Stone Will

117

The orderly he was talking to turned away too abruptly and went to the field.

Hadjar could not take a single step further. The whole area, as far as the eye could see, was littered with bodies.

Dead, moaning, wounded, dying, impaled on a spear, torn to pieces, burned, broken people… were everywhere.

The once beautiful plain was covered in bodies, all the way to the horizon.

Hadjar looked at his feet - they were buried in blood up to the ankle.

“Damn it,” Nero hissed. “Damn it... Damn it!”

“Let's go,” Hadjar said softly.

Overcoming their fatigue, they kept dragging the bodies back to camp until nightfall. Only when they themselves had almost collapsed on the battlefield from exhaustion were they replaced by the lightly wounded soldiers. As well as by those warriors who’d come out of this monstrous meat grinder with no more than a couple of cuts or bruises. Those people must have been cared for by God since their birth.

The hard, brutal days stretched on.

Hadjar and Nero set up their te