These sounds and more interweaved, providing a throbbing, unearthly background tune to the central historian, who had begun to sing. Her words were growled over the top; almost choked on in the very back of the throat.
Near forty-eight thousand years after the Deep,
Lelex, mighty Black Lord, sat on the Stone Throne.
His hair was dark as clotted blood, his judgement
Measured and calm; slow to come, and sweet to hear.
Steel is sooner etched with a fingernail,
Than fear was drawn from his swift, rain-grey eyes.
The Black Lord’s allies were the wolf; the wind;
The mighty river and the ragged sky.
When Mighty Lelex took the throne, his duty
Was clear to all. The folk of the north wearied
Of bones and steel. The warrior yearned to lay
Down his armour, and take saddle and barding
From his horse; and the fletcher make his arrows
For hunting alone. So was it hoped that
Mighty Lelex might nurture a wilted peace,
Shrivelled by a sea of blood and endless war.
For three full years, through summer and winter both,
Mighty Lelex did all his people desired.
The Black Kingdom knew the order it had craved,
Scarce and consoling as a still, iron sea.
But peace, precious as a newborn, and fragile
As one too, was dashed at last by Suthern band
Striking north. The legions marched, their swords still sharp,
And met them on the field, at Gusanarghe.
The fight was quick, the Sutherner defeated,
But at conflict’s dawn, Mighty Lelex’s son,
Brave Amundi, was cut down by Suthern band.
Mighty Lelex saw him die: watched immobile,
Aghast and accountable as his firstborn
Was drowned beneath a sea of Suthern bodies.
Mighty Lelex’s heart, once so sure and so hard,
Crumbled like a rock in the fire’s blazing teeth.
The fragments of once-mighty Lelex were left
With his son’s, and he, who came home from battle,
Could not remember the man he had once been.
His eyes were frozen and his voice was muted.
His council’s words sank slowly through his ears,
And his wife, Cleocharia, did not know him.
Mighty Lelex, once so bright, began to twist
The Black Kingdom into an ugly thing.
Anguished and confused on a hunt soon after,
Mighty Lelex quarried his dear friend Agnarr.
His many companions, even he himself,
Grew still among the trees when he’d hurled his spear,
Silent as his dear comrade crashed to the earth.
After, two councillors were hung as earrings
From the gate; testament to unwise comment.
The people were muted, songs no longer sung,
Of Mighty Lelex, bereft of his mind and his son.
The Sacred Guard, who had once been so holy,
Became poisonous fume at their lord’s command,
Spreading through the streets so both man and woman,
Were disquieted at the tread of their boots.
One Ephor dared object, summoning Lelex
To court, to match crime with its retribution.
Five guardsmen came instead, breaking down the door
And flinging the Ephor from off his own roof.
Lord by birth, father by love, hero by war,
And tyrant now, to his blasted heart,
Mighty Lelex was beaten at last by war,
The drug that had consumed him and exacted
A fate far crueller than death and long lament,
That waits for the unswerving warrior.
That man was gone, and it was proved beyond doubt
When he drew a knife on his crying daughter.
Cleocharia now suffered the same fate
Which had discharged her husband’s mind. She watched
With no whisper of shelter from the screaming
As her own dear child was slain before her. Yet,
Unlike Mighty Lelex, she was not finished
By the ordeal. Her form realigned; her task
Was clear. The watchword was vengeance, she would see
That her husband got all that his actions deserved.
One night, when darkness consumed both stars and moon,
When the hearth had burned low and a bitter wind
Mourned through the north, Cleocharia summoned
A band that came forth in greatest secrecy.
“By this way or that, our lord must die,” she said.
“But though his mind is gone and his tongue directs
Evil deeds alone, the Almighty’s chosen
He remains. The Almighty must bless our plan
Before we can still that hateful tyrant’s heart.”
So she spoke, exposing a pale silver coin,
The captured moon, flattened to bright reflection.
“By Suthern silver was our lord’s mind discharged,
Suthern silver now decides his fate once more.
When our lord unjustly kills an innocent,
By the fall of this coin shall god’s will be known.
By this side he lives, to chance against the fates
Once more. By this side has the cuckoo flown,
And my second son shall occupy the throne.”
The bright coin was laid in bronze eagle feathers
To yield Almighty blessing; and the true men
That Cleocharia had summoned scattered
To their homes, their purpose now to train through night,
Cold and blue, in the sacred craft of death;
Achieved with the knife, with poison and with wire,
That lacks the honour of the face and the chest,
And seeks instead the inky sufficiency
Of the back, and of the slowly pulsing neck.
Each day that Mighty Lelex or his Sacred Guard,
Killed an innocent without cause, Cleocharia
Cast her silver token. Seven times it flew,
Seven times it fell, delivering
