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There are things you cannot ask in daytime of honest men. - Low fantasy, war. |
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Prologue Wake: the vaulted shadow shatters, Trampled to the floor it spanned, And the tent of night in tatters Straws the sky-pavilioned land. -A. E. Housman She was so quiet at first that we scarcely thought her breathing at all, and then she stopped breathing altogether. It was as if she were dead; I know no other way to describe it. It must seem very callous of me to say now, but there was no life in her. She was utterly limp. We had resolved to leave her there, under the grasping branches of that old sycamore, and I think not one of us felt as if we could have done any better than we did: she was dead, this was fact, and we were not. We could hardly be blamed. That she was still very much alive was not something we found out until later. The war had mostly run its course, and I remember one night by the campfire, warming my hands, while Hans heated old beans in a kettle cap. Two men from a neighboring regiment had stopped over to trade supplies – the standard fare – and in the course of conversation her name was mentioned. Hans, he did not know her, but I remembered her quite well. We had served together for years after all, and her death had been hard on me. Her death. To say it now seems insincere, knowing she was not dead and that we had left her to die. I suppose that is why she lived – to spite us all, ultimately. The two men, they spoke quite highly of her, said she had crawled for days with the broken shaft of an arrow pointing up out of her back. There was hardly any blood left in her, and when the scouting party found her, she had called out – There! – and fallen senseless in the arms of a wetback boy, still green in his chaps. God knows she should have died. They took her first to be a refugee. I suppose this was only natural; her uniform was long gone, shredded even before we had left her as dead, and several of the villages nearby had been ransacked. They put her in a tent with other survivors, left her in the care of a battle-medic named Ghastly George, and proceeded forwards to the front, unsuspecting. But she was always too damn stubborn for her own good. They said, the men, she had stolen a mare by the end of the day and rode, bloody-bandaged and beaten, hard on their heels until the regimental headquarters had sight of her. It was then and there, swaying atop that misused horse, she gave the report we ourselves had vowed never to utter. I don’t know why they believed her – the bandages, maybe, or the bruises, or the blood crusting in her hair. Perhaps it was the horse, wheezing beneath her, or the wild look in her eyes. Those who saw her then would swear it was the first time she had ever looked at anything before, but anyone who knew her at all knew better. That was the only look she ever had: that reckless, fierce determination; that maddening, hungering wonder. They must have all fallen in love with her then, I think, that very moment. I should explain. God knows, I should explain everything. It is – it would be – only right. You must understand we all thought her dead, and would not have left her otherwise. You see, we loved her too. Anyone who ever met her loved her, and it broke us all to see her there, lying dead, lying broken, and the horror of it now – it breaks us still. It kills me. So. I will explain everything, and after which I will say nothing more, and be at peace. |
| Chapter | 1 | September | 17.26k |
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