Of Teeth and Heart
A war's bloody conclusion, a doomed city, and the smallest of souls.
On the night before the walls fell, a Gultrish officer named Henris walked the field’s edge beneath the swarming stars of spring. Frozen dew crunched lightly beneath his boots as he passed the dark shapes of Luraldea’s cannons, shadows on shadow, waiting for dawn to come to finish their work.
Behind those cannons to Henris’ left, the warcamp: the Luraldean army along with Henris’ own Gultrish armament, arrayed for the siege that was about to end. To his right, up a grassy slope: Regenhange, the city with its damaged walls and the castle rearing separately on its motte. It was Regenhange’s duke who had begun this grievous war, and within those walls it would end, whether he was present to witness it or not.
Behind the Gultrish officer, a figure approached. “Who’s there?”
“A countryman.”
“Sir Cortie, I expected you to be abed.”
“No commander is abed before an assault, Henris.”
“Sooth, Sir. I feel the same.” Henris looked at the city.
“You are troubled.”
“Sir… did Regenhange offer surrender?”
“They did.”
“Then why are we preparing to assault?”
“Because… our Luraldean allies would not accept it. They claim the Duke is hiding somewhere in the city, and they will burn it down until they find him.”
“Duke Leuthol?! They claim Duke Leuthol is in there? Impossible! He hasn’t been seen since we defeated his army five days ago, and meanwhile this siege has remained tight. Surely he lies among the corpses! If he was in there, he would surely make his presence known!”
“I know, Henris.. I know.”
Standing there in that darkened dale, Henris understood.
The Luraldeans would not accept surrender because they wished to sack the city.
“There are… women and children.” Henris pointed up the slope. “There are countless innocents in there!”
“Sooth. So there are.”
“‘Tis vile and unholy, Sir Cortie.”
“‘Tis war. And the Luraldeans are our allies. And Regenhange is our enemy. This is the cost of ending this war.”
“Tomorrow won’t be a war. It will be an execution.”
“Henris… as long as Regenhange’s duke remains unreckoned, the Luraldeans shall have their justification. The die is cast. There is naught left that can bring this to a stop.”
“God won’t forgive us if we do nothing.”
“We can and shall do what is possible to mitigate the sacking.” The captain’s head fell. “Have you considered, though, that Regenhange might deserve this? You know what they did in Luraldea. You witnessed some of their handiwork. Think on it. It might help you endure whatever happens tomorrow.”
“Is there no mercy? Is there no redemption, even for the enemy?”
The captain looked up at the city wrapped in quiet serenity as though already dead. “Redemption? No. Not here. Not for Regenhange.”
***
Dawn broke. Tattered pink clouds above, late frosts on shingled roofs within the city, and blades of grass without. The sun’s first rays bent high over creation, illuminating only the highest points: the snowy mountains along the horizon in brilliant pinks and reds, and Regenhange keep’s pinnacle in bold yellow. The rest lay in blue shadow. Mists in the lowlands.
At the city gatehouse, a guard sipped a cup of ale through his pluming breath. He waved to his fellow militiamen down the wall and watched the Luraldean cannoneers down the slope preparing their equipment. Not yet the seventh hour of day, yet there they were.
He cursed at the unfolding daylight when he heard her small voice just outside the gates:
“Sir? Sir?”
He looked down, and there she was, standing before the gates like an apparition of more innocent days: perhaps seventeen, in a rough brown kirtle and gray scarf, half-starved, clutching a burlap jute sack little larger than her hand. “Sir?”
“What are you?”
“A lass, Sir. Will you please let me in?”
He looked around. “Is this a jest?”
“No, Sir. No jest.”
“What are you doing here? Where do you come from?”
“I come from Feurho.”
“Feurho… I’ve not heard of it.”
“It’s a small place, naught but a church and a mill.”
“You’re a farm girl, then?”
“Aye, Sir.”
He looked down the length of Regenhange’s damaged wall, then at the cannons behind her. “Are you perchance mindful we’re in a siege… a siege that will be over ere day’s end?”
“Aye, Sir. That’s why I must get inside.”
“You’re mad, lass. A dog would not want to be caught among the living in here. Hie back to Furra.”
“Feurho.”
“Aye, hie back there. Luraldea’s guns will commence volleying soon.”
“I know, their crews told me so when they let me through.”
“They… let you through?”
“Aye, Sir. They said to hurry and enter before they begin firing!”
From his stony pulpit the guard stared down in nonplussed wonder at the shivering maiden and her jute sack. Down the slope, the Luraldean cannoneers were calibrating their devices and taking aim, the black snouts swiveling in their direction.
“Damn it all, child! You know not what you ask for. You haven’t a prayer nor a weapon.”
“I have a pistol, though it’s a jot rusted. Please, Sir. I must get in. I’m looking for an assayer.”
“An assayer.”
“Aye, Sir. An assayer is one who appraises bullion and sometimes works–”
“I know what an assayer is, lass! What are you, his kin?”
“No, Sir.”
“His lover, then? His whore?”
“No, Sir.”
“Then why? Why seek admittance into Hel?”
“Because, Sir.” Though alone, she looked around briefly. “I might stop the war. I have this.”
In the thin light she held up the sack and told him what it was. He was silent.
“Sir?”
“Come in, lass. Come in. Make haste!”
The gate opened briefly. She slipped inside. The city was dark and quiet, awaiting its doom with chill solemnity.
“I thank you, Sir.”
“You know,” he said, softly enough she had to stop to listen, “we’ve done heinous things to the Luraldeans. Our duke, our armies… all of us. Whatever awaits us today will be our just deserts.”
“I must go.”
“What’s your name, lass?”
“Lotte.”
“God be with ye, Lotte.”
“God be with ye, Sir.”
He watched her disappear down the street, then returned to the parapet and his ale cup. He peered into its depths and his expression soured. “Heinous things… just deserts.”
Then came a deafening clap like thunder. He had only time to blink before the first cannonball struck the tower and a chunk of stone ripped through his head. His life disintegrated in a pink mist.
The next cannon boomed.
***
By the eleventh hour one of the flanking towers was destroyed and the first Luraldean shock troopers were scaling the breach with spears and swords and shot. Regenhange’s militia held them for scarcely an hour before they themselves were driven back.
The first Luraldean soldier over the walls smashed the window of a nearby house and crawled through. He found its tenants hiding in their fruit cellar. “Good day! Is Duke Leuthol hiding in here, perchance?”
The family he addressed – a father, mother, and three young children – spoke no Luraldish so could not answer. But nor did it matter, because in the midst of his address the Luraldean raised his pistol at the father and the cellar filled with sulfur and the sounds of screaming. The children were also slain but the mother spared for other purposes.
The pillaging rolled like creeping floodwaters. A bell tolled out from somewhere.
***
Lotte ran down the street, navigating the detritus and corpses lying in the unpaved avenues amid the sundry pop of gunfire. Occasionally faces would appear and disappear from doorways or windows. In Lotte’s left hand she clutched the jute sack, in her right she dragged along a wretched, whimpering girl no older than seven.
She turned a bend and on the opposite side some twenty paces away saw a fine corner shop with a wooden sign swinging from its dragon beam. She couldn’t read, but beneath the name was carved a swage block, jeweler’s saw, and file.
“There it is!” she exclaimed, and began to run. “Come on, not much–”
Something crashed inside. A Luraldean officer burst out the front door, chiming the customer bell. The officer carried a sword and a cloth bundle jangling with what sounded like silverware. Blood painted his whole front. He looked at her standing some ten paces away. “Ah, who’s this, love?” he exclaimed in her native Himlish. She began backing away, but he dropped his sack, procured a pistol from his bandolier, then shouted to his comrades still inside.
Lotte let go of the girl and reached for something in her dress. “Run,” she whispered to the little girl at her side.
The urchin cleaved to her hem.
“What’s that, love?” the officer stepped forward and waved his gun at her jute sack.
His fellows exited the door behind him. They regarded her hungrily.
“Come back, love. Show me what’s in there.”
In the folds of fabric her hand reached the pistol. “Please,” she said to him. “Let us go.”
“Tell us where your duke is and perhaps I shall. Is he in that bag? Is he up your legs? We might need to check.”
Her thumb found the hammer and her index the trigger. She lifted, ready to draw and fire.
Suddenly a cry of rage rose up from down the street. Another soldier of finer uniform and different accent ran up and began haranguing the Luraldeans. Lotte grabbed the urchin’s hand and ran.
As they fled away around the corner, she looked back and saw that the soldier’s argument had devolved into blows.
***
They crouched in a filthy alleyway perhaps a quarter mile from where they’d begun. Their uncontrolled breathing echoed off the bricks.
“Why were they fighting?” asked the little girl.
“The handsomely dressed one… he was Gultrish. The others were Luraldean. Methinks the Gultrishman didn’t want them stealing, so they fought.”
The girl wouldn’t stop shuddering. Lotte reached into a pocket and drew a morsel of coarse barley bread she’d packed. She offered a piece to the girl.
“Is that food?” came a raspy voice.
Lotte and the girl froze, but it was only a beggar emerging from a bundle of rags as out of hibernation, stiff-faced, aged beyond his years, and missing an arm at the elbow. His hair clung to his skull in lank wisps and he stank like a corpse.
Lotte looked at the bread in her hand and tore it again to share. The beggar accepted without thanks. The three sat together chewing for a few minutes. Far off, pistols popped and people screamed.
“We’re going to die,” said the beggar.
The little girl cried silently.
The beggar pushed the rest of the dough into his cheek with filthy fingers, and a the lonely and dispossessed are wont to prate at any opportunity, so the beggar began an unsolicited testimony: six years ago he’d been a soldier for the Duke and had participated in sacking the Luraldean city of Banvira on a bloody day much like today. The Duke had ordered him and the others to collect the Clavian monks there and sever their hands and tongues before stripping and banishing them to the road to walk fifty miles to the next city. Two seasons later, Regenhange’s army was still passing the naked, tonsured corpses along the roadside.
He then began to describe what they’d done to the next city when Lotte asked him to stop. Anger flamed up. “Fain hear me out, wench!”
Lotte explained she was neither wench nor servant, but was from Feurho, a small place with–
“Farm wench it is! Now look you: this calamity, those shots you’re hearing… this is our portion. Not a thing’s being done to Regenhange that we didn’t first do to them.” He nodded at the retribution and touched the stump of his arm. “You’re not from here, farm wench. How come you this way?”
“I was looking for an assayer, but I fear he’s dead.” Hopelessness weighed on her.
“The assayer… you mean the silversmith, Sefryd. You found his corpse?”
“No, but his shop was broken into.”
“Then it’s fortunate for him he’s not there. He visits his sick mother on Korren Street each Crethensday.”
Lotte looked up. “His mother? You’re certain?”
“I beg on that street. I know his habits.”
“Where is Korren Street?”
He gestured vaguely in the direction of the breach and sundry gunfire.
“Please, won’t you take me to him?”
He only laughed. Bits of dough flew out the gaps in his teeth.
“I must find him.”
“You’d leave your sister here to die, farm wench?” he pointed at the waif.
“She’s not my sister. She was alone on the street, so I took her with me.”
He registered surprise, then unchecked disgust. “I despise your sort. Look around you. This city’s being deflowered and you’ve risked yourself to protect a wastrel who will likely be dead by nightfall. I’ve seen that one, too: a molly who pickpockets visiting merchants! Do you even know its name?”
“I couldn’t just leave her…”
“Pah! You’re worse than this little thief. I know your sort, farm wench: the type who’s the first to be winnowed by wars. It’s only by hap you’ve made it thus far. And I’ll tell you more: the animosity here didn’t merely begin with our duke. We and the Luraldeans have always hated each other; not for two centuries has it been otherwise. Tomorrow we may all be dead, but you can be certain that in the day that follows that one our countries will find a new reason to kill one another. Your compassion is in vain.”
He stood with difficulty and raised his chin like an official.
“As for your assayer, he is on Korren Street in the wealthy house with a second-floor balcony. Don’t ask me to take you there, though. I’d sooner escort you to Hel.”
“Then at least take this girl to–”
The beggar spat, gathered up his rags, and limped away.
Lotte’s hand went to her nose. Now was not the time for tears.
The waif tugged at her scarf. Lotte bent her head to receive her whisper. “What’s that?” she pointed at the jute sack.
Lotte looked around before conspiratorially opening the edge, letting a short white length peek out.
“Teeth?” the girl whispered.
“Aye.” A whole lower jawbone, in fact.
The girl frowned, then grinned slightly. “Are you a bit daft?”
“Aye,” Lotte smiled dimly, “maybe I am.”
***
She bade farewell to the girl, wrapping her red scarf around the child against the chill of the setting sun. “If you see any more Gultrishmen, you can trust them. Hide from all others.”
“I want to go with you.”
“I know, but it’s too dangerous.” She kissed the little girl’s head and stroked her mangy hair, knowing that by morning they might all be dead. “God be with ye.” Then she left, chilled by the evening breeze. Rosy, shredded clouds blew high across the sky above Regenhange.
***
Back she traveled toward the nidus of violence, running against the flow of refugees wearing expressions of terror or vacancy. Many were bleeding. Many warned her to turn back. She whispered small prayers for them.
The report of gunfire grew louder. Her footfalls quickened. The setting sun drew shadows across Regenhange, blue and cold, with only the castle on its motte collecting the sun’s final orange rays. She felt herself beginning to race against the gathering darkness.
At a point where the street narrowed, the Regenhange militia were assembling a barricade with barrels taken from a cooper’s shop nearby. When Lotte made to cross over and out of their ring of safety a man with a spear pulled her back. “Wait, Madame! You can’t go that way! Sir Pieder! Sir Pieder!”
“You, Madame!” shouted a taller man marching up. “Turn back! It’s not safe that way!”
“I must pass through! I need to find Sefryd the assayer!”
“I cannot permit it! The Duke is missing and we are the remaining militia!”
“I must get through! It concerns the Duke!”
“I won’t abide–”
“Sir Pieder!” shouted the man next to them. “I see some coming down the street! They–”
Down the avenue, sparks bloomed and pistols cracked. The man who had been shouting received shots to his chest and pelvis and he fell backwards into his officer who caught a third bullet in the middle of his head and his face caved into blooming darkness. The two men wavered in one another’s arms in a strangely fraternal posture of shared surprise. Lotte fell backwards behind the barrels.
“They’re attacking! They’re coming again!”
Lotte clambered across the dirt street on three limbs with one hand on the jute sack as men streamed past. More shots snapped and above her head and her scalp stung from their passage. Screams of men filled the air. Lotte crawled and slipped and struggled further and soon the voices of the Regenmen were overwhelmed by Luraldish shouts and she knew their hopeless barricade was overrun.
Another bullet sprang from a stone mere feet from her in an alien timbre and her hands reflexively flew above her head. She lost the jute sack. A few feet away she saw it and picked it up. Too light – it was empty. She wailed but then saw the white jawbone clattering away and ran to it. She brought it to her chest and ran again and found the nearest open doorway and fled inside, heaving and shuttering and holding to the jaw like a ward or a relic.
She found the darkest recess she could and crawled inside.
***
Hours passed before she emerged. No lights remained outside. Searchers had rifled more than once through the building in which she hid. They’d found many things, but not her.
She crept partway out onto the floor and knelt there. The air was as cold and clear as the outside. Her dress was soaked with urine and clung chilly to her thighs. Out a broken window, stars shined in. The world was as vacant and hollow as a corpse’s ribcage.
A noise from the hall. She gasped. Dropping the jaw, she raised the pistol in two hands at what might come.
A gib cat appeared at the doorway. Sleek, predatory, made of moonlight. It barely regarded her before moving on.
She lowered the pistol to the floor. Her head bowed with it as if in prayer, and she opened her mouth in a noiseless sob.
You’re the first to be winnowed by wars, the beggar had said to her. He was right. She never should have come here, to this domain where even the strong and ruthless could not survive. She didn’t even know if her pistol worked.
Then, from somewhere without, came the sound of a woman weeping. Not of men dying, nor children suffering, nor even the lonely barking of a hound. It was a woman, a siren of sorrows, like the dying soul of Regenhange itself calling out to her.
She picked up the jaw, rose, and ventured out into the street.
Scarcely a sound. Her footsteps too loud. All the lights out, the shingled peaks and gables drawn in silver by a bone-slender moon. Between the roof peaks, Regenhange castle reared black with a few yellow torches glimmering on its walls and arrowslits. In the morning, the Luraldeans would set their guns to tearing down that wall, too. Then what would be left to save?
She passed the doomed barricade, its barrels pushed aside and its garrison lying lifeless in the dirt. Their bodies and eyes strayed out in all directions in still and frozen agony. She whispered a small prayer for them as she passed. Starlight reflected on the black pools in which they lay.
Two more roads, and naught but ghosts. The scent of a campfire reached her. Orange light played on the brick wall ahead. Luraldean voices. She crept by their drunken merriment with her pistol drawn but not cocked. One of them got up and walked loudly toward her. She laid down as one of the dead.
He ambled not three feet from her, stopped, urinated, then returned to his friends.
***
She found the house with the second floor balcony. A window was shattered on one side, but there were few other signs of violence. The door was intact.
She waited a awhile to watch for signs of pursuit, then went to the door, and gently knocked. “Sir Sefryd?” her voice a defect on the canvas of silence.
No answer.
She knocked again.
“Sir Sefryd?”
Something stirred within. A the door creaked open and a well-dressed man looked out. His eyeglasses were cracked and a black, crusty stripe ran down his head where he’d been smote. He looked pale as death, in strange contrast to his refined demeanor.
“What, Madame?” asked Sefryd the assayer.
***
They stepped over the wreckage in the darkened house and coaxed a small fire out of the brick oven in the kitchen. Despite the bedlam, Lotte had never been in a house so fine. Sefryd took the jawbone and held it to the light. He placed his finger on the incisors, then ran to the back where three silver molars had been implanted. “Aye… aye, ‘tis his! ‘Tis the Duke’s own set! I made these for him, at my shop! ‘Twas years ago… he was out hunting when one of his retainers fell in the river. He leaped in to save him and a branch in the water struck him in the mouth. He lost these two on the bottom and cracked this one on top. I…” he trailed off, and momentarily removed his glasses to pinch the bridge of his nose. “The world may enshrine him as a monster, but for me it won’t be so…”
“So it was him for certain,” Lotte said. Relief washed her body with fatigue. “After all this, I was afraid they might belong to someone else.”
“Madame, where did you get his teeth?”
“He was killed in the fields near my village. He was fleeing the battle, and was wounded. Some Luraldeans chased him down and slew him. Then they brought oil and burned his body. All that remained was his bones.” She shuddered as she recalled the episode.
Sefryd shut his eyes. “They destroyed his remains so they could reject Regenhange’s surrender. If the Duke cannot be located, they can continue their pillaging.” Suddenly he looked up. “...But now we have proff! If this can be brought to the Gultrish, they might force the surrender! They might stop the pillaging!”
“Aye… or so I hope.”
“Capital. Here, Madame…” he shuffled off into the dark, then returned with supplies for a letter: paper, beeswax, ink, and quill. He scratched out and signed a letter, then poured the wax and pressed it with his ring. “This is a Ducal seal. If what you say is true, the Luraldeans won’t accept it. But the Gultrish surely will.”
“You’re not coming?”
He stopped and stared at the tiny oven flame. “No… I’ll have to remain.”
“You’ll die if you stay.”
He rotated painfully until his leg was in the light. A tourniquet bound his upper thigh, but still he bled.
“Besides,” he said, “our duchy’s iniquities are vast. We don’t deserve the mercy you bring.”
“I didn’t do this for deserts,” A few tears escaped. “Amid such pain, I only wish to be kind.”
“Oh, don’t be glum, Madame! You should come and stay with us next Crethensday. We’ll sit on the balcony and have tea and cake. We can watch the children playing in the street and gad along the walls in the eve. And this will all be over. Like a bad dream.”
A sound from the alleyway outside. Boots on glass.
Sefryd’s eyes went wide. He slapped the iron pot over the fire with a small hiss and they dropped to the floor.
Lanternlight swung through the windows in arcs. Several sets of footsteps announced in the passages around them. A low voice spoke in Luraldean. Lotte could not breathe.
The door burst open and a man erupted into the room with sword drawn.
“Run!” Sefryd cried. “Run, Lotte!”
***
Out the back door and into the alleys again. She knew not where she was and had only the moon and the castle to orient herself, but she knew where she had to go: to the breach and back outside, then to the Gultrish camp.
The Luraldeans shouted after her and their lanterns played down the passages and across the destruction. She held the jawbone and letter in one hand and threaded the avenues and alleys until she found the city’s outer walls. She looked down the length until she saw the breach some two-hundred feet away, ran toward it, then suddenly stopped.
A Luraldean stepped into the path ahead of her. He staggered forward and threw something at her head, but she ducked and the ale bottle shattered behind her. “Ah, it’s you!” shouted the Luraldean officer from earlier, brandishing his sword. “I’d hoped I would find you again, love!”
She reached for her pistol again. Her heart fluttered in her chest like a trapped bird and her breathing brought no reprieve to her thirsty lungs.
“I see you still have that article held to your breast. Is that what was in your parcel? Won’t you show it to me now? And while you do you might show…”
She drew the pistol, aiming with one hand. More shouting behind her, getting closer.
“Well,” he said. In the bleak light he was scarcely a shadow, and she saw one dark arm rise to his face in ponderance. “No,” he concluded, “no, you won’t.”
He took another step. She tried to cock it, then had to use her opposite hand. The hammer rasped into place.
“You won’t,” he repeated, “you’re not capable.”
He moved closer. She could smell him.
She inhaled deeply, and pulled the trigger.
The hammer scraped forward and hissed.
It didn’t shoot. Misfire.
He laughed. A dark, horrible thing.
Suddenly a cry flew up from just nearby. The Luraldean hardly had time to turn before a man crashed into him in a tangle of emaciated limbs. The two fell to the ground.
“Run!” screamed the beggar, grappling with the soldier. “Run, you farm wench!”
More voices came from behind her. She ran past the grappling men, along the wall until she found the ruined tower and scrambled up the gravel embankment. She positively leaped from the walls themselves and let gravity carry her down the slope and into the voices shouting for her to stop and threatening to shoot.
***
They would have killed her if not for Henris’ intervention. He brought the jawbone and letter to Sir Cortie in a righteous frenzy. “The Luraldeans hid this! They knew the Duke was dead but concealed the information so they could scour and scourge the city! The Vicar will want them hanged! Surely even their king will need to yield!”
“First things first, Henris: we remove them from the city! Tonight!”
No time was wasted. The Gultrishmen entered the breach and recalled the Luraldeans under the sternest orders. One by one the Luraldeans exited the broken front gates, blinking in the direction of dawn and occasionally glancing at the anonymous soul sitting in the grass alone near their path. A young woman disclosing her trauma and grief to the newborn sun. The smallest soul in that rent city, a most improbable and undeserved redemptrix. A farm girl of perhaps seventeen.
Thanks for reading! This story was actually meant to be the tail-end of the war featured in another of my stories, How a Magister Fights:
But if you enjoyed this, you’ll like this story of mine:
And as always, subscribe to Dunmore Dispatch for similar stories shared every other week.
Great story here - the characters are so well written, from the beggar to the silversmith to the main character. Really great job.
The thing I love about this story is the tiny threads of goodness that pervade the moments of darkness. The evil moments are fleeting but every one of them packs a memorable punch… I also think the opening does an excellent job of setting the tone, and serves as a good frame for the bigger (and smaller) story within.