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.