The March to Nowhere

The Scum Kings, a broad Sword Studio production created and written by Mike Daltrey, Episode fifty, The March to Nowhere. The blade went back into my sheath. It was not a victory. It was a pause. Stigand and Orso stood apart, chests heaving, their eyes still locked on each other with a pure, murderous hatred. The rest of us stood in the cold, gray twilight, a circle of seven broken warriors. The fragile bonds that held us together now permanently severed. Stiggand his face a mask of rage, finally spat a thick glob of bloody saliva at Orso's feet before turning his back. Or So, cold and impassive as ever, simply bent down and began to methodically clean his dagger on his boot, as if the entire confrontation had been nothing more than an inconvenient interruption. The silence that fell was worse than the argument. It was the silence of a grave. I looked at their faces, Selaine staring into the middle distance, her entire purpose gone with our silver Brynn, a shadow already detached from us, her eyes scanning the horizon for an escape route. I knew she was considering Dix for the first time, looked bored, his manic energy extinguished by the sheer, grinding, hopelessness of our situation. Cob a weeping, shivering mound on the rocks. I knew, with a certainty that was as cold and hard as the flint beneath my feet, that if I let them sit here, if I let them make a fire and stew in their own poisons, I would wake up in the morning to find either or So or Stiggin dead and the crew dissolved. Or I wouldn't wake up at all. There was only one thing I had left, one last blunt instrument of leadership. Get up, I snarled. No one moved. Stigan didn't even turn around. Or So continued to wipe his blade. I said, get up, I roared, kicking Stiggin's boot hard enough to make him stumble. We're moving. Stiggin turned on me, his eyes blazing, moving where dre to another patch of nothing, to die on our feet instead of on our arses. There is nothing out there. We're moving west, I said, my voice, a low, hard command, away from gray Mark's patrols. Now, it wasn't a plan, it was just motion. Away, to keep the blood flowing, to keep their hands busy with walking instead of finding each other's throats. They obeyed not out of loyalty, not out of hope. They obeyed out of a deep, weary habit, and because the act of marching, however pointless, was marginally better than the suffocating tension of the camp. And so the grim, silent slog began. I led them into the barren, rocky hills, a king of ashes leading an army of ghosts. The sun rose a pale, watery eye in a gray sky, and it brought no warmth. There was no sound but the crunch of seven pairs of boots on the gravel, and the incessant cold wind that tore at our rags. This was the lowest I had ever been. My leadership was a lie. I was not a king. I was not a leader. I was just a man with a sword who was slightly more afraid of stopping than he was of moving forward. I had no grand strategy. I had no riches to promise them, no food to give them, no hope to offer. All I had was my own unyielding, forerocious will, my own animal refusal to lie down and die. In this ditch, and I would drag them all with me, whether they liked it or not. I watched them as we walked, a tattered, silent procession of my own failures. Stiggan was a wounded beast. He walked with his head down, his steps heavy and uneven. His burnt hands were wrapped in scraps of cloth, and I could see the dark, wet patches where the wounds were festering. The fire in his eyes was gone, replaced by a dull, hateful resentment. He blamed Orso, but I knew, in that quiet, broken part of him, he blamed himself, and he blamed me for not letting him find his honor in a final, bloody death. Or So walked apart from us, his pace quick and precise. He was in his own world, his eyes constantly scanning, his mind calculating. He was not my man anymore. He was not part of this pack. He was just a man of cold, hard logic, and logic told him to keep moving. It was a coiled spring, and I knew he was just waiting, waiting for me to fail again, finally and completely, so his own path would be clear. Brynn was a phantom scouting ahead, not because I told her to, but because it was the only thing she knew how to do. She moved from rock to rock, a shadow of the hunter she had been in the tangle. But this land was dead, and she knew it. She was still performing her duty, but it was a mechanical act, a pantomime of a purpose that no longer existed. Selaine, she was a ghost. Her entire purpose had been the ledger, the coin, the plan. Now there was no coin and no plan. She was just a woman in the wilderness, her intellect a useless weapon in a war against starvation. She walked with her eyes on the ground, just another body I was forcing onward. Even Gis was broken, chaos was gone, the laughter was gone. Dicks thrived on the spark of madness, on the edge of violence. But this was not chaos. This was despair. This was a slow, grinding, gray emptiness, and it bored him to his soul. And then there was Cob, the physical manifestation of all our misery. He wept as he walked, his sobs a quiet, constant counterpoint to the howling of the wind. He stumbled, he whimpered, He was awake. We all had to drag the raw, bleeding nerve of our shared defeat. All day we marched, We crossed one barren ridge, only to be met by another. The lie I had told them that the land would change was proven false. With every step, the sun began to dip toward the jagged black line of the mountains, and the air grew colder. And then it happened. The thing I had been dreading, the march stopped. I heard a thud, a clatter of a dropped cook pot. I turned. Cob was on the ground. He hadn't just stumbled, he had collapsed. He was on his knees and hands in the gravel, his whole body shaking with a despair so profound it was a physical sickness. The crew ground to a halt. This was it, the moment I had been trying to outrun all day, the physical act of stopping. Cob was sobbing, his voice small and broken. No more, I can't, I can't get up, Cob, I said, my voice flat. No. He wept. He looked up at me, his face a mess of tears and dirt. Just leave me, please, I'd rather the wolves have me. I'm done. He collapsed on to his side, curling into a ball. There's no point, he whispered, And there it was the truth, the poison that I had been fighting all day, Now given a voice. The crew didn't move, They didn't urge him on. They just stopped. They looked at Cob and in him they saw their own hopelessness. Stigan leaned on his axe, his face empty or so, just watched me, his face a cold, unreadable mask, his eyes asking and now, king, what is your next great plan? My authority, my will, my entire leadership. It had all run out. I had nothing left to say.