II. "The Glorious Cause"

PART SIX

    Gabriel Audaz blinked away the sting in his eyes.  The harsh sand was making them tear up, obscuring his vision even more.  He was back on the beach again.  Isabella, his best friend in the world, was talking to him.  She had asked him a question, the same question she always asked in this memory.  He hadn’t answered her yet.

    “Gabriel...”

    He turned his head to look at her, studying the way her blonde hair stayed on her face no matter how much she pushed it off to the sides.  A few of the sun-kissed, golden strands hung down almost to her nose.  Gabriel looked past the wind-teased locks of her hair to her pale, piercing cobalt eyes.  Looking into her eyes was like looking into lakes of solid, crystal blue.  The kind of lakes found high in snow-capped mountain ranges.  The kind of lakes full of enchantment and mystery.

    “You can’t avoid the question,” she said, trying to look him in the eyes.

    Gabriel had lowered his gaze to her lips as she spoke.  He brushed the loose strands of his own soft, black hair off his brow.  He remembered kissing those lips once, the way they felt like a rosy satin against his own.  He thought of a flower petal in comparison, the way they are so smooth and delicate at the same time.  And, in the next instant he also thought of how they are often better admired from even the smallest distance.

    “I’m not,” Gabriel had finally said.  “I’m just thinking...”

    “About the answer?”

    “I guess,” he said distantly.  He let his gaze fall back to the sand in front of him.  “...About...how to answer, too,” Gabriel continued, hesitantly.

    “I’m not sure I understand.”  Isabella had been leaning back, her hands buried in the sand behind her, bracing her slim body.  She pushed herself upright, straightening her back.  “I didn’t think it was that complicated a question.”

    Gabriel shrugged his shoulders.  He could see the disappointed look on her face.

    “Do you have an answer,” she had asked after a moment.

    Gabriel could hear the concern in her voice and knew that was the reason for the expression on her glowing face.  Her features were beautiful, the skin of her cheeks and brow unmarked by the slightest blemish.  She was worried she wasn’t getting through to him, that she was failing in some way.  She feared what it could mean.  Their friendship had long-since healed from a single, previous fallout, but remained scarred.

    Gabriel finally looked at her.  “I do.”

    She smiled warmly, laughing away her moment of frustration.  “Then tell me.”

    Gabriel bit his lip.  He hesitated for a long moment, listening to the sound of the waves crashing against the shore line.  “I’m...I’m afraid,” he began to say.  “...I mean really afraid...of...failing to act.”
    Isabella frowned.  “Huh?”

    Gabriel leaned forward, the sand spilling off of his hands as he brought them up, folding his arms on top of his knees he held pressed against his chest.  “The things happening inside of me, the feelings I have that won’t go away-”

    “Sweety, it’s okay,” Isabella said reassuringly.  “They’re natural.  It is just who you are-or will be-starting to come out.”

    “That’s the thing.  I don’t know who or what that is.  I want to know but I also want to do the right thing.  I’m joining the army, Izzy.  And, I know this...stuff...doesn’t matter anymore.  Not officially.”

    Isabella watched her best friend carefully.  “But?”

    “But I’m not ready to give these feelings, these thoughts a voice or a name yet.  I’m in complete conflict.  I...I want to be as honest as possible in my life-with you, with everyone...with God especially.  Yet, I can’t help but keep this inside and I’m so, so very afraid that I’m going to die before I can accept who and what I am.  Before...before I can finally put my demons to rest.”

    Isabella seemed to think for a long moment, considering everything Gabriel had just confessed to feeling.  Finally, she grinned at him then scooted through the sand on her haunches, closing the arm’s length between them.  She hugged her best friend tightly.  “Do you want to pray with me?”

    Gabriel nodded.

    A noise pierced the fog of his mind.  Gabriel was awake in a flash, lost in the space of the world he was occupying for a hazy instant.  Sand and gravel shifted around him in the subtle vibration surging through the bedrock.  The wind making the limbs of the dry trees and brush all around sway and hiss carried in it the smell of smoke and bitter sulfur.  A mortar, Gabriel thought.  He blinked away more of the sleep still mired in his eyes.  Against the horizon, a thin column of smoke had begun to reach above the cliffs.

    Gabriel wiped down his face with both hands, trying to awaken fully.  It worked, but not the way he had intended.  The deep breath he took in as he dragged his palms down his brow and cheeks drew the strong stench of iron and dirt deep into his nostrils.  Gabriel quickly pulled his hands away from his face only to stare at the dried blood stained across the skin of each.  It went up and down all ten fingers to each wrist, spiraling unevenly across the backs of each hand and over his shoulders.

    He knew it wasn’t his blood.  Gabriel remembered the bearded stranger who had tried to take his boots and their struggle that followed.  Gabriel felt the weight of the rust and crimson-stained knife tucked into his belt and remembered the other figure in the night.  His brain recalled the sound of the gunman’s flesh tearing open as Gabriel drove the serrated blade deep into his body.  Then, with a start, Gabriel suddenly remembered the sergeant who had saved him.

    “Sergeant,” he called out, his voice low and hoarse.  There was only the sound of the wind rolling over the landscape that answered him.  Gunfire echoed faintly down the wide valley, its source the same location as the smoke.  “Sergeant,” Gabriel called out again, trying to keep his voice low.  He didn’t know who else could be listening, waiting unseen in nearby places.

    Gabriel tried to stand only to collapse onto his hands and knees.  A muscle-wrenching pain, tremendous and unforgiving, seized his left side.  Gabriel cursed his cracked ribs.  Then, he cursed himself for having forgotten them in that moment, for trying to get up too quickly.  He lightly pressed his hand over his fatigues above the epicenter of the pain.  He could practically feel the bruise through the dirtied cloth.

    Gabriel could have given up right there.  A part of him wanted to.  The left side of his torso definitely wanted him to throw in the towel, to lay back down and let time and fate roll over him.  He was stuck on his hands and knees, fighting back tidal waves of pain barely starting to ebb.  He was lost somewhere in a dry, cold corner of a small, war-torn country on the far side of the world.

    A rattle of gun fire reverberated down the steep walls of the frozen valley.  Gabriel opened his eyes when the diluted sound reached his ears.  The first thing he saw was the dried blood on his hands.  Gabriel stared at it.  People are dying, a voice inside of him whispered.  People are dead.  Gabriel lifted his head.  He spotted the droplets of blood clinging to the dried leaves of nearby brush.  He saw how others had become red-brown blotches caked into a discernible train in the dirt.  But maybe there’s still time.

    “Sergeant,” Gabriel called out again, risking an uptick in the volume of his voice.

    With a slow, precise deep breath that brought with it a predicted-but far less intense-wave of pain, Gabriel grit his teeth.  His even breath became a gasp as he pushed himself upright.  He wanted to scream.  He desperately wanted to scream.  Somehow, he managed not to do so.  His strength, like his courage, was holding.  Breathing quick and shallow, Gabriel slowly managed to stand all the way up on his feet.  He realized, as the pounding pulse of his heart stopped drumming against his eardrums, that he was humming.  Gabriel chuckled at himself.

    “Sergeant,” Gabriel called out again, walking quietly through the brush.  He was following the crimson trail laced across the brittle plant life and dusty floor.  “Sergeant, this is Corporal Audaz.  Can you hear me?”

    There was a low groan from somewhere nearby.  Gabriel listened, adjusting his course toward the sound.  “Sergeant, can you hear me?”

    A man on the ground stirred amongst the trampled brush a half dozen more paces away.  Gabriel smiled with relief.  There is still time, he thought.  He quickened his pace, despite the pain that throbbed powerfully from his side at every other step.  “Sergeant, just hang on.”

    The older man groaned, “Hold onto what?  I’m already on the ground.”

    Gabriel’s smile broadened.  “Yes sir, you are.”

    “Corporal,” the man said unenthusiastically, trying to roll over onto his back.  He was laying on his stomach where he had collapsed in the hours Gabriel had fallen asleep.  “...You’re going to get us shot if you...keep...talking so loud like that.”

    “Sorry, Sergeant,” Gabriel said, softening his voice.  He stood over the wounded man, watching him trying to painfully reorient himself.  The older man’s dark stubble peppered his sun-reddened, coarse cheeks.  His fatigues were covered in dried dirt and blood.  Gabriel blinked before saying, “But you’re already shot, sir.”

    The half-dead man opened one eye.  “Yeah, well...I don’t want to get shot again.  I’m...I’m not trying to to start a collection, Corporal.”

    Gabriel tried crouching.  He winced as the pain in his side suddenly ratcheted sharply upward.  It felt as if the blood and muscle around his left ribs were suddenly coming to a boil.  The sensation was too much, forcing Gabriel to stand fully upright again.  “You need some water, sir,” Gabriel said, nearly out of breath.

    “I know.  But you gave me almost all of your water a little while ago.”  The sergeant exhaled sharply, groaning in pain as he finally rolled all the way over onto his back.  He sighed and said with his dry voice getting raspy, “Getting shot sucks.”

    Gabriel smiled.  “Yes, sir.”

    The man on the ground at Gabriel’s feet, struggling just to stay conscious, dizzily pointed a blood-stained finger up at him.  “You should avoid it.”

    “Yes, Sergeant.”  Gabriel held his smile.  He watched the sergeant drop his arm against the dirt.  “Still, you need water.”

    “I’m not taking the last of your water, Corporal!”

    The echoing din of the distant battle swept slowly down the valley.  Gabriel lifted his gaze to the smoke climbing into the dawn-lit sky.  The few clouds there were stretched at canted angles from east to west.  The rising sun was bathing them in brilliant light, coating their windswept, downy bodies in a breathtaking gold hue.  The heavens beyond were changing from the velvet darkness of the early morning to the pink and blue of the approaching day.

    Gabriel hadn’t realized until that moment how captivating the landscape in that corner of the world could be.  He found himself distracted by the view provided by the low cliffside they had stumbled up during the late hours of the night.  He smiled, despite himself.  He was thankful for the opportunity he felt he had been blessed with.  He had been given the chance to live to witness the birth of a new day and a new lease on life.

    Gabriel thanked God for the opportunity received, then cast his eyes back down from the illuminated clouds to the column of smoke.  “There might be some water that way, sir.  Up the valley in that direction,” Gabriel said, pointing toward the cliffs and the smoke beyond them.  “There could be more of our guys there, sir.  Medics and the like.”

    The sergeant did his best to nod.  He hardly moved at all, but it was still a noticeable gesture.  “Good, Corporal.  Go.  Get water and get your side looked at.  Help the boys there win the day.”

    “I’m not leaving you here.”

    The sergeant coughed a chuckle.  “I’m already dead, Corporal.”

    Gabriel shook his head.  There was an unshakable determination in his eyes.  The sergeant could see it clearly, even in the haze of his semi-consciousness.  “Not dead enough to stay here, sir.”

    “Corporal-”

    Gabriel took a deep breath.  He knew what he was about to do was going to create a tremendous, body-shocking amount of pain for both of them.  Action had to be taken.  They may suffer the effects of their injuries and live, but Gabriel knew without doubt they would surely die if they remained in place, avoiding the challenges of their circumstances.

    “Sorry, sir,” Gabriel interrupted, preparing to lift the wounded man off the ground.  “It’s time to live.  You’ll just have to die some other day.”