The Knight's Dog

Part III.

THE DOG WAS GONE when he woke in the morning, the horse dead. The rider was still dead, his face and body now covered in a layer of frost that sparkled in the morning sunlight. Dern wiped the frost away from the dead man’s shield and inhaled sharply at what he saw. The shield bore an insignia of an eight-pointed golden star at the peak of a violet mountaintop. Dern didn’t recognize the insignia itself, but he knew well enough that the star was the symbol of Zolon, the father of the gods. The great helm Dern had pulled from the man’s head in the night also bore the star of Zolon, he saw, embossed on the crest and plated with gold leaf. A knight of old. Dern shrugged off the fur cloak and apologized to the corpse for having taken it. He’d never seen a true knight before. Garamund had told him many a tale, but….

Up the road, some twenty feet from where the man had collapsed, Dern found the knight’s long sword. It stood four feet in length and had an ornate hilt with an amethyst embedded in the pommel and a gold plated cross-guard embossed with eight-pointed stars. Dried blood filled the fuller running down the center of the blade. Whoever had shot him up with arrows had tasted his metal.

Dern began digging. He used his axe to loosen the frozen ground in the field beside the road. When the hole was big enough, he dragged the knight into it, pulled the arrows from his chest, replaced the great helm on his head, and placed the cloak over him. He spent the next several hours collecting and placing rocks on top of the dead knight. I protected you from the wolves all night. I’m not about to let them eat you now. When he was done, he placed the shield atop the cairn and thrust the long sword into the ground above it.

It was midday. Dern had still seen no sign of the dog.

He went to the dead horse and rifled through the saddlebags. In them he found a coin purse filled with silver and a few gold crowns, and also a pack of salted beef wrapped in oilcloth. Dern took the purse and meat, along with the saddle blanket, which would be a lot better to sleep on than pine boughs, and trudged wearily back to his camp. There he found that the wolves had gotten into his pack. What little food he had left was gone. What few valuables he owned were destroyed. The carved wooden beads from his mother’s necklace were strewn everywhere; the book Garamund had given him that had fabulous drawings of wizards and knights—even if he couldn’t read the words—was chewed to bits; the bone dagger he’d picked from the pocket of a brown-skinned merchant from the Sun Isles was gone completely; his father’s lucky dice were split open, revealing the lead weights embedded near one side.

Dern gathered together what he could, then sat beside his burned out fire eating the knight’s salted beef. His father, Kyler, found him like that a short time later. He was angry about the dice, but cheered visibly when Dern told him about the knight and the silver. “We’ll be sleeping in the finest inns for the winter, lad,” he said as he hefted the coin purse up in the air with a hoot. “Now let’s see this knight.”

Dern led him to the cairn and his father promptly yanked the sword from the ground. “We’ll get good coin for the jewel in this handle.”

“No,” Dern told him. “Put it back.”

His father looked at him as if he was mad. “What did you say?”

“I said, put it back. We’ve already got his coin. A dead man’s got no use for that, I’ll grant you, but leave his sword and shield. Leave him his honor. He’s a knight.”

“Piss off! I’ll take his sword, shield, and whatever else I want. Was he wearing any jewelry?”

“Look at his shield,” Dern pleaded. “It’s the star of Zolon. We’ll have the wrath of the gods upon us if we steal his sword.”

“The gods can go forn themselves. You pay more heed to Garamond’s fool stories than you do me.”  Kyler tossed the shield aside and began pulling stones from the cairn.

“No!” Dern yelled, pushing his father harder than he intended to and knocking him to the ground. His actions surprised even himself and his first instinct was to apologize, but no, he was done backing down, he decided.

Kyler rose slowly to his feet and brushed the dirt from his hands. “So it’s come to this, has it?”

“I’m a man now. Nearly fifteen. It’s about time I had some say in what we do. You never listen to me.”

Kyler struck him across the face with a closed fist, knocking him to the ground. “The day I start listening to you is the day you say something smart, the day you quit believing children’s tales and stop telling me you won’t steal from ladies.”

Dern wiped the tears from his eyes and the blood from his nose. “If you’d listened to me, we wouldn’t have been chased out of Wheatston and stuck hiding in all these small villages and the forest. I told you it was mad to rob—”

Kyler heaved a stone from the cairn into Dern’s chest, cutting him short. When Dern regained his breath and opened his eyes his father was pulling more stones from the knight’s cairn. Dern growled and rushed him. The both of them tumbled to the ground. Dern found his father’s fingers in his mouth and bit down hard, but in turn received a knee in the stomach that knocked the wind out of him again. He spun away and jumped to his feet only to see his father grab up the knight’s sword.

“I’ll kill you,” Kyler fumed, coming at him.

“No, you can’t,” Dern sputtered, stepping away and glancing about to find his pack and wood axe. “You’re my father. Nothing is more cursed than a kin slayer.”

“I’m no more your father than any other of the hundred men to stick your mom’s sweet cunny.”

“My mother said—”

“Your mother was a drunk whore. She gave you to me for a bottle of honey wine. Never even asked why I wanted you.”

“Liar!” Dern yelled, sidestepping towards his pack and grabbing up his axe. “You’re my father whether you like it or not.”

Kyler kept coming towards him with a smirk on his face. “Unless you were born from you mother’s arse, there’s no way—”

Dern rushed him, swinging his axe with all his might. Kyler’s sword swooped up to meet the attack.

What am I doing?

The collision knocked the axe from Dern’s grip and left his hand and arm numb. Before he could react, Kyler’s forearm was smashing him in the face and he toppled backward to the ground. He opened his eyes to see Kyler raise the knight’s sword above his head. Dern thrust out his arms to protect himself, but the blow never came—the dog was there suddenly, flying through the air and knocking Kyler over. Kyler screamed once, but then the dog got a hold of his throat and the brief struggle ended with a wet gargling noise.