The last of William’s adrenalin had been burned up, and all that was left in its wake were a few crumbly, blackened ashes of what had been a brew of rash courage, blind luck and biting fear. Now the embers within William cooled off, and their glowing hues of red, orange, amber and yellow gave way to a speckled grey mess of numbness and despair. Like charred bones in a firepit, a deep and raking sensation of regret and dread began to materialise in his head. Death had come upon him, yet somehow his body remained alive. He still drew breath, even as warm blood ran down his legs and pooled inside his boots, thick and wet, and dripped from each of his fingertips onto the thirsty earth below with each laboured step that River King took. Through the exponentially swelling pain, the hearts of man and horse still somehow beat on, pumping blood with a tireless diligence through their bodies, even as that precious crimson leaked drop by drop from their bullet wounds and sabre cuts.
William felt the Reaper’s scythe prickling the skin of his neck with its deadly proximity, the glacial steel of the blade shimmering with all the combined cold of billions of corpses buried and long-rotten. He shook himself awake, trying to keep his eyes open, and willed River King on beneath him with a mumbled slur of barely cogent encouragement.
Through the blur of his shifting double-vision he saw the corpse of Private Watson on the ground as he and River King plodded past it. The big man’s body was riddled with bullet wounds, and half of his face and head had been taken off by a cannonball.
‘I’m sorry Watty,’ William croaked. ‘Looks like the Russians finished the job on your face tha’ I started. I hope you’ve found yoursel’ some peace at last, old boy.’
He urged River King on, and the horse and the two men he carried continued to move through the maze of strewn corpses and banks of thick smoke.
William sucked in a breath and bit his lower lip as he saw yet another familiar face frozen in death. As he looked upon the contorted, pain-grimacing expression locked on the visage of the body of Private Smythe, sadness jabbed him with its scorpion stinger and injected its crippling venom into his veins.
Private Smythe was lying on his side, and his back was arched in gruesome agony. Intestines and other slimy organs spilled out in a macabre pile from a gaping wound in his midsection, where a cannonball had struck him full-on. His hands were frozen in motion, with his fingers locked in a claw-like grip, thick with congealed crimson and purple gore; perhaps in the last few moments that he had been alive he had tried, in a pathetic and futile effort, to stuff his insides back into the cavity from which they had spilled.
William choked down a sob and looked quickly away as tears burned at the corners of his eyes.
A flood of urgent questions began rioting through his brain, gushing like water through fractured canals: what had just happened here? Had he really just been through this experience? Was this reality, or some awful nightmare that he just needed to pinch himself to wake up from? Had he died somewhere back there on that battlefield, and was he now wandering this muddy, blood-soaked plane as some sort of phantom, trapped here forever to relive this series of events again and again until time and the universe itself crumbled eventually into nothingness?
In front of him, on River King’s withers, Captain Liversage coughed weakly and spat out a mouthful of blood. He tried to speak, to say something to William, but his words came out only as an unintelligible mumble.
It was then, when his eyes caught sight of something truly terrible, that the venom of that injection of sorrow fully hit William’s heart, reaching it at last from its blackening passage through his veins and arteries. And once that poison had billowed and bloomed like a diseased rose opening up to a hell-red sky, it caused him to reel with debilitating shock and gut-wrenching sickness. His eyes rolled back in their sockets and his hands were seized with a tremor so violent that he could no longer maintain his grip on the reins, nor even keep himself upright in the saddle. Dizziness cast its head-swimming spell over his body, and the world began to tipple and teeter upon its tenuous axis. With a whimpering gasp William tipped over and fell from his saddle, landing with a heavy impact in a wash of thick mud.
For there, next to him in the brown, green and red mix of muck, was sprawled a body that had lain so many times by his side in the cellar of Mr Goode’s when they had been chimney sweeps, and then after that in the hay of the stables at Sir MacTaggart’s, or on the lush green grass of the Highland hills beneath a rich cyan sky, with books and sketch pads and a flask of whiskey in their hands, and laughter and smiles on their lips.
Now, however, those gentle eyes and that soft, introverted smile were frozen forever in an unmoving mask, never to change expression ever again.
William could not look at Andrew’s body, and could not bring himself to gaze on that face that stared up, eternally up, at the greying sky above. An expression of calm serenity beamed from Andrew’s still visage, and his body was unmarked by any cuts or stabs. The only evidence of violence done to his person was a small round hole between his eyes, where the musket ball that had killed him had entered his skull and wrought its destruction on the exquisite organ within. All of that art, all of that music, and all of those melodies, all of those wondrous images, all of that
