Solstices Obscurity "Nightfall" Ch. 04

"What is all this blathering disquietude?"

Grabbing my candle, I vacate my tree stump to go investigate. As I near the stone pier I pause and a slow sanguine smile begins to cross my lips. There are hundreds of souls, gathering there. No even more than that perhaps as more seem to be arriving as I watch. They look to my light but unlike the majority of the souls that have come here, these men do not flinch back. My smile becomes a toothy grin.

"War, oh thou scaly beast. Thy doth raise thine grim head again once more," I say in joyful glee.

A single man, somewhat grimmer of vicissitude, approaches me.

"Who are you?" he demands.

Somewhat taken aback by his crassness, I look him over. Features plain yet rugged. Masculine. Strong in carriage, but not noble born. A certain inbred set of the eyes I've seen before.

"British?" I ask, as my had strokes my thin chin.

"I am not! I'm an American you French Pig! Now, who the hell are you and where is this place?"

"American?" Confused I look him over again till I find understanding. "You're from the English colonies in the Americas."

"I'm from Virginia, you Frog! You call me an English man again and I'll toss your fancy-dandy-arse into the river."

Smiling, I look past him at the milling souls piling up faster and faster. A few seem to look at this man before me for guidance. So he was a leader of some kind. Even better.

"You are dead, man from Virginia. Dead and likening already, your body has beginning to rot on some battlefield somewhere." My words tumble past the laughter I'm feeling.

Unable to tell my truths from a jests he spits at my feet and starts for me, proving once again the stupidity of the common man. For stupid indeed is any man, noble or Jacobite born that naked as a babe lunges for a man with his hand already resting on a sword hilt.

I run him through with ease.

But he does not quit! Not even when my rapier blade is sprung from his back like a porcupine quill. Laughing at the fiery joy of finally meeting again a man with a spine, I let loose my sword and tumble into the mud with him, us both grappling for my dagger. I'm as giddy as a child with a new toy.

"Yes! Give me a fight, I've been in such need of this!" I scream, as I drive the shorter blade into his vitals.

Then others are upon us, trying to pull him from me, but I let them not. I skin my teeth into his throat and tear the skin and flesh away in such a gorgeous way. He screams and so do I. When I decide that others should join this rancorous, I slash around me with my dagger, letting the blade taste again the hot flesh of other men. Then my rapier is back in my hand, ripped from the man as he falls and I lay about with it. Piercing with that diamond tip the most obvious hanging of targets till as last I have a circle of men holding bloody crotches.

"Come on! More! I want more! No?" With my mouth filled with copper I spit my bloody contempt at the throng. "What are you? Deserters who died with holes in your backsides? Come on, I am but one man and you are many!"

I watch with a smirk as the ones I wounded crawl away towards the safety of the others. Out upon the river Charon's light has appeared and some of them are calling for him to come all the quicker. I laugh at that. Calling for the very devil to deliver them from a demon, as it were. Turning I look down at the first man I fought. He is not trying to crawl but to get to his feet to have a second go at me. I drop my weight on top of him and pin his arms into the mud, my face just over his.

"Do not get on that boat. I know not where it goes, fighting man of Virginia, but it takes away souls like a sheepherder taking his flock to slaughter. Do not trust it." Why I of all people give him this warning I know not, but perhaps I find in him something worth admiration.

He struggles under me for a second, and then goes still. "But if I'm dead then is that not the way to heaven?"

"Or perhaps to Hell. Why go eagerly towards it not knowing which it will be?" I look at his bristled face. "I trust not to any priest's words in this place. Nor would I advise you to do so."

For not better reason than I wish to, I kiss his lips. A gesture he pulls his face away from in disgust. I move just enough to shift my knee and ram it into his crotch. I grin in his face and revel at the scream of pain. Leaving the groaning man to be helped to his feet by the others, I watch from my tree stump as he foolishly boards the boat despite my advice to the contrary.

I pick up my quill, and take advantage to a bloody split in my lip, to write.

War, oh you sweet mistress, how I thank you. I thank you for the life I got to lead with all it's various sins and joys. For without your not so gentle touch I would have been left to die in that dark cell. To see light again only on the last day of my life.

When the distant screams began I thought nothing of them. Screams in that place were not even of notable awareness, similar to the damp stone and smelly rats, just a part of that hell. But then the silence began. A silence so long and terrible I wondered if I had in fact died and not know it had happened. Then the hunger in my belly began to build, telling me I was still alive. Now hunger was also nothing new. The guards would often let us go for days without food if they were of a mind, but this stretched longer than that. I was licking a wet stone corner of the cell for moisture, for my cracked lips, when I heard the silence broken by a cheer of joy. Now that caught my notice for such had not been heard by my ears in so long, so very long.

The sound grew and grew till it was right outside my cell, then the door was flung open. I stood with my back to the wall, my thin wooden bed-stave "sword" in hand ready not not be taken simply. In the months since Yinsen was carried off I had spend every waking hour doing as he had told and taught me. My body was lean, whipcord muscles, and I was not afraid. No fear held me in its grip. All that awaited me was death and she and I were old lovers by then. Pain I knew how to take, how to live through, how to fight through.

The cell opened, light washed my face."

With a smile I reach up and touch my cheek. So still even now, here, a tear can fall at the memory of the happy, dirty, emaciated, smiling faces of the other prisoners who released me.

The joy in those men who had been as I locked into the dark to wait for death, only to be born anew. And that was what it was like. Being born. Those first steps from my cell, the bright light, the pain of it. Those hardy slaps on the back by other prisoners, the terrible turmoil of noise and sounds that assaulted my ears.

Then the some what brutal treatment we were given when we exited the prison. The guttural speaking warriors who had taken the city, Russians I do believe by their language, were busy looting it and put us to work clearing stone blocked gates. They had us haul dead, already begun to attract flies and bloat, bodies from the street to a huge fire. To men starved for years on the thinnest of water gruel that was a sore task, to smell so much meat ablaze. If not for a simple meal were were soon given I think more than a few of us might have succumb to those beastly impulses. Myself, I'm honest enough to admit, would have been among them.

With a tattered cloth tied into a script, a broken sword scavenged from the rubble, clothes I looted from the dead, and a single loaf of black bread I left that burning city of my captivity.

"Can't say I didn't look back."

No, oh no. I looked back. Looked back and smiled to see those high towers topple, the golden domes falling to shatter upon scorched paving stones. Smiled to see the black, oily smoke rising from the corpse pile that still smoldered. How many faces had I recognized in that pile as we built it. Men that had laughingly jammed their picks down my throat to use it in brutal fashion, when my slave taught skills could have given them far more pleasure.

How wonderful it had felt to relieve my urine into the dead face of one lady of nobility; who I know never washed her cunt in the whole time I was at the coffee house.

I would often turn and look at that growing column of smoke rising to the heavens and smile, till the night descended and I could see it no more. I found a rocky hollow and wrapped myself in my tattered rags to hide from the night chill.

I sit, rapier still close at hand, and watch these strange warriors board the boat and get taken away. Charon is busy for hours to haul them to whatever fate awaits them. His light appearing and disappearing far more than I have ever noticed it to be, till at last the shore is silent and dark again. Save for my single candle.

Bemusedly alone, I stare into that forever-flickering flame and wonder If I have the courage to write what is soon to follow. Oh, not of my time in Greece, that could almost be termed pleasant, but the months and years to follow. When the vengeance of the bastard...came home.

Oh, how bloody a time is to come for this quill to write about.

"par la mort de dieu."