The Dead
Soldier
I had never seen war, or even talked of it at
length with someone who had, but I was young and knew something of
violence, and so believed that war would be no more than a new
experience for me, as other things—the possession of authority in
Thrax, say, or my escape from the House Absolute—had been new
experiences.
War is not a new experience; it is a
new world. Its inhabitants are more different from human beings
than Famulimus and her friends. Its laws are new, and even its
geography is new, because it is a geography in which insignificant
hills and hollows are lifted to the importance of cities. Just as
our familiar Urth holds such monstrosities as Erebus, Abaia, and
Arioch, so the world of war is stalked by the monsters called
battles, whose cells are individuals but who have a life and
intelligence of their own, and whom one approaches through an
ever-thickening array of portents.
One night I woke long before dawn.
Everything seemed still, and I was afraid some enemy had come near,
so that my mind had stirred at his malignancy. I rose and looked
about. The hills were lost in the darkness. I was in a nest of long
grass, a nest I had trampled flat for myself. Crickets
sang.
Something caught my eye far to the
north: a flash, I thought, of violet just on the horizon. I stared
at the point from which it seemed to have come. Just as I had
convinced myself that what I believed I had seen was no more than a
fault of vision, perhaps some lingering effect of the drug I had
been given in the hetman’s house, there was a flare of magenta a
trifle to the left of the point I had been staring at.
I continued to stand there for a watch
or more, rewarded from time to time with these mysteries of light.
At last, having satisfied myself that they were a great way off and
came no nearer, and that they did not appear to change in
frequency, coming on the average with each five hundredth beat of
my heart, I lay down again. And because I was then thoroughly
awake, I became aware that the ground was shaking, very slightly,
beneath me.
When I woke again in the morning it had
stopped. I watched the horizon diligently for some time as I walked
along, but saw nothing disturbing.
It had been two days since I had eaten,
and I was no longer hungry,
though I was aware that I did not have my normal strength. Twice
that day I came upon little houses falling to ruin, and I entered
each to look for food. If anything had been left, it had been taken
long before; even the rats were gone. The second house had a well,
but some dead thing had been thrown down it long ago, and in any
case there was no way to reach the stinking water. I went on,
wishing for something to drink and also for a better staff than the
succession of rotten sticks I had been using. I had learned when I
had used Terminus Est as a staff in the
mountains how much easier it is to walk with one.
About noon I came upon a path and
followed it, and a short time afterward heard the sound of hoofs. I
hid where I could look down the road; a moment later a rider
crested the next hill and flashed past me. From the glimpse I had
of him, he wore armor somewhat in the fashion of the commanders of
Abdiesus’s dimarchi, but his wind-stiffened cape was green instead
of red and his helmet seemed to have a visor like the bill of a
cap. Whoever he was, he was magnificently mounted: His destrier’s
mouth was bearded with foam and its sides drenched, yet it flew by
as though the racing signal had dropped only an instant
before.
Having encountered one rider on the
path, I expected others. There were none. For a long while I walked
in tranquillity, hearing the calls of birds and seeing many signs
of game. Then (to my inexpressible delight) the path forded a young
stream. I walked up a dozen strides to a spot where deeper, quieter
water flowed over a bed of white gravel. Minnows skittered away
from my boots—always a sign of good water—and it was still cold
from the mountain peaks and sweet with the memory of snow. I drank
and drank again, and then again, until I could hold no more, then
took off my clothes and washed myself, cold though it was. When I
had finished my bath and dressed and returned to the place where
the path crossed the stream, I saw two pug marks on the other side,
daintily close together, where the animal had crouched to drink.
They overlay the hoofprints of the officer’s mount, and each was as
big as a dinner plate, with no claws showing beyond the soft pads
of the toes. Old Midan, who had been my uncle’s huntsman when I was
the girl-child Thecla, had told me once that smilodons drink only
after they have gorged themselves, and that when they have gorged
and drunk they are not dangerous unless molested. I went
on.
The path wound through a wooded valley,
then up into a saddle between hills. When I was near the highest
point, I noticed a tree two spans in diameter that had been torn in
half (as it appeared) at about the height of my eyes. The ends of
both the standing stump and the felled trunk were ragged, not at
all like the smooth chipping of an ax. In the next two or three
leagues I walked, there were several score like it. Judging from
the lack of leaves, and in some cases of bark, on the fallen parts,
and the new shoots the stumps had put forth, the damage had been
done at least a year ago, and perhaps longer.
At last the path joined a true road,
something I had heard of often, but never trodden except in decay.
It was much like the old road the uhlans had
been blocking when I had become separated from Dr. Talos,
Baldanders, Jolenta, and Dorcas when we left Nessus, but I was
unprepared for the cloud of dust that hung about it. No grass grew
upon it, though it was wider than most city streets.
I had no choice except to follow it;
the trees about it were thick set, and the spaces between them
choked with brush. At first I was afraid, remembering the burning
lances of the uhlans; still, it seemed probable that the law that
prohibited the use of roads no longer had force here, or this one
would not have seen as much traffic as it clearly had; and when, a
short time later, I heard voices and the sound of many marching
feet behind me, I only moved a pace or two into the trees and
watched openly while the column passed.
An officer came first, riding a fine,
champing blue whose fangs had been left long and set with turquoise
to match his bardings and the hilt of his owner’s estoc. The men
who followed him on foot were antepilani of the heavy infantry, big
shouldered and narrow waisted, with sun-bronzed, expressionless
faces. They carried three-pointed korsekes, demilunes, and
heavy-headed voulges. This mixture of armaments, as well as certain
discrepancies among their badges and accouterments, led me to
believe that their mora was made up of the remains of earlier
formations. If that were so, the fighting they must have seen had
left them phlegmatic. They swung along, four thousand or so in all,
without excitement, reluctance, or any sign of fatigue, careless in
their bearing but not slovenly, and seemed to keep step without
thought or effort.
Wagons drawn by grunting, trumpeting
trilophodons followed. I edged nearer the road as they came, for
much of the baggage they carried was clearly food; but there were
mounted men among the wagons, and one called to me, asking what
unit I belonged to, then ordering me to him. I fled instead, and
though I was fairly sure he could not ride among the trees and
would not abandon his destrier to pursue me on foot, I ran until I
was winded.
When I stopped at last, it was in a
silent glade where greenish sunlight filtered through the leaves of
spindly trees. Moss covered the ground so thickly that I felt as if
I walked upon the dense carpet of the hidden pictureroom where I
had encountered the Master of the House Absolute. For a while I
rested my back against one of the thin trunks, listening. There
came no sound but the gasping of my own breath and the tidal roar
of my blood in my ears.
In time I became aware of a third note:
the faint buzzing of a fly. I wiped my streaming face with the edge
of my guild cloak. That cloak was sadly worn and faded now, and I
was suddenly conscious that it was the same one Master Gurloes had
draped about my shoulders when I became a journeyman, and that I
was likely to die in it. The sweat it had absorbed felt cold as
dew, and the air was heavy with the odor of damp
earth.
The buzzing of the fly ceased, then
resumed—perhaps a trifle more insistently, perhaps merely seeming
so because I had my breath again. Absently,
I looked for it and saw it dart through a shaft of sunlight a few
paces off, then settle on a brown object projecting from behind one
of the thronging trees.
A boot.
I had no weapon whatsoever. Ordinarily
I would not have been much afraid of confronting a single man with
my hands alone, especially in such a place, where it would have
been impossible to swing a sword; but I knew much of my strength
was gone, and I was discovering that fasting destroys a part of
one’s courage as well—or perhaps it is only that it consumes a part
of it, leaving less for other exigencies.
However that might be, I walked warily,
sidelong and silently, until I saw him. He layed sprawled, with one
leg crumpled under him and the other extended. A falchion had
fallen near his right hand, its leather lanyard still about his
wrist. His simple barbute had dropped from his head and rolled a
step away. The fly crawled up his boot until it reached the bare
flesh just below the knee, then flew again, with the noise of a
tiny saw.
I knew, of course, that he was dead,
and even as I felt relief my sense of isolation came rushing back,
though I had not realized that it had departed. Taking him by the
shoulder, I turned him over. His body had not yet swelled, but the
smell of death had come, however faint. His face had softened like
a mask of wax set before a fire; there was no telling now with what
expression he had died. He had been young and blond—one of those
handsome, square faces. I looked for a wound but found
none.
The straps of his pack had been drawn
so tight that I could neither pull it off nor even loosen the
fastenings. In the end I took the coutel from his belt and cut
them, then drove the point into a tree. A blanket, a scrap of
paper, a fire-blackened pan with a socket handle, two pairs of
rough stockings (very welcome), and, best of all, an onion and a
half loaf of dark bread wrapped in a clean rag, and five strips of
dried meat and a lump of cheese wrapped in another.
I ate the bread and cheese first,
forcing myself, when I found I could not eat slowly, to rise after
every third bite and walk up and down. The bread helped by
requiring a great deal of chewing; it tasted precisely like the
hard bread we used to feed our clients in the Matachin Tower, bread
I had stolen, more from mischief than from hunger, once or twice.
The cheese was dry and smelly and salty, but excellent all the
same; I thought that I had never tasted such cheese before, and I
know I have never tasted any since. I might have been eating life.
It made me thirsty, and I learned how well an onion quenches thirst
by stimulating the salivary glands.
By the time I reached the meat, which
was heavily salted too, I was satiated enough to begin debating
whether I should reserve it against the night, and I decided to eat
one piece and save the other four.
The air had been still since early that
morning, but now a faint breeze blew, cooling my cheeks, stirring
the leaves, and catching the paper I had pulled from the dead
soldier’s pack and sending it rattling across the moss to lodge
against a tree. Still chewing and swallowing, I pursued it and
picked it up. It was a letter—I assume one he had not had the
opportunity to send, or perhaps to complete. His hand had been
angular, and smaller than I would have anticipated, though it may
be that its smallness only resulted from his wish to crowd many
words onto the small sheet, which appeared to have been the last he
possessed.
O my beloved, we are a hundred
leagues north of the place from which I last wrote you, having come
by hard marches. We have enough to eat and are warm by day, though
sometimes cold at night. Makar, of whom I told you, has fallen sick
and was permitted to remain behind. A great many others claimed
then to be ill and were made to march before us without weapons and
carrying double packs and under guard. In all this time we have
seen no sign of the Ascians, and we are told by the lochage that
they are still several days’ march off. The seditionists killed
sentries for three nights, until we put three men on each post and
kept patrols moving outside our perimeter. I was assigned to one of
these patrols on the first night and found it very discomforting,
since I feared one of my comrades would cut me down in the dark. My
time was spent tripping over roots and listening to the singing at
the fire—
“Tomorrow night’s
sleep
Will be on stained ground,
So tonight all drink deep,
Let the friend-cup go round.
Friend, I hope when they shoot,
Every shot will fly wide,
And I wish you good loot,
And myself at your side.
Let the friend-cup go round,
For we’ll sleep on stained ground.”
Will be on stained ground,
So tonight all drink deep,
Let the friend-cup go round.
Friend, I hope when they shoot,
Every shot will fly wide,
And I wish you good loot,
And myself at your side.
Let the friend-cup go round,
For we’ll sleep on stained ground.”
Naturally, we saw no one. The
seditionists call themselves the Vodalarii after their leader and
are said to be picked fighters. And well paid, receiving support
from the Ascians … .