The good guy always wins. Because he's so good. That's why he wins.

The people of this village could not remember a time before the law. They could not remember a time when they had solved disputes simply, according to custom, without resorting to trial or punishment. Could not remember a time when theft was unknown and murder was rare, when simple goodness had reigned in their hearts.

Now the village had gathered in a square, on their God’s Day, to witness a scene that would have shocked their grandparents: a woman tied to a whipping post, displayed for all to see. A man stood next to her, reciting her crime: the murder of a young boy, the son of the village headman.

Everyone in this village shifted uneasily, knowing it was immoral to display a woman in this way, but what could they do? They could not remember anything different—could not imagine a different regime.

But there was one amongst them who knew better.

This man, Erdric, was a traveler. He had come to this village to visit a holy site: a cave in the nearby mountain. He had preferred to sleep in a nearby grove, but one old man in the village still kept to elder ways and had begged for the blessing of Erdric’s presence in his home.

Now Erdric asked the man, “How can her innocence be proven?”

“She’s a bad one,” Heynar said. “One of the hillfolk. We knew she was living in the lowlands, in violation of the King’s law.”

“What’s her name?”

“She called herself Sandrine,” he said. “Said that was close enough to her real name.”

Erdric heard the testimony that the boy, Arnulf, had gone into the woods, and when he had returned, he complained of a burning pain in his stomach. He lay writhing, crying out, the spume floating from his lips, and with his last words he had accused the witch-woman of the marshes. She’d given him a potion that would give him great power. She had claimed it would make him sick, and from the sickness he would be reborn as a great Knight and Champion, so long as he never spoke a word to anyone of the bargain he had made.

A cunning plan, if true, to play upon a boy’s mind-sick hopes. To indulge in the torment that would accrue to him, surrounded by his despairing womanfolk, desperate to speak, and yet wondering, if he did, whether it might spell his doom.

“The boy was a fool,” Erdric said. “Did nobody teach him the true path to strength?”

“He came to me from when he was young,” Heynar said. “Always wanting to know about the elder ways. And I told him, same as you would’ve, that strength comes to those who are already strong.”

Everyone in these parts knew one path to strength: a vow of chastity, taken fearlessly. A vow to retain one’s own fluids, and never to spill blood unjustly. But this boy had ignored this wisdom, so freely offered, and now he’d paid with his life.

Erdric would call that justice, and so would many others. But the boy’s father had sought a different justice—a King’s justice—and now this grotesquerie, this woman displayed for all to see, was the result of such a thing.

The magistrate asked twice if anyone would speak for the girl. He had ten witnesses arrayed against her, and if she could muster on her own behalf a simple ten plus one, then she would go free.

“Nobody speaks for this woman?” the magistrate said. “Then so be—”

And then there was a groan. It came from the menfolk, who had been waiting, perhaps without knowing, for the one amongst them who could call an end to this thing.

Erdric had unsheathed his terrible sword, and now he tapped it against a nearby stone. The noise, so soft, rang through the crowd.

In this land, no woman could be hung so long as a single man would speak for her.

If the magistrate had been willing to settle for lashes or for banishment, then this could have been done. But his mandate was to stamp out worship of the older gods, and of the elder law as well, and he had wanted for some months a reason to kill Erdric of Elmorath, who some folks accounted the last Paladin.

He sent to the King’s court for their strongest knight, to face Erdric in single combat. And in the meantime he bound Erdric with an oath not to leave the village square—for seven nights he would sleep under the sun, and if he crossed a threshold or left behind the village’s boundary stone, his cause would be forfeit. Then, on the final night, the magistrate staged a feast, high up in his manor house atop the hill, and bid every villager to come and greet the King’s newly-arrived champion, Sir Tomas.

The village emptied for the feast, and now Erdric lay alone, on the sodden ground. Sandrine, at least, had been freed from the post, and she dwelled now in Heynar’s hut, secured only by a stout rope.

“Come,” she said. “I’ve brought you some.” Sandrine bent over him, holding bread. Her body, young and lithe, filled his consciousness.

Erdric was not an old man: he was about twenty years of age, and he had taken his vow three years ago, on a summer hill outside his own village–a place not too far–under the tutelage of aged Denrickson, who’d also been called (by some) the last Paladin.

He took a breath, trying to control himself, as her flashing green eyes came near, and her long hair fell over his chest. His armor lay by his side, and now only a brown tunic covered his skin.

“I cannot take this food,” he said. “And you know this well.”

She grimaced. “Foolish superstition.”

“The flour was not sifted to remove the insects and crawling things. Many living creatures were baked into that bread.”

“Eat,” she said. “It is my portion. It is not stolen. They want to weaken you. That is why they you’ve been kept here, away from proper food.”

“I choose to remain here. Heynar would have prepared my bread, if he was able.”

“Then let me collect…”

“No,” he said.

“What? You cannot take food from a woman’s hand? Food prepared by a woman?”

“It is impure.”

She showed her small, narrow teeth, and he forced himself to look at her, at the body that shifted inside that light tunic. He had never known a woman. For ten years, since he was a small boy, he had begged Denrickson for his tutelage, and Denrickson had said, before I will consider teaching you, you must prove you can abjure this thing.

But even now, he could feel the titanic energies inside of him, the tremendous force, the drive, the fire that yearned to mate, to bring out new life, to conjure up a lineage and send it spurting into the future, as a man's destiny ought to be driven forth.

“And what would happen,” she said. “If a woman gave you some different fruit…or what if she did not give…? What if she took something…”

He lay transfixed, as her body brushed against his—and a part of him felt the touch as a homecoming.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “After the trial.”

“You will lie with me?”

“If it happens beforehand,” he said. “Then my power will be lost, and you will not survive.”

“Your gods are so foolish that they will let you keep something you have already forsworn? Is the intention not enough? My goddess demands my complete compliance—every moment of my life, I must live for her.”

“Give me one day,” he said. “And if I survive…”

“No,” she said. “My goddess has demanded this from me. She hates you utterly, Paladin. If you do not give up your power to me, then I will run. I will leave this place. I have broken my bonds, as you can see. If I run then there will be no trial, and you will be executed. So give me this thing.”

“No,” he said.

She fell upon him, and she pushed her lips against his. He closed his eyes, and he thought not of her, but of a different village—one not too far, just six days journey, where he had lived since birth. And in that village he had desired a girl. And if she had asked this from him, he would have foregone any earthly thing. And, to his shame, his father when he had wanted to tempt Erdric from this path, his father had asked if there was any woman he might consider marrying. And he had given his father a name: Alamanea. And his father had gone to her father and been refused. And perhaps in that far-away village, they said that Erdric had been sworn to celibacy out of weakness and pique and rejection, but their words did not matter, either to him or to his gods.

But now, in this moment, he pushed away Sandrine.

“In one day,” Erdric said. “I swear to you, by the gods who hold my life, that I will yield myself to you, if you desire it.”

“That is your oath?” she said. “And if you break it, you stand forsworn?”

“Yes,” he said. “It is an oath. Now go to Heynar’s cottage and take up once more your chains. For by tomorrow night, you will, in the eyes of man, be free.”

Even with these words, she did not unravel herself from his body. Her fresh scent filled his nose, and now she relaxed against him. He put an arm around her, and they lay like that for long moments, until they fell asleep, chastely.

At dawn the villagers jeered at the couple—this man, the Paladin, was no better than anyone else, they said. And the magistrate smirked, for he had seen the bread, had seen the maiden’s body. And both sources of Erdric’s power, he believed, were broken.

The magistrate hurried up to the manor to reassure the knight that the combat would be an easy one.

“So this man is a paladin?” said the knight who’d come from court.

“The people name him so.”

The knight, Tomas, was an old man, almost forty years, but still fair-haired. He had supped last night on beefsteak, had drunk deeply of the manor’s wine, and had lain with a woman—a servant girl who claimed her husband had run off, deserting her, but he suspected the tale wasn’t true. Her husband was off in some distant field, and she was cuckolding him, as was typical for a woman when confronted by a better class of man.

Tomas had served the King for twenty years, had fought in many wars, had lost many a fortune at the gaming table, and had always won them back at the point of the sword.

“Think, man,” Tomas said. “I cannot fight in single-combat against some village boy who calls himself a paladin. There is no honor in that.”

“I…” The magistrate stood silent, his eyes to the floor.

These men, these new men like the magistrate—Tomas hated them. They had infested the kingdom of late: come down from the universities and schools. The sons of butchers and merchants, they claimed to know the law, but to him the law was nothing. When Tomas was young, there had been little need for law! Justice had been obvious, when he was young. The rot came from the King, who was weak and mad, and from the Chancellor, who did not trust true strength—who was afraid of men like Tomas, men of ambition.

“I–I can arrest him for interfering with the king’s justice,” the magistrate said. “But—I—he will—”

Tomas understood. The men of the village would balk at being asked to arrest a man who wielded a sword. That was the job of a knight, they would say—what else were knights for, but to defend them from sword-wielding ruffians.

But Tomas equally knew there was no honor for him in this combat. He would be a laughingstock, mocked in the capital, where he had few enough friends, and this combat would be used, by the Chancellor, to discredit not just him, but the whole institution of knighthood–they would all be rendered absolutely absurd.

“Yes,” the magistrate said. “The Paladin—he is weak—he has lain outside in the rain. We can delay the combat for some days, and if he weakens…”

“Deal with it,” Tomas said. “This combat is beneath the attention of a knight.”

With that, Tomas sallied forth around the manor, looking to see if it might be possible to get up a game of cards, or a hunt, or some entertainment that was worthy of a person of his stripe.

But that night, Tomas heard a shout: “Will you refuse to defend the King’s verdict against this woman?”

He was groggy, still drunk. But Tomas was a warrior. He knew a threat. He steadied himself, and he looked down. There was a sodden, mud-streaked little figure. And there was a crowd.

“It is a lawful postponement,” yelled the magistrate.

Now Tomas took a few moments to collect himself. He looked at his sword, but no, a sword was a weapon for a nobleman—a knight who was confronted by a village-boy needed something else. Instead Tomas emerged with a horse-whip.

“Get thee gone,” he said, to the sodden figure of the man—the boy, really, who was no great barbarian, no hulking figure, no knight. Just a boy, who looked like any other villager. “Get out of my sight.”

“The hour and day for the appointed combat has come,” the villager said. “Defend this verdict or you shall lose the honor that you claim to value.”

Tomas cracked the whip. He’d practiced with the whip as a boy. It was a dangerous weapon, but difficult to control. Now the villager lunged at him, and Tomas instinctively dropped the weapon, knowing it wouldn’t serve. Everything happened in a moment. Tomas tried to grapple and throw the man, but Tomas was old, and the villager had raw power on his side. Then the villager was upon him, and the blows rained down on him. He protected his face and head, but each blow cost him some of his strength.

Then the villager stood over him. “Put this knight in his armor, and let us fight, honestly, before nightfall, so he doesn’t stand forsworn.”

Tomas looked at the villager, looked at his sword. Looked at the boy’s old armor, looked at his stance. This combat was impossible. But this village had seen him beaten, shamed. And now they were asking him to defend this—this—this King—this magistrate—this regime that, in his heart, Tomas knew was immoral, unjust.

Tomas strode forth, holding his sword, praying for death, but expecting still to do his duty, to fight and probably to win.

He raised his shield to take the first blow from the paladin, and he felt the impact, and then a sudden lightness. His arm was no longer his own. The Paladin’s sword had gone through his shield and was now wedged in the forearm of his foe. The paladin turned, and used that force to take over Tomas’s body, to turn him around, to bring him to the ground. Then, with a foot to Tomas’s chest, the Paladin pulled free his sword, and with another motion, he once more brought it down.

The combat occurred in front of the magistrate and in front of the entire village. When it was done, Erdric strode to Heynor’s cottage and brought out the girl.

Then he took her to the headman—to the father of Arnulf. He took her to the man who’d sought the King’s justice, where once, generations ago, he would’ve called a village council and taken the power of justice to himself.

“Will you take this woman in place of the son you’ve lost? This girl is innocent, under the eyes of the gods, and of the law as well. But you have done her wrong, by allowing her to live alone, by letting her dwell amongst you, friendless, as an outcast.”

“Her people—”

“They are gone.”

Erdric knew the history of these wrongs. They were done back in his own village and in many of the villages he’d encountered since. These villages called the crime by many names, and usually they did not call it a crime at all. But there were always, in each place, some people who were held apart, forsworn, impure. And those people became a repository for all the sins, all the unspoken desires, of this community. And then those sins were visited back upon the community, in a cycle that never ended, never healed. He did not know the answer to this. All he knew was that this girl, and this man, had an opportunity now to break free.

The headman stood silent, and Erdric turned: “Who will claim this girl as his daughter, and stand in trust for her behavior?”

“I will,” Heynar said. “She is mine. And anyone who harms her will be due vengeance from me.”

Nobody knew what to do at this moment. All the old forms in this community had been broken, had been superseded by King and magistrate and nobility and priest. But the Paladin led the girl into Heynar’s cottage once more, under the glowering eyes of Heynar's aged wife. Heynar had sons too, he had kin. It would be his battle to fight on her behalf, in the coming weeks, and perhaps he would lose, if he was impure.

But with his work done, Erdric went into the woods, in search of the shrine for which he’d come.

This shrine was a cave nearby, the resting place of another Paladin, a man who’d left the order and taken a wife. They had lived there, outcast, in that little cave, tending their plot.

However, all of that was hundreds of years in the past, and most of the remnants of their life were gone.

But the old man, Denrickson, had taught Erdric how to read the old tongue, the runic language. And he’d mentioned that this cave contained one of the longest texts in that tongue that remained.

Now Erdric went inside, with a torch, and he read the words that this forsworn paladin had etched there, day after day, during stolen moments—words which perhaps nobody would ever care to read.

Erdric read those words, trying to commit them to memory. Once he left here, these words would perhaps live only in his memory, unless he could find some way to transmit these words to other people.

There were many things Erdric didn’t understand. When he had come to Denrickson, he had wanted power. He understood this now. It was the same thing that the boy had wanted—the boy Arnulf—who had taken the girl’s promised potion. And now Erdric possessed great power, yes…but to what end? That’s what he did not understand. He could not destroy every evil. He could not solve every wrong. He was doomed to carry this tremendous power across this globe, until he died. And part of him deeply yearned to lay this power down.

Everyone knew the sacrifice that Erdric had made to get this power. Everyone knew it. Tomas had known it too. If you serve goodness, then you will gain power. This is something everyone knows when they are a babe, from before they can even speak.

But goodness is difficult. And now here he stood—he had created for himself a situation where he could easily lay down his burden without being forsworn.

He sat there, his heart pounding, knowing that he desired the girl. That he could live in this cave as her husband—according to the pattern laid out in this very text. He could raise children, have a life. He did not need to fear anyone would hunt him down. People would respect the goodness of this act—they would respect the goodness of taking this girl to wife.

So he waited there, hungry for the moment, and feeling, honestly, that it was his due. That a man deserved a woman—wasn’t truly a man until he’d possessed one—and that a man without a woman really had no place in this world.

After a time, he heard a rustle. And he felt her coming. He stood up, and he saw her there, tall and slender, with her green eyes and fair skin. And he took three steps toward her, ready to grasp her, in the same way he'd often seen done.

“Are you ready, Paladin?” she said. “Ready to take your due? Ready like all the rest of them. Like every other man in this world?”

He paused, silent. And in that moment, the words spilled out of her in a torrent, and she told him the tale that he’d known without knowing it. That she was from a clan that was held apart, held in disrepute, by the people of the lowlands. That her people had lived in these hills and had prospered, oftentimes living in these very caves. But then a bad winter came, and the babies starved. In desperation, the hill-people went down into the forbidden forests to hunt for game, but knights like Tomas had come and ridden them down, hanging them as poachers. Her people decided to brave the mountains, seek a home in some other lands, but they were sick and tired—she believed this journey was just another way of choosing death. They had asked what other option they had, and she had told them she didn’t know. But she had fled, and they had left her behind. She’d learned later on that they’d died—trapped in a barren pass by an early thaw that fattened the rivers and made them impassable, her people had dithered for too long, wasted their food, and had starved.

It wasn’t too long before the men of this village had realized that Sandrine was living in a cottage on her own. Many were terrible, but not Arnulf. He had given her kind words, had said he understood. Had sympathized. He had never wronged her—hadn’t done more than what other men did—but he had promised more, with his kind gestures, and with his manner, and for that he deserved to die.

“And your friend Heynar,” she said, “He knew what they did. What all the men of this village did. Because I was outside the law. Outside of justice. Everyone knew.”

“But now that cycle is broken,” he said. “And he has made a promise, before all, to protect you, which he will.”

“You have made a promise,” she said. “To give yourself to me. One way or another, you will fulfill that promise. I offer you the chance to do it lawfully, as my husband. To stay here, with me.”

“That I will not do.”

She blew out her breath, and then she swarmed over him, pulling and tugging at a part of him, and saw that he was cold. She screamed that he was forsworn, that he had violated his oath. She scratched at his face, leaving dark marks.

He said, “If I carry you down fighting back to Heynar, then you shall lose all that you have gained, and the village will consider you soiled once again by your unruly conduct. But this I will do, if I need.”

“You are damned,” she said. “You are forsworn.”

But then something changed in him. He stood straighter, and an odd hesitance entered his face. And she saw the boy inside him—the boy perhaps not too different from those she’d known—those gallant youths who’d died in that mountain pass, alone. Then she was clutching at him, wordlessly. He embraced her, and he pushed her against the wall, against those very runes that stood a testament to that forsworn Paladin’s love. And she wept, holding him, wept out the frustration of a lifetime of loneliness—a lifetime of iron will—the sort of will that had earned her the right to this second chance at life.

And she must’ve felt the part of him that had roared to life, but instead of taking it, she said, “I release thee.”

In the morning, she went back to Heynar and his wife, to face the coming storm, from this village whose secrets she knew too well, while Erdric sallied forth to parts unknown.

John William Waterhouse. The Magic Circle (1886). Source.

P.S. This story was inspired by my recent reading of the Conan the Barbarian stories, which I posted about two days ago. As an aside, it came to my attention that I hadn’t linked to the collection of fan criticism about Conan that I’d read. That was an oversight! It was The Dark Barbarian, edited by Don Herron, and available as part of this collection.