A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor-Chapter 1916: Tears of the Gods - Part 5

The pain of that loss, it would not allow him to vanish. Even if he tried to dismiss it, the pain was there, heavy and impossible. He could not allow it free of himself. That suffering, it dug in between his ribs as the coldest of daggers.

"My Lord," Verdant said, from at his side. A face cold with expectation. There hardly seemed any love there. Oliver found himself shying away from the man, and the harshness of him. Even the slightest little cold glance now wounded him immensely.

"...Apologies," Oliver said, looking elsewhere, trying to steady his breathing, as once more, the situation ran away from him, along with his own mishealth.

"We’ve lost a good few men..." Blackthorn said as well. There might not have been accusation in her voice, but Oliver still thought that he could hear some. The weight of that responsibility. Two thousand men they had charged in with, at the back of their General, for the weighty sacrifice he had made of himself, and what had they brought to bear for it? Nothing but the slaughter of their men, and the remaining thousand good Patrick soldiers that they had.

Oliver grit his teeth. It took everything that he had to simply climb back into the saddle, but that still was far from being good enough. He swayed uneasily, fighting his breath, unable to establish a rhythm. He almost fell. The wound to his arm only added to his dizziness.

A breakthrough from Tiberius’ men, as they gathered themselves from a distance, and began lurching forward. Disorganized they might have been, but it hardly seemed to matter. The speed of the chase now, that was to their advantage.

The need again – the need to make a painful decision. Oliver didn’t have it in him. He grasped for the reins of some strategy that might serve to pull it all together, but his heart was an unsteadily beating, chaotic sort of thing.

Endure, that was the only thing he could summon up the want to do. Endure, but for what? For what future? For which memories that flashed through his mind?

That summer day, when he’d been determined not to bring his little sister along. When the waters of the creek were perfectly clear, the sunlight illuminating the bottom, and he had sprang through them with such ease, and she had stumbled and had to half-swim her way through, calling out to him with tears in her eyes all the while.

He’d grumbled, but he’d gone back for her. Then grumbled some more when she insisted on staying with him, and slowing him down. That memory, that small mistake, now that brought to light such a thorn in his heart. Straight through it pierced, straight through. Could he not have been kinder then? Could this man that could not even stand in front of her when it truly counted, could he not at least have afforded her that kindness that ought to have come so easily?

A flash of gold. The same light of that sun. The hair of a woman, with a heart kind enough to do what he failed to do so consistently. Patience enough for an entire kingdom, but with fire enough in her that none could doubt she was a Pendragon Queen for true.

Those eyes, so full of life – and then the tortured corpse that had been left behind.

Oliver lurched in the saddle, fighting the sickness. Voices in his ears. Verdant, Blackthorn, Gar. All of them pulling at him, all of them willing him in a certain direction. Then the voices beneath him, the hands that reached out towards him from by his feet. The dead that he’d failed to do right by. This dangerous game that he played. The storms that he so often delighted in flying into. Now look upon it, they said, look upon these consequences that you have wrought.

The men came in from the front, heavy with their armour. Oliver’s left arm ached. There was enough pain in it to pin it at his side forever, forcing him into one handed combat, as if he were Dominus, or as if he were Captain Lombard that came after him. A strange sense of destiny, something almost enough to give into.

But when those men did come, when their plate and the empty gazes behind their visors, when they stood right in front of Oliver, and his heart ached, and his stomach turned, and his world swam with dizziness. That wounded arm still found its way to the grip of that trusted blade, fallen from the hand of a teacher that he sorely needed for so much longer, but had only been afforded for the short span of a few months.

Wounded arm that ought to have been immobile not only for the course of the battle, but for weeks to come, perhaps even eternity beyond that. It gave the sword the added strength it needed. It bit through solid metal harshly, sliding along it, and finding those little gaps in between plate where flesh and chain mail dwelled.

He cast up a cloud of blood. Nelson dove into it. That fine mist. Once, he had feared the shedding of that blood. He remembered the first time he’d drawn the blood of another man. How his hand had shook, and his will had threatened to fail him – how it was duty, beyond all that, which he had clung to.

A man fell in front of him, cast down, the way he ought to be. Water falling from the height of a cliff, pulled down to the churning waters of the plunge pool below, by that natural force of gravity. So too did Oliver Patrick wield his blade, buoyed back and forth by the raging waters of a stormy sea.

What light could there be? There was none. His ship was full of holes, and the crew that he had relied on to navigate the realm that they had all agreed to pierce through – those men of such importance, they were all dead. It was the wind on Oliver’s face alone now. The rain that battered him. His own Patrick men shrank back away from him. He reached out with hand, and he reached out with heart, and cruelly, as if they were receiving orders from some man with more authority than their General, did they batter his hand aside.