Jeff Salyards - Veil of the Deserters

He recited this distantly, not quite like when he was narrating stolen memories of dead men, but not far off, either. If this was a confessional of sorts, it was devoid of passion or pain, as if it had happened to someone else.

“Soff saw me,” Braylar said, “and she started toward me, and then I began to sob. I fell forward on my knees, just as my father had a few days before, and I wished there was mud, mud I could swallow, drown myself in, but there was only dirt, and I grabbed handfuls of it, smashed it into my hair, my face, my eyes. Soff tried to pull my hands away, to hold me. And I could take no more of it. I climbed to my feet and burst out of the room, and the next, and the next, out of the longhouse. I ran into the woods, away from the village, ran until my lungs felt like they might split open in my chest, and then I continued to run, hoping they would, hoping they would rip and tear, and I would be the next one Grubarr would have to work on. But they didn’t, they only gave out. I fell over, and still my body wanted to cry, but there was no breath for it, so I lay there, wracked with silent sobs, wanting to die, feeling like I was, pounding the dirt because I couldn’t scream.

“It was only then that I realized where I’d run to. The grove of dying birch near our village. I had not gone nearly as far as I’d guessed. Having gotten some of my breath back, I stood there in the rain, suddenly angry. No, furious. At my father for getting killed, at the gods for allowing it, at my ancestors for creating him and me. I screamed at all of it, as new tears watered my face, and then I screamed at the futility of screaming at all.”

It was difficult to imagine the captain so overcome, but even more difficult imaging having to endure all this.

“I ran over to the closest standing birch, and kicked that, pushed it. The rotting tree groaned but didn’t fall. And so I retreated, ran at it again, hit it with my shoulder, with my head, and fell off it, bounced truly. Fell into the wet grass and looked up at it. But it was moving just then, albeit very slowly. It creaked, and groaned, and made all of the noise it could with its treeish voice, and then, with one last, wet crack, it fell. The rotten tree fell away from me, colliding with another as it went and taking that down too.

“My shoulder ached, snot bubbled out of my nose as my head pounded like a great drum, and I felt all the world like a gaping, pulsating tear, exposing all the tissues beneath, tissues that would die if they were open too long. I couldn’t have put it into those words then, but I was a wound that knew it must be cauterized, burnt until the blood stops flowing and the tissues blacken and close in on themselves. I didn’t have the words, but I knew-sensed perhaps-that that was what I must do.

“And so I got to my feet, ran to the next standing tree. I found a log alongside it, one of sturdier stuff than dead birch. I lifted the small log and clubbed the dying birch in front of me. I hit it, bits of peely white bark flying, again and again, until my hands blistered and split open and blood ran sticky across my palms, and then this tree fell as well. And it went on like this. I pushed and struck and screamed and cried, killing these dying trees, one after the other, killing them and cursing everything I could think to curse, over and over, clearing the already sparse glade like a maddened druid. And this went on, for how long I don’t know. But it continued until I could continue no more, until the wound was seared shut and a dozen more trees littered the ground around me.”

Braylar stopped for a moment, looking back and forth between us as if he had nearly forgotten there was an audience at all. Then he said, “Rather than help prepare my father for his funeral, I fled to the forest to knock down trees and rip my hands bloody.”

Vendurro clearly wasn’t accustomed to being in a position to soothe his captain at all, but he tried just the same. “You weren’t but a boy, Cap. And it was wrong, you having to prepare your father like that. Sorry if you feel the opposite, but got to say, that’s rough, even for a no-exception making kind of people. You weren’t nothing but a boy.”

“True enough. I was but a boy. But I was also the only relative capable of avenging my father, and I was off to a miserable and shameful start. I vowed then that the moment of weakness in the deadroom would be my last. Vowed that I would punish the man who killed my father, who prevented me from having even the chance to grow to appreciate the man he was, instead of recoiling from the one I thought I knew. I made these vows and several more, not knowing that they were but the first I would likely break.” He blew on his hands, shook his head, and said, “Rest while you are able.” Then he disappeared behind some trees.

Vendurro looked at me and said, “Revealing a cowardly deed is about the bravest thing a man can do. Not saying it’s cowardly, what he done, running like that. Sure I would have done the same, or bawled like a babe before even getting to that deadhouse, had to be dragged there kicking and screaming. But in his eyes it is. And…well, plague me, but I never heard him go off like that in all my years. Can’t say it don’t make me a wee bit nervous.”

I couldn’t disagree.

Vendurro moved off to find his own spot to sleep in and I looked around at our company. With Syldoon on the ridge, out in the woods to spot any incoming patrols, and back with the wagon, it really did seem a meager force. I pulled my thin blanket around me, vowing not to think about the likelihood of us all dying in this forest, and tried to find any stretch of earth that wouldn’t prove miserable. Even after clearing out every pine cone, pebble, and stick I could find, my chosen patch of ground still seemed just as bumpy and intent on keeping sleep at bay.

I tossed and turned for some time, and each movement only served to make things worse. Still trying to get over my amazement that Braylar not only spoke at great length with little reticence at all, but chose to reveal something so intimate and painful, I wrapped my blanket on my shoulders and walked out of our small glade, careful not to kick any of the bodies on my way. They were easy enough to avoid, even in the dark, as the Syldoon were breathing deeply or rumbling away in a mixed cadence of snores.

I climbed over a log, ducked under a tree, and was looking to find a good place to relieve myself. It was the woods, after all, so there wasn’t a really bad place, but I’d been told to walk far enough way that I didn’t piss on anyone’s head, but not so far I got lost in the woods.

Satisfying those requirements, I was about to pull my trousers down when I felt, rather than saw, someone nearby. I froze, hoping it was another Syldoon, and not a Brunesman sneaking through the brush, or an animal, or better still that I was merely imagining things.

I looked around. With the horned moon high in the sky, it didn’t take long to see Skeelana’s silhouette. I took a few steps closer, approaching from the side, watching the details of her profile materialize in the dark-the large lips, the puckish nose, the hair seemingly trying to flee her head in as many directions as possible. I was about to say her name softly when I noticed her eyes were closed. She stayed like that, standing perfectly straight, eyelids shut but fluttering gently, for a long time. As she wasn’t a horse, the only other thing I could imagine was that she was one of those people afflicted with nightwalking. There was a man like that in my wing of the university. He could wake up almost anywhere at any time of night. The headmaster had warned us to leave him be, under threat of the cane, so we had. I’d never seen them wake him or try.

But that was a contained building and complex-this was the wild, with a camp full of enemies half a mile away. I was debating whether to try to rouse her, or to possibly try to direct her back to wherever Soffjian had bedded down, when Skeelana’s eyes suddenly sprang open.