No Man’s Knight
by TW Williams

The wolf’s-head helmet snarled soundlessly as the Lictian champion lunged toward me. I spun away, nimble-footed despite the drizzle that had been falling all morning.

Wolf-head and I were trapped in our own little airless, timeless space of rage and blood as the battle stormed around us, and the price of leaving was death. The skirmish between the Lictians and the Duke’s knights and mercenaries had disintegrated, as battles do, into a series of one-on-one strivings.

Others might prick that bubble and tilt the contest, but they would do so at the peril of turning unguarded backs to their own foes, or of tainting their knightly honor. That the latter was even of concern shows how stupid man can be.

If we be made in gods’ images, then the gods must be blaring jackasses.

The Lictian was lean and had brown hair flecked wih gray, and his cheeks were ravaged by the thin scars that are the hillmen’s way of tallying dead foes. He had the wiry strength and agility of the beast that was his personal totem and pressed the attack relentlessly.

Clenching my teeth, I fell back a step, and then another, my sword blurring in a silvery arc to fend off his blows. A nagging thought intruded on my concentration and I tried to shake it free: Perhaps the choice of the wolf wasn’t coincidence, but Lictian witchy-work.

If it was magic, he didn’t prove it that day. Perhaps I was too much for the hillmen’s spells. Of a certainty, I was bigger and stronger and quicker than my foe. One more step back to set myself and then I moved into his attack. The move was unexpected and in that eye’s blink, I caught his blade on the cross-hilts of my sword.

I knew three things he didn’t, and that knowledge meant his death.

The first was this: I hate magic, with a white-hot loathing that turns witchy-words to ash before they can cling to me.

The second was this: No matter how formidable he was, the rape and pillage and greed that stoked the Lictian fires were paltry things compared to fighting for where you live and what is right – even if you are being paid for it.

Wolf-head dodged my counterstroke, and slipped in the mud, and he learned the third thing as he tried to regain his footing and my sword bit deep into his spine, extinguishing the light in his eyes forever: A knight would have stepped back and let him climb to his feet.

I am no man’s knight.

The sound of the voice dripped into my dreams.

No words at first, just an irritating drip-drip, rainwater falling from the eaves into a barrel.

“John.”

“John.”

“John. John. John. John Humble.”

For a moment, suspended between dreams and waking, I slipped into a familiar place – back in the High Duke’s hall, the raven on the old wizard’s shoulder croaking my name. And then it began pecking with its thick, dark beak. My words matched the rhythm of the pecking and they were the same as always: I. hate. magic. I. hate. magic.

The beak became a callused hand plucking at my arm, tugging, pinching with broken nails.

It seemed soft enough last night when the wineskins were being drained. This morning it felt as coarse as goat hair and it smelled like the goats in the muck-filled yard outside.

The season of rains had begun, and the damp added another layer to the pungent smells around me. I woke up enough to remember leaving the camp near the Clan Border and the storm and the long trudge south along muddy roads.

The real rains might not get here for a few weeks, but I’d had enough and judged the Lictians felt the same. I thought of my last fight, of the wolf-headed fellow who still haunted my dreams. At least one Lictian felt the same – or would have, if he hadn’t become a corpse.

I had been aiming for Greenhollow, but somehow got turned around in the rain and fog. Wil Cooper was fond of saying I’d get lost between my pulling down my leggings and finding the privy hole, but that’s just campfire heckling.

I rolled over and squinted. My sword was still there, leaning against the wall within reach. Over-sized. Like me. Almost four feet worth of waiting violence. Violence that wouldn’t wait for another spring.

I knuckled the fog of sleep from my eyes and cleared my throat, working up a wad of phlegm and hawking it onto the cottage’s dirt floor. It lay there, glistening and quivering slightly in the gray dawn.

She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. I could tell she would like to say something about uncouth manners, but couldn’t quite find the courage. I could tell, too, that inside she was quivering like that ball of snot.

“I told you to wake me before dawn.” My words tasted as sour as they sounded. It was cheap wine, and three wineskins weren’t quite enough to keep the stink out of my nose and out of my mind. Or to erase the last four months of blood, vermin and death.

“I … I tried …” Her words faltered. I caught her looking at me sidewise again. She looked like the goatherd’s woman that she was, I decided. Goatherd’s widow, I reminded myself. He was buried out there, not quite deep enough, where the yard’s muck bordered the pasture.

I would have put him deeper, but he was stinking and I was tired. It was still an improvement over how I found him: lying in the mud with his head split open and the raindrops bouncing off his sightless eyes.

I didn’t mind death, as long as it was someone else’s. I just had had my season’s full of the rotting and festering and stink.

“They won’t come yet,” she said. Her voice was thin and wheezed through her nose. She was thin and wrinkled and splotchy red from working outdoors. Her long nose was about the biggest part on her. She had yellow hair. You could tell it was once her pride by the way her hand wandered to it now and then.

“They’ll wait until the rain lets up. They’ve been bitchin’ about it. They’re staying in that half-burned manor about a mile up the Green Hills road. Willow Manor. The one fronted with the pond, with the willows.”

I didn’t bother to point out the obvious: It probably wouldn’t be called Willow Manor if there weren’t willows. Instead, I grunted and scratched. The goatherd’s shack – one longish room with an poorly mortared hearth at that end and the bed at this end with a table and stools between – was a flea-infested hole. I’d slept in worse places.

We shared the bed, and I guessed she was grateful for the warmth of a living body. If anything else happened, only she and the smelly mattress knew, and I didn’t care to find out. I was pretty sure nothing had, because that would mean she was taken advantage of all over again, and that’s what this is all about, after all. It was the reason I couldn’t walk away, rain or not.

“How many did you say there were?” My voice didn’t sound any less sour in my ears, and I already knew the answer, but her sideways staring was bothering me. She had her doubts about me, I could tell, but her doubts couldn’t hurt my feelings.

She got up from the bed and smoothed her skirts around her. Why she bothered, I didn’t know. Before she answered, she went to the table and tossed me a block of crumbling cheese – goat cheese, what else? – and an old apple. I put the cheese in a pocket for later and bit into the apple. It was still sweet, but a bit on the mushy side, its red-yellow skin crisscrossed with wrinkles. Maybe it was related to her, I thought.

I didn’t say it out loud, of course. I might be uncouth and no gentleman, but I wasn’t insensitive. If I had been, I’d have been miles away, sitting in a tavern in Greenshollow and trying my best to empty an ale cask or two.

“I seen four,” she said. “But there’s more, because some of them would be holding my girls.”

Or there’s just four and the girls don’t need holding any more, I thought. I wasn’t insensitive, so I held that ugly thought to myself, too.

I staggered out to the yard, telling myself it was just stiff joints from the thin, straw-filled mattress and not the wine’s lingering. After adding my water to one of the puddles, I scouted around and picked up a couple handfuls of pebbles and small rocks. I have big hands, so it was quite a pile that I dumped on the table.

She was sort of still watching me in a sidelong way. And wringing her hands.

I gave her a small pouch of silver and copper, all of the Duke’s pay-out. If I’d stayed for the last weeks of the fighting season, I’d have had more, but I was weary of the “lord” this and the “sire” that and so I left. The Duke followed me with curses and oaths, ranting about my lack of honor, but the words haven’t been spoken yet that will break my back. He didn’t need me to mop up and, besides, he’d got the bargain of it: The real rains would be here soon and he’d got almost full work for from me for only two-thirds pay.

She found a small burlap sack for the rocks. It didn’t look full enough, so I went out to get some more from the yard. She watched me from the doorway, hands folded across her thin chest. The goats shied away, bleating in their nasal tones.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked.

Answers flitted through my head. Because I could. Because if you let bullies pick on the weak, it just made them greedier. Because someone who grew up as an orphan is sensitive about things like family.

I shrugged, and added a grunt for good measure.

“Now, when you hand them the bag of rocks, hold the pouch of coins inside the neck of it and be sure to jingle it,” I told her. “When one reaches for the bag, drop it. It won’t fool them for long. ” Gods willing, I wouldn’t need long.

“What story did you tell them, again?” I ran a sharpening stone along the edge of my sword. Four feet up one side and down the other is a lot of edge, and the steel went shrop-shrop-shrop against the stone as if it was some thirsty animal lapping at a watering hole.

Her frown added more wrinkles to her lined face. “I told them that I’d get the gold from my sister’s husband. He’s the butcher over to Pikeville.”

“It sounds like a thin lie to me,” I said, pausing to test the edge of the sword with my thumb. It was as sharp as I could make it. Thirsty-sharp.

“I had to tell them something, else who knows what they would’ve done … poor Poppa lying there dead,” she said. “My sister’s man is the butcher over at Pikeville. Some butchers are rich.”

She screwed up her wrinkled-apple face and jutted her chin stubbornly. “They ain’t from around here, and they’s stupid about how common folk get along. Besides, if it’s a lie, it’s a lie that kept me alive for a day and my girls, too, and that’s more than can be said for their poor Poppa. If the gods are going to curse me for a liar, well, it can’t get much worse.”

Her defiance lasted no longer than it took the words to whine past her lips, and her hands began to flutter like broken-wing birds, making some religious signs.

Bad luck for Poppa, I thought, a goatherd with a kernel of courage to stand up to four horsemen with nothing more than a herder’s staff. The woman said they claimed to be knights, asking for coins in exchange for protection. Poppa had had the stones to call extortion what it was, but not the muscle to back up his words.

Maybe bad luck for you, too, John Humble, I told myself, seeking shelter from the storm and stumbling into all of this. Maybe I was feeling a mite bit guilty that if I had done my job better at the Clan Border, these knights would be tending their homesteads and not be landless, cut loose to torment common folk. The moping heated me up, and I shook my head hard to jar the thought loose. Knights or not, they chose their path.

We all make our own luck, I figured. Or at least make our own choices and let the gods fret about the planning.

I dragged a stool near the wall and leaned back, planning on taking a soldier’s nap. “Wake me when the rain stops,” I said before falling asleep.

# # #

She was tugging again, and I heard the drumming of hooves. Center of the road, I thought, where the rain hasn’t softened it too much. Single file, then. Coming fast when there was no need to. Showing off. They would be thinking they have it all figured out. I could use that against them.

I move quickly for my size, and I grabbed my sword and was out the door and behind the hedge before three more breaths. I didn’t bother with the sheath. I expected I wouldn’t need it for awhile.

The rain had stopped and the sun was a milky disk behind the low, gray clouds.

They rode into the yard and all of them dismounted. Stupid move. Arrogance dripped from them like the lather from their horses. Leaving one mounted would have given them a chance to ride down any lurking foe. Like me.

They were about what I expected: Renegade knights, their armor showing the wear and tear of life on the run. Two of them were medium-big, one with a rusty patch riveted on the shoulder of his armor and the throat-piece missing from his helmet, the other with a pikeman’s helmet instead of a knight’s helm. Their broadswords looked well-used. The third was smaller, and has made some attempt to polish his armor. He carried a weapon that I’ve heard about but never seen before, a morningstar. Kind of a spiked ball attached by chain to a short wooden handle.

The fourth was troublesome. He was the biggest of the lot, only a few finger-widths shorter than me. His armor was dark gray, almost black, and in good shape, though he’d tried to scrape or scour away whatever device was on his shield. Part of it still showed, silver against the dark metal. It looked like a dragon’s tail, or a snake. I couldn’t tell, and it wasn’t important. What was important was that he has a short-handled stabbing pike – heavy, deadly, and with a longer reach than my sword.

The goatherd’s widow was standing at the door, holding that heavy bag of stones. From where I crouched, it looked like a bag of stones. The old saying runs that greedy men have short eyes. I hoped it was true in this case.

“We’ve come for the gold.” It was the smallest one, and he twirled his morningstar in a menacing fashion. He kicked at a goat that was nosing near his foot, sending it bleating away in terror.

“M-m-my girls.” The woman had some courage. Then again, so did her husband, and he was lying in a muck cocoon.

“We wouldn’t want them catching the damp and riding through the mud and all,” the small one said, still twirling his weapon. I could see his grin through the slits of his helmet, and it was an ugly one. “We’ll fetch them along after you give us the gold. You have our knightly oath on it.”

“How do I know you won’t just take it and kill me, like you did Poppa?” Whether she realized it or not, her talking had bought me time to creep along the hedge and get behind them. One of them should have been watching, but they were all focused on that bag of rocks.

“Your man learned the hard way about attacking his betters. Besides, woman, you have a knight’s word on it.” This from Rusty Patch. All four of them laughed heartily.

The woman was out of words. She held out the bag. I heard the clash-clash of the coin pouch hidden inside it. The four knights heard it, too.

She dropped the bag, her courage spent, and ran shrieking into the hut.

The knights leaned toward the bag as the pebbles rolled out, and their faces twisted in ugly anger.

It was time.

In three long steps, I reached the first one, the one with the pikeman’s helmet. He was bellowing something about knaves having no honor, but I shut him up quick. My thrust took him from behind, under the armpit, going deep. Before the others realized what was happening, I had my sword free and spun to my left, bringing it around in a long, horizontal arc. The tip got under Rusty Patch’s helmet where his gorget should have been and caught his throat. He breathed blood instead of air.

I felt something slam into my right shoulder, tearing through my heavy leather jerkin. My right arm went numb and I had to look down to see if I was still holding my sword. I was, and that was too bad for the little fellow with the morningstar.

I took the sword into my left hand just as he swung again. The chain wrapped around my sword blade and he tried to tug it out of my hand, but I moved toward him, not away, and my sword hilt ruined his helmet’s faceplate and made his grin permanently ugly. Shaking my sword free from the morningstar, I found the joint between his chest plate and chain-mail skirt. His gut pierced, he fell with a shuddering moan and was still.

And then it was time to duck. Part instinct, part sound, part vague shadow on a milky morning. The pike thrust went where my neck had been a second before. I spun to face the big knight.

“Declare yourself, you cowardly back-stabbing varlet,” the big knight said, “Or yield. I pledge your death will be quick.” His pike was at my throat. My sword was a half-second away from being of any use.

I dropped to both knees in the muck and made a whimpering sound, gambling on his knightly habits, no matter how eroded they might be. For about a half-second, his brain told him that things were as they should be: A craven, cowardly back-stabbing varlet, groveling before his better. I repaid the generosity of that half-second in the best way I could think of: Surging upward with all my weight behind the thrust, I buried more than half my sword’s length in him. Like I said, he was a big man, almost as big as me.

“You’re no knight,” he gasped, and died.

“Never said I was,” I told his twitching corpse.

Then the woman was screaming and crying, throwing rocks and muck at the bodies. My shoulder hurt like hellfire. I liked one of the horses, a big gray, and I told her she could sell the others. Maybe she’ll move to Pikeville and live with her sister and the butcher, I think.

I pretended to forget about the silver and copper lying in the goat yard. She would remember it by and by. It wouldn’t pay for her girls, but it was something.

I didn’t think there was much use, but I guided the gray horse up the road to the manor to see the ugly ending to the tale. The willows hid most of the burned-out west end from view, and the house looked pretty good from some angles – like most people do, I suspected, until their ugly side is revealed.

Reluctantly, I dismounted and I stuck my head inside to find out the truth.

I thanked the gods.

Always be grateful for life’s gifts when you find them, I thought – those gifts can be few and far between. I’ve cursed the gods enough when things have twisted wrong, so they deserved a good word for the small miracle on the Pikeville Road.

The sun finally came out as I reached the crest of the knoll above the manor. I reined in the horse and looked back. The willows around the pond were blowing in the breeze and it was a pretty picture, if you didn’t squint too hard at the scorched bricks.

But the prettiest part, the one I carried in my mind’s eye over the hill and far away, was beyond the manor house: Two tiny girls, blonde hair shimmering, running toward their mother’s outstretched arms, and home.