I Won Every Roll — But At What Cost?

A priest once gave me a gift in Aragon. He said it had belonged to a saint. That was a lie. Whatever power dwells in those dice does not answer to heaven.

I have no expectation that this account will be believed, nor do I seek redemption by its writing. If absolution were mine to claim, I should have knelt at a confessional long before now. But the hands that hold this pen are soaked too deep in blood — not from war, which is honorable, but from a quieter, meaner kind of murder. The sort done with laughter, wine, and the clatter of dice on a mess-table.

My name is Lucien Moreau, born in 1782 in Dijon, in the heart of Burgundy. I was the second son of a former dragoon captain under the old regime — a man of rigid posture and powdered wig, who taught his sons early the weight of duty and the silence of obedience. My mother was a quiet Provençal woman, devout and long-suffering, who lit candles for her sons and kept a book of saints beneath her pillow. My elder brother, Étienne, chose a gentler path: he married young, took up the law, and remained in France while I chased glory in the Emperor’s wars.

I was educated in the lycée  before taking a commission in the cavalry, and by 1809 I was twenty-seven years of age, unmarried, and already a veteran of the German campaigns. I served with the 4th Regiment of Hussars — the red pelisse, silver braid, with all the fierce bravado of the light cavalry. Ours was the swift arm of the Emperor, his eyes and sabre alike — God save him.

***

It began in the spring of 1809. Our orders were simple: to screen the right flank of Marshal Lannes’ advance through Aragon and secure the hill country against guerrilla attacks. We were to reconnoitre villages, disrupt supply routes, and drive out the partisans who infested the countryside like vermin. I rode under the command of Général de Brigade Antoine de Lasalle, the very model of cavalry dash and fury.

We had driven the Spanish partisans from the village of Santa Rosalia, a God-forsaken clutch of white stone and brambles, crouched in the hills north of Zaragoza. A chill wind clawed through the olive trees, carrying the scent of distant smoke and something fouler — a damp, moldy smell that stuck to my skin and seeped into my bones

The monks had fled days earlier, leaving their monastery defiled in a fashion more Roman than Christian — broken altars, shattered reliquaries, scrolls of sacred verse burnt in their own sconces. My men, veterans of Lodi and Austerlitz, were more at home amidst the carnage than I.

The locals called the place cursed. They spoke of saints who watched with hollow eyes from the crypts, who bled when strangers trod their floor. I paid no heed, war breeds tales in every tongue.

***

It was on the third evening, after the looting had settled and the wine flowed freely, that I first saw the priest.

He was old — unspeakably so — with eyes like glass marbles and a spine twisted as though God Himself had tried to snap him and failed. He carried the faint odor of damp stone and old dust — a smell like a crypt sealed for centuries, with a trace of bitter herbs, something unsettlingly alive beneath the decay.

Like a ghost he wandered into our firelight, unarmed and unafraid with a shuffle that was uneven — his worn sandals scraping the silence like fingernails. He carried only a pouch stitched from blackened cloth. The men jeered and pelted him with crusts of bread and coins, but he did not flinch. Instead, he fixed his gaze on me.

“You,” he said, with a voice cracked like dry parchment. “You like to gamble?”

I laughed. “Do I look like a man of the cloth, padre?”

He opened the pouch and spilled a pair of dice into his hand. They were white — not the chalky white of bone from an ox or pig, but something finer. These were almost translucent. The pips were etched so finely they looked grown, not carved — like the dice had come into the world already marked.

“These belonged to Saint Justus,” he murmured, and the name made my sergeant cross himself.

“They were taken from his tomb by heretics, passed down by pilgrims and kings. They bring great fortune, but each throw exacts a price.”

“Let us see them then,” I said, drawing my coin purse. “And let us see if your saints favor the Emperor’s coin.”

We played.

The dice clicked softly against the wooden table with a crisp, almost musical clatter — but beneath it, I thought I heard something else: a faint sound like teeth clicking in someone else’s mouth.

The priest did not touch the dice, he only watched as I won. Again and again, no matter the odds, no matter the wager — I won. At last, I offered him a bottle of cognac and a handful of silver for his troubles.  He took neither.

“I give them freely,” he said. “To you, who will learn.” Then he left. I never saw him again.

***

The next morning, we rode out before dawn — a standard sweep through the hills to scout for signs of British movement. Reports had reached us of a column of redcoats advancing to rendezvous with rebel bands near Calatayud.

We kept to narrow mule tracks, rising higher through the olive groves just as the sun was beginning to crest above the valleys.  Duval rode ahead.

I remember thinking how quiet that morning was— no birdsong, not even the buzz of flies.

Then his horse screamed and the beast reared for no reason anyone could name — not to the shot of gunfire or to any sign of a snake on that trail. Duval was thrown hard and fell from his horse, cracking his skull open on a rock  at the edge of the trail with a sickening sound like an axe splitting wet wood.

Save for the involuntary twitch of muscles, he was dead.

We buried him at midday beneath a cypress tree with less fuss than a mule. The men were too unnerved to speak — even  the chaplain kept his prayers brief.

At first, I did not draw the connection. Accidents are the currency of war after all.

***

But it happened again.

We’d bivouacked one evening just south of Belchite, in a dry gorge with good elevation — a place we’d swept twice already, and where no sign of the enemy had been seen in days. Leclerc hadn’t wandered far when he stood to relieve himself.

Then I heard the shot myself: a flat crack in the air sharp and dry.  We found him face down in the dust, one hand still clutching his belt buckle, the other curled around a sprig of thyme. The blood from his ruined skull had drawn a cluster of flies as though a feast had been laid out just for them.

The men blamed the tiradores, those damned Spanish sharpshooters, who could hide behind a pile of goat shit and still shoot the buttons off your coat from fifty yards, then melt back into the brush before you hit the ground.

Maybe they were right. But no one ever found the perch, no glint of a barrel, not even the scent of powder in the air.

***

Two days passed, and it was  Corporal Mareau who would receive his billeting orders from the Devil next. He drank from a stream that ran clear through the rocks west of camp — looked harmless enough, though it stank faintly, like meat left too long in the sun. Mareau had laughed it off, cupping it in his hands while the others waited for the water wagon. “Better than the wine at Wagram,” he joked.

By nightfall, he was groaning in his bedroll, skin clammy, his eyes rolling. Come dawn, he was voiding blood and babbling nonsense.  Mareau died choking on his own bile while the priest murmured last rites that no one stayed to hear. Afterward, the stream went untouched, and no one said a word when I tossed my cup aside.

I found the dice on my saddle blanket — as if they were waiting.

Three more followed by the end of the week. All dead within a day of my winning some new trinket, bottle, or privilege — always with the dice.

I began to test them.

I’d roll once, without wager — a simple toss onto my mess tin beneath the stars. And always, without fail, misfortune followed: a man taken ill with no fever, another vanishing into fog, another trampled in a stampede no one recalled starting.

I lied to myself. Coincidence perhaps? Superstition?  But the pattern grew too cruel, too precise. The dice brought favor — extra rations, fine loot, privileges denied to others.

***

One humid afternoon, a courier arrived from de Lasalle’s brigade headquarters, just a day’s ride from our billet at Santa Rosalia. He handed me a sealed letter bearing the imperial eagle—an order and my promotion to captain.

No man dared offer congratulations.

That same day, sous-lieutenant Duval — no kin to the first — was crushed by a bell beneath the cloister of Santa Rosalia.

The afternoon had been still as a held breath Not a gust stirred the olive trees. Not even a bird.

Then, with no warning, a wind tore down the valley — sharp, shrieking, like a thing alive.

I was no more than twenty paces away.

I heard the groan of timber high above — a dry, cracking sound. The bell, already split from cannon fire, twisted loose from its rotted beam.

I watched it fall.

It struck Duval squarely across the shoulders, driving him into the stone. The noise was deafening as the bell slammed him down.

Then — silence.

Only the slow drip of blood from beneath the bell’s rim.

We raised it with poles and muskets wedged underneath. What we found was… no longer a man.

A heap of flesh and cloth. His sash was ground flat like parchment pressed in a Bible.

His arms twisted like a marionette’s.

The stone beneath him had cracked clean through.

I had not asked for a promotion, I had merely rolled —  and the dice had answered.

In the following days I tried to lose. I wagered recklessly, foolishly. Yet I could not. The dice loved me. Or they loved something else.

***

I tried to be rid of them.

The first time, I rode to the edge of a ravine south of Tarazona and hurled them into the depths without a word. I heard them strike stone on the way down — a dry little clatter, like teeth on marble. I felt lighter riding back. But the next morning, they were in my saddlebag, right where I always kept them. They were wrapped tight in the oilcloth the old priest had given me weeks earlier — dry and clean as if they’d never left.

I tried again — this time offering them to an old muleteer who guided us through the lower passes. He had crosses tattooed on his fingers and a silver rosary knotted round his wrist. I told him they brought luck. He took them, but not gladly. He said nothing, just made a sign against the evil eye and shuffled off.

The next day, he was gone. There was no sign of him save for his mule tied to a post near a burnt-out hermitage. The man himself had vanished leaving no track in the dust.

That night, the dice were waiting on my bedroll.

***

The men began to look at me differently.

They no longer joked in my presence, no longer offered me their flask or asked about the next day’s route. They watched me when they thought I wouldn’t notice — side-long glances over mess tins, murmurs that ceased whenever I approached. Some refused to eat the rations I secured, muttering that the dice’s favor was poison.  A few crossed themselves when I passed. One trooper scratched a cross into the stock of his carbine, and wouldn’t meet my eye for days.

Then, one night, I found myself sitting alone beneath a sky full of stars, staring into the fire in front of me. Without thinking, I unwrapped the pouch — and there they were, the dice rested in my palm — pale, smooth, still faintly warm. I rolled them, not out of desire but of habit.

That was when Lieutenant Barras passed by and caught me.

“Still playing, sir?” he said with a chuckle, a flicker of the old camaraderie still left in his voice.

I looked up. “Old habits,” I replied. My voice felt strange coming out of my mouth.

He smiled and moved on, into the darkness behind the trees.

They found him the next morning with his throat cut, slumped against the roots of an olive tree just twenty paces from the fire. There were no signs of struggle and no tracks.

The men were mad with rage, as we rode to the nearest hamlet — a nameless place of stone and thatch — where we seized six of its inhabitants without cause —  one a boy no more than twelve, thirteen perhaps. They were hanged from the olive trees at the village edge.

***

I tried yet again, though in vain to be rid of the dice. I tried burning them in the chapel fire, and the flames hissed a sweet-smelling smoke, yet by supper, the dice lay atop my mess tin.

One after another, my men continued to perish — not in battle, but through mischance.

The pattern became impossible to ignore. At first, only my company knew, but word spreads faster than typhus among the ranks.  A supply runner from the 3rd Dragoons rode with us for two days and left pale, saying nothing. A medical officer assigned to observe our sick returned to Zaragoza and reportedly refused further field duty. Soon even the locals shut their doors when we rode into their villages. Others crossed themselves like we were ghosts already.

The Spaniards began calling us El Regimiento Maldito — the cursed regiment. The name stuck. The locals made signs against evil when we passed. Even our allies grew wary. No one wanted to billet near us. My requests for replacements went unfilled. Marshal Lannes himself remarked on my “singular fortune,” and not warmly.

By autumn, I commanded scarcely a dozen. All others had died — cleanly, strangely, or in such horror that no veteran dared speak of it. I had ceased rolling the dice.

It did not matter, they rolled themselves.

***

Three years have passed since those cursed months in Aragon. I was transferred, given new orders, a new command, and — in time —a  promotion. Colonel Moreau, they now call me. The 7th Hussars bear no knowledge of what befell my old regiment, and I have learnt to speak little of it.

Spain is behind me. Russia lies ahead.

The Grande Armée has crossed the Niemen. We bivouac tonight beneath a low ridge of pine, just east of the river —  beneath a sky too blue for war. Another campaign on foreign soil awaits — and yet the dice remain — always with me. They lie wrapped in oilcloth, sealed in a pouch I never open, buried deep in my saddlebag.