The guys were sitting at a table in the local tavern, glugging down beer, swapping raunchy jokes and telling tall tales. They were having a grand old time, and deserved it. Their worn and torn jackets and boots testified eloquently to how rough a business war can be; these guys were soldiers. Some were young, still full of the piss and vinegar of men whose dreams of conquest and glory haven't yet been overwhelmed by the long stretches of exhaustion and boredom occasionally interrupted by the high passion and mindless terror of a pitched battle; others seemed ancient, and while not necessarily any wiser than the younger fools, they tended to be quieter, not given to swaggering braggadocio, and tending more to discuss the assignments they'll be given next while trying to weigh the probability of snagging enough high class swag to get out of military service and buy that farmstead somewhere far in the North. Several of them were somewhere in between, and might have just been really old-looking boys or really young-looking dotards.
No matter what his age, none failed to appreciate a good mug of beer and the beauty of the barely clad dancers making the rounds in the great hall. Some of the guys elbowed their buddies, taking bets on who might have enough money, charisma or charm to woo one or two of these beauties away for just a little while. “Psheah, right, she'd take your money easily enough, but she'd be back in less than five minutes crying with laughter at that tiny little pigsticker you call your primary weapon!”, one would tell the other, only to be answered “Well, I would have the good grace not to wee all over myself in terror when the door closed!”, and everybody at the table would slap his knee and laugh uproariously.
“Oh, I dunno... how so much more deadly than the sword is a harlot's fingernails! That is how you got your scar, isn't it? She decided what you were asking for was worth a lot more money than what you paid for, so she gave you a good rake?” More laughter.
“Well, if you must know, I got it last year somewhere east. Seems some fellow objected to my being on the same battlefield as he, and had a sword to express his displeasure with. Where'd you get yours? I suppose your sister got tired of saying 'no'.” Hooting laughter, raucous whistling, knee slapping, this time with some pounding on the table.
“Naw, that was somewhere south. Some of those people just don't want to listen to the King, and some of those idiots not only have swords, they almost know how to use them!”
“Oh, yea? Wait one, let me show you something”. He got up to remove his jacket. While he was doing this, one the other guys quipped “If yours is any bigger than hers”, pointing to one of the dancers, “I joined the wrong damn army!”, eliciting even more raucous laughter, hooting and whistling. After removing his jacket, he turned around and showed everybody his back, which boasted a wide, ugly scar running from shoulder blade to buttock. “This one put me in bed for a month or more. I never did see who put that scar there, but somebody told me this was an axe.”
They admired his scar for a while, maybe a degree or two less boisterous than they had been just seconds before. Most of them had been in battle, and most of them had small scar here or there as a souvenir. This man's was bigger than most, and they knew he was extremely fortunate to still be breathing.
“How about you? That little scratch on your cheek? Some harlot gave you that one, or maybe did you just get too frisky with a cat?”
The man they were now all looking at was one of the older ones, one of the quieter. Also, one of the biggest; the bole of an old oak tree with legs and a black hat. Unlike most of the older guys at the table, though, this man tended to stare off into space most of the time, seemingly oblivious to everything around him. He looked at the boy posing him the question and favoured him a thin, vaguely amused smile.
“I guess you could say that, yeah.”
“Oh, come on, give. There's no shame in not having the biggest scar, you know. Maybe you're smarter or luckier or tougher than us, if that's the worst scar you've got. You're certainly bigger than just about anybody here.”
“Hmm. Smarter? Maybe not. If I were so damn smart, I'd have gotten out and bought that farm a long time ago. Tougher? Also, maybe not. I got this scar from a thorn bush, if I'm not mistaken, while running away from a fight. As for luckier? Yes, I suppose you might say that. Luckier than all of you put together, I guess.”
Tall tale, indeed. It's not impossible for a soldier to grow old, but it's very far from easy.
“You got that scar from a bush running away from a fight, you say? Man, if I were you, I'd have made up some kind of story! Not having the biggest scar is no big deal, but admitting you ran away from a fight is admitting to treason and cowardice!”
“Dunno about 'treason', but 'cowardice' seems about right. Yup. I ran away from a fight, cut my face on a thorn bush or a tree branch, and hid. When I thought it was safe, I stole a horse and rode it away just as fast as it would carry me.”
The guys all heard this, but kept making jokes and guzzling beer and having a grand old time. A few of them had done time with this guy in this campaign or that, and knew him to be solid, strong, fearless and faithful. He was telling a “story”; had to be.
“Oh, so you ran all the way back home so your mother could kiss your wound and make it all better?” One of the guys spewed a great plume of foamy beer all over the front of his jacket, choked, coughed, put his hands on his belly and his head on the table. Funniest thing that man had heard all night; he was incapacitated with convulsive laughter.
The man smiled again, just the tiniest little bit. “Wish I could have.”
The young man doing the prosecution didn't really even have a good beard going yet.
“Ah, of course. You must have run to get reinforcements. A convenient excuse. Were you faced with a much larger or better armed force than what you were expecting, so you shit yourself and ran?”
“Yes, I shit myself and ran, and no, we ran more or less exactly into what we were expecting. A biggish shire of farmers, hunters and miners. Say, maybe five hundred people all told, a thousand on the outside.”
The guy with his head on the table laughed harder. Some kind of joke was building up, and when the punchline came around, whatever it was, it was gonna be a real doozie!
“Heh... so, it was just you and a couple of buddies, and you couldn't handle a simple farmer?”
“No, we were a few hundred. Well, a few hundred when we went in. I can't say how many were still there when I ran. Not very many, I think.”
Young Prosecutor knit his eyebrows and frowned.
“So a few miners and farmers decimated your hunting club, so you ran off to your mother to see if you had any more cousins to call on?”
“Nope. I ran off to the Duke's stronghold.”
“I think I'd have heard if anybody's come to the stronghold needing help with much of anything. I mean, there's been no Duke for it to belong to in.... how many years...?”
One of the other guys chipped in “Wow, he's been gone for twenty years or more, hasn't he?”
“Right. Twenty years or more. Ever since then, there's been nobody there but old women.”
This time, the man offered no smile. He just looked into his beer with a thousand-yard stare.
“Yup, seems about right, except that it may have been a bit closer to thirty when I ran. The Duke was still in the stronghold then.”
Some of the older men stopped smiling, stopped trading jokes. Started looking soberer.
“Oh, so you ran off to the Duke so he could kiss your thorn bush scratch and make it all better, and send you off with some more buddies to hold your hand while you tried to take care of some farmers?”
“Yessir.”
“I presume the Duke did this? Send some more men with you? Some of his own men?”
“Yessir, except that I didn't go with them. I couldn't.”
“Where did he send them?
“Dukesbane.”
Dukesbane, graveyard to an army or two, and an entire indigenous population. A place last reported to be encircled by poles with human skulls mounted on them. A place said to be populated now only by a ghost. An angry ghost. A deadly ghost. Maybe the ghost of a witch, or a demon.
A ghost with a widely known name.
Everything at the table froze. Beers that had been en route from table to mouth hung in mid-air. Faces froze with the smiles still on them, looking just a little bit plastic, before dissolving slowly. The partying atmosphere went on around them, nobody else having tuned in to the conversation, but for the men at the table, the party was now not only outside, beyond some invisible barrier surrounding their table, the party was over. The guy with his head on the table made some strange “ee ee oogh” noises before catching his breath.
“You were at Dukesbane?”
“Yessir.”
Young Prosecutor wasn't prosecuting anymore. His tone had abruptly turned respectful, and maybe just a little bit scared.
“When...?”
“From the very start.”
“You survived Dukesbane.”
“If that's what you want to call what I did, yes. I survived Dukesbane.”
“I didn't think there were any survivors.”
“In all these years, I've only ever run into one other that I know of.”
“So... what happened?”
The old oak tree bole took a long, slow draught of beer.
“Me and a bunch of guys from my homeland happened to be in the area when the Duke was assembling an occupation force consisting of basic footsoldier types like myself and a few of the Duke's men he called 'advisors'. Seems there was this little patch of country that wasn't paying yearly tributes to the King.
“This Duke, he was a talker, and when he talked, people listened, and it wasn't just because he was the Duke. He had big, shiny eyes and a way with words, and he had a lot to say. He talked to us for a while about how important it was to support the King, and you just know my guys didn't really listen. Then he went on to talk about how important it was to heed the word of his god, but you just know we didn't much care about that, either. But then he went on about how these godless and lawless people went around without any clothes on, and how they had gold and silver and diamonds hidden away in their mines or under their houses, and then we started to listen. He talked it up, and we took it in, about how we were going to be going in, pacifying the natives, securing the area for the King, partying it up with all the farmers' maidens, and carrying away enough gold for every man Jack among us to set up his own kingdom.
“A bunch of farmers and miners, and no military force worth mentioning. This was going to be a walk in the park!
“We got there a few weeks later. Strange place; we passed through miles and miles of really thick forest, and came out onto a plain. Across the plain we could see hills we thought weren't very tall, and behind those, a couple of mountains. Between the end of the forest we'd just gone through and the hills we were going to, there was nothing, just a whole lot of flat grassland.
“Took longer than we thought to get across that plain. Those hills were taller than we thought, and there were a lot more of them.
“We split up. A bunch of us went to the right, and another bunch to the left. We were going to go in from all sides, at the same time so none of these miners and farmers could get away. Mostly, my guys just didn't want all the gold and silver leaking away on some hidden cowpath.
“We got there and found that the Duke wasn't very truthful about what we'd find. These people weren't rich. Looked like they'd wear whatever they managed to skin off an animal, though they also wore some pretty rough wool. Nobody wore any gold or silver, and nobody wore any rocks that you can't find just anywhere.
“We pacified what few men had swords. Wasn't very hard to do; whoever made them didn't know what he was doing, and they'd either just shatter when we hit them with our own, or we'd just cut right through them. They couldn't hit any better than a small boy, either. If any of them were going to try to throw you a good haymaker, he'd get all wound up and screw up his face, so by the time he had a chance to start his swing, you could break his nose three or four times over. It's like they just never fought.
“The guys who'd split off left and right came in from the sides, either driving people in towards their trading centre or just pacifying them on the spot.
“So far, standard stuff, just like we thought. Once we got everybody under wraps, we partied. They had some damn fine wine to get polluted on, and a couple of different kinds of weed to smoke that'll send you off to someplace warm and fuzzy.
“I'll tell you what they did have, though. They had food. They had whole houses full of nothing but grains, and some big honking gardens with every kind of potato and onion and carrot... I tell you the truth, gentlemen, I'd never seen so much food, or so many different kinds, in one place in all my life, and I've only rarely ever seen it since. You seriously want to bet I ate my share of it.
“A few days after we started getting settled in, we started looking for their mines, but didn't find any. Not what you'd call 'real' mines. Nobody had anything hidden in his house, either. It didn't really matter; we've all been sent on actions like this before where the booty just wasn't worth bothering with, but we took what we could. They had lots of curious little knick-knacks that'd look good hanging on somebody's living room walls, those oughta fetch fairly good prices.
“Some of the guys knew people who bought unusual people. They'd pick out this girl with white hair and no breasts, saying 'there's this guy down in Persia who likes 'em young and pale', or they'd pick out that man with the red hair, saying 'there's this guy over in Constantinople who loves a man with some fire in his loins' because of his unusually bright and rich red hair. Me and a few of my guys were on patrol with a couple of the Duke's men when we found a couple of girls and a baby hiding out in the woods; the Duke's men took the girl with the black hair and black eyes, saying something about the Duke being interested in women with black eyes ('black-eyed women have black hearts'), and one of my guys grabbed the other girl who'd had that redder-than-red hair and violet eyes ('woman-child with such hair and eyes, stretch marks but little apple-sized breasts oughta fetch some really nice prices in my brother's brothel!'). The Duke's men took the baby for food, although only the long-forgotten gods might know why, because these people also had some of the finest beef and finest venison I've ever eaten.
“After we'd been there a few more days, we started loading wagons up with what we could find. People in some wagons, mostly girls and younger boys; three or four wagons full of fruits, potatoes, sacks of grain, a wagon full of wood we'd gotten from a few trees of a kind we'd never seen before. Lots of native crafts, bunches of spices, a few pelts, rocks and things we found from their 'mines'. Couple barrels of their wines and some mushrooms we had seen before. Whatever we could find that might make the Duke not pull us out anytime really soon.
“After we'd seen the wagons off, we got settled in for real. We bound up all the men we hadn't 'pacified' and put them to work in the fields alongside the oxen, so we didn't have a problem keeping the area free of military nuisances, had the guys patrolling the shire to make sure nobody else moved in. We poked around in their mines a bit more, just in case. Mostly, we partied and ate and enjoyed the women and girls that hadn't been carried away.
“Once in a while, more of the Duke's men would show up with more wagons to fill with food and wine. Once in a while, other men would show up, and we'd load them up with more women, girls or younger boys.
“One day, when the girls were starting to get pretty round in the belly, a couple of the guys came in from the outer reaches and reported a man burning up. We laughed and said that some guys really can't handle their hot peppers, but the guys said that they'd seen this guy sleeping in the grasslands just outside this shire. They saw him get up, make noises like he was going to puke, and then just went up in a flash of fire. The only thing left was bones.”
The oak tree bole finished off his beer, signaled a maid to bring him another. The general tavern din was everywhere, undiminished, except at this particular table.
“Couple of days after that, a couple of my guys had been found with their bellies split wide open, and another with his head missing.
“It occurred to us that some of the shire's men might have hidden away, maybe in some mine we never found, or out in the woods, and were getting up some kind of rebellion. We asked the folks in the village centre about them, but nobody knew anything about it. We believed them, of course – when you ask people questions like this with red-hot knives, they tend to be pretty forthcoming, and often as not, it's somebody in the audience who'll do the talking to spare a son or daughter or brother or sister.
“Couple days after that, we gave up on the theory that their own people were getting up some kind of rebellion when we found several of them missing their heads.
“I didn't see anything myself until a couple weeks after it started. We were just outside the village centre, maybe an hour after sunset. There were these sounds behind me, like a wet ripping kind of noise and a body being dropped on the ground. Then there was this whistling sound in my ear. If you've ever had an arrow sail past your ear, you'll know what I'm talking about, but this whistle had a deeper note. Next thing I heard was a 'THADUMP'. The two guys in front of me, they took maybe two more steps and then their heads rolled right off their shoulders, just like balls off a crooked shelf.
“I turned around and ran, but didn't get very far. Tripped on the body of another one of my guys. His head had been ripped off.”
One of the other guys at the table asked “Ripped, you say?”
“Yeah. Ripped.
“We've all seen men lose their heads before. We've all chopped men's heads off, so there isn't one man Jack among us who doesn't know. You have to have a good sword, or a battle axe – a sharp one - and you have to be pretty damned strong, and you have to have a very sure stroke. Most of the time, the head doesn't come off because the sword or axe doesn't go all the way through, so the poor sap just sorta yells, or maybe makes a gargling sound, puts his hand up to his neck, and bleeds to death. Other times, you don't even hit the neck, you just hit a shoulder or an ear. Most of the time, it's all good, because whoever you just hit isn't getting back up anytime soon. If it's his shoulder you hit, that's one less arm he can bring into the fight, and he'll usually be too busy hollering in pain to worry about the knife or sword that's about to go into his belly.
“When you do manage to chop a man's head off, it comes off more or less clean. Head goes one way, body goes another, and there's maybe a minute of blood shooting out a couple of yards. You can tell his head's been cut off because... well... what's left between his shoulders looks cut.
“This guy whose body I tripped over, when I held my torch up to see who it was, he didn't have a head, but where his head should have been was all these arteries and tubes and muscles pulled out all ragged and every whichaway. You'll see something a lot like it when people get drawn between horses and his arms or legs get pulled off. But there weren't any horses, and there weren't any ropes. This was almost silent, and it was fast, and this was no man's doing.”
The tavern's general din was dying down, as if a pall was growing outwards from the the table where the old man was talking. People were turning their heads towards this table, and telling each other in hushed tones to be quiet.
“Before I got away, there was this voice. I think it was a voice, anyway, but I can't describe it. I couldn't tell where it came from or how far away it was, but I thought it spoke Frankish, same kind as the folk in this shire spoke, which I didn't really understand then.
“My guys wanted to leave this shire. We weren't cowards. Even though I wasn't any older than the youngest of you, I'd already fought Danes and Turks, and all the other guys with me could say much the same. Whatever was doing this wasn't men, though. Men can't rip off heads, and they can't cut off heads in the dark, and they can't do it so quietly. We didn't know what we were up against, maybe a ghost, maybe a witch, maybe some kind of demon nobody's ever heard of. This wasn't our war; we were just in it for the booty, and the booty (such as we could find) just wasn't worth it now.
“After a couple more guys came in from the outer reaches to report another couple of guys out in the grasslands burning up, we all gathered in the village centre. My guys presented a petition to the Duke's men, these so-called 'advisors', to gather up all our stuff and take a hike.
“The Duke's men reminded us that in order to get back to the worlds we knew, we'd have to cross the grasslands. Even if we made it across, we'd be hunted down for the rest of our lives for desertion. The Duke had admonished us most sternly that we should hold this land for the Duke and for the King.”
Somebody on the other side of the tavern farted. Another man belched, but it was a polite closed-mouthed belch that tried to be as quiet as it could be. There was no other sound. The whole tavern now knew who this man was, and what he was talking about.
“The Duke's men painted the mark of their god everywhere, on the sides of houses, on the boles of trees. They sang songs in languages we didn't know, and did these strange little dances, and waved around these little pots with candles or burning incense in them.
“It didn't do one bit of good. Next day, we found a house with its door ripped off. The door had one of this god's marks on it. Inside the house were the bodies of several women who'd been pregnant. Their bellies were slit wide open.
“I think it took less than a week for my guys to lose their lust for life. We ate, but it was usually just a few quick bites to get our growling stomachs to shut up. We didn't have the girls dance for us anymore; we didn't have the girls at all, I think. Mostly, we just drank their wine or smoked their funny weed or ate their mushrooms. The Duke's men hit us, and swore at us, and even tried whipping a couple of us, trying to get us to be soldiers again, but as one of my guys said: 'when you can tell us what what's killing us, how to find it and how to kill it, we'll be soldiers again'. That's how we all felt.
“The girls didn't feel like dancing. They usually wouldn't, even when times were good, but they'd always danced when we told them to. They were scared, too. There was this one girl I'd been kinda regular with, she'd make a point of coming around and sleeping with me at night. Maybe we'd go at it, maybe we wouldn't; mostly, those days when people were dying in all kinds of crazy ways, she'd just curl up into a ball next to me and jabber away in that funny Frankish talk. Didn't understand Frankish much, but you don't have to be very smart to get that she didn't know what was going on, either, and she was scared.
“This had been their land. Still was, really. I'd have figured it'd be their gods or demons that ruled over the land, and the girl would have had some idea of what was going on. She didn't; none of her people did. I think she said the older ones might have known, but the older ones had been among the first we'd pacified.
“It got bad. Patrols stopped coming in from the outer reaches, guys would wander out into the woods to get berries or take a dump or something, and just not come back. Sometimes we found their bodies, with their bellies cut wide open, or their manhoods ripped off. One of the guys we found, looked that last dump he took turned all his insides out. Some had their faces ripped off, their throats ripped out, arms or legs pulled off. We found one guy whose body had arched over backwards, almost as if to lick the heels of his own boots. Another guy we found had a spearhead sticking out his mouth, and I guess you don't need to be told where it went in. Most times, when guys went missing, they just went missing, no idea what happened to them. I'd hope it meant they'd run safely away, but as I said before, in all the long years since, I've only ever met one other who'd lived.
“One night, it happened again, except it was to the guy walking right beside me. There was a deep whistling sound, a 'PUNK', and then I was showering in blood. First time it happened, I didn't know enough to be scared. This time around, yea, I dropped a hot load right where I stood. Then, I ran. No particular direction, any was as good as any other, and that's where I got this scar. When I couldn't breathe anymore, I dropped to the ground and hid in some bushes. Wasn't fooling anybody; anybody or anything that can see well enough to target a man's neck where there's no light could probably see me hiding under some bushes, plain as daylight, but I kept hiding, just the same.
“And again, I heard what I think was a voice, talking in something that sounded like Frankish.
“When the sun came up, I grabbed a pack of food, couple of knives and a few other things, stole a horse and lit out. Yea, guys are going up in smoke in the grasslands, but guys were losing their heads in the woods, losing their bellies in the meadows, losing their manhoods in their homes. Maybe I'd burn up, too, and if I did, maybe it'd be a deliverance, not having to wait for something to come and get me.
“So, I ran. I got over the handful of hills and through a few miles of woodlands with nobody calling out to me. Got across the grassy plains, too, but the sun was setting just as I'd gotten all the way across. The horse I stole just couldn't go any further or any faster.
“Some of the Duke's men were stationed at the first village on the road away from that place of death. When they realised who I was and where I'd come from, they arrested me, threw me into a wagon and hauled me off to go see the Duke. Seems the Duke had some questions to ask. That was fine; I had some questions to ask him, too.
“The Duke had some questions, sure enough. Asked them the same way we'd asked the villagers about their supposed hidden army: with a red-hot poker. He didn't actually need it because the song I had to sing was the only song I knew to sing, and I sang it long and loud and often. I sang out everything I knew, and I mean everything, just like I'm doing now. Only thing that pissed me off was that I never got to ask the Duke my questions. I was usually too busy screaming.
“From the questions I was being asked, though, I guess shipments back from that little shire stopped. He sent wagon trains in, but nothing ever came back out. He sent companies of soldiers in with more wagon trains, and nothing came back out. He sent in companies of the biggest, fastest, nastiest, most bloodthirsty men he could find, and nobody came back out.
“I never knew this, never even suspected. All these men coming in, and nobody in my camp ever caught a glimpse or heard a peep from any of them?
“I was kept in the topmost room of a watch tower. My beard got pretty long while I languished in that room. Guards brought me food decent enough to eat, and wine or water to drink, but wouldn't talk to me to let me know what was going on. I could sometimes see sorties heading out the gate, and could only guess whether or not they were headed to the shire for which I still had no name except 'that place of death'.
“One night, I banged on my door because I was thirsty and wanted more water. Nobody answered. I banged louder. Nobody shouted at me to pipe down. I looked out the window to find somebody to holler at, but the grounds were deserted.
“I guess the nearby villagers came after a few days and scouted the place out. I know I spent a few days in that room, getting thirstier and hungrier by the hour, until I couldn't remember anything more. Woke up in somebody's bedchamber. After they'd given me some water and some food, they started hammering me with questions, too. Unlike the Duke, they didn't use any red-hot pokers – mostly, they used spiced wine. Didn't make any difference; I sang them exactly the same song I'd sung to the Duke, only, this time, I wasn't too busy screaming to ask a few questions of my own.
“Seems the Duke had taken a lot of the stuff that came back from the first wagon trains down to his dungeon, and he spent quite a bit of time with them. Things like food, wine, mushrooms and suchlike, he'd sell or even just give away out on the open grounds, but things like crafts, stones, weapons and a few of the people, he'd take down into his vaults. Nobody knew what he did down there; nobody was allowed into the vaults after the first wagons had arrived, but I guess he spent lots of time down there alone.
“One day, the Duke was seen throwing something wrapped up in a blanket into a wagon and taking off like a bat out of hell out of town with it. When he came back, just minutes before sunset, he ordered all the gates and shuttered closed. Nobody knew what to make of that, or what was in that bundle, but apparently the Duke wouldn't leave his private chambers anymore after that. People said he was scared.
“A week or so before I woke up in some strange bedchamber, soldiers were seen burning up in the stronghold's courtyard. People in town were being found minus their heads or bellies or other body parts.
“I told the villagers the best thing to do is to fill up their wagons with all their stuff and hit the road, and to keep going down the road until there's just no road left – but to head away from that place of death. They said they couldn't because a man had told them that what was about to happen to him would happen to them all if they tried to leave. That man said that terrible things would happen to everything they held dear if the Duke were ever to leave his stronghold, even if only for a few minutes. They said that man went up in flames in front of dozens of witnesses minutes after delivering this warning.
“Whatever was going on, though, seemed to be just between the stronghold's men, the Duke and whatever had come away from what we now call Dukesbane. A few villagers died, here and there, but not very many, but it only took about a week for most of the stronghold's guards to be wiped out or go missing.
“It didn't take long for the whole village and most of the outlying areas to know my whole story, and we all agreed that something woke up after the Duke's men and mine went into that place the first time, but we couldn't figure out what. I'd been around a good deal of the known world and could tell many long stories about some of the angels and demons people believed in, some of the gods and the devils, or witches or djinn or werewolves or dryads... there's just no end to the tales people tell, and there's no way for a poor mind like mine to figure out what's real and what isn't. In terms that the stronghold's village people understood, there didn't seem to be a name for whatever killed off my expedition or the stronghold's men. Witches don't pull heads off living men, even if they can burn them up right where they stand. Werewolves don't cut or pull heads off, either, although a lot of the gore I described to the villagers could have been credited to them. Nothing moves as fast or as quietly, either, except maybe a ghost, but all a ghost can do is scare the living crap out of people. A troll could have done everything I described except move that fast or that quietly, except maybe burn people up, and nobody knew if trolls can see in the dark or not.
“We ruled out a lot of things, though. For example, it wasn't anything anybody ate, drank or smoked. The people who'd lived at Dukesbane presumably had been eating, drinking and smoking the same things we had when we got there, and they'd all been healthier, stronger and younger-looking than anybody you've ever seen, and when we started dying, they did, too. Same goes for the air, especially since the stronghold's air wasn't anything like the shire's air.
“The villagers, a lot of them spoke Frankish, but not the same kind as what the folks at Dukesbane spoke. Maybe the Dukesbane Frankish was a little older; you see that a lot when you travel away from bigger cities towards more remote villages, the languages are almost the same, but the more remote areas tend to use antique versions. The stronghold villagers asked me many times to try to remember what I thought I'd heard that could-be might-be voice might have said, but they couldn't really make sense out of what I could remember.
“Well, except one, but I don't think he was from the stronghold's village. Strange little boy, wore a shawl over his head and his face all smeared with some kind of gunk and had a funny accent. He said it almost sounded like somebody named 'Aye Leesse' claiming to be from some fields that people stole things from that didn't belong to them, and warning people never to come back. I tried to talk to him, but he walked away, and disappeared around a corner. Must have been pretty shy.
“So, yes, young man, I survived Dukesbane, if 'survived' is what you want to call it. Took me a few years to get back into soldiering, but I'd tried everything else. Can't work on a farm because I don't understand animals and can't seem to make green things grow. Can't help build houses, though the Spirits know I tried, but getting all the different pieces to fit together is a whole different species of magic. Whether or not I liked it, soldiering was what I knew, and now that my beard's grown grey and my vision's started to dim, soldiering is the only thing I still know.
“I went back down that road, towards Dukesbane, some years afterwards.
“The Duke had died, and there were no new stories. The stronghold village was still there, still farming, still milling, still blacksmithing and whatnot, but nobody would get anywhere near the stronghold itself. Last I'd heard about the stronghold, not long ago, its woodwork had started to rot and fall down.
“I got as far as the last village before Dukesbane, and dared go no further. The villagers there told me that years before, whole armies of men were seen on the road heading towards the shire, but nobody had ever been seen coming back out, except one man for sure (that might have been me), and maybe another, but he'd been crazy and saying all sorts of wild stuff.
“They said nobody ever goes there anymore. What few people lost their way, hunting or whatnot, and wound up at the border between their woodlands and the Dukesbane grassland plains came back reporting poles with skulls on them. Human skulls, sometimes of men, sometimes of children. Lots of poles with skulls on them.
“They said that in all the years since the armies and wagon trains had disappeared into that place, there'd been nobody coming back out of it except maybe just a few weeks before I had arrived. They couldn't be sure, but they'd thought he'd come from Dukesbane. They thought it was a boy, but children of that age, it can be hard to tell, and the clothes this boy wore were several times too big, and it was after dark. They said he was kinda vacant, kinda empty, yammering on about how his mother was gone, his mother's mother, his sister and her son. Everything was gone, and now nothing could be heard but the rustling of the wind through the trees, and now he wished his home could be his grave.
“But unlike the folk at the Duke's stronghold village, this village did have a name for the ghost that now haunted Dukesbane. They couldn't say who this woman was, or why her name was attached to this this place, they could only give just a name.
“That name was Elysse Deschamps.”