1 Defeat

Midnight.

Inside a tattered tent, sitting deep in the prairie.

The General slowly lifted his beard with his left hand and pressed the cold, sharp edge of his sword on the left side of his neck, head tilting back slightly, eyelids clenching tightly, teeth grinding together like a plier, breathing heavily and painfully, and a deep roar was heard from his throat like a dying tiger with severe wounds.

Just a sway, that was all he needed to put an end to all the problems he was facing.

He, a battle-scarred general, even knew what would follow: he would feel cold for seconds after blood gushed out of his throat and then bled into a coma; his death would take only minutes after that; lying in the pool of his own blood was the scene when discovered.

What held him back at the moment was not the picture of post-death in his head, actually, to which he was already numb, but the feeling that he had something left behind--his seven children, his sick wife, his old mother, a ritual of goodbye to his dead father, the four orphans he adopted from the families of his dead soldier brothers, and the fame of bravery built by generations of his family.

"General," someone shouted outside his tent. A voice so loud it seemed as if its owner were standing right next to him, made the General snap open his eyes and look at the entrance flap.

As if awakened suddenly from a long dream, quivering a little, the General quickly threw his sword on the ground behind the table. Because of the panic, he cut off strands of his beard.

Wiped out the blood oozing out on the left side of his neck for the pressing of his sharp sword, cleared his throat with a cough, brought himself back to composure, crossed his hands behind his back while raising his head high, all finished in seconds, and then he said, " Come in!"

"What's it?" He didn't look at the soldier.

"I just finished the headcount as you ordered, and the number is twenty-one thousand and ninety alive, about one thousand wounded within," the soldier reported, kneeling one of his legs on the ground.

The general glanced at the soldier in secret, to ensure that he did not feel anything was wrong.

"I hear you! You can leave now!" He, then, just wanted the soldier to leave him alone as quickly as possible.

"Wait!" General added, with hesitation, when something suddenly popped up in his mind just before the soldier dismissed himself. "Bring the Counselor here to my tent!"

This big man, six feet high, two hundred and twenty pounds in weight, fifty years old, paralyzed into his chair as if an empty sack for the tiredness, which, unlike anything he ever felt, ripped off his spine and left nothing to support his body.

Not much time for him to recover, though; according to the clink of chains and shackles, he could judge the Counselor was getting closer and closer to his tent, so he rubbed his face with two palms and seated himself up and straight, awaiting the Counselor's coming in.

"Need some water!" General pushed a mug on the table to the Counselor's side when he found his Counselor's lips dry and cracked.

The Counselor, with heavy chains around his wrists, grabbed the mug, threw back his head, and poured the water into his mouth with a loud noise in his throat. Obviously, his thirst was ignored by the guards, because not only was a prisoner anything but a human being, but in an intense situation where everyone could die at any time and a place deep inside a prairie, water was as precious as gold.

Hair half black and half a gray, brow ridges prominent, eyes deep-set and half-closed, high cheekbones sticking out of his lean face, covered by his messy drooping long hair and cumulation of smudges more than everyone else, he was hardly identifiable to the General. As for his clothes, if they could be called so, only some strips were left on his body, and half his chest and one leg were entirely exposed to the cold air. From a distance, against the candle's flickering light on the table, he looked like a charcoal sketch or a serene dead body; if it remained still, you would think of it as such.

A man could change so much just for a few days of physical and mental torture. Nobody could possibly recognize him as that confident military Counselor with stylish hair and neat clothes. However, all these didn't matter to him, for the next day was the day of his execution.

"With respect to your death, I would like to hear what you want to say," the General broke the silence.

No reply he got from his Counselor after minutes of his waiting.

"Nothing you want to say? To your family? To your sons? A will you can write down, maybe?"

Still, nothing but silence from the Counselor.

"What about me? Do you have anything to say to me?" the General asked again, losing his patience.

The Counselor stared at the General's face without blinking.

"You won't listen." Finally, Counselor spat some words from his mouth.

"Which means, I guess, you still hold to your opinions," General said coldly, "You stubborn monster!"

"If you are going to kill me anyway, why waste your breath with me?"

"Are you asking for mercy?!"

"I am not begging for your mercy. It's too late for that."

Stopped for a moment, staring at his blurred face, and the General continued, "If you withdraw your words, I will spare your life! I've killed enough people, and I, surely, don't want to kill you."

"What's the difference? How can you spare my life? If you do not heed my advice, we all will die here for sure." Counselor lifted his head a little and stared back at the General's eyes.

Rarely, General could keep his temper in a moment like this. He was just too exhausted to bellow his anger out. He sat back in his chair, also back to silence and speechlessness.

By that stare, the Counselor, an extremely smart person like him, already saw the thin cut on the General's neck; he also glimpsed the sword on the ground behind the table.

"How many left," said the Counselor, in a low-pitched voice.

"About twenty thousand," the general looked up from his tent, nothing but darkness there.

"Which means we are at a dead end." The counselor never looked away from the General's face. "Perhaps you should listen to me; my advice is a better option than your suicide," the Counselor said as if speaking in his dreams.

The General sprang up from his chair as if stung by a needle in the butt. He looked the counselor straight in the eyes, chest heaving because of outrage. Without a word, reaching for the dagger attached to his boots, he rushed to grab the counselor's hair and pulled him up.

"Who told you that? I can kill you now!" The general put the point of his dagger against the counselor's chest. Part of the dagger's point had already been in his flesh, a thin stream of blood oozing out as a red caterpillar inside his body poked out its head from the cut and then climbed down his chest.

The counselor's feet could barely touch the ground because of the pull from his hair, but his expression didn't change a wee little.

"You are brave and smart, but not as smart as you think." He stared at General, no fear, no fury, but the softness and calm in his eyes, from which General's sight shrank, panting with anger and upset.

"This whole thing is a stupid idea from the beginning! It is the stupid King and you, you arrogant general, who got all the soldiers dead! With two hundred thousand soldiers marching here, now, only twenty thousand!" Counselor continued.

The two men staring at each other in the eyes, their breath heaved their chests at short and irregular intervals as if they were in the middle of a fight. The general loosened the grip on the counselor's hair.

"For what? For keeping his throne more stable, and for perpetuating your bravery fame? We should not go deep into the prairie! We should not go deep into the prairie! How many times did I tell you? Hundreds of thousands of soldiers died because of his stupidity and your arrogance!" Counselor screamed in his highest voice.

"How dare you!" General was being driven crazy by his words, regretting bringing this man here, and couldn't wait for tomorrow to kill him.

"General!" Suddenly, the voice of a soldier from outside his tent interrupted them, "Scouts are back!"

"Wait there!" General went close to the curtain and yelled. No need for him to talk with them, General already knew the message they brought back tens and hundreds of times before: the cavalry who beat the shit out of them was on the edge of a breakdown. But they wouldn't fall down, at least not earlier than them. The two sides of them were like at the end of boxing, fragile, weak, sometimes, gathering all the strength left to give the opponent a blow, but most of the time, waiting for the other side to collapse first. No doubt, the General would be the one to fall down first.

General didn't turn back but stood there still. This interruption brought him back to the current from the intensity of the conversation with the Counselor.

After minutes of silence, Counselor realized it was then or never when there was a chance for him to change the General's mind because the General seemingly lost interest in talking with him and he could be put back into the prison anytime. Then he crawled on his knees to General's side and grabbed his clothes.

"General, listen to me! Please listen to me! The friendship between our families has sustained for generations, and you know I am not possibly ill-intended. It's not the death that I am afraid of but your slip. A small wrong step of yours can make a big mistake." Desperation and excitement were in the Counselor's voice, who knew this was the last chance to make a difference.

"Let go of the fame or whatever inside you; think about the soldiers, the brothers, the sons, who trusted their lives on you. A slaughter, a ruthless slaughter instead of a glorious war you are pushing them into..."

For his own fame? Maybe. Also, he wanted to wipe out the enemies on the border once and for all, just like what the King wanted. It happened again and again in history: if the King flung the main troops to the border, the invaders would run away; after the main forces left, they came back and robbed the border. And the kingdom's economy couldn't support and keep big forces on the border years after years. This biggest headache in this kingdom lasted hundreds of years. In which case, if he didn't go deep inside the prairie, how would he unroot it? From generation to generation of the country, this was a dream, and he, the single and unique one, would realize it. However, the truth showed the opposite.

Tears rolled down the general's face, he tried hard to suppress his emotions. "Don't you think it is too late?" said the General slowly, motionless, with a low and abandoned voice, "the dead are dead, and I can't bring them back, even I admit I was wrong in the first place."

"No, no, no! It's not too late! We have a choice: living! Living is the hope, is the memory of this war, is the possibility! Even ten of us alive instead of twenty thousand, it is not too late..."

When he continued his words, the general, after a long deep sigh, turned slowly around, lifted him up by his arms from the ground, and led him to the chair.

The Counselor stopped his talking and looked at the General's face surprisedly as if he could see the light of hope there, because, based on his knowledge of him to the General, he knew there was a chance.

The General looked at the ground avoiding his Counselor's eyes and said, "You're like an elder brother to me, and I didn't really want to kill you. I'm sorry! For this time, finish all your words that haven't been finished. Nothing matters now since all of us are going to die in this hell."

"It's ok, my brother! Even if you kill me, I won't hate you. Only the truth that you go in the wrong direction, and I can't help, tortures me deep inside the most." The counselor's eyes were full of tears.

The atmosphere got a little awkward, because the two men, masculine, hardly expressing directly their feelings and emotions ever, were bad at dealing with a situation like this, which, to them, was harder to handle than a life-and-death struggle.