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wanted someone to blame.

4
    E ven the Kind dreamed. But with the passing of so many years, the old man had outlived his imagination. All his mind had … left was the almost unbearable weight of memory. There was so much he could no longer consciously recollect. Yet all of it existed, untapped by his waking self, in his night thoughts
…
    By the standards of centuries he would live to see, it had hardly been a battle at all. A routine patrol of six or seven horsemen with maybe two lances between them had come upon the enemy encamped in a shallow valley and, against his orders, engaged them. The din had carried in the strong winds, and his own camp had been roused to the combat. His hand thus forced, he had committed his men to the skirmish. It had turned into a minor massacre.
    Taking both armies into account, there were perhaps one hundred dead. But he was well pleased. The English captain had been taken, and he had spent a long, rewarding afternoon with him. The man had been a genuine soldier, not some royal cousin assigned a command to keep him out of treason and plotting at home. He was much more resilient than the children who were his frequent guests between wars, but, in the end, he had yielded as completely as the scrawniest peasant brat.
    He was satisfied, glutted, complete. Beneath his helmet, the tangle of his hair, grey-streaked at dawn, was a match now for the purest sable. His lieutenants no longer remarked upon the changes in him. By now, they were used to his cycles and simply put his occasional youthful appearance down to sorcery. A few of them were given to boasting about their master’s skill in the Black Arts, and that could be useful from time to time. Poor Sieur Barbe-Bleue, meticulously obsessive as ever, was even trying through atrocity and alchemy to ape him, searching in the ruined and abused flesh of small boys for an elusive immortality. But some of his other officers, an unfortunate number who would soon learn better, had almost forgotten to fear him. For them, the English captain should have been saved for a ransom, not wasted on pleasure.
    He had his ragged cloth-of-gold pitched on the bloody grass, about where the fighting had been most concentrated. He looked forward to stretching out on the insanguinated ground and luxuriating in the residues as others would in a heated and perfumed bath.
    After the Englishman was exhausted, and consigned to the bonfires with his followers and the dead horses, he paid a visit to the girl.
    She was squatting between the fires, her face still streaked with blood, her hands clasped in prayer. Sometimes he wondered what she said to her saints. Did she apologize for the extra load of souls that were lining up outside the Gates of Heaven as a result of her conversations with dead divines?
    He knelt before her, and took her young head in his hands. His fingers slid into her cropped, coarse hair. He picked out a hard-shelled parasite and popped it between thumb and forefinger.
    He, the Monster, kissed her, the Saint.
    That year, he favoured little boys. But his congress with the girl was different. Her skin was permanently marked with the weave of chain mail. During the physical act of love, she called him ‘father’ several times. Whether she meant her father in the village, a father at the church, or the Father in Heaven, he could not say.
    The wind tore at the already tattered walls of the tent, detaching wisps of golden thread that floated over the camp. A detail was stripping the dead of their armour, and piling it up. The fires burned fiercely, roasting and consuming carcasses with much crackling and hissing. The soldiers sang, words about intercourse with goats set to sacred tunes.
    Every so often, there was a gurgling cry. He had ordered the whores to comb the battlefield, cutting the throats of the wounded, no matter whose colours they wore.
    Close to his already dwindling body, the girl slept, doubtless dreaming of the young king and the angelic voices