A Country Life

CHAPTER 1 - THE WATCHER

"If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind us."

Coleridge, 1831

Hidden behind the dark mass of overgrown hedgerow the assassin was little more than a grey shadow. Crouched low, he moved quietly and carefully so as to not give himself away. The hooded cloak he wore was travel-worn, stained and crumpled, its folds hiding his features but failing to hide the fact that the man beneath it was huge and powerfully built. Even so, he moved like a cat - lithe and graceful. In the early dawn half-light, the frost-kissed fields and the castle beyond were insubstantial, dismal shapes. They made a mournful backdrop to the murder that was about to take place. Every few seconds the assassin paused and peered through gaps between branches and leaves of the hedgerow to check where his target was. At the far corner of the field was a break in the hedgerow, where an old wooden gate lay askew on its hinges and the ground was churned up and muddy from the passage of farm animals. The assassin quickened his pace, intent on being the first to reach the gap.

Through his telescope, the watcher could see both the assassin and his target. He would once again be witness to the death of another human being; the independent verifier of yet another sanctioned murder in a war that almost everyone alive thought had ended over two centuries before. Or, more likely perhaps, weren't even aware that a war had happened in the first place. He watched, idly wondering, like he always did, who this particular person was, and why he was so important to his superiors so far away from where the war was still being fought. If indeed that particular war was still happening. Perhaps calling it a war was too grand a title, thought the watcher as he adjusted his position to get a little more comfortable. Skirmish was perhaps the better word. A skirmish that had been raging for more than two decades. It had been a long time since anyone had told him how that battle was going. Maybe it was over now? Perhaps not. If it was over, they wouldn't need him to watch.

The target was not clear enough for the assassin to see clearly, hidden as he was behind the dense leaves and branches of the hedgerow, but in a few seconds, he would be close enough to the gap to place him in line of sight. Whoever it was, the target showed no sign of being alert to danger. A man dressed in dark green roughspun cloth and a thick brown cloak with the hood pulled over his head, a long stick held in his right hand to compensate for a limp. He was strolling across the middle of the field towards the gap in the hedge, with no cover anywhere less than a hundred feet in any direction. He would be an easy kill.

The assassin reached the break in the hedge where the fence lay askew. From beneath his cloak he pulled out a sleek, delicate looking crossbow, then hunkered down, waiting. And the target suddenly came to a halt. The watcher held his breath.

What had caused the target to stop? The man seemed unsure of something - maybe the assassin had made a noise, or he'd seen movement through the hedge. He didn't run, or call out. Instead, he reached up with his left hand, and lowered his hood, staring hard towards the gap in the hedge. Through his eyepiece, the watcher saw for the first time who the man the assassin had been sent to kill was, and gasped.

*

All these years, the events the watcher had been tasked with being witness had only ever involved people he knew to be enemies of the state. Some he knew by sight, others he only guessed must have been threats to the cause. Never before had the target been someone he'd once called a friend.

The watcher had been following the assassin for hundreds of days now. From the moment the assassin had set out, it had been the task of the watcher to track him, and report back to his masters any developments that may be of interest. The watcher did not know the name of the assassin, nor whose side he was on even, but that did not matter; the watcher did only what he was told, and never had he found any reason to question the motives of his masters. Hundreds of days - and many thousands of miles. The watcher had been there when the assassin departed, waiting for him to appear and begin his journey to wherever it would take him, and to whatever ends it was for. Twice he had almost lost him. Once, during a sandstorm that had blown for five days straight, during which time the assassin had not bothered to find shelter and wait it out as one might expect, nor taken the obvious route to safety, but had instead struck off across a barren and featureless desert, emerging from the dust many miles to the south of where the watcher had focussed his attention, and he had almost missed him. The second time had been in the teeming streets and alleys of old Boston city, where tracking the assassin had been much harder; hidden inside buildings for long periods of time, or mingling with crowds of people in markets or dockside trading posts. It had been two days with no sight of the assassin before the watcher had realised the obvious, and another two days before he identified which ship the assassin had boarded. All he needed do then was look for the ship each day, note its course and speed, and check it was where he expected it to be the next day. For the watcher, this was the easiest part - even more so than when the assassin was crossing the desert wastes where he was the only living human for hundreds of miles in any direction.

Once the ship closed land, the watcher had increased his watch schedule, not wanting to risk losing the assassin again should he enter one of the more populated ports that dotted the south coast of the archipelago the ship was approaching. The watcher had the resources - if he so chose to make use of them - to follow the assassin almost continually, but that came with huge risks, and he had never in all his years as a watcher had to invoke such dangerous measures, so instead he relied on his being able to find and observe the assassin with his own eyes when conditions were right. And as luck would have it, the watcher had a good view, just as the assassin appeared to have found his target.

The watcher had performed many Watches. In his time, he had followed hundreds of men and women across several continents, and seen things both monstrous and unfathomable, yet always the faces of those he watched had been anonymous and unfamiliar. His masters chose who he should watch, and for how long, and often it appeared to be for no clear reason why he should be prying on the lives of people who's life by turns seemed dull, or full of strife, or occasionally bizarre and deranged. Sometimes those watches had ended with his observing a death; usually violent, and always tragic. Mostly the Watches ended because he had been told there was no need to watch any more, but never in all those years had he seen someone he knew - until now.

The watcher did not want to see this man to come to harm. Years ago, he had been a colleague. A friend. A comrade-in-arms. They had both worked together to make a difference in this battered and ravaged world. But that was before the break, when it became impossible to tell who was on which side; when resources and options became so limited that only drastic and irrevocable courses of action were all that were left. The watcher had chosen the side he thought the least abhorrent, and in the chaos and turmoil those few people he had liked and admired enough to call friends had become separated and lost. The watcher had assumed, like many of the others he had known, that this man was long dead.

The watcher could intervene, but it would mean giving himself away, and that would be against his explicit instructions – to watch, report, but to not do anything that would endanger his being discovered, under any circumstances. In any case, the watcher was unsure where his superior's loyalties lay. It wasn't the watchers place to question the instructions of his superiors. However, that didn't stop the watcher from forming his own opinions about those he watched, and he was certain in his own mind that the hunted man; a man he had worked with for many years, was still a good person.

*

The watcher had to decide if he would intervene now, or let fate take its chances. Had his superiors known the target of the assassin? Would they have told him if they did? If so, then by intervening, the watcher would be working against his own side, potentially jeopardising all they had worked for over the last decade. But what if they didn't know? What if the assassin was, as he suspected, working for the other side? Would his interfering be wished for, or approved of? There was no time to check. He had to choose.

In the end though, there was only one choice to make. The risk of discovery was too great. He would have to watch the assassin kill his old friend. The watcher looked closely, unable - and unwilling - to look away.

The sudden halt in his old friend's stride across the field seemed to have given the assassin pause. Like the assassin, the watcher was sure that nothing could be seen, so why had the target stopped? Neither moved for two seconds. Then, both men moved simultaneously, the target turning around and running away as fast as he could, the assassin stepping into the gap and aiming the crossbow. The assassin pulled the trigger. The target stumbled and fell.

The watcher let out a small sound of distress, but had no time to consider his grief, for within a second of firing the crossbow, the assassin was himself dead. And what caused that death made the watcher sit back in shock, wondering how, and why, his old friend had been in company with such an ancient, and long ago outlawed, creature. 

The watcher filed his report to his superiors, his mind full of doubt and concern as to whether he was doing right by not reporting everything he had been witness to.