Chapter 5 #2
Something crashed into me and sent me sprawling.
I swung the hatchet and connected; it bounced, and I felt something go wrong with my arm.
Not to worry, I had a spare. I switched the hatchet to my left hand and took another swipe, which missed.
I plunged forward and slammed into something very hard, dropping the hatchet.
I put my arms around whatever it was and pushed against it, like a man trying to push over an oak tree.
It pushed back and forced me backwards, until I felt the wall behind me. Oh well, I thought.
There was something digging into my back. If I hadn’t known better, I could’ve sworn I was being shoved up against a rope. What was a rope doing in a corridor?
Like it mattered. I managed to get my left leg up so that my foot was braced against him, and I pushed as hard as I could.
No effect, except to lift my other foot off the ground.
Now there’s a thought, I said to myself.
I let go with my hands, shoved again and scrabbled for something to hold on to.
What my hands connected with felt like rock, hard and stone cold: two beams, or arms, horizontal, exactly what I needed.
I squeezed myself upwards, like a man climbing a wellshaft, and got my right foot on one of the beams. They shifted as I did so; I toppled backwards, banged my head on the wall, thinking, Why is there a rope in a corridor?
I remembered someone telling me something about a bell-tower.
You can hope faster than you can think, under certain circumstances. A bell-tower, and a rope. Put it another way, a third dimension in a hitherto two-dimensional fight. Me for some of that.
I let go with my hands and flailed about over my head, eventually connecting with the rope.
I got my hands around it and pulled, expecting to hear a chime.
Nothing – and the rope didn’t give. Unimportant.
I kicked hard with both legs, then brought my feet together where I desperately hoped the rope was.
I found it, third or fourth attempt. I was in business. I started to climb.
When I was fourteen, second year in the order, I was on a roster for whose turn it was to shin up a rope into the bell-tower and unlock the bells for ringing.
When not in use, the headstock (the wooden beam from which the bell hangs) was locked solid with a bolt, to keep the bells from swaying about and clanging if a sharp draught happened to come down the tower.
I hated that particular job and did my best to swap bell-tower duty for some other chore with my fellow novices, but after a while I got used to it.
There was, of course, a perfectly good stair up to the bell-chamber, but it was kept locked in case anyone went up it. Monastic logic.
Hooray for monastic logic, because it saved my life.
I felt the rope shake as he grabbed it and tried to pull the rope down, with me still climbing it.
Bell-ropes are pretty substantial things, made to the same specifications as ships’ hawsers, but it wouldn’t last long with him tugging at it.
I went up the rest of the rope like a topmast hand on a freighter, and found the headstock with the top of my head.
One last push from the knees; I wrapped my arms round the headstock beam, got my leg over, and fell sideways onto the solid floor of the bell-chamber.
At which point, he must have given the rope another almighty tug, because I heard the headstock beam splinter and snap, and then the loudest noise I’ve ever heard in my life.
Walkers are smart but parochial; we don’t have bells or bell-towers in the Mesoge. How was he to know, therefore, that if he pulled hard enough to break the headstock, the bell would come crashing down right on top of him?
I wanted to stay where I was, preferably for the rest of my life. But I knew that time was of the essence.
I found the stairs and scampered down them, arriving at the same time as six guards and a lantern.
There was the bell, at an angle and cracked diagonally in two.
The leading sharp edge of one of the two pieces was buried in a body, entering it where the shoulder meets the neck.
I’m no expert, but at a guess I’d say it was slightly bigger than the biggest bell at the monastery when I was a kid, and that one weighed a ton and a half.
“Keep back,” I yelled at the guards. “It’s still alive.”
Poor bastards, they were paralysed with terror. I grabbed a halberd from one of them, then took a proper look.
His skin was the colour of bruises: swollen, plump-looking, like a ripe berry.
He had no hair, fingernails or toenails.
At a guess, I’d say he was a whisker under eight feet tall, though it’s hard to tell when a body is slumped down.
I could see three deep dents in his forehead, presumably where I’d hit him with the hatchet, but the skin was unbroken.
There was no blood seeping out where the broken bell had cut into him.
As I approached, he turned his head just a little and smiled at me. Long time, no see.
It’s not true that you can’t cut a walker’s skin.
It’s just very, very difficult. I swung the halberd with everything I’d got, but the shaft snapped and the blade went flying against the wall, bounced off and landed scarily close to my feet.
“Give me another,” I yelled. Nobody moved, so I took a step back and grabbed one, not daring to break eye contact with those two pale, watery blue eyes.
He was grinning. This time, I got smart and aimed for the point where the bell had already cut the skin.
I think I may have mentioned that I’m pretty strong. It was like when you try and split a log but you miss the shake, where the grain runs, and hit crossgrain, and the axe just sinks in a quarter of an inch or so. It was only a little cut, but it was a cut.
“Don’t just stand there, for fuck’s sake,” I howled at the guards. “Help me.”
So we set to, like four strikers hammering a bloom of iron on an anvil. It took us a very long time, but we managed it. Just before the head came off, he looked at me. It was sheer contempt.
I hadn’t noticed, but there was now quite a crowd of people jamming up the corridor.
That was no good. We had to carry the body, and the head, down the stairs and out into the cloister garden.
Then we’d need firewood, lots of it, and a couple of gallons of lamp oil, and buckets and shovels.
I found a man who looked like an officer and told him what had to be done.
I think he was too stunned to argue. Quickly, I told him, we really don’t have much time.
How long? I don’t know, I said, just not very long, that’s all.
It took twelve men to lift the body and three to carry the head.
They had to take the lower door off its hinges to get the shoulders through.
There were ever so many people around now, getting in the way.
I’m afraid I was neither patient nor respectful.
I may have raised my voice. In any event, we got the body out onto the grass of the cloister garden, and I think they smashed up some pews and a couple of doors for wood, until I reckoned we’d got enough.
Nobody seemed to know where the lamp oil was kept, but someone suggested using brandy instead.
There was a barrel of it in the archdeacon’s buttery.
So we used that, and it worked reasonably well.
We kept feeding the fire with charcoal and brandy, to make sure every last bit of solid matter was turned into grey ash.
Then they scooped up the ashes, making sure they got every last crumb, and put them in a barrel, and sealed the lid down good and tight.
I explained what had to be done. Would the river do?
someone asked. No, I said, it’s got to be the sea. Nobody argued, which was just as well.
Someone – I think he was in charge of something, but I neither knew nor cared – came bustling up demanding an explanation.
I was too tired, and everything hurt, so I told him to piss off.
The officer who’d been running the show got between him and me and ran interference for me, which was lucky, or I’d probably have thumped somebody.
They opened the main gate and brought in a cart and put the barrel on it.
I suppose I should’ve gone with them, seen the barrel loaded on the ship, seen it rowed out into the middle of the bay and the ashes scattered, but by then I’d had enough.
I limped away and nobody tried to stop me.
I met her in the cloister. She looked at me. “What the hell happened to you?” she said.
“I won,” I told her.
“What do you mean, you—?”
“I killed it. Excuse me, please, I need to go and lie down.”
She went with me back to the More Joy. I couldn’t make it up the ladder to the hayloft, so she helped me lie down in an empty stall. “I thought you said they couldn’t be killed,” she said.
“That’s right, they can’t.”
“But you just—”
“Killed it for now. Look, would you please go away? I need to close my eyes for five minutes.”
No chance of that. Someone must’ve recognised me, because it wasn’t long before a bunch of men showed up, soldiers and clerks and officials and Vitimer, archbishop of Stachel and de facto chairman of the council following the death of the princess.
They wanted to ask me questions, and swearing at them didn’t make them go away.
So I told them everything they needed to know, except for one pertinent fact, and eventually they ran out of questions and left me in peace, on condition that I presented myself in front of the council at the start of the next session for further questioning. Whatever, I said, and away they went.
When they’d gone, I called her over. She kneeled down beside me. “What?” she said.
“One thing I didn’t tell them.”
She looked at me. She was scared. “Go on.”
“I knew him.”