"Turns the Wheel Eternal"

The column of retreating horsemen stretched across the valley and into a rocky pass.  Most of the men, packed into a motley array of leather, scale, chain, and plate armor, were massive in build.  Weapons of every hooked, barbed, and bladed variety protruded from scabbards and saddlebags, with the odd lance or pole ax held aloft for good measure.  A few of the longer weapons were adorned with tattered hides, grim remembrances from actions recently fought.  They would have been a fearsome sight to an untrained observer, but the one remaining eye of the rider who sat watching was not untrained.  His eye was keen and sharp, like every other part of him, like the double-edged cleaving sword that lay naked across his saddle.  He had seen all manner of things over the long centuries, countless years that had passed by and left their stain upon him.  He did not approve of what he saw in front of him now.

            He shifted his weight slightly to his left.  The horse sensed its rider’s annoyance and snorted in reply.  Granicus was annoyed, supremely annoyed with what had become a common theme for his army:  retreat, calculated withdrawal, the practice of showing your horse’s arse to the enemy.

            “You.” 

A horseman, long hair pulled back into a topknot, acknowledged the summons and left the line of retreat.  He reined to a halt two horse lengths short of Granicus.  “Aye?” 

Granicus looked at the pole ax and the hide of the nightmare that hung from its studded blade.  “Let low with that can opener.”  The rider did, and Granicus leaned forward and gripped the mangled mane, caked with blood and intestines.  He tore it loose with a hand as big as a slaughterhouse mallet.  The two men locked eyes.  “No trophies for men in retreat, trooper.  Get gone.”  He did.

The one-eyed commander looked back along the line again.  He pushed a hand through his hair, almost as dirty but not as bloody as the carcass he had just cast aside.  The hand came away with a clump of his own hair.  “Uh,” he grunted and spat.  He looked at the long, dark tangle of hair.  Then he dropped it, and rejoined his men.

 

Sergeant Brian Lear leaned against the sump of a battered parking meter and observed the scene before him.  A woman, wearing a sheet that failed to cover all that it should have, stood rooted to the pavement.  She was screaming at four patrolmen, two trucks full of firemen, and an ambulance driver.  Her apartment smoked behind her, water dripping from a shattered window.  He was hoping that some or all of these men would have the sense to stop staring and leave, but they didn’t.  He was hoping that the screaming fat lady would run out of steam, but she didn’t.  So he watched.  “It’s gonna have to be me, he thought.”  He was right.

Half an hour later he was walking down the steps of the precinct house.  Someone else would handle the paperwork.  Someone else could have the arrest, too.  “Who cares,” he thought.  He had given up on detective years ago.  Lately, he had pretty much given up in general.

“Yo,Stripes.”  Brian smiled despite his effort not to.  He wanted to look depressed, but Leroy made it hard.  “What you doin’ here, Pops?  Lookin’ for coffee?”

“Evening, Leroy.”

“Yo.”

“It’s late.”  A formality, really, because Leroy was always outside.  Time, weather, hail of bullets, nothing made a difference.  Brian continued with the ritual.  “Don’t you have homework or something?  Shouldn’t you be in bed?  This is a school night, right?”

Leroy looked up at him and they both laughed at the same time.  “Man, you funny.”  They paced each other as they walked, Leroy doing what he could to keep up.  Brian liked him.  He liked the fact that he was always around, the fact that he was actually named Leroy, the fact that the boy never cursed even though the world around him was a curse.  The boy was his friend.

“Big mama was just lettin’ it out, Stripes.  You didn’t need to tag her.”

Brian shrugged.  “She was going on.”

“Yeah.”

They kept walking, never glancing at the pimps, drugged out vagrants, or just about anything else.  Both were glad for the company.

They moved on far enough to find a franchise that sold hot chocolate.  They drank in silence.  Leroy finished, then tossed his cup into the trash.  He always did, making up for the fact that he never said thank you.  “Alright.  Later.”

“Later.”  Brian watched him walk away.  But he didn’t feel bad for him.  Leroy was the perfect antidote for this dirty little patch of earth that they were sharing.  No, he didn’t feel bad as he watched the boy walk off, kicking a beer can.  The warmth was leaking out of him like blood, but still he watched.  Feel bad?  What for?

 

Granicus made it to the river and pushed the wounded trooper off the back of his horse.  The man was just about dead, and there was no time for pleasantries.  He pulled the reins sharply to the left, twisting and swinging his sword with his right arm.  The nightmare had made the mistake of going airborne instead of staying low.  His blade clove it in half.  He rose in the saddle and with his backswing split the top of its handler and buried the blade a good two feet into his chest.  He tore the blade loose.

“Times are tough when I have to lead my own scouting party,” he thought.  The bulk of the troop was watering the horses, two miles beyond the river, waiting for the scouts to come back.  Granicus was coming alone.  And for the first time in eight hundred years, the nightmares would be crossing, too.  He could see a black wave of them in the distance, beyond the fresh corpses of his men and the ambush party that had taken them by surprise.

A new wave of creatures bayed nearby, and he could hear the call of their handlers.  He wiped the sticky, viscous fluid off of his blade and wiped sweat from his brow.  A fresh clump of hair fell to the ground.

Granicus shifted his blade as Brundt turned to face the approaching threat.  “Nah.  Come.”  He rode down one bank of the river, waded across, and then charged up the other side, eying his dead scout.  Index finger extended, middle finger curled tight, he traced a rune in the air above the fallen man.  The body disappeared.

Granicus sucked n a great breath of air and his blue scale armor tightened around his bulk.  He let out a roar that froze his adversaries.  It filled the air with sound made physical.  The returning echo told him that the army had stopped advancing toward him.  A temporary condition, he knew.  He cursed, then rode off to join his men.

 

Brian drank his third cup of hot chocolate, rubbing his eyes in the harsh glare of the all-night book café.  “You’re like a kid with those things.”  The young lady had probably served him a couple of hundred cups during the past year, almost as many as her predecessor. 

He massaged his eyes through the lids and decided that a snappy reply was not worth the effort.  The affected, laid-back atmosphere was beginning to irritate him anyway.  Time to go.

He walked the twenty or so blocks back to his apartment and then climbed the steps to the third floor.  He dropped the books that he would probably never read onto his kitchen table.  With one hand he swiped the newspaper and notebooks onto the floor.  Otherwise, the place was tidy.

On cue, the first flakes of snow began to fall outside, glowing beneath the streetlights.  It made Brian feel happy.  He removed his wallet from his back pocket and shifted his body into a position that would allow sleep.  His badge caught his eye.  He had always liked his badge.  It was a silver shield, something a knight would carry.  Brian looked at it, comfortable and drowsy, enjoying the winter weather.  Outside, heavy snow fell.

 

The snow fell in waves, blanketing the ground, men and horses, weapons, and the scrub brush that dotted the low-lying hills.  It covered everything it touched.  Except Granicus.  The blue scales of his armor glowed in the light of the storm.  It was his element.  He looked up at the sky and called to it.  “Fall fast, fall deep!  Hizzah!”  His black eye patch stood in stark contrast with the white snow.  His scalp glowed as well, now almost completely devoid of hair. 

He urged Brundt forward and met two of his favorite troopers.  Dark skinned, quiet, each one was holding a long silver tube with black handgrips at one end. A blue light pulsed just above each grip as the weapons powered up.  Before he gave them orders, though, there was a bit of business to attend to. 

“Hail.”

“No.  Snow.” 

Granicus frowned.  “Here, in the Mythscape, we have little love of humor.  Even good humor falls flat on mangled ears.”

“Mythscape?”

“Aye.  That is where you are now.  You are not one of us.  But I know who you are.”

Brian closed his eyes tight, then opened them again.  The scene had not shifted.  He tried again.  “You are not dreaming,” Granicus said.  His voice was deep and loud as it always was.  But it held no menace.  It didn’t need to.

Brian looked at the figure on horseback and tried to make sense of the situation.  He was some kind of warrior, something from a different time.  He wore armor and held a sword big enough to chop a motorcycle in half.  His armor wasn’t something from a museum or a book about knights.  It was a pale blue and it seemed to pulse with an energy of its own.  The rider was impossibly large and no doubt stronger than three men.  But still, he looked ill.  Almost all of his air was missing. What remained was bedraggled, hanging loosely in a few matted clumps.

Brian spoke the first words he could think of.  “Your horse is very big.”

“Aye.”

“Does it have a name?”

“Brundt.”

“Brundt?”

“Aye.”

“Does that mean something?”  Granicus nodded, pulled back on the reins and stood in the saddle.  The horse rose on its hind legs, then returned to all four, its forelegs colliding with the ground in an explosion of earth.  The sound of the impact was remarkably similar to the horse’s name.  “Oh,” Brian offered.

“What have you brought me?” Granicus asked.

“Brought you?”

“Aye.”

Brian shook his head then looked at his closed fist and opened it.  His badge reflected the light.  “I didn’t know that you could bring things into a dream.”

“This is no dream.  I told you once already.  This is the Mythscape.”

“What’s that?”

Granicus offered one of the only smiles in his boundless existence.  “It is everything that matters.  What have you brought me?”

Brian looked at the gathered soldiers, picked out weapons and armor from half a dozen times and places.  Then he offered the badge without looking up.  When he finally did shift his gaze, he said, “You don’t look well.”

Granicus received the badge and examined it, pathetically small in his hand.  “Aye.  I am not well.”

“Are you sick?”  Granicus nodded.  “Dying?”

“ I cannot.”

Brian stared.  “What do you mean?”

“What I said.  I cannot die.  I can fade, as I have done before, but never die.”

“How do you fade?” Brian asked.  “Like a shadow?”

“Aye, like that, but never all the way.  But this time is something new.  That is why I called for you.  For this.”  He held up the badge.

“What good is that?”

“Maybe no good at all.  Maybe something.  I will know soon.”

Brian nodded.  If you fade . . . all the way this time, will one of them replace you?”  He gestured to the troopers gathered on the plane.

Granicus shook his head.  “No.  I am unique.”  He returned his gaze to the badge.

“Are you a knight?”

“What is that?”

“A knight.  A warrior with a horse and a sword.  You serve a lord and follow a code.  Chivalry.”

Granicus understood and shook his head.  They don’t come here, to the battlefields of the Scape.  We let them watch the roads, though, over that way.  They don’t do too much, though.”

Brian looked up.  “I understand.  All of a sudden, I do.”

“What is it that you understand?”

“Why you’re sick.  Why you’re losing.”

“Tell me.”

“You need me to believe.”

“Believe?”

“Right,” Brian continued.  I read this once or saw it in a movie, I don’t know, but the place can live if people, at least one person believes.”

Granicus stared down with his one good eye.

“Am I right?”

Granicus slipped from his horse’s saddle with a quick motion that seemed pretty, something a dancer would do.  “Come,” he said.

Brian followed him to a ravine where the corpse of a large creature lay.  It made him take a step back and raise his hands.

“Dead,” Granicus said, pushing his sword into the ground, the hilt, handguard, and blade framed in cruciform against the hill behind them.  He balanced Brian’s badge on the massive pommel.  “Nightmare.  More than a pup, not full grown.  Watch.”  He reached down and clamped two impossibly large hands on the beast’s jaws and neck.  His grunt was followed by a crack and manifold crunching sounds.  Granicus tore the head loose with a twisting motion, and part of the beast’s spine came with it.  He heaved the distended column of gore the length of a city block then turned back to Brian.  “Not long ago, I could have taken a beast twice that size and crushed its skull with one hand, tossed it further than your eyes could see.  Not now.”

He reclaimed the sword and shield and walked back toward his horse with Brian following.  They stopped and watched the troopers who were once again gathering in a line, preparing to move.  “Not long ago, my army would have filled the valley and shaken the boots off your feet when it moved.  Not now.”  He brought one hand up to his head.  “Not long ago. . . .”  He patted the mottled skin of his nearly hairless crown.  “Not now.”

Brian looked at two of the troopers, the two with long metal cylinders.  Granicus nodded.  “Aye.  Had more of them, too.  But those paths are gone now.  Probably for good.  I don’t know.  They come from after you.  All these others, they come from behind.  They are the past.”

“You mean my past?”

“Aye.”

And those two, they come from my future?”  Granicus nodded .  “So you mean that I have no future.  I get it.  My whole time has no future.  Kind of a dead end.”

Granicus shrugged and nodded.  “That sums it, I guess.”  He shouldered his sword and tossed the shield back to Brian. 

“But I believe this.  All of this.  You’re Ajax, or Thor, or Gawain.  I believe it.  Doesn’t that help?”

Granicus’s one good eye burned an icy hole in Brian’s forehead.  “I am the form that casts shadows over countless worlds.  You see the sun and turn away blinded, yet you say that you believe in me.  You are a passing shadow.  So how can I believe in you?  

 

Brian woke and saw that snow was still falling.  The badge was not in his hand.  A brief and frantic search revealed that it had fallen to the floor.  He picked it up and found that it was still warm.  He squeezed it, wanting to weep.  But no tears would come.

One foot followed the other.  He forced himself not to look down because suckers looked down and suckers didn’t last very long.  He was drunk with panic, panic that made his head spin.

The pictures in his head became more vivid, more detailed.  They didn’t fade like other dreams.  Finally, he had to admit that it had not been a dream and that the man on the horse was real.  Somehow, all of it was real.  He recalled that the patch over his eye had been faded.  Somehow it had stayed in place with no strap, as if it had been painted on. 

The thing, the beast that the rider had mangled and tossed an impossible distance also became more vivid in his mind.  The teeth and cruel claws were too big, too sharp.  They belonged on a movie set.  What had the man in blue armor said?  Something about the beast being small, just a pup.  Whatever it was, it was bigger than any wolf that could exist this side of a fairy tale. 

Panic.  He knew what.  He knew where.  The Mythscape.  Wherever or whatever it was, the place was home to things that only knew how to rip, and tear, and hack.  Brian understood that Granicus and his troopers held them back.  It didn’t look like they were going to get the job done much longer.

Panic.  Troopers died but no new ones took their place.  Why?

Panic.  The corner of his eye, the edge of his vision, told him the answers to his questions.  The answers were coming for him.  Brian knew that those beasts and things even worse were on their way, wending through time, into worlds from which long ago they had been banished.  The big man was about to fail.  And somehow, it was Brian’s fault.  His fault and the fault of thousands just like him.  People who were supposed to be brave, who should have been strong.  The words echoed, “I am the form that casts shadows over countless worlds.”  And then, “How can I believe in you?”

He turned as something larger than a dog but smaller than a horse receded into a dark alley.  Brian cringed and ducked.  He pushed through a door and into a dingy apartment building.  Something with wings, something big, had passed overhead.

Inside, he caught his breath.  The empty lobby of the housing project stared back at him.  Numb, Brian pushed open the door to the stairs (the part of him still focused on this world warned him against taking the elevator).  He began to climb.  He ran up steps, through doors, and out onto the shifting gravel surface of the roof.

In front of him stood a man.  He turned slowly and faced Brian.  Short, black, face hard and mean, like so many other men Brian had seen in this neighborhood that he had walked for a decade and more.  Brian almost laughed with relief to see that this man belonged, no wings, no claws.  The man stepped aside and looked down.  So did Brian. 

His mind performed the calculations twice, making sense of the scene and then checking for accuracy.  Brian knelt and touched the still warm face of the boy.  It was Leroy.  His eyes were open and so was his throat.

“Little punk got into everything.  Saw too much.  Wouldn’t shut up, neither.”  Brian closed Leroy’s eyes, ignoring the stranger’s words, but registering the casual tone.  “No problem.  Nobody’s gonna care.”  Brian stood up and faced Leroy’s murderer.

He still held the knife, long and thin, tape over the handle.  The blade looked black and wet in the semi-dark.  “Why you up here, then?  You buyin’?”  When no answer came, “Who you with?”  Then, “You want some, too?”  He raised the knife, casually, like he was about to gut a fish.  Their eyes met for the first time.  “You’re a cop.”  He faltered then, the knife lowered one inch or two.

Brian saw an image of himself filling out papers in an office, of himself sitting in front of Leroy’s casket, of something that looked like a black lion with ten inch ears standing at attention as it climbed onto the roof.  Brian’s body was in motion, diving through the air, before he could even give himself the command to do so.

One man collided with another on the edge of a roof.  Two men tumbled over the side and into empty space and then crashed into the pavement far below.  On the roof, in the dark, a beast howled in fury and fear, then disappeared, back to where it had come from.

 

His hair fluttered, like the standard at his side.  The eye patch was gone, and he was glad.  It had made him itch. 

“All formed,” spoke his standard bearer. 

“Aye.”  Granicus rode Brundt to the top of a rise and looked east across the field at his army, assembled in ranks.  The horses and riders undulated, waves in an ocean of metal, matching the color of a soft gray sky overhead.  It was good to see them again.

Granicus lay his sword across Brundt’s saddle and knotted his hair, long and black, in the way that warriors had learned in dozens of worlds stretching forwards and backwards through time to the end and the beginning of things.  Brundt snorted and stamped.  Granicus turned and faced west.

A black wave broke the horizon.  No scouting party, no probing attack.  It was a storm to put all stars and candles out.  With it came a wind that blew across his face; it tugged at his knotted hair. 

Back the way he had come, Brundt snorting.  In front of the standard bearer, the horse reared and brought its forelegs down, speaking its name into the dirt.  Granicus patted the horse’s flank.  “Not yet.”  The wind gusted and he added, “Soon, though.”

“Well?”

Granicus looked at his footman who had materialized beside him.  Leather armor dirty, face fresh, hair pulled back in a topknot. 

“Hold high the standard.”

The standard bearer did, and the ranks of troopers shook the ground with their roar, approving in good faith what they could not see with their eyes.

“Interesting,” nodded the footman.  “A gray shield on a field of blue.  It’s new.”

“Aye.”  Granicus looked at the standard, pulled taught by the wind of a battle ready to begin.  He swept his eyes across the legions of men, searching.

“Looking for someone, Lord?”

Granicus shrugged.  “He’s there.”  He picked up his sword from where it lay across the saddle.  “Somewhere.”

He nodded to the standard bearer, who followed, and then he pushed his horse once more to the top of the rise.  The first wave of troopers followed. 

“The footman raised an arm and spoke.  “Make all our trumpets speak.”  They did.  And the charge of man and horse made a mockery of the thunder that broke overhead.

 

Give thanks then, and listen.  Or read if you can and the printing presses still churn.  Hear tell of the glories of that day long ago, during that battle which is still being fought, of  the time that wise men still struggle to give name.  Choke back the dust, hold high your sword, and speak with your own voice the name of your own now.  Can you hear the call of the trumpets?  Give thanks, and charge!