Crown of Silence

I EXPERIENCE OF WAR When Shan was fifteen years old, dark soldiers came out of the west, like a cloud of evil boiling over the soft hills of his homeland. They commanded terrible beasts, which killed with hooked claws like scythes and cold eyes that dripped icy fire. The soldiers wore helmets that looked like fiends, tusked and snarling and sneering. Shan was just an ordinary boy. His mother was dead, and his father, Hod, gathered crops in the fields for a local farmholder. In the winter, Hod harvested wood from the rustling forests that surrounded the fields. Shan worked at his father's side, with no ambition ever to do anything else. They lived in a one-room cottage on the outskirts of Holme, a village filled with peasant folk, whose lives were those of toil and scant ambition. There was a squire, Sir Rupert Sathe, to whom they paid tithes and who occasionally funded village celebrations. Once a year Sir Rupert attended God's chapel for the harvest festival, but other than that, he was mostly invisible in the villagers' lives. His sons and daughters spent most of their time, along with their mother, in the city of Dantering, far down the Great Western Road. Country life held no attractions for Sir Rupert's family, so there were no winsome, blue-blooded maids to fire the hearts of local boys, nor rakehellion sons to make the village girls tremble in their beds. Shan was as happy as any person in his position could be. He was fed adequately, the cottage snug and secure against wolves in winter and cool in the summer. He and his father grew vegetables in the small patch that surrounded their home, and there was a single apple tree that always bore good fruit. His aunt came regularly to make sure he and his father didn't live like pigs, which left alone they probably would. Once a week they worshipped in the chapel of the God who had no name, and laid offerings of forest flowers at the altars of His three daughters, the virgin, the mother and one without child. Though devout in their conventional worship, they also made more furtive offerings to the folk of the forest, to ensure that their livestock were free from blight, and their produce without bane. Also, most importantly, they revered the guardians of the land, those invisible spirits whose benevolence ensured the seasons gave forth their appointed bounty. The god might enable a person's soul to walk the airy road beyond death into the heaven of heavens, but all the villagers knew who really held power in the realm of the living; the fertile earth, the running stream, the water-bearing clouds. The guardians cared not for human souls; they were the life of the land, and were treated with respect rather than worshipped. News came slowly down the Great Western Road, or not at all. The people of Holme knew nothing of politics. When the great city of Dantering fell to the Magravands, nobody heard. Messengers might have fled from the burning walls with dire news for other cities, but the villages were hidden among the hills. Who would bring news to them in time? They were unaware Dantering had been their last defense against whatever might come prowling from the west. The soldiers came at sundown, first to the manor house. Sir Rupert, dining alone, was dragged roaring from his dinner table and summarily beheaded before the astonished servants, who had been rounded up like sheep. Then the male servants were hung, the women raped and beaten. A commanding officer of the invading army went into the dining room and there sat down with his staff to finish the squire's dinner. All the time they ate, they must have been able to hear the screams of the women, the pleading moans of the men. While their officers were making inroads into the port wine, the rest of the troupe rode down toward Holme, their beasts flapping and scrabbling before them. The guardians of tConstantine, Storm is the author of 'Crown of Silence' with ISBN 9780312873653 and ISBN 0312873654.