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       There was more than a five o'clock shadow on his chin now. While he lay in recovery, no nurse came to clean off his wounds or even pass water over his brow to cool him down in the desert heat. He didn't know how long he'd been out there. He passed in and out of consciousness, frustrated and dehydrated. Dull pain throbbed in his right shoulder. He raises his fingers to the wound and find that the fragments of arrow have been removed. His sigh of relief comes too soon.
       The general walks down the line, snatching the blankets off of soldiers he deems well enough to fight. "Flesh wound," he says of Aramis' arrow through the shoulder. "Suit up and get back to the front lines." The Astalonians wouldn't get away with this.
O'ne'e ke'st'ris's heth'w' i'ty'im'yet. No one strikes with impunity.
       He knows better than to protest this command. He obeys, getting to his feet, and fumbles through the armor pile outside looking for the helmet that is specifically his. Neither is marked with a name or number. They're all exactly identical. And yet he pushes aside one after the other, searching, searching, until he finds the one that warms in his hands. This one. It calls out to him. This helmet is the one he was meant to wear.
       On go the greaves, the shoulder plates, the gauntlets. The helmet goes on last. The pain dulls, dies away. He's filled with constriction, as if his veins tighten around the muscle and squeeze, reticulated pythons all slithering under his skin. Aramis is directed to a horse, mounts it, and falls in line with the rest. Quentinn and Nestor lie in the stone grains somewhere further off, a sandstorm away from being uncovered. Let nature take its course. The Church will send letters of condolence and a small monetary gift.
"Ahead to Darlis Kesh." We will not run. We will not retreat. Victory or death.
       The sands are bright under the morning sun, enough to cause them to squint, even through the unnatural shade provided by the helmets. They march onward. Aramis knows the Astalonian resistance is waiting for them ahead in Darlis Kesh. Hell, everyone knows they're walking straight into their territory, terrain they know better than anyone else. And still they press onward.
       Someone begins to sing. It's a well-known prayer, one sung in every sermon, every day in every Temple of Deus. Another joins in. More than likely, it began as a distraction, a way to calm the nerves. But as each ear caught the melody, another mouth opened to sing, and soon the army of 10,000 advanced towards Darlis Kesh, singing hymns about Deus' greatness. A mass of locusts, black and buzzing in the desert, heading for the city of Darlis Kesh. The idea was frightening enough. The reality was downright horrific.
       Take no prisoners. This time, the Crusaders fire their slings onto the people of Darlis Kesh, the everyday working-class citizens of Astalon's industrial center. The laborers, the men and women on whose backs the city is given life, and their children, the future of Astalon's continued existence. They're all fair game of the steel swarm.
       Time for a simple lesson in logic.
       Assume the following statements are true.
             1. Good soldiers do what they're told.
             2. The order is given that no one be spared: men, women, or children.
             3. Aramis refuses to raise a hand to the two latter.
       According to the laws of logic, that would make him a bad soldier. It's not to say he's got the cleanest hands of the lot, though. He thrusts his spear into every Astalonian male he can find, but the women, the children... He kicks them away into the dirt. It's all he can do. He can't tell what becomes of them when they fall out of his peripheral vision, but he knows at least he was not the one who strikes the fatal blow. Not to them anyway. In every child's face he sees Adrianna and Azrael, and he punished those two with hugs and kisses. He couldn't bring himself to raise a sword and cut the Astalonian children down in their youth.
       Their women were warriors, too. In his home country of Meenah, a woman's place was barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. In Astalon, women fighters were feared over male fighters. These were mothers, and no one fights with more ferocity than a mother protecting her child. All around him, another khurki is yanked from the throat of a Crusader, then clenched in the teeth of the woman who buried it there as she stalks out another victim. This whole campaign was a suicide mission. A Goddess-forsaken suicide mission.
       The stench of blood begins to rise up. A fine crimson mist covers the ground; the Astalonians slash and run, leaving Crusaders to die on the fields, squirming and helpless like maggots in stagnant pools of blood. Panic begins to set in; things are moving too fast for him. The horse turns wildly, and the sound of crunching bone crackles in his ear. Someone was trampled underfoot. He'd rather not look.
       Aramis tugs on the reins hard, trying to gain control of the jolted horse. Bodies are lying everywhere, and he can hardly tell friend from foe. A blow strikes him square in the back, causing him to lunge forward onto the horse's neck. Pain quivers through him like so many volts of electricity, and he turns around, raising his sword high.
       A face looks up at him, rage in his eyes. He's no older than twelve, eleven perhaps. But the look in his eyes transcends things such as age and understanding. It leaps across the gap of puberty and in that instant the boy becomes a man, tasting pure hatred for the very first time in his young life. When Aramis lowers his sword, the boy bends down low and picks up a rock. He hurls it, missing by a wide margin, and Aramis simply rides away. Not you, not today, not ever. If this were Gaia ten years into the future, that could have very well been Azrael. Someday, that boy may find him and murder Aramis as he slept.
       He would have deserved it.
       Blood and entrails. There's no use in fighting any longer; the Crusaders were suffering casualties far exceeding that of the Astalonians. You don't fight the enemy where he has a home-turf advantage, and especially not after they already know you're coming, and attacked once before. It was stupid, stupid, stupid to go into this war. Quentinn, Nestor. What did they die for?
       There's never a call to retreat. It's kill or be killed. Explosions ring in his ears; the magicians have done their work and blasted the enemy armories to pieces, fragmented steel and concrete flying towards him and everyone else on the battlefield. He's pelted with shrapnel traveling at the speed of sound and falls back. The horse falls on top of him. It saves his life.
       There's light but no sound. Blinding, white light, burning his eyes even as he clenches them shut. And when he dares to open his eyes again, he finds it surprisingly easy to stand up. All that's left of the horse is teeth and dust.
       Only those wearing the Dark Armor are visible in the piles of smoldering ash around him. The silence is so loud it makes his ears bleed.
 Bleeding Apocalypse · Wed Mar 07, 2007 @ 09:19pm · 0 Comments |
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