Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

They stepped into the belly of the largest tent, a cavernous wideness of white cloth that groaned under the weight of the morning wind. Inside, the world was filtered through the pale light that made way through the walls.

Long, rhythmic rows of beds stretched into the dimness,accompanied by the labored breathing and wet, hacking coughs. It was the realm between the sunlit world of the living and the silent dark of the dead.

Narrow paths, barely wide enough for a man to piss through, snaked between the beds, perfect for nurses and medics to go from one shattered body to the next.

The beds were raised from the damp earth on simple wooden frames, their mattresses stuffed with hay. Basil noticed a pile of sodden, red-stained straw being carried out the back;he didn’t know why, but he could theorize it was for that thing, which Agalosios spoke in those few times he tutored him about the human’s body.

In those lessons, which Basil usually slept through,he would speak of way to ward off ”germs” during operations, invisible, tiny monsters that feasted on the weak.He never understood the reason why he had been taught that, he was to be a prince not a medic. But if his father chose for it to be taught him, than it meant it must have been important.

In the past, when life became too loud or too heavy, Basil had practiced the art of the inner fortress. He could shutter his mind and close his ears until the world was nothing but a distant, muffled hum. His uncle Asag had told him it was a trait he inherited from Alpheo, the ability to simply vanish behind one’s own eyes.

But today, Basil didn’t dare to hide. He felt swallowed by the sterile, crushing sadness of the place.

It wasn’t the gore he had expected. There were no entrails spilling onto the floor, no men screaming for their mothers or cursing the gods, as the veterans along the camp he usually asked described battle.

He knew for a fact that in tavern , those stories were always told with a strange, frantic mirth, washed down with cheap ale and the touch of a willing tavern girl. Basil wondered now if those stories were just another kind of inner fortress, a way of stuffing the horror into a box and painting it with the bright, gaudy colors of ”glory” so they could live with themselves.

The horrow of what they had done, seen and perhaps suffered.

The hospital was worse than the battlefield. That was clear.

In the heat of the fray, a man could slip through the horror on a wave of adrenaline and instinct. But here? Here, time was the enemy. Men lay staring at the canvas ceiling, their eyes tracing the seams of the tent as they pondered the wreckage of their lives.

That was the feeling that threatened to drown the boy: Trauma. It was the sight of dreams interrupted at their peak by the irrationality of a butcher’s whim. He realized, that the joy and safety of the thousands in the capital were paid for by the misery of the few in this room. He searched the eyes of the wounded for the ”glory” he heard so much about, but he found only hollow sockets, red-rimmed and exhausted, filled with a vast, wordless vacuum.

It was only when Alpheo moved into their line of sight that the vacuum broke.

As the Prince walked the narrow aisles, his shadow falling across the beds, the change was instantaneous. It was subtle, yet profound, like the first glimmer of a sunrise after weeks of suffocating, grey rain. The men didn’t cheer. Instead, they simply shifted. A hand would twitch toward a blanket; a head would turn painfully on a pillow.

All eyes toward the sun in that cold and white room.

”Don’t you dare look at them with fucking pity,” Alpheo whispered as he passed ” These men will spend the rest of their lives being looked at with that gaze, by their wives, their neighbors. They don’t need it now. Not after what they’ve done.”

Basil swallowed hard. His father had given him the choice to stay outside if he lacked the stomach for it. He had chosen to enter, and now he had to drink the bitter milk he had spilled. If a man wanted to enjoy the safety of the house, he had to be able to look at the blood on the bricks that held it up.

He followed closely behind.He wanted to retreat from the room, but he didn’t, as the two instead walked to the edge of a young man bed. The soldier was plump, with short-cropped hair and a face that still held the soft roundness of youth.

His eyes had been tracking them since they entered, widening into saucers as he processed the white bandages around Alpheo’s head and the unmistakable set of his shoulders.

’’T-the Prince?’’ He stummered.

’’What’s what soldier?’’ Basil watched mesmerised how easily his father could intrude himself in another’s life and make it seems as if they were familiar with each other for years.

’’Y-Your Grace!I...you, Is all good!I already got blood on bandage!’’

’’You probably swapped words there.’’ He chuckled as he patted the unbandaged shoulder.

’’Yes!I-I did, your Grace’’

’’You can drop it with that.’’

The soldier nodded unsurely,the small silence between them filled by the prince’s smile.

”What’s your name?” Alpheo asked. Basil watched, mesmerized, as his father’s posture shifted. The cold, distant monarch vanished, replaced by a man who spoke with the easy, grounded familiarity of a brother-in-arms.

”O-Oto, your Grace! From the Third! I... I’m fine! Truly! The doctors, they already put fresh hay in the bed and everything!” He scrambled to sit up, his face flaring with a desperate sort of pride.

”Sit back down before you tear something, Oto,” Alpheo said with a dry chuckle, resting a heavy hand on the boy’s unbandaged shoulder. ”You’ve done enough moving for one week.”

”Yes, your Grace. I... I saw you. At the center,” Oto whispered as if that were some secret ”I say, you... you were there. We thought the sun had gone out, but then we saw the Falcon fly on the enemy line and you running behind it.”

”The Falcon was nearly plucked and roasted, if we’re being honest,” Alpheo replied, his voice warm.

The soldier pointed at his head. ’’What’s what there?’’

Basil tensed, but Alpheo just laughed, somehow it sounded genuine. ”A lance-tip decided it wanted to see what was inside my skull. Two inches to the left and you’d be listening to a priest drone on at my funeral right now. As it stands, I’m just short an ear and a bit of skin down my cheek. I’d take the bandage off and show you the mess, but the surgeons would probably have my other ear for interfering with their handiwork.”

He gestured to the heavy, blood-spotted binding around Oto’s chest. ”And you? What’s your story?”

”An axe, your Grace. One of those knights on horse. He hit me through the mail, cut right through it.” Oto smiled, though it looked painful. ”But I took his hand for the trouble when the horse’s chest was caved in by my comrade’s halberd. He won’t be swinging that axe again.”

”A fair trade,” Alpheo nodded solemnly. He squeezed the boy’s shoulder once more, a firm, grounding pressure. ”We all got a kiss from Death that day. Some of us just bit her tongue before she could finish. Now, listen to the doctors. Rest. Eat what they give you, even if it tastes like boiled boot leather. You’ve earned your seat at the fire and a long vacation I’d say.”

”Thank you, your Grace,” the boy breathed, sinking back into the hay as if the Prince’s words were a soft pillow. ’’And congratulations for the victory.Mad shit we had there, glad to see they hadn’t got you.’’

The two continued with some barter before his father went and got himself peering over the bed of another and then another after that.

Basil stood in the wake of his father’s shadow in all of it, feeling smaller than he ever had as his father moved with the practiced grace of a shepherd among a wounded flock, Basil caught the eyes of the men watching him.

They weren’t looking at him with the reverence they reserved for the Fox. In their hollow, salt-rimmed stares, he saw a reflection of himself that he hated: a well-fed boy in fine wool, clean-skinned and trembling, standing behind his father’s cape like a chick hiding beneath a hen’s wing.

He was a clay thing of silk and honey who had never felt the jar of a mace against a shield or the wet heat of a comrade’s breath failing against his cheek.

He realised that then. Huddled in the safety of his father’s presence, he would never be more than a pampered heir who stared at the sun but never felt its burn.

With a sharp, sudden intake of breath he stepped away.

The distance between him and his father grew, one pace, then five, then ten, until he was but a solitary figure in the middle of the aisle. The air seemed colder without his fahter’s heat of reassurance, the smell of vinegar and rotting blood sharper. He felt exposed, a raw nerve twitching in the open air of the hospital, but he forced his legs to move.

This was the world he was set one day to inherit, so he might as well walk it with his own two feet.