34 - Chiravesa

The next few days as I was healing, I thought of Elera far too much. It made something inside me curl black like burning paper, taste of poison, chafe worse than I could understand. If skill and fame and position are what he aspires to, I thought, he has every reason to envy me. It isn’t that he’ll outlive me; I’ve outgrown that… I think. I feel it with no one else. Why does it haunt me so? My flogging-pain told me just to hate him, that it was as simple as an honest soul’s distaste for a petty, vicious one; for a time I indulged myself in contempt. But I am adult enough, I told myself, to see he is human and Yeoli, not so different from me.

I tried being him, and found so much pain I cringed away. Then my heart went out to him. But it left me where I had started. I could not fight him: that would help nothing. I could not comfort him in his shame: my comfort would be scalding oil to him. Yet I could not forget him; I could never forget him. An ancient thought twinged: how many other people do I so touch? There was nothing I could do to make peace with him, but one.

Realizing, I understood my heart. He hated me for my capability. To end that I would have to diminish it. Envy sends the knife I carry to cut out the imperfections in me twisting into the good, asks me to blacken my heart, dull my mind, slow my hand. It turns you against yourself.

I sprang up. By the woodpile was an axe; I snatched it up and went to look for him among the tents. “Elera?” said some warrior, gleefully, when I asked her where he was. “Good, you’ve found something to punish him for already! His face needs rubbing in it.” I went the way she pointed. It was evening. He was at a small fire, surrounded by his friends.

Through a field-hedge I heard some of their conversation. “We’ll elect you deka, at least. In a while, when this is all forgotten. One foul-up doesn’t cancel two years of good command, to my mind.” The reply was in Elera’s voice. “No. I couldn’t stand it either way, serving under him, after this. I’m transferring, and if he doesn’t approve it, I’ll go over his shit-eating head… Of course he’s their little darling too. He goes to command councils, did you know that? At his age.” I backtracked silently, then approached again, rustling grass, snapping twigs. They went quiet, looking to see who was coming, then quieter still when they saw.

Never before had I been fixed by so many eyes with a glare, except on the battlefield. Most thought I’d come to rub salt in his wounds; but two faces bore the same cold shape, alien as a moonscape, that I knew from his. Whether he had infected them with envy, or they him, or it was a matter of like to like, I couldn’t know, and didn’t really matter. For a moment, again, I wondered if I was in the wrong. But I said what I’d intended. “Elera. I wish to speak with you, alone.”

He could not refuse, lest I command it, nor plead flogging-pain, while I stood before him. Slowly he rose. I saw his eyes flick puzzled, to the axe in my hand. It was too late and dark for wood-cutting.

I brought him to a copse by the edge of the camp that had been left standing to serve as a small shrine, and the clearing within it, hidden by trees. I gave the axe to him handle-first, unclasped my sword-wristlet and laid my forearm across a fallen tree.

“Go ahead,” I said. “We can say we were here chopping wood, and it was an accident.” He stared at me, his eyes hidden in shadow, the stare apparent only by the stillness of his body. “Isn’t this what you want? One chop, and you need never be bothered by my skill again.” I offered him my dagger. “Or is it my judgment? Take out my eyes then. My courage? Take a slice from my stomach. My weapon-sense? I’m not sure where that is in me, but if you dig around you’re bound to get it sooner or later. Well? You want to be free of whatever you envy in me, don’t you, so you can think clearly?”

He whirled, and flung the axe into the ground, where it stuck. “You overrated stripling! Don’t play teacher with me! You could never understand, in a thousand years.”

“That’s a call to chiravesa if ever I heard one.” I rose and stood where he had, unfastening the setakraseyeni collar from my neck. To imagine I had got my stroke and flogging from a general instead of him was not hard.

Yet the act was difficult in itself. I was out of practice; like a clam’s shell grown around me were the hard habits of war. Fighting, one clings to oneself with all one’s might; it goes against the grain, to dissolve oneself the way one must for this. I was too young yet for the warrior’s lesson in that.

“What I feel you could never understand, in a thousand years. How could you? Look at you, a warrior at thirteen, Tennunga’s son, carrying Chirel—how could you know what it is to be ordinary? Everything was made easy for you; how could you know what it is to have to work for anything, to strain every moment against the bounds within you, knowing the ones you yearn to cross most you only will in your dreams, because chance fashioned you mediocre? Then to see some slight-built boy dance across them with ease … and know it will be him who lives your dreams, not you. He will command the army, not you; he will do the great deeds, not you; he will get carried through the streets of Terera, showered with wine and flowers—not you! It is his name the people will sigh and the warriors chant in love, never yours; I can hear it now, ‘Chevenga, Chevenga!’ where once I heard ‘Elera, Elera!’ Of him the songs will be sung and the tomes written long after his death, never of you! You will just be an arrow in his quiver, forgotten the moment you die.

“And now Fourth Chevenga is under me. He says nothing; he doesn’t have to; his presence is enough. The general’s apprentice, watching my every move for flaws, waiting for his chance to catch me off-guard and make his name correcting me. … Is it any surprise it happened, when it was always on my mind, and he wished it so dearly? How could I think?

“So—I am flung into the dust: caught, corrected, struck the stroke of shame and flogged by the General First, impeached, a common footsoldier when I was a setakraseye . . . what am I? What am I now?” I touched the plain collar of my mail-shirt, and felt tears on my cheeks. This was the pain I had turned from, toying with playing him at the fire. The last cruel cut came to me, full of bitter symmetry. “And who, who in the great Earthsphere, have they elected to take my place?”

I looked at him. He was gazing at me stunned; it was too dark to see tears. He sank to the log then, burying his face in his hands, and I heard a sob.

For a long time I sat beside him, not knowing whether he would want my hand on his shoulder or not; in the end I chose to err on the side of comradeship, and put it there. He did not move, nor show any sign of feeling it. “Who could you ever have envied?” he said. Not about to say, “Everyone over thirty,” I did not answer, and he said, “It’s none of my business, never mind. I suppose I must be you now. So many times I have imagined I were Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e. Always wrongly.”

“It’s all right, I’ll let you off, you don’t have to.” He lacked, and I could not give him, the one piece of knowledge that would make it true. “I said it all when I gave you the axe. May I tell you a story, instead?”

He signed chalk, drying his eyes, and I sat down next to him, both of us starting to lean our backs against the log and deciding not to almost as one, which made us share a shy laugh. I wished I had a wine-skin to pass him; later.

Like a warrior recounting old battles, I told him of how I had not wanted to be one at all at first, of Esora-e choosing to make me the greatest in the world without asking my choice, of my quarrels with him, of the worst trials of my training, of all the tribulations that which he envied me for had brought me. Soon he began recalling his own training, and a tyrannical teacher he’d once had, and we ended up laughing together.

Finally we were friends and clasped hands on it. Though he doubted he would cease envying me he swore not to hold it against me. We forgave each other for everything and gingerly embraced, and he invited me to his fire. The looks on the faces of his friends were a delight, when he introduced them to me with his arm over my shoulders.

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33 - Envy

We sent all but those we ransomed over Kamis, and claimed, as is our custom, a Lakan valley large enough to feed all those lost on this front in this war. Foreign scholars ask us how, if we were never the aggressors, Yeola-e acquired land from other nations. It was all gained this way, when we could, every fingerwidth the compensation for lives lost, which can never be regained. We take no more than has been taken from us, nor do we always win, but we’ve had a long time, one and a half millennia.

Tyeraha summoned Hurai to Leyere, and me with him, my ten among his guard. By then I’d read in a Lakan military history about a tribe to the northwest of Laka, the Kadril, who had countered the Lakan horse better than anyone else, the author wrote, by using three-man-height-long pikes with their butts set in the ground. The first five or six ranks of points extended beyond the first rank of warriors, who were in very close order lending the whole formation, which was fifteen ranks deep, great weight. It was deadly against horse or foot or anything that could not flank it.

Since we’d come up with nothing that worked well ourselves, Tyeraha, Hurai and Emao-e decided to try it. Each enormous spear had to be made out of two tree-trunks, since it would be too wasteful to whittle down a whole tree that tall, joined with a steel coupler; a drawing in the book showed this. Then we had to train up our pikers to wield something half again as long as they were used to, and work in the new formation.

The great battle expected there had not come yet. The Lakans had stopped marching upriver at Kantila once the snows became heavy, but left a garrison in Leyere. Plague does not distinguish the color of one’s skin; they caught it, and then through a messenger or supplies, I imagine, it spread to their army in Kantila.

So at the same time thirst-sickness had been plaguing our Lakans through the winter, fever had been plaguing Tyeraha’s, likewise halving their number. With those left of Emao-e’s army gathering together, and the reinforcements, our force matched theirs by spring, with five thousand pikers well-drilled in the Kadrini way. For the first time we could face them army-to-army on a plain.

I was too small and slight to be in a pike unit, of course, and so stayed with my ten in the heavy foot for the first Kadrini battle, close by the right edge of the right-most Kadril, in a hundred with Elera Shae-Tyeba of Terera, whom I knew very distantly, since he was from Terera, as our setakraseye. The whole army was ranged across the valley with its steep sides and on one end the river guarding our flank.

Confident as usual—maybe their general, Arzaktaj, hadn’t read the same book, or didn’t recognize the formation—the Lakan horse came charging. We’d set up the traditional Yeoli crossfire from archers on either wing; their countermeasure to that was always to get through it as fast as possible, losing a few, and engage, usually cutting easily through.

Not so easy this time. The valley floor had a slight slope, so I had a good view, as the entire vanguard line of the Lakan horse came to a dead halt, either from horses balking or being impaled if they didn’t, and the second rank of units all but piled into them. I remember the screams of horses, so much louder, longer and more terrible than those of the people, being uncomprehending.

Stopped, of course, they were at the mercy of the crossfire, and didn’t know what to do, the commanders bellowing conflicting orders to each other, until their general, Arzaktaj, pulled them back. Had I been commanding, I’d have had our wings of heavy foot on either side curl in to flank them rather than stand pat—what matter if we left gaps between the ends of our lines and the valley sides if their cavalry was trapped still?—or better still, had reserves behind on either side to fill in the gaps in case the rear horse rallied and charged around, having anticipated stopping them dead Kadri-style at the start. To see the horse so destroyed would have unnerved the Lakan foot, and that would have turned it into a rout. I’m sure I would have done that when I was twenty-three or twenty-four, knowing always to plan a battle from beginning to end more than one way, and having learned how to know how things would go. But I was still only sixteen, and not in a position to send suggestions that major to Emao-e on the field. We won anyway, forcing them into a fighting retreat, which we left off pushing when the valley widened out enough to thin us too much, in Emao-e’s opinion.

But now we had the problem that we wouldn’t be able to surprise them by being Kadril again, and of course Arzaktaj would charge his horse elsewhere. What we decided to do was split the Kadril into four and intersperse them along our whole line. If he tried to send the horse between any two, they’d close in from either side.

What he did instead—the next battle was a half-moon later—was order his foot to advance, holding his entire horse in reserve.

My hundred, then under the command of Elera Shae-Tyeba, of whom I knew little except that he was a few years older than me and from Terera, was near the center of the Yeoli line, my ten just to the right of a bloc of Kadril. Suddenly the Lakans before us fell back fighting, and Elera chased after them, ordering us to follow.

I had a bad feeling; the Lakans had changed too quickly and easily to retreating, it seemed to me, as if it were planned. I cursed my shortness, which kept me from seeing where we were in the forest of warriors. The oldest trick in history came into my mind: the horseshoe, in which an army falls back at the centre to draw in the other’s centre, and then sweeps in the flanks to surround them.

I would normally be the first in the file; now I signaled in Krero and said “Mana! Lift me on your shoulders!” He looked at me as if I were mad; engaged though we were there was still the odd arrow or javelin flying. “That’s an order!” Sure enough, I saw as I straightened up, both lines were curving, like the edge of a glacier. As if to agree with my eyes, the gong boomed, in the rhythm that means “Keep the line straight!”

All the other commanders called their units to where they should be for that; my nine turned as one when I did. But Elera, to my disbelief, charged on as if he were deaf, and the rest of the century, torn two ways, scattered and strung themselves all out in a half-hearted advance. In a moment we were all in the open. Like a nightmare clearer than waking, I saw what would unfold. It was time for arrows; the Lakans would begin their volleys, and our archery-commanders must either leave them unanswered, or say kyash on the fools who’d ignored the gong and go ahead.

I should have sent someone else; if Emao-e did command a volley it would come down thickest furthest ahead. But I didn’t think Elera would listen to anyone else. The nightmare began playing itself out as I chased him, with a volley of Lakan arrows falling unanswered as Emao-e chose to spare us, for now. Kahara… she might be holding off, I realized, because she knew it might be the unit I was in.

I found Elera advancing a spear-length from the Lakans, who kept up their orderly retreat, beckoning us to fight them with smiles on their faces, as if it weren’t obvious enough. “Seta!” I screamed, “the child-raping gong, if you're deaf to it at least look over your shoulder!” Perhaps he’d misunderstood the rhythm; I don’t know. What he claimed afterward was the root of his misjudgment defies my understanding. “I knew I’d have to say this sometime,” he snapped. “Shut your cocky brat’s mouth, Fourth Chevenga.”

I was so stunned, I stood flat-footed, beyond even anger. He’d said it with satisfaction. Was this envy? Here? Now? Several Lakans called out “Ahai!” and they all ducked behind their shields; Emao-e had given the signal. I threw mine behind me and heard a shaft thump into it from my shield-side while another hissed past my ear from my sword-side; ever effective is the traditional Yeoli crossfire. I couldn’t stop myself from hearing two Yeoli death-cries. “All those who don’t want to get their own arrows in the back follow me I’ll take the whip!” I screamed. As one, they did; they’d only needed someone, no matter who, to command it. We sprinted across open ground with our shields before us for the Yeoli arrows first, then behind us for the Lakan, many of which were aimed specifically at us. Elera was the last to get back, his face such a deep red it seemed black, and his hands trembling. He didn’t look at me.

When we reformed I saw we were down to about seventy, plus fifteen wounded badly enough to be sent back, including Kamina with an arrow in his shoulder. When we did our full accounting later we’d find out that seven of our dead, as we would never mention aloud in camp, had fallen to the obsidian points of Yeoli arrows.

His ruse failed and our wings hacking back his, Arzaktaj ordered in the horse at our centre after all, thinking to overrun the Kadrini there by sheer numbers. That brought the edge of their squares to us. It gave me more joy than usual, to turn the lance of the man who’d lined me up and unhorse him with a flying kick; I even liked finding myself in a press, the worst place to be, so that I had to carve my way free through more Lakans than I counted. Even so, when it was over, ended in a mutual retreat, I was full of the internal shaking of anger.

I wasn’t even all the way back to our tents, let alone washed or ungeared, when a hand seized my hair, hauled my head down and dragged me along bent over like a child. I came within a hair’s-width of fighting Elera, before sense seized me; there was too much rage here already, he was still my commander, and whatever harshness he showed me would add only to his shame, not to mine. Most of the unit was already following, yelling “Seta, kras’, no, don’t, he saved some of us!” until he ordered them all to shut up. “Insubordination is insubordination, is it not, Fourth Chevenga?”

“Yes, setakraseye.”

”On your knees, then.” I obeyed as they milled around muttering, and he struck me the blow of shame so hard everything was dark for a moment, then had them set up the flogging-post and lash my arms to it, though I’d proven in front of twelve thousand in Shairao that it wasn’t necessary. “You said you’d take the whip, did you not, Fourth Chevenga?”

“I did, setakraseye.”

“To falling.” There were gasps all around. “Silence; next one to speak other than him gets the same.”

“I submit myself,” I said. My stomach clenched and sweat broke out icy all over, my body remembering last time. Everyone went even more quiet. He snapped his fingers for the whip; he wanted to do it himself.

In my life I had come to know the envy of children, of overshadowed siblings, of friends wishing themselves in my place, of older warriors imagining what I would someday be. But what I felt on my skin now, I was unprepared for and thus naked to, having never dreamed it possible. There before all who were left of his warriors, as if it were right, he laid into me as if his mistake had somehow been my fault, as if he could erase it by purging his anger on me, as if he could make himself greater by causing me pain. I did not see his face, but my friends did, and they told me that all through it was joyful with satisfaction in the guise of discipline.

When it was over I woke hanging by my arms, and Mana and Krero untied me, their hands, even as they tried to be tender, trembling with rage. As Elera turned to walk away, a score of voices called him back, the loudest his second, Karili Senchara. Though I had not been aware of it, there had been whispering all through the flogging. “The people request a vote; our wills as one are our own until it is done,” she said, formally, then: “Your balls are ash, Elera.” His features went stone-grim, but weren’t entirely surprised. He’d wasted no time, I saw, so as to get it in before he was impeached or demoted or both.

Of seventy-eight, seventy-four voted chalk to impeach him; even his friends did not vote charcoal, but abstained. Without a word he surrendered the insignia to Karili. Mana and Krero half-carried me back to the tent, and on the way I threw up thoroughly—it was a cursed hot day—while everyone else washed and cared for their gear. Then a messenger came from Emao-e, and I had to get up and move again.

Before her tent, with me in a chair, she questioned us all. Elera’s answer to why he had not obeyed the gong-order I couldn’t believe I was hearing: “With someone like Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e under your command, it gets hard to think clearly sometimes.” He really was blaming me for his mistake. “Oh right!” Mana spat, speaking entirely out of turn, “and he’s to blame for the plague, the flies, and last century’s poor harvests too, I suppose!” --“And the heat!” snapped Kunarda. --“And the hardtack!” Sachara got in before Emao-e shut them up. The fast give-and-take of jest suddenly cast me back into the past, nine moons ago, when it had had no obsidian-sharp edges, when we’d known nothing and had no scars; when we had been children.

“Well,” the general said once she had all the answers she wished, “I was going to just demote you to common rank, Elera, but that’s been done for me, no surprise, and it seems you are a believer in harsh punishments.” She struck him as hard a blow of shame as he’d had me, and ordered him flogged to falling.

Some in my place might have wanted to watch, but I didn’t, and so with my friends’ arms under mine I went back to our tents. Evening brought blessed cool, and cookfires were being lit, though I wasn’t hungry. We assembled between the tents to choose a new setakraseye; Karili told us she was willing to take it but would prefer to remain second, and everyone began saying my name. I agreed and it went chalk all but unanimously. The next day, when I was healed enough to stand straight, Emao-e awarded me the Bronze Circle, for presence of mind on the field.

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32 - One stroke

Winter came, an early and cold one, the local people said, but a far worse curse to the Lakans than to us, who were billeted in a friendly town.

We went on growing up; war doesn’t stop that. When I became semanakraseye and chakrachaseye, if I went to war, by custom I would visit a different campfire every night, and deny no Yeoli who wanted me; it’s a way of binding the army as one. An anaraseye need not feel so obliged, but practice was good.

I spent more of that winter shopping for books than I’d have expected in war. When I’d showed Inkrajen’s copy of Shae-Frisena’s Greatest of Our Battles to Hurai and then the command council as a whole, I was so certain they’d drop everything to find every Lakan book on generalship they could get their hands on, I said nothing to suggest it. To my astonishment they did not, and shrugged it off when I did say something. “Isn’t that the key to how he was defeating us?” I asked them.

“Victories are generally attained with steel, not paper,” Emao-e said, to which everyone else laughed. In a smoldering silence, I remembered their ages. Cursed grown-ups, so hidebound and stone-minded and set in their ways; I started to swear I’d never get like that, when it occurred to me I probably wouldn’t live long enough to.

I wanted those books. I went to Hurai afterwards, since of course I didn’t have the money, made a more passionate argument—I tended to see eye-to-eye with him more than with Emao-e or most of the others—and got allotted a sum. The generals would take note, I knew, once I brought what I learned into our councils.

So I took leaves of absence to prowl through bookshops in larger towns, and sent operatives even further afield. Over the winter I got all the major works that had been translated into Enchian, including one by Inkrajen himself, The Principle of Deception. I’d study by lamp or firelight while my friends played knucklebones, made rude noises with their armpits and teased me for not leaving school at home as they all had.

Some two moons after the solstice, three hundreds under Lurai Roranyel seized a Lakan caravan carrying a moon’s supply of food to Nikyana, whole, by sweeping down on skis. The Lakans there had been relying on receiving it.

In twenty days, their sentries were leaning on their spears as they stood, weak for want of food. Then plague struck them, the disease of thirst, for which you must be given huge amounts of water. All day one could see them scraping snow from the earth around the town to melt; when they had to come further out we’d raid them. The last of our spies to leave their camp brought the news that without enough healthy arms to cut the needed wood the corpses could not be cremated; so the living had had to heap them in alleyways until spring thawed the ground enough to bury them. Spring came slow that year. Their number was halved, leaving six or seven thousand to our twelve, which for all they knew was eighteen; as well they were weak, despairing and facing starvation, and had little hope of relief, their king having turned his attention south.

We need do no more than surround them so to make sure no supplies got to them, demand their surrender, and if they refused, wait. Hurai made me think of this as a lesson; stuck in thoughts of siege and battle, perhaps from reading too much about it, I took a while to come to it, while he led me all over by the nose with deceptions. “An enemy general will do the same, and crush you as fast as he can,” I remember him saying as I stood shaking with frustration at myself. “When you’re semanakraseye, I won’t be there to give you hints.” Oh yes you will, I thought; you think I’m such an idiot as to not have you in my command council? We broke camp, and closed our ring around Nikyana.

After six days, a Lakan herald waved a bare ivy branch, and a party rode out. They were different now than in autumn, horses and men both gaunt beneath their bright panoply, their steps slow and weak, their proud bearing straining; grief, that had been fresh and spiced with anger in fall, was now worn deep into their brown faces. I noticed Inkrajen’s son was not there; I heard later that he’d succumbed to the plague. We would never have our fair fight.

The glow of triumph faded from my heart. The fighting done, they were enemies no longer, but fellow humans, starved, sick, bereaved, broken, with no choice but to give themselves into our hands, and accept what that brought them.

Some say we Yeolis are barbarians, for thumbing. But we have reason, fighting against slave-holding countries. If they capture us, they sell us into slavery, thus ensuring we do not fight again. If we capture them, we have no such means; so we let them go, but first make sure in our way. Sometimes there are mercy agreements, but there were none in this war.

I felt most for Orbukjen, whose face wore the shadow of illness. What his fate would be in Laka, I did not know. Here we impeach failing generals; there, all is subject to the king’s whim. He could make a defense of circumstance, and bad luck; yet everyone knew it all would have been very different had Inkrajen lived. I remember the reins trembling in his satin-gloved hands, as his herald went through the ubiquitous formalities, whose pomposity rang so discordant now; but he was steady, as he handed Hurai his sword, and cut off a thick lock of his hair with his dagger.

The plague had mostly run its course, but many Lakans still lay sick. We took the walls, but Hurai forbade us to enter the town so we wouldn’t catch it. One could see them when they came out into the streets, the faces of the camp-followers and servants, who in the way of Lakans had gone hungriest, looking like brown death’s heads, their clothes hanging like sacks on their bodies. We waited until all the sick had recovered or died, a half-moon, sharing our rations with them.

When the sun was well up on that day, meltwater dripping silver from the dark eaves of the houses—how the Lakans must have cursed to see spring come, a moon too late—we gathered them in the square, where the two blocks and the brazier for the cauterizing-irons were set up. The trained warriors were separated from the serfs; even now when one would think they’d want to hide it, all but a few still wore their insignia of warriorhood, the spear-head shaped earrings. Now I learned the old trick for catching the rest, of having someone strike a Yeoli war gong behind them, then picking out the ones who spin around into stance unthinking.

Orbukjen we could ransom, and therefore we were not planning to thumb him; but when all was ready, he left Hurai’s side to go to the head of the line. Not much on wit, at least he had courage and fair-mindedness. The murmurs among the Lakans sank to silence. He bore it with grace, too, his chin high and steady all though. In the throng of brown faces many cheeks glistened in the sun with tears. Then the line began to move, and soon the air was thick with the smell of burned flesh.

Though I had got used to battle, I felt sick: I think it was that it was done in such an orderly way, like in an infirmary, or that there was no fight in it, like in a slaughterhouse. My stomach was most turned, somehow, by the way the hatchet-worker would clear the block with his hatchet after each blow like a cook discarding rind, as if what he added to the brown heap beside it had never been part of a person. Of course I did the same, in my own turn. By custom, I had to take a turn in every position in the thumbing-crew. The hands come fast, and you think only of the ten lashes you will get if you don’t bring the blade down hard enough, that being the standard punishment for taking more than one blow to do it. It was seeing them tear their spear-earrings from their ears afterwards with their shield-hands, equivalent to Yeolis flinging away their wristlets, that most struck my heart.

Using the iron, at least you can tell yourself you are a healer, stanching their bleeding even as they flinch or scream. Asking their choice, thumbing or death, is worse than it looks; you have to see their faces. Looking for tricks is part; a left-handed man, we caught out by the wear-mark of his scabbard-strap on his belt. Unlike the others, he wept like a child; unlike the others, he had nursed hope.

Then came a middle-aged man with long hair-earrings, who was the first to answer my question by drawing a finger across his throat. I tried to dissuade him, with gestures and in Enchian. He stared at me astonished; then he drew himself up. I had never seen such a look, immutable as a cliff-face and pure as diamond in its contempt, knowing as much of humility or uncertainty as gold knows tarnish; the disdain, through this one man’s black eyes, of a hundred generations of Lakan nobles.

I understood. He’d made peace with death; the pride which required him to die rather than return home thumbless was all he had left, and I had tried to take it from him. It struck me that I was seeing the God-In-Him, even if he was a Lakan who worshipped many-armed idols. While I tried to find words to apologize, he turned away and strode to the death-block. The guards moved to seize his arms, and before I knew it, my hands were on their shoulders and I was ordering them off him, though I had no authority to. The Lakan looked at me as if to say, “Perhaps I thought too harshly of you.” Then Hurai said “Chevenga,” and gestured to the death-block, and the beheading-axe leaned up against it.

I had to have a turn at every position. I knew he was thinking to let me get over it fast. “One stroke or twenty lashes, lad. It won’t make much difference to him, but it will to the other Lakans.” The Lakan lord laid his head down without hesitation, and I did it in one stroke. I could never be an executioner. I still sometimes feel it, hefting that so-easily lethal weight, feeling the edge catch for the shade of an instant on a nub of bone before it thumped into the block, in my nightmares.

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31 - For once I was the same as everyone else

So began my part in the Lakan War. My own actions were all much more ordinary after that, mostly, so I won’t detail them much.

As greenhands, we all came to it with our weapons as familiar as our hands and the motions of war ingrained into us, our training having made it all part of who we were, as well as fine opinions of ourselves as experts. Now we were having ingrained into us the feeling of steel going into flesh, the scream of agony, the spurt of blood, the eyes glazing over, the instant and routine strikes of death all around us, and by our own doing, and learning in our bones that it was the fruition of all we had so loved learning. When I draw Chirel, the feel of everyone I’ve ever killed is on the blade and in my hand, so accustomed and so much part of me that I feel nothing.

So we became true warriors. For some, such as Kunarda, it was almost immediate, as if he’d been born to it; most of the rest took longer, getting the pukes a time or two and then getting over it, just as Kamina had said. One of us, I won’t say who except that it’s one who is no longer alive as I write, began to relish it far too soon and far too much. It’s a requirement of warriorhood to accept that part of you will take pleasure in it, especially after your side has taken losses, but when a warrior slips into becoming entirely devoted to that, it’s madness, or at least so Yeolis believe.

Not everyone could manage the transition. Alaecha, for instance, reported to Kesariga after two engagements that she didn’t think she could bear another, and was sure she wouldn’t be able to keep the death all around her from engulfing her next time, not that that mattered, she said; she was reporting only out of fear that she’d get others among us killed, too. I remember how she flung herself down in front of all of us, and ground her own face in the dirt, crying “I’m failing you all, I’m failing Yeola-e, flog me, exile me, execute me, I don’t care, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” In other nations she would have been executed, but by our customs Yeolis may be warriors only by choice, another reason why we do not undertake wars of aggression but only defense. She was cleared to go home, where the asa kraiya people would take her in. She still had to face her family and her teachers at the school and all Terera branded a coward, though.

Blooded though I was, the transition wasn’t as different for me from the others as we all expected. I’d killed five Lakans and then gone back to the clean and bloodless training ground for three years. Without knowing it, I’d cut the memory of that night apart from the rest of my life in my mind as if it were an aberration. I had to become a warrior again.

And yet part of me felt more at home on a battlefield than anywhere else. I understood after I puzzled it out for a bit; the sound of the whirring wings of Shininao was familiar. In battle, everyone is equally close to death, and so for once I was the same as everyone else.

At least, being Yeolis, we (except for me) could talk about these things, with friends, with parents and uncles and aunts who were posted, with commanders, with the local senaheral or the staff psyche-healers. I have learned since from foreign friends that in most armies, you simply do not mention certain topics, on pain of being considered weak or cowardly. I’m not sure how they keep fighting; yet they aren’t sure how, when we talk about everything, arms waving, we keep fighting.

In battle we faced a thousand strangers, four in every five of them levied serfs, there only because they were required to be. To fight such people one must forget they didn’t choose, though that’s easy enough, in the fury of battle. If I could persuade every nation in the world to become a demarchy, I would; until then, we must fight conscripts.

So I’ve forgotten their faces, having never seen them truly, but only blows coming at me, the spear-thrusts, the sword-cuts, the arc of a black axe, already bloodied, aimed for my head. These things are the same in any battle. If you’ve fought, you know what it’s like; if you haven’t, you’re better off not knowing, and my thin words cannot truly make you know anyway.

Hurai asked me what he thought we should do generally, and I answered not attack but hold ground and harass them, destroying their food. Winter would favor us. To my delight that was what he felt was best too, and we did it.

Along with the townspeople, we built a rough but serviceable wall across the pass first, then another all the way around the town. Inkrajen, we found by deciphering his maps, had planned to lead his army around our defenses by night, before we’d had time to build the full circle; Orbukjen, with the lack of boldness characteristic of lack of intelligence, waited, then flung his forces straight on against the wall. We shot down scores of them while they were clearing the dung-sticks alone, the lowliest of the serfs shoved ahead to do this work, protected only by leathern vests, while the plate-armored knights waited out of bowshot. Why Orbukjen ordered horses into the assault on the wall I couldn’t begin to understand; I learned later it was to do with Lakan nobles’ distaste for putting their feet on the ground. No matter, if they were willing to bring their greatest strength into arrow-range uselessly, we’d take advantage; the order went out along the wall, “Aim to kill the horses before the men.” I felt sorry for those beautiful coal-black beasts, strong as draft-horses but swift as racers, who had even less choice than the people to be here.

In Orbukjen’s boots, I think I would have just gone around Shairao by another pass, leaving us behind; he might have had time to do it before it was all walled, had he moved fast enough, and no matter that his supply line was cut, when so much lay defenseless before him to forage, and to follow him we would have had to come out. Instead he called for reinforcements, settling another five thousand Lakans in Nikyana (at this rate they’d have half the forest cleared by spring) and threw them against us.

They sent the siege-towers; we answered with poles and fire. I remember when Renaina Chaer, who was a setakraseye then, had her people heave against a tower instead of hold, it being on a steep slope. Ponderous as a mountain, it toppled slowly backwards, landing soft and with a hundred crackings, on the press of Lakans behind it. I remember the screams, first a few in terror as they saw it start falling, then the entire mass in agony, all starting in unison as if commanded by a choirmaster, and fading raggedly to a few that did not stop.

At first in that war, my ten all fought full of fierce cheer, trading grins and jests and death-counts. We didn’t understood people whose faces curled in carven hate when the Lakans came, as if they held a grudge against every one. In one of the Shairaoni battles we learned.

It was Ramiha; she’d been out from behind a crenel for just a moment, and with a choked cry, the too-intense kind a warrior soon learns to dread, she doubled over and staggered back, then fell in a faint, ending with her head thrown backwards over the inner edge of the parapet as if in ecstasy. There was an arrow standing in her solar plexus.

Krero knelt beside her; defending a wall, we were numerous enough for him to be excused. He broke off the shaft and carried her down the spiral stairs to the infirmary.

In the University Hospital on Haiu Menshir, there were the people and tools to save her. Not in an obscure Yeoli town with just one Haian. The Haian did her best with what she had. Ramiha and Krero had sworn a mutual oath, as warrior-couples often do, so when the Haian pronounced her wound incurable, it fell to him to end her pain. She asked him to wait until the battle was over so she could make her farewells to all of us. I remember how she put her arms around his neck, and took it silently, albeit with tears in her eyes. He was between me and his blade so I didn’t see, but weapon-sense has no eyelids to clench shut against such a thing, and Ramiha’s uncanny fighting-skills, gained over so many years by such toil, were extinguished in a moment like a mosquito happening into flame. I remembered bitterly what Hurai had said to me, to which I’d signed chalk sagely, as we’d cut the plan; “We’ll lose a few.” That was what it is to be a general; to carry everyone’s lives, and everything that they mean, and yet maintain equanimity.

For a long time after, I kept seeing her eyes shining in firelight and hearing her voice in the cacophony of talk at night before Kesariga shut us up, as well as just mourning and missing her. It drove Krero a little mad; for a time he didn’t comb his hair or eat, seemed alive only in battle and wouldn’t speak to anyone about it, no matter how much we urged him. The scars her nails made on his hands as she died he bears to this day, having worried at them to keep them from healing, so they would never fade.

Atakina 19, which in Shairao is in Threshing Moon, and my sixteenth birthday came. Orbukjen moved his army back into Nikyana, we pursued so that now we were besieging them, and the news came that Leyere had fallen. Crowded and hungry, it had been struck with a plague of fever, leaving too few people well enough to defend the walls; the Lakans had stormed over with sheer numbers, thirty thousand in total. Some half of the people had got away, and the city had not been sacked, but everyone who had fought to the last was dead or in chains, and the Lakans were on the march up the valley, while Emao-e scrambled to put an army together.

My aunt went there, bringing Jinai Oru, who had won further renown by predicting Inkrajen’s death, though only two days before it happened, too late to inform us from Vae Arahi. She called reinforcements from all over, including the entire Demarchic Guard, to march before winter closed the passes. That meant my shadow-parents would be there; my stepfather had never been war-trained, and my mother had gone asa kraiya years before.

It also included a third of Hurai’s army. But he had them march out quietly at night, shipped in an equal number of tents and had us pitch them and hang about them, spread evenly, and light just as many fires at night. I don’t know whether Orbukjen ever saw through this, but he was content to wait, and before the first snow fell some half of his army and most of the horse he still had were called away too.

I wanted to go, imagining myself asking Emao-e, “Do they have a general they can’t do without?” But Tyeraha expected one pitched battle in the valley of Leyere, into which we would throw all our strength, do or die in one toss. If we lost, she might even come to grief herself; best I didn’t as well, she wrote me.

Doing raids under Renaina and others took my mind off it. I itched to be promoted so that I could lead such things too, until it was brought home to me what exactly causes promotions in a fighting army.

One of our first raids was an ambush on woodcutters, for whom we waited in hiding places spread out in the uncut woods all around where they’d be. Twelve Lakans came with saws and wood axes shouldered along with their spears. The one standing watch, in the center, wore a long mantle, under which he had hidden at his side a bow slung for quick draw, and on his hip a full quiver. I knew only by weapon-sense. And I’d hid across from Kesariga; I couldn’t tell him.

I frantically made the call a blackbird does for “danger,” hoping he’d take the warning, and he might have, for there was a longer delay than he had planned after the axes began to ring. But someone’s head or shoulder moving must have been seen, for one of them shouted, “Ahai!” and they flung down tools to seize up spears. A bad time to call charge, but it was that or run, and running from an archer is a good way for someone to die, or more than one, depending on how fast the archer is at drawing and shooting. Whether by Kesa’s manner or insignia, the archer guessed he was leader, and aimed without hesitation. The arrow came high, and I hoped it would glance off his helmet, but it and he stopped dead at once, and he fell as fast as if as if he’d meant to.

Our charge faltered, the war cry breaking in the middle; I kept running, knowing only that I was in a race with the archer’s hands nocking another arrow, and that he had cursed good aim. Looking all around and seeing me, he whirled to draw a bead on me and was almost there, the arrow-head swinging around to line up with his black eyes, when I slashed his bow-hand in half with Chirel. Now I was alone in a circle of Lakans, with the Yeolis all screaming “Cheng!” A death cry tore out of a Lakan trying to spear me from behind; behind him, bless his grinning soul, was Mana.

In the end, we killed seven and set the other five to flight, at the cost of a deep cut on my leg that I hadn’t noticed myself getting (my first proper wound, stitched by the camp Haian, no less), shallow ones on others, and Kesariga’s life. The arrow had gone into his brain through his eye.

We broke the shaft off before we carried him back to camp; Isatenga, who’d been closest to him, was sure he would not have wanted to be seen so. I could understand; I had always believed that one’s appointment with Shininao was a relatively private thing, perhaps because I had been secretive about my own for so long, or perhaps because it is the time of ultimate helplessness.

Though Krero had been Kesa’s second, he’d tapped me to replace him, on unit approval, if he came to grief. Now they approved me, and that meant I must be the one who dealt with the arrow. I remember how the other eye, staring emptily as hazel glass as I wrapped my hands around the shaft, shifted slightly as it broke, and Sachara ran into the woods to throw up.

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30 - Reward and punishment

When the sun was a fist west of the crag, I went to Hurai with my backpack. “I have it in my head, kras’,” I said.

“Let’s hear it, then.”

I took a deep breath. “Assassinate Inkrajen.”

“Assassinate Inkrajen?” I signed chalk. “That’s it?” I signed chalk again. He heaved a great sigh, that said clear as words, ‘And there I was, hoping you were the genius of my dreams.’ “Well, that would certainly be a great victory, which I asked for—if it were possible. You learned what you should for a field plan, not an assassination!” Clearly he’d checked up on me. “Did you even ask anyone whether we’ve tried it already?”

Kyash—no wonder he had two guards right in the room. I signed charcoal.

“Fourth Chevenga…” He heaved another sigh, and I could tell he was trying to think how to best approach this. “Come on, inside my tent. There’s something amiss here. We need to talk.”

“Krachaseye?” said someone behind us, a deka’s second by his insignia. “I was sent to report, there’s some sort of commotion in the Lakan camp, again.”

“Are they attacking?” Hurai snapped. “That alarm last night turned out to be nothing.”

“No, kras’, but—”

“Then it can wait, keep watching, no reports until it’s something actually useful, dismissed, come, Chevenga. Sit here.” He looked me in the eyes, like an uncle who knows he must share his wisdom emphatically with a nephew who’s on the verge of some disastrous choice. “The man knows how valuable he is, and guards himself like the Lakan Gods’ bracelets. We’ve tried three times, lad. We lost one that way, one of the better assassins I had. So—I’m nixing your first example of perfection in the strategic art as shit. What’s your second? You do have a second plan, at the very least, as a general always must? If it’s ‘Send for reinforcements,’ I’ll smack you.”

I was speechless, his words, ‘tried three times, lost one of the better assassins I had’ echoing through my head. It was a good thing I hadn’t asked; I’d have chickened out for sure. He took my chin in his hand and turned my face up to make my eyes meet his. “You came with such recommendations, lad… and you’re Tennunga’s son. Something isn’t right here. Are you sick and not telling me? Is it an attack of nerves?”

“I have something I think I should show you, krachaseye,” I said. Why my hands were shaking now, I didn’t know. The knotted lock of Inkrajen’s white hair trembled as I drew it out, followed by the sand-timer, the gems, the sheaf of maps covered with Lakan writing, the Shae-Frisena book. His mouth dropped further and further open, the more he saw. “That’s what the alarm in their camp was, last night,” I said. “Today, they must be mourning him.”

Old as he was, Hurai still had hands like lightning. As well, it was the last thing I’d expected. With that big arm he could ring a skull as hard as Esora-e could. After the crash and the time of darkness, the pressing of the tent-floor into my chin and chest came to my consciousness slowly; then words, in a haze. The voice was familiar, one I’d come to know recently; absently I remembered, Hurai Kadari. “No stripling not even sixteen ever comes fresh to a fighting army, and puts himself in the general’s place, no matter who he is… and then comes to take credit without bringing the person who actually did the deed!”

Kahara… of course he’d think it couldn’t be me and so I got someone else… I tried to lift my head, felt and saw the tent turn end over end around me, and lay back down again. His voice turned crisp, giving orders. “Samo, fetch a mail runner, Ina, take a letter. Saint Mother shit on me, boy, you tell me how I should word this, to your aunt the semanakraseye, your mother, your shadow-father, your Teachers, to all Yeola-e…” I vaguely remembered the story of General Maha exiling her son for acting without orders. My mothers and stepfather would argue charcoal, but Esora-e would argue chalk; which way would Assembly go?

Struggling to keep from getting vomit on his tent-floor, I said, “Krachaseye, I did it. The others in my ten who weren’t on sentry-duty can be my witnesses; they saw me gear up and I told them where I was going. Whatever punishment you order, I willingly accept.”

There was a long silence, then he said, “Ina, cancel the letter, catch Perha, tell him to cancel the runner, Samo go order the scouts closer to the Lakan camp and look for signs of mourning, go.” There was another long silence. I felt that now I’d be able to get up, but decided to stay where I was.

“You know, Chevenga,” he said finally, musingly, “your shadow-father told me to expect surprises from you. Stubborn old goat that I am, I resolved with myself to be surprised by nothing you did. I guess I don’t need to tell you—in one day, you’ve laid utter waste to that. I’m… surprised.”

I’d broken the assassin’s law of secrecy, mentioning it to Mana, joke or not. “You’ll be marked on the field, but then you are already anyway,” Hurai said. “So we’ll just make it another chapter in the Chevenga legend. I didn’t rattle your brain too much for you to recount it well, did I? Good, Kema, get the Proclamatory person and send out the order to assemble after noon meal.”

The reports came back; the Lakans were indeed mourning, running up black ribbon-banners. As I was recounting it to the scribe, the report came that the Lakans were sending a parley delegation was spied. “I think you should attend me as I meet with them,” Hurai said as he geared up.

A Lakan General First’s helmet is plumed with a stiff tassel extending from a gold silken rope an arm thick coiling around his head, somewhat silly to my eyes; the banner he carries is the black pegasus of Laka, his wings, mane and tail made of golden flame, on a field of scarlet. It now had the ivy-branch of truce tied on it. “It’s odd to see black hair under the tassel,” Hurai said. “That’s Inkrajen’s second, Orbukjen.”

Orbukjen’s squire was wearing two golden arm-rings and a thick gold-and-jewels collar that I suddenly knew I’d seen before. “I guess they think foxiness runs in the blood, and want to keep what they have,” Hurai said, when I asked him who the boy was. “That’s Inkrajen’s son.”

I killed your father. I saw his eyes run over the parley party and then to our army beyond, never suspecting the assassin would be at the general’s right hand. Now I saw the resemblance. He was armed with only a dagger, being too young to fight. But maybe you will be before the war is over, and since it’s going to be announced, you’ll be able to seek and call me out on the field knowing.

The Lakan herald began to proclaim, in Enchian with the Lakan lilt with its thick consonants, beginning with ponderous formalities. It must surely be beneath Hurai’s honor to murder his distinguished counterpart, he said in effect, so the assassin must have been “a renegade, a coward and a criminal, who acted without your authority.” To prove his honor intact, Hurai need only deliver said person into their hands.

“Without my authority; they hit dead on there,” Hurai chuckled. “Maybe I should… just kidding.” He dictated his answer to our herald. “Inkrajen was indeed honorable enough never to send one man creeping in the dark, but only a thousand horses; the world has less devious in it, for his loss. We Yeolis defend ourselves with every advantage we have when invaders come to kill and enslave, however much that might offend their delicate morals. If, O illustrious Orbukjen, you find this disagreeable, you have my wholehearted invitation to turn around and march home.” Behind us from the army there was a deafening roar of laughter and cheering.

Orbukjen cursed us with his own voice, so loudly I could hear it, and waved his fist. Most of the knights stood steady, but two or three dropped their banners to one hand and drew their straight swords, flashing; one spurred his poor horse against the reigning of his own squire. No surprise, they’d loved Inkrajen. Thus the parley ended.

“Don’t look so green, you’ve only got four years until you’re semanakraseye,” Hurai said as I readied to go out before the assembled Yeoli army. “Just think of it as saying hello to twelve thousand dear friends. Oh, and don’t forget they’ll have spies watching, so incriminate as many of their sentries as you can so they execute plenty.”

He was right; they were all my friends, cherishing me to the same degree they’d suffered at Inkrajen’s hands. Once I remembered to cast my voice as I’d been taught, they clung to every word, roared with laughter where I least expected, adored me with their eyes at every pause. There was nothing I could say, even admitting fear, that displeased them. Love-drunk, I suddenly yearned to tell them all that was in my heart, even what I felt about Inkrajen’s son, and had to tell myself to hold back. When I finished they leapt up to cheer me standing, the clashing of wristlets ringing like storm-rain.

Hurai awarded me the Serpent Incarnadine, Yeola-e’s highest award for stealth. I was the only one of twelve-thousand who was taken aback, I think; I remember my shadow-father standing at the edge of the speaking-circle, looking not surprised at all, as Hurai fastened it to my collar. But a flogging-post was set up too, and a whip-worker warming up his arm. I had acted without orders. The reward and punishment in one; it was just.

Hurai Kadari was always a brilliant general; he was not so good a politician. When he explained the wrongness of what I’d done and told them his order was flogging to falling, someone shouted, “Hurai, no! After what he did? You can’t flog him!” In a moment, the whole army had taken up the cry.

The general stood frozen. In the sun, I saw sweat on his head, where his hair was thin. They didn’t like him as much as his ability truly warranted, having held fast at best under him, recently lost, and never won. I had given them victory just with my two hands. I saw my power, by the law unwritten. I could draw myself up, say to him, “The people wills. You can’t flog me,” and walk away unscathed.

They yelled and he stood unsure, and I thought. I had never been flogged to falling before, but I’d heard how much it hurt, and didn’t want it, especially in front of twelve thousand people. But I saw us tomorrow with his authority successfully defied, thus weakened, the warriors losing respect for him, talking against him, arguing over who had been right, so we’d be weakened in the field. If I turned against him I turned against them, whatever they felt.

So I took off my shirt. The yells of “No!” redoubled, a hint of anger in them now. They wouldn’t listen to him explaining, I saw; only me. I held up my hands for silence. It was almost instant, so with me they still were. “You are the souls of kindness,” I said, “and I thank you for the mercy you’d grant me. But justice is better than mercy in a case like this. The krachaseye is right; I did act without orders, as no warrior should do, and I resolved in myself when I did that I’d accept what punishment he decreed. I deserve his reward and his punishment both, so I accept both.” That silenced the protests, and I went to the post.

They came with a rope to lash me to the post, perhaps thinking of my age. I waved it off, hoping I did indeed have the strength to do without; this wasn’t the same as keeping my hand still for a combing. I took a good grip on the post, and the army went dead silent.

I can remember every grain-line and crack in the spot of grayed wood before my eyes to this day, though the memory of pain has been effaced somehow, as it often is with me. I remember the temptation to fall before my legs gave out, since that would end it, and staying up almost more from ground-in habit than will; I remember thinking, as the pain began ripping apart my senses, “It’s probably a good thing I never got flogged to falling before; if I’d known it would hurt this much maybe I wouldn’t have submitted to it.” I held still, though. Soon after that it was over; I went to proper unconsciousness, deep enough that I have never remembered Mana and Krero catching me. Most of the army was in tears when I woke up.

Though it was hard for me, we celebrated that night. I was carried all over the camp, which I could only bear by the aid of copious draughts of painkiller. Hurai gave me two days to recover—the Lakans were standing pat, no doubt waiting word from home—then called me to his tent the morning of the third. “Next assignment,” he said. “What you don’t know, you can find out; everyone knows you now. I want one brilliant battle plan, perfect in every aspect, overlooking nothing, certain to bring us great victory at negligible cost, in short, a perfect example of the strategic art… and I don’t want anything like last time!”

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29 - It was the thing to do

Just when my bones had started to whisper that time was growing short, and I was starting to make my mind up to retreat, one guard whispered something to the other, and went away across the floor, and down the ladder.

While a breeze was making sound, I stood and made a hand-span long slit at eye height behind the remaining guard. The fabric was like oil on the palm. I made the full cut, quietly enough, sheathed the blade and unsheathed my pin-dagger, fast; he might sense my presence just by feel, as people do. I stepped through to his back, choosing the ring of his mail I would put the needle-blade through into his heart just as in training, clamped my hand over his mouth and nose and did it, both at once. He gave a huge thrash, but though I felt the bristles of a moustache on my palm I had sealed off his breath well enough that he could make no sound. I took his weight as his muscles failed, and laid his body down silently, his black eyes frozen in the shock of feeling instant death. I remembered what I had said to he who was called Perai; “If I have to stab a back to save Yeola-e, semanakraseye’s honour not only permits but requires it.” There was no more thinking about it to be done.

I turned to the bed, seeing the room only from the corners of my eyes and taking no more impression than gold and a sense of richness; it was long white hair I looked for. There it was, almost too real to be true, like the surprise gift a child finds after wanting it for years, creamy silver peppered with the odd strand of black, unoiled, the straight tendrils disheveled with sleep. Inkrajen did not move; he had not awakened. The body beneath the gold satin covers was small and slight; the face, its brown startling against bright hair, was forty or fifty years old, clean-shaven and delicate in a Lakan way, its wrinkles of sun and strain smoothed in sleep. In such an innocuous scabbard, I thought, comes the deadliest steel.

Pin him with my knee, clamp down on his mouth and nose and cut hard and fast across his throat, I’d do in a moment; I absolutely should not have hesitated, since the other guard would come back any moment, but I did.

Maybe it was because he was asleep and so had that childlike look of peace and innocence that all people have in sleep, no matter how evil or dangerous in waking. Or perhaps it was that I knew him, in a sense, by what I’d heard of him, as I hadn’t the other man I’d murdered, and it’s harder to kill someone you know. Or perhaps it was that the moment I did it, that mind with its brilliance, its decades of war-memories and lessons drawn from all of them, its few broad principles and host of specific tricks of strategy and tactics rising in part from his character and in part from wisdom built over all that that time, would be gone like a candle-flame snuffed out. Part of me didn’t want to kill him but to talk to him, hear his stories, learn from him.

Thus I stood teetering on the knife-edge of half-action. Any instant he could have awakened, seen me and called the alarm, and I would have done worse than failed. Sense spoke to me in Azaila’s voice. Why did you come here, then? Rya-kya, lad. All or nothing.

I pinned his chest with my knee, clamping his mouth and nose with my hand. He woke as I did it, and his eyes, like two oiled jets framed wide all around with white, flickered with each catching of the knife-edge on sinew in his throat, looking at me but seeming to see only pain. When the stroke was finished and his life-blood pouring out, they stared, full of shock, disbelief, sorrow, anger at the guards who had failed him, but no rancor for me. When his eyes fixed on me, they went puzzled.

All or nothing went without saying for him. I was Yeoli; what else would I do if I could, but kill him? His was the perfect acceptance of the aggressor: I chose; I paid. Though he would have stopped me with steel through my heart if he could, I don’t think it even entered his mind to hate me.

Only one mercy could I give him. I took his head in my hands and lowered my lips to his ear; having no time for all I wished to say, apology for the pain, blessings for the next life that Lakans believe in, I just whispered, “My name is Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e, Tennunga’s son. I got through all your guards by my gift of weapon-sense and my training in the School of No Name in Terera.” It was what he would want to know.

He gazed at me—I found myself wishing my face was clean of grease, and my hair combed—and was mouthing the words “Thank you, lad, I will see you in the next—” when death took him, making his eyes glass.

I got up from the bed. My plan was to kill the other guard silently as well when he came back, so I’d have that much more time to creep out before his corpse was discovered and the alarm sounded, so I had to stay here. I wiped the blood off my hands on the sheet, and looked around; I might find something useful.

He’d had little furniture, just desk, night table, shelf, one chair and the bed, whose headboard was a three-tiered shelf full of books; but it was all ebony carven more ornately and smoothly than I had thought wood could be carved. Everywhere were prizes of war, jewelry, carvings, tableware, statuettes, all gold or crusted with gems, in our style or Enchian or Hyerni.

Jewels always help; into my pack I quickly put a few that looked priciest for their weight. On his night table lay a sand-timer and several large maps. Even with him dead his plans could still be used, if I left them, so I folded them all into my pack. Set apart from all else upon a cushion of red satin under a petaled arch of gold-inlaid ebony, lay a miniature spear, bound with tassels, its head wrought of gold polished smooth as glass. A sacred talisman, I saw, and being in the chamber of the general, one of significance to all the army, if not all the nation, like the sword of Saint Mother. That would be a loss to cause them anguish; but then it struck me as petty malice. I laid it straight on his chest, instead, curling his hands around it, as weapons to be cremated with their owners are laid; let them take what they would from that.

Inside the carven doors of the bookshelf were personal things I would rather not have seen at all: a letter in childish Lakan script, a child’s play-sword, three busts, fashioned from real Lakan hair and mahogany to depict their dark skin, of a woman and two children. I presumed the books would all be Lakan, but an Enchian title caught my eye, being familiar: Greatest of Our Battles, by Rao Shae-Frisena. I froze, tingles spreading out all over me as I ran my eyes over the titles. He had Enchian translations of every major Yeoli work on general-craft in existence.

All-Spirit, I thought, no wonder he’s beating us! ‘Know the enemy,’ I was taught, yet no one in Yeola-e goes this deep with them. It was as if the thousand dead of yesterday all screamed Why not? It seared into my soul; I was determined that it would, that I would never ever forget this. To show Hurai, I took the most concise classic, Naishana Krai’s Warcraft.

For proof I’d done it, I cut off one lock of Inkrajen’s white hair. Just as I was knotting it to put in my pack, I heard a gasp at the door.

I had expected the warning of weapon-sense, or at least a polite hail from the foot of the ladder if someone else came, to give me at least a little warning. I did not know Lakan servants are considered no one, their comings and goings expected to go unnoticed. I and a round-shouldered, short-haired brown man who was halfway up the ladder stared at each other, both freezing. He knew better what to do, though, and so acted first. Throwing back his head, he let out a scream of anguish that seemed to last a day, and ended with “Ahai! Ahai! Ahai!”

I threw what was nearest my sword-hand—a sand-timer—which made him jump down out of my sight. The thought came with an unreal slowness like the movement of a glacier: Oh shit—the alarm’s been sounded. I remembered the word “ahai” from the raid on the Shae-Tyucheral. “Ahai! Ahai! Ahai! Ahai!” Many voices took it up, spreading outwards fast as fire; the floor shook with guards scrambling up the ladder.

My hands thought for me, snatching off the helmet of the guard I’d knifed, a peaked cone in the Lakan style. I scrambled out the slit, hacked through the outer wall with my dagger and dived onto the canvas roof, taking its slope in a roll, tumbled off the edge and landed running. The cry sounded all over the camp now; torchlight spread fast as flame catches. Now thousands of Lakans staggered out of tents or ran by with spears, every way I turned.

Now when I had true reason for terror, it vanished somehow, leaving my mind clear as water; perhaps it was the knowledge that what I had feared longest I need fear no more, since it had happened. The plan I thought of, had I considered it beforehand, I would have spurned as too ridiculous to try; now, as there was no other choice, I did it unthinkingly. Between two tents I buckled on the helmet, and ran out shouting, “Ahai! Ahai!” It was the thing to do.

Perhaps it was then that I learned that an utterly unexpected move can work, for it did. In the confusion and the madly-flickering torchlight, my darkened face and straightened hair aided them in seeing, as people will, what they expected to see. I certainly never stayed still long enough to give anyone a good look, and for all fear was gone from my mind there was plenty enough left in my body to give my cries sincerity. Pretending to be running in a daze of panic, uncaring where I went, I worked my way towards the edge of the camp.

When I had got within twenty strides of it, a man with a torch seized my arm and rattled off something to me in Lakan—probably something like “Calm yourself boy, and tell me what’s going on!”—and awaited an answer. I shrugged, shook him off and dashed on, shouting, “Ahai!”

I know now what gave me away. We Yeolis, as I didn’t know until a foreigner told me, have a unique shrug, a double motion: first the hands and forearms turn up, then, distinctly separate, the shoulders rise. Seeing something so strange he’d known right away I was not one of them. As I cleared the edge of the tents he roared to his comrades, and next thing I knew fifty Lakans were chasing me.

Though I could not see the ground I ran flat out. Carrying no light, I was soon lost to their sight in the dark, and I heard what I knew by their tone were curses. The sentries were closing in to where they thought I would come, so I dashed wide around them; then a command must have been given to spread out, for the bobbing knife-point of lights behind me widened into a comb. Suddenly one of my feet found air instead of earth and I flew headlong, into a ditch; chance was kind, not to break my ankle, or neck. I would come to grief running across fields and fences in this darkness without a flame, I saw; so I trotted gingerly until I found a fence, crouched behind it and groped for my tinderbox. It lit, Saint Mother bless it, on the first try, and I touched it to the torch. When the line of Lakans came even with me I joined their number again, torch high, pretending to give death-chase to myself.

We all headed for the foot of the stream-path, for even if that demon wool-head assassin fled through the woods, we can head him off that way. … I pulled ahead; like those of the rabbit that outruns the wolf, my legs had more compelling reason. The pair of guards there waited in stance with spears levelled, searching in the dark for pale skin and curly hair. Beckoning grandly, I ran right between them. It was only some way up the slope that it dawned on them that the most enthusiastic runner had been strangely taciturn, and spear-less. Their cries sharpened with rage, and several spears were cast; but by then I was far enough ahead to dodge them.

It was a plain race now, on a long, steep ascent. They were scores to my one; but I had run up the side of Haranin every day in training for nine years, breathing air too cold and thin for trees to live in; in the Breaker of Hearts, as our long obstacle race is called, I had scrambled up steep Hetharin for the last stretch, after all the other ordeals, first among those of my age for six years running. Beneath its mantle of forest the slope seemed to laugh, and say, “You know whose side I am on, lad.”

Where the path resorted to switchbacks, I climbed straight, pulling myself up on trees and rocks with my free hand. Two sentries stood at the junction, I remembered, their legs fresh; I veered into the forest to my sword-side again. It slowed me and strained my luck, but did the same to them; I heard one crash down yelling behind me. On the mountain-girl’s path and its gentler incline, I increased my speed; my legs were jelly with streaking pains now, my lungs and heart wanting to tear loose from my chest, my body to fly to bits. I knew from experience they lied, though, and I had strength left if I willed it. Eventually I was staggering, barely making a fast walk; rested legs could have caught me easily as a baby. But the Lakans were all the same. As often as not in the Breaker of Hearts the racers come to the finish on hands and knees; but the first there still wins.

In sight of Yeoli torch-hooks they gave up, but I did not stop using all my strength until I was within hailing distance. I had never thought flames could seem to have embracing arms. I had planned to creep back through our sentries, but now I could not find it in me; so I called out “Friend!” and the tongue twister, wiped my face as best I could, and tried to make my curls curl again with my fingers. One sentry knew my face despite the grease, having seen me with Hurai. “Anaraseye! What in the name of—”

“Secret assignment, no questions!” I gasped, and staggered in.

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28 - An anaraseye's ransom

I spent what was left of the day memorizing what I had drawn. The sun fell behind the mountains, we ate, and the night turned dark as black wool, with a new moon and patchy clouds which thickened to solid. When Kesariga ordered us to bed, it was so dark one could barely see one’s hand in front of one’s face, away from torches; perfect.

He took the first sentry-duty, with Ramiha. I started gearing up for darkwork, putting on my soft black leathern shoes, my black sweater and trousers, and arming myself with my two daggers and my shortsword. “Curse it,” Krero said. “I knew this would happen, the moment anyone put me in any rank over you. You know I’m supposed to not let anyone leave, Fourth Chevenga.”

“So you didn’t see me,” I answered. “You were asleep, it was hardly your fault.”

“So I was,” he said after a moment. “As a matter of fact, we all were. Weren’t we?”

“Where are you going, Cheng?” That was Mana.

“Into the Lakan camp, to kill Inkrajen.” Sometimes the best lie is truth so preposterous no one will believe it.

“Ah, I see.” His voice was sage. “Well, be sure it’s his safe time of the month.” They all began snoring loudly, and Krero buried his head under the covers.

I put two small torches and a tinder-box in my backpack, darkened my face and hands with soot-blackened grease and slicked my hair back straight with oil. Outside, I was seen but not noticed, assumed to be on some errand. At the edges of our camp, I saw the torch-hooks of the sentries, held dead still; the moment one moves, a check is made. As I crept in the grass through the first line, I found myself sweating. It occurred to me they would almost certainly strike before they challenged, seeing a dark figure crawling along the ground. Far worse than being killed by Lakans: for one thing, no one would ever know why the Ascendant had been stealing out of the Yeoli camp in the dark of night. But I can shout before he strikes, I thought; then it will be merely an extreme embarrassment. I could have just told them I had clearance, but of course they’d check, because of my age. Always my age. I prefer sneaking to lying anyway.

I took the mountain-girl’s goat-track, slipped around two Lakan guards where a stream crossed it—they had a signal fire the camp could see, ready to light—by foot-groping over fallen trees and rocks. Now I was in their territory. I had been taught not to think of that as a wall, but as a sieve. This was still Yeola-e, in scent and feel and spirit; the land would be kinder to me than to them.

I came to the streamside path going down, a faint ribbon of slate black against velvet black. A thought came to me: should I stumble into someone in the camp and hope to be mistaken for a Lakan, I should smell like one, and they wear scent. Coming to a meadow I felt for flowers, smeared a few on me. Through branches of feathery black, the lights of the Lakan camp came into sight below. There were two more sentries where the path joined the cleared land; I cut around them, and hopped a stone fence into a pasture. This had not been burned off, but the crops beyond had. I smelled lingering smoke, and ash raised by my own footsteps.

It was now I began to wonder whether I was in my right mind. I only got to the front this morning, I thought, and here I am a stone’s throw from fourteen thousand enemy soldiers plus who-knew-how-many other Lakans, planning to be in their midst. What in the bounds of all that exists induced me to do this? Sweat broke out cold on me again, I started shaking all over, and tasted the taste that precedes vomiting. Krero’s assertion, “Chevenga knows no fear,” seemed a bitter joke now. I could still go back, and nothing lost, as I had determined to if it appeared too dangerous; I crouched in the corner of two stone fences to reconsider, and almost chose that.

But, seizing hold of myself, I saw I was thinking the wrong thoughts for a warrior, fear pretending to be sense. Nothing has happened that should make me change my plan, I reminded myself; the night is just as dark, no alarm has been sounded, and as far as I know I haven’t mislaid any of my skills along the path. I took the deep slow breaths Azaila had taught me, down into my centre, from which fear and strength both come. The vomit-taste faded, and I saw truth; the terror was just a child’s feeling, not reality. When my head was clear again, I went on.

They had knocked down all the near fences to get rid of hiding places, but had built no palisade, intending to attack us soon, win, and camp in Shairao, in Inkrajen’s confident style. We’ll see how that goes after tonight. The sentries had no lights, and did indeed call each other, in sequence around the ring; I’d be given away soon if I knifed one even silently. The signal word I practiced a few times in a whisper. But to go between them I must creep across scorched ground, every movement raising ash-dust, and they were nowhere more than fifteen paces apart. They might not see or hear me; but if they had a lick of sense they’d smell the dust I raised.

Well, so much for that, reasoned one part of my mind, time to go back to bed. Then I thought of the stream: dark, trickling loudly, containing no twigs to snap or dust to raise, the channel it cut in the earth just deep and wide enough to hide someone small and slender. I knew where it ran from my map; doubling back, I hitched my pack high, set my teeth against the cold and lion-crawled in.

Careful not to slip on the slime-covered rocks, I worked my way past the first line of sentries, passing almost within spear’s reach of one; I heard him clear his throat. The second line did not call, being the secret sentries; the first I knew of them was their spear-heads. Just as I was past them I sensed a moving spear, being carried right towards me.

I can’t have been seen, I told myself, freezing; they’d all be calling and running. More likely he was changing with another. He moved at a walk, meaning to cross the stream. If he uses his spear to vault over, I thought, I keep my silence or I’m done; I wonder where on me he’ll plant it. Or if he hears my teeth chattering; I clenched them tight. If a man pisses on you, how do you make the sound it should make in a stream? His footsteps drummed the earth beside my ear; I closed my eyes and turned my head down lest the whites or some spot I’d missed on my face with the soot show white. He leaped right over my back.

I crawled on, aching to the bones, now, with the cold, until I was among the tents; there I lifted myself out, careful not to let the dripping from my clothes make noise. It seemed ten years since I’d left our camp.

The Lakan camp smelled more of horses, and spicy food. There was quiet but for snoring. I foot-groped; in our camp I had known by heart where the guy-ropes were, from having pitched such tents; here every one was different, and closer together than ours, so that I almost did trip over them a few times.

Inkrajen’s quarters loomed against the sky. It had two levels, the ground level a cross, each arm wide and high as a small house, the upper level square-built with a turret-roof, glowing faintly with a light from within which I could see by the softness of the shadows shining through two walls of cloth. Along its corners were the silhouettes of what seemed to be pillars until I saw they were giant tassels. On the ground, one guard stood at each of the eight points of the cross.

I got down again and aimed for a crook of the cross twenty paces of open ground away, telling myself not to be afraid lest they smell my fear. It took me the time it takes to walk from Vae Arahi to Terera, my muscles screaming all the way to leap up and run; I dared not even open my eyes when the wind was not making some sound, nor when the guards were looking my way.

Then, sheltered in the shadows of the corner, I gained bitter intelligence by my gift. Two armed people stood awake in the upper chamber. I understood. He slept not only with light in his room, but two bodyguards.

My heart sank as if it would fall out of me. I should have known before I came it would be impossible, I thought; why would Inkrajen be any more of a fool at night than day? What commander makes an attack on such slight reconnaissance as a glance from a cliff? Having come all that deadly way to no purpose, it almost seemed too much trouble to creep all the way back, having failed. I remembered a story my mother had once told me, from the Enchian wars: in the morning they’d found a young Enchian assassin sitting stone-still in a hiding place in the middle of the Yeoli camp, who gave himself up without resistance, confessing everything in tears. Now I understood why.

But, I knew, I was thinking with emotion rather than thought again. I imagined my friends waking up to find me gone, the faces of my parents as they heard the news, Hurai, cursing my idiocy while he and a smug Inkrajen haggled over the ransom price of one anaraseye, slightly used. It was back, or onward, all, or nothing.

Seizing myself, I thought, I have time before dawn. The two guards are human; sooner or later one of them must visit the latrine.

I cut a slit along the edge between floor and wall of the ground story of the great tent, and crawled through it into darkness like a wall of coal before one’s eyes, that makes them scream for light and in desperation see non-existent dancing shapes. I lay still, just to listen; how many could be sleeping in such a huge tent I could not know, though the Lakan habit of sleeping with a dagger under the pillow helped. The air was thick with scent. I felt canvas floor, a quilt, a hard shape beneath it; that stirred, with a man’s low grunt, turning me to ice. I think it was his knee.

Groping my way around them towards the center I found a canvas wall, with a door-flap edged with small tassels, which I opened just enough to fit through. It followed that in a tent big as a building there should be corridors; sure enough, I was in one now, which formed a square around the central chamber. At one corner of the square was the one doorway to the outside, from which a ladder of painted wood led upward; but knowing that a Lakan on guard holds his spear in his right hand and wears his sword on his left hip, I could tell the two guards above both faced it.

Somewhere there had to be tent-poles. Feeling at the corners of the central room I found through the satin the hardness of wood. The upper chamber was supported on four posts at each corner. Delicately I cut my way in; here there was enough light leaking through chinks in the floor of the upper chamber to see shapes and light-catching things. Before me lay a wooden cage, centered in the room; in it on satin bedding slept a Lakan boy who by the line of his shoulder was about my age, wearing a golden arm-ring a finger-width thick. Some favored slave, I guessed, and had no more thought for him but that he must not wake. He could not attack me, nor I him, other than by throwing blades through the bars, but he could call the alarm.

I climbed halfway up the pole and felt around its top. This wall was attached to the edge of the platform planks with knotted ropes, and the canvas ceiling of the corridor likewise joined. I felt the outer wall of cloth; it had two layers, canvas and netting, fixed at the base only by silken cords tied in bows. Around the sleeping chamber was a promenade, to be opened in fine weather. No doubt he ran battles from it.

The boy tossed; around his neck he wore a collar that was either counterfeit or worth an anaraseye’s ransom. I untied knots, quickly. On the balcony, it struck me, my silhouette might be visible from outside. Not that the guards would think to look up here; that would require admitting to themselves that an intruder had crossed the ground in front of their eyes, a lapse warranting death. Still, I kept flat on the planks. Inside someone shifted his weight, making the floor creak. So often in life one finds oneself blessing the same thing one has cursed some other time; now I was thankful I was young, and light.

I lion-crawled to behind the shadow of what I guessed was a tall and grand headboard—the bed centered between the two guards—and turned my dagger over to use its unused edge. A blade must be sharp, to cut through silk both fast and quietly. I knelt, careful not to creak the floor, and waited.

Time passed, and my senses went sharper still. I counted how many times they shifted, how many times they raised water-cups, swallowed, then quietly put them down, blessing each draught; what goes in must come out. A breeze flopped the canvas and the flags, creaked the ropes; then it stilled, letting the calls of the guards sound clear from all around, even the distant ones. Somewhere a baby bawled; satin swished, a different sound than canvas. Time passed. Cold found me again, tonguing me through my mail-shirt from my sodden sweater; I drove calm and warmth outward into my skin by will. Time passed, and my legs and ankles went stiff; fearing they would lock too tightly to move when the moment came, I gingerly shifted.

Time passed; I counted my breaths, had to shift again. Time passed, and I ran through my multiplication tables, poetry I’d memorized, lines from the statutes of Yeola-e, obscene songs. Time passed and I loosed all my blades in their scabbards and told myself fairy tales. Time passed and I felt I had to piss myself, but told myself firmly that I had drunk nothing so it was not truly necessary. Time passed and I got thirstier and wondered if these men had bladders of steel and how far off dawn was; might I have to sneak all the way back out without an attempt, and try it again tomorrow night?

Time passed, and I imagined myself sitting here all night and through into the day, so silent no one would find me, and indeed all through the war; when they dismantled the tent they’d just roll me up with the poles, and when it was pitched anew I would be sitting here still all through every night of the war, waiting for one of Inkrajen’s guards to piss.

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