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.