What the Badger Dreamed
By Adam

The crest of the knight was a yellow sun on a field of blue and white. As he wheeled his horse and made a second charge up the hill his standard caught the light for a moment and was marvelous. His sword moved through the sea of soldiers like a spoon stirring broth, now trailing, now advancing, now here, now here, and everywhere that it went they fell and bled their lives into the ground. His mail shrugged their spearheads and his shield scored their steel. He wore a crucifix so that his spirit never flagged, and his lady’s handkerchief kept the heaviness from his arms.

I watched him from a far hill as he faced them again and again, his horse like a great ship surging through a wave and almost, almost, in a breathless moment, plunging over top. I watched his horse lean in to the hill as it drove forward on great, rolling, sweating flanks with muscles drawing tight as tow ropes. In my language there is no word for the mud that is made at the bottom of hills when men die at the top. I watched him face the hill again and again, tirelessly but not effortlessly, dauntlessly but not recklessly, and as more of my men rushed to meet more of his, I saw a metaphor for the eternal.

“I want to speak to that one,” I said to an attendant, “when it is too dark to fight, send for him that he should come in to our camp. Say that I would like to parlay, but only with the knight of that particular crest. Tell them that he will be safe in our camp, but when they do not believe you tell them that I will send my son the prince into their camp that they might afford him equal safety. The English will think that I am mad, but this they think already. Now go, and also have a lamb butchered for our guest and offer it to him along with wine. This is my desire.”
”...” said the attendant, tongueless.

A musician began to play as I sat back on my mattress and fell into a slow sleep. He sat cross-legged on the dirt beside the rug, and played a strange instrument I had never seen before, which he held in the crook of his legs and hugged between his neck and shoulder. It was a hollow tube with holes in the side into which he put his long fingers. He plucked invisible strings that had been secreted inside the tube, and the music it played did not come from the instrument, but instead vibrated through the whole of his body itself. Sitting there, it looked like he was caressing the trunk of a tree, while his skin sang an unspeakably beautiful song.

When I woke up the musician was gone, but the knight had been brought before me. With his helmet off I did not recognize him.

“Who is this,” I asked the attendant, “who awaits me?”

The attendant gestured with a few incomprehensible waves of his hand, and I dismissed him angrily, and almost dismissed the knight with him until I saw the crest with the yellow sun on the blue and white field. Instead I propped myself up on a pillow and apologized for my attendant.

“I am sorry for the confusion. You see, it is difficult sometimes for me to communicate with my attendants. None of them have tongues, you see, and all speak a language of the hands that I find meaningless. It is the same with all of my soldiers, who understand each other perfectly, but cannot make themselves known to their king except through loyalty. They are exceptionally loyal subjects, because if they have ever planned treachery, I have not heard a word of it.”

The knight stood quietly. The wounds on his arms and back and legs would knit themselves together with imperceptible slowness and become scars in the fulness of time. The wine in his stomach would baste the lamb there for a while.

“I do not understand why people are born these days with nothing in their throats. Is it the same in England now as well?”

The knight passed his hand over his face, indicating something. I had thought of a metaphor for eternity. There was no word in my language to describe the white and blue clouds stirring the sun like broth. I grew tired and saw a strange instrument, like a drum, that didn’t make music, but listened to it being spoken.

PREMISE:

In the future, scientists irradiate a badger in an attempt to give it human intelligence. The experiment fails, but in the split second before its brain fills with a strange fluid and it dies, the badger has an instantaneous, dreamlike flash of consciousness.