By Elijah Browne
In a castle on the hill, there lived a coward.
It was not a grand, austere, saintly castle. It was dingy, worn, filled with attendants and maids. Its stones were chipped and faded, its grounds airy and distant. There were no guards, for the reputation was enough. The king was his own protector.
In the halls hung thick tapestries of the king, locked in combat with his mortal enemy. As visitors walked, the woven hero moved around the dragon, across its spine, and came to stand atop its severed head, sword held high. Faded with time, cemented into legend, the king’s legacy safe for generations to come.
He was a fraud.
* * *
In a gone-by age, when the vines that crossed the castle’s stones were thin and young, and the fields were greener, and the king was not a king but a boy, a monster lived at the top of the mountain. On the peak of Feignmouth, nestled among the crags, lived a great beast feared more by man than any crest, cudgel, or clan. By night it brooded, smoke blooming from the mountaintops to darken the dreams of the chieftains below. By day it swept out of its lair on graceful leathery wings, hungry for flesh and fire. Though valiant, neither the bowmen of the south nor the marauders of the north could break its glinting scales or stop its creeping inferno. Day by day, the lands fell into gloom as they watched their cattle, crops, and children burn away in the blaze the monster spewed as it filled its bottomless gullet. Hope withered at the roots.
In desperation, the lands sent out their heroes to conquer the Monster of Feignmouth. Generals, lords, and wise men all went grimly up the mountain pass to battle back the beast that feasted on their homes. Day by day, the lands waited for their heroes to return with news of triumph, sacrifice, and valor. They never did.
Our king, not yet a king but a saddle-polishing servant of a warrior’s house, found himself dragged up the mountain pass by the Knight of the East. Tall, scarred, imperious, the Knight was the model of a hero in glinting armor of the finest steel. His sword was known by name in seven kingdoms for the stories it carried of justice and noble victory.
He made the squire carry both armor and blade the whole way there. No sense risking a mount, he had said, with a servant already in tow.
Trudging behind his Knight, the squire eyed the smoldering heaps of horseflesh and melted armor along the path to the smoking cave. An unrivaled beast, the Knight had monologued to him as he sweated and groaned beneath the bag of armor.
A creature that devours its lessers day and night, sleeping for a hundred years between its abominable hunts. A thing that cannot be reasoned with, only killed.
With the smell of ashen men cloying in his nostrils, the squire wondered if they had reasoned right that it could be killed.
Taking back his blade and pulling on his armor, the Knight shooed his squire away to hide. He scurried up the side of the path to hide among the crags, catching his breath in a foxhole as the Knight of the East struck a valiant pose and bellowed a challenge to the monster in its lair.
In towering green scales and a wreath of smoke, it emerged, bellowing. The Knight charged, as did the beast. The monster lunged. The Knight sidestepped and swung upwards, blade cutting cleanly through. The monster reeled, roaring in pain as one long, white horn clattered to the ground. The Knight shouted in triumph, waving his sword at the beast. The monster snorted as its severed horn rolled among the stones, then sucked in a great billowing breath. It spewed fire and smoke from its gristly maw, a cloud of molten destruction billowing forwards. A scream and a sizzle, then silence.
No more Knight.
Poking his sweaty head above the rocks, the squire’s eyes went wide as he watched the great beast pull back its neck and trumpet flame and cinder into the sky. The Knight—or what was left of him—lay pasted to the stone in a blackened, steaming heap, one arm stretched out behind him, sword still bright and unbloodied among the charred rock.
The monster spun and stalked back to its lair, spiked tail whipping against the ground. The squire watched as it disappeared into its cave and pulled a boulder across the entrance with one huge claw, sealing the lair shut. Residual smoke from its roasting of the Knight poured through cracks in the stone, trailing up into the sky in an eternal gray stream.
Which slowed to a trickle, then stopped.
The squire, nestled among his crags, stood up and cocked his head. Then, with great care, he picked his way out of the rocks and crept to the boulder at the foot of the monster’s lair. He placed one quivering ear against its cold, rough surface. Through the stone, faint vibrations of what sounded like tremulous snoring thrummed in the squire’s ears. He didn’t dare hope.
For years that thick gray cloud had followed the monster as it tore through his homeland, never sleeping nor resting, returning only to its distant lair to deposit its spoils or lick superficial wounds. For years that billowing smokestack had taunted them from the mountains where the creature prowled, warning always of impending death. Now it had stopped.
A hundred years, his barbecued Knight had said. A hundred years it slept between its hunts, or so the stories said. Dared he believe?
The squire was not stupid. He grabbed his chance with both hands.
Scurrying to the cooled remains of his master, the squire pried that bright storied sword from the melted fingers of the Knight’s gauntlet. He swept the blade through the char and grime the Knight had become. Perhaps it would look battle-tested and well-used. For good measure he scooped up ash and charcoaled bone to rub across his hands and face and clothing. He picked up that great length of severed horn last, his trophy and proof—if he carried it well.
Then down the mountain pass the squire dashed, hoping for all the world his gambit would pay off.
* * *
I’ve killed it, he cried, first to the people, then to the chiefs, finally to himself. I’ve killed the beast, I have its horn, now I am your hero.
With that gray cloud gone and a blackened sword in his hand, they believed him.
Honors they heaped upon him. Feasts in his name. Armor sent as gifts, accolades from the wise men of the north, ceremonial furs from the marauders of the south. Gifted an earldom in gratitude by the kings of the East, given his own people and throne and nation, all in thanks for the peace and freedom he had bought for the lands among which he lied.
There, in that old castle, his fame fermented among the rugged halls and newfound riches. That great storied sword hung above the mantle in his dining room, never cleaned out of respect, gazed upon with pride by a new earl, who became a chief, then a king. That sword on his mantle and the horn he kept secreted in a lockbox under his bed were all he needed to cast a shadow longer than any monster.
Out the highwaymen would come, or the marauders of the north, and he would send only a missive with his seal upon it. Continue in your endeavors, it always said, and you will find what the beast of Feignmouth found. It was always enough.
And yet the squire, now a king, always carried his secret. The vines on the castle walls began to grow long and twisted. The king waxed old, and his children moved on, seeking new fortunes and greater gardens in palaces he could not afford for them. Even his wife, his queen, sensing the coldness in him, retreated to the farthest corners of the castle to stave off his unbearable chill. The borders of his lands began to shrink as bands of marauders picked off his little towns with whispers that he was growing weak, sulking in his castle gardens. How little they knew of him. How little he showed.
The pride with which he eyed his sword, earned from a con and not a contest such as the townspeople told stories of, began to sour in him as wine made of unripe grapes. His wife, his children, all lauding him for cunning and bravery in the face of danger, had never truly known his heart. The secret cost him much, and the servants watched him those many years walking absently among the gardens, consumed by loneliness in the lies he had woven about himself. Though he had fought no foe that day on the mountain, something within him had died a slow, mournful death as he had come down from the pass. He never smiled, not even for a moment, once that light in his soul was extinguished.
There in the gardens he sat, day after day, watching that jagged peak on the horizon. Still, he caught his breath when rain or snow darkened its peak for a moment, fearing a beast not yet awoken. Year after year he ruminated on that monster, running his hand along a horn he now kept clutched in gnarled hands that knew no victory. He wondered what the Knight had understood that he did not.
But his kingdom went on, and the feasts were held, and festivals thrown about the countryside with candles and couriers and great retellings of grand deeds from ages past. Through it all the king trundled along, waving here and musing there, as any king should. The people began to see him for what he was, in some way, as he retreated from their cares and holed up in his old castle, but they never said. They loved who he had once been to them, if only for the holidays he put on in the countryside with their gold.
One day the king spied a black column on the horizon, streaming up from the mountain. He always knew he would.
The monster had not slept for a hundred years, as his long-dead master had told him. Not by half. And yet when it finally came, and the king was faced with the mark of his treachery, he felt no fear. He was old, older than his years, run down by the lies he had spun. His time was over. In a great wide breath, the king exhaled, relief soothing his tired body.
In the dining room, he made himself ready. Armor he had never worn, now fastened to his spindly limbs. A sword he had never swung, held once more in hands that had never known anything but defeat. His servants thought him a hero, perhaps. Going out to face a legend on the horizon, to again vanquish an evil only he could dispel. It was not so. Better than any the king knew that no man, especially he, could kill this monster. And yet he walked out the castle doors, down the road, and up the mountain pass once more.
He supposed it would cement his legacy, bind him to history books for ages onward by going up that pass again. He didn’t care. He knew he would die, as all men do, but now grown up and seeing clearly, he could decide what he would die for.
The squire knew he could not conquer this monster. But he walked up that pass, sword in hand, and wondered if maybe he could finally become a king.
