The Phantom Queen Awakes (19 page)

My head is not worth your efforts, I tell him,
but he doesn’t listen. He has taken many lives and many heads, all
worthy opponents. I am nothing to him but a tighter hole of
pleasure.

Ianthe cries out.

Cadmon turns.

Spare his life, she pleads.

Cadmon twists back to me, ready to slice the
blade through my neck.

I close my eyes, ready to die, my last
thoughts on Ianthe and our encounter, her soft skin against mine,
her eyes to mine, her lips to mine. Her breast under my fingertips.
I imagine for a moment my head nailed above their bed ― our bed ―
watching her beauty forever.

Cadmon leans into me.

Banish him! She shouts and I open my eyes in
horror.

Kill me, I say, unable to grasp the thought of
exile.

He pulls the blade away.

Tears run the course of my cheeks as I look to
Ianthe. She stares at the ground before moving her hands to her
gown. She loosens the straps and lets the fabric fall from her
shoulders to the floor, leaving us in her nakedness. The sight of
her saddens me more. In all of her goddess beauty, it is the
swelling purple of her cheek that draws my attention. I look to
Cadmon’s sword, but I would try at my own life before attempting to
take his.

Again he raises the blade. For an instant, I
feel there is hope. But instead of dismembering my head, he uses
the handle to strike me down.

****

The sun, the soil,
but not the slave, the same;

Unchanged in all
except its foreign lord–

Preserves alike its
bounds and boundless fame

The Battle-field,
where Persia’s victim horde

First bow’d beneath
the brunt of Hellas’ sword,

As on the morn to
distant Glory dear

When Marathon became
a magic word;

Which utter’d, to the
hearer’s eye appear

The camp, the host,
the fight, the conqueror’s career,

The flying Mede, his
shaftless broken bow;

The fiery Greek, his
red pursuing spear;

Mountains above,
Earth’s, Ocean’s plain below;

Death in the front,
Destruction in the rear!

Such was the scene –
what now remaineth here?

What sacred trophy
marks the hallow’d ground,

Recording Freedom’s
smile and Asia’s tear?

The rifled urn, the
violated mound,

The dust thy
courser’s hoof, rude stranger! Spurns around.

~ Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

(from Canto the Second

****

A ship awaits my departure, but I look back to
it with baneful eye. It is there to lead me to foreign lands, away
from what most I desire. The hilltop provides an awful view of the
flat blue sea to my back, the ship nothing more than a brown crumb
dropped onto the water. At my front is a battle. Perhaps Cadmon
will die this time, which would null my expulsion from this land. I
could lay with Ianthe and we would not have to worry about hiding
our love. As I sit clutching my knees to my chest, I hold a pile of
rain-soaked soil and wonder how much blood has spilt on this land I
have called home for the thirteen years of my life. I remember
running up these hills as a child, and rolling down them on my
sides. I remember the laughter, and it pains me to bring it all
back, but I must, for it now amounts to nothing more than fallen
memories as it passes through my fingertips.

A gray cloud looms over the battlefield,
casting everything underneath in heavy shadow. The wind whirls
cold.A crow lands near my feet and tilts its head to look to me
with a beady black eye. I toss some dirt at it and the bird
flutters.

Watch, it says as it dances. It shakes the
earth off its wings and turns its neck toward the battle. It looks
back to me and caws. Watch.

Watch what? I ask, and I know then it is
Morrigan.

The crow doesn’t answer. It only looks at me
with a crooked head and what I assume are distrustful black
eyes.

The two sides of war below grow eager as they
wait for the horn. From my seat they are nothing but riled ants
merged together, angered and ready to attack the opposing
threat.

Listen, says the crow, as if it were she
starting the battle.

For a moment, there is nothing but silence.
Both sides below take a shared breath. I listen as a distant horn
croons death. And then a thunderous roar erupts from the crowd and
I wonder if it is only thunder from the clouds reigning over them.
Soon these separate armies merge as one, as shield and sword create
a cacophony of music from a symphony comprised of metallic and
wooden instruments.

The harmony of life taking death, says
Morrigan. The crow dances once again, wings fluttering. The music
is for her.

Drums pound. Cymbals crash.

The crowd below dances with her. Most
fall.

If only he would die, I tell the
crow.

Morrigan says, I guard your death, but nothing
more.

As the sun moves directly overhead, it passes
through a hole in the clouds, removing the battlefield from shade.
It reveals a field of red as her music dies down.

Only the soft moan of fallen men remains. One
side has won, but only a handful basks in the glory, if it can be
called such a thing. Those clinging to life are either left for
dead, or pierced one final time with a blade by the
victor.

Morrigan flies to the ended battle, cawing,
urging me to follow.

She leads me to the dead.

I walk through a maze of fallen barbarians,
naked and covered in the life that once filled their hearts. They
stare at me with hollow eyes. A hand missing its two smallest
fingers grabs my leg before falling limp at my feet. I step over a
twitching man, a blade pierced through his throat. He chortles
blood and finally stills. Morrigan tells me to retrieve a blade. I
choose a dagger and pull it from someone’s back. I pass once
glorious men, now missing appendages. Those that cling to life, I
ease to death, for that is what she tells me to do. I approach two
men clutched together tightly in their nudity, arms wrapped around
one another and moving as if making love, and I realize it is
simply one man fallen over another; the end of a spear poking
through one to his lover, binding the two in an eternal embrace. I
cut each of their throats.

I cannot save them all, I tell her.

Our journey ends at a large granite stone, and
it is Cadmon leaning against its base. One hand braces his body
upright; the other rests on his thigh. He is alone, and naked
except for the crimson torc around his neck, exactly as I remember
him from earlier that morning. He looks to the ground. At first he
appears untouched, only fatigued from war.

Morrigan perches atop the rock. She urges me
closer.

Cadmon looks to me with shame and I notice his
heavy panting and dripping torc. Blood surrounds his body and he
seems to float buoyantly within it like the ship at sea set to take
me away.

He has lost his manhood on the ground next to
him. Someone has cut it off, and it is to that flaccid member and
the attached flaps of skin clinging to it that holds his gaze. He
bleeds from a hole between his legs; it pulses out of
him.

The black crow on the rock laughs as his body
slowly drains.

I wait for him to die before carving off his
head with my dagger.

****

I see before me the
Gladiator lie:

He leans upon his
hand – his manly brow

Consents to death,
but conquers agony,

And his droop’d head
sinks gradually low –

And through his side
the last drops, ebbing slow

From the red gash,
fall heavy, one by one,

Like the first of a
thunder-shower; and now

The arena swims
around him – he is gone,

Ere ceased the
inhuman shout which hail’d the wretch who won.

He heard it, but he
heeded not – his eyes

Were with his heart,
and that was far away;

He reck’d not of the
life he lost nor prize,

But where his rude
hut by the Danube lay,

There where his young
barbarians all at play,

There was their
Dacian mother – he, their sire,

Butcher’d to make a
Roman holiday–

All this rush’d with
his blood – Shall he expire

And unavenged? Arise!
ye Goths, and glut your ire!

~ Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

(from Canto the Fourth)

****

I carry Cadmon’s head with pride. It hangs at
my side ― now all but drained ― as I think of Ianthe and how it has
come to pass that we can be together as I had once dreamed. Cadmon
watches the ship at sea as his head swings back and forth in
pendulum. The vessel sails away without me aboard and his dead eyes
cannot look away.

Those I pass glance strangely, for they
recognize Cadmon and his sad fate. Is it respect, curiosity, fear?
It doesn’t matter. I swing his severed head by a wad of matted
brown hair as one would swing a basket of fruits.

It is my gift to Ianthe.

And she waits for me.

Watch, says the voice of the crow. I look
around, but the black bird is nowhere to be found. The phantom word
is only in my head; it sends cold water down my spine as I walk
toward my love.

I see her through the silken shade. On woolen
sheets she lies naked, vulnerable and as white and bare again as
the early evening stars forming in the sky. She is the essence of
beauty, and the outline and curves of her slender body remind me
that our love will no longer be a triangle of three. We can now be
two as we form into one. She will take me inside. She will moan and
call out my name. Harold, she will whisper into my ear. Ianthe, I
will mutter in a broken breath. Her back will arc skyward with
pleasure. We will melt like the wax from two candles placed close
together. Tears will run down our cheeks from the bliss.

Ianthe: I can finally have her; she belongs to
no one now. She is mine. I am hers. I raise the head as I enter the
room.

But the smile on her face holds a secret, and
her eyes cannot see what I offer.

The handle of a dagger protrudes from the soft
flesh beneath her navel. Dead hands grip the hilt. She has taken
her life.

I replace the head staked to the wall with
that of Cadmon’s. He looks upon us as I weep over Ianthe and slide
the blade from her stomach. I toss it aside as easily as Cadmon had
tossed Ianthe the night before. I kiss her cold lips. She kisses
back. I confess my love and this time, fear doesn’t make her push
me away.

Cadmon watches with cloudy eyes.

****

Afterword

‘The Dying Gaul’ is an experimental piece of
fiction on my part. It is a love story, of sorts, and I tend to
stay away from love stories as a general rule. Love is an emotion.
It’s easy to write about and it’s been done to death. If I’m going
to write a love story, someone is going to get maimed a few pages
into it.

Romance novels could be to blame: some
chiseled warrior man-handling some large-busted woman on the
cover...they’re all the same, with titles like
Eternal Flame of
the Heart
.

This tale is also a period piece, and I
normally avoid writing about the past. ‘The Dying Gaul’ is also a
tragedy; and horror cannot be horror without tragedy to some
degree. Someone has to get hurt; someone has to die; something bad
has to happen to a character the reader has fallen in love with, or
it’s not truly tragedy.

Prior to discovering the call for submissions
for
The Phantom Queen Awakes
, I knew absolutely nothing
about Celtic mythology. Blame the U.S. educational system. I do.
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
popped up during my extensive
research for this project, and I was instantly drawn into its
words. If you haven’t read the narrative poem by George Gordon
(Lord Byron), I suggest dumping the title into an Internet search
engine and finding a copy.

Also stumbled upon during my Celtic
self-enlightenment was a marble sculpture called The Dying Gaul
(hence the title of my story), a Hellenistic work from the late
third century BC, sculptor unknown. The work reveals a naked man
wearing only a torc, kneeling over his shield as he fights against
death; the look on his face is a complex mix of emotion. This was
the character I wanted to portray with Cadmon, and I have Lord
Byron to thank:

He leans upon his
hand – his manly brow

Consents to death,
but conquers agony,