‘Must we so?’ said the
oldest of the elders, a woman whose silver hair fell past her waist, and whose
face was lined deeply as the very old of other kinden were, and not simply
become taut and gaunt as most Mantis became with the years. ‘We know all of
this already, Tisamon, and yet we ask ourselves
if
we should resist. For what would be the good? We cannot hold back time any
longer. It has been five hundred years since the Days of Lore and the greatness
of our race. We have dwindled and withered since, and become a pale ghost of
the warriors we once were. Look at us now with unclouded eyes, and you will see
a dying people.’ She paused and eyed him before continuing.
‘Where once we were
sovereign and unchallenged, now we become adulterated with every generation.
Our young men set sail not for sacred Parosyal but for the harbours of Kes to
sell themselves as mercenaries. They turn their backs on their homes for the
touted wonders of Collegium, the grimy wealth of Helleron. The Beetles cut wood
at the edge of our forests and poison us with their gold, which buys those
parts of us we cannot sell. Their peddlers visit our Holds and bewitch our
young with their toys and their gauds, and they take their gold back from us
again, without ever returning to us what we sold. We are become their shadows,
become the savages that they take us for. Each generation is less than the
last, until soon we shall be nothing but beggars sitting before their tables,
bartering thousand-year skills for what crumbs they deign to give us. Faced
with that, Tisamon, can you not see that a good clean death at the hands of
warriors
might be preferable. Let the Wasp-kinden destroy
us, and finish the work that all the years have been doing. At least we can
then die as the brave die.’
Tisamon knelt before
them with head bowed, and Tynisa, craning her head around the doorpost, thought
he was defeated. She felt the weight of their words herself, and she did not
even belong to these people. Tisamon had one shot left, though.
‘I shall take a boat
east along the coast,’ he announced.
‘For what purpose?’
asked the Loquae.
‘To see their army, and
discover whether it is at Merro or Egel, or elsewhere,’ he said. ‘To see, that
is all.’
‘And what then?’
‘Then I shall return,’
he said. ‘I will have a plan, by then, a proposal. Will you hear it?’
‘We can do no less,’ she
said, ‘though we shall likely do no more. I imagine you will do what you think
is right.’ Her eyes narrowed at the thought of where Tisamon’s judgement had
led him in the past.
They made camp that
evening in a half-burned Wayhouse, which seemed to Salma like a physical mirror
to his own thoughts of late. There were a dozen charred corpses within that
they hauled out and burned properly outside. It seemed likely that the
destruction was Wasp work, for the Way Brothers kept rest-houses all over the
Lowlands, and they turned nobody away and maintained only peace within their
walls. Many a bandit had used them as a place of refuge, so they were seldom
robbed or attacked by thieves either. The Wasps obviously had no such
traditions, and Salma found it easy to imagine a scouting or foraging party
descending on the place, killing, looting and then setting a half-hearted fire
as they left. There was a Wasp army on the long road to Sarn, north of them,
and Wasp soldiers were neither the most disciplined nor the most restrained.
It had pushed him to a
decision, and before dusk he had lit some torches, and then stood on Sfayot’s
wagon to address his followers.
They had gained well
over four dozen since the defence of the village, so that Salma now had to
pause before matching a name to a face for many of them. There were villagers
that had actually followed after them, stout young men and women looking for
something more than subsistence farming. Then there was the Fly-kinden
engineer, and her whole extended family, who had fled Helleron before the Wasps
seized it; the five Sarnesh crossbowmen who must have been deserters from some
mercenary company; a lean old Spider-kinden archer and hunter who went on ahead
each morning to stalk game; a Moth woman with a haunted face who had not given
her name or said a single word to anyone since joining them.
He glanced at Nero, who
nodded encouragingly, though the Fly did not know what he was going to say.
Salma was not entirely
sure of that himself. What scared him was that they were now all listening,
waiting for it. He looked from face to face: at the Fly gangers still clustered
together, the escaped slaves, the bandits, their leader Phalmes with his arm
about Sfayot’s eldest. The pair had slept together the night after the defence
of the village, but Sfayot himself had not seemed to mind. ‘He’s strong that
one, in lots of ways,’ the Roach-kinden had said of Phalmes. ‘She could do
worse for a while.’
‘You’ve followed me this
far,’ Salma began to address them. ‘I didn’t ask you to. I didn’t ask to be
your guide or your leader, but here we are, all of us, and it seems to me we
cannot go on like this. We cannot just drift aimlessly and finally end up
beached somewhere not of our choosing. We need direction. Thus far you have
looked to me for that. So from now, if you will let me, I will accept the
mantle you have offered. I will offer you leadership, purpose and direction.
Let me tell you what direction I would be taking you, though. Then you may not
wish to continue with me, but we will see.’
He left a pause there.
How did this come about?
He had no answer but, as he said,
here they all were.
‘Sfayot,’ Salma
indicated, and the Roach-kinden man nodded. ‘If we came across more of your
family, you would want to help them wouldn’t you?’
‘Of course,’ the Roach
said. ‘No question.’
‘Of course,’ Salma
echoed, ‘because they’re your family. We all understand that. So tell me . . .’
He looked over at the Fly youths and singled one out. ‘Chefre, if we ran into
more of your gang, you’d want to look after them, surely?’
She nodded cautiously,
saying nothing. They were close-mouthed, that lot.
‘You would,’ Salma
confirmed, ‘because there are ties and obligations. That is what makes us who
we are. And Phalmes, I have spoken to you. I feel I know you. You cannot escape
who you are or where you come from. If we met a Mynan on the road, a man of
your city, you would aid him. You would have done so even before you fell in
with us. Can you deny it?’
‘I cannot, nor would I,’
Phalmes said clearly, though wondering where this was going.
‘Family,’ Salma stressed
for them. ‘Family is family, whether it’s blood, or brotherhood, or
citizenship, or even kinden. And we look after our family, and they look after
us. I used to think that family was a Commonweal thing, and that only my kinden
really understood it. But that was just because I did not understand what held
the Lowlands together.
Family.
’
He paused, bracing
himself for the mental leap he would have to make.
‘We are all part of the
largest family in the Lowlands, and it is a family that grows larger every day.
It was never small, but it has never been as large as it is now. That family is
the dispossessed, the victims, the cast aside, the ill-used. Look at us all,
from different lands and different cities, different trades and races, and yet
we are all family, and there are thousands of brothers and sisters, uncles,
aunts, children who are our family, and who now need our help. Our help against
the men who would do this to them.’ His sweeping gesture took in the burned
Wayhouse, the cremation pyre. ‘They are our enemies. Let us become theirs.’
‘Just what are you
talking about?’ Phalmes demanded. ‘We can’t exactly take on a Wasp army!’
‘Can’t we?’ Salma said,
and the certainty in his voice shook them. ‘We can attack their scouts, take
their supplies, aid their victims. We can strip the land so they go hungry. We
can nip at them and draw a tiny bead of blood, a hundred ways. We can force
them to change their plans, because of us: divide their forces, hesitate,
falter. Or that is what we shall do if you follow me. We can take the war to
them, without ever meeting them on the battlefield.’
Some of them were aghast
at the idea, some were keen, most were simply bewildered. ‘I shall give you
tonight to consider all I’ve said,’ he told them. ‘Anyone who wishes to find
their own path is free to do so. Those who are still with me in the morning will
have cast their lots in with me. In the Commonweal there are men called Mercers
who ride the roads and keep them safe. Those who stay with me shall become my
new Mercers.’
And he turned from them
and headed for the Wayhouse. The others had made their camp in and around the
broken building, and those that wished to go could do so without feeling that
he was watching them.
Salma slept easily that
night. He had met the burden of his responsibility, and his conscience was
clear.
When he awoke it seemed
very quiet beyond the drape. He knew what that must mean. He rose and dressed
slowly, then took up his staff. Finally, he pushed the drape aside with the
point of the staff and went out into the stark dawn light.
They were all there. Not
one of them had gone. More, they had been joined by someone new.
She was there, radiant
with her own light even in the sunlight, glowing with rainbows, and gazing only
at him. Grief in Chains and Aagen’s Joy – and who knew what other names she had
gone by – had come for him.
He could only imagine
how it had seemed to Phalmes and the others, this vision striding in with the
first rays of dawn – a sorceress, a mirage, and here for Salma only. It must
have seemed like a sign for them, the final augur in his favour.
As she approached him
now, he felt blinded by her beauty. Her lightest touch on his arm thrilled him.
‘I’ve found you at last,’ she said.
‘How?’ he asked.
‘You came so far for
me,’ she whispered. ‘How could I do any less for the one I love?’
Food was arriving, in
cartloads, in baskets, in handfuls. Men and women who had tilled their own
land, or the land of those that had owned them, were heading out now daily to
reap vacant fields. Children swarmed through abandoned orchards like locusts.
Farmhouses were raided with the thoroughness of the truly hungry. When they
found the hastily abandoned country seats of the rich in their isolated
estates, they climbed the walls and broke down the gates, coming back with
armfuls of expensive delicacies or coal for the fires. Traders and peddlers
threshed and ground, while artisans built the clay ovens to make bread. Hunters
came back dragging their kills or driving errant livestock.
Nobody was eating well
but nobody was starving, and Salma could have asked for no more.
‘So what’s your next
move, lad?’ Nero asked him.
‘Our next move is to
move, then to keep moving,’ Salma said. ‘Otherwise we’ll exhaust what’s around
us. We’re still just scavenging, though on a greater scale. The bulk of these
non-combatants need to find sanctuary, and Sarn or Collegium remain our best
chances.’ He watched the woman Grief in Chains as she moved through the people.
She spoke to few of them, barely even acknowledged them, but her shining
presence changed them as she passed. Just looking at her brought a smile to
Salma’s lips, and he knew it would remain the same however dark the times
became.
She called herself
‘Prized of Dragons’ now.
‘News has been short
from westwards,’ Nero reminded him. ‘And that army north of us can only be
heading for Sarn.’
Salma nodded. ‘And yet
what option do we have?’ He looked at his hands. It was something Stenwold did,
when he had difficult decisions to make. ‘Sfayot! Phalmes! I need to speak to
you!’ he called out.
The Roach and the Mynan
came over, and it was clear that both of them had been expecting something from
him for a while.
‘We’re moving,
tomorrow,’ Salma informed them. ‘Sfayot, you must take the needy onwards, at
your own pace, gathering and foraging as you go.’
‘Of course,’ the Roach
agreed.
‘If scouts from the
Empire spot you, they’ll see no more than refugees on the move.’
‘And we can defend
ourselves, if we have to,’ Sfayot added. ‘And I take it you two will be
campaigning, yes?’
‘It’s about time we drew
our swords,’ Phalmes agreed. ‘Where are we bound?’
‘I want to see what’s
happening north of us. We’ll probe the Wasp army, see what we can learn, and
what good we can do,’ Salma explained. ‘But information first, action later.’
Phalmes nodded, his
expression suggesting that he had no doubt about the latter. ‘And your girl?’
Salma faltered for a
moment. ‘I had thought she would stay with Sfayot.’
‘She can close wounds
with her bare hands,’ Phalmes pointed out. ‘We’ve all seen it, and
Butterfly-kinden Art is like nothing else. Besides, after all the ground she’s
covered, do you think she’ll agree to stay behind?’
‘True,’ Salma realized,
knowing that he had no right to hide her away while he put himself in danger.
‘As for you,’ Salma
turned to Nero, ‘I have a special task.’
‘I’m one of your
soldiers now, am I?’ the Fly asked.
‘As good as, yes,’ said
Salma. ‘But I want you to go to Collegium.’
Nero nodded slowly.
‘It’s been a while, but I can still find my way there.’
‘Find Stenwold, or at
least get word to him. Let him know what I’m doing.’ After a moment he added,
‘And tell him about Totho, too. He’ll want to know.’
They entered his tent
carefully and, from his hidden vantage point, Thalric saw the brief glint of
steel as they pushed aside the flap.
There was a moment’s
pause and then he stepped up behind them, startling the two soldiers Daklan and
Haroc had brought with them. ‘Were you looking for me?’ Thalric asked.