The Hollow March

by Chris Galford

  “It is not kind,” he muttered. “Not kind at all.”

  Tessel’s dark eyes—the Emperor’s eyes—grew grave. “What do you bring?”

  Rowan and Essa lay the body down before the Bastard and his men, and reluctantly pulled the cover from their lord. A strangled cry broke from several among them, but Tessel made no sound, save a sharp intake of breath as the cover was drawn. His face—waxen, suppressed.

  “Father…” the misbegotten son murmured, stretching out his hand to touch the cold flesh. He retreated as soon as he had touched it, folding his fingers against his chest. No longer a man. Rurik thought that he might hit him. Tessel looked away, and rubbed at his eyes, and at his hair, a clawing, maddening motion.

  Without looking up, Tessel asked him, “How did he die?”

  Choking for words, all Rurik could think to say was: “Honorably, lord. Honorably.”

  The general nodded solemnly, for a moment lost in thought. Then Tessel rose with a heavy sigh, slapping his hands against his thighs. He hovered for a moment longer, then turned with purpose. All hint of sorrow was stricken from his face. Like a washed canvas. It might have seemed cold, in another time or place, but it only struck Rurik then as necessary—and he was envious. He thought of his own father. He never could have managed such a lie.

  Tessel looked around at his men, and at Rurik, settling on none, demanding of all.

  “Martin, fetch an ammunition cart. We’ll not have him rotting here. The rest—back to your labors. All of you. A man lies dead—that does not mean the battle is. We have work to do and little time to do it. On, all of you, on. And not a word of this to any man. It is time for a reckoning.” Then, snapping back to the pall-bearers, the Bastard jabbed a finger into Rurik’s chest and narrowed his attentions on him alone. “What is your name? I swear I’d know your face.”

  “Rurik,” he gulped.

  “Rurik,” the Bastard repeated. He seemed to weigh it before adding, “It’s the eyes, you know. You were the outcast, yes? Just so—Ivon’s brother.” Seeming to suddenly come into the full meaning of that, the man nearly leapt upon him. “Where is Ivon? My father’s guards?”

  “In battle, ser, or dead. The smoke pulled them apart.”

  “Ser Ettore? Viltenz? Seppelt?”

  He shook his head. They had seen Ettore’s white hair bloodied on the field—Rurik knew nothing of the remaining Imperial Guards, and his mind shook with his body. His legs no longer obeyed him.

  “Wretched thing. Yet there was you. And that—that was something.” Tessel nodded to himself, turning back to his horse. The expression in his eyes was hungry, yet uncertain. “You have done us a service, ser.” That hungry expression curtly appraised him. “Are you still fit?”

  “My arm,” he found himself saying. The rest choked out. He watched it sway, ground his teeth against it.

  “Mace shattered it,” Alviss added for him. “Blade bared the leg.”

  “Then to the doctors with you. Be quick about it. The longer you wait, the more the lines, and time is of an essence with these things. And do not stray. I shall wish to speak to you later.”

  The Bastard’s men gave them no choice in the matter. Rurik stumbled on between them, staring into the field, still waiting for his brother to emerge. He saw him, saw his father and Matthias all stretched out before them, heard their voices, felt their gaze—and at last, the blood and the tension welling up in him simply broke. They made it only paces from the Bastard before he collapsed in a cold sweat, the darkness crashing over him like the rising of a tide. Submerged, he merely slipped away. Like everything else.

  In his dreams, he saw grey-eyed jackals tearing at the corpse of a great gryphon, its stiff wings snapped at the base of its back. A man rode on and on, and another stood atop a pile of corpses, shouting endlessly to the sun. There was a crown atop his head, wrought of paper. He saw himself sitting beside the bodies, and he wondered, even in his agonized illusions, if for all that they would win, they had not given all the more to win it.

  They had lost more than a leader. Men might die in the thousands and the world would go on, effortlessly. The death of one could set the world on its side and reverberate down to the very dregs that held it aloft. With the Emperor’s passing, all the world would shudder.

  And the fool on his broken throne could but laugh, helping himself to the gryphon’s leg.

  Chapter 19

  By the time Roswitte and the knights arrived, the battle was done, and a new battle had begun. Crows circled the field, pecking through the chinks in dead men’s armor and tearing loose the icy flesh where it lay. Men joined them, for while the birds quarreled over food, the men fed on all that shined. All things had their purpose, and they refused to let them go to waste.

  The dead were being brought away in carts. The dying moaned and cried aloud, and there were limbs in heaped bundles within the camp, an ode to overworked doctors largely incapable of dealing with the shattering shots of the lead bullets that had felled them. They could burrow in until they found the bullets, but what the shots didn’t kill, the pus and gangrene often would. Man’s ability to kill always outpaced his ability to give life.

  Baggage trains were being emptied to make room for the excess of bodies, the dead wheeled off in piles to the holes that lay beyond. Men from the neighboring village had been drafted, under heavy guard, to dig through the frozen earth and carve the mass graves into which the majority of Effisian bodies would be dumped. They passed them on their way to the camp, and these slaves looked every bit as pale and haggard as the men they interred. Across the plain, bonfires belched the ashes of the victorious. In death, they would be fed to the wind, that their spirits would be as one with the world.

  They parted ways with little fanfare as they rode into camp. The sellswords went to find someone to whom they could report and Roswitte left to find the youths to whom her life was yet owed. She did not suppose she would see them again. It bothered her less than she thought it might.

  For a victorious army, she did not see a sign of mirth. They may have lived the day, but everyone looked to have one foot in the grave. They met her with haunted eyes. Most seemed affronted by the boldness of her questioning. She didn’t have the time to be polite. Their long faces and harsh demeanor only steeled her resolve.

  Yet few had anything to offer her. Ivon, she learned, was in council, but of Rurik there was nothing. That unnerved her. Days had passed without word from the camp. They had learned from a hunter that the two armies were maneuvering for a clash along the river’s edge. They had seen its red stain seeping through the ice long before they ever reached the field. Then, as now, she had felt the fear rise in her—that knotting whisper that everything she had done, and all she had seen, would be in vain. Her search would not come to fruition. Rurik and Ivon could be two of the thousands waiting for a grave.

  When she finally found someone that could point her way, his words did little to ease her fears. “They’re with the Emperor,” the man said, cutting off a dry laugh.

  It did not take her long to follow that endorsement. The tent to which the hands gestured was deserted. There were no guards, no noblemen. Gryphons fluttered over the head of the tent, but people seemed to step at length to walk around it. She peered inside, but silence greeted there. Papers lay scattered across the table or spilt along the floor. It had not been used for hours.

  Even the body was gone, she learned. Emperor Matthias’s body was ferreted away in an artillery wagon, covered and sheltered. To where it went and whom accompanied it were questions without answer from the masses. Tessel had taken command of the army. The name was unknown to her, but the men spoke lithely of him. He had hidden word of the Emperor’s death and rallied the soldiers. He had organized them and made the final push with the dusk, seizing the Effisian guns on the hill overlooking Iłóm. Then he turned them back on their former masters wherever they rode.

  The Effisians had been driven from the field, retiring before they could be overrun.
The Imperials might have given chase. Tessel held them back. The dead, they said—there were too many already gone.

  What must have been elation had soured by the time of her arrival. No one smiled as they gave her the word. No one laughed. They all knew Matthias was gone, and there was not a one that did not feel it. Darkness had descended, and even with the morn, Roswitte felt as though she walked a moonless night. Their mood, at least, did not isolate her as it might have others. She was already alone. Their solemn segregation only softened her collapse.

  She found Rurik sitting alone beside a fire, some distance from the hushed place, lost to the flames. A sling gripped one of his arms, and bandages bound it up to the shoulder. Alviss nodded to her as she approached, keeping a silent vigil over the boy to which he had pledged so much of his life. Blood had dried along his armor and his beard, but he had made no effort to clean it. The rest surrounded Rurik, drawing in the heat his fire beckoned. All looked to her at her approach, but they looked away as quick. Sorrow hung as steeply there as it did in the rest of the camp. She felt the words bubble in her throat, like a poison waiting to spill. She did not long for her duty. Nor did she long to repeat it when she found Ivon.

  When she sat beside him, Rurik scarcely looked at her. She did not think he recognized her, like the rest. The journey had left her waifish, wasted—just as it had strengthened him. He seemed taller, a bit more weight swelling in the arms and calves. Even broken as he was, he looked more a man now.

  Yet she could not help but see Fallit, and Kasimir’s eyes in his. So much had been given for this wrecked, pathetic creature. How could he be worth so much? There were so many things she wished to tell him. But it would all be for naught. The man was not his father. He did not even realize the blood dripping from his fingers.

  When she spoke, he scarcely stirred, but at the mention of his father, she watched some of the color rush back into him, and his head lifted hopefully. She let his questions come, drawing deep on what little remained of her spirit for strength. Then she set about the task of telling him everything that had happened. To watch the color drain again, and life with it, she felt herself dying all over again.

  About the Author

  Chris Galford spends his days as a freelance journalist and editor. Writing, in all its forms, has been his passion from a young age, but fantasy and science fiction are the sparks that give his nights purpose. A native of Michigan, in his spare time he can usually be found wandering the lake shore with a camera in one hand and a pen in the other.

  The Hollow March is his first major work (followed by At Faith's End in 2013), based on a series of short stories he wrote in the summer of 2008, titled "The Company of the Eagles." It was followed by At Faith's End in October 2013 and by As Feathers Fall in 2015. Another short story set in the same world, The Child's Cry, has been published in the Oct.-Dec. 2011 edition of Lorelei Signal magazine.

  Visit his website at: http://cianphelan.wordpress.com/

  Or contact him directly at: shadowedwolfe@gmail.com