The Black Chalice

Twenty-Four

Sir Lowick found the door and the hidden stairs. He had to stoop to walk through them, as though entering some secret garden. Immediately on the other side of the door the sea breeze turned blustery, picking at and buffeting him as he negotiated the narrow steps. Hand-carved into the volcanic rock, the steps were rough and irregular despite the constant battering of the elements and shuffle of cautious feet as the monks made the daily journey down to the water. He picked his way down the cramped steps on his heels, and the further he descended, the slicker they became with sea spray, and the more treacherous.

A blood-curdling scream tore at the night behind him.

Lowick froze, half-turning, prepared to run back the way he had come, and almost lost his footing on the wet stair. He reached out for the wall to brace himself. He was more than fifty feet beneath the wall, still another hundred or more down to the water. He steadied himself, and then looked back the way he had come.

All he could see were the crenellations of the wall, the top of the bell tower and the thick black smoke rising around it.

There was nothing he could do back there, and the blind monk's words gnawed away at him. His path took him to the wharf — where death awaited him. Try as he might he couldn't shake a sense of creeping dread, and that dread was a killer every bit as ruthless as any reiver's sword. But Sir Lowick had no intention of dying today, nor any other day. Like most men of the sword, he was arrogant enough to suppose he might just live forever, if the Lord willed it.

Looking down at the churning whitecaps and the four brutish men wrestling with a pair of coracles, the knight believed for the first time that there was a chance he really might die on the pebble beach below.

Instinctively, he made the sign of the cross to ward off ill-fate and cursed the monk.

"This is not how I die," he said to the seagulls and the wind and the world and whoever else, deity or devil, might be listening. "Do you hear me? This is not how I die!"

The tremors in his sword arm belied his words. At this rate, if he couldn't rein the dread in, by the time he reached the bottom step his death would be a foregone conclusion.

Sir Lowick started down, moving faster than was safe on the treacherous stairs. He clutched his sword in his right hand while the fingertips of his left brushed against the damp rock of the cliff face. He saw the black crow — he was sure it was the same bird he had seen skimming the tops of the flames — perched on an outcropping above his head, watching him intently with its beady yellow eyes. The bird gave him the creeps. Every warrior had heard talk of the deathbirds; the carrion eaters who knew when death was imminent and came to shepherd souls toward the light of heaven.

The knight brayed a raucous caw of his own, startling the bird into flight.

It was the worst thing he could have done.

The bird erupted into the sky in a flurry of feathers and caws so loud the men below turned to see the knight as he came down the last few stairs.

They were there to meet him at the bottom, and the battle was joined.

The size of the northerners' two-handed blades kept them from fighting side-by-side. There just wasn't room for them to swing on the narrow pebbled strip of beach. The knight had no such problems, and coming off the steps his reach countered the length of their blades.

Breathing deeply of the salt air Lowick felt good about life.

He felt alive.

"We have no fight with you," the Scot rasped in his thick brogue. Lowick could barely understand him. His eyes were wide and wild and his muscles were corded so tensely that his entire body quivered. "All we're after is getting off this cursed rock, and putting the damned sea between us and these demons. If you had half a mind, you'd do likewise."

"As far as I can see there are only four demons here, lads," he inclined his head at each in turn, "one — two — three — four. Repent and I might absolve your sins⁷ before you move on to your next life. But know this," the knight said, gravely. "You will not leave this place alive. That much I promise you."

"So be it."

One of the reivers broke ranks, plunging into the sea and wading toward him, forcing Lowick to defend himself on two fronts. The northerner was hip-deep in the water, but the knight was forced to divide his concentration, which could prove fatal.

Lowick took the first wild overhead swing from the grim-faced raider on the flat of his broadsword. The entire sword shivered from foible to forte. The sheer ferocity of the blow had the Scot's blade slide along the length of his broadsword and slam into the cross-guard. The knight heaved his wrist around, disengaging. His heel butted up against the back of the step. He grunted, another eerily bestial sound. The warrior backed off, allowing the man in the sea to swing. His was a more controlled two-handed thrust; a manoeuvre his cumbersome sword was not best suited for, but that didn't make it any less lethal should the point find its mark in the knight's sweetmeats.

Lowick whipped his sword around barely in time, an almost dismissive flick of the wrist sending the thrust wide and very nearly wrenching the claymore out of the big northerner's meaty hands. It was only the man's brute strength that prevented the sword from ending up on the seabed.

The knight countered with a clubbing left hook square into his opponent's face. The man staggered back, rocked by the blow. The cartilage of his bulbous nose ruptured, spewing blood and mucus. He spat one of his front teeth out. The other sat crooked, giving him a gap-toothed cemetery smile as he came back for more. Blood dribbled down through the stubble on his chin.

Sir Lowick blocked two more savage thrusts as they came in from his flank. The big Scot had planted his feet as best he could, but the shifting stones and roiling sea betrayed him. His huge, broad shoulders didn't help him. Desperately trying to maintain his balance, the reiver only succeeded in announcing his intentions a moment before he could deliver the blow. The knight read him, turning both strokes aside.

The killing stroke itself seemed almost an after-thought, a left-over from the parry. Sir Lowick rolled his wrist with the momentum of the thrust, letting the raider's own strength lend itself to the blow that killed him. He locked his elbow and bought the broadsword up in a wicked arc that slashed down through the reiver's torso, opening a gaping wound from his throat to his balls before ending in the water in a bloody splash.

The northerner dropped his claymore and clutched at his throat, and the knight turned his back on him; any potential threat he represented was extinguished. In a moment or two he would sink to his knees and go under.

"Do you regret your crimes?" The knight asked the three men in front of him.

"The only thing I regret is setting foot on this damned island. If that is regret enough for you, then aye, I regret."

"And the families you destroyed on your way here? What of them? Do you not regret what you did to those poor people?"

"They were weak! Just like you. You want me to fall on my knees, weep and beg for mercy? Well you can kiss my hairy crack, laddy. Now come down here if yer in such a hurry t'die!"

The reiver stepped back, inviting Sir Lowick to come down onto the shifting pebbles, and brought his claymore up to kiss the flat of the blade.

The two other men fanned out across the stone beach to take up position beside him.

"It matters not to me where you die," Sir Lowick said, stepping onto the stones. "I can kill you just as well here."

"You talk a lot for a dead man."

"It's a curse," the knight said grimly, bringing his own blade to bear. "So, shall we dance, boys?"

They came at him, three at once, bellowing their hideous ululating war cry as they rushed across the unsteady ground at him.

Sir Lowick braced himself, regretting the lack of his shield, which he had left back with the horses in his haste. There was nothing he could do about it now. Gritting his teeth, he met the first blows head on.

The clash of steel was lost beneath the crash of the waves and the roar of the surf.

The knight's sword moved seemingly of its own accord, so perfectly attuned were the man's body and mind that nothing separated thought from action. Every breath he took was in perfect concert with the cut and thrust of the fight. It was a long, brutal, and bloody slaughter, but as he had promised them, the reivers did not leave the beach alive.

Spent, the sweat of survival thick on his skin, Sir Lowick raised his hands and bloody sword to the heavens and cried, "I'm still alive!"