Quest of the Five Clans: the Harlequin Tartan

CHAPTER 9

He who Trains the Horse to War

Horses are not loyal, as dogs knows loyalty. A horse's service is one of obedience. A steed charges into battle because it knows its duty. And though it may love its rider, it will not race into smoke and horror save it is first taught to bear the sight, the sound, the smell. But if I do not recall what passed in the Goat's Cave, I know that Day and Knight leaped to my aid from what they themselves did not know, yet feared. I believe they did save me. I did not come out that darkness on strength of boy's legs or boy's soul.

Years later, I wandered a field in France. The day after my first battle. I could see these had been green fields a month before, set pretty within stands of woods. But the harvest now was bone and flesh, mud, ash and battle-trash. The trees stood so splintered you could press a hand within their shattered trunks. Here and there a voice still called for help, en francais oft as not. Attendants shouted 'where are you?' unwilling to dig within the larger piles of mud and corpses. Yesterday's blue sheets of acrid smoke had turned to the stench of wet burned things. Touched by the first wafts of a meaty rot. Parts of men, fly-bedecked, lay casual as cast clothes on a bed-room floor. More solid corpses displayed just as they fell, yet no longer like men. They'd begun to swell and stiffen, limbs become ill-suited for human clothes. Faces turned wax copies that could never have held a man's expression. I wandered trying to recall yesterday's running, screaming, peeing, bleeding, waiting, firing, running. I remembered a figure charging me with a saber, his eyes wide with fright. I looked for where he lay, but he could have been any corpse in a French uniform.

It was not broken parts of men that made me retch. It was the still-living horses. Here and there they'd lay, shaking and wheezing, screaming sometimes, attempting to rise on shattered legs, opened entrails. Attempting to return to service, to duty. Eyes rolling white, froth yellowing on their mouths. Most still in halters and reins, still bound to smoldering carts, to saddled corpses.

I drew knife and wandered from field to field, cutting the throat of each horse I found. Even those resting dead. Someone shook me eventually, told me to return to camp. I near slashed their throat for their trouble. I had no earthly idea what day it was, which direction camp lay. They had to lead me back with a motley collection of others who'd lost the way.

* * *

I walked through fog again. Penn holding my hand, not grasping my cloak. How had I come here from a box? Absurd question to ask of a magic cabinet. As well, I was out of my mind. I, who oft boasted he could never go mad. Protested overmuch, no doubt.

A phantom puppet-boy had led me into the Fabled Box of the Orient and then out again. A theatre act, deserving a round of claps from the audience. I supposed I held Penn's real hand now, unless he'd borrowed again from his uncle's exhibits. It felt warm. Real, if small. It pulled me through a muck of swirls and clouds.

I tried to think when a child last held my hand. I've never had much to do with the young. In war children were creatures trapped, fleeing from horror to comfort to horror, begging or hiding or standing disinterested on the roadside, separated from their minds by overlong exposure to death, rape, hunger, blood, fire, cannon-thunder and the general business of glorious war. In civilian life they stood safely outside a spadassin's concerns.

Elspeth sometimes invited children into the kitchen, to gather warm by the oven while she'd cook or sew. Neighbors' children, I suppose. Never thought to ask. The sight would set me laughing, Stephano to grin. As though she'd gathered a gaggle of goat-kids into her lap. She'd have them singing in Irish like Dublin parrots, holding no meaning for the words, nor caring. But they'd go round-eyed and silent at me. Afraid of the Seraph. Not so for Stephano, though he had a face to petrify Medusa.