Hello and welcome!
One of my goals for this project is to not write stories that are hopeless or a bummer to read. It’s too easy to give in to cynicism. But it’s also too easy to write escapist stories that lack, shall we say, nutritional value.
This is a story that tries to walk that fine line!
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A Single Pane of Glass
He stands at the center of a storm. Servants in white and purple livery swirl around him, placing benches and cushions and garlands of flowers just so. He filters them out and sees only his men, each with a stripe of orange across their formal purple tunics. Two in the bushes just behind the altar, out of easy view but close enough to sweep the bride and groom into cover should the need arise. Four at the rear of the benches on either side of the aisle for guest control, along with ten arranged at attention on each flank, their backs almost touching the side hedges of the large courtyard. Two dozen archers in the towers with arrows on the string, his best marksmen and with shoot-to-kill orders if an assassin slips in among the two hundred expected guests. He thinks of the fifty men waiting in the corridors upstairs, ready to rush in at his signal. It is enough. He is as ready as he can be. He still fingers his own orange sash with nervous fingers. This is an important day in the history of the House of Curzon, and Captain Tabor Locke is determined to do his part.
* * *
“Lo-ckey! Have him, Lo-ckey! Burn him down!”
The cries from all around reached Locke’s ears, but he heard them as if they were meant for someone else. The young Locke—more boy than man now—was at a drunk’s remove. His hands were locked onto the other drunk’s tunic and he could feel breath blowing hot into his ear as they clinched like buck deer fighting over a doe. Except that Locke couldn’t remember why he was fighting. Besottedness had taken memory and reason and left him with rage. He jerked down on the tunic, trying to force the other man from his feet. He now realized that he also didn’t remember who he was fighting. Was it a friend? Was this whole thing some silly misunderstanding?
Locke leaned his head away far enough to make out some blurred features, and ascertained that he did not know his adversary. Good enough. He jerked down again, and this time his opponent’s feet slipped from under him. Locked finished the throw with a flourish and was rewarded with a satisfying THUMP of the man’s head off the tavern’s floorboards. The stranger was limp now. Still. Beaten.
Locke raised his arms, wavering on his feet. A roar from the crowd greeted him, crashing over him on a slight delay, as if the sound was traveling through water. Locke turned to acknowledge those behind him when there was another audible WHUMP. A searing pain across the back of his head informed him that own flesh had made the noise.
He woke outside on the cobblestones some hours later, with the first ray of dawn peeking over the city walls. He sat up and could feel his own pulse pounding through his head. He blamed it on the drink until he touched the back of his own skull and found a knot the size of a sparrow’s nest. He rose. He looked up into the sky, at the last fading twinkle of starlight. He still could not remember the name of the man he had bested, nor the complaint that caused their scuffle.
Then a feeling settled down on him, as if it had come from the stars themselves. He might have called it the voice of God, except that it was no voice at all, just a certainty—a sudden knowledge that he was meant for more than this. And not a little more, but a great deal more. Not just a wife and some children and years of toil to put food on the table, but a destiny.
And so he did what all poor and undistinguished men do when they wish to change their lives. By the time the sun had lifted itself fully from the horizon, he had made his mark and become a soldier in the army of Lord Allen Curzon.
* * *
Captain Tabor Locke hurries down a flight of stairs set into the castle wall, and emerges just inside the giant gate, made from whole timbers lashed with iron bindings. The gate is open now, and the edges of the portal are festooned with garlands of white and purple flowers. Single petals escape their bunches and flow down in a light but steady rain, adding to a carpet of trampled blooms already on the ground. Then a wagon flying the black-on-yellow flag of the House of Bretagne fills the opening. Its horses and driver are clad in the color of the sun, and make a stark contrast to Curzon’s soft purple.
The wagon skids to a stop, and before the wheels have stopped turning, the side door bangs open and a long leg clad in well-sewn breeches of the finest calfskin emerges onto the first step. Another such leg follows, and then a torso and neck and head all clad in equal finery, until Roland Wyndham, first son of the Earl of Bretagne, stands before Captain Locke, surveying Curzon Castle as if he is already its lord.
* * *
Private Tabor Locke could not stop his hands from shaking. He stood in formation, wearing a clean, purple tunic identical to the hundreds of others that surrounded him. He wanted to check his bow and finger his sword handle, but he forced himself to be still. Still except for the trembling, that is.
A whistle sounded and a flag went up, and almost without realizing it, Private Locke found himself marching forward in lock step with the men around him. As his first footfall struck against the dirt, the tremor in his hand ceased. The knot in his stomach that made him feel like he needed a privy dissipated into nothing. He felt almost as if he was riding along on his own shoulder, and his body was part of a different person. He couldn’t feel any of the physical sensations anymore. He could move his hands, or his eyes, if he really put his mind to it, but only in the way that a puppeteer moves a marionette, at second-hand and willfully, with a chasm of string between his mind and the movement.
They marched up a steep hill, and as he crested at the top, he saw the green ripples of the enemy ranks for the first time. He found himself screaming a guttural war cry, a sound that had never escaped his throat before, and a hundred brothers echoed the same cry from all around him. More screams from the enemy in front, like some macabre echo of their own ranks. And then all were surging forward and he was moving down the hill, still stepping in unison but picking up speed, now drawing his sword as the spearmen lifted their long spears. A volley of arrows went over his head from somewhere behind, and he looked up to see a thousand glinting metal arrowheads passing over like a swarm of wasps.
His unit reached the bottom of the hill and now the march became a full-out charge. Locke lowered his eyes from the sky and now he could see individual faces, rendering the enemy no longer an inchoate mass of green. The armies were a hundred paces apart and closing fast, like two boulders launched off opposite walls of the valley and on track for a terrible collision. Locke’s vision skipped from enemy face to enemy face, noting a patchy beard here, and there a strand of unbound hair bouncing across a forehead.
Then Locke settled on a face almost directly in front of him. It was an older man, perhaps twice Locke’s own age, with scars on his cheeks and teeth missing from his snarl. The man held a flail, the spiked ball jouncing from the end of its chain as he ran. Locke tried to recall some useful piece of training about how to fight against flails, but he couldn’t remember ever practicing that. Still, he saw the man and knew that was the one: His first kill.
The armies’ first ranks came together but Locke did not hear the crunch of metal on metal. In later battles he will be more relaxed, and things like hearing and thinking will return to him, but in this first one there was only the target. All else faded away. The second ranks charged into the back of the first, then the third, and then his. Locke had his eyes fixed on the soon-to-be-dead man now swinging the flail around himself and looking for a target.
Locke ducked a spear thrust from someone he never saw, crouched low, and skittered across the ground past several individual battles. He came up a few paces short of the flail’s range. The man wielding it saw him. His eyes went wide, and he brought the flail in a horizontal arc designed to terminate at Locke’s head.
Private Tabor Locke dropped into a forward roll over his shoulder. He still heard nothing, but now he felt the cold wind as the flail passed inches above his head. He rolled to his feet and thrust with his sword, directly into the man’s belly, and now he heard one sound. A gasp. Keening and slow and agonized. The sound of a man’s life going out of his body.
* * *
“We’re meant to be friends, you and I,” says Roland Wyndham to Captain Tabor Locke as they stride down a long hallway towards the ceremonial courtyard, followed by Wyndham’s entourage and servants. “I’ve heard of you, naturally. The Lion of Bal-Rizen and all that, and much deserved ballyhoo on that score, but more to the quick, I can see you are the sort of man I favor. Steadfast, ferocious. Quite so. We shall accomplish great things together.”
Locke walks beside his newly appointed friend with matching steps, and makes affirmative noises followed by my-lords while the other man talks, but in truth, he doesn’t need to. It is clear that Roland Wyndham isn’t even really talking to him. In time, they might be friends indeed, but today is a day for history. They walk around another corner and come face to face with Lord Allen Curzon, wearing his finest gold-embroidered clothes and flashing a smile that is perhaps a bit too wide to be genuine. It is the grin bordering on grimace of a man who wanted sons and received only daughters, and thus was forced to choose another man’s blood to rule his domain after his death.
* * *
Second Lieutenant Tabor Locke knelt behind the low wooden palisade, pressed into the rough wood, and kept his shoulders as low as possible. Every time the battering ram crashed into the nearby gate, the vibration shuddered down the length of the wall and found its way deep into Locke’s guts. Again and again and again the thunderous crash came, interspersed with the hiss of boiling oil and the twang of bowstrings and the screams of men from either side or both.
“I’m most likely about to die.” The unwanted thought came at him from nowhere and he stuffed it away. Locke thought he had long since conquered the worst of uncontrollable fear, but now it came back anew and let him know that this battle would be unlike other battles he had fought in. Those others had danger but this one had death. This was Bal-Rizen, the dying ground, where the forces of House Curzon had beat back their enemies for a thousand years and more. But now the House of Sindamere had come calling and the fort seemed suddenly vulnerable and flimsy.
Locke chanced a peek through a minute gap between boards, and saw the black and white checkered tunics of Sindamere’s forces jostling for position beside the huge battering ram. One man staggered away, screaming and covered in slick, black oil, but three more stepped up and fought to take his place. Locke pulled his head back and looked down along the line of his men, so few and so many already injured from the days and weeks of fighting that had led to this final, fateful charge.
“Steady, boys. Not until they break through and are on the move. On my order,” he said in a voice that somehow sounded more sure than he felt. The courageous nods from terrified men he received in return made tears well up in his eyes. And then the unwanted thought again: “I’m most likely about to die,” and he swallowed the words and pressed his head against the palisade.
But he did have that thought, that memory, of the feeling of an awaiting destiny that had come upon him so suddenly, all those days ago, that had driven him towards this moment. He wondered if dying in this battle was really enough.
Boom, boom, boom came the battering ram, and then a great crack as the gate gave way. A cheer from the Sindamere men. A moment later, another crack and then a crash as the gate fell back into the fort. Then a sustained roar as the army of House Sindamere surged forward.
“Steady!” he heard himself yelling. “Steady, men! On my signal!”
Locke waited. His hand gripped his sword-hilt. Each breath seemed to last an hour. He counted them back from ten, and then. “CHAAAARGE!”
Up and over the palisade as he drew his sword, and then he was charging towards the mass of enemy. All his men were behind him, so that it seemed as if he were charging alone. He saw purple tunics arrayed along the fort’s higher walls, firing arrows down into the mass of enemy, but Sindamere men were already pouring through the gate.
Just as Locke had predicted when he volunteered for this mission, the men of Sindamere were so focused on the gate that they hardly saw him or his men until they were close on their flank. Locke charged in like a thrown spear, expecting to be cut down at any moment, but instead skewered three of the enemy before they even turned to locate him.
Then a kind of haze set in. It was not the closed-off distance of his first battle, more a sort of fading away. He fought, and parried and thrusted, unmoored from the inside of himself, letting go all that he was but for a pair of eyes and a sword arm. He took a shallow spear-thrust in the thigh and it burned but he did not slow. He killed the man who had hurt him, took his spear, and thrust it into the man behind the dead enemy. Another kill, and another, and another, until the space around him became a swath of cleared ground in which his brave men fought, back to back and hip to hip, swords flashing in a ghastly dance whose spins and twirls threw up sprays of blood.
Locke threw his head back and roared like a lion. He could taste the blood of his enemies on the back of his tongue. He knew that Bal-Rizen had been saved. He felt a surge of love for his land and his lord and the men who fought with him. Then another foolish soldier in a white-and-black-checked tunic came at him, and Locke turned his attention back to death.
* * *
Captain Locke stands to one side of the altar and waits, watching the faces of the two hundred most powerful people in the realm of House Curzon to see any who might not belong or who might hold ill intention even if they do belong. Yet something gnaws at his guts. Not fear. Far from that. He does not honestly believe that any assassin is waiting to strike. This duty is a reward and a relief from the real dangers that wait outside the castle’s stout walls. He has long ago concluded that the charge at Bal-Rizen was the destiny to which he was called.
And yet something gnaws at him still, something he can sense but cannot name. Or perhaps, something he could have named, if only he had been able to bring himself to do so. But he cannot. Courage comes in many forms, and he has some types in spades, but he does not have the courage to name that thing eating away at the inside of him. And so he stands beside the altar and waits for it to be over.
* * *
Second and soon-to-be-Full Lieutenant Tabor Locke fought off the urge to itch his collar. The brand new dress uniform he had been fitted for the previous day now chafed at every seam, and he would have traded it in a heartbeat for a muddy battle tunic and some armor. He found, however, that he preferred the food here in the castle to the half-rotted jerky he was used to.
A servant led him towards a huge set of double doors, which two more servants swung wide as he approached, to allow him entry into the formal reception hall of Lord Allen Curzon. Lord Curzon himself sat on a raised dais at the room’s front. His entire court filled the room, all decked out in their finery, and as Locke entered they all stood and clapped and cheered like a gaggle of idiot geese mooning over a child with a fistful of bread crusts.
The servant led him to the place of honor, just short of the step up onto the dais, and there Locke knelt, head bowed before his lord, until he was bidden to rise. Then he stood at attention. Lord Curzon rose from his throne, smiling broadly.
“So…the Lion of Bal-Rizen, here in the flesh. Care to grace us with your best roar, soldier? No, best not, we mustn’t have all the ladies fainting as the Sindamerians did,” Lord Curzon began. Peals of obsequious laughter rang out from the audience. “Where are you from, soldier?”
“Falmouth, my Lord,” said Locke. “The docks specific.” A flush of shame went through him as he said it, although he had never before given much thought to his birthplace. He fought off a blush. Why should he feel shame before these stuffy folk whose lands he had just saved from the torch?
“Ah,” said Lord Curzon, “Well if even a rat’s nest in my lands holds such stock, then perhaps we shall prevail in the end!”
Another great laugh from the assembled lords and ladies, and now Locke did flush scarlet and there was nothing he could do to prevent it. He held his head high and looked into his lord’s eyes, refusing to budge. Curzon finally nodded, and favored him with a smaller, more genuine smile.
“You have done your people a great service, soldier,” Lord Curzon continued, now in a voice that lacked bravado. “Your name will be written in history as long as the House of Curzon holds these lands. So do I swear. And as a token of your honored place, I have awarded you the Silver Shield of Curzon. No higher honor can be given to a common soldier. Delia!”
Lord Curzon stepped back. At the back of his dais was a curtain, and now, from behind the curtain emerged a woman who nearly stopped Locke’s heart. He thought he had seen beauty before, but now he knew he was seeing it for the first time. The world seemed to hold its collective breath for the ten paces that brought her to stand in front of him. She had hair the color of ripe wheat and eyes like emeralds set into a face perfect in line of bone and smooth expanse of cheek. The kind of face for which wars are fought and kingdoms sold. She was the kingdom. She was the land itself.
Their eyes met for a moment. Locke could not breathe. He could not swallow the lump that suddenly appeared in his throat. He could not even blink. The thrill of battle took him away from himself, but this moment brought him more fully into himself instead. He felt every hair on his head, every pore in his skin, all the way down to the tip of every finger and toe. Lord Curzon was still speaking behind her, but Locke could no longer hear him. The whooshing of his own blood and hammering of his own heart were far too loud.
Delia Curzon favored him with a small smile, and Locke reckoned he could die a happy man right there on that dais. She held up a silver shield as he tried to smile back, then pinned it onto his formal tunic to the thunderous applause of the crowd. Her fingers brushed against his chest as she did so, and he wanted to grab her hand, to hold it there forever, to never let her go.
But instead he stood, stupefied, as she curtsied to him and then retreated behind the curtain. He turned and raised an arm to the crowd. He walked among them and received congratulations and promises of favors and thanks for what he had done. But the whole time, he was waiting for someone to point out that he had just been ruined. The man he had been was destroyed, replaced by the man who had encountered his destiny at last, only to watch it disappear behind a gently swinging curtain.
* * *
Delia Curzon steps out into the aisle, wearing a cascading white wedding dress, and the thing Locke could not name suddenly bursts out of hiding and presents itself to be reckoned with. He thinks back to the only time they ever touched, when she pinned the silver shield onto his tunic, and the contact feels as fresh now as it did three years ago. He has dreamed of it uncountable times in the interim, in trenches and on battlements and sleeping wet in pitch-black forests. As she comes down the aisle now to join her new husband, he cannot banish the image of her standing before him and smiling at him.
She approaches the altar, and as she does, she catches his eye and gives him a small smile, the same one she gave the day they first met. And for just one moment, Locke allows himself to wonder what world might have to exist before a boy from Dockside could wed the eldest daughter of Lord Allen Curzon. If not this one, where he has done what he has done, does such a world exist even in dreams?
He knows such a thing is impossible. What he really wonders more than anything is whether she wonders, too. If she has thought of him during the long nights, wondered where he was, or if he was in danger. If she has asked her handmaidens to make inquiries after his safety. Or whether that smile, that touch, was nothing to her, just another duty like the ones that fill his life.
He will never know the answers to these questions. Even at this moment, when he could reach out and touched her easily, there exists between them a single pane of glass, clear and transparent yet omnipresent and indestructible, and from where he stands he could never touch her, no matter what either of them wanted.
* * *
Captain Tabor Locke stood at attention, looking the opposite direction from the entire rest of the audience. They were all staring up at the altar, where Delia and Roland waited before the Priest to be wed, but Locke was staring out at the faces in the crowd, drowning in his sorrowful loneliness inside his own mind but still alert, full of unbreakable discipline instilled by a life holding a sword and needing it.
He thought of that fight, so long ago, in that bar against an opponent he could not name, and of his fateful waking the next day. The distance he had come from then to this was incalculable, a distance measured not in paces or even years but in spirit, in growth. And yet there was still that pane of glass, between him and Delia, him and all these monied, unserious folk. No distance traveled in a life or in a heart could surmount that invisible barrier, he despaired.
He was jerked from this reverie by a flash of movement, at the back of the crowd. Someone stood up and shook off their cloak. It was a face he didn’t recognize in particular, but an expression he would have known anywhere—someone about to kill.
Locke sensed the drawing of a bow before the assassin even began the movement, while the bow stave was still under his cloak. Locke’s feet began to move as always in battle, without the intervention of his conscious mind. Yet now, after so many battles, he stayed in himself, in control. He did not yell, for he knew that yelling would only cause others to move and possibly get in his way.
Locke saw the assassin string his bow in an instant, and a small part of Locke admired the years of practice it took to make that delicate and dextrous motion under such pressure. The arrow came out of the assassin’s sleeve, sliding to his fingers and seating on the bowstring at the exact same moment.
Others were starting to react then, seeing Locke pass by them on his way to the altar. The thought came into his mind again, only this time there was no ‘probably’ attached: “I’m about to die.” And then he knew. This was the great destiny he had been promised all along.
The assassin raised his bow. It seemed agonizingly slow, but Locke knew that the arrow, once fired, would be quick. He planted both feet in the plush, rich carpet beside the altar, bent his knees, and leaped into the space between the royal couple and the crowd.
Twang! Locke heard the string snap, saw the arrow come, fancied he could hear the air whipping past it in its flight. Then he was in front of Delia, and he knew satisfaction in his heart that she was safe, protected by him although she was never his and never would be.
Then the impact. The arrow sprouted from his chest, the head deep inside. He felt his heart try to beat and fail, cutting itself on the arrow’s razor-sharp edge as it swelled and tried to pump. In some far recess of his fading mind, he heard the shouts of his men, and knew the assassin was dead. But then he was falling, to his back, already slipping away from himself, in a way so unlike the feeling of battle. This was a final slipping, no control, no return.
Then she was over him. Others were trying to pull her away, to protect her, but she touched him once more on the chest. She looked into his eyes, and he knew that she had felt what he had felt, in that moment of their first meeting and since. Nothing would come of it, not now and not if he had lived. They had both known that all along. Yet just to know that they had shared that unspoken connection meant everything.
That arrow had broken the pane of glass between them, and although it was a pity he had to go, it seemed somehow worth it. And so Tabor Locke—stripped of all his rank now, and gifted with feeling instead—put his fingers ever-so-gently atop hers, felt true happiness for one moment, and then died.
END
Thanks for reading! Have a great week, and I will be back next week with something fun. :)
Owen, In just a few paragraphs you have me caring about the protagonist. And what a great love story. Bravo!