Country's War

.2

War Voyage

          At the bow Iron Horde was engraved across a battered and scratched gold plated banner. Atryn eyed an empty bench beneath the banner and limped his way towards it. Clattering down with his armor, he began rattling the pieces together, connecting the giant knee plates to the steel boots, and twisting and screwing the bolts in place. He caught a glimmer of shining metal amongst the grimy lumps of twisted shield. Searching the sky for the sun, there was none, only the ambling billows of layered clouds gathering over the open sea. Searching the beach dunes of the coast, his eyes settled atop a ridge with an edge of foliage and grass that spilled over the cliff like sand. A woman stood from the ledge wrapped in a large grey shawl, she disappeared with the sky. Blinking Atryn found her gaze as she stared directly at him, acknowledging this with a slow deliberate nod of her chin once his eyes met hers. Suddenly shivering he felt for the first time the cold of the morning and he cast his eyes down to the boat again. She had to have been some five hundred yards off, there was no way she could find his gaze, and yet Atryn could not shake the feeling that she spoke to him with her eyes. A deep and dividing fear crept over his spine and through his brain as he looked back towards the ridge and searched across it, not finding the woman in grey. A slamming metal door obscured his view as the ship was clamped shut and he felt the hunk of metal heave away from the shore and slosh into the ebb of the sea. Blood and chaos and crossed steel lay before him, yet the only thing his mind could see was the unwavering stare of the woman in the grey shawl. 

A thousand footprints took hours to stamp across the sand, it took merely a moment for the tide to wash them all away. The outline of the sun hung overhead, a circle of light inscribed in the clouds; it just as well have been night, for there was nothing to see but the rusted deck of the Iron Horde. The clanking of metal as men shivered in their armor, the wretched scent of vomit, dry and moist, stung the air. Moldy bread and potatoes was all they had to eat, along with as many waterskins as they could pack and carry along with their armor. No meat. 

"You'll have your meat with victory!" -Viceroy Nikan

          Soon the weak would jump from the back of the ship. Atryn could never understand it, the drawn out torture of the lungs filling with ocean was a fate far worse than the meandering voyage which would probably end with a short quick death under the blade. He knew which he preferred. The opportunity to reap the rewards of victory was enough to keep him alive and fighting. His second War Voyage, upon the first a soldier returning home victorious was allowed to take a wife and given a bit of coin. Atryn chose not to take the wife; he knew he would be leaving for his second voyage soon. The year and a half it took the Viceroy to choose a target was excruciating. Atryn spent the duration drinking beer and fighting with the other soldiers. He trained and waited patiently for his second chance at glory. 

          Upon return from a second War Voyage, a soldier was granted a plot of land, a horse, a farmhand, and double the coin. A boyhood dream some twenty-five suns ago. Now was his chance to earn his leisure, with the blood of a foreign threat.  The strays were usually boys who had been coddled by their mothers far too long, better for a boy to learn how to survive in the mud of madness, so to defend himself from the torturous silence of the voyage. So Atryn sat, in the back of the Iron Horde, in his suit of steel, huddled with six other men, when finally the rain stopped. He would make these men his squad before landfall. But that would not be for many moons, and with the rain stopped he could finally quiet his mind to sleep.