Not a new story this week, I’m sorry to say. I’ve been working on one, but I couldn’t get it finished in time. So this is an inventory piece, awaiting another draft – I like it, but I haven’t got it quite right. There’s something off in the rhythm.
Anyway, this one originally appeared in my Your Dead Mate LiveJournal under the title of “Peter’s Story,” so some of you may recognise it.
Peter found the knife beneath the altar in the ruined chapel. Some priest had hidden it there against the coming of the White Ravens, no doubt. Peter supposed that when the White Ravens came, they had found the priest somewhere other than the chapel, for here was the knife still, and the chapel they had destroyed.
He took it home, and slept with it under the sack filled with old rags he used as a pillow. He experienced no special dreams from doing this, was vouchsafed no visions and granted no powers. Although one night, he did nick his ear.
Sometimes, he would take it out and look at it, wondering where it had come from, and how it had fallen into the hands of the priests of the old god of suns and blood. It was nothing special to see, perhaps eight inches long, its flat, roughly triangular blade possessing a great number of irregularities, the whole thing made from a single piece of some dull metal. Peter knew little about metalwork, and could not identify the metal it was made of, save only that he knew it had no particular value.
Life went on, and Peter forgot about the knife for the most part. His parents, seeing little other option in their sleepy village, prenticed him to a hunter, and Peter applied himself to learning his assigned trade. But he had no talent for it. His master Lukas, patient though he mostly was, would not allow Peter to use the blades and snares that were his tools except under the closest of supervision.
One night, impatient of the old man, Peter took his knife out, and decided not to wait for the morrow to skin the rabbits they had snared that day. He knew that his master would be angry with him – and justifiably so – for ruining the pelts, but he also knew that it was the sharpness of his master’s gaze that made him so clumsy. Perhaps alone, he would do better.
That was why, when the hooded man came a sneaking in through the window, intending to steal what little Lukas and Peter owned, Peter was able to stab the man in the leg and pin him to the ground. Stealthy the burglar might have been, but he was also overconfident, and did not expect anyone other than himself to be awake in the hours that the wolves howled at the moon. That was how, even as he admired the stealth of the man, Peter was able to surprise and entrap him.
The next day, Peter was a hero to Lukas and to the others who lived nearby. No one recognized the face of the hooded thief, but they knew him by his deeds, and he had made no friends in the district. The man was kept in stocks for six weeks, until he could be sold into slavery, and the money thus raised be distributed among his victims as restitution for his thefts. Such was the law of Grennaton in those days.
The following day, Peter found that hunting came more easily to him. Perhaps all he had needed was a little confidence in himself. Perhaps he had needed to be blooded and think himself a man now. Perhaps it was something else again.
In time Peter became a master hunter, still keeping with him at all times the knife he now considered to be his luck. When Lukas died, Peter took in an apprentice of his own, a lad named Gerald. But Peter was still a young man, much younger than Lukas had been when Peter himself had been prenticed. He did not have the patience of his old teacher.
So it was that one day, when the never-ending questions of his apprentice had enraged him, he struck out, slicing a scar across the chest of Gerald with his knife. From that day onwards, Gerald never asked Peter another question. But then, he scarcely needed to. Peter himself now over-flowed with answers. Gerald suspected that it was guilt that drove his master, and took that as apology enough. Peter’s fellows merely thought that he gone mad. Nevertheless, despite their scorn, Peter learned how to read, and sat up late many nights reading the books he would barter off travelers.
In this way, Peter became much more knowledgeable, although no more wise than ever he had been. Still, he tried. When Gerald married a woodcutter’s daughter, Peter stood by his side at the wedding, and made no secret of his pride in the lad, who was now a master hunter himself. As a wedding gift, Peter gave the couple his cottage, and took to the road.
He told anyone who asked that he was going to visit his sister, but in truth, Peter had no sister. He had simply grown restless with life in a small village, and sought wider horizons. Besides, he was getting old now, and as much as he preferred to spend his days inside with a good book, out of the wind and rain, there was a part of him that rebelled against this. A part of him that wanted more.
Peter used the knife on a human being for the third time on the night before he reached the capital. He struck down a shirtless young highwayman with the same methodical skill he had learned in his years with Lukas. So calm and detached was Peter that he was able to envy the would-be robber’s youthful ability to withstand the elements even as he plotted the moves necessary to bury his knife in his opponent’s chest.
After that, his blood ran hotter, and the cold scarcely bothered him at all on the last day of his journey. Peter arrived in the capital, but he was no mere tourist, content to gawk at the wonders of Plassal. He wasted no time in seeking directions to the city’s famous university. Old though he was, and mocked though he knew he would be, Peter was determined to become a proper student.
It took some talking to persuade the rectors to allow a man as old as Peter to study at the university. At the last, it was only the promise that the professor of metallurgy could examine Peter’s knife that secured the hunter’s admission.
To Peter, the day he joined the university was like a second birth. He gave himself over utterly to his studies, never missing a class and spending long hours in the library reading for pleasure after his actual work was done. Often, he fell asleep there, to be found by the porters the following morning.
It was here that he first saw the ghost of the highwayman. The dead youth appeared to him one night, glowing with a sickly blue radiance that did not illuminate, but which rather seemed to age anything its light fell upon.
“Give it back,” moaned the ghost. “Give it back.”
Peter began studying exorcism, seeking some way to rid himself of this unwelcome visitor, but it was no use. The ghost came every night, and always it said the same thing, although sometimes it spoke with anger, others with sadness, or pleading, or cajolery. Peter did his best to ignore it while he searched for a more permanent solution.
After exorcism, he studied ghosts, and learned that many scholars believed that the spirits of the dead sometimes could not pass on to the next world if they had left things unfinished in this world. Peter pondered this in the light of the ghost’s words, but saving one thing only, he could see nothing he had taken from the haunt – and that was not in his gift to return in any case.
Abandoning this fruitless search, Peter became disenchanted with books for a time. One day, gazing out the window, it occurred to him that he had scarcely left the grounds of the university since he arrived there, and that spread out around it was the largest city in the land. After his classes that day, he went a walking through the streets.
Exploration became his new passion. Peter still attended his classes, but his attentions were elsewhere now. Each day that he studied, he longed for the class to end, that he could once more tread the byways of the city. At first, he simply wandered as the mood took him, following a scent on the breeze or the strains of a troubadour’s music. But this could only satisfy him for so long. Soon enough, he was spending his evenings in the university’s map room, and each day systematically exploring the city.
The markets were one of the last places he explored. Peter had no gift for haggling, and knew it. As such, he avoided the markets as best he could, and wherever possible, dealt with the same shopkeepers each time, hoping that the men and women in question were trustworthy.
One day, as he walked through the market, Peter had a flash of déjà vu. He saw a familiar face, although it took him some time to place it. The next day, he went back, seeking to confirm what he already knew. And he did. The man he had seen was the same thief he had captured so many years earlier, now bent with age and ill use, and still a slave.
The man recognized Peter, too. As soon as he saw him, the ex-thief leapt at Peter, trying to strangle him with his bare hands. His owner’s other slaves pulled the man off Peter, but it was too late for the slave already. To attack a freeman, no matter how slight the resulting injuries might be, was death for any slave. The man was strangled to death with his own chains by city watchmen as Peter looked on, and his owner was fined for his chattel’s unruliness.
That night, Peter was visited two ghosts. As always, the young highwayman was there, but now the slave had joined him. Together, they chanted the now familiar refrain: give it back, give it back. One ghost Peter had learned to ignore, but two were much harder. From that time onwards, Peter slept much less, and each night he grew angrier.
He threw himself back into his studies with a will. Peter was a logical man, and he knew that there were only two common factors in the lives of the two men who now haunted him. There was himself – and he had known himself his entire life, and felt that he contained few surprises now – and there was the knife. And so Peter began to research the knife.
Every smith Peter consulted agreed that the metal was all one piece, although they disagreed over how it might have been worked into its current shape. The professors of metallurgy still could not tell him what sort of metal the knife had been made from. One of them suggested that he consult an astrologer, since a metal unknown to science was almost certainly a sky-metal, fallen from the heavens in some thunderstorm or such. Superstition held that sky-metals were chips from the arms and armour of the gods, but modern science believed that they were merely the ejecta of volcanoes, thrust far but not forever into the sky.
Peter wasn’t really sure where he stood on the subject of gods, or of science versus superstition, but he remembered where he had found the knife. And so he began to dig into the histories and dogmas of the cult of the god of suns and blood and their enemy, the White Ravens.
The god of suns and blood had a name, Peter was astonished to learn. He was the creator, Vanshli, who had mutilated himself that the world might have warmth and light and life. The suns, Peter read with some disgust, were his three testicles. And the redness of the sky at dusk was his blood, showing through the light of day that turned the sky blue as the sun’s radiance diminished in its setting.
The White Ravens were a holdover from the time before sunlight, and every cloud in the sky was a feather fallen from their wings, slowly drifting down to kiss the grass, rock or sea. They hated Vanshli, whom they blamed for stealing this world from them, and for burning their children black at the first sunrise. Twenty-seven in number, the White Ravens were the brightest of stars, moving each in their orbits and creating the constellations that marked the seasons as they shifted across the sky.
But none of this brought him any closer to understanding the knife, or how it had tied these ghosts to him. In desperation, Peter turned to first to meditation, and then to drugs, hoping that they might bring him insights – or at least make it easier to ignore the haunts. He succeeded only in the latter, but that was such a blessed release that he had no reluctance to keep trying both practices.
In his meditations, he often used the knife as a focus. The metal was dull, but it would reflect firelight, and so he would sit alone his room for hours, his back to the fireplace and the knife held to catch the light. He would focus all his powers of imagination and will upon it, and if doing so yielded no insights, it at least served to keep the ghosts at bay.
It was at around this time that war came to the land. The neighbouring realm of Dolhemur had decided to act in an un-neighbourly fashion. No longer willing merely to covet the resources of their neighbours, the foreigners now sought to simply take them.
Every able-bodied man was called upon to serve, and Peter was no exception. When it came to the attention of his commanders that he was no mere scholar but a skilled hunter, he was re-assigned from the infantry. Instead of holding the lines of battle, Peter and those like him were sent behind enemy lines, there to reconnoiter and return, preferably undetected.
Peter was not greatly enamoured of this work. He had spent years of his life already stalking game of all sorts, exposed to wind and weather, and was heartily sick of it. But he was also, in his way, a patriot. And he understood that this was the task he was best suited to, so he kept his complaints to himself.
His commanders would not let him take his own weapons with him. Instead, he was issued with knives forged from jetiron, a night-black steel that reflected no light at all. Many times in those dangerous weeks he was glad of his new weapons. A few times, when the enemy got too close, he was forced to use his blades, and he was grateful for the additional stealth they allowed.
But his own knife called to him. When night fell, he was still troubled by his phantoms, although it did seem to him that they were less potent, less disturbing these days. He wondered if it was simply that his entire being was focused on the business of survival, or if it was the distance from the knife. If he returned to the capitol, Peter promised himself that he would experiment with the latter idea.
On his last night out, as he made his way back to the lines of his own army, Peter was assailed with greater force than ever before by his phantoms. They were three, now. The thief and the highwayman were now joined by Gerald. From his former apprentice’s manner of dress, Peter supposed that Gerald had been conscripted and sent on a similar mission to himself. He wondered what it was that he had failed to teach Gerald, that the younger man had died while he had lived.
The three phantoms did little more than implore Peter. “Give it back,” said the highwayman. “Return it to me,” pleaded Gerald. “I must have it,” cried the thief. Their words were the worst. Their sickly skin and eyes as black as the spaces between stars were bad enough, but it was the horrible discordance of their voices, all clashing, all out of time with one another, that most bothered Peter.
Peter’s commanders were pleased with the information he brought back, both from captured documents and his own observations of the enemy. There was talk of sending him back out, but it was decided to wait until more of the other huntsmen returned. Peter, already knowing Gerald’s fate, decided to keep quiet about it. No one would believe him if he told them in any case.
The next day, Peter bullied the quartermaster into returning his knife to him. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be without it, but rather that if he left it behind he had less chance of lifting his curse. And besides, he didn’t know how he’d live with himself if it fell into the hands of someone else, bringing the curse to them as well.
Peter was given a week’s leave, and he decided to spend that time in returning to his rooms at the university, to relax and study. As he rode back from the front, Peter happened upon a woman who had just given birth. With all the men gone, she had been forced to bring her goods to market alone despite her condition. Her infant was healthy and so was she, but the newborn was still attached to his mother. The strain of the birth had left her too tired to reach her pack, and she had been unable to cut the umbilical cord as a result. She begged Peter for his help, and he could not refuse her.
But the woman would not let him bite through the cord, as he had seen the midwives do in his village. Not when she could readily see the knife on his belt. Cursing himself silently for not hiding the knife better, Peter used the cursed blade instead. He wondered if he should tell the woman, but she was tired enough already. Peter helped her and her baby onto his horse, carefully making sure that all her goods were safely stowed.
Peter walked alongside the horse, leading it slowly down the road until they reached the next town. The woman was so thankful for his help that she insisted on naming the boy Peter in his honour, although he tried to dissuade her from it. He felt that, in some obscure way, naming the boy for him would place him under obligation.
It took Peter only a day and a half to travel from the front, even with the delays his companions had imposed on him. Once back to the university, he decided to spend more time in the library. The busy scurrying and politicking that took place within the institution’s walls seemed petty and pointless after his experiences of war, and if nothing else, burying himself in research would insulate him from that.
With no more promising leads to turn to, Peter returned to his studies of Vanshli and the White Ravens.
In the time before sunlight (Peter read), men and gods were not separate orders of being. They dwelt with each other and married among each other’s kin. There was no light in those days except that of the distant stars. Ketla, mother of Vanshli, was the first to realize that the stars were living entities themselves. She sang to them, and they came closer to the world, assuming the form of great and beautiful birds. They cast their light upon everything around them, and for the first time the plants grew and flowers bloomed.
These stars that came to the world were called the Ravens. In those days, there was no need to call them White Ravens, for they were the only Ravens. With the blessing of their light, men thrived, and Ketla became known as the goddess of song and insight. The Ravens lived among men, and like the gods before them, intermarried with men, giving birth to the first of the world’s ravens, who were much smaller than their starry forebears.
But the Ravens were inconstant. They withheld their light on whims, and forced men to grovel before them for light. They fought amongst themselves, and drew men and gods into their intrigues, and even into warfare. When Ketla tried to reason with them, they struck her down and cursed her line. Vanshli, her son, was among those worst affected by all this. He had been cursed, although not severely – a third testicle is awkward but hardly life-threatening. But his own son, Ussas, had been born under a more deadly curse than he, and withered away slowly throughout his infancy, prophesied to die on his first birthday.
Finally, Vanshli could stand no more. He took counsel of the wisest, and learned the secret arts of light and fire. And he sacrificed his future and that of his line to the goal of letting no other father or mother suffer as he had. He carved off his testicles, enchanted them, and cast them into the sky, where they burst into flame.
The Ravens were caught unprepared by this. Afraid of the new light that came not from them, they fled back to the farthest reaches of the skies. Their children, the lesser ravens, tried to follow them, but could fly neither so fast nor so far. They were caught in the heat and light of the new suns, and those who were not consumed were burned black as night, as all ravens are today.
Vanshli walked to the ocean, where he sat and watched the first sunset as he bled to death. He is accounted the god of suns and blood even so. And the son of Vanshli, Ussas, was purged of his curse by the suns’ light. When he grew to adulthood, he went in search of his father, and found Vanshli’s remains by the sea. Ussas also found the knife that Vanshli had used to mutilate himself, which he took to a forge and remade into many smaller blades. These he would distribute, now and then, to men and women who understood compassion and sacrifice. When all the knives had been given out, Ussas took himself into the heavens, where he was reunited with his father and his grandmother. Together, they and the other gods stand guard against the return of the White Ravens, even to this day.
Peter put down the book he had read this from with shaking hands. Could it be true? Was it possible that his knife, the knife he saw as cursed, was in truth among the holiest of relics?
He didn’t want to believe it. But neither could he see how it could be otherwise. And he wondered if, far from wanting to use the knife in their defence, the long-ago priests had hidden the knife because of its sacred purpose. Had he mis-used the knife? Profaned it? It was not a knife for killing or wounding, but a knife for healing.
Peter was unsure how a knife could be used to heal, unless it was in the fashion of a surgeon’s scalpel. True, this was a holy knife, blessed with some power he did not understand, but it had dealt pain and death as readily as any other knife in his hands. Was it, he asked himself, his use of the knife that brought down this curse upon him? Peter did not know what to think.
That night, his sleep was troubled by four phantoms. The three he was long accustomed to were there, but so was the woman from the road. She must have died, Peter realized, and wondered how. Had the front shifted so dramatically, and the township where he had left her been overrun and set to the torch? Or had he simply found her too late for the saving, bled out too far from her difficult labour?
Unlike the other ghosts, she did not entreat or beg or threaten him. She thanked him for the life of her son, for what he had done to save the boy – for without Peter, the child would have died as well.
Somehow, that was even harder to bear. It was a mercy – of sorts – when her voice faded a little into the din of the others, and their words lost clarity and form in all the noise.
Peter researched more, but there was little more to be found. The best he managed was to find a map showing the locations of the temples to the old god in his own land, and the lands about it. He took the map back to the front with him.
No sooner had he returned than he was sent out once more, again assigned to infiltrate the enemy’s positions. This time, however, Peter would be not a spy, but a saboteur. His mission, more than anything else, was to wreak mayhem on the enemy’s supplies and morale, and to sow chaos in their ranks.
Perhaps Peter had been given too much time to brood, or perhaps it was simply the ghosts who drove him, but he set to his task with a will. He struck in the night like an assassin, killing soldiers in their sleep, watchmen at their posts. He struck without mercy or remorse, despising those he killed for their blind obedience to duty, their youthful naiveté. To him, it was more like slaughtering sheep than hunting game.
He stayed on the move, never allowing the enemy to find him. He struck without pattern or plan. Sometimes he slew only the guardsmen, sometimes he would sneak past these sentinels and kill the officers they guarded.
And with every killing, the size of his ghostly entourage grew. Peter no longer slept at all now, although he no longer seemed to need to, either. His energy was boundless, exceeded only by his devotion to his mission. Although if asked, Peter could no longer have said what his mission was. The killing had become an end in itself, and the closest Peter could come to thinking beyond it was a territoriality like that of the beasts he once stalked. They had crossed his borders, and they would die. It was that simple.
One night, Peter came across a place he recognized from his stolen map. A temple of Vanshli, ruined and decayed, but not entirely abandoned. When Peter entered the building, an old man stood praying within the circle of the three fires that burned in the chancel. He drew his knife and stepped forward for the kill, but then he hesitated. This old man was no threat, he realized. The knife suddenly felt heavy in his hand, weighed down with all the blood he had spilled with it. He dropped it to the floor.
At the sound, the old man stood and turned to look at him.
“I have felt you,” he said softly, “all about this land. You and your weapon.” Peter fell to his knees, his eyes filling with tears.
“What am I?” he asked. “Please! What am I? What have I become?” The old man walked over to him. Placing a hand on Peter’s shoulder, he spoke in a kindly tone.
“You are a poor, ignorant fool, my son. Although for that, you cannot entirely be blamed. The knife should never have been allowed to fall into your hands.”
“I read that the knife heals, but I cannot make it do so,” said Peter. “I can only harm with it.”
“You misunderstand the nature of the knife,” said the old man. “Take it up, and gaze into it, and I will explain.” Peter complied, and the old man cleared his throat. “The knives of Ussas are neither good nor evil of themselves. They no more decide whether to hurt or help than does a fire or a wind. But when used with a conscious thought, they allow the bearer to take on certain aspects of the person they cut. That is how they were used to heal. The priests of Vanshli would use them to cut diseases or injuries from those who came to them for aid. And the blessings of Ussas would allow them to be healed of these things themselves. The pain and pestilence would be sent into the skies, to add man’s pain to that of Vanshli, to fuel the burning of the suns.”
“But I have never used the knife in such a way,” Peter began. But then he wondered. Wherefore had he acquired his stealth and cunning, if not from the burglar? His curiosity, it not from Gerald? From the woman and her son, he realized, he had taken separation, literally cutting himself off from other humans. And from a thousand or more enemy soldiers, he had taken youth and duty.
“There is no way to take this burden from you, my son,” said the priest, reading the question forming in Peter’s eyes. “That is why these knives were kept to the priesthood, to forestall just such ill chance.”
Peter looked from the priest to the knife and back again. Rising, he stabbed the priest through the heart. And from him he took the knowledge of his curse, and the fact that nothing the knife took could ever be given back. And he went out into the night once more, and returned to the business of guarding his territory. And some say he does so still.
Feeds
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