‘The Earth Has Bubbles’ by PG Streeter

With him I marched across heath and moor, as soil and blood caked our boots and swords. I marched with him through the rebels’ ranks, and we waded through heaps of dead men, much as we’d trudged through marsh and bog, day upon day during that long march. We stood together and did bloody battle, and later they sang of us as twin cannons cracking —  

— but that is just the way of songs. Really, there was little poetry in it: we earned every inch of our passage with swinging sword and ever-plodding foot, and men did not quail before us but met us with the possessed strength that such occasions bring. The sounds of battle, of our swords rending flesh and bone, were not like thunder-crash or cannonade. If you have not heard the sound of a blade running a man through, or of a spine being severed, or of a soldier’s final, gurgling death-cry, I count you blessed; I will not ask you to hear such sounds today.

I am a skilled horseman, of course — as is he — and as generals under Donnchad’s banner we oft rode ahead on horse, our Lord’s light cavalry and heavy infantry filing behind us. The horses never lasted, though; all our company was on foot long before that final confrontation. How many of those miles did we tread upon our own worn leather boots?  

With him I must have walked across all of Scotland.

Son of Findláech: by our swelling feet, we were brothers. 

On my last day — after battle had ended, and I believed, for a moment, the lie of peace — I rode, and my son rode at my side. But we dismounted and were treading lightly afoot when the cutthroats, hired men cloaked in hood and shadow, fell upon us. 

So it is on foot that I now continue to stride across this blasted land.  

My son does not walk with me, and this gives me courage: either he fled and lives, or, dying, fled elsewhere. May he find himself in fields lit by the cool sun of early autumn. I can hope.