The Red Knight

They ate it, and went about their business. No one thanked him or told him what a fine meal it had been.

Ota Qwan laughed. ‘It’s food!’ he said. ‘The Sossag don’t eat that well, and we all know what it is like to grow hungry. Your meal was excellent in that there was enough for everyone.’

Peter shook his head.

Ota Qwan nodded. ‘Before I was Ota Qwan, I understood what it was like to cook, to eat well, to dine.’ He laughed. ‘Now, I understand many things, and none of them involve fine wines or crunchy bread.’

Peter hung his head a little and Ota Qwan slapped his back.

‘You will earn a place. Everyone says you work hard. That is all the People expect of a newcomer.’

Peter nodded.

But that night he made a number of new friends. Dinner had been a simple soup with some seasonings and deer meat that Ota Qwan had contributed, and one of the reptilian monsters had come, sniffed the carcass of the deer, and made its strange crying noises until Skadai came at a run.

Peter had been afraid, but it had left them in peace, the deer meat had gone into the soup, and all was well.

When the soup was served, two of the boglins came out of the woods. They were slim without being tall – when they stood erect, they were only the height of a tall child, and their heads were more like insects then men, with the skin stretched tight over light bones perched on bodies with a bulbous armoured torso and four very mammalian appendages. Their legs were thin and heavily muscled, the arms whipcord-tight. They were hideous, and just watching one move was the stuff of nightmare. They didn’t mix much with Sossag, although Peter had seen Skadai speak to a group of them.

They also seemed to come in three types – the commonest were red-brown and moved very quickly; the second type were clearly warriors, with a more heavily armoured carapace and paler, almost silver, skin. The warriors were almost as tall as a man, and every appendage had a spike. The Sossag used the Albin name for those ones – wights.

And finally, there was what seemed to be a leader class – long and thin, like great mantis creatures. The Sossag called them priests.

These two creatures were both lowly workers, each carrying a bow and a spear, naked except for a quiver and a canteen. Peter tried not to watch the liquid sliding of plate on plate in their lower abdomens. It was disturbing.

They stopped by his fire. Both rotated their heads in unison, their strange lobe-shaped eyes seeing the fire and the man together.

‘Guk fud?’ said the nearer of the two. His voice was scratchy, almost a screech.

Peter tried to get past his fear. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

‘U guk fud?’ said the other one. ‘Gud fud?’

The first one shook its head and abdomen – an alien display, but Peter understood it was showing impatience. ‘Me try fud,’ he screeched.

Peter still didn’t understand their shrieks, but the pointing claw-hands seemed to indicate his stew pot.

None of the Sossag were rising to help him. As usual, they had eaten to satiety and now lay on the ground, virtually unmoving, although every one of them was watching him. Ota Qwan was smiling – a hard, cruel smile.

Peter bent, turning his back on the creatures, and poured stew into a bowl. He added a little wild oregano and handed it to the nearer of the two monsters.

He took it, and Peter watched him sniff the bowl. He wished he hadn’t. Watching the thing’s not-entirely- inhuman nose split open to reveal a cavernous hole in the face with spiky hairs-

The thing made a loud scratching noise with two of its arms and poured the whole bowl straight into the hole in its face.

Threw back its head at an unnatural angle and screamed.

Then it held out the bowl for more.

Peter scooped two more bowls, put oregano on both, and handed one to each boglin.

The entire process was repeated.

The smaller of the two boglins opened and closed its beak-mouth three or four times, emitting a chemical reek that caught at the back of Peter’s throat.

‘Fud gud!’ it chirped.

Long, agile tongues of a shocking pink-purple emerged from their mouths, and they licked the bowls clean.

They emitted a long scratching noise together, and raced off, running lightly on the ground, bent half over.

Peter stood by his fire with two empty food bowls. He was shaking a little.

Skadai came. ‘You have been honoured,’ he said. ‘They seldom notice us.’ He looked like a man with more to say, but then he pursed his lips, patted Peter on the shoulder, smiled and loped off, as he always did.

Peter was still trying to decide what to make of the incident when the woman came and put a hand on the small of his back.

That hand on his back was a palpable thing – another means of communication, a thing he hadn’t expected, and it conveyed a wealth of information to him – so much, in fact, that an hour later he was between her legs . . . and moments after that another man kicked him in the head.

Such a blow might have killed, but the painted man was barefoot and Peter had a little warning. And despite being a former slave and a cook, Peter had been bred to war, so as the kick turned his head, as he ripped himself free of the dark-haired woman’s embrace, he was already moving, calculating, reaching for the knife he wore around his neck.

The painted man expected him to be easy prey. He screamed, in rage or feigned rage, and attacked again. Peter had rolled on his back with the force of the kick, and he had the knife in his hand, and when the painted man – his red and black and white mixed in blotchy patches that looked like a skin sickness – jumped at him, Peter killed him as easily as such a thing could ever happen. He rammed his blade deep into the man’s belly and then rolled him over as he screamed in shock and desperation, his wild eyes suddenly wide with the despair of agony leading inevitably to death.

Peter ripped the knife up his abdomen, spilling his guts and covering himself in the man’s gore.

Then, full of his own terror, he plunged the knife into the man’s eyes, one and two.

By then, the blotchy man was dead.

Peter lay there for a moment. Every one of the last hundred heartbeats was open to him like a long book, carefully read, and the remnants of his erection reminded him that he had passed from one extreme of life to the other in that time.

He tried to get to his feet but his knees were shaking and there were men all around him.

All Sossag men.

Skadai held out a hand and hauled him to his feet with a firmness that seemed threatening. But was not.

Then Ota Qwan was there, with a steadying hand.

‘Open your mouth,’ he said.

Peter opened it, and Skadai stuck a bloody finger into his mouth and began to chant. Ota Qwan grabbed his arm tightly. ‘This is important,’ he said. ‘Listen: Skadai says, “Take your foe, Gruntag, into your body.” ’ Ota Qwan squeezed again. ‘Skadai says, “Now you and Gruntag are one. What you were, he is. What he was, you are.” ’

Peter wanted to retch at the taste of coppery, warm blood inside his mouth.

‘I say, don’t make a habit of killing Sossag,’ Ota Qwan said.

‘He attacked me!’ Peter squeaked.

‘You were fucking his woman, who was only using you to be rid of an inferior man. She avoided the shame of sending him from her blankets by arranging for you to kill him. Understand?’ Ota Qwan turned to a group of painted men and said something, and they all laughed.

Peter spat. ‘What’s so funny?’

Ota Qwan shook his head. ‘Our humour. Yours later, but not now, I think.’

‘Tell me,’ Peter said.

‘They asked how you were. I said you weren’t sure whether the dick or the knife went in more smoothly.’ Ota Qwan’s eyes were a bright blue, and the man was amused. ‘You are now a man, and a Sossag. Killing your own