When the White Horse Came for Walda

It hadn't been the monsters, at the end. They were terrible, of course, but he'd managed well enough for an old man, anyway. Then came a pain in the chest, worse than the others, and he fell unaided in the end by anything the Black Land had spat out.

Walda sat for a while, once he woke, wondering what exactly was going on. He'd always thought that, once the end came, that was it; just darkness, like the back end of an unlit cellar where the really big spiders lived, but then, the horse stood up. It'd been dead. Clearly, dead. Impaled on a pike, unmoving, but up it rose, undamaged, and looked at Walda like it knew everything there was to know about the world now that it had been dead, and it was charged with sorting out some drunken idiot to do a work of penance.

“I know I'm dead,” he told the horse, a pale dapple gray with eyes like a cloudless night, endless and almost blue in their blackness. The animal shook and stepped toward him, heedless of the piled bodies surrounding them. It came within arm's reach, head tilted to look toward the sky, ears pricked. But the voice he heard didn't come from the animal. It was deep, but female, and filled with power.

This is so, the voice replied. Knowst thou that reward comes after?

“Aye. For some,” he said. The wind snatched at the words but they reached the horse's, or someone's, ear anyway.

Not thine, clad as thou are, in the warrior's way?

Walda looked down; battered old armor, boiled leather and wood, studs missing, straps frayed almost to breaking. Threadbare jerkin, half unhooked beneath the corselet to accommodate his belly. Hole in the toe of his sock. Leaky left boot. He was no warrior. Just a man, poorer than most, doing what good men do in times like these.

Times? The voice asked.

“Well, the end of the world o'course. That's all this could be, isn't it?”

Is't? The woman asked through the horse's fathomless eyes.

“Looks like it to me,” he said, studying the monster nearest his feet.

Tell thou then, what is the end of the world?

Walda had to think about that, and think hard.

“When there are no good men left,” he said finally.

Are there no such men?

Walda looked about him again. He stood in a field of dead. Alone.

“None.”

None?

“None left.”

Art thou not a good man? She asked.

He needed next to no time at all to answer, “No.”

Impatient, the horse stamped. The silence, the lack of her, waited for an explanation.

“I made my livin' keepin' others from their homes n' beds,” he told the wind. “Away from their families. Kept them drunk. Numb. Gave them wimmin, not their own, mind. Helpless ones. Houseless ones. Ones with nothin' but their backs as means of earnin' bread. An' I let 'em... I turned 'em whores. Young, old, ugly or fair. I turned 'em all whores. Never took what they was sellin', mind, my Hild was ever all I needed m'self. But them girls...”

The chill in the wind made his eyes run.

“Them girls never should've been trusted to a one such as me.”

Thou regretest thy life?

“If you knew my life,” Walda said, faces and names flashing through his mind like a thousand fluttering blades of grass before a storm, “you'd regret it too.” All those people. He'd always thought drinkers-- the steady, regular ones, the hard drinkers-- must have some kind of hurt to the spirit. They were sick in the soul, and he had only poison to nurse them. Poor doctor, he was, all his life. And those girls. All those babies never born, or born dead, or born living but never seen so save by the woman that caught them...

“There are no good men left. Not in this life.”

Thy life is known. Thy battle was long, and silent, and unseen. It was well-fought.

“Battle? What battle did I ever fight until these beasts came down on the good and the innocent?”

The horse turned aside, looking toward the horizon. The faintest glimmer of gold stood out above the hills; dusk had fallen, purple-grey and cold, with ominous soot colored clouds above it melting into night. And Walda was hungry. Bone-deep, painfully hungry: a hunger he hadn't felt since he was a young man, more like a boy really, with nothing in his bowels to shit out but a few shards of his own fingernails bitten off in desperation. The cold tore through him, and he shook like one with palsy. His vision grew keen, as though he were fevered, and that thin line on the horizon grew outward, expanding around him in a pool of sunlit warmth.

Hild stood there, well-clad and plump with roses in her cheeks and the long glossy honey blonde hair he'd loved so well braided on her shoulder. Then Feolcwyn and Cubby, and Dreame, and a sea of other faces.

They lived because of you, the horse with the woman's voice said. Safe. Fed. Housed. Clothed and shod. When their foe was hunger, thou found them food. When shelter they needed, thy roof housed them. When they protection needed, providest it thou did.

Thy battle, good man, was not that trouble should never pain, and evil ne'er take a day, but that, as thou endst, the good done with thy aid should outweigh it.

“I am NOT a good man!” he shouted, turning about. There was no source to the accusation, but he looked anyway, struggling to find something to fight.

You were imperfect, the voice said. Goodness depends not upon perfection, but upon doing that which is best with what is known at the time for deciding.

He looked at the horse, since it was all that was there. “I'm not a good man.”

Neither, then, were they, she said, and the golden daylight surrounding him was filled with the risen dead, restored and whole, armor gleaming, mounts healthy and clean, pennants and flags lifted by a warm southerly breeze.

But all these here did as they thought right when choices rose. Thus is all a good man may do.

Walda recognized some of those men, and there a young woman from Edoras with whom he'd once walked from the butcher. And scattered among the Rohirrim, dark heads beneath shining silver helms-- The Mundbergers-- and some few with no helms at all, and strange dark armor, and curved blades and heavy bows.

“Southrons?” he marvelled. “Easterlings? They're going too?” The horse stamped her hoof and whooshed a sigh, turning broad side to him. Her saddle was well-padded and finely stitched. Kingly.

Think thou the skin and the country condemn a man? That the good outweighs the bad is enough.

Climb thou on this saddle, Reward. Thy stirrup, Forgiveness. Thy rein, Mercy. Take for thyself the journey of the good man who has faced his end.

Around him the golden lit company formed up and mounted. Here and there amid the press rode shield maidens, tall and fair of feature and hue, their horses broad-built and rippling with muscle. Their armor glistened, burnished gold, sodden and gored as it was with blood. One carried a long spear, another a great round shield. A third still wore a great two-handed sword slung across her back, her red-gold braids dancing against the sheath as she directed the others with a gesture or a look. On her shoulder or flying at her side was a great raven, twice again the size of a hen, and cunning in his gaze. Gleaming, woman and horse moved as one, showing this man forward, counting heads. They massed at the head of the company, then turned as one to wait. All was not yet ready.

Take thou the journey, the voice repeated, and those gleaming earth-bound spirits stood waiting. For him.

Forgiveness and mercy give thou reward. Take thou the journey.

Walda stood, at war once again, this time with himself. The red haired woman moved toward him without the least outward sign to her mount, cloak feathers ruffled by the breeze. The raven quorked.

Forgiveness. And mercy.