The next day, at dawn, I want to be a naked and tender-fleshed young gargoyle, perched up on high, the bottomless wind sliding deliciously over me and I am blank, hurtling from on high coming to rest again in all this rustling quiet. I want to linger over the fantasy, but the story won’t let me. The column is moving.
The second day passes much as the first. Did. Luckily the path, high in the mountains, is more or less level.
The third day, we come to a broad place with many roads. The signpost lists nearly to the ground, peeled battered and useless, but there are characters carved into the adjacent rocks.
“Interpreter!”
I come forward.
“Lulom, isn’t it?”
“Low.”
Makemin points to the stone—“Anything?”
“Is it in Lashlache?” Nikhinoch asks.
“I think not,” I say, stepping up.
I examine the inscription.
“It’s Wiczu!” I say this in astonishment only because I hadn’t expected to recognize the language at all. “It says Ciawixde is ten miles down that road”—I point the way—“through the hills and over a bridge. Then that way goes to the sea.”
Makemin has pulled out his waterproof map and is scanning it intently. Evidently his ordained route is marked there—I can see red lines.
“They’d have us go through Ciawixde,” he says in a moment. “But an old bridge is liable to turn up wrecked after so much time. And there are Wacagan in the area.”
I hadn’t known that. I look around me, trying to see menace in this unchanged scenery.
He goes on peering. Now he dashes the map into his lap.
“I’m sure those imbeciles have the wrong idea. The lay of the land over there,” he points with his tightly brown-gloved hand, “is far better. I say we go round to the sea. Check for more.”
I look.
“Blank.”
“Fine.—Where did you learn your languages?”
“The Narrator’s College, sir. In the mountains, near Qulo.”
He visibly registers this information.
“You’re a narrator?” he raps out sharply.
“Yes, sir.” Am I getting myself into trouble or out of it?
“Nikhinoch.”
Up comes Nikhinoch on his pony.
“Mm?”
“This one’s a narrator. Can you get him a horse, a pony?”
Nikhinoch shakes his head.
Makemin looks back at me.
“You’ll walk near to me in the ranks from now on. Right?”
“Can my friends walk with me?”
“Go on, go on, what do I care?” He waves us on and we begin again to march, on the heading he has chosen.
The path descends shallowly for a time, and the land opens out to our left in a high, flat-bottomed valley with pale new green and mild breezes. The men keep striking up loud atonal songs behind me. Now, not only do we have a faster, more even road before us, but we will have the solace of shade, too. The column is moving; we mark the earth with our perishable steps and make the heel song of our foot beats, an exhalation chorus layered on top.
Around sunset we make camp, and Makemin indicates he wants me near. He draws a long satchel from among his paraphenalia and brings out his rifle. He exposes it proudly; a Galvanophre Thunderbolt, a heavy double-barreled over-and-under bolt action rifle with two six round magazines, one per, that slot into a box on the receiver’s left side, two bolts which can be snapped together to throw both chambers at once, two barrels for the quick follow-up shot so crucial in sniping, or so he says. Trigger has four settings—only top barrel, only bottom barrel, half and half which means the trigger fires the top barrel on the first half of the pull and the bottom barrel on the second half, and alternating full pull. Makemin draws and chambers two long but not especially heavy rounds from a pouch inside his kidney belt. He lifts the rifle to his shoulder sights and fires instantly, and again. Two plumes of dust spurt from a stone clear across the valley. With a grim smile he lowers the weapon and pulls the bolts one at a time. The action seems extremely stiff, and Makemin impresses me with his strength pulling them back so smartly, expelling two spinning, spent shells. Each flashes once in the sun on its way to the ground.
“I was second in a thousand ranked in sharping,” he says mixedly, something souring his pride. “And was one of seventeen commenced directly to adjutant.”
“They must be faring well at the front to spare you here,”—ugh. Just because I’m good at it doesn’t make buttering him up feel any better. I want his story, for my own sake.
He practically spits.
“They’re miserable at the front! They’re pitiful! Men who graduated at half my standing are giving orders at the front while I’m pissing away my life on this assignment!”
His gaze takes hold of me and I realize I’m in for the story.
“When I was twenty. I was arrested. For stealing dirt.”
He says this levelly.
“My cousin needed fill earth to build a new post office in a town it doesn’t matter the name. For years there had been an enormous mound of displaced earth standing in a lot by the river; they had built a footbridge there to connect some islands in the river. When I was a boy we would visit my cousin and together we used to play in it. Only because people constantly were walking through the lot was it clear of vines, and that’s the only reason the mound wasn’t overgrown. No one touched it—it was like a feature of nature. So when my cousin needed the fill earth I said to him, ‘let’s go take some.’
“We went at night and started to load the cart. I looked up and saw the footbridge sway, and the handcar rolling towards us in the rust lights, so we tried to hide in the shadow of the bridge—then there were bullseyes shining. A fine and a reprimand—that’s all.”
He shrugs, sets his lower lip angrily.
“But it went on the record.”
Now we are sitting around in the evening, digesting and resting. I can see Makemin through the transparent front of his tent, sitting at his desk with a bale of papers, writing frenetically. From time to time, Nikhinoch will come to attend him. Once I see Makemin take up a small container, slide the lid aside, pull out a pinch of some peach-colored snuff, and sniff it vigorously first in one and then the other nostril. I refer my querying eyebrows to Silichieh, who smiles, his voice muffled by a mouthful of smoke.
“Oh, that stuff. Keeps him alert, I think. I don’t know exactly what it is but it fits him. I wouldn’t touch it myself.”
I sit and listen as the breeze blows through my ears, and the sunset lights go colors down over my scalp.
I pass on the dirt story, and Silichieh snorts a little, lying back against a stump with his hands in the pockets of his sweater.
“That’s typical.”
After a moment he says, thoughtfully, “But that’s good for us, I think, because it means he’s not going to stick to nice little points of decorum too much. That’s best kind of commander.”
A worrying thought—“What if he tries to heroically—heroically to recoup his name?”
“Oh, you mean with a something big? He’s tried that too. He has a decoration though he doesn’t wear it.”
Tell, tell ...
Makemin had belonged to a sharp shooter unit that fought at some place on the far side of the mountains called Galleh. The Alaks there had been talking to the Laughing Gas and went over to the blackbirds—that’s Wacagan, the Enemy, you students—and it was a matter of putting the insurrection down.
Soldiers marching on the road through fields and copses. They run right into the rebels set up in a village. Shock, scrambling, shots. Neither side is prepared to pull back, and no reinforcements are coming to the soldiers; head of the local garrison died of the Influence and had not yet been replaced—without him, no good organization.
The fighting breaks up, drags on in skirmishes and both sides find themselves killing their own in the confusion, and through a tormented night of aching watchfulness and impossibly sudden explosions of violence, dying. A flashing steel wing flickers over you and in the next instant half your unit is gone, breaking twigs and random shots all around you, and in the next second it’s just as quiet as before, and you reel bewildered from cover to cover not knowing what you are.
Here’s young Makemin pinned down in a burned-out farm house, the last of his unit. No knowing where the rest of the soldiers are, where the line, if any, is, if there has been a retreat or advance, if there are any soldiers but him left. A distant shot startles the rooks and he shrinks. Hoofbeats, he glances through the window. In watery light just before the dawn he sees one of the rebels ride past at an angle heading for broken ground at the horizon. Makemin can see, in the turmoil of the man’s wildly flailing cloak and loose clothing, that he wears a sword—that makes him one of the leaders. Not having a clear shot Makemin crazily breaks from cover and begins sprinting after the horse. He raises his rifle and sights it on the veering horseman, holding the gun level as he runs all out, his legs slithering and swivelling beneath him to keep his upper body plumb on the perpendicular.
Shots on his left—one or two guns, a shot cracks against the charred trunk of a tree to his right and behind barely missing but still he runs sighting grinding his teeth in frustration as the figure before him slips in and out of his line and now as the rider sinks below the ridge furrowed into the ground and wheels to the right, the horse tosses back its head a bit and in so doing lifts it above the level of the furrow into Makemin’s sight—the gun barks and shears off the top of the horse’s head sending ears flying two different directions and a shank of skull whirling onto the top of the ridge. Makemin lowers his gun and keeps running up the ridge vaults over the fallen horse where the fallen rider scrambles for his thrown rifle. Makemin rams the leaded stock of his gun into the man’s head and up and down he swings it like a butter churn, moils the butt in his brains and the spatter of ejected blood joins red flecks to the motes of foam clinging to Makemin’s lips.
Some time later a small group of soldiers, led by Makemin’s commanding officer, will appear, having driven off the shooters in the distance, and having witnessed Makemin’s kill. They find him still panting not far from his man, sitting on the dirt bank, distractedly dragging his rifle’s grisly butt in a clump of reddened grass.
*
The next day is all soft light and wind; pale green new leaves stand out brilliantly against trunks and branches blackened by night rain. Welcome relief for smarting feet that afternoon when Makemin, who heads the column, stopped short to accost a pair of anxious-looking locals. These are the first people we’ve encountered, and I worry what we are going to do to them. I am brought forward to translate—the moment Makemin refers them to me, their eyes follow his hand and slip onto my face from his, and at once they begin again their halting speech in Cvaivrenew.
When it peters out, I turn to Makemin.
“Someone stole two of their chickens.”
Makemin makes an unusual, wry face.
“Tell them we’ll keep our eyes open.”
They stand by the road, arms at sides, evidently intent on watching the entire group pass and shouting encouragement as we go by, as though they were dispatching us personally.
As the afternoon dreams on, the road begins to climb slightly and the trees become more dense.
One of the forward pickets comes back stepping high and reports seeing a figure darting in among the trees at our approach. We continue, now everyone is looking this way and that.
There in the bracken I see a white flash in a little handful of scattered sun. Nothing to be heard over all our clanking and thudding. Another flash—the figure veers in mid leap, magically dropping out of sight again.
“Is it a talku?” Someone asks in a low voice.
(Talkus are mountain spirits one is especially liable to encounter when lost, and in confusing winter weather. They often take on the appearance of persons familiar to their victims, by a kind of imagination mirror effect.
“What are
you
doing up here?”
“Oh, just poking around. You know how it is.”
“But—you’re barefoot?!”
“We don’t feel the cold,” he says equably.
“Don’t feel the—why it must be 40 below!”
“Is that very cold?”
“... Stay away from me ... You stay away!”
“Why is that any way to pa-la-la-la-la-laver
ooooooollld fffrrriieennnddd?
”)
Makemin, without stopping the column, turns his head this way and that. He dons his goggles and looks some more.
“He’ll have to cross the path up ahead, unless he has already crossed the path.”
He wavingly indicates the slope, which is on our right, where this white errancy has been up until now.
“The slope ahead is too sheer on that side.”
At his order a few sergeants trot up, and he sends them fanned out ahead. There’s commotion in almost no time. One of the sergeants has collared someone.
“Who are you?”
“Spih-ch duwa!”
The sergeant gives him a shake. His defiance collapses.
I am to translate.
“Your name?”