The Reluctant Champion

Death

Torches smoked in stone brackets never meant to hold them.

The great hall in the palace of Napesh stood dank and dark and silent, its darkness scarcely relieved by the sputtering torches. Once this hall had sparkled with light and gaiety, but not now. Apparently no one had found it worth the trouble to light the lamps and had instead jammed these greasy torches in wherever they could be made to fit.

One man kept a lone vigil in the night. He paced the hall slowly, shadows growing and shrinking as he passed each torch. If the lack of light bothered him, he did not show it; his chin was sunk on his breast and his pace never varied. The shadows jumped with the flickering of the torches and the movement of the man until the whole place was unquiet with darting shades.

At his side, the object of his contemplation, a table had been pressed into service as a bier. A man lay there, not young but not yet old. His hands were folded over the hilt of his sword and a rich cloth under him gave him state. Another cloth folded from shoulder to waist like a sash hid the ugly gash that had killed him.

Bashanadar ceased his pacing to gaze on his adversary's face. What he found there seemed to give him no peace, for he jerked into motion again, keeping his eyes always on the face of the dead king.

"There you lie, as I lay for so long," he whispered in the sooty darkness. "And will you lie as unquiet as I? And will you drive such a devil's bargain as I drove?"

The face before him gave no answer.

"How is it I feel kinship with you now, when I felt none in life, brother? For you are my brother, though you now walk that cold dark road and I own the halls of your palace."

Silence.

"What kind of people are these of yours? Are they easy to rule? Are they quarrelsome? Are they meek? Will they contest my accession to your throne? I have so much to learn from you. Will you not teach me?"

Silence.

"This is a strange land of yours, brother. The heat and the rain. The mildew. The lizards that run across the ceiling. Your food burns my gut, brother. Better my land of fierce winters and crisp summers. Better my land of open fields and longboats making landfall after a weeks-long journey over the open sea. I shall never see that land again in life—this thing I call life." His voice was suddenly bitter. "Can I call it life, when I am exiled forever from the land of my fathers? Too late to ask."

After a few more turns, he stopped and faced the dead king again.

"I shall marry your daughter, so you will be father and brother both to me. That will make your people happy, and easier to manage." A short, mirthless laugh. "Your daughter was sadly deceived in me, yet I never lied to her. I come from the barrow-lands, I told her. I am descended from those kings. Yes, I come from the barrows. And I am a king, and a descendant of kings. Am I not a clever politician, brother, to so lie without lying?"

Silence greeted this declaration.

"I shall treat you with honor. I promised that, and I will fulfill it. I shall build you a funeral pyre for all to see, piled with your weapons and with costly cloths and your servant to go with you. I charge you to rest quietly and leave life to the living. Learn from me, brother."

Behind him there was a hole in the ceaseless flickering of shadows. A greater shadow seemed to swallow them, shape uncertain, darkness on darkness.

"You grow maudlin." A great, hollow voice seemed to echo in the chamber.

Bashanadar's hand clenched into a fist at his side. "I have known kingship, and I have known death. It is a bond."

"Form your bonds with the living and where they may do some good. Do you wish to draw back?"