39 - Ten thousand Lakans

The fastest learning, say the sages, comes with the truth that shatters the mind; one is changed forever after, for one can only go on after a rebuilding. But like skin tightening before it splits, the mind resists. So I had to run the words through my head a few more times, before its meaning came clear. What Hurai had said came back, clear as yesterday: if we do this and there is no agreement, we will have to kill them. Ten thousand—though I’d seen them gathered, suddenly I could no longer understand how many that was.

“Emao-e… krachaseye…” As we rode away, I could barely get words out for the dryness of my mouth. “Why didn’t you try to talk him into going back to the king one more time?”

“What are you talking about?” she said. “You heard; his word is immovable as stone. You think he didn’t mean it?”

“Chevenga,” said Hurai, “I told you if there was no agreement we’d have to kill them. Why didn’t you believe me?” I couldn’t answer.

In command council, their faces all seemed grim, but not as if they were feeling as I was, shocked to emptiness as if everything inside my skin was gone. “Well, lad,” Emao-e said to me after she’d call. “You recall that so far, every idea you’ve had that we’ve used that you could enact, we’ve had you enact.”

I must have been pale; the world was fading in and out. I looked from one face to another, for mercy, I guess, to be spared from this; but we were just doing what we had always done, and they all agreed. “Take a deep breath, put your head down and have your emotion for a bit, lad,” Emao-e said. “Then we have work to do.”

They waited patiently while I did. Then I thought out how we’d do it, with their assistance, and when we were done I went back to my tent. “Cheng, are you all right?” said Mana, his red-brown brows peaking with concern. “You look as if you’ve looked into the face of Shininao.” How often people say the most apt thing by chance.

A jabber like in a market debate erupted, when I told them. Sachara fumed at the madness; Krero shrugged and reminded us we’d killed so many in the war already; Nyera wondered how we would do it. Mana laid his hand on my shoulder. “Cheng… it’s hardly your fault.”

You know me so well, I thought, very cold and clearly; but not well enough, who I will have to be. “I never told you whose idea it was, to threaten them,” I said, in barely more than a whisper. “Mine.”

His face froze, and he stepped back, his hand falling off my shoulder. I heard camp noises all around, the slap of a rope, a fly buzzing, someone whetting a spear-head, while their faces all stared silent, eyes white-ringed. I lay face-down on my bedroll, burying my face, the darkness a scant comfort. After a while Mana came to sit with me, saying nothing, just putting his hand on my back.

Today we would march the Lakans to a plateau a half-day east, have them dig a trench and a mound-wall in a circle around their camp, telling them it would be the bounds of their prison, while in truth it would be their grave. It touched slavery; but one could argue that it was something they did for their own sakes. Then we would poison the common pot from which they ate, with white arsenic from the copperworks in Arahameno, which we’d send a fast rider for.

They had a Haian, who had insisted on staying with them. Of course we must not kill him; but he would no doubt warn them, if we told him. I’d seen a way: like all Haians, he was a vegetarian; already we had supplied meals just for him when the common fare had meat. We need only put the poison in a meat stew.

We formed them up and got them to shoulder bedrolls and tentrolls. Even in ranks of ten, their column faded hazy in the heat. “No emotion in their sight,” Hurai, who’d been assigned to officially lead the detachment that would march them away to where we’d kill them. “Think what would happen if they guessed.” I closed my face tight, though I felt unreal almost to dizziness. I was close enough to see each one as a man now, with their varying expressions—endurance, shame, fear, anger, hope, even the odd youthful laugh or defiant stare—on their brown faces, and each carrying its character, its cares, its scars, the story of a life, the resemblance to parents and siblings.

All serfs, half-enslaved to their landlords at home, brought to this war by levy; those who did choose to come, I thought, we’ve let get away, because it brought us money, because Astyardk cared whether they lived or died, unlike these. On the march, a few did make runs for it, and we shot them down.

On the plateau we set them to work digging the trench. Work was something they knew well how to do, settling into a comfortable pace, setting rhythm for the shoveling with songs. Starting the next day we dropped them to half-days, letting them off when the sun was highest and hottest; finding and bringing the poison took whomever did it four days.

On the morning of the fifth day, Hurai sent Perha down with orders to our cooks: feed the Lakans half-portions for breakfast and nothing again until evening, so they will eat eagerly and much.

I must be hard with my heart, I thought. “Who are they?” I asked myself, looking down on their camp. “Levied or not, any of them would have cut any of us down without a thought, if he could. I’ve seen that many and more die in this war, without a blink. Why should I care any more for these now? It is not even by us their lives are thrown away, but their own king.”

We raised the command-post on the mountain above the plateau, but camped our warriors in a bowl on the other side of the ridge behind. After training I tried to sleep, but my eyes would not close. I told myself stories, studied, read; but even so, the coming of evening pressed heavy on my skin and body, a mass too vast to bear looking at, nameless, inexorable, growing worse as the sun crossed the sky. It didn’t matter whose fault it was; ten thousand people would die tonight.

The end of the afternoon came, as it must, and the head cook reported.

Now as I stood beside Hurai he explained to her all that had happened, and what she must do. She went pale, but saluted; war-cooks are still warriors, and she could tell herself, “I have been commanded.” The poison would be brought in like a delivery from Kantila. All the cooks must be told, since they must add it, but the scullions would be commanded only not to taste the stew; and as soon as they had served all, the whole kitchen-staff was to march straight to Kantila, though it would be night-time. Hurai wanted them out of earshot, a mercy for those who had done, but not willed. I remember the head-cook was shaken enough to want to sit for a time before she went back down, but Hurai had allowed for that. That was a lesson I learned from him: a good general will think of such things.

Evening came clear and bright, the sun’s descent bringing a gentle coolness that chilled away the haze, while above us cream peaks turned to flame against purple sky. So many strange peaks I had slept below since fall; I wondered what the names of these ones were, then thought of Hetharin, and home. Perhaps I can be forgiven, for wishing I were there, now. Below us, the trench and mound-wall were a clean circle, around a ragged quilt of motley tents. Now and then the valley breeze carried up to us, mixed with the scents of pine and meadow hearts’-ease, the homey smell of garlic-mutton stew. In the same pattern as always, the food-lines formed.

Hurai wrote out something on a waxboard, and showed it to me: an order signed and sealed, to pull the sentries as soon as the Lakans were finished eating; they would no longer be needed. It was an order the commander wouldn’t take just on a messenger’s word. “And the Haian,” he told Ina, who was to take it. “You know what to say to him.” That was, one of our people was deadly ill, we had no Haian here, and could we beg him to come up.

We had to get him away; when the poison took effect, they’d probably tear him to shreds, putting his blood on our hands in the view of Haiu Menshir. “You also know what to do if he refuses,” Hurai added. If he was anything like our Haian, I saw, the Lakans were his companions, his helpers in the infirmary, his friends; he must have healed hundreds in this war, and to a Haian, of course, patients are sacred. In one stroke we would undo his work of months, perhaps years. He might have to be brought away by force.

The sun reddened and the wind died. A great height is not so great a distance as it seems, so sound comes from further than one would think. I heard the quiet buzz of a thousand conversations, someone hammering a tent-stake, and from here and there, mixed together, the songs they sung, to keep their spirits up. Somehow one had kept a stringed instrument, for on the barely-moving air I heard faint plucking. Most were finished eating; it was done.

I saw the speck that was Ina begin up the path, with the Haian, black in his robe with the two broad white stripes; he’d believed the story. Haians tend to be trusting. When they were most of the way up, our sentries moved off the mound-wall, formed up and began running the path to camp. “Pack up,” Hurai ordered the command-post staff. I was doing that when he barked my name.

I saw the Haian, his face in the typical mold, flat and chip-eyed and copper-hued; his black hair hung long, straight-cut as usual at the ends. He was in a sweat from climbing in a hurry, his bag in hand; I could read the thought on his face, “Someone is dying; why have I been brought before this general?”

“Do you speak Yeoli?” Hurai asked him in Enchian. He answered “No,” on which Hurai called two guards away from the packing. “If he runs, restrain him. Without hurting him, on pain of flogging.” He told the Haian our names and offered him water, which he took with growing puzzlement on his brows. His name he gave as Imenat of Oiroru.

“Haian, we lied to you,” said Hurai. “No one is dying, not here. I am sorry, but it was necessary; you will understand why as I tell you what has happened, and what will.”

I don’t think Imenat believed it at first. His honest brown face seemed to be straining, as if to hear clearly. Finally he said, in a calm voice, “That’s impossible.”

“No,” said Hurai. “It’s done.” The Haian sprang to his feet then, making the guards tense, and gazed down at the Lakan camp, which looked no different from before. “No,” he said. “No. It’s a lie. It’s madness. You couldn’t do this. They are more than ten thousand!” Of course, he had an accurate count.

“Who have been your patients,” said Hurai. “For that, I am sorry. But it is done. You may stay with us, if you wish; you may go anywhere but down there, where you would be no use anyway. I recommend strongly that you go with these people here to our camp; there you’ll see and hear nothing.”

Somehow that was what made it strike him; and it looked like a death-stroke. For a moment he stood frozen, all the blood draining from his face, leaving it yellow; his bag dropped from his fingers and crashed to the ground, sending glass vials flying out to shatter on the stones, spilling out pilules and bleeding herbal tangs into the air. His body jolted all through; the guards seized him by the arms, and he began screaming.

He didn’t intend to hurt us—he was a Haian—he just let out the words that came to mind. I don’t remember all he called us: inhuman mainlanders, mind-sick brutes, barbarians with no notion of civilization, evil madmen who should all be in restraints. I opened my mouth to answer back that it was Astyardk who had chosen this, but Hurai put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “What does it matter, what he says? We know what is true.”

Then from fury he went without a pause to abasement; falling to his knees in the guards’ arms, and beating his head against their greaves, he begged us to be merciful, as if we could, now. Next he took to shrieking in their direction in Lakan, trying hopelessly to warn them, I guess, or saying farewell as best he could; I heard words which I knew by their tone to be names, and tears poured from his eyes. He vowed we would pay for this, that once Dinerer in Haiuroru heard, there would not be a single Haian left in all Yeola-e in a month; that we should learn what death was, if we gave it out so freely.

One of the guards angrily drew a hand back, and looked at Hurai for permission; Hurai chopped charcoal and made the flogging gesture very forcefully. “Never strike a Haian, as long as you live.” I went back to helping pack, but I could not look away from the Haian even as I worked. After a time, he weakened, and lay spent on the ground, clawing with his delicate hands, and now and then hitting his head against the ground, at which the guards would put their hands under to soften the blows.

“To camp,” Hurai ordered, when all was packed. “You too, healer; you’ve done all you can; call this a battle, that you can have no part in.” Imenat answered that these people had been his patients, and he would watch them die; so he stayed, and Hurai commanded the two guards to stay also. He himself went to the slope’s edge, and knelt in the warrior’s kneel, facing the valley.

He had not ordered me either to stay or go. Not a chance that he’d forgotten, not Hurai. He was leaving the choice to me. As I tightened packstraps on Samo’s shoulders, I glanced past his head to the mountain’s spine; beyond that, safe from sight, safe from sound, lay our camp.

I looked down again at the Lakans, still standing or sitting or lounging, still living in kind ignorance that they were all dead. This is going to leave me changed, I thought, no matter what I choose; I have to accept that. But watching is going to leave me even more changed, and I don’t know whether I am going to like the person it changes me into. Or even know him. I felt sick. If I didn’t watch, I’d have to live the rest of my life knowing I’d refused to watch what I had wrought. The rest of my scrap of life… death is in me, death is all around me, I carry death with me and it spills out of me and takes other people.

I stayed.