Precognition

They sat in a semicircle. There were seven of them, around one side of a blazing campfire. The story-teller sat at the other side of the fire, so as to be able to be heard by each of the band of hunters. To them, he commenced to relate his life story. Or rather, the story of the most significant episode in his life.

“It was my first time away from my home and family,” he began, as he sat at the small fire in the woods with the strangers, “and even though I was apprehensive about leaving, I was not outrightly afraid as I was in good, and familiar, company.” He took a mouthful of water from his canteen and continued. “There were three of us,” he said, “myself, my brother and our friend (who was almost our third brother). His sister had expressed, by no means subtly, her wishes to accompany us. Of course, she was denied. Eight-year-old girls were not allowed on adventures, no matter how ‘tough’ they were. Not that it was anything close to an adventure we were going on, but to three twelve-year-old boys, even camping in the woods a mere league outside our village was adventure enough. As far as we were concerned, we had, at that moment, reached the pinnacle of our maturity. There were no adults out there to watch over our every move like we were children. Though by the end, I wished there were. We were more than children that day. We were adventurers. We were explorers. We were warriors. We left at dawn that morning, bringing with us bags of food, flasks of water and…”

“Excuse me,” interrupted one of the strangers. He had spotted a deer in the dusk half-light through the trees just outside their clearing. In the blink of an eye he had an arrow nocked to the string of a longbow, and with uncanny accuracy embedded the arrow in the skull of the deer without rising from his seat. The story-teller shifted uncomfortably at this display of sharp-eyedness. It took him until the deer fell to see it, and it was too dark even that early for him to get a clear aim.

Lucky shot, he thought. It was more to put himself at ease than to note the archer’s apparent ‘fluke’.

Two of the strangers dragged the deer carcass into the clearing and began to skin it with practised efficiency.

“Dinner,” explained the archer, staring at the deer. He turned to the story-teller. “Please continue.”

The story-teller was in awe of the speed of the whole operation and hesitated a moment before tearing his transfixed eyes away from the amazingly quick-working skinners, who had at this point removed the skin from all four legs of the deer, and resuming his tale.

“We brought food, water and wooden toy swords into the woods with us. Our future adventures, coined by our vivid imaginations, were surpassed only by our thirst for drawing the blood of the wicked. Fate weaves terrible ironies into the fabric of life.”

He paused for a moment, head bowed. Even the skinners stilled their work. After a deafening silence, he wet his lips and continued.

“Our parents had given us a small bow and quiver with five arrows. Short, bodkin arrows tailed by three Robin feathers each. My brother, elder by ten months, was the only one of the trio our parents permitted to use it. Just as well, too. He was the only one who could. Well, the only one who could use it properly. However, our parents had given the strictest orders that it was only for use in an emergency. I think what happened that night could be counted as an emergency.

“The sun was diving rapidly below the eastern horizon. Much too rapidly for an August night. We had been engaging each other in mock displays of swordsmanship and gallantry when the disc of the sun plunged under the disc of the land. We decided it was too late and dark to continue our battles, so we sat under our bear-skin tent and tried to scare each other with farfetched accounts of paranormal events. Even in the eerily dim light of the oil lantern, our attempts proved vain. After my brother failed miserably with a pitiful yarn about a man who is eaten by a wolf, which subsequently becomes the man that it ate and endeavoured, successfully, to devour the population of a village, we dropped off to sleep. Something woke me. At first I was not sure what it was, but then I heard muffled, distant cries of fear and panic going up from our village. We thought nothing of it. Futile invasions of our village by inept wildmen from the west were commonplace. Our kith and kin had effectively defended themselves before, and we all knew that they were more than able to do it again.”

At this point the deer had been completely stripped of its skin. It was liberating a pungent odour, which rebounded around inside the story-teller’s nostrils and stifled him.

Much to the disdain of the story-teller, the two skinners moved the reeking carcass to the centre of the semicircle of listeners. Wordlessly, the seven strangers unsheathed a short, jade dagger each and proceeded to cut pieces of meat off the corpse. They then ate the venison raw. The story-teller could almost taste the revolting raw red meat himself. He felt his own last meal of berries and a cooked rabbit creep its way slowly back up his oesophagus.

Nevertheless, he suppressed his disapproval (among other things) and continued his story at a gesture from the archer, who was sitting in the middle of the semicircle across the fire from the story-teller.

“We left our tent and faced the village when the dim orange glow of burning, carrying with it draughts of black smoke and fearful shrieks, filled the air. Low, crackling noises drifted across the league of forest between us and the village. The fire made us wonder. The wildmen were afraid of flames, so they couldn’t, and wouldn’t, have started it. And it was not a known strategy to us for our kindred to use fire to drive out the wildmen.

“We were suddenly made aware of a terrifying fact; the cries of fear had died out. They could not have been the cries of wildmen, as we had already established. That left just one horrific alternative. At that moment, indistinguishable roars of victory and songs of triumph went up from the village. Not in our villagers’ voices, but in deep, gruff voices, and in a language we could not recognise. As the dreadful truth sank into our souls, the voices gradually increased in volume. They were coming our way and they were getting closer.

“We fled and hid up a large oak tree about twenty yards from our camp, which we did not have time to clear. I, being the most agile, was at the top of the tree. It was hard to keep our balance, as a stomach pit saturated with horror does a good job of disrupting one’s equilibrium. We could hear the voices clearly, now, speaking and chanting in their harsh language, probably still congratulating each other on a job well done. They sounded very close, yet I could still not see their owners, even from my high vantage point. It was then that my worst fears were confirmed. They were not, definitely not, wildmen. For all the loudness of their voices, they had just entered my field of vision then. I could barely make them out, but I noticed that they all had quite light-coloured hair and were very pale of face. They were now directly underneath us, having moved at an incredulously fast pace, and I could make out almost every detail on them. They wore plain, jet-black armour, which contrasted sharply with their bright, almost luminous, skin and hair. They were about six feet tall, from what I could see of them. Had I not hated and feared them so, and heard their tongues exercise, I might have thought them beautiful and elegant. As it stood, there were around twenty of these graceful, rough-mouthed knights making their way through the forest. They spotted our camp and stalled. Their sudden silence amazed me. They spread out in every direction, scouring the ground for any signs of the camp’s ex-inhabitants. One Blackknight strode forward towards our tree and stood directly under me, peering out into the darkness as if it were glass.

“I guessed that this man (Was he a man? Was he human?) was the leader, because he was taller than the rest by a foot (though it was difficult to tell from a vertical viewpoint), and wore armour with beautifully elaborate golden designs superimposed on the blacker-than-black steel.

“My legs, dangling from the lofty branch I had hastily perched myself on, were shaking with fear. In a combination of trembling and cold sweat, my left shoe had begun to work itself off my foot. If it fell it would land on the knight’s head! In a last-ditch attempt to protect our hiding place, and subsequently our lives, I flicked my foot upwards and sent my shoe flying off over the knight’s head to land in a pile of early-fallen leaves about ten feet away. His gaze jerked quickly towards this spot and he shouted something in his jagged language. He and his troops began to move towards the shoe. The butterflies in my stomach began to subside. It was by a cruel act of fate at that very moment, however, that the lower branches supporting my brother and friend broke, sending them tumbling to the ground. The Blackknights halted, turned, and with deadly efficiency and lethal accuracy, swiftly decapitated the two boys. I tried my best to remain still, which was not easy considering I was now shuddering violently with fear and my stomach was tying knots around my ribs with the shock and repugnance of what I had just witnessed. Luckily, the Blackknights did not look up. Apparently assuming that they had found their targets here, they turned and paced towards the leaf pile. The leader, whom I now saw to be a good eighteen inches above the rest, examined it closely for a second, and then strode off east with his army, never looking back.

“Time lost all meaning in that tree. I was astray in my own thoughts, or unthoughts, and memories. I was lamenting for my friends, my family, my home, all that I held dear. All that I held dear. Gone. It was gone. All of it. All shattered at the hands of the bittersweet Blackknights. I was too shocked to cry, I was too heartbroken not to. It was almost dawn when I alighted from the tree. My legs buckled under me as I landed, not only because of the blood that had rushed to my ankles, but because of the blood that had left my heart when I saw the corpses of my brethren in four pieces on the floor. Not bearing to take a second look, I packed up our – my – tent (surprisingly left untouched by the Blackknights) and bow and arrows and gathered as much food as I could carry with me as I set off for the next town, two miles north. I did not bother to go back to my village. After witnessing the viciousness of their attackers, I knew in my heart that there would be nothing there for me except more depressing nostalgia, but I did not think of that at the time, I just thought that there would be no food or valuables there to take with me. My emotions had left me and my body was numb.

“When I reached the next village, a week later, it seemed the Blackknights had been there too. By the looks of things, it happened about ten days beforehand. All the buildings had been burned and the decaying corpses were piled up in the centre of the town. Pools of blood lay dried and stagnant about the ruins. Seeing this devastation made me wonder what had happened my own family and village, if it was something similar. I felt like vomiting. I decided to continue north. That was five years ago, almost to the day. When my food ran out I survived on whatever I could find or hunt in the wild, and have done so ever since. No matter how hard I try, every now and again I think of home. But not of the Blackknights or their devastation. I have now only happy memories.”

And so he concluded his story.

“Fascinating life you have led,” said the archer in the centre of the semicircle, with a stony expression. “A pity it must come to such an abrupt end.”

The story-teller then noticed, out of the corner of his eye, that a man at the end of the semicircle was standing. He was holding a nocked bow. It was aimed directly at the story-teller’s chest.

He heard a twang, and as the arrow zipped through the air towards his heart, time seemed to stand still. The arrow was now crawling unhurriedly in his direction. His head was empty. Vacantly, he saw the arrow pierce the flames of the campfire and carry them with it. It was at his chest. He could have reached out and touched it. He abruptly came to his senses and one thought entered his mind: This is it. I am dead.

He woke. A twelve-year-old boy lying under a bearskin tent in a forest. He was wrapped in the blanket his mother had made for him especially for the trip. He looked to his left and right. His brother and best friend were both sound asleep, wrapped up in the blankets his mother had made for them. He remembered none of his dream. He wondered what had woken him.

Suddenly, he heard muffled cries of fear break out from the village, and die after a moment. A warm orange glow and a crackling noise entered the forest, followed by the first pale wisps of smoke, and one other sound. The sound of shouts and cheers of victory.

They were getting closer.