TOOTHLESS

Book I: Fallen Arise

Chapter I



He remembered his name.

He could not remember a family name, only a single word.

Martin.

Martin lay on the ground. His left leg was straight, his right bent beneath it. His arms were outstretched, palms to the gray sky. The hilt of his greatsword, the silvery angel's face there, touched his right fingertips. Its round, smooth cheeks were like a baby girl's.

He was conscious of the battle, of his wounds, of the loss. The notion of a loss, however, retreated through a shimmering barrier at the edge of his consciousness. There, a colonnade, a stand of bright trees, marked the border between the living and the gone. Memories fled to this wall, only to pass through and dissolve. In all of the heroic tales, dying soldiers saw their lives pass before their eyes. No, Martin realized. The memories were just running like rats from a sinking ship, down the ropes only to drown. He watched the backs of their heads.

There was Aine, his wife. She carried Emer, only thirteen months old. The girl had been an early talker, having mastered "mama" and "papa," and even experimenting with the dog's name. "Goonka," she would say, pointing a fat finger at the young bitch Kennocha and laughing with lust and a deep chest. The dog enjoyed this and would jump among the sheep so much as to startle them into a stampede.

"Just making more work for herself," Aine would say.

Aine, dark hair braided, was beautiful like the dusky spring hills. Walking away from him, neither she nor Emer showed the bruises of the plague. First, the black moss appeared on the trees. Then, animals fell ill. Kennocha died, pink froth blooming out of her mouth. Then, Aine pointed out her first bruise. It was purple and deep beneath her skin. Within days, both she and Emer were dead.

The Black Yew had arrived.

Martin could barely remember Aine's face, just her gray eyes that, no matter how happy she had been, betrayed a cold cynicism. The plague infected life itself. It closed the market. It shut the heavy chapel doors and silenced the monks in their cells. Aine was not surprised. She had always acted as if something would happen, as if something would go wrong. Martin had forsaken another life to be with her. He had broken vows and abandoned comrades for her. It infuriated him that she would remain so suspicious. She was right in the end, though she refused to say it. She gave him that.

One figure stood apart from the retreat--Tuan. The master Templar was short and wore a tonsure in the old Irish style, so that the front of his head was bald but the rear full of hair that fell to his shoulders. For a man who had seen so much, who limped and ached each day but who could best any of the initiates he had trained, he had a soft, grandfatherly face. Laughter had worn lines and grooves into his forehead, into the corners of his eyes and mouth. Tuan was a font of myth and understanding, a scribe, a teacher. He was also a warrior. Tuan, standing apart and looking back--Martin would not have predicted it, but he was not at all surprised.

Tuan was speaking. Martin heard the words from memory.

"If they kill you, resist them."

"I don't understand," Martin said. "If I am dead, then I am dead."

The Yew had only begun its march. Reports had only just reached France from the edge of Scandinavia, which had quickly become a black wasteland. Martin did not yet know of the plague, or the fate of those who fell in battle against the Yew's demons.

He and Tuan sat in the scriptorium, a place consecrated by the great Irish Saint Columbcille. It was a magical room. The monks concocted ciphers in this room, and buried them deep into glorious manuscripts. It was empty but for Martin and Tuan. Still, the room echoed with the monks' quills against the vellum. The sound was now part of the soft wood grain of their desks and buried in the cold stone of the walls.

"They will promise everlasting life," Tuan said. "Power and glory. These are false prizes."

"I still don't--"

"Go. Protect us. Keep your vigil. Know that if you perish, we will honor you, your wife and your daughter as long as we have breath. As long as we remember them, they live."

Tuan's voice receded beneath a curious string of numbers, meaningless arithmetic that floated over Martin in his own voice.

"Three plus three times twenty …"

It faded into the smoke.

A breeze touched upon the roof of Martin's mouth. His teeth and lower jaw were gone. The slice had come from a demon. Martin could still taste the blue steel blade of the scythe deep in his open throat, upon the root of his tongue. Fading, perhaps dead, he felt no pain. He could see it, though. The pain hovered around him, a green cloud of mist that clotted like his blood about the broken edges of his skin and the thick black hair at the back of his head.

The battle was distant and muffled, as if coming to him through water. Men made plans for battles. When armies followed these plans, they made music. They were a king's symphony, and one felt the glory in his gut and a glittering joy in the roof of his mouth that flared into every thought. Every man, every horse, every joint of armor was a string or a breath through a reed. In defeat, the army was a primitive, amateur ensemble. Its voices were untrained, its instruments broken or bumped out of tune.

Martin heard the enemy. Leather slammed into dirt, thousands of feet marching in order so precise as to be a single thing walking. The Black Yew's wagon creaked. Clumps of dirt, sticky with vile sap, plopped to the ground. Fibrous ropes, their threads straining, twanged in the smoke.

The marching dead shed their memories with every step, leaving them behind to be taken by the black roots, drunk by the Yew's needles and sighed as a raspy voice, a whisper carried through smoke and stench by buzzing insects fat with carrion.

"Fallen, arise."

Martin had heard it through the entire battle, but was conscious of it only now. It was the Yew.

"Fallen, arise."

Creatures surrounded him. Spriggan--they were bred from frogs or salamanders. The monks were not sure. The imps were no taller than a man's knees. The waved long, awkward arms and had bulging eyes without pupils. They scurried in packs over the battlefield, their noses to the air and their pointed ears against the earth. This was their role, to find and harvest the dead, to carry them to the Yew. Martin had heard them. They spoke like the fat frogs that, upon discovery, belched in warbling protest before flopping into the water.

Tuan closed his eyes and turned, joining the refugee memories.

Martin was moving. A pair of spriggan pulled him by the wrists. His back scraped against stones. Another pair straightened his right leg and took his ankles. The four chanted. Their song went into his chest, separating his soul from his heart as a butcher separates fat from meat. The memories were now all gone. Still, Martin could see and hear. He could think.

The Yew spoke again.

"You will live forever."

They lashed his wrists and ankles to a post as if he were prey. The spriggan, the pair at the front and the pair at the rear, carried him through a gully. They slipped, dropping him in mud. Beside, a stream ran red. They lifted him.

The spriggan moved along a tree line, seemingly bickering. Their voices ran high and low, fast. They slapped one another and threw stones at their comrades, who carried others from the battlefield.

Martin's head fell back and bobbed, dragging through dirt and twigs. He could barely see. A gray green mist framed the world. This haze grew larger and larger, threatening to choke off the center altogether.

He was dying.

His feelings, his very consciousness, seemed to break further with each of the spriggan's steps. Like his memories, his own being fled his body. Yet something remained. That voice, that strange rustle of sound that was the Black Yew, gripped certain bits of him and held them fast. His spirit, incomplete, tore away and drifted. It was an empty, listing ship to be swallowed by the sea.

Now, Martin thought, he should be floating above the lifeless corpse that had been a warrior. He should see his wounds, his fibrous muscle and tendons. His heavenly gaze would mark that ground as hallowed ground. Instead, his head bobbing, he saw the rumps of the spriggan that carried him.

"Fallen, arise."

They entered the forest. Brush and bracken whipped Martin's face. Brier tore at his dead hide. The spriggan kicked up dirt and leaves that clumped in the gore on his neck. The forest leaned over the creatures, surrounding them in darkness. The trees themselves were poisoned, wearing the plague moss that bred tumors in their bark. Their limbs snaked around one another. Leaves, where there were leaves, were thin and brown or eaten into mere sketches of leaves by tiny insects that swarmed in buzzing, choking clouds. This had been a living forest.

The Yew had brought the plague from the north. It had brought demons and spirits. It had freed ancient slumbering things that now possessed the woods. Shouts and cries, screams of witches--even the spriggan moved slowly as they, with their shivering steps, seemed full of fear.

A light flit into view, answering the cries of the spriggan. This orb danced and bobbed. A wisp. It shot forward, lighting the path ahead, overshooting and coming back, then darting off again like a puppy. The spriggan followed, yelling at it, throwing sticks at it but missing every time.

The path led downward, sloping into a clearing. The wisp darted into the canopy, its light lost in smoke. Corpses, though they were not dead, sat and stood upon the moss. These were the mindless shamblers, the fodder that the Yew threw into battle.

Some of the dead, however, stood apart. They were sentient, almost human. One of these stood in command. Little more than bones, he wore a tattered purple cape and bronze armor that had gone green. He shouted and the shamblers gathered in formation. This captain turned his sunken eyes at Martin. The dead captain stepped forward, crossing the clearing with a strength in his stride that would have been uncommon in a living man.

The wisp fell and flew through the opposite wall of the clearing. Its light exploded among the trees, casting twisted, bony shadows onto the marching dead. Groups of spriggan gathered into a line, bringing Martin and many others. The captain followed.

The forest fell into an empty field of stumps. Demons the height of four men felled the trees with their bare hands and broke them upon their thighs. They burned these trunks in giant piles. The smoke filled the sky, announcing the coming of the Yew to the next army that would be so foolish as to stand against it. Priests in black robes chanted. The flames took a green hue and danced in rhythm with the song. Spriggan heaved some of the dead, the unsuitable dead, into these flames. With each of these corpses, the flames swirled with playful glee. The smoke billowed. Martin could not smell but remembered the sickly-sweet of burning flesh. The lord who owned his farms had wisely, though to great controversy, ordered the cremation of the victims. So had Emer and Aine left the world, drifting on the wind. And fire was fire. Those flames had danced as gleefully as these.

Countless dead gathered around a copse of trees at the bottom of the slope. The wisp bobbed once, then shot back over the spriggan's heads, back to the battlefield.

It was not a grove, but a single tree. It was the Black Yew. Tortured beasts tangled in ropy vines pulled its massive wooden cart, just inches with each struggling step. They were mammoth, deformed beings with muscular legs and shoulders. Their faces twisted in pain and their mouths opened in silent roars. The Yew's roots spilled from the sides of the cart and shot through the ground in all directions. Its needles and branches breathed. Deep within its canopy, a greenish orange light shone, the phosphorescence of insects lured from subterranean darkness to feed on the black tar that seeped through the cracks in its bark. The creaking of the massive wheels, the marching of the dead, the sighs of the branches--this was the melody of the victor's symphony.

The spriggan carried him forward, through the crowd of the dead, past the tangled demons to the edge of the cart.

"Fallen, arise. Now."

Martin was not the first. There were several ahead of him. A demon stood at the Yew's twisted trunks. His gray skin was riddled with white scars and his left eye was missing. A single horn, broken at the root, grew slightly aside from the center of his bald head. He wore nothing but a dented silver girdle over his groin. He held an unrolled, mildew-stained parchment and a black quill.

The corpse ahead of Martin now lay in a heap.

"Breakneck," the demon bellowed. "Who will take him?"

The captain from the clearing stood forward, his arms crossed over his breastplate.

"I will," he declared, his voice little more than a whisper. "And the next one."

"Longinus claims Breakneck, and the next."

None challenged the claim. The demon squinted, then made two marks on the parchment as Breakneck stood, his head falling to one side, and stepped mindlessly down the stairs, toward the captain.

The spriggan cut Martin's bonds. He lay in the glistening mud at the demon's feet. The ogre peered at him, perhaps wondering if this corpse were too damaged, if Martin were better suited for the bonfire than as a soldier in the field. Finally, he looked at his parchment, perhaps realizing that he had already made the mark, and said: "Toothless."

On the second snaky syllable, Martin's body flooded with prickling energy. His limbs jerked, pulling him to a stand. He felt no pain, only a cold tingling. Pins and needles. He began to walk without thinking, as unsteady and stiff as a newborn foal. He remembered his daughter walking, her first steps, as if her feet knew what they were doing but had failed to alert the rest of her body. His shoulders threatened to drop him, but he soon found his center. A column of life, some sort of soul, rammed up through his body. He clung to it, a mast in a storm. He walked more smoothly, but not adept, down the stairs and across the mud, to Longinus.

"You," the captain said, his voice a breath of dry air through the bleached, exposed bone of his jaw. "Choose your arms."

A mound of loot lay on the field beyond them. Toothless and Breakneck wandered to the edge of that pile, gaining confidence with each step. They did not look at one another. They did not speak, or even know how to speak. Toothless could not even conceive of how to force air from his lungs, and remembered that he had no tongue or jaw to form words. He concentrated intently on staying abreast of his companion. So, he learned to walk.

Swords, axes, shields, armor. Toothless still wore his chain mail and, though it was typically forbidden to a married man, even a widower, the white surcoat and mantle of the Knights Templar. The red cross on his surcoat, however, was stained with his own blood.

A familiar hilt, an angel's face--Toothless reached for it. His hand was shriveled and gray.

"Resist them," Tuan had said.

The Yew spoke to him, now.

"You shall live forever."

Toothless gripped the sword, Martin's sword. Its steel sang as it slid from the heap, filling him with glorious rage.