Chapter 13
Saul ~ continued from Chapter 13 | I Am The Message
David shook himself as if out of a deep sleep.
“What?” Michal said.
David handed her the knucklebones in silence.
“Come look,” the priest put her piece on the board. “Aye,” he said. “Faraway lands.”
Michal looked away and shivered in the cold night air. She wiped away her tears and did not speak.
“Perhaps we should stop.”
The priest looked around the room.
“No,” said Jonathan as he gripped the knucklebones and threw them on the board.
“Look then,” the priest said. “Across the great seas to another land, another place.”
Jonathan looked over the board.
The Rose came full of mercy and dark judgment, over the sleeping Moormund, patriarch of Greythorn, on the Isle of Burton.
Her breath became the very mist that clung to his hazy memory.
“You fools have learned little of compassion,” she whispered through the dark labyrinth of Moormund’s mind.
“The wicked ninth has caused much turmoil, this sending young Arlemay away so many years ago.”
He drifted in his disturbed sleep, moving imaginary, heavy chains that bound his bloodstained hands and feet. He turned his eyes up only to look away from the brilliance that immediately blinded him. The cold stone floor became a refuge where he kneeled.
“I know, I know,” the prisoner pleaded, grasping at straw with broken and bloodied fingers.
He nervously swept his hands over a long, dirty, gray beard and scratched his deep powerful chest before reaching out and clinging to the dungeon wall in terror.
“Please, I beg you, enough.”
He trembled as he stood hunched against the cold stone wall, his face in his hands as the white winged vision rose momentarily only to vanish in the dawn of the new day.
“What? What have we done?” Moormund cried as he sank to his knees. “But it’s not too late if we go back and undo the Laws.
He cried, “We can get our Arlemay back from the wilderness.”
He fell weeping.
“He’s not so wicked, not so bad.”
Moormund breathed deeply and saw himself once again on that day: two horsemen galloping down the cruel coast as the wind blew up. The sea was angry, the sky brooding.
Bru grabbed a wineskin that hung over his saddle and quickly drank from it, gulping the wine until it spilled over his black cloak.
“Steady,” Moormund urged.
He looked over at his second eldest son as they made for the town with the wind lashing at them.
“Steady,” Bru laughed. “There is the world to be taken by force not steadfastness.”
“You must learn when and how to take things,” Moormund yelled into the wind.
“Like that little runt Arlemay.”
Bru wiped his mouth with his sleeve.
“Send him away. He eats too much and even the dogs howl in laughter at him.”
Bru’s arrogance and cold heart could not be contained. They both slowed their mounts.
“He is your younger brother, only a boy of nine.”
“He does not ride. He does not hunt with us. He is weak and as the old laws tell us, ‘Ye may set forth one child so that the rest may live. Whosoever is weak shall be cast out as the wicked ninth.’”
The wind and rain swallowed the two voices. Moormund let out a deep nightmarish scream.
***
Continue reading… Chapter 13 | Dear Sweet Lamb
[…] Chapter 13 Saul ~ continued from Chapter 13 | The Wicked Ninth […]