When they reached the low plains the milder air was like a lover’s kisses, soft on their faces and hands and in their lungs. There was winter grass for those horses and mules that had survived, but still nothing for the men. Starvation made them all a bit mad; it gave them a glint in their eyes like feral dogs. And Suleiman would not eat. He showed no interest at all in the brownish grass that was suddenly all around him; without the numbing ice in his feet he was in such pain that he trembled all over, all day long. It tore at Jonathan’s heart to see him suffer so. There was no reproach in the horse’s eyes, no blame, but there was also no fight, no spark. On a mild, damp day on which the men finally caught the tang of the sea, Suleiman’s shuffling walk halted, his knees buckled and he lay down. The men trudging behind them parted around the fallen horse without a pause or a thought.
Jonathan knelt beside his horse’s head. He tried to lift it onto his lap, but it was too heavy and his own arms were far too weak. For a while he was content to let the horse rest. He dribbled some water into Suleiman’s mouth, but it ran back out again. Only after an hour had passed, and Captain Sutton came to find him, did Jonathan begin to see the danger.
‘Major Alleyn, sir, we must move on. We’ll make camp on top of the next rise, if we can reach it by sundown,’ said the captain, rousing Jonathan with a hand on his shoulder. ‘Come, sir, we will find you another horse from the lines.’
‘What? I need no other horse. I have Suleiman,’ he said, shaking his head.
‘A valiant creature, indeed, Major Alleyn, but I fear he is spent. Come, let us end it for him the more swiftly, and be onwards.’
‘You will do no such thing!’ Jonathan struggled to his feet and staggered as a wave of woozy exhaustion swept over him. ‘He will make it. He is not spent. Come, Suleiman, up! Up, my brave boy! We are nearly at camp!’ He tugged on the reins, his voice growing louder and louder. He leaned with all his weight, but Suleiman did not even raise his head.
‘Sir-’
‘No! I will not hear of it! Up, Suleiman, up! Fetch me some brandy, Captain. That’s all he needs, a little brandy for strength!’
Captain Sutton fetched a tot of brandy in a tin cup and dutifully handed it over, though his eyes said that he knew a lost cause when he saw one. Frantically, Jonathan lifted Suleiman’s chin, peeled back his lips and dribbled the brandy onto his tongue. The horse’s gums were greyish white, and the brandy had no effect.
‘Come up, Suleiman! Up!’
‘Leave off him, man, the poor beast is done for,’ remarked another officer, walking past with the bandy-legged gait of a lifetime spent in the saddle. Frantically, Jonathan fetched his crop from behind the saddle and gave the horse a whack across the rump. It left a welt in his fur, but the muscles beneath the slack skin didn’t even twitch. Jonathan could hardly see for the tears burning his eyes. He had never hated himself more. With a gasped breath he hit Suleiman again.
‘You must get up!’ he shouted. With slow surrender, Suleiman blinked his uppermost eye. Jonathan dropped the crop and collapsed beside him, weeping uncontrollably. He smoothed the thin coat around the horse’s eyes and ears; a gentle stroking to make up for the blows he’d delivered. ‘I’m so sorry, my friend. I’m so sorry,’ he murmured, over and over again. He felt Captain Sutton’s hands on his shoulders, coaxing him away.
‘There’s nothing more to be done, sir. There’s nothing more you can do for him. Come away. Come away now.’ Jonathan rose unsteadily and allowed himself to be led away. ‘That’s right, sir. Best leave him now. No more to be done, and it upsets the men to see you so distraught. Best to leave him; I’ll make sure he’s taken care of.’ They’d gone only fifteen or twenty paces when a shot rang out, and Jonathan turned to see a man standing over his fallen friend with a smoking pistol in his hand.
‘I made it down the mountain only because of him. My friend. And see now how he is rewarded for all his strength and bravery.’ Jonathan loathed the tears on his face, and scrubbed at them angrily.
‘There never was a better horse, Major Alleyn. But there was nothing more to be done.’
That night, Jonathan sat in his tent at his folding field desk, quill pen poised over a piece of blank paper. He’d been trying to write a letter to Alice, the first one in weeks, but there didn’t seem to be anything he could write. To tell her anything was to invite her into the hell in which he found himself. To tell her anything was to tell her what he had become, and risk her loving him no longer. He was a man who watched newborn babies die in the snow; a man who drank the blood of dead comrades. He was a man who feared battle; a man without valour, who reviled the passionate violence that his country needed from him. He was a man who had left Suleiman lying on a grassy plain to die – that beautiful, powerful creature she had called magnificent, in the water meadow at Bathampton the summer before. He was a man who wanted to go home, and see nothing more of war, ever again.
Christmas had come and gone. Bathampton and everything in it seemed to belong to another world completely; a world in which things as sweet and pointless as Christmas could exist. The page stayed empty as the minutes crept past, and when Captain Sutton came in Jonathan was glad of the interruption. The captain carried a plate, and on it was a thick steak of roasted meat and a slice of bread; the smell of it made Jonathan’s stomach twist in painful anticipation. But the captain didn’t speak as he put the plate in front of Jonathan. He opened his mouth as if to, but then he said nothing, and would not meet Jonathan’s eye. So Jonathan suddenly knew exactly where this meat had come from, and he stared at it with perfect horror. He was relieved when Captain Sutton left again at once, and didn’t stay to watch him eat it. To watch him eat of his own horse. But eat he did, though it was with the sure knowledge that he would never be himself, would never be as he had been before, ever again.
‘We reached Corunna the next day. That was how close Suleiman came to finishing the march. But part of me is glad he didn’t make it – the lame horses… the lame and the weak were shot instead of being allowed to take up valuable space and supplies on the journey home. He would have been shot even if he had finished the journey. This is how men repay their loyal servants and companions.’ Jonathan fell silent, and in the wake of his words the air felt colder, and harder to breathe.
‘And you wrote to Alice from there. That day that you reached Corunna, you wrote to her and told her of your shame.’ Starling’s voice was small and weak in the aftermath of his brutal speech.