I come to reality. Away from my fever dream. And as my senses return, so does the pain. Needles prick the back of my eyes and I hope it's one last sensation before death. I've saved a people. Not all, but enough to deserve my reward. I sigh in my rest, and my breathing becomes a moan.
"He wakes!" A soft cry from a child. Boy or girl, at such an age it's hard to tell.
"You hear that?" The voice is familiar. A rasp on the air.
It takes maybe a minute to realize no matter how hard I think of it, release won't come so easy. I open my eyes and turn my head to my unwanted benefactors, much to their surprise. The boy gasps and quickly looks away. The old man lifts his head in a start.
"So the dead rise," he says.
I turn to my side and lift myself onto my feet. Or I try, at least. As I twist my body to its side, I accidentally lay across the wound in my flank, remembering just in time that it's there. At the same time I feel a lesion in my back pop and a warm ooze trail my spine. Feeling numb to everything and then feeling everything at once, I yell a sharp noise and fall to the ground. It's here I also rediscover my head wound.
"I have a feeling Lazarus had a little more grace," the old man says. He and the boy wait a while in silence, perhaps to hear if I have a retort, but I just lay on the packed dirt floor and shiver. After a moment of silence, they motion themselves by each of my arms and unstick me from the earth. The old man mumbles incoherently and I stutter back. A conversation between imbeciles.
I'm thrown like a cadaver back onto the stone slab, ready for dissection at the hands of the butcher. Though my muscles decay and my organs melt, the boy still has trouble placing me on the cold altar. The shivers die as they bring the flame of a torch closer. The torch lights the lines in my face and I flinch from the brightness. The old man's uncut nails pry at my eyelids. He peers deep into the nothingness. "You too then," he says. "Dead like us."
The fever dreams sweep in and out of my vision with the flame. Images of waves crashing, the sea black with ink... crowds of people lining up, taking turns to prod me with jagged hands.
He moves the flames away: "You'll need to leave soon. Stay to wither or follow, I don't care. But the grain in our fields were planted too late into the winter to live. Our first harvest was taken from us. Our farm hands have left town to survive elsewhere."
He moves the flame close to me: "I only ask that if you find the strength to walk out of here and stay within our step that you bury us, should we die first."
I will not spend my last days at heel with a pauper to bury him in his grave. "I will not spe--spend--" I cough and grow cold again. As I lift my body from the slab I find the strength to exercise my words again. "I won't bury you. I wouldn't expect you to do the same."
"You're not planning on dying here, are you? There's nothing left, and you have some days on you yet."
"I have more than days." The air passes through the door and divides between us. Awkwardness fills the void. Snow kicks its little fury into the room. I watch it melt for a time. I wait for someone to break the silence. The way I look, they're waiting to see if I expire. My voice booms in the thick of the dark and they jump, fully expecting me to keel where I sit. "Your people left, and they expect themselves to live?"
"It's happened before," the old man says, "Never the same group of people you met last time. Sometimes someone familiar will pop up. New clothes, new wounds. In the last town they farmed, in the next they delegate the courts."
"You're nomads?"
"Well we don't mean to be. We're forced to be. Nomads of ghost towns. We occupy the spaces left behind."
"By that man in the stolen life? The horse that wasn't his? The sword that wasn't his?"
The man rose his voice as if I couldn't hear him. "You act like you've never seen a thief before."
"A thief?" I muse, "A thief has decency. At least enough to leave the town when their prosper is gone."
"Not in this world. They stay to loot the corpses as well. The one you met-- the one you speak of... he's just as bad as the rest, he just happens to be our particular cancer... Named himself The Son of Lilith."
I can't hold the chuckle over a title so ludicrous. "I'm willing to bet he's a Matthew. Never have met one that wasn't a colossal ass."
"Don't take anything of the sort lightly. You're liable to die by one's blade if the illness doesn't kill you first--"
"Enough." I rise to my feet. They stay planted this time. The muscles are more rigid, the mind more focused, the lungs rasping still-- but the job be done. "I won't die here. And I refuse to die by the steel of a lesser."
The old man jeers and lowers his torch to the ground, grinding the flicker into the dirt: "Well I'm happy you made up your mind then." I walk towards the door, set to wander after salvation. Shall the snow freeze my veins, or anything more rewarding, I'll seek it. But I'll do so alone. "Wait a moment, wait a moment." The old man leaned to the other side of the slab I've lain on. "Might as well take this. It's of no use to anyone else. You've infected the damn thing with your blood." He raised-- so much as you could call it that, his strength ebbing from sickness-- the sword that Son of Lilith let fell to his side, and dropped it on my resting place. I walked back and looked at the workmanship. The man spoke again as I studied the craft, and my own branding of dried blood at the point. "I'm not sure your games, but it seems to me you aim to die whilst acting the world isn't already set to ruin. You'll find that outside of your pampered walls there lies a hatred in all men. And they don't look at the abhorrence in themselves to fight, they look to fight those that have what they don't."
"I have nothing," I said to him.
"You have the luck to stand with courage to tyrants."
"It's a learned trait. Why did you say I came from 'pampered walls'? What do you know of me?"
"Your pants, for one. You may be some shirtless heathen from a distance but no one wears linens like that unless you were going to bed. People around here don't have beds. And frankly you don't smell like shit like everyone else."
"I noticed." I picked up the sword, heavy in my hand, but a blessing to feel that weight again. It belonged to a soldier, for that I'm sure, but the blade was long. It seemed to be from a lancer-- someone to cut from the height of his horse. As far as I knew, The Son of Lilith got his steed and steel from the same man. I turned to the boy but spoke to his senior. "You've taught this lad well. You don't feed him as much as yourself but you taught him manners at least. He hasn't spoken since I woke. He knows this is conversation between men. Rare to see civility in these parts."
The old man furrowed his brow and leaned as if hard to hear. "You're mistaken. Since you woke? He hasn't spoken at all. His tongue has swollen from the illness, and can no longer converse. Same reason he's so thin. He can't eat but simple broths." The boy stood against the wall and would not look at me, only at his compatriot. The old man spoke again as he stepped a stride closer: "You hear voices and-- tell me-- do you see things that allude you, too?" I turned away from his accusations. "Your mind, my friend from privilege... has it rot?"
I lis't to his words no more. In part from my humor that there would be a possibility that I've fallen so far in so short a time, and in part of my fear that he prophesied truth. I strode out the door. In the time since I arose in that hovel, the snow clouds had passed. I stopped in the street to breathe the smoking air. "I thank you for your kindness, as lacking as I was in want of it. But tell me, where is the nearest kingdom?"
He and the boy poked their heads from the threshold of the hut. The old man asked, "To do what? No one will let you in their gates. You wander like anyone else on the outside." I repeated the question. The truth is, I have hopes to speak my name and be treated as equals to a diplomat. I have had dealing, and have fought alongside, many kingdoms in the past. Rarely have I met face-to-face with other men of royalty, but our respect was always traded between consuls and clergy. But I would not tell this to the elder and the young man. Dying stragglers will show me no gratitude at their walls. Finally, with thought, he listed the towers one sees on horizons and the names the locale give to them. Within the names I chose one. Murray, whose armies I've supplied in the past, and heard tales of their victories from my throne.
I sniffed at the air again to feel the rattle in my lungs, and walked with sword drug at my side towards rescue or redemption.
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