The Hollow March

by Chris Galford

  They might have left her by the road. They might have caved her skull in with their clubs and been done with it. But they didn’t. The leering eyes. Those things both said and unsaid that passed between them in the dark. These things cut the anger out from under her, and began to play at her fear.

  All men are dogs. Dogs, dogs, dogs.

  Roswitte saw Fallit lying in the snow, as the corpse-man had been, the dog picking at his remains. She felt cold all over.

  “Answer me when I’m talking at you, bitch.”

  The bandit struck her with the back of his hand. She jerked and felt the chafing of her binds all the more clearly as she did. A voice in her tried to scream out, but she held it back through bloody teeth. Another few good blows to the head and she might never wake at all.

  “Stop it,” a rasp of a voice called from somewhere behind him, but the bandit stepped to block her sight.

  The bandit was laughing again as he bent down next to her, so she could not evade him. “So what noble’s lackey is you, little lady?”

  She craned her head up enough to spit at him. Blood dribbled down his shoulder and her tooth wobbled in its socket. She swooned, and nearly lost herself in the flurry of blows that followed. A series of stinging slaps, cheek to cheek, twisted her about like a storm.

  Laughter. Pain. Then she was staring up at nothing.

  All but one had surrendered themselves to slumber. The last sat by the fire, warming his hands. He was a small man, with a frog’s eyes. She tried to reconnoiter the lost time. It would not come. One minute waking, one minute dying. Every breath seemed to hold further promise of the same.

  She stirred her bloody wrists. All she succeeded in doing was breaking open the scabs. Fresh, warm blood trickled down her fingertips and dribbled to the frosted rock. She tried to lay down, but the ropes would not allow it. She could stand, or she could kneel, but there was no way for her to lay down, and no way for her to sleep.

  Ironic, in a way. She had spent who knows how long sleeping away her pain, but now when she tried, it was impossible.

  Wanting to scream, but finding no energy to do so, she resigned herself. Blood and agony, that seemed to be all that waited. She had known there would be trouble, but she had naively hoped they could evade it long enough to reach the camp.

  Might be they could have avoided them. If they had used back roads, perhaps—but Witold’s soldiers did not, and they surely would have lost the trail if they had followed only at such distance. The snow was too unpredictable. Perhaps they would have only lost a few days. Rushing. That was their problem. They went too fast, thought of speed and nothing else.

  But her lord needed speed, and now, now there would be none of it. Lord Matair would die upon a chopping block, and she would die rotting in a cell, whether from beatings or from shame of the cruelties that were sure to come. She had failed her lord as surely as she failed herself. But she had also failed his sons. Sons that might now never see the palatine’s motions until it was too late. Sons that might wake one morning to find daggers buried in their backs.

  Her tongue twisted around the word, and it ensnared her mind. They. Somewhere between worlds, she heard the man’s laughter beckoning her home. Not the bandits’. Sweet, friendly, unassuming. Like as much to split the heavens with the sound. She could feel him near and calling to her, and she felt herself crying out for him.

  Fallit. Fighting in the snow. Brawling in the dust. Blood and bones and earth. Surely he was not…

  Frantically, she looked for a sign. The reverberations in her head, like the slow, monotonous beating of a drum, were ignored. Focus through the pain. She narrowed her eyes, peered out into the shadows of the place, trying to stalk them out. Past men. Past flames. Past cold and fear, she spied him hanging from the furthest wall, bound as she imagined she was bound.

  He watched her. Sure as hellfire he was staring back at her, and there was some cross between relief and a new, utter terror coursing through him. He feared for her, she saw, in ways he could never fear for himself. It was the same for her.

  The body was a vessel. It was meant to serve. Life was measured by the measure of others. The laughs they shared. The warm embrace. Quick words and lost chances—a hand combing through a woman’s hair. Life, like rope, a binding—soul to soul, body to body.

  She wanted to reach out to him. Even to talk to him. But he shook his head at her, knowing. He nodded toward the bandits. He knew what they would do. Damn them, damn them all she did not care. A familiar voice—that’s all she wanted to hear. Not phantoms, not ghosts. Memories were pain here, were another slumbering agony she could not bear. It made her remember what she did not have. Something. She needed something in the here and now.

  “Fallit,” she whispered. He shook his head, tried to look away. She persisted. “Fallit, how bad?”

  “I’m fine,” he answered tersely. The frog-eyed thug stirred. Fallit waited a long moment before adding, “But you, oh Roswitte…so much blood. I feared they had done you sure.”

  She smiled, despite herself, to assure him. “Theirs, more’n mine. Walloped my head harder’n a cow to slaughter, though.”

  “I…”

  The words faltered as the short one started to sit up. Fallit shook his head at her, and the bandit groaned, stretching out his legs before taking a glance at them. He sneered and slowly lay back down. They did not trust his slumber enough to risk another conversation.

  But she would, for a time, suffice in a look. There was much that passed between. Mirror, mirror on the wall…reflect the pain, the joy. Sweet pain, stir. Each saw themselves within the other, and each saw hope for a friend that might not live the night.

  By morning, the brigands’ leader was at it again. She had not slept a moment of the night away, so he did not have to force her back to the world. He grabbed her chin and she tried to bite at his fingers, but he merely laughed and shook her head for her, cooing as one might to a baby. Then and there she swore if his cock came anywhere near her, she would surely bite it off.

  How’s that for a baby?

  They beat Fallit as they beat her, but the knowledge that he lived and breathed and stirred was enough to give her strength. Unending as they were, she weathered their blows through torchlight and shadows. Sometimes, she would catch a ray of light through the opening of the cave, but as her eyes blackened and swelled and her mind grew more sluggish, she could not rightly say what time was which, or if any of it was real.

  They were caught in some timeless rock face, forced to bare fist and boot for eternity. It might have been an hour. Maybe days. She did not know. Time was merely the space between unconsciousness—the pain and the hope in equal measure.

  Once, in waking, she found them asking after her again. She managed well enough to tell them, “I’ve but one name. One set of clothes. One bow. I am no noble, and none will pay my way. So either do me in or set me back on my road. But I cannot bear anymore of your useless wind.” She kneeled a little straighter, marveled at the fire in her own words.

  But they did not faze her captors.

  “Oh, they mightn't pay for you, but I reckon they might for this.” From his own pocket, the bearded man produced a wrinkled bit of parchment, no longer folded. Its red wax seal had broken, little scarlet crumbs still clinging to it. “With a seal and everything,” the bandit mused.

  She wanted to tear it from his grubby fingers. To bludgeon him into the same darkness he had bludgeoned her—only to make sure his slumber was a permanent terror. Strangulation, perhaps. But that would shed no blood, and it seemed to her that nothing would do for these men that did not involve their blood.

  “This message here’s your whole worth. What a thing. And that’s what they do, ain’t it? Make you less than human. Well, girly-girl, you may be as ugly as a mule’s ass and dumb as a post, but I promise ya I’ma see your dry little cunny fucked right back to somethin’ like a woman. Ain’t got no other worth for ya, and just wouldn’t be right to let ya go on goin’ on as nothin
’ now would it?”

  She screamed at him, thrashed in her bonds. Even managed to spit her tooth at him that time, which the successive blows had finally jarred free. He looked appalled as he stared down at the discarded bone. But he seized up, snarling, and backhanded her again. Fallit shouted something from across the cave, and she could hear the cracks of fists assailing him for daring it.

  In the bearded brigand’s eyes, she saw some shift, pitiless and whole. He turned from her, to Fallit, and calmly considered some irreversible course. When he looked back, she saw a resolution there had not been before, and for all his talk, and all his bravado, it was only now she truly feared his myriad threats. There had been no purpose before. In the letter or the torture. It was obvious he did not work for anyone—this extra bit was all for sport. Now she spied determination, and it made her stomach cramp.

  “I cannae rut a man. Nor cans we put him to the road. Know the men, know the land. And for you, I’d say, he’d hunt and peck the world over for us. You’re dry, girly, and cold, but ya can warm a man. That bastard’s got no endurin’ features.”

  You can’t. But he could. Please, not Fallit. Not Fallit—I’ll kill you. I’ll rip out every one of your throats, cut off your balls, and I’ll…But she couldn’t. Yet she seized against her bonds, trying to come at the man. He withdrew, laughing, and took it as her reply.

  “I’ll kill you,” she screamed. “If you so much as dare, I will see each and every one of you crawling blind and deaf through puddles of your own blood, forever wondering if this second or the next will be the moment I plunge a dagger through your putrid little hearts.”

  “Oh my, a bit of feist, ain’t ya?”

  Don’t do this. You can’t do this. He drew a dagger, dangled it before her face to show just how powerless she was, and promptly strode across the room. No! Said it or thought it, she did not know. All she saw was the steel, and Fallit, stiffening in his bonds as the bandit neared. The others held him still, made him kneel. Can’t. You can’t. Oh Assal no. Me, not Fallit. Take me, rape me, just not…She surged like a rabid dog. Vaguely, from some distant part of herself, she could feel that she was still screaming and shouting damnation, but they seemed not to hear her.

  Fallit was not looking at them. He looked at her. It broke her heart, made her keen in frustration. But he looked at her, and his eyes proclaimed a great and profound regret, and she saw in him a lifetime of things unsaid and undone. She made one last heave against her ropes, and she thought—she could swear—they were giving way, slipping over the blood running down her wrists.

  “Ros—”

  Less a sound than a whimper. His lips moved, and then the dagger with them, carving a broad red smile across Fallit’s throat. His eyes bulged and his face whitened. She could see his tongue and his mouth struggling around the words, but there were no words because there was no air. Sound devolved in a primal gurgling, the ranger’s throat sagging as blood seeped into his tunic and poured down from betwixt his lips, like so much wine. Still, he watched her, though his eyes seemed to beg her to look away, until he could no longer hold open the lids, and the struggle for air grew too great to maintain. Not like this. Not like this. He rasped and rattled—minutes, days, hours…then sank forward in his ropes and grew still.

  And the man was no more.

  And the woman was no more.

  There were no barricades great enough to wall off the wails building in her throat, and they would come on long into the night, until mind and body broke entirely, and the woman that was withdrew into a place so dark, so deep, no mere mortal blow could ever reach her.

  The end of man was also the end of hope.

  * *

  In the early morning, as a faint and trembling mist settled on the frosted plains, the five of them came on. They crested rises one by one, lingering only to scan the horizon before dipping back toward the flatlands. The plains stretched for miles, on and on, with only trees and low rises to break the monotony of their visage. Behind was emptiness, and beyond lay the same.

  Essa rode some distance ahead, the hunter and the tracker, stopping frequently for a look at some hidden sign of human life, or dismounting to prod it with finger and toe. Always she would return to her saddle, less than satisfied, and the march would go on, matched by more than a hundred other men abreast in the field. Soldiers, all, and scouts—combing for life in these all too familiar fields.

  There may have been a border here, but its bounds were indecipherable beyond the armed camp somewhere to their rear. A year ago, even that did not exist, and the surrounding land was still in the hands of the Effisians. The land never changed. Merely the people that claimed it. Come a summer, or two, and that could change again.

  It was a largely aimless route they took, chasing ghosts it seemed at times. Still, in her silence, Essa read things the others would have missed. Even Alviss, for all his wiles. Signs of scouts, like they, and feints and withdrawals hastily made and hastily covered; signs of exhaustion, choices both boggling and stupid.

  There were the obvious trails as well. Rickety wheels tore even into the frozen dirt, led by two, or half a dozen oxen, at points. A dog’s paw prints led to the place a man had knelt and notched and killed—the blood-stained earth to the west showed where the deer had fallen. The imprint of its antlers and the clumps of hair that lingered in its wake were ample proof of that. A herd of cattle, at least a dozen head strong, had also moved through the area, likely led by some frightened farmer eager to escape the coming bloodshed. He could have come from any one of the numerous farmholds scattered across the plains. She wondered if the cold would get him before he found shelter.

  They watched, once, as another party raided a silo, hoping for some sign of preserved treats, but the serfs that worked the land had taken it and fled, presumably to the protection of whatever lord still held their allegiance. Given the ravages of war it was doubtful, if any of these homesteads even were occupied, that they would find anything worthwhile. What the Imperials didn’t steal, the Effisians either seized or burned in an effort to deny the Idasians fresh supply.

  It was the main reason, they had learned, the Lord Marshall’s efforts had so bogged down. Supply was low. With the Emperor, however, came a supply chain stretching as far as Anscharde, as well as the troops to defend its progress.

  It didn’t make the prospects of a winter war any grander.

  All signs of life pointed east, to a village beyond the next rise, a quiet lumbering town, as yet removed from war and bloodshed, and soon to be removed of such a simple honor as that. The more they searched, the more Essa grew convinced the village was where their quarry lay. Who knew how many serfs and peasants.

  These scouts, if scouts they were indeed, knew how to cover their tracks. Campfire remains had been scraped aside, but only to a point—enough not to look deliberately left behind, but obvious enough to her. Some trails were lost to the shifting snow, others peeled off in unassuming and illogical directions, to lure pursuers into a wild goose chase. What signs she could decipher, however, gestured east, and in force, though she could not say how large a force it might have been. Some were obviously mounted though, which could complicate matters.

  She did not wish to damn a village into ruin, but as Rurik said, the soldiers made their choice when they put themselves in amongst their countrymen. They knew the ruin it would bring.

  Rurik, for his part, was woefully ignorant of the signs before him. He looked down when he rode beside her, looking for inclinations of their quarry, but saw nothing, looked at the trees and the snow and saw nothing but the same. It brought a smile to her lips to see him so confidently struggle through something so dolefully out of his element.

  The city was his, and let him have it. This was hers—every chilling bit.

  In other areas, however, Rurik was nigh unbearable. Alviss and Chigenda kept their quiet and their wits, bending their heads to the earth, and speaking only on discovery or contemplation. If ever she was doubtful, she would turn
to them for opinion on the sign. Even Rowan, for all his restlessness, kept his words to the others, and left her to her thoughts. Rurik, however, had initially insisted upon her company, as he often did, but this morning he did not value a stilled tongue, and she did not have the patience for it.

  His conversation with Ivon had set him to ranting. She bore it for a time, even made half-hearted efforts at dialogue. But he persisted, until she was forced to tell him off. Silence, she demanded. So he slunk back to the others, obviously riled, but guarding his tongue well. She promised herself she would make it up to him later, but for the moment, concentration. That was what she needed.

  Around high noon, another rider galloped out to greet them at a furious haste. The rider—a boy of scarcely thirteen summers—ordered them to push for the village, which he called Arnesfeld. Rurik rightly demanded to know why.

  By sheer dumb luck, it seemed the boy’s own scouting party, of which his master was a part, had run headlong into a band of Effisians scouting the same territory. In the resulting confusion and clash, the Effisians had wheeled around and broken through them on horseback, and fled into the east, and Arnesfeld. Imperials were in pursuit, but the boy’s master had sent him to gather the other parties to join the sortie, lest the scouts slip loose and make it back to their lines. He said this all in haste, and then speedily fled the field for other ears.

  Already they could see groups of armed men scurrying across into the east, plumes of white rising at their backs. The mounted men would get there first. The rest of the party would take some time. If this were a trap, there was much to lose, but that was supposing they had any real choice in the matter.

  Opportunity was a sliver on the hand of time. Sometimes, if one didn’t seize it straight away, it might be lost forever.

  “You realize they could already be back to their lines,” she said.

  The others exchanged uncertain looks, but none replied. Essa chuckled and drew her horse around, and they all plunged on into the snow.