The Baby and the Battlefield

Chapter Two: A Prisoner

 Far across the battlefield, a woman shivered. Her dark hair was pinned high on her head, offering no protection, and despite the chill she was dressed only in her under-tunic. Even her soft leather boots had been taken away, leaving her feet bare. The wind cut through her, but she could not protect herself with her arms – they were tied to the cart wheel behind her back. She watched the men, imperial soldiers, warily. Their speech was almost too quick for her to follow; she had learned their strange, clipped tongue when she was still a girl in her father's house, but this argument was difficult for her to understand. The woman had never thought that imperial soldiers were such an unruly lot; she knew it was ridiculous to picture them standing in straight lines all the time, but she had expected it nevertheless. She had not expected this noisy crowd of men, young and old, short and tall, all smelling of sweat, milling around pawing her things, while crows called overhead.

The young woman knew her people had lost the battle. She knew that no one was coming to rescue her. She had watched when the soldiers killed her husband. A tall imperial man had slit her husband's throat as he had tried to rescue a stash of copper and silver coins from her tent. The man who killed him had then taken her roughly by the arm, dragging her to where a knot of his colleagues had been plundering the other tents in the convoy. She had kicked, and shrieked, and tried to bite, but it was to no avail. Her hands had been tied behind her back and bound to a cart wheel, and then the imperial soldiers had, mercifully, ignored her. Right now they were fighting over the delicate blue robe with the pattern of peach blossoms sprayed across it, the one she had worn on her wedding day. She loved that robe, not because of her husband - she had been married for eight years to a man who hardly seemed to know she existed - but because the robe reminded her of her childhood, and her parents. She cried when the fine robe was torn in two by the barbarous soldiers.

The tears drew their attention at last. One of the soldiers, a tall man with his two front teeth missing, the one who had slit her husband’s throat, leered at her. The men crowded around her, and the toothless man drew a finger along her cheek. She shuddered as he reached around, unpinning her hair, so it fell, long and heavy over her shoulders, reaching, straight and black, past her waist. To her surprise, the man was more interested in the jewelled combs he had pulled from her hair than he was in her. He turned the combs over and over in his hands, then held them out for the admiration of his colleagues. They praised the combs, and the woman pretended not to understand their language as the toothless man turned back to her.

The woman pulled her head away as the man’s fingers feathered against the back of her neck, under her hair. She focused on remaining impassive, like water flowing over rocks. She could feel her hair being lifted, and gathered together, the man holding it at the base of her neck. Much to the young woman's surprise, the soldier fished a short length of rope out of his sleeve, and tied her hair roughly into a ponytail. The soldier grinned and drew a knife from his belt, a giant, wicked thing, with a serrated edge. In spite of her resolve, she gasped as he raised the knife threateningly close to her throat.

“Shh,” he hissed softly, like she was a horse he was trying to quiet, “Shh.”

The woman shivered. She could feel the weight of her hair lightening slightly as the man picked up in one hand. Suddenly, her head was jerked from side to side by a violent sawing motion. It was only a moment before her head felt lighter than she could remember it being ever before, and she realized that he had cut her hair.

“Long and straight,” the man with the knife commented, as the woman’s arms were set free, “It’ll fetch some pretty coin from a wig-maker.”

The one who had killed her husband, the one who appeared to be the leader, took the long pony tail, and coiled it up in his hands, nodding. The woman watched him, a shocked expression on her face. Her hair had bushed her thighs since she was a young teenager living in her father’s house in the mountains. It had been the one thing that made her even a little bit beautiful. Now she did not even have that. The woman felt even colder than she had before. She burst into tears.

The leader of the men shrugged and said, “She's pretty ugly when she cries, don't you think? We captured better than her in the morning. Some of those little maidens were a right pretty sight. No, I say we just take this one to be sold.”

This, the woman understood. She was relieved, but her cheeks glowed red at the insult inherent in his speech. Then she schooled her expression to careful neutrality, reflecting that she should be grateful that they were not interested in her. After all, the pretty little maidens they had mentioned would probably not enjoy what these rough, cruel men would do to them. The man who would buy her, in the end, might be no more gentle, but at least there might be a warm house and decent food. That would be no different than her marriage had been. And with that, she was released from the cartwheel, and two of the soldiers led her off to her fate.