Of Blood and Bile

The cold is the first new memory. A fine mist hovering low over the ground, trembling feelers reaching over one another. The sun hangs too low in the sky to disperse the death shroud. It knows that, should it raise itself to its fullest heights, it will have to look on what man, oh so perfectly formed is he, has made of the Redeemer’s finest gift. A field patiently waiting for spring, for the peasants to emerge from their dwellings and begin to work the softening soil. After at time the air will fill the with the scent of new life as the first buds poked their heads out from the loam, each one verdant and ripe with promise of abundance.

There was no such scent on this day. In its place - the thick burning stench of the afterlife.

I lie amidst the lifeless, trying not to look into glassy eyes and hear the final screams repeat over and over again. A cataclysm carried out in a half an instant. It reeks of nightmares but does not take its leave in wake of the sun’s arrival as a courteous thing would do. The applause of hooves as their gallop drums the earth, giving way to an appalling crunch as oceans of steel, blood and thunder collide. When the kingdoms clash, they make a great incision. The flesh unfolds, umber muscle bulges, straining free as Gaia involuntarily flexes and then the ironclad illness plunges forth. Only in this place is the sound of dying so colossal. We seek the quietest death possible, in the safe confines of our home and families, where a relieved sigh is the sole sound of passing. Battle does not afford such calm and home feels like lifetimes ago now, such is time’s vicious mockery.

For four years, we have been at war. For four years, in all seasons, we fight to keep our land safe from forces of Ouran who stands in defiance all that we hold dear. An enemy who spits in the face of the Redeemer, he who filled the human vessel with life, who sheltered us from the machinations of the Tempter, instructed us in right and wrong, and how to act in life so that we may one day, in our passing, re-join him at his table and feast in perpetuity as just rewards for our worldly piety. I have lived my life in accordance with his teachings. I have served him and his agent here in life, King Nadi, with every thought, every breath, and with every swing of my blade.

Without fail, I can recall the day I was called to defend my kingdom. A knight, his armour shining resplendently in the noonday sun, came to my door. He told my father it was the solemn duty of every able-bodied man to answer the king’s summons and that refusal was tantamount not only to treason but to heresy as well. I traded ploughshare for sword – gladly. Life on the land was unnatural to me and the war offered me the chance to leave it behind, to write my own tale of valour. I walked away from home with nothing but the promise of my safe return and the clothes upon my back and, in my breast, I bore a throng of riotous warriors baying for blood. Four years ago now…

A pike met me first. I did not hear the horseman’s approach over the raucousness of war. I think this what caused me to pass out - the tumultuous blossoming blasted me in twain as my armour failed to hold and the point lanced through me, delving greedily in the flesh beneath. The injury done to my leg is the greater, more agonising, mystery. It is a mangled image of its former self. It pulses with the gruesome pantomime of life, a mocking rhythm of anguish that bludgeons my reason.

I have been here for a day now – a lonely survivor. But, on this day, I dare not move out of a twofold fear - First, that by my stirring, the dead will realise that the living still lurks in this place that belongs utterly to them; Second, because of the shrouded thing that stood across from me.

I knew it was not living and bore no resemblance to anything I knew to be alive. but still I knew it. It was as familiar to me as any person whose visage bubbled up from the warmer climes of fondest memory. Their face was the most disquieting. It was an ever-shifting collage of everyone I have ever known. Even those hazy friendly faces that echoed distantly in my head like the pealing church bell of my hometown appeared in the disfigured squall. It was my father, my mother, my three sisters – Lorelai, Kezia, and Lilybeth –, my wife and the child who is yet to be but still fills out hearts and minds as if we already held them in ours arms, listening fondly their cooing and crying.

However, as much as my head told me I knew it, in my soul, I knew I did not. Draped in black shroud, topped with a crown of coral bone, its thousand faces looked at me, through me. Without warning it began a slow march towards me.

With each step it took, something else, equally ominous within, matched its stride. The pulsing in my leg grew louder, its vile chorus joined by the droning tones of the aching in my side. Step after step after step. how my body began to burn. I ignited with ghastly incandescence. I cried out with every name I could recall to help me – nay, save me – from this demon’s approach. By the time the fiend ceased its advance, there was so little left of me spared from the conflagration of pain - only a shattered spirit.

A distant sound takes hold of the stillness. A fresh panic finds its home in my velvet marrows. This place is no longer home to the dead alone. The living have returned - but who are the living?

Stillness. Zephyr holds his breath in tandem with my own. My ears prick up, a reaction I curse my body for. I reach towards these new intruders. I hear feet working their way through the trampled earth, fingertips brushing against the unbuckling of clasps, struggling to displace the banded metal carapace to get at the treasures underneath. Thieves? But even as it crossed my mind, I knew that it could be something fouler than that. There were plenty of treasures to be had without the need to disrobe a corpse and so these must be-

Grave Robbers

We do not know what the dead think. The endless procession lost beneath the earth are the quietest minds even if their bodies are in near constant disturbance by nature’s eaters. Only the most select thoughts become written word. The quill and ink are the affluent’s tools. Wielded deftly, they grant immunity from post-humous disgraces. Even as their flesh returns to the earth, their minds are encased in parchment and inked in sable blood. With words beyond me they can preserve the secrets they have kept locked in the strongbox that crests the serpent of bone. The common dead do not get a say. Their words dried up as their tongues swelled stiff. They were only ever taught to wield the sword and not the weapons mightier than it. Coin speaks louder than they ever could. Coins that pass from pristine gloves into the muddy, grubbing hands of robber ghouls, each one laced with promises of fine specimens. This is the fate that awaits my comrades. The carrion-eaters - raven and craven man alike - have descended and would sate themselves on what remains until even the memory is swallowed, and the living stand unaware of the bones that girdle the land beneath their feet.

This is the only acceptable remembrance of bodies. For the rest, everything is left to chance. Will you lie serene, entombed by the earth, and find your way to the Redeemer’s Table? Will he welcome you, take your hands in his, noting just how perfect yours are, between the labyrinthine scars that cross his saintly hands. Will he offer you the blood-red wine and bread whose crust cracks clearly like knuckles? Or will you be pulled from the earth, made a victim twice over, and pulled down from the heavens as the Tempter did in ages long past, to know nothing but the void of Chaos for eternity?

Today, the men came before the birds.

Will I join them? Will I soon my find myself linked arm in arm once more with my friends and compatriots in that merry dance? Will I watch as each in turn returns to ash as their earthly vessel is laid bare by the dissector’s hand, until I am alone and afraid, uncertain if what awaits me is a lifetime of promised paradise or an oblivion without end?

Perhaps that is why I still live. Perhaps this is the will of the Redeemer.

I will do right by those who now must call this wasteland their grave. Breathe in – grimace as the lightning arcs betwixt the bars of my ribcage – and breathe out. I take up my sword, which never left my side even as I slept. If the enemy have returned, then I must meet them. By the sword I wield, I am the master of life and death. This is the power granted to kings, and here, in this mass grave of friend and foe, I am the monarch of the fallen, the king of the dead.

Let my foe come to me, for the finest feasts await the righteous at the Table of the Redeemer, and with this deed, the Penitent One will throw open the gates and reunite me with my friends, with endless patience, will offer me the first goblet of wine, and we will supp together once again.

Lidding my eyes, I drew one last breath and slowed my thoughts until I am nothing.

The heavy breathing draws closer. The footsteps stop before me. I waited, coiled. Something brushes against the chalice pendant at my neck, the symbol of the Redeemer, a parting gift from my late father which I carry with me always.

Hold. Wait for the fatal mistake. The brush becomes a firm grasp. My world explodes in an instant. Bursting out of the darkness, I strike. My body howls as hellish alchemy transmutes blood to molten metal. I scream with it as I grapple the enemy before me, bringing my sword to the throat, steeling myself for the bloodletting. The fields would reinvigorate themselves, gorged on the blood of the heretics, and grow fertile once again. This would be the most fitting remembrance I could offer the fallen.

The final blow never comes. There is a moment before the ending of a life where you must stare through the eyes, straight into the depths of the soul of one fated to die by your hand. King Nadi calls it “The Redeemer’s Final Test”. In this instant, it is revealed whether you are worthy enough to wield the power of kings.

I am not among the worthy.

In my unsteady grip was not a Ouran heretic nor an opportunist in service to well-paying master. Instead, my thief was a grimy slip of a girl, wearing a mask of sheer horror, mouth agape in a scream her lungs never summoned.

As death became me, to her, I became death. I was the unwelcome spectre rendered in rent flesh. The girl’s feet sink into the turbid shores of the Styx as a skeletal hand – my hand – clutches ever tighter. Our struggle resurrects the landscape with the horribly familiar din of conflict and my wound was resurrected with it. It was with me again now, that deathly figure. I could not see it, but I felt it so acutely. As for the child, no more than thirteen moons old, that fought against me, she had found her scream.

“Quiet!” My voice resounds off the corpse-piles like an edict from the damned.

The black bile was in my words now, flecks of it staining it syllable. Her face was covered it in now, so close was she. Forgotten was the hammering of the forge in my flank, replaced instead by the hammering of the heart. This hammering was achingly familiar. Mere days ago, I had felt it. I had gazed across the field, the helm on my head as heavy as a crown, at the warped silhouettes of apostates who have only known despicable hunger and never known mercy.

“Please syr, do not kill me! Please, I beg you!” A shimmering trout, the girl tries her utmost to wriggle free.

“Quiet I said!” Pain makes acid of my blood. I nearly bite my tongue in two to muffle the agony. “Quiet! Or I will- “

A bestial scream devoured my words, one far removed from the war-cries of men that had once rung across this wasteland. So too was it different from the inanimate screams of metal. Sword against sword, sword against armour, the collapsing of the layered plate defences against a siege of blows.

It was my scream, untimely ripped from aching lungs. The girl, in desperation to free herself, had stamped on my broken leg with ferocity ill-befitting her stature.

Another scream took up the last vestiges of my own. As the shrouded spectre returned to me once more, I caught a last despairing glimpse of the girl running through the valley of death, chancing a single moment to look back but not at me; rather, she stared at the shadow over me and, even as the distance grew between us, and my sight was blocked by hands unseen, I sensed her fear even through the torrential pain that pulled me underneath the surface of consciousness.

Here, I could feel them closer than ever. Winter’s breath stirring the hair on soldier’s attention. It let itself be known to me. It was ingrained deep between the shattered bones and the desiccated flesh despite the tearful pleas and half-mumbled curses. I wanted nothing more than to die, surrounded by brothers-in-arms, loyal to the last - it would be a fitting death, would it not? Maybe then would I know peace, away from the shrouded monstrosity and its ceaseless torments.

I…I would give up my seat at the Redeemer’s Table if I could have true rest. I have only known the bastard son of peace, that could only be conjured by a pain-addled head to trick a damaged body.

Even this was not permitted to last.

I feel something - a thread, tied deep within me. The pulling grows stronger and stronger: I flounder and squirm against it. I dig, scouring for the root, to pull it out so I may never return to the living world. Give me this at least, my lord Redeemer. Let me sleep a while longer, away from mortality’s strife.

I find myself in a morbid repetition of before: The girl, framed by the eerie peaks of cadavers, reaching out to me. There was no screaming this time, not from either of us. She recoiled soundlessly as I awoke. She clearly wondered if I was alive or merely a trick sent by the Tempter to claim to her soul. I was still unsure of that myself.

I gave a horrified yelp at the realization that we were not alone. Towering behind her was a figure draped in a dark overcoat the fell to the ankles. It moves past her, their tall leather boots were far too polished to be tackling the sucking mud and grime of a battlefield, and stood before me. No longer blotted out by the scant sunlight seeping through the murky clouds, I face a Caladrius mask – the snow-white bird which is the symbol of medical men the realm over – whose tinted glass eyes failed to betray what sort of thing lay underneath be they young, old, handsome, or as foul as knifefish. I realise then that, despite all appearances, this was not the awful thing that stalked me.

It places a gloved hand upon the girl’s shoulder, lowering itself down as it did so. The beak of mask lightly touches the tip of her nose as it looked at her. An empty gaze as far as I could sense but the girl smiles warmly back all the same.

A man’s voice emanates from behind the mask: “Return to your task, Fabula. I will attend this to this unfortunate soul. Thanks to you, he might still yet live. Well done.” The mask proffers nothing comforting, not a single indication that something caring lurks beneath. The beak, filled with aromatics of all kinds - roses, carnations, lavender, peppermint, and camphor - was said to protect the wearer from various miasmas that hover in the air. But those same aromatics stifle any humanity in his voice. He is wholly unknown to me.

She nods resolutely. She takes a second to look past the wide frame of the apothecary into my face before dashing off into the grey afternoon.

Now alone with him, I feel a chasmic fear. Although I want nothing more to be rid of the infernal pain, which plagues my every movement and thought, the mere idea of being alone with this person is unfathomable.

“Who is she to you? Is she your daughter?” Hollow laughter was the not reply I was not expecting.

“By the Redeemer, no!” He exclaims, opening his medicine bag. “Fabula is not mine by blood.” He regales me about how Fabula had stumbled to his door three summers ago. She had tumbled over the threshold like nature’s discarded bride when he opened it to explain he was no longer taking visitors for the day. He had feared Black Rot at first, so feverish and weak was she but, in time, she regained her strength and, to repay his kindness, he employed her so that she might work off her debt for she had money nor even family to her name.

“Although,” he pulls a small vial from the depths of his bag, giving it a small flick. “I don’t think she knew exactly what working for an apothecary entailed but she accepted, nonetheless. Her diligence is truly admirable.” Inside the glass are untold ingredients suspended in a dark liquid now brought to light by the exhausted sun. A curer or a killer, which will it be?

Even as he spoke, a horrendous thought comes to me: has he already made his assessment? The apothecary had done nothing but glance over me and made idle chatter about his ‘assistant’. No probing gloved hands engaging in ghoulish cartography in search of my affliction. He took not a single tool from his bag, save this one vial. Were it in my power, I would have run from this place but I was held tight in that now familiar awful embrace.

Please let me go. I do not know to which of them I spoke: The masked Death before me, or that veiled Life-in-Death who had won me in their game and insisted on inflicting hellish punishments of every known sort upon me.

He places a reassuring hand upon my shoulder but, by the time it reaches me, all reassurance has gone from it and it is cold, and foreign, and sterile just like his words.

“It’s alright, the mixture will put your body at ease. It is Paracelsus’ Archanum. Do you know what that is?”

“I’m a soldier, not a scholar” I say, shaking my head. Again, the silence where a smile should be. This time, though, I cannot shake the feeling that behind the mask is the face of derision. The learned are all the same. They do not feel kinship with men like me. They see only puzzles to be solved, broken things that howl and holler, begging to be put back together.

“It’s a simple mixture,” he explains. “The white nectar of a poppy, yew bark, nutmeg, and wine. All of which will help you.” Hand still firmly clasped on my shoulder; he offers me the vial. He even lacked the courtesy to unstopper the vial for me. Gingerly I take the offered remedy.

“Trust me, it’ll be a lot easier for me to help you if you drink this.” This is first instance where I sense something vaguely resembling an emotion, but I cannot decide which: Empathy? Concern? Or perhaps it is merely just his true impatience finally cracking through the professional exterior?

I open the vial and drank the tincture in as smooth a motion as my debilitated form allows. I do not have to wait long. The world begins to shrink and lengthen, the apothecary’s visage distorts into comical proportions. Between the mixture and the exhaustion that had been stalking me since I awoke this morning, it is not long before I am lost to the world, my body in sole possession of the apothecary.

I slipped back into a distorted mockery of what I left behind. A collection of hazy after-images struggling to come into focus. The Caladrius, still crouched before me, joined by a ragged, sullen thing who gazes at me with concern even as she guards themselves behind their master’s wings. My tongue is a leaden slug in my mouth with my trap-jaw clamped shut around it. My head is a beast whose cage has been rocked to and fro, scrabbling and clawing in outrage.

“Do not move yourself anymore.” The apothecary’s voice was as distorted as his face. “I have done what I can for now.” Shaking my head, I try to make sense of the torpid speech. It is not the agonizing sweet nothings spoken in heathen tongues; icy words setting me ablaze, making my heart leap like scolded dogs, causing my flesh to crawl as though the insects had begun their feasting. This was a voice of calm, of reason, of man.

“You’re very luckily, syr. Other men have died from wounds like yours. If Fabula had hadn’t when she did…” As he spoke, he gently patted Fabula on the head. She emerges slightly from behind him, accepting the praise with modesty, casting a small smile at him. Perhaps there was some humanity behind the mask after all.

Looking down at myself, I see my tunic ripped open and body wrapped in dyed cloth like some purpling ragdoll. Furthermore, my leg was bound and splinted with the haft of something, a pike or a banner, I could not tell. The mixture had done exactly what he said it would do. The pain is distant now, commanding a far lighter touch than before.

“The wound in your side was deep, but clean. Whatever it was went right through you, fortunately enough. I applied a poultice and let some of your blood to rebalance the humours. That should suffice for the time being.” The Apothecary spoke plainly enough as he set himself down across from me. “Your leg is another matter, however. There’s nothing I can do for it here.” Pinching where the bridge of his nose would be, he turns his gaze to the floor and exhales deeply. “I need to take you back to the clinic to amputate your leg.”

Amputate

Only a man like him could make a word like ‘amputate’ lack all meaning. He would proclaim that he did everything he could to help me, that my body had already failed me, and that there was no other choice. He would list the reasons: deep miasmas, twisted bones, unbalanced humours; but each would be of no comfort to me. I would be the only one who would have to live with it. As soon as it was done, as soon as I was out the door and into a world that would offer no pity or help to me, he would have already forgotten my face. He would only ever remember me by the type of operation he performed, another case to be noted in his blasted journal and nothing more. Chirurgeons are not forced to endure the consequences as their patients must. Even as they saw, snap and suture, they give no thought to the future, the future now awaiting me.

I double over, spewing violently. A sickening sound, heralding by a sulphurous river bursting its banks, flooding the fields inside me. My entire body contracts, attempting to crush itself and contain my boiling, writhing innards. The apothecary scrambles back, narrowing escaping the outpouring of yellow bile, grabbing Fabula and clamping a gloved hand over her mouth and nose as he did so. My retching fills the air, a grating metallic sound. I fumble for the chalice again, seeking the guiding warmth of reminiscence. It is cold, I knew it would be even before I reached for it.

Emptied of courage, I cannot contain my sobbing. I weep for the dead who will no longer see the setting sun. They will never see home again, or feel the embraces of loved ones, relieved to see them after years and years of absence. I weep for the land, sullied, and ruined, that will be haunted by slaughter for lifetimes past my own. But, above all, I weep for myself, the most wretched of the wretched. Why do I yet live? Why was I the one to chosen to suffer?

I draw a shuddering breath in a vain attempt to halt my quaking. Granted brief reprieve from injury’s shackles, my mind was free to race. Is this my just rewards for all the lives I have taken? For my years of service to king, saviour, and realm? A miserable half-life from which there will be no turning back. There must be something more than this. Anything. Surely, this cannot be the end of the me? Please, let this not be the end of me…

When I awake on the surgery table, who or what will I be? Not a soldier, for what kind of solider cannot fight? What good is a soldier that watches war from afar, fingers twitching for the phantom grip of the sword they once wielded so effortlessly, but now is no longer able to swing? Nor would I be of the Redeemer who, even in his suffering, remained holy and whole. I would be unwholly and profane, my seat at his table forfeit, handed to those who only knew scintillating pain for an instant before the end. I would be nothing – a void, lacking all purpose. What solace can be found in that?

I would still be alive. Alive and free of that terrifying shrouded thing. I would not have to look at its warped features nor know the sorrow it brings. I could leave the battlefield forever, forget the faces of the men I had fought alongside, and let everything heal, returning to the way it was before, even if I could never be the same again. The question remained: Was I willing to pay the price, take hold of that dark future in both hands, and make every moment of it mine and mine alone?

I will leave pain here in this grave place and I will carry life – my life – back home.

I long to see home again. Please forgive me, but I will fight no more. Take whatever you want of this body, oh Redeemer. If I must endure unknown hardship so that I can knock upon that heavy oaken door once more, and feel those blessed, familiar arms around my neck, and gaze on her beaming face, as we stand at the threshold, our faces fraught with joyous tears, then I can and will endure the chirurgeon’s blade. I could see my child grow old, hopefully in a world free of the strife I have endured, and they will be the one to watch me pass in the shared comfort of home.

I am sorry, my liege. I cannot serve you nor our saviour in the manner I have these past four years. I am a soldier nor more. I am a man bound to a tarnished body. But it is my body, and, with it, I will give and know love of a kind that I hope you and my lord above would approve of.

“Please…” I beg with all that I have left. “Please syr, I beg you… make me well again…”