Rodrik Barther (2)

The instant it was done, every archer who had drawn a bowstring threw the bow aside and pulled a sword. Morten had shattered most of our arrows, and that volley was the last we had.

Rodrik saw for himself that Esmartin’s defense army had taken the blow, and raised his sword high.

“Charge!”

The soldiers’ hot breathing and the rattle of shields and weapons filled my ears. Hundreds of feet broke into a run across the plain and tore the bare earth up without mercy. The war cry of our own side at the charge and the faces of the enemy scrambling to raise their shields crossed one another, and in an instant the gap between them closed.

One of our own in the front rank shouted and drove a spear through an enemy soldier’s belly, and the hand-to-hand fighting began.

This is the melee Esmartin’s defense army intended. Once they knew we had a mage among us who had killed Morten, holding the walls for a siege amounted to baring their necks and saying, kill me. So the enemy chose instead to draw us into hand-to-hand fighting, near enough to a melee, both sides’ forces tangled together where no mage could step forward carelessly. The stratagem bound a mage’s hands, and it bound them well. Morten himself, after all, had brought no troops with him for fear of catching them in his own magic, had he not?

But there is something the enemy has overlooked.

It is the fact that Rodrik is a superb warrior even when he uses no magic, and—

“Uwaaah!”

—the fact that a hand-to-hand fight does not particularly give them the odds either.

A spear came thrusting in between the soldiers with a shout behind it. I caught the shaft, hauled on it, and kicked, and a solid weight came back through the wood.

In a melee, whoever goes down had best give up any intention of living.

I turned my eyes from the soldier I had kicked and forced a hand in between our own side’s spears and blades. The enemy soldier whose shield I had caught swung a blade on reflex, but it would not bite through my armor. I hauled the shield toward me and drove my sword into the throat behind it, and in that moment a violent pain bored into my belly.

A spear shaft driven clean through my stomach came into view.

Not a blow swung at random but a spear thrust in with its mark properly chosen.

Someone who has seen a fair share of fighting.

The soldier gripping the shaft, glaring at me.

The face was twisted like a fiend’s, and tears were pouring down it.

It is an age of war.

The soldier had grown just used enough to it that the weight of taking a life, of plunder, could be shaken off with a few tears.

— CRACK!

I felt the spear being pushed deeper. I said nothing. I snatched at the arm instead and dragged it toward me; the balance went, and I drove my sword into the throat.

Nothing but a death cry with the blood boiling in it marked that someone had been here, if only for a moment.

“A monster! It’s a monster!”

The shout burst out from somewhere.

The soldiers’ shouting, and the overpowering reek of blood.

It is death. The noise of death and its echoes are binding my whole body fast. Mechanically, the way one passes through an everyday scene, I moved my arms and legs toward the enemy’s line. The gray, unfeeling field of my sight is turning red.

The more blades passed through my body, the more my armor went to rags, the more my head filled up with worry.

Lilian will worry.

The touch of her hand on my forehead, when I came back from dealing with the revenant, flickered before my eyes. What expression had she worn, touching my face with that cool, soft hand? Her expression was so horribly like Eladin’s, back when she used to stroke my wounds, that I ended up turning my head away.

Stray thoughts.

Woolgathering in the middle of a battle, and a large tangled melee at that.

A lapse unlike me.

As though someone had rebuked me for it, my hand tightened on the sword before I knew it.

Only when I came back to myself did I see the sword falling toward my shoulder. Losing the right arm would be a nuisance. I raised my left arm and took the sword on it. A ghastly pain came as the flesh was gouged out, but I paid it no mind and shoved my body forward.

I could not see how many of them had fastened on to me. If I let my strength slip for even the shortest moment, it would not be the spears and blades that crushed me flat but the sheer weight. Even so, I pushed against the line with my whole body.

Though blood seeped from the punctures until the leather was soaked through, though the soldiers held on to the spears run through me and pushed back.

I swung the sword. A solid feel came back through my hands, but what I had cut I could not tell.

There is no need to know. Everything around me is enemy, and all of it has to be cut.

Once I had bored into the line I could have shut my eyes altogether and simply flailed my arm about. A flash of light rose, and blood spouted.

“GRAAAAAAGH!”

Someone’s scream filled my eardrums. Those cut across the vitals showed eyes steeped in pain; the ones who were not screamed instead.

I cannot see it, but I can feel it. So long as I hold out here, the tide of the battle leans our way. The stretch of line I broke into is on the right, a little apart from where most of the soldiers are. If I cleared this spot, or at least pinned it down, our own side had the advantage in numbers and would gradually come to surround the Esmartin army. Nobody had been pushed back and nobody had advanced; the deadlock had dragged on and on.

At some point the weight bearing down on me began to lessen.

The metal ring of spears and blades striking, coming in without pause.

Our own line had finally come up as far as the point I had pushed into.

Not idiots after all.

Once more it fell to me to open a way.

I stepped back once, then dropped my upper body low. My muscles are sodden with blood and my whole body is heavy. Blood that had run in through the helm wet my lips.

Still low, I threw my weight forward and swung the sword crosswise. The sword took someone’s breastplate, someone’s waist, someone’s arm, and their front faltered. I did not let the opening go and pressed forward.

— SHUNK!

One at a time is a luxury. There is no need to end an opponent’s life. Killing was not required, so with every swing of the sword I tried to put three or four out of the fight.

A sword came thrusting into my chest. I clenched my teeth and held back the blood that surged up. I ran the enemy holding it through, put them on the ground, and pulled the sword out of my chest with my left hand.

All at once a burning thirst ate through my whole body. With the fog as thick as it was there was no shortage of moisture, and yet breathing that damp air did nothing whatever for my parched throat. The soldiers packed in around me on every side were probably to blame.

I wiped the stray thoughts away and thrust the sword out.

By the time I came back to myself and looked around, a fair while had gone by. The fog was as thick as ever, so I could not tell even roughly what hour it was.

While I was vaguely guessing that it had gone past afternoon.

Once again someone’s shouting fills the battlefield. But this time it is different.

“D-don’t come near me! Don’t come near me!”

The soldier in front of me was shaking all over.

Those eyes, watching me after I had beaten everything around us to death.

They are exactly those eyes. Eyes that fear something they cannot know, blanched with a formless terror.

I gripped the spear shafts buried in my body. For as long as it took to tear out all five or six of the blood-slick wooden shafts, the soldier neither ran nor attacked, only screamed.

“O God…”

Even in a place the eye of a god does not reach, are there still those who cry out for salvation? Right up until the sword came down on the neck, the eyes stayed fixed not on the point of the blade but on somewhere far off.

The melee had settled into a lull, and with that soldier’s breath stopped, there was no enemy in sight still coming at me.

“…”

A spearhead was leveled at me. The tip of the blade is trembling faintly.

The person gripping the spear, on the far side of the shaft, was—

“D-don’t come any closer.”

—a mercenary I had passed coming and going in Siltrein.

The hero Tairen Beloa is a Barther by blood who wields magic, and the wandering knight Roan Belgard is a monster that will not even die. Whether they wished it or not, people were coming gradually closer to the truth. The eyes of one who had shed the veil of ignorance neither burned with will nor glittered with sharpness.

“I… I only want to go back to the family that’s waiting for me.”

Whatever scheme Rodrik was hatching, whatever I might be.

People were too tired to hold a question in their minds.

I looked back into those eyes, long dead and with no life left in them, and into the stares of our own soldiers watching me warily, much the same. Had the time come to begin wandering again? I could feel, moment by moment, the hour drawing nearer when I would have to put an end to a life in Erbern that had been short, and had also been sweet.

“Is that so.”

My mouth is bitter. A stink rises, rank iron mixed with sour sweat. Without affirming or denying the mercenary’s words, I moved.

The war was not over yet.

When I lifted my head, the sky had turned orange without my noticing. Getting the fighting wrapped up enough that I could look away had taken a full half-day. As I watched the sunset hanging on the horizon with clouded eyes, a voice came.

“Quite a sight you make.”

Rodrik Barther was walking toward me, and his left arm caught my eye. The cloth torn off and bound around it in a hurry had a reddish cast spreading through it.

“Your arm got cut?”
“Caught by a blind stroke. Bad luck.”

This is no ordinary wound. He might well be unable to use the left arm for some time.

“Friend.”

Rodrik was looking not at me but at the soldiers.

“Seems there’s something to it.”

I made no reply at all.

“Gear gone to rags past all reason, and soldiers giving you a wide berth because they’ve noticed. Am I barking up the wrong tree?”
“No. You’ve seen it right.”

I had no intention of hiding the undeath forever. Even if my position had kept anyone from seeing me during the fighting, it was a thing they were bound to notice sooner or later.

“Well, never mind. It’s a bit absurd, carrying on like this at this stage.”

The soldiers are not the only ones worn out. Rodrik, the root cause of the whole business, was no different in wanting the truth left buried. To be exact, it was less that he was worn out than that he had no room to spare for anything else.

“It’s right there in front of us.”

What lay before his eyes was too vast for him to take an interest in small things.

“We’re really almost there now.”

Esmartin, with not a soul left to hold it.

At the end of a long war of rebellion, the city stood waiting at last for a new master, grand and imposing in its bearing. The white cloth that hung at the end of the wall fluttered, held the sunset in it, and scattered orange about.

“What do you mean to do about the undead that will come at you?”

The city’s troops cannot move because the undead raid them at any hour at all. Most of the soldiers who would have held Esmartin against them were dead, and as things stood it would not have been strange for the city to fall into the hands of the undead rather than of any human.

“We’ll have to stay a while.”
“You mean to take the defense on with our own troops? There’ll be no end of complaints.”
“That much we’ve no choice but to bear.”

Tairen Beloa is no longer the mercenaries’ hero. Having crossed the river there is no turning back from, he will stand above Erbern not as Tairen Beloa but as Rodrik Barther. Is that not a tragedy?

The war brought its curtain down on a Siltrein victory, but it left both cities without the strength to rise by their own power, and nobody was smiling.

Those pulling themselves together, those staying beside dead comrades, those looking quietly up at the sky.

The battlefield, with no victor and only the defeated left on it, was as quiet as a stage after the performance has ended, and as desolate.