then, turned by some instinct, looked east across the wheat field. Two strangers approaching, swords at their hips.
‘It’s a bad day to be a peasant.’ The taller of the two men smiled as he walked across the field, flattening the new wheat beneath his boots.
‘It’s never a good day to be a peasant.’ Alann straightened slowly, rubbing the soil from his hand. The men’s grimy tatters had enough in common to suggest they had once been a uniform. They came smeared with dirt and ash, blades within easy reach, a reckless anticipation in their eyes.
‘Where’s your livestock?’ The shorter man, older, a scar threading his cheekbone leading to a cloudy eye. Close up both men stank of smoke.
‘My sheep?’ Alann knew he should be scared. Perhaps he lacked the wit for it, like goats led gently to their end. Either way a familiar calm enfolded him. He leant against his hoe and kept his gaze on the men. ‘Would you like to buy them?’
‘Surely.’ The tall man grinned, a baring of yellow teeth. Wolf’s fangs. ‘Lead on.’
For a heartbeat Alann’s gaze fell to the soldiers’ boots, remnants of the fresh green wheat still sticking to the leather. ‘I’ve never been a good farmer,’ he said. ‘Some men have the feel for it. It’s in their blood. The land speaks to them. It answers them.’ He watched the strangers. Conversations carry a momentum, there’s a path they are expected to take, a cycle, a season, like the growing of a crop. Take the rhythm of seasons away and farmers grow confused. Turn a conversation at right angles and men lose their surety.
‘What?’ The shorter man frowned, doubt in his blind eye.
The tall man twisted his mouth. ‘I don’t give a—’
Alann flipped up his hoe, a swift turn about the middle, sped up by kicking the head. He lunged forward, jabbing. Instinct told him never to swing with a long weapon. The short metal blade proved too dull to cut flesh but it crushed the man’s throat back against the bones of his neck and his surprise left him in a wordless crimson mist.
Without pause, Alann charged the soldier’s companion, the shaft of his hoe held crosswise before him in two outstretched hands. The man turned his shoulder, reaching for his sword. He would have done better to pull his knife. Alann bore him to the ground, pressing the hoe across his neck, pinning the half-drawn blade with the weight of his body.
Men make ugly sounds as they choke. Both soldiers purpled and thrashed and gargled, the first needing no more help to die, the second fighting all the way. When soldiers poke a hole in a man and move on, leaving him to draw his last breaths alone, there’s a distance. That’s battle. The farmer though, the death he brings is more personal. He gentles his beast, holds it close, makes his cut, not in passion, not with violence, but as a necessary thing. The farmer stays, the death is shared, part of the cycle of seasons and crops, of growing and of reaping. They name it slaughter. Alann felt every moment of the older man’s struggle, body to body, straining to keep him down. He watched the life go out of the soldier’s good eye. And finally, exhausted, revolted, trembling, he rolled clear.
Getting to all fours, Alann vomited, a thin acidic spew across the dry earth. He rose to his knees, facing out across the next field, rye, silent and growing, row on row, rippling in the breeze. It hardly seemed real, a dead man to either side of him.
‘You should get up,’ Darin said. Solemn, pale, watching as he always watched.
‘… they called me kennt.’ Allen’s mind still fuzzy within that strange and enfolding calm. ‘When I was a boy, the others called me kennt. They knew. Children know. It’s grown men who see what they want to see.’
‘You can walk away from it.’ Darin looked down at the dead men. ‘This doesn’t define you.’
‘Forgive me then.’ Alann got to his feet, drawing the sword the soldier had failed to pull and taking the dagger that he should have reached for instead.
‘You need to forgive yourself, brother.’ Darin offered him that smile, the only one he ever had, the almost smile, sadder than moonset. The smile faded. ‘You have to go to the house now.’
‘The house! They came from the house!’ Even as Alann said it he started to run up the slope toward the rise concealing his home. He ran fast but the sorrow caught him just the same, a chokehold, misting his eyes. His life had never fitted, his wife, his children, always seeming as though they should belong to someone else, someone better, but Mary he had grown to love, in his way, and the boys had taken hold of his heart before they ever knew how to reach.
Alann ran, pounding up the slope. The flames had the house in their grip by the time he cleared the ridge. The heat stopped him as effectively as a wall. Some men, better men perhaps, would have run on, impervious to the inferno, impervious to the fact that nothing could live within those walls, too wrapped in grief to do anything but die beside their loved ones. For Alann though, the furnace blast that blistered his cheeks and took the tears from his eyes, burned away the mist of emotion and left him empty. He stepped back from the crackle and the roar, one pace, three paces, five until the heat could be endured. He dropped both weapons and stared into his empty hands as if they might hold his sorrow.
‘I’m sorry.’ Darin, standing at his side, untouched by the heat, untroubled by the run.
‘You!’ Alann turned, hands raised. ‘You did this!’
‘No.’ A plain denial. A slow shake of his head.
‘You brought this curse … you never forgave me!’
‘It didn’t happen for a reason, Alann. These things never do. Hurt spills over into hurt, like water over stones. There’s no foreseeing it, no knowing who it will touch, who will be left standing.’
Alann knelt to take up the sword and the knife.
‘You’ve got to get to the village, warn the elders. There needs to be a defence—’
‘No.’ Alann’s turn to offer flat refusal. He turned and walked toward the shelter where the sheep huddled against winter storms. Kindling lay stacked in the lee of the dry-stone wall, and in a niche set into its thickness, wrapped in oil-cloth, an old hatchet, a whetstone alongside. Alann thrust sword and dagger into his belt and took the hand-axe, and the stone to set an edge on it.
‘There’s another side to this, Alann. It’s a storm like any other, the worst of them, but it will end—’
‘You want me to rebuild? Find a new wife? Make more sons?’ Alann scanned the distant fields as he spoke, his hands already busy with the whetstone on the hatchet blade. He could see the lines where the soldiers had set off through the beet, angling towards Warren Wood. Robert Good’s farm lay beyond, and Ren Hay’s, the village past those. Alann pocketed the stone and set off after his prey at a steady jog.
Darin was waiting for him at the wood’s edge.
‘You’ll die, and for nothing. You won’t save anyone, won’t get revenge. You’ll die as the man you never wanted to be. God will see you—’
‘God sent the soldiers. God made me a killer. Let’s see how that turns out.’
‘No.’ And Darin stepped into his path, careless of the hatchet in his brother’s hand.
‘It’s over.’ Alann didn’t pause. ‘And you’re just a ghost.’ He stepped through Darin and went on into the trees.
Six soldiers rested at the base of one of the old-stones, monoliths scattered through the Warren Wood, huge and solitary reminders of men who lived off these lands before Christ first drew breath. They had insignias beneath the grime of their tunics but Alann wouldn’t have known which lord they took their coin from even if the coat of arms had flown above them on a new-sewn banner. He slipped back through the holly that hid him and in the clearer space behind drew the sword he had taken. It would serve him poorly in the close confines beneath the trees and he had never swung one before. He stepped around the bush, breaking through the reaching branches of a beech,