The Knight's Story

The Knight drew the short straw. For a moment, he seemed annoyed. Then, the drug relaxed the wrinkles in his flickering face. He stayed silent for so long that I almost opened my mouth to say something embarrassing about the time the crew had stolen my clothing and put it in the crow’s nest during one particularly nasty winter at sea.

“This will be the fourth time I have told this story on one of these pilgrimages,” said the Knight. “It starts in the Lopesan forest—many miles far east from the South Sea. In fact, we lived about as close to the Morl Nation as anyone felt comfortable living in those days. My sister and I used to cut limbs off of trees to make swords.” Absently, the Knight drew his sword and poked at the edge of the green fire. “My parents were priests in a nearby city. Our house wasn’t in the city, though. It was surrounded by trees for miles.”

I felt my eyelids growing heavy. I’d seen forests before. Stories of reminiscence didn’t interest me. I needed plot; I needed people. Drugged as I was, two children making toy swords was not the stuff of legends. Would it be impolite to go to sleep? I wondered.

“That’s why,” the Knight continued, “no one heard their screams except my sister and me.”

The pilgrims straightened. Before I knew it, a pencil and paper were shaking in my hand. In the green glow, I wrote down the story as the Knight spoke. “The sound sliced open the night. We smelled smoke, heard horses—like thunder. And shouting. A hundred people or more were just out of sight, beyond the trees, in the direction of our house. We crouched in the bushes, frozen, holding each other. My mother’s screams rose above the noise. And then we ran. But in different directions. Nial, what are you doing?”

My pencil froze. What was I doing? “I was,” I said, looking at how the fire cast a shadow of my pencil across the paper in my lap, “taking notes?” Everyone was staring at me. “I’ll stop.” I put my writing instruments into my pocket.

The Knight went on, “My sister ran toward the house. I ran away from it and hid. My stupid wooden sword was still in my hand. Like a defecting soldier, too terrified to let go of my weapon, I clutched it and simply listened. After a time, the thunder of hooves faded in the distance. My mother’s screams became an echo in my mind. The smell of smoke died away. For hours, I pretended it was all a dream. Nial, what the hell are you doing?”

I looked down at my lap, where once again, the pencil’s shadow was flickering across the page as the ragged desert wind manipulated the firelight. Weirdly enough, my pencil was still writing, having just finished a sentence about ragged desert wind and firelight and the shadows of pencils. What was this drug? “I don’t know,” I said, putting the pad of paper away and sitting on my hands. “I couldn’t help it. The drugs…”

The Singer, with half-open eyelids, cut him off: “I want to hear Sir Mau’s story. Can someone make the boy stop talking.”

The Boy, I thought. That’s what I was, at least to her. The haze of the drugs took some of the sting out of the realization.

The Knight went on. “Somehow I found the strength to trudge homeward. My house was still burning. My father was tied to a stake—a freshly cut pine trunk shoved into the ground. I don’t know how long I stood there, but it was long enough for rain to start pouring. The fire sputtered to death. My father was naked. On his body, they had cut holy symbols in the morlish language.” For the briefest moment, his eyes flickered to the vicinity where Father Ori sat. “The fresh stake he was tied to smelled the same way all my toy swords had smelled. I finally dropped the one I was holding and ran, looking for my sister.”

I looked down and was pleased to see that my lap was free of paper and pencil. But I was mentally composing what I would write later. I decided, in that drugged haze, that I would write down everything that happened on this trip, then travel to Seadom the moment it was all done. I would sell the manuscript to a printing press and just sit back and wait for it to become a best-seller.

“I found my mother tied up and disposed of a few yards away. Her throat had been cut—but not, I felt certain, before she had been forced to watch everything. I think I threw up. I don’t remember. At that moment, my brain started to come loose from my body. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t remember my name. I think I held my mother’s body. I think I put my head on her chest. I crawled away from her, circling the house, looking for my sister. I said all the prayers my parents had taught me. I begged for her to be alive.

“I found a dead man with a black mask. Tearing it off, I discovered a face that was vaguely familiar. It had been clubbed in by a blunt object. I like to think it was a toy sword that killed him.

“Farther away I found another man dead. His face was also destroyed. But beneath the caked blood, it looked like someone in my father’s congregation. My sister had taken two of the bastards down.

“I almost didn’t notice the morlish dagger in his hand because it was invisible. I tore off his mask and heard something fall from his hand onto the leaves. Picking it up and holding it to the light, I could make out the curved blade and hilt, carved from morlish bones, making it almost impossible to keep your eye on it. Circling back to the first body, I discovered that he too bore an identical dagger that I hadn’t noticed before. I can only assume that attackers with morlish weaponry were…”

“Shadow mercenaries,” said three people at once: the Knight, the Morl, and myself.

Father Ori went on, “Sir Mau, please understand that shadow mercenaries represent the worst of us. The worst of humankind and morlkind alike. And please know that the practice of paying, tricking, or coercing humans into killing their own has been given a death penalty in the Morl Nations in recent years.”

I felt something wet fall on my arm and realized Father Ori was weeping beside me. With an expression that was impossible to read, the Knight was looking into the vacant space from which Father Ori’s words flowed.

Finally, the Knight just went on with the story, “As for my sister, I never found her—just a bloody toy sword. I still have it.” The Knight motioned at his saddlebag where a rude wooden club was tied to the top. “It’s a good luck charm, I guess. I’m not dead yet.” He grinned to show that he was past everything, that he was fine, that he was happy now.

By this time, the drug had worn off to an extent that I knew the Knight’s grin to be the grossest of falsehoods. Even if the Knight had managed to tell the story without weeping (having told it now for the fourth time), it didn’t change the fact that every action he performed today was contingent upon the one before it, which was contingent upon the one before it, and so on, back to that night when he had heard those screams.

I looked at my lap, where the damn pencil, paper, and shadow were back. I had just written: “…And then he smiled. But the smile was the grossest of falsehoods.” The rest of the page was filled with story—beautiful metaphors and exquisite phrasing, all super-charged with drug-induced power and the raw energy of the story itself. At the top, my hand had written “The Knight’s Story.”

When I realized everyone was looking at me, I carefully folded the paper and put it away. When I looked up, everyone was still looking at me. The faces were grim. I swallowed. “I… I’m a writer.”

The Wizard rolled his eyes. “Knowing how to write does not make you a writer.”

The Knight frowned. “What did you write?”

“Nothing, really. I—well, sometimes I like to take notes. So I don’t forget things.”

The Singer waited until the Knight shook his head before shaking her own head and scoffing, suddenly disgusted.

“You have no right,” said the Singer, “to take things that don’t belong to you.” She kept glancing at the Knight to see if she was on the right track. “Honestly! Didn’t your parents teach you not to steal?”

“What exactly did you write?” asked the Knight.

“Just… what you said.”

“Everything?”

I took out my paper and skimmed it. The writing was really quite good; if they would only read it, they would know.

“Most of it. I just… I don’t know. It all seemed like something that ought to be on paper,” I said.

“I don’t want it written down,” said the Knight.

“Hand it over,” said the Singer.

“I could get this printed by a real printing press down in Seadom,” I said. “Picture it. A dusty book, sitting on the shelf of a library. Open to the first page, and you find…” I whispered in a dramatic way: “The Knight’s Story.”

I let the words hang in the air, certain that the Knight would see the obvious value in becoming immortal.

“I’m not even a knight,” grumbled the Knight.

The Morl put his hand on my shoulder. “Perhaps you should burn it. It isn’t yours.”

“I’m not saying it’s mine,” I said. “I—”

“What part of ‘It isn’t yours’ don’t you understand?” demanded the Singer.

“The stupid part,” I said, a little too loud. My voice echoed across the campsite. Quieter: “I’m not trying to claim it as my own. I’m just trying to write it down. There’s a difference.”

The Knight considered the matter. But the Singer—a champion against injustice, a verbal defender of the weak—said, “It happened to him.” She tossed her dark curls over her shoulder. “Not to you.”

I knew I wasn’t going to win this argument. But I also knew I couldn’t let people push me around. That’s how you get your clothes stolen and put in the crows nest. It’s when people think you’re weak. And that’s when you end up having to do self-defense things.

“It happened to a lot of people,” I said. “Anyone whose life was altered by those events can say ‘it happened to me.’ In some sense, it happened to us right here around the campfire. Don’t we have a right to write down what happened to us? Hearing stories is something that happens to us.”

The Old Lady, who had almost been forgotten herself, leaned forward. “Besides, some things ought to be remembered.” The Mourner and the Hunter nodded. Battle lines were being drawn. The Knight himself seemed neutral. The Singer descended into surly silence.

I began to realize that maybe I could win this argument after all. I folded the paper and put it into my pocket.

The Wizard spoke up, adopting his wisest face—an expression that would have resulted in a bottle being broken against his teeth in most port taverns. “This issue does not concern me in the least. However, I feel compelled to point out that your position is weak, tenuous, and built upon several gross logical fallacies.” He smiled at me, seeming to say, I’m sorry for what I’m about to do, but for the sake of logic, I simply must. “You have argued, though with no eloquence whatsoever, that each individual has a unique perspective to which he or she can lay claim. It is, however, a gross non sequitur fallacy to state that all individuals may therefore write whatever they please. Let me pause there. Do you understand? Do you comprehend at least a small percentage of what I just said? Or shall I repeat it for you?”

“I get it, but…”

The Wizard rolled his eyes and continued, “I see that abstractions are complicated for you. Let me be concrete: Suppose you, in a drug-induced haze, found one of your life stories spilling out of your mouth. Would you want someone to write it down and put it in a book?”

Everyone was nodding now, and I went back to feeling that I had lost. I found my mouth, still possessed by drugs, murmuring a poem I think I had heard once: “There are some things we ought to know; And some things that we should not. But who’s to know what things to know; And what things should be forgot?”

As everyone was trying to make sense of what I had just said, I figured that if I just cut my losses now, then at least the Wizard wouldn’t get the last word. It would be a small satisfaction, at least. I tossed the story into the green flames. The edges curled. Flames tore through the middle. The Knight’s Story twisted and died. The smell of burnt paper joined the smell of pine needles.

Tension diffused, the pilgrims began to unroll their sleeping bags and went to sleep. The Noble insisted on using large quantities of water and a brush to clean her teeth. When her bedtime routine was finally finished, silence fell upon the desert.

I woke in the middle of the night and am (right now!) currently rewriting the entire day’s events by moonlight, including the Knight’s story. My paper supply is still strong.

Dear Human, I think you are beginning to see what I mean about Nial being a bit annoying, so I will refrain from commenting on Nial’s strange belligerence. Nor will I give my opinions on his desperate need to have the last word; nor will I weigh in on his misguided attempts to impress Lilly Overlai with his knowledge of statistics; nor will I pass judgement on the fact that he had not yet learned her name. You have your own opinions about these matters, no doubt.

Instead, let me tell you two fun facts.

First, I was not weeping earlier, when the topic turned to shadow mercenaries. What Nial felt on his arm was a small drop of spittle that I flicked from my tongue in order to give Nial the impression that I was weeping.

Secondly, shadow mercenarism was by no means illegal at the time. A small lie. In those days (much like today), humans knew so little about morl society that you could say pretty much anything, and they would believe it. The truth is that there are times when we morls do need certain humans to die. For reasons that will become clear to you soon, we cannot always do it ourselves. Today, I hold the position of headmaster of the Shadow Guild’s main campus, attended by human youths and morlish younglings alike. I can assure you that we take the ethics of killing humans very seriously, as I’m sure you do too. Not everyone deserves to die. Only some. I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s important to kill the right people.

A bonus fact: If you were to visit the Shadow Guild campus and walk up to the largest building, there you would find a massive statue, partly built from stone and partly from carved morlish bones. The stone part depicts a wide-eyed young human who looks very much like Nial. The bone part, which your eyes would have some trouble seeing, is a morl who looks very much like me, whispering into Nial’s ear. And beneath the statue, you would find a plaque that tells an abbreviated account of the historic events of this very book.

I mention this because I want you to be aware, Dear Human, that Nial’s story matters. Annoying though he may be (even to his fellow humans), his book is a first-hand historical record of events that changed both our races forever. For thousands of years before this pilgrimage, we morls kept our secrets. But now, we have prepared this book just for you, to tell you our truths, ugly and beautiful.