XLII

 

 

HE KNEW HE was in a desert. The absolute conviction came long before he was able to properly comprehend what he saw. As the wide, dazzling plain grew gradually clearer before his eyes, it was confirmed as fact. A vast expanse of fine, near-white sand, almost blinding in the intense sun, rippled into low, regular dunes, its surface ceaselessly shifting, blurring, swirling like a smoky haze all the way to the indistinct horizon. He knew, with equal certainty, that this was the desert west of Lake Tiberias, although it resembled a desolate part of the Judaean desert he had once passed through, near the Dead Sea.

But it possessed a strange purity more extreme even than that. There were no trees. No signs of life. Not even rocks under which hard-shelled creatures might hide, or stunted plants gain purchase with their meagre roots. Nothing to disturb the indistinct surface of the sighing, shifting sea of sand. Nothing except him.

He was walking.

His walk was laboured, as if he were climbing a hill, as if his feet and legs were lead, and the sand displaced with each weighty footfall parted and slid away uselessly beneath him. There was no slope. Just endless, gently rippling dunes.

He knew that Acre lay somewhere ahead, and that he had to reach it. The urgency was almost a physical pain. There was a ship there. A ship that would not wait – his one chance to reach home. As he laboured, seeming to get nowhere – unable to judge his progress in this landscape even if he was – he felt the awful scale of the task weighing down upon him, asserting its impossibility with every step. In his chest he felt a kind of tight panic. It began as a simple fear that he was not moving fast enough, that his feet and legs would not obey his commands – that when he tried to apply more speed, they seemed sapped of strength. But over time – he could not tell how much – it grew and changed, mutating into something more terrible.

He began to doubt his sense of direction. Everything, everywhere he looked, was the same. The sun – directly above, making one tiny pool of his shadow beneath his feet – told him nothing. He did not now know any longer whether he was heading towards Acre, or away from it – if he had, in fact, been putting even greater distance between himself and it since he had begun. He could not remember when that was. He felt the creeping, gnawing terror of the unknowable, the ungraspable, the indefinable – of himself slipping further and further adrift from the world, from his place in it, from anything that could fix him in time or space. From his own sanity. It was the dread of chaos.

The horrors of Hattin suddenly returned to him. In his mind, he knew them to be distant. Yet the sprawl and stench of death left in its wake, and the shouts of the terror-stricken and the dying, seemed all at once to assault him – and with them the horrid possibility that he was, of his own free will, walking back into their midst. That, somehow, they had become an inseparable part of him, and could never be left behind.

The figure jolted him back to the present.

It had appeared without warning. There had been no approach, no gradual reveal. It was simply there, directly ahead, a hundred yards or so distant. Just standing. At first, he could not make out any details. It was evidently a man, tall but somewhat hunched, its head bowed, its back turned to him. As he drew closer, his progress still painfully slow, he saw that it appeared to have its arms wrapped about itself. It was leaning slightly to one side, as if drunk or in pain. The clothes, he could now see, were ragged. Bloody. No, not simply ragged – slashed. And wet. And the figure itself – absurd as it clearly was in this place – seemed to be shivering. Though the distance between them would seem to have been too great to allow such a thing, he swore he could also hear the chattering of its teeth.

A wave of something akin to repulsion passed over him. It was not just the strangeness of the encounter – of this man in the desert, dripping wet and clutching himself with cold, wrong though that was. It was the creeping certainty that this was merely the prologue to something far worse.

Suddenly, he was mere yards away. Close enough, now, to see the cuts and slashes in the figure’s bloody garments, and the exposed wounds beneath. Some were as shallow and neat as parted lips. Others were so deep that great ragged flaps of flesh hung loose, and what should have been inside spilled out. But none were bleeding. Not any more. Instead of the glistening red of fresh meat, the exposed tissue was grey as ash, the blood blackened, the skin pallid. The dead flesh of a corpse.

At precisely the same moment this realisation struck, he recognised who it was. Immediately, as if awoken out of a slumber by his own terrible thought, it gave a jerk, and twitched its head, and with a horrid, lopsided gait, began to turn.

The long-dead, milky eyes of Gilbert de Gaillon stared blankly at him, blue-black lips curled back, the elongated teeth in the shrunken gums chattering incessantly.

There had been so many times in his life when he had wished he could restore de Gaillon to the life of which he had been so cruelly robbed. Now that wish had been granted, and it was an abomination. The thing that had once been a wise and noble friend twitched, and stumped awkwardly towards him, one part-denuded arm outstretched, flaps of blue-grey skin hanging, jaw gaping open as if to articulate words. But all that came from the cavernous, wet hole was a gurgling, wheezing groan, and a string of black drool.

Gisburne could not speak or shout. But in his head, he heard his own voice, struck through with horror and revulsion, repeating over and over: He belongs dead. He belongs dead. He belongs dead...

Everything merged, became confused. For a moment it seemed he was looking out through the corpse’s eyes. Far away, on the horizon, was a horse. Black. Riderless. Nyght. The stallion whinnied and shook his head. If he could only get to him... He tried to cry out – used all the force he could muster – but all that would come was a feeble whisper.

Then, the first of the things rose out of the sand.

Black and shiny, its insectoid limbs thrust out of the hot desert. They unfurled like spiked, obsidian blooms just yards from him, their quill-points planted upon its pale, shifting surface in a splayed circle. Then came another. And another. Seven black, bunched things in all – each unfolding with the same halting, mechanical motion, the same horrid, dry rattle. Then, within each ring of arched, protruding legs, the trickling sand heaved and bellied up. The mounds parted and fell away, and the huge armoured creatures lifted themselves free of the cascading sand.

They were scorpions. But they were also men. Great, gangling arachnids, each the size of a cow, but within them – merged into each black, articulated monstrosity – a strange approximation of human features, somehow blurred and imprecise, as if realised by an intelligence that only half understood what it was attempting to replicate.

They stood as if frozen for a moment, and then, suddenly, were hurtling towards him, legs clacking like dry bones, weird mouthparts gnashing and glinting.

He was running now. His legs were like lead, aching and slow, but would not move faster. The things were gaining – he could hear them uttering a strange scree scree scree as their legs pounded the sand – but he did not dare look back. Not even when he felt them at his back, saw their glistening limbs flash about him. He knew only that he had to protect what he clutched to his chest. That was all that mattered. But he realised, then – in a moment of confused panic – that he had no idea what it was. It shifted and moved against him. Then he looked down, and saw it. Cradled in his arms like a baby was de Gaillon’s head, eyes wide, jaws snapping, a strange, strangled cry issuing from its tattered throat.

He screamed. There was no sound, but he knew he screamed. Then the world broke apart and he was plunged into edgeless, formless black, filled with colliding voices shouting over and over in endless repetition like a thousand lost souls, their words overlapping and incomprehensible – the ravings of madmen. Febrile fragments of images flashed and swirled in the churning, inky void, thrusting themselves at him before being swallowed up again: stick-thin figures shaking spears; a dancing pattern of fresh gore; huge, amorphous creatures with hunched backs and horns; tiny hands, red with the sheen of blood; flapping, eyeless birds as black as oil. And faces – hundreds of bellowing, idiot faces, pushing in at him – everyone he had ever known, taunting, laughing, screaming.