Carnifex

25/10/462 AC, Parade Field, Balboa Base, Ninewa Province, Sumer

The troops in the camp stood in ranks and sang lustily and in their thousands:

"Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;

The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide;

When other helpers fail and comforts flee,

Help of the helpless, oh, abide with me."

Patricio Carrera, commander of the troops of the Legio del Cid in Sumer and of their thousands of compadres in training back in Balboa, didn't join in the singing. Any other song and he might have. But this song, a favorite of his late wife, Linda, figured prominently in one of the recurrent nightmares he endured of her death, and of the deaths of their children. He just couldn't sing it. It was all he could do not to cry. Instead, his blue eyes, normally fierce, became indescribably sad as, indeed, did his entire face.

Carrera's closest friends stood or sat around his office, drinking Christmas cheer that had, until that moment, seemed very cheerful indeed. Yet the mood the song brought to Carrera instantly transformed the mood of every man and the two women in the place.

Two of those closest friends, Sergeant Major John McNamara and Legate Xavier Jiminez, both coal black, very tall and whippet thin, looked meaningfully at each other. Note to the chief chaplain: next year that particular song does not go in the Christmas program. The two women, Lourdes and Ruqaya, exchanged glances as well. As much as the two blacks resembled each other, one could at least be certain they were unrelated, Jiminez being frightfully handsome and McNamara . . . . well, the best one could say of him was that he looked his part, the quintessential grizzled sergeant major, his face heavily lined and never exactly lovely.

Lourdes and Ruqaya, on the other hand, might have been sisters, or at least close cousins. Both were tall and slender. Both had amazingly large and melting brown eyes. Skin color? About the same. Faces? Different, of course, yet each was in the range of symmetrical attractiveness that tended to resemble. However, whereas Mac and Jimenez had shared the same thought, the woman's thoughts were only somewhat related. For Lourdes: Poor Patricio. For Ruqaya: Poor Lourdes; having to share her man with a dead woman.

"Where is death's sting? Where, grave, thy victory?

I triumph still, if Thou abide with me."

Carrera gripped one of his disgustingly small, distressing soft, and nauseatingly dainty hands around a tall tumbler of scotch and drank deeply. For the things I do, he thought, and the things I allow to be done, somehow I doubt that the Lord will abide with me.