49 - in which I refrain, with difficulty, from smirking

It was fall now. I turned seventeen. The war stood still, the Lakans sending home many of their serfs to bring in the harvest; of course many of us had to do the same.

The army had been reconstituted, with many people moving up ranks to replace commanders killed or thumbed, while I’d been away enslaved. In an army that promotes by election, a place cannot be kept even for someone who is expected to be back except at his existing rank, and perhaps not even that. And an anaraseye cannot just be jumped up ranks, but must work his way. Yet Tyeraha, Emao-e and Hurai all felt that the faster I did, the better.

Now a milakraseye’s second who’d been laid up with a festered wound died, leaving the position open. Hurai called me into his tent.

A second is chosen by the commander, with the unit’s approval; the mila was Taisha Nokiri and she was well-loved, so the generals figured that whoever she chose, the thousand would go along with. They were reconstituted, a mix of survivors of Kantila and fresh troops; the latter would expect her second to be chosen from the former, which would make it a little easier.

“Taisha’s going to be talked into it,” Hurai told me. “But not by me—by you. That’s an order. To which she is not, and won’t be, party, by the way.”

I could have argued, by saying that an order whose fulfillment depended on the choice of another person besides me wasn’t a fair order, but I didn’t. I knew what he was thinking; if I wasn’t up to persuading her to choose me as her second, I wasn’t up to being her second. I had a feeling Tyeraha and Emao-e were with him on this.

As I went to Taisha’s tent, I was suddenly very aware of the sparseness of my hair. It had grown out a little since it had been hacked down almost to nothing by Klajen’s minions, but to even it up Mana had had to take it down all over to a finger-width long, hardly enough to show it was curly. But you can’t put on your helmet for such a meeting. I felt acutely the holes in my earlobes, from my slave-earrings, too; they’d stopped hurting, but still showed as small red scars.

I was no longer the proud bearer of Chirel, either. A wise chakrachaseye will have good spare swords on hand for new elite warriors joining whose families don’t have or can’t afford one, or those, like me, who somehow lose the family blade on the field. Thus I was issued one, along with armour, as soon as I got back, and quickly had a shoulder-scabbard made for it. It was good, but it was no Chirel.

All these things I tried not to think about as I waited for Taisha to be finished the business that had come before me. She was a milakraseye who was happy to stay a milakraseye, feeling it fit her mind and heart to command that many, no less and no more. She was at least three times my age, and had fought in the Enchian wars; with distinction, I’d heard, and the glittering of her collar attested. She had a square, severe face, tanned with the deep tan, lasting even through winter, that a person gets who is out in the sun all the time. Two sparse frizzy clouds of gray stood beside her temples, her hair otherwise brown and tied neatly back in a club.

“You next,” she said to me when my turn came, in the voice unthinkingly accustomed to command that a person only gets from doing it for twenty or thirty years. I was going to try to acquire it fast. She cocked her head and stared at me quizzically. “Fourth Chevenga?”

“Yes. I know I look… a little different.”

“Well, war changes us all. I know you were captured honourably, I hope you didn’t suffer too much in their hands , and I commend you for arranging to be ransomed for a bargain. What may I do for you?”

“Well… I know—I don’t know how close you were to your second, but my condolences—I know the position is in need—”

“Of filling and so you’d like to fill it,” she said.

Of course it’s that obvious, I thought; why else would I be here? My hair seemed very short, suddenly, the ear-scars very red and the sword very much not Chirel. “Em… yes.”

“To do that, Fourth Chevenga, I would have to pass over five setakraseyel who’ve been fighting under me through most or all of this war. Now you know—or maybe you don’t, yet—how it goes in such a case; out of five, on average, two are happy to be seta for life, two would like to be promoted someday, don’t feel ready yet, and yet would accept if they were asked, and one feels that he’s capable and would be promoted right now if life were just. So you have to persuade me not only that you’d be good enough, but sufficiently better than three other setal who are capable that it would be worth frustrating the one who’s itching. Go ahead.” She sat down on her folding stool, and fixed her eyes on me.

I found myself tongueless all of a sudden, thinking, all the best things I’ve done, she already knows, because everyone does. But I had to say something. “I… what you don’t know, probably, is that I didn’t just command against the mamokal—that was four-hundred and fifty people—but conceived the plan in all its details—”

“I knew that.”

“I’ve conceived quite a lot that people don’t know about, apprenticing for Hurai and sitting in on command council—”

“I heard that it was your idea to threaten to kill those ten thousand prisoners; is that true?”

I signed chalk. And I came up with the way of killing them. I decided not to mention that. “But maybe you didn’t know it was me who found the Kadrini pike-method, that’s worked so well, in a Lakan general-craft book.”

“That I admit I didn’t; but how does it make you the best second?”

“Well… I…” I suddenly found myself annoyed, and it cut through the nervousness like a splash of cold water on the face. What was wrong here? Why was I so tongue-tied? It came to me; I’d been so immersed in shame in Laka, had so much of it thrust down my throat, that some of it at least was still in me. I shook myself like a dog throwing off water.

“Look, milakraseye Taisha, everything you know I’ve done, you know,” I said. “I quote Hurai Kadari, ‘The person who has the gift of finding ways to bring victory single-handed is rare, but we are blessed to have one,’ meaning me; you can confirm that with him. You can ask Emao-e too, what she thinks of me, or any of the generals. Or you can look at this”—I ran my finger across the sparkling of decorations on my collar—“because it’s all here. Of course I’m sufficiently good to be worth frustrating the seta who’s itching. How can you doubt that?”

She looked at me sternly for a moment; then a smile played around her lips. “Boasting goes against the grain for you, doesn’t it, lad?”

“Yes.” I took a deep breath. “Yes, it does.”

“Listen, and take this as a lesson. War is full of things that go against the grain, as you’ve learned. The thing a warrior must learn is to have no grain, so nothing goes against it. That way you are entirely free, you see that?” I signed chalk. It was another way of saying what Azaila always said, that the perfect state in which to fight is equanimity as untouched as a pond with no ripples; not that I’d attained that. Probably I wouldn’t live long enough.

“Sometimes, you have to boast,” said Taisha. “Sometimes it’s best. Say you are somewhere where, for some reason, you have to make a call to arms in some place where no one knows you. You want to convince them to obey your orders, you have to convince them you know what you’re doing. Or you’re in some place where it’s intimidate the enemy or die; things the like of what you’ve done scare the shit out of enemies—if they’re presented right.”

Again a grin quirked one end of her lips. “Or you get an order from a general to go talk a mila into making you her second. It’s invaluable there.”

I stared at her, feeling the two points on my cheeks burning, and so knowing they’d gone red. She laughed. “Ah, don’t worry, my child. There’s no conspiracy between him and me, to set you up. I only know because he did this same thing with your dad, some twenty years ago.”

All my breath heaved out of me. Maybe she hoped she’d strike me speechless, but the perfect answer to this came to me. “Did you choose him as your second?”

She laughed again. “Of course. As I choose you—subject of course to the thousand’s approval.”

They chalked it by a good majority, and if the seta who was itching felt hard done by, she never showed it. (Taisha told me which one she was.) After the vote and introduction assembly, I did with all the setal and their seconds what a Yeoli officer does to let warriors get to know him: shared a campfire, ate, drank, sparred everyone who wanted to spar me and gave myself to everyone who wanted to have me. We Yeolis know how to forge ourselves into one.

Next day I called the drill as a new second traditionally does. At the end of it I felt ready to face a million Lakans, if Astyardk sent them. I wanted to pester the generals. We were shorthanded but so were they; why wait? Then the Lakans called parley, and as usual I went in the escort.

After all the usual royal-message pomp, the Lakan herald read: “My King Astalaz son of Astyardk, Blessed Hand of Parshahask, Soul of Gold in the Eternal Gaze, Light in the Eye of She of Destruction”—and so on—“requests a cease to all hostilities and to meet in good faith with the Regent Queen of Yeola-e to negotiate a reasonable peace.”

We must all have looked like gaffed fish. Hurai spoke my thought: “Son of Astyardk? Only one way that happens in Laka, that I’ve ever heard.” By “Regent Queen” I realized they meant Tyeraha. Meanwhile Emao-e had our herald ask for a direct parley with Arzaktaj, with an escort of one. He brought one of his aides; Steel-Eyes took me.

“Pardon me, General, but I didn’t quite hear the name of the sender, only ‘son of Astyardk’; I heard that correctly, did I not?” Emao-e said, in her most polite and formal Enchian.

“Astalaz son of Astyardk,” Arzaktaj said, in his thickly Lakan-accented Enchian. “He is the eldest of the late King’s sons.”

“Late King? He came to grief… somehow?”

“He did,” the Lakan general said, tightly. It would come out how, soon enough, by other ways.

“And Asta…lasa… wishes to parley directly with our semanakraseye, I understood that right?”

“Yes, General.”

No need to ask Tyeraha, Emao-e decided; I felt the same myself. If the Lakan king was willing to come all the way here for peace-talks, he truly wanted peace. “That is agreeable to us, General. No hostilities on our part indefinitely”—she took her crystal—“as sworn by myself as chakrachaseye, second Fire come if I am forsworn, if you will be so good as to swear no less strongly.” The Lakan did it with the usual miming of striking off parts of his own body.

Would they go so far as the other cease-fighting tradition? Emao-e unslung her dagger in its sheath and handed it to me; Arzaktaj did the same, handing it to his aide, who took off all his weapons and his helmet. I did likewise. “Remember you go down on one knee and present it on the back of your shield-hand, crosswise,” Emao-e whispered.

Arzaktaj’s aide and I crossed on the open ground between the two parties, matching our steps. I went down on one knee before Arzaktaj, seeing for the first time how ornately he liked to dress and that his hair-earrings were a good half-arm long. I put Emao-e’s dagger on the back of my shield-hand and presented it to him with my hand crosswise, so the blade was pointing at no one. Behind me his aide was doing likewise with Emao-e. “Thank you,” Arzaktaj said, and took it in a stiffly formal way. “Prince Fourth J’vengka.” My shoulder-scabbard, my youth’s build and my decorations identified me to him at least.

Then he went still, his eyes fixing on me, studying. His black brows lowered and darkened, as he took in the shorn hair, and the scars in my earlobes. I could see him thinking, I tallied up our ransom earnings, and I never saw the amount a prince is worth.

Do not smirk do not smirk do not smirk do not smirk, I intoned to myself. He said nothing. I turned and matched my steps to his aide’s again.

“Good,” said Emao-e as I returned to her side. “There’s a fair chance, my lad, that the war is over.”