Authors: Graydon Saunders
The list of mighty things
bound by Halt’s name since the First Commonweal came into being is long enough. Having everything Halt has ever bound break loose at one time could be described as spectacular, though I’d describe it as other things.
Grue hands Halt a glass of something; it smells like pear brandy. Halt murmurs “thank you, Grue dear”, points, the usual Independent chin lift, at the guy with the satchel, and says
“Oh, and Captain, this is Wake.”
The forearm clasp on introduction is automatic.
Wake. First of the Twelve to fall to the Foremost. Considered third in power, after Halt, who brooks no rivals, and Shimmer, who is mad with a terrible madness.
Wake, whose might as a necromancer is not equalled, is not provided with a peer known to history.
Guy goes right on looking like an itinerant bricklayer,
complete with having a grip and a half.
Grue hands me a refill.
The standards worked.
Even for the Eighteenth, the standards worked, and the dead abide together, waiting, before they are successfully emplaced.
It took the Independents a day to get there, and a day to set up, but those two days are entirely quiet; none of the creatures out of the Paingyre show the least interest in climbing the Folded Hills, and the Army of the Iron Bridge has nothing
more to do than march toward the Eighteenth’s emplacements. Two of the seven Independents responsible for the ritual get subsumed into it — not part of the plan. The subsumed Independents stick around and go weirder than the dead of the Line, but Halt and Wake each proclaim the thing stable.
The combination of the wards on the Folded Hills and the escarpment back of the Lily Swamps cuts communication
with the First Commonweal; we can’t tell much more than that the ward on the escarpment went up. Anything else would require a messenger, with the short way through the mass of creatures and the known long way over the Northern Hills and through Reems.
The pivot back to the Folded Hills works; Chert is sure enough that the Line got everybody out ahead of the creatures from the Paingyre to be sleeping.
The lack of battalion standards makes things difficult; once it gets behind the ward-line, the Line ought to be building roads or terracing fields, two of the three heavy battalions per brigade. Making a road with a whole brigade is like trying to stir your coffee with a shovel, and leveling fields is worse, you wind up cooking the soil. Chert keeps the colour party on the ridge, and sends
the Tenth, Twelfth, and Twenty-Second into the Folded Hills whole and entire.
There are four valleys, all roughly parallel, all running north-northwest to south-southeast. The most distant from the Creeks, and the two closest, all drain away southeast; the second-most distant is higher, narrower, and doesn’t drain out of itself. The resulting long narrow lakes are deep and cold and full of large
long-necked creatures, fangy-faced and hungry. Makes that valley less of a settlement priority.
Each brigade takes a valley and starts putting in a canal; big fused dams and canal-scale rock cuts is using a shovel as a shovel, something you want a whole brigade for in regular times.
Won’t do anything for transport between the Hills and the Creeks, but it’s a start.
Half the Creek weeding teams
— they flipped coins — head into the Folded Hills. After harvest is usually their slow time, but anything they can do to get fields established in the Folded Hills is a help. Some of the displaced — we can hardly call them Foldies; the general hope is that the individual valleys will develop useful names — arrive in the Creeks with crated-up machinery and books.
The first group of standards work,
but they can’t last, made with wood and ink instead of refractory metals. If it was plain iron, we wouldn’t have a problem; iron is short but not “can’t find fifty kilos” short. The list of metals and additives isn’t short, and Chert has every geologically inclined Independent available, plus a few hobbyist school teachers, out looking. Blossom gave the general a schedule in days from when the
last ingredient arrives, and it’s a lot of days.
I get to feeling useless shifting paperwork, find a servicable spear thrower in the Captain’s House arms closet, make some javelins, and put my name down on the Troubling Critters list. People and sudden work in the Folded Hills have all manner of creatures moving, and the Creeks side of the hills is the long, gentle slope, with substantial stream
valleys to follow straight into the West Wetcreek.
It might not have been a good idea. Eventually I go out with whole files of the self-designated colour party, it’s effective, we suffer no significant injuries despite the cruncher, my companions conduct themselves with due seriousness, and it is a clear material help to the Peace. The bad idea part is how ineffective it makes pretending to be
human.
The next bit of immediately relevant paperwork to come through is a note from Chert. Chert’s got a Sergeant-Instructor volunteering to come into the Creeks and assist with raising the battalion. I’m to send the fellow straight back if I don’t think that will work out.
That’s a strange thing for a general to say, or to think needs saying. It makes sense when I see the guy; Prowess, who is
an excellent arms instructor but who is also a deep traditionalist. Traditionalists don’t approve of my career path.
I make no effort to avoid the inevitable sparring match, or fuss much that it’s with spears. The Line’s notion of spears are simple two-metres-of-shaft things with a twenty centimetre blade you can slash with and a plain butt cap, no attempt at a mace or a spike. They’re mostly
training weapons, and spikes aren’t worth the damaged feet.
We’ve got a bit of an audience, along the training ground wall; I get the feeling they can tell Prow’s not especially concerned to make this look like sparring. Between standards like this, the traditionalist notion of propriety won’t have a problem with killing me. That’ll correct the terrible error of any graul accepting a warrant of
commission, and the traditionalists will all sleep better.
Should word of my death reach them someday.
Fighting another graul is interesting. Going carefully defensive and relying on stamina won’t work. Even if you get left alone the whole time, sometime in the next three days someone’s going to make a mistake. Given that you decided to be an idiot, it’s probably already you.
You can try to get
inside their physical responses; get them out of position enough that yeah, they know it’s coming, but can’t actually move fast enough to avoid it. With weapons, this would work a lot better if there were substantial differences in reaction speed amoung hale graul. Mental speed differs plenty, and if you’re quicker-witted than another graul commander it’ll work fine, but not in a straight fight
with spears.
You can get try to reach further into the future, and try to get a couple attacks and counters ahead. It’s never clear if this is going to help, because you eventually have to do something to gain advantage, and that will be only a little while in the future, and just as obvious as anything else a little while in the future.
If you’ve got a lot more practice than the other graul,
if you spend most of your days working out with weapons and teaching fighting, and you’ve been doing that for about twice as long as the graul you’re fighting has been alive, you can just about guarantee that you’ve got a bit more depth on the future and less lag between your awareness and your response. Not enough to be showy about it, but enough that it’s overwhelming likely you won’t make the first
mistake and that you’ll be able to exploit that mistake effectively.
From the way the first thirty seconds go, Prow gets less and less sure of that bet, much less sure than anybody ought to be to make a bet on a real fight. Everything’s that’s not the fight is falling away from Prow, one single murderous intention.
And there goes Prow doing the starfish, nerves locked and breath tight and spinning,
back down, over the grass. Grass or no grass, you do that face down and your nose might never be the same. Prow’s spear doesn’t make it halfway to the wall.
Prow comes to a stop, and gets some focus back across the eyes, and makes a first attempt to sit up. Sitting up feels like a completely bad idea, because Prow stops and lies back down limp and looks — if you know what you’re seeing — panicked.
We don’t have ribs, strictly. If you ask a natural philosopher we don’t have bones. Straight up into the lung-box like that, hit right in the struts, is about the only way to disable a graul by hitting them. Letting all the ichor out, torso crushing, or tearing limbs off don’t properly count as disabled, besides being really tough to do in recoverable ways.
Prow’s breathing ok. Gotta watch for
that. A metre-twenty of spear haft for lever back of the butt-cap is a hard hit.
I walk over, and Prow’s eyes are tracking me. Graul don’t concuss but that doesn’t mean landing on your head can’t hurt you.
“How?
“Sir?” Under the circumstances, not enough of a pause there to get started on the disappointed look.
Besides, Prow can just about inhale enough for one syllable at a time.
“The future
is a surprising place, Sergeant-Instructor.”
Which is nearly certain, yes, I can see it move through Prow’s face, to be understood as I’ve got a way to lie, that I can make another graul see what isn’t going to happen. Which would be very difficult indeed. It’s a lot easier to change your mind in the past.
Meaning I can do the one, and not the other, but still, it’s surprisingly easy to do.
Really
a pity you have to spend a continuous month in the focus and cursing your bad decisions to figure out how to do it. More of a pity that the reach back isn’t very deep.
I give Prow a hand up. Prow takes it out of pure need. Prow’ll be recovered in three days. Maybe five. Fit for duty at the end of travelling back to the Twelfth.
I make it clear to Prow that back to the Twelfth is precisely where
the Sergeant-Instructor is going. I can see various traditionalist notions of propriety and the part of Prow’s spine that knows I’m a real Standard-Captain locking up as bad as Prow’s lungs just did, but Prow says “Sir” and means it before moving off.
Wouldn’t want Prow’s instruction style around Creeks even without the murder and mutiny issues.
Chert’s reply to my message about returning the
Sergeant-Instructor includes the news that Prow returned fit for service. It also had the Twelfth’s betting pool results, probably to explain why I’m getting a thank-you note from a file closer in the Third of the Second of the Twelfth. That shows up a décade later.
One of the Creeks leaning on the stone wall along the south side of the practice lawn watches Prow shamble off, and looks at me.
“Didn’t realise the Line did that.”
I shrug. “The Line don’t. Folks in the Line, it’s not unknown.”
I can see it running through the slow nod, the slow nods of the Creeks on either side of my questioner — since, well, folks in the Line remain folks.
The nodding fades out, and I get looked at with more thought. “Glad to see you don’t mess about with it.”
Might be the first real smile I’ve ever
let a Creek see. “If it’s worth doing, do it.”
Real laughter, from all of them, by sorrow and despair.
At the end of Frimaire, I find myself in the refectory kitchen next to Wake. I’m peeling parsnips; Wake’s grinding spices.
Creeks are a practical people; give the graul something sharp, figure out that the Independent is an entirely sound pharmacist, if no comfortable cook, and set the Independent to powdering spices, so there’s real work and no-one has to be troubled about what ancient
power cooked dinner.
It’s not a feast, in the sense of extra food, but the Creeks tradition has it that the last décadi of the month is the day to combine dinner and conversation. People try to not be travelling, everyone plans for dinner to take longer, and there’s a big gap for tea between the food and the nibbles.
Very Creeks; social chatter is acceptable at planned times.
Enough people not
from the Creeks have been coming through that there are signs beside the lettuce root tea, pointing out that if you’re not from the Creeks the stuff will kill you.
To a first approximation, anyway: Halt appears to like the stuff. Various Creeks, fully aware wood-lettuce is a cumulative toxin, have finally stopped worrying about it creeping up on Halt.
Which means our quiet corner table has a pot
of the stuff, a pot of coffee, and a jug of something cold that tastes of joy and citrus. Grue swears there’s nothing in it but water, beets, time, and a “minor exercise of the Power”. Everybody in town has tried it; there have been some spectacular faces. About one in four like it. One in four in Westcreek Town is three-thousand some-odd; Grue is going through three tonnes of beets a décade, making
the stuff.
Wake makes a sharp distinction between eating and talking; Halt seems determined to eat, when Halt eats, as quickly as possible because one must never knit and eat at the same time. Blossom eats with one hand, mostly, and scribbles things on a notepad with the other. Grue eats slowly, looks happy, and radiates contentment. By the end of the meal, there are usually three or four sleepy
children piled up against Grue. Grue’s current record is eleven; seven of those were three-year-olds, and their mothers expressed effusive thanks for the quiet hour. Blossom asserts that better three-year-olds than the pile of ocelotters they get at home; the kids have already been fed.
At the pause, I get a child coming up to me; I’m at the head of the table, so it’s possible to come up to stand
beside me. Kid looks nervous, and maybe twelve.
“Captain,
why
did you get into a real fight with the other graul?”
“Would no one tell you, or did they say they didn’t know?” Grue snorts, and the kid looks nervous and surprised, now.
“Didn’t know.”
“Do you know what
heretic
means?”
I get a head-shake.
“A heretic is someone who is wrong because they disagree with what everyone believes is right.”
The kid’s face twists up with thinking. “Really wrong?”
“Not testably wrong”, Blossom says. “It’s about what people believe, not what they can prove.”
That, well, it moved the confusion. Not the same as not helping.
There’s a worried parent about five metres back, but they’re not interfering.
“Laurel made us to fight, but we think, too. So graul can disagree.”
A nod. Not the nod of understanding,
but the kid doesn’t see anything wrong with what I said.
“Am I a monster, or a weapon?”
That gets a look of total affront, and a “people!” response.
I nod. “If it can really talk, it’s people.” There are hundreds of special cases, it’s a continuum, there are things like Halt’s howdah, but that’s the rule you learn when you’re a child. “All the graul alive come from the graul Laurel made. All
of them were made to fight, and not for themselves; to fight for the wizard who made us. We serve the Commonweal now, but what graul think they are still comes from Laurel’s time in the Bad Old Days, and a bit more than two-thirds think we’re monsters and the rest think we’re weapons.”
“Do you think you’re a monster?” A doubtful voice.
I shake my head. “I think I’m a weapon. Most graul who think
they’re weapons leave it at that; their service belongs to the Commonweal, and the Commonweal gets to strike its enemies with them, the way you could strike an enemy with a sword.”
“But you don’t?”
“I think I’m a weapon in my own hand; serving the Commonweal is a choice I made, something I decided to do, rather than a law of nature for which I have no responsibility.”
“Really traditional graul
think they are monsters, and don’t serve in the Line; they keep the forests and manage boats on the river. No-one gets through the graul townships off the roads, that’s what they think Laurel made them for. Less traditional graul and graul who think they are weapons often serve in the Line, but as troopers or sometimes in authority, if it isn’t too much; a Sergeant, but not a Sergeant-Major.”
Disbelief, and some spluttering.
“Old beliefs don’t have to make sense, they just have to not be a big problem. Changing beliefs is hard work, and there’s always all that other work you have to do right away.”
A heartfelt nod, then another and another.
“When the Line offered to send me to Officer’s School, I said yes. The Line were surprised; they always ask, if they think you could do well with
a warrant of commission, even if no graul had ever said yes. I was a little surprised at myself, and all the other graul were some mix of surprised and angry.”
“Why say yes?” The parent almost moves forward then.
“I couldn’t have told you, back then, but mostly because if you’re going to serve something, you should do it as well as you can, not as well as someone else expects you shall.”
A thinking
look. Brief thinking look, the kid comes out of it still looking curious, so I keep going.
“The other graul, Sergeant-Instructor Prowess, is deeply traditional, almost too traditional to serve in the Line. They think my accepting a warrant of commission was wrong, and a threat to all graul, because it meant graul didn’t always serve properly.”
“The only way a traditionalist could see to fix that
would be to kill me; that would mean that graul as a whole would get rid of the…defective graul, so other people” — humans, who have the sorcerers — “could let graul go on existing.”
“Isn’t that crazy?”
“All graul have a belief that serving well is the only reason we exist, Laurel put that in us when we were made. It’s strong, like thinking your family is important.” Never mind how many ways
humans define family.
“Prow’s view is extreme, most graul wouldn’t agree, but we’re not human. We’re people, but different things are important to graul. Even humans aren’t the same everywhere. I have to explain different things here in the Creeks than I did with the Eighth Brigade.”
A quick nod. “Why not kill them, when they were trying to kill you?”
“I didn’t have to, to keep Prow from killing
me.” Plus Prow’s an able instructor who benefits the Line, but there’s a limit to how much argument-from-utility you give twelve year olds.
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
There’s a dash back to the parent, and a fast, quiet, and gesticulated explanation delivered moving away.
“How often have you explained that?” Wake sounds nothing more than honestly curious.
“In my head? To the dark?” I manage
to smile. Wake isn’t asking about what happened to Prow.
I wave in the vague direction of over there, where the kid went. “That’s the first person who has asked.”
Wake produces a completely human smile. I have no idea how Wake does it. You take Wake for a bricklayer, or maybe a guy who does architectural pottery like roof tile and gutters. The Independent is effectively invisible.
“After five
hundred years, I have an explanation for why, when the Foremost were nearly all graul, the Line has had so few for so long.”
Halt’s knitting needles only click when Halt wants them to. They’re quite silent now. “The standards, and the Hard Road, and the graul, were Laurel’s tools. The Line didn’t know what it was, but it knew it wasn’t Laurel’s.”
Wake looks rueful.
“I thought, well, what could
Laurel know of necromancy? This new trick would be easy enough to get around if the low-talent soldiers using it were dead.” Centuries of practise can make art out of a “that was a stupid thing for me to conclude” look. “What Laurel did not know of necromancy made a short list, and here I am, in the Commonweal.”
“Are not we all in service of it?”
Wake looks at me; Halt looks at me. Thousand of
years and millions of dead look at me.
Even so.
“Isn’t that like asking the hinge-pins in the lock gates if they serve the canal?” Since the Shape of Peace, Blossom wavers into pure enchanter, without any evident cause. There now, suddenly entirely eerie.
“You’re more like the geography. The water goes where the geography puts it, even with canal building.”
Blossom doesn’t argue the point, though
Grue looks more amused than usual.
“The Standard-Captains are more like hinge-pins.”
In the old Commonweal, there were four Independents living for every Standard-Captain there had ever been. In the Second Commonweal, the ratio is over ten to one for the Independents, and it may not drop much.
“And the river?” Wake goes right on being completely canny.
I make a small gesture, meant to indicate
the whole room. “Them. All of them, in their generations. Over time, the river determines the geography, just as in the present, the geography creates the river.”
The child on the far side of Grue turns over, makes a noise — young graul don’t do that — and subsides. Grue indulges in some hair-stroking.
Wake finishes a tumbler of the happy-beet-stuff, sets it down. “Someone here, a mother of several
children, asked me if I would be able to fight in defence of Westcreek Town. They were updating the defence plan, after the Second Commonweal came into being.” Wake’s head shakes a little. “I said I would do as I could, if matters came to that pass.”
“Some of us are non-combatants.” Grue’s voice is quiet.
“That entirely new thing”, Wake says. Back in the Bad Old Days, Wake once fought Halt to
a draw, if you define “draw” as both parties withdrawing in good order.
The nibbles come round.
The plate for our table has a little bundle of sections of rose stems on it, maybe fifteen centimetres long. Someone’s getting around to the flower garden pruning, or harvesting rose hips, but either way, it’s a kindness. One of the kids leaning on Grue isn’t quite asleep, and looks extremely puzzled
at the crunching noise.
The parents of the children piled against Grue come collect them; Wake and I stack chairs. The happy-beet-stuff and some of the nibbles mean Grue cooked, so Grue wanders off to join the clump of people watching Blossom and Halt scour the kitchen with excessive force. Most of the watchers are holding a cast iron or copper pan or two safely away from the scouring. Scouring
is mild; it looks like there’s an angry storm god trapped in there. Having Halt and Blossom on the same rotation means there are nights the dishes get done very abruptly, and with sterile thoroughness.
The Creeks consider the weather too cold for sitting outside, but there are little clumps of them out in the plaza to look at the stars. I think it’s a lovely night.
Radish wanders by. Radish hasn’t
been in Westcreek Town much, been all over the Creeks for the Food-Gesith, toting up storage spaces and who’s still short of canning jars.
Turns out that was one of Radish’s neeves, asking the question. Wants to thank me for the thorough answer; I tell Radish it was a good question.
Halt drifts out, stick tapping, and I again miss how the persistent camp chair gets there. Wake drifts out of a
clump of the builders Wake’s been teaching how to make fired clay houses, one big dome you fire all in one go. It’s a lot quicker than sawn stone blocks, and sturdy enough to suit the Creeks. They still have questions, and Wake looks happy to answer them.
Grue and Blossom arrive together, arm in arm. They’ve got stem-glasses and a glass decanter full of something pale and faintly shining.
Radish’s
head shakes, rueful or astonished or something else, looking at the decanter. “I won’t tell you you’re crazy, but…” and Grue and Blossom chorus along with Radish, quietly, “but not before the kids are in bed!”
Radish laughs, and says “Thanks again, Captain” and wanders off. Radish has a lot of kin in Westcreek Town.
Someday soon I should get one of its senior members to explain to me precisely
what this political cabal I’ve joined does.
Halt produces a small glass of black currant brandy, and a smaller jar of pickled demon heart. Blossom will eat that sometimes, but clearly not tonight; Blossom and Grue have got the Mead of Poetry, out of Split Creek three days past. Halt looks entirely calm at the prospect of a militant enchanter and whatever subtle thing Grue is drinking it, a confidence
I envy Halt.
Wake has a big fired clay mug of beer, the same beer the Creeks all around are drinking.
I’ve got a glass mug with a lid, courtesy of Halt’s glass shop, one that can stand to be filled with dragon’s blood. That takes a little planning, and some glass kegs, but at least the stuff doesn’t go bad. The Captain’s House has plenty of cellar space.
Everybody clinks the rims of whatever they’re
drinking out of; Halt’s chair gets quietly taller, to accommodate this. The townsfolk don’t watch, really don’t watch, not the not-watching that makes your eyes itch. No-one proposes a toast.
The Commonweal isn’t being attacked tonight.
I’ve survived worse.