At Faith's End

by Chris Galford

  “I can’t accept that, Alviss.”

  “Then more fool, you.” The Kuric’s gaze leveled back on him, heavy as a weighted pike. “Choice, as I say, is not yours to make.”

  He had made sure Rurik did not come back, either.

  Pitiful, perhaps, but it gave him more time to focus on other things. His family, for one. The army. And Usuri, of course. Their whispers in the night were a comforting thing. When nothing else could be. And she was opening to him. Night after night, when he could reach her, the walls gradually wore their way to cobbles, and the path led back to the old ways—to the time before all this madness. When both had been something more than orphans.

  Then again, what good did it do to cling to the past like this? It did not hide one from the present. She knew it. He could sense it often enough in her voice. She wanted to escape, but even magic could not change her horror. Every time he felt it, the hurt in his own heart deepened.

  Fortunately, in hours like this, when it was naught but he and Berric and the endless, ravenous swarm of steel, it was easy to fall into the routine. War demanded just that. All of them were orphans, in truth. Lost. Adrift. Desperate to feel. If only he had made different choices.

  He looked to Berric, the russet-haired spring of man’s best nature demanding a smile in response, though hunger had wasted it nearly to the bone. Was this what they fought for? What they would die for? A nation of ghosts, stalking the peripheries of nightmare. How one could keep such a smile, he did not know, but he did know that if the day came that Berric ever lost it—that was the day the world would finally end.

  Giving his horse the leave to meander through the plains grass, Rurik could not help but give his thoughts voice. “How do you do it, Berric?”

  All his loss of decorum earned was a chuckle from the older man. “Losing faith already, ser?” Berric made a wave with his hand. “Have you tried a life for others?”

  “I worked in a company before. Of friends—family, near enough. The ones you…but I-I lead men now.” His voice lacked weight. Berric, catching the horse’s reins, guffawed at him.

  “Do you really?”

  His silence was answer enough.

  “Everyone wants to be a leader—such trouble! Such drama. What is a soldier, at heart, but the purity of devotion? We listen. We answer. We act, for the other.”

  Was not his whole life for others? Essa, he had once thought, was bread and butter, life and limb and world. He would have done anything for her, and as soon as she had offered him something he wanted—or so he thought—he had taken it without second guess. Family? Where were they now? And his friends? A means to an end, perhaps, used for coin and life and laughter but…

  That was for me, it seemed. The thought harrowed him. Used, always used.

  They marched a long way through rocky ground, up onto the poor reaches of a downtrodden farm—the last before the trees. A score of pikemen had preceded them to the pasture to feast on goat cheese and milk, under the shade of a distant tower. Flickering shadow, for the fire atop had gone up, and the truth of war with it. Not long ago, another man had perished in the flames.

  Do I use Usuri as well? It was only as they neared the cowering farmer that Rurik found reply. “And when it all abandons you?” The heart of it. The fear. Two dozen eyes were glued to him, and not one would have qualms against cutting out his heart. Exile.

  His friend touched his shoulder gently and motioned the farmer forward with the other. “I think you have this all wrong, Rurik. It is the young who are supposed to be optimistic. It is not your land being eaten up.”

  There it rang again: the call of the south. He looked across the plains, following the line of mountains to where he knew a river bled into the soil. Verdan. Nestled in the bosom of the trees. Far from battle, but not far from war. He felt his breath quiver: Not yet.

  In the days that followed, Tessel put the forced march mercifully to its end, and split his army still further, leading the horde in arcs around the line of towers Momeny, and its father Idasia, called the Eastern Gate.

  At least, parts of them did. Their army grew scattered over miles of open land, each segment as careful as the next to avoid the vast specter of Hanschleig Forest. Had they not, they should have never found themselves again. As it was, for days Tessel allowed them free range across the plains, Rurik suspected, to pillage and plunder and burn the province’s margrave into foolish action. Rurik could not fathom how they would be brought together in any form of cohesion again.

  Still more demoralizing, at night when the horsemen had gone, any illusion of war’s evasion remained picked apart by the flames the watch had lit. All along the border, it was as if their families called them home to feast. It was a bitter taste.

  Then the moment came. Some farmers—whether pressed, or earnestly intrigued—brought them news of the enemy call to arms. Of a mustering in the trees before the city Oberroth, the province’s second and only other settlement worthy of the name. It was a place existent only for the benefits of trade the border should have offered. Nor was it far.

  At the news, Tessel thankfully put out the call for order, and the army set to march anew. For one night, if one night only, the general let them sleep. As exhausted as the day’s duties left him, Rurik was, naturally, one of the few that could not manage to partake. Yet that night he held himself back from beckoning Usuri. He rolled his coin between his fingers, tipped his head against the poles of his tent, and kept his words to himself. These were not things to trouble her with. Not this.

  “This is the moment.” Unbidden, Tessel told him such that very night. “Oberroth will be the first step. It will set the path to which all others shall fall in line.”

  None saw it as Rurik did. Neither Tessel nor any other soldier wished to think of the ghosts. When they had joined battle at Leitzen, they must have had nigh 30,000 souls. Now, on the soil of their homeland, between disease and attrition, desertion, battle, and the old winter’s chill, the roll calls put them at less than half that number for all the battles to come.

  And all he could think was this: For what?

  Madness was the only answer he could find.

  The following day, after a late sleep, the army begrudgingly roused and marched to a more defensible spot a mere ten miles to the west—a forest-eaten place dotted with little lakes and smaller tributary rivers. Trees swallowed them up, and the mass finally began to pull together as the shadows descended.

  Rurik closed his eyes and breathed in the piney musk of spring. For the first time in a long time, he felt as if he were home. A pity they would burn it all down.

  Oberroth was somewhere in that mess, and it took them another day before they stumbled across it, as well as the army their informers had spoken of. Where the denseness of the underbrush broke and some manner of maneuverability opened in lanes of high green grass, points of fire struck the night, and gave the men away. Like fireflies, Rurik thought with little mirth. To the Idasians, fireflies were, after all, the messengers of the dead.

  By daylight, they slunk from the trees like the draugar of legend. The two armies massed across from one another, rows upon rows of men, a grey blight on a green land. Sunlight slanted off mail hauberks as pennons and banners hung limp in the dead air.

  Then the clamor began. Officers cried out commands, barking at the Bastard’s army until the whole great beast began to churn forward. Cannons wheeled forward and the ground roared as the first shells sundered saplings and quaked the canopies above their heads, but all fell short of the enemy lines. Bawdier men hurled curses and raunchy jests, calling the men of Momeny women and whoresons and cowards, and some merely screamed, brandishing flesh and weapons both as they closed the distance with their foes. Rurik scowled at that. Months without the spoils of war—without any piece of war’s release, in truth—could do that to an army.

  Where Tessel’s men looked almost eager for the fight, however, Rurik could see no signs of such impatience in their foe. Near their center, beside t
he flag of Momeny, Rurik spied the banner of a black goat, and he knew the first twist of fear’s dagger in his bowels. His brief time with Baron Pordill had taught him one important lesson about the man: he was a master of discipline. That fact was reflected in the rigid lines of men at his command, stone-faced, pikes and rifles seamlessly shouldered. Whereas Tessel’s soldiers milled about in a fashion more befitting a mob than an army, the Black Goat’s men might as well have been an iron wall, patrolled by silent captains. Not one of them shouted back, or broke rank.

  Despite the fact that Tessel’s army dwarfed their own in number, the Black Goat’s flock did not seem so much as rattled. While he could not spy any sign of horses among their ranks, the thought did not rest well with Rurik. But as Tessel rode out to address his troops, Rurik called Narve and his men to arms, and drew close to enough to bid the Company be ready, for he would follow as the Bastard commanded. He owed Tessel that much.

  The wall of Momeny grew nearer and nearer, and he could feel a thousand eyes on him, waiting. The all-too-familiar weight in his stomach threatened illness as the trumpets blared. From the growing stench, others had not managed to contain it. Signs of the “honorable” deaths to come.

  Naivety is a fact of childhood. Colors enter the world pre-tinted—the rose of a mother’s praise, or the blackened horror of a particularly lumpy food. Staunch are the lambs in their presumption, but time batters all.

  In his youth, Rurik had seen war as such trumpets, as armor glittering in the noontide sun, as men, all of a father’s stride, scattering the villain like so much chaff. And this, from a boy that heard naught but truth from his father’s own lips! How quickly, how horridly, true war annihilated that prospect. He had seen blood. He had watched men die. He did not wish to see it again. He could not understand how any of these mangy fools could either.

  But boots marched in only one direction: onwards, ever onwards.

  Their soldiers came on like a plague of grasshoppers. They hopped and howled and sprang, and every few seconds a long gun fired without order, and smoke belched, and even as Tessel cried for order, Rurik knew they did not hear him. Then he was among them, and the all too familiar chaos was his again.

  The defenders saw no need to march for them. Even in the face of cannon, they ground spears and pikes and shields into the dirt and peppered the encroaching horde with arrows and bolts. When enough bodies drew within a few hundred yards, those same men retreated behind the shield lines, and from that entrenched mass emerged a scant few hundred in lines of three, to rotate through an effort of kneeling, crouching, and standing. It meant there would be no downtime for reloading, as they bore long guns, and from them the lead poured on with the horrid cry of its victims.

  Rurik watched, dead even to the crack of the fire, as the first line of corpses plummeted to the earth. The priest-captain Narve, rattling his saber like a madman, was among these, and even at a distance, the boy could spy the instant the shot burst through the intestines and rent the man’s life out with a scream. A mammoth pile of human fat and blood heaved to the earth, and was no more.

  Rurik watched a man slip in another’s brown water and felt his mouth go dry. Berric, at his side, cantered forward, twisting round about with his cavalry saber held high. “Forward! Forward!” Another line crumbled under the fire and more scattered as a handful of light cannon were rolled forward, their shots bursting among Tessel’s ranks.

  “Captain, we must be to the fight!” Around them, others were rolling forward, eyes already dead. Rurik turned, found Tessel wandered still along the lines, shouting orders and encouragements, a dozen shots no doubt primed for his head, but sufficing to whip by without so much as winding him. “Captain!” Berric, shouted, louder still. “It is time for blood.”

  If there were words, he did not know them. He had no encouragements, no condolences. Behind him, a paltry hundred men shifted uneasily, hands touching to the myriad weapons their motley band called to the bloodshed. Rurik raised a hand, weakly, and flitted it forward, and they moved to its motion. Berric cried out, “Glory to Assal,” but Rurik could not tell if it carried or was swallowed in the inferno. He urged his horse forward and drew the pistol at his hip.

  Only a few still had horses to call their own. Beyond that, there was nothing to call cavalry in the whole of their great horde. Nothing but infantry, and a few dozen scouts arrayed upon the vicious claws of their gryphon steeds. These Tessel held aloft, roving the edges of the lines. Rurik caught glimpses of their white tufted bulks darting through the trees. Tessel would spring them in the case of a rout, to hunt stragglers. So the people were left with nothing but a march. Bodies unto bodies, and all that would come of it was blood.

  Rurik’s horse stepped over the broken bodies of fellows, their faces gray and lost. They drew close enough to taste the ash on the wind. Then with a sharp cry, Berric raised his sword, and he and the men lurched forward through the splinters of bark and shards of stinging dirt.

  Kicking his heels into his horse’s ribs, Rurik spurred the beast at a trot, and hastened to join his men in the thick of it. As honorable men fought.

  Gunfire continued only sporadically from his lines, but their heavier cannons pounded true. Rurik rasped as a cast iron ball surged through the air above his men, causing him to lean forward with the force of it, and he watched as that shot thudded into the dirt between the lines, only to bounce once, twice, and through a row of legs that simply disappeared beneath it.

  When they drew within a few yards, the pounding of cannons stilled. Long gunners fired their final shots, then either turned their guns to clubs or discarded them for the weapons at their hips and at their backs, while reinforcements marched from behind, a wall of pikes and swords and axes moving to bar the widening lines of the march.

  Due to the wearied but frenzied nature of their forces, Tessel’s whole plan seemed to lie in their numbers—theirs was a three-pronged assault, arcing to cut into the much smaller forces of the margrave from three sides. Yet Scheyer, whatever else someone might say of the man, seemed to have realized this would be the case, and formed his people into an armored square, a formation Tessel called “the turtle.” Those long gunners that withdrew from the frontlines made swift return to the corners of that square, to guarantee no side would go without support. Perhaps not the most morale-intensive position, for the sight it brought all sides, but deadly effective.

  We will crash against it. Even as he watched, the first ranks struck the lines and the whole length of it seemed to shutter. Like a hammer on a breastplate, the mass reverberated, bent, but held. Then the blows traded. Shields heaved forward and the men of Momeny stabbed out.

  We will be smashed against the walls and drown in our own fluids. Rurik drew his pistol and breathed through his mouth to escape the stench of shit and blood and saltpeter. All the margrave needed was this first move, to watch and to wait out a weak spot in their flailing.

  “They need more men,” Berric crooned in his ear. He only grunted in reply. They could see the place of impact then; they were within a stone’s throw.

  “Arms, to arms!” Berric cried, for Rurik had no voice, and he still was not sure they could hear him. He felt so small in the mass of men—could anything be heard in this? A final look about him showed faces etched with as much fear as resolution. These men would fight and they would die, but they would piss themselves doing it. The tongue near shriveled in his mouth.

  Then his horse pitched up with a deafening whinny, and he felt his bladder shift. It reared, and he bucked against it, Berric shouting something to him and then—then he was on his back, staring up at the clouds and the leaves.

  There was a boy there, in those leaves. Children flitted around him, naught but shadows above, and he knew that he was done. Ended. The girl stood over him, legs bowed to leave no part of him uncovered as she leaned to lock eyes. “You know. You’re always a little slow.” He tasted autumn and ginger and felt the blood of youth on his back. Some memories no creature could outg
row.

  It was Berric that stood over him, and his loyal lieutenant seemed to flit to and fro between the shadows of that world, in some strange dance. “What…” he croaked, but his throat was dry. There was a weight on his leg, he realized, and all too slowly he saw the shape of his still horse, his own body awash in its lifeblood, and Berric—Berric wielded his saber in his dance, warding any that drew too close to Rurik. The crush of steel was so close.

  Then he came again into the dew and grass, older, no wiser, stripped from waist up. The same girl, older, every bit as beautiful, though the body more so with time, lay tussled against him, plucking at the sparse hairs of his chest. “These make you a man?” Her face screwed with mockery. “Manhood is quite the brittle thing, isn’t it?” He swatted at her, but she batted him off. “Perhaps that is why women are the stronger,” she said, swinging a leg about to straddle him. “Our age comes in blood. Yours is naught but flakes.”

  When he opened his eyes, there was nothing around him. No one, save a few bannermen crouched like squatters over what he assumed to be his corpse. They pressed at the horse, and he could feel it through throbs of his leg. There was wetness on his cheek. His hand rose and fell—too late, he realized: tears. His head rolled and he tried to sit up.

  One of the men loosed a little shout and took him by the arm, helping him to rise. The other pushed the last of the horse off its master’s leg. “Ser? Can you hear me, ser?” He blinked over the man’s shoulder—he did not recognize his face—to the trees. Shapes flitted through the murk, and the fires belched black clouds into the sky, lit still further by the splinters of bark. Yet the lines had moved far beyond him, and only one banner fluttered between those shadows.