The Barghest Knight 1: The Dullahan's Head

Chapter 1: Ashes and Embers

The pebbles, as they called them, were in fact chunks of brick and shattered blocks from what was once the well. They landed with a thunk on the roof's overhang, sometimes grazing the young boy's shoulder as they arced overhead. He kept his face pressed against the charred wood and hands firmly crossed over the back of his head. He mingled his shaking, dusty fingers into his pitch coloured locks and tried imagining he was back in his mother's lap. It was better than this place, anywhere was. Yet when he attempted to sink into the comforting dream he would be violently ripped out by another hunk of stone gliding over his head.

"Fucken hell, I'm getting right tired of this. These pebbles are too heavy. Let's leave the little grot up there, tell Lord Whatshisface he's dead anyway." One of the men who was throwing things at him, a rotund man with one leather glove and a cloth cap, suggested to his fellow. He crouched down, with some measure of effort, and grabbed the halberd he had set down earlier. The blood on it was fresh, but quickly turning brown as the sun rose.

For a moment, the little boy dared to hope. He glanced upwards, light grey eyes catching the morning light and briefly turning into mercury. He parted dry lips with a tongue that felt like sandpaper and attempted to moisten them. He wanted to let out a soft whimper as a patch of dry skin was ripped, but knew he couldn't. Any signs of life would renew their interest in him, and the rain of masonry would turn from a light drizzle to a merciless shower.

There had been more men earlier. They had come with horses and hounds and howling carnage, turning his village into rubble with the strange orbs they called bombs. When the first volley had been tossed he had thought they were small cages containing blazing demons, a patch of hungry fire sprouting wherever they landed. But the flames were only a side effect of these bombs. Those metallic contraptions made the earth thunder and rock like the blood drunk dance of a mad titan, sending roofs high into the air and flattening walls into dust. The little boy was thankful they didn't have any more of those, he would take pebbles over them any day.

Emboldened by the hope of the men giving up on their task, he tried peering through a nearby hole in the roof. It was difficult to see, a faint trail of the grey death called smoke leaking out of the opening. But through squinted eyes he could see his mother and father, unmoving. His throat tightened.

His father was sprawled out on top of his mother, the edges of the hole in his back crusted with brown blood. His head was pressed against the ash covered ground, but his mother was staring right up at him. Through the smoke it seemed that her parted lips, dry blood staining her wooden teeth, were silently repeating her last words. "Don't look back, and stay silent." He should have followed that first order, he wouldn't disobey the second.

"Bollocks to that. He said, and I do quote, "for every peasant left alive you'll lose a finger." You wanna risk that? Can't hold a weapon with no sodding fingers." The second man, thin as a starving dog, with pouty lips, contended. He wore a surcoat with a coat of arms over the breast, a red bear against a wall of white. It stood on its hind legs with an opened maw. "We stay here and make sure he's dead."

The young boy could hear them arguing. He wiped the ghosts of tears from his eyes. He had no more to cry with. Though the Gods knew how much he wanted to.

"But we've been here hours! And he's been up there huffing smoke just as long, little shit has to be dead now. Besides, I'm sure one of me pebbles got him earlier." The man with the cloth cap shot back, easing himself down onto the remains of a low stone fence. "Nailed him right between the eyes." He raised two fingers and tapped the space between his eyes. "I heard his little skull crack and everything."

While they quarreled it came to the small boy how good a chance this was to escape. He forced himself to look away from the bodies that were once his parents and shuffled across the smoking remains of the roof. He dragged himself along on his stomach, like a snake on a tree branch. He had to get away before the rain of rubble started again.