by Doug Kelly
Then a perverse question came to his mind. Where did the strange tasting meat come from? Images of all the dead men strewn across the ground hit him in the gut. He had never known the kind of hunger that could drive someone to cannibalism, but his increasing fear was that he had just eaten human flesh. Suddenly, he felt a sensation in his stomach like fingers were trying to crawl free from his belly and move up to his throat, dirty fingernails scratching their way upward as they did. He grabbed the old man and demanded to know where he had gotten the meat. The old man leaned back, moving away from Aton’s wild eyes, and told him it was from a horse killed during yesterday’s battle. The thought of eating horse disgusted Aton just the same. They were loyal beasts with names, and people should not devour them for their meat. He had a sad memory of his loyal horse that had saved him twice as he fled for his life from the Regalyon estate after the spring festival. Even when his horse was in the last painful throes of death, he could not put his faithful steed out of its misery. As for this horse, if he had seen the animal or had heard its name uttered, he would have vomited the entire meal no matter how hungry he was. He put another horror of war on the back shelf of his mind and tried to let it pass, because there was nothing he could do. He was a prisoner trapped inside Grinald’s war machine.
Apparently, the meal had not offended the others. Two men accused another of eating more than his fair share. Taking offense at the allegation, the man charged with the wrongdoing stood tall and revealed his true size. He could have cast a shadow that covered both of his accusers. They exchanged heated words, until someone whom Aton believed was a man of power, possibly a troop commander, interjected his authority into the matter. He separated the men and said, “Save it for the enemy. We are all brothers here.” The accused returned to his old seat. In a short while, the three antagonists sat close together, cordially discussing strategy; they were saving it for the enemy.
Later that morning the sound of a horn assembled them at the side of the road. They formed columns stratified by the fighting men’s village of origin. At the sound of an ox horn, the column went forward like a line of ants. On the way, they heard intermittent clashes. Occasionally a stealthy arrow would fly from the darkness of the forest and claim a victim. That brought a nervous twitch to the marching men, always turning to look beyond the trees on either side, waiting for the arrow that would bring them eternal sleep. The closing battle would happen this day.
The columns marched to reinforce a line that had lain in some shallow trenches, which farmers and their field slaves had dug parallel to each other across a cotton field. Those furrows in the ground were close to the city that Grinald had chosen to attack and siege, the town of Kern, so he ordered his men to stay low in the trenches to conceal their numbers and prepare for the attack. The excavators had intended the ditches to be irrigation canals, but they were not completely finished, because the farmers had not connected the trenches to the nearby stream. Some unlucky farmers had dug them to bring water to the cotton field, but now the crops lay in waste, tramped by angry men and their battle horses, after they repeatedly tried to kill each other. Excavated mounds of dirt hugged the edges of the trenches and created berms as long as the ditches, behind which Grinald’s soldiers could hide.
Grinald’s men took positions in the dry channels across the field. In front of them was a level stretch of cultivated land surrounded by a forest, but straight ahead, just past a clearing that divided the woods, were the walls of Kern. From the forest came unpredictable arrows, just often enough to create caution in how boldly a man should walk out of a shallow trench. The men nestled behind the embankment, and those with shields placed them over their heads. A weary man next to Aton lay down, buried his face in his arms, and almost instantly, was in a deep sleep. The fatigue of recent combat, the lack of food and restful sleep, had been overwhelming. Aton leaned his chest against the brown dirt, peering into the woods and up and down the line of men in the long ditch. The curtain of trees protected the enemy from his view. A few flags of clans loyal to Grinald were perched on the dirt berm at the edge of an irrigation canal. When Aton looked to his left and right, he could see other inquisitive heads sticking curiously over the top. To his right was an approaching commotion along the line of men laying prone in the trench. A wave of yelling, arm waving, stomping, and curses advanced toward him. He quickly realized that a large rat had carelessly scampered its way into the ditch and was running for its life, toward him.
—— —— ——
In the first years after the asteroid impact, after the human population drastically decreased and the survivors abandoned their wrecked cities and farms, the prone remnants of the unharvested fields became the home of countless rodents. They swarmed in incredible masses, devouring the abandoned grain. In the untended fields, bales of rotting hay, pierced with the tunnels of burrowing rodents, became a breeding place for the pestering creatures, as generations of them poured into the meadows, year after year. The grain left in barns, silos, granaries, mills, and in the warehouses of deserted towns disappeared in the same manner. With those enormous stockpiles of food, the rodent population exploded, and they spread disease across the landscape.
The worst of all the rodents were the rats, which came out of the old cities in such vast numbers that the few surviving people who saw them all fled in fear of the ravenous creatures. A rapidly advancing cloud of fur with quickly moving claws and gnawing teeth consumed those too weak to flee. That trepidation did not last as long as the evil of mice, because the rats, probably not finding sufficient food when together, scattered abroad, and were destroyed by starving cats and dogs that devoured them by the thousands, killing far more than they could eat, so that the remains were left to decay and spread diseases. In some cases, unbearable hunger overcame the armies of rats; they became cannibals and attacked each other. They were still plentiful, but did not appear to do the same amount of damage as was occasionally caused by mice, when the latter invaded the cultivated fields.
When people had begun to raise crops in the fields once more, those swarms of rodents rushed in and destroyed with an uninhibited fury. Nothing could keep them out, and if a person were lucky enough to kill even one, a hundred more returned. They came back in perpetual waves, like the waves crashing on a shoreline, eroding everything in its path. Birds of prey, the fox, and coyotes, too, hunted these rodents, but at first, they made little or no perceptible difference. In a few years the predators, having such a wealth of food, multiplied in numbers, as did the vermin before them. Although there was some relief with the rebalancing of predator and prey, as nature does, fields and villages were still susceptible to invasion, and the granaries and the standing crops continued to suffer from the eternal plundering of these rodents. The population of rats, field mice, and swamp muskrats seemed to contract in some seasons, but humankind’s hate for these furry pests never diminished.
—— —— ——
Lying low in the trench, Grinald’s conscripts attacked the fleeing rat with strikes from their spear butts and stomping feet, to no avail. To Aton’s amazement, the rodent was navigating skillfully through the maze of lethal hazards in the ditch, heading directly for him. Just before it reached his position in the line, it sprinted up the dirt wall and leaped from the berm. The rat disappeared as it scurried away under the remnants of cotton plants.
A moment later, battle commanders came from the rear lines and began to meander among the men, pushing them into a better alignment to charge. They chased and beat those who straggled, and they fumed at a few men who seemed to have decided to remain where they were. They were like critical shepherds, struggling with obstinate sheep. After the commanders had passed through, the warriors were like molded clay; the artistic hands of the commanders had bent and shaped the men into the forms of sprinters before a signal. The call to charge was almost upon them. Many pairs of glinting eyes peered from the grimy faces toward the curtain of the deeper woods and the walls of Kern just beyond. They seemed
to be engaged in deep calculations of time and distance.
Aton stared at the land in front of him. Its greenery now seemed to shroud both unknown powers and secret horrors. He heard the blowing of ox horns relayed down the line, and whispers of men mumbling that they were ready to charge the enemy. The man next to him began to cry for his mother. From the corner of his eye, he saw a troop commander with a black banner gallop by on a horse. This was the moment to do or die; a real and fierce battle was going to test his manhood. His legs felt wobbly. Was this normal? Briand had told him that they would feel like steel springs just before the charge. Suddenly he felt a straining and heaving among the men on either side, approaching him like a wave. The line fell slowly forward over the berm in front of the trench, like a toppling wall, and the charge began. His comrades pushed and jostled him for a moment before he sprang ahead and began to run in a desperate search for cover. A distant, but prominent, clump of trees caught his attention, and he ran toward it. He felt like a deer pursued in the hunt as he ran, bounding over small obstacles, fearing that if he were too slow, or that if he fell, an arrow would find his heart. He had to run for his life and get to the grove.
As Grinald’s men charged forward from safety into danger, the woods and thickets in front of them awoke. Angry men with swords appeared from behind trees and bushes and more appeared from under the forest’s shadow, carrying spears. The line of charging men went forward in an asymmetrical design, uneven places on the ground splitting the advance and scattering it into isolated clusters. Aton’s light feet propelled him quickly along; not burdened with a heavy sword or awkward spear, he sped by those around him and continued running for the clump of trees.
Sword hilts beat on shields, men with spears made grotesque faces as their opponents advanced, and there was the soft thud of arrows finding their targets as doomed men fell limply to the ground. Swords moved to the rhythm of pumping arms as they ran. One man’s foot found a rabbit hole as he ran at full speed. The sound of the leg bone breaking was like the crack of the whip. He fell so quickly that his prone body tripped the man running behind him, and that warrior fell onto his own drawn dagger when he hit the ground. Other men, punched by silent arrows, fell in grotesque agonies. The charge left a distinct trail of bodies.
As he ran, his mind raced with quick thoughts of how best to survive, but although his mind was in turmoil, the world around him seemed to be moving in slow motion, with total clarity of even the most minor details. It seemed to Aton that he saw everything. Each blade of grass was separate and distinct, like warriors clustered in a green battle. He thought that he was aware of every shift in the wind as he went forward. As he got closer, the rough brown tree trunks showed each furrow and ridge on their surfaces. The charging men, with their wild crazy eyes and sweating faces, running madly or falling dead, bristled with arrow shafts. The picture gallery of his mind had cataloged it all.
The straining pace of the charge had consumed his endurance, and a tide of weakness began to overcome him. He slowed, but continued his sprint for cover. Aton went forward with burning legs, but he was desperate not to stop because he was afraid of greeting an enemy’s arrow. The archer in front of him fell to his death. Only stopping for a moment, Aton grasped the bequeathed arrows and continued running like the wind, gaining on the enemy’s territory. An arrow whistled by his ear.
Aton continued sprinting like a maniac to reach the small grove of trees, an oasis of safety from which he could launch his own brave offensive, but only if an arrow did not discover him first. He ducked his head low, his neck disappearing as if he were afraid that a fanged demon would swoop from above and drain his soul away through sharp teeth. He almost closed his eyes as he gained on the objective, but quickly remembered the image of the man who had broken his leg in the rabbit hole. The sound of the bone snapping had made his face cringe more deeply than the race for his life was already doing. The scene was a wild blur. Pulsating saliva stood at the corners of his mouth. When he reached the grove of trees, he lunged into the thicket and dove behind a hollow, rotten old log, covered with moss, and leaned his back against it while he breathed frantically, his lungs craving oxygen and his thighs burning as if they were on fire. He had never run so hard in his life. Perspiration from his forehead found his wide eyes and as the salt in his sweat began to burn them, his vision blurred again, so he closed his eyes to keep out the burning perspiration. The clash of battle was all around him, and he could still hear it perfectly. He felt like a sailor in a lifeboat during a storm on unfamiliar waters. The hurricane of war raged around him. In his mind, he could feel the violent rocking of the little boat that he desperately needed to stay afloat as it pitched in the waves of death. Not wanting to drown in that morbid ocean, he opened his eyes and crawled to the edge of the log so he could peer over and around its end to see what was happening on the field of battle. His trembling fingers grasped the rim of the log’s hollow end, and he pulled himself up to view the action. He pressed his chest against the moss and saw two undulating lines of soldiers pressing against each other, moving like meandering streams of death, slaughtering each other with savage weapons of war. Suddenly, he felt the sharp sting of claws attack his right hand, which gripped the edge of the hollow log. With all the adrenaline coursing through his body, he instantly sprung away and landed on his back. Leaning up, his eyes squinting from the sharp pain, he could see the silhouette of a black forest cat that had arched her back; hackled fur ran down her spine. It was sidestepping toward him with ears turned back, teeth bared, and hissing. Behind her were four young kittens, eyes still shut and blind to the whirlpool of violence and carnage that surrounded their lair. She defiantly raised a paw and spread her claws; she showed no fear to her enemy. He knew he could smash the mother cat with one stomp of his foot, but her level of unbridled bravery seemed to wake him from his persistent and obsessive thoughts of fear. In front of him was a small cat ready to fight to the death against an armed man. She poised bravely but edged toward a losing battle against the possible force of his crashing heel, seemingly defying death with each little step forward as she hissed at her nemesis.
The cat inspired Aton. He stood and shooed it away with his bow and turned to face the battle. If a small cat could confront a comparative giant like Aton, then surely a skilled archer could face his enemy, too. He tossed his quiver behind an oak tree and stood tall, using the trunk as cover. Bodies littered the landscape. His comrades were pushing back the enemy. It appeared that his companions were winning. He fitted an arrow to the bowstring and let it fly, then another. He looked for dense groups of the enemy and sent them death from above. The wound the cat had left on his hand hurt each time he pulled the bowstring, and it angered him that such a small animal had made him jump in fear. The stinging wound from the brave cat inspired him again, so he snatched the remaining arrows from the ground and ran to the open field. Closer now, he sent more arrows forward and he could see them all find their targets. Not one arrow was wasted. Grinald’s men were vanquishing the enemy; victory was close. Completely focused on finding targets downrange, he did not hear the horns blow behind him, announcing the presence of Black Fang and his entourage. Kern’s foot soldiers and cavalry were crumbling. Grinald and his following wanted to watch the enemy troops recede before them, so they had mounted their finely groomed horses and slowly trotted forward, discussing the bravery of the warriors under their command as though they themselves had actually fought in the battle, risking their own lives. The horses maneuvered around the dead men; some were not yet dead, but still writhing in pain, moaning for mercy. The forward trotting group of elite and privileged horsemen paid no attention to the death surrounding them. They were discussing female conquests, land acquisition, and what they each planned to do with their share of the spoils of war. Their laughter mixed with the groans of dying men as they went. The closer they trotted to the receding battle lines, the more littered the ground became with death. Their horses stepped on the dying as if they were just
tufts of grass in a pasture, but instead of the sound of dry grass under hooves, there was the crack of broken ribs when the muscular black horses of war stepped on fallen ribcages.
Grinald was an impatient man, and he found it inconvenient to have all these obstacles in his way as he advanced toward his next siege, the walls of Kern. The warlord waved to the man with the horn, and it sounded again. His troops were to give him wide berth on the field of battle. His entourage was getting closer to the actual fighting, although it was waning now, and he and his minions did not want a stray arrow or spear to hit them. Therefore, Grinald thought it prudent to have his troops disperse from his presence, for his safety and the security of his procession.
Fighting for their lives, his soldiers had not heard the horn blow; they continued struggling with the enemy. That irritated Grinald. He dispatched his color bearer, a mere child with a flag of the warlord’s colors. The horn blew again and the boy tilted the warlord’s banner forward and ran toward the battle to announce that Black Fang had arrived. Grinald’s warriors finally noticed the banner coming from behind them, and the entourage of privileged men that followed it. The warlord’s line of fighting men arced as if an invisible force were pushing against them, and they gave the powerful men on horseback adequate space, just like Grinald and his entourage expected. The young flag bearer continued running forward, waving the warlord’s banner.
Aton could see Grinald’s banner and the warlord’s mounted cronies coming toward him. He had shot his last arrow, so he pulled a bloody sword from a dead soldier’s back and stood there trying to decide which section of the front line of combat to run toward and continue the fight. He was going to dive headfirst into battle, slashing like a barbarian at the enemy. His father and cousin would be proud. They would be delighted with his newly found conviction, because he was not running from a real and dangerous battle, but toward it. He decided that he was a real man now. With a tight grip on the handle, he felt the heft of the metal blade in his hand, and it felt good. He was a warrior and this was his calling, just like his father and the other brave men of his clan. As he stood there, he watched the waving banner come toward him, flapping over the unrelenting legs of what appeared to him to be a very small soldier. He stared at the pennant as it approached, and thought how gallant it would appear to charge into the thick of battle with the warlord’s colors fluttering beside him. When the banner passed him, he was going to run beside it and charge the enemy. The flag was close now and he could not believe what he saw. He mopped the sweat from around his eyes and blinked twice. The color bearer was a child. He was just a young boy, groaning under the weight of the flag as he ran toward the receding front line of battle. Almost next to Aton now, the boy stopped suddenly and fell to his knees. The flag’s momentum carried it forward before it hit the bloody ground. The child’s little hands clutched around his neck and the boy opened his mouth as if he wanted to scream, but nothing came out. An arrow had pierced his throat. The child’s cries were silent. There was just a hissing sound and gurgling blood that splattered as it came from the wound. The young boy fell backward; his small hands still around his neck, weakly pressing against the hole in his throat. He appeared to be crying now, but there was no loud sobbing, just silent tears and facial contortions accompanied by the sound of babbling blood as he respired through the open wound in his throat. Aton dragged the sword as he went to the child’s side. The tip of the blade had scratched a trailing line on the bloodstained battlefield behind him as he had walked. He was speechless as he watched the boy suffering. Aton tried to say something, but his jaw only twitched, and nothing came out. The boy went limp, and the pool of blood stopped expanding on the ground around the small body. He was dead. The child might have been eight years old. Someone had dressed him like a soldier and had given him a toy wooden sword to carry into battle with the warlord’s flag. The young child had probably thought that he would be a hero, but he really had died for no reason at all, just the vanity of a warlord needing a banner to announce his presence, and the novelty of dressing a young child like an allied warrior and marching him to his death. With that image burning deep into his memory, he recalled the warning that Hauk the slave had told him in the city of Acadia. Aton had told Hauk that he wanted to provide the warlord with loyalty and service on the battlefield; he wanted to be a warrior in his ranks and prove his manhood in combat. Hauk had cautioned him to be careful with what he desired, because he might attain it. He had warned Aton that the battlefield was where he would find death, not manhood.
