Verdigris

Sir Aldus Gilroy lay slain in the muck out in the open field. The field stretched flat and broken under a low grey sky, the grass beaten down to mud, the mud beaten down to something darker, and the dead lay still and unmoving in that dark. Crows worked the far end of the field loudly, picking through the tendons and gore among the bodies, their beaks dripping with the innards of the dead. Nobility or not, knight or common mercenary, the crows ate. Closer in, the flies had already found their way. In death all were of the same worth, at least the crows and the flies and the gods didn’t care.

The rot had already taken Sir Aldus Gilroy. The knight lay flat on his face, drowned, stabbed, and beaten, and his body rested in the shallow mud. His armor, a pale green, bubbled still. An air pocket trapped beneath the fat of the man as he sank into the sludge of earth. The armor he wore would have been quite attractive if it weren’t so beaten and rusted, the pale green would have been a pleasant mint color. Cristoff liked a pistachio or mint green; pistachio always reminded him of his favorite bakery he grew up with in his town. Instead, it was the color of infection, of disease, of illness, and of life passed on. The smell of death and the caved-in helmet deterred any pleasant notion orbiting the man, and the sweet smells of that bakery drowned in the mud alongside that.

It would be some time before the knacker man came to collect Sir Aldus and drag the body onto his cart with the rest of the victims. So Cristoff sat, and attended to his knight’s belongings. Sir Aldus’s overloaded mule stood tied a few yards off, along the decomposing wooden fence that framed the battlefield.

Cristoff was a young squire. He was decent at a few things and shite at most, or so his father had told him often enough that he believed it. His father had sent him to serve Sir Aldus, thinking a knight could knock some usefulness into him. Instead, in the month since he’d begun squiring, Cristoff had learned only that knights spent most of their time drinking and whoring before getting paid to swing a sword in some muddy field. Preferring settling disputes between lords no one had ever heard of, or cared for, for coin.

Take this battle for instance. Before which, he and Sir Aldus had been riding the benches at inns and pubs along the highways, miles from the countryside, keeping to places that let you haggle for a pint or two before they ran you off. Business was business, but the busier inns wouldn’t take knights like Aldus. They knew of his ilk. Cristoff had figured out fast enough that slimy, chivalry-for-the-highest-bidder types got turned away at the door for the ruckus they brought in tow. The state of the rooms they stayed in always cost more in repairs than the silver brought in to those innkeepers.

“Scum, the lot of ‘em,” his mother had argued the night before he left. “He’s just gon’ be holdin’ his sword while he swings his dick. No boy needs that. I already got one of those in this household.” Giving her husband the stink-eye in jest, but some truth underlay the statement.

His father, the calm and stoic type, hadn’t stood for the talk and had sent him anyway, out of spite to his mother. The patriarchs of this kingdom had the final say, regardless. Cristoff had heard once that in the southern kingdom it ran the other way, but he had never been south, and he doubted he ever would.

Cristoff started packing up the few things scattered around their mule, Hodge, who was still shaking from the battle the poor animal had witnessed. He set aside a few bags of feed, a bag of tools for the armor, two wooden swords, clothes, spare kindling, a whetstone, waterskins, and the ledger Aldus kept. A few crows scattered and flew into the air as he threw a sleeping kit into the wet grass. One lone crow flew down and landed on the armored carcass of Sir Aldus, pecking at the armor straps before digging into the exposed flesh between the neck and the chest plate.

The crow’s head cocked once, twice, and then it shrieked and burst into the air as the body beneath it convulsed. Cristoff froze. A wet, gurgling heave rolled up through Sir Aldus’s chest. One gauntleted hand dug into the mud, fingers curling like roots, and the dead knight pushed himself up out of the muck with a slow, terrible patience. Mud sluiced from the dented chestplate, and globs of dried mud fell from his sides. Blood, black and ropey, poured from the knight’s gums and from the holes where his teeth had been, threading down through his beard and into the gore that already painted his jaw. The caved-in helmet shifted with him, half-crowning him, half-swallowing him, and from inside it came a sound that did not belong to Sir Aldus or to any man Cristoff had ever known. It started low. A wet rattle deep in the throat. Then it climbed, and climbed, and broke loose as a roar that rang inside the steel and echoed out through the eye-slits and the broken visor. It was the bellow of some animal that had been buried alive and had only now remembered the shape of its own voice.

Hodge yelped and bucked. Cristoff was in shock and didn’t move. The pale green armor, the color of infection, of illness, rose to its full height in the muddy field, and Sir Aldus Gilroy turned his ruined head toward his squire.

Cristoff dropped the pack of feed he was loading as Hodge bucked more and tugged at the rope on the fence until it snapped. The bedding packs tumbled and tossed aside as the mule bolted down the highway.

Sir Aldus balled his hands into fists and let out another inhuman roar, slobber and spit spewing from his helm with chunks of coagulated blood frothing and bubbling at the visor. The knight trudged toward the small hill where Cristoff stood with the broken rope still in his hands. Cristoff watched him come, watched the stilted figure lurch forward and step over the bodies of his own dead comrades, each armored boot crushing a skull, caving in a chest, snapping an arm with the man’s momentum.

“Sir Aldus! Sir! You’re not yourself! No—“

Cristoff frantically backed away from the rotted wooden fence, dropped the rope, and ran. The boy had no other ideas. Going back to the inn where he had watched Aldus shit himself while drinking his eighth pint was all he could think of. He wasn’t great with ideas. The knight was supposed to have been making him better at that.

He ran. His boots hit the hard ruts of the highway, and he ran the way a child ran from a dog, stupid and straight, no thought for the trees on either side or the ditch he could have rolled into. Behind him the roar came again, closer than it had any right to be. He risked a look back. Sir Aldus had not bothered with the gate. The knight had walked through the fence, the rotted wood splintering around his greaves like wet bread. Now he was on the road too. He stumbled at first, then not at all. His pace steadied into something that was not running and was not walking, but ate the ground between them all the same. The dent in his helm caught the gray light. The roar came a third time, and Cristoff understood, without wanting to, that the sound was shaped now. It had become something. He did not want to know what.

Still sprinting down the road as best he could in shock and horror of what had become of his teacher, his knight, or what was left of his lordship. The road bent suddenly with a short dropoff downward. Cristoff did not. He went off the side of it, down the embankment, and the ditch took his ankle the way ditches did, sideways and all at once. He went down hard in the wet grass, and the breath left him in a single punch as a rock he rolled over squeezed the air out of his lungs. For a long moment he could not make his lungs work. He lay on his side, staring up at a sky the color of old pewter, and listened to the slow, deliberate crunch of Sir Aldus’s feet on the road above.

The crunching stopped.

He held what little breath he had managed to claw back. He could see through the lip of the ditch the lower half of Sir Aldus standing in the rut where he had fallen. The greaves were caked in mud, blood, and trailing some unidentifiable piece of something worse. One sabaton was splayed open at the toe and something pale moved inside it that he did not let himself look at. The knight stood there a long time, the way a hound stood when it had lost a scent and was deciding whether the scent had ever been real.

Then the helm tilted down.

The roar came out of the steel like a thing being born wrong. It was not a man’s anger, Cristoff knew that much. It was older than that, and hungrier, and it shook loose a wet rain of something dark from the broken visor that pattered beside him in the ditch. The spew nearly hit his face.

He did not move. He could not have moved if his mother had walked up behind him and asked him to. His body had decided for him, and his body had decided to be a stone.

A long beat of time passed. The wind moved through the field of grass. Somewhere far off, he could still hear Hodge running and yelping.

Sir Aldus stepped down into the ditch with a thud. His armor groaned with the impact.

The mud took the knight’s weight with a slow sucking sound, and he came on, one heavy boot and then the other. The broken sabaton dragging a smear of black through the wet grass. Cristoff watched him come the way a man watched a far-off storm, the knight he had once served a solemn dark cloud bent on raining down. There was nowhere left to put the feeling. He thought, absurdly, that he had never finished learning to sharpen a sword properly. That his mother had been right about everything. That his father, calm and stoic, had sent him out into a world that was eating itself and had not bothered to warn him. He thought of the pistachio cream in the bakery his aunt had taken him to on a few special occasions when he was small. He could see the green of it, smell the sweetness, how he had smeared it on his nose to make her laugh.

That same green closed around his head along the fingers of a dirty gauntlet from a man he no longer knew.

The gauntlet did not crush him all at once. It pressed. It pressed the way a man pressed a thumb against a piece of fruit to see if it had gone ripe. He felt his own skull complain. He heard the small, wet beginnings of something giving way at his temple. The pressure stopped, and he thought, absurdly, that he had been spared. Then the gauntlet tightened, and the world went white, and the white went red, and the red went out. The last thing the boy felt was warmth, which was strange, because he had been cold, so so cold.

The helm lowered over what was left of him, but he did not feel it.

He did not feel the chest plate hitch above him, once, twice, and he did not feel the hot black slurry of blood and mud and bile and something that had been a tongue pour out through the ruined visor and onto him. The cold air steamed with the vile concoction covering the now dead boy. Cristoff did not feel the knight kneel, or bend, or the helm come apart at the cheek where the dent had broken the seam. He did not feel what was inside the helm come out to meet what was left of him in the grass.

Sir Aldus Gilroy released the broken helm from his head. His greyish and pale skin exposed to the world, and his head missing a significant chunk.

Then Sir Aldus Gilroy ate. First the neck and then the arm of his squire, and before long the fingers and the toes.

Sir Aldus ate for a long time.

When it was done, the crows had come.

The crows did not stay long, however, before Cristoff stood yet again, his now broken bones crunching and resting on their fractures and letting out an agonizing yell of something not human.

The squire rose again, and joined his knight, lurching across the battlefield towards the inn from whence they came.