The Hollow March

by Chris Galford

  The spider smiled. “Always, my lady, always.”

  * *

  Trumpets rattled sabers when the sun arose, creeping inch by inch over the icy wasteland. Voren watched it rise, watched it spread the shadows across the land in long tendrils, and was silent. Cold had numbed him as much as his thoughts, and though the sunlight breathed some semblance of warmth into this barren place, he felt none of it. The other men of his patrol mocked him for it at first, but when they realized they could not get a rise out of him, they called him deadweight and shifted off into their pre-laid orbits, leaving him to his own devices.

  Voren made the rounds in shoes that were another man’s to walk, and when he was done he shed the armor that was too heavy for him and the pike that did not well-mold to his baker’s hands, and started back for the tavern. His first thoughts shifted to his own tent, and for the sleep he knew he needed, but he shunned it. There was nothing there he wanted. It was already packed and set for march.

  There was nothing for him at the tavern either, he realized, but he had nowhere else to go. It ate him up inside. Everything he had done had culminated in a single moment, and yet that moment had been taken from him, as surely as his father had. He scratched at his chin—the lightest shade of stubble was beginning to rouse there. At another time, he might have felt proud of that, or taken a blade to it for respectability. Now, he did not care. It was merely another inconvenience. There were many of those. Most were of his own making.

  Without Essa it had all been for naught, he thought wearily as he dragged himself through the streets. Men were rising, stretching, going through the rolls. Tents were being stripped and corporals were marching through the lines, barking orders at any unfortunates made too lazy by the brisk morning chill. Voren walked on, dismally aware of the loneliness clinging to him. Essa was the only reason he was here in the first place. He had ratted to Brickheart on the auspices of gaining her. He had been sentenced here because of her. He had lost a finger because of her.

  Voren winced at that, holding his hand aloft against the low-lying sun. The other fingers flexed, and the pinky of his glove lay flat against his palm. He felt nothing. What was a baker without his hands?

  Life had been simple, if not necessarily easy, in the days that had gone before. Now it seemed that life would be a string of one disappointment after another. There wasn’t even hope of end. He was a supplyman, nowhere near the front. While other men fought and died and saw an end to the struggle, he sat in camp and divvied up boxes of hard tack. The only way he would die was if the cold came to take the rest of him.

  A few men had roused by the time he arrived, one of them still with a whore on his arm. She clawed at his chest and pressed kisses into his shoulder, but he shrugged her off with a grunt and told her to get, all the while fiddling with his belt. When she persisted, he slapped her rear, and repeated himself. Looking much reduced, the woman slunk away for the rest of her clothes.

  Serves her right, Voren supposed. She was one of the ones that had laughed at him the night before.

  The men paid him little heed as he wandered between the tables. A door slammed from somewhere down the hall and he heard a woman weeping. His ears pricked at the sound and he found himself drawn back toward the rooms. He saw a girl wrapped in a sheet, hair disheveled, sobbing as she disappeared behind another door. His heart stopped; he stood frozen. One of the men called out to him, asking what the fuss was about. Voren ignored him.

  “Essa,” he murmured, and in spite of everything, he wished to stride up to that door and demand to know what had happened. He would hold her as she cried and tell her everything would be alright. It wouldn’t help him, but it would surely help her.

  Rowan’s room. She was going to Rowan’s room. Voren’s attention swiveled to the room on its left. She had come from Rurik’s room. Some of the swell of his concern went out of him then, and some of the void bled a little deeper into his veins. Fists clenched as he took a determined step toward the room.

  It would be so easy. He would take one of Rurik’s own daggers and drive it through his heart. The boy would cry out for mercy and still he would stab, again and again, until the boy no longer moved and his words could no longer hurt them. Any of them. Soldiers would come, and they would bear him down, but Rurik would be dead. Satisfaction would be his.

  He looked solemnly between the doors, and unclenched his hands with a deep, steadied breath. What happened in the dark? All night he had faced the images, and they had rotted his mind. Essa bending to Rurik’s touch. Essa moaning Rurik’s name. It had burned him until he thought he would surely be scorched away, but then it deadened him, and though the images went on, he simply became numb. In the darkness, he had brought them together, and that was the worst of it. Everything he had done had turned on him, and not only that, it helped Rurik. It gave him everything Voren had wanted for himself. The thought of it made him sick.

  Yet there she was, fleeing from their rendezvous like some debased street trollop. Alarms rang through his mind. If Rurik had hurt her, if Rurik had taken advantage, he swore there was nothing that would turn him aside from vengeance. He would carve out the boy’s heart and feed it to him before he died. He would light his corpse aflame and scatter the ashes in the ocean. There would be nothing left of him, as there was nothing left of Voren.

  From the beginning, everything had been Rurik’s fault. Everything Voren had done had been for Essa. Everything that had happened had been because of Rurik.

  Now, if he…if he…

  In the end, though, what did it matter? They were in there and he was out here, alone. Rurik had drank of her and she of him, and come the morning march, Rurik would undoubtedly suffer for it, but Voren suffered every day and no one came to him. Even in death, there would be those that looked on Rurik’s grave and wept.

  But not for him.

  In a matter of hours, the army lurched to its feet and was set upon the road. Slush slickened the streets, and as the people watched in dormant horror, the soldiers slipped on the cobbles and trudged through the gates. A few hundred men lingered behind, a paltry garrison for a gutted city. Lieven was intended to serve as a waypoint for supplies. Voren might have stayed there, if he had been given the option. It would have been a better fate than this. Instead, he shuffled in with weathered men and green boys as they trod across the plains, plunging back into the snow they had but lately fled.

  From the beginning, it was a sloppy mess of a day, and it held little hope of shaping into anything better. The pace was sluggish and miserable. It took hours for the army to stream out of the city. The ground itself rose up against them. They sloshed through it, and the horses’ hooves before them, grinding the snow and ice to slush and mud, which caught and clung to the wheels of the wagons. Many were called to put their backs to the wagons, to force them free again. The horses protested against the gruff terrain and the men complained with them.

  For all that, however, Voren’s mind remained set upon a woman. At first he tried to hide from her. Then he tried to distract himself with work. He gnawed at the tips of his fingers and shuffled his feet amidst the snow, but his mind kept returning to Essa and her accoster. By mid-morning, he stepped into the ranks and vanished from his post. As he figured it, if Irdlin took affront, he could discuss with him the virtues of drinking on a shift. They were even, as of the moment. If Irdlin wished to punish him later for the fact, then so be it.

  When he happened on them, he was met with the sounds of desperation.

  “Rowan, I have to speak with her.”

  “She will not see you, Ru. Get you gone.”

  “Please…”

  Chapter 18

  In defiance of nature and all military logic, the Imperial army pressed on through the winter, wading north along the Ipsen River on their seemingly unstoppable march to the Effisian capital. Harsh weather made it difficult to camp in the open countryside, but the soldiers bore it, and the slog went on, day by day.

  The men were dismally aw
are that no one cheered their movements north. Villages were as ghost towns before them, the only eyes to meet them doing so behind the illusional safety of cracked doors and drawn sheets. Food remained rationed out, so that the army did not starve, but nor did they know comfort.

  Because the Emperor forbade the looting of those towns that did not stand in opposition, there were instances of some men attempting to goad villagers into taking arms against them. These largely passed without incident, save for the handful of men lashed for the efforts.

  Scouts kept them apprised of the enemy’s march. The Effisian main corps, led by Prince Leszek, was moving steadily south to meet them. They were well-supplied and well-armed, with many strong regiments among them—battle-hardened veterans who would fight to the death to defend their homeland. Despite certain misgivings, all were assured that they maintained a numerical superiority, and that Assal’s will stood firmly behind them.

  Rurik spent the days surrounded, but alone. Having been permitted into his brother’s entourage more by lack of anywhere else to go than by his brother’s generosity, he found himself amidst men better armed and armored than his friends, but no more given to conversation. The majority ignored him, treating him like a victim of the plague. It would not have been as such, he knew, if only Ivon had shown any sort of kindness. As it was, the soldiers mimicked their lord, and their lord had little to say to him.

  True to his word, he did not attempt to speak with Essa again after that first day. Much as it pained him, he spared precious few words with Rowan, and gave his words to Essa through him, but he was given no sign of whether or not they were delivered. Only Alviss made the occasional foray into Ivon’s company, and these days only darkened Rurik’s spirits further. Though Alviss smiled and spoke to him, both were wearied things, and in the old man’s eyes he could see that something had diminished between them, that a darkness loomed overhead or just out of sight, threatening what once had been. The old man still loved him, but there were doubts, and even his stoic gaze could not hide their murky depths.

  In those hours when Alviss came, Rurik found the company of his brother’s men much improved. Though the nobles shied away, the men from Verdan remembered the Kuric and they greeted him with open smiles. Even Ivon joined in conversation with his former teacher, and the two shared more than a handful of laughs. Sometimes, Rurik was invited to join them, but even as Rurik laughed and shared their jokes, his sense of isolation grew.

  It was depression born of the realization that they did not come to speak to him. He was only as good as the company he kept.

  His most precious moments were those spent pressing for details on Essa. “How is she?” he asked, in those rare moments he had his guardian to himself. Alviss always grew grim at that, but he told him all he knew.

  “Pain and silence,” he answered.

  Fatigue dominated her and silence lingered about her like a funerary pall. Of men’s touch, an irrational fear she seemed to be taking root. She kept largely to herself, and said nothing of Rurik, save what she told him one night at camp. Those words hurt worst of all.

  “He does not know me,” she had said. “If ever he did, he should have known that was not me that came before him.”

  For Rurik, the loss of Essa was worse than any dagger’s twist. Her absence was felt as the loss of all that was good in himself, for she was every bit as much a part of him as his own limbs. It was the loss of an inexhaustible source of joy and stability in his life, which no labor might restore. Food did not taste any less sweet, nor the air lay any heavier about him, as poets had long written, but life seemed to lose a great deal of its substance, and its purpose, in her absence. He wandered as if in a trance. The tracts of snow stretched on and on before him, and the desolateness settled heavily about him without Essa’s mirth to lend the miles any shape.

  The loneliness was worst at night, in those long hours after twilight when he and Essa once walked alone among the tents, or lay awake, talking in whispers.

  Coupled with the words of his father’s death, such isolation was enough to rend sanity. Rurik did not sleep well. When he closed his eyes, he saw his father’s headless corpse riding him down through the forest, or Essa, screaming at him as she had the morning after their great disaster. Once, he even saw little Anelie, with Essa’s eyes, cradling Ivon’s child. She wept blood, and when she held the babe to him, he saw that it was gray as a rock, and just as dead.

  These were days without laughter. It was hard to think that for six long years they had gone without one another’s presence—for now each waking moment without seemed a torture.

  Then, Essa’s drunken father had been the cause. Yet they found their way home again. By chance, if nothing else. He tried to draw strength from that. Tried to tell himself that some bonds were unbreakable. Still, it was hard to convince himself. Rurik looked out on the winter and dwelt upon it, for it was the embodiment of his fears. If winter taught anything it was that all things died. If the end of their season had come, he knew not how to deal with its arrival.

  At night, he wrote in his father’s journal in an effort to keep both sanity and wits about him. Entries drifted between a soldier’s writings—short, purposeful—and a horrified mess of childish reflections, put to paper so he did not have to dwell on them in mind. There were times he wished to tear these out and do away with them entirely, yet he could not bring himself to do so. However dark, however childish, they laid his thoughts before him in a pattern he could follow. He used them to steady the gathering inquisition.

  There was after all at the heart of all his fears the realization that in his tragedy was also blame. If Essa told it true, and arasyl were indeed the cause of their misfortune, then someone had seen it purposefully done. The possibilities were many, at first, but the mind came round quickly enough. Any number of people might have had access to her drink before Voren set it to her hands, but the question was who might have had cause. His mind circled round and round the baker, and would not turn aside.

  They had been feuding. Voren wanted Essa, of course. What’s more, he had the means. Yet for all that, Rurik could not make sense of his decision, if it was Voren’s to be made. Arasyl was dangerous, addictive. Voren might have killed Essa with it, if he had not taken care, and Rurik could not think a reasonable man would take such a risk. Furthermore, she sat with friends and family all night, and slept with them as well. If Voren had hoped to take advantage, he never would have had his moment. He did not stay with them. Not in waking, nor in sleeping. There was nothing to gain in it and everything to lose. It seemed too brash, too illogical for even the most wild of men to consider. There had to be another.

  Dishearteningly, Rurik realized the picture he painted only made him all the guiltier. He slept beside her. Day and night, he was always with her. For all this opportunity, he had never done it before, but one might see it as desperation—taking extreme measures to prod something that wasn’t proceeding quick enough. Logically, he was the most obvious culprit. Would that he could prove otherwise, but if he stumbled about pointing fingers, it would only condemn him further.

  He wanted to say it was the baker, but he could not. The facts did not add up. He ran through the list of all those acquaintances Essa kept in camp, trying to put a face to even the most wild of accusations, but his conclusions drew him nowhere, and he often sank down, exasperated with himself as much as the situation at hand. It seemed to him that there was nothing he could do and no one he could talk to. Despair flourished.

  Without Rowan, his swordplay floundered as well. That second night from Lieven he practiced alone, but he was distracted, and the air made a poor opponent. He lingered at the edge of the Company’s camp, hoping one of them might come to him, but only Chigenda obliged. The Zuti smiled as he followed his gaze, nodding at the tents and back at him. The Zuti’s teeth squelched a mouthful of chewing tobacco as he looked on, and Rurik shrank away in disgust.

  “Try your luck, boy?” The spearman held his weapon aloft, ge
sturing to Rurik’s sword with the tip. Chigenda eased his legs out, in a mockery of the “proper” stances Rowan liked to take for his swordplay. Stooped by the fire, Rurik was aware that Alviss watched them, and he suspected the old Kuric’s hand in the Zuti’s appearance. “Is best way. Take mind from trouble.”

  When Rurik refused, the Zuti called him a coward. He tried to shrink away, and Chigenda tripped him up with his spear and sent him sprawling. Still, Rurik might have let it go if the Gorjes hadn’t caught sight. A few young bloods clustered nearby rose and circled, jeering. Apparently they thought him the night’s entertainment. Being a matter of pride then, Rurik rose, red-faced, and took up the challenge. The Zuti grinned and spit out his tobacco as Rurik advanced, and Chigenda dropped back, raising his spear to a high-guard, angling the tip down. It was to be aggression, then. Rurik shifted his footing and put up his sword, and laid into him.

  It seemed he was quicker than he had been before. He clocked several of the Zuti’s less subtle gestures, and made a show of parrying and withdrawing. His ripostes were ineffectual, though, for the Zuti twisted free of those in turn and tried to maintain a distance. Save a glancing thrust against the Zuti’s thigh, Rurik’s blows were deflected until Chigenda laughed and promptly turned on him, launching a furious counterattack. The Zuti was quicker. Rurik could block some of the blows, but never all, and the sheer volume of rapid jabs disoriented him, the red plume about the tip destroying his measure of speed and distance. The spearman toyed with him until he couldn’t even make a show of defense, and then Chigenda took him down cleanly, using the pole for a blow to the gut and the back of the neck in quick succession.

  When he looked up, Rurik almost hoped to see Essa watching, but she had since left the campfire, along with her cousin. Alviss shook his head at him, as though reading his thoughts. His face reddened and he felt all the more the fool for it. Still, the Zuti clapped him on the shoulder and lent him his hand.