Marus couldn't sleep worth a damn. Every day was a hell to slog through. He spent the mornings feeling awful and tired and usually hungover- mouth dry and vomit on his tongue and upset stomach and the light was too bright. By midday he was merely tired. Sapped. Spent. He wanted nothing more than to lay down in the street and sleep, but there was always some stupid job waiting to be done. Inventory layouts, meals to eat, conversations to get through. By nightfall he was zoning out. Three flagons of cheap wine to start off and then enough rotgut to blind an ox. He'd hit the sack once he could no longer stand up reliably and wake up an hour later, screaming. Marus would spend the night half asleep, half terrified, until the sun came up and he rose for a piss and a puke.
Loud noises made him jump. Once a horse reared up and slammed its shoes on the stone road and the clatter made him panic because he thought something was going to kill him.
Sometimes he wondered if he was going to be like this forever. The sons of bitches wouldn't send him home. Like every other farmer in Gondor he'd trained with the pike, the sword and the bow. And like everyone within two hundred miles of Mordor he'd figured one day the storm would come. He wasn't a coward. When the Steward called for men, he'd walked sixty goddamn miles in mail and helm with a seventy pound ruck on his back. He'd stood the walls and fought on the Pelennor Fields. Then he'd marched with King Elessar to the Black Gate two hundred miles, even though he wasn't stupid enough to think that it wasn't a suicide mission. Then after getting his bell rung by an armored troll he turned and marched every step of the way back.
When they broke ranks in Minas Tirith, he'd fallen where he stood and just lay down, enjoying the throbbing sensation in his feet. He had blisters on top of callouses that hadn't been there when he'd left home. His calves felt like rocks and his knees and back were pure agony. Marus hated forced marches more than fighting.
Now the sons of bitches wouldn't let him go. There was paperwork that the king's bureaucrats had to work through, there was equipment layouts, there was so many pointless hold ups.
They war had been over for three weeks, and here he was in Minas Tirith still. While drunk, he frequently speculated that he'd died on the Fields of Pelennor, and was now in hell. Maybe hell is just a swirling mix of hangovers, paperwork, homesickness, and exhaustion. It was a fine working theory, one which did not require him to blame his sergeants, his battle captain, and his king for his misery.
Marus had been a virgin when he left his family's farm to go to war- just a tall, thin kid still two months shy of his seventeenth birthday. His life consisted of chores and training in the army reserve. His homestead was a good ten miles from the nearest town and his only interaction with girls his age had been dancing at the Autumn Feast, and despite his efforts he'd never gotten lucky.
The day after the hordes of Mordor took Osgiliath, he'd gone down to a tavern on the first level of Minas Tirith. He had heard from the regular soldiers that that's where the whores were. When he tried to talk to the skinny girl in the revealing bodice, he found he had no idea how to ask to buy her. Every way of phrasing it seemed more humiliating and disrespectful than the last. But she was a professional who was working a city full of young soldiers about to die. She had read his need when he came in, and she took him by the hand to the bedroom upstairs.
Marus was hard before she even led him through the door. He was scared at first, touching her in all the places he never had before. He kept expecting her to slap his hands away and ask what he thought he was doing. The only time she reacted to his touch was when he tried to kiss her on the mouth. The whore didn't say anything, but it was made clear that that was off limits. She laid him out on the bed and undressed, exposing pink flesh, stroking him through his breeches. After several tries, he was moving inside of her.
After he came, she wiped him down using short, impersonal swipes with a damp cloth and gave her price. It had been three silvers more than she'd said at the start. Marus payed and left.
The fear and anxiety were still with him- sex hadn't made him a man, it hadn't changed anything. He felt cheated, like someone had made a solemn vow to him and broke it.
The memory stayed with him, though. After the Pelennor Fields, in his down time, he would close his eyes and lay in his bedroll remembering her. He remembered how her neck had tasted like sweat when he licked it, and how her breasts had felt cupped in his hands. Shockingly, it hadn't been as ethereal as he had been imagining it for all those years. It was just flesh. He could get the same sensation by cupping his own chest, or by kissing the back of his hand. Only the fact that it involved a pretty girl made the acts erotic. The main thing that disturbed Marus was that the whore hadn't wanted his hands or lips there. His touched repelled her. She slept with him against her will because he paid her. He didn't think it was rape, but it seemed to live in the same neighborhood.
Marus had marched from his farm with four other guys from the same county. They had linked up with the local lord to go to Gondor as a company sized unit.
Pittar, the blacksmith's kid, was a tough guy. Built like a ox. Some people are born strong and others gain their strength through training, and with Pittar it was both. He was an easy going soldier, didn't really care much about regulations or keeping discipline. While still in the reserves the captain tried to make him a corporal, but he got busted down for not making his privates follow the rules. Pittar just could not make himself care whether the straps on their sword sheathes were properly tied off, or if the guys were goofing off in formation.
Sometimes, at night, Marus saw him take that arrow to the face. It was crazy, because he hadn't actually seen it happen. It had only been described to him afterward. It had happened up on the battlements before the gate fell. One minute Pittar was sighting down his bow into the boiling mass of soldiers below him. Then the arrow smacked into his cheekbone. You could see the cheekbone splinter beneath the skin as the arrow went through the brain. With no drama at all, Pittar's knees gave out and he fell into a boneless heap to the stone floor. The other soldiers didn't notice and tripped over him, their toes getting caught in the straps of his armor.
There was Otto, another farmer. Not the sharpest sword in the armory. He was short and stout and needed every command repeated to him three or four times before he got it. He could be the most frustrating son of a bitch sometimes. In every group there's that one guy that never stops screwing up, usually publicly. Once he forgot his sword back at the farm when he showed up for drill. The sergeant had cut a branch from a nearby oak tree and made him use that instead, to teach him not to forgot his gear. That branch must've weighed twenty pounds. Within a minute Otto was utterly spent from swinging that branch around doing his forms. And sure enough, next drill week, he remembered to bring his sword, but not his armor.
Despite that, though, Otto was the best friend you could ask for. He'd give you his last pair of clean socks when yours got soaked. If you were struggling to stay awake on guard, he'd relieve you a half hour early. He had a good heart and no brain, that was his problem.
Otto would never walk again. Both legs had been crushed by a dying horse. In fact, the doctors at the Houses of healing gave him a fifty fifty shot at surviving long enough to live as a cripple. Marus had visited him after Pelennor and again after the Black Gate, but both times he was drugged to the gills and comatose, and the nurses had pushed him out after only a few minutes.
Tibur, a local hunter, was the oldest guy in the company. He'd spent forty years trapping and hunting, selling the furs to Rohirrim traders. Rumor had it he was also the only poacher the local barons hadn't caught yet. He was hot shit on the bow, of course, but never showed much aptitude with sword or pike. His old bones just couldn't take exertion in heavy armor. He had no business being in the shield line. He never should have left the gates to fight in the open fields. And the captain never should have ordered him to.
Karl was just a straight up shitbag. He was a whiner. If it rained, he bitched about getting cold and wet. When the sun came out, he moaned about the light in his eyes. He never shut up about how everyone was against him. And if anyone ever told him to shut the hell up for just one second, he'd sigh like a martyred saint and bitch about how no one believed in respect anymore. The problem was, he was easily the best swordfighter in the company, and he never let anyone forget it. He just had the reflexes for it. Anytime someone called him on his bullshit, Karl would make a point that he was the best sword here, that people needed to stop getting so jealous and trying to tear him down for no reason. Marus hated him. And every tournament day in training, Marus would focus on trying to get a shot in just to take the passive aggressive little bastard down a peg, but he never could.
Karl went on the suicide mission with King Elessar up to the Black Gate too. Only he never got the chance to ruck march back to Minas Tirith.
Marus didn't know why his mates were coming back in pieces and he was fine. It didn't make any sense he could see.
A week after the victory at the Black Gate, word spread through the barracks that some sergeant in another company had gone crazy the night before. He had been sucking down rotgut and waving a knife around, threatening the other patrons at the tavern. The town guards tried to take him in for disturbing the peace.
The ensuing fight left two guards dead. The sergeant was crying and trying to cut through his wrists when reinforcements came to take him away. He would be facing death by hanging before the week was up.
"Hell of a thing," one man said. "Losing guys after the war's over."
Those weren't the only losses. Easy access to rotgut and wine led to three men dying of alcohol poisoning over a two day period. This led to a new rule limiting soldiers to three drinks a night. This new regulation was universally ignored.
Another guy in the same company as Marus overdosed of the milk of the poppy. He had just gone to bed and never woken up. Some guys figured him for a suicide, but Marus knew that he had had a lot of trouble sleeping. More likely than not it was an accident.
The day after the sergeant went crazy, two guys from the regular army had stabbed a local over a game of cards. The guards had them in the line for the noose as well.
It seemed that the army could handle orcs, but it couldn't take peacetime without self-destructing.
His money was evaporating. Gondor had compensated him pretty well for his service, and he had had plans for that gold. Go back home and hire some workers for the summer. Dig that well so he wouldn't have to walk half a mile out of his way. Get the fence repaired. Plow a second and third field to let the soil lie fallow. Maybe invest in a cow or two to milk. Bury some for a rainy day. A farm is a hole in the ground that you sink sweat and gold into, and hope to God it gives you food in return.
Drinking every night was cutting into his purse. Visiting the whores on the first level wasn't helping either. Marus kept swearing to stop but every time the sun fell he'd find himself with a bottle in his hand staggering to the tavern where he met the skinny whore from before. He hadn't seen her since. He hoped she had lived through the battle. There were enough fire gutted neighborhoods around to make a guy wonder.
He couldn't stop himself. When he was curled up naked with a woman, his fear and misery died down a lot. He could bear to live in his own body. Next to that feeling, the prospect of prosperity back on the old homestead seemed pointless.
And every day was more military bureaucracy. Formations all the time. Formations for accountability. Formations to put out information. Formation that got canceled at the last minute, and then when you were walking away they yelled at you to get back, we're forming up.
Clerks in uniform trying to account for every little piece of equipment before marking it down on paper scrolls. Marus's shield had been split in half on the Pelennor Fields, and his sword notched and bent after the Black gate. That wasn't counting his dinged up armor either. He enjoyed more than his fair share of bullshit, filling out forms stating the losses were due to enemy action.
And they couldn't do it all at once, either. The day would come when the sergeants called up people to turn in their shields, and Marus would wait in line all day in the hot sun to explain to a clerk that an Easterling had broken his shield with a battle axe. Then he'd be shifted to another line to do the paperwork that exempted him from having to pay for the loss, only to discover he'd been waiting in the wrong line, that this line was for broken helmets, and by now the line for broken shields was halfway up the steps to the keep.
Three days later the call came to turn in armor, and he'd have to sweet talk the clerk into accepting his dented armor. Only the clerk didn't have the authority to accept it in that condition, he'd have to wait for his supervisor to get back from lunch, only the supervisor had a meeting to go to after lunch and wouldn't be available till tomorrow, and armor needed to be turned in today.
No one knew when they were doing helmets and swords, but it would be any day now, so just stand by.
And every night he'd find a pretty young girl and pay her to stay with him for the night. As long as he didn't try to kiss her mouth, he could pretend that she loved him and that his life was basically all right.
It was disorienting, being treated like a hero. Passers-by on the street would shake his hand and thank him for his service. Old guys with missing fingers and eyes would talk to him about when they were in, the units they were with and the battles they were at. He thought that they were talking to his uniform, not to him. Like he was just the horse that his uniform rode around on.
He didn't feel like a hero. King Elessar was a hero. King Theoden was a hero. They were larger then life, saving the day and leading Gondor and Rohan to victory.
Heroes don't hate their lives.