Ghosteria Volume 2: The Novel: Zircons May Be Mistaken, Tanith Lee [classic fiction txt] 📗

and stare on it. The Sub-umbrisis a corpse in all truth now? For never do we see, nor hear report, thesethings can diey. They are already of the dead.

As is the Scholar’s choice, andmy lady’s, there is not much seems amiss with this stricken enemie. Others ofits kind trample a way off, avoiding maybe this one. Its eyes are open, blue, andnow I see them turn on me. Makes sound, the lips of it. Has lost a tooth to oneside. No impediment, I in life lost two, one deep in, that blackened and Ipulled it forth, and one in fighting, but in the lower jaw.

I go near. I am stood above.

It makes a sound at me. But itsboth eye close now.

It is near death, and I notliking it, then surely the easier to leave it should I mean so.

It is of the male division, whatelse. Its hair is black as that of my Lord, when I served him, Hroldar, thatEliseth has call Rauldr, or some such. But the eyes as mine, in life. I stand,and by my will I reach inside.

Here it is this way: an emptytower. Its stones are firm and all in place, but through the vault of it thecele winds run like water in a stream.

I make testing of the spaces.None is there. One glimpsing sceadowe before me flies. It is a remembering, Ithink, of death. But that is done, as long far off was mine. Yet still I pause,thresholden, not yet to enter in.

And while my thought speaks tome, my life takes hold, and in like a spear of ice and fire, before ever I amready, and so inside the towr of it am I.

Who now then will I be? I lie in fear,then to my feet I ream, lifting the lunk of me like a great wiht upon my soul.And stand I now, and solid as a tower may be, and my feet upon the back of theworld, as Great God intended, flesh and blood and bone.

Andthen again I fall. The weight of him, of life – and there are memories – theyrun like rats, white and black and grey – and red. And with them, my own, myown, rising out of deep water.

I have the language now of thisfuture place. I have the truth of my past. I am ruined, like the towers of thecastle. Defeat and fall, if not death.

He – I – hurt. I hurt.There is rot all through him. Gangrene is its name. Inside a day or so, I’lldie of the rot in him. Why did I never see in time? In my first life then, wehad this evil rot, but now I can’t remember its proper name – its name-of-then.

I lie, groaning, helpless. Thisruined tower will die, and then I shall be free again. Or can I be? No secondchances.

The pain is horrible.

I remember a pain as bad, andworse. Though did not last for long.

It was then, the battle, on the rampartsof the castle, my Lord’s just fight –

Only –

I remember –

I remember.

TheFall of Leaf had come, and the weather yet very warm, the skies deep blue.

We were to fight the foes of myLord. They sat below our fortress like mad dogs about a tree in which they hadbrought to bay something as powerful, but more so, than they.

But being crazed of course, theywould come up to kill us. And so, a back door, as it might be, being undone forthem, they duly do.

And then I am before my Lord. Icast off the foe from him and so his life is safe, but I in turn receive theblow, which is mortal and does for me. There we go. Done for. Always look onthe bright side – these frills come from my host’s dead brain-case. I speaklike him. Or near to it for Christ’s sake and damn this filth of pain in him –but I try to break away, and now I can’t. Stuck in the mud of him, this Zombie.(Even without a tenant soul, still these dead bodies are able to die. They fallapart, as does the castle over yonder as, bit by bit, the house does too thatwas built here, with its green silks and old statues that aren’t real...)

There instead am I, before myLord. I take the blow for him and perish. And he lives.

But, to be honest. It wasn’t likethat.

Christ.

It wasn’t like that.

Two months or more before thatautumn, I had the spring fever common to these parts. The illness passed. Butthen came another skirmish, some unimportant little spat between my Lord andsome other lord, some bugger with less right to hold an army than a fly. So onthat day too I went to fight, I and fifty others. No more did we need. But on thatday, that little new summer day, that day of stink and shit and hell, on thatday some passing mace or other club came down upon me, and knocked me for sixupon the ruck of grass, where I lay, not in my senses for some while, tillgathered up.

And when again I came to myself,to myself I did not come, not I.

Do I remember this? In a manner.I heard a bell ringing in my head, over and over, on and on, till I would takea knife and stick it in my ear to stop the noise, yet some fool stops me.(There is always some fool will do that, sure. God makes fools for the verypurpose.)

Let me be frank. To be honest.Lay my cards on the table.

From that dry tomorrow I was anidiot, a piece of flesh not a man, silly as a child of two. Weak as one. A foolforever.

Any other master would have slungme forth to whine and beg about the land, or for the holy women to care for, orthe landsmen to jeer to death for a jolly wee laugh.

But my Lord, my Lord Raulder, hekept me on. Oh, no more his man, no more the guard of his body, the companion totoast at the feast: “My Gui – to you.” As