Fall - The Knights of Gloom
In the gloom they gather and the gloom they rule, lordsof the half-closed eye. Snare-hearted men who lost the light but would notserve the dark, branded by sun and star.
(Beksynski)
No knights of the equator these, their castles ring theutmost north, where they retire yearly for week-long half-lit days, sending bright factotums into dark and sunlitlands, seeking scrolls of forgotten verse and vases given as funeral gifts tolong-dead emperors.
Only here, at the interstice of time may they thrive forthey are sworn to shadow as a whole
and to the court of Mab. Their tents and pennants hungwith wooden wind-chimes which make their own music in the still air.
Here they drink from clouded glasses and dine on slicesof pale meats which they skewer with silver forks, served by fae with the headsof whippoorwills and the bodies of upright foxes - dressed in tabards andcarrying bras anthophagous carnyx, or by huge snuffling hedgehog squires, orpairs of orphans, one deaf, one blind, or ancient men, their grey beardstrailing on the earth.
Do they even have political views? Their minds like dustybarns with swooping owls. They are desirous of fine China and will meet youreyes in a silvered mirror. Adjacent to death they make congress with beautifulghosts, their tournaments attended by pale maidens for whose favour they quest.Aye, anything for a dead maid. Why else should killers fear the gloom, and allretire to sunlit lands?
Thus they hunt. Unmoving, they appear. Knights thatgallop not, congealing from mist, etching themselves from branch-shadows,arising from the cambers of dark streams, under moss and willow. Soft-edgedknights whose hoof-beats sound like puddle drips, mist beading on their longcloaks of Ungulix fur and Jabberwock skin. Helms capped with cupped hands,tarnished silver owls, leafless bronze trees, gibbous moons, stooped crows ortragedians masks in bronze. Shields picturing thistledown flowers, half-closedeyes, half-open gates, half-drawn swords and half-suns bisected by smearedhalf-clouds, or infinitely quartered blazons that can never be completely read.
Their lances quest like tentacles - curling intotree-boles, under doors. The Knights ride lantern mares made of pale light.Fretwork like branches. Pausing in the distance to dismount and fold up theirhorse like a triptych which they carry like a shield.
Are they sniffing?
Are they whispering?
But nothing can escape them,
In the gloom.
Perhaps by closing your eyes, pressing the heels of yourhands into the ocular gap - producing utter dark - perhaps then they cannotfind you. For all that is half-see sings to them; the choir of the occluded.
Or by holding them in clear, full, un-occluded sight -then they shall cringe and must act knightly, offer war or mercy and makehalf-lit unbreakable oaths in whispered words like blinded bats.
They are closing in as the sky darkens and the silverlyre plays, like leaves on slow water, they drift closer, barely seeming totouch the earth.
As swift as the wind,
Silent as owls,
Gentle as a shave.
Colourless men lead forward by swords held like tweezers.Swords which quest like hounds, sniff like cold noses, and shift in their handslike weasels. Swords fed on chickens in the night. For these are no earthlyknights.
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