The pennants on their lances don’t ripple in the wind.
They make no moves to either threaten or attack us, obviously satisfied with merely observing our own movements and intentions. Even so, our captain calls up the nearest trooper, sending her galloping back to warn the rest of our squadron following on far behind us.
The dead are on the march once again; and that’s a far worse threat to us than any number of angels.
*
The dead have agreed to talk to our commanding officer.
Only she and the shaman are allowed to approach the dead; then again, no one else wishes to join them, and would only do so if commanded to.
In our world, you can feel the cold and dampness emanating from the dead, I’m told. Apparently, they’re equally uncomfortable with the heat and stench that rises off from our bodies: they keep their intrusions into our world to the minimum.
Certainly, however, nether our commanding officer nor the shaman show any signs of being either cold of discomfited by the presence of these deathly silent troops.
She, the shaman and a small band of troopers had ridden hard to join us, leaving orders that the rest of the squadron had to also catch up with the Forlorn Hope as soon as possible, without unnecessarily tiring their mounts.
We’ve halted while the parlaying takes place, but we don’t expect the others to meet up with us until evening at the earliest.
When our commanding officer returns from her brief conversation with the dead, she orders us all to form up again, to set off at an easy trot that will allow the greater part of our column to meet up with us quite soon.
‘They’re only here to observe,’ she reassures us, offering no more information.
Observe us for what reason?
To see how many more of us will soon be joining their ranks?
*
The watchful dead are still with us as we all ride down into the valley where we expect the angels to be waiting for us.
This is as far as any column as reached before being blocked by angelic forces.
The valley floor is littered with rusty armour, mangled skeletons.
The dead seem to be of a like mind to us, at least when it comes to believing that this is where battle will be joined. Their patrol wheels off from what had been a perfectly parallel course to ours up until now. They begin to head for a high rising of the surrounding hills rather than continuing their descent into the valley.
This will give them the perfect vantage point to see our ineptness when facing the angelic columns.
Is that why they’re here, then? To see what ridiculously easy meat we will make for them?
Or is it the angelic host whom they are really here to see?
If they feared our encroachment across their borders, what must they make of the likelihood that the far more powerful angels might also begin to lay claim to their lands?
Abruptly, the regimental horns blare out their instructions, their calls to be brave, to prepare to make the most supreme sacrifice.
We begin to fan out into wider lines of twenty abreast, the widest we can mange within the confines of the clearer areas of the track remaining unbroken by shrubs or boulders.
I haven’t seen any signs of the angels as yet. But obviously someone has.
As the horns change their notes, their rhythms, we pick up speed, preparing our mounts for a full-blown charge.
The sun’s dipping behind the enveloping hills, leaving a liquid dark pool in the valley’s base, one broken by white islands of bones, the remains of those who’d fought to the last around shattered standards.
The horns wail again, urging us to lower our lances, to break into the charge.
We howl like wolves. We holler and bravely cry out.
‘To death and glory!’
*
Chapter 12
Suddenly, all around me, friends are falling.
Their mounts pitch forward, crumpling to the ground, horse and rider chaotically tumbling across the ground, falling prey to the hooves of those coming behind them.
Sometimes, the horse rides on, unaffected, the rider alone whipped back out of her seat, as if struck by invisible lances.
And still I haven’t seen an angel.
There are just spurts of flame coming at us out of the darkness. Flame that rips through armour as if it were nothing but the finest cotton sheeting.
We continue our charge, our frenzied screaming that’s supposed to instil fear into our enemies.
More troops whirl in the air, spill to the ground.
There are massive gaps in our front ranks. There are even empty spaces in those lines far behind the leaders.
The efforts taken to fill these spaces seem hopeless, as more and more of us brutally crash to the earth.
We’re rushing now through the darkness of the valley bottom. The dead from previous battles are being crushed beneath our hooves or, worse, their shattered limbs are being torn from their bodies, whirling up into the air everywhere about us.
Just ahead of me there are cries, the frightened whinnying of horses. The riders and their mounts are being whipped back towards me, as if they’ve ridden into the springy, spreading branches of a vast, invisible oak.
There’s an abrupt burst of incredible heat, the whoosh of hundreds of arrows all being loosened at once; and the darkness before me flares in blinding, orange light as an angel rises up into the air on wings of fire.
*
Chapter 13
In the darkness alongside me, there’s a vicious snarling.
The darkness swirls, moves, leaping up high to strike hard against the side of my mount’s neck, the growling more terrifying than ever.
Neighing in fright, shying away from this brutal attack, my horse stumbles, collapsing under the weight of this massive, dark shape.
As my horse falls off to one side, I whip my feet out of the stirrups, not wishing to be entrapped under its own considerable weight when it strikes the ground. I tumble from the saddle, rolling across the ground, across corpses still rotting, corpses little more than skeletons.
From the dark sky above me, the angel rains down his fire, his lance spitting out flames that fly over my head to bring down the riders who had been following on after me.
In the light of those flames, I can at last make out my attacker.
It’s the dog; the Hellhound.
It seems he’s on the side of the angels after all.
*
My horse isn’t seriously injured by the dog’s attack; she rises, stumbling only a little in her nervousness to get away. I’ve tumbled too far away to chase after her, while any cry to her I make wouldn’t be enough to stop her bolting; it might even alarm the dog enough for him to attack me.
As it is, he seems content with eyeing me warily as he keeps his distance and quietly slips onto his belly.
Like him, I stay close to the ground, realising that to reveal myself would be tantamount to suicide while the angel throws out his seemingly endless fan of flames.
Those who had gone on ahead of me are dead.
Those who were behind me, even those who were riding alongside me, are now all dead.
I survived only because my horse crumpled to the ground, pitching me headlong into the darkness, into the perfect camouflage of dead bodies.
I survived only because the Hellhound made my horse crumple to the ground.
The dog hadn’t attacked me; he’d made sure I’d be spared.
Reassured that the hound won’t attack me after all, I quickly take in what’s happening around me.
The angel is no longer hovering above me, his wings of flame having dulled a little. He’s dropped to the ground a little farther on from me, yet he’s still letting loose with his arrows of fire, bringing down more and more of my comrades and their mounts.
Farther over to my right, another angel has taken to the air, his skin apparently impervious to the arrows and even the spears being sent flying his way. His own lance spews
out the fire that takes down our armoured cavalry as easily as a scythe cuts through corn.
Somewhere in between, a solid punch of hard-riding troops have managed to draw close to the angel who still remains grounded. With a lowering of his lance, he cuts through the massed horseflesh as effortlessly as a knife slices through cream, both riders and mounts propelled backwards in a chaotic sprawl of flailing limbs and bloody chunks.
One trooper draws close enough to attempt a plunging of her lance into his shoulder, only for a fierce blow from the spouting flames to splatter her as surely as if she were made of nothing but crimson water. The lance tip shatters without penetrating the angel’s skin.
Despite the warrior’s failed attack, it’s distracted the angel enough to allow the last of these troopers to make her own attempt at bringing him down, aiming her lance towards his waist. The angel whirls, aware of the danger, letting go with another burst of flames that rips through the poor girl’s flesh.
But her lance sinks home, the angel’s body apparently eagerly swallowing the shaft, the force of the dying horse’s charge lifting him clear of the ground without any need for his wings of fire.
The first angel I’d seen rushes forward, perhaps with the intention of helping his friend. Thinking the darkness cloaks me, I draw my sword and spring up towards him, hoping to take him by surprise.
He seems to see me as clearly as if it’s day, the glare of his immense, globular eyes a green as vibrant as any woodland pool.
He swings around to bring his fire down upon me, but once again, the darkness flows alongside me – and it’s the angel who goes down, crumpling under the unexpected and unbearable weight of the leaping hound.
It seems unfair to hack at a man when he’s already been brought low.
But this is an angel, whom I’ve seen bring down friend after friend as if they were nothing but geese being slaughtered in the markets.
Before he has a chance to recover, I dart towards him, curving my sword down towards his stomach with all the force I can muster; and with a clang, the blade springs back, shattering into glistening moon-like slivers.
I quickly throw myself aside in a roll, perhaps erroneously hoping the darkness can veil me this time.
It was a vain hope.
Even as I flow from my roll into a rise and turn, searching for a handy weapon, I see that he’s rising and turning too, preparing to aim his lance at me.
Once again, it’s the Hellhound who saves me, throwing himself so brutally against the rising figure that the angel’s head is sent spinning up into the air.
The angel’s head screams anxiously, in multiple voices, its inside revealed as it drops towards and rolls across the ground, the brain one of countless miniature lanterns, rainbow coloured and flashing erratically.
The angel’s decapitated body had collapsed to the ground as the hound brought it down, but now it’s rising again, a smaller head having taken the place of the original one.
No, of course; it was a helmet the angel had lost, not a head!
But the angel no longer has his green, globular eyes. It seems to me that he can no longer see in the dark. He’s suddenly confused, obviously unsighted.
Yet I see what I need.
I pick up a nearby spear.
I hurl it hard and true towards the angel’s exposed head.
Thankfully, the spear sinks through an angel’s unhelmeted head as readily as it would any man’s.
*
Chapter 14
The angel dies as swiftly as any man.
Only…there’s no spirit that rises up from him.
Just as I’d heard in all the tales, there’s no rising of the dead, no wraiths wishing to head home to say their last goodbyes to their loved ones.
The angel pinioned earlier with the lance is still writhing in agony, clutching at the deeply embedded shaft as if he’s still hoping he might be able to withdraw it, bringing his agony to an end.
All around me, it seems that – for once – we’ve been victorious.
The field is a mass of warriors, apparently eager to form back once more into regimental lines.
Their faces expressionless, shocked by their experiences, they rise to their feet, walking back the way we came without a word, without a clink of mail or weapons.
As silently as the dead.
No, we haven’t been victorious; this is the dead rising.
Everywhere around me, they rise up from their now useless, empty shells. If there’s anybody I know still alive, I can’t see them.
The whole battlefield is quiet now. There’s no sign of the angel I’d seen hovering earlier. Perhaps he’s flown off; perhaps he was brought down.
Is that it?
Three angels?
I thought we were fighting a whole army!
Surely there were more, surely we killed more than three of them!
Surely we can’t have sacrificed a whole regiment to bring down less than a handful of angels!
The angel pinioned by the lance has gone quiet, still; he’s dead too now.
And yet, like the angel I’d killed, there’s no spirit rising up from his corpse.
As my friends depart – those still on duty fated to report yet another massacre of our troops – I’m left alone on the battlefield.
Up on the hills, the watching column of the dead turn and unhurriedly file away.
*
The hound growls.
So, I’m not really alone after all.
He’s waiting for me.
He wants us to leave the battlefield. He’s facing off towards a range of hills, one foreleg raised, impatient to step forward; he glances back at me, his eyes wide and questioning.
What am I waiting for?
I want to see more of these angels, of course.
Before I can take a closer look at their dead, however, a storm-like roar rolls over the hills on the opposite side of the valley. The sun has rapidly set behind those hills, so the darkness that had flooded the valley floor has now surged much higher, veiling the storm’s effects.
The hound barks urgently at me, the lowering of his head, the narrowing of his eyes, telling me we need to leave – quickly.
Now!
I hesitate, wondering if it’s all just an animal’s overreaction to a perfectly natural squall. Yet the onrush of wind is hurtling directly towards us, weirdly focused in its intent rather than more naturally spreading out across the whole valley.
It seems to whirl and pound at the darkness itself.
It’s darker than the sky.
It’s huge, something with immense outspread wings, with a body as sharp and fluid as a shark’s.
It’s as if one of the vast chalk giants has come to life and risen up into the night sky.
It’s a colossal raven; the King of the Ravens.
*
The hound lopes off, and I sprint after him.
I can feel, now, the downdraft from the beating of those immense wings.
The dust rises up around us, choking in its thickness. Even the materials of old uniforms and banners flap wildly, as if brought to life once more.
The dog doesn’t panic. He just moves quicker, now that he knows I’m following on behind him.
He’s heading out into the darkness lying beyond the edges of the battlefield.
Behind us, there’s a creaking of joints as the raven lands amongst the more recent dead. The dog lithely spins around as he throws himself to the ground, lying alongside the rotting corpses of those who fought here so long ago. I join him, trusting in his instincts.
The giant raven appears to have folded it wings down by its sides, to be lying as flat as possible upon its belly, such that its great beak also rest upon the ground.
With another creaking of pained joints, the upper part of the beak rises up, revealing a glowing, bloody gullet.
Then, as it might spew out worms to its young, the King of the Ravens disgorges an angel.
*
Chapter 15<
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The angel somewhat nonchalantly steps out from the yawning beak.
He’s followed by another angel, both of them walking out onto the dark battlefield as if they can see as clearly as any cat.
They make a quick check of the area, making sure – it seems to me – that no one’s left to endanger them in any way. One of the angels raises an arm, a signal for both him and the other angel to raise the strange, globular eyeguards on their helmets.
I blink in surprise as the whole area around them is suddenly lit up as if a small star has plummeted to earth. The light is incredible, as if generated by thousands of candles reflected over and over again by polished metal reflectors.
Alongside me, the dog rises quietly to his feet. He realises, obviously, that the angels won’t be able to see out into the darkness now they have bathed themselves in such bright light.
He silently slopes off; and I follow him, as he seems to know the way.
Although, where he knows the way to, I’m not so sure.
*
‘The dog guards the secret.’
Isn’t that what he himself had told me?
If so – if it was indeed the dog who had spoken to me – he’s lost any capability he had of speaking while journeying in the land of the dead.
As soon as we’re clear of the angels, we can pick up speed, as I no longer have to crouch, no longer have to take care that I’m not making any sudden noise that might startle our enemies.
The hound leads me higher up into the hills, although keeping for the moment to the hollows weaving between the rises and peaks simply because they make for easier traveling.
He pauses at one point, his nose held high in the air; then he quickly slinks over towards a small outcrop of rocks, a glance over his shoulder letting me know he wants me to do the same. We lie here, waiting for a visual of whatever it was he’d scented on the night air.
A broken moon has risen and, briefly unveiled by the scudding clouds, its silvery light brings a vibrant glow to the white lines of the gigantic figures scattered across the landscape.