I’ll wait here, he decided, standing on a low rise that overlooked the willow-fringed Thames bank fifty yards away. They’ll find my body closer to the bank, but I’d like to get a long, clear look at my murderer first. And who on earth, he wondered, will it turn out to be? He noticed that he was trembling, and he sat down and took several deep breaths. Take it easy, old lad, he told himself. You’ve known for thirty-five long and mainly happy years that this day was coming.
He leaned back and stared up at the turbulent gray clouds. And most of your friends are dead now, he thought. Byron went—of a fever, too—in Missolonghi twenty-some years ago, and Coleridge bit the dust in 1834. Ashbless smiled and wondered, not for the first time, how much of some of Coleridge’s very late poems—particularly “Limbo” and “Ne Plus Ultra”—might have derived some of their imagery from his dimly remembered experiences that night in the early April of 1811. Certain lines made Ashbless curious:
and
He rubbed his eyes and stood up—and froze, and his chest went icy hollow, for a rowboat had been moored to one of the willows while he’d been looking away, and a tall, burly man was climbing sturdily up the slope, a sheathed sword swinging on his right hip. Interesting, Ashbless thought nervously—a lefty like myself. Okay, he told himself, now stay calm. Remember, the wound in the belly is the only one they’ll find on you, so don’t bother with the epee-type parries, that protect the arms, legs and head—only parry thrusts to the body… while knowing, of course, that there’s one coming that you’ll fail to parry.
His right hand fluttered over his stomach, and he wondered which patch of presently healthy skin would soon be parted to admit several inches of cold steel.
In an hour it’ll be done, he thought. Try to brave out this last hour as well as Jacky did. For she knew it was coming too … knew it ever since that night in 1815 when you got drunk enough to give in to her demands to know the date and circumstances of her death.
Ashbless squared his shoulders and stepped off the crest of the rise and walked down the path toward the river to meet his murderer halfway.
The man looked up, and seemed startled to see Ashbless coming toward him. I wonder what our quarrel will be, thought Ashbless. At least he isn’t young—his beard looks as white as mine. He’s been in foreign parts, too, judging by that tan. His face does look vaguely familiar, though.
When they were still a dozen yards apart Ashbless stopped. “Good morning,” he called, and he was proud of how steady his voice was.
The other man blinked and grinned craftily, and Ashbless realized with a chill that the man was insane. “You’re him,” the stranger said in a cracked voice. “Ain’t you?”
“I’m who?”
“Doyle. Brendan Doyle.”
Ashbless answered, in a tone that concealed his surprise, “Yes … but it’s a name I haven’t used for thirty-five years. Why? Do we know each other?”
“I know you. And,” he said, drawing his sword, “I’ve come to kill you.”
“I guessed,” said Ashbless quietly, stepping back and drawing his own blade from its sheath. The wind whispered in the tall grasses. “Any use asking why?”
“You know why,” the other man replied, lunging fast as a whiplash on the word know; Ashbless managed to parry it with a wild outside flail in sixte, but he forgot to riposte.
“I really don’t know why,” he gasped, trying to get a firm footing on the muddy ground.
“It’s because,” the man said as he launched a quick feint and disengage that Ashbless barely avoided with a screeching circular parry, “while you’re alive,” the man’s sword sped up out of the bind and darted in at Ashbless’ chest, so that Ashbless had to hop back out of distance, “I can’t be.” As he recovered from his lunge his blade flicked sideways at Ashbless’ forearm, and Ashbless felt the edge cut right through his jacket and shirt and grate against the bone.
Ashbless was so stunned that he almost forgot to parry the next lunge. But this is wrong, he thought bewilderedly, I know I won’t be found with a wounded arm! And then he laughed, for he’d figured it out.
“Yield now or die,” Ashbless called almost merrily to his opponent.
“It’s you that’s to die,” the tanned man muttered, starting a lunge and then abruptly halting halfway through it, so as to provoke Ashbless into a premature parry; but Ashbless didn’t fall for it, and caught the end of his opponent’s blade with the forte of his own, and lunged forward with a strong bind that drove his point corkscrewing in to poke, and then deeply stab, the tanned man’s belly. He felt the narrow blade stop and constrictedly flex against the spine.
The man sat down on the wet grass, clutching himself with hands already slick with blood. “Quick,” he gasped, pale under his tan, “me be you.”
Ashbless just stared down at him, his exhilaration suddenly gone.
“Come on,” grated the man on the ground, dropping his sword and beginning to crawl. “Do the trick. Switch.”
Ashbless stepped back. His opponent crawled forward for a yard or two, then fell forward onto the grass.
Several minutes went by before Ashbless moved, and when he did it was to kneel beside the body, which had stopped breathing, and lay his hand gently on the dead man’s shoulder. If there is any reward after death, he thought, for such creatures as you, I’ll bet you’ve earned it. God knows how you made your way back to England from Cairo, and how you found me. Maybe you were drawn back to me, very like the way ghosts are supposed to be drawn to the place where they died. Well, you get to share, a little bit at least, in my biography: you provide the corpse.
Eventually Ashbless wiped his sword clean on an uprooted tuft of grass, and then stood up to sheathe it; and he tore off a strip of his scarf and knotted it around his cut forearm. The chilly spring breeze blew all thoughts of the past out of his mind, and with a sense of adventure he hadn’t known in decades he walked on down the path to the moored boat, leaving behind him the ka which Doctor Romanelli had made of him so many years ago.
It’s unknown, whatever happens to me from here on out, he thought with a smoldering elation as he untied the rope. No book I ever read can give me any hint. It may be that I’ll capsize the boat and drown within five minutes, or it may be I’ll live another twenty years!
He climbed in and fitted the thole pins into the oarlocks, and after three strong strokes he was well out onto the face of the river. And as he rowed on, toward whatever might prove to be the true destiny of the man who’d been Brendan Doyle and Dumb Tom and Eshvlis the cobbler and William Ashbless, and was not any of them any longer, he regaled the river birds with every Beatles song he could remember… except Yesterday.