A Black and White Cross

Chapter 7

The Beginning

Alba woke up slowly. It was cold, he knew that much, and he closed his eyes against the light streaming in the window. He reached down to try and grab a blanket, but there was nothing there. He must have kicked it off, probably because cuddling with Esdese was similar to cuddling with a furnace. As his thoughts turned to her he smiled a little bit, turning over. He started to move his hand around, searching, but it only encountered empty space. He squinted his eyes open after a few moments.

The bed next to him was empty, small dust motes swirling in the early morning light. He sat up and looked around the large bedroom. Everything was where it was the night before, except for a pile of clothes next to the bed. Alba noticed his undergarments in the pile and a deep blush crossed his face as he grabbed a pillow and place it in his exposed lap. After that he noticed Esdese sitting one of the plush couches only a few yards from the bed. She was still in her night shirt and her hair was still a little harried. She had a drawn and distant look.

"What's wrong, Esdese?" He asked softly, half because he wasn't fully awake yet and half because he was truly concerned. He hadn't seen her look so depressed. Her eyes came back to Earth and she gave him a sad look.

"Why didn't you tell me?" She asked, her voice small. He gave her a confused look.

"What do you mean, love?" He asked. He got up, completely forgetting his nakedness and went over to her, sitting on the couch.

"I don't know who you are." She said, "You never told me that you were a survivor of the Aachen Massacre. That is something that as both your lover and superior officer I should know. It makes me think what else I don't know about you. What were you like before? What have you been doing in the three years since?" Her eyes grew distant once more, "Who else have you given your love to? Who else have you pledged yourself to?"

Alba reached up and kissed her. It wasn't particularly romantic, or passionate, but it relayed the answer to at least the last two questions.

"Wait here, let me get a shower and put some clothes on, then I'll tell you as much about me as you want to know." He gave her a disarming smile and stood up. He was still unclothed, but he didn't really feel embarrassed if it was just Esdese there, he was hers, after all. She went back to her thoughts as he disappeared into the bathroom.

"Hey, hey Sis, wake up." Tatsumi said as he shook Leone's shoulder. The massive walls around the palace were actually hollow, filled with guard barracks, storehouses, armories, and a plethora of other rooms. Tatsumi and Leone had taken up residence in one of the storehouses with an outer wall that overlooked the same courtyard as their charges' bedroom. By removing a few bricks and using a combination of binoculars and some bowl-shaped device Lubbock had given them for sound, they were able to keep tabs on Alba.

"Ughhhh… What is it?" She said groggily, she had liberally depleted the palace's store of mead kept in this particular storehouse on her shift.

"Something important is about to go down." He said quietly.

"What?" She asked, her hangover asserting itself even in the darkened storehouse.

"I think they're going to talk about Alba's past." He elaborated. She looked up at that. Najenda had indeed tasked her and Tatsumi to protect Alba, as they had told him the night before, but what they hadn't told him, was that the boss had ordered them to gather as much information on Alba as possible. They had put a lot of bets on the white-haired teen, but they knew almost nothing about him.

"Give me that." She said as she got on her knees next to Tatsumi, pushing him out from behind the binoculars and grabbing the headphones off his head. Tatsumi was forced to go sit on an old bag of grain and wait.

Alba frowned at the mirror in the bathroom. He wore the white utility uniform of Army Group North, still without any insignia. He would have to find some new clothes, maybe even dye his hair. The white skin, hair, uniform, and light blue eyes made him pretty easy to pick out in a crowd. It was like painting a big target on his forehead for the Prime Minister's assassins…

He shook his head. Although what he was thinking had merit, he was merely stalling. He had kept almost his entire identity bottled up for more than three years, almost to the point where his soul and mind where as white and clean as his hair and skin. He took in a deep breath, held it for a moment and let it out. He couldn't be so selfish about it now. Someone else had a right to know, someone who actually wanted to know. He took another deep breath before leaving the bathroom.

Esdese sat in much the same position she had when he left her. Her knees together and her feet far apart, leaning back slightly on the couch. Alba moved to a chair opposite the couch and sat down. Esdese still looked off into the distance. They sat in silence for a few moments before Esdese spoke.

"Who are you?" She asked, her voice as distant as her eyes.

"My name, is Alba Tapaidh," he started, "as for who I am, that's a much longer story." Esdese simply looked at him, waiting. Alba sighed. He wasn't going to get out of it that easily.

I was born sixteen years ago to a woman named Maria Salvia. She was, to put it bluntly, the town whore. Sleeping with nearly every passerby that entered our village. No one really knew who my father was, no one even cared. I was the bastard son of a wench, and so was stained from birth. Now Aachen, while being in the mountains, was settled by refugees of the great wars that forged the Empire. THs particular group of refugees happened to be from the coastal plains, and still carried the physical characteristics of those people, mainly dark hair, eyes, and skin. As you can see, I embody the exact opposite of those qualities, being pale, white-haired, and with eyes like those of an ice demon, or so the town butcher would say. My mother did not try to alleviate these in the least, and tried to auction me off to travelers on several occasions.

And so it was that I was alienated from all that I knew. I spent days at a time camping out in the mountains around the village during the summer, and in winter I usually slept in the inn my mother worked for, as long as I worked like a slave. I still have scars from beatings liberally administered by the inn keeper and drunkard patrons. One summer, while exploring one of the mountains overlooking Aachen, I found a tower. It seemed to be carved from a single block of grey stone perfectly matching the precipice that it sat on. I was about seven at the time, so I thought a mysterious tower was cool as hell. It had scraggly juniper trees and vines struggling to grow up its side and around its base, which gave it had this scraggly-abandoned-wizard/warlock appearance. So, like any seven-year-old boy, I went in to the tower. Luckily for me it hadn't become the den of a mountain lion or small danger beast, but instead was simply filled with dust. Under the dust of centuries was a fully furnished library-house, almost. It had a bed, kitchen, outhouse, and was fully furnished with chairs, rugs, etc. It was almost as if the original inhabitant had just gone to the grocer's and never come back, there was even still oil in the lamps. I was incredibly lucky, there was a fairly large trunk of coins in the cellar, along with a large selection of wines and other beverages. The wine was incredibly old, and so I was able to sell it whenever a decent-looking trader came through. With the funds from the drink and chest I was able to buy bread, cheese, and vegetables at the village market, but I still had to hunt. Oh, yea! I started living at the tower full time, only coming down the mountain to buy foodstuffs and the like. For five years I lived in the tower, and I had finally found a companion: books. I could submerge myself in a book and be the greatest of heroes, the grandest of knights. I lived in worlds where human kind had passed far beyond our own technology, or where they could use magic to heal and to fight and to build. I lived in those worlds for five short years.

One sleepy day in the fall, I woke up to the smell of smoke. Only it wasn't day, it was the middle of the night, and the village itself was burning bright enough to make it seem like sunrise. I couldn't really tell what was happening, only that things were bad. Eventually I saw people coming up the path toward my tower. I was twelve by this time, so I hid. The cellar had a trap door to a panic room, where I waited. I would stay there for several days, leaving only when I ran out of water. When I came back out, everything was eerily quiet. All my books were gone, but they hadn't touched the valuable wine or furniture. This confused me because all of the brigands and mercenaries in my books looted everything that wasn't bolted down before burning it down, preferably with a helpless damsel inside, but everything seemed to be unharmed. One thing I was sure of was that I couldn't stay. The village hated and despised me, but it provided most of my food, so since it was gone I couldn't survive, as the hunting was sparse and the ground to rocky to grow a proper crop.

And so I went off, with as much food and money as I could fit in my old sack backpack. I went to Leone first, which wasn't so bad. The road from Aachen to the provincial capital was a good one, patrolled more or less regularly by Imperial troops and provincial guards. Leone wasn't a half-bad city to begin with, but I couldn't stay for long. I had a very finite supply of money and by extension, food. So I did what any twelve year old filled with dreams of fantasy and heroes would do, I bought a sword. On top of the many fictional books I consumed I read a number of non-fiction books, including several on swordplay. I would actually practice for several hours each day with a stick back at the tower, and I thought I was pretty good. I soon found out that swinging a stick through air and swinging a sword through flesh were two very different things. I actually got into a scuffle with some footpads not long after I had spent my last coin. I took my stance, confident in victory, but they simply laughed at me. In anger I lunged at one of them and ran him through the heart. He gasped and choked once, twice, before falling over. The other became enraged at his comrade's demise and came at me with a knife, which I parried easily before taking his hand off at the wrist. Losing his hand was a little much for him and he fled, leaving his twitching digits and his friend's body behind. I was proud of my victory for a few moments, but when I closed my eyes, I could see the footpad's face as I ran him through. How I could feel the life leave him through my sword and his eyes dim. The thought struck me that he had probably had a family. Parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters, maybe even wife and children. All of those people would mourn his death. Those people would see me as the villain. The Villain. The Bad Guy. I had killed a man in cold blood. It could have been seen as self-defense, but I could have just held them off, wounded him to the point where he ran, like the other, but instead I had killed him.

I didn't have a lot of time to fall into dismay. The captain of a company of mercenaries passing through Leone on their way to the Southern War saw my little fight and approached me. He said that he was impressed with how ruthlessly and skilled I had dealt with the footpads and offered me an apprenticeship with him. I was a little preoccupied with my sinking depression to notice, and he took it as a yes, going on to say that it gets easier, that everyone feels like that the first time. And so I started with the Free Griffin Company. The first few weeks were the hardest. I was pressed into more menial chores and service work than anything resembling training. They were by no means bad people, many of them were only seventeen or eighteen year old farm boys who had never left their home villages, and even the older sergeants were the grizzly militia veterans, most of them with children and grandchildren. All of these men had been forced to form a mercenary band in order to make money to feed their families. There had been a drought that year and the farmers were low on stocks for the winter and the poor economic state of the Empire had rendered many of the townspeople broke. Only the Captain, a grizzled, middle aged man, had any real combat experience, a marine with more than twenty years in the constant struggles off the coast. Many of these men were fairly nice, and took pity on me I guess.

After several weeks with The Company, I began to get a hold of myself. By the time we reached Los Panteras, in the Southern Desert, I was more or less recovered and a permanent fixture in the camp. The Captain put me on a rigorous training regimen, I would do parade with the Company before having swordsmanship practice with The Captain or one of the sergeants. It was winter in the desert, and it was biting cold. Many of the other mercs were from the temperate central plains of the Empire, and were ill equipped for the near-freezing day and negative degree nights. We lost some good men to frostbite and sickness before we even got to Los Panteras. When we got to the adobe city we reported to one Colonel Maraudus, the noble boy jackass that Nasim had put in charge of the numerous mercenary companies coming into Los Panteras, the headquarters of Army Group South and the center of the Southern War. The guy didn't even inspect us, he just put us on the front line with the Rasugas. The Cats, as we called them, are actually closer to human than anything else, but they still have the distinctive ears, tale, and fur of their ancient ancestors. Their tactics reflect their heritage as well in being swift, brutal, and deadly.

Now The Free Griffin Company was well trained and disciplined by our captain, but we were very poorly equipped. No two people had the exact same weapon, no two spears were the same length. We only had about a hundred and forty people, too small a number to effectively divvy up between swordsmen and spearmen and the like. Some of the swordsmen had actually made makeshift spears by strapping a dagger or dirk to the end of a sapling. We were a rag-tag bunch to be sure, but we were ready and rearing to go. We were ordered to hold some unknown little town in the middle of nowhere with no strategic or tactical value whatsoever. Everyone was sorely pissed about it and when we got there we were less diligent in preparing the defenses and keeping watch than we would have been. One crucial piece of intelligence that the good colonel had declined to tell us was that this little backwater(less) village was actually major stop on the pilgrimage required by the Cats religion, and that he had already lost several merc companies trying to hold it.

Alba paused for a moment. He thought he had buried this particular wound far enough down already. He was wrong, and old pain began to resurface. Esdese, who had been sitting down across from him, stood up and walked past him to a small bell string on the wall. A few moments later a servant came to the door and knocked. Esdese walked over and opened it. The servant was a professional, but it was hard to keep a straight face when a woman like that was standing half naked in front of you (Esdese still only wore the button up shirt she always wore to bed.

"Could we get some breakfast?"

"Of course, madam."

The servant disappeared with nary a whisper as she closed the door. She went to Alba's chair and sat down, wiggling down next to him and holding hi close as he struggled to overcome his old scars.

Alright, fine, I'll see it through, but from here-on-in, it is going to become less and less vanilla.

I really need help with Chelsea, can't figure out what to do with her.

Don't worry, the back story will be finished.

I might draw and post a map on deviantart or something so you guys can get a sense of the geography I'm thinking of

Thanks again for all of your support!