A contender I had written for another short story competition. It takes place in the immediate aftermath of a large 15th century battle — two enemies remain in the wake of 20,000 fallen soldiers; Ruelle De Saincourt and Vernon Valcante.
Enjoy!
“That sword becoming heavy, cur?” his metallic bark filtered through the slits of his helmet, directed at his similarly armoured opponent. They circled, circling on mulched, wet ground. Puddles of blood and water spilled over their rims as their plated boots landed in them with heavy splashes, staining their flowing capes – one green, the other yellow.
“Nay,” he tested his sword against his opponent’s with an echoing clang. “Tis as light as a quill,” his sluggish movements dragged his yellow cape along as if it were a duvet. “Do you boil under that armour?”
“As cool as Winter’s breath,” he flung his green cape from his way. Their swords met again, briefly, before they returned to their weary dance. “If you would fall face-first, you would surely drown in yours…”
“Drown in the blood of all the men I’ve killed,” Yellow chortled back, fighting to keep his footing. In truth, both had killed a generation’s worth of men and boys; stacked high and far across the scape, having died and fallen on heaps of their own kin. Green tested Yellow’s blade again and they recoiled, stumbling away from each other. “Too hasty, my friend, too hasty.”
“Tis your own haste that will be your downfall.” Green swung his sword over his head and charged, catching a glance off of Yellow’s shoulder plate. They had now swapped sides; still circling, still breathing in spite of the other. Their movements pained them. Their hearts beat like war-drums. Their lungs bordered exhaustion. As much as it was a battle of strength and skill, it had become a battle of lies.
“You tire?” Yellow barked with the same burning throat as his opponent. “T’will be an easy, easy victory.”
“And of our armours,” Green panted back, “yours has more marks than mine.”
“Perhaps you found time to count while I was, I was winning.” He came down amidst a loud crack on his plated knee, but still he churned the earth in an effort to circle.
“And so the tide turns!” Green moved to strike, but slipped and landed on his knee. The dance had ended. Heavy breaths, seen in the cool air, exuded from both of their visors.
“Stand, stand up you cur! This fight is not yet over!” Yellow called, clinging to the hilt of his blade to stay upright.
“Alas, it is. You hath fallen first!” Green clung to his harder, depending on it like a crutch. At once, both sat back onto their calves and turned to face the overcast sky above. “You hath fallen first…” he released his grip and went for his helmet.
“What, what are you doing?” Yellow protested. “Stop, no!” but the helmet hit the ground like a hammer on iron, revealing the clammy face of an older man; mousey-brown, grey hair and bearded in coarse wet-ginger and black. “No,” he whispered.
“The battle is over…” Green shook his head, moving to begin taking off the rest of his plates. In anger, Yellow flung his helmet aside, causing it to bounce along the earth and stop at a pile of bodies. His own features were young with a damp mop of blonde hair over his hard eyes. “It’s over,” he whispered again, scanning the battlefield.
“Over?” Yellow wiped the muck and blood from his stubbled jaw. “But we yet remain?”
“And what of it?” Green riposted.
“On each of those hills are our Kings,” he pointed to the one over his shoulder and the one at his front; distant hills. “They still have a man each.”
“There is your King,” he motioned to the crushed antler-crown on his left, the head wearing it fat and bloated. “There is my King,” he motioned to the bent thorn-crown on his right, the head wearing it split apart and leaking. “Our Kings are no more. We, we are all that is left of our armies…”
“So stand, stand and fight!” Yellow tried to, but couldn’t.
“What does it matter?” Green winced. “Both of us, both of us have lost.” Finally, finally Yellow's keen eyes switched between hills upon hills and mounds upon mounds of murdered men.
“But, but how?” his shoulders fell and his tired hands rested on his lap. “How could it have come to this?”
“You would expect me to know?”
“I thought…”
“That the battle had turned in your favour? As did I. Overconfidence, then, is what killed our Kings.”
“Had we sent our Knights in, in the hope of putting a swift end to this?”
“I would think it so…”
“Heaven above,” he prayed quietly.
Green allowed him to finish before unbuckling another of his plates. “What is your name, Knight?”
“Forever and ever, Amen… Ruelle De Saincourt,” he answered blankly. “And what is yours?”
“Vernon Valcante,” he saluted with two lazy fingers. “Ruelle… You are a skilled swordsman.”
“As are you, Vernon,” he returned the gesture. “Thrice I thought I had you, and yet it is thrice you have escaped.”
“To fight another day, as it were,” his soft eyes followed a flock of Swallows flying overhead, arcing towards Africa for the Winter. “In truth, I have no recollection of the reason, the reason as to why we are here, fighting on this good earth. T’was good earth before we trampled it with boots and hooves…”
“I would hope that nature forgives us of our crimes,” Ruelle sighed. “Least not the crimes we hath committed on each other.”
“Crimes indeed,” Vernon grumbled, his eyes turning to the ground in his shadow. “Twenty-thousand men died here today… Friends, Foes-”
“Fathers, Sons…” he continued for him. “Whatever grows here after we are gone will be Brothers to us, if only by the lakes of blood spilled to soak the soil.”
“Was it in vain, Ruelle?”
“The battle?”
“Did it mean something? To anyone?”
“It did once, to me, but I cannot answer that truthfully, not now, for I do not now know in my heart of hearts.” A single tear slid down his flushed cheek, clearing a path through the grit and grime. “It meant something to a pair of dead men, and yet we are the ones left standing in their stead. It meant something, to all of us, but not now, not at the foot of their graves,” he gestured.
“That we have to ask at all is answer enough,” Vernon wiped his forehead with a plated hand. “A waste, I say. A waste. No thing on Earth is worth the weight of this; be it land, titles, gold or power. I wish the lives taken today to be as leaden boots on our Kings' feet as they try wade through the Styx.”
“Hell, you would imagine, not Heaven?”
“No life taken today will be going to Heaven, boy. And when we die, when our time comes, neither will we for what we have done. Not for what I have done.”
“Three Wars, my fourth I was promised to see the white gates of the Lord’s home.”
“And seven later I am still searching for them,” Vernon replied with an open heart. “No King can promise Heaven.”
“For there is no Heaven fit for a King,” Ruelle chuckled. “I know this now.”
“And if you can learn something quicker than I had done, then the day is not fully lost,” Vernon smiled painfully. “Are you fit to stand, soldier?”
Ruelle tried and, eventually, he propped himself up with the dregs of his strength. “I fear my knee to be broken. I had landed hard on it.”
“I fear for mine as well,” he held a hand out. Ruelle inched over to him and pulled him up with a grunt. They threw arms around the other’s shoulders and limped away from their arena. “There’s effort in you yet, young man.”
“You can say that again if we get out of this graveyard.” For a graveyard it was, though none of its dead were buried. They trudged onwards between spires of man and horse alike; the remaining pieces of their plate clinking in lockstep. “Where is it that we should go?”
“I do not know this land,” Vernon sighed.
“Nor do I,” he scanned the cloudy sky. “If we venture over my hill, you will surely be cut down as we make for our infirmary.”
“And should we venture over mine, our squires would kill you for a title,” Vernon chuckled. “Though, perhaps there is a third way?”
“A third way?” Ruelle eyed him cautiously.
“We venture over neither hill, instead we carve our own path. I see no injuries on your person. I certainly feel no mortal ones on mine.”
“Only for our sundered knees…” he grimaced, unbuckling the last of his armour. That yellow cape fluttered away, landing limp and damp over a trio of bursted corpses. Vernon undid his and draped it around their shoulders. “Together then, we would surely find a town…”
“Together then, we will find a town,” Vernon started pulling his weight. “Have you family? A wife? Children?”
“A wife. No children as of yet,” Ruelle made sure his gaze never strayed from the clear path before them; the smell turning his stomach. “And you?”
“Three children, daughters all.”
“Lucky you.”
“Lucky me, indeed,” he smirked. “I would hope to see them again one day.”
“As would I like to see my Celinè,” happiness visited his face for a fleeting kiss. “Your Wife, she is?”
“With the Lord, if he would see fit. Blasted Pox took her from us last Summer. My girls are all grown up, having fled the nest.”
“You would return to an empty home, then…”
Vernon mulled over his words. “No place can be called a home if it is empty.”
Ruelle chewed on that for a time. “I would invite you to our home then, mine and Celinè’s,” he proposed with a resolute tone.
“Nay,” Vernon smiled with relief to the green grass of the battlefield’s edge entering his view. “I would seek my own path home.”
“I would insist.”
“Neither I nor you are fit for a duel to decide the outcome of your proposal.”
“Then I would insist again. It would be my honour to host the man I could not best.” They put each other down and turned to face the field from whence they'd come. Ruelle whispered another prayer, but halfway through he stopped. “Perhaps we already are in Hell.”
Vernon laughed, struggling with his boots. “If it were Hell I would have received a hero’s welcome by now.” After a pregnant pause Ruelle chuckled, but Vernon’s face changed; clouding over with uncertainty. Those spires, those mounds, those puddles and lakes filled with blood. Mortality was the only thing on his mind; his own in-fact. After another pregnant pause he stretched a gnarled, blood-wet, open hand over. “Ruelle De Saincourt, I will take you up on your offer… Get us home, young-man.”
Ruelle took it firmly and shook it thrice. “I will need your help with that, old-man.”
Some years later...
“And so, having found lodgings for a time, we walked all the way here,” Vernon said after finishing a mouthful of mead. The little girl on his lap clapped at the conclusion of his story.
“Is that true, Uncle Vern?” the girl sitting at his feet looked wide-eyed into his.
“Truer than we are sitting here, Veronique,” Ruelle smiled, releasing a cloud of thick smoke from the side of his mouth. “Uncle Vern saved my life.”
“As you hath saved mine,” he whispered.
“Girls, time for sleep,” Celinè entered and shooed them away. “Go on, it is almost morning!” Neither of them wanted to budge making Ruelle and Vernon laugh at their charade.
“Goodnight Papa, goodnight Uncle Vern,” they both called as they were corralled to bed.
“Goodnight girls,” Ruelle smirked after a puff of his pipe.
“Sweet dreams, Veronique. Sweet dreams, Mabel,” Vernon said with a glowing smile.
“I'm going as well,” Celinè stood by the door, “do not keep me waiting.”
“You're on course for a third?” Ruelle slapped Vernon’s arm for that remark. Regardless, Celinè granted them the room as the fire crackled its last breaths, but Vernon threw another log on, sending sparks to flutter anew. “Ruelle, I have received a letter from home…”
“Is the ruse up?” he chuckled. “Have we been found out after all of these good years?”
“Nay, t’was a letter from my eldest. Catherine.”
“Well, don’t keep me waiting,” he stuffed new tobacco into the bowl of his pipe.
“They, they wish to visit… If that would be-”
“Say no more,” Ruelle waved, “your family is always welcome here. But, it will put some strain on our work.”
“Right, right,” Vernon nodded in agreement but with a cheeky smile. “We’ll need to hammer twice as hard.”
“Lord Erringal will want his first,” he disregarded his friend’s jibe. “His court’s faire is in two weeks and he will be keen to show it off.”
Vernon scoffed, stroking a bushel of grey hair draped over his forehead. “Making actual swords is far easier than ceremonial ones.”
“True,” Ruelle smoked on. “True, but these pay better, and their edges will never tear flesh.”
“After all of these years,” Vernon grinned, “after all of these years, it is you who has finally bested me.”
“Bested you?” Ruelle asked quizzically.
“You killed the man I once was,” he tapped his temple.
“No, we are yet even,” Ruelle said with a knowing grin. “You killed the man I was so close to becoming.”
Auf Wiedersehen.
AJ Carney 