Col Buchanan - Stands a Shadow

He’d felt awkward around his wife these recent weeks. He’d found that in her presence his guilty conscience would often make him think of the girl Curl, and it made him uneasy in his wife’s gaze, as though she might somehow see through him.

Now he stared hard into her eyes, unflinching. Marlee clasped her arms around his neck as he held her slim waist in his hands. Their noses touched.

‘I love you,’ he told her.

‘And I love you, my sweet man.’

Her eyes shone with the beginnings of tears.

He held her to him tightly, crushing her against his armour. He did not wish to let her go.

I don’t deserve this woman, he thought bitterly.

The children were already asleep inside. Bahn had kissed his sleeping infant daughter on the forehead, had shared a few words with his bleary-eyed son tucked up in bed.

He couldn’t shake what he’d seen in the streets on his hasty return home. People had been lining the thoroughfares as columns of soldiers and old Molari marched for the northern gates, cheering them on as they passed by, forcing good-luck charms and parcels of food and bottles of spirits into their hands. Some had cried at the sight of them, old men even, stirred by the determined expressions of the soldiers and the knowledge of what they all marched towards.

We can do this, Bahn had thought as his own emotions soared with the collective spirit of the crowds. If we stand together we can get through this.

But then, cutting through the backstreets to make better progress, he had passed countless people rushing with their belongings towards the harbours, hoping to find safe passage off the island, and he had watched them pass with something of envy in his heart.

On the walls, fresh graffiti was painted as though in blood. The flesh is strong. Surrender and be free. The work of Mannian agitators, resurfacing in the city now that it was truly vulnerable, and the majority of its forces were leaving.

Standing with Marlee in his arms, Bahn once more felt the urge to grab his wife and shake her and say, For pity’s sake, take the children and find a way out! But they were words for him alone, for he could never bring himself to say them. Not to Marlee, his pillar of strength, this woman whose father had fallen on the first day of the siege in defence of the city. She would say no, absolutely no, and then she would think less of him as a husband, as a man.

‘Look after them,’ was all he could say amidst the soft thickness of her hair.

‘Of course,’ she breathed. ‘And promise me you’ll be careful.’

‘I will.’

And despite their words of reassurance, they kissed long and hard and desperate, as though they would never see each other again.

On the still-smouldering hilltop, Ash stood amongst the ashes and debris that were the remains of a small fishing village, and stared down at a line of severed penises laid out in the gloom like a children’s forgotten game of half-sticks.

Close by, the charred corpses of their owners lay contorted amid the rubble of a collapsed stable. Ash had glimpsed smaller bodies lying amongst them; children and even infants.

Of the women, there was no sign.

Not for the first time in Ash’s long life, it struck him how death smelled the same no matter if it was man, zel, or dog. Ash had seen such things before in his days with the People’s Revolutionary Army. The long-running war of his homeland had burned the compassion from many men’s hearts. Friends had become unhinged with loss or simply callous and hardened like himself, while those men already tainted with cruelty within had revelled unfettered through a landscape of war where the normal bounds of decency no longer applied.

It had broken his heart the first time he’d witnessed such an atrocity; an anguish almost akin to the heartbreak of a beloved’s infidelity, though much worse than that; like a great lie at the heart of the world, suddenly exposed by shocking vivisection.

‘This is not your war,’ Ash told himself aloud in the darkness of the night.

He almost expected to hear the voice of Nico in admonishment. Those were Khosians lying there in the rubble. The whole country, the boy’s family included, faced slavery or the same fate as this.

Nothing came to Ash, though, no voice of conscience or disembodied spirit, only the vague unsettled feeling that he was as much a part of this as anyone, whether he chose a side or not.

The brief gap in the clouds closed above his head, and pitch blackness enveloped him. Sheathed sword in hand, face and hands blackened with soot, Ash turned his back on what lay there in the darkness.

He held a finger against a clogged nostril and blew it clear, then stepped beyond the ruins to the edge of the hill, where he lay on his belly on the coarse grass and looked down on the glowing tents of the Matriarch’s camp below.

The tents were visible for the lamps that shone within them, and they stood on a rise of ground that was broad and flat on top, surrounded by a palisade of sharpened, outward-leaning stakes, and the black line of a ditch ran around the foot of the position. Behind the stakes, white-robed sentries stood half a dozen paces apart. At their backs, a bonfire crackled in a clear space between the tents. The flames were illuminating the twitching flag of the Matriarch.

Ash ranged outwards with his gaze, taking in the much larger camp that sprawled around the Matriarch’s palisade, perhaps a thousand Acolytes or more. They were surrounded in turn by a band of blackness, and he struggled to make out the double picket lines he knew would be positioned there beyond the light. He couldn’t see them, though; only the fires that flickered further along the dunes, the main army spread out far and wide.

He snapped his attention back to the imperial enclosure. By the look of it, the entrance lay on the western side of the palisade, but he couldn’t see clearly enough from here. He would need to get down there if he wanted a closer look.

Over the course of the next half-hour, Ash descended towards the outermost perimeter, working his way around it as he went. He stopped once to take a drink from a brook running down a cleft in the hill. He stopped again when he was on the flat ground to the west and sensed that he was approaching the first line of sentries, the pickets he’d been unable to see from above.

Ash waited until he formed an impression of what was ranged before him; an outer ring of guards spaced widely apart. He could smell them, their musk of sweat and garlic. He could hear them too: a throat being cleared, the rustle of movement as a cloak was drawn tighter against the chill.

When he thought he knew where the nearest two were located, Ash crept forwards carefully through the space between them. It was no more difficult than that.

Ahead stood the inner line of pickets. He could see them silhouetted against the many fires, standing some fifteen paces apart. They were too far out, he thought in his experienced way; more vulnerable here in the backlit darkness where they were visible but could barely see.

At the heart of the camp stood the Matriarch’s enclosure. Barbed wire had been stretched in coils between the stakes of the palisade. The ditch below it was invisible from his position; most likely filled with caltrops to impale the soles of unwary feet. At least he could see the entrance to the enclosure better. It was covered by a screen of wood, and while he watched he saw it being dragged aside to allow an Acolyte to pass through.

Ash had a decision to make: whether this was to be a reconnaissance or a full attempt at reaching Sasheen. He’d seen enough to know there was only one way for him to gain access to her enclosure.

He lay down on the cool grass and rested his chin on his hands. Tried to sense the flow of it all. The opportunity was there all right, though it was a risky one. And no telling what procedures the guards were following at the entrance to the enclosure – not from here.