Cassandra's Lantern

Chapter 5: A Meeting of Minds

The movement of the blades was achingly slow, almost too much to bear as their deadly sharp edges came so close to one another and then turned in different directions, seeking to connect with flesh rather than tempered steel. Every movement was stretched out and deliberate, as if the two souls locked in combat were suspended in cloying syrup that weighted down their limbs and turned the engagement into a torturous slow-step when it should by rights have been a swift and dextrous dance with a sudden conclusion.

   Was the way in which the passage of time seemed stretched a consequence of her fore-knowledge of how the duel would end? Perhaps the fact that she had seen every element that came together to describe the fight before, knew even the smallest detail of where a heel would be placed at any point or just when a wrist would shift the vital inch required to turn a thrust into a parry, perhaps meant that instead of a flowing whole she saw only that which constituted it. Like the pages of a chapbook made to be flipped so that the pictures danced, the illusion no longer fooled her mind into accepting what she was supposed to see.

   More than making the watching of the duel agonising and drawn out despite the inevitable course it took, the need to do so made her all the more aware of the point at which she would have to interject for all she was worth. The one pivotal moment when her judgement told her the pattern might be broken and the same ending avoided.

   It was upon her so soon, despite the way in which seconds dragged into minutes.

   “To the right,” she screamed as best she could, “block to the right!”

   Was there a hint of recognition in the eyes of the boy as he failed to follow her advice?

   If he had heard her at all his attention was wrenched away a fraction of a second later by the fact that the other blade had opened his throat, spilling his life onto the uneven cobbles under his feet.

Cassandra awoke from the dream with little to show for it apart from a pounding heart that was already starting to slow and a renewed sense of her own wretchedness. She had been forced to endure the same recurring images night after night since she had been freed from her bizarre magical imprisonment as the figurehead of an ocean-going vessel and the experience was becoming more of a dull pain than an actual torture thanks to familiarity and repetition. It was a small consolation that she had been spared the same dreams whilst held in place by the spells that Mosca, her former master had placed upon her as her mind seemed to have been stilled as much as her body. At least now that she was free and animate once more there was the chance to find distraction in the world at large.

   There was still enough guilt over the fate of the boy with whom she had duelled to have drowned herself in had she been inclined to and the terrible pain of simply not knowing whether poor Novolo was either dead of his wounds or alive and wishing revenge was ever present. But the place where the duel had been fought and Novolo, be he living or a corpse, were far away from where she now found herself.

   Fate had taken away the life she had made for herself and replaced it with a new one to which she was still neither comfortable nor sure she exactly liked, and yet she could not help but admit that it was preferable to the death that awaited her in her former home of Venice.

   She pulled back the sheets and swung her legs off the narrow cot in the equally narrow room that she had been given for her own. The long nightshirt that covered them was still hard to get used to, especially after living most of her life in a climate that allowed her to sleep naked for the largest part of the year. Yanking the hem up she was convinced that she could already see the colour leeching out of her skin, sapped by the constant cold and miserly sun that characterised the coastal town of Whitby.