The Singing Sword

IV

I rode hard all the way to Cylla's tryst that afternoon, cursing myself and debating my own sanity with every beat of my horse's hoofs, and at the end of my journey I tethered the animal to a sapling just inside the forest's edge, about fifty paces from the entry to the path that would take me to the clearing. The sun had passed into the fourth hour of its afternoon journey and it threw my shadow directly ahead of me as I walked. By that stage I was numb; I knew only that I was lost in a wilderness beyond my understanding and completely beyond my control, but it was that last, pusillanimous thought that finally stiffened my spine and gave me the strength to stop in my tracks and turn around. I knew that if I went into the woods to that clearing, if I took even one step along that pathway, I would have forsaken the last remnants of my pride and honour; if I stooped so low as to watch Cylla with another man, I would be betraying not only my family and all I held dear, but my own manhood, giving up total possession of my immortal soul to Cylla's beast as well as to my own.

My horse stood cropping the sparse grass beneath the trees where I had tethered him, and I leaned my full weight against his side for a spell, smelling the clean, equine odour of him. He smelt exactly like a horse, exactly as he should, sweaty and wholesome, and there was nothing false or specious about him. He was a horse, full of a horse's strength. He had no truck with anything that was not fit for horses. When he rutted, he rutted straightforwardly, without subterfuge, and only with a mare who was in season; otherwise, he did as horses do.

I had a ludicrous vision of him gazing in fascination at another stallion rutting with a mare, and I began to laugh, quietly at first, and then with more and more abandon and less and less sanity as I was struck by the ridiculous folly of what I was imagining and I saw myself clearly for what I had become.

I ended up sitting on the ground between his legs, laughing uproariously and then suddenly weeping; like the sensible animal he was, my horse moved away, eyeing me uneasily, which made me laugh and weep the more.

I regained my senses eventually and felt better than I had in a long, long time. And I knew, with the clarity of absolute certainty, that Cylla's game had ended. I had found my direction again, after years of wandering lost, and it had been pointed out to me by a horse! How many times had Equus called me a horse's arse? Now I knew Equus was wrong, but it had taken a horse to show me what I was, or should be: I was a man, and a maker of weapons; a smith and a soldier. I had no business with unmanly, lesser things, and from this day I would avoid them and regain the strength of my manhood.

I saw the fallen, rotting tree that I had noticed earlier, the reason for tethering my horse where I had. When you have a leg like mine, you watch always for easy means of mounting. I led him to it, climbed upon his back and pointed him away from the forest, down towards the stream among the bushes in the bottom of the valley. The trees here were sparse and small, no more than saplings; you could almost gallop among them.

On the bank of the stream, this time by an ancient, mossy stump, I dismounted again, took off my sandals and light leggings and then sat down, dangling my bare feet in the gurgling water. I watched tiny fish darting in the stillness of a lazy eddy by my side and let the soothing sound and touch of the cool waters wash me clean. And when I dressed again and left for home, it was without regret for Cylla or the game she was playing in the forest glade.

On the way home I was acutely conscious of the beauty of the day and of the scenery around me. The sprouting, unformed leaves had not yet lost their fragile newness and the moss of winter and spring was still bright green and moist; flowers bloomed among the grasses everywhere I looked and the air seemed full of butterflies and bees. At one point, I heard a crashing in the bushes and my horse shied nervously, scenting the bear that had already scented us and gone. I gentled him and then kicked him to a trot to get out of the area and leave the poor bear in peace; I had no quarrel with any animal that day. In this way, it took me far longer to get home than it had to arrive.

As I prepared to dismount outside the forge, I heard my name being called and turned to see one of the household servants running towards me, waving his arms. I stayed on my horse and waited until he ran right up to me, gasping for breath, with the news that Luceiia had been looking for me "for hours" and had sent him to the forge to wait for me and make sure that I went straight to her on my return.

As I strode into the villa, wondering what could be amiss, Luceiia came hurrying to meet me, her face pale, and I braced myself to hear bad news of the children or of Caius.

"Thank God you're here! Have you seen Domitius?"

I was taken off guard. "Domitius? Dom? No, he's in Aquae Sulis. He left this morning. Why?"

It was Luceiia's turn to frown and look nonplussed. "What do you mean, in Aquae Sulis? He was here less than an hour ago, looking for you."

My heart thudded and seemed to miss a beat. "Dom? No, he couldn't have been. He's away."

Luceiia was close to anger, impatient with my thick-skulled slowness. "Publius, listen to me! You have to find him. He is distraught. Something terrible has happened. I don't know what, but I'm afraid for Dom. He was wild, Publius, and there was blood on his clothes."

"Blood?" I was having difficulty taking in her words. "What do you mean, blood? How much blood? Whose? Tell me, Luceiia, in the name of God!"

She threw her hands apart in a gesture of helplessness. "I don't know, Publius! I don't know anything, except that something was very, very wrong and there was nothing I could do for him. He would not talk to me. He wanted only you and no one else. He was out of his senses, Publius — completely, totally undone. He burst into the house and I heard him shouting your name. When I came out to see what all the commotion was about, he was upstairs, rushing from room to room, all the while shouting for you.

"I went to him and told him you were out, but I don't think he even heard me. He looked awful, Publius. His hair was standing on end and his eyes were..." She broke off and raised a hand to her mouth as though to stop the words she knew would come out next. "Oh, Publius, I have never seen such eyes — filled with so much pain and rage and grief."

My mouth had gone dry and I could hear my heart beating in time to the dread wings fluttering in my gut.

"Then what? What did he say?"

"Nothing. Or almost nothing. He stopped shouting and looked around, blinking his eyes as though he didn't know where he was. Then he looked at me, and his face — I don't know how to describe it, Publius — it darkened, and he asked me, 'Did you know?' Then he looked around him again, and up at the skylight, and then he ran down the stairs and away, shouting your name."

"And no one followed him? You simply let him go?"

"At first, yes. We were all amazed, and he had a horse outside. I regained my wits as soon as he had gone and sent Paul the groom to follow him, but by then it was too late; Paul could not find him."

"Blood, Luceiia. You said there was blood. How much and where? Was it his own?"

She shook her head in an abrupt negative, as though dismissing my question. "I couldn't tell. He wore a cloak, fastened to the neck, covering him completely. I only saw a glimpse of his tunic, and it looked black. It was not until I saw his legs and feet, as he went out the door into the sunlight, that I saw it for what it was. Publius, his legs were covered in blood."

"Where was Cay during all this? And where is he now?"

Again the headshake. "He's not here. He went out earlier with a man, an old friend of his, who came here about noon. I don't know who he was. I was busy with the children and did not see him. Anyway, the servants said he was a stranger, but Cay knew him well from long ago. The two of them went off somewhere and have not come back."

"Sweet Christ!" I was already limping to the door as quickly as I could move, shouting back over my shoulder, "Call Equus and assemble a mounted party and make sure there's wagons and a medic with them. Tell them to meet me at the Villa Titens as quickly as they can, and you stay here!"

My horse still stood in the yard where I had left him. I flung myself across his back and had him running before I was properly seated. He was a strong animal and ready for another run. Now I whipped him to a gallop and put him to the shortest route towards the home of Dom and his faithless wife.

It took me half an hour, at full speed, to get there, and I was careless now of the poor brute beneath me, abusing him cruelly in my fear. As I went, I fought with my own imagination, telling myself it could not be as bad as I was fearing.

The first sign of tragedy was waiting for me at the villa gate: Carlos, Dom's manservant of many years, lay sprawled and disembowelled across my path. Behind him, some paces distant, lay another corpse, unknown to me. I looked further and saw more, four in all, in the entrance court. It looked like the aftermath of a raid, and I told myself Dom had been unmanned by discovering the scene unexpectedly, but even as my mind formed the thought I knew I was only deluding myself again. Dom, my gentle friend, had done this in the grip of madness.

The last of the corpses, this one a young woman, sprawled stiffly in her dried blood on the steps leading to the portico of the house itself, and I paused there, outside the door, dreading to enter, fearing what I would find. Rather than look too closely at the dead woman by my feet, I looked up at the sky. Night was approaching and heavy clouds had rolled in from the west, gravid with rain. Perfect, I thought. You will need all your rain to wash away the blood here on this ground. I drew my sword, for what reason I knew not, pushed open the doorway and stepped through into Hades itself.

A soldier grows inured to the sight of blood. It is part of his life; the spilling of it part of his occupation; and as he accepts blood and the spilling of it, he accepts as well the effluvia and the ordure that go hand in hand with the abrupt and violent, brutal severance of life. He learns to accept and ignore the stench of voided bowels and bladders; he sees without seeing the liverish, blue-white-purple glisten of entrails, and the sharp, pungent stink of visceral fluids assaults his nostrils only in passing. The soldier is endowed with this detachment in the same way that iron is tempered: by being immersed in fire and then beaten with heavy hammer blows. His tempering is in the fury and the terrors of battle, where nothing may survive in his mind that might distract him from his most sacred, dedicated need: to survive.

Remove the stimulus of dire, frenzied struggle, however, and transport the man, along with all the chaotic slaughter of the battlefield, into the confines of a quiet, spacious, well-lit family home, and you amplify ten-thousandfold all the cumulative horrors he has been able to ignore throughout his life. The result is waking nightmare: horror and loathing beyond description.

I had never really known, in spite of all my experience, just how much blood can spill from human bodies. Every wall in the interior of that house, it seemed to me, was polluted with blood: it was everywhere, smeared and splashed in thick, dark gouts from which grim trickles ran towards the floor, which was completely awash in thick, black, coagulated sheets and puddles of gore. It was a scene from Tartarus, lacking only leering, gibbering demons. I would not have been surprised to see demons. I looked for them, but only their minions were present, the flies. Beelzebub himself, the Lord of the Flies, had been here recently but was now gone, and only his servants remained, their buzzing drone filling the air like the moans of tormented souls.

I stood just inside the open portal, my feet in blood, as though I had frozen to the floor, and my scalp crawled and I found myself fighting to draw breath as the scene seemed to revolve slowly around me. I counted seven bodies, all household servants, all butchered horribly. The broad stairway to the second floor, the stairway where I had first seen Cylla touch herself, was a dried river of blood. I made a mighty effort and succeeded in flexing my fingers, which gripped my sword hilt so tightly that they were in pain, and then I moved toward the stairs, looking down to place my feet carefully, trying to ignore the charnel-house around me.

There was another young woman lying at the top of the stairs. She had been almost completely decapitated and it was her blood that drenched the steps. Cylla's bedchamber lay along the passage to my right, Dom's to my left.

I went to Dom's room first, turning the handle cautiously and pushing the door open with my foot. It swung back slowly, revealing an empty chamber, clean and miraculously free of blood.

It seemed to take me an age to retrace my steps, past the dead girl at the stair head and along to Cylla's room, where I found the door wide open. An open window faced the door directly and I saw the curtains stirring sluggishly, too heavy with dried blood to flap in the strengthening breeze from outside. I stepped inside and vomited immediately, my whole being revolted at the sight that greeted me.

Cylla and someone — I presumed her young deaf-mute — had been destroyed on the bed, hacked and slashed almost beyond recognition, and their dismembered bodies piled together in a heap. In my first glance I saw severed arms and legs, a gutted male torso, and Cylla's head, wide-eyed and screaming, her lustrous hair glued to her skull with blood and her lips drawn back from her bloodied teeth in a rictus of terrified realization of what was happening to her. All of that I saw, and then I threw up, bending over with my hands upon my knees, my sword still gripped bone-tight. Reeling with nausea, and fearing I might fall into the blood, I staggered backward, groping behind me for something to support my weight, and I found Dom. My hand touched his face, warm and alive, and I recoiled with a scream of fright, my sword arm swinging high to strike my assailant down.

But I did not strike. For I saw his eyes immediately, then his face, and then his condition. He was wedged almost upright, hunched over, his knees almost giving way, in a corner behind the door, and he was dying. His left hand hung by a flap of skin from its wrist, where he had chopped it off, and most of his life's blood was already gone. His eyes were ghastly in the whiteness of his face, but they seemed clear and lucid. He knew me. We remained there, immobile as statuary, for what seemed like a very long time before I lowered my sword. Dom's own sword, a fine, sharp one that I had made for him, lay by his feet. When I moved, so, too, did he, gesturing with that grotesquely flopping hand towards the bed and its horrid burden. The movement brought a feeble jet of blood spurting in my direction and I remembered another handless arm that had saved my life in battle long ago, allowing me to be crippled rather than killed.

"Cylla..." His voice was little more than a wheeze of sound. "She mocked me, Publius..." I remained motionless and he went on. "Railed at me... Laughter... Struck me ... Tried to kill me." His eyes looked towards the bed and back to me. "Said everybody knew, Publius... everybody knew... servants ... friends... all knew. Did..." He sagged, then drew his head back with a great effort, fixing me with rapidly glazing eyes. "Did you...?" His strength gave out and he fell to his knees before me like a supplicant. Then his eyes rolled back into his head and he pitched forward on his face. I did not bend to feel for a pulse. Dom was dead and the better for it.

I can remember walking from that house in a state of absolute calm, picking my way with care to avoid the blood as much as possible. I crossed the courtyard to the gate where my horse stood waiting for me, far enough removed from the smell of blood to be unaware of it but sidling nervously, nevertheless. The first, heavy raindrops fell and turned into a downpour as I squatted on my heels against the wall outside that dreadful place. And in my mind I saw nothing of the slaughterhouse, only my good friend Dom looking at me with his incomplete question: "Did you... ?"

We found a gibbering, hysterical survivor in the cellars, a woman who had managed to escape with only a minor slash wound. She told us of Dom's rampage, of how he cried only "Did you know?" before he cut down each living soul he met, and, when he could find no more to kill, ran screaming from the villa.

We burned the Villa Titens and all that it contained, removed its stones and ploughed the ashes under, leaving no sign of its existence in our lands.

It did not occur to me until long afterward that Cylla could not have been in the forest glade that afternoon.