John patted Harley on the shoulder, and the cleric's legs almost gave out. "My friend," said John, "from today it will be both."
Harley was dismissed, and when the priest hurried off towards the nearest outside bathroom, John and Joshua left the chapel for the courtyard where John's horse was housed. For a time, none of the men spoke a word. But the shroud of unspoken words hung over them, until Joshua was forced to say something. Anything.
"Where are you going to start?" He asked.
"I'll find Andrew," replied John without hesitation. I had thought about it long before. "There is no battle or campaign that I can conceive of fighting without him by my side. As soon as he is with me, the others I need will follow me."
Joshua nodded, nodding, and they walked several more steps without saying anything. John looked at the stones between his feet, sunk in sober contemplation.
"Of course, first I need to give the good news to Lisandra," he observed, his voice lower now, as if speaking to you.
"How will she react?" "To be honest, I don't know who should fear more ... if Dexter's army of abominations or her reaction," replied John, joking only partially, "I promised I would never go to war again. It was the only condition she imposed when he agreed to marry me. "
You are not going to war, "Joshua suggested." It is a peculiar mission in the name of your king ... and, frankly, of your God. Lisandra is a woman of faith, isn't she? You will definitely understand. "
John thought for a moment, "A campaign," he said at last.
"Just a little one," agreed the king, ironic, with a smile that he noticed had no response from John. Joshua knew his friend well enough to realize that there was more to his mind, something he was reluctant to express.
"Is there anything else you want to ask me?" He asked. And that was enough to make John stop. The knight turned and looked seriously at Joshua, with something that approached an anger that the king had never seen directed at him.
"I have just one question to ask," said John. "How could he have been so blind as not to see where this madness, this ... heresy would take him?"
Joshua looked around as if searching for an answer. And John saw things on his face that he had seen many times in other men, but never in his king. Remorse. Fault. Shame.
"I have asked myself this question many times. I have also asked God. So far, none of us have had an answer. All I can say is this: all the things I have done in my life, including this horribly wrong endeavor, were compelled by a single aspiration ... to protect and defend this realm. So knowing that my actions may have put this realm in greater danger than any Norseman has ever hurt me more than you can imagine. I ask you now, not as your king, but as a friend, to help me with this one last time. To help undo the harm that I myself have caused. "
John watched his king. Joshua found his expression impossible to decipher and waited for some gesture of understanding or, he dared to hope, absolution. But all John gave was a single shake of his head before he turned and walked away in the direction of the stable, where the mare was waiting.
"It will be done," he said without looking back.
When John got home, it was worse than he feared. Lisandra barked and cursed and threw everything that her state of advanced pregnancy allowed her. Joshua was wrong, of course - not about Lisandra being a woman of faith, but in suggesting that it would help her understand why John needed to leave her when his belly was already ripe and she needed him most.
John knew that Lisandra would never have believed in a story of monsters and magic, so he invented that a band of dangerous heretics led by a stray priest was spreading blasphemies and needed to be liquidated - which was, after all, the truth, so to speak . But invoking the obligation to God and did so had little effect on Lisandra, whose priorities now began and ended with the gift she carried within herself.
'Tell Joshua that he can shove this campaign of yours deep in your ass! "She shouted at her husband through the bangs of copper pots hurled from the kitchen.' God doesn't want you chasing crazy priests hundreds of miles away - he that you are here, with me and your child, to be born! How can you do such a thing with us now? '
'That is why warriors should never marry,' thought John later as he straightened his saddlebag and tended a wound to his forehead caused by a jug of milk that Lisandra had aimed with peculiar and unmatched skill.
'Because war is a jealous lover. There is a way to call us back to her, long after we think we say goodbye forever. '
John mounted Carpeado and left shortly thereafter. At least he hoped to stay that night, but Lisandra told him, in very straightforward terms, that the only place she would have to sleep would be the stable. And so he rode into the night, heading east, where he knew he would find Andrew. He stopped at the top of the hill and looked back, hoping to see Lisandra watching him from the door or the window. But there was no sign of it. Sad, he turned and spurred the mare.
***
John was sitting with his legs crossed in the middle of a green meadow, slowly examining a curious flower caught, a species he had never seen before and could not identify. It was a moment of silence, among the few he had had in many months, except for sleep - and even any eyelash was often fertile ground for the nightmares that haunted him. And so he tried to find some peace in every rare moment of quiet solitude, like that. Although, as a matter of fact, having so little to occupy the mind just made it more difficult to ignore the pain for which he could not find relief.
Even months after that deformed beast had attacked him in Joshua's dungeon, John still carried the wound around his wrist - as apparent as if he had done it the day before. He will try every kind of ointment and treatment he knew, but he still felt it burn under the bandage he kept wrapped. Sometimes it was as if the animal's tongue was still there, a phantom appendage encircling the wrist like a shiny hot handcuff, dissolving layers of meat. Just another damn aspect of Dexter's black magic - the wounds refused to heal with medicine or time.
John was pulled out of his fantasies by the sound of footsteps on the soft grass behind him.
"The men are wondering if they will be sitting here all morning or if they plan to give them orders to attack," said Andrew.
John looked at his knight friend. Since John was one of the few men in Joshua's kingdom who had earned the right to speak to the king on an equal basis, Andrew was among the few who had the same privilege with John. All the other Auriana soldiers, even the senior officers, approached John with a degree of deference that made any kind of useful or honest conversation impossible. But not Andrew, a knight who, like John, had once been a commoner enlisted in Joshua's army. He fought John's side in almost every battle against the Norse, before Ethandun and after.
They liked each other instantly, the first moment they shared bread around one of the enlisted campfires. They found out they were from the same county. Their families bought fruits at the same local market and even had some acquaintances in common. And both were blessed - or cursed - with the innate talent for fighting. They had a lot in common and quickly became inseparable on the battlefield. Soon, the two had saved each other's lives more times than they could remember. In the beginning, they maintained a score, in permanent competition on the right to brag, but after a while they lost count. Except for Joshua himself, John did not know another man in all of Auriana to whom he would more readily entrust his life. And so Andrew was the first that John sought to help him hunt down Dexter and his army of abominations.
Andrew, unlike John, had not been so humble as to refuse abundant land and titles that Joshua offered in gratitude to the two after the war. But he ended up getting more and more restless in his retirement. He was tired of the castle, expensive to maintain and impossible to heat, and even more tired of the woman, who was constantly disturbing him. In fact, he had never called his wife much, but he had always wanted to have children more than anything, and she was older than five sisters, the other four all with children born and married.
Fate had decided that she would not give Andrew any children, although it was not out of a desire to try. When the inevitable fights came, she never failed to remind him that he was of fertile descent, and that was why the problem was in him.
Andrew began to resent her and the damn windy castle, with all those empty rooms that should, by right, should be full of childish laughter. And so, when John came knocking on his door with the offer to fight at his side again, Andrew asked no questions about the nature of the enemy or even the size of the reward; he simply seized the opportunity to get away from everything that reminded him of an unfulfilled life. 'It seems easier for me to end lives than to create them,' commented John sadly as they rode together away from the castle.
Andrew did not turn to see if the woman was watching him go. He didn't even tell you that he was leaving.
Together, they wasted no time in assembling the small but powerful infantry never climbed. Nearly a hundred strong veterans who chose from the danish campaigns, men John and Andrew knew could make a difference on any mission and would balance the odds against Dexter's beasts. Joshua tried to warn John: only one beast was the equivalent of a dozen men. 'Not the men I plan to take to fight them,' said John to himself.
Most of the warriors John and Andrew sought to recruit first laughed out of the story they told him about Dexter and his abominations. Some don't; they had heard stories in breweries and around campfires in villages ravaged by unspeakable mutant horrors led by some dark wizard. But none hesitated to join them; they followed John and Andrew in battles against any enemy, no matter how unlikely.
With strength gathered, John and Andrew rode northeast, tracking Dexter's path to the Danelaw border. Those among John's men who had first mocked the story began to believe it when they followed the trail of horrors that the mad archbishop had left in his wake. Everyone saw the settlements plundered by the Nordics, but nothing like that. There were no bodies, no injuries. Instead, entire towns and villages emptied, leaving behind nothing but bleak desolation. As they scanned the silent ruins of the first ghost town they found, John reminded men of what the king had said about Aetheired. 'Your enemies don't fall into battle - they become allies.' They were all hardened, but none of them went through that city, but they did have a shiver down their spine.
They ended up catching up with Dexter on the outskirts of Aylesbury, a small market town he had looted in search of souls that same tomorrow. It was too late, for Aylesbury was dangerously close to the Danelaw border.
And there was no longer any skeptic among John's men, for they saw what was before them with their own eyes: a great vacation order out of some kind of nightmare, oily and dark, its shapes beyond imagination, crawling and walking heavily across the land between howls and moans, a hellish cacophony that only by the sound inspired repulsion and despair. And, in their minds, the lone figure of Dexter leading them in their advance, like a demonic shepherd.
The irregular shapes and movement of the creatures made it difficult to tell the amount at a distance, but John estimated that the horde had at least five hundred individuals - the combined population of the dozens of villages and villages that Dexter had attacked along the way, now transformed into the grotesque tribe who staggered under his command.
John was a scholar of war, of battle tactics. He had given a lot of thought, during the chase, to the best way to confront Dexter and his minions when he finally reached them, and he had decided to follow the attack plan that had always been best for him - straight into the enemy's heart, without fear or hesitation. John knew Dexter would be partly relying on the psychological fear his abominations caused in the hearts of everyone who set eyes on them. But John had neutralized that particular factor by selecting men who, he knew, would not be paralyzed or hesitant, even in the face of the most terrifying enemy. "Dexter's army is no different than any we have faced and defeated countless times," he reminded his soldiers the night before. 'A careless horde of barbarians and animals without honor or intelligence or God at their side'. He also recalled that Harley was working tirelessly on the armor each wore with the protection that would render Dexter's other advantage useless in battle.
The speech had worked. In the morning, John and Andrew took their contingent of almost a hundred men straight to Dexter, across an open field, the horses' hooves thudding on the ground, swords raised, fearless, roaring "bloody murderer" at the top of their lungs, so loudly that rivaled the howls of Dexter's pack of monstrosities.
At first, Dexter seemed to like the approach. Defiant and fearless in front of his army, he focused his attention on Wultric and the tip of the approaching spear.
I raised my hands with fingers and deaf fingers dancing in the air like a virtuous artist playing an invisible instrument while invoking a spell. But the defiant look slowly became dismayed when John and his men continued to move forward, seeming immune to the spell that, at that moment, would have deformed them, making them even more obedient and submissive servants.
Harley had done his job well. John's breastplate glowed with an iridescent glow when the protective seal the young cleric placed on it absorbed the weight of Dexter's magic as a lightning rod and dissipated it, rendering it harmless.
Dexter blasphemed and began to prepare another spell, but John's horsemen were already fifty meters away and approaching at full speed. And so Dexter panicked and retreated close to his acolytes, ordering them to attack. The creatures advanced to find John's warriors. In the moments before the collision, Dexter wondered why this small force of men, with five times fewer individuals and surpassed to a much greater degree, was not escaping the mere sight of their abominations, when so many had done this before them. I could only assume they were foolish or crazy. But if he couldn't add them to his contingent, his beasts would surely wipe them out quickly.
Dexter's arrogant assumption soon proved wrong. No doubt his entourage was a frightening sight, but it had never been tested in battle; all the enemies they encountered before would have already been transformed or fled in terror by now. This was his damned sons' first taste of combat, and Dexter found, much to his dismay, that unlike John's hardened war veterans, they had no training. In the first chaotic confrontations, his monsters brought down several men, waving their claws, fangs and tentacles, but John's knights retaliated harder, tearing and stomping a bloody line in Dexter's crowd, leaving a trail of crippled abominations, bleeding and screaming in agony.
The shape of the battle changed quickly after that, and the horde of Dexter's monstrous woman dispersed, terrified and confused. To the surprise and happiness of John and his men, it soon became clear that those infernal beasts were not so terrifying when confronted on equal terms - more like wild horses, they were terrified at the first sign of danger. The entire horde was spreading and fleeing in the face of John's explosive forces, even when Dexter made a desperate attempt to maintain some impression of discipline between them. Although John's men were still struggling with various beasts who were doggedly fighting - most of them had been furious after being wounded - the archbishop realized that there was no hope. With so many of his forces running and his magic innocuous, the battle was almost lost.
So he sought to retreat, gathering a small group of his most obedient servants - the few who had been transformed during his escape from Joshua's tower. With them, he ran through chaos, descending a cliff to the edge of a nearby forest, where he disappeared into the trees while John's knights finished with the rest of the beasts.
John lost twenty men that day - which was better than he expected to have stolen more than a hundred beasts with swords and scattered the rest in the wind. Only Dexter himself and the abominations he still controlled remained a threat.
From then on, the raids became a hunting expedition. John and Andrew chased the archbishop day and night, hoping to find him before he had a chance to regain his strength. The trail took them to Greenland, Dexter's headquarters, and the cathedral where all that horrendous misfortune had started.
And here they were, precisely four months since the day John had left an unborn wife and child behind. It had been a long campaign, arduous for body and spirit, but almost over, and he was almost home. His army camped not far from the Cathedral of Greenland. Dexter was known to be inside, licking his wounds. A final battle to end that story, and John could finally go home. Soon she would see her son, already a month old, for the first time and fix things up with Lisandra.
Finally, she would start her new life as a husband and father.
However anxious he was to do all that, however, he did not allow haste to be his undoing in those final hours. Dexter had been defeated in battle and his magic neutralized, but John was too smart to underestimate his opponent, who despite his advantage, knew that Dexter was a cunning, defiant man, and whatever he was doing in those three days he spent in hiding cathedral. John was sure it was more than five so I called to wait for him and his men broke down the door and finished him off.
No, Dexter wouldn't fall that easy. No doubt he still had a final card to play. The only question was, what letter?