Ónhnhe/Kenhé-ion

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Dark.

So dark, the men only had their fixed bayonets, silvered by what dim light the moon offered, as their anchor in this utter dark. A vault of unclouded blackness swallowed the sky studded with pin needles of stars, and caped underneath were rigid men waiting for dawn to break, and blood to flow. In the lightless draw, the ranks of men were merely disembodied voices of varying pitches, a forest of starving ghosts brandishing their wicked steel, hidden beneath the blackness of the pine trees, their dead branches webbed against the dreaming sky, trapping hordes of insects that hummed and chirped.

Private William Langton crouched and hunkered down with the other men, palms slicked with sweat in the early November night. Heat tingled in his ear, curling up and around the spine, forming a bead of sweat which then trickled down the edges of his hairline to his brow which stung his eyes as he blinked.

“Fuck!” The curse was a hoarse whisper.

“You alright?”

William didn’t need light to know it came from James, this quaint tone tenored and strung up even in a whisper, moreso belonging to a librarian than one of Butler’s Rangers. It was made more apparent in the dark; William imagined the voice coming from plump, moist lips; musket at an awkward ready, threatening to blow with each step; buff trousers overflowing with billows of fat like pints back at the Old Bank; balling up right next to him with some nondescript peared face squished with a thick set of glasses.

“Hmhm.”

“You nervous?”

He also had a tendency of asking stupid questions unfounded on the bloody field blotted in bodies droning in the language of flies. Questions deserved to be in books written by someone that merely watched death overseas such as ‘Why are we here?’ or ‘What about their families?’ often resulting in answers leaving thrumming swells on his face, black and blued, and bulging eyes forever squinting at some invisible sun etched inside his mind’s eye, being orbited by swears and the blurry faces of knuckles.

“A bit yeah.”

“Hmm.”

“You?”

“Worried about those Indians.” James whispered.

“Aye a bunch of dogs, they are.” A bassier instrument vibrated somewhere to the right. William and James were surprised to feel the man’s throat shudder as the words croaked, forgetting about the other hundred forty eight men sweating and rattling in the dark, too focused on their own glinting bayonets, and now just registering the hundred blades floating amongst the ranks. Some were twitching, gripped in fear of the what-ifs, yet tempered with a young man’s pride. Most were calm, grounded, unperturbed by the blaze that will come with the morning light.

“Works for us as long as they scalp the right people.” Another one piped up in front of them. His blade shivered.

“Heard they eat people.” James added

“What-”

Footsteps lumbered from the left cleaved the conversation in half, twigs snapped and crunched under the dense weight of gear and belts. William pictured Sergeant Thompson in the dark, heavy wide frame fuming and red, his face sculpted from swamp mud and fixed in a permanent scowl, eyebrows sloping sharply downwards not unlike the draw they find themselves in.

“Get yourselves ready boys,” Sergeant Thompson continued down the ranks “Dawn’s about to break!” he whispered, yet it still struck the men all the same as a shout.

Almost in unison, the dry and fallen needles broke underneath a hundred nailed boots, the resulting crunch sounded as if the earth was about to break open, Hell following with it. Belt slings against random leather, and ammunition pouches bouncing were drowned out by the shrouded insects surrounding them, but William still wondered if the men stationed at the palisaded fort across heard it, and so rustled about, wiping away their sleep-crusted eyes, and cocked their muskets at the ready.

And as sudden as the ground split, an order was whispered down the file, forcing the men to stop and crouch.

Two voices, fifty or so meters beyond, echoing in the dark, words unintelligable yet they latched onto William’s nape like hot tendrils.

Must be the men from the fort, he thought, and it sounded close, very close. William shivered, skin pricked with orange rinds, and his blade trembled with it, even with the burning tendrils noosed around his neck.

He couldn’t breath. His throat constricted at the thought of flesh against steel, and the men surrounding him which excreted an overwhelming pheromone of bloodlust further forced him to heave in uneven breaths.

“Up! Up!” A whisper weaved down the file. The men were led out of the draw and up the ridge.

Night was coming to a close as the sun started to shift in its sleep. In this faint purple light, William saw down the ranks of men, their green woolcoats black in the false dawn, and shifting in and out of trees, their pins on their coats glinting with their bayonets. Ghosts, the word branded his skull in response.

“Down!”

William crouched and stopped, his hands melded with the barrel forcing the bayonet to flutter with the wings of a hummingbird. A heavy hand laid on his shoulder.

“Relax.” A voice as dense as the hand thrummed. “Go for the belly. Bigger target.”

William turned to look as the hand retracted but the sea of faces all held the same soul, for all he knew the voice’s owner was at the very back of the file.

The men continued to wait, listening to the voices beyond the dark, ebbing and flowing in the torrent of bugs and whatever creature the night spawned overhead. Every twig that snapped and every rustle of the wind made the men freeze, waiting for the two voices to start hollering and shouting in response to them.

Will eyed his bayonet, unwavering now, yet his heart still pounded with the thought of death. He thought of the enemy fixing their musket barrels at them from up above the palisade walls, the blurry cannon balls wheezing by inches above his scalp before hitting its target behind, and the horrific screams of men that’ll either call out for their dead mother, or a God they never believed in that all came packaged with it.

“Where’s the sarge at?” James’ wan voice anchored William to reality.

A voice from the back replied back “Shut it. We’ll-”

Shots cracked through, echoed across the pine tops, and whipped the birds to carry it along with the flaps of their wings. Confusion whirled among the ranks, from whispered muttering slowly exploding to a frenzy of shouts and swears as Indian warcries shrieked and pierced their eardrums.

“Fuckin’ Indians!”

“Move it! Move it!”

Dogs started to bark and horses whinnied, the ranks of men advanced, bayonets at the ready. Their nailed boots plodded the uneven ground, some of the men tripped and fell, some barely catching themselves by putting all their weight on the man infront of them or on the steel tips of their guns. The ranks dispersed into chaos, scattering into disorder made by the dark and the sudden gunshots.

“FORWARD! FORWARD!” One of the captains howled now, almost drowned out by the banshee screams at the front.

Men, no longer in an orderly rank, charged and came out of the treeline into an empty expanse of field. William followed suit, mind in shambles and legs stumbling on every step as if the puppeteer controlling the strings was a newborn. The field was utter darkness, a void where steel tips advanced towards palisade walls, torches atop offering a faint glow for the dark figures crawling up the walls.

His legs ran on its own as his mind waited for the blur of cannon balls and the screams behind, and the parallel line of muskets firing in unison, yet the only thing that tore the air were the screams inside the fort, each punctuated with the cracks of gunshots. A hundred and fifty men ran across the field untouched and hunkered down behind the wooden paling, all wondering where the sentries were, and started to help one another up and over. Sergeant Thompson hollered out at the men inside to open the gates, blazing like the sun in the new torchlight.

As the gates opened, the men unleashed all the tension coiling in their bowels and screamed, welcomed by the smoke and embers of blazing barracks, and the chaotic scene of the tribesmen against enemies of the Queen. William’s fear was now replaced by exhiliration and joined the throat-tearing howls.

The tribesmen had already assaulted the first of the enemy. One of the leftovers laid on the ground infront of William, still in his nightwear now spotted in blood. William stomped the man’s jaw down, digging his head further into the soft ground, and thrusted his blade into the man’s belly. He felt him wriggle about like one of the fishes his father and him would catch back home, and dug the blade even further in an attempt to finish him off.

The blade started to scrape the earth beneath but he didn’t stop. He flopped and struggled against the blade, mouth brimming with blood and dirt as he tried to shout something, his hands outstretched towards one of the burning barracks.

William closed his eyes and squeezed.

The recoil threw him off forcing him to step back, ripping the steel free from flesh, and splashing warm blood and guts on his face. He opened his eyes, and a red cavernous hole stared back at him, hollowing out the man’s belly. The man’s eyes were stuck open, staring into the stars of the night sky, and hollow like the one that replaced what his belly used to be.

The British rushed past by William, on the lookout for enemies with their blades at the ready.

“Clear out the houses! Clear them out!” An order rang out.

No one obeyed. Everyone drone the same tune of angry hornets, their little hive kicked by a child, and drowned out the captain’s orders. It was as if a miasma of unrestrained violence shrouded the fort, even James followed the mob without thinking and started throwing torches to light the barracks on fire. The enemy then scrambled out of their burning tombs, driven out because of their own fire crackling inside them, but the surrounding one burned brighter than the ones they kindled. They were impaled by steel tips through their necks, their stomachs, their ribs, their chests, and died with their mouths imbibing the sky above that now veiled the stars with smoke and death.

The rangers and the Iroquois men swelled through the bright fiery fort, their spirits still soaring with adrenaline. The change was night and day, a few minutes ago they were entrenched in the lowground of the draw, waiting and cursing softly underneath shadows of pine trees. Their muscles coiling up for hours in that cold camp, and coiling up even tighter when the scouts came back reporting of huge numbers.

Now, all at once, they uncoiled and snapped with the length of a world-spanning snake only seen in bygone myths.

William witnessed one man try to fight, roaring with his own fire of defiance, and charged upon the rangers and the tribesmen. As quickly as William blinked, the lone man fell and skidded across the ground facedown, tomahawk embedded on the back of his skull. Another enemy, silhouetted against the burning stables, raised their pistol before their head vanished in a red cloud of guts and gore; arms limped while still holding the pistol, then his limbs followed suit and slumped down to a kneel, realizing what had occured, and crumpled, perpetually burdened by the weight of a thousand suns.

The raid was in its dying breath, rasping for air. A small moment of triumph and cheers echoed throughout before being disciplined by the shouts of sergeants and officers. William wondered about and saw a crowd gathering at the center of the fort. On the way there, a Mohawk man, his face sopping with blood lit up by the still raging blaze of the barracks, executed a wounded man with a quick stab of a knife, then crouched to either loot the body or scalp it, or both. Just a mere few steps beside him, an enemy’s corpse laid breechless as one of the rangers pulled it off, sizing it up and stuffing it in his knapsack.

Squeezing through the crowd, William towered over two men kneeling on the ground with their hands tied. One was an old man, wrinkled face outlining a gray stubble. The other was a young child, mustn’t have been more than ten, blonde hair and blue eyes wide like he was born without eyelids, staring a thousand yards into the soot-covered dirt.

“You bunch of Godless fucks!” the old man blubbered in a crying mess, “I’m going to kill every last one-”

One of the rangers thrusted the rifle’s butt into his belly. He coughed once, convulsively, and toppled over, heaving in a mixture of blood and soil.

Sergeant Thompson forced his way into the fold, nodded slightly as to understand the situation, and simply said “Give both to the Mohawks.” leaving behind a sense of dread in the men as they all gazed over at the child.

“Oi! You posh fuck!” The old man exclaimed, spitting out chunks of dirt and blood, “You know what you fucking did? Huh?”

The sergeant stopped and swiveled around, and took a step towards him with the rigidness of a chess piece. “Striking down the enemies of the Queen.”

The old man shook his head, taking in the audience starting to form around them. “That includes women?” He gestured behind, “Children?”

A small gust of air exuded from Thompson’s nose, “What kind of-”

“Check underneath the floorboards.” he spat, “You think the only child here managed to survive because of luck? Or are all of you across the sea that fucking stupid.” A bitter, proud face grimed in red dirt stared at the sergeant.

Thompson turned to see the unrelenting burning effigies his men and the Mohawk people made, wondering if it was worth knowing if the old man was right and then satisfy that morbid curiosity. It made some sense after all, the walls of the fort were unprotected, no sentries stationed; but if the old men, women, and children were so important, why wouldn’t they station more men in the fort?

Fragile shadows twisted as the bright edges of fire swung and flickered through their waltz. Layers of black smoke rose from the dancers, drifting westward away from the rising sun. The dawn flooded the fort in a band of gold, unable to save the mangled and torn bodies which littered the ground in its picturesque light. Everything was soaked in blood. Blood drenched in blood. Blood haloed twisted and tangled bodies on the soft dirt. Blood seeped through the roots of distant trees. Blood on wood.

“Fuck.” James’ curse ruptured the silence, fragile as the dancing shadows being swallowed up by tears of the sun. “Look.”

His fingers pointed at a woman on the ground spotlit by a holy glow, scalped and beaten beyond recognition, a bump in her stomach stabbed and gored through. In the perfect angle, one could see a feeble hand poking down the skirt. The scene reminded William of the cathedral paintings back home, how pristine and holy they all looked as the figures were suspended in a beam of gold. He remembered how the priest prayed with him, gave him his blessings before he went to war, and then he left for home, joining his mother and father for dinner, a simple stew.

“You lot are marked men,” the old man bellowed, ”... the devil’s in your eyes, the edges burnt in its shadow.” he looked deeply into each man before laying on Thompson, “Especially you sergeant, your footsteps brim in its weight, and I know the old devil’ll take ye, as he would me. And I’ll meet you-”

His face was erased in a humming red mist. The sergeant’s pistol.

The blond-haired boy stared at Thompson - unshaken - blue eyes drawn to its extent.

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