The Poet
You will say I am a murderer, and maybe I am. Or would have been, at all events. For how can one have murdered a man who yet lives?
The poet read the words over and over again before daring to go further. Even then he avoided looking down at the pages—written in an elegant but hurried hand—as long as he could. Rain battered the iron-crossed windows. Beyond them the cobbled streets of Vienna wound in a twilit haze toward the Danube, a wash of blue punctured by torch fires burning in their glass cages along the white stone buildings. A ghost city, the poet thought. A city of memories in thrall to…
“Here you are then, love.” The innkeeper’s wife set down the bowl of chicken broth and mug of freshly drawn water—rainwater, maybe—that came with the closet he’d rented for the week. She eyed him as he slowly pressed the spoon to his lips. “Sure I can’t get you anything else? Look at you. All skin and bones.”
The poet smiled weakly at her, then carefully drew the hot broth between his lips. She touched his shoulder.
“There’s plenty of work to be had here if it suits you,” she said. Then she was gone.
The inn’s common room was empty now apart from him. On the far wall, illuminated in soft candlelight, a stone statue of the Sorrowful Mother—draped in the black veil of Passiontide—watched him. Arms outstretched in a gesture of welcome, or pity. The poet set down the spoon, brought the bowl to his lips, and drank the broth down in one long gulp. His tongue and throat burned. A fire kindled in his stomach. He smothered it with water, then let his eyes fall upon the manuscript.
At last he read on. His hands suddenly quivered with energy, excitement, or maybe just fear. The mere fact that he had begun meant that the story would be real—it would never leave him now, and it would be his to tell.
He had heard the story itself already, told by a stranger in black over the last several nights. But it had been immaterial then. Just words passed between men in the shadows. Formless, and therefore harmless. Now they were there in front of him—the truths he had sought for so many years, at last entrusted to him.
“Mother,” the poet said, head bowed, too afraid to look up at her. “Help me.”
Thunder rolled in from the mountains. The sound crashed over the city in a slow, angry swell that crescendoed as revelation fully arrived:
They are real. You were right.
It was not all for nothing.
Then doubt crept in. The poet’s stomach rumbled. He was drenched in sweat. The man couldn’t have been one of them, he told himself. Just another rambler, a fraud seeking fame. He had certainly met more than his fair share of those, and discarded their tales even when they were exactly what he wanted to hear.
Even when the Knights of Prometheus were mentioned by name.
This stranger had been different. Something about him seemed honest. Perhaps it was simply his reluctance, the sense that he was forcing the words out through grated teeth. Either way the poet had listened to his story by choice, become a willing vessel for its dark contents, its black wine. For all his reticence, the stranger had a compelling way with words, so much so that at first the poet thought he’d been bewitched. But in time he’d come to understand that the man in black spoke truth, his own truth if nothing else. And for a storyteller, truth is more intoxicating than any wine or witchcraft. Truth is what made a story truly great, and the teller of it—well, better fed for a start.
The light emanating from the kitchen side door went out. The innkeeper’s wife had waited for him a while, to see if he’d come and accept her proposition in exchange for some proper meat and bread, but had given up and gone to bed. He was alone with the Sorrowful Mother now, her candles already burnt halfway to their stubs. He didn’t have much time left before the room would be swallowed by darkness. Once that happened, all that would be left to him was the story, and his fear of telling it, and the deep hollow grave it had already dug into his heart.
“Why are you telling me all this?” he had asked the stranger.
The man had regarded him carefully with his bright, wounded eyes, saying nothing. This was their last moment together before he had risen and left the inn for what turned out to be the last time, hanging his hood low over his face and stalking off into the rain toward the river. If the poet had known what the man intended to do next, he’d have followed him, pleaded with him. The next morning, his drowned body had washed up on the shore.
Presently the poet put his head in his hands. He wanted to weep. For a moment he thought he heard something whispering to him in the deepening gloom, but it was just the wind. That was what he told himself.
The windows were black now. The candles burned dimly. The Mother’s veiled gaze was shrouded in shadow. Darkness pressed in on every side. He knew if he could not find his courage now, he never would.
He laid a shaking hand on top of the pages and read. He did not see the eyes watching him from the dark.
