Трудности перевода

The night ended with rain. 

It brought no relief: a cold October pounded into the soil no less than the previous day's bombardment. 

A rhythmic thud, machine-like in the silence of the trenches. Bullets or raindrops, it mattered little to the ones that had fallen in yesterday's counterattack.

Byron's boots squelched in the liquid mud with every wary step he took forward through the narrow crevice to the main dugout - the last place where the enemy tried to re-group and hold out. In the dawn’s heavy haze, through the dirty lenses of his gasmask, Byron could still see how his footprints turned to crimson puddles. 

Behind him, a small troop mirrored his advance. Guns cocked, whispers filtered through the thick rubber, wary eyes following the thin mist that hung at the bottom of the trench. Their bayonets fixed to the barrels and bouncing like the noses of bloodhounds, sniffing their prey out. His bodyguards. 

Taking their time, allowing him to kneel at every stilled body, cup the face and press the Sigil onto yielding, waxy flesh. Byron could feel their disapproving stares bore into his back. The veiled, patronizing insults squeezed between teeth and cigarettes as he went about his grisly task. Still, he pressed forward, attending the fallen with a reverie they most definitely didn't experience while drawing breath. 

Byron felt hollow. He lost count of these fields, these trenches. The provisions changed, the landscapes changed, summer followed spring and then died out with the first September breezes, but one thing remained constant: mortar craters, smoke, dirt and rotting human meat lying around, sucked and then spit out by the soil itself.  

Iperyte didn't discriminate by creed or affinity, by virtue or sin. 

When the Blight Dragon passed the enemy trenches on a low glide, it exhaled the noxious cloud all over the foxholes, shrouding the Germans' positions in this deadly veil. Iperyte sunk fast, and as the battle raged on, they took lungfuls of the poison in an instant. 

The 11th Battalion should be grateful, Byron thought as the platoon finally reached the dugout. Grateful for such a foul gift that had him towering over a pile of bodies. Over young men that clung to each other in their final moments, to their guns.. faces twisted in suffocating agony. One soldier's hand still stuck out to the edge of the trench, curled in a grasp over a root like a large pale crab. 

Unseeing, their eyes peered at the shuddering sky, gathering rainwater like little pewter cups. There was no one around courteous enough to close them. Yet, the gas gave them a painful, but otherwise dignified death. That's why he, Byron was usually sent in after such gas attacks. The bodies were intact, making his task sensible. 

Lowering to his knees in the dirt, with the heavy flackjacket soaking up the water hungrily, Byron un-latched the spellbook and dagger from his belt. Began the binding ritual. He unwound the bandage on his wrist, re-opening an old wound with the tip of the obsidian knife, and as the blood dripped into the crudely scratched sigil in the warm soil before him, he began the incantation.

Something else moved his dry tongue - a will, Byron felt, not entirely his own. The will of the screeching shells, the will of the burning villages, the will of the stuttering machine-guns. He submitted himself  to it. Like always. 

He rubbed at the dust in the mask's eye-pieces. The spell practically worked by itself, like a forest fire hungry consume more and more on its way.

Byron watched as they blinked when the imbued Sigil bound all the bodies into one single urge. As the dead Germans shrugged off the paralysis of death, rising in unison on the accord of his wordless command.

In those glazed eyes, he - only he - could read their avulsion, their sorrow, their fear... but he couldn't apologize. Couldn't redeem himself for what he was about to do as his bloodied fingers moved, rousing the dead from their slumber, directing them to sluggishly pick the same weapons they had abandoned as death crept over them. 

There was vomit on their dull-grey uniforms, and their lips parted apart lax and dark with cyanosis. They couldn’t breathe, but they tried.

Hastily, he finished the incantation. Wiped his hands on the hem of the coat, got to his feet and turned back to the troop, happy to stop looking into those condemning, stone-cold faces.

"They ready, 'mancer?" The Corporal's hand dug into his shoulder with an approving squeeze. "Can't wait to see the sons of whores marching up to their positions uphill. What a sight, eh? They won't guess a thing there, think it's their lads coming back! Welcome with open fracking arms! And none of ours would die today - you're a godsend, ‘Ron".

For once, Byron felt grateful that the gasmask concealed most of his face. Even the itchy rubber felt pleasant - in a perverted, self-punishing way.

"Yes", the words slithered out. "I'm ready to send them over". 

The Corporal nodded, giving the sign for the rest of the platoon to move on. The soldiers followed, climbing upwards along with the dead Germans. Some of his supposed comrades passed him by with a barely audible insult, nearly spitting into the filter of their masks. Rot-head. Vulture. So much for gratitude.

One fellow lingered by him - Jack Haley, the youngest of the troop. The little light there was bounced off the boy's gasmask lenses, for a second revealing the troubled expression beneath. The hose dangled on the rookie's chest like a sad elephant's trunk.

"Um, Byron, sir?"

"Yes?"

Jack twitched a bit in hesitation, all rabbit-like, his voice dropping to a conspiratory, raspy low as he glanced back on the marching, determined dead.

"Will you rise me up as well, sir?"

"What makes you think so?"

"Well...", the youth paused. His fingers drummed nervously on the stock of his carabine. "Isn't it your duty to send everyone back? So that we win?"

Byron's lips thinned into a rigid line. The less the living battled, the more the dead entered the front. Even though the Commonwealth professed that only the enemy corpses are risen to fight again, it was common knowledge that the Queen's necromancers returned every soldier available. In death, everyone had an equal chance to grasp the gun again and be directed to murder his friend, his brother, his father. 

"It depends".

"On what?"

"If your body is intact. What good you are in death, if your legs are missing?"

The admission sent the kid reeling. The necromancer couldn't see it, but he was sure that red-head Jack became paler than the Grim Reaper himself.

"Please, don't bring me back", he whispered to Byron, and turned sharply, taking off in a hurry after the rest of the soldiers.

Byron remained in the trench for a while - now blissfully empty. He threw his head back, allowing the sparse raindrops to spatter on the masks' eyeholes. The necromancer took a deep breath, immersing himself in the monotone hush of the receding rain. When he looked back a few moments later, in the distance, he could see dark figures moving into the barren forest north-east of the trenches. He had to follow.

The wound on his forearm stung, but he welcomed the pain. Without it, Byron felt, life and death looked horrifyingly similar. He wasn't sure there was anything else, but magic, separating them anymore these days. 

The dead marched on - and so did he.