We chased them on horseback down the mountain. Cuts and bruises and pains running their course through my body, so encompassing that even my disciplined sense could not rid them. Strange humors. Strange nervousness. After all this fighting, was still present through my belly and finger tips. I tightened the slacks around the horses neck, I could not tell whose horse this even was. If it was even mine. But I used it never the less and chased them down the narrow way, until after some time they stopped to drop gunpowder upon the track. It exploded, capsized some of the surrounding rocks and made a little distraction for us. We waited a bit, for there were stones still tip-toeing at the edge of their craters, falling constantly and threatening the way with boulder-rain.

“It’s alright.” Vincent said. A cut along his face, the first I’d ever seen.

“We’ll pick it up tomorrow.” I said. “You see their carts? Empty. They’ve got nothing left. I don’t think they’ll make it through the desert. They’ll have to stop. They just have to.”

“I agree.” Vincent said. “They will stop, but whether they’ll surrender…I’ve heard Duvall is a stubborn one.”

“How stubborn can he be? They’ve got nothing. It’s suicide to fight.”

Vincent looked at the smoking road, the scent blew to us. The blood stopped halfway down to his neck and he nodded. We turned back some to reconvene. To rest. To inspect how much had gone right and how much had gone wrong, that in the quarrel and the heat of life and death was difficult to reckon.

We set up many camps along the road, set up our backline to keep watch. Which consisted mostly of the archers and novices. With few men though, that wasn’t many.

Men came and went with giant jugs of water, some soaked dried meat into little bowls and chewed on it. A haggard look upon their eyes, which I wasn’t surprised about. An intense look on others, whose animosity had not lessened one bit from battle to camp. They were isolated from the others, in little empty pockets, eating and staring into the fire. Silent and contemplative in the tongues of the camp furnace. I felt my own imaginations and memories flicker with each snapping coal. I stopped at Vincent’s camp. He wore his brown tunic and trousers and rubbed ointment along his fair skin (which was still pale, even in the sun). Red in his eyes, in his lips, on his face as he looked into the fire and spoked them with a long blackened stick. I offered the bowl, he took it and put it next to him. A soup of mostly potatoes and onions, garlic. Some stock. Little melted pockets of tallow floated and skittered from one end of the bowl to the other. I tipped my own bowl and let it run into my mouth, an oily feeling across my lips that made me pucker.

“We lost five.” Vincent said. “Twelve were injured.”

“What is that? A tenth of our forces, considering what we have.”

“Something like that. Yeah. They had a few years with us. That’s going to hurt.”

“We wiped out a quarter of their men.” I said. “And you’re going to like this.”

“What?” Vincent asked.

“We’ve got five of them captive.”

He turned his face up and stood, walking in no particular direction until I lead him. We went through the camps out to the far end (the side of the road where we’d come from at the spring of the attack) to a little underpass below a bulge. A large rock standing parallel, nestled so neat at a right angle as if to be a chair for a giant or some such creature. I crossed my arms and bent down a little to the five of them sitting underneath the shade of the stone. A few guards around them with torches, with their legs kicked up against the walls.

“That’s them.” I said.

Vincent came from the dark, a little beyond an olive tree growing out the side of the stone wall. Roots clung with strong desperation unto a stone fixture on the wall.

He did not bend down. He stood in front them, stepping up little after little.

“Are you Duvall’s men?” He asked.

Silence. I stood and put my groin right upon one of their faces, the man leaned back and darted his eyes away.

“He asked you a question.” I said.

“Ain’t it obvious?” One of the side, middle of the group. None of them had any medals of distinction, or looked any stranger than the other. They all seemed like simple foot soldiers and perhaps on account of being simple foot soldiers, they were caught. A well trained man would have killed himself and never allowed it in the first place.

“What do you know about where your leader is going?” I knelt down to his level.

He looked away from me and spat. I grabbed him by the face and dragged his head down the wall of the boulder until he was on the floor, my palm on him, pressing him down into the dirt and leaving the imprint of his gasping mouth on the sand. He struggled, even with the wraps around his arms and waist. His tied legs squirmed. The other four jostled in place, some meaning to help and others trying to pull away. Spit ran out of his mouth, through my fingers and wet my grip on him.

Vincent put his hand on my shoulder. I stopped.

“Where are all of you heading?” He asked. “Duvall should know he doesn’t have the rations or the will power to cross that desert.”

The man coughed. He spat out sticky dirt from his mouth. I grabbed a torch from the guard and lit the faces of the walls like some long-ago man of that long-ago primevil time. Perhaps the primevil times never went away at all.

I put the torch close to the fallen soldiers face. His cheeks lit up, the glow reflected from his green eyes. He must have been sixteen. He was not old, did not even have his first wrinkle break on his forehead. His cheeks were plump and flushed and his lips were cracked and upon him there was a mild shake. Like there would be for most.

“Where’s he going?” Vincent asked. “We just want to end this.”

Vincent knelt, the boy turned his face from me to look at him.

“I fought you on that lakebed. I saw you all for what you are and know where all of you stand. My army will wipe you from this fucking earth and the only means of stopping that is a surrender. The white flag. That, and that alone.” Vincent said. “I take no pleasure in the killing of men. What good blood to waste. And what good blood Duvall is wasting now.”

“I don’t know much. That’s the truth. None of us do.” He said, his voice broke. “All I know is he scouted a cave or somethin’.”

“A cave?”

“That’s it. He ain’t planning on running. He just wants to hold out. Kill as many of you as he can.”

“He can’t win.”

“We know.” The Boy sighed. “We know. We know. We know…”

“So he’s going to run in a cave?”

“Shut your mouth Fredrick.” One of the tied men said.

“To hell with that.” Fredrick lashed out. His neck strained as he raised it off the ground.

I took out my blade and put it to the neck of the interrupter.

“Is there anything we can expect on the way to this cave.” Vincent said.

Fredrick’s eyes flickered left to right.

“He’s got bombs along the road. He’s got them high up.” He said. “A couple men are there. They’re committed to dying. I can’t tell you how many he has.”

“I will end this war by the weeks end. And you will go home.” Vincent said. “That is a promise.”

It wasn’t as if the soldier was happy to hear about the conquering of his people, or the defeat of his friends. But he seemed relieved some, that he would be going home to some capacity. That it would end. Which considering a siege, the long months prior to our own army arriving to the east, and now the chase seemed a better thing that the blind fight they’ve been committed to. The truth is that most of them were tired. I could see it upon their faces as I dragged the torch to and from. Men who looked away, with their flesh close draped around their thinned bones. A hollow look to their cheeks and a twitching about their faces. The guards came around with spoons of food and fed them. One came around to Fredrick and wiped the dirt and blood around his face. For a moment I felt wrong. Which was strange considering the murder I’ve done.

And I do consider war murder; justified or not.

Yet seeing the poor boy with a bruise on his eyebrown left a bad taste in my mouth. Most of it did, anyway, though you don’t realize it at the moment. It seems something of an afterthought. The violent life rarely leaves you with moments of reflection and most of them are spent in the throes of justification. You justify it all. You justify your existence, you justify the reason, you justify the recourse. A game whose players has to convince themselves that the game is worth playing in the first place. No other like it than that of war. Every child knows the thrill and the fun of a sport, of a game of marbles. Every man understands games of chance, of the pleasure of gamble and the thrill of victory or defeat. But fight long enough. War long enough and you lose the feeling. And it starts to feel bizarre, the transient moments of slitting a mans throat once thrilling loses that heat. The dejection starts off from the fight itself. An ambient static noise in a room once filled with choirs for war. And soon the sound grows. You grow more uneasy, look at yourself more clearly as you become omniscient to your own actions. A ghost looking at the body it used to shell itself in.

Then there is no thrill in fighting. Then there is no pain to the injuries. No taste to the food. No smell to perfumes. No nothing to nothing. But a growing weight and a wrongness upon seeing what you’ve done unto the world.

I turned away from the bruised boy and followed Vincent.

“You really think it’s going to end when we kill that bastard?” I asked.

“In what sense?” Vincent asked.

“In the sense that we’ll go home, what other?”

“Oh. Yes. We’ll be going home.” Vincent said. “Whether the war ends is another matter. But here, on the borderline, it will at least. Xanthus will gain more ground.”

“And when he gains more ground, he’ll threaten more borders.” I said. “So I’ll ask, will it end?”

Vincent rolled his tongue.

“There will be a time when we will have a great war to end all wars, yes.” Vincent said. “Not yet. But soon.”

“Is that what it’s all leading to? Your great war?” I asked.

“Something like that. Yes.” He said. “Why? Does it bother you? Didn’t you say you’d follow me to any end?”

“I did and I will.” I said.

“Do you regret your oath?”

“No.” I said. “S’far as I’m concerned, my life was owed to you from the start. I consider this a repayment of a life-debt.”

“Good.” Vincent turned to me, his red eyes wide. “You belong to me. Good. You plan to repay that life-debt for life, correct?”

My hand shook.

“Yes. Yes.”

He narrowed his crimson eyes, then smiled. It was joy on his face, but something else. Something oppressive, something frightening behind his white teeth. Behind his nubile, cherub face. Something beyond his fair skin and ruby eyes and beauty. Something dark. Very, very, dark. Vincent tilted his head.

“You’re going to wake up early and you’re going to take whoever you need down that road and you’re going to clear out every one of those suicide bombers.” Vincent said. “Do it however you want. Just get it done.”

“And then you’ll follow up?” I held my hands together behind my back, my finger quaked a bit.

“Yes.” Vincent turned away. “We’ll chase him down and my guess is he’ll retreat to some base in a cave perhaps. There are quite a few caverns and it seems like the only mode left to him. Then we’ll isolate him and kill him. Simple.”

“That’s how the plan will go?”

“Yes. Do you have doubts?”

“None worth mouthing.”

“Good. Get some rest.”

Easier said than done. Get some rest? After all said and all done and all fated. Get some rest? Vincent walked away. His face returning to that still consternation, the look of a thinking-warrior. I was not so easy to return. And often times caught myself shaking my own head as I fell tarred to the bog of my thoughts. My body slacken and heavy underneath worries. Why now? It was always the worst timing. Now in the turning point of a war.

Why not now? It could only be this time.

I found a little spot beneath a tree and laid out a tarp on the roots, filling the gaps with clothes or gear until it was leveled and presented itself as a raised bedding. I laid down and felt the soft bark upon my back. Which was the best I was going to get.

I rolled my shirt around my leather breast plate and tucked it underneath my head and looked up to the stars with every intention of sleeping, but never the opportunity to sleep. And I rolled and rolled and watched the stars.

Until. What felt like minutes later. There were no stars and off to the west a light blue had already started to break.

I did not feel tired, though my body certainly was. I just felt a little numb.