The time had come again and he thought he could not bear it.

He struck.

They answered.

He was the beat of death itself, and they marched to his beat in time with death.

He could smell it now, smell the death, as well as hear it. He could smell it in the metallic scent of blood, see it in the wounds of the fallen, hear it in the screams of the dying.

I bring this death, the drummer boy thought, and he quaked, his fingers shaking in time to his beat. This is my doing.

But he could not stop it. He could not stop striking his beat. He could not stop the dying around him. He could not stop the dying he felt in himself.

“Please, someone see me!” he screamed. “Help me! Here, at the end of all things. Here I am! Look at me!”

But nobody looked at him.

They were too busy dying.

He hated the sun, burning sweat on his brow. How could it shine? How could there be such light illuminating such deaths? He stared down at his fingers, at the calluses that whispered to him of life on a farm, of innocent toil. They were no longer innocent. He was no longer innocent. He was singing this song of death.

What would they say of me now?

A man shoved him aside and he stumbled, falling to his knees. He dropped his sticks, and the feet of desperate men knocked them aside into the depths of the mud. He scrabbled in the dirt. Where were his sticks? He could not lose them. But why? He hated the sticks, hated the beating rhythm of death, but who was he without them? He was death, he was blood, he was a farmer boy caught in a battle. But he was nothing now. He screamed.

*****

It was finally here, the hornblower’s first battle, and his heart raced with exhilaration.

He lifted the horn, and took in a deep breath, his fingers shaking. He gazed out upon the masses of figures before him, waiting, waiting, waiting. The roiling crowd of armored figures pushed and pulled at each other in the sunlight, clear from where he stood upon the hill.

He hesitated.

“BLOW!”

The scream sounded from his commander. He could not hesitate any longer.

He blew.

Screams split the air and he gasped, a chilling wind smarting his cheeks as he watched men advance towards each other, weapons of pain in their hands and looks of hatred in their eyes. He was left defenseless, a horn in one hand and nothing in the other.

As the masses lunged around him, he began to grow afraid. What should he do?  Where should he go? He had not been prepared for this.

He took a small step forward and was knocked to the ground by an uncaring arm. He wiped mud from his face and cheeks. Careless feet began to trample him.

“Help! Help me!” he screamed, but no one listened.

The sun shone down on him as he climbed to his feet and pushed past men engaged in combat. The air reeked of sweat and blood, and the ground was slick and wet. If no one would help him, he would have to try to help himself. A sudden blade flashed toward his undefended stomach. He ducked, and tripped upon a huddled figure on the ground. He fell back into the muddy soil. Sitting up, he looked across at the person who had tripped him.

Another boy.

An enemy.

He wore a blue uniform instead of red, and around his neck, there hung a drum. He was a drummer boy, a fact that was made clearer by the mud-splattered sticks that lay a few inches from his outstretched fingertips.

The drummer boy was alive. But when the hornblower looked into the drummer boy’s eyes, he saw death.

“Help me!” The boy was screaming and shaking. “Help! Somebody, help me! It is me, my fault, all of this!”

Before he knew what he was doing, the hornblower reached out to the boy, knelt beside him, and pulled him into a sitting position.

The drummer boy opened his cracked lips to speak, but all that issued from his mouth was a low murmur.

“What did you say?” the hornblower asked.

“You sing of death, too?” The drummer boy looked at the horn hanging around the neck of the hornblower.

“No,” said the hornblower. “I blow of honor.”

“I do not blow of honor,” the drummer boy said. “I beat of death.”

The screams around them seemed to grow louder at the words, more piercing and violent than ever.

“Nobody will look at me,” the drummer boy said. “Nobody will help me. I scream, and they do not look.”

“I will look at you,” said the hornblower. “I will not stop looking if you promise to look at me, too.”

The drummer boy’s eyes filled with tears, and he opened his mouth to speak again when a body fell beside the two of them, shuddering and screaming in agony.

The hornblower had never seen anything like this before. He turned to look, but the drummer boy grabbed his wrist, forcing him to look away.

“What is your name?” he asked over the screams beside them.

“The man—” the hornblower began, his eyes wandering back to the dying figure beside them, but the drummer boy interrupted.

“Do not look at him. It will hurt you, and you cannot help him. You said you would look at me, remember? What is your name?”

The dying man screamed beside them. “Mother, Father, God, help me!”

The hornblower could feel tears running down his cheeks.

“What is your name?” said the drummer boy.

“My name?”

“Your name.”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes.”

“I am…I am Athen.”

“And I am Charlie.”

Another man fell beside them, clutching a wound in his chest. He was silent, but the hornblower caught the look in his eyes.

“Do not look at him!” The drummer boy commanded, compelling the hornblower to turn his eyes back to the dirty, broken face of his peer. “This is death,” the drummer boy continued. “This is the death our music brought them to! Do not look. It will only kill you!”

The hornblower felt himself shiver again. The drummer boy was shaking, his thin shoulders quivering in the hornblower’s grasp.

“Do not think about the death,” the hornblower began shakily.

“We are death,” the drummer boy said.

“Think of the sun instead,” the hornblower whispered.

“I hate the sun. It shines on this death,” the drummer boy said bitterly.

Another man fell.

The hornblower turned to look.

The drummer boy reached across and covered the other boy’s eyes.

“Think of the grass and the breeze,” the hornblower continued as the drummer boy slowly took his hand from his eyes.

“I cannot think of them,” the drummer boy murmured. “I do not remember them.”

“Think of your ma and pa and siblings,” the hornblower said. “Think of their smiles. Think of their love.”

The drummer boy’s lips quivered.

“They would not love me now!” he said. “I have brought only death! With my music—the music I wanted to use to make life beautiful! I have taken life away! What would Ma say to me now? How could Pa look me in the eyes?”

Screams. Blood. Death. The hornblower couldn’t think clearly.

“Don’t look,” the drummer boy reminded him. “Don’t look at it.”

The hornblower blinked and shook his head, clearing it.

“I think…I think they would look at you,” he said. “I think your ma would kiss you. And your pa would hug you. And they’d both say that they loved you and tell you how sorry they were that you had to see what you saw and do what you did. And I think…I think that as awful as this death is, we must remember that it is being spilled so that others can see the sun shin, so that others can wander through grassy fields unstained by slaughter. It is being spilled so that farm boys like us can play their instruments to bring only beauty instead of death.”

The drummer boy’s eyes had filled with tears at the words. The hornblower suddenly saw a dandelion standing alone and bright in the midst of the mix of mud and blood, and he plucked it.

The drummer boy was now crying.

Another man fell beside them, and the hornblower saw that it was his commander, bleeding onto the soil.

“Don’t look,” the drummer boy whispered, reaching out and covering the other boy’s eyes.

There was a pause.

“Look,” the hornblower murmured, holding out his dandelion in front of the drummer boy’s eyes.

*****

Blood was staining his soles, but so they always were after a battle of such magnitude. The Prince in blue strode the battlefield, surveying the damage that had been wrought, considering his tactical options.

“Victory for sure, my Lord,” his officer spoke from several feet away. “An estimated three thousand deaths in all. Out of that lot, an estimation of one thousand were ours and…”

But the Prince had stopped listening. He stood, gazing down at two small figures in front of him.

“Johnny,” he said, “look at this.”

The officer quickly came to his side. “My word…”

Two young boys. Both around the age of sixteen, lying side by side and surrounded by a circle of maimed bodies. One, a dark-haired drummer boy, who wore their uniform of blue, his instrument around his neck. The other was a blonde hornblower, who wore the enemy’s uniform of red, his horn hanging from his neck.

The drummer boy’s fingers were placed gently over the eyes of the hornblower, keeping him from seeing the carnage around them.

The hornblower’s hand was held out in front of the drummer boy’s sightless eyes, and clutched in his fingertips was a beautiful dandelion.

They were both smiling.

“Dead,” the officer said. “Both of them. Stabbed, looks like.”

The prince did not say anything. He looked at the two boys, at their horn and their drum. He looked at the two who had beat to the time of death and blew to the sound of judgment. He stood there a long time. He stood there until the sun sank over the battlefield.

When he at last turned away, he was weeping.

E.G. Runyan

E. G. Runyan is a teen author who writes to see the miraculous in the mundane. Her aim with her tall tales is to cause her readers to see the old in a new way. You can find her on her blog at egrunyan.com where she posts regularly on everything ranging, from comedic nonsense, to her faith journey, to what it means to write meaningful stories.