“Can I help you at all, my lord?” came a gentle voice from somewhere. De Havilland suddenly roused himself and sat bolt upright. He unfolded his hands and removed them from the backrest of the pew in front of him and tried to get a sense of his surroundings. It was only after a few moments that he finally realised he was still at the cathedral where only hours earlier the Planetary Duke had commissioned Baron Christopher Hawkwood to be his Lord Protector. The memory of it all suddenly came flooding back to him.
Stood just to his left-hand shoulder was a local Sister from the Suryada Urth Orthodox Cathedral. She was in her elder years with a well-worn and slightly drawn face and although she was covered head to foot in the formal attire of a strict devotee he couldn’t help but notice a few curls of grey hair poking out from underneath a headpiece. De Havilland straightened his doublet and cleared his throat nervously, “Err ahuhu…. My apologies sister, I was only intending to take a moment but…” He looked around the Cathedral and suddenly noticed then that the place was now pretty much empty.
“I’m afraid that they’ve all gone now, my lord” responded the Sister, “I did spot you here earlier but didn’t know whether it might be appropriate to disturb you at all.” The sister slowly twisted herself down into the pew in front of him. “Did he answer your prayers though my lord”, she queried? De Havilland raised an eyebrow, looking confused. The Sister points up to a statue of a robed man wielding a sword hanging from the ceiling above them. “Mantius, did he answer your prayers?” De Havilland’s mind immediately flashes back to the first time he had heard that name spoken; to the stories of Mantius The Soldier that his father used to read to him as a small boy. He shakes himself free of those old buried memories and looks up into the sharp face of the Sister, “I don’t know yet Sister.”
The Sister shifts position tentatively as though preparing herself for something and then looks searchingly into the eyes of De Havilland. He can see that she is weighing her next words carefully. “I expect you will need to be going now, in order to get ready for the celebrations?” She flashes a look out from the corner of an eye that tells De Havilland that she already knows the answer. He has to laugh, he’s never had to verbally spar with a Sister before and the idea of that is more than a little amusing.
“Sister, sat here with you right now is about as close to that event as I am going to get.” The Sister laughs and the mood lightens a little. “Well from bitter experience I can tell you that there are certainly more hideous members of your noble order attending, and from the short time I spent in the company of the Cultural Attaché today, you certainly smell a whole lot better than most. So why aren’t you with the others?” De Havilland thought back to the encounters he had with the Count and Countess earlier that day. He had only seen his brother months previously and as ever his mind had been very much focussed on just winning the war and taking back what he felt was rightfully his. Seeing his half-sister had been an unexpected pleasure though. He had luckily managed to catch her gaze whilst she was talking to one of the ambassadors from Follari North. She had smiled at him, painfully. He had smiled back, uneasily. Talking in public was now something of a taboo for both of them. Otto knew of course that they’d met up six months previously and that was entirely accepted. But to talk openly in public ruffled far too many feathers and put enormous pressure on both sides.
“No Sister, I’m sad to say that not with any of the others any more. Truth be told, I’m not even a real Hawkwood now either. I guess I am pretty much no one right now.”
“How can you say such a thing?” gasps the Sister, “I don’t believe that for one moment…”
“I am almost totally alone now Sister. It’s my duty you see, it… separates me from everyone I know. To be honest with you Sister coming here today and seeing all these people who used to call me a friend... It hurts. I’ve kind of had enough of it all at the moment.”
The sister looked concerned and reached out to touch the back of De Havilland’s hand. She held it there for a few moments attempting to offer some small comfort. “I believe we all have a duty to the Pancreator to serve him in the best means we know how. Do you feel your duty is like that?” De Havilland shifted back into the pew seat. “If I stay loyal to my duty then I run the risk of facing immediate death or if not then at least ostracising myself from my family and my noble house for the rest of my days. If I leave, then I will have to take up a post fighting my sister’s army knowing that I could have possibly done something to help end the senseless slaughter of hundreds, if not thousands of lives.”
The Urth Orthodox Sister smiled warmly, desperate to want to convey a sense of sympathetic understanding. There was a moment of sudden comprehension and De Havilland guessed that she had just realised who he was. She nodded, her eyes betraying feelings of genuine sadness.
De Havilland felt a surge forcing him to want tell her it all, to unleash some of the pent-up pain he had been nurturing. He beat the feelings back down in to the dark pit they were attempting to escape from.
“I’m beginning to wonder whether someone has made a mistake here. Maybe I should just stop thinking about all this and just go and join the party…” The Sister looked up to the figure of Mantius above them and took in a deep breath, waiting for some sign or divine intervention perhaps?
“I’ll tell you something now, and it needs to stay between us and my friend up there”, she nods in the direction of the statue. De Havilland sits forward and gets close to the nun so that she can whisper it quietly to him. “I was never very enthralled when our Emperor was put on the throne. I didn’t know him, I still don’t understand him. And when I heard about these Questing Knights, well, I just thought it was all for show really; Part of the circus I see in this most holy of places from time to time. Much like today. I might be speaking out of turn now, and you’ll have to forgive an old Sister if I cause any offence, because none is meant. But I looked out today and saw the very noblest of our planets families in all their finery, pomp and ceremony and it just worried me. I mean, do any of them understand what today meant to the people?” The Sister looked around just to make sure no others were listening in but they were completely alone.
“And then I saw you sat here earlier, and I could see how deeply troubled you were by all this madness. Yes, I said madness. Don’t assume that just because I live within the walls of this Church that I don’t hear and see all that is going on in the world outside. You know we do share this world together don’t you, I also share your concerns. What heartened me today though, what gave me hope was that when all the others had gone, and all thoughts had turned to fun and frivolity there was one man sat in this holy place still at war with himself. That gave me some courage and some confidence in the judgement of our new Emperor...” The sister shifted in her seat slightly, “…whatever his name is.” They both laughed, the noise echoing through the empty Cathedral. “Well…?” she asked, “what will you do next?”
De Havilland walks through the local merchant district on his way home. It gets cold in Suryada at night now and he pulls a cloak around his shoulders to help keep the biting temperatures at bay. As he passes by a small artisan stall he stoops to pick up a roughly hewn figurine carved from local marble. He recognises the image and reads some words carefully scratched into the underside of the idol:
‘Empyrean Grace shines on the valorous soul who faces evil armed with the sword of the Pancreator’
They are the words of Mantius that he had spent endless hours reciting back and forth to his father as a boy. He weighs the statue carefully in his hand feeling the difference between the polished and more unfinished edges. He looks up into the wide starry sky above him and recites the missing part of that verse:
‘- his body may suffer mightily, but his soul will rise the higher for it’’
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