There was even more discomfort among us now than there had been after the first time we shirked duty and embraced dereliction as a substitute for the dirty grind of battle. Our numbers were greater than those of the Priangeles, and additionally, they barely had weapons! So this retreat was much, much worse. At least the first time we had fled, there was a good chance we would have lost the battle. As for the Priangeles, if our archers' hands had not quaked so violently with fear, we could have simply lobbed arrows down the hillside and easily won the day. If we couldn't even manage this, then what good were we? Great doubts assailed us. Were we not paid by the king to protect his lands from disreputable bandits like the Priangeles?
A few nights later at camp, Niomedes the Intransigent smashed his shields together in front of him. This was the signal we acknowledged as one that meant high oratory. Niomedes' frame was squat and low, but he was hearty, with the chest of a rhinoceros, and the plumes of his helmet, culled from the most vigorous peacocks in Falazia, roared triumphantly above him, creating a span almost as tall as the warrior himself. On the fields of battle, he used his height to his advantage; no man could equal him in the "duck and thrust," a strategy that consisted in overprotecting his head and recklessly pushing his naked chest and loins out to be exposed to enemy weapons. When the sword or pike tried to hit its target, Niomedes would sidestep the thrust of the weapon, crouch like a ferret, and with his falchion flashing ominously, he would amputate one of his enemy's feet, expertly finding the exposed flesh where the greaves met with the boots. Niomedes' father begot him with the young dwarf, Cleompta, this accounting for both his short height and the muscles that permitted him the idiosyncratic movements that depended so heavily on muscles not entirely human.
"Ledomians!" he bellowed. "After our second craven escape, I met with Tremonedus the dream-reader, and this great oracle told me of the vision he had had the night after we escaped those charm-less Neanderthals. He stated that in his dream it was indicated that we had lost touch with our sense of honor in war, but that we were soon going to get it back."
Niomedes turned around to acknowledge Tremonedus, who was in the process of urinating about fifty yards away into a stream. He looked embarrassed when it came to his attention that Niomedes so indiscreetly made a point of naming him and pointing him out. Seeing his mistake, Niomedes jerked his head back and continued, addressing Tremonedus as if he were among the listeners:
"Tremonedus, sage, you have divined rightly that the sacrificial blood you speak of we will indeed let flow from our veins, arteries, and hacked-off limbs, and these kinds of injury, unfortunately, will indeed signal the violent onrush of approaching death, as this cowardly trend seen so readily in our behavior of late must come to an end with the next army that we come across. We are warriors, after all, and physical pain and death are a part of war; we seem to have forgotten this. It is not for us to quail in the face of our adversaries, or yield like women in the face of danger. We must charge into battle without concern for injury, and instead let the grim butchery of armed conflict declare us victor or vanquished. Yes, I say, there will be death, but that is most specifically for the gods, not us, to decide. We must accept this, and not retreat in terror at the least sign of physical harm. We are some of us mercenaries, we are some of us lieges to the king, others are impressed, yet we are all fighters united by our allegiance to the sovereign .... Let this be our bond: that we die together, and not, unless we are greatly outnumbered, flee in panic!" Niomedes again smashed his shields together to quell our rising shouts of vigorous agreement. "Be the blood ours or of our enemies," he screamed, "the earth wants blood, and it shall be requited!"
The warriors bellowed anew with clamorous assent, as the ocean rises after a typhoon, the resulting displacement enacting a violence that the future waits for in the distance with outstretched hands—to grasp and wrestle it into submission, to pin it down on the earth before stabbing it to death yet again. Each man felt within him a furious sense of violent anger, fueled by a stoic resolve that imminent extermination was inevitable.
Priasphalatius unsheathed the dagger next to his sword, unclasped the bands which held the protective bronze armor to his forearms, and repeatedly dragged the ruthless steel of the blade up his charred wrists toward his shoulder and back to his wrist, forming with this repetitive motion multiple lines of blood that dripped down irregularly. We roared triumphantly at this spectacle; our screams we hurled into the sky; our blood seethed within us like water in cauldrons hanging suspended under the fires of hell.
Yes, I felt myself greatly moved by Niomedes' words, though not so much as Priasphalatius. Indeed, our ends may come, but our courage would live on; it wasn't our continued existence on earth that would define us, but our icy fatefulness on the fields of grim butchery and carnage. The twilight gleamed furiously at us; yes, and we gleamed back at it, marching toward it ominously: we would butcher the sun itself if it got in our way. Our enemies were to the west; mass slaughter and extinction awaited us. We went without sleep, we marched through the night, we butchered through the hours of the day, in search of a town we could raid and claim in the king's name. The courage of our resolution did not falter. We felt that our obliteration was so complete, so ineradicable, so utterly imbued with absolute annihilation, that our voices went into the future, subjecting it, bending it, and hammering it to the will of the present moment; we could hear the agonized cries of our future victims as they begged for a mercy we were too savage to grant them. The determination of our footsteps seemed like linear time piercing through the nebulous haze of cowardice that had sullied our instincts for carnage; the future became a form of negative dust, ashen with the promise of doom and the hacked limbs of rampant, uncontrollable butchery. We journeyed on—our voices and our feet moved ahead of us, persisting, and our swords, nestled edgily in their sheaths, cried out for blood. Retreat now wasn't even possible. Failure was not an option.
And I saw in Bencetheleus of Neomia a new resolve. He strode like a god, his lean but muscular buttocks swinging themselves back and forth with graceful masculinity—his loins, presumably, hale. The strength revealed in the agility of his frame reminded me of how capable he could be on the fields of carnage.
Though our battle with the Antikiedos had taken place long ago, I remember Bencetheleus' form on those fields of slaughter like it was yesterday: he had drawn his broad arm back, the muscles across his shoulders like the flesh of an enraged ridge of mountains rippling with the undulations of raw, protuberant muscle. The heavy shaft of his spear flew from his arm as a bolt of thunder roars from the heavens, striking a swineherd's shack and turning it to fire and ash, incinerating it entirely, the swineherd inside engulfed in unspeakable agony as his life, burnt beyond all recognition, rises up with the consuming fire and smoke to meet the vacuous abyss of the sky. The spear left Bencetheleus' hand and screamed through the air with propulsive fury and pierced through the warrior Anclides' breastplate, sliding easily through his flesh, tearing through his ribcage and lungs—the point protruding through the back of his cuirass, impaling the hero completely. It was a good shot. Raw blood dripped down the victim's body, the gooey red grease wetting his backside and loins. He tottered, and the body of Anclides, once so lithe and muscular, was now nothing but meat—his body was now a smorgasbord in progress; the process of decomposition would soon be preparing his mangled carcass for the vultures and other assorted carrion birds of war to glut on mercilessly. Before the victim's life flew out of him completely, Benetheleus strode over, raised his sword and mercilessly, if a bit pointlessly, cut his victim's head off, sending it rolling into the anguished field of slaughter. No more would Anclides greet the day. No longer would he enjoy his wife's embrace, or sport through the fields with his siblings and children.
I felt a great steadying force in thinking this over. I regarded Bencetheleus' resolve. How could a man like this ever cower before anybody? How could he shrink from the hack and grind of battle? With such a warrior as Bencetheleus of Neomia, however great the cowardice we had shown in the past, it could never last.
We knew that we were nearing Hesphresia, a town on the outskirts of Samanthicus, lands where some of the enemy troops could have been billeted. The region's women were known to be beautiful, and its livestock were healthy; we reassured ourselves that our king had noted many times that any village successfully raided in this region would be worth the effort. The previous night we could see torchlights and campfires blazing only miles ahead in the distance. Even with our newfound courage, it would be best to start small with these settlements.
Day having broken, we strode across the fields. Within a mile we would finally reach some conflict—at least some angry residents to decapitate—and that done, we could proceed from there onward across the plain. We strode up a pasture, toward a series of huts on fields separated by clumps of pine and birch. A little girl, no more than four years old, had left one of the small thatched huts where the slaves were presumably housed. She appeared to have just returned from a well; she held in one of her tiny hands a small bronze cup of water, in the other a little toy animal, perhaps a unicorn made of cheap lamb's wool. She put the toy animal between her arm and her chest, rubbed her eyes sleepily with her tiny little fist as we approached, and looked at us with confusion as we began to slow our footsteps, our front ranks coming to a terrified halt.
We turned in the other direction, and ran away from her. We ran like hell. We ran away, down the slopes into the gullies and through the streams and into the plains. We followed the paths in the woods into the clearing and then we continued running. Our boots left footprints indicative of terror on the soft soil of streambeds. We let our feet ensure our safety by means of putting distance between danger and our bodies. Our rapidly beating hearts surged in our chests as our footsteps thundered through the plains. In a collective surge, we ran: we crossed the borderlands; we ran toward safety. That little girl could have been dangerous.
Elmore Snoody is 38. He is currently finishing a degree in English literature.
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