She was seated directly in front of my tent, by the remains of my fire…
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The Polemarch sent one of the soldiers to the aft of the caravan days later, as we stopped to encamp for the night. The Apothecary and myself were ordered to attend him in his command tent. We found him sitting on a stool, working over a map and an astrolabe in the little pavilion the soldiers set up each evening that served as his quarters. As we approached he looked up at us with his usual weighted down expression. His eyelids seemed to grow heavier and more swollen each time I saw him of late.
“Gentlemen. How stand our supplies at this time?” he asked.
Ryzard spoke first, explaining that he was still well stocked with medicaments, but that with the weather cooling and the freezing season getting closer, things would get difficult as more folk tended to get sick and need care, being so exposed to the winter elements.
“Of course frostbite is more likely as we move into winter, mi lord. Were we in a city with a proper clinic, we could attend to this before it became serious. In our present circumstances… the only corrective we have at our disposal will be amputation.” He spoke the final word slowly, as though savoring the sound of each syllable.
The Polemarch’s face went pale as Ryzard, unprompted, began elaborating on the brutal hacking work he would need to do to keep men alive if they failed to keep their extremities warm. I briefly recalled the gruesome pages I had glimpsed in the surgery vademecum he kept in his wagon. A chill ran through me as I thought of him having to pull the book off his shelf and use it.
“Enough.” The Polemarch said, waving Ryzard’s butchering lecture away and turning to me with a deep sigh. He queried me about our food supply. How much longer could we last out here? I thought it over for but a moment, for this question had been nagging at the back of my mind in the last week, and I had spent several idle evenings scratching out various sums on an empty page in my tally book, trying to guess how thinly I could stretch out the daily allotments for each man and horse, before we starved.
“By my best estimates, we have enough to continue on full rations for approximately another two and a half weeks, mi lord. At most.” I said.
“And if we reduced the rations to emergency levels immediately?” he asked. I had feared being asked something like this from the day we left Abdera. Emergency rations were a cup of cold gruel a day for each man. A half-measure of starvation. The thought of proceeding forward on so little made me grimace. But alas, in my boredom and trepidation, I had also derived a number for this wretched outcome too.
“Then sir, we might be able to continue for four and a half weeks or so, although our pace will slow down greatly, given that the horses and the men will have less vitality.” I said.
“Mi lord, forgive me, but I must protest on medical grounds”’ the Apothecary interjected “your troops are already hard-put to march the distances you ask of them each day. Some of them are almost walking on stumps as us. Reducing food will greatly elevate the chance of sickness and disease, not to mention the approach of winter and–”
The Polemarch raised his hand for silence and we just stood there, mute. The pavilion’s cloth panels flapped faintly in the chill night wind that was blowing through the bivouac. The nights were growing much colder. Our leader put his map and equipment aside in a small strong box and took a sip of something that steamed with heat from a wooden cup, and pondered to himself for a time.
“I have no intention of starving us to death out here, gentlemen. Quartermaster: reduce the daily food allotment by five percent starting tomorrow. And another five percent the following day. For both the men and the horses. That will be all” He said to me, blowing on his drink.
“As you command mi lord. I shall go and prepare the morning allotment now.” I said, bowing to him and quickly turning to leave him and the apothecary to discuss whatever other matters were between them. Our road to starvation begins. The arithmetic for decreasing the rations tomorrow was mostly complete in my head so that by the time I got back to the supply wagon and saw the girl, I already knew the adjustments to make for each man and animal.
She was seated directly in front of my tent, by the remains of my fire. A pale little thing in a gray shift. She looked just too young to have had her first bleeding. The hair upon her head was stark white, and her eyes a shade of deep violet that barely reflected the dying embers of the fire. She looked meekly at me, like a sickly child will look at its parents when put abed with a fever. I stared back at her a moment, saying nothing, and rubbed my eyes. A figment of my imagination, perhaps I am more fatigued than I realize. I walked forward and kicked some of the fire embers towards her, expecting her to vanish before me.
Yet she remained. Unmoving and still staring at me silently. I reached down immediately and felt for my falchion in my belt. I had not brought it with me when the Polemarch summoned us, which meant it must be inside the tent. Behind the girl. Foolish of me.
“Who are you?” I whispered. She continued starring.
“Who are you?” I asked again, louder.
She stood up and I saw she did not even come up to my shoulder. What was this pitiful little thing doing here? I wondered. A glimmer caught my eye. Something bright and shining was attached to her left arm. No, not attached. She was holding something. Something long and slender. A faint, almost bluish light emanated from it, a light that swam over the thing in twisting patterns that seemed to fold into one another. Like that dark and terrible light I had seen in the petitioners court when the Margrave came to me.
It was the silver aspergillum. The one I had found beneath Abdera, in the tunnels. My aspergillum.
“Put that down.” I commanded.
She continued staring at me. The odd glow coming off the silver giving here an even more ghastly aspect, for my camp fire was mostly dead now, only the queer light the girl held illumined us.
“I said put that down, now.” I took a few steps towards her. The look on her face, told of no worry nor fear, nothing but a deep exhaustion. It gave me pause. Is she deaf I wondered?
“I do not know who you are, but put that down now, and I promise I will not harm you.” I said, pointing at the femur bone and then down at the ground, my shock starting to mix with a growing irritation. How had this little moppet come here? How had she found my treasure? I wanted an explanation from this…whatever she may be. I took another step towards her.
She turned then, and with the speed only small children possess, fled past my tent and the supply wagon, disappearing into the darkness of the wastes beyond the edge of the encampment. The great relic still clutched in her dainty hand. I’d seen urchin children at the markets in the capital pilfer foods before, running off as fast as their feet would carry them, lest they be caught and the offending hand cut off. The white haired girl ran with that same terrified, animal vitality. A ghost has no need of fleeing. And so I gave chase.
The black loomed all around me as I plunged into the ever-darkening umbra of night. The land stretching hostile and barren before me, a tiny sliver of moon waxed above and the lichens crunched tenderly under my boots as I ran. I was furious at this theft, yet it was also liberating to run at full tilt after weeks of sitting on the wagon each day. My body pressed everything, my worries about the food and the frostbite, the apothecary, the mission, and even Baldwin himself, deep into some little pit in the back of my head.
I have been stolen from. Wronged. This wrongness coursed through my blood and saturated me with each frantic beat of my heart as I pursued the damned little thief. What remained of my reason peppered me with a long chain of questions my mind constantly swatted away as I gave chase. Who was she where had she come from how how had she come here how had she found my treasure, how was this possible how how how how how. She had a decent head start but I could see her shape grow before me as I began to close the distance, her shift and that silver-white hair flapping wildly behind her in the dim moonlight.
Thod. It was the girl he had seen, the one hiding in the Ryzards’ wagon the night he came to me. It had to be her. I had refused to believe him and here the little monster was! Not only real, but a thief to boot, making off into the wastes grasping my treasure. That I had stolen. A treasure twice stolen. A stow away and a thief. I had to get it back, had to get her, had to bring her back as well, somehow. The little fiend must have taken not only my treasure but pilfered our rations as well over the last weeks. It was because of her that our food was being reduced, because of her criminal little mouth nibbling away at our hardtack that we would now have to do with less. It was because of her that I was ordered to take food out of our bellies each day.
The Polemarch would kill her, if I didn’t catch her and kill her first myself. My anger swelled as my breathing grew more ragged and I came close enough behind her to see the individual wisps of her hair flying wildly in the night. Little demon I will throttle you and cook you and eat you to gain back what you have taken from all of us. From me. I will beat every mouthful of lentils and salted meat out of you. My fury flowed as I came closer and closer toward her, stomping across the plain like an implacable, vengeful spirit. I reached out my hand and I could almost grab her.
It could not last. A sharp pain in my side began to throb, and my pace slowed. The distance between me and the girl grew and her silhouette began fading off into the nothing in the distance before finally being swallowed entirely by the night itself. I stopped, bent over and heaving to catch my breath, my sides burnt as though they had been flayed.
As my panting slowed I whirled about, trying to find the light from our camp, uncertain of which way I had come from. Every way I looked held naught but blackness. I looked up at the crescent moon. Had I been running towards or away from it? I scanned the horizon, looking for a sign of anything.
Even at the tail end of the caravan, I was immersed in sound each day. The constant turning of the carriage wheels on their greased axles, the breathing and blowing of the horses as they strained forward in their leads. The occasional rattle or thump when one of the barrels in the carriage behind me came loose, and I had to halt, unlock the the creaking iron carriage door, and recinch a rope, causing said barrel to groan, before taking up the reins and lashing the horses to start up again. These were the sounds of my world.
And so the sheer silence of the wastes I felt about me now was crushing. It was not a quietude, but an absence in the air itself. As though all life had been wrung from earth and air leaving only dead stone. The skin on the back of my neck went to gooseflesh, yet my fear could find no purchase, no object but that endless emptiness, which now became an object itself. My breaths, still laboring from the exertion of the pursuit, neither sounded nor echoed in the air around me, but vanished straight off my lips. Even the lichens carpeting the ground I trampled over were soundless as I walked in a small circle, trying to catch a glimpse of something, anything amidst the crushing nothingness.
All men believe themselves important. Who does not secretly suspect they are the center of creation, and robbed of their proper glory and splendor by some cosmic trick? I never felt so disabused of that idea as I did that awful night as I glanced around into the dark, searching in terror for some sign of the way back to the caravan. I would die here, crushed under the apathy of creation itself.
I glanced up at the moon once more and something, some awful shape swimming up in the air caused it to be snuffed out. It only lasted for a moment before the dim sliver of light reappeared, but in that moment, I felt every part of me from my toes up to my head shudder violently. As though creation itself had ejected me from its presence off into some great abyss, from which there could never be any return. It must have only been a bird flying overhead.
Alister’s journey continues here
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