Feathers Ch. 01

Tripping over the body of one of our slain countrymen in the dark a little while later, we found that he had a full skin of good wine, and huddled behind a tree we drank it all, without becoming even the slightest bit tipsy. Battle can be a great sobering influence. We had both pissed ourselves at the start of our short little skirmish, and our stock of heroism and courage was empty. The wine didn't seem to help that much either.

In the morning, meeting at last back at the formerly besieged town, we lined up for assembly to discover that nearly a full score of our number were already missing. A few trickled in from the forest later that day, lost like Pieter and I had been, but by the time the march began for Lacestone, our company had been permanently reduced in number to two hundred and fifty-one. Of the lost, I remembered the happy ginger-haired lad Osric the best, and I much mourned his loss. I knew him well from my class and the cheerful lad had every talent to become a great gléaman, as he was ever a merry teller of songs and stories. His happy voice would never sing in our town tavern.

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Of the great epic battle of Lacestone, the mightiest and most terrible fight that any veteran could ever remember being involved in, I will say little. There are a thousand stories of that terrible battle, of the valiant Lord Rowan and his equally indomitable mate Lady Gwenda, of Duke Boyle's heroic charge against the dragon, and how his lover the Duchess heroically smote the foul beast into destruction... but I personally saw none of those courageous and noble things. Pieter and I, and our little company, were at the back of the right wing of our army, held back behind the battle-line in reserve.

It is true we saw smoke, fire and death everywhere we looked, but this was all mostly shrouded by steam clouds towards the center of the battle-line, and the heavy downpour of sheets of cold rain so limited our view that we could barely see a few yards in front of our faces. Still, our miserable company served, and we did what we had sailed a thousand leagues to do. We were slightly to the rear of our lines, near the center of the battle-line, waiting in reserve to be called if our regular Oswein soldiers fell back or had their lines breeched. Clouds of Boar-Men blood-red sheathed arrows fell upon us nearly as thick as the pouring rain, and again in a matter of moments, nearly half of our numbers fell never to again arise, but when our call to duty was cried, some of us were indeed left to answer the call! When the center of the main battle-line began to break, our young leader, the son of our baron, ordered us surviving ill-trained men and lads up to help seal the breech and he was the first of us to fall in actual combat but a few moments later. By then we were reduced to about a hundred and fifty men, but as one, we grimly marched forward towards our doom.

Like entering a dark cloud of death, we entered the smoke and the fire, and the fury of combat for which we were in no way prepared. In the midst of the steam, smoke and haze of rain, and over the din of crashing metal I clearly remember hearing the voice of the Duchess calling to us from the center of these dark baleful mists, to rally to her and to hold, to hold until death, and I ran towards her voice to reinforce the line... and to hold it. To my memory her voice was loud and clear, calm and confident, without a hint of worry or panic. It cut through the noise and chaos of the slaughter like the calling of an angel, and I knew that I must obey her. I was no longer a frightened boy - now I had a man's job to do and I resolved that I would hold my ground against the endless horde of huge monstrous appearing Boar-Men, and somehow my feet held and I never took a single step backwards despite the horrors that faced me during the terrible slaughter at the front of the battle-line.

When the sun set upon our great victory many hours later, the salvation it was said of the entire Southern Duchies, it was with but barely three score survivors of our numbers that we had still left standing, all bearing some physical wounds... and most with emotional ones as well.

Pieter remained safe by my side, but Largo, Hamton, Reese, Telmud and another score of my personal school friends remained still, forever to remain buried in that worthless forever bloodstained brown mud.

We pulled the blood red feathered arrows from out of our slain friends and companion's bodies, but Pieter, as if in a daze, kept gathering even more of fatal shafts from the fallen, stripping and gathering the feathers and placing them into a small sack. An odd choice for pillow stuffing, I thought, but most of the other survivors of this horrible battle were all quite half-crazy as well, so I let my friend continue his grim collection task until it became too dark to see.

Of our wounded that had fallen from the Eorfleode arrows, even the lightly injured surrendered quickly one by one to fever and fell into the Shadowlands. The soulless monsters had poisoned their arrowtips with their own spoor waste and the slightest scratch brought on wound-fever and then blood poisoning that our ill-trained and far too few medicuses were mostly helpless to treat.

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Sixty-three lads and men we were remaining, and we cheered that our duty was done and that we might now return to our homes. Our Duke, for whom we served at his pleasure, had lost a great many men, just over a third of his original numbers, and we barely blooded recruits and conscripts were now a core and very irreplaceable part of his remaining army. An army, he soon discovered, that he needed to ship off at once back to his frontiers, to defend against the ever encroaching Caestorian legions to the north and east, and two years later, to man the depleted border forts against the raids of the barbaric Hen'kal nomadic tribesmen of the wastes to the west.

Being unluckier than most men, our troop of sixty-three was sent in turn to each frontier, losing over the next several years, slowly but surely, yet another two-thirds of our remaining number, one every month or two. Even the wounded were never given their medical release from duty, but we were returned back to our ranks time and time again to risk our lives yet once again, until we all abandoned any hopes of ever regaining our freedom, or even living long enough to see the next season.

When at last, the surviving twenty-four of us received our release orders to return to our homes, after nearly five full years of service, with the thanks and praise of our Duke and of our officers, we could scarcely believe our eyes and ears. Even the most optimistic of us thought that we'd never see our green fertile valley ever again!

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For my best friend Pieter, this wondrous news came about a month too late. On a previous patrol a Hen'kal arrow, fletched with a feather of sandy-gold color, had pierced his hip deeply. Although the arrowhead was not in any way poisoned, it was a bad injury after our camp medicus had painfully dug out the imbedded arrowhead, and the wound soon began to fester. The blood sickness took him slowly and painfully to join our comrades and friends in the Shadowlands. I added this new feather to Pieter's bag, already quite full of other feathers, all taken in combat. In the dullness of fort garrison duty between patrols, he had painted the names of every boy, lad and man who had fallen from our numbers, since the first day we had marched off as innocents to war. Over and over again, each evening his white paintbrush would inscribe the names of our lost friends onto the blood red feathers of the Boar-Men, or the blue feathered shafts of Caestor. Now with a fresh pot of red ink, I added Pieter's name to a bundle of these golden yellow feathers, to complete his collection.

For the last few years I had hardly known my very best friend. He hardly ever spoke anymore and when he did, it was just a few quiet short glumly spoken words. His eyes were forever haunted by the things he had seen and done, and he slept ill most nights, if he slept at all. We all had bad nightmares often, but his night terrors seemed to be more frequent and more unpleasant. I think he knew that he'd never return home to his family. I actually think he was relieved and happy to die, to escape the shadowy life of horror that he lived now. He was not afraid of dying, but he was sorely terrified of dying alone, somewhere forgotten and lost in the sandy wastes with no marker to remember his bleached bones. I held his hand and comforted him as he passed into shadow and I made sure that Pieter got his grave marker, on the southeast side of a grassy hill near the fort so that he could forever rest looking towards a home that he would never return to. As I buried him, my very last speck of my own hope for ever returning home someday was buried with him.

This large pillow sack of feathers was the first item I packed when we made our preparation to leave the fort to our young replacements, to return home. Pieter had never found a long term use for his feathers, other than to repeatedly mark the loss of our friends, but now I had a more proper idea for a good use that they should be put to.

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Three of our number declined to return, and they all stayed at the fort, perhaps to remain forever, and accepted postings as sergeants, to make a career with the army. Another two, immediately upon reaching the capitol, instead took service with a mercenary company, earning an enlistment bonus pay sack that was quite heavy with silver. Our pay had been irregular, to say the least, especially out in the wastes of the western frontier. Upon our discharge, it took the very real threat of violence for us to receive our final six months of owed back-pay. It wasn't much, but we wouldn't have any other traveling expenses... the cheap army paymasters cut us off high and dry without any travel money with which to make our last journey home. Still, with our packs loaded with army rations and several full ale and wineskins, we had few needs for the week long journey home from the capitol city, where we had been discharged.

Ronald, who was my last surviving school friend from my school class, after Pieter had died, began acting increasingly oddly as we traveled the final four days towards home. On the surface he was pleasant and talked of his memories of home, but each night as we stopped at an inn, he would drink with a thirst that both amazed and frightened me. We all drank quite heavily those last years, especially while we were either bored or terrified while out on the western wastes, where there was little to see besides sandy desert outside of our fort, and even less to do for amusement, and not a woman to be found in over a dozen leagues. The look of utter madness grew in his eyes as he drank though, and he started fights at every opportunity, hardly caring when he lost them and he awoke beaten and increasingly sore every morning.

On our last night before we reached home, Ronald became especially drunk and was in a mean and sour mood. I left him to his cups and went off to sleep. In the morning, I found that he had hung himself in the barn. He left no note of explanation, but now years later I realized that he could not bear to bring the inner demons he had inside of him back to his old home. Perhaps he too should have stayed in the army, unable like the others to face the quiet life of farming once again back home.

He had been a jovial lad, even while facing constant danger on patrol in the frontier. He hadn't done anything particularly heroic on his own, and he had faced the exact same dangers all of those years that the rest of us had. Once he knew that the ordeal was finally over, he now cracked... unable to cope with peace. I worried that I might someday do the same, that all of the terrible memories would now become too much for me to bear as well.

While the epic battle of Lacestone had been horrible enough to permanently damage the minds of most of the men who fought there, for me, my own personal worst memory was the night skirmish with Caestor, on top of Belyer's Ridge along the border, about a year and half later. A small troop of their scouts discovered our lines in the middle of the night, and with stealth and long knives they slit a few of our throats before the alarm was given. I'd been one of the ones asleep and I suddenly awoke to find a grinning legion-man about to put a knife into my own throat. I quickly drew my own dagger and we rolled in the rocks and dirt for nearly twenty minutes together before it was my blade that sunk in-between his ribs. Every single night since, I've dreamed of that desperate awakening, unless enough wine or ale was available to numb my sleeping thoughts.

Still, with the packs upon our backs, the last eighteen of us walked those last couple of leagues home to Meryton, and to begin our old lives, anew once more.

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