Auld Man
The auld man limped through the gate as the numbers began turning in their LED display, it was losing focus, complicated tides pulling it out of synch from its ascribed and locked destination. Yet the auld man didn’t hurry, didn’t even seem to notice the flimsy fabric of the reality around him start to tear and flap. He was on the home side now, just barely got the heels of his worn ceramic plated boots through and the gate blinked out, blank space where access to another place had been.
He swung his scarred and grizzled head, the face half prosthetic now and that gone half way to seed too. Looked both ways and limped on out of the long corridor where degraded and shorted out electronics rusted and corroded. His ceramic armour, plates thin and light yet with a tensile strength equivalent to a mountain range, to thick stone balustrades and fabled Greek steel, was worn, chipped and bent and with almost all the paint missing. But still he wore it with that youthful naïve pride that had started him on the long journey, a journey now he was to complete, with half of what he had missing and the other half broken, redundant, old. In his hands a sword still gleamed, cast from complicated alloys forged by competent scientists in ancient and half remembered rituals. It was just a cleaver, a razor, a separator, no romance even in the elegantly engraved handle, the names of sponsors embossed in silver. It was just a tool to do a job, an anachronism. On the armour too there had been the names of those who had wished him well, the ad men, the conglomerates and the science institutes, the flags of the country and the township he had sworn allegiance too, who had told that it was the honour and survival of their families he was fighting for.
That was the past, the future, the present perhaps even. Could he still judge the time? Had the mighty task he had shouldered taken him in such a great circle he had arrived before he had left? It had happened, with grim irony it had happened. Knights had readied themselves to leave, the new crop ready for the tasks of their elders, stepped up to whichever gate had been chosen and found themselves starring into mirrors of themselves. Into mirrors that showed old men in old armour with old scars and gaps maybe where the knights had fallen long ago. That was enough to shake the young knights faith, to have to see their futures staring back at them, to watch them limp down into the crowds that had sent them, to report on what deeds they had accomplished, to pretend that it all was worth it, had been worth the death of half their number and only the rough shells of the boys they had been coming back.
It was worth it. He knew this as he climbed through airlocked hatches, winching them open where the relays had shorted. It was a part of him, the stories, the glory, the desire to win. Ever since he could remember he had wanted to be one of them, had idolised Aldred and Mertan, the Legion of seventy two on the great crusade, that undefeated group who had won through against terrible odds and to return still young men, sideburned faces smiling out at him from fading newsreels. There were statues to men of that order, whole lives would have been given to be a part of that. Even the lives of those they had touched, who had been mere observers to those quests had lived forever in common memory. The ideal of doing that for your tribe, for your family and country, for the economy and for the good of all humanity, that made it worth it.
His suit told him where to go, told him where the next gate was. Electronics talked to electronics. The suit was full of them, woven through the ceramic and the soft plastic fabric that touched his skin like oil, he could rely on the suit, and always had. The suit told him how long it would be before the gate shut down, and how it would take him back to the old country. There it would be at an end, the last quest he had almost completed, the items, the treasures stowed safely in the pouches on his hips. With those he would live forever in the hearts of his people, he would be given great gifts, the greatest and simplest of those respect. He knew how easy it was for old knights to lose it, a few simple missions missed or failed, a final quest not as glorious as had been promised. The public was fickle like that, and would move on to new attractions. The new crop coming through, the big names and the big crusades, the ones with the best sponsorship deals. The auld man had never been one of the biggest names, there had been chances he could have taken, ways the chips could have gone that would have put him into the great league, up there with the true heroes on the high table but it was not to be. He was content, had grown to be content, with the loyalty of his people, small in number as they were, he flew the flag of his tribe, small enough as they were, they were at least his tribe. He was not crusading for some people who would buy and sell his loyalty, not wandering like a Ronin for tidbits, flashing an old sword and tired tricks, hoping that someone somewhere could give you the big send off, die glorious and forever remembered.
He hurried a little when the voice told him to, numbers in his vision counting down quicker now, the feeble gyros of this interspace unit had come unmoored and it was flailing, the gates inside losing their lock on other gates in other places, places that the auld man needed to be. He felt the pain in his legs, old injuries that would never heal, ruined legs replaced after a battle gone awry, knights against their fellows, a skirmish that had gone from serious to deadly in seconds, honour had to be served, rules observed though there had been no need for the killing, no will to slaughter, just the knowledge that it had to happen. That fate would decide and that the people had spoken. Crowds had cheered them on, screaming voices in the earphones of the knights on each side, floating drone cameras like squires sending video through time and space to the faraway land of home. They wanted honour, the sponsors wanted blood because that’s how commerce works boys. The Auld man had downed ten men he might once have saluted and hailed, the eleventh cut him off with a swipe of a blade, left him bleeding on the muddy grass to be collected like a worn out vehicle after the battle was over. He expected to be sold like scrap, but there were still enough then that had faith in him, and he was then at least photogenic, people in the tribe still cared enough about him. If not at least for the fact he was still local and his loyalty was one of the few not bought by hard cash.
It had been two years then out of the game, recuperating on the company account, sold his story of the battle and his injuries to syndicated news agencies. Always wanted stories of brave knights, their troubles with women, fears and anxieties, stalked them like hyenas, collecting around them when they were weak, attracted by the smell of success grown sour. That had been the high point, ignoble as it might seem. He had not realised at the time, thought once he got his legs back and got back into training he would keep going up the leagues, a barony here, fielty of the city state there. Before he would know it he could be on the high table, supping with the high King’s council and with the ear of the high and powerful.
That had been an idle dream, the kind of dream he had tried to avoid when he donned himself with the mental armour a knight was meant to keep with him at all times. No emotion but the desire for the purpose of the quest and to serve the people he had sworn loyalty to, nothing on his mind but all the higher purposes. He stoically had followed all the quests he and his fellow knights had been sent on, eager for word that he was one chosen to ascend the next level, further along the golden path but each time knowing it was further away. Knowing that he would never be presented to the king and go with his sword, that he would only be good enough to follow in the wake of such knights, be given scraps of glory from their table. It was at least a living, and in one where he had stayed alive, no mean feat that. He had known so many left on the cold planes of far away lands, of knights better braver and fairer than he who were nothing more than a suit of armour hanging in a dusty hall or if they were lucky a ossuary of bones in the crypt of a venerated order. Some had fared even worse, had been left armour and all where they had fallen, no return, no burial and no ladies lament over their passing, gone as if never existed. Others had escaped death only to spend a lifetime in the cage of their own defunct bodies, fallen on hard times and no cash to get regrown the parts they had lost, would wander around the townships they had once strode like Lords, begging almost, their minds still torn and left somewhere in the hills of Zion or the Tutt dimension.
The old walls of the station were shuddering now, air being sucked into the void outside and the Auld man felt tension coiling in his guts. Cutting it fine, he surely was, but it was for a reason, everything he did was. He stopped himself from glancing around at the floating copper ball behind him, the lenses covering its surface green and unblinking. That followed him everywhere, more faithfully any of the retinue he had had to leave behind, and he had long ago learned to perform in the way he knew it liked. That meant not hurrying too much to the gate, because it did not thrill the viewers a million light years away in their cosy homes and comfortable lives, because they after all called the shots and they wanted excitement, not enough to be racing against time he had to escape again only by the skin of his teeth. It was the only thing he really knew how to do properly, the only thing that kept him from being relegated to squirehood, to meekly following some other, younger knight. To almost certain death, the easiest way of packing off old heroes who had passed their prime.
It did not become him to be a showman, though by his time most knights were little but. Those who succeeded these days did so not by skill or by courage but by careful manipulation of the public, by appealing to the sponsors, getting the money to have their nervous systems and reflexes amped up so they were nearly indestructible. That wasn’t how it was meant to be, not how they were taught honour and duty at school but any argument against it was dismissed with a wave of the hand and the excuse that these were desperate times and that all that stood between humanity and destruction was the bravery of its knights. And the Auld man still believed that, despite the evidence to the contrary, he saw the massive waste of resource, of money spent on quests that had no value, on vanquishing monsters that had been harming nobody but gave a chance of some easy valour and a few hundred million paying viewers. It may make the average man in the pub feel like his knights were cleansing the universe of evil and furthering the progress of man but to a more enlightened or cynical observer it seemed like the purpose of the knights had expired centuries ago. Humanity was a species that had pushed itself by way of the gates into every corner of a million universes that existed along the same curve in reality, had colonised a dozen versions of earth, a hundred other planets and a whole host of other more abstract astral bodies. There were more way stations and interspace units than people, more gates than could ever be counted or tracked by even the most intrepid and mentally enhanced of people. The simple fact was that humanity didn’t need any of these things, pretty much everyone was content living the same shape of life as they had since time immemorial, the township, the community, semi tribal, semi national. Lines of cross cutting loyalty to any number of conflicting authority figures, to companies and conglomerates whose logos they wore with pride. They were content to travel no more than the distance from homes to their jobs to their once a year two weeks in the sun. The mysteries of the universe, travel to places outside of the realism of physics, places where magic seemed more applicable than science and superstition more use than reason held no appeal to most. It might be dangerous, and besides that was Knight’s work, best leave it to the professionals. They were happy to watch as other men ran in search of glory down corridors stuffed with ancient technologies, who battled alien races to reach holy artefacts thought lost since the dawn of time. They were happy to see blood spilt in the defence of humanity’s honour under dying suns so long as it wasn’t theirs.
He thought suddenly of Aerthur, the beginning of it all and the magnet for every young boy’s desire in life. His sister who had not agreed and hated all there was to do with this masculine, violent and boorish world called him the child stealer, the pied piper of foolish knights. Men, she snorted with contempt, were just looking for a way to get themselves killed, and no one thought of the mothers or the widows. The women who had to watch their young crop go off and annihilate themselves for silly words like honour and glory. The Auld man had tried to explain but knew in his heart she would never understand, she knew of no reason why a man should sacrifice his own life simply at the behest of another. She knew nothing of glory, the pull of honour and the self respect it gave a man. If it was not for the knights then they would be emasculated, in a world, where all the old pursuits of men had been whittled away as no longer necessary or as overly destructive to society, this alone survived.
The Auld man reached the gate, its usually rectangular shape twisted into trapezoid form under the pressures of rapidly changing realities. The faded and dull LED’s and information screen on the top bar had shorted out but the Auld man knew the count was less than five seconds. Any closer than this really wasn’t worth it. He slapped the coordinates into the number pad with a brief spasm of paranoia that perhaps that too had shorted and dived between the glowing thick plastic frame of the gate.
He landed and rolled on the hard but smoothed coral surface of the townships gate 3 transit ramp and was on his feet in seconds. He was not surprised to see the small crowd, some dignatories dressed for the occasion, the sponsors beaming and in the middle the Earl to whom he had sworn fealty to many, many years before.
He went to his knee in front of the man, armour protesting slightly and a fiery twinge through the never quite healed nerves. The Earl’s armour was of a vintage greater than the Auld man’s, more ornate and covered with sigil script, the names of those who served under him, company mottos and advertising slogans. Running down his arms were the embossed logos of all the conglomerates he represented and in pride of place above his heart the King’s own sign.
The Earl leant down and grasped the Auld man, pulled him to his feet and laid a kiss on each of his scarred cheeks. His words of welcome boomed from loudspeakers hidden in the walls of the township’s transit gate complex, the traditional place to welcome back crusading knights. This was all part of the ceremony, one the Auld man had been through more times than he cared to imagine, and he saw it as just another inconvenience of the quest. It would not be over until later, where there would be a reckoning and he hoped a final one at that, retirement with glory. He let himself be feted by the sponsors, by the representatives of the munitions guilds that had put his armour together and forged his swords. They were just businessmen though, every word they said was product placement, the Auld man just nodded when needed and spoke the words the armour told him to, knowing his place in this ceremony. The drone was still there behind him, spinning with a dozen others now, hateful buzzing he could still hear even above the shouts of the crowds and the words of the worthies. A part of him had hoped it would get trapped behind in the imploding interspace station, that physical emblem of his distaste of what he had become, what the whole noble purpose he had devoted his life to had become. A voice in his head told him he would not be thinking this if he had been more successful, that if he were at the high table he would be lapping up the publicity.
There were interviews and medical checkups, there was the presentation of the treasure and the remembering of the fallen. All were TV events and thus unreal, the memory of the fallen men was a personal thing that the Auld man would unburden himself of at his own pace, though he knew when to look solemn and when to shed a single tear in memory of those who had died for the handful of trinkets that he had placed in the Earl’s hand.
Then it was the reckoning, the debriefing, the time when the Auld man felt more apprehensive than at any time on the quest. Out there he knew how things worked, that was familiar terrain, this was foreign, trickery would abound.
He stood there at the front of the man he had made his oaths too, a man who wore the armour but had never been on crusade in his life, who had bought his commission on the open market and with the happy backing of many locals who thought his money would bring them honour lost over a tricky decade. The last Earl had been a knight, one brave but not too clever on the financial side, and had died still owing great sums to the township he had championed.
“Will you let me retire with honour, my liege?” grated the Auld man, more hope on his face than he had meant to show.
The Earl turned to the other men in the room, the townships PR personnel, the ad man from the local industrial combine and chief sponsor of the auld man’s last quest.
The ad man spoke up “You did very well, ratings were up .24 percent on the last, we can give a break down of ad earnings when they come in. However there were a few factors that don’t play in your favour” the adman ticked them off on his pale, thin fingers
“Ok, firstly the deaths of the squires and the other knights did not play well at all. No heroism in that, getting cut to pieces in that ambush. Second they lost a lot of sympathy when you left your comrade there” he held up his hand to cut of the Auld man’s protests “I know, you had little choice but still, that cost you bad. In all though you got the goods, and we’re thankful don’t ever think we’re not, it was not the success we really needed”
The earl nodded thoughtfully “Well, its out of my hands I’m afraid good Sir. You heard the money men, if it were up to me” he made an expansive gesture “I’d let you retire, but we just can’t do it. We’re all on a budget here”
And he laid out an offer for a new quest, one with an even greater prize at the end where all the knights of the Auld man’s crop, those that were left alive and not supping at the high table would be involved.
“It’s gonna be a killer, the completion of a crusade begun when you were all barely out of training. It’s life or death, but you have to destroy the beast that claimed the lives of many of your beloved comrades” he went on to sketch out the details but already the Auld man knew what would happen. It did not matter that he knew he would not return, nor that the Earl had got the year of his crop wrong and that he had never met most of those men meant to be his oldest comrades. It only mattered to him to do his duty, to spend those last few weeks in his home township, to see all those he still knew how to love and those he never could. To try not to think how he could have been walking out of it a free man, could have been made a Lord or Baronet for his long service, nor to think of what little remained of the future.
He simply bowed to his liege and thanked him for his commission. Limped out of the door with his scarred head held high.
He swung his scarred and grizzled head, the face half prosthetic now and that gone half way to seed too. Looked both ways and limped on out of the long corridor where degraded and shorted out electronics rusted and corroded. His ceramic armour, plates thin and light yet with a tensile strength equivalent to a mountain range, to thick stone balustrades and fabled Greek steel, was worn, chipped and bent and with almost all the paint missing. But still he wore it with that youthful naïve pride that had started him on the long journey, a journey now he was to complete, with half of what he had missing and the other half broken, redundant, old. In his hands a sword still gleamed, cast from complicated alloys forged by competent scientists in ancient and half remembered rituals. It was just a cleaver, a razor, a separator, no romance even in the elegantly engraved handle, the names of sponsors embossed in silver. It was just a tool to do a job, an anachronism. On the armour too there had been the names of those who had wished him well, the ad men, the conglomerates and the science institutes, the flags of the country and the township he had sworn allegiance too, who had told that it was the honour and survival of their families he was fighting for.
That was the past, the future, the present perhaps even. Could he still judge the time? Had the mighty task he had shouldered taken him in such a great circle he had arrived before he had left? It had happened, with grim irony it had happened. Knights had readied themselves to leave, the new crop ready for the tasks of their elders, stepped up to whichever gate had been chosen and found themselves starring into mirrors of themselves. Into mirrors that showed old men in old armour with old scars and gaps maybe where the knights had fallen long ago. That was enough to shake the young knights faith, to have to see their futures staring back at them, to watch them limp down into the crowds that had sent them, to report on what deeds they had accomplished, to pretend that it all was worth it, had been worth the death of half their number and only the rough shells of the boys they had been coming back.
It was worth it. He knew this as he climbed through airlocked hatches, winching them open where the relays had shorted. It was a part of him, the stories, the glory, the desire to win. Ever since he could remember he had wanted to be one of them, had idolised Aldred and Mertan, the Legion of seventy two on the great crusade, that undefeated group who had won through against terrible odds and to return still young men, sideburned faces smiling out at him from fading newsreels. There were statues to men of that order, whole lives would have been given to be a part of that. Even the lives of those they had touched, who had been mere observers to those quests had lived forever in common memory. The ideal of doing that for your tribe, for your family and country, for the economy and for the good of all humanity, that made it worth it.
His suit told him where to go, told him where the next gate was. Electronics talked to electronics. The suit was full of them, woven through the ceramic and the soft plastic fabric that touched his skin like oil, he could rely on the suit, and always had. The suit told him how long it would be before the gate shut down, and how it would take him back to the old country. There it would be at an end, the last quest he had almost completed, the items, the treasures stowed safely in the pouches on his hips. With those he would live forever in the hearts of his people, he would be given great gifts, the greatest and simplest of those respect. He knew how easy it was for old knights to lose it, a few simple missions missed or failed, a final quest not as glorious as had been promised. The public was fickle like that, and would move on to new attractions. The new crop coming through, the big names and the big crusades, the ones with the best sponsorship deals. The auld man had never been one of the biggest names, there had been chances he could have taken, ways the chips could have gone that would have put him into the great league, up there with the true heroes on the high table but it was not to be. He was content, had grown to be content, with the loyalty of his people, small in number as they were, he flew the flag of his tribe, small enough as they were, they were at least his tribe. He was not crusading for some people who would buy and sell his loyalty, not wandering like a Ronin for tidbits, flashing an old sword and tired tricks, hoping that someone somewhere could give you the big send off, die glorious and forever remembered.
He hurried a little when the voice told him to, numbers in his vision counting down quicker now, the feeble gyros of this interspace unit had come unmoored and it was flailing, the gates inside losing their lock on other gates in other places, places that the auld man needed to be. He felt the pain in his legs, old injuries that would never heal, ruined legs replaced after a battle gone awry, knights against their fellows, a skirmish that had gone from serious to deadly in seconds, honour had to be served, rules observed though there had been no need for the killing, no will to slaughter, just the knowledge that it had to happen. That fate would decide and that the people had spoken. Crowds had cheered them on, screaming voices in the earphones of the knights on each side, floating drone cameras like squires sending video through time and space to the faraway land of home. They wanted honour, the sponsors wanted blood because that’s how commerce works boys. The Auld man had downed ten men he might once have saluted and hailed, the eleventh cut him off with a swipe of a blade, left him bleeding on the muddy grass to be collected like a worn out vehicle after the battle was over. He expected to be sold like scrap, but there were still enough then that had faith in him, and he was then at least photogenic, people in the tribe still cared enough about him. If not at least for the fact he was still local and his loyalty was one of the few not bought by hard cash.
It had been two years then out of the game, recuperating on the company account, sold his story of the battle and his injuries to syndicated news agencies. Always wanted stories of brave knights, their troubles with women, fears and anxieties, stalked them like hyenas, collecting around them when they were weak, attracted by the smell of success grown sour. That had been the high point, ignoble as it might seem. He had not realised at the time, thought once he got his legs back and got back into training he would keep going up the leagues, a barony here, fielty of the city state there. Before he would know it he could be on the high table, supping with the high King’s council and with the ear of the high and powerful.
That had been an idle dream, the kind of dream he had tried to avoid when he donned himself with the mental armour a knight was meant to keep with him at all times. No emotion but the desire for the purpose of the quest and to serve the people he had sworn loyalty to, nothing on his mind but all the higher purposes. He stoically had followed all the quests he and his fellow knights had been sent on, eager for word that he was one chosen to ascend the next level, further along the golden path but each time knowing it was further away. Knowing that he would never be presented to the king and go with his sword, that he would only be good enough to follow in the wake of such knights, be given scraps of glory from their table. It was at least a living, and in one where he had stayed alive, no mean feat that. He had known so many left on the cold planes of far away lands, of knights better braver and fairer than he who were nothing more than a suit of armour hanging in a dusty hall or if they were lucky a ossuary of bones in the crypt of a venerated order. Some had fared even worse, had been left armour and all where they had fallen, no return, no burial and no ladies lament over their passing, gone as if never existed. Others had escaped death only to spend a lifetime in the cage of their own defunct bodies, fallen on hard times and no cash to get regrown the parts they had lost, would wander around the townships they had once strode like Lords, begging almost, their minds still torn and left somewhere in the hills of Zion or the Tutt dimension.
The old walls of the station were shuddering now, air being sucked into the void outside and the Auld man felt tension coiling in his guts. Cutting it fine, he surely was, but it was for a reason, everything he did was. He stopped himself from glancing around at the floating copper ball behind him, the lenses covering its surface green and unblinking. That followed him everywhere, more faithfully any of the retinue he had had to leave behind, and he had long ago learned to perform in the way he knew it liked. That meant not hurrying too much to the gate, because it did not thrill the viewers a million light years away in their cosy homes and comfortable lives, because they after all called the shots and they wanted excitement, not enough to be racing against time he had to escape again only by the skin of his teeth. It was the only thing he really knew how to do properly, the only thing that kept him from being relegated to squirehood, to meekly following some other, younger knight. To almost certain death, the easiest way of packing off old heroes who had passed their prime.
It did not become him to be a showman, though by his time most knights were little but. Those who succeeded these days did so not by skill or by courage but by careful manipulation of the public, by appealing to the sponsors, getting the money to have their nervous systems and reflexes amped up so they were nearly indestructible. That wasn’t how it was meant to be, not how they were taught honour and duty at school but any argument against it was dismissed with a wave of the hand and the excuse that these were desperate times and that all that stood between humanity and destruction was the bravery of its knights. And the Auld man still believed that, despite the evidence to the contrary, he saw the massive waste of resource, of money spent on quests that had no value, on vanquishing monsters that had been harming nobody but gave a chance of some easy valour and a few hundred million paying viewers. It may make the average man in the pub feel like his knights were cleansing the universe of evil and furthering the progress of man but to a more enlightened or cynical observer it seemed like the purpose of the knights had expired centuries ago. Humanity was a species that had pushed itself by way of the gates into every corner of a million universes that existed along the same curve in reality, had colonised a dozen versions of earth, a hundred other planets and a whole host of other more abstract astral bodies. There were more way stations and interspace units than people, more gates than could ever be counted or tracked by even the most intrepid and mentally enhanced of people. The simple fact was that humanity didn’t need any of these things, pretty much everyone was content living the same shape of life as they had since time immemorial, the township, the community, semi tribal, semi national. Lines of cross cutting loyalty to any number of conflicting authority figures, to companies and conglomerates whose logos they wore with pride. They were content to travel no more than the distance from homes to their jobs to their once a year two weeks in the sun. The mysteries of the universe, travel to places outside of the realism of physics, places where magic seemed more applicable than science and superstition more use than reason held no appeal to most. It might be dangerous, and besides that was Knight’s work, best leave it to the professionals. They were happy to watch as other men ran in search of glory down corridors stuffed with ancient technologies, who battled alien races to reach holy artefacts thought lost since the dawn of time. They were happy to see blood spilt in the defence of humanity’s honour under dying suns so long as it wasn’t theirs.
He thought suddenly of Aerthur, the beginning of it all and the magnet for every young boy’s desire in life. His sister who had not agreed and hated all there was to do with this masculine, violent and boorish world called him the child stealer, the pied piper of foolish knights. Men, she snorted with contempt, were just looking for a way to get themselves killed, and no one thought of the mothers or the widows. The women who had to watch their young crop go off and annihilate themselves for silly words like honour and glory. The Auld man had tried to explain but knew in his heart she would never understand, she knew of no reason why a man should sacrifice his own life simply at the behest of another. She knew nothing of glory, the pull of honour and the self respect it gave a man. If it was not for the knights then they would be emasculated, in a world, where all the old pursuits of men had been whittled away as no longer necessary or as overly destructive to society, this alone survived.
The Auld man reached the gate, its usually rectangular shape twisted into trapezoid form under the pressures of rapidly changing realities. The faded and dull LED’s and information screen on the top bar had shorted out but the Auld man knew the count was less than five seconds. Any closer than this really wasn’t worth it. He slapped the coordinates into the number pad with a brief spasm of paranoia that perhaps that too had shorted and dived between the glowing thick plastic frame of the gate.
He landed and rolled on the hard but smoothed coral surface of the townships gate 3 transit ramp and was on his feet in seconds. He was not surprised to see the small crowd, some dignatories dressed for the occasion, the sponsors beaming and in the middle the Earl to whom he had sworn fealty to many, many years before.
He went to his knee in front of the man, armour protesting slightly and a fiery twinge through the never quite healed nerves. The Earl’s armour was of a vintage greater than the Auld man’s, more ornate and covered with sigil script, the names of those who served under him, company mottos and advertising slogans. Running down his arms were the embossed logos of all the conglomerates he represented and in pride of place above his heart the King’s own sign.
The Earl leant down and grasped the Auld man, pulled him to his feet and laid a kiss on each of his scarred cheeks. His words of welcome boomed from loudspeakers hidden in the walls of the township’s transit gate complex, the traditional place to welcome back crusading knights. This was all part of the ceremony, one the Auld man had been through more times than he cared to imagine, and he saw it as just another inconvenience of the quest. It would not be over until later, where there would be a reckoning and he hoped a final one at that, retirement with glory. He let himself be feted by the sponsors, by the representatives of the munitions guilds that had put his armour together and forged his swords. They were just businessmen though, every word they said was product placement, the Auld man just nodded when needed and spoke the words the armour told him to, knowing his place in this ceremony. The drone was still there behind him, spinning with a dozen others now, hateful buzzing he could still hear even above the shouts of the crowds and the words of the worthies. A part of him had hoped it would get trapped behind in the imploding interspace station, that physical emblem of his distaste of what he had become, what the whole noble purpose he had devoted his life to had become. A voice in his head told him he would not be thinking this if he had been more successful, that if he were at the high table he would be lapping up the publicity.
There were interviews and medical checkups, there was the presentation of the treasure and the remembering of the fallen. All were TV events and thus unreal, the memory of the fallen men was a personal thing that the Auld man would unburden himself of at his own pace, though he knew when to look solemn and when to shed a single tear in memory of those who had died for the handful of trinkets that he had placed in the Earl’s hand.
Then it was the reckoning, the debriefing, the time when the Auld man felt more apprehensive than at any time on the quest. Out there he knew how things worked, that was familiar terrain, this was foreign, trickery would abound.
He stood there at the front of the man he had made his oaths too, a man who wore the armour but had never been on crusade in his life, who had bought his commission on the open market and with the happy backing of many locals who thought his money would bring them honour lost over a tricky decade. The last Earl had been a knight, one brave but not too clever on the financial side, and had died still owing great sums to the township he had championed.
“Will you let me retire with honour, my liege?” grated the Auld man, more hope on his face than he had meant to show.
The Earl turned to the other men in the room, the townships PR personnel, the ad man from the local industrial combine and chief sponsor of the auld man’s last quest.
The ad man spoke up “You did very well, ratings were up .24 percent on the last, we can give a break down of ad earnings when they come in. However there were a few factors that don’t play in your favour” the adman ticked them off on his pale, thin fingers
“Ok, firstly the deaths of the squires and the other knights did not play well at all. No heroism in that, getting cut to pieces in that ambush. Second they lost a lot of sympathy when you left your comrade there” he held up his hand to cut of the Auld man’s protests “I know, you had little choice but still, that cost you bad. In all though you got the goods, and we’re thankful don’t ever think we’re not, it was not the success we really needed”
The earl nodded thoughtfully “Well, its out of my hands I’m afraid good Sir. You heard the money men, if it were up to me” he made an expansive gesture “I’d let you retire, but we just can’t do it. We’re all on a budget here”
And he laid out an offer for a new quest, one with an even greater prize at the end where all the knights of the Auld man’s crop, those that were left alive and not supping at the high table would be involved.
“It’s gonna be a killer, the completion of a crusade begun when you were all barely out of training. It’s life or death, but you have to destroy the beast that claimed the lives of many of your beloved comrades” he went on to sketch out the details but already the Auld man knew what would happen. It did not matter that he knew he would not return, nor that the Earl had got the year of his crop wrong and that he had never met most of those men meant to be his oldest comrades. It only mattered to him to do his duty, to spend those last few weeks in his home township, to see all those he still knew how to love and those he never could. To try not to think how he could have been walking out of it a free man, could have been made a Lord or Baronet for his long service, nor to think of what little remained of the future.
He simply bowed to his liege and thanked him for his commission. Limped out of the door with his scarred head held high.
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