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    The Battle for the Throne: Watchers, #2
    The Battle for the Throne: Watchers, #2
    The Battle for the Throne: Watchers, #2
    Ebook268 pages5 hours

    The Battle for the Throne: Watchers, #2

    By William Meikle

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    About this ebook

    Battle is joined...
    It is 1745. The forces of the Boy-King have decimated Milecastle. The Thane is dead, another chosen, and Mary Campbell has been taken by the Boy-King as his unholy bride.
    The town is a scene of carnage and the Watchers have failed...but they may yet have a chance at redemption. Can Martin be a leader to his people in their time of need?
    And can Sean fulfill his oath without losing his soul?
    Neither have much time to consider, for the Boy King is on the rampage...and his heir is waiting to be born in the Blood Chapel of Ross-Lynn.

    Praise for The Battle for the Throne

    "I'm always impressed when anyone can add a new twist to the venerable vampire canon. Hugely enjoyable fun to read." -- Joe Gordon, The Alien Online

    "It is refreshing to read a story where the triumph of good over evil is far from definite..." -- The Eternal Night Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror

    "Meikle blends reality and fantasy so well that the reader believes that it could have happened." -- Kelly Rothenberg, author of Hitler in Progress

    "Meikle...can grace the page with words of beauty whilst twisting a nightmare into grotesque shapes before your eyes." -- Len Maynard and Mick Sims, author of The Secret Geography of Nightare and Incantations
     

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGryphonwood Press
    Release dateFeb 28, 2016
    ISBN9781524212186
    The Battle for the Throne: Watchers, #2
    Author

    William Meikle

    William Meikle is a Scottish writer, now living in Canada, with over thirty novels published in the genre press and more than 300 short story credits in thirteen countries. He has books available from a variety of publishers including Dark Regions Press and Severed Press and his work has appeared in a large number of professional anthologies and magazines. He lives in Newfoundland with whales, bald eagles and icebergs for company. When he's not writing he drinks beer, plays guitar, and dreams of fortune and glory.  

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      Book preview

      The Battle for the Throne - William Meikle

      Battle is joined...

      It is 1745. The forces of the Boy-King have decimated Milecastle. The Thane is dead, another chosen, and Mary Campbell has been taken by the Boy-King as his unholy bride.

      The town is a scene of carnage and the Watchers have failed...but they may yet have a chance at redemption. Can Martin be a leader to his people in their time of need?

      And can Sean fulfill his oath without losing his soul?

      Neither have much time to consider, for the Boy King is on the rampage...and his heir is waiting to be born in the Blood Chapel of Ross-Lynn.

      Praise for The Battle for the Throne

      I'm always impressed when anyone can add a new twist to the venerable vampire canon. Hugely enjoyable fun to read.—Joe Gordon, The Alien Online

      It is refreshing to read a story where the triumph of good over evil is far from definite...—The Eternal Night Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror

      Meikle blends reality and fantasy so well that the reader believes that it could have happened.—Kelly Rothenberg, author of Hitler in Progress

      Meikle...can grace the page with words of beauty whilst twisting a nightmare into grotesque shapes before your eyes.—Len Maynard and Mick Sims, author of The Secret Geography of Nightare and Incantations

      The Battle for the Throne

      Copyright 2016 by William Meikle

      All Rights Reserved

      Published by Gryphonwood Press

      www.gryphonwoodpress.com

      This book is a work of fiction. All characters and situations are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons and events is entirely coincidental.

      Chapter 1

      MILECASTLE 3RD NOVEMBER 1745 

      When Sean and Menzies descended from the wall, they finally realised the extent of the carnage that had been wrought on Milecastle.

      So many? Menzies whispered. So many gone.

      Bodies were littered everywhere...dead, dying, and Others, all of whom would have to be staked and sent to the true death.

      There was a moan from below, and Sean saw the Warden trying to raise himself into an upright position.

      Lie still man, Menzies said, rushing to his side, else you will burst an artery.

      The doctor tended to the Warden’s leg on the spot, and the big man screamed long and loud as his bones were reset.

      Will he lose the leg? Sean asked, but the Doctor shook his head.

      No. He is big and strong. But he will have a limp for the rest of his life.

      The old man said no more, and went back to trying to match the broken ends of bone in the big man’s leg. When it was finally done, the Warden looked tired and haggard, and as Sean led him away, he hung, almost a dead weight, against the youth’s shoulder.

      Christ, boy, the Warden muttered through clenched teeth. I’d rather die than face pain like that again.

      Sean made the sign of the evil-eye.

      Words like that should not be uttered in jest, he said. Not so soon after good men have given their all for us.

      Sean got the man settled in his bedchamber, then he left to meet the Doctor and assess the true nature of the damage that had been wrought on the town.

      The town could barely muster thirty able-bodied men. Eighty men had perished in one night, along with twenty women, and six children, one no older than six years. Four other children had disappeared and Sean hoped they had simply run off—the thought of what the Others would do with innocent children was simply too much to bear.

      They found Martin sitting in the Thane’s chair, the body of his father draped across his knees, the big sword clutched tightly in his right hand.

      At first Sean thought his friend had been turned Other, so pale was he. But when he tried to take the body of the Thane from Martin, he saw the anger flare in the depths of his eyes.

      It is only me, Sean said softly. Let me have him Martin. I will take care of him for you.

      Something in Martin’s eyes softened slightly, and he allowed Sean to lift the Thane’s body away. But he did not let go of the sword, and he still did not speak.

      For much of the rest of the morning, Martin sat in the Thane’s chair, and Menzies and Sean tried to salvage the tattered remnants of the youth’s left arm.

      Will he be well again? Sean asked.

      The old doctor shrugged. The arm might improve, given time, but the damage to his soul will be harder to heal.

      Martin listened in silence as the doctor worked on his arm and related what had happened— how Milecastle had fared during the battle. The only time there was a flicker of life in his eyes was at the mention of Barnstable, but even that had faded. The memory of the loss of the old Thane seemed to have forced everything else from his mind.

      At first Sean tried to help the old doctor, but the sight of the mangled arm and pale death mask of his friend’s face eventually sent him out into the sunlight, tears almost blinding him.

      The old Thane lay dead in the great hall, his wound laid open for all to see the treachery wrought by his own Constable. Menzies had told Sean that Barnstable could not be held responsible for his actions, but if Sean ever met him again the big man would die and Sean would question his actions at a later time.

      Sean tried to find the Constable’s son, to take some revenge that way, but young John was, like his father, among the missing. By now he was most probably sheltered somewhere from the sun, down in a deep dark place waiting for the cool night so that he could rise as one of the Others.

      All morning there were bodies to stake, many of them a result of that last attack on the wall. Late in the morning, Menzies came out of the hall to join the filthy work.

      Our new Thane is well? Sean asked, but the doctor waved him away.

      Only time will tell. He is talking now, but he refuses to leave the chair, and he refuses a sleeping draught until after we light the pyre. It is in the Lord’s hands.

      Of the old musketmen who had stood with them, only Menzies remained, and he insisted on personally sending the bodies of his fallen comrades to the final death.

      They were all of the watch in their youth. You knew them only as old men who told tall tales when they were in their cups, and bored you with stories of days gone by, he said to Sean. But they kept the wall before you were even born, and all their lives they dreaded the coming of this day. And when I ordered, they came, as if the years meant nothing. Milecastle owes them a debt that will be many years in the paying.

      Sean nodded, saluted the old doctor, and handed him a stake and a hammer.

      I would be grateful if you would send them to their rest, he said. The officers of the Watch would be grateful.

      Menzies accepted the hammer and returned the salute. As he walked away from Sean, the youth noticed, for the first time since he returned to the town, that the old man looked slow and frail.

      I will gladly take your burden from you, he shouted after the doctor, but the old man did not reply. He stooped over each body in turn, each one receiving a word of gratitude before the hammer went up and came down. There was no sound other than the thud of the hammer, and no blood, but the old men now seemed to smile in their repose, the terror of their deaths wiped clear.

      The doctor rose slowly, and when he turned back, Sean noticed tears streaming down his cheeks.

      He handed the hammer and stake back to Sean.

      I can do this no longer. I return to tend to the Thane, he said. You will see to the rest?

      Sean nodded, and once more saluted the old man, but the doctor merely walked slowly away, his head bowed.

      In the pale morning sunlight a funeral pyre was lit in the heart of Milecastle and the Parson— whom Sean suspected had spent the night cowering in his church— delivered a hellfire and damnation speech to send the dead to their rest. A second pyre was being prepared, for the sole use of the Thane, but that would have to wait until Martin was able enough to light it.

      Sean watched the pyre start to burn, then turned away...there were more bodies yet to be staked, more fuel for the ever growing pyre.

      Campbell stood guard at the door of the great hall.

      The Scotsman’s eyes were hooded and haunted, and he did not acknowledge Sean’s presence. He had not yet allowed any treatment of his wound and his hair was tangled with blood and plastered thickly against his neck. But his eyes were fierce and as piercing as ever, looking through Sean at the courtyard beyond. Sean left him there, as immobile as a statue and returned to the hardest task he had ever undertaken.

      Body after body he staked, men, women, even children, and in time it got so hard that he could not look at their faces. He kept his head down, his arm rising and falling methodically, the weight of the hammer threatening to tear his shoulder from its socket. But when he came to one in particular, and saw the fisherman’s wife sprawled beneath him, legs akimbo, red marks at her throat like marks of love, the hammer fell from his hands. He staggered away, gorge rising in his throat.

      His stomach rebelled, but there was nothing in there to bring up. He tried to remember the last time he had eaten, and could remember nothing apart from the pie at Fitzsimmons’s bar, more than twenty-four hours before.

      He went in search of breakfast and found cheese and bread in an empty kitchen off the hall. The vermin were already moving in, and he had to disturb several mice from the food. He took it outside. But when he realised that the smell of burning flesh from the pyre was actually making him salivate, he left the courtyard at a hurry, almost running. His breakfast was left on the ground behind him. It would not be long before the mice found it again.

      He ran, knocking into walls and barricades, and once he fell over a body, coming eye to eye with a staring woman with a stake in her heart and death in her eyes. Panic took him, all self- control gone, and he fled, not caring where he was going.

      Eventually he found himself out in the field to the east of the town and had to fight hard to stop his flight. Part of him wanted to keep going, to flee, anywhere where he would not have to face the dead, where he would not have to put a stake in the heart of someone he had so recently lain with. His heart threatened to burst through his chest, and his breath was fast and ragged. He forced himself to stand still, forced his brain to quiet.

      The clearing up had not yet started here—there were just not enough people left for the task. Large black crows fluttered overhead and strutted amongst the strewn bodies, but even they knew better than to eat the poisonous flesh of the Others. Occasionally one would take a desultory peck at the face of one of the fallen, but would then squawk and spit and flutter its feathers before returning to its strutting.

      Near the fort’s walls the ground was littered with the remains of the Others hit by the water from the bellows and the shot of the musketmen. The bodies were all fused and melted as if they had been wax models held over a candle then removed and allowed to become solid again. The melted flesh seemed to be hardening and darkening in the sun, creating thick runnels of dark grey flesh that looked like heavy candle wax. It settled along the base of the wall, giving Milecastle a new, gruesome shell. Later, Sean would have to come and burn off anything that survived the day, but for now he let the sun do its work.

      Some of the bodies that had been hit by the silver shot were little more than skeletons. Sean could see thin wisps of smoke still rising from where the pellets had hit, as if the silver was consuming them from within.

      He picked his way through corpses that thinned considerably only twenty yards from the wall, and by the time he was fifty yards away there were no dead on the ground at all. He walked to the spot where the greater blackness had been, trying to find some clue as to the fate of Mary Campbell, but all he had found was his sword, lying alone in a bare patch of grass.

      For a long minute he considered leaving it there. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to use a weapon again, not after last night’s work. But then he thought of Mary Campbell. He cleaned the blade on the grass and sheathed it, vowing that it would not be long before it tasted William Barnstable’s blood.

      If the Boy-King had meant to pick the one instrument that would enrage Sean above all else, he could have picked none better. Just the thought of the man, his hands on Mary Campbell’s body, brought the red mist to Sean’s thoughts. He had to fight hard for control, but his mind was full of images—Barnstable with a sword through his heart, Barnstable hung from a noose, Barnstable burning at a tall stake.

      His antipathy to the Constable went back a long time, long before the incident of Sean and Martin setting fire to the barn. Barnstable never let Sean forget that he was a bastard. Sean’s father was unknown and long since gone. His mother died when he was only seven years old. Since then, Sean had made his own way, in his own fashion. He rose to be the youngest ever officer of the Watch, a full month ahead of the Thane’s son.

      But before that he had been the bane of the Constable’s life. The young Sean had no need of petty rules and regulations, and was always being dragged before the Thane for minor misdemeanours. And always, much to Barnstable’s chagrin, the Thane would ruffle his hair, and let him off with a warning.

      At one time he had thought that the old Thane was his father—indeed he’d wished for it in the long dark nights—but the Thane had told him otherwise, on his thirteenth birthday.

      You are almost a man now. You should know the truth, the old man had said. Sean had sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the high chair.

      Your father was a fine man, the Thane said. "He was an officer of the Watch, and a good one, but he had trouble with his breeches—he could not keep them on. Most of the women of the town had their eye on him—indeed there was much speculation as to who could catch and keep him.

      "But his eye fell on one in particular, Yvonne Grant. The fact that she was betrothed to a young officer of the Watch by the name of Barnstable didn’t stop him.

      They were indiscreet, and Barnstable caught them in her bedchamber.

      The Thane stopped, his eyes staring out into the distance. "I never found the truth of how the fight went, or what occurred there, but your father was dead when the other officers arrived, and your mother was bloodied and bruised.

      Barnstable claimed your father’s death was his right as a wronged betrothed, and the council gave him legitimacy—my one vote was not enough to overturn their view. Your mother was ostracised, and nine months later, there was a child, a fine boy who looked much like his father. And since then, I’ve tried to watch out for you. Your father would have been proud of you.

      Remembering that day, and the kindness the old Thane had shown him, threatened to bring tears to his eyes. Soon he would have to watch the old man taken to his pyre. He had lost the nearest thing to a father he had ever had, and for that, if for no other reason, Barnstable would pay.

      But first he had to make sure that Mary Campbell had not been left dead on this battlefield. He criss-crossed the field, but there were no dead this far from the town, only trampled grass and the occasional scrap of tattered clothing. He headed east, along the wall until he came to the spot above the gorge.

      Garlic bulbs lay strewn on the ground in all directions, and the path was tramped into a muddy mass. There were patches of blood here, and the flies were thick in those places. Sean realised that this was where his fellows of the Watch had fallen...the first line of defense that had lasted mere seconds against the black horde.  Somebody was going to have to rethink the wall’s defence in times to come. For decades the wall had been their security, their bulwark against the Others. And it had been breached in minutes.

      Sean could see now that they had been complacent. The Boy-King had become no more than a figure of legend, a bogey-man to frighten children rather than the real threat he should have been. They had kept up the Watch, and they had walked the walls, but they hadn’t really believed that anyone would come. And that had been their undoing. It must never happen again. He only hoped that the fort of Milecastle would be given another chance to get it right.

      He looked out over the wall to the north and tried to clear his mind. Out there clouds lay low and heavy across the forest and all was still and quiet. Just over the wall the ground was also heavily trampled, but even with his tracking experience he couldn’t see any evidence of anyone heading back north.

      Maybe if he had come earlier, he might have been able to pick up a trail, but he feared he was already too late. He wanted to leap down and follow the Others who had taken the girl—they would be out there somewhere, laying low in the daytime. But the ties of duty were strong, and Milecastle called him back, back for the funeral pyre of his Thane and the investiture of the new leader of the people.

      A grey pall hung over the fort as the smoke from the burning of the dead refused to dissipate. The smoke was like a living thing, its coils swirling and clinging to the ramparts and towers as if the very souls of the dead were trying to cling to their earthly realm. The taste of death clung to Sean’s throat as he re-entered the town.

      The Thane’s funeral pyre was rising up, even as the other was falling inward on itself. In the red glowing ashes there were still visible signs of the bodies that had been burnt there, and Sean helped heap extra wood on top, obliterating them from view, if not from memory.  Old Menzies was helping to construct the Thane’s pyre.

      You have a story to tell me, old man, Sean said. I need to know why she is so important to the Boy-King.

      And Martin needs to know your story, Menzies said. He has called a council meeting for after the pyre is lit. Since I am all that remains of the old council, I have appointed you Captain of the Watch, which gives you a say in the council. The Thane will hear your story in the Great Hall when he has mourned his father.

      Martin is well then? He is himself?

      Aye. Awake, but still in a dream. I know not whether it is the effects of the poppy he finally let me give him, or whether he will ever be the same again, but he is no longer the youth you knew. He is a man, and Thane, and must take care of his responsibilities. Remember that when next you see him. And do not address him as Martin. Your boyhood friend has to grow up fast, and reminders of youthful indiscretions will not help.

      The doctor continued placing wood on the pyre, and refused to be distracted further. Sean aided him until the stack stood a full three feet above his head, the dome of wood half filling the central courtyard. A hollow had been left in the centre, with a path leading in, and Sean tried not to think of the old man being laid there.

      You have time to change your clothing, Menzies said. And wash off the stink of battle. It would be best for the new Thane to see that you are being respectful.

      For the first time Sean realised what he must look like to another.

      His

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