The Man Who Would Be Nyder

Private Nyder's feet hurt.

He was in uniform, carrying full kit and real weapons. He'd been turned out of the Dome without ceremony and given a geographic location for his new section, a map, and a compass; but scarcely any water. And the two streams he'd passed had been dry; not that it would be entirely safe to drink free water, even if he used the chemical purification kit. His feet hurt, and his shoulders, and he felt like he was all alone in the world. All alone, with no comforting roof over him, just the vast empty unknown brightness of the sky. All alone for the first time in his life.

The world was dirty: it was mud that had been pounded flat a thousand times, great heaps of stone to be crawled around or over, buzzing flies that stung his ears and eyes, and the dead. The only Kaleds he saw were dead, lying twisted in the mud as though crumpled and tossed by a giant. The smell of them was hideous, unmistakable: he thought that he would never be able to un-smell it.

He finally found his section, and gave the correct password to the sentry. When he stumbled down into the trench and reported to his commanding officer, Sergeant Ralt, he shivered inside as the other men gathered, staring at him. They were all taller than him, of course: all bigger and stronger. He was the littlest, again.

"All right," said one of the most battered ones, stepping forward and reaching out. "Let's see what you've got for us."

Those words were nearly his last; Nyder's kick to the throat was off-centre, though, and he didn't succeed in crushing the man's windpipe. The other soldiers dove for their weapons. Nyder lunged backwards, white-eyed, bringing his rifle up-

"STOP!" shouted his officer, and he stopped.

Sergeant Ralt was both brave and used to handling new recruits; he stepped forward and explained to the trembling boy that they were low on supplies and gear. What Nyder brought with him, fresh from the Dome, would have to be distributed between all the men, to maximise everyone's chances for survival.

Nyder looked at Ralt with empty eyes, paying more attention to his body language than his words. But finally he surrendered his kit. His fine new weapons were handed over to the oldest soldiers, and he got the most battered rifle in exchange. He lost his toothbrush, his helmet and his fork; he'd have to eat with his spoon.

In some faint feeling of gratitude for the new helmet, one of Nyder's fellow soldiers advised him in a dead-tired voice, "Keep your head down. Keep your feet dry. And try to look unimportant; they may be low on ammo."

That night, he bundled up in his sleepbag, waiting for some of the others to come and try to touch him: but none of them did. They ignored him. He was cold and alone and thirsty, and the ground was hard, and the night was dark and probably full of monsters, Thals and Mutos and worse. And his rifle was right there, within reach. How easy it would be to pull it into the bag with him, snug the barrel under his chin, and-

He swallowed, hard, and stared upwards. And his mouth fell open.

There were stars. Tiny lights burning in the sky, scattered like…like…he didn't know what they were like. Like nothing he'd ever seen before. At first he thought they were all the same colour; then he started to see differences, reds and greens and yellows. And hanging in-between the multicoloured points of light were two great glowing shapes which must be the moons.

It was beautiful. The sky was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen in his life. He stared up at it, and forgot about his rifle, and the cold ground, and the loneliness for a little time. Long enough for him to fall asleep.

* * *

The unit ignored him the next day, and the next. They spoke to him as little as possible, put him on the point position, set him to scouting. Nyder accepted this. And it rather made sense: he was the newest, he was the most likely to die, so he should take the most dangerous position. He did not complain, even though he was hungrier than he ever remembered, and more exhausted, and so filthy he thought he would never be clean. He scouted wide-eyed, and wondered when death was going to come for him. And whether it would hurt.

He tried to be happy. He stared at the daytime sky, and found it uninteresting. The landscape actually repelled. The food pills were stale-tasting, the water was cloudy and stank, his uniform chafed. He concentrated, and told himself: while I am alive, there is the chance to be happy, the chance to be kind, and the chance to get out of here - somehow.

His first kill happened almost by accident. He stepped around a rock and found a man standing there in the wrong uniform. He didn't have time to see if the man was pissing or napping or watching; he just fired. The Thal fired as well, but reflex aimed his shot high, and it whistled over Nyder's shoulder while his own bullet went into the man's guts. The Thal thrashed on the ground for a moment, then shivered and was still, mud soaking into his blond hair and open eyes.

Nyder crouched and looked in all directions before calling in a low voice "Clear!" and going to examine the man's weapon. Unfortunately it was incompatible with the ammunition he had, and the Thal didn't have any reloads, so he put it aside. He did find a new toothbrush in the man's pocket: it was even Kaled issue. The thin plastic wrapping seemed intact, but what if the Thals had somehow tampered with it? He was pondering this when the rest of the squad came up.

"Your first, Private?" asked Ralt, not casually.

"Yes, sir. This toothbrush all right to take? It's still sealed."

"What? Yes, of course. Your kill, your loot." Ralt watched with faintly dismayed eyes as Nyder rifled the corpse, pocketing some things and handing the rest to the other men. This sort of callousness was what you expected in someone who'd been on the battlefield months, not days.

They fell back into march, with Nyder on point. Nothing seemed to have changed, and if some of the other men looked at the slim shape in front of them with new respect, Nyder did not notice, or particularly care.

That night, he woke up to see four of the soldiers looming over him with a hooded lantern. His throat tensed. What did they want from him now?

One of them whispered, "I brought the blood."

"What?" Nyder asked, his voice barely louder than the wind.

"The blood of your first kill. Here, sit up." Nyder did, and felt them rub a wet cloth on his cheeks, leaving behind cool stickiness. The one who had marked him reached under his own collar and fished out a pendant of some sort: when he cracked the lantern Nyder saw two arcs of twisted metal, joined together at the bottom.

"This is the sign. The God of War, the Horned God. He who gores the world. He makes war, and makes men powerful through it. Now that you've made your first kill, He can see you. If you pray to Him, an' He chooses you, you'll be His avatar. You'll lead all the people to destroy the Thals, forever."

That sounded all right by Nyder, so he willingly said the chant with them, accepted as they scrawled the sign of the horns on his forehead with the Thal blood. One of them used an entrenching tool to scrape a single notch into the pommel of Nyder's service dagger. But afterwards, he felt no different. They had no pendant for him; he would have to make his own. And none of the men offered to stay; they went back to their own sleepbags and their own partners.

The blood flaked on his face, and he ended up rubbing most of it off on the edge of his sleepbag before he went to sleep. The faint red stain of it remained on the cloth for a long time, the mark and the smell of his first kill.

* * *

Eventually another new recruit came, after the soldier who wore Nyder's new helmet stepped on a land mine. They stripped the trembling boy-soldier of his supplies, and then turned their backs. It was Nyder who told the new recruit where he could sleep, and suggested that he keep his head down.

In gratitude, he came to Nyder's sleepbag that night. Nyder had never known what it was like to be touched by another to give pleasure rather than take it: to be kissed instead of slapped, licked instead of bitten. He peaked fast, shuddering all through as though his bones would break, but when he whispered his willingness to return the favour, his partner whispered back that he was too scared to get it up.

They huddled together instead, keeping each other warm, and it was dreadfully awkward to figure out how to get comfortable and still be able to reach their weapons, but they slept together.

And the next day the new recruit was dead; he stepped around a rock to take a piss, and did not return. They found him slumped there, with a look of surprise on his face and a red slit under one arm from a knife blade. They never found the killer. The other soldiers' eyes were sharp on Nyder, and he was careful to keep all emotion out of his face as they parted out the rest of the gear between them.

He had to force himself to try and help the next replacements, and they died anyway. The other soldiers were starting to mutter, and after Jaou stepped wrong and went into crunch-wire that contracted and stripped the flesh from his bones, they cornered Nyder and suggested, strongly, that he not try talking to the next recruit. That he ignore the new ones, like the rest of them did, because obviously he was somehow shitting it up for them.

And before the new one could even give his name to Sergeant Ralt, he said in an excited voice, "Are there really Thals out there?" popped up and looked over the edge of the trench, and a stray bullet took him square in the forehead. He fell backwards in a spray of red.

The other soldiers stood there, dead-eyed. Equally blank, Nyder wiped the splattered brains off his face and said in a calm voice, "Perhaps you'd like his toothbrush?"

He kept his calm in the face of their snarls. And from then on, he was allowed to talk to the new arrivals. Sometimes when they asked why, he would tell them about a man named Erem, who had been kind to him.

* * *

The truth was, everyone died. The new enlistees, the old soldiers, everyone died. The new ones just died faster. And when a gas barrage took out everyone in the unit except Nyder and two other men (Ralt strangled while holding his gas mask grimly to the face of one of his downed men, not knowing that both their wounds were fatal), the three of them went back to the Dome, and got new assignments.

Before they entered the Dome itself, the two older soldiers showed Nyder how to cache his best gear, because otherwise the Dome military clerks would just take it and give it to new soldiers. If they showed up with the bare minimum of gear, they might get punished, but they also might get new equipment.

Of course when Nyder got his assignment and went back to the hidden cache, the other two soldiers had got there first. He looked bleakly at the little empty hole in the ground, before taking out his new map and old compass and heading out to his new section.

* * *

Nyder detested his second posting. His commander, Corporal Dert, was a lecher who insisted on obtaining sexual favours from every man in his unit as often as possible. It was standard operating procedure, of course; but Nyder exerted himself to please with his mouth and hands, so as not to have to offer up anything else.

Nyder's attempts to keep as clean as possible were a source of amusement to his new unit. But when a particularly nasty species of lice took hold among them, and Nyder had the only nit comb, things changed. Nyder refused to give it up, saying that the other men might lose it; to be fair, they had tried to steal it from him several times. His compromise was that he would comb the soldiers himself. They submitted to this, and perhaps even thought it kind.

When one of the more vile-minded soldiers loudly and lewdly insisted that Nyder comb him all over, Nyder carefully wiped the comb with treated oil to kill any leftover nits and did so. The soldier hadn't realised how sharp the fine tines of the metal comb were, and how painstakingly Nyder could drag them against him, just on the edge between necessity and pain. He'd been planning on bringing himself off during the combing; instead he broke and fled, limp as a dead man, before Nyder half-finished scraping his pubes clean. He endured the lice, and later the discomfort of shaving his body hair, rather than be touched by Nyder again.

Except for such unpleasant incidents as that, though, it was more of the same. He marched through the mud, crawled through the dust, slept in the dirt, shot at figures just as ragged and muddy as he was, dodged bullets, sweated in his gas mask, hid and ran and killed. Sometimes he cried out to the Horned God in his fear, begging Him for aid: but Nyder never felt anything in return. And he was usually hungry, always thirsty, and finding it harder and harder to be kind.

It was Dert who found the dead Thal, fifteen weeks after Nyder had joined his unit. The body was still leaking fresh blood, and although the hair was cropped as short as any of theirs, it was definitely a female Thal. Dert gloated, actually rubbed his hands together with delight, and announced that all the enlisted men would have a go at the corpse after him.

"You're mad," said Nyder, with exquisite bad timing. If he'd held his tongue for half a second, the whooping from the other soldiers would have drowned out his words.

"C'mon, you coward, you afraid of even a dead Thal, eh?" Dert turned his ruddy face to Nyder, flushed with his own excitement and that of his men. "If you're so afraid, you little son of a shit, then go. We're setting up camp, here."

The Corporal quickly arranged for the sentries and the watch lists, before stripping off his trousers and going to stand over the dead woman's body. He pulled his prick out and started pissing on her face, saying that it was to wash off some of the Thal smell; the other men clustered round, half-interested and half-frightened. There were strict regulations, terrible stories told in training: orders were to never touch a dead Thal or disturb their bodies. But if Dert was willing to go first….

Nyder was not on watch, so he crept away and curled up in his sleepbag. He listened to the shouts and yells of the men as they urged each other on, posed and mounted the cooling corpse. He shivered with cold, and sleep was a long time arriving. Even looking at the sky didn't help, because it was a cloudy and moonless night.

In the morning Nyder rejoined the others, tried to ignore their blows and their boasts, and resolutely refused to talk about it. There was no sign of the dead Thal, but a rusty red stain on the hard-packed mud suggested that the body had been abused even more after he had left.

It took until noon for Corporal Dert to collapse; the others started to go after that.

The Thal woman had been wearing a poison-laced pessary that only secreted its contents at less than core body temperature; the Kaled men, completely unfamiliar with women, had not detected it. A nerve poison that operated on skin contact, fatal in even miniscule doses, which rotted the men's nerves from the groin outwards. The pain was unbearable; some of the men drew their daggers and tried to cut the poisoned flesh from the bodies. This did not save them. It was Nyder who grabbed the youngest soldier, who swore up and down that he hadn't touched the woman, and headed towards the nearest permanent camp to try and get help.

They sent Nyder back to the Dome from the camp, along with certain tainted sections of Kaled skin and muscle (the youngest soldier had lied) in a bucket, so that his report could be taken, and the poison could be analysed for a possible antidote.

A bored-looking clerk took his report, typing it out for the official records. The doctors scrutinised him with humiliating thoroughness in Dome hospital, took new samples of all his fluids and bits of skin as well, ran him through a Fitness to Serve test and looked disappointed that he passed. And then they sent him back out.

He left with the contents of a paper recycling bin hidden in his pack. Again and again he would study those papers: discarded requisitions forms and a precious torn personnel record. How were they made? How did the computer know how to put these numbers and facts after this name, and not others? Could the computer be changed? Erem had said not, but there had to be a way. Nyder couldn't prove to other men that he was better than them, but if he could only convince the computer, somehow…

* * *

He went on living.

Nothing seemed important anymore, not kindness, not happiness, nothing except staying alive, sleep and food. He slept whenever he got a chance, and he ate whatever he could find: food pills, rodents, grass, insects, even scavenged Thal food. Once his unit dug up a canister of triple-sealed food packets that looked pre-War; Nyder thought that the strangely fluffy and fangless polla pictured on the front had something to do with the green crunchy pellets inside, which tasted nothing like polla meat. But he couldn't read all of the words on the packet. 'Tasty Treats for your (something) Polla!' it said, and he stared at that unknown word, munching and wondering.

He memorised the faces of everyone he met. But he rarely saw the same face more than once, and grew more and more certain that he was remembering only the dead. When he did see a face he recognised, after weeks or months, it always seemed that there was something gone from it, hollowed out from the inside.

He wondered what was gone from his own. He wondered what he was losing, every night when he fell asleep and realised that there had not been one moment of happiness in the previous day, or the day before, or the day before…

He thought back to the Children's Barracks; there had been at least ten-hundred children there. Perhaps eight hundred in the Trainee Barracks. But he never saw a face he remembered from growing up. It was as though none of them had ever existed. The Wastelands seemed to be a world where everyone died. Except for him. He joined a new unit, he watched as new recruits came and died, he watched as the older soldiers died, and when there weren't enough men left to make up a unit, the survivors headed back to the Dome for reassignment.

He hoped that this lack of dying wasn't some sort of blessing from the God of War. If it was, Nyder would kill Him for it.