“Naä? He’s…at the burial meadow.”
“Rahm. We have to leave—all of us. Right now!” “Leave? But why?”
“The Myetrans are coming! Didn’t you hear them? They want you to surrender.”
“I heard. Naä, what does this ‘surrender’ mean—”
“Oh, Rahm… !” Then, suddenly, she was running away into the dark.
Puzzled, Rahm turned back to the gathering in the common.
A few people still dug forefingers in their ears. The drums were louder. From the eastern fields another light struck. Something—a long line of somethings—was moving toward the common. The sweeping beams threw shadows over the beets, the grain, the kale, all bending in the night wind.
Children and mothers and uncles and cousins looked at one another.
“Why do they come across the field? They’ll damage the harvest.”
“There are so many of them that they couldn’t fit on the road.”
“Such late visitors—and so many. Will we have food for them all? They walk so strangely…”
Grain stalks snapped under the boots in time to the drums. As searchlights swung away, in the inadequate light from the nail paring of a moon, straining to see among the armored figures, Rahm thought to look for his friend from the morning—and, there, thought he saw him: only a moment later, he saw another tall, cloaked figure. Then another. Among the armed
men advancing, a number wore the uniform Kire had worn. Some rode nervous horses; others came on foot. Their capes, despite the wind, hung straight behind them, heavy as night. Above them all, on rolling towers, the searchlights moved forward.
With the others, Rahm waited in the square.
Soon, with their mobile light-towers, the soldiers had marched to the common’s near edge. The ground was fully lit. Villagers squinted. On a horse stepping about before the visitors, a bearded man in brown leather, wearing a single glove, barked at the short silver rod in his bare hand:
HALT!
Everyone looked up, because the word echoed and reechoed from the black horns high on the moving light towers. The soldiers stopped marching. The drums stilled.
The man with the silver rod rode forward. The villagers fell back. The man spoke again. Again his voice was doubled, like thunder, from the horns:
SURRENDER TO THE FORCES OF MYETRA!
Around Rahm, people looked at one another, puzzled. Then Kern, the quarryman, who was not really shy—only very quiet—stepped forward.
“Welcome to you…” he said, uncertainly. Then, which was almost twice as much as Kern ever said, he added: “Welcome, visitors in the night.”
“Are you the leader here?” the mounted man demanded.
Kern didn’t answer—because, as Rahm knew, Kern wasn’t anyone’s leader.
(He was not even an elder—none of whom, Rahm noticed, seemed to have arrived yet.) Kern frowned back at the villagers behind him.
Someone called out:
“No—he’s not!”
Which made a dozen people—including Rahm—laugh. Rahm whispered to Mantice who was standing beside him, “That’s Tenuk,” though stocky Mantice knew it was plowman Tenuk being funny as much as Rahm did. They both grinned.
“You speak for the people here,” the mounted man said, which was funny in itself because Kern probably wouldn’t say anything more now. But the man spoke as though he’d heard neither Tenuk’s “No” nor the laughter. “You are the leader!” While his horse stepped about, he pushed the silver rod into his shirt, reached down, unfastened his sling, and lifted out his powergun—for a moment it seemed he was going to hand it to Kern as a gift.
Rahm had seen a powergun that morning, but not—really—what it could do.
Flame shot out and smacked Kern just below his shoulder. Kern slammed backward four feet—without either stepping or falling: upright, his feet just slid back across the grass—the left one was even slightly off the ground. Blood fountained a dozen feet forward. The horse’s flank was splattered and the animal reared twice, then a third time. Rahm was close enough to hear the meat on Kern’s chest bubble and hiss, as he fell, twisting to the side. One of Kern’s arms was gone.
When it hit the ground, Kern’s remaining hand moved in the grass. Kern’s heavy fingers opened, then closed, with not
even grass blades in them. Kern’s face was gone too—and half Kern’s head.
The bearded man lowered the powergun from where the retort had jerked the barrel into the air. “Your leader has been killed. So will you all be killed—unless you announce your surrender!”
Rahm felt a vast and puzzling absence inside him. Nothing in it seemed like any sort of sense he could hold to. Then, something began to grow in that senseless absence. It grew slowly. But he felt it growing. At the same time, something—a strange understanding—began to grow in the face of the bearded man on his horse, who raised his gun overhead.
Suddenly the man turned sharply in his saddle and barked back at the troops:
“They refuse to surrender! Attack!”
Though he had learned far back to fight well, like many big men Uk did not like fighting. Uncountable campaigns ago, he’d also learned that little Mrowky actually gloried in the insult, the attack, the pummeling given and received, the recovery, the re-attack. Mrowky could make as much conversational jollity at losing in a melee as he could at winning.
Since men—and sometimes women—so often feel obliged to start fights with big men, Uk had grown grateful for Mrowky’s willingness, even eagerness, to jump in, when others, to prove themselves, picked quarrels with him in strange towns and taverns. Since people tended not to start fights with runty men like Mrowky (who enjoyed the fight so much), hanging out with broad-shouldered, beer-bellied
Uk was a way to guarantee a certain frequency of entertainment—possibly it was the core of their friendship. For both were different enough from one another to preclude close feelings in any situation other than war.
Uk had an expansive, gentle humor he used largely to mask from his fellows a real range of information and some thoughtful speculation—while Mrowky was, in simple words, a loud, little, stupid man, who’d been called and cursed by just those words enough times by enough people so that, if he did not actually believe they were true, he knew there was
something
to them. Thus the friendship of the big soldier, who was also smart, flattered Mrowky. Both could complain about one another in fiery terms, starred with scatology and muddied with proto-religious blasphemies.
But they were devoted.
Perhaps a little of that devotion came from the knowledge both shared, that their time in the Myetran army had taught them: life in the midst of battle was on another plane entirely from that in which relationships could be parsed (a concept Uk would understand) or parceled out (an idea Mrowky might follow), analyzed, or made rational.
With ten other soldiers, Mrowky and Uk had been stationed just along the turn-off at the common’s south corner. (Other units of a dozen each had been deployed at seven more points around the green.) When the first villagers hurried by, still unsteady from the grating whine of the high speakers and more or less oblivious to the soldiers (basically because they were just not used to seeing soldiers standing quietly in the shadow), light from an opened door spilled over the flags.
A young
redheaded woman passed through it, as a young redheaded man—clearly a brother or a cousin—came up beside her. They disappeared, displaced by others rushing to join the villagers gathering on the grass. But Mrowky had given Uk an elbow in the forearm; and, in the darkness, his breathing had increased to a tempo Uk knew meant the little man now had the grin which said, “I like that girl—she’s hot!”
When the lights had rolled onto the common, Uk and Mrowky had moved up to the edge of the illuminated space, per orders. As, with his microphone, Nactor had ridden out to address the villagers, Uk wondered, as he did so often, just out of sight, whether the populace ever really saw them—or not. Just how aware were the stunned and disoriented peasants of the soldiers in their armor, waiting for the word?
In two years, Mrowky and Uk had been through this maneuver seventeen times in seventeen villages. It had taken the first half dozen for Uk to realize that it did not matter whether the villagers surrendered or not; the attack came in either case. Over those half dozen times, Uk had listened to Nactor’s amplified address, watched the elimination of the spokesman (that’s how it was referred to: though in a half a dozen villages now, the spokesman had been a woman), and awaited the final order with a growing distaste—till, by the seventh time, he’d begun to block out the whole thing.
Over the first ten times (which is how many times it had taken Mrowky to learn what Uk had learned in six), Mrowky had watched the process with hypnotic fascination, awed at its duplicity, its daring, its distractionary efficacy.
But his attention span would have been strained by any more; so now he too gave no more mind to the details than did the other soldiers.
When the attack sounded you pulled out your sword, moved forward, and began to swing. You tried not to remember who or what you hit. A lot of blood spurted on your armor, and got in the cracks, so that you got sticky at knees and elbows and shoulders; otherwise it was pretty easy. The villagers were naked—most of them—and scared and not expecting it.
Among his first encounters, Uk, out of what he’d thought was humanitarianism, had—with some forethought—not always swung and cut to kill. It seemed fitting to give the pathetic creatures at least a chance to live. Three days later, though, he’d seen what happened to the ones who were just badly wounded: the long loud deaths, the maggoty gashes, the bone-breaking fevers, the cracked lips of the dying…After that, from the same humanitarianism, he’d used his skills to become as deadly as he could with each blade swing at the screaming, clamoring folk—who simply had to be decimated.
That was orders.
Indeed, there was some skill to it—like avoiding the flesh-burning power beams lancing through the mayhem from the mounted officers. Best thing to do (Uk had explained to Mrowky a long time back, when the little guy’d gotten a burn on his right hip), was to glance up from the carnage now and then and keep Kire’s horse a little before you, not drifting too far to the left or the right of it—since the mounted lieutenants had the sense (most of them) to avoid powergunning down each other.
You fought.
And you
tried not to remember individual slashes and cuts you dealt out to bare shoulders and ribs and necks. (After the diseases and lingering deaths among the wounded in that first campaign, Uk tried for lots of necks.) Sometimes, though, an incident would tear itself free in the web of perception and refuse to sink back into the reds and blacks and chaotic grays and screams and crashes and howls that were the night.
When what happened next stopped happening—
But it was too violent and too painful for Rahm to recall with clarity.
He remembered walking backward, shouting, then—when Tenuk fell against him, like a bubbling roast left too long on the spit and so hot he burned Rahm’s arms—screaming. He remembered his feet’s uneasy purchase on the flags because of the blood that sluiced them. He remembered a dark-glazed crock smashing under a horse hoof. (With the soldiers, horror. spread the village.) He remembered running to the town’s edge, to find the gravefield shack aflame.
Ienbar had called, then shouted, then shrieked, trying to get past the fire from the mounted soldiers’ muzzles; then Rahm hadn’t been able to see Ienbar at all for the glowing smoke, and there’d been the smell of all sorts of things burning: dried thatch, wood, bedding, charred meat. Rahm had run forward, toward the fire, till the heat, which had already blinded him, made him—the way someone with a whip might make you—back away, turn away, run away, through the town, that, as his sight came back under his singed brows, with the chaos and the screams around him, was an infernal parody of his village.
*
Uk pulled
his sword free to turn in the light from one of the towers, parked by an uncharacteristically solid building with a stone foundation. Something was wrong with Uk’s knee; it had been throbbing on and off all last week; for three days now it had felt better, but then, only minutes ago, some soldier and some peasant, brawling on the ground in the dark, had rolled into him—Uk had cried out: it was paining him again. Turning to go toward the lit building, he’d raised his sword arm to wipe the sweat from under his helmet rim with his wrist—and smeared blood across his face, sticking his lashes together. But that had happened before. Grimacing at his own stupidity, he’d tried to blink the stuff away.
While he blinked, Uk recognized, between the struts of the light-tower, from the diminutive armor and a motion of his shoulder, Mrowky—who was holding somebody. Three steps further, knee still throbbing, Uk stopped and grinned. The little guy had actually got the redheaded girl—probably snagged her as she’d fled the common’s carnage.
You’re a lucky lady, Uk thought. Because Mrowky would do his thing with her, maybe punch her up a little, afterward, just to make her scared, then run her off. That was Mrowky’s style—even though, when a whole village had nearly gone into a second revolt over the petitions, laments, and finally rebellious preachings of a woman raped by a soldier, Nactor himself had harangued the troops a dozen campaigns back: “I don’t care
what
it is—boy, woman, or goat! You put a cock in it, you put your
sword
through it when you finish
with
it! That’s an order—I don’t
need
to deal with things like this!” But Mrowky wasn’t comfortable—nor
was Uk—killing someone just because you’d fucked her. And rarely did a woman carry on afterward like the one who’d raised Nactor to his wrath, especially if you scared her a little. Though others among the soldiers, Uk knew, honestly didn’t care.