The Night Death Came for Me
I was not anyone of consequence. I want you to understand that before I tell you the rest.
My name is Aldous Pike. I was a cooper in the market town of Kettlewick, which is to say I made barrels. Ale barrels, water barrels, salt-fish barrels, pickling tubs. I had a small shop at the bottom of Tanner’s Row, beneath the sign of the Red Cross inn, with a forge out back for bending the iron hoops. I was forty-one years old. I had a bad knee, a burned left hand from the forge, and a daughter of nine named Bess, who had her dead mother’s gray eyes and her dead mother’s temper.
I was nobody. And yet on a cold, wet night in the autumn of my forty-second year, Death came for me.
You will have heard of the Strikers. Everyone has. When I was a boy, my grandmother told us of them by the fire to keep us in our beds at night, and I was too frightened to sleep for a week.
They were not men. Or rather, they had been men once, long ago. Warriors of the old times, from before the kingdoms had their names. Nobody knew how they became what they were. Some said they had made a bargain with something. Some said they were simply born that way, one in a hundred thousand. But they did not grow old as we do. They lived seven hundred years. Eight hundred, or more. They grew stronger and wiser with every century, and slower to anger, and they had seen everything there was to see in this world at least twice.
And the older they grew, the darker their faces became.
A young Striker, my grandmother said, of only a hundred years or so, looked almost like any other man, only with shadows beneath his eyes that never lifted. At three hundred, the shadow crept across his cheeks and brow. At five hundred, you could see only his eyes and his mouth. And the very oldest, the wisest, the most terrible, had no face left at all. Only darkness, inside a hood, where a face should be.
You could hire them. That was the thing. If you had wealth enough, which most people never did, you could find a Striker and pay him a heavy purse of gold, and name a name. And he would come, and that person would die.
But only if he judged it just.
That was their law, older than any king’s. A Striker would kill only those who deserved to die. And if he came to your enemy and found him innocent, if you had lied to him, or hired him out of greed or spite or jealousy, then the Striker would turn his horse around, and ride back down the road, and the name he carried would be yours.
No one who hired a Striker ever did so lightly. Most people went their whole lives without seeing one.
I saw one on the night of the ninth of October, in the rain.
I was in the shop, late, finishing a set of hoops for the brewer. Bess was asleep in the loft above. And through the open shutters, I heard the town go quiet.
That is the only way I can describe it. Kettlewick on a market night is never quiet. There is always the shouting from the Red Cross, and dogs, and carts, and somebody singing. And then, all at once, there was nothing. Just the rain on the cobbles. Doors slammed up and down Tanner’s Row. Shutters banged closed. Somewhere a woman began to pray out loud and someone hushed her.
And I heard hooves.
I went to the door and looked out. Down the length of the street, through the rain and the red glow of the lanterns, a rider was coming at a slow walk. A huge black horse, with a white star on its brow, its breath steaming in the cold. And on its back, a figure in a long, ragged cloak of dark wool, soaked through, with a deep hood drawn forward. The hilt of a great sword rose over one shoulder. A second sword, long and bright, hung naked from his right hand, its point toward the cobbles, catching the red light of the lanterns in a long thin gleam.
And beneath the hood, where his face should have been, there was nothing at all. Only shadow.
I knew what he was. Every soul in Kettlewick knew. I stood frozen in my doorway with an iron hoop in my burned hand and watched him come, and I thought, God help whoever he’s come for.
The horse stopped in front of my shop.
The hood turned. And the darkness inside it looked at me.
“Aldous Pike,” said the Striker. His voice was low and quiet and very old, like the creak of a ship’s timbers. Not unkind. Simply very, very tired. “Cooper. Of Tanner’s Row.”
I do not remember answering. I think I nodded.
He swung down from the saddle, slowly, the way old men move, though there was nothing frail about him. He was taller than me by a head. He tied the black horse to the post outside my door. Then he walked past me, into my shop, and sat down on the upturned barrel by the cold forge, laying his bright sword across his knees.
“Close the door,” he said. “And sit. We have the whole night.”
I closed the door. I sat on my own workbench, because my legs would not hold me. I could hear Bess breathing softly in the loft above us, asleep.
“Are you going to kill me?” I asked. My voice came out like a child’s.
“That,” said the Striker, “is what we are going to find out.”
And so began the longest night of my life.
He asked me questions. That was all. Hour after hour, while the rain drummed on the roof and the lantern burned low. He did not shout. He did not threaten. He did not tell me who had hired him or why. He simply asked, in that quiet, ancient voice, and listened to every answer with a stillness I have never seen in any living thing.
He asked about my trade, and my prices, and whether I had ever sold a barrel I knew was faulty. I told him once, when I was young and needed the money, and that I had gone back a month later and given the man a new one for nothing. He asked about my wife, how she died. A fever, eight years ago. I could not afford the doctor from the city. He asked about my neighbors, which ones I liked and which I did not. He asked about money. Debts. Quarrels. Whether I had ever struck a man. Twice, I told him, both times drunk, both times I was sorry.
He never told me if my answers were good or bad. But sometimes, when I spoke, the darkness under his hood seemed to grow a little deeper. And sometimes, a little lighter.
I learned later that a Striker knows when a man is lying. Not by magic. By eight hundred years of watching men lie.
I did not lie to him. I do not think I could have, even if I had wanted to.
It was nearly dawn, and the rain had softened to a drizzle, when he finally asked the question he had been circling all night.
“Tell me,” said the Striker, “about Thomas Dunmore.”
I had known, I think, from the moment he rode up. I had simply not let myself think it.
Thomas Dunmore was twelve years old when he died. He was the only son of Horace Dunmore, the wool merchant, the richest man in Kettlewick, who owned the great house on the hill and half the shops on the market square. Thomas was a bright, reckless, laughing boy who was always climbing things he should not climb. And on a gray morning last April, with the river swollen brown and roaring from a week of rain, he had climbed up onto the stone wall of the old bridge to show off to his friends, and slipped.
I was crossing the bridge with a barrel on my shoulder. I heard the scream. I saw him go into the water.
I dropped the barrel and went in after him.
I am not a strong swimmer. I never was. The river took me the way a dog takes a rag. But I found him, somehow, in all that churning brown water, and I got one arm around his chest and held on. I held on through the cold, and the dark, and the current slamming us both against the stones of the bridge, again and again, until my ribs cracked and my hands were torn to the bone. I held on for as long as I could.
And then a log came down the river, end over end, and struck us both, and he was gone out of my arms.
They found me half drowned on a gravel bar a mile downstream. They found Thomas two days later.
I told all this to the Striker in my dark shop, with the dawn coming gray through the shutters. My voice broke more than once. I showed him my hands, the long white scars across both palms where the bridge stones had torn them open. He looked at them for a long time.
“Horace Dunmore,” he said at last, “paid me forty pieces of gold. He swore before me that he stood on that bridge and watched you push his son into the river.”
I stared at him. I could not speak.
“He said,” the Striker went on, in that same calm, ancient voice, “that you had quarreled with him. That you spoke against him at the town moot.”
That part was true. Three weeks before Thomas died, I had stood up in front of the whole town and said, out loud, what everyone in Kettlewick knew and nobody dared say: that Horace Dunmore’s wool scales were weighted short, and had been for years, and that every poor shepherd in the valley was being cheated. Dunmore had gone purple in the face. And afterward he had offered, through his steward, to buy my shop. The plot it stood on, at the bottom of Tanner’s Row, was the one piece of ground he needed for his new wool hall. I had refused.
“He wasn’t on the bridge,” I said finally. My voice was barely a whisper. “He was in his counting house. Everyone knows that. He ran down after. He was screaming at the water.” I looked down at my scarred hands. “I tried. God help me. I wasn’t strong enough. But I tried.”
The Striker was silent for a very long time.
Then he stood up, slowly, the way old men stand. He slid his bright sword back into its scabbard. And the darkness beneath his hood turned toward me, and for the first time all night, there was something in his voice that I can only call gentleness.
“I have spoken to the boy’s friends, Aldous Pike,” he said. “I spoke to them before I ever came to your door. And to the miller who pulled you from the river. And to Dunmore’s own clerk, who sat with him in the counting house that morning.” He paused. “I already knew the truth. I needed to hear whether you would tell it.”
He laid one great gloved hand on my shoulder. It was heavy, and cold from the rain, and somehow it did not frighten me at all.
“You are not deserving of death,” said the Striker. “You are a man who went into a flood for another man’s child, and has carried the weight of failing ever since. There are not so many of those in the world as you might think. I have been looking for eight hundred years.”
I put my face in my hands and wept, the way I had not wept since the morning they found Thomas.
When I could finally look up, he was at the door.
“Wait,” I said. “Dunmore. What will you…”
The Striker did not turn around.
“You know the law,” he said.
“He lost his son.” I did not know why I was saying it. Dunmore had tried to have me killed. He had lied to buy my death. And yet I kept seeing his face that morning on the riverbank, gray and screaming at the water. “Grief makes men mad. Have mercy on him. Please.”
The Striker stood very still in my doorway, his ragged cloak dripping on the floor, the gray dawn behind him.
“Grief I have forgiven a thousand times,” he said quietly. “Grief is not what sent me here. Greed sent me here. He wanted your shop, Aldous Pike, and your silence, and he used his dead son to buy them. That is a thing I do not forgive.”
He untied the black horse and swung up into the saddle.
“But I will tell him,” he added, “that you asked.”
And he rode away up Tanner’s Row in the gray morning light, slowly, toward the great house on the hill. The doors of Kettlewick stayed shut behind him all the way.
I do not know what happened at the house of Horace Dunmore that morning. No one does. No one heard a sound. But by noon, his servants had fled into the town with their belongings in their arms, and the great doors stood open, and the house was empty. Horace Dunmore was never seen in Kettlewick again. Some say the Striker took him. Some say Dunmore was given a choice, and rode out of the valley before sunrise with nothing but the clothes on his back, and spent the rest of his days a beggar on some far road, paying back what he had stolen, one coin at a time.
I have chosen to believe the second story. I do not know if it is true.
That evening, at dusk, I came back into my shop from the forge and found a leather purse sitting on my workbench. It was heavy. Inside were forty pieces of gold. And beside it, scratched into the wood of the bench with the point of a blade, were six words.
For the bridge. For the boy.
I understood.
We built it that winter, the whole town together. A stone railing along the old bridge, chest high and thick as a castle wall, so that no child could ever slip from it into the river again. At the center of it, carved into the stone, is the name THOMAS DUNMORE. The shepherds of the valley came down from the hills to help lay the stones. Every one of them had been cheated by those weighted scales, and every one of them came anyway.
That was forty years ago.
I am an old man now. My knee is worse. My hands are still scarred. Bess has children of her own, and grandchildren, and they come and sit by my fire on rainy autumn nights and beg me to tell the story again.
And I always tell them the same thing at the end.
I saw the face of Death once. Or rather, I saw where a face had been, a long, long time ago, before eight hundred years of looking hard at men had worn it all away into shadow. I sat across from it all night, in the light of a single lantern, and told it the truth.
And just at the very end, as he turned in my doorway to go, with the gray light of morning falling into his hood, I could swear that somewhere in all that darkness, for just a moment, I saw him smile.
That was the night Death came for me.
And decided, after all, that I was worth something.
___________________________________________________________________
All of my stories can be found here in my stories collection. Please consider subscribing to it.