Ava what a warrior was supposed to be, what her mother had been, and inadvertently taught Ava to fear the life she had been born into.  All Silvan women were warriors, but from the moment the news came that her mother was dead, Ava had forgotten any desire to follow in the family tradition; it was not merely her mother’s death, but the terrible look that came into her grandmother’s eyes when she heard the news.  The old woman had seemed for a moment as she must have done in her youth upon the battlefield, sword in hand and death in her heart.  At the age of five, Ava had known that much as she did not want to die, she feared far more to become as her grandmother; bleak and terrifying, harrowed so that she resembled in spirit the ancient sword she wore until her dying day.

When the wars ended Ava was seventeen, but there was no longer any Silvan army; they had lost, their nation conquered, all Silvan warriors commanded to surrender their swords. When the news arrived, Ava’s grandmother killed herself.  Without a word, she walked away into the woods; Ava had followed and arrived just as the old Diva fell on her own sword. Ava had pried the blade from her grandmother’s dead hand, dressed in her mother’s old uniform, and gone perform the one act of courage in her life; she had gone to the great surrender, and laid down the family blade. From that moment, she and every other to attend the surrender had been slaves, and Ava had been taught fear rigorously until it was the defining fact of her existence.  She had lived thus, in fear, until she had been given as a concubine to an Imperial general. He had been a strange man, wild, brought from remotest Kellia to serve the Empress of Silveneir. But he had been kind to Ava, abhorring slavery and offering to set her free.  In her fear, she had refused, remaining as his slave until she had learned to love him, fearing his departures to fight in the new wars at the Empress’ command.  Eventually his hatred of slavery turned him rebel, and Ava learned new fears; of hardship and danger, long journeys and bitter fights.  In the end, it had been too much; when her lover was wounded, she could not see the great hero that others called him.  All she saw was death, waiting at his bedside, and she had not waited to see her fear’s fruition, but fled.  Still she had been afraid, terrified every waking moment and haunted by nightmares until she settled at last in a remote village.  There she met a man who was, in her eyes, both as strong and as kind as her lost general, no warrior but a farming man, and for a time, she had been happy.

Then news came to the village that stirred again the lifelong terror: the wars were over, at last, and her general, her master, the great warrior Sir Karel Tate: the Headsman of Vale, still lived. She knew at once, even before word of it arrived weeks later, that he could come.

Her husband Arlan knew of, but did not understand, her fears.  He was a working man who had seen nothing of the wars.  To him the way of the sword was meaningless compared to the love of the earth and her bounty.  So he had tried to calm and comfort Ava’s fear, to teach her the solid faith in the unchanging cycles of a farmer’s life.  But when the news came that the great knight Karel Tate would soon visit their town, Ava’s fears overcame her.

While the townsfolk were still abuzz with the news, excited that a hero of the wars they had escaped would soon visit them, Ava slipped away.

Arlan found her hiding in the cubby-hole under the floor of their barn.  No one else would have found her there; a natural void in the foundations of the building, concealed by a trapdoor in floor that she had insisted he install while the barn was still under construction.  It had seemed a bizarre and paranoid request, but Arlan had complied for the love of his wife, never expecting her to actually use it.

She did not at first respond to Arlan’s knock on the hidden trapdoor, but he heard through the wood a muffled gasp and shudder.  The door locked from the inside; he had to wait, talking softly through the panel, until Ava was calm enough to withdraw the bolt and peek outside.

“Come out,” Arlan said, still in the same gentle tone. “He won’t be here for weeks, and even then you won’t have to hide there; he doesn’t know you’re here at all.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Neither do you. How could he know you’re here?”

“He’ll know,” Ava sniffled. “Maybe he doesn’t yet, but he will.  He’ll be ten miles away, twenty, the horizons off, and suddenly he’ll know.”

“It’s just another town,” Arlan said. “Home to us, but just a place to him, nowhere special.”

“He’ll know.” Ava insisted. “I knew; as soon as I knew he was alive, I knew he’d come here.”

“It’s just fear, Love,” Arlan said. “Like fear of a spider, or the dark; just an old fear.”

“I’m not a child!” Ava snapped, still cowering in her cubbyhole.

“And what will happen if he knows?”

Ava stared at him blankly, baffled that he could not see the awful doom approaching.

“He’s the Headsman of Vale,” she managed at last.

“So? Who is he to me?”

“The man who married his concubine?”

“And?” Arlan, like most men, was far from comfortable discussing his wife’s past; that this soldier, this knight, had once called Ava his property, filled her husband with a cold rage alien to his nature. “Do you think I’d let him take you?”

“You couldn’t stop him.”

Arlan stood up and walked away. Ava called after him, then scrambled out of her hole and ran to catch up, fear of losing him far outweighing in the moment her terror of the approaching knight still many days away. Arlan stopped when he heard her following, but did not turn to look at her.

“I don’t know why you fear him.”

“He’d never hurt me,” she said. “But I couldn’t fight him, and he’d kill you if you tried.”

Arlan’s eyes had turned towards the village, a cluster of houses surrounded by scattered farmsteads numbering their own little plot of land among the wider fields.  As if she could read his mind, Ava added, “He’d kill everyone in the village.”

“The rumour is he rides alone.”

“Yes,” Ava nodded. “He’ll come alone. He’s always alone, even when…” she trailed off, remembering the long nights beside Karel Tate, who rarely spoke and who’s eyes looked always far away. “You don’t know him.”

Hearing her begin to cry, Arlan turned and took her in his arms. “It’s alright. Just wait. You need not even see him when he comes; you can hide, if you must. But he’s not here; I am.”

 

The news came thick and fast then to that little town which heard so little of the outside world.  Karel Tate was coming; the Headsman of Vale was near; the great knight, the rebel hero, master swordsman, giant, dragonslayer… and soon one rumour-monger recalled that Ava had, on occasion, mentioned that she had once known this man whose fame redoubled with every repetition of his tales.  She refused at first to be drawn, hiding herself indoors, but her silence only added mystery that drew the rumour-mongers’ attention onto her. What had Ava’s relationship to this warrior been?  His lover, or his slave?  Had she fled from him as from an ogre?  What had he done to her when she was in his power?  She was already an outsider, a foreign woman in a small town where every other inhabitant could trace their family back to the same soil for generations.  Now they looked at her with new eyes, the men appraisingly, the women with jealousy, wondering what life she had known as the concubine of so terrible a knight.  At last, when she could bear it no longer and Arlan prevailed upon her to still the gossip with honest truth, Ava emerged and went with her husband to the tavern where the rumour-mill held court.  There, with her husband silent at her side and the shadow Karel Tate looming larger with every passing day, she answered their questions.

They had already guessed the truth of her relationship to the great knight, and her confirmation here granted credence to the rest of her tale in the villagers’ ears.  She did not need to express her fear; the villagers were already whispering of what would happen when Karel Tate learned that his concubine was in their midst.  Voyeurism contended with the villagers’ pride; it would be good theatre to see the foreign woman dragged off by her hair in the wake of the feared hero, but in another sense Ava was one of their own, they had accepted her, and the villagers looked after their neighbours even as they gossiped cruelly.  The jealousies and dramas of village life were sustained on boredom and the knowledge that nothing would ever change; once of the village, always of the village.

“How tall is he?” The first question addressing Karel Tate himself. “A giant?”

“Seven feet,” Ava confirmed.

“And his sword?”

“As tall as I am.” An image of a sword over five feet in length appeared to the listener’s minds as if they saw it with their own eyes, and a man like a mountain to wield it.

“He must be strong,” someone said.

“Like a blacksmith,” Ava replied, for this was the highest standard of human strength within the villagers’ experience.

“And is it true that…”

“Yes,” Ava said, not even needing to hear the question. “He killed a dragon.  I was there.”

“And at the Battle of New Adathen…”

“Yes.  He held the breach against the living dead. I tell you the man is utterly without fear.”

Arlan had heard enough. “He’s not coming for Ava.  He’s on his way to Vale, he doesn’t even know she’s here.”

“But he will,” one village wag said, and the claim was confirmed when Ava quailed.  But she had lived with fear all her life and considered it her own; her only courage lay in that she would not pass on her fear to others. “I don’t want anyone to interfere.  I know some of you would defend me,” and here she looked up at her husband, “but I don’t want that.  I’ll avoid him, I’ll go away while he’s here, I don’t want to see him at all.  But if he sees me, then I don’t want anyone hurt by trying to stop him.”

This had the opposite of the desired effect; there were grumblings from men and women alike, the villagers’ minds now turning to mobs and pitchforks.  Ava, looking around the room, suddenly saw them all attempting to rush Karel Tate, the Headsman standing like a monolith against a tide of foes, as she had seen him in battle so many times before; a giant wading through blood and murder, his face utterly calm, fighting in silence while around all him others roared and screamed, his sword a flicker of gory silver dancing in his hands. A second glance at her neighbours told her she could never explain; they both did and did not believe the stories. As a novelty, a visitor, they believed in the legend of the invincible knight; as a foe, they were too proud and knew too little to imagine that any foe could threaten them.  The village had known peace for untold decades, one of the few places untouched by the wars that had swallowed up whole generations.

Filled with the certainty of her fears, knowing that nothing she said or did would make any impact upon fate, Ava began to cry.  Arlan took her home, regretting that they had ever gone to face their neighbours with the truth, and disquieted by the growing knowledge that there was something in his wife that he did not and perhaps never would understand.

 

This story will conclude in next week’s story corner.  If you can’t wait that long you can read more by Mr. Samuel Z Jones here: http://www.dekelliastravels.co.uk/

Image by The Grumpy Badger.

 

 

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