Inside River

She blocks the blade of another warrior and puts hers in their chest. Shock and pain twists the warrior’s face: it’s behind their visor, so she cannot see. And the din of swords and armor clashing makes their individual scream impossible to pick out. She drops the warrior, lets a glancing claymore slide off her plate armor in a shower of sparks, and kills again. Again. Dirt, mud, and turf whirl around her with trails of gore and flying limbs. Deep sweat, shit breeches, and open entrails overpower what would be the smell of a clear forest glade. Her armored shoulder checks a knight in the ribs, and she tosses them into their allies in a messy clatter.

 She rears up to slash at someone else’s throat. She misses, falls forward, and something dents the back of her helmet. Her head gets hit hard. She falls unconscious among the piles of bodies, walked over as the battle goes on.

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Many hours pass. Perhaps a whole day. The fight has since ended, and its corpses were left behind. Too many died for the victors to make a concerted effort to clean up.

 She comes to, vaguely, her eyes rolling back to their right places in her skull. All is quiet beside the sound of ravens’ wings and air. Feeling returns to her, and she is sore and hurt all over. She wishes first to go back to sleep. But someone’s dead elbow or knee is pinning her bladder, and a desperate need to urinate overpowers everything else. She groans. Struggling to work her arms and legs, she manages to shift one way, pushing once, twice, three times to slough a heavy body off to her side. She sits up. Her head immediately throbs as blood rushes to it and past her injury. She breathes in, and the thick rotting scent of the battlefield worms through her nose. Vomit rises up her throat and then out the thin cracks of her helmet. She grabs at the back of her neck and peels the helmet off, revealing hair stuck around her face by sweat and stomach acid, dripping off her chin.

 Her mouth hangs open, and she looks up at the sky in a daze. Black ravens and vultures swirl overhead against a bright blue. Her brain hurts. She has a concussion, and she’s dehydrated. Her sword is still in hand, and she uses it to prop herself up, rising from the heap like a solitary zombie. She wavers back and forth. Then she hobbles towards the bordering woods for a place to pee.

 The forest is empty and would smell better if not for her piss. Armor half off, she pulls her undergarments up and curses discontentedly. Her warband has gone—somewhere or other—she doesn’t even know if there are any of them left. She looks over the leafy earth and bracken; there is no movement except for the birds in the trees. Sunlight falls from the canopy above, an insignificant breeze turns the branches ever so little, and there is naught there but tranquil green. Even though she’s finished relieving herself, there’s another trickle from not too far off. She lets her curiosity follow the sound and leaves the edges of the old battle behind.

 Behind some bushes, down a path bordered by moss, a burbling creek passes through a tunnel of trees. Light glitters across it like stars churning. She comes to the pebble bank by the water and stops to stare, reflected light dancing across her chestplate and in her eyes. The breath of the current is cool and sweet. Its bubbling syncopates with treefrogs and crickets so softly that her headache eases away. She hesitates, then steps towards the brook, unbuckling the plate on her chest as she goes. It falls to the ground in thoughtless discard. Next her greaves, then her boots, and soon she is free of all her steel. She feels the rocks under the balls of her feet and lets the cloth around her toes soak with water.

 The small, smooth stones of black and tan under the surface are collected in a silence and stillness that rivals every parliament of the land.

 She kneels and cups the riverwater to her her face, first cleaning her chin and dousing her scalp, then drinking of it, relieving her headthrob. Flecks of lingering puke drip and dissolve in the stream: she watches them cloud the water and run by swimming minnows. They flex their fins with passivity. She submerges her hands and lets the creek wash them, barely wincing as it stings her cuts and scabs. Grime tumbles out of her jagged fingernails. And blood loosens from her skin, caked and thick, hers and a nameless hundred others, clumps dislodging and fading away. She keeps her hands pressed down and watches an opaque red storm rise to shroud the pebbles. It goes and goes. She watches, then suddenly draws her hands back, wrongly worried there may be no person left once all the blood is gone.

 Up the stream, a sunny radiance enchants the headwaters with gold. Down it, she sees a glint of metal armor not her own. She wipes her hands on her leggings and goes over to investigate.

 Two soldiers are stuck on waterlogged branches down the way, damming up the creek. Enemies, bearing different crests, swords stuck in one another. They must have brought their fighting into the woods and died in tandem. Their capes drift eerily, and their bodies are still, creating a traffic jam of backed-up leaves. She lingers there. Was their joint sacrifice decisive towards the battle? Did anyone see them go? Probably not, same as she went unknown at the end of things. She walks through the water towards the sticks and dislodges them. The soldiers slowly turn and follow the motion of the river, bobbing lightly as they glide downstream.

 She looks their way for a very long time. Eventually, she lowers her body down into the coursing of the brook, letting her hair submerge and her ears wet as she lays flat. She floats on the surface. And she lets the current bear her away, too.