Crusader Read online

  They sat, or lay, under a great crystal dome in a secluded part of Sanctuary. The crystal dome rested on seventy crystal columns that rose the height of two men from the terracotta-tiled floor. Beyond the columns stretched a great plain of newly-ploughed earth.

  Nothing else was visible.

  Drago’s witches waited, each consumed with their own thoughts, or with their dying.

  He strode across the ploughed fields, his naked feet barely sinking into the soft earth.

  His body was similarly naked, save for the white linen wrap about his hips, and the lily sword and jewelled purse that hung from his begemmed belt.

  The skin of his body glistened slightly with sweat.

  DragonStar, the Enemy Reborn.

  Behind him walked the Star Stallion, relaxed and sinuous in every movement, his head nodding and dipping with each stride, the stars sprinkling over the naked earth as they fell from his mane and tail. From his withers, fixed by magic or perhaps merely by wish, hung the Wolven and the quiver of blue-feathered arrows.

  Behind the horse, but slightly to one side of him, trailed the Alaunt. They loped in single file, each with head raised just enough that they could keep their golden eyes fixed on the man in front of them.

  Their jaws hung very slightly open; enough that the glint of teeth and tongue spun through.

  Behind them all trundled the blue-feathered lizard, occasionally snapping at imaginary gnats.

  The crystal dome appeared on the horizon, but DragonStar did not increase the rate of his stride, nor change the expression of his face. He was at peace with himself, even though his mind was consumed with the image of millions of stars and galaxies tumbling through the universe, chased by a great dark cloud with the stinging tail of a scorpion raised threateningly behind it.

  Thus had Evil subverted every good ever created.

  Thus had the Star Dance been chased by the TimeKeeper Demons since the creation of the universe itself.

  Now was the time to end it.

  Now. Here. In this time. With this man, this Crusader. And then…then…

  …how many aeons had the Star Dance waited? How many worlds, solar systems, galaxies torn apart had it watched?

  …then could the Garden be created anew. And this time, without the scorpion’s tail sting of temptation.

  Only the Infinite Field of Flowers gently waving into eternity.

  Faraday turned her head slightly, and she seemed to smile, even though her facial muscles did not move.

  There, she could smell him.

  And then he was behind her, and she could sense the sway of his body and its warmth, and her lips parted, and she shifted very slightly on the chair in remembrance.

  He put his hand on her shoulder, and she relaxed back into his love. He bent swiftly down, and kissed her full on her mouth.

  Leagh, Gwendylyr and Goldman lifted their faces and smiled with pure joy.

  “DragonStar!” Leagh said.

  He nodded, embracing each one with the warmth of his gaze, then looked at DareWing.

  The birdman had turned his head in DragonStar’s direction and opened his eyes. They were red, and horribly consumed with the weight of his sickness.

  And yet, somehow, they were still glad.

  DragonStar slipped past Faraday and entered the circle. He paused, then squatted down by DareWing’s side. “I need you alive,” he said.

  “Good,” croaked DareWing.

  DragonStar grinned, then leaned down his hand and rested it on the skin of DareWing’s chest.

  “Do you feel like an adventure?” he said.

  “For you,” DareWing said, “I would fetch the coals that feed the flames in the firepits of the AfterLife.”

  DragonStar’s hand rose to cup DareWing’s face. “From you,” he murmured, “I require far more. A flower a day from the field that surrounds you.”

  Both men smiled with love, and then DragonStar rose, and addressed the four witches in the circle.

  “Yet the field that surrounds this dome,” he said, “is a field of bare earth. It has been turned over and ribbed and ridged, but it lies barren. What does it represent?”

  “Us,” said Goldman, who delighted in such philosophical dabblings. “We have been ploughed, and the seeds laid within us, but we have yet to flower.”

  “Aye,” DragonStar said.

  “Perhaps we cannot,” Gwendylyr said, “until DareWing is healed.”

  DragonStar nodded, but did not say anything.

  “We must heal DareWing,” Faraday said, her voice quiet and introspective. “Not DragonStar. We must.”

  Again DragonStar nodded.

  “And I must heal myself,” DareWing said.

  “Stretch your wings,” DragonStar said. “All of you.”

  And he stepped back out of the circle.

  An expression of mild panic crossed Leagh’s face, and one hand tightened briefly over her belly. “How do we do this?”

  “We all have Acharite magic within us,” Faraday said, “now freed, as we have all come through death.”

  DragonStar had now walked very quietly out of the dome, and was wandering through the ploughed field. The Alaunt had settled down into a restful, watchful pack to one side of the dome, while the Star Stallion rested his weight on one hip and dozed, ignoring the lizard who lay stretched out behind him idly swatting at the stallion’s twitching tail.

  A tiny star fell from the stallion’s mane and fizzled momentarily in the damp earth.

  “How strange,” Faraday continued, her voice still very quiet, “that we have the use of Acharite magic, and that DragonStar has placed us within a field of ploughed earth, and has emphasised these things to us.”

  Of the others, only DareWing had enough memories of the old Achar to truly understand what Faraday alluded to.

  “You speak of the old god of Achar,” he said, then paused to cough violently. “Artor the Ploughman.”

  “Artor was evil!” Leagh and Gwendylyr both said together.

  “Yes,” Faraday said, “but perhaps we should not disregard the influence Artor would have had on the literal physical realm of Achar, as also the influence that that would have had on our power.”

  She paused, trying to sort out her thoughts. “Of the five of us, it is DareWing who is sick. He has a mixture of blood, Icarii and Acharite…and maybe the Artor influence that—possibly—exists in all of us has sickened him nigh unto death.”

  “I thought DragonStar said it was ground fever,” Gwendylyr said, frowning.

  “Ground fever is the outward face of the sickness,” Goldman said, catching Faraday’s train of thought, “but the stain on DareWing’s spirit is the Artorite stain. It would affect him far more than any of us.”

  “And is that why this field has not yet flowered?” Leagh said. “And why DareWing cannot get better? We must expel the remaining influence of Artor?”

  “Yes!” Faraday said, and the others all smiled, for the explanation felt good to them. “Yes. We must reject the rib and ridge of the ploughed earth.”

  “How?” said Gwendylyr, ever concerned with the practical.

  There was a silence.

  “We must ask ourselves a question,” Goldman said. “What is it that remains within us of Artor the Plough God?”

  Another silence.

  “Faraday,” DareWing said, his voice now nearly a death whisper, “of all of us here, you have been the only one who has been thoroughly taught in the ways of Artor the Ploughman. I only fought against it, and Goldman…”

  “Was but a boy of twelve when Azhure ran Artor into his grave,” Goldman said. “Faraday, what can you tell us?”

  Faraday sat in silence for a while, remembering her childhood lessons in the Way of the Plough, and her allegiance to, and love for, Artor the Ploughman. The months, months that, in all, amounted to years, she’d spent studying the Book of Field and Furrow. How blind I was, she thought.

  But the faith of the Plough was so comforting. Why?

&
nbsp; “We loathed and feared the landscape,” she eventually said, “and Artor gave us a face and a name for that fear. Untamed landscape, mountain, forest and marsh, was the haunt of evil creatures—the Forbidden—who were undoubtedly planning to swarm over all that was good and beautiful…all over us.”

  DareWing’s mouth curled in a bitter smile, and he turned his head aside.

  “Having defined our fear—the wild landscape and all that lived within it—we felt comforted, and so we took to the forests with our axes, and to the mountains with our armies, and to the marshes with our engineers, and we pushed back the wild landscape as far as we could. We tamed the earth and made it our slave.”

  “We enslaved it with the plough,” Gwendylyr said.

  “Yes,” Faraday said, “with the plough, and the neat square fields, and the straight and tightly-controlled furrow.”

  “‘Furrow wide, furrow deep’,” Goldman said. “I remember my father saying that constantly.”

  “Must we make amends?” Gwendylyr asked.

  Faraday looked to DareWing. “Must we?”

  “No,” he eventually said. “Not as such. The earth does not require ‘amends’.”

  “It merely requires us to let go our hatred and our fear,” Goldman said.

  “But I don’t hate and fear the landscape!” Leagh said.

  “There is still something deep within each of us,” Faraday said, “that corrupts us. It is the legacy of a thousand generations of unthinking worship of Artor. We must let that corruption go.”

  “How?” Leagh said. She looked about at the other witches in the circle, then down at DareWing. He looked worse than she’d ever seen him, and Leagh realised that they must correct whatever was wrong very shortly.

  Faraday smiled. “I think I know,” she said, and in the ploughed field DragonStar raised his head and smiled also.

  “We still fear some aspect of the landscape,” Faraday said. “All of us. We must confront the fear, and let it go.”

  “But—” Gwendylyr began.

  “We all fear some aspect of the landscape,” Faraday said again, and looked at Gwendylyr steadily. “All of us.”

  “I know what I fear,” DareWing said, but Faraday would not let him finish, either.

  She stopped him with a gentle hand, leaving her chair to kneel beside him. “DareWing, I think I know what you fear, and I think I know how strong that fear is.”

  Faraday grinned, but sadly. “No wonder you have ground fever.” Then she raised her head and looked at the other three, keeping her hand on DareWing’s shoulder. “We must confront our fears first, and then, stronger, be ready to support DareWing. Goldman?”

  “What? Oh…I, ah…” Goldman lapsed into silence, his eyes unfocused, then his mouth thinned and his hands clenched on his knees.

  “I loathe dead ends,” he said, and Faraday nodded. Goldman was ever the aggressive, determinedly successful businessman.

  “There is nothing worse,” Goldman said, and his eyes were now flinty and hard, “than walking through the countryside and finding yourself in some dead end gully, and having to retrace your steps to find another way forward. It’s so time wasting!”

  “Non-productive,” Leagh said, understanding a little more the process they must all endure.

  “Yes!” Goldman said, and he stood and paced about the dome. “Dead ends are so frustrating! So pointless!”

  Faraday watched him carefully. It seemed almost as if hate consumed Goldman, and she realised that somewhere here was a deeper lesson they must all learn.

  “So pointless,” Goldman said again, and then he vanished.

  Goldman found himself standing before the infuriatingly calm—and very high and very steep—rock wall of the canyon, and he raged.

  He had walked hours to get to this point, put in effort and time that could have been spent more profitably elsewhere.

  He had walked and walked down this canyon, thinking it would lead him to a better life, more money, and even, perhaps, a profounder understanding of life itself, and all it had presented him with was a dead end, a rock wall, a point past which Goldman could not walk.

  He raged. Was it possible to demolish the dead end? Perhaps a force of several hundred men armed with pickaxes and shovels could clear it in a week or so. Perhaps a smaller force of men armed with fire powder could destroy it in less time. Something had to be done to force this rock wall to give way to Goldman’s needs and ambitions and…

  …and Goldman quailed at the force of his rage. Why did he think such things? Why was he so angry?

  He was railing at a stand of rock, for the Field’s sake!

  Goldman stared at the rock wall and wondered how best to combat his inner frustration and anger.

  You have walked to this rock wall, he thought, and thus there must needs be a purpose to this dead end. What is it?

  He sat down cross-legged on the ground and stared at the rock.

  “What do you have to teach me?” he asked, and instantly all his frustration and hate fell away and he felt a great joy fill him.

  The rock absorbed the joy…and then it leaned forward and began to speak to Goldman in a very earnest manner.

  Goldman dusted off his tunic, and smiled at the four faces staring at him.

  “Your turn,” he said to Gwendylyr.

  She was in the garden, almost incandescent with fury.

  How long had she tended that hedge? How many hours had she pruned and clipped? How many days had she spent carefully digging in the soil about its roots to add light and air and fertiliser?

  And the hedge was so necessary! Its (once) neatly-clipped length had tidily divided field from garden (and what a neat garden, with its carefully measured garden beds and precise rows of stakes), providing the line that everyone needed between order and disorder.

  But now disorder had invaded the garden.

  Disorder in the form of a rigorous ivy. It had taken over the hedge, weaving and creeping its way through the hedge’s dark interior spaces before bursting triumphantly through to wave long, gleeful tendrils into the bright summer air down the length of the hedge.

  The hedge was ruined! It was doubtless dying! How could it support the parasitic ivy and still manage to keep—

  Gwendylyr realised suddenly that she was very, very afraid. There was no dividing line between order and disorder, was there? It was all a lie. Disorder would win every time. It could never be kept at bay.

  Gwendylyr backed slowly away, terrified that one of those tendrils would reach out and snatch at her at any moment. Where could she hide? Was there anywhere to hide? Perhaps the cellar…surely the dark would keep the ivy at bay…the dark would be safe…safe…

  Gwendylyr stopped, appalled. She would hide herself in the dark the rest of her life to avoid disorder?

  Was that a life at all?

  She swallowed, stepped forward, raised an arm, and took one of the waving tendrils gently in her hand.

  “Very pleased to make your acquaintance,” she said.

  “Likewise, I am sure,” said the ivy, and the sun exploded and showered both hedge and ivy and Gwendylyr in freedom.

  “Leagh?” said Gwendylyr.

  “No! No!” Leagh screamed, and grabbed at her belly.

  It was completely flat. Barren.

  As barren as the landscape about her. She ran, more than half-doubled over her empty belly, through a plain of hot red pebbles. A dry wind blew in her face, whipping her hair about her eyes.

  The sky was dull and grey, full of leaden dreams.

  “No, no,” she whispered. She was trapped in a land that had stolen her child to feed its own hopelessness. Both sky and ground were sterile, and both had trapped her.

  “No.” Leagh sank to the ground, gasping in pain at the heat of the pebbles, and then ignoring the burns to curl up in a ball.

  Nothing was left. Best to just give up. Best to die.

  Nothing worth living for.

  She cried, her breath jerking up through her
chest and throat in great gouts of misery. She wanted to die. Why couldn’t she die? Wasn’t there anyone about who could help her to die? Why couldn’t someone just put a knife to her (hopelessly barren) belly and slide it in? The pain would be nothing compared to this…this horror that surrounded her.

  This desert. This barrenness.

  Leagh cried harder, and grabbed at a handful of pebbles, loathing them with an intensity she had never felt for anything or anyone before. She threw them viciously away from her, then grabbed at another handful, throwing them away as well.

  When she grabbed at her third handful she stopped, aghast at her actions.

  Why blame the land for her misfortunes? If she had lost the child she carried, then how could she blame this desert?

  A cool breeze blew across and lifted the hair from her face.

  A tiny rock squirrel inched across her hand, its tiny velvety nose investigating her palm for food.

  Leagh smiled, and then laughed as she felt a welcome heaviness in her belly. She rested her hand over her stomach and felt the thudding of her child’s heart, then…

  …then she gasped in wonder and scrabbled her other hand deep in among the pebbles about her.

  A heartbeat thudded out from the belly of the earth as well, and it matched—

  beat for beat

  —that of her child’s.

  “What are you telling me?” she whispered, and then cried with utter rapture as the pebbles explained it to her.

  Leagh raised her head and stared at the others. A hand rested on her belly, and a strange, powerful light shone from her eyes.

  “Faraday,” she said.

  Faraday knew what it was she would confront, but her prior knowledge did not comfort her at all within the reality of her vision.

  She was trapped, as she had always been trapped (time after time after time). She had trusted—the trees this time—and they had turned their backs on her and left her to this.