Chapter Text
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, hunger, death, and the beasts of the earth.
-Revelation 6:8
King James Version
Go, Buck. Get out of here.
Mud crunches under Gale’s worn, blistered feet, wet enough for it to be slippery, cold enough that the thin shell of ice over everything leaves it deceptively traversable. His breath puffs around him in a strange, cloying fog. Drifting, lazy and slow, as if it doesn’t recognize the urgency the night calls for.
The guns have long since fallen silent. No bullets hitting earth, trees, hopefully not his own body– the soft thud of them something he hasn’t heard for some time now. No German voices, screaming threats, ordering him to stop. No John, shouting through the trees for him to run.
Gale is alone. Aching feet, empty stomach, body that feels as shaky and delicate as the ice-coated pine needles that shed from every tree branch he slaps aside with torn mittens. He’s all but a corpse, the loudest thing in this dead forest, heart beating so hard in his chest it feels fit to burst.
He puts his head down, and runs.
The Germans are retreating, falling back behind every shrinking and patchy lines. They’re belly down on the dead grass on the side of the road, trucks rattling past and sometimes over their half-frozen corpses like they were little more than sticks and debris clogging the road. A thousand miles from friendly faces and safety, their best bet the forest on the other side of the road only they have already seen that a thick forest doesn’t necessarily mean survival. Gale and Bill hold their breath for several long minutes as the never-ending human and machine train rattles by. Several minutes longer as things fall silent, making sure the coast was truly clear before pulling themselves from the protective cradle of the earth.
Only to realize they were not quite so alone as they had thought.
What Bill sees is a horse. Gale knows this because he asks, mud-stained and bloody and hushed, is that a horse, spoken through chattering teeth right into Gale’s ear. His breath is rotting, fetid, bad diet and untreated cavities eating them all from the inside out. Gale has an ache in his own molars that’s beginning to pulse and throb in warning. Something gone off that needs to be taken care of, carved out like a cancer.
Gale sees it, too, for just a moment. The horse. White, mane long and as dingy with mud and blood as they are, draped in a similarly blood-stained saddle and trailing reins. She pauses in front of them, almost expectant, intelligent in the way Gale knows horses can be. Only for a moment, she is ordinary– or at least as ordinary as any animal trotting through the ravages of war.
Is that a horse? Bill repeats. And he might even be right, mane as long and as dingy with mud and blood as they are, draped in a similarly blood-stained saddle and trailing reins. Because Gale sees it, too, for just a moment.
He watches the Mare pause almost expectantly in front of them, intelligent in the way Gale knows horses can be, but all of it feels wrong. Feels premonitive. Like something is about to happen. Something is about to be fundamentally changed. It’s a thing he’s felt before, as he put his pen to paper and signed his name over to the United States Army. Felt when John had tossed his bag next to Gale’s that first night of basic training. The first time he broke through crowd cover into the birds’ domain, and the first time he felt the concussive shudder of German firepower shake his very bones.
Like something big, and powerful, and entirely unknown is watching him, waiting to see his next move.
Gale stands, and Bill hisses at him warningly, hand reaching up from the muck to grab him.
“Gale!”
But Gale sidesteps him, uses his chapped, cracked, bloodstained hands to haul himself out of the ditch. Onto the mud of the road.
“Jesus Christ, Cleven!”
Gale takes one step, then another, hand outstretched for the soft pink nose ahead of him, thinking, John’s never going to believe this.
Inches away, close enough to touch and feel the heat of, if there had been any to feel, the Mare tosses her head, powerful neck muscles rippling. The air shudders, hollowing out in Gale’s ears until they pop. The swish of its mane sounds like weeping, and when it prances, the strike of its hooves sound like mourning bells. A curving horn sprouts from the center of its forehead, ribbed and grooved like the antlers of a deer, swinging back like the crescent moon. Its eyes are pale, pale as the snow, lashes paler still, feathering with every blink.
On its back– bare unlike whatever worldly creature Gale had first seen in the first few seconds of its appearance– sits a robed rider, face turned towards Gale, still in the way only corpses are. Still in the way something is when it no longer draws breath, no longer contains the quiet shiver of life.
Gale can’t look long, can’t maintain eye contact with that empty cavern of a hood for anything more than a second, or two. Something looks back out at him that he knows, from pure animal instinct, is not at all human. Or hasn’t been for a long time. It makes his ears ring, a pressure vibrating through his head that he fears allowing to grow too strong. He looks off to the left, at the thing’s shoulder, where the robe drapes, soft and gossamer and grey. Like ash-filled cobwebs.
Its neck cracks, as it regards Gale silently.
“I didn’t see it coming,” Gale says. His voice sounds shockingly numb.
The unicorn snorts, pawing at the frozen mud with a heavy cloven hoof– not dainty, like they’re drawn in picture books, but huge. Sharp, broad, like a cart-horse. Like something that might kill. The whole creature is a weapon, and as it kneels in front of him, Gale thinks someone better tell Father Teska his good book got things real wrong. Steam rises up where its pale knees hit the ground, and at the same moment the paler-still rider vanishes, winking out of existence in the blink of an eye, without sound or word or response to Gale.
Bill is calling his name. Calling his name like Gale isn’t right there, like he isn’t just here in the middle of the road with a creature of fable kneeling in front of him. Like Bill can’t see Gale at all.
Gale wouldn’t know. He can’t turn to look over his shoulder even if he wanted, certain if he takes his eyes off this beast it will skewer him through.
The unicorn snorts, shaking its head, and again that gossamer mane sounds like weeping, like mothers' laments and the cries of sisters and the wailing of lovers. Its eyes, milky white, feathered by long, delicate-looking lashes, blink at him with intelligence. The horn, pale, yellowed bone, looks wickedly sharp, and a sick part of Gale urges him to reach out and grip it– just to see if he can still bleed.
If he is still alive.
The hide under his skin twitches like any other horse’s neck, shivering at his gentle fingers. It feels like a regular mane, capped with fat and muscle along the top ridge like a stallion, but Gale can see no more obvious indicators of maleness. It’s cold in a way that burns, sending a shock of numbness up Gale’s arm and right to his heart, until it doesn’t.
There’s no saddle. No reins. Just the broad, muscular white back, fur soft under the drag of Gale’s palms. Even kneeling, it’s a chest-high leap, the wasted and abused muscles of Gale’s prison-camp-thin body aching with the effort of hauling himself atop. Finding his familiar seat, the drape of his long coat as dark as the unicorn’s body is light, he leans forward to pat that neck again, automatic to do with any steed that stands well for a mounting. When the horse straightens, tosses her head, Gale has to dodge to the side to avoid that horn directly to his skull. Chill seeps through him, familiar and soothing now. Freezing his lungs, his heart.
“Easy, girl,” he says, breath clouding from his lips even though the spring thaw is all around them. Was around them. The muddy road has vanished, overtaken by a quiet fog that smells faintly of roses
He realizes he can’t remember when Bill had stopped calling his name.
The Unicorn shudders underneath him, head tossing, cloven hooves pawing great gouges into the earth. It sounds like the gong of church bells. He takes one step forwards, then another, the shifting roll of his body a rhythm that takes Gale a second to remember. Like sinking back into a half-remembered dream.
Gently, he digs his heels into the horse’s ribs and rather than lurching forward the beast steps sideways. First through the fog, ground thundering beneath them, and then it’s just fog, swirling and choking and tasting like incense, fresh rain, salt, ether. Now and then the vapor parts and Gale can see black night, bright stars, eyes blinking at him. He has the sensation of being watched, has the feeling he’s not quite in time and space, anymore, not the way human beings are meant to be.
It’s all impossible, surreal. He might not have believed it if he had not already seen men pull miracles out of metal beasts, seen his own crewmates starve away to nothing before him.
What did any of them know about the real world?
You know where we’re going? he wants to ask the creature. But he can tell by the purpose to its movements that there’s a destination in mind, a job to be done. He’s not a religious man, never has been, the faithless son of a faithless, gambling father. God wasn’t in his home, because God had never been with Gale Cleven Sr. at the betting tables, at the pony tracks. He hadn’t been at the benches Gale slept on, or in the room when his mother died, no matter what the priest promised him. So he doesn’t believe in the afterlife– believes in it about as much as he believes in unicorns and pale riders and in John’s lucky two-dollar bill.
But Gale doesn’t ask, because he’s still not quite sure if he’s simply riding, or being ferried.
Ride he does, though. Long past the point where he thinks his body should be tired, long past where he thinks he should be cold, from the damp and the wet of the fog. Only he’s not quite sure it is fog. Isn’t quite sure if this is death. Maybe a stray bullet did catch him in his escape, and these strange days are the last moments of his brain shooting out desperate electric impulses. Conjuring up a strange dream of sacrosanct beliefs– and John's favorite extinct animal.
The world hollows out, Gale’s ears popping like he’s passed the thousand foot mark, aching all the way down to his jaw until that discomfort, too, fades away. He feels the wet of clouds, beading on his knuckles like tiny crystals– knuckles almost as pale as the horse’s. Cold, but he doesn’t feel it. Cold like the muddy, flat farmland they step out into. Green, maybe once. In the summer, before it had been bombed and shot and trampled to mud.
Gale can smell the blood in the air, mixed with the silty smell of dirt. See the rusted out skeletons of a few trucks– and a B-17, tucked up against a tree like a fledgling.
There’s no war here currently, as much as there could be ‘no war’ anywhere in Europe. There is nobody actively fighting, actively dying. Death, destruction, the silence after conflict– that is as close to peace as anyone could hope for these days. Off in the distance, there’s a lone farmhouse, one single window glowing faint and brave and golden.
Gale expects, strangely, that the mud won’t touch them when they hit the base of the hill they stepped out onto, the beast beneath him too fantastical, impossible, to be marred by the blood-sludge beneath them. It does– it splatters up its legs, its belly, its chest. Gale feels it hit his ankles as they come to a sliding stop, where it soaks into that pristine white coat in dark, greedy streaks.
Gale can smell it. Silt and copper and rot. There’s a dead cow in the field, legs reaching for the sky at an unnatural, bloated angle. Too late in the evening for flies, it adds to the eerie silence covering the farm.
“Easy, girl,” Gale murmurs out of habit, though the horse creature– Gale knows his bible well enough to know what this thing is– beneath him seems entirely at ease.
Of course it would be. Death is in its element.
The wreck in front of him is old enough the edges have begun to rust, fire-blackened metal edged out with orange. Left behind was the skeleton of a bird long dead, not even the chemical scent of fire lingering anymore. Just cold night air, mud, and cow shit.
There’s someone sat in the gaping, open belly of the ship, legs swinging childishly and murmuring to themselves, words mostly snatched away by the wind.
“–Beauty, terrible beauty! Deathless goddess– so she strikes our eyes!"
Gale slips down off his steed.
Dead grass shivers under his feet, the strands sparkling with glittering frost, bending away from him as if in avoidance. They are not dead, for all their dormant brownness– Gale can sense the thrum beneath, down in the earth, down in the roots. The horse beside him snorts, pawing at the ground and sending icy spray waist-high with every strike to the frozen surface. Gale takes a breath– though it, oddly, aches– and, with a soldier’s training, listens to the instinct telling him to walk forward. Across the field, a handful of steps. The moon is high and cold and sweet, lighting everything silver, including the way no breath clouds in front of the occupant of the plane’s mouth.
He’s still speaking.
“But still, ravishing as she is, let her go home in the long ships and not be left behind…”
As Gale draws closer, he sees a youthful face, boyhood not yet done constructing the visage of a man, curly hair and prominent ears and soft, bright eyes. There is no blood on him, no ash or soot or gore. His flight suit is in perfect, pristine form, though there are nicks and tears across the surface of it, stuffing drifting like snow every time he swings his legs. There’s a gaping tear underneath one armpit, where Gale can see right down to pale, clammy skin.
“The Iliad,” Gale says, his voice shockingly loud, deep, rumbling in the silence of the dead field.
“Yes, Sir,” Herbert Nash says– though his face shows no recognition, and Gale’s stars are covered by his heavy coat. “Reminds me of a girl I left behind.”
Gale stares at him– noticing now the frost on his eyelashes, the blue on his lips. The waxy color of his skin and the way, when he turns his head to look up at the sky, a silvery sheen under his skin shifts and warps until one could make out the hollow of empty eye-sockets, the faint promise of neat rows of teeth. No heartbeat flutters away at his neck.
“Do you know where she is, Sir?” Nash asks him. “I promised her I would be back.”
Gale steps closer, reaching down with one hand into the wreck. It startles a nest of sleeping doves, who shuffle and click their beaks at him reproachfully. Gale can hear every one of their heartbeats, fluttering away like sweet windchimes. Hears the blood pumping in their veins and sees the faint silvery curl of their souls, kept solidly inside their bodies. Nash has those wisps, too, drifting away from him like smoke leeching from the holes of a church thurible. Bits of him pulling away and vanishing to nothing.
“You tired, Lieutenant?” Gale asks him.
“No, Sir,” Nash answers, straightening slightly, boyish pride and gusto. “Never, Sir.”
And then he falters, spine losing a bit of its straightness, the skull beneath his face pushing outwards like fingers pressing underneath a cloth sheet. “Maybe– maybe a little, Sir. I suppose I can’t remember the last time I slept.”
Gale raises his hand once more, in offer of help out of the wreckage into the moonlight. Nash lifts his own palm, satin and translucent down to the bones beneath, then hesitates.
“I can keep going, though,” he says. “If I need to, Sir. I’m not that tired yet.”
“No need,” Gale assures him, “I’ve come to relieve you.”
Nash’s face cracks. Like just for a moment, a split second, he knows.
Then his eyes slide past Gale, over his shoulder.
“Golly,” Nash says.
Gale, who had felt the chill approach of his companion the moment the beast had started moving, knows what Nash must be seeing. Teeth made for meat rather than hay, razored enough to slice flesh and heavy enough to crush bone. Pale eyes, pupil white instead of natural black, staring with an extra dose of intelligence no earthly animal should have. The Unicorn’s horn brushes against Gale’s cheek as it lowers its head to point the tip at Nash like a finger, like fate.
“Nothin’ to be scared of, Lieutenant,” Gale says, though he isn’t quite sure if that statement is entirely true.
“I’m not afraid, Sir,” Nash says.
Gale can’t help but smile, in the way he had in bars and airfields and cockpits on training flights. Young but not as young as the man in front of him, the men at the yoke beside him. Lying through their teeth. “I know you’re not,” he echoes his own self. “Nothin’ to be afraid of at all.”
Nash nods, takes Gale’s hand. It’s as cold as Gale’s own, temperature hardly registering; only grip and pressure. Gale hauls him up out of the wreckage and then wonders if he shouldn’t check for other lingering Airmen. But he knows, in the same way he knew to get off the Unicorn, the way he knew to approach it, the way he knew when to bank and turn and ease a rattling, half-dead fort back to earth. The way he knew the first time John Egan had met his eyes and smiled and asked him what kind of man walked around with a name like Gale.This, right in front of him, was the circumscribing of what Gale was meant to do.
The horse steps forward, and Gale, instincts honed by a childhood of dealing with overconfident yearlings, shoulder-checks it away. It snorts, affronted, and stamps one hoof, mane tossing. The sound is reminiscent of Gale’s mother crying on the kitchen floor after she got the call that her brother had been kicked in the head by a young bull and died.
He hauls Nash up, chest to chest, and he pats the young Pilot’s elbow, squeezing the bones beneath that move and grind unnaturally.
“Come on, Herb.”
“My sisters call me Herbie,” Nash says.
“Would you like me to?” Gale starts leading them away from the wreckage, back out into the dead center of the dead field. The horse stands there once again, staring dolefully at Gale, favoring one leg as if to make a point.
Nash shakes his head. “I don’t know, I–” he pauses, and then turns back to the wreckage, face troubled, confused like a child's. “I don’t know if I should go. I think I’m forgetting something. There were people here. Men–” He cuts himself off again, face confused, blank. “Sir, I–”
“It’s time to go, Herbie,” Gale rasps.
“Will you tell them?” Nash asks, turning back to Gale. “If they come looking, will you tell them where I am?”
Something insurmountable stirs inside Gale for a moment– like the urge to cry, only heavier, stone weight and crushing force. A cave wall falling in on him, a fort spiraling at full speed toward the ground, almost enough to make him black out. Gale squeezes Nash’s hand.
Pressure and release.
“I’ll tell them.”
Like a child, sudden and easy, the fear and tension melts away from the downed pilot’s face. He smiles, just a little bit around the corners. The only man whose hand Gale has ever held is John’s, veiny between the knuckles, sensitive between the digits, so much so he’d snatch them away if Gale so much as traced his fingers over the thin skin there. Nash’s hand is smaller, more delicate. Calloused the same way as John’s, the same way as Gale’s, bumps and roughness in all the same spots. But it feels odd, feels wrong, as Gale leads him over to the unicorn. The hand in his own is not the hand it’s supposed to be.
Nash looks up at the thing pretending to be a horse, and there’s a fear on his face that Gale understands, too.
I didn’t see it coming.
“Oh,” Nash says quietly. And then again, a little louder, like he’s trying to be brave. “Oh.”
The unicorn turns its head around, horn aimed, lowered, and Gale clicks his tongue harshly, and the beast snorts, stomps, swings its great head back around front and settles with an angry swish of its tail.
Nash turns to Gale, mouth open and uncertain.
“Come on,” Gale says.
When he lays a hand on the small of Nash’s back to help brace and lift him onto the back of the horse, he notices that the mud and blood and ice of his coat has been washed away, the fabric pristine as if new. Darker, too, wine bottle dark instead of the faded military green. “Up you get.”
Once, when Gale was a teenager and they still had a few horses– before he’d joined the army to put a new roof on the house, food on the table– a few of Gale’s younger cousins had come to visit. It had been a good year for his father, sobriety a shiny new toy he was playing with and work steady for once. They were his mother’s sister’s children, and both women had watched with ill-hidden worry as Gale had lifted them atop the back of their old, well-broke plow horse. He recalls it now, as he swings up behind Nash, the weight of the responsibility of keeping them safe, keeping them atop the wide, swaying back as they took off in a gentle trot across the field. The feel of their bodies against his chest was akin to the faint weight of Nash between his arms. Less than it should be, by a fair and far amount. But tangible.
Real.
And when Gale digs his heels into their steed’s side, it is not a gentle trot that the beast breaks into. Instead, it’s an all out run, mane whipping their cheeks ice cold and smelling like freshly turned gravedirt, weeping and wailing, hoofbeats on the ground like soldiers’ drumbeats. Despite himself, Gale feels a faint giddy thrill.
Unlike Gale’s cousin’s, Herbert Nash also knew how to ride.
Between one step and the next, Gale, Nash, and this creature that he knows is Death, slip back into that foggy twilight place. It slips around them like a stream around river rocks, smooth and liquid and parting now and then, just to show flashes of green, purple, pink, red, rainbows of color dotted with shining sparks of light– stars.
“Oh,” Nash says again, though with the speeds they’re moving Gale should not have been able to hear.
But he does. And by the time that he looks down, the weight and presence of Nash has faded away and vanished. It is just him, alone, once again.
When they step through the veil again, it’s at the foot of slumbering mountains. Coated with snow, they glitter and shine in the moonlight like giant lighthouses. The shape of them is unfamiliar, their name unknown to Gale– he could be anywhere in the world for the speeds they were moving, if he’s anywhere at all. Ice crunches under his boots when he slips off the back of the unicorn, puffing miniscule crystals up into the air that swirl around his ankles.
It had been late afternoon when he’d left Bill behind, and now the moon is high overhead. Gale isn’t quite sure, even so, how much time has passed.
Minutes, centuries. It could be, maybe, that he’s outside of time itself.
Out of habit, he pats the muscled curve of the Mare’s shoulder, a silent thanks and approval for a ride well carried. Quick as a whip, before he can blink, that large horned head whips around and inches-long razor teeth sink into the meat of his hand.
Gale, well-trained, makes no sound. He yanks his hand away, yanks it free though he knows, in the logical part of his mind not frozen by shock, that this is the worst possible thing he could do.
Flesh ribbons off his hand, bones, already delicate, snapping with quiet pops. What he leaves behind inside the horse’s mouth is more than a significant portion of his limb, bits trailing from its teeth, dangling like streamers down over a bewhiskered chin. When he holds it out, fingers spread, his fingers appear longer– not because they have grown, but because the meat and body of them has been torn out. The ring finger is missing entirely, as well as part of his pinky. Blood wells and falls like a sink running over, melting the snow by his feet and staining the perfect, pale hide of the horse in flecks that glitter like black glass in the night.
There is no pain, no hint of the agony Gale is sure he’s supposed to feel, only icy numbness.
His hand shakes.
He looks up to meet his aggressor's eyes, and for a moment it’s the numb detachment of John’s Stalag-crazed blues staring back at him. Not in shape nor color nor recognition. But an animal, unsure of why it’s lashed out.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Gale says.
The Mare stomps its cloven hoof, tail swishing. It sounds like windchimes and mourning bells. Gale, ignoring the flood of wet carnage, drops his hand and tugs his sleeve over it, hiding it away like any number of hurts over the years. His father was never a mean man, but drunken incoordination made little discrimination. Gale doesn’t know what else to do, not when his hand doesn’t hurt and he has some suspicion he’s past the human capability of bleeding out, so he lifts his head and looks around more closely.
Here and there, across the landscape below him and around the foot of the mountains, lights of homes and villages dot the darkness. Not alone, then. Not outside of time nor universe. Gale has simply been carried somewhere else, somewhere unfamiliar. He wonders whether the destination is important, or simply how long it took for Nash to fade away completely. The horse seems content to remain for a moment, dropping its head to graze at the ice, breaking off crystals with the same vigor a regular steed might chomp at the most succulent of grass.
Gale watches her feast like it will afford her any sustenance. There’s nowhere to sit, so he chooses the ground, folding his knees up towards his chest and watching her large body graze over the mountaintop. After a moment or two, he tilts his head back and exhales, though it feels strange and sore to do so.
When he opens his eyes the sky above is unfamiliar.
For a heartbeat’s time he wonders if they hadn’t stepped out of time and earth altogether. Somewhere uncharted, unmapped, and unreal. No longer on earth or in the sky or anywhere known to science. Certainly nowhere he could come home from.
Likely all the stars above him are charted and named and studied, but they are far from the stars Gale grew up knowing, and their strangeness is sobering. Terrifying. The cold indifference of the stars he knew had previously been something Gale found reassuring. Before, stoicism was indicative of the rules of the world. That human life on earth and its connection to the stars above was a straightforward thing. Bound by science and fact and the understanding that practicality and methodology beat out the fantastical.
Gale put his faith in gravity and physics. Of the two of them, it was John who was the dreamer.
Now he has questions nobody but children are meant to ask. Now Gale wonders if there is magic to the stars, too.
If there is, they certainly have no interest in telling him. Not now, in this moment, as the Mare drifts closer, body swaying in a way that’s not quite natural, not quite regular, until he can reach out and touch it again.
He doesn’t touch. He’s learned his lesson. “Time to go?” he asks it.
The unicorn snorts, stomping one cloven hoof and leaving no footprint behind.
Rising slowly, Gale circles up and around, until he comes to that smooth back, lifting two perfect, whole, hands and swinging up astride the Mare again. When he settles, he feels the great bellows of her lungs heave and expand. She gives him no pause, no chance to wonder whether he’s meant to nudge her sides with his heels in prompting. The moment she feels him secure atop her, she’s off. And Gale, if he had to give her credit after her lashing out, could admit she had one of the smoothest gaits he’s ever met.
The journey is quick, the method fantastical. Gale had been a respectable navigator when they’d rotated through all the roles, but tracking where from and where to they’re traveling is beyond his abilities. Sometimes, they are surrounded by clouds, though they never grow wet. Sometimes, the veil parts and Gale sees city lights, dying fields, lush vegetation. They’re moving, that at least he knows for sure. Mostly, he just enjoys the feeling of riding a horse again, even if the ground beneath them is nonexistent.
Even if, if his suspicions are correct, they’re traveling too high above the earth’s surface for Gale to realistically be able to breathe.
He wonders if they look like a shooting star to those below them, a meteor, a strange shape in the clouds. And then, as the acrid smell of burning metal, gunpowder, and fire fills his mouth, Gale wonders if they might not look like something else altogether. But the clouds part and they remain unmolested, as Gale’s nameless steed trots them down towards a shockingly dark London. He can only tell by the great shadow of the clocktower, illuminated by anti-aircraft fire, smoke, and the occasional orange flicker of a flame. Alighting on a barely-recognizable-as street, Gale can hear the distant wails of sirens, and the closer wails of mourning. It’s raining, as it tends to do in London, and Gale feels the slip of it over his face in only the faintest of ways. As one might become aware of their blinks, or their breathing. Inconvenient, until forgotten again.
Their hoofbeats clop through the cobblestone road, great chunks missing, burning and blackened debris making their path winding. Here and there a fire flickers, casting their shadows on a wall that, when Gale glances to his left, makes it seem as if their two figures are melded together into one awful creature, the unicorn's horn arching back over its head like a great scythe.
His shadow seems to nod back at him.
They come to a stop in front of a near-destroyed grocery, a still-smoking apartment building above. Glass from the blown windows litters the wet street, shimmering like the icy plain Gale had just left. It doesn’t crunch under his boots when he slides off the Mare, heavy coat not weighing him down the way he expects. This time he has some understanding of what to do, what to expect, and though the stairs leading up to the second floor are splintered and warped, they hold firm under Gale’s feet as he ascends into the remnants of a parlor.
The wallpaper had, minutes or hours before, been a bright, cheerful green and yellow pattern, the furniture nice if not well-worn. There’s photos on the wall, crooked and torn to shreds by the glass of their frames breaking. Further in, a stove belches gas into the empty, silent space.
Gale walks over and turns it off. Rights the knocked-over kettle, and the teacup just beside it, somehow miraculously still intact.
“Thank you.”
Gale turns around.
“I tried to do that myself,” says the woman at the broken table, nightdress pristine despite the destruction of the rest of the room. “Couldn’t remember how.”
She’s young– younger even, maybe, than Gale, hair in curlers and shoulders straight and no ring on her finger. She’s old in her eyes, the same way Gale is. She doesn’t look put out, nor shocked, nor very much confused at all, and Gale wonders how long ago she made peace with something like this. If she expected it to go like this, wayward American soldier and all.
“We’ve got time,” Gale says, though he doesn’t really know if he’s on a schedule or not. What he figures is that his beast will come fetching if it grows impatient. “If you would like one.”
She looks at him, then at the kettle, and sighs heavily, like she knows this will be her last. “I do fancy a cuppa.”
Gale is ordered around like a cadet. How much to pour, how much sugar and cream. Ordered to make himself some, and to sit across from her. He does so, the resemblance to Marge a quiet comfort. He settles across from her and they toast. While she takes her sip and sighs, Gale sets his teacup on the cracked saucer.
“I know what you are,” she says, once she settles her own cup on the bend of her knee.
Gale watches her.
“You’re an American soldier.”
Something inside Gale slumps, as if this dead woman in front of him might have had the answer he’s looking for, an easy definition for the state of himself and the role he’s been thrust into. All Gale had wanted to do was escape back to Thorpe, find out a way to rescue John. He hadn’t meant to get up on that horse. But he’d also understood, in that moment, that the path had been chosen entirely for him.
“Yes, Ma’am,” he says.
“Oh, that accent,” she murmurs softly, seemingly to herself.
And Gale– almost laughs.
“Were you on the streets?” she asks him. “Did you come up to help?” And then she pauses. “I think I might be rather hurt.”
With that she looks down at herself, as if she might spot some hurt or harm on her person, and then begins twisting around in her seat, looking about as if to find the culprit of her remembered wounding.
“What’s your name?” Gale asks quickly, so she might avoid seeing the ash-dusted lump behind her, slumped up against the wall, as dirtied as she is clean.
She turns back to him. “Joyce Dowey.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Joyce. Ma’am.” Gale adds an extra bit of Wyoming syrup to his voice just for her. The way that used to make the tips of John’s ears turn red. “I am here to help. They’re gathering everyone who can walk outside, to bring them somewhere safe.”
“That’s very smart,” she sighs.
“You can finish your tea,” Gale offers.
“No,” Joyce stands, brushing her nightrobe off and setting the cup on the table, “that’s alright. It’s gone cold. Shall we?”
Gale stands at her cue and loses a few minutes to watching the ash drift around in the amber liquid of his tea, before looking up. Offers Joyce his arm and feels none of her weight when she slips a hand through the crook of his elbow. He only knows she’s there by the scent of her perfume, and the way she begins telling him about everyone who lived on the block and how she hopes they’re all safe, especially the couple next door with the new baby.
“Everyone made it out,” Gale assures her with confidence. “You’re the last.”
“Waiting on my damn tea,” she mutters, though still good natured, as they walk out of the burnt building and into the wreckage of the street.
There are a few people milling about now, firefighters with a hose and civilians going through the rubble, pulling out survivors and belongings. There’s a couple with a baby off to the side, soot-covered and shell-shocked but looking no worse for wear aside from their whole lives going up in flames. Joyce gives them a small wave but doesn’t seem put out when they don’t wave back.
“Plenty going on without me trying to make social chatter,” she reassures him, defending their perceived rudeness.
A few rescuers, neighbors and officials both, brush past them and into the upstairs apartment. A wail rises from inside, echoing over the cobblestones, and Joyce turns her head curiously. Gale gives her the gentlest of nudges, tugging her away from the crowds and the commotion and over to where the Unicorn is standing lazily between a car crushed by brick and a firecart drawn by two heavily-built horses. They seem not to notice the third, unnatural equine in their midst. But they’re visibly unsettled. Pawing and stamping at the ground, tossing their heads with ears switching between pinned and alertly forward. Reacting to something they could sense but not seem to see.
Gale’s steed, in contrast, is entirely unbothered, using its great horn to scratch an itch on its hindquarters.
Joyce, too, shows little fear. “Oh, look at you, pretty thing,” she says conspiratorially, like two old friends.
The Mare turns to gaze at them with one milky eye, as if she understands, and switches her tail proudly. Then, tossing her head and horn flashing in the evening light, she steps forward.
Again, Gale turns her aside, pulling Joyce towards the large expanse of her back. Unlike Nash, she now seems uncertain, fists clenched bravely, jaw lifted and confused. With quiet permission, he lifts her by the waist, helping her settle across the Unicorn’s back and adjusting her robe to cover one pale knee where it had fallen uncovered.
“Never ridden a horse before,” she admits nervously, reaching out to pat the Mare’s neck until Gale catches her wrist gently.
“Well, you’re in luck,” he says, placing Joyce’s hand back in her lap and then swinging up behind her. “You’re riding with a cowboy.”
“Is that what you are?”
Gale’s heart gives a single solid thump, painful in a way he doesn’t expect. “Yes, Ma’am.”
Joyce fades away slower than Nash. Fresher, or maybe just less ready to go despite her seeming easgygoing nature. They watch the clouds and the stars together and she tells him about her Mother and Father and her younger brother killed somewhere in France.
“I hope they aren’t worrying about me too much,” she admits, voice wobbling just slightly.
“Everyone will be okay,” Gale assures her, though he has no real authority to make such a promise.
But the last bits of Joyce find this comforting, or at least agreeable, because the last weight of her body wisps away the same as Nash did– into the fog around them.
Gale takes a moment to feel something, feel anything; it creeps in slowly, a heavy weight in his stomach and a sense of calmness. The conflicting emotions make him nauseous, and he foolishly leans forward and presses his face into the thick mane in front of him, trying to hold his composure. Beneath his nose he expects the smell of horse-hide, wiry hair, dust. And it is there, faint and natural. But he also smells funeral incense and wax candles and dry leaf-litter and the scent of wood oil on the fingers of the coffin maker they went to speak to about his grandmother’s casket.
This, at the very least, appears acceptable to the creature beneath him, and Gale is able to collect himself without punishment. Perhaps, maybe, because they’re still moving. Still traveling, droplets of moisture clinging to Gale’s hands and sleeves like tiny stars, shimmering as if they’ve gone through cloud cover. Gale has always loved to fly, even when dropping those bombs, when being shot at, in a dog fight with planes that were half his size and twice as agile– at least with the way Gale was weighed down by equipment and men and a set of orders. None of that thrill is lost on him now.
It might not be natural flight. But it is flight, all the same.
Sidestepping again, like a spook only the Mare moves with far too much confidence, Gale finds himself once again brought to a smoking, bombed-out city. Tracer fire and search lights fill the strees under the faint buzz of engines above. Gale would think they’d never left London at all, only the architecture is different, the shop signs a different language.
The buzz above them is from the engines of B-17s. Fading, but still recognizable; their mission done and jobs performed.
For a moment, Gale feels like a bird left behind by its flock. Following the sound as if he might pursue them, might miraculously appear inside one of the forts next to his men, a few thousand feet in the sky. He could come up with some sort of explanation they would believe. Even if they didn’t, even if they tossed him from an open hatch out of sheer terror, he might be able to tell them where John and the boys are.
But then there’s a tug in his gut, pulling him downwards, back to this new purpose of his as a one-man ferry. He doesn’t have to urge the unicorn onward, but he does take note of the way it had paused with him, as if giving him the chance to decide.
Gale doesn’t decide, exactly. Turning away was like denying the urge for air. Doable only for so long.
“Who’s next, huh?”
The Mare snorts, head bobbing, and they find themselves on another city block, burnt and blackened and destroyed by bombs that Gale so far had only had the privilege of seeing through the buffer of miles of difference. Here, down on the earth, even though Gale is beginning to suspect he’s rather untouchable, he feels as vulnerable as an ant. Slipping off the back of the horse, he can’t help but step lightly, pausing when he hears another explosion somewhere in the city. The attack too fresh for sirens and rescue crews, everything is eerily silent. Everyone is holding their breath, waiting and fearing a second round.
Wasn’t their style to go back around when Gale was flying. But it’s been a long time since he’s been in a mission debrief, hair combed and uniform washed and body strong, lean, muscular. He’d never appreciated it, not like now, with the way his wrists are bony, skeletal. He’s pale in the moonlight, all his color leeched out by a hard, hungry year.
They’re in the shadow of a factory, pushed up against a swathe of apartment buildings that, though the damage of the bomb is clear, were crumbling well before any attack came along.
There’s a child sitting on the front steps, drawing shapes in the black soot with a toe. When he notices Gale, he waves.
“What’re you drawing?” Gale asks as he approaches, crouching down on his heels and leaning in close.
The child opens his mouth, and though Gale is sure he isn’t speaking English, Gale understands every word.
“My dog. I came out looking for him after the bombs fell.”
It’s too dark to tell the color of the boy’s hair. It’s pale, and curly, and flops over his forehead like he’s needed it trimmed for a few weeks now and his mother has been struggling to find the time. Clothes old but well cared for– hand-me-down’s from older siblings or cousins or perhaps a charitable church. He’s clean, though they all had been, the apartment block behind him a pile of rubble and brick behind him. There sits a piece or two of furniture in the debris, oddly intact. Silent and eerie. A pile of rubble and brick and the occasional, oddly intact piece of furniture. There are other figures moving through the mist and smoke, though too far away for Gale to tell whether they’re survivors, spirits, or perhaps others like him.
Gale doesn’t know. But he certainly isn’t moving fast enough to cover every lost life in the world.
“What’s your name?”
“Angelo.”
Instead of his arm this time, Gale holds out his hand, palm up, bones shining through the skin for just a moment. “I’ll help you find your dog, Angelo.”
The weight of his hand is negligible, even less than Joyce or Nash, like a feather has lighted there. His fingers are still chubby around the knuckles, not quite able to reach all the way around so they wrap around three of Gale’s fingers instead, holding his thumb for a quick, playful swing as he jumps from the top step to the sidewalk below.
Gale makes sure he doesn’t tumble.
“Are you a soldier?” Angelo asks as they walk, looking up at Gale, curls falling back from his face. He’s missing a tooth, face scrunched up as he takes Gale in thoughtfully, critically, and with the childish suspicion of a small brain trying to figure things out.
“Just someone lookin’ to help.”
He has to lift Angelo onto the horse, easy as picking up nothing at all, his stare so hard and firm that the beast doesn’t even try to swing that horn around. Angelo is scared, terrified even, Gale can see it on the pale lines of his face, and he gets a single flash-second memory of a little boy on the floor of a forest, staring up at the gun Gale has aimed at him. His hand is shockingly pale on the boy’s small back. Years of color given to him by the sun, now bleached away by imprisonment and starvation and whatever he is now. Coat gone dark, woolen, the green like a full wine bottle rather than the soft fade of moss.
Gale thinks about his father putting him on the back of a horse for the first time, near the same size, same age. Same terror. Remembers the feeling of a hand on his back, big enough to cover the entire thing, a voice telling him to hold on, don’t let go no matter what, Gale. And the smack on a rump, sending the horse flying.
How Gale’s scream had turned to laughter.
“I won’t let you fall,” he promises the scared boy, swinging up behind him and steadying the horse with a firm press of his knees.
When they move, stepping sideways faster than even the forts Gale flew, he wraps a hand around the little body in front of him, anchoring the boy close and safe for as long as his form chooses to stick around.
The fourth soul Gale takes– not the first, not with how he had felt that weight every time he turned the fort over to his bomber, but the first up close, the first in this manner– is a man in uniform, like himself. Unlike himself, in color and insignia and positioning. Gale knows the uniform from propaganda films and posters and news clippings and guns pointed at his raised hands, from leashes of guard dogs gripped threateningly loose between their fingers. Telling them to leave, telling them to march. Gale knows the uniform same as he knows the sound of his front door back home opening.
The German soldier’s death is no glory; there is little admirable or heroic to be found in a fog-covered ditch on the other side of a hedgerow. A few inches of scummy rainwater gather at the bottom, now turned rusty with old blood, flirting with the open yawn of the corpse’s mouth. It’s too fresh for crows and ravens to begin taking their tax, but Gale hears the click of a beak now and again, eager and ready and razor-sharp. Though perhaps that’s just the Unicorn’s hooves on the gravel behind him.
The spirit, sat on the edge of the ditch and chucking stones into the water, stands when Gale approaches.
There’s a whole battlefield out there. Gale can hear the battle still being fought. Can scent the blood on the breeze. Behind him, the Unicorn’s ears are pricked, eager and interested, towards the lives still being taken a dozen yards away.
Not so much a man as a boy, Gale now realizes, younger and thinner, though not so young as he should be, eyes old and lines unnatural on his face. Blonde and blue and pale, he’s a strange mirror image to Gale himself, and for a second he seems to light up at the resemblance. Then he notices the stars on Gale’s lapel. His face falls, and he glances half-heartedly at the rifle strewn uselessly in the muddy water next to his corpse. Gale can already hear the faint crackle of rust taking hold in the metal.
“Come to finish the job?” he asks Gale.
“It’s already finished,” Gale says.
The corpse beneath them says nothing.
“What’s your name?” the spirit asks him, turning to look at Gale and squinting like the sight is strange or worrisome. Perhaps the sun is shining above them. Gale never bothered to look.
Buck.
“You know what I am,” Gale says instead, a breeze tumbling over the grass like he’s said something correct, gained the approval of some great eye watching him.
The spirit’s bottom lip trembles and he does, for the first time, look frightened in a way that Gale feels no urge to soothe. Maybe it’s the extra emphasis of having seen the people he’s taken already, maybe it’s the humiliations enacted on him over the past year. Gale has no respect for men too blind and scared to do anything but follow orders.
“Will it hurt?”
Gale looks down at the corpse again, odd movement to the sight, clothes moving strange and lumpy until he realizes it’s rain-drenched rats sniffing over the still-cooling body, hunting for the right spot to dig inside. “Didn’t it already?”
A snort, heavy presence coming up behind them. The spirit’s eyes go wide, and round, and fearful. The name on his jacket says Klein.
The Unicorn brushes past Gale, gentle enough to not make him stumble, slow enough that Gale could stop her, if he so wished. In the past her attempts were far firmer, more insistent. This one feels like a favor.
Not touching her as she goes past, Gale watches that great, wicked horn lower, the point so sharp it more vanishes to nothing than comes to an end. The sound of the ravens’ beaks clack louder, and those of the battlefield soften– the cracks of rifles and screams and the smell of blood fade away as the fog rolls in. Every sound muffled except for what is right around them, the scrape of hooves on the ground and a sharp, unneeded inhale from Klein as that horn pierces the center of his chest. Slow and tender, like the first and last time Gale had fucked Marge, the night before he left to chase John halfway across the world. A quiet goodbye, her body willing and soft and supple beneath him, bending to whatever whim he had in a way that confirmed, finally, that Gale wasn’t going to be the man to give her what she wanted and needed and deserved. That he just wasn’t built like that.
Like his memories of Marge, the penetration is clean, no blood welling up from where the horn sinks into the very center of Klein’s chest, denting the fabric of his uniform inward, pushing him down, onto his back into the sucking, clinging mud. His hands grasp uselessly at it, and then fall away as if burned, his mouth opening and eyes going blank, empty.
The Mare takes another step forward, the horn sliding clean through his body with a soft whisper like a flag being draped over a coffin. Gale hears the pop of it exiting Klein’s jacket, sinking down into the earth beneath, pinning him like a bug. Her forehead presses flat to his torso, nearly the same size, pale, milky eyes open wide.
Gale can see the reflection of stars in them.
The calm breaks with a horrible sucking noise, Gale’s steed yanking her horn free from the earth and body beneath her. Instead of blood, silver wells up from the wound, from Klein’s gaping fish mouth, opening and closing silently. It spills from his body in liquid waves, strangely behaved, like the small sample of mercury Gale had once gotten to play with in science class. His boots get stuck in it, the silver mixing with the mud until it all shimmers, bright and eerie. There are stars in his eyes too.
With a snort, the Mare bends her head and drinks.
With each pull, the form of Klein fades away a bit more, going transparent and then faint and then gone altogether, leaving nothing but the corpse and its gape-faced shock below.
The first crow descends to join the rats.
Gale waits until the unicorn has drunk her fill, silver droplets dangling from her whiskers as she lifts her head. Her horn is pristine.
“So that’s how it’s supposed to go?”
She flicks her ear at him.
Below them, the crow has started at Klein’s eye. Gale can hear the keratin scrape of beak against bone, the wet sounds of eating.
“Him I don’t feel bad for,” Gale tells her, “but not the civilians. The children. Those ones we do my way.”
Another twist of an ear, more dismissive and begrudging. He has no true grasp of how much his words have been understood, but there is a sense about the Mare that she is, perhaps merely due to her fantastical nature, smarter than the flighty, silly beasts he grew up around. Her coat is glowing in the rising sun, bone-white, flat without the usual sheen horse-hair has. The muscles beneath are defined, smooth, firm under his thighs when he rides her.
“John would love you,” he murmurs.
John, whose soul he had not been brought to collect. John, who might be lying in mud as well, rats chewing on his big, grinning face. Ruining the mustache he cared for, burrowing beneath his clothes to pick away at what’s left of his fat and muscle after a year of hunger. His stomach would be empty, nothing for them to burrow inside and find; they’d have to settle for the lining instead, drink his bile and acid that maybe still contains a bit of Stalag hooch. Knowing John, he still has a bit, stashed away in some pocket.
“Is he alive?”
A long-lashed eye blinks at him. Gale can still see a hint of stars, just a bit. He wets his bottom lip. Has to do it again, because his tongue is completely dry. He can’t remember the last time he swallowed.
He’s already close enough to mount up and does so smoothly, mud and grime and the last silvery residue falling away, as if no tarnish could touch the Unicorn. Gives her a scratch on the side of the neck, automatic reflex, and feels her skin twitch and shiver under his hand. Her coat is smooth, soft, a strange lukewarm that’s neither the cold of death or the warmth of life. Some sort of in-between, stasis, that is pleasant for its nothingness. His hand is nearly as pale as her.
After that it’s a dozen, maybe more, lost souls and spirits and people killed mostly by war, followed by hunger and thirdly by the occasional, lucky, natural cause. They blend together, small acts of kindness and conversation and people asking who he is, what he is, is he truly there for them? The smell of death is a rich perfume, overripe fruit and flowers gone rotten and sugar crystalized on the outside of old candy. It seeps from the Mare’s breath and Gale’s coat in a sickly bouquet. Chokes him, fills his throat and masks, at least temporarily, another feeling slowly pushing itelf to the surface until it is no longer ignorable.
There’s a tug in his gut, familiar now. Somewhere he’s supposed to be, someone he’s supposed to collect. But he ignores it for another string– deeper, older– tied around him. Red and fateful and knotted tight and messy around his spine from the first moment a fellow cadet had thrown a skinny bird-wing arm around his shoulders and declared his striking resemblance to a buddy back home. How this must mean they were going to be friends, too.
The irritating thing about John is he is, despite his everything, quite frequently right.
Turning the Mare’s head away from that new urge feels a bit like buzzing the tower, flying with all engines silent. Forbidden and a little bit terrifying. He feels her resistance, instinct or duty warring with whatever natural inclination she has to obey the rider on her back.
Gale gives her no choice.
It would be a lie to chalk up Gale’s knowledge of where John Egan is to his newfound fantastical nature. In truth, his sense of direction, his compass inside him that should have been pointing north had always, instead, faced towards the man who gave him his name. Had started as a joke, at first, about how Gale could always tell anyone where to find John at boot camp, on base, which bar in town he might be dragged out of and dried out. Had instead become a reliable method of locating their wayward Major. Hunt down Buck, and if he wasn’t already at Bucky’s side then he certainly could point one in the right direction.
Have you tried down on the hardstands? He likes to watch the mechanics work.
Not yet, sir, thank you.
His grandmother used to be able to find the best foraging spots, always returning with bright, ripe chokecherries, sweet celery-like osha and fresh acorns. Even in winter, she would show Gale where to brush away the snow at the base of trees to find bright green fiddleheads. It was a sense, she told him. A knowing. She’d died before Gale had sprouted the first hairs on his chin, and he was never able to find her secret spots. But maybe this is it for him.
Maybe his knowing begins and ends with John Egan.
Gale does what he’s always done, turns in a direction and starts going, sure that eventually his feet will lead him to where he needs to be. And as he goes, he feels more tendrils of pressure on his gut, pulling him in different directions. A soft itch, a quiet insistence he has somewhere to be, someone to meet. The mild, peaceful panic of running late for an important meeting. Then there’s the need, stronger than any of them, something he’d had well before he sat astride this horse. If he’s feeling sentimental he thinks, sometimes, from his moment of birth. He follows it right back to his men and their tired, huddled forms, hunkered down against the walls of a long bombed out warehouse in their coats and hats like sad, soft crows come to roost.
Coughing and shaking and sickly, ill-health rises from them like a physical smell. Something tangible and heavy and familiar to Gale. The Mare’s nostrils flare, scenting the air.
They alight down at the edge, in the shadow because Gale isn’t quite certain if he would be seen or not. He waits for long moments, still as the air or the snow beneath them, as several patrols pass by without noticing either man or unicorn.
He wonders what they might see, if they were to notice him. A strange, pale figure in the dappled moonlight? The dark of his coat and the paleness of his wrists peeking out, the beast beneath him strange and unearthly? Would they see its horn curving back like a scythe, or would it appear as a pale, bark-stripped branch instead? Would they be just a strange tree, a wisp of smoke, a trick of the light?
The guards don’t notice Gale.
He slips past them, horse too, and ducks into a ruined doorway. Nobody notices him as he picks his way through the sleeping, coughing forms. A few, no more than a sickly, tired handful, seem to lift their heads as he passes. As if they might just barely see him. Sense him close by.
Gale ignores them.
Destination found by accident or instinct, Gale comes up against what was once the belly of some sort of forge, the iron split wide open, a group of men huddled together, shivering and shaking and conversing in low voices.
“–on my mother, I saw all three hit the treeline–”
“–overheard guards talking, saying one went down–”
“–ut the fuck up, Hoerr!”
Hambone, Benny DeMarco, and Hoerr huddle together, their breaths a single cloud, shoulders and knees knocking without any care for propriety. The need for warmth far outweighs manners. Beyond them sit a few more guys; Johnny Brady, Crank, and Frank Murphy, with Solly and another set of familiar, broad shoulders propped up between all of them. Even from where Gale stands he can see the rising purple and red of bruises, the black of an eye. The way they’re all shivering, but John a little harder than the others, as if he’s hurting, too.
His head rests on Solly’s shoulder, anchored there by a gentle hand on the opposite cheek. Crank and Solly are speaking quietly, and Johnny Brady stares out into the night with straight-backed intensity, like he might leap onto the back of any guard that happens by. His gaze is steady, his hands resting on his knees as if atop an invisible rifle.
John is asleep, his lashes crusted with ice. His great body trembling and shaking with the effort to keep it warm.
Gale, who steps right past Brady’s vigil without even a blink, crouches down beside John and places a silly, hopeful hand on his shoulder.
Beneath the heavy coat, Gale can feel the chill of him, the lump of wasted muscle a block of ice, thinner than it used to be. The bulk is artificial, put there by layers of washed-gray, moth-eaten sweaters and shifts and a second coat, one with the seams in the back ripped open. Gale had watched John do it, loosening the sleeves in order to fit his wasted but still large frame.
His touch garners no reaction. His hand, so, so pale on the dark of John’s coat, rests faint as the snow crusted there. He can feel John, feel the hurt and the ache and the exhaustion.
Can feel the shivers jostling Solly beside them.
Behind Gale, the unicorn wickers, as if she’s trying to call him away and, at the very least, be gentle about it. He ignores her, slotting himself behind John, up against his back where he can’t be seen or felt or heard. He doesn’t know if he contributes any heat to John whatsoever– he hasn't felt cold in a long time now, he thinks. Nor warm, or hungry, or tired. What he does feel is the contraction and expansion of John’s lungs like a pair of stubborn bellows, shifting both their bodies with it. John’s heart, thumping solidly away beneath his clothes. It echoes through Gale’s body, filling up all the places that had gone silent.
Gale rests his forehead between John’s shoulderblades, ignoring another quiet attempt of the Unicorn to draw him back to her side.
There had been a moment there in the constant train of souls where Gale had nearly forgotten to think of John. He fears if he leaves John’s side now, he might forget him fully.
Perhaps he’s fooling himself, but he thinks John’s shivering might ease, just a bit.
Morning comes like a gasp for air, the meagerest amount of warmth afforded by the winter sun pinkening John’s cheeks as they’re all nudged awake. Gale had not slept, hadn’t felt the need to, and so he’d spent most of the night taking over Johnny’s vigil after the exhausted, hungry man had finally dozed off.
The guards don’t notice their lost prisoner amongst the rest. The boys don’t notice him. John doesn’t notice.
Not as they eat a pathetic, unfilling meal of stale crackers and the oats someone had managed to scrounge up, softening the dry grain in their mouths without access to hot water until they’re chewable. It’s a luxury, a hidden stash of Crank’s saved for a hard day. Gale can still remember the dry, sawdust taste of them. He watches the flex of John’s jaw as he chews, blue eyes just barely peeking out from under the rim of his hat, and he still does not notice, does not see that Gale has come back for him, that Gale never truly ran from him.
But Gale can see something in them.
Can see their quiet, burning triumph.
The heavy hands of the guards. The lack of news from the other side. The way Gale had dropped weight like deer dropped their antlers, sudden and quick. It had all pushed John into a slow, downward spiral that he had, at times, met with something that was almost vicious excitement. And it had all been wiped away by the one small victory.
Three of their guys slipped away in the night. No matter if one hadn’t made it out of the forest– that failure is on Gale and Gale alone.
He wonders who or what had come for George. If it had been the figure Gale replaced, if that was what had brought it so near. Fate, or chance, or coincidence.
It might be the triumph alone that carries John through that day. His body is clearly hurting, past even the pain of the others. He walks like has bruises on his ribs from the guards, and his face continues to swell even with the built-in ice pack of the weather. In the daylight it’s worse, one eye swollen shut and a crusty smear of blood trailing from one nostril down into his mustache. At some point, DeMarco stops them for a few minutes to bend down and get a scoop of the snow. He offers it to John to clean his face, numb the split on his lip that keeps breaking open every few minutes from the dryness of the air, the tired puff of his breath over his soft lips.
Gale marches with them, the Unicorn at his shoulder, weaving between the ranks, walking along the edges like one of the guards. Sometimes their horses start and stir, their dogs going quiet and hiding their angry teeth behind nervous lip licks. They travel amongst the men as quiet, silent companions, and though there’s still a part of Gale being tugged elsewhere and beyond, there is a part of him that knows there is space for him, too, here.
The bodies they pass on the road call to him like alarms blaring, each one deafening and desperate. It rings his ears and makes him choke for air he no longer needed, and the only thing that keeps him from wandering off, from giving into the Mare and the way she paused and nosed at every corpse like she might tempt him near is the broad shoulders heaving back and forth in front of Gale. So familiar a sight that everythign else seemed reduced to less than reality.
It’s not until midday that John finally speaks. “I saw them,” he croaks, voice ruined like he’d been out all night drinking, smoking, chasing skirts and coming home to Gale grinning and silly and beautiful. Beautiful now, even with his broken face and healed scars and wind-chapped cheeks.
“I saw all three of them make it out. Never seen Gale run so fast.”
He sounds proud, sounds full up with it and bursting.
“The Yankees would shell out big numbers for him,” John says, breathless with exhaustion. “That’s how fast he was goin’. They didn’t get him.”
As he speaks, his lip splits and bleeds again, dripping down his chin until he bends– with sore effort– and scoops more snow to wipe it away.
“You think, Bucky?” Johnny Brady asks, the caution in his voice born out of the last few years of captivity, of a Major who was more likely to snap than answer a question.
“He’s on his way home. He’s bringing the cavalry, boys, just you wait.”
It’s a lie. The grim sort of fantasy they’ve all been telling each other for days, weeks, months now. That rescue is coming, that they’re near the end of all this. Tomorrow, next week, a little while from now, they’ll come. They’ll come and the men will all go home to their wives and girls and mothers. Not get shot on the side of a snowy road on a march that never seems to end. But even if Gale did make it back to Thorpe, there would be no glorious rescue mounted– the Army has no resources to spare on them. The fantasy is simply the closest thing they have to a warm fire and a full belly and having a Bucky Egan that they believed in back. Gale watches the men around them settle their nerves, quick, amused grins and fierce determination.
It’s enough to keep them all walking.
Gale cannot reassure them of the truth to John’s words, his future as a pro-ball player notwithstanding, but he can walk with them. Can steady them. Can, when John stumbles over a body buried in the snow or slips on a patch of ice, be right by his side. Cannot pick him up, Gale discovers, neither his touch nor tugging at an elbow or a shoulder having any effect, no matter how he strains.
But he can bear witness to it. To all of them and their slow, determined suffering.
John says Buck got away.
Gale resumes marching with them– altogether like he never left, except his feet never grow tired and not a single soul notices him in their midst.
On the dawn of the third day that Gale walks with his men like a ghost, they arrive at a break in the trees and another hastily built camp.
It’s been raining for the better half of the morning, muffling the stink of unwashed bodies to a slow, musky stench that one can smell only when right up close. The wool coats, waterlogged and heavy, reducing them to reeking animals, funky and musty. Miserable men, quiet and exhausted, whatever momentary triumph and energy brought on by Gale and the others’ escape beaten back to exhausted acceptance by blistered feet and hungry bellies and a damp that Gale cannot feel but knows must go bone deep.
John’s been silent since dawn. Should have been still and resting since his beating, but to stop would have been to be shot, and Gale doesn’t think he’d be able to stomach helping lift John up onto that horse.
The Mare is still traveling amongst the column, watching him now and again with baleful, judgmental eyes. Her cloven hooves remain spotless despite the refuse they’re all tramping through, her coat shining milky-white like bone, and her lion’s tail twitching with irritation every time Gale ignores her quiet urging.
He can feel it, too. A quiet pulling, like something tugging on the end of a leash, insisting Gale move on.
Gale has never believed in God, so he feels no compulsion to listen. He’d agreed to obey the will of the United States Army, and nobody else.
Through the wooden gates, the men are lined up and counted and numbered, just like the first time. He watches them dismissed to be sorted into bunks, given beds and thin, potato stew and showers that are little more than buckets of melted snow in hastily built shacks. Welcome, still, after the long, muddy journey. They bathe both their clothes and themselves at once, peeling away soiled, worn out layers and scrubbing the dirt and sweat from them, laying each out to dry in the milky, tired sun until they’re nothing but pale, wasted bodies, bloated by water and goosebumped by the cold. Hair stringy and strange, dehydrated skin pulling back from their pores.
Gale watches the flex of John’s shoulders as he washes his stomach and groin, muddy water sluicing off between his bare, bleeding feet, long past self-consciousness or concern for modesty.
There’s pockmark scars all over his body, and the well of fat that used to round out his sides has given way to flat hipbones, bruising the skin they poke at. His body is littered with bruises, in fact, strange and rectangular imprints of rifle butts and a boot, high up on his ribs. It makes him wince every time he bends over to lay out his clothes, to grit-teeth scrub the mud and dead skin from his blisters.
Sitting, dry even in the spread of water around them, Gale watches John bathe and reassures himself with this newfound sense of his that none of them were fatal.
He can’t stop looking.
It’s clear the camp hadn’t expected to suddenly double their population. They men are packed in like sardines, John afforded a bunk instead of a spot on the floor only out of respect for his rank and his size. Gale, who never much minded having to mold his body around the sprawl of the other man, settles in with him as John slowly folds himself into the quiet space. His body moves as if decades older, bruised and tired and aching. All of them move in the same way, and Gale doesn’t wonder if their youth will be stolen from their bodies, too, not just their minds. If the war will take it all and he’ll be stuck taking them all, when the time comes.
John settles with a slow, puffed sigh that wheezes faintly with the ache of broken ribs. Throws an arm over his face as if in exhaustion, but Gale can smell the salt in the air.
He no longer needs sleep, it seems, so Gale spends the night watching over John’s rest, sat upright and looking out the window and the shapeless, foggy form of the Mare beyond. At times, he reaches out to John’s forehead where his arm has slipped down in sleep, cheeks flaky and chapped, and brushes the single errant curl off his forehead. Or does his best, at least. Under his hand, he can feel the sweat of John’s brow, chapped and rough. The scratch of John’s hair against his skin, catching on callouses and refusing to let go, the curls like little fingers. Can feel it all, despite the way John’s hair does not move, his touch having no effect.
It’s no better than a ghost.
Gale contents himself with the thump of John’s heartbeat. Steady, if not a little fast.
In the morning, John wakes with a fever.
By afternoon he’s so hot that Gale almost imagines he can feel it. Radiating out of his red-flushed cheeks, his lips chapped and eyelids waxy, twitching as his gaze tracks back and forth underneath. Coherent, at least. Enough to sit up when he wakes and make sure someone’s setting up to get everyone fed, get them any clean clothes available, or sewing needles for repair if there’s none. He leans heftily against the side of the bunk, pausing now and then like he’s trying to keep his thoughts on track. He’s stripped down to only a few layers, hair slicked off his forehead in a pomade made of sweat. When there’s no more bossing around to be done, he slumps back down onto his pillow and places a palm flat across his chest, breathing like he’s making a concentrated effort to keep it slow.
The sickness on him is something Gale can feel. A sweet, rich smell like overripe apples gone alcoholic. Rotten and tempting.
Gale, delegated to silent observer, can do no more than stand and watch and occasionally speak to John. Outside, the Mare waits, silent and more patient than before. Like now there might be reason to hang around. A reason for there being there and maybe Gale had underestimated the scrutiny that she had given John. Perhaps less so to do with Gale’s own fixation and more so a quiet promise, the anticipatory silence before the ring of a bell. Perhaps she had allowed Gale to win the tug of war to come here because she knew that there might soon be something worthwhile to be done.
Her form circles the outside of the shack like a vulture with a kill, hooves swishing same as the flap of crows wings and soft snorts like the thud of more falling snow. Gale ignores her. Turns his back on her. Will stand in the doorway and face her down if he has to. Take the horn to his own chest if need be.
If John’s soul makes any effort to split from its body, Gale will take it in hand and shove it back inside.