Chapter Twenty-Seven #2
It’s hard to run in the mud, though easier by far than it was with full pack and rifle on the way in.
You lift high and stamp down, try not to snag an ankle in one of the remaining intact coils of wire, try not to slip and slide so you’ll fall and land on the barbs.
Duncan sees it all through the tunneled vision of the fever.
He’s vaguely aware of da Silva at his side, but it takes him a while to realize that they’re not alone, that all along the line, men have clambered out of the trench and are sprinting alongside each other like some mad, ungoverned end-of-term cross-country event.
He hears yells of encouragement, of warning as the shells howl down.
Da Silva shoves him violently sideways into a foxhole—lookout, boyo!
—and then is gone, utterly, in a shattering gout of blood and earth and steel.
Duncan feels shrapnel strike home in his body, red-hot peppering pain across his back and down one leg.
He just has time and presence of mind to throw up an arm to shield his face, and then he’s pelted with mud and bloody fragments as what’s left of da Silva rains down on him with soil and stones, and apparently one of those stones hits him in the head, and someone turns out the lights.
—
He’s aware again of hands and soft voices, he doesn’t know how much later; the light has changed, the darkness is bleached through to indigo. Hands, under his arms, hauling him out of the foxhole.
Loading him onto a stretcher of some sort.
Jolting at the run across the oddly quiet ground, chased by the crack-crack of rifle fire somewhere behind.
Maybe not chased; it’s not custom to shoot at stretcher bearers, a rule that both sides largely honor.
Or maybe it’s still not light enough to see clearly, and all the Germans can make out is men running into the murk, back where they came from.
He thinks they must’ve spiked him with morphine, because he’s relaxed and dreamy the whole way, even when they stumble and tip him headfirst into a sap, and he starts laughing uproariously and can’t seem to stop, even when the stretcher bearers get him loaded back up.
Glad you think it’s fucking funny, one of them grumbles, and of course it’s not funny, not really, and he knows that, because look, here are tears, streaming like rain down his face, a shuddering release that’s waited ever since he crouched on the stairs outside his parents’ drawing room at Stac Dubh and understood what had been taken from him, forever, beyond anything he could ever do to get it back.
—
He limps out of the hospital four days later as Captain Gareth da Silva, freshly uniformed, waiting on papers, blinking in the bright French sunlight like a newborn.
He seats himself in the rickety motor transport that’s come for him, and is ferried, in bone-rattling discomfort, away.
Off to Saint-Nazaire, off to meet Americans, off to join the war anew.
Duncan Slaven, dead-eyed, feral-nerved slaughterer of the Hun, mentioned in dispatches, has gone to his rest in the Flanders mud.
There was nothing much left for him to come home to anyway.
Later, he’ll hear that Slaven was awarded the Victoria Cross, posthumous, though he’ll never bother to find out which particular piece of abandoned madness in combat it might have been for.
—
“Look, what about Silver?” Murdoch tries.
“Silver?”
“You know, like the pirate—ole Long John Silver. Treasure Island. It’s close enough to what you want, but it sahnds English.”
Duncan considers. He’s shed Slaven like snakeskin, but he can’t risk being Gareth da Silva for very much longer.
As long as the war lasted, it was different.
So many had died, gone missing in action, been reassigned or hurriedly promoted to fill the devastated ranks—it was a world of strangers and strange new circumstances, and Duncan now spent almost all his time among men who’d only just arrived from across the Atlantic.
To the Americans, he was just another Limey officer, albeit one they got on with better than most. The chances of an encounter with anyone who actually knew da Silva from before were fleeting at best.
Families and peacetime are another thing.
Reconnection, tearful reunion, is the air they all breathe these days, the desperate search for those lost, by all and any means up to and including fucking séance.
Dead or alive, the vanished will be sought.
Loved ones are tenacious, demob records meticulous.
Passports and photographic identification, poorly applied panic measures that came in with the war and were widely expected to go out with it, too, now look like they’re here to stay.
He has no idea what family da Silva might have, if any, nor what their resources might be.
But if they come looking, he won’t be hard to track.
The new papers he’s paying Murdoch for will cut the trail.
But for some reason, there’s something about da Silva he can’t leave behind, even if it’s only his name.
The violent young man and the kindly Welsh officer who cared for him in the dugout—one is dead and gone now, utterly obliterated from the world, and who’s to say which one it is?
He has already become the other man, so completely he sometimes dreams it actually was him, Duncan Slaven, blown apart by artillery, and soft-spoken Gareth da Silva who got stretchered out.
And that this was fitting after all.
Perhaps it’s that idea, cobbled together in his feverish and morphine-addled head at the hospital, that da Silva was a kinder, better man than Slaven ever could be, a less ruined man, with a better chance of a future—though what future he’s going to seek is hard to see, in a world where the Forest nightmare of Slaven’s childhood has erupted everywhere in the full light of day to haunt the world da Silva must step out into and survive…
Perhaps it would take some combination of both men to live on.
“Silver.” He nods slowly. “Aye, that’ll do it.”