chapter seven

MONDAYS WERE FOR ORDER. I learned through the hard way that marching was a world’s difference from simply walking. It demanded a coordination that I could not command my limbs to obey. I could not march fast enough, or bend my knees at the right angles. The corporal would introduce a long wooden baton. The learning stick, he called it. And he would strike me punitively, considerately, at where meat covered bone as to not debilitate.

Again! No, no, all wrong. Again! Did your mother drop you on the head as a babe? I said: Again!

For hours, we marched to the arising heat, in our sweat-soaked footslog. Our feet treaded the ground bare of weeds and loose soil around the camp.

Then every mid-morning, I would muck out the stables.

While the other men dusted the barracks and polished the armoury, I bent to shovel away wet bedding and manure. Rows of stalls lined the shelter, loaded from the length of the night. I worked ankle deep in excrements, and sometimes the smell would not leave my nose for many following hours. It was clear, that I was not favoured. Soldiers talked. I was the “savage critter” and they had standing bets on when they would “break me in” like an undomesticated animal.

Elymus visited once and once too many. On one bleary morning, he stood, a silhouette, in the doorway of the stables and did not tread a step closer.

“You did not leave with Father,” was all he said. His eyes narrowed, at the burgeoning purple around my eye and the healing cuts on my bare arms.

“I won, didn’t I?”

Rai had left two days ago, just a day after my initiation. He helped me settle into my room in the barrack, which I shared with twenty other men. I had a cupboard and a bed and some worn sheets. Rai stroked my hair when I sunk to the floors at the foot of my bed and the tears leaked from beneath my eyelids. Be back in six months, he told me, stay strong. I am not, I thought, but in these six months I will become someone that is—someone to be feared. He left the next morning before I woke.

I thought Elymus might laugh in memory of my fight, as the others shared that sentiment. But instead, he seemed to frown. “You cheated,” he said. I bristled then, not realized that he had noticed. I wondered why he hadn’t tattled on me.

“It does not matter anymore. I’m here, whether you like it or not. I want to be here.”

“Do you? I heard you cry last night.”

His voice was softened but I stiffened at that. I was annoyed that he had gotten a glimpse of my vulnerability. Shown, my soft underbelly to a wolf. Then I startled at my own distaste. Just one week ago I had laughed with him with a belly full of wine.

“What does that matter to you?” I snarled. I was exasperated and weary and my ire broke through.

A frustrated sound leaves his throat. I tensed. For a second, I thought he might come closer. Winter descended in those dark earth eyes. Though, when I realized that he dared not act out his vexation, I turned around dismissively, and picked up my strewn shovel. “Leave me the fuck alone.”

I felt his hackles rise then. Felt his mood shift like the desert sand. Felt murder in the gaze pinning the back of my neck. “Gods, you can be such a bitch,” he barked. But he left nonetheless. Quietly I bent, and scraped away another shovel of wet hay. He would not return.

The afternoons were crueller with the rolling heat. In the roast we learned to carry our wooden swords and shields, fashioned twice as heavy. My head swam. We would practice formation drills, and then some more, until my limbs were lined with lead and I could scarcely see through the sweat in my stinging eyes. Still, we would practice some more. The assault of the learning stick ensured this.

Then every night, following a ration of unseemly gray sludge, I would visit the latrines. It was worse than the stables, the smell so pungent my eyes would redden.

I dropped on my scabbing knees, and started scrubbing.

TUESDAYS, WE WOKE to the chill of the night. We walked for miles in the desert, following the shaft of Orion’s arrow. When the sun broke through the horizon, we would find where the earth cracked below our feet and streamed water.

We filled our pails with water, hooking them onto our shoulder yokes. Then retraced our sullen steps back to the camp, carrying the weight of rivers on our backs.

And with barely a trice of rest, we pulled on our gear and left for the training yard. The day would come and depart on those barren grounds.

Most days, I would be alone. Some days the hawks that glided the skies would swoop down from the blue, perched on the high walls to pick at their feathers. I watched them arch their mighty wings, and my mind would wander to places beyond my control.

Theros was my one loyal companion, the one I laid down beside at the end of a day, overcome by a heavy exhaustion. I gave him my tears, my grievances, and he would press his tiny wet nose against my cheek without a word. I did not care what the other men thought. I was a pariah—a foreigner. There were four recruits that despised me the most: Vulture-nose, Freckle-face, Longneck, and Rock. I did not bother to learn their names. They taunted me with their words, then with their fists.

Bullies. I was too old for them, too tired. No matter the century, the land, those blackened hearts scavenged and grew fat on intimidation. When they pushed me around, I grit my teeth and let them until they grew uninterested. When they sullied my shoes in my sleep, I simply washed them.

When they started calling me “rat-boy”, Theros crapped in their beds.

WEDNESDAYS, WE FOUGHT. The training yard was our battlefield where the heat-baked ground scuffed our bare feet as we wrestled our swords. The commander observed from aside, a passing sightseer that made the men twitch.

We began with a simple stance: right foot forwards followed by the other turned; knees aligned with the toes and straight, keeping a steady balanced gait. Relax, the corporal instructed, shoulders, knees, legs. You are the artist and the sword is your brush. This is how you hold your sword: index finger around the quillon; the thumb pointed upwards along the flat of the bade; the pommel should rest against your wrist and align with the forearm.

“You are overextending the wrist,” the corporal corrected me, “cant your sword forward, else you will injure yourself.” Then he raised his baton and pain would pulse along my calf. “I said relax.”

He continued to demonstrate some basic footwork. He stopped when the commander rested his hand on his shoulder. “I want to see them in combat,” the commander said. The corporal looked surprised, but did not argue. A test, I gathered, to discern the crème de la crème…or weed out the weak.

“Pair up,” the commander ordered, “and fight.”

The recruits that shunned me, loved me now. They turned to me. They were parched for his attention, depraved at the eyes. Rock won the first fight. He pushed away the other men and grabbed me by the upper arms. “You’re mine.” He sneered. I did not dispute. “Romantic,” I said.

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He let me step backwards and raise my wooden sword. At least I could hold it properly now. Relax, I reminded myself. Still my thighs grew tense and my shoulders lifted.

Rock was built like a boulder. Then Rock swung his sword like the reckoning of Hercules’ mace—thrusted, reversed, and cut with a barbarous force of nature.

And Rock would win that fight and many more after that. He beat me with his sword in the thick of my clumsy dance. Then he beat me with his hands. My own gave way to baser instincts, they clawed into his flesh, but still, they would yield. He stood in his victory. Then pulled back, and kicked me in the skull. “Eat this, rat-boy.”

Blood filled my mouth, and I swallowed it down. My body would curl like a shrivelled insect. It would not dissuade his second assault, nor his third. From the corner of my eye, the commander watched, smiled, then he turned and walked away. When training ended, I crawled my way to the barracks and into my bunk.

I laid still as a corpse, all dust and dirt and blood. A betraying tear sprouted from the corner of my eye.

For a long time, I could not figure out my tears, they simply poured. There was seldom rhyme or reason to them. Maybe it was the abuse—the bruises and the pains. The frustration: glass-bottled wrath from limitations and hard-cut discipline. Perhaps it was the loneliness. Or perchance, it was the fear after all. I have been terrified for so exhaustingly long; my mind had defaulted to it.

I stayed to become strong, but I was a lamb that dreamt of becoming a lion. In an unfamiliar country, stifled by a language I barely spoke, beleaguered by butchers that bespoke of slaughter. Everything, everywhere at once, it siphoned away my fervour.

Yet, when the pain ebbed away and the world became numbingly still, I rolled off the mattress and retrieved a book I had hidden beneath. A book about swords. A manual for fighters I had discovered in some dusty alcove. I returned to the battlefield in my lonesome and the night would sleep with my absence. One by one, I cut down shadows with my wooden sword.

Then again. Repeat.

Sólo los fuertes sobreviven. Only the strong survive.

That was the last time I cried.

THURSDAYS DEMANDED we run with the mountains strapped to our backs. Across the stretch of dead land, our feet slapped the coarse sand in our pace. It seared like hot coal. Sharp pebbles cut into our feet. I ran until the cuts no longer hurt and my pulse was in my eyes and my lungs split from my heaves. When I fell finally, the men behind stepped over and into me. The corporal, on his steed, bound my wrists with rope and then kicked his horse. When other men fell, they joined my torture. For miles he dragged me across the desert, until the skin on my back and my legs turned to meat and muscle. The sun was red through the filter of my eyelids. I screamed until he cut the ropes a half-mile from the camp. Leave, he dared, and die. Then he left my broken body in the sand amongst corpses, with his remaining men and his mirth. They did not see, the ichor that soaked into the lifeless desert. They did not see, the flowers that grew where I laid.

FRIDAY, I TOUCHED the future and it felt like a gun. It was smooth brass and wood, and heavy in my arms. Every shot, a small worship to Ares and Hephaestus—warfare and fire. Following the forty-two measures of preparation, I aimed and pulled the trigger, stumbling from the recoil. The barrel-end of the musket steamed. Bullseye by my divine eye. A man could die at the crook of my finger, the movement so trivial and reckless—I hated the thought.

Vulture-nose appeared scorned. His shot was skewed like his face. He turned his musket on me. “You’re a cockroach, rat-boy. Just won’t die. Let’s see if you survive this too.” But the corporal intervened. Do not waste good bullets, his mouth said. But his eyes stared at me with the strange look he bore since he had witnessed me crawl through the camp gates. Like he’d seen a ghost. No, I thought, the desert would not kill me. And if he had let Vulture-nose take his petty shot, he would learn that bullets would not kill me either. There was something in his eyes, like looking at something he could not understand, and could not decide if he hated it or not.

Then later in the day came a sudden gift. The corporal proclaimed that we had earned passage to The Secret Oasis. Secret? The existence of the oasis was renowned amongst the recruits. It was the forbidden fruit, and suddenly, it was no longer a sin. The Secret Oasis was a stretch of effervescent azure waters in the dry desert, where fig trees rimmed the edges in its indulgence. It was the Garden of Eden, for men with flaking sun-sick skin. I thought I could die a happy nymph as I pressed the fragrant skin of fresh fruit against my mouth.

The men whistled and whooped, abandoning their clothing to slide into the waters. The corporal shared a supply of soap-plant, and some men began lathering their skin with the sticky root. Instead, I rolled up the legs of my breeches and let my feet submerge. The water was delectably icy against my swollen feet, prickling into my skin with a thousand needle-point spines. Yesss. I groaned my graciousness at the small reprieve from my pain. But watching the men bathe, a yearning tugged at my chest. My back and thighs were in pieces, skinless raw flesh that took too long to mend. Regretfully, I bent to clean my face instead, and let the waters caress the skin of my arms. It was sweet on the tongue—like strawberries and honeysuckle between my teeth.

I was still glowing in the evening as I washed the latrines. Theros scurried to my company, as if tasted my pleasant mood. During the days, he roamed to his liking, favouring the kitchens. I worried for him, because men hated rats and rats loved their scraps and wherever men were, rats died.

“The Secret Oasis,” he echoed after I told him about my day, “that’s what I call my mistress.”

“Hold on!” I dropped my scraper. “What are you saying?”

He laughed at my disbelief. “I have a mate, and children in Barcelona.”

I had once conjured a backstory for the gray rat. Theros, a small rat with a big dream for adventure. Orphaned in his youth, he survived on solely wits and bits of cheese in the streets of Spain until coming across a merchant ship that would take him halfway across the world and back. That is how one becomes a rat of the sea.

“So, what the hell were you doing all the way in Virginia?”

“There’s a secret oasis there too,” he said with feigned innocence.

“Theros,” I gasped at the rat, “you dog-”

My lips sealed as a shadow fell over mine. “What are you doing?” I turned around quickly, almost guiltily. It was the soldier that guarded the commander’s tent, I recognized. He was one of the few men in the camp that did not shake his fists at me, but rather ignored me mostly. I picked up my scraper and waved it. “Never mind me,” I said loudly. He passed me an odd look, but left.

When I turned back to face Theros, he grinned disarmingly, baring his little rodent teeth. “Rats do not care about mortal things like monogamy.”

“Sure…” I drew out the word. Shaking away my stupor, a bittersweet understanding clutched at my heart, sudden and arresting. My voice softened like melted butter. “Theros, why are you with me and not with your family?” He had not left my company since the docks of Barcelona. On my shoulder, in my pocket, we were thick as thieves. While his presence preserved my sanity, I did not want to keep him from his family.

Family was sacred.

His eyes glittered. “Because people are pendejos, Persephone.” Assholes, he said.

“Not all of them,” I laughed mutedly.

“Aye, all of them,” he insisted, “you need someone to look out for you.”

A smile broke over my face. Unable to help myself, I scooped him up into an embrace. Mortals had their gods to look over them. I had my little guardian angel in the palm of my hand.

SPEARS RAINED ON SATURDAYS as we learned to wield the pike and then the javelin. It was much less effective than the musket, but it was Tercio tradition for defence and probably more economical. The pike was almost twice the length of my body and difficult to command. The javelin was much lighter and would arch through the air in its flight.

Later, the stable boy would let me brush the mane of the horses. He taught me how to braid their hair with small wooden beads. It reminded me of Arctus, and that made me smile. The steeds nickered, pleased, their wide almond eyes gleamed. It did not seem so tedious when I shovelled away their bedding.

SUNDAYS WERE FOR PRAYERS. I drank the balm of their faith greedily like nectar, licked the seams of my mouth when it dribbled down my chin. It rejuvenated me, restored my wounds with clean flesh. The day of rest was spent in church. A white rubble structure assembled around an altar, where the consecrated wine and bread sat under the Christ’s stained-glass stare.

“The body of Christ,” the priest said. “Amen,” I replied, imitating the soldier before me. I received the Eucharist on my tongue, the unleavened bread dissolving quickly in my mouth. I clutched my fingers tightly, and released them when my body did not rupture with flames. It felt like a small betrayal.

I thought I saw the Lord’s carved marble eyes wink from the ceiling.

At night I sheared my hair with my dagger, which grew at an alarming rate. But when I held the jar of black dye that Rai had left for me, I did not open it. Red streaked through the artificial blue-black. Let them see my fire, I thought. My eyes looked like stones through the reflection of the glass.

A month passed in slow succession of weeks incarcerated in a temporal loop. A month bled into two, then four turned, and when I woke up one morning to the fickle autumn draft, eight months had passed.