The Ravens of Falkenau & Other Stories Read online

  The Ravens of Falkenau

  & Other Stories

  By Jo Graham

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Copyright 2011 by Jo Graham

  Cover art by Wanda Lybarger

  "Don't the great tales ever end?"

  "No, they never end as tales, but the people in them come and go when their part's ended."

  — J.R.R. Tolkien

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  CONTENTS

  Author's Introduction

  The Ravens of Falkenau

  Dion Ex Machina

  Cold Frontier

  Small Victories

  How the Lady of Cats Came to Nagada

  Prince Over the Water

  Horus Indwelling

  Paradise

  Slave of the World

  Little Cat

  Vesuvius

  Unfinished Business

  The Messenger's Tale

  Morning Star

  Templar Treasure

  Winter's Child

  Brunnhilde in the Fire

  The world is a numinous place, for those who have eyes to see it.

  Welcome to the Numinous World, where gods and angels intervene in the lives of mortals, and a band of eternal companions unite and reunite over the centuries, striving to make the world a better place despite wars and dark ages, hatred and cruelty. Here are stories from the very beginning of our history, when the Lady of Cats entered the life of a young woman and changed her forever, long ago when farmers first scraped a living from the soil. Here too are stories of the ancient world — of Dion, the peerless scientist of Alexandria, of Lucia, a Roman waif, of a Persian princess and her Jewish sister in law, of Lydias of Miletus who is once and always Ptolemy's man, and of a Nubian girl who begins a long journey toward a strange destiny. There are stories of the Dark Ages, of a last Roman outpost on the shores of Britain and of an Arab warrior who at last comes home to a white city on the sea, of a Scottish witch who serves the Storm Queen and fears no other magic, and a Knight Templar enslaved by the beauty of the world. Others follow — a messenger boy dragged into the Great Story and a desperate ride dogged by the Wild Hunt, and a mercenary captain of the Thirty Years War who finds his destiny in a remote corner of the Bohemian mountains. Here too are more modern tales of the Age of Revolution, when Dion, Emrys, Sigismund and Charmian reunite in Napoleonic Paris, and at last we roll into the twentieth century with a young American girl with extraordinary oracular powers. Of course there is also Michael, Mik-el, Mikhael, who watches over his charges as best he may, though the world may change around them.

  These are tiny windows into a miraculous world, glimpses through a glass and darkly of all that might be — for those with eyes to see. I hope you enjoy the journey!

  The Ravens of Falkenau

  1614-1634 AD

  This is one of the oldest stories in the Numinous World, in the sense of having been begun first. I started it in 1995 when I was working at an exceedingly boring temp job. I couldn't put anything personal on their computers, so it was written in longhand on a yellow legal pad and then finished more than fifteen years later. In many ways Georg is the darkest version of our main character. It has been a long time since Black Ships, and the road has not been kind.

  I was seventeen when I first came to Falkenau, in the Year of Our Lord 1614, the second year of the old Emperor Matthias, the last king before the wars of religion began. I was young and unemployed, another hopeful boy pursuing the trade of arms unsuccessfully, hoping to make enough in bounty and plunder to live well before I died.

  Falkenau was a medieval fortress high in the mountains, situated on a crag swept about on three sides by a river now frozen and pale with a dusting of snow that rested on the ice. There was a village as well, not large, with the usual steep, muddy streets with goats everywhere, and the Church of the Virgin beneath its pitched roof and mushroom dome.

  In the summer I'm sure it was all very pretty, but in January it was nothing but cold. We would not have come to Falkenau at all, my companions and I, if the Prince of Anhalt-Bernberg hadn't discharged us in September without even a bonus, and by January money was running out. Rumor had it in the coffeehouses of Prague, which were much warmer and more pleasant, but much less profitable, that the old lord of Falkenau was looking for armsmen, but by the time we got there he had already finished hiring everyone he wanted.

  I was ready to leave again, but Marik advised against it.

  "Just sit still, boy," he said, putting one hand on my shoulder as we negotiated our way back down the steep road that led to the castle. "Have a little patience."

  "I'd have more patience if I had more kroner," I replied. The sack at my belt was nearly empty.

  "Some of those bastards he hired won't work out," Marik said. "Just watch and see. In a week he'll have to turn out four or five for drunkenness and then we'll move into their positions. It's a matter of being in the right place at the right time."

  I shrugged. "I'm never in the right place at the right time." Beneath me the frozen trickle of water looked blue against the stones, and the valley was encased in snow. I'd sold my horse seven weeks before.

  Marik seized my sleeve and pulled me back from the edge, from the leap I hadn't really thought about making. "You will be, son. You've good eyes, good health, a good mind and a way with horses. If you don't do something stupid you'll see thirty."

  I shrugged. "And so? What then? I wind up too old to fight with a mess of scars to prove it, broke as I am now, with what to show for it?"

  Marik gave me a hard look beneath his bushy brows. "So what did you leave home for?"

  "Nothing to leave," I said. I would not talk about that. Ever. "I went to win my fortune," I said.

  On that day in the spring two years before, Captain Sylvester Von Boren was hiring, set up at the best inn in town, a mug of hot wine at his elbow, the lace on his cuffs dripping down over his hands. I joined in the line of ragged plowboys, university students, and grizzled middle aged men snaking its way toward the long table where the celebrated captain sat, resplendent in buff and scarlet, captured Mongol gold spread out before him for an inducement, with a young priest at his elbow to write in a fair hand the names of those joining the company, their skills, pay and terms. As each man stepped up the captain had a word with him, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes only for a second or two. The grizzled veterans he sent to his right, to the priest, with no hesitation. The others fared less well. Most shuffled away, disgruntled. Only a few took the priest's quill in hand to make their mark next to their name and sign their life away for ten gold kroner, a knife and pick, and a full suit of clothes.

  I noted, hopefully, that most only make an X. I could at least write my name. So could the university students. The plowboys never got a chance. I was acutely aware of the ten pounds of aged metal strapped to my side, a heavy iron sword I bought off old man Gottfried when I left home, who had used it in the last century. It was a pr
etension to gentility.

  At last it was my turn. The captain's blue eyes flicked up and down me once, taking in my faded brown coat, my scraggling attempt at a dashing moustache. "Your name, boy?"

  "Georg," I managed, trying to make my voice come out deep and manly instead of the pleasant tenor I'm cursed with.

  The captain sighed wearily. "Georg what?"

  I thought of the cobbler's house I had grown up in, the refuse in the street, the hens picking in the gutter. High above the town I was born in, Marianburg Fortress reared its head, with strong walls and the little chapel that was older than the Son of God, Corinthian columns about the statue of the Virgin.

  "Von Marianburg," I said, straightening my back. "Georg Von Marianburg."

  There was a glimmer of interest in the captain's eyes. "What can you do, Georg Von Marianburg?"

  I swallowed. "I have a strong back and I'm good with horses. I can fight and I have shot a musket and I can write my name as well."

  "Can you use that chunk of metal you're wearing?" rumbled a blond, bearded man behind the captain, the company's Second, a Dane named Shorty who wasn't.

  I swallowed again. "Yes," I said.

  The Dane snorted. "Hardly worth the trouble, Captain."

  Von Boren shrugged and reached for his mug.

  "Wait!" I said, desperate not to be turned away as so many had been. "I'll fight for my place."

  The captain looked up, startled.

  "To first blood," I amended. "Any man you choose. It's my risk. But if I put up a good showing you'll make a place for me."

  The Dane chuckled.

  "Done," the captain said, rising to his feet. "It was near time to take a break from so much sitting. This will at least prove entertaining. Shorty, will you take him?"

  The Second gestured to his beautiful blue velvet doublet. "Me? I've small desire to spoil my new clothes with blood and sweat, even if it be another's. Let Lukan do it." He gestured to a smaller man of indeterminate nationality who grinned at me with two black teeth between gray lips.

  "Out in the yard, then," the captain said, walking around the table, his suede boots making no sound on the floor.

  We went out into the stone courtyard of the inn, a bit of the crowd following us, hooting derisively. I pretended I could not hear them, and truthfully I really could not, seized as I was by a curious sense of unreality. I could get killed here, I thought. That would be a useless end to a useless existence. There was no one in the world besides myself it would matter to. I could not believe that it would matter to God.

  Lukan tossed his coat to a friend of his who stood by. I had no friend, so I kept mine on.

  With a grin, Lukan unsheathed his sword. It was lighter than mine, but longer, Italian in design, with a swept hilt. I hoped he wouldn't kill me.

  He raised the blade in ironic salute, then stepped forward, the blade whistling past my eyes as I stepped back.

  Then I went absolutely cold.

  I swung at him with all my strength, connecting with his blade with a shock and a ringing sound like bells, flailing at him like a battering ram. His blade was faster, his responses much cleaner. I did not see or think, only reacted, as though my entire self were concentrated in my hand instead of my head, as though this was a dance I had known all my life.

  I could not hear the crowd. All I could hear was the whistle of his blade, and the sound as it connected with the pommel of my sword, wrenching it from my hand and sending it clattering across the cobblestones.

  "Hold!" the captain said.

  I stopped, my breath loud in my ears.

  Lukan lowered his blade. "This boy flails around like he's threshing wheat," he said.

  "Like he's got a damned broadsword," the Dane muttered.

  I felt something moving against my chin and brushed it away, surprised to see my hand come away bloody.

  Lukan stepped across the distance between us. "I got you with the tip on my first attack. You didn't even feel it." He handed me a linen square from his pocket. It took me a moment to realize it was a handkerchief.

  "Where do you come from, boy?" the Dane asked.

  I dabbed cautiously at the cut on my chin, which still didn't hurt. "My father was in the service of the King of Saxony," I replied. "He was killed fighting the Tartars in Wallachia." Which was all entirely untrue, as my father was a cobbler and died when I was six.

  The Dane raised skeptical eyebrows. "And then? You fell on hard times?"

  I looked down at my shabby peasant clothes and tried to stand straighter, as befitted a young nobleman bereft of everything in the world but his name and his pride. "Very hard, sir."

  The Captain frowned. "Have you no family to object to your taking a position as a common soldier?"

  "None, sir." I did not have to lie about that. "My mother died recently. I have no other family."

  Lukan looked at the Dane and shrugged. Shorty raised an eyebrow. I held my breath.

  "Oh very well," the captain said. "Father, read him in and pay him. Shorty, you'll have to do something about that sword. He thinks it's the Goddamned Crusades. Read him in and pay him off." The captain turned and strode away.

  That is how I joined Von Boren's company, when I was just short of sixteen. I know this, because it was March then, and I was born under the sign of the Bull in the fullness of spring in the year 1596.

  That summer we fought for one of the Lusatian princes in his quarrel with his brother-in-law. I learned to fire a musket propped on a tripod, to disassemble it, clean it, and coat it with warm oil, to keep powder dry and match alight. I could hit the target better than some, but also worse than some, not that anyone hit often with those hideously inaccurate guns.

  That fall we were paid in full, quartered decently, and in the spring we sacked Cottbus for the Margrave of Brandenburg. I won a horse there, which I could ride, and also killed two civilians, which made me sick, though not too sick to take their gold.

  I was seventeen then, a man grown. I would never be large, as few of us Bavarians are, but my beard came in dark and glossy and covered the scar on my chin. I killed a Swede in a tavern fight in Prague after the captain was killed and the Duke turned us off, so it was all for the best that Marik and I, and three other men of the company, went up to Falkenau.

  That night we made merry in the best inn in town, while the townsmen watched us suspiciously, as out of work mercenaries don't have a reputation for keeping the peace. Outside the snow was falling soundlessly. All you could see of the fortress were some distant lights on the crag.

  Marik, of course, had found someone he knew who was in the Old Lord's employ and was offering him good wine by the fire and pumping him for information.

  I sat staring idly out the front window, warming my hands around my cup and wondering why the barmaid was both unfriendly and a hag, listening to Marik and the guardsman with half an ear.

  "Old days!" the guardsman said, lifting his cup, Marik following suit.

  "Old days! Things aren't like they used to be!"

  "No, indeed." The guardsman drank. "Everything goes from bad to worse."

  "Does it?" Marik said. "I thought you had it good, with a nice permanent post at arms for a lord with money to spend."

  "Not so much money as that," the guardsman said, and drank again. "And not much mood for spending it."

  "Oh?" Marik asked, refilling his cup. "Why's that?"

  "He lost his lady wife scarce a sevenday ago. Childbed. Poor woman threw five sons in a row, and not one of them saw his first birthday. Now she's had a girl and died of it. The Lord's like to lose his mind."

  "A hard thing. Hard thing," Marik sympathized.

  I took another long drink, waiting for the familiar feeling of the world tilting in good red wine.

  The garrulous guardsman continued. "Most likely this babe will die, same as the others. Then he'll have no heir."

  "No heir's the same as a girl child," Marik said.

  "It's said she's a sickly thing," the guardsma
n said sadly.

  The swirling snow made shapes out of wind. There were lights in the high towers of the fortress.

  Somewhere up there the Lord in his comfortable rooms lost his wife in winter, and the last of his line lay near death, a sickly babe in a cradle lined in velvet.

  "Death," I said softly, and toasted the distant lights in the snow.

  It was nineteen years before I came back to Falkenau.

  I took service with the King of Poland to hold back the Tartars, and spent four years fighting up and down Silesia for his gold and a long scar on my sword arm. I learned to ride like a Pole, which is to say as if I'd been born on horseback, and decided to live no other way unless necessity forced me. I loved a girl in Warsaw who played me false, and I went away to war again.

  In Prague the young King of Bohemia, Frederick, and his Protestant English bride took on the might of the Holy Roman Emperor, and angry townsmen threw the Pope's men out the windows of the hall. I served Frederick and his bride, Elizabeth, the Winter Queen, with a joy I saw no reason for. It was right to me, and fair that her name was Elizabeth, and she was beleaguered and alone, but she was no tactician. In the end they fled, and Marik died in their last battle, covering the Queen's retreat, and I had had enough of queens.

  I won a blackened Italian rapier off a corpse in Brandenburg, and a fine Andalusian horse from the Palatine cavalry. I loved a girl in Ulm, left her with child, returned and found her dead, and I had had enough of women.

  The Protestant princes allied against the Holy Roman Emperor, and the King of Sweden joined them. I had a company now, all cavalry, in buff and black. I wore French lace at my cuffs now, and sat in inns deciding who should live and who should die.

  We joined the Catholic army when Gustavus Adolphus, the King of Sweden, landed. I could care less whose God won.