40 - Never forget what you're doing

Thus it began, in silence, to end as it began, in silence. Only five witnessed it. I will try as best I can to describe the indescribable.

We had forbidden them fires or lamps, but allowed them candles; now a thousand tiny flecks of flame sprouted among the tents, pinpricks in the dying sun. Presently some of the people, on the outer edges, noticed they were unguarded, and a few crept out and into the woods, dark shapes against the dried earth; others called friends to join them, and a whispered debate half-quieted the camp. Then came the first vomiting and moans turning into cries.

Naturally, the poison did not strike all at once, but started with those who’d been first in the food-lines. Exclamations rose from here and there, all over, and all conversation died but frantic yelling. I cannot imagine what it must have been for them, to see one of their number sicken and lie down, then ten, then a hundred, until it became clear none would be spared, and they understood what had been done to them.

One needed no Lakan to understand the curses against us, the pleas to their gods. As it worsened, the camp fell into madness. A gout of flame spouted, where a candle knocked over had set a tent on fire; then another. A few Lakans, then a crowd, swarmed into and then out of the trench and down the slope towards Laka, as if escape lay there, or anywhere on earth; others knelt, as Lakans sometimes do to pray, lay down and beat their heads against the earth, or ran aimlessly. Some took out their rage on each other with their fists; others clung together.

Still others seized up torches, shovels, tent-poles, whatever they could find, and set off up this path, which they knew led to where our command post had been. It was a good fifty at first, that soon swelled to about three hundred, all giving the Lakan warcry. We all looked to Hurai; not being an experienced poisoner, he looked to me, who had done the research. “I think it’s too high,” I said, my saliva gone thick as gum. “Exertion speeds up the effects.” Hurai gave the order to be ready to retreat if we must; we need not fight them.

More than half of those who were coming after us were down before they’d got a quarter of the way; we saw the bushes beside the path shake with their throes in the deepening night. But many got close enough for their dark faces to became visible, twisted as if with madness, streaked with tears and sweat. Their chests heaved, the waryells now broken between sobbing breaths, full of pain and fatigue; fingers clawed at rocks and grass. One would crumple gasping, clutching at his stomach, and let out a cry of frustration and grief while the others left him behind, or crawl a little further, his eyes still burning on us, until the throes took him. The last were the best, the strongest; one could see how it spurred them, to see us standing calmly.

But their fight was hopeless, being against that which cannot be fought; the death-blow had been slipped into them without their knowing long before, and their spirit earned them nothing but the bitterer grief of failing by a lesser margin. I remember one could have been a champion if he’d been trained, built like a dark oaken statue of the athlete’s ideal, who pulled himself to within thirty paces of us; with his last strength he threw his tent-pole like a spear. When he saw it fall short, the poison seized him, as if he’d let it.

Imenat was crying again, his close wail loud against the distant ones; when one of the guards with him offered him a drink, he threw out the water and thrust the cup back, spitting. Darkness fell deep enough to hide the plateau from our sight, but for the tent-fires that were many now, spreading, and the black silhouettes moving before them, almost as if they were dancing.

The noise changed, the thousands and thousands of cries growing louder and losing words, fear and anger fading into the pure outpouring of life that any sentient thing gives as life is torn from it. It was nothing like a battle; there, one hears war cries as well, victory shouts, the clash of weapons which mean at least that everyone has a chance. This was like the death-howl of a single great animal with ten thousand mouths, that has eaten poison bait and now dies by parts. Sometimes in the dark of night when my thoughts are not entirely mine to direct, I still hear it.

It took me apart, as if it were reaching into me. I didn’t even know at first, wondering where the gasping sobs were coming from when they were not Imenat’s, the guards were standing steady and Hurai never cried, until I recognized them as my own. Then I had to lie flat on the ground, same as the healer.

After a while I calmed, though the noise from below did not, and I wondered how heartless I was to have ceased crying while their deaths continued. Hurai was kneeling beside me. “Why feel so?” he said. “Why cry? What fault is it of yours? If it is true what you said, their fate is in Astyardk’s hands, not ours. It is he who has killed them, if you were right. What are these tears then?”

It was hard to find words, in the wordless din. “For them!” I finally got out. “For their deaths! How could he? How can he call himself their leader, and allow this? For his cursed land-greed, he sent them here and threw their lives away! Ten thousand! How can he sleep at night? Why isn’t he crying for them, when I am? He won’t, so Saint Mother accept me, I will!”

“Why?” he cut in. “They aren’t your people to cry for; they’re his. He’s a king, not a semanakraseye, and kings do this sort of thing; we all know that. How many Yeolis do you think they’ve killed, between their ten thousand? Saint Mother, this is war, lad. You never shed a tear striking them down in battle.”

“But they aren’t fighting! They’re defeated, weaponless, helpless! Hurai, should I feel nothing? Is that what you’re telling me? They have families, wives, children, who are losing them forever! And we did it! I did it! I thought of it!” I turned my face into the earth again, and filled my fists with my own hair.

He said, “Are you asking yourself ‘what has Astyardk made me into?’ ”

I lifted my head, put my hands out on the ground before me. Their familiar shape shone black against the flames below, and the wet warmth that slicked them seemed to be blood.

“He has made you into nothing different, Chevenga. You are what you were yesterday, the one who conceived a plan, one of whose branches we are now enacting. If he alone decreed that it should turn out this way, how is it your fault? Do you plan to carry these deaths on your shoulders—if so, why not all the others you’ve caused? This is war. We are all defending our nation, and our hands are all red. We didn’t attack. We only did what Saint Mother permitted us, when she gave us the sword, and what we consented to do, when we lifted it. You conceived, and you conceived well, else we wouldn’t be doing it. We stood to gain, either way; it’s ten thousand less Lakans to plague us, after all, Astyardk’s bound to catch some trouble for it, at home, and it’ll sap the morale of all of them. We did what we chose, carried it through, and now it is done. Why regret?”

I could not answer, except with tears. He had to use his commander’s voice to be heard; Imenat was screaming again, from the ground where the guards were now wrestling him. “Because you are gentle-hearted, Chevenga? Is that it, do you call yourself that? More so than I, who watch this with dry eyes? Yet you were ruthless enough to suggest it. Which are you? Which is the truth inside you? One day”—he tapped the back of my sword-hand—“these hands will carry it all, these hands will enact every choice for Yeola-e in time of war. You will have to learn what you are, or more exactly, decide.”

Into the screaming fire-pit below, he pointed. “Weep, then; you’re right to, in truth. Weep for them, and know what war means. Weep for them, and grow up.” A voice that I could only hear in memory, but which touched me much deeper, spoke. Never forget what you’re doing.

So I lay and let the waves of weeping take me, as did Imenat, until the death-howl of the Lakans, which sustained loud and steady for a long time, faded into silence. That night seemed years. I did not sleep; my thoughts were waking nightmares.

Reveille came at the first paling of sky, not dawn; the day would be hot as usual and the sooner we got them buried, the better.

On the plateau, a brown mottled mass lay spread over the land, lying in and over the trenches like a liquid spill half-congealed, here and there charred black. We found the first corpse, of that athletic man, on the path, and more as we descended.

They lay tangled in the tents and each other, limbs twisted and faces contorted; where there had been fire, some were burned to raw red flesh, some blackened. We scared the birds off them, but there was nothing to do against the flies, or the stink of open latrine that was everywhere. We were a thousand; each pair need carry twenty to the trench, Hurai ordered, and no more. My thought had been that this would get it done quicker than a plain command of double-time, since everyone would want to get it over with, and would race each other to get the nearest ones.

I had the luck to be paired with a woman from Leyere who was all jokes. “Let every dirt-brown army come to us this way!” she said cheerily as we worked. “They’re easier to deal with, don’t you think, anaraseye?” Not for her, to lower a corpse respectfully into the grave by climbing down; everyone else was tossing them, she reasoned, so we’d end up rooting through the forest searching to make our twenty if we didn’t do likewise. Or else she’d pretend to pick wax out of their ears and eat it (switching fingers, of course), and ask me with envy that made me sick to my stomach what their deaths had looked like.

Then, in a moment that my hands were not full, I heard my name in a voice and a lilting Enchian I knew. Imenat threw himself down in front of me, clasping my knees, and begged me weeping for something I couldn’t at first understand. “Spare them, don’t kill them, I beg you, for mercy’s sake, for the sake of whatever divine thing, if any, you believe in, I beg you…”

“Spare who?” I thought we’d killed them all.

“The infirmary,” he gasped. “Some are still alive there. They had no appetite… Prince, Heir, whatever you are, please, I beg you!”

By proper procedure, I should have told him, “You are begging the wrong person; I am only a general’s apprentice,” and kept working. Instead I ran to the infirmary with him, my Leyereri partner following, cursing me.

It was like seeing someone return to the burned ruins of his home; he knew his way through the devastation. As we entered the large tent that was the bed-quarters, it was as if he found a new flame licking at the last sound beam. He ran screaming to where a Yeoli had raised a sword, and fearlessly grabbed his arm, too fast for me to stop; the Yeoli yelled and had his dagger a finger-width from Imenat’s stomach when he realized it was a Haian and pulled the blow. “Stand down!” I ordered, and he backed off and sheathed both, staring at me.

There were several people with blades drawn, seeing a quick way to complete their twenty. Even those patients who looked capable of resisting lay still, as if they had no argument with death; in the bed beside me lay a round-faced youth who could not have been more than seventeen, his eyes alive but staring sightlessly upward, as if the soul behind them were turned to stone. The words tore out of me. “Chen! All of you stand down!”

I could think of nothing to say, when they all looked at me, but, “By whose permission do you do this?” It was only afterward that it occurred to me it might well be Hurai’s.

It turned out it was no one’s. “Wasn’t it the plan, to kill them all?” a man answered. “We’re just finishing off.”

“Nine-thousand nine-hundred and seventy dead Lakans out there,” said someone else, “what’s another thirty in here?”

“You cannot do this without consent of the General First,” I said, though not without a quick glance around to see if any of the warriors were higher-ranked than I, which none were. “I will check with him. Not a drop of blood is to be shed until I get back, and perhaps not even then. So go somewhere else and find some bodies that are deader—no wait… you and you, stay here, and tell anyone else who comes my order.” Bringing Imenat along, I ran to find Hurai, who was carrying corpses like everyone else, and directing at the same time.

While the Haian pleaded on his knees, Hurai looked over his head straight at me. “He came right to you, didn’t he? No fools, these Haians.”

He spat into the dust, always a sign, with him, that he was persuaded. “Let them go home and tell the story, then, it will make it worse for Astyardk. But same as with all your ideas, Chevenga; you are in charge of it. Now get lost.” By the time we got back to the infirmary, the stone-eyed youth was gone; people had been taking those who looked like corpses. I hope at least they gave them the grace-stroke, so none were left to smother among the dead. The surviving Lakans were twenty-two in number.

We spread quicklime over the corpses, then earth. In the sun, the shovel I held still seemed warm, from their hands. There was not enough time for us to entirely fill and mound the tomb; that work, Emao-e later contracted to the villages nearby. We finished by early afternoon, bathed in the river as thoroughly as we ever had in our lives, and then marched back to Kantila, carrying the twenty-two. I found an empty house in Kantila for Imenat to use as an infirmary. As the Lakans healed, I secretly freed them one by one.

A stone stele was raised on the ring-mound. Whenever I visit Kantila, I go there, so I remember the epitaph.

“In this circle lie ten thousand Lakans, their names too many to know, captured in Kantila by Yeolis under the command of Emao-e Lazaila on etesora 11, 1544, slain by Yeolis under the command of Hurai Kadari on etesora 16, by reason of the will of their king, Astyardk, who would return not even a finger-width of Yeoli land for all their lives.

May reason bring peace to the living as death has brought peace to the dead.”