The Final Battle
The Final Battle
Excerpt from The Brightest Light
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Copyright Scott J Robinson 2014
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The Final Battle
"My name is Cen Wegner," he says.
He isn't Cen Wegner. Wegner is a legend with eternal youth and a magical sword named Gold-Fire. He is not an old man with a rusting blade and missing teeth. But I won't argue: let him be whomever he wants tonight.
“I'm Ket.”
I don't want to talk. The night is too dark for talking— no fires have been lit and the Sister moons cower behind a bank of rain-clouds. Too dark, too wet and too cold. I close my eyes and try not to think of home.
The small shed beside the house where my father turns the hard, colourful wood of watanagi trees. My mother, singing hymns to Jela, the sun Goddess, as she feeds the chickens. My little brother trying to skip stones on the pond. Bec from across the meadow...
Don't think of home.
The clash of steel on steel snaps my eyes open and I reach instinctively for my sword, which is strange— my instincts have never moved me to such actions in the past.
"It is nothing, lad," my companion says softly. "Nothing."
I don't know how he knows, but I relax.
"You get to know these things," the old man continues, combing fingers through his stringy beard. "It gets to the point where you can distinguish between the sound of an axe and a sword. It gets to the point where you can tell the difference between a death cry and the cry of a man merely wounded."
Too dark, too wet and too cold. I shiver.
We are sitting beside the sheer, flaking wall of the defile. Only an angled, fallen tree divides us from the others, but that divide seems immense. It feels as if they have deliberately set us apart, the old man and the boy. But that is ridiculous, for there are as many old men and boys as anyone else— and not nearly enough of either.
The silence stretches on. The night seems to wait expectantly.
"You've fought in battles before?"
The old man gives a slight smile and a sad sigh all in the one breath. "I am Cen Wegner."
"So... You have no family behind the walls?" I indicate back up the defile towards the unseen city, as if there can be any doubt which walls I mean. As if there are any other walls left. My own mother and brother will be in there now, waiting for the end. And Bec...
My companion shakes his head. "I have had no family for a long time." He picks up his sword and carefully wipes the water from the rust-flecked blade. "I have had no family since the battle of Summersville."
"That was eighty years ago," I say. "That's a long time to be alone.""Longer than you can possibly know, Ket." He continues to wipe the blade, as if it can make a difference, as if it matters. "I was only young then, hardly older than you are now, but I had a wife and new baby daughter."
I nod my head as the old man ruins his own story. None of the tales of Cen Wegner say anything about a wife and daughter.
He leans back against the wall of the defile and offers his face to the slap of the rain. "The King called for men to fight the goblins— to stop them from retaking the land— and I decided to go."
I watch his face. It appears as if a dozen emotions, just out of sight, pull in a dozen different directions. Perhaps some of his story is true, if not all of it.
"Something happened while you were away?" A quiet question.
He shakes his head. "No. Before I left. My wife stood by the door, Feni cradled in her arms. 'If you go, I will not be here when you return,' she said. 'You cannot just think of yourself now, Cen Wegner.'"
"What did you say?"
The old man shrugs. "I said to her, 'I am thinking of other people— I am thinking of the babies who don't have fathers to fight for them.' And I left."
"But your wife was there when you returned, wasn't she?"
"I don't know." He shakes his head again, the barest of movements. "I never went back."
"But..."
"It isn't always enough, Ket. Sometimes there are no right answers. Sometimes there are no answers at all, just different ways to ask the questions."
I close my eyes and think of home.
My father shearing sheep, fast and sure with blessed blades. A Jela quilt my mother has sewn to sell at the Mid-summer Festival. My little brother laughing as he watches two baby mere-dragons trying to fly, even as he flaps his arms and tries to fly himself. He will never fly now. Bec from across the meadow. I can picture her face as if she stands in front of me. Warm, dark eyes like a shaded pool. A sprinkle of freckles across her nose. Soft lips always tweaked into a smile— a smile that I had nervously kissed a month past.
"Do you know what Bec said to me?"
"What?" His question is as quiet as mine was earlier.
"'Your going will make no difference, I know, but the memory of your going— the memory of your courage— will mean more to me at the end than anything else.'"
Bec wanted me to go. The old man's wife wanted him to stay. Who knows which woman was right? Who can tell which story is the sadder?
Sometimes there are no answers at all...
I pick up my sword. Where my companion is wiping the rain away from his blade, I tilt mine so that it catches more. I let the stinging drops wash the mud from the cold steel. A week of training has taught me enough to know that I will not last a minute in battle. My Sergeant told me I swing a sword like I am hoeing turnips. Well, what does he expect?
"You can do no wrong here, lad," the old man tells me, as if reading my thoughts. "Being here is enough."
"Was it enough for you, all those times?"
"Yes." He does not look sure. How could he? He has lost his wife and daughter to war as surely as I lost Bec a month ago. "And this time there will be no looking back," he says, "to wonder what might have been."
I do look back, over my shoulder towards the city. Bec is there, waiting for me though she knows I will not return. I want to go to her for one more kiss. I sit, tense, ready to spring to my feet and run. But that would not bring a smile to her face. One last moment is all I can offer. She will smile to know I had the courage to stand and fight.
"And the time that has gone while we waited here?" I ask.
A kiss that came too late. A month that slipped away while we all waited for the end of the world.
Can he see my tears through the rain, like I can see his?
"Sometimes there are no right answers, Ket."
Only different ways to ask the questions...
"Perhaps everything people do is inevitable in one way or another," I say. "Perhaps it's enough that there were some who asked the questions. Perhaps that's all that was ever expected of us."
The old man clears his throat and looks over the top of the log. "They goblins come." He climbs to his feet as if the weight of the world is on his shoulders. But there is so little of the world left to weigh so much— just this defile and the city at its head.
I stand too, and look into the night. I see nothing, but I do not doubt. My heart is racing like it did a month past in the aftermath of a kiss. My hand trembles on the hilt of my sword like it did when I touched Bec's cheek.
My companion raises his own sword in the air, warning cry on his lips. A bolt of lightning sli
ces open the sky and the rust on his sword sparkles like flecks of gold. Like flecks of Gold-Fire.
To my left, others are hurrying to rise— a few dozen old men and boys and a scatter of labourers. Let them all be whomever they want tonight. I am husband and father and farmer, for these few moments at least.
I tighten my grip on my sword and prepare to hoe turnips.
Excerpt from
The Brightest Light