The Virgin by Jim Butcher Tani killed a man on the first day of spring. The day had dawned clear. Tani, as a unit scout, had been one of those chosen to overlook the terrain between the village and the approach the Carthaginian forces were to take. He moved his horse through unfamiliar terrain. The Alps, on the southern facing of the range, looked dirty and muddy as the first warm days of the year started to sluice the soiled snow off the mountainsides. “Up that next hill,” the Gaul said. “We’ll get us a good look at the dirty bastards from there.” Drago had bright blue eyes. He claimed northern blue eyes could see more. The Gaul had signed on with Hannibal’s forces on the Iberian side of the alps. He stank. Sometimes his laugh made Tani feel sick. Tani said nothing. He was a slender young man, barely out of his mid- teens, with the flawless, dark skin of his Numidian mother and the broad, stocky build of his Spartan father. Drago peered up at him from under heavy eyebrows and snorted. “You got no stomach, darkie.” Tani let his eyes slide aside to the grinning Gaul. “What makes you say that.” His voice was gentle, and quiet. His mother had thought that he could have been a herald, or an actor. His father would have had nothing but a soldier’s helm or a grave. He shifted the long, curved blade at his side, and let the Gaul see the movement. “Can see it in you eyes,” Drago grunted. “You sick already, and you ain’t even seen you first kill.” Tani said nothing. The sun was hot on his hardened leather breastplate. “Heard you unit talking one night. Talk how you never killed a man. How you a scout so you won’t have to get the blood on you hands.” “That’s none of your affair.” At least the Gaul’s chatter helped him to think about something besides what he was about to do. The barbarian snorted. “The hell you say. I got run around bastard mountains with you. I got bleed if you can’t fight.” “I’ll fight, when it’s time.” The Gaul snorted again. “Fight. Believe that when I see it.” “Then keep talking.” He laid his hand on his sword, now. Drago was like a vicious dog. One didn’t show weakness to a vicious dog, unless one wanted it at his throat. The Gaul stared at him with hard, blue eyes. They had both come to a stop. Tani let his steel blade come an inch out of the scabbard when Drago touched his soft iron longsword. “If your chattering brings the tribe down on us you’ll have all the fighting you want.” Tani kept his voice even, reasonable. Drago spit at the ground, through his thick moustaches. Bits of spittle caught in his long, wild hair, but he didn’t seem to notice. Or at least not to care. He turned and kept walking, and the tension vanished. “The hell you say,” he repeated. He always cursed when he was angry, or frightened, or couldn’t think of anything else to say. Drago cursed a lot. But then, thought Tani, so do the rest of us. * * * * * * * * * * Tani finished up the scout, and returned to the detachment commander. Quietly, he laid out the positioning of the objective, and what forces they had. He did not mention the smoke rising from the campfires, the chatter of the girls milking cows and goats in the predawn light, or the first laughs of children that had come drifting up to where he overlooked the valley, unseen. He rode to the rear of the column. The scouts, but for a few, would fan out behind the force to ensure against a rear attack. Hanno, another scout, pulled his horse up next to Tani’s, and greeted him heartily. “Moloch’s strength, Tani. You look like hell.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Hanno frowned, whirling his short lance absently. “I’m serious. If you’re sick, maybe you shouldn’t be going into action.” “We’re going to be at the rear, Hanno. We aren’t going to be in any action.” “With these barbarians, who can say. They’re a wily bunch. A horde of the bastards might put up a good fight.” “There’s not more than two hundred of them. This isn’t a fight. Just a slaughter.” Hanno shrugged. “Moloch’s will, then. The strong do what they like.” “You really think that?” Tani asked. The other young man looked uncomfortable. Tani watched his friend’s face as they rode past a group of laughing Gauls, excited about the prospect of pillaging the village. “Do you really think that?” Tani repeated. “I don’t know,” the other said at last. “We’re just following orders.” Tani barked a short little laugh. “Right. Orders. It’s not our fault, then.” Hanno looked troubled. He made no answer, and they continued to the rear of the column. Tani didn’t see his friend again until after the fighting, such as it was, was finished. * * * * * * * * * * The village was in flames. The houses had been set on fire, as had virtually anything else that could burn. The wounded who were not yet blessed with death screamed and moaned. Women were wailing over lost family, and screaming as they were pursued through the muddy tracks between houses by laughing Gauls or bored cavalry soldiers. Tani always found this the worst. He would not have come at all except that a group of a hundred or so tribesmen had been seen on the western flank, and someone had to report it to the batallion commander. He pulled his horse around a screaming girl, no more than fourteen summers, being systematically raped and sodomized by a dozen laughing men. An old woman, cradling a blanket, tried to run from a Gaul, and took an arrow in her withered back for her effort. She fell to the ground, and the infant she had been holding screamed as it fell naked into the cold mud. No one was there to listen. Tani closed his eyes. Moloch was the savage patron diety of Carthage. The strong worshipped Moloch. The Carthaginians gave their firstborn children to Moloch, to ensure his blessings. They gave him the entrails of their enemies, to honor him. The village men, and the boys old enough to have any sort of muscle, were being forced to dig their own grave, an open pit on the ground. Tani had seen mass executions before. Their entrails would be spilled out onto the ground, and then they would be tossed, still alive and screaming, into a pit, deep enough for all the bodies. Their faces were grim. He could see that they knew, but that a desperate hope kept them digging. Hope that something would happen in that hour. It never had. Unable to look at any more, he turned his horse aside and rode between a sacked building and a long pile of stones. The animal paused to take a few bites from a pile of hay, its own pillaging. Tani paused, and allowed it. Something within the hay stirred, and Tani had lowered the razor-sharp point of the lance to the breast of the boy who rolled out of the hay before he could regain his feet. The boy stared up at him with wide eyes, and his chest heaved with frightened breaths. Tani regarded him, curious at the lack of feeling in him. He could nudge his horse forward, and pin the young man to the wall. Or simply extend his arm. The spear would slide through skin and muscle, and into one of the young barbarian’s lungs as easily as through water. The young barbarian soiled himself in a sudden acrid stench of urine, and closed his eyes. The stench turned something inside Tani. He drew his arm back, and let the lance fall. The young man looked up at him with wide eyes. Tani jerked his head, out, towards the perimeter of the village. The sacking of the place was well underway. No one would notice a single boy running away. The young man vanished in a flurry of flying elbows and pumping feet. He was weeping miserably as he ran. The children, the ones that were too young to be put to work, or raped, were being rounded up in a single, large group. The soldiers in charge, Carthaginians, wore emotionless masks as they marched them past the buildings Tani stood between. Tani turned away, sickened at last. He slid from his horse, and stumbled into a small house, one that had miraculously escaped the flames. It was cool and dark inside, and quiet. The rush of motion caught his mind off-guard, but his father’s training had prepared his hands and arms. His sword came flying free of its sheath, and there was a gurgling scream. Something hot and salty sprayed him, and there was a scream. The wind blew the door open again, spilling light into the room in a banging cycle of light and darkness. Light, dark. Light, dark. A young man, Tani’s age, lay dead upon the ground. A young woman, the same age, and only half-dressed, stared, horrified. The young woman screamed. The young woman rushed to the corpse with a wail, tears already rushing from her eyes. Tani stumbled back, drenched with the dead man’s blood. The young woman looked up at him, hatred in her burning blue eyes. Others entered, and one of them brought a torch. Drago, and several Numidians were there, and one of them, Hanno, Tani thought, slapped him on the back and shouted congratulations. Tani cleaned his sword of blood for the first time, and sheathed it. He watched as the girl was stripped, bound, and cast back onto the floor. Drago knelt between her legs, and suddenly Tani was moving. He struck the Gaul a blow to the head, and the big man fell aside, whirling with a snarl. He dragged a dagger from its sheath, and crouched, as if to leap. Numidian lances from his countrymen leveled on the barbarian’s heart. “Go ahead, Iberian dog,” Hanno said pleasantly. “Moloch won’t mind another set of guts or two before the day is done.” There was a silence. The only sound was the young woman’s muffled weeping. Tani faced the Gaul without moving, without flinching. Again, he noted how numb he felt, within. He had never found such a lack of feeling within himself. “Another time, darkie,” the Gaul spat. “Another day and another fight.” “You will die,” Tani replied, without feeling. “I will kill you.” Drago spat again, and stalked out of the tent. Hanno put a hand on his shoulder, and Tani slapped it away, his eyes hard. Hanno searched his face. “Get out,” Tani whispered. “She’s mine.” “Tani. Are you sure you want to--” “It’s no use, Hanno. I should have known it wouldn’t be any use.” “Look. Just go. I know you--” Tani laid his hand on his sword. Hanno’s face grew pale under the Numidian darkness, but he nodded. The other Numidians shifted back and forth uncomfortably, and then left. Tani shut the door. Tani turned to the bound girl. The young man, evidently her lover, lay dead. The corpse’s face was sad. She stared at it and wept. Tani had never been with a woman, but the mechanics were simple enough, as he understood it. He had killed the girl’s man. By conquest, she was his, to dispose with as he wished. Most would rape her for the night, and then throw her to their friends to use. That was what they would expect. He had claimed conquest and shown himself ready to fight for the priviledge. Even if he didn’t use her, the others would, come morning. The young barbarian, for her part, never stopped her soft, helpless keening. She never stopped weeping. She never looked away from the corpse, and for all the note she took of him, he could have been nothing more than a bad dream. She was gone, somehow. There wasn’t anything alive in her eyes. She was dead, even though she was still weeping quietly. He could mount her and she wouldn’t even feel it. He knelt down next to her, and stroked her hair away from her face. She was pretty, for a Gaul. She had beautiful blue eyes. Her world was gone. In his mind, he saw the Gaul crouched over her again. There was nothing he could do for her. There was no way to have mercy, really. But for one. He drew his sword. Her blood sprayed his face when he cut her throat, and he stayed there with her until she had gone still and silent. He curled up in the corner, then, far away from the two dead people. He drew his knees up against his chest. The tears cut a clean track through the blood that coated his face. He stayed that way, until dawn. Moloch’s will. The strong ruled. He had only been following orders.