The Day's Wake by Erik A Otto

Author:Erik A Otto [Otto, Erik A]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sagis Press
Published: 2019-05-13T22:00:00+00:00

Henly camped the rest of the regiment near the cave for the next two days. They searched the environs but found nothing; no other Sambayans, no signs of flight. There weren’t even any homes nearby that these cave dwellers could have come from.

Henly chose to interrogate the Sambayans on his own. He told Baldric the Sambayans would be escorted to one of the main refugee centers to be connected with other families and resettled. He commended Baldric and his sub-squad for their valor and said they should take time to rest and reflect. So that’s what they did. They had little else to do those days by the pond.

Reflecting gave Baldric no joy, nor any relief.

He kept thinking, what did these people fear so much that death was the only escape?

He’d been told time and again to expect the unexpected. The day they met the scout was one for sure, and here was another. But no matter how many times he told himself it was all part of the engine of war, that it was just a random blip of violence attributed to chance, somehow it didn’t fit. Even in the confines of combat there was a code. Some had a code of honor, others actions were based on survival instincts, but not this; rational people weren’t supposed to act this way.

And it was his first real skirmish. He’d been worried he would come home empty handed, with no medals, no tangible contribution to the war effort, and no account of struggle against their heinous enemy. The farther they made it east, with so few Sambayan’s left, it was looking like his service would be a non-event, an honorless vacuum.

Now he had wet his sword, as they say in the league barracks. Yet he couldn’t imagine telling Father, or even his friends. They had chased down a half-naked man to a nest of Sambayans. His men slaughtered most of them. The rest decided to haphazardly kill themselves in lieu of surrender. All the while a child was wailing in the background. And for what? To capture three refugee women and two children that were horribly traumatized? Did they even manage to collect any intelligence from the survivors? Baldric doubted it, and Henly wasn’t inclined to share.

It was hard to see how the army was better off. These Sambayans were just scared. They were scared, desperate people, and they killed them.

No, that’s not a story to bring back to his friends. It’s not a story for Bartholomew Bronté to recount to his business colleagues about his valiant sons.

It’s a story that should never be told.

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