The Band departs on their journey in August dusk, riding down the streets of a great grand walled city named Dullwater to a parade of sight and sound at a time when any other day not even a dog would dare bark. They ride on the backs of great horses with hooves marking grooves and echoes across the narrow alleys and winding streets, all the jingling and jumping of their provisions, stores, armors, and their great portable arsenal drowned out by the sounds of firework rockets banging off in the street. Children, man, and woman alike cheer in vague patriotism, all cast under a rising sun of bloody crimson far in the west. It is in that direction and towards that pie eyed red sun that the contingent of five rides, where out past the gates of this great and awful grand city of stone and brick they will be greeted with a cruel expanse which knows not their names and cares not to learn them.
Those five names are not of noble nomenclature or high standing, rather those of farmers, urchins, orphans plucked from the streets and rendered through years of training in dull autumn and searing summer into perfect instruments of The King and Kingdom. Those instruments serve to diplomatize, to peacekeep, to enforce law, but primarily and above all else to kill. Their hands and guns are quicker than their young minds at none a day older than eighteen, and said hands are more than eager to perform the task at which they are so well trained. But for now those hands are stayed, and it is out towards the dirty and cheering faces of gaptooth and ragged dress that The Knights look, waving their hands and turning their bodies dressed in fresh riding clothes out towards the masses and smiling their most diplomatic smiles.
Their horses bray towards the frenzies and are stayed, dogs of ragged fur and blind eye run beneath and around their hooves, children run up to The Knights sides and stick out hands in which are flowers of all bloom and shade. Jesse Black takes a fancy to a darling rose of scarlet and tucks it in his hair of almost a shade to match, smiling across his tawny freckled farmboys face to the pale eyed child who provided him the decoration.
“Why, thank ye. I’ll make sure to keep it safe.” Jesse says, and the children giggle. The spectacle of electric lights and stampeding animals and peoples is almost too much to bear for the young knight, and he finds with a strange dread that he has to resist the draw of the two pistols slung across his waist in their holsters waiting to be drawn and called upon. He looks to his fellow knights and sees on their faces similar looks of constrained overwhelm as they parade through the streets. They clop through mud of fresh rain and swarms of flies, past the blind eyes of beggars and the yellowing smiles of pimps and gaudily dressed whores, past exhibitonists and merchants of all colors and creeds as they wind from the aristocratic high streets and down, down to the poorest and most run down backwaters of this damned city they have called home for nigh their entire lives. Up comes the gate open and guarded by two pig faced and ruddy skinned guards, and then they are at home no longer. The threshold is marked by improbable growths of indigo roses out of the mud and tincan detritus, all askew and peering up at The Band like some oracles truth seeing eyes. Those eyes see there on the young and fresh faces only damnation.
Out on the dusty road of fresh countryside the great and extravagant parade refuses to die kindly but instead tapers and sputters out, faces of farm folk families and drifting merchants all alike dressed in fine church clothes giving way to plain old hillbillies and red necked drifters dressed in rags and gawking at the passing of the five young men like it is some sort of grotesque at a carnival. When they are past any citizen of anything approaching good standing or distant relation to it, Jesse turns to his fellow knights. There he sees the faces of his comrades already beaded with sweat and tired of eye.
“That ought to be worse than the journey itself.” A fellow named Sunny Miller says. He is tall and wry, of straw colored hair and dark eyes. His seemingly fixed cheshire's grin already making an appearance as the cocks just begin to crow now, singing their mournful sign from behind the rows of corn and cotton and the seclusion of their farmhouse roosts.
“I’d reckon so.” Says Duncan Briar simply. His shadow is by far the largest of the fives, the kid behind it a massive ox of a young man with spine long as an oaks and shoulders broad enough to match, skin a dark black and carved across it the long and pale scars of a childhood spent in the gutter alley roughs of Dullwater. He puts one hand gently on the nuzzle of his horse, a draft special bred as to carry his bulk of nearly six and a half feet, hair of pure white striking contrast like the squares of a chessboard with its master.
Jesse only spits off into the cornrows. The sun rises from vermillion to the hot and oppressive gold of August, casting the willows of the country in its yellow light and seeming to silence even the cicadas with its presence. The Knights quickly fetch their riding hats of fitted black leather and put them atop their heads to shield from the sun, carrying on that way until noon and making perhaps fifteen miles on the morning. They stop then to lunch under the shade of some fluttering and clearly imported cherry tree, pink petals hovering down onto the knights sweat rung hair as they set forth their picnic cloth and provisions.
“Goddamn near think we doubled our stocks from all that the cityfolk gave us just then.” Sunny says with a whistle, plucking from the horn of his saddle a ridiculous rotisserie chicken stuffed all about with grapes like some gaudy cornucopia. He takes one of the legs and puts it between his teeth, gnawing at it with the lack of etiquette only a born and raised back alley scavenger could muster.
“Let’s not go through it too fast now.” A young and fine faced fellow named Giles LeClerc says. He is milky skinned and blue eyed, of undoubtedly the finest make of the five with his dark hair framing the medlied face of a merchant's son. His dialect a mongrel tongue born from that upbringing, out of place and strangely fair among the bastardized backwater twangs and drawls of his compatriots.
“It'll rot before we get around to eating it.” Jesse says, putting in his mouth a gold colored sweet around which is tied a cloth reading the name of some lady or another as a sort of advertisement. Jesse does not read the cloth, only throws it away with the rest of their litter under the boughs of the cherry tree. He looks among the faces of his fellow, settling on the one face he knows best.
There he sits, the other half of the Black brothers, back against the tree and looking out to the countryside quietly while he eats a slice of watermelon down to the rind. His face is the spitting image of Jesse’s down to the freckle, the same simple country features and those cold gray eyes always seeming to be flitting about to one object or another, never quite resting or sitting still. Both share even the same body, of unremarkable stature, weedy build, and slender hand, the only difference between the two a long white scar running across Morgan’s right cheekbone.
“You farin well?” Jesse asks his brother, grinning when he turns, evidently startled from his trance. Jesse follows his gaze and sees nothing there but a herd of piebald skinned cattle grazing at the weeds.
“Farin just fine.” Morgan says.
“Don't know where this shit was in the castle. Goddamn.” Duncan says as he tosses away the thin and picked off carcass of a quail.
“Hiding it from us so we don't get a taste of the good life.” Sunny says. Jesse looks out to The Road, sees it stretching there a thin line of carved red dirt across the expanse of pastures and bramble grove, disappearing far in the distance over a small carriage bridge.
“You missing home?” Morgan says with an elbow at his brother.
“Damn nearly.”
“We ain't got no home, not for the next couple months. Reckon we’ll be back by.” Giles stops mid speech, scratching at his chin as if doing some advanced calculations to which the others could not even hope to comprehend.
“Shit. Maybe May or so?”
“Ought to get our shooting honed up we can have the whole thing sorted out by April at most I reckon.” Duncan says as he fixes up his white riding shirt and brown leather coat and takes up to his mount. There by the horses at their tie ups are the two pack animals, big and ruddy furred mules named Otis and Tweed, staring at the knights with their dark eyes which always seem to Jesse slightly haunted as if in those beasts minds exist ruminations of some better world than this that can never be reached only by hoof.
“We ought to get going.” Morgan says.
“Well. That's what I was getting at.” Duncan says.
Trotting there under harsh sun, slow but steadily westwards on The Road as it cuts red and serpentine through tall cornrows like tunnel mazes gold and labyrinthian, groves where the shadows of the tree dance blowing in the breeze like biologic windchimes of green and yellow leaf. Casting their shadows long and barbaric across this pristine and open country great and oblique factories, knackeries, plantations of brick and wood and stone looming with great windows like thoughtless industrial eyes, from their long piped chimneys billows of smoke white and black drifting away upon the breeze its faint and acrid stench filling the nostrils of the young knights. Soon even these too give way, leaving only a great and open expanse of blue sky and semi-tamed wilderness roaming upon which flocks of wild deer and hogs look up at the passing humanity with black eyes. All these sights new to the city born knights, only before seen in the dusty and wormbit pages of books and tapestries, as foreign as if they were tableaus of alien life on some far off cosmic body.
Over a simple and squat cobble carriage bridge ricketing and black water rushing under their feet, to a crossroads shaped like an askew x demarquating which a tall and spindly ivory skinned willow on which lay three road signs, two pointing away and one towards.
“Greenrun, one hundred an fifteen miles.” One signs says.
“?” The other sign pointing away says, its original meaning scratched out by some unknown hooligan.
“City folk and whatnot.” Reads the sign pointing back towards Dullwater.
“Smartass folk round these parts, I see.” Sunny says with a spit and a grin.
“To Greenrun we go. No deliberation about it.” Duncan says, pulling on his horse's horn and kicking off, leading them down the northwesterly branch. The Road carves its way through gulley and trench in the thicket forest of birch and willow and hanging kudzu, cutting through the stuff like some unwelcome entity making its last stand in this reddirt land. They pass the wreckages of farmlife and desperado, the still embering camps of harriers and passing trader alike and along the roadside all manner of litter and detritus, occasionally standing there the burnt out, torn out, archaic wreckage of wagon long since raided and looted in their entirety. From the trees as the day begins to grow long the cawing of blackbirds and swifts, faintly in the agricultural wetlands and floodplains the croaking of toads and bullfrogs beginning to chorus across the still summer air. They come at purple sunset grand and lavender-gold like an aristocrats cloaks to the shadow of one of Dullwater’s last satellite vestiges, a faded and graffitied abattoir from which look two massive windows like unstained chapel faces upon the knights. As they set their fire by its perimeter they hear on the wind the squealing of bedding pigs and smell the aroma of pigshit and their gross feed of lard and cornmeal.
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Morgan stokes their fire using his long sword of fine forged steel, prodding over the embers and kindling as the flames begin to raise orange, casting sparks like a miniature chimney into the still night air. The night is still hot and across Jesse’s red brow a fine sweat as he leans against the fence of the abattoir, closing his eyes and listening to the sounds of fresh country freedom. Giles sits on one of the crooked fence posts and sketches under the rising starlight a family of ravens all perched on a defunct telegram wire by the road, seeming almost the perfect subject for a portrait as they roost there with shoulders squared and black eyes peering curiously. Perhaps they are studying Giles themselves, and it is unlikely that they are the stranger of the creatures. Sunny preparing over the rising fire in a cooking apron the stew of his chores, prepared of canned beans, pork, and vegetables from the bulging bags of their mules. Duncan sitting there staring into the fire with his massive dark form casting a hulks shadow behind it and down the road, at that negative forms side the shadows of the other knights all cast as if in some light gone puppet show of country pastorals. Morgan watching them all with his cool gray eyes, from his neck dangling his crucifix of crude wood swinging large and free against his thin chest.
“Damn peaceable night.” Sunny says.
“Yessir.” Duncan says without much interest, still entranced by the rising and falling of the fire. Faintly from behind the long shade of the abattoir a barking of dogs, notable not in its volume but in its franticness. Jesse furrows his brow and pauses as the barking grows louder, the rest of the knights rising as well. Out suddenly like bursting bottle rockets from around the stone edge of the abattoir and through the bramble come three hunting dogs of lean bodice and rushing leg, coming through askew and zig zagging towards the knights at alarming pace. As they grow yards closer by the second Jesse sees frothing from their mouths the thin foam of rabidness.
“They’re rabid.” Giles says calmly, hardly even looking up from his sketch and hurrying along before the birds are scared.
“Watch this now.” Jesse says softly, drawing his dual pistols of single barrel, long black gunmetal and weighted grips of rosewood. He keeps them there at his sides until he can see the whites of the dogs eyes and then he draws the guns up at lightning crack speed, firing with a sound to match and dropping the two backmost dogs in crumples of crimson gore and burnt fur like crimson castaways of some bloodbound origamist infuriated by his own work. The ravens along the wire flutter off in a hurry, five dark shapes spiraling and dervishing up towards the stars with utmost haste, perhaps fearing being slewn themselves. The foremost dog howls as it gets closer not ceasing for a second and is felled when Sunny pulls his pistol calmly from where he prepares his stew, only casting one glance to the creature and not even looking its way when he pulls the trigger and fells the beast. It skids in a cloud of dust right to their campfire where it lays convulsing, its long skull pummeled in and one dark eye peering from shapeless mess of brain matter but not quite dead.
“You didn't get it.” Duncan says, upset. He pulls from his trousers his long and wicked knife nearly a shortsword in length, bringing it down on the dogs jugular and severing its lifeblood in a mute sputtering. He shakes his head and Sunny only shrugs.
“Didn't get much time to aim.” He says. Jesse peers out as he reloads with nimble hands, looking into the shade of the abattoir for signs of any more ferals. Through a waft of acrid and burnt smelling gunsmoke Jesse sees a shape come, not of a dog but of an overalled young boy with straw hat askew on his head. As he comes Jesse raises a hand to his fellows to halt their fire.
“Just a kid.” He says, and the knights put their guns away uneasily. The Boy approaches and gazes from perhaps twenty yards away with big and widened blue eyes, looking upon first the dead dogs and then to the knights as if they are some haunted specters come as omens of death. Jesse gives him a wane smile.
“Those your dogs?” He says gently, leaning over the fence.
“Nah, just some strays.” The Boy says after a pause. He looks not a day over ten, face pale and soft and hair so blonde as to be almost a snow white.
“This your slaughterhouse?” Jesse says.
“Well. Not mine, but my pa’s.” The Boy steps closer and looks among the knight's city faces with curious country boy eyes.
“Say. That was damned good shooting.” The Boy says as he plucks at his tiny buck teeth.
“I’d reckon so.” Sunny says idly, stirring at the stew and tasting it on their long wooden ladle.
“You from the city?” The Boy says.
“That we are.”
“You come a decent way then. What you come out this way for?”
“Business.” Giles says, folding his sketchbook and abandoning the half finished picture of the family of ravens.
“Are you knights?”
“Why, how’d you reckon that?” Sunny asks, grinning after a long and still moment.
“That we are. Got keen eyes you do.” Jesse says.
“Thank ye. My daddy says I'll be a fine shot myself when I'm old enough to tote a gun.” Jesse sits down at the fire and motions The Boy along, him standing there like a shadowy and youthful orphan phantom.
“Yer daddy got a gun?”
“Yer, my daddy got a gun. One of the only in a couple dozen miles.”
“Quite a find to see someone with a gun these days. Does it work?”
“I’d reckon it works as I've seen him shoot it.”
“Ah.” The Boy looks among them with his pale eyes, staring upon their blades and pistols and upon their horses their rifles with a decided awe.
“Geez, I reckon I've never seen this many guns in my life before. Swords neither.”
“Quite a sight ain't it. Chows ready if you boys want some.” Sunny says, and quickly tin bowls are readied and filled with the stew still bubbling and steaming its vegetable scent. He looks upon The Boy and motions towards the stew then back at him.
“You want you some stew?” Sunny says. The Boy looks upon it greedily but shakes his head.
“Nah, I don't reckon I should. Pa said I can’t have me no supper today.”
“And why is that?”
“Cause I was chasing those dogs around all day instead of tending the shoates. Figured I might try to tame them, keep them as pets. Named that one there Redtooth.” The Boy says, pointing to the stuckthroat corpse of the last dog as it lays right outside the campfire.
“Can't tame a rabid dog.” Duncan says matter of factly.
“I know that. Didn't figure they was rabid.” The Boy says cagily. Jesse smiles slightly from behind his stew.
“Well. That's all right then. We ain't your pa, so you can have some stew around us.” Sunny says.
“Nah, I really shouldn't.”
“I insist. City hospitality.”
“Well.”
“You ought to.”
“I guess I will.” Sunny grins his broad grin and hands the boy his stew which he begins to slurp down greedily.
“You’s a good chef, mister.” The Boy says and Sunny nods and waves his hand as if it is some long settled fact.
“I reckon so.” He says.
“I reckon not.” Retorts Giles as he plucks at his own stew distastefully.
“Well, it's a matter of some debate at least, aint it?” Sunny says.
“Less debate than one would care to guess, though I suppose it can only be firmly settled by manner of food poisoning.” Sunny slaps Giles aback the head with the ladle and Giles crouches over grinning with white merchants teeth. Jesse looks upon The Boy as he stares upon the comraderous scene confusedly.
“What's yer name, son?” Jesse says softly over Sunny and Giles’s giggling as they now stand slapping at each other and wrestling with the ladle like some slap stick fools.
“Arthur.” Arthur says. Jesse smiles.
“Arthurs a fine name it is.” The Boy grins childishly seeming genuinely flattered.
“Thank ye. And what of yer name?”
“My names Jesse, and these here are my fellows. Giles, Duncan, Sunny, and Morgan, mind you not their foolery.” Arthur's eyes are especially fixed on Morgan as he works about casting the dogs bodies into the bushes to rots, working diligently and without complement.
“Say, is he yer twin brother?”
“That he is.”
“Shit. That's something.”
“It is, aint it?”
“I’ve never seen a twin and certainly never two before.”
“No, I guess you wouldn’t see too many different folk in a place like this would you?”
“You’d think, but we see all sorts of strange folk while we're working at the abattoir over there. Passerbys of all kinds of odd.”
“How so?”
“Well, they're just as vagrants are. Harriers, hobos, merchants, minstrel men and performers. I've seen all odd sorts. Just yesterday passed by the strangest drifter I've ever seen in my short life.” The Boy says the last line proudly, as if parroting it from some elder source. Likely he had.
“What did he look like?” Jesse says. The rest of the knights now gathered around the fire save Morgan still gathering the dogs, now all watching the boy and crouched over with great and seemingly genuine intentment.
“Well. He was dressed all funny, for one.”
“How so?”
“He wore a long coat and a big broad hat, and the coat was all made up of patches. Real old patches, I mean real old, like he had stitched it together over a hundred years.”
“Some sort of hermit?”
“Not a hermit, I don't think. He wore old and tattered boots all covered with road dust. I tell ye walking men get that dust on their boots and sitting men don't, and hermits are sitting men. So that's why I reckoned him a drifter an not a hermit.”
“Alright. Go on.”
“And he was tall. Not as tall as. What was yer name mister?”
“Duncan.” Says Duncan.
“But still damned tall. Real thin too with long arms, something like a scarecrow as he had his bag slung over his shoulder and in that coat of his.”
“Right. And what did his face look like?”
“Well.” The Boy drawls off.
“Was he real ugly?” Sunny chimes in with a fascinated grin.
“No, not at all. Its just.”
“Why do you pause then?”
“Well, he was real-I don't know, fine looking.”
“Pretty?”
“I mean, I guess so, though he most certain wasn’t a girl. I don’t say that in a faggy way you know.”
“We know.”
“God knows I’m not a faggot.”
“Alright. We believe you.”
“But he was real pretty. Pale face all with freckles, dark hair combed neat and with these green eyes. Green eyes bright almost as a cats.” Jesse looks to his comrades and shrugs slightly, a shiver ringing strange down his spine.
“Alright. We’ll keep an eye out for him.”
That night they sleep sound under a full and cats eye moon hung amongst the electric tapestry of the stars and milky way like some great silver dollar, curled among their thin blankets and with hats tipped over their eyes. As they sleep Jesse is struck by terrible and twisting nightmares, of endless corridor streets zig zagging off into darkness, of blood dripping down walls of pale adobe, of a dark tower standing amidst a field of ash and lightning. He stirs and in his sleep he whimpers, faintly off from the abattoir the pigs sleeping with dreams of matching quality and with snorts much to match the young knights.