Count Brass Read online

  Hawkmoon ploughed on, still crying out: 'Count Brass! Count Brass!'

  Though he knew this was a dream, a distorted memory of the Battle of Londra, he still felt that he must reach his old friend's side. But before he could reach Count Brass, he saw the count wrench off his mirrormask and face Saka Gerden bareheaded. Then the two closed.

  Hawkmoon was nearly there by now, fighting wildly with his only object being to reach Count Brass.

  And then Hawkmoon saw a rider of the Order of the Goat, a spear poised in his hand, riding down on Count Brass from behind. Hawkmoon yelled, spurred his horse forward and drove the Sword of the Dawn deep into the throat of the Goat rider just as Count Brass split the skull of Saka Gerden.

  Hawkmoon kicked the corpse of the Goat Rider free from its saddle and called:

  'A horse for you, Count Brass.'

  Count Brass offered Hawkmoon a quick grin of thanks and swung up into the saddle, his mirror-helm forgotten on the ground.

  'Thanks!' shouted Count Brass above the din of the battle. 'Now we'd best try to re-group our forces for the final assault.'

  His voice had a peculiar echo to it. Hawkmoon swayed in his saddle as the pain from the Black Jewel grew still more intense. He tried to reply, but he could not He looked for Yisselda in the ranks of his own forces, but could not see her.

  The horse seemed to gallop faster and faster as the battle-noise began to fade. Then he was no longer astride a horse at all. A wind blew him on. A strong, cold wind, like the wind that blew across the Kamarg.

  The sky was darkening. The battle was behind him. He began to fall through the night. He saw swaying reeds where he had seen fighting men. He saw glistening lagoons and marshes. He heard the lonely bark of a marsh fox and he mistook it for Count Brass's voice.

  And suddenly the wind no longer blew.

  He tried to move of his own accord, but something tugged at his body. He no longer wore the mirror-helm. His sword was no longer in his hand. His vision cleared as the terrible pain fled from his skull.

  He lay immersed in marsh mud. It was night-time. He was sinking slowly into the greedy earth. He saw part of the body of a horse just in front of him. He reached towards it, but only one arm was free from the mud now. He heard his name being called and he mistook it for the cry of a bird.

  'Yisselda,' he murmured. 'Oh, Yisselda!'

  Chapter Five

  Something Of A Dream

  He felt as if he had already died. Fantasies and memories became confused as he waited for the marsh to swallow him. Faces appeared before him. He saw the face of Count Brass which shifted from relative youth to relative age even as he watched. He saw the face of Oladahn of the Bulgar Mountains. He saw Bowgentle and he saw D'Averc. He saw Yisselda. He saw Kalan of Vitall and Taragorm of the Palace of Time. Beast faces loomed on all sides. He saw Rinal of the Wraithfolk, Orland Fank of the Runestaff and his brother The Warrior in Jet and Gold. He saw Yisselda again. But weren't there other faces, too? Children's faces. Why did he not see them. And why did he confuse them with the face of Count Brass? Count Brass as a child? He had not known him then. He had not been born then.

  Count Brass's face was concerned. It opened its lips. It spoke.

  'Is that you, young Hawkmoon?'

  'Aye, Count Brass. It is Hawkmoon. Shall we die together?'

  He smiled at the vision.

  'He still raves,' said a sad voice which was not that of Count Brass. 'I am sorry, my lord. I should have tried to stop him.'

  Hawkmoon recognised the voice of Captain Josef Vedla.

  'Captain Vedla? Have you come to pull me from the marsh for a second time?'

  A rope fell near Hawkmoon's free hand. Automatically he passed his wrist through the loop. Someone began to pull at the rope. Slowly he was tugged free of the marsh.

  His head was still aching, as if the Black Jewel had never been removed. But the ache was fading now and his brain was clearing. Why should he be reliving what was, after all, a fairly mundane incident in his life?—though he had come very close to death.

  'Yisselda?' He looked for her face among those bending over him. But his fantasy remained. He still saw Count Brass, surrounded by his old Kamargian soldiers. There was no woman here at all.

  'Yisselda?' he said again.

  Count Brass said softly. 'Come, lad, we'll take you back to Castle Brass.'

  Hawkmoon felt himself lifted in the count's massive arms and carried to a waiting horse.

  'Can you ride yourself?' Count Brass asked.

  'Aye.' Hawkmoon clambered into the saddle of the horned stallion and straightened his back, swaying slightly as his feet sought the stirrups. He smiled. 'Are you a ghost still, Count Brass? Or have you truly been restored to life. I said I would give anything for you to be brought back to us.'

  'Restored to life? You should know that I am not dead!' Count Brass laughed. 'And these fresh terrors come to haunt you, Hawkmoon?'

  'You did not die at Londra?'

  'Thanks to you, aye. You saved my life. If that Goat rider had got his spear into me, the chances are I'd be dead now.'

  Hawkmoon smiled to himself. 'So events can be changed. And without repercussion, it seems. But where are Kalan and Taragorm now? And the others . . .' He turned to Count Brass as they rode together along the familiar marsh trails. 'And Bowgentle, and Oladahn, and D'Averc?'

  Count Brass frowned. 'Dead these five years. Do you not remember? Poor lad, we all suffered after the Battle of Londra.' He cleared his throat. 'We lost much in our service of the Runestaff. And you lost your sanity.'

  'My sanity?'

  The lights of Aigues-Mortes were coming in sight. Hawkmoon could see the outline of Castle Brass on the hill.

  Again Count Brass cleared his throat. Hawkmoon stared at him, 'My sanity, Count Brass?'

  'I should not have mentioned it. We'll soon be home.' Count Brass would not meet his gaze.

  They rode through the gates of the town and began to ascend the winding streets. Some of the soldiers rode their horses in other directions as they neared the castle, for they had quarters in the town itself.

  'Good night to you!' called Captain Vedla.

  Soon only Count Brass and Hawkmoon were left. They entered the courtyard of the castle and dismounted.

  The hall of the castle looked little different from when Hawkmoon had last seen it Yet it had an empty feel to it.

  'Is Yisselda sleeping?' Hawkmoon asked.

  'Aye,' said Count Brass wearily. 'Sleeping.'

  Hawkmoon looked down at his mud-caked clothes.

  He no longer wore armour. 'I'd best bathe and get to bed myself,' he said. He looked hard at Count Brass and then he smiled. 'I thought you slain, you know, at the Battle of Londra.'

  'Aye,' said Count Brass in the same troubled voice. 'I know. But now you know I'm no ghost, eh?'

  'Just so!' Hawkmoon laughed with joy. 'Kalan's schemes served us much better than they served him, eh?'

  Count Brass frowned. 'I suppose so,' he said uncertainly, as if he was not sure what Hawkmoon meant.

  'Yet he escaped,' Hawkmoon went on. 'We could have trouble from him again.'

  'Escaped? No. He committed suicide after taking that jewel from your head. That is what disturbed your brain so much.'

  Hawkmoon began to feel afraid.

  'You remember nothing of our most recent adventures then?' He moved to where Count Brass warmed himself at the fire.

  'Adventures? You mean the marsh? You rode off in a trance, mumbling something of having seen me out there. Vedla saw you leave and came to warn me. That is why we went in search of you and just managed to find you before you died . ..'

  Hawkmoon stared hard at Count Brass and then he turned away. Had he dreamed all the rest. Had he truly been mad?

  'How long have I—have I been in this trance you mention, Count Brass?'

  'Why, since Londra. You seemed rational enough for a little while after the jewel was removed. But then you began to speak of Yisselda as if she st
ill lived. And there were other references to some you thought dead— such as myself. It is not surprising that you should have suffered such strain, for the jewel was . . .'

  'Yisselda!' Hawkmoon cried out in sudden grief. 'You say she is dead?'

  'Aye—at the Battle of Londra, fighting as well as any other warrior—she went down...'

  'But the children—the children . . .' Hawkmoon struggled to remember the names of his children. 'What were they called? I cannot quite recall . . .'

  Count Brass sighed a deep sigh and put his gauntleted hand on Hawkmoon's shoulder. 'You spoke of children, too. But there were no children. How could there be?'

  'No children.'

  Hawkmoon felt strangely empty. He strove to remind himself of something he had said quite recently. 'I would give anything if Count Brass could live again . . .'

  And now Count Brass lived again and his love, his beautiful Yisselda, his children, they were gone to limbo—they had never existed in all those five years since the Battle of Londra.

  'You seem more rational,' said Count Brass. 'I had begun to hope that your brain was healing. Now, perhaps, it has healed.'

  'Healed?' The word was a mockery. Hawkmoon turned again to confront his old friend. 'Have all in Castle Brass—in the whole Kamarg—thought me mad?'

  'Madness might be too strong a word,' said Count Brass gruffly. 'You were in a kind of trance, as if you dreamed of events slightly different to those which were actually taking place . . . that is the best way I can describe it. If Bowgentle were here, perhaps he could have explained it better. Perhaps he could have helped you more than we could.' The count in brass shook his heavy, red head. 'I do not know, Hawkmoon.'

  'And now I am sane,' said Hawkmoon bitterly.

  'Aye, it seems so.'

  'Then perhaps my madness was preferable to this reality.' Hawkmoon walked heavily towards the stairs. 'Oh, this is so hard to bear.'

  Surely it could not all have been a graphic dream. Surely Yisselda had lived and the children had lived?

  But already the memories were fading, as a dream fades. At the foot of the stairs he turned again to where Count Brass still stood, looking into the fire, his old head heavy and sad.

  'We live—you and I? And our friends are dead. Your daughter is dead. You were right, Count Brass—much was lost at the Battle of Londra. Your grandchildren were lost, also.'

  'Aye,' said Count Brass almost inaudibly. 'The future was lost, you could say.'

  Epilogue

  Nearly seven years had passed since the great Battle of Londra, when the power of the Dark Empire had been broken. And much had taken place in those seven years. For five of them Dorian Hawkmoon, Duke of Koln, had suffered the tragedy of madness. Even now, two years since he had recovered, he was not the same man who had ridden so bravely on the Runestaff's business. He had become grim, withdrawn and lonely. Even his old friend, Count Brass, the only other survivor of the conflict, hardly knew him now.

  'It is the loss of his companions—the loss of his Yisselda,' whispered the sympathetic townspeople of the restored Aigues-Mortes. And they would pity Dorian Hawkmoon as he rode, alone, through the town and out of the gates and across the wide Kamarg, across the marshlands where the giant scarlet flamingoes wheeled and the white bulls galloped.

  And Dorian Hawkmoon would ride to a small hill which rose from the middle of the marsh and he would dismount and lead his horse up to the top where stood the ruin of an ancient church, built before the onset of the Tragic Millennium.

  And he would look out across the waving reeds and the rippling lagoons as the mistral keened and its melancholy voice would echo the misery in his eyes.

  And he would try to recall a dream.

  A dream of Yisselda and two children whose names he could not remember. Had they ever had names in his dream?

  A foolish dream, of what might have been, if Yisselda had survived the Battle of Londra.

  And sometimes, when the sun began to set across the broad marshlands and the rain began to fall, perhaps, into the lagoons, he would stand upon the highest part of the ruin and raise his arms out to the ragged clouds which raced across the darkening sky and call her name into the wind.

  'Yisselda! Yisselda!'

  And his cry would be taken up by the birds which sailed upon that wind.

  'Yisselda!'

  And later Hawkmoon would lower his head and he would weep and he would wonder why he still felt, in spite of all the evident truth, that he might one day find his lost love again.

  Why did he wonder if there were still some place— some other Earth perhaps—where the dead still lived? Surely such an obsession showed that there was a trace of madness left in his skull?

  Then he would sigh and arrange his features so that none who saw him would know that he had mourned and he would climb upon his horse and, as the dusk fell, ride back to Castle Brass where his old friend waited for him.

  Where Count Brass waited for him.

  This Ends

  The First Of The

  Chronicles Of Castle Brass