Shieldworn

I had a baby and was catatonic with sleep deprivation for a while, but now I’m back! …to my wickedly fast production rate of one story a month….

I’m going to be honest and say I think this story could be better. (I’ll chalk some of that up to the previously mentioned catatonic sleep-deprived state) It’s loosely bounced off of this awesome post by BrokenKestral and I don’t think my story quite lives up to its source material. I had a really great idea for improving it this morning but now it’s nighttime and can’t remember what I wanted to do to it. I love the idea though so I’d welcome any suggestions for improving it!

Fortunately my sister is smaller and slower than me. I sprinted down the alleyway, gravel flying under my feet, widening the distance between us. If they caught her first, maybe I’d have time to clamber over the chain link fence at the back of the lot.

Behind me there was a thud and a yelp of pain. Glancing back I saw Amy sprawled on the ground, gravel in her chin, her hands outstretched. She looked up at me; her eyes huge, her mousy brown hair flying into her face. “Kip!” She gasped, tears standing out in her eyes. “Wait for me!”

“Get up!” I shouted at her, angry that she was so tiny, angry that she had tripped, angry that she even expected me to help her. See, we’ve got this agreement: I’m the model brother as long as we’re at home and Mom and Dad are around. And when they aren’t around, she leaves me alone. What I get out of this arrangement is a spotless reputation with Mom and Dad, and what she gets is me not telling Mom and Dad that it was her and not the cat that smashed Grandma’s priceless antique vase last year. This arrangement worked great until Mom sent her out to find me this afternoon when I didn’t come home in time.

As I paused, two boys came around the side of the building and strolled down the shadowed alley towards us. Stephen was swinging a wrench as long as his forearm, Nate just grinning his shark’s grin in anticipation of seeing other people frightened.

See, even just stopping to look back was a bad idea. I swore and bolted. Hopefully Amy was sufficiently pathetic to interest them long enough for me to escape. If they got too close they might remember that it was me who had stolen the wad of cash out of Stephen’s back pocket and Amy had only been an unfortunate bystander.

“Kip!” I heard Amy shriek behind me, but I kept going. I’d tell Mom I was on the other side of the fence before I’d realized she wasn’t beside me. That should do it.

The fence, and safety, was just seconds away. I barely registered the corner of rusted metal sticking out of the gravel and weeds; my whole focus was on the fence. My side was burning, my muscles tensed to spring and leap—my foot caught on the metal corner. I landed on my face. My foot felt like I’d nearly wrenched it off altogether.

Now I was lying on the gravel gasping and my foot was still caught on something. I twisted around and found that my shoelace was hooked around the edge of a large piece of metal. It had been wrenched out of the ground by the force of my jump. Stephen and Nate were laughing at me and I twisted around in a panic, trying to free myself before they left Amy and came for me. I reached out and grabbed a corner of the sheet of metal.

It felt as if I’d grabbed a pool of quicksand.

Time itself sucked me in, pulling me backwards, rushing past me. The world blurred, shifted, refocused. Through the fog surrounding me I could almost hear something—someone—thinking, in a dazed, desultory fashion like a person woken up from a long, sound sleep. It did not know where it was or how it had come to be there. Memories trickled past me, blurred and hazy. A battlefield. Horses, men, armor, the glint of a sword beside it. And then one day, in the chaos of battle the arm that held it went slack, the blood trickled over its heraldry, and it fell to the ground, to be forgotten. No one remembers the shields, it thought. Swords are remembered, but shields are forgotten.

After that, there had been wind and rain, a slow slide into the ground, and then centuries of silence and the weight of dirt. Swords are symbols of power and authority, and men will always seek them because men always desire power and authority. But no one remembers the shields. So it waited, battered and buried and patient, and the gravel and silt and mud moved and shifted over the years.

Abruptly, like I’d been sucked through a dark tunnel and had just been spat out, my own senses returned. All around me I heard the cries of men dying, the clash of blade on blade, horses whinnying—chaos. In the midst of the cacophony I felt that someone was watching me. And even weirder, I got the feeling that whoever it was it was didn’t think much of me.

“Pah!” A voice snorted, disgusted, in my ear.

I jerked around, looking for the source of the voice. A man in a metal suit was rushing towards me, mace raised. He swung, the massive spiked ball whipped around—something shoved me in the middle and I collapsed backwards, feeling a breeze as the weapon hissed past me. The knight ran on as if he hadn’t seen me and vanished into the melee. I was sweating, goose-pimpled, hyperventilating, and then the voice spoke again, so close that it was easily audible over the roar of battle.

“What a puny thing are you, boy. Who is your knight? Who has neglected to teach you the better things? Well?! Speak up!”

“I haven’t got a knight.” I spluttered, trying to back away and nearly walking through a horse. It screamed, reared up, and something shoved me out of the way so that I sat down abruptly in the dirt. The horse galloped past. I put my hand down to steady myself and felt something cold and soft under my fingers. I was bracing myself on a dead man’s arm. I jumped up, gagging and wiping my hands on my jeans, looking around wildly for the voice. “What are you? Let me go!”

“You are a weak kneed, chicken livered, son of a mouse!” It boomed. “Half-witted sheep could tramp on you with impunity and eat your clothing! No knight would take you! You run away from a fair maiden in distress?! Craven, yellow-bellied—”

That was what was upsetting him? “S-she’s not a fair maiden! She’s my sister!”

The voice shouted in my ear: “The defenseless are worth protecting, even when they are relations!”

“Oh yeah? What do I get out of it then? Except maybe a lot of bruises.” I was still scared out of my mind but I wasn’t going to let a disembodied voice stuck in a piece of old rust push me around. “She’s a pest! It’s her own fault she’s there in the first place!”

“You see no value in protecting the innocent and weak?!” It boomed, shocked.

I shrugged. “I guess you haven’t heard of survival of the fittest back here in the Dark Ages or whenever it is. And you’re one to talk; in my time you’re lying underground in a back lot. Just trash, basically. Woo. I just can’t wait to protect people for no reason. That really worked out for you, didn’t it?”

There was a long pause. I almost thought I must have convinced it and wondered if it would send me back, but it spoke again, quietly, reflectively. “As you said, you have no knight to educate you.”

“No!” I said, sensing an excuse that might pacify this deranged voice and get it to send me home. “No knights!”

“S’blood what a wishy-washy world you have come from. What a pathetic, tiny-minded existence. You have my pity.”

Well, that was laying it on a little thick. “Hey, come on, just because I—”

“Marry, I’ll not leave you to such spineless cretins. Come and learn your lesson, boy.”

“What do you—”

And with the jolt of centuries, I was lying on the ground three foot in front of the chain link fence. Behind me I heard my sister’s high-pitched babbling: “Please, leave me alone! Please!”

For the first time I felt a pang of guilt that I was over here by the fence, not over there with her. Not enough of a pang of guilt to have moved me in any direction but away from her—but then I was made aware that I was no longer alone in my own head and I didn’t have a choice anymore.

Something else got me to my feet.

Something else dragged the slab of metal out of the dirt, brushed it off, and fitted it neatly to my arm. It was a shield, a metal bar welded to the back, almost as tall as I was.

And then I—we—charged back towards Stephen, Nate, and my sister.

I meant to scream “What the heck!” but instead I found my mouth hijacked as well and to my utter horror, instead I shouted, “Unhand her, foul creatures!”

Now in all of this I was still myself—wearing my own body, I mean. I was just sharing my thoughts. So I could see my own bony twelve year old arms swinging and my own bony legs pumping and I knew those arms and legs didn’t know two cents about how to fight. When Nate and Stephen looked up, they saw a skinny twelve year old kid with banged up knees running at them with a piece of rusty metal on his arm. If I wasn’t so terrified I might have died of embarrassment.

They looked up at me and their eyes widened. Stephen was mid-swing, about to slam his wrench into Amy’s side, and he paused, arm in the air.

The being propelling me (I had the distinct feeling it was piloting me from the shield) gave me the seconds needed to close the last few feet, thrust my shield arm up, blocked the descending wrench with a resounding BANG, and sent me sliding, feet first into Nate’s legs. I (or it) used the shield to bat Stephen away. Nate stumbled and tripped and I found myself standing on my own two feet again, with some extra gravel burn, but guarding Amy as if…as if she mattered to me.

Now on my own, I might at this point have engaged in some trash talk. Truth be told, I was about to give it a go. After all, I hadn’t ever done anything remotely heroic and self-sacrificial before. And you know what? It was awesome. I intended to gloat about it.

But instead my mouth said, very quietly: “You will have no sport here any longer.” And somehow that was way more scary than what I’d been planning on saying.

Stephen, wide eyed and holding his arm from where the shield had slammed into it, dropped his wrench. It thumped onto the dirt. In a flurry of gravel, they sprinted—not jogged, not sauntered, but hell-bent, arms flailing, jackets flapping—sprinted away from me.

Amy was staring at me, eyes wide, gratitude shining out all over he rface. “Kip!” She said. “That was awesome!” Then her eyes caught on the shield still hanging from my arm and she stopped, mid-sentence. You know I’ve never really cared how my sister felt about me. She’s small, she’s kind of irritating, and I just didn’t see what use she was. But when she looked back at me, the gratitude was gone from her face and I got to admit, it didn’t feel great.

“That wasn’t you.” She said flatly, and I couldn’t deny it. “Whose shield was it?” She asked. There was no convincing her that this was some random piece of steel from a construction site. The thing had probably just told her how little I’d had to do with our rescue attempt.

“I don’t know. Somebody…somebody great.”

“I’m going to take it home.” She struggled to her feet. I reached out a hand to help her up—she gave me a skeptical look, ignored my hand, got to her feet on her own, and picked it up reverently. I watched her carry it away.

No, I wasn’t the kind of person who went back to rescue his sister. But for one strange moment, I had been. Somehow, I wanted to be that person again.