The Afghan Campaign by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Format: epub

25.

Night has descended when I come to. Lucas supports me. We hunker in the river, the pair of us, concealed beneath a cut-bank, with only our eyes, noses, and mouths above the surface.

Lucas has been sabered across the forehead. He has lost an eye. The whole left side of his face, bound up, is a mass of matted blood, hair, and flesh. Several ribs are cracked, though I don’t know this yet; his right knee is half-staved, stepped on by a horse. He holds me up from behind, arms round my chest to keep me from going under. My head lolls against his shoulder. Roots and branches screen our hideout. I struggle to speak, to thank him. He hisses me silent.

Out in the current, the enemy are pillaging corpses. They troll for survivors—their own to rescue, ours to murder and loot. They carry torches. When one of them spots movement, he elevates his brand; together he and his mates converge on the site.

I am freezing. A terrible thirst torments me. My skull is pierced with such agony as to nearly make me blind. The arrow shaft has been extracted from my shoulder. Lucas has saved my life. I feel bitter culpability. I plead with him to get away, save himself. He stills me with two fingers.

“You’re out of your head, Matthias.”

I pass out again. When I come to, the moon, which had been high over my left shoulder, now sinks below my right.

“Can you take your own weight?”

I find a root and sag against it. Lucas frees himself. God knows how long he has been holding me up.

The river sprawls thick with bodies. Corpses have piled up against deadfall and downed limbs. The Daans and Massagetae scalp a man, then strip everything of value. They leave the bodies naked. The dead Macks and mercs bump together in the current like a boom of logs. These are our fellows. Flag and Stephanos may be among them. Rags, I know has gone in the books. I saw Knuckles take a ticket. Flea, my last glimpse of him, had a lance through one hip and an arrow wedged through his windpipe.

River rats have found this banquet; they scamper across the boom of flesh, their wet fur glistening in the torchlight.

The foe has built bonfires along both banks. One would have thought of such savages that they would, by now, be given over to riot and licentiousness. But either they are possessed of strong native discipline or their officers are made of keener stuff than we have believed. Sentries have been posted. Mounts are being tended to. Even the parties plundering corpses in the river do so with the formality, even stateliness, of magistrates dividing an inheritance. A protocol governs the despoliation. We can hear the braves. “Did you kill this one? No, I think that one’s yours.” At least that’s what we imagine they’re saying—before the points of their scalping knives inscribe the half-circle ear to ear and then the trophy-taker’s fist, gathering the victim’s hair into one hank, with a swift and practiced twist rips the crown free.

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