Tim Leach - A Winter War

A screaming voice nearby – Chodona, Bahadur’s son. He was there upon the ice, tiny it seemed amongst the tall men of the Legion, pinned by a fallen horse. In his high child’s voice he was screaming at them to stop, to wait, that he surrendered. But they could not understand what he spoke, and as the swords fell Kai heard a high-pitched squeal, like a hare in a trap.

Kai looked elsewhere – for Bahadur, or the Cruel Spear, his sister’s name upon his lips. Yet the only familiar faces about him were those of the dead.

‘Kai!’

A call, piercing through the air. A singer’s voice, that cut through the howl of battle. What it meant to hear a name, in a place such as that. Kai turned to answer it, and saw Bahadur, somehow still mounted, the long spear running red in his hand. He rode forward, sure footed, one hand on the spear, the other reaching forward, beckoning.

Something flickered past Kai’s head. A little line of darkness, the shadow of a spear.

There was something wrong with Bahadur – grey faced and still, as though some witch’s curse had aged him a decade in a moment. Then he turned in the saddle, and Kai saw the spear in his side, the wicked point buried deep, just as Bahadur fell backwards into the mob. The whirling mass stealing him away, the wave of swords falling over him bright and coming back up red.

All about, the spears flew from the Roman shield wall, and men and horses died upon those points, and Kai could hear the horns of his own people, calling the retreat.

The circle of iron closed about him – no horse for him to mount, no path to safety off the ice. The stillness then that comes with the certainty of death, the chill touch of omen and fate that removes all fear. A gladness, of sorts, for who would wish to outlive one’s people? Who would want to be the last one left, when all had been lost?

Others were coming – they were all around now, dancing shapes upon the ice, grey death in their hands. Everywhere he looked, they were about him. His breathing came fast in the close-fitted helm, his vision obscured and narrowed through the eyelets. He turned his head from side to side, trying to see who came closest to him, to see which man he might take with him to the Otherlands.

But there was another shape coming with the Romans, moving closer, moving faster. Crawling over the ice, back legs dragging, front legs scrabbling at the ice. It drew close to a man of the Legion – a hoof flickered, and the Roman was bowed in half, clutching at his side. A second strike, a ring of metal like the striking of a bell, and the Roman was on the ground, eyes rolled back white, blood pouring from the staved helm.

Bahadur’s horse moved forward again, and Kai felt the terrible joy of one who no longer has to die alone. But too late he saw the madness in its rolling eyes, the bloody slather chanting from its lips. It was trapped in some last command from its master – Bahadur had sought to save Kai, to keep him safe, and so did the horse. It bore down upon Kai, rolling him to the ground, lying upon him with a smothering love.

Kai screamed out, pushed up, fought to lift it, but it only moved further upon him, shutting out the light.

The weight bore down. He could not breathe.

In the darkness of the dream, a circle. A circle of men and women, dressed for war, watching and waiting.

The land warped and shifted, in that impossible, changeable way of the dream. Sometimes it seemed they stood upon the green sward of a grazing ground, at others in a clearing of the forest fringed by leafless trees. Or ringed by the huts of a Sarmatian village, where it seemed he could hear but never see the daughter he had left behind. Every place and none, that was where the circle stood.

The faces changed, too. Some were the living, and others the dead. He saw the first man that he had killed, a tall and soft-faced Dacian – jawless, tongue lolling and slobbering on his throat from where Kai’s clumsy axe stroke had hacked away half his face rather than splitting his skull. His mother was sometimes there, though she wore a changing face. She had died giving birth to him, and the face she wore was one he had made of stories he had been told.

The faces changed – all except one. For there was a man kneeling before him, there at the centre of the circle. And that man was always the same.

The hilt of the sword was slick in Kai’s hands as he held it beside his head, his breath frosting on the iron of the blade. A broken weapon, half the blade lost in a battle that had been fought long before Kai was born, yet it was still a rare treasure for a people reduced to fighting with weapons of bone and stone.

The stench of sour, fermented milk was in the air, wet upon the beards of the men in the circle. A drink of the old times, for this was a ritual of the past. They rapped their weapons against scale mail and shield – a sham battle, war music for what had to be done.

Kai raised the sword higher still, his arms straight and the sword reaching towards the sky. His vision spun and danced, and not just from the workings of the dream. When he had stood in that circle in the waking world, his vision had wavered too.

The chant stopped.

In that dream he hoped to strike fast, to make his kill in the single beat of a heart. As always, he swung too slowly. For the man on his knees raised his head, locked eyes with Kai. Those eyes – bright and kind – that looked back at him with love.

The sword swung and bit, the dream turned and swirled, and darkness was all.

He was not certain, at first, that he had returned from the dreamlands. Blackness and stillness, an unseen weight that seemed to pin him in place – all familiar sensations of his dreams. But the air was filled with the stench of blood, that hot, coppery smell that never found its way into sleep. It was no invisible force that held him in place; there was something of weight and flesh that covered him. And then Kai remembered the horse.

He could not seem to breathe, his lungs half crushed, and the panic made him gasp too hard, driving him from consciousness for a moment as the blackness stole back across his sight. He breathed again, shallow and careful, and felt the chains of the dream slip from him fully.

He was beneath the horse, pinned in place. He could turn his head but a little, and when he did so a sliver of light crept to the edge of his vision. He could see the ice, marked black with blood. He could see the still shapes that lay upon the ground.

Kai listened for the sound of a battle still being fought – the death songs of surrounded, doomed men, the panicked, high-pitched screams of routing warriors being ridden down. Or for those sounds that come after, the heavy tread of those who wander the battlefield, cutting rings from fingers and scalps from heads, opening the throats of the wounded left behind.

There was only silence, and the wind.

Gradually, Kai worked his way loose, crawling like a snake from beneath the body of the horse. There was pain in his side, a stabbing three-pointed pain, but he could not think on it until he was free, and he crawled and wept and cursed his way slowly across the ice until he was out from under the weight of the corpse. He tried to stand, but his legs shivered and gave way, and he fell back to sitting, looking upon the silence of the battlefield.

A fortune in iron lay about him. There were tales that the elders told around the fire, of men cursed with useless wealth, starving and weeping in a world of gold and iron and praying for meat and milk. Had he the wagons and horses to cart the treasure away, if he were to live beyond the coming of the next day, he would have been a great man of his people.

But it would not be. For there was nothing that moved on the field of ice, only the familiar dead remained, friends and companions. Padagos was there – Kai could remember a hard winter’s night spent curled in that man’s arms, scouting for a cattle raid, too close to the Dacian border to risk a fire. Now Padagos was curled up once more, almost sleeping it seemed, pillowed with red blood. Kai could see Galatus as well, not so far away. Always quick with a joke, and now he lay with his face carved into a permanent smile. And Mada – she had been so frightened before the battle. He could remember the rattling sound of her hands trembling on the spear, stilling as Kai and Bahadur had told her the old lies of war. No need for fear now, for her hands were brave and still around the spear that had split her tattered armour. Even run through, she had hoped for the impossible, fought for the impossible, to live against the odds.