Strung up by rope from the tree behind them was the flayed skin of a lioness. A charge shot through my veins. My belly disturbed by a current. The sky was fuming with thick nacreous clouds, and without a single droplet’s notice, a wall of rain seized us. It hit the flame with a vituperative hiss that sent clouds of steam up and up until the pink metallic clouds were blotted by ash. Two men foisted the girl into their tent and the rest of us crowded under wooden struts shielded with plastic.
I swam up from the murky bowels of a black sleep in the middle of the night. Perhaps what did it was the moaning captive in the adjacent tent, pulsing in orange candlelight, silhouetted and contorted into the pitching, rolling shapes of torrid and illegal acts. A soldier stood guard like a sentinel before it, a nonplussed expression stretched and drooping across his face. The fire was long out and the taste of creosote had reached as far as my lungs. I stretched myself out and, feeling grim, stepped of the encumbrance wearing only a t shirt . A group who couldn’t fit under the awning was bivouwacked under two trees. The sentinel regarded me impassively, and turned back stonefaced, gazing somewhere out in the moribund of dusk.
I walked until I felt water cooling my feet. It was as if I’d broken free of the bonds of war and entered the free world once more. It was so soothing. I followed the stream with calculated step barefoot among slippery wet and mossy stones. Jagged shards of mineral and shale. I soon reached the mouth of a swamp where a small fire was wisping and combed backwards, like air blown against a lit wick, and yet, there was no wind. An oasis in the black, dripping, vaporous forest. The hearth flared but there was no trace of glow upon the trees.
I slunk along cautiously. I hadn’t stood in opposition to the enemy in a long time; so long, in fact, that the very concept of wartime had embedded itself into some long passed extradimensional vicissitude as foreign to me as Archaic Latin. I shuffled through the gravel latently, drawing out my approach with as much quietude as the terrain allowed for, and once I scaled the peak of the dale, in untarnished view, witnessed something which rendered me icebound and which heated my blood. The salt of my sweat burned my eyes, and I could taste anchovies.
The flame gave off only darkness. I’d never seen anything like it. There was no hue, no pervading of light. An arrow whizzed by and I dropped to my stomach.
“Friendly!”, I shouted. Friendly!
From out of the flames stepped a man chalked fully in white paint from shaven head to taloned toe. His leg was burning with gaseous blue, wisping flames like some black occultist pagan enduring the sacrifice of effigy. He drew back a granite-tipped arrow against the taut line of his bow and released.
Friendly! For Christ sake!
He withdrew another from his satchel and sauntered toward me in crouched attack posture. The trees were infected with blister rust. It has a sharp, peppery scent that’s unmistakable for any other fungus. It warped the bark and fragments would break free and drop like ashen chunks of dry rain. I rose to my feet and held up my arms and began waving them. He slackened the line and my arms fell stoop-shouldered to my sides.
You can’t be a Colonel, he said in a low droning voice that was a twinge nasal.
Corporal Randone?
This is my clearing. Nobody enters my clearing. Not even colonels. He’d know to heed these words. What is it you want, Rigby?
Captain Jacobs, sir.
Rigby. You’re all Rigbys, except for your Colonel, whom by rights should have been the one to have sought me out.
I’m Captain of 133rd. Here to-
We did them. Was it Forster who sent you to us?
We’re looking for Charlie battalion who absorbed eight of our men.
Yeah, said he, stomping his foot incessantly as if putting out an invisible fire.
That’s us.
I don’t understand.
We’re the mission, which translates to mission completed.
You’re the mercenaries?
You interrupted my mass. Never interrupt a superior’s prayer service. Go back to where you came from.
I’ll get my squad
You’ll go back and remain in place, importunate Agnostic. Backslider of the Catholic Church.
How did he know this about me?
He raised his bow once more. I took the hint and disappeared back down the creek. A high pitched ululation soared across the sky, as if the very place which emitted it. I went back a ways and then turned. GhostFace was standing, quite literally, in the heart of the fire, all his limbs ablaze, mewling in tongues.
The next day Bismarck woke me with a prodding stick and said “time to go home”.
Did you know about this?, I asked.
Not entirely.
Where is he? Randone?
He regarded me with grave eyes, spat, and said “suit up. Fall in”.