Swords & Heroes Story #7

A Crown of Crimson and Silver by Chris Hall

Aug 20, 2024

Today’s story harkens back to the tradition of the saga, when bards sang of the heroic actions of their fyrd during cold winter nights. Hall’s short adventure feels like an epic tale but told in a compact style with a poetic touch - close to flash fiction in length, but one which packs a punch. Maybe I should have saved this story for Yuletide, but then again, any time of year is the right time to go on a quest - especially one as dangerous and magical as this. - Ed.

This week, we present Story #7…

“A Crown of Crimson and Silver” by Chris Hall

As the soldiers marched along the narrow forest track, the moon shone bright and the wind whipped through the high branches above, so that shadows flitted dark and silent as raven’s wings across the ground below.

Osbeorn, stout of frame and stalwart of bearing, surveyed the motley host of soldiers under his command. Wielding spear and sword, clad in hauberk and helm, each man was ready to fend off the fiends that lurked within the forest’s depths. As they forayed once more into the fastness of the Wychwood, the bonds they’d forged through weal and woe held fear at bay, though this was a night full of portents black and baleful.

Though night’s shadows and fatigue from the day’s long journey slowed their steps, the soldiers soon attained their first objective: the crossroads, and it was there that they read their first tiding of doom.

At the center of the crossroads stood one of the wild folk’s crude effigies, a life-sized human shape adorned with antlers. The totem marked the glade as a place of power, a place as sacred to the wild folk and wychlings who peopled the forest as it was deadly to those who dared step unbidden into its sylvan shadows—those like the men of Osbeorn’s fyrd. It was a sign to stay away, to seek safety outside the mist-haunted groves and untrammeled wildlands.

But Osbeorn and his men had battled many a wychling and wild man and would not be so easily deterred from their quarry. For tonight they pursued the legendary White Hart of the Wychwood who, it was said, roamed this forest only one night each year, on Yuletide Eve.

As Osbeorn studied the crudely carven statue, a shudder passed along his spine, as subtle and unbidden as the chill breeze that cut through the woods. Stories, strange and dreadful encircled their endeavors this evening in this ill-omened place—midnight on Yuletide Eve, in the Wychwood, at the crossroads. For Osbeorn, it was all too easy to imagine apparitions far more monstrous than this crude statue watching from the forest’s lightless depths, to mistake the call of a night bird for the fleering of fiends. He knew the same must hold true for his men.

“Remember men, Eorl Camberwell himself charges us with this task, and we have all the might of the Lightbringer behind us this night.”

Unsettled by the wildling’s crude effigy though he was, he was also a veteran soldier of Westerhold and lately the leader of a renowned fyrd. He knew the words that would calm the men’s hearts, for those same words calmed his own heart in turn. Besides, abandoning their task now would mean failing Eorl Camberwell; and the message screaming silently from every disembodied head displayed atop the gates of Camberwell Keep was this: failing the Eorl bore no small consequence.

So it was that he set his fear aside, steadied his trembling hand, and signaled to Wealhmaer the dwimmerman to proceed with the ritual.

In the moonlight, Wealhmaer’s pallid face looked strange and ghoulish. Always, the man had struck Osbeorn as something of an oddity, for Wealhmaer was bred of the northern forests of the Cymbrian Wilds, a place known to the folk of Westerhold to be every bit as dark and faerie-haunted as the Wychwood itself. His unusual lineage made him ideal for his role as dwimmerman, wielder of magic both eldritch and august.

The ways of the wychlings and wild folk were known to Wealhmaer, and so it was that his craft exceeded that of any other dwimmerman in the kingdom. Any fool could sprinkle cold iron and chant the rites, but only one such as Wealhmaer, one who had seen through the veil of mist and shadows to spy the weird world beyond, could truly understand what the words meant, truly know the sting cold iron brought to the faerie folk they hunted.

And they would need a man such as Wealhmaer this eve. For the White Hart was no ordinary beast, but a creature of legend, stalking the foggy night-dark depths of ancient groves that had somehow endured despite the axes of the eager invaders from the west.

With one hand, Wealhmaer began to sprinkle the cold iron shavings in a circle round the crossroads. His other hand held his dwimmerman’s bowl, a silver receptacle ornately adorned with carvings and filled with mare’s milk. As he walked, he intoned:

Iron to keep the faeries at bay, mare’s milk to curdle if come they may….

But before he could finish the verse, the sour stench of clotted milk wafted from the dwimmerman’s bowl, and a great crashing and splintering of branches shattered the night’s stillness.

“There!” Halflric shouted, his youthful eyes descrying the distant shape before his fellows.

Turning to look where the young man pointed, Osbeorn spied it. Perhaps a furlong from where he stood a great crown of silver horns topped the ghost-white form of a giant stag.

He knew at once what he witnessed, there, in the mist-choked wood. This was the White Stag, the herald of the Wild Hunt that wandered the woodlands on Yuletide Eve. He had heard the tales since he was a child, but to see the thing brought home to Osbeorn how great a trophy the creature’s head would make, how fine a feast Camberwell and his thanes might enjoy should Osbeorn and his fyrd fulfill their charge and bring the venison home to roast.

Truly, his would be a tale of heroism, the sort of story that had stirred him, so many seasons ago, to put down the plough and pick up a blade. Perhaps the once humble farmer would earn at last the renown and riches he so longed for.

He indulged such thoughts for only an instant, but it was an instant too many.

The White Hart lowered its head, antlers gleaming silver in the moonlight as it charged straight toward the men. Its body easily twice the size of a warhorse, the stag bowled over half a dozen of the unmounted soldiers before even slowing its pace. At last, the sharp horns struck the young soldier Halfric, impaling him neatly before hoisting him off the ground.

Osbeorn shouted for his men to have courage, to surround the beast and restrain it with ropes.

The men worked knots and threw with precision, so that soon the ropes caught the charging stag round the legs, halting it in its tracks. Halfric’s body slid from the horns and fell face up on the leaf-strewn sod, a wet ruin of gushing blood and splintered bone where his face should have been.

The stag raised its head and surveyed the remaining men, its own face stained crimson, its eyes blazing with a fierce green fire.

Then, in a voice like the susurration of barren branches in the winter wind, the stag spoke.

“I am he who fights for the fallen; it is I who shall bring victory to the vanquished; it is I who shall make the hunter the hunted!”

Osbeorn could read the fear on his men’s faces, and though that same fear etched his own heart, he knew he must make a show of courage now or risk seeing his men routed.

“We do the will of the Eorl Camberwell himself, and his is the will of the Lightbringer. By firm faith and cold iron shall we show you to be naught but a crude beast!”

The stag merely laughed, a truly discomfiting sound, part animal grunt, part human laughter. Then, suddenly, it charged again, moving with such speed and force that it tore the ropes from the men’s hands. Soon, another soldier of the fyrd festooned the stag’s silver crown of horns with crimson. The beast pierced the man’s torso with its antlers and bore him into the trunk of a gnarled oak in a single motion. The horns struck the oak so hard that they pierced its thick bark, pinning the stag to the tree.

“Now!” Osbeorn shouted. “Strike together while the beast is trapped!”

He had trained them well, these men, and he watched with great pleasure as the fyrd converged upon the stag, moving as one, their fore-thrust spears making the shield wall a porpentine’s back.

Such valor was the stuff of the stories of his boyhood, great heroes braving perilous places to vanquish the monsters that dwelled within. But if in that moment a ballad stirred his heart to happiness, that song soon turned to a dirge, his heart to despair. For as the creature struggled to free itself, massive neck muscles rippling with the effort, it kicked mightily, splintering bone with its great silvery hooves and shattering the shield wall.

As it pulled its antlers free, the beast roared, “Day and night, the forest feeds the people. This night, the people shall feed the forest!”

From bodies bruised, bloodied, and broken, the Norns soon wove a tapestry of slaughter upon the crossroads. Osbeorn watched in wide-eyed horror, the fearful child within him showing through chinks in the rough armor of the seasoned commander. For a moment, he thought of the Lightbringer, of the prayers of courage commanders should say when faced with devils out of the darkness, devils like this ghostly stag that had so swiftly and savagely slaughtered his men.

But facing the being before him, its all-too-real horns and hooves, its ghostly blood-drenched hide, the Lightbringer stood revealed as the airy nothings of old men’s imaginings, a desperate phantasm conjured by those too fearful to face the dark and trackless midnight wilderness that lay beyond the feeble flickering flames which lit men’s houses.

A few members of the fyrd still stood; though shields splintered and broke, their bravery remained intact. But in that moment, Osbeorn knew the bitter truth: bravery is a close cousin to foolishness.

His eye met Wealhmaer’s and saw his own desperate, fearful thoughts reflected there. The dwimmerman had not completed the rites, and cold iron alone could not keep a beast such as this at bay.

They would call for no retreat; let the men hold the beast at bay. Let them die fighting in the name of the Lightbringer, believing in stories of heroes who could overcome all odds.

Then, if the caprice of the gods allowed, Osbeorn and Wealhmaer might live to tell another tale of Yuletide in the Wychwood, a tale of darkness and death whose desperate warning would be lost on those who heard it within the shelter of stone walls and basked in the warmth of the hearth fire.

A Crown of Crimson and Silver © 2024 by Chris Hall. (1770 words.) All rights reserved. You may restack this story via Substack but please do not republish elsewhere. Banner and sword illustrations by Gilead, used by permission.

Image of the White Stag, used by permission, is by Jasiah Witkofsky, author of Enter the Pistollera, a swashbuckling series of tales available from Nordic Adventures Press.

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