John Kuhn

         To the one who finds these words, greetings. I write them on a winter's day, in the third year of the reign of Vehement the Merciful. Tomorrow I will be burned alive.

         It tires one, etching words into stone with the mind. I choose my words carefully. The stone is large, but the mass of it lay buried in the loam. I can just see it through this barred window. The stone is a rectangle the size of a bread loaf, laying flush with the ground. It is my slate. I will small strokes into being, and I will them disappear as they are etched, to appear in their entirety only when a nobleman—a true nobleman—should happen upon them. I wager the date of their discovery shall be many years hence, for the last knight of my generation will die tomorrow.

         Few know in these evil days that magic and power are inherent in genuine nobility. Chivalry itself fuels our sacred abilities. Knights whom I have known—the true ones, not those of purchased title—have slain the most wicked of beasts without unsheathing a blade. They have scaled towers by walking upright on the face of their precipitous walls. They have sensed their lieges' danger from afar and have ridden their mounts with a fury that outpaced the wind. I have seen it; I have ridden along.

         I will these words to appear in your language, friend and reader, when you lay eyes on them. It is my hope that you might tell my story.

          I long ago covered my shield with a donkey's hide, and I wear beggars' rags over my mail. The people of Fairgaarden have not held knights in high esteem since Vehement the Merciful took the throne. Under Pierce the Wise we were respected and loved. We rode shining mounts over the length and breadth of Fairgaarden, and the people showered us with good wishes and rose petals. I cannot count the occasions when my fellow knights and I watered our horses at the troughs of simple folk, at their insistence, and went into their homes to share their bread, never uninvited, always finding it difficult to tear ourselves away from them when the time came for us to depart.

         Pierce—God rest his courageous soul—understood that knight was not a name he could bestow. God himself knighted us when he rewarded our chivalry and courage with these powers. Pierce and his fathers before him merely beseeched that we serve them. None of them ever made a man into a knight. Rather, they made knights into their protectors.

         It was Pierce's son Vehement who knighted friends and the sons of favored supporters. It was Vehement who issued the One Law, and we put our swords away. For a time, we rode about Fairgaarden and kept watch, but it was idiocy. Knights in full armor carrying the banner of their king throughout the land, but lacking swords. Lacking a decree. A thousand enforcers for a single law that erased all others.

         Most of the knights I knew simply went home. They reserved chivalry for their wives and children, teaching the ways of a knight to their boys in private. They became cobblers, horse-tenders, and cooks. They lost their magic. They slid gradually into commonness, though always there was some glint in their eye that set them apart.

         I continued to ride. I'm not sure why.

         I saw a man strike a lady in those days—I remember it well. I was in the highlands, though I don't remember the village. Perhaps Inglevern or Halderoit. The fellow stumbled out of a tavern and she stood waiting for him outside the door. It was a bright evening, with a full moon in the sky. Smoke rose from the chimneys of houses that had them. It poured through the doors and windows of those that didn't.

         "I'll walk you home, old man," she said, or something like it.

         "You'll go home alone, you will," he growled. "I've business to attend to." He scanned the street for another tavern.

         "No, sir," she told him. "You'll be going with me."

         "The blazes I will," he replied, and he lunged at her, striking her hard across the forehead with the back of a grungy hand. She fell upon the cobbled street and sobbed.

         I leapt down before I could stop myself and seized the drunkard by the throat. Instinctively, my right hand reached for my sword, but it found only air against my hip. The man spat in my face and cursed my mother. I remember the bitter taste of his spittle as it lay on my bottom lip.

         "Dog," he said. "You'll unhand me, you will." I loosed my grip and he staggered back a half-step. That's when I looked at his garb. He wore the same symbol on his chest as I, Fairgaarden's cedar, with a lion resting at its base. He was one of Vehement's knights.

         "Come, wench, let's go home," I heard him slur as I mounted my horse and drove away in agony.

         I have covered myself in rags since that day.

         The One Law was well received by many in the kingdom. The ones who spoke against it were knights, especially the old ones, and the gravest denizens of Fairgaarden's vast expanse. These voices were easily drowned by the festivals that ensued. Great parties from which we abstained became commonplace. Festivals that had been held before on a single night now stretched out over a fortnight. The King himself often appeared at these celebrations, as many as he possibly could, and he encouraged the revelers by waving his ring-laden hand at them from some high place and stretching his glossy lips into a smile. Soon, it seemed that there was a festival for every night of the year in Fairgaarden.

         Vehement had banished austerity from Fairgaarden's bounds. No more would knights scour the countryside for wickedness and pull it up by its roots. The One Law assured it. Instead, celebrants besieged our kingdom from across the continent, filling our hotels and taverns. They dressed in the fine silks that Vehement himself preferred, and his picture hung in every brothel and house of games to be found.

         I rode through Ilion on the longest day of the year, I remember, and as I watched the sun finally settle behind the town's thatched roofs I heard a commotion. Turning up a cobbled street in the heart of Ilion, I saw the king himself in the second-story window of an inn, the lavender stone in his pinky ring glinting in the light of the throng's innumerable torches. His golden curls bounced under the delicate curves of his wiry crown, the one he'd made by melting his father's heavy war helmet and using most of the gold for wristlets and rings.

         As I watched, I saw a thief in the crowd lifting coins from purses and food from packs. I cannot rightly describe to you the pain I felt when I pushed my heels into the loins of my steed and rode away, leaving the thief to his foul business.

         Obeying man's law at the expense of heaven's is an especially odious transgression.

         I do not admit that easily, though I will never know you, nor you me. It is with great shame that I confess it: I followed the One Law. I obeyed man's law, and broke every law in heaven.

         It is a miracle that enough magic is still in me to write these words.

         Some insist that nobility is found in the blood. I tell you on the eve of my death that it is only found in the spirit.

         Obregon's spies had slipped in and out of Fairgaarden's southwestern reaches for as long as anyone remembered. During the reign of Pierce (and of his father Creed before him), the knights had pursued them relentlessly. As their bodies went home to Obregon strapped to their horses, he found it increasingly difficult to recruit spies.

         With Vehement the Merciful on the throne, Obregon quickly divined that the true nobility had quietly retired from the affairs of the kingdom and that the only knights left in Fairgaarden were that band of scabby landowners' sons that Vehement had united. Obregon doubled the stipend he offered his spies, and they flooded the border.

         When word reached him of the One Law, he upped the stipend again, and he sent all the spies his treasury could afford into our peaceful land.

         "One King, One State, One Law, One Fate."

         So reads the arch at the entry of every town and village in Fairgaarden. The arches went up during the second year of Vehement, not long after he announced the One Law.

         When I was brought before him days ago, he quoted those words to me.

         "Behold the nobleman," he muttered in his soft voice, smiling nervously and playing with his rings as I stood shackled before him. "What have you done, Sir Rainier? Should a knight not follow the law as everyone else? I give you but one law to follow, and you cannot do it? 'One King, One State, One Law, One Fate.' I find you guilty on the preponderance of evidence that has been presented to me. By killing those men and seizing their property..." He nodded at the weapons I had brought him. "...you have broken the One Law, and your punishment—for there is only one—shall be death by flame."

         I was riding along our border near the Spanish hinterlands when I happened upon a band of men camping in the woods. I willed my horse sleep on its feet, and I dismounted, tying her to a tree. I slid through the forest with supernatural silence, creeping right up to the edge of the darkness. I willed myself translucent. I bade their voices come to me.

         There must have been sixteen of them, all but one Obregon's spies. The sixteenth I took to be an official in Obregon's army. He carried himself as a leader, and he spoke in military terms. I heard talk of villages that would be easiest to take, of overlooks to hold early for ease of defense. The spies offered the official reports of our defenses—disparaging without exception.

         Their words picked up fervor as more of them spoke. They spoke of imminent action, of the massing of troops, of concentrating the spies already within Fairgaarden in the first towns to be attacked.

         "How will you recognize us?" one of the spies asked.

         I didn't wait for a response. I was dizzy with anger, with an unquenched thirst for justice. The enemies of the throne conspiring on the very soil of Fairgaarden—this I could not abide. I reached for my sword. It wasn't there. I leapt from the cover of the forest and into their clearing with no weapons but the two at the end of my arms.

         My magic was weak—I was easily visible to them. The first one to reach me drew his sword. I took it from him and ran it through his ribs. The sword clattered against them as he staggered and fell. I heard them splinter as I pulled the blade coarsely out. His groans provided music for the dance as I slew the sixteen intruders. One by one, they came near enough, from all sides trying to stick me, slice me, hold me, topple me. Some I cut in half. Others lost their heads. God was with me, blessing the foreigner's blade in my grip. My magic grew strong. I saw them when they circled behind me. I saw all of them at once, as if I were looking down from heaven. I lay them all down there, and their blood watered Fairgaarden's cedars.

         After I hung them in the trees, I tethered their mounts to mine and gathered their weapons and supplies, and I rode with haste to my liege's throne.

         It was there, after I had led the beasts to his stables and piled the shields and blades at his feet, that he had me shackled.

         "What have you done?" he asked. Tears rolled down his ruddy cheeks. I hadn't seen a king cry since his father did so at the funeral pyre of a friend of mine, Sir Win the Steadfast, who died of exhaustion after besting a Spanish dragon.

         "I have killed your enemies, liege," I replied. "I have uncovered a plot against the kingdom."

         "No!" he screamed. "You have broken the One Law!"

         I am tied to a pole now, looking down at the stone I have etched. I only see one letter at a time, glowing red to gold, and that only for the minutest fraction of a second. Little room remains on the stone for these words. My ashes, I suppose, will hide the tablet after my death. Perhaps one day someone will uncover it.

         I take my leave with no regrets. I have dealt death to many unjust men. Now one of them deals death to me. It is the same. I have upheld my oaths.

         "This man was knighted by my father," he is saying now. "Sir Rainier the Fierce. It is with a heavy heart that I impose this penalty, but fierceness has no place in Fairgaarden today, in my Fairgaarden. 'One King, One State, One Law, One Fate.'"

         He steps toward me. He will not look me in the eye. The timber presses heavily on my legs; the weight of it is slowly breaking my bones. I smell the freshly cut wood, and the tar they've ladled on the timber. And on me.

         The heat from Vehement the Merciful's torch chases away the cold morning air. For now, I enjoy its warmth.

         "He has broken the One Law. The only law. People of Fairgaarden, recite it with me."

         Their voice is deafening: "We must be tolerant."

         The torch falls on the timber. The fire rises quickly.

         The fire is deafening.

         My words fail.

 

 

Copyright 2007, John Kuhn

John Kuhn is a writer of speculative fiction and poetry from Texas. He's also the proud winner of the 2006 DKA Magazine poetry contest. Look for his works online at Son and Foe Magazine, KidVisions, and DKA Magazine, and in the pages of Turnpike Gates, The Sword Review, Kaleidotrope, Bleeding Quill, Blood Moon Rising, and The Mythic Circle. You can check out his blog at < johnkuhn.blogspot.com >.

 

    

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For more information visit www.dkamagazine.com. This work appears as part of Issue 40, January 2007.

                                                     

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