Solomon Kane (23 page)

Kane lifted his face into the rain, and the gloved hand helped him. Kane was making sure his answer would be heard throughout the square. “Never,” he declared.

The gloved hand gripped his face, and the black gaze seemed to plumb his soul. “Join us,” his captor hissed, “and be saved.”

Kane’s answer was almost a shout. “I will have no part in your foulness.”

“Then you are lost.” As the Overlord let go of Kane, he might have been relinquishing any trace of humanity that had remained in him, hidden by the mask. “You will die here,” he said, “and then your true suffering will begin.”

He turned his back and mounted his horse as a raider stepped in front of Kane. The livid symbols on his dripping face seemed to work his mouth. “This man cannot save you,” he shouted to the townsfolk, who had been herded into a corner of the square. “He is nothing.”

Two of his fellows seized Kane by the shoulders and dragged him, still kneeling, across the square. Between the two crucified men, who had fallen silent from exhaustion or from loss of blood, a cross lay supine in the mud. Perhaps it was Kane’s destiny, which had lain
in wait for him. Though he did his best to struggle, he could not prevent his captors from forcing him onto his back on the cross. A cord was passed around his torso, binding him to the central shaft so securely that the rope bruised his flesh. A raider stretched Kane’s right arm to its full length while a second man knelt on the other and stooped to Kane’s left hand. Kane clenched his fist, but the raider prised it open. He leaned his weight on the fingers and dug an iron nail into Kane’s palm, piercing skin and flesh.

The first hammer-blow drove the nail so deep that when the man released Kane’s fingers, their anguished convulsion could not dislodge it. Kane clenched his teeth to bite back a cry and glared at the man from the depths of his soul. Another stroke of the hammer sent the nail between the tendons of his hand to lodge in the cross, and a third blow pinned his hand to the wood.

Only instinct – the will to cling to life before it drained away, to prolong even the suffering that kept him alive – made Kane close his other hand. The raider levered the fingers back and thrust a nail deep into the palm. A blow of the hammer drove the nail through flesh and gristle with a crunch that seemed to resonate throughout Kane’s body, or the outrage did. Kane ground his teeth until his jaws ached, but the pain was no distraction from the blaze of agony in his hands. A final stroke crushed the palm under the metal head and flattened the tendons against the crossbeam. The raider stood back to take a moment’s pride in his work, and then the cross was hauled up from the mud.

If Kane had imagined that he had reached the peak of his torment, he was stripped of the illusion at once. The rope that bound him to the central shaft did not entirely support him, and his weight tugged at his nailed hands.
His clenched jaws throbbed, and his bulging eyes wept with rain. As the square fell away beneath him, he could hardly separate the tilting of the cross from the vertigo his agony brought on. The cross wobbled vertical and then steadied in the socket that had been dug for it. Every movement shot a fresh pain through his hands, but he managed to hold a solitary notion in his mind: his torment was not meaningless if it prevented any worse from befalling the townsfolk. His soul was lost along with Meredith, but at least he would have succeeded in leaving some good in the world.

The Overlord rode to the foot of the cross and gazed up at him. He might almost have been sharing Kane’s thoughts; certainly some preoccupation detained him while Kane drew a shuddering breath. The mask might have been displaying his inhuman disinterest as he turned his horse away, voicing his decision through the mouth of a raider. “Burn this town to ashes,” he said.

So Kane had presumed too much even now, and he was nothing after all, just as the raider had informed the townsfolk. He was incapable of helping anyone; he could only bring evil upon them. His eyes grew blurred, no less with agony than rain, as he witnessed the destruction of the town. Raiders smashed windows and threw blazing brands into every house, and some drove a wagon on fire into the stables. He was reminded of breaching the doors of the obsidian African castle. It seemed a lifetime ago – another man’s lifetime – but it was one of many stages on Kane’s journey into the embrace of evil. Soon the entire town was ablaze, and flames leapt from the upper windows, which were level with Kane’s face. He thought the flames were beckoning him to a greater fire – one that would never be extinguished. He turned his face up to the heavens,
but no sign of redemption was to be found there. Just as the sun had forsaken the sky, so all light had forsaken his soul, and he could only wait for the darkness to take possession of him.

M
eredith was drenched by the constant rain and spattered with mud. Her fingers ached from clutching at the bars of the cage, and her head swam with the incessant jolting of the wagon on the stony road. Her hair was loosely glued to her face, and her clothes clung to her like a waterlogged shroud. She had to keep dashing rain out of her eyes, although all she saw were leafless trees advancing through the downpour. She was so cold that she could no longer recall how it felt to be touched by the sun. Above all, however, she felt ashamed of herself.

It seemed that deep down she had hoped for some privilege. She had been captured by the Overlord himself, after all. She would have been glad if the reward of her apparent importance had been a quick death, to take her to her family in Heaven. It was wrong to hope to die – far worse to pray for it, however secretly – and she might have concluded that her plight was a punishment from God. In any case it was naïve to expect so immediate an end when the Overlord had gone to such lengths to find her. Whatever she was marked for lay ahead.

She was in the foremost wagon of three, where she had been escorted by two raiders and the Overlord himself. Not only this suggested a mockery of prestige. Most of the captives were in the other cages, apparently to ensure
that Meredith was not crushed to death, and the cart was guarded throughout the interminable journey by four mounted raiders, leaving two alongside each of the vehicles behind. It was plain that her treatment had made her unwelcome, and her fellow captives had glimpsed the mark on her hand as well. None of them would speak to her; perhaps they believed she was associated with the evil that had them in its grasp. She could not have dissuaded them, whatever Captain Kane had said. She had been touched by corruption, and the insensibility of her marked hand felt like the start of the death of her soul. The dullness seemed to be overtaking her thoughts when she saw that the forest was thinning ahead.

At first she could see nothing beyond the trees except a grey veil of rain. As the wagon emerged from the denuded forest the veil retreated across an expanse of sodden fields, revealing black clouds on the horizon. It was not a storm ahead; they were masses of smoke. The horses plodded onwards and the wagon lurched over muddy ruts, and in a few minutes she saw another plundered town on fire.

While many of the buildings had collapsed, the entrance to the town – a stone arch – stood firm. As the wagons trundled down a slope, a band of raiders drove their captives through the arch to meet them. The guards unlocked two of the cages and forced back the occupants to make room for more, but left the foremost cage unopened. Meredith sensed how her companions resented being made to seem favoured by evil. She alone was, and she felt more outcast still – abandoned by her fellows and, she was even more ashamed to think, perhaps by God.

The cages were slammed and locked, and the wagons resumed their journey. The foremost horses shied a little as they passed between the blazing ruins, but the
driver quelled them cruelly with his whip. The women in the other cages hid their children’s faces from the conflagration. Perhaps this was the only road west, but Meredith wondered if the raiders were taking a wicked delight in confronting the prisoners with the destruction of their homes – and then she saw that they were being shown far worse. The smoke hovering over the ruins had drifted low as if weighted by the rain, but now it parted raggedly to reveal the heart of the town.

It might have been a diabolical parody of Calvary. Surrounded on every side by fire, three men had been crucified in the town square. Blood trickled down their arms and dripped from their nailed hands into the mud. All three heads were bowed, and Meredith hoped that God had granted them peace. She breathed an entreaty on their behalf as the wagon lumbered across the square, and then she seized the bars of the cage and peered through the rain. Although the face of the victim on the central cross was almost hidden by bedraggled locks of hair, above which the downpour sprouted from his scalp like a translucent spiky crown, she thought she recognised him.

His fists clenched in what might have been a final convulsion. His torso strained against its bonds in an attempt to take the weight off his pierced hands, and his head wavered erect. Some of the hair trailed back from his face, and Meredith cried “Solomon.”

The driver of the wagon turned to stare at her, and then he whipped the horses into a reluctant trot. The cage was past the crosses before Meredith could repeat her appeal. Captain Kane had not opened his eyes; he seemed unaware of anything around him. His head sank as though the strength was draining from him with his blood. Meredith struggled to the back of the cage, heedless of the muttered protests of her fellow captives.
She grabbed the bars and sucked in a breath that felt like inhaling rain. As she did so Captain Kane’s head lolled to one side, and his mouth fell slackly open. “Solomon,” she cried, but the wagon was leaving the sight of his limp body behind, and with it the last mockery of her hope.

B
efore Kane closed his eyes the world began to leave him. The walls of the burning houses wavered as if they were no more permanent than the rain, and the faces of the raiders seemed close to abandoning their shapes like waxen masks on fire. Perhaps all this was an illusion produced by the waves of heat that even the downpour could not quench, but Kane thought he had come to the end of his senses. A black pall drifted across his vision, and the stench of smoke filled his nostrils. In a while the stink dissipated, but his sight stayed dark. It could show him nothing that would comfort him, and so he let his eyelids fall shut and bowed his head.

He felt all his sensations withdraw from him – the vicious gusts of rain in his face, the rope that bruised his body as it lashed him to the cross, the dull ache that extended along his arms to link him with the anguish of his nailed hands. A surge of that agony reached for him, to return him to his torment on the cross. His head rose in protest, and he struggled to lever up his body against its bonds to relieve the burden on his hands. As his head pounded with the effort, he imagined that he heard his name.

The blood in his ears was louder. It thumped like a funeral drum while he strove to lift himself even an inch without using his arms. He managed to sustain the
posture for a very few seconds, and then all his weight dragged at his hands. The swelling agony brought faintness in its wake, and the torment grew remote as Kane’s consciousness drew into itself. He was scarcely aware that his head was drooping onto his chest. It tilted to one side, and his mouth gaped as though it was preparing to expel its final breath. He was urging oblivion to engulf him when someone called his name.

The cry was desperate, almost prayerful. It was so hoarse and shrill that he could hardly believe it was the voice he had never expected to hear again in this life. Was Meredith inviting him to join her in the next world, or was this some diabolical trick? In any case he need not regain his senses, and he was blissfully close to leaving them behind when the voice cried out once more. “Solomon!” it beseeched him.

Kane shook his head dully and opened his blurred eyes, and his sensations flooded back – the onslaught of rain, the clinging icy chill, the aches that racked his exhausted body, the anguish that pierced his hands. He strained his eyes back into focus and peered wearily through the rain and thick drifts of smoke. A train of prison carts was splashing sluggishly through the mud of the ruined square. Faces clustered behind the bars, too closely for Kane’s enfeebled vision to tell them apart – and then he caught sight of a lone figure at the back of the first wagon. He squeezed his eyes shut to rid them of rain, and stared until they felt like cinders embedded in his skull. His vision swam with the agony in his hands, and then it fastened on the captive’s face. At that distance the face was no larger than her image in the locket, but it was unmistakable. “Meredith,” Kane blurted.