Disclaimer - the characters belong to the immensely talented Toby Whithouse and the BBC.
First time I've written something on here, so reviews are very welcome and appreciated!
Those early hours of the morning when the sun was still making its first tentative steps, they were the worst. He wiped the sleep roughly from his eyes and glanced around the camp. His brothers in arms were still sleeping. Lucky them.
He hated the silence. It gave him time to think, to reflect. He never had been one to enjoy introspection. He thought of his dead friends. He couldn't picture their faces any more, he had lost so many. He pulled the coat tighter around him to protect himself from the morning chill and silently thanked the man whose corpse he had stolen it from for his generosity.
When he had first come out here these early hours before the battles commenced were spent staving off the fear with jokes. The men, no boys he corrected himself, that had been with him on the ship out of England were all long dead. Killed in a long list of battles that their only reason for fighting in had been for the thrill of it, and of course the meager pay.
At first he had sought to form bonds with his fellow soldiers in the armies he had joined, but eventually they had all either been killed or starved on the paltry rations that they were allotted. He didn't bother anymore. Building relationships in these circumstances seemed to be nothing more than a futile exercise in masochism. The men around now him were strangers. Their inevitable deaths wouldn't make him pause and reflect and he would shed no tears for them. Of course, the other side of this self imposed isolation was that on the inevitable event of his own death, there would be no one left in the world who would mourn him. No one to even remember him.
The whores who had raised him had died one by one. Some taken by disease and some by violence, and each time he had lost one of them a little piece of himself had also been lost. When he was fifteen there had been just one of them left. Anna she had been called. He was sure that at one time she would have been seen as very pretty, if not a beauty. By the time of her demise the hardships of her life were etched on her face and body. Her death had finally come in the form of a drunken punter: supposedly an upstanding gentleman of the city of York. Hal had seen him before, looking down on the ordinary townsfolk from his horse drawn carriage on the way to important meetings with the sheriff.
On that fateful day Hal had returned from a largely unsuccessful hunt for food to find Anna lying dead on the floor. The supposed gentleman stood over her body, his hand raised in anger. Before he could even think about what he was doing, Hal had grabbed a poker from beside the fireplace and began to beat the punter with it relentlessly. By the time he had finished the man was lying on the floor beside Anna, his body twisted and broken and his plump ruddy face now a mess of flesh and bone. The body continued to twitch. Hal beat it until it finally stopped.
He sat there for a while next to the bodies. He stroked his hand through Anna's coarse hair and ran his hand over her eyes to shut them, stop her staring. If it weren't for the blood pooled around her head she could almost be asleep.
He didn't know how long he had sat there for. His vigil was interrupted by the sound of voices coming from downstairs. For the first time it dawned on him what he had done. He would hang for this for certain. He could hear footsteps coming up the steps and rushed to the window to look for an escape route. He took one last look at Anna then climbed out the window and clambered down into the street below. Then he ran.
The sun was getting higher in the sky. He wondered vaguely if today would be the day that death would come to him. He wasn't scared of it exactly. Untimely death had been a consistent companion throughout his life. He had seen countless men die, both friends and enemies. It wasn't that he was scarred of it; it was just that he wanted his life to amount to more than it had so far. He didn't believe in life after death or any of that shit. Sentimentality and religion had been beaten out of him long ago.
What scared him was dying without ever having made a mark on the world. On the ship out of England he had dreamt of earning glory as a soldier, of being respected, maybe even feared. Those childish dreams were so long ago now. The last ten years had been spent fighting countless wars that he had no personal stake in, half the time he hadn't even bothered to discover what he was even fighting for. He couldn't remember when the killing had stopped seeming abhorrent and become normal, enjoyable even.
The likelihood was he was going to die an anonymous death on a far away battlefield. He had accepted that. There would be no funeral, no reminiscences about his life. He would just be another corpse in a sea of thousands.
The sound of horns signalled the start of the battle. The men around him began to stir. He pushed himself to his feet, taking his blade in his hand and tucking it into its sheath. He had a feeling about today, he glanced around the camp and knew with certainty that he would never return here. He swallowed, pushed the foreboding to the back of his mind and made his way to his position in the forest.
As the sun began lower in the sky, Hal thought that maybe, just maybe, his sense of foreboding had been mistaken. He was almost disappointed. Another night of waiting for death, marking time until the inevitable.
The Battle of Orsha was over and he was fairly sure that his side had somehow won, but he would always find another war to fight in, there would always be more wars. He smiled grimly to himself wondering where life would take him next. He glanced around the surrounding woods, he seemed to be alone. Finally, he allowed himself to drop his guard.
He didn't see the muscovite until the lance had been thrust into his abdomen. Hal starred at his assailant. The man locked eyes with him for a moment, his face expressionless. Before Hal could react the man pulled his weapon from his abdomen and turned and ran into the trees.
Hal looked down at the wound almost disbelievingly. He had always thought it would hurt more he thought absently as his legs gave way beneath him as he collapsed onto a fallen log. He felt himself slipping into a warm darkness. Death, it wasn't so bad.
A hand shook his shoulder roughly. 'You still alive?' an English voice asked.
Hal opened his eyes. He was still in the woods, it was almost dark. 'Hello lad? You're still with us then.' The man was pale. Hal's vision was beginning to blur and the only feature he could make out on the man's face were his pale blue eyes.
'Your wound's fatal.' The man continued, softly maneuvering a hand under Hal's head to support it. 'It'll take a while to kill you, but it will.'
Hal moved his lips, trying to form words. No sound came out. 'Don't try to talk. Save you energy.'
The man was well spoken. 'I've been watching you. You've got potential. I could make you into something.'
The warm darkness was welcoming Hal in again. The man slapped him sharply, bringing Hal's focus back to the world of the living.
'I'll give you a choice. I can leave you here to die here, alone. No one will remember you existed, no one will even find your body.' He gave Hal a toothy grin. 'Or, I can give you a gift. Eternal life. The devil will get your soul, but you will live. You could be a great man.'
'I doubt there's very much left of my soul,' Hal managed to choke out. 'Devil's welcome to it…' he trailed off. 'Live forever?' he coughed, he could feel the wetness of blood on his lips. 'Yes,' another cough. 'I want to live.' He watched in astonishment as the man's eyes turned black and his canines extended into fangs.
The man lowered his face towards Hal and a sharp pain exploded in his neck as the man's teeth sank into his flesh and he began to drink. Hal closed his eyes and let himself slip into the waiting darkness. It felt like coming home.