by Gustavo Bondoni
in Issue 106, November 2020
The sun set over the Romans to the west. Rasce smiled grimly at them, wondering whether they would enjoy the autumn mosquitoes outside Aritim, and whether they would die of fever or decide to stay camped outside the walls all winter. It was all the same to him. The city had access to a very deep well and enough food to last another year and a half.
Besides, the Romans were in no hurry to breach the walls. They’d seen what awaited anyone dumb enough to enter the town. Even the well-disciplined troops the Southeners could field tended to balk at the prospect of being torn apart by a reanimated corpse.
“Do you think they’ll try sappers?” he asked the man beside him on the wall.
Tite thought about it a while. “I doubt it. They know as well as we do that the walls aren’t what’s holding them back. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that most of their soldiers see the walls as something that’s keeping us in rather than keeping them out.”
They both fell silent as one of their tireless sentries walked past. The Guardians of the Rasna were never a pretty sight, and this one was no exception. The man’s uniform had gone unwashed for weeks, and his boots had worn all the way through from constantly walking along the walls. Two Roman arrows protruded from his chest.
Tite sighed. “I know they’re the only reason we’re still alive, but they still feel wrong, somehow.”
“Everything the Priests of Mantus touch is wrong. I’m glad they’re on our side, though.”
“I’m not so sure.” He turned towards the nearest ladder, which led upwards to the next, higher ring of wall. “Will I see you at dinner tonight?”
“You should know I never miss a meal. At least while we still have a little meat, anyway.”
The other man laughed, and Rasce descended into the space between the walls. At the moment, it was just a convenient place to look for breaches and evidence of sappers—Rasce didn’t share his friend’s optimism in that regard—but if the outer wall were breached, it would become a nice place from which the defenders on the wall could dump burning oil on their heads.
A scraping sound behind him made Rasce turn suddenly. It had sounded like metal against stone, indicating that there was someone back there. It wouldn’t have been surprising, since there were at least five ladders leading to the gap between the walls, and the soldiers were known to come down here at night to escape the crowded cities. They came with their wives, with market girls who’d had all their other merchandise confiscated by the army, with other soldiers’ wives, and with each other. Sieges could get very long and boring.
He should have dismissed the noise out of hand but, for some reason, thought it sounded a bit too purposeful to be just a dallying soldier. He walked in its direction, allowing the curve of the wall to reveal what was up ahead, but saw no one. The scraping had stopped.
Rasce shrugged and continued his inspection. There was no sign of sappers, and he went off to dinner with a somewhat heavy heart. What was the use of fighting a war if one couldn’t attack the enemy? And when the Romans did engage, the fighting was all done by the abominations controlled by the black priests. The generals kept all the living soldiers back.
Tite was already halfway through some kind of porridge which looked completely vile, but which, at least, seemed to have small lumps of meat in the mix. Only officers were given meat any more, and even that wouldn’t last.
“Remember when we were real soldiers?” Rasce said, as he took a seat beside his friend, his own steaming bowl in hand. The Eluveitie tribesmen knew to avoid us.”
“They gave as well as they got, from what I recall. I prefer to be here, behind the walls.”
“Those are wise words,” said a third voice, sepulchral and unwelcome. Cutu, one of the black-robed priests of Mantus, sat beside Rasce without waiting to be invited. He was probably well aware that an invitation would never be forthcoming. “Better to be where the enemy won’t dare to come.”
“Yes,” spat Rasce. “Unless you happen to remember why the Romans won’t come near us.”
“Would you rather have your head on a pike?”
“We could hold the walls without the help of your abominations!”
“For how long?”
“At least until the Rasna army comes and breaks the siege.”
“Your faith is reassuring,” Cutu replied. “One hopes that it isn’t misguided.”
“They’ll come. These Romans won’t last,” Tite said, rising to his friend’s defense. “They are just Rasna without history – or at least that’s what they’d like to be.” He turned to the priest. “You should refrain from saying things that might be considered treasonous. We have a lot of bored soldiers sitting around, and even you aren’t immune from military justice if your words reach the wrong ear?”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Cutu replied. He continued his meal in silence—not a concession, but a declaration that he had said what he wanted to say.
***
Despite Cutu’s smugness, it actually was true that there were countless bored soldiers sitting around. Waiting, waiting and waiting was all they had the ability to do. Leaving the city was to be captured by the Romans. Within the walls there was little to do, other than to win back the coppers you’d lost the day before, or find if there were some wench that you hadn’t savored. The possibility of either grew less each day as the gambling grew stale and enthusiasm of the girls waned with the passing of time.
Rasce needed more than his usual amount of self-control to get out of bed the following morning. All he had to look forward to was another endless day staring at an army that wasn’t going to do anything, and inspecting walls that were as pristine and faultless as the day they’d been laid out.
The best part of his day, the only part that didn’t drag interminably, was sunrise. And that would be over in half an hour.
But at least he could enjoy it while it happened. He stood facing the east, wondering if his shade would soon be marching there, to join his ancestors in hell. The sun crept slowly up, throwing his long shadow on the wall behind.
“By the balls of Veltha! What is that?” The exclamation was followed by the shouting and cursing of soldiers, and by the shrill scream of a woman who, against all orders, had been smuggled onto the outer wall.
Rasce turned and gagged.
On the wall behind him, the inner, taller wall, hung the body of a soldier. There was no doubt that he was dead, as his stomach had been slit open, and his entrails pulled out. Some of the guts hung out beneath him, black with flies, while a single line stretched above. The soldier hung from his neck from a length of intestine.
It was also clear that he hadn’t died quickly. The wall was smeared with blood two full body lengths in each direction, the gory evidence of a human pendulum, testimony to the desperation of his dying struggles.
Rasce stood, staring, remembering the sound he’d heard the previous night. Trying not to think about it. He also stared hard at the body. He was a hardened soldier, and he’d seen the insides of many, many men. But it was hard to digest when a man so obviously, so thoroughly dead moved his head from side to side, looking for a Rasna noble to give it orders. It was another reason to take the fight to the Romans out on the planes: any man who died within the walls was denied entrance to the underworld, and his spirit sent back to animate his body.
He slowly got himself under control. “You and you,” he said, pointing at two soldiers who’d appeared atop the inner wall. “Cut it down.”
As the luckless men ran to do his bidding, Rasce addressed the undead soldier. “You don’t look like you’d be too good in a fight. Wait for me by the sally port over there.”
It nodded, and then fell from the wall as the soldiers cut the improvised noose. Rasce walked off. He knew that unless one of the other officers happened to walk past and give it different order, the wight would just stand there forever. In the meantime, it might be a good idea to try to find out what happened.
He climbed the ladder connecting both walls and walked to where the body had hung. A piece of entrails, crudely hacked by the soldiers’ swords, was all that remained. One end was trapped under a very large stone block.
There was dried blood everywhere.
And that was it, other than a few lines in the blood that might or might not have been sandal-marks or boot-marks. A few had clearly been caused by the soldiers who’d cut the thing down.
It was obvious to Rasce that the man had been attacked by a number of other men, enough to control him and, even more obviously, enough to lift a large stone while restraining a dying, desperate man.
The crime being punished could have been anything at all, and for that number of men to have been involved probably meant that the man had deserved it – although, with the way things were in Aritim, the issue had probably involved gambling debts and women, as everything now seemed to.
Rasce shrugged and turned away. He’d been involved in more than one case of justice by peers, and knew that no one would have seen, heard or suspected anything. It wasn’t worth pursuing, and he had walls to inspect.
The day passed, as they all did, without further incident. The Romans sat in their camp. Every once in a while, they’d send a messenger over to discuss the “Terms of Etruscan Surrender”. They were a young race, and perhaps one day they’d learn to treat their elders and betters with the respect they deserved. Mentioning surrender was a calculated insult, but even Romans should know better than to call the Rasna anything other than Rasna.
It took too long for night to fall, and when it did, and the sun had set over the Roman camp, it was none too soon for Rasce. He did his nightly round and eventually came to the gate where the wight was waiting for him, immobile.
“Hello,” Rasce said. “Do you remember your name?” He knew the soldier’s name. He’d been informed in the course of the day, but he wanted to see whether the undead knew it, too.
The thing in front of him shook its head. Rasce wondered at that; in the early days of the war, the abominations that the priests created were fully able to remember what had come before, and even up until recently they’d known who they were. But now… It seemed a bad omen to be contemplating in the night, in front of one of the undead, surrounded by a foe that, from all reports, had brought down everything the Rasna stood for.
Well, he couldn’t do a lot about the army out west, but he could do a little bit. It wouldn’t even be necessary to open a sally gate.
“All right. Come with me.” Rasce led the monster up one of the ladders, to the outer wall. He then ordered one of the sentries – a living man this time – to bring him a length of rope. “You must climb down this rope, walk into the Roman camp and attack everyone you see. Don’t stop fighting until they’ve hacked you so far to pieces that you can’t continue. Do you acknowledge the order?”
The thing nodded. They always did. Their only reason for existing was to obey Rasna officers.
“Go.”
He watched as the unholy apparition made its way down the wall, then stood there as it disappeared into the night. Rasce strained to hear what would happen next, hoping not to miss it in the distance. Fortunately, the night was still and clear, but he knew that the distance was just too great to allow them to guess what was happening in the Roman camp.
But still Rasce strained his hearing. Was that the clanging of a sword? Was that distant shouting? That was definitely the scream of a dying man, and the old Rasna warrior smiled to himself. The rest of the story would play itself out as it would, but he could go to bed.
The next day, they woke him before dawn.
“Another one,” the frightened soldier said.
“Another what?”
“A dead man. Like yesterday.”
“Show me.” It wasn’t his jurisdiction, and he had no authority to investigate. But, as the officer on the scene of the earlier murder, the soldiers immediately came to him. It would be no use fighting it, there was an unspoken inertia in that kind of group mentality which no one fought against. His superiors would frown upon it if he didn’t have at least a cursory look around.
There were similarities enough to see that it had been done by the same group. But there were also differences: the entrails, though completely removed from the body, had been wrapped around his neck as if to strangle the man, instead of used to hang him from a wall. And though no large blocks seemed to have been moved on this occasion, Rasce still imagined that the murder could never have been committed by a single man.
“When he starts to move, send him out to attack the Romans.”
“Who’ll give the order?”
“Ask the first noble you see. If he questions you, tell him I said so. Don’t open a sally port, send him over the wall without breaking him if you can. Let the Romans deal with him.”
The rest of the day passed in a haze, a vague memory of watching the Romans in the distance and of thinking that the meals were getting worse as the siege wore on. Nothing stood out. Nothing was notable, as his head went over and over the issue of who would have killed the men. It seemed that anyone could have done it, but it also seemed that someone should have seen it, or heard it. A group the size of the one needed to subdue even a single man that way had to have been noticed.
Tite knew his moods and avoided him subtly but effectively. Even so, it was evening and dinner before Rasce realized what his friend was doing. “Hardly saw you around today, is anything wrong?” he said.
“No, just a bit of maintenance work on the south wall. The Romans don’t seem too keen on coming over here, but a falling wall might be too much temptation.”
“Nice try,” Rasce told him.
“One does one’s best.”
Rasce laughed ruefully, foul temper forgotten. Being a soldier had its share of boredom, but it also had its moments.
The conversation moved to other topics and, eventually, wound down. Rasce went to bed with the terrible feeling that he would wake up to another corpse.
He wasn’t disappointed. This one was impaled upon a spear wedged into a crack in the flagstones in such a way that Rasce had to reach up in order to touch it.
“Get Tite, and any other noble you can find. I don’t care what they’re doing, and I don’t care how important they are. We need to discuss this.”
The nobles filed up to the wall one at a time, gave a glance at the man in the air and muttered something on the lines of how his investigation didn’t seem to be going all that well. Once a reasonable number of them were there, Rasce spoke.
“We need to organize ourselves. Someone is killing our men, one by one. At first, I thought it was some kind of gang out for revenge. I actually thought it was about women, or at least about one woman. But now, I think differently. There is something a little worse going on here, and we need to be open to the possibility that we may have been infiltrated by a group of Roman spies.”
“So what do you suggest?” The cynicism of his peers was not aggressive, more the bored voyeurism of men with nothing better to do delighting in the discomfort of one of their peers. On one hand, it was better that way, but on the other, Rasce worried that they weren’t taking the matter seriously.
“We need to make certain that each man is assigned a partner. No one is to be alone – then, if any single man dies, the partner will be held responsible. It should be enough for now.”
“The men won’t like it. They hate to share their women.”
“They may have to, or take turns as lookout, until we find the men responsible for this.”
“What if it’s just one man?”
“There’s no way that a single man would have been able to manage any of these murders without making enough noise to wake the entire camp. These men were killed slowly and very painfully. This one here was impaled alive. Look at the way his hands are clenched around the spear.” He let them take it in. “Silence requires at least two men. And moving rocks about even more. No, my friends, this is the work of an organized gang.”
Cutu, hadn’t been summoned – the soldiers never went near him unless expressly ordered to do so – but always seemed to appear where he was least wanted, spoke: “Perhaps we should cut him down and let him go about his business. If you would be so kind, I’d rather keep this one for my garrison on undead soldiers. The two from the previous nights seemed to have disappeared.”
Rasce grunted assent. It was better not to defy the priest of Mantus too directly, no matter how much one preferred for the stinking abominations to disappear.
The other officers, certain that the entertainment was over, dispersed.
“Do you think they’ll do it?” Tite asked.
Rasce shrugged. “Maybe. Some of them will, at least. It might make things more difficult for the killers, at any rate.” Inwardly, he doubted that more than half of the officers would give the orders, much less see to it that they were enforced. They were mainly sons of the first families of the League, and many had had indolence trained into their bones. The rest likely didn’t care.
The common soldiers surprised Rasce, however. When the men got wind of Rasce’s solution, they adopted it with a vengeance. In fact, by midafternoon, they were organizing extraordinary patrols of the wall, sacrificing their rest to save their fellows, and making Rasce wonder at the fickleness of the lower orders. He was well aware that if the men had been ordered to do something so extraordinary, they’d have probably butchered the officers and surrendered the city to the first foreign army that passed, Roman or otherwise.
As night fell the enthusiasm showed no signs of waning. The soldiers took turns marching in pairs along the walls, going into the darkness with looks of earnest duty that seemed out of place on faces more accustomed to the slackness of interminable routine, and returned to a hero’s welcome and a drink of water.
But, two hours after midnight, Rasce was awakened by a violent commotion on the wall. He took his spada and rushed out, not bothering with his leather. A single soldier stumbled down the stairs into the pool of light where his companions awaited and collapsed.
“We found them…” he spluttered. “Terrible fight, dozens.” Then, he seemed to rally, to attempt to escape the inevitable. Terror overcame the pain on his face. “No… undead…” but there his strength failed him, and he died, blood spewing from his mouth as dozens of soldiers looked on.
Almost simultaneously, the fighting on the wall ended and soldiers began to descend, telling any who’d listen that they’d encountered and driven back the Roman spies, killing many.
But the other soldiers in the light were having none of it. “Did you see the undead who killed Buce?” they demanded.
Rasce reeled. Undead? That wasn’t what the man had said. He’d been expressing his horror at becoming undead himself, not at being killed by one of the wights. The mob had simply misunderstood.
“Killed by undead?”
“How many?”
“Dozens!”
“Armed to the teeth!”
“They fought valiantly, but to no avail – Buce came back to warn us!”
“He’s a hero! We would all have died without him!”
“Murdered in our bedding!”
“Cutu turned on us!”
“Kill Cutu!”
That last one chilled Rasce’s blood. If the soldiers went after the undead garrison, it would be utter, total war. Cutu would not sacrifice himself so that the ghastly tools of the Rasna were spared. He would order them to fight, and fight they would. Implacably, until they’d been hacked beyond the ability to move.
It was unlikely that the number of soldiers in the city could destroy the hordes of undead – and even if they did, the loss of the magic monsters would mean Romans at the wall.
“Stop!” he shouted. “The Guardians weren’t involved in this! Did any of you see any of the undead attacking us? I know you didn’t.”
“You lie! I saw them myself!”
Angry voices assented, and the mood, if possible, grew uglier.
“Listen to me! You probably ran into the spies.” Another thought occurred to him. “Or maybe you even ran into another group searching for spies. It’s dark on the wall! You may have been fighting your own friends and comrades!”
“We’re not fools!”
“I know what I saw!”
The crowd pushed past him and went in the direction of the temple, picking up stragglers as it went. Rasce went off in the other direction to look for Tite and, if possible for anyone else with an idea of what to do next.
Tite actually found him first. “This way!” his friend shouted as he ran by with sword drawn.
“What are you doing?”
“Some of the men are attacking the officers’ camp. We’re bringing reinforcements.”
Rasce said nothing and followed. The officers, with a good number of men loyal to them, had holed themselves up in a large storehouse in the eastern side of Aritim. It was an inspired choice because none of the soldiers was willing to set fire to their own food in order to smoke the officers out.
Tite’s reinforcements hit the mutineers from behind and scattered them like the ubiquitous mosquitoes. One of the nobles emerged, a cut on his forehead dripping blood into his eyes.
“Thank you,” the man said. “We were nearly overrun.”
Rasce nodded. “Do you know where the others are? I saw hundreds of men up in arms, but only a few of them were here.”
“They’ve gone to the temple. Cutu has barricaded himself in there with his abominations, and the men are trying to force their way in. We tried to stop them, but there were just too many of them, and they were angry. We had to hole-up in here.”
“They were in an ugly mood, truly. Do you know whether they were making any progress in digging Cutu out?”
“Not that I could see. They seemed very keen on surrounding the temple, but no one really wanted to be the first to storm the doors.”
Rasce chuckled. “That is something I can relate to. Those dead men make me very nervous, and I have little wish to join their ranks. Tite, what do you think? Do we hit our mutineers from behind and save Cutu’s undead, or do we join them?”
“I think it might be best to sit this one out and join forces with whoever wins.”
Rasce laughed. “It might be a moot point. Tomorrow morning, the Romans are going to see the smoke rising and decide to come have a look. I don’t think we’re in any condition to hold them back.”
Tite looked thoughtful. “Maybe we should just throw ourselves on the mercy of the Romans then.”
“Perhaps. But not yet. Something tells me that this is far from decided.”
“So we sit tight?”
“Yes.”
The officer who’d been defending the food depot looked relieved. Waiting to see how things would go meant staying alive a little longer.
Setting sentries and ambushes to keep from being trapped, Rasce led his men into the food depot, to huddle and wait. It seemed like dawn took years to arrive, but at least this time, he wouldn’t wake wondering if he would be confronted with a dead soldier. He knew that there would be dozens of dead soldiers.
The certainty comforted him, and he dozed off.
“Wake up, Rasce, the sun is coming out. We should probably go out to see what’s happening.”
They selected a handful of men, exited the storage depot, and advanced cautiously towards the temple square. Before the final turning, Rasce decided that it would probably be best to observe from the roof of a building facing the square, so they climbed an external stair and looked down at the flagstone-and-Earth floor of the market square.
As dawn slowly dispelled the shadows, the situation looked to be exactly as described. Outside the temple, a disorganized mass of soldiers – at least two hundred of them by Rasce’s rough calculations – stood outside the temple gates. A few dead bodies littered the steps and covered patio in front of the entrance. Within the temple’s wide door, menacing shadows could be discerned in the otherwise dark interior.
The men outside were a ragged, disorganized mob, but they seemed determined to hold their ground, and Rasce wondered what Cutu was waiting for to attack. It probably would have been better for him to let his undead out at night – Rasce could imagine few men who’d be willing to face them in the dark. But Cutu, it seemed, had decided to stay inside the temple.
“Look!” Tite said, pointing at the temple with a trembling finger.
Rasce looked, and saw that one of the dead men near the door was twitching. Of course, the dead men would rise.
But after the previous night, there would be dozens of dead. Would the priest’s dark magic work on so many? Rasce didn’t know – he’d always seen men reanimated in small groups.
The soldiers laying siege to the temple milled around. They seemed to be debating whether to attack the corpses before they joined their fellows in the darkness of the temple.
But they hadn’t thought things over fully. Before they’d reached any decision that Rasce could identify, they were attacked from behind by a man who’d been cut nearly in two the night before, who reached them at a crawl. The soldiers, fuelled by panic, cut the remains of the man to pieces.
They would have been better served if they’d decided to run.
Corpses in better condition began to pour into the square from every entrance. Dozens, perhaps a hundred.
The men had no chance. First they started to run, but seeing the entrances blocked they tried to fight. It was over in minutes, as each man killed rose moments later to join the other side.
The screams of terror turned to screams of pain, and then to nothing, as the corpses had no one left to fight.
A black-robed figure emerged from the temple.
“That’s it. Cutu has won. Let’s get down there and join him.” Tite made as though to get up and wave, but Rasce restrained him.
“Wait. I want to see what he does next.”
Cutu did nothing, but spoke to the undead around him. They turned and strode into the city, radiating out from the square. Emptiness and silence reigned.
But the peace lasted only instants. From somewhere behind the roof where Rasce’s men lay, a scream pierced the dawn air. Not the scream of a man in pain, but that of a terrified woman.
It cut off suddenly.
Sounds of fighting and screaming could be heard from other places now, and the city seemed to awake. The soldiers flattened themselves against the roof, trying to conceal their presence as best they could.
“What’s he doing?”
“He’s killing them all. Mantus is the god of death, after all.”
“But why?”
Rasce shrugged. Cutu had probably simply gone mad with the power. Who knew what kind of toll a magic that dark would take on a man. “That’s not the right question. The question you should have asked is what we’re supposed to do now.”
“And what should we do?”
“I don’t know. Anything is better than dying within these walls.”
“The Romans will kill us if we leave. You know how they deal with resistance,” Tite exclaimed. “We should make our stand right here. We can hold off ten armies on this roof. There’s only one stair leading up.”
“Ah, but for how long. We have no food, no water.”
“Then, let’s fight anyway. I’d rather make a stand here than be executed by the Romans! I say we fight to the death!”
“And I say you shouldn’t have shouted. They’ve heard us now, and you’ll get your wish.” Rasce shook his head ruefully. “But you should remember that there is no longer a chance to fight to the death. I won’t bother to say goodbye, my friend – we’ll be standing together again as soon as we fall.”
Tite swallowed. “I prefer to say goodbye.”
“Suit yourself,” Rasce said. “But do it quickly. I hear feet on the stairs.”
©November 2020 Gustavo Bondoni
Gustavo Bondoni is an Argentine novelist and short story writer who writes primarily in English. His debut novel, Siege was published in 2016, while two others, Outside and Incursion, were published in 2017. On the short fiction side, he has over two hundred short stories published in fourteen countries. They have been translated into seven languages. his writing has appeared in Pearson’s Texas STAAR English Test cycle, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Perihelion SF, The Best of Every Day Fiction and many others. He placed second in the 2019 Been Memorial Contest and received a Judges Commendation in The James White Award. His work has appeared previously in Swords & Sorcery.
Other recent work includes an ebook novella entitled Branch, published in 2014. He has also published two reprint collections, Tenth Orbit and Other Faraway Places (2010) and Virtuoso and Other Stories (2011). The Curse of El Bastardo (2010) is a short fantasy novel. His website is at www.gustavobondoni.com.