Into the Dusk
Day Ten, Year Unknown
"We do not know the man's customs..." you begin, to the grumbles from your men. "And we are none of us ordained by the Church to speak prayers over the dead," you finish sharply. "Let us not presume to mark the passage of his soul and instead see his body interred away from the beasts and birds." A grim task, but common enough for soldiers, no one raises any objections over it. The ground is too rocky here to dig with any swiftness, but there are stones aplenty to make a simple cairn.
Briefly you consider the other thing a soldier might do in this instance. The bronze gleams brightly, valuable in its own right, but in the end you think the better of it. The war has not impoverished you as much as it had some that you must strip the dead, and as for any use it might have to your men-at-arms in this instance, none of them are used to armor so heavy. If you should come across his countrymen you shall be able to say that you buried him taking nothing.
As the last stone is laid you say to the doctor. "If we come across his countrymen later they can collect the body and do their own rights, whatever they might be."
"Assuming we can even speak to them," he grumbles into his beard, but you can see in his eyes that he appreciates the heeding of his counsel.
You nod, then turn to the others. "In the meantime we should be on our guard for whoever might have killed him."
"Can't think of any folk that would leave a corpse like that," someone grumbles from the back. "Even robbers would've stripped him."
For the next few hundred feet the trail seems to give lie to your fears, there are no more dead and no more signs of old battle. Here and there along the path you start to see signs of travelers passing by, old camp sites and even the tracks of wagons, though nothing fresher than a few weeks. Yet as you descend towards the eastern side of the island the chill of the mountain seems to linger like a cloak deeper than evening's shadows, and in the failing light you spy arrows of bronze glinting under oak and heather. Likely as not you would find more bodies if you should look, but you have the living to see to before the dead, your own folk before strangers.
"We aught to camp here for the night and press on in the morning," you say to the doctor, softly enough that he should disagree he can do so without seeming to undermine you to your men.
"There is a saying in my land that you aught not bed down among the dead after moonrise, Sir Knight," he replies darkly. "I think we should press on."
Is it true worry, or simply the desire to see the journey to its end, you wonder and so think to test him. "For a man so quick to dismiss sorcery you worry much of the unquiet dead."
"Whether some ill will of the spirit or poisoned air that rises from rotting corpses, it is still an ill thing to keep company with them." As he speaks he shivers from the unaccustomed cold.
What do you do you do?
[] Make camp
[] Press on following the stone
[] Write in
OOC: I actually did not expect to make this vote, but then I looked at how big I had made this island and I realized there was no way you would make it to where you were going before nightfall.