The long-anticipated – and by Ava long-dreaded – day arrived; Karel Tate came to the village. Children out minding the sheep saw him first and came running into town with the news. The whole populace was out to watch by the time the great knight on his great horse appeared, riding wearily down the road. The horse was midnight black, bigger even than a carthorse; no smaller beast could have carried the giant armoured figure that rode upon its back. He was huge; seven feet tall if he were an inch, chest and shoulders four feet wide, arms as thick as most men’s legs. On his back, in a great black scabbard, he wore a sword taller than a woman, four feet of steel and two of hilt. His armour was black chased and inscribed with silver; bright runes crawled over every inch of polished steel. He rode bareheaded, and carried no pack or other weapons beside his sword. His face was unsmiling, stern as if hewn from granite; hawk-nosed, lantern jawed, pale skinned save for a red scar that ran from his cheek to his hairline, where the mane of jet-black hair was marred by a slash of pure white.
He seemed oblivious to the silent crowd awaiting him. Dismounting in their midst and taking his horse by the reins, he stood head and shoulders above even the tallest man in the village. His stare was glassy, eyes unfocused like a man in a trance.
Ava was not there to witness Karel Tate’s arrival; as soon as the news came in, she fled to barricade herself in the bedroom of her house. Arlan, returning from the fields with the other men of the village, left them to marvel over the giant knight and followed his wife, half expecting to find her either in her cubbyhole again or else packing a bag to flee for the hills. He could not deny, at least to himself, that he was shaken to see Karel Tate in the flesh: the size of the knight, the expressionless scarred face and eyes devoid of emotion, the weight of armour and sword negligible on his massive frame.
Whenever Ava had cried over the last few weeks, when she had woken in the night from some visitation of memory, Arlan had imagined himself fighting this dread knight who had once enslaved her. In his dreams, he had grappled with an armoured demon, defied unholy strength, faced a foe no man could defeat, and prevailed. But no conjuring of nightmare had prepared him for the fear that the sight of Karel Tate inspired. The Headsman of Vale had been legend before Karel’s time; he was the son and grandson of a line of Headsmen stretching back into antiquity; men of evil fame, hereditary executioners from the old order that had fallen in the wars.
All this and more Arlan grappled with on the threshold of his home, mastering himself before he went inside to face his wife’s terrors. He called out, assuring her who it was before he knocked on the bedroom door. She emerged reluctantly, pale and shaking, and clung to her husband.
“Did you see his eyes?” she whispered.
“Yes,” Arlan said, surprised at the question. “Like a man bewitched.”
“He is. Not by some sorceress,” sudden bitterness entered Ava’s voice and face. “By her, by Sabra Daishen.” There was not a single person alive in Kellia or Silveneir who had not heard of Sabra Daishen, but those who had not seen her in the flesh rarely credited the tales, so much more grandly impossible than any legend of Karel Tate. “One look in her eyes,” Ava’s went on, distantly as though looking back into memory. “One look and he was gone. The same man, but different somehow…”
This was the first tie Arlan had ever heard his wife speak of Sabra Daishen; the fact that she had known such a person raised a thousand questions in his mind, about who his wife was and how much she had not told him, but he forced the confusion aside and focussed on her immediate need.
“He’ll get poor welcome in the village,” Arlan began, trying to comfort her, but Ava laughed bitterly.
“He won’t care. He sleeps outside. If anyone offered him a bed, he’d still sleep on the floor. He’ll hunt his own food, bathe in the pond; that there’s even a village here won’t mean a jot to him. But somehow, he’ll know to stay, and not just ride on.”
“Why are you so afraid of him?” Arlan drew her close, and she rested her head on his chest.
“I’m afraid of everything,” she whispered. “Hadn’t you noticed? But him… it’s not the sort of fear you mean. I’m not afraid of him; he just represents my fears. Does that make sense?”
Arlan was not sure that it did, but did not say so, preferring to let his wife talk while she was willing.
“He never hurt me,” she was saying, “never even raised his voice. He was always kind, but… he’s a killer, Arlan; he put me in so much danger. He was always there to protect me, but danger followed him, and when he was wounded at New Adathen, I… I couldn’t bear it. I was afraid to lose him, so I left him myself.” She looked up into her husband’s eyes, seeing there the pain that her confession caused him. “And now I’m afraid for you. Karel would take me with him, of course he would; he loves me.” Another bitter laugh broke through her tears. “He was devoted like a dog. But I wouldn’t want to go with him, I’d run away again… what frightens me now is what you might try and do, seeing what his being here does to me. I’m afraid of losing this one place where I’ve been happy.”
Arlan almost broke down in tears, for he loved Ava dearly. He could not speak, torn apart inwardly by conflicting needs to comfort his wife; the only aid he could imagine was to confront this man who terrified her, and it was that very aid she feared.
Ava reached up to kiss him then, drawing his face down to hers. “Promise me,” she whispered. “Promise you won’t face him. I’ve known too many warriors, Arlan, you can’t hide that look from me; swear to me you won’t do it.”
She had already drawn him halfway to their bed; there was no resisting her when she put her will towards seduction, and soon Arlan gave her the promise she required.
He woke in the dark, shaken from a dream in which he had woken alone. But Ava was still beside him, curled up asleep at his side. He lay there for a long time, unmoving, bound by the oath she had extracted only hours before. But he could not sleep, and just as Ava did when the night-terrors woke her, he went out onto the porch to breathe the night air.
The village nestled in the darkness, invisible but palpably near, the scene of his childhood, a place never threatened and so knowing no fear. He had never thought to be so tested, but like all men he believed that such a test was not beyond him. Somewhere, in the darkness, Karel Tate would be sleeping. A mad thought possessed Arlan then; not to fight Karel Tate, no he had sworn not to do that… but to kill him nonetheless. It was an abhorrent thought; murder, seeming to call to him from the darkness, seeping into him from the shadows all around until his fists clenched and his body shuddered.
He lurched upright, suddenly, and stalked across the yard. In a tree stump on their land stood the axe, used for chopping firewood. He took it without conscious thought, and walked slowly down the road towards the village with the weapon in his hand. He had dismissed Ava’s belief in the power to simply know something without explanation, but he felt it now; he knew where Karel Tate would be. Long before he reached the village, he could see the knight asleep, stretched out beneath a tree on the village green. Rounding the corner where the tavern obstructed the road, his premonition was confirmed; there was Karel Tate, fully armoured, propped against the tree, with his head bowed upon his breast. The knight’s sword was still upon his back; his horse was tethered to another tree nearby. The man lay as still as death, pale in the moonlight, only the slight rise and fall of his armoured chest attesting that he lived at all.
Arlan crept closer, the realisation of what he meant to do rising up like a black fog in his mind, darker than the night. His hands, rough from a life of hard work, slid along the smooth wood of the axe as he lifted it above his head. One blow. The knight was bareheaded, his neck exposed as he nodded in sleep. One blow to behead the Headsman and put an end to his line.
Arlan froze, locked like a statue with the blow waiting to fall. Karel Tate was a killer; he deserved to die, how many had he killed and how many would be spared if this demonic man were slain? But Arlan had never killed anyone, never raised a blade and only rarely a fist in anger. He hesitated, his teeth gritted, barely breathing, fighting within himself to either bring the axe down or fling it away, unable to do either. An image of Ava swam before his eyes and he uttered a choking sound; at that tiny, involuntary noise, Karel Tate’s eyes snapped open.
The spell suddenly broken, Arlan tried to bring the axe down for the killing blow, but Tate was already on his feet. Fully armoured, somehow he moved in a blur; rising from repose as if catapulted to his feet, surging forward with the force of the sea. His armoured forearm met and parried the haft of the axe even as his gauntleted fingers closed on Arlan’S throat.
Arlan was not a small man, he was accounted one of the strongest in the village, but he was lifted up and born backwards as though by the strength of a dozen men. Karel Tate flung him six feet with one hand; before the farmer could regain his feet, the knight’s sword whispered from its scabbard.
Only then did Tate blink as though becoming truly awake; his eyes focussed and he regarded his attacker. He said nothing and showed no sign of fear or even surprise; the only question in his gaze was a silent enquiry what his opponent would do next.
Arlan reached slowly for the axe that lay near his hand. Karel Tate did not move; the great sword resting in his hands, neither on guard nor quiescent, merely waiting. On his feet again, the axe unsteady in his hands, Arlan met the eyes of the man he had thought to kill. Nothing that he had expected, no berserker rage or laughing madness, could have frightened him more than Karel Tate’s unblinking stare; devoid of any human warmth, willing to kill but lacking both passion and remorse: utterly calm. A strange, cold peace seemed to flow from those eyes like an unearthly wind. Arlan shifted his hands upon the axe haft, seeking the will to break the trance that Tate’s gaze cast upon him. Tate seemed to stare through him, as if his gaze were fixed not on his foe but on some distant, inner vista.
Then the knight spoke. “I am the Headsman of Vale.” The man’s voice was as expressionless as his face, but there was ritual weight behind those words; the challenge of a knight introducing himself to a foe.
“I… I am Arlan. I am Ava’s husband.”
At this, the first flicker of expression crossed Karel Tate’s face; almost imperceptibly, one eyebrow rose. Then the man’s face settled back into its preternatural calm.
“Have you come far to die?” Again the blank tone was laden with ritual, words spoken for the sake of form by a man who had no desire to speak.
Arlan said nothing, and Tate accepted his silence; he nodded minutely and lifted his sword to the salute. “Defend yourself, for it is written that none shall come against a knight in arms and withdraw unscathed.”
In the next breath, the Headsman of Vale was upon him; the huge sword flickered, fast as an arrow, and Arlan reacted on instinct, leaping backwards to avoid the blow that would have clipped off his head. Immediately the great blade reversed its stroke and twitched back along the same trajectory, its wielder advancing even as Arlan ducked and darted back again. The axe hung useless in his hands; he leapt back again, flailing a parry, and a third time the knight’s sword flashed a hairsbreadth from his throat. Karel Tate’s strength and speed were fearsome enough; the surgical precision of his skill was yet more terrifying. Arlan knew, without a shadow of doubt that he could not win; he was insane to have even thought it, driven mad by love and jealousy. Time slowed as Arlan ducked again, his only glimmer of hope being that the Headsman always struck for the neck. With strange dissociation, knowing death was near, Arlan recalled one of the tales of his opponent; at the siege of New Adathen, Karel Tate had held the breach alone for over four hours against an endless tide of foes. Arlan was exhausted already, sapped by adrenalin, his limbs shaking and a cold sweat on his brow; despite the added weight of his armour, Tate was not even breathing hard.
The sword swept in again. Arlan dodged, stumbled and lost his footing; the blow that would have claimed his head took only a snippet of hair, but the long blade was already spearing in, pursuing him to earth. He saw it, the tip coming like an arrow straight at his throat, Karel Tate square behind the thrust to drive it home, his face grimly serene. Then a woman screamed. Arlan felt the swordpoint touch his throat only to be suddenly withdrawn, the death-blow aborted.
For a long moment, the sword hovered before his eyes; then Ava barged Tate’s arm aside and flung herself protectively across her husband. At the sight of her, Karel Tate staggered as if struck. The first human expression Arlan had yet seen crossed the knight’s impassive face; the look of a man hit by surprise with an arrow. His mouth gaped and his eyes widened; his face, already pale, turned white as death. In the next moment he had mastered himself; his mien turned again utterly calm. But his dark eyes now burned with fierce intensity. The effort of asserting his self-control was greater than the physical exertion of the fight; Tate leant heavily on his sword, studying Arlan and Ava on the ground before him.
The rush of relief after coming so close to death left Arlan stunned and breathless; he was aware only of Ava, crouching over him like a lioness at bay. He could not recall a moment when he had ever seen his wife so beautiful, transfigured by her terror into a vision of desperate courage.
Very slowly, Karel Tate sheathed his sword. “You love this man?”
“I do.” Ava’s voice was harsh with emotion. “I do.”
She did not bother to threaten or plead; she knew Karel Tate too well.
“He is brave.” It was not a question; Tate met Arlan’s eyes and gave him again the minute nod of salute. “Foolish. But brave.”
Abruptly, the Headsman turned and walked towards his horse. Glancing at Ava, Arlan saw that his wife was no less surprised than he, all her fierce courage vanished into bafflement.
“That’s it?” Ava scrambled to her feet, but did not pursue Karel Tate. At her question he stopped, his hand already on the reins of his horse. He turned enough to look at her, one eyebrow quirking again in that momentary almost-expression of mild surprise.
“Of course. I would not harm you.”
“But…” Ava could not frame the question, but Arlan understood, recalling the Headsman’s words right before the fight; none shall come against a knight in arms and withdraw unscathed.
“Honour is satisfied,” Tate said, and turned back to his horse.
Arlan touched his throat and found a tiny cut, wet with blood; the tip of Karel’s sword had nicked his throat.
At the sight of the blood on his fingertips, reality and volition returned. He climbed to his feet and stood beside Ava, watching as the grim knight mounted his horse. As he settled his feet into the stirrups, Ava suddenly ran to him. Arlan remained where he was; knowing nothing he could say or do would alter fate.
Ava stared up at Karel Tate. “You’re just going to ride away?”
Tate shrugged; his face a mask. “How many could I kill to win your love? Go. Live.”
With that, he spurred his horse and rode away, gaining the trot and then the canter, fading like a ghost into the night.
Arlan put his arm around Ava, and they walked back together towards their house on the village edge. The sound of the fight had woken their neighbours; Arlan saw curtains twitching in the windows as they passed, but no one stepped beyond the thresholds of their homes.
They had reached the doorway of their house, and were about to go inside, when they heard a distant sound; a man’s voice, howling once in anguish. For the first time, Arlan realised how readily his wife’s name could be uttered as a scream.
Read more by Samuel Z Jones here: http://www.dekelliastravels.co.uk/
