Chapter Eight

A Village - Thousands of Years Ago

A Village - Thousands of Years Ago

Whenever there was death, Chrysanthos’s thoughts returned to his final battle. First came the smells: sweat, blood, piss and greening armour. And as he breathed them in he was there again, seeing it again, living it again. Men, the old and the young, packed together in the phalanx. Their hymns long faded, their lusty battle cries extinguished, all they could do now was grunt, scream, sob. 

Each army had broken its spears on the other and now there was only the endless push: shields locked together, barely moving, limbs trembling with the exertion. Only it wasn’t endless. It could never be endless. As awful as the push was, when it stopped what inevitably followed was always worse. For even though this time it was the enemy’s ranks that broke first, the advantage was always slight. Chrysanthos fought no grand battles; there were no horsemen to thunder down upon the broken lines. Now it was blades held in quivering arms and slipping from sweaty hands, rocks crushing helmets into skulls, blood-drunk madmen and puking cowards alike gouging each other’s eyes out with their bare hands. It didn’t end quickly; it couldn’t end well. It slowed and it slowed and still stricken, bloody men staggered to their feet and hurled what was left of their broken bodies into the fray. All battles were terrible; this last one was the worst, but the worst of it was yet to come.

Chrysanthos coughed up blood, perhaps his own, pushed himself out of the dirt and the filth and forced his eyes open. How he wished he hadn’t. But now he had seen them, he couldn’t look away. Amidst the carrion crows and the vultures, the Keres were there too. Blood spattered wings, sagging grey flesh and awful misshapen mouths. Gnashing, tearing, fighting with one another over the strewn bodies. But the one that came before him was different. Its wings were almost clean, its skin near-pink, its face as much of beauty as of horror. It spoke to him in pictures not words. The images were otherworldly, but the message was clear: a bargain. A life for a death.