Then my guilt was canceled out as I said something more cruel than I should have; “The people that belong here carry weapons, Jay. So I wouldn't talk, if I were you.”
Fifteen –
I was in my tent when the signs I had been secretly dreading for the better part of a week began to make themselves known. A small tremor in the earth. A raised voice in the camp – followed closely by the first clamor that would start the hustle and bustle of preparing for battle.
They were coming.
I sat cross-legged on my bedding, my eyes rising to the tent flap as if I could see what was coming through that veil. Dear God, I thought. It's happening. I had been living in a state of denial every minute that I could following up to the second round of violence. Everyone had known it was coming, but I had not given it a chance to take root in my mind.
Numbly, I rose. Pushed my way out of my tent. The flap billowed in the breeze behind me. The cold draft blowing off the field was a sour mix of fresh dew and damp ash in the face, acrid and refreshing at once. It stung my eyes, cold and smoke-flavored, but I looked through it to the curve of the earth, where that evil line of black was manifesting. Fresh smoke rose from their ranks as they panted from the long march, the ghostly substance churning up and spreading into the air, turning the blue of the sky an ill color.
It was time for Jay to witness what I had witnessed. Bless his heart.
Bless all our hearts.
The men went into action, blurring and whirring around me. This time I did not take my eyes off the advancing army, but watched them come, a statue witness. I could not help but measure every step, thinking – With every step, they're coming to butcher us. With every step, they had the chance to change their minds, but with every step, it didn't happen. I willed it too. They had a thousand opportunities to change their mind, to leave off, to turn back before they reached us.
But such a clause was for an alternate universe. In this one, it never came to pass.
I thought: It may just as soon be me dying today, as any of the ones that do.
I wondered where Jay was.
What he was thinking.
If I would lay eyes on him again before all hell broke loose. If I would lay eyes on him ever again.
The mounted formations scurried into proportion, and the fleets went out. The camp grew scarce, vacated, all of the manpower focused out on the field. I could hear the sound of empty tent canvas flapping in the wind, with no other sounds to override it.
As Gabriel's army drew nearer, the smoke they brought with them gathered into a more formidable barrier in the sky. It became like a cloud, blocking out the sun, and the wind grew colder and staler. Charred remnants of weeds scuttled into camp, kicked up and broken loose by a thousand marching hooves. A piece of it got caught beneath my tent, fluttering in the drafts, struggling to get loose.
Idly, I bent to free it, holding it in my grasp as I looked out toward what was in the making on the field. It was brittle, though, and soon I had crushed it in my grasp. Glancing down, I parted my fingers to consider the sooty pieces. The flakes fluttered in my palm, where small currents of air channeled through my fingers. For a time it held my attention, setting me on a progressive train of thought.
I was holding snuffed life in my fingers. This small thing had labored its whole life, striving and striving to reach new heights, beating the odds of the elements, weathering storms, making something out of nothing out here, day after endless day and year after taxing year – without ever an ounce of appreciation, and only to be vanquished without a second thought, in a hapless instant, along with the rest of its neighboring kin. And that, not even the beginning of the tragedy that befell the humans. All that meaning that existed, snuffed – and it didn't even hold a candle to what else happened on that field. Yet I found myself caring about that plant, appreciating all about it that no one else had ever bothered to appreciate. And it made me think: if I could stand there and find myself caring about a plant, I ought to put at least as much energy and care into the other beings out there – if not much, much more. A gross amount more.
And that's when that alternate perception of mine began to take over. The one that could see into the secret lives of plants, much as it could see the secrets of animals, and which could hatch all kinds of outlandish ideas.
There was a bang – a gun gone off in the ranks. I could not tell which army it issued from, but the result was the same: horses grew restless, on one side as much as the other. The formations began to fidget, nervous nickers and restive snorts beginning to ramp up toward the burst that would start it all.
My heart pumped louder in my chest. I didn't have to carry only snuffed life in my hands. I could carry real life in my hands.
The Lieutenant had checked in with me daily to measure Char's progress. He had not been ready or willing to have another human being on his back yet. But I could ride him.
I had always been able to ride him.
He could make a difference out there, if only he was out there.
Treachery flourished itself inside me, and my heart set itself to pounding into my head at what I was suddenly aspiring to do. But I was not in the real world anymore, where common sense and practicality – or an altogether healthy dose of fear – might bring me back down to earth and send me running like a sensible girl for the hills. I had stepped out of my grounded self, into that distant stranger who had come calling more and more as of late, and who, less and less, seemed to know when to leave. Away from reasonable, Equine Dr. Jekyll, into a confused and whimsical, champion Mrs. Hyde.
As the battle broke out in the field ahead, I bowed my head into my hand – and when I came out of it, soot was smeared across my face like war paint.
It was the least of what would be smeared across my person that day.
Sixteen –
The battle was underway by the time I threw Char's horn-studded bridle on and swept myself up onto his back. I did not need it, to ride him, but I hadn't been joking when I'd called it his 'helmet', and it never hurt to sport a figurehead blade out in front, when charging into battle. I had fashioned the bridle to go without a bit, because it would only serve to annoy Char and I required no such thing to direct him. As such, there was very little messing about getting the thing on his head, and then we were out of the pen like a shot. I did not give myself time to think. If I had, it might quickly have broken the spell.
Toby's torches and make-shift spears were leaned up against his tent at the ready. It was these that I took a detour for, only long enough to lean down off Char's cantering back to snatch one of the spears up, and then I was leaving the safety of the camp that only moments before I had been all too willing to be resigned to.
Char did not seem to share any of the disinclined sentiments that had held me back up until now, lengthening his stride to charge out into that field as if it was not swarming with deterrents. I brandished my weapon, making sure it was poised for the onslaught. Never once did practical fear rise up in me to demand what I thought I was doing. The world was awash with only the things that motivated a person: adrenaline, impulse, exhilaration, egoism, incentive, gratification... These things rushed around me as surely as if they were colors, vibrant and shining, streams of light breaking through the clouds. I was so immersed in those rays that I could see the dust matter floating in them, even amidst my thundering flight. Golden dust, sparks, and little swarms of pixies drifting between heaven and earth. They were thick in the air, an alternate-dimension sludge that made everything happen in slow motion. But the pixies had my back, and as everyone knows, pixies are fearsome creatures. In the real world – the one that was more real than the sludge plane – those whirring wings were what drove me, dancing beneath Char's hooves so he might as well have flown, propelling me from behind, flurrying up under my arm and lifting my spear for aim.
As I charged into the fray, the pixies flew forward with my weapon, channeling its path and driving it home into the first Demon Mount that reached with
trap-like jaws to do me in. Char responded to my cues like a pro, maneuvering around so I could retrieve my spear. I yanked it free without so much as a cringe, spinning in search of my next victim or attacker. The blood running down my spear was like the prettiest color of paint. If I had not been in the middle of things, I may have been inclined to smear that over my face as well. I may have even drank it.
An interesting thing about the demon army was that some of the mounts had riders, but others directed themselves, unchecked and wild with their own ambitions. I did not know if there was any kind of method to the madness, but in the heat of things it mattered little. The enemy was the enemy, equine or human.
To my delight, Char's crown did not go to waste. More than once it punctured the flesh of a beast or man that crossed our charging path. And by 'delighted', I could not rightly say if it was over the fact that my ingenuity had been put to good use, or if in fact I was a little bit delighted by the carnage. I was not in my right mind. I was in a glorious, crazed state of mind. Euphoria flared through my nostrils at the smell of blood and fear and all that raged around me.
Char's muscles bulged and churned beneath me, a source of power and direction that centered me just enough to do my half in order to keep us both alive. I was inexperienced, but it didn't matter – I was great, the stuff of legends, a transcendent force to be reckoned with. All I had to do was perform my part. Char and the fairies would take care of the rest.
Char spun and lurched and surged, and I clubbed and jutted riders off of their horses and onto the trampling ground. I did not pay attention to whether or not my spear actually punctured human flesh. There was no time for that anyway. The onslaught was too much of a clanging, baying, furnace-sounding, smoke-and-blood-painted mayhem for small details such as a single tear in a man's flesh to be even remotely traceable. One would think, simply from the look of me, that I had been fatally injured half a dozen times over, and I had scarcely been grazed yet. Char was too busy making shish-kebabs out of those in front of us and pulping the ones behind us with his hooves. My spear seemed to serve for the other areas left open around us.
I'm sure it was chaos – a roiling mess of snarling, twisting, bashing, leaping and crumbling, but to me... To me it was a dance. Wild and savage, but all you had to do was dance away from the blows, the charging-bull-like creatures, and those around us crashing and burning. In a slow-motion world, it was not that hard. It was beautiful, seeing the pattern, being able to find the gaps, slip into them, swirl out of them.
Until Char slipped. My fantasy, my mind – it was able to create an atmosphere that I could work with, survive in. But I had failed to be aware that it didn't extend to Char. It was a bubble around me, and could do nothing to control, smooth, or enhance his actions, the signals that his own brain sent to his limbs. He was brave and wonderful – he was magnificent – but he was still prone to the same level of error that all of the rest of them were.
We were swinging around, aiming at an oncoming demon mount, when he lurched beneath me. He attempted to save himself, splaying out a desperate leg, but our momentum wouldn't allow such a thing. He stumbled further, throwing his head up in a last-ditch effort to keep the ground at bay, but it was useless. All at once we crumbled from our glorious vantage point into a collapsing, skidding tangle of limbs and slamming body mass.
The ground gouged out beneath us, spitting charred weeds and earth up around us as we crashed. Char threw his neck to the side, shifting his entire body weight, and while it saved him from tumbling head over heels and snapping his own neck, the next thing I knew he was overturning to the side, crushing my leg beneath his body, pinning me, rolling over me.
And the only thing I could think was: how blue the sky was, lying on my back looking straight up, past the smoke, past the black earth flying in clods through the air. It was a breathless thought. Not once did it occur to me that it might be breathless because my lungs had just been crushed by a thousand pounds of horse grinding me into the ground.
Char's momentum carried him across and off of me, and distantly I was aware of him coming to rest somewhere on the ground beside me, the weird vision of seeing hooves flailing against the sky the memory that lodged in my head before his careening mass settled. Then I lay there, entranced by that patch of sky above me, the blinding lights and colors of the fantasy world sparking at the corner of my vision. I heard nothing.
Worse: I felt nothing.
But the sky had never been so beautiful.
*
A very few memories stuck in my head from my time on the ground, there on the battlefield. The underbelly of a horse, leaping over me, raining dirt and drops of blood onto my form. A black rider pulling his horse up next to me, looking down at me with fearsome, bloodshot eyes, drawing his weapon as if to put me out of my misery only to be dethroned by an attacker before he could go through with it. A vulture, drifting in lazy circles overhead through the dust and smoke.
Jay's face.
My Jay.
And then it was all a blur as I was dragged out of there, through the mayhem, across the ground I couldn't feel. But somehow, by the time we reached camp, I was walking. Being dragged by nothing but my arm, on my own two feet. I was distracted, momentarily, by a pixie flitting by, my eyes trailing after her over my shoulder. But then my focus jolted; I was thrust forward, spun around to face the one dragging me.
“What the hell, Willow?” the image of Jay's face was demanding in front of me, and it was then that I snapped out of it, and the savage, whimsical state of mind that had taken over my body drained out of me. I looked at Jay for the first time, noticing what he was saying. “What were you thinking? You can't whisper to guns and men intent on bashing your head in.”
I blinked, disoriented, and shifted to take on a more civilized stance. And then rational thought – for me – came rushing back, and I plowed over Jay's words to pose a dire question of my own.
“Char?” I asked, half-panicked.
Jay stared at me. “Damn it, Willow,” he said when he could bring himself to respond to that. “You nearly got yourself killed like an idiot, should be dead and destroyed this very instant, torn asunder and plowed into dirt, and you're worried about the horse?”
A defensive flash rose in me. Of course I was worried about the horse. What if I had gotten beloved Char killed, just like that, before my very eyes? What if he lay broken and twisted out on that field, cold where I left him, a tragic product of my reckless actions? Or worse – not dead, but suffering? Lying there in torment...
But the look that rose to Jay's eyes was so pained, so angry, that just its existence wiped out the relevance of my concern. He looked away, barely containing some outburst that might have downed me again for my foolishness all by itself. I became less aggravated as I read the pain in his features, becoming almost complacent.
As I looked at him, though, it occurred to me that the unspeakable torrent raging on his face was not the only thing humbling me, making my own feelings dim inside me. Something else was wrong, draining me of my usual intensity. As I stood there I wavered, ever so slightly, and a confused frown touched my face. What was this strange feeling glazing over all the others?
When Jay's eyes returned to me they paused, seeing something there as well. For a moment neither of us reacted, uncertain, but then a look even more horrible entered his eyes, and once the floodgates were open every ounce of anger and hurt that had been there before gave way to something entirely more alarming: fear.
Jay stepped forward right as I collapsed, his arms catching me crudely and his fingers fumbling to find purchase among my grungy, blood-spattered clothing. Only as he worked me around in his embrace so he was cradling me on my back, and one hand came away to reposition me, did I see that it was soaked in blood. Fresh blood.
The kind that could only be coming from one of us, then and there.
Mine.
Seventeen –
I couldn't tell if it was dreams, or fantasy, or the place one goes
as they're fading from life that took me, but whatever it was, it was where I went when the tax of my wound overtook me. Only with the occasional, fading heartbeat was I aware of my body, jostling limply where I was draped in Jay's arms, as he carried me for what felt like a thousand miles through rain and storm and desert.
I dreamed of cold diamonds of rain beading on my face, running off like tears that I could not shed in my unconscious state, mixing with the blood caked on my skin, turning pink and prism-like as they fell. When Jay carried me through the desert I licked the remaining beads off my lips, quenching an age-old thirst, replete as they slid like pristine gems down my throat.
I turned my head where it lolled, gazed into the wake of land stretching out behind us, and as it flickered between desert and rain I saw the white stallion in the distance, following us. I watched him as we walked, numbly entranced, until my eyelids lulled shut, and there I found a deeper place to dream.
Jay and I rode double on that stallion, bareback, mane whipping up in our faces, Jay's arms lashed about my waist. We galloped across a green land, the velvety moss staining the stallion's hooves, fetlocks, and legs. It was flung up as he ran, caked to his underside, caked to our feet. We were wild, free, together. One with the earth and animals. We breathed wind. Threw our heads back and drank the rain.
Medic Cory's face intruded, briefly, through a crack in the sky, looking down in on us, but I could not be bothered with it. I reached my arms up, drew a curtain of fog over the sky, shutting him out. This was my private world. Jay's and mine.
The stallion slid to a stop at the top of a hill, reared up, pawed the sky as if to laugh in Cory's face. Jay and I tumbled off, rolled down the hill one over the other, laughing, moss in our hair. I was wearing a dress – some foolish white dress – and by the time we reached the bottom of the hill it was green, clear through. Soiled and stained and torn, and beautiful. Earthly and tantalizing.
Whisper Page 13
