Lady Death's Invitation

What this track is

Lady Death’s Invitation opens The Medieval Chronicles and is an album intro in the strict sense: she speaks to the listener, no battle is fought, no year is given. There is no fact box on this page because there is nothing to put in one.

It differs from the first record’s intro in what it is for. I Am Lady Death introduces her. This one introduces a record, and it does something almost no album intro does: it describes all six battle songs before you hear any of them, in her voice, without naming a single one.

The six she names

The middle of the piece is a list. Six sentences, each a battle on this record, each given as an image rather than a name. Decoded, in the order she gives them:

“A field in France where the sky turned dark with arrows and the mud swallowed nobles and common men alike.” Agincourt, 25 October 1415, and the track The Archer in the Mud. The mud is the correct detail to lead with: a newly ploughed field under October rain is what killed the French nobility that day.

“A bridge where one man turned his back on the mathematics entirely, and fell only when he had made it mean something.” The siege of Paris, and the track One Man on the Seine. The phrasing turned his back on the mathematics is exact for what happened at the Petit Pont in February 886, where a flood cut off a bridge tower and the men inside were told plainly that no relief was possible and refused to surrender anyway.

“An island of stone where the sea delivered enemies to every shore and held no mercy for either side.” Malta, 1565, and The Cost of St. Elmo. Both halves are right: the Ottomans came by sea to an island with no interior to retreat into, and by September they had lost around thirty thousand men to fighting and disease.

“A city on its knees, the siege grinding through weeks of dwindling hope, and then the hillside split open and eighteen thousand horsemen came down it in the greatest charge the world has ever seen.” Vienna, 12 September 1683, and The Wings of War. The eighteen thousand is the figure the song itself uses and it is the accepted count for the largest cavalry charge in European history.

“A road through holy land where men killed each other over the same God, called by different names.” Antioch, 1098, and The Lance of Antioch.

“A city that had been the crown of the world for a thousand years, until the walls that had saved it a hundred times before became rubble and memory.” Constantinople, 29 May 1453, and Carry Me Home. The Theodosian Walls had held for a thousand years and had never been carried from the landward side until Mehmed brought guns to them.

About that count. She says “six of them”, and there are exactly six battle songs on this record: tracks two through seven. Track one is this intro and track eight is the closing ballad, which is the album format this project follows. The count in the lyric is not a round number. It is the tracklist.

The song, against itself

The opening is the sharpest writing in either intro: “I am Lady Death. You know me now. We have no need of introductions.” It is a second album intro that refuses to introduce, and it works only because the first record exists. A listener arriving here first is being told they have already met her, which is either a small joke or perfectly true depending on how literally you take the character.

“Leave this world of light and wire behind you” answers the circuits line from the first intro and turns it into a threshold. The medium is named again and then stepped over.

What follows is period detail at close range: “iron and mud and wood smoke, the sound of prayers spoken in languages your tongue has forgotten. The smell of horses and fear and consecrated ground.” Three senses in two sentences, no adjectives doing decorative work, and consecrated ground sitting at the end where it does double duty for a record that runs from a Viking siege through the First Crusade and the Knights of Malta to Vienna.

“I have been keeping these stories” is the project’s thesis arriving in the middle of a track listing.

Then the ending, which is the reason this is the better of the two intros. “Not to the glory that was written down, but to the moment just before, when the outcome was still anyone’s and the living did not yet know what they were about to become.” That is a statement of editorial policy. Every battle song on this record is written from inside the hour rather than from the far side of it, and the intro says so before a single one of them starts.