They descended together, and when they had come to the level ground they unfastened their cloaks, removed their heavy shoes and stripped themselves naked. Rantel flung his clothes away to the sloping grass. Braigon folded his coarse garments and laid them across a boulder. He saw that Rantel was feeling the edge of his blade which danced in the moonlight like a splinter of glass.
They said nothing. They tested the slippery grass with their naked feet.
Then they turned to one another. Braigon eased his fingers around the short bone hilt. Neither could see the expression in the other’s face for their features were lost in the shadows of their brows and only their tangled hair held the light. They crouched and began to move, the distance closing between them, the muscles winding across their backs.
With Keda for hearts’ reason, they circled, they closed, they feinted, their blades parrying the thrusts of the knife by sudden cross movements of their forearms.
When Rantel carved it was onslaught. It was as though the wood were his enemy. He fought it with rasp and chisel, hacking its flesh away until the shape that he held in his mind began to surrender to his violence. It was in this way that he fought. Body and brain were fused into one impulse – to kill the man who crouched before him. Not even Keda was in his mind now.
His eyes embraced the slightest movement of the other’s body, of his moving feet, of his leaping knife. He saw that around Braigon’s left arm a line of blood was winding from a gash in the shoulder. Rantel had the longer reach, but swiftly as his knife shot forward to the throat or breast, Braigon’s forearm would swing across behind it and smack his arm away from its target. Then at the impact Rantel would spin out of range, and again they would circle and close in upon one another, their shoulders and arms gleaming in the unearthly brilliance.
As Braigon fought he wondered where Keda was. He wondered whether there could ever be happiness for her after himself or Rantel had been killed; whether she could forget that she was the wife of a murderer: whether to fight were not to escape from some limpid truth. Keda came vividly before his eyes, and yet his body worked with mechanical brilliance, warding off the savage blade and attacking his assailant with a series of quick thrusts, drawing blood from Rantel’s side.
As the figure moved before him he followed the muscles as they wove beneath the skin. He was not only fighting with an assailant who was awaiting for that split second in which to strike him dead, but he was stabbing at a masterpiece – at sculpture that leapt and heaved, at a marvel of inky shadow and silver light. A great wave of nausea surged through him and his knife felt putrid in his hand. His body went on fighting.
The grass was blotched with the impression of their feet. They had scattered and crushed the dew and a dark irregular patch filled the centre of the hollow showing where their game with death had led them. Even this bruised darkness of crushed grass was pale in comparison with the intensity of their shadows which, moving as they moved, sliding beneath them, springing when they sprang, were never still.
Their hair was sticking to the sweat on their brows. The wounds in their bodies were weakening them, but neither could afford to pause.
About them the stillness of the pale night was complete. The moonlight lay like rime along the ridges of the distant castle. The reedy marshlands far to the east lay inert – a region of gauze. Their bodies were raddled now with the blood from many wounds. The merciless light gleamed on the wet, warm streams that slid ceaselessly over their tired flesh. A haze of ghostly weakness was filling their nakedness and they were fighting like characters in a dream.
Keda’s trance had fallen from her in a sudden brutal moment and she had started to run towards the Twisted Woods. Through the great phosphorescent night, cloakless, her hair unfastening as she climbed, she came at last to the incline that led to the lip of the hollow. Her pain mounted as she ran. The strange, unworldly strength had died in her, the glory was gone – only an agony of fear was with her now.
As she climbed to the ridge of the hollow she could hear – so small a sound in the enormous night – the panting of the men, and her heart for a moment lifted, for they were alive.
With a bound she reached the brow of the slope and saw them crouching and moving in moonlight below her. The cry in her throat was choked as she saw the blood upon them, and she sank to her knees.
Braigon had seen her and his tired arms rang with a sudden strength. With a flash of his left arm he whirled Rantel’s daggered hand away, and springing after him as swiftly as though he were a part of his foe, he plunged his knife into the shadowy breast.
As he struck he withdrew the dagger, and as Rantel sank to the ground, Braigon flung his weapon away.
