Not Even the Smallest

 

Not Even

the

Smallest

 

 

 

 

 By B. R. Bloor                                    

 

 

 

Casting a long shadow before him that stretched across the frozen trail the wanderer approached the old impoverished town. His tired breath steaming into the evening air Agmon entered the Gaulish village hoping to find lodging for the night, hoping that the little bit of Gaelic that he had picked up was enough to get him out of the cold.

            The sun bore down bright as the evening approached, glaring harshly off ice and snow, gray snow that had been polluted with dirt and ash. Even in the dead of winter the villagers busied themselves with the toil of their lives. Struggling, seemingly against nature itself, to survive long enough to bring their children up in this harsh world. Their names would be forgotten in time, as would be the names of their children. For this they toil, for the few years of life that they may know.

            Pulling his woolen cloak tighter around himself the Judean quickly assessed his meager surroundings. The small village had no defenses: no wall or ditches, no mound or motte, only thatch roofed huts of dark wood and gray mud. Smoke billowed from the hearth of every home, taunting him with the promise of warmth and shelter. Long gone was the aroma of fresh wattle and clean thatch of newly build houses, replaced by the choking smell of smoke and soot of the old rank shacks that lined the road.

            Weathered and weary Agmon found neither hostel nor boarding house, only the cold stares reserved for those trespassing from foreign lands. Cold stares from red-rimmed eyes, eyes that were sunken and tired. Eyes that peered out from pale flesh and worn muscle. These were eyes that he had seen before, all too often, left in the wake of the dead thing that he hunted.

            A child stopped in the road at the sight of the imposing stranger. Never before had the lad seen the likes of him with his darker skin, not Moorish but brown compared to his, though it grew ever more pale the longer he traveled in this god-forsaken land, this land of ice and snow, this land of Gaul. The boy stared with tired eyes and Agmon could see in his lean face the old man he had been meant to one day be. Too curious to run the child’s breath was bated as Agmon reach out and brushed aside the fur and wool that shielded his neck from the cold, and there he found the wounds. Wounds he knew they all would bear. Wounds from loved ones, once lost, once dead.

            Agmon’s heart sank for he knew that he had found no rest, no reprieve from his hardship, only more weight to be heft on his already weary shoulders. A frantic woman grabbed the child away, eyeing Agmon suspiciously. He pitied her as he watched her hurry the boy off for what she thought was the safety of his home, for he could not warn her. He could not warn any of them of the evil that dwelt before the blind eye that they turn, for their language was as alien to him as the snow that fell from the cold sky.

            The setting sun began to cast the countryside in an ever deepening red, emboldening the shadows surrounding the village - and lurking within. As the sun had drawn closer to the horizon the shadows had crept further from their shelters, their lairs where they had hidden themselves from the eye of the great god, the Bringer of Light. Agmon knew he did not have much time to prepare, for soon the goddess would have the sky.

            Walking passed the remains of the dismantled church, the Roman mission that now lay in ruins, piles of gray stone and broken mortar, Agmon found himself surrounded by fresh graves dug into the frozen earth. Marked by ashen statues stolen from the mission, statues of the confusing array of heroes and demigods forced upon the people by the priests of Rome, many of the graves stood empty. Stark and vulgar they were as open sores, wounds, affronts to the land itself. He expected an outcry when the villagers began gathering at the border of the cemetery, an accusation that he had defiled sacred land or disturbed the burial grounds of their honored ancestors, but none came. With muted lips they watched with hollow eyes, staring toward graves they knew would be their own. Then the shadows claimed the land.

            Filling the void left by the retreating light the shadows melded with dusk, then twilight, displacing the villagers as they cringed away as if they feared the dark, as if they meant to hide themselves from the blackness of night. Grabbing the leather wrapped handle of his sword he pulled the wide bronze blade from its scabbard low on his hip and stood with trepidation as the shadows of twilight merged together and spread their darkness across the land, heralding the coming night as the eye of Baal looked to other lands.

            The temperature dropped markedly as the night closed in around him, and the fear he lived with became real. Shivering from more than just the cold he ‘felt’ the crawling from within the graves around him. The clawing beneath his feet, the writhing inside the earth, made his hair stand on end. Holding the hilt of his sword to his brow Agmon bowed his head as the ground erupted with movement beyond the limits of his peripheral and shadows began to loom at his flanks, drawing ever closer. Silently he offered up a prayer to the god who had left him alone in the dark.

            Without warning his blade flashed against a distant light as he suddenly turned around, stepping back with his right foot and shooting his hand out to the fullest extant of his arm, cutting cleanly with his sword. The thing that fell to his feet had long since been dead, its head now separate from its body. It had been a man once, perhaps a husband or even a father. Agmon had little understanding of what it had become.

             It was not alone.

            Like corporeal figments of the night itself the dead grabbed at him with taloned hands; their maws gaping, grotesque and misshapen. His blade flashed again and again, cleaving flesh and marring bone but still the dead advanced, unthinking, uncaring, undaunted.

            He stabbed his sword into the corrupt belly of a dead thing and stared down into the abyssal depths of its black eyes, eyes that seemed to open into the blackest of voids. So transfixed was he by the tranquil depth, so sudden and surreal, that he barely noticed the dead man’s jaw unhinge as his mouth dropped open, his impossible teeth opening towards his throat.

            In a panic Agmon jumped back away from the thing, pulling his sword violently from its stomach. Following through with the sword’s motion he brought it back around with both hands, cleaving the skull of the thing before him.

            Standing over the crumbled body Agmon’s chest heaved as he gripped the cast bronze hilt tightly with both hands, and he stood for a moment to catch his breath - a moment to regain his bearings. It was only a moment.

            Searing pain tore through his arm as the macabre nails of a once living woman, hidden by the cloak of night, ripped through his flesh. Wielding his sword as though a reaper’s scythe Agmon howled with furry and terror as his blade shattered her arm, sending her scurrying away from her severed limb.

            Rustling Agmon’s cloak an abrupt wind began to blow across the surface of the land, causing snow to eddy and swirl among the statues of the cemetery. Agmon squinted against the sudden gust that sought to hide the shades of the dead behind a veil of driving snow, but they were shades that would not hide.

            Wide and terrified Agmon’s eyes watered against the cold that washed over him, and he struggled to see through the blinding flurry that the night had conjured against him, for with the Divine Eye gone from the sky and the Goddess not yet risen, the night was free do as it wished. Though through the blackness of darkest of hours, through the furry of winter that shrouded and blinded, the dead found him.

            Dreamlike, ethereal, the dead reached for him as though from a world beyond his, a world whose boundary had become threadbare, a world that he could not escape. It was a world that Agmon stood steadfast against.

            Holding the hilt of his sword with both hands Agmon swung hard at the movement surrounding him, stepping into the nearest shadow, and then the next. Bone cleaved and shattered against the force of his heavy blade, again and again, but he was overwhelmed and his arms and shoulders quickly grew tired. Terrified, Agmon feared that the teeth of the dead would soon find him.

            Again the woman appeared from the night, from the concealment of the storm, her inhuman teeth parted impossibly wide and her filthy nails reaching for his torn flesh. Swinging low Agmon opened the woman’s body below her ribs, eviscerating her, her corrupt organs spilling to the ground. As she collapsed before him Agmon quickly stepped over her body looking for more movement in the storm, more evil in the dead of night, but she was not done with him.

            Reaching up as he stepped over her she dug her long fingers deep into Agmon’s thigh, pulling a yell from his throat and dragging him down to the icy, wind-swept ground. Though she had but one arm the dead woman quickly clawed her way up his body as he lay in the snow, trying to over-take him, but he buried his sword in her neck, just below her jaw. She became still and her body became limp, but Agmon was slow to react to the shadow that loomed above him.

            Pulled to his feet by a powerful hand that closed around his neck Agmon found himself again staring into the deep blackness behind the eyes of the dead. The wind blew itself out as Agmon looked into those eyes, and he was only dimly aware of the movement around him, of the shadows that swarmed and gathered. He knew only that the blackness behind the teeth of the man who held his gaze was as deep as that behind his eyes, and the blackness behind his teeth had become cavernous.

            His vision grew black and his head swam as the hand tightened around his neck. Fighting to breathe Agmon pulled his dagger from its leather scabbard and stabbed it hard under the dead man’s chin. Swiping at the dagger’s hilt the man dropped Agmon who collapsed exhausted to the cold hard earth, disoriented and gasping for breath. Finding the handle of the dagger the man pulled the blade from his neck as Agmon found his sword, prying it from the neck of the woman who lay disemboweled beside him.

            Agmon stood as the man reached for him, swinging his heavy sword at his attacker in a panicked attempt to save his life, severing his hand above the thumb and cutting him cleanly across his chest. Then with a powerful back-handed swing Agmon shattered the dead man’s scull. Quickly prying his blade from shattered bone Agmon turned his attention to the movement that flanked him on every side, but with staves and threshing flails in their hands they were not the shades of the dead that he now faced, but the shadows of the living silhouetted against the pale night

            With their wild, haunted eyes and the piercing cry that suddenly erupted from amongst them, from the guttural depth of their very souls, they were more fearsome than the dead, but it was the dead that they had come for. Those without weapons of iron or wood used rocks to smash the heads of the dead, to kill the shades of their people once loved. They fought with furry and vengeance, wielding anger and bitter hatred as keenly and deadly as any weapon. In the end the dead moved no more within the field of graves.

            Agmon stood motionless, gasping for breath as the last of the dead fell, staked to the ground to satisfy the superstitions of the villagers. With his muscles burning and his joints aching sleep was his fondest wish. Through the darkness Agmon saw a man extended his hand to him, empty, weaponless, a offered as gesture of friendship. Another man followed, then a third. Soon they all stood in a macabre salute, standing over the bodies of those they had so dearly loved such a short time ago. The rising moon had thrown shadows across them all, shadows of the statues of dead heroes and holy saints. Falling across their faces the darkness sunk into their eyes and the hollows of their mouths, and Agmon was struck aghast by their visage for they looked as though dead. A chill ran the length of his spine for he remembered their wounds and knew that the people who stood before him were already lost, already feed upon, already prey. His heart wept as his grip tightened around the haft of his sword for he realized what he must do, but he let his soul grow cold as he had so many times before.

In the end, he knew, he could allow not even the smallest of them to hid.

Reviews

[LaurieAnn]

This another great book to be. No doubt many await what is to follow.
Again very well done.