The soldier, the beginning of a story or maybe just a drabble.
Here's the thing. People make mistakes. We're not perfect. And I've yet to meet the day where that didn't matter.
Take the war, for example. Had I been the paragon of valor people make me out to be, I'd be dead. And, alright, maybe that kid'd still have her arm, but that was her mistake.
If I was perfect, I'd care more if stupid people were in pain. If I was perfect, I'd wouldn't get that dark satisfaction out of it.
If everyone was perfect, wars'd never come to an end.
People can live perfectly well in a war, provided there's enough plces and calm moments for theto have a normal life in. It's peace people can't stand. They praise peace, like they praise mercy, or beauty, or strength, or daring, or truth. But in truth, they can't stand these things, not purely.
If you have those things, you'd still need war, or some other horrible thing to remind people they matter, and judgement, and gritty uglyness, weakness, cowardice, lies and pretty stories and hope.
They need to believe heroic images, like they have of me, to be an example of what people couldbe; they want to see the best of humanity, so they sleep better at night while they know of he worst. At least there's hope, eh? Maybe it'll be alright, yes? Maybe there'll be a hero? Somewhere, anyway.
Truth is, I'm afraid of the dark and the loneliness. I'm smart, see? I've got imagination, I have. I fill the darkness before and behind me up with faceless people and horrible things with teeth. It'd be easier if any of those things were actually there. Then at least I could fight them off, yeah? For the same reason, I was scared of the Mother's hall of dolls, even though they never did anything. The jerky movements of their eyes, and their rigid smiles. I saw old blood there, on the velvet, I know it.
And of hights, and spiders and bugs and getting hurt and if there is any courage in me at all, it'd be the courage of having a tendency to face my fears head on.
After, of course, ensuring more or less that that would not be epically stupid.
But alright, the kid. Torwen's handmaiden, the beloved heroine, the inspiration of songs and whatnot. She'd like that, the little git.
Now don't get me wrong, I like hear as much as anyone, but she doesn't deserve praise. She's undisciplined, unthinking, endangering her brothers in arms. Honestly, if we hadn't beenshort on soldiers, she never would've been one of us. But then again, then I probably wouldn't either.
If I was a songmaker, I'd sing one about the blind lady.
Devious bitch, that, always one-upping everyone who looks down on her, and triving on the pity she doesn't need, and vengeful as anyone. Bloody determined too. I can ppreciate that in a woman.
Yes, alright, ýou're saying "How dare you, Lady Sarli is kind and beautiful and graceful and suffering and brave and wise!" and sure, maybe.
I've seen her up close, though. Did you? The thing is, we were in the middle of a war. City besieged. I'd lived in that for I don't know how long. Years. Came of age in it. I know I could look it up in a history book or something, but for me, the war'd been going on from the moment I realized a thing like war was possible.
Which must have been since I was, what, thirteen? Before that, war was just a word for stories and histories and foreign places. Not something that could possibly happen in a real place.
You didn't notice much of it inside the city. It was big. Big black walls, plenty of sky above it, plenty of farms and fields and wells in it to keep us fed.
My father was a potter. Nothing exceptional, but he was good at it. I liked his trade. There's just something about clay, you know? Mixing it and purifying it and kneading it and throwing it and using your hands to make something that's alive.
The moment a work is finished is always a bit sad to me. I mean, that's when it ends, really. And sure, it'll go out in the world and be a cooking pot or a candle holder or jewelery box or whatnot, and later pottery sherds, but the point is that after you bake it, the clay isn't alive anymore. It can't change again after that, see? Anyway, when I think of my father, I think of feet turning a wheel and hands shaping clay into something marvellous, same reason spicy food and sarcastic comments remind me of my mother. And certain queens and godesses too. My mother was good in instilling obedience and a nearly frightful respect into a small muddy child.
Iguess I was fifteen when my father showed up home in a uniform and with a spear, and my mother bowed her head and wrung her hands and suddenly looked vulnerable.
I was sixteen, and it was spring, ad the blossoms were in full bloom, and it was a thursday when my father would never come home again at all, ever. Some old bloke from down the street in a unifrom that didn't fit him either came to tell.
He wasn't an oficer, so no-one'd bothered to bring his body back either. And I'm sure that it'd be difficult for the people in the retrieval rushes they did outside the wall to distinguis one rotting corpse in uniform from another. And anyway, they were send for the armour and weapons, not people.
I guess that the old man who told us must have died in one of the following weeks. That must have been around the time the north-eastern outer wall fell, one-and-a-half month after it was pierced.
What I remember most that my mother had gone quiet, all over. And she would try not to see the uniform I had been given only a short while before. The people in my patoon were mostly men, some grey-haired and old, some barely more than children, who'd get offended if you'd call them that. I wasn't physically older than most of that last group. There were about five women or so, with hard eyes, hatered burning in them, none of them much the sort for smiling anymore. You know the story behid those. Lost brothers, fathers, husbands, sons. Some women go crazy like that then. 's ok. They have a right. It's just that you know that they don't have much living to do anymore, which is rather depressing, at times.
A lot of my fellow soldiers were a bit dumb, but I can't remember a part of my life where I haven't been surrounded by people who were mostly a bit dumb. Sometimes I was even one of them. The trick is not to tell them they're being dumb, except when they're me.
Man, aren't I uplifting.
My officer must have been some retired low-ranking fellow they'd pulled from some where ever they'd keep some retired soldier who has no living family.
He joined his family soon enough, and by then I'd got the hang of it all for a bit.
Some of the women had died, hacking at the enemy soldiers, screaming their hatered, killing dozens despite their lack of skill or upper-body strength. They were women, and as scorned as they come.
Most of us had some inkling that we were losing, and none of us fought honourable or any of that drivel, not this close to our homes. They fought withouth even the last traces of selfpreservation that the ones of us had that didn't went, you know, switchy in the head.
Oh. Right. The kid. You asked about her. Pretty and brave, yes, of course. One of the few still brighteyed and ful of glory-dreams. Arrate. Bitch endangered my men, rushing out like that, refusing to retreat. I got them back saying I'd save her, get gover from the arrows now, and that is a command, you too, Harver.
And I did drag her back.
The first shot didn't hurt her much, and I guess I should have moved then, but you know the whole inner darkness philosophers keep waxing on about? Inner beasts and all that. They say those are one's carnal instincts. Not in me. In me it's a cold and oh-so-logical voice, sayin, for example, you're safe here, and she is useless, worse than useless, just wait until she dies and say you were too late to help. No-one'd blame you.
And then se got shot a second time, straight through the arm, and I rushed out to scoop her up and carry her back, because, let's face it, even worthless little shits like her were part of our side, an no man leaves one of their own to die if they can help it.
She took a while to heal, and she lost that arm, but she made it, and unfortunately after that, she was insanely loyal to me, and no smarter, and her rushing about and being loud and facing the enemy got Zark killed.
I liked Zark.
By our fifth month, the second wall had been breached, and we only had the inner city left, and the gril next door was hit by something from a catapult that set her on fire, and two months later she died, ad she ahd no eyelid and her lips and nose had melted and her hair was gone and her hands, oh gods, her hands. She used to be so proud of them. Ladies hands. And her ski was red and pink and shiny anf veiny and boily and crusty and oozy all over and one of her eyes was boiled whitish and this gunk was coming out and we were going to marry and her hands.
And she died. We should have helped her along, but, hope, you know?
And the rocks and things from the catapults wrecked houses and little Sanya... Her mother had a sort of crude doll after, made of firewood, calling it Sanya and dressing it up in little todler clothes and sometimes laughing and sometimes staring and part of her knows, but she doesn't want to know and there is no look I have seen that is grimmer and knows better of dark despair than that of her husband.
Maybe if Sanya had been more inclinched to exploring or following her mother around, or maybe not, I don't know.
Rocks could fall anywhere.
By the time they started to catapult rotting bodies, the Starlight City was starving and sick and full of wounded and dead and near-impossible to defend.
So we surrendered. Well, our leaders did, in our names. The enemy general promised to spare the civilians and grunts and just kill the leaders. How very very kind of him. He'd captured the city council, and the lord, who'd lost both his parents some time before (Pretty standard. His father fell in battle and his mother decided to end hers after.), and most of the officers, who, thanks to field promotions, partially weren't even proffesional soldiers.
His mistake was to want to make some big public execution out of it, which had to wait until the following day.
By dawn, the general was assasinated, and his prisoners and half of the city folk were missing.
Including me. I'd already taken off the officer's signs and the armour. My mother told me to go. She stayed in the city.
They still had public executions after, I've heard, with just ordinary townsfolk instead, one for each escaped prisoner and five for the death of the general.
I haven't dared to find out whether my mother was one of them. If she was, at least now I can still pretend she's alive.
I know her. I know what's likely. I prefer the maybe.