Struck
To kill a man in the heat of battle is taxing, a matter of brute strength directed and controlled in the chaos of blood and noise; but the work of death is sanctioned, no threat to soul or what the great call honor. There's virtue in war, as--Gisborne was always bleakly amused by the thought--Richard Plantagenet had assured them all.
To dispatch a man in cold blood is easier; there are endless ways and means, and a surprised or unresisting body is not difficult to subdue. But it requires the momentary abandonment of one's soul to God – a taste of death itself -- unless the death-bringer wishes to join his victim in hell: so the fida'i who'd taught Gisborne believed. Or so he told the infidels he sometimes chose to instruct.
God, if God were true, had long ago finished with him, Gisborne knew, and he'd never found reason to care; but the old Syrian's soft, ironic voice sometimes still rose in his memory, repeating the lesson, because he'd found some truth to it in the years since. The instant's pause before a death-blow emptied him of everything but the man he was to strike, and for an instant after he knew in his soul-- call it a soul, for lack of a better--that both of them had died.
It was only lately that he wondered about the one so struck. Was there a moment's agonizing grace before the mortal kiss of the blade, and did the stroke rip through the boundaries of heaven and hell, as well as the receptive flesh?
She had no knife but needed none; he waited for the blow to take him. Then she lifted the shirt to show him the mark where he'd all but cut her life away; and he heard Rashid al-Din's voice saying, "the instant of knowing is as water through sand, but the thirst that follows is eternal." Loving a woman, Gisborne discovered, was very like that.
[End
December 21, 2007