Country's War

Country’s War

W.B. Preston 


.1
 The Clatter of Armor

“Puncture the shores of our enemies with the iron ships of war. Dye the sands on the banks of their land with the blood of its men.”  -Viceroy Nikan

            The War Command escaped Viceroy Nikan’s thin nasals. The snarling speech would be the last words Atryn heard standing on his home soil. Thousands of men trudged across the beaches of Ganamoth lugging the clanking metal armor through the muggy bay all the while Atryn wishing he were comfortable in his bed. What of the other thousand soldiers? Loading themselves into the Iron War Ships in the early morning. Was it blood or blankets they yearned for?

 Dragging his War Armor through the slog of the early morning shore, the sky fell short and leaden.  He carried his steel suit hunched over his right shoulder, pulling and heaving with strained biceps and gritted teeth. Atryn, like the rest of the infantrymen of Ganamoth trekked across the seafront towards the iron ships, the giant metal monoliths black and motionless, forged and anchored to the bay floor. Twenty hulking shadows, steely and ferrous, dotted the landscape a half-a-mile down the shoreline. Engulfing one soldier after another, the metal monstrosities bobbed and moaned with the morning tide. The low chromic roars echoed inland as the shadows on the sea devoured one soldier after another, slowly, hour after hour. Entering the mouths of the beasts, the men went in willingly, and quiet.  

Lightning purple and pale tore across the smothering gray blanket of sky, afterward a crack and a boom of thunder round and full. Atryn saw the tear and heard the rip, yet looking to those around him, the soldiers were too busy to bear witness, they sunk in against the wall of wind that slapped at their jaws riddled with ocean as water sprayed across the brow and they loaded on to the warships. Clanking metal pounded over and over again for hours a half-mile down the coast as two thousand armored boots met the steel bilge of the lurking colorless, flagless ships. Floating towards a foreign coastline, they appeared enormous black creatures of the sea, carving through ocean waves and smashing all that lay in their wake. To Atryn they seemed the same kind of beast, blights on his home coastline, enveloping and floating away with its men, good men. In victory most would return, in defeat only some. The monsters over the waves were to blame.

The nearer he came to the metal ships, the louder their anchored roar bellowed from deep within their rusted depths. Beside each ramp was a Monitor in hooded robe holding a lantern above his head. The yellow glow a speck beside a black void, once over the ridge. Now they were orange and faded, as the last of the soldiers loaded on to their assigned ship. The Monitor held the lantern until the last man of his ship entered and the ramp was lifted and the entryway closed. Atryn recognized his Monitor by the long white beard and sunken eyes. It was he who had taught Atryn chess in his childhood. Without the slightest gesture or glance the Monitor stood motionless, eyes fixed on the horizon as Atryn’s metal boot came down with a clang on the iron bilge. The ship was half full and Atryn despised the rectangular deck surrounded with hard iron benches. A few of the older men he recognized, but there seemed to be many young faces, First Voyagers whom had never seen the battlefield.